The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

Introduction

Introduction Poetry and Empire In 1721, with a twenty-year war against Sweden concluded in victory, Tsar Peter I of Russia proclaimed himself emperor. To the state chancellor Count Golovkin the new title ratified Peter’s feat of ushering his “loyal subjects from the darkness of ignorance onto the theatre of universal glory, from nonbeing . . . into the society of political peoples.”1 Some eighteen years later, in 1739, a subsequent Russian military triumph , this time over Turkey, became the occasion for a related cultural revolution. Hearing of Russia’s recent capture of the Ottoman fortress of Khotin, the young poet Mikhail Lomonosov, then studying in Germany , penned an ode hailing the victory, which he sent to Russia together with a letter proposing a new set of rules governing Russian versification. Just as Peter’s transformation of Muscovy into the Russian Empire was intended to signal Russia’s belated embrace of western modernity, so, too, Lomonosov’s ode would eventually be hailed—in Vissarion Belinskii’s classic formulation—as “the first Russian poem written in a correct measure” and thus the beginning of modern Russian poetry.2 New beginnings, like the ruptures that make them possible, seldom happen quite as neatly as textbook histories would have us believe.3 Yet it is largely true that empire and modern versification were established almost simultaneously in eighteenth-century Russia. This has been widely, if partially, acknowledged: we need only recall the scholarly commonplace that views modern Russian literature as an outcome of the Petrine reforms, even if its full consolidation would span the long century from Lomonosov’s debut to the death of Pushkin.A telling example 3 of this view is Belinskii’s observation of 1842 that “to write the history of Russian literature means to show how, as a result of the social reform wrought by Peter the Great, it began as a slavish imitation of foreign models, acquiring a purely rhetorical character; how then, it gradually strove to free itself from formality and rhetoric and to acquire vital elements and independence; and how finally it developed to the level of complete artistry and came to express the life of its own society, becoming Russian.”4 Once romanticism had established the primacy of organic national forms, the grafted nature of eighteenth-century Russian culture seemed embarrassingly evident. Generally identified with classicist poetics and the ode, the literary system of the eighteenth century is widely believed to have declined with the demise of both, ushering in an era of greater writers whom Belinskii could champion as authentically Russian. As the nation emerged, it seems, so the empire receded in importance. Such an approach, which acknowledges the inaugural period of Russian literature only to demote its significance, has had the effect of obscuring certain continuities displayed by Russian literary culture from the establishment of the imperial state to its collapse in 1917. If empire and modern poetry were established in Russia at practically the same time, then how did these near synchronous events reverberate in the two centuries to come? To what extent was the evolution of modern Russian poetry a response to and an effect of the imperial state? This book attempts to trace a vital part of the answer to this question, by examining the rise of empire as a literary theme in close tandem with the first systematization of modern literary Russian, specifically poetry. Initially rooted in the vicissitudes of court life, the imperial academy, and state policy, Russian poetry began with and as a subject of empire. While its subsequent history would take it far beyond its early role as the clarion of victories won and treaties signed, the traces of the Russian poet’s original subjection to autocracy and its expanding realm would linger, subtly marking the poet’s responses to a range of interconnected issues. As imperial discourse came to be manifested within a Russian literary system marked by increasing formal complexity as well as a growing ambivalence to the official state culture in which it was first conceived, the thematics of empire became complexly imbricated in questions of poetics and rhetoric. The imperial theme, in other words, was quickly linked to a range of other questions, from formal problems of language, genre, style, and lyric subjectivity to the connection, within an autocratic state, between 4 Introduction authority and authorship. This range of issues, both formal and ideological ,isthesubjectofthisbook:togethertheypointtoaspecificallyRussian tradition of relating poetics, rhetoric...