In the first half of the 1990s a new generation of Russian poets, — or a considerable part thereof — found itself facing the challenge of inventing a new way to speak straightforwardly: readily available poetics either wasn’t up to the job or was itself part of the problem. Poetry optics, which emerged at the...

This seminar will examine the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realist painting, a tradition which existed primarily from the mid-1840s through the late 1880s and was associated with a range of artistic figures—from the much-celebrated Ilia Repin, to the less well-known figures of Vasilii Perov and Ivan Kramskoi. Russian realist paintings have long been compared to...