The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

1. Sublime Beginnings

1 Sublime Beginnings Not by the silver of merchants but by the iron of Mars Feofan Prokopovich, from his second Petersburg sermon, 1716 Imperial Beginnings Some forty years after Peter the Great assumed the title of emperor, Voltaire, whose enthusiasm for Peter’s legacy was an important confirmation by a key figure of the Enlightenment of Russia’s entry into the concert of European nations, would comment suggestively but inaccurately on this shift in terminology: “As for the title of czar, it comes from the tsars or tchars of the Kingdom of Kazan. When the Russian sovereign John or Ivan Vasilievich [the Terrible] had reconquered this realm in the sixteenth century . . . he assumed its royal title, which his successors kept. . . . The name czar was therefore the title of oriental rulers, more plausibly derived from the Shahs of Persia than from the Roman Caesars . . . [while] the name emperor . . . is given nowadays to the sovereigns of Russia with more justification than to any other potentate, if one considers the extent and power of their dominion.”1 Voltaire was implying that the tsardom of Muscovy, for all its traditions of monarchical rule buttressed by territorial expansion, was still an Asiatic power. Although the title of tsar was in fact of Byzantine rather than Islamic origin, Voltaire’s folk etymology was not inaccurate in one respect. It intuited that Peter’s conferral of imperial status to Russia marked not only her newly augmented “extent and power” but also a fundamental cultural reorientation. In his recent book, Scenarios of 28 Power, Richard Wortman has identified this reorientation as a “shift from a Byzantine to a Roman imperial model.”2 Eliminating the Byzantine vision of a religious symbiosis of church and state, Peter envisioned his empire as a secular western polity measured chiefly by the standards of military might and cultural progress. Muscovite ideology was thereby displaced by a new kind of absolutism, in which modernization itself became a projection of the emperor’s will, in foreign policy as in internal reform. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia entered modern Europe as a reforming state ruled by a sovereign of unlimited power whose territories would expand through successive conquests. Not surprisingly for a reign known for its prolonged wars, the pursuit of empire contributed greatly to the direction of state policy. Peter fought protracted wars against Sweden and Ottoman Turkey: the Baltic, and to a lesser extent the Black Sea, provided the context for Russia’s definitive entry into the realm of European diplomacy and politics. To a considerable degree, the imperial context was also to determine the shape of domestic policy: in the classic formulation of the historian Klyuchevsky, “the war was the principal cause of Peter’s reforming activity: initially a military reform, it became ultimately a financial reform.”3 Petrine absolutism, then, was fundamentally imperial rather than national or confessional in tendency, and the deployment of unlimited sovereign power in all aspects of civic life closely followed Peter’s vision of martial order and preparedness. This had several consequences in the realm of symbolic representations of the monarch and his rule. Richard Wortman has insisted on the newness of Petrine symbolism, which “recast the image of tsar and elite in terms of a Western myth of conquest and power.”4 Diluting Muscovy’s messianic role as defender of Christian Orthodoxy, the new order would seek cultural affirmation in the celebration of its military achievements and worldly greatness, combining reform at home with victory abroad. This transition from “theocratic tsar to sovereign emperor,” as Michael Cherniavsky has termed it, was fundamental, although never entirely completed. No longer a saintly guardian of the faith, the emperor became a divinity in his own right, the source and repository of all power, “self-contained and selfgenerated .”5 The arrival of secular modernity in Russia involved more than the subordination of church to state. In according the emperor powers wrested from the church, modernity rearticulated the relationship between profane power and spiritual authority. The influential MoscowSublime Beginnings 29 Tartu school of cultural semiotics has highlighted how persistently both Muscovy and imperial Russia legitimated political rule through recourse to the sacred. This tradition survived even Peter’s radical secularization of Russian elite culture, so that the emperor was able to enhance his power further by arrogating to himself the creative force of God. The sacred was thus altered rather than abolished, and secularism, like all...