Authors

Oleg Larionov¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

The second half of the eighteenth century saw a growing proliferation of various articulations of modern national identities across Europe. During this period, new notions of national character, culture and history were formulated and promoted by intellectuals, gradually influencing the thinking of state officials and informing their policies. Increasingly, literature played a key role in shaping the nation as an ‘imagined community’. This paper explores the early Russian expression of this broader social and cultural shift, focusing on the sentimentalist writings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Russian literature of sensibility sought to create and disseminate forms of subjectivity that were to be internalised by the reading public. Russian sentimentalism primarily promoted self-introspection, religious meditations, aesthetic contemplation of nature, and virtuous life within emotional communities of friends and lovers. Yet the subjectivity constructed in this tradition was not confined to private life and morality; it also extended to the public sphere and was framed in national terms. Through close readings of theoretical essays and fictional works by Nikolai Karamzin, Pavel L’vov, and other authors of the time, I will demonstrate how the seemingly universal sentimental self was consistently localised within a specific setting, with its personal experiences of time and space shaped by visions of a national past and present associated with collective historical and political existence. The international culture of sensibility, with its shared canon of imitated emotional patterns, rhetorical strategies and exemplary texts, readily adapted to the needs of emerging nationalism.