This chapter offers a wide-ranging assessment of cosmopolitan interpretations of war in the European sentimental tradition. Taking impetus from Tolstoy’s reporting on the Crimean war, Gusejnova draws on the Russian formalists’...
moreThis chapter offers a wide-ranging assessment of cosmopolitan interpretations of war in the European sentimental tradition. Taking impetus from Tolstoy’s reporting on the Crimean war, Gusejnova draws on the Russian formalists’ interpretation of his technique to reconstruct Tolstoy’s use of literary montage, which was later adapted in film by Sergei Eisenstein. The chapter then contextualises the history of this technique within genealogies of cosmopolitan thought on the one hand, and literary sentimentalism on the other. Drawing on works by Adam Smith and Stendhal, Gusejnova surveys some of the intellectual and literary techniques thanks to which cosmopolitan sentiments became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European societies. The capacity to generate multi-sensory experiences of compassion through montage presents the case for a fundamental connection between mediated experiences of war and nineteenth-century ideas of cosmopolitanism. The chapter proposes that greater understanding between people was driven by the literary, visual, and sonic mediation of violent wartime encounters.
