“Zrelishche nachal i kontsov: tragediia v teoreticheskoi optike O. M. Freidenberg” [Gazing at the beginnings and the ends: tragedy in the theoretical optics of O. M. Freidenberg]

Abstract

The article elaborates some of the key insights drawn from olga Freidenberg’s analysis of Attic tragedy in Image and Concept, focussing on the implications of her notion of primitive spectactorship for research into other forms of literature. Freidenberg’s categories are put into dialogue with those of Walter Benjamin and György Lukács and, in the concluding section, employed in a contrastive analysis of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and Valentin Kataev’s time, Forward!, works that display opposite attitudes to the descriptive (and scopophilic) impulse in European realism.