The Magic Lantern in Russian Literature

Abstract

This dissertation examines Russian literary receptions of the magic lantern, an early optical projection device of the European Enlightenment. A significant precursor to the twentieth-century technology of cinema, the magic lantern enjoyed a wide-reaching cultural vogue that made it a striking point of reference in a vast range of Russian and Western European texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. This dissertation investigates how this relegated scientific invention of early modernity in fact played a crucial role in shaping Russian literary discourses around knowledge, desire, visual representation, and memory, and how the device's paradoxes and marginalities gave it particular appeal as a cultural phenomenon. The study will begin with the works of canonical Russian authors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Gavrila Derzhavin, Alexander Pushkin, and Vasily Zhukovsky, situating the device’s appearance in Russian literature in the wider context of eighteenth-century Russian visual culture. The latter two chapters consider the role of the magic in the writings of Karolina Pavlova and Marina Tsvetaeva, examining how these women writers used the device to explore the problematic territories of gender and poetic identity in response to the earlier tradition. The dissertation draws from literary criticism, history of science, media theory, and gender and sexuality studies to consider how these distinct but interconnected fields inform Russian textual production around the magic lantern.