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1.4 - Sentimentalism and Romanticism

from History 1 - Movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Ilya Vinitsky
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter covers the period from the late 1780s through the late 1840s, and introduces two closely intertwined cultural movements: Russian Sentimentalism (or the age of sensibility) and Russian Romanticism (also known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry). Departing from debates on the paradoxes of Russian Romanticism, the chapter considers the genealogy and basic features of the movement by assessing the oeuvre and literary impact of the ‘father of Russian Romanticism’, the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. To paraphrase a dictum wrongly attributed to Fedor Dostoevskii, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the literary spectre of Russian Romanticism came out of the angelic robes of this lofty, melancholy, and chaste poet, who playfully called himself the ‘poetic guardian of the English and German devils and witches’.

Keywords

RomanticismSentimentalismmelancholyRussia and the WestballadAleksandr PushkinVasilii Zhukovskii
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 71 - 88
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Brown, William Edward, A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, 4 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986).Google Scholar
Gasparov, Boris, ‘Pushkin and Romanticism’, in Bethea, David M. (ed.), The Pushkin Handbook (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 537–67.Google Scholar
Golburt, Luba, ‘Alexander Pushkin as a Romantic’, in Hamilton, Paul (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Hammarberg, Gitta, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karlinsky, Simon, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
Leighton, Lauren G., ‘The great Soviet debate over Romanticism: 1957–1964’, Studies in Romanticism 22.1 (1983), 41–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powelstock, David, Becoming Mikhail Lermontov: The Ironies of Romantic Individualism in Nicholas I’s Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Ram, Harsha, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Vinitsky, Ilya, Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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