Vivliofika (Вивлiоѳика) is the flagship online publication of the Eighteenth Century Russian Empire Studies Association (ECRESA), an affiliate group of the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (ASEEES). Volume 11 of the journal includes a special forum on “Russo-European Artistic Encounters in the Eighteenth Century,” guest edited by Margaret Samu, which highlights recent research on the Russian art world and its engagement with Western Europe in the eighteenth century. It arose from an online program in September of 2021 hosted by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA).

f o r u m : r u s s o – e u r o p e a n a r t i s t i c e n c o u n t e r s

Ivan Argunov, Portrait of Anna Nikolaevna Kalmykova, 1767, oil on canvas, 62 × 50 cm (Moscow: Kuskovo Estate Museum).

• Margaret Samu, “Introduction: Russo-European Encounters in the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 1–4.
The introduction summarizes the special forum and explains the effect that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has had on art historical research. It argues for the importance of both trans-national and post-colonial approaches to the study of eighteenth-century Imperial Russian art.

• Margaret Samu, “Andrei Matveev: Painting Allegory from Antwerp to Russia,” pp. 5–36.
Margaret Samu explores Russia’s adoption of allegorical language in art, as well as the practice of sending art students to Europe in the Petrine era, through a close examination of Andrei Matveev’s Allegory of Painting (1725).

• Anna Korndorf, “The ‘Sketes’ of Cheerful Elizabeth: Mid-Eighteenth-Century Russian Hermitages” (in Russian), pp. 37–60.
Anna Korndorf’s article looks at hermitages as intimate, informal spaces for elite sociability. Her study helps us to rediscover the hermitages of Elizabeth Petrovna (r. 1741–62) by emphasizing their personal significance to the empress and their connections to similar structures in Europe.

• Zalina Tetermazova, “Self-Portrait Prints and Portraits of Printmakers: On the Social Status and Self-Image of Printmakers in Russia in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century” (in Russian), pp. 61–81.
Zalina Tetermazova’s work uses self-portraits by printmakers as a lens through which to investigate their social status, as well as the role of engraving in the academic hierarchy of arts during the second half of the eighteenth century.

• Alexandra Helprin, “Ivan Argunov’s Portrait of Anna Kalmykova,” pp. 82–101.
Alexandra Helprin focuses on Ivan Argunov’s portrait of Anna Nikolaevna Kalmykova (1767) to explore the relative positions of the enserfed artist and Kalmyk child in the Sheremetev family. She analyzes the ways in which European conventions of portraiture took on new meanings under Russia’s particular conditions of serfdom and colonization.

• Emily Roy, “St. Petersburg through Venetian Eyes: An Episode in Late Eighteenth-Century Book Illustration,” pp. 102–24.
Emily Roy’s article explores Venetian perceptions of Peter I’s founding of Saint Petersburg by studying an etching published by Antonio Zatta in 1797 as part of a six-volume biography of Catherine II.

a d d i t i o n a l a r t i c l e s

• Erica Camisa Morale, “In Search of Nature and Consciousness in Andrei Bialobotskii’s Pentateugum: Classical Echoes and Modern Impulses,” pp. 125–41.

• W. Forrest Holden, “Making Sense of the Empire’s Others: Mikhail Chulkov’s Dictionary of Russian Superstitions and the European Enlightenment,” pp. 142–62.

• Rodolphe Baudin, “Translation as Politics: Translating Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler in Nineteenth-Century France,” pp. 163–84.

r e v i e w s

• Barbara Skinner, Review of Zenon Kohut, Volodymyr Sklokin, and Frank Sysyn, with Larysa Bilous, eds., Eighteenth-Century Ukraine: New Perspectives on Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press / Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2023), pp. 271–75.

• Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, Review of Vera Proskurina, The Imperial Script of Catherine the Great: Governing with the Literary Pen (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023), pp. 276–80.

• Rodolphe Baudin, Review of S. V. Pol’skoi and V. S. Rzheutskii, eds., Laboratoriia poniatii: Perevod i iazyki politiki v Rossii XVIII veka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2022), pp. 281–83.

• Sara Dickinson, Review of Nikolai Karamzin, Lettres d’un voyageur russe, introduction, translation, notes, and commentary by Rodolphe Baudin (Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 2022), pp. 284–86.

• Brian Davies, Review of A.G. Gus’kov, K. A. Kochegarov, S. M. Shamin, Russko-turetskaia voina 1686–1700 godov (Moscow: Russkoe slovo, 2022), pp. 287–89.