Authors

Oleg Larionov¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

Throughout Europe, the eighteenth century saw the rise of the new attitudes towards commemoration in which traditional reverence for rulers, military heroes and statemen was supplemented by a new recognition of the importance of the memory of a wider range of individuals eminent for their benevolent acts for the sake of their fellow-creatures, country, or all humanity. This shift of attention was manifested, among other places, in sentimental fiction that publicly represented private experiences of the self; the culture of sensibility proclaimed intense personal emotions to be necessary and sufficient condition for public praise and recognition. This paper will focus on the interplay of these ideas in meditative prose of Russian sentimentalism of the late eighteenth century. In these texts sentimental subject was depicted in natural settings that provided both the background for and the source of his or her emotional inner life. I will demonstrate how in sentimental writings nature became converted into a series of places of memory invested with highly individualised meaning and affect. In each text, a specific natural site was transformed into a personal memorial whose significance, it was implied, should be appreciated by the reading public that formed an imagined emotional community with the author.