Russian romanticism and theologically founded aesthetics: Zhukovskij, Odoevskij, and Gogol and the appropriation of post-Kantian aesthetic principle

The history of thought and art from the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century marks a period where the areas of philosophy, theology, and aesthetics represented not separate entities but were instead melded into a unity predicated on a redefined relationship between the individual and God. The birth of Romanticism built upon this redefined role of the subject (the self), and figures in both England and Germany focused specifically on the subject's creation of art (aesthetics) as a conduit for knowledge (epistemology) of the divine (theology). Whereas Romanticism in Germany and England arose "organically" in the innovations of belletrists such as Schlegel, Novalis, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, Russian Romanticism, by contrast, was not native born. In the early nineteenth century, certain Russian poets and thinkers begin to assimilate the tenets of the Romantic program within a Russian context. The result was a strong tradition in Russian literature, which espoused this same idea of perceiving the divine in the aesthetic acts of artistic creation and reception. Three of the most influential figures in Russian nineteenth-century literature, Zhukovskij, Odoevskij, and Gogol, specifically advocated the Romantic ideas of: a noumenological sphere beyond sensible reality, the subject's constant nearness to this suprasensible, noumenological sphere, and the capacity for art to bridge this divide and thus to lead the subject to knowledge of the suprasensible. Each of these thinkers defines the noumenological sphere according to a conception of God in a Christian context and consequently defines the elemental nature of art according to specifically theological-as-aesthetic terms.