Wednesday's Lecture/Discussion: The Rise of Romanticism

NOTE: Friday's questions are BELOW this post... 

As a prelude to reading A Hero of Our Time, I introduced three paintings that help us understand Romanticism, which was the artistic movement that followed hot on the heels of the Enlightenment, and which all writers and artists in the 19th century got swept up in. 

The painting on the left, Kramskoy's An Unknown Woman (1883) depicts one of the biggest differences between 18th century paintings and those in the early to mid 19th century: sensibility. This painting captures a psychological portrait of the woman in the coach, who you note is perched well above us. She looks down on us, seemingly with power and command, even though she also seems rather defenceless: she is alone, and no woman could travel alone this time (esp. in Russia) without some kind of chaperone. The black suggests that she could be a widow, though the empty seat beside her suggests that she's used to having company, and is inviting the viewer to join her. She might be "unknown" because society doesn't want to know her; she's probably a woman who flaunts her independence and refuses to marry (or marry again) and could even be a kept mistress of a rich bachelor (or worse, married man!). Yet she's proud of her status, and even the painter shares his admiration with the viewer. We get a sense of who she is: not a satire, but a flesh and blood woman full of passion, strength, and ideas. This captures the idea of sensibility, which is that art should move the reader deeply, or at least help us feel what is inside the painting or novel we're reading.

The next painting (right) is Caspar David Freidrich's Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818), which showcases the very Romantic notion of the sublime. The sublime is defined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant as "the tall cliffs, towering thunder clouds, volcanoes, hurricanes, the boundless ocean set in a rage, lofty waterfalls, and the like as overwhelming to our puny powers." When we face the sublime, we feel small, insignificant, and often in the presence of death. Yet this makes us feel vibrantly alive, since it knocks us out of our day-to-day ego to feel part of something vast and 'human.' The Romantics loved to have adventures in Nature to feel part of a greater world, one that was both beautiful and terrible at the same time, and Lermontov is very much like this Wanderer, contemplating the beauty of the Caucasus Mountains in "Bela" (which you'll read for next class). 

Our third painting (left) is by Jean August Dominique Ingres, and is entitled La Grande Odalisque (an "odalisque" is a harem slave, or concubine in the Middle East). The Romantics loved the East and legends and stories of the Orient, since it represented to them an exotic world beyond the morals and taboos of Western society. They created a romanticized vision of the East through stories and paintings of harems, deserts, mosques, and picturesque villages perched in the mountains. Many of these works can be seen as somewhat racist today, as they treat the East--and especially Eastern people, and women--as objects, seeing them less for who they are as what they represent for the West. This is called "Orientalism," and Lermontov's novel certainly engages in this a bit, though Lermontov did have first-hand experience as a soldier in the Caucasus region (see below) which was kind of like the "Wild West" of Russia. So while the East represented a way to experience the sublime without the constraints of polite society, they also brought their 'civilized' biases along with them, framing the East in light of Western notions of beauty and morality. 

In many ways, Russia is the greatest place to tell the story of Romanticism, since it is perched precariously between the Eastern and Western worlds, and is full of sublime landscapes and dangerous culture clashes. The novel A Hero of Our Time is a novel that transports the sensibility of Europe to the sublime landscapes of the near-Middle East, there to dabble in conventional portraits of Orientalism while also offering an eyewitness depiction of the people and places the author himself visited. So in this book, does art imitiate life...or life imitate art?