Russian Realisms

One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century—from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of reform to the mature masterpieces of Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the paintings of the Wanderers, Repin chief among them. By examining the classics of the tradition, Brunson explores the emergence of multiple realisms from the gaps, disruptions, and doubts that accompany the self-conscious project of representing reality. These manifestations of realism are united not by how they look or what they describe, but by their shared awareness of the fraught yet critical task of representation. By tracing the engagement of literature and painting with aesthetic debates on the sister arts, Brunson argues for a conceptualization of realism that transcends artistic media. Russian Realisms integrates the lesser-known tradition of Russian painting with the familiar masterpieces of Russia's great novelists, highlighting both the common ground in their struggles for artistic realism and their cultural autonomy and legitimacy. This erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history, and nineteenth-century realist movements.

Molly Brunson is associate professor of Russian literature at Yale University.

Brunson's book underscores the power of close looking (and close reading). As she does, she weeds out the evolving urgency of Realism, pulling out both the historical and the transhistorical aspects of the movement. In doing so, she makes a convincing case not only for Russian Realism's place in the wider European and American discourse, but also for Realism as an ambitious project in its own right.

In this splendid study, Molly Brunson sets out to reshape how we look at and think about nineteenth-century realist painting and the relationship between painting and narrative realism. Brunson succeeds masterfully at dislodging assumptions about Russian nineteenth-century Realism that are most stubbornly ensconced in accounts of visual art.

A substantial achievement of this study is that it indulges, excites and greatly enhances modern insights into nineteenth-century Russian realist painting.

Molly Brunson has written a provocative, sophisticated, and illuminating study that focuses on the making of Russian realism through the collaborative effort of literature and painting in the period 1840 to 1890.

John Bowlt, editor of Russian Avant-Garde Theatre:

In Russian Realisms, Molly Brunson tackles a very complicated subject and elaborates a serious philosophical context. An analysis and appreciation of this kind are long overdue.

Margaret Samu, co-editor of From Realism to the Silver Age:

While Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have long been part of the Western literary canon, this book is the first that not only integrates the history of Russian painting into the work of these two giants, but also incorporates art and literature spanning five decades into a broad trajectory of Russian realism. As such, it stands as a major contribution to the field of Russian cultural studies.

Michael Holquist, Yale University:

Nineteenth century Russian novels have become a global standard for defining realism in the novel, while realist Russian painting from the same period is either little known abroad, or attacked by later critics as kitsch. Molly Brunson begs to differ, and makes a passionate plea for the aesthetic, social, and formal achievement of artists such as Ilya Repin. Organized as a coherent, clearly written argument from beginning to end, this book perceives the relation between the great novels and paintings of nineteenth century Russia as a spirited dialog, using such imaginative evidence as sketches made by Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky in their manuscripts, the historical research of Repin, and even the famous panorama at Borodino.

Donald Fanger, Harvard University:

Molly Brunson's Russian Realisms is an extraordinary achievement-brilliant, original, multifaceted, as illuminating in its attention to detail as in its shifting contextualizations, and a consistent joy to read. The scholarship is both deep and broad, and Brunson deploys it in a way that breathes new life into concepts that turn out to have been far less familiar than many will have thought.

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Harriman Institute, Columbia University:

This book is a richly rewarding and innovative study. It rescues Russian nineteenth-century art from the widespread indifference or contempt it enjoys in the West as being excessively literal and narrative. Brunson offers instead a new analytical paradigm-an 'inter-art' relationship between the verbal and the visual in the works of Tolstoy and of Dostoevsky, of Fedotov and Repin: one that moved beyond objectivity and was based on a creative and interactive enrichment, not on bland, facile imitation. Highly recommended to all interested in Russian art, literature, and culture.

Peter Brooks, Princeton University:

This is a wonderful book, one of the best and most nuanced studies of realism in painting and literature that I know. It introduced me to many remarkable and rarely discussed 19th century Russian paintings. At the same time, it revisits classic novelists-Tolstoy and Dostoevsky-to offer a very new understanding of their visual imagination. Throughout, Russian Realisms is thoroughly rewarding.