The First Epoch. The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination

The discussion of the cultural imagination is confined to a detailed analysis and explication of selected works penned by a limited number of writers starting in the mid-eighteenth and running to the late nineteenth centuries, with a number of points also illustrated and elaborated through discussion of six eighteenth-century portraits - the majority of them of Catherine II herself - by five different artists (illustrations included). Underlying the whole is the postulation that a male-dominated nineteenth century, especially from the time of Catherine's grandson Emperor Nikolai I, looking back uncomfortably at the female-dominated eighteenth century, was developing a gendered response to the first epoch, a theme recently explored by a number of literary scholars. [...]according to Golburt, the eighteenth century was preserved only in Russia's backwaters, on run-down noble estates and in provincial towns.