In “The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Historical Imagination,” Assistant Professor Luba Golburt (Slavic Languages & Literatures) argues that the Russian Romantic historical consciousness matured through a close examination of the eighteenth century. Professor Golburt claims that the eighteenth century in Russia was a period of unprecedented modernization that bequeathed radically new forms of political, cultural, literary and personal conduct to the epochs that followed. Professor Golburt’s study detects this legacy in a range of literary texts, bringing the work of celebrated Russian poet Alexander Pushkin into dialogue with authors of several generations—from the neo-Classicist poet Gavrila Derzhavin, to the Romantic Vasilii Zhukovskii, to the major realist novelists Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Through an exploration of these texts, “The First Epoch” considers the nineteenth century’s departures from the eighteenth, including the transformations of the generic contours of historical writing; the shifts in the economies of literary circulation; and the changes in conceptions of temporality.