Daria Storoshchuk (Eldridge)
Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
September 2023 - May 2024
Supported by HURI with the Jaroslaw and Nadia Mihaychuk Fellowship Fund
HURI Research Project
The Image Between Appearance and Being: Iconic Vision in Ukrainian and Russian Worlds
The fellowship project is a study of iconicity across three sites within the Slavic world. Taking the iconographic tradition of Eastern Christianity as its jumping off point, the project conceptualizes the image through a particular set of ethical and ontological grammars in which the image participates in an economy of formation rather than representation, and in which it is effective rather than descriptive. As such, the problem of iconic vision is not reducible to the phenomenology of optics. Rather, following these grammars, the project reprises the question of the image as delineated by the viewing subject’s relationship to it as an object of veneration. The project traces these questions across the following topoi: the first chapter studies a particular moment of reformation and modernization at the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium during the 17th-18th centuries. It argues that the resulting shifts in Ukrainian iconography demonstrate a significant remapping of the visual field, a change which is obscured when it is narrativized through projects of political, national, or religious identity which are premised upon a progressivist temporal break. The second chapter takes up the writings of Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), first tracing the author’s addresses to what I term a ‘counterfeit’ tradition of iconography together with his program for its rehabilitation, which pivots upon considerations of style and medium. It then shows how Leskov’s desire to purify the iconographic tradition in some ways mirrors the “near-deification” of the wood and paint of the icon which he ascribes to the Old Believers in “The Sealed Angel”, a tale narrated in the geographic and social hinterlands (Kyiv, Old Belief) of the Russian Empire. The third and final chapter looks to the filmography and writings of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), arguing that the filmmaker stages the impasse of the Kantian subject—whose transcendental ego ties the split domains of the aesthetic and the rational—in his filmography. In doing so, Tarkovsky reprises the question posed by this project: that of the image, its beholder, and the real to which it stands in relation.
Biography
Daria Storoshchuk (Eldridge) is a Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She recently completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University. Her dissertation and now fellowship project, titled “The Image Between Appearance and Being: Iconic Vision in Ukrainian and Russian Worlds”, examines how icon theory and theology is taken up across different media and genres—principally the graphic arts, literature, and film. During her fellowship year at Harvard, Daria is revising her dissertation into a book manuscript and working on two articles, which address pokrova imagery in the ongoing war in Ukraine, and Aleksei Shchusev’s dual legacy as a pre-revolutionary church architect and the designer of the Lenin Mausoleum, respectively. Her research interests include the visual arts, Ukrainian formalism, decolonial studies, and Orthodox theology.