[Vocabulary] the lightning catches out of the darkness the silhouettes of houses

[Marina Gaidar]

In Russian, if I want to say that something becomes visible for a second when the lightning strikes, I would say "the lightning catches out of the darkness the silhouettes of houses and so on". How can I render that into English?

 

[emsr2d2]

I would use "briefly/momentarily lit [up] by lightning".

(Note that "momentarily" has different meanings in BrE and AmE.)