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Reign of Alexander I

Nikolai Karamzin, the most influential writer in Russia before Alexander Pushkin.
Liza and Erast, with the Simonov Monastery in the distance. A classic of Russian sentimentalism, the story plays up the characters’ emotions, which are superior to the “reasonable mind” that characterized the Enlightenment.
August von Kotzubue, an enormously popular German/Russian melodramatist who was assassinated by a German nationalist in 1819. He wrote “The Magpie.”

 

Reign of Nicholas I

No literature captures the essence of Nicholaevan Russia as effectively as Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” – the story of a bureaucrat who awakes one morning to discover that his nose has left his face and developed a life of its own. Moreo

Gogol confronts The Nose

ver, The Nose has a higher social rank than Kovalev!

 

 

 

 

 

Reign of Alexander II:

This painting evokes the so-called “Bulgarian Horrors” and how public opinion pressed him to go to war with the Ottoman Empire in 1876.

Orientalism Made Manifest

Reign of Nicholas II

“A man lies dead at the end of a Russian film.”

This is a clip from the movie “Children of the Age,” starring Tsarist Russia’s most popular actress, Vera Kholodnaia. In this clip she is raped by her husband’s boss, but nonetheless leaves her husband for him, taking their baby with her.