Inga Vidugirytė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2016.7.3
The article is based on the idea by W. J. T. Mitchell that in the 19th century, the landscape became a media for broadcasting imperial and colonial ideology. This interpretation of the genre is extended by the assumption that a landscape also conveys a romantic conception of the relationship of a nation with the land it inhabits.
The study focuses on the assumption that geography is a visual discipline that uses maps and descriptions of landscapes to represent knowledge of the Earth. Therefore, it could be discussed within the field of visual culture studies. On the other hand, visual study instruments could also be applied to analyse a literary landscape. In the article, the concepts of the observer, the techniques of the observer and the scopic regimes are used in the research of literary landscapes by Nikolai Gogol. These concepts allowed us to disclose how Gogol’s interest in geography enabled him to form a cartographic scopic regime borrowed from maps and moved into his literary landscapes. In the story Terrible Vengeance, Gogol used two cartographic images, namely the relief map of Europe by Karl Ritter (1806) and the map of Ukraine drawn by the French engineer Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan in the first half of the 17th century. The geographic landscape genre was formed in the 1808 treatise Views of Nature by Alexander von Humboldt.
The illustrations published in the article are an experiment in artistic research using visual tools to solve practical and theoretical issues of literary analysis. The illustrations were made by Giedrius Jonaitis, a professional graphic artist, who was tasked with following and reproducing the descriptions of Gogol’s landscapes as precisely as possible in his illustrations. The purpose of this visual research was to verify the hypothesis about the visual sources used by Gogol and to see if it was possible, using visual means, to reproduce the process of geographic imagination as described in Gogol’s work, which implied that by looking at a certain point on the map and listening to the verbal description of the place, it was possible to ‘see’ how the entire landscape grew and evolved from such an observed point.
Keywords: W. J. T. Mitchell, Nikolai Gogol, geography, maps, Alexander von Humboldt