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theses

The idea that melancholy pervades cultural production and serves as one of the primary temperaments has deep roots in Western culture. But in nineteenth-century Europe, a growing interest in what was seen as a new and pervasive kind of malaise became central to discourses on the rise of Realism in art and literature. This dissertation explores how painters in two of the primary artistic centers of Europe – Paris and St. Petersburg – sought to depict these inner psychological struggles associated with modern life. There was a dialogue between France and Russia in the nineteenth century and the distinctly modern form of existential sadness was viewed in both primarily as a malady among men, one which arose concomitant with new male heroes in literature. In Russia, the character type known as the “superfluous man” suggested growing fears about the idleness of male aristocrats and in France, discourses on the flâneur and spleen formed a central part of ideas on the detrimental effects of modern life. All were fundamentally alienated beings, but their visual manifestations illuminate the divergence in these two countries’ use of Realism and their respective experiences of modernity. As much as subject matter was analogously considered a vehicle for bringing about social change, artists in these nations utilized the depiction of “real life” to varying effects. While French artists such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Edgar Degas valued impartial observation and objectivity, Russian artists like Pavel Fedotov, Ivan Kramskoy, and Ilya Repin were exponents of a Realist style that prized tendentious judgment and empathy. Drawing on a wide variety of literary material from the nineteenth century – from poetry, prose and criticism to letters, memoirs, and manifestoes – this dissertation discusses these disparate kinds of writing in dialogue with paintings and graphic works from the same period. The work seeks via this interdisciplinary and cross-cultural method of analysis to present the constitutive signs of the affective experience of modern life as a complex constellation of visual structures that are tied inextricably to the environments of class upheaval, political change, and warfare in which they were produced.

ETD_5477

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Allison Leigh

doi:10.7282/T3CF9NDN

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.