Description
Book SynopsisPhotography, introduced to Russia in 1839, was nothing short of a sensation. Its rapid proliferation challenged the other arts, including painting and literature, as well as the very integrity of the self. If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky greeted the camera with skepticism in the nineteenth century, numerous twentieth-century authors welcomed it with a warm embrace. As Katherine M. H. Reischl shows in Photographic Literacy, authors as varied as Leonid Andreev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn picked up the camera and reshaped not only their writing practices but also the sphere of literacy itself.
For these authors, a single photograph or a photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment. But just as authors used images to shape the reception of their work and selves, Russian photographersincluding Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and Alexander Rodchenkoused text to shape the reception of
Trade Review
A superb, erudite account, which will be of value to literary scholars, cultural historians, and anyone interested in the intricate relationship between text and image.
* The Russian Review *
The monograph is incredibly well-written and meticulously researched.
* Canadian-American Slavic Studies *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction: Chasing Pushkin's Photograph
1. Tolstoy in the Age of His Technological Reproducibility
2. The Diffusion of Domesticated Photography
3. Microgeography, Macroworld
4. Look Left, Young Man! The International Exchangeof Photo-Narratives
Conclusion: Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and the Anxiety of Photographic Authorship
Notes
Index
