Eternità dell’istante. Letteratura e fotografia in Russia

The Moment’s Eternity. Literature and Photography in Russia Photography develops along with aesthetic views and literary investigations across the decades. Studying this fertile relationship, the essay outlines the most relevant steps focusing on some exemplary texts of Russian literature, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Improvements in the photographic technique, debates on artistic quality and on the ability to capture the experience this new medium shows, developed together with the birth of the great nineteenth-century novel, and with the affirmation of a new perception of time, later interweaving with political events of twentieth-century Russia. The dialogue with photography offers to the artists of the word new opportunities of investigation on time, memory and the self. The fleeting uncertainty of the moment that the photo shot reveals, testifies, in the texts, to the fragile identity that we try to find any time our eyes observe photographic portraits. The latter arrived to the present from remote or close time dimensions.