The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

2. The Ode and the Empress

2 The Ode and the Empress The Odes of Lomonosov In the preceding chapter we saw that the imperial sublime came together in Lomonosov as the sum of many parts: the sublime of Longinus and Boileau, with its notions of lyric transport and Pindaric rapture, the vysokii shtil’, which allowed for the grafting of the European ode onto the domestic tradition of ecclesiastical writing and panegyric verse, the prophetic mode derived from the translations of the Psalms, and the ideology of the imperial state. The latter element, empire itself, becomes dramatically evident as the defining context and primary theme of the ceremonial ode. The heyday of odic production coincides with the reign of Russia’s three empresses, Anna (1730–40), Elizabeth (1741–61), and Catherine the Great (1762–96). Becoming a mass phenomenon only under Catherine , the Russian ode took several decades to evolve its range of topoi and themes, and to test out the possible modes of addressing the sovereign. Although it remains unclear whether the ode was necessarily declaimed during ceremonial occasions or simply presented to the monarch, odes were certainly intended to coincide with an event of significance to the court or its anniversary, or for convocations of theAcademy of Sciences.1 As such they were generally included in officially published accounts of court celebrations and festivities. Although they were occasionally commissioned, odes could also be written at the poet’s own initiative; in both cases they served as a means of securing royal favor and the patronage of court magnates. Externally these poems functioned as a form of praise, recounting the sovereign’s virtues and the poet’s enthusiasm for them, combining both in a paean to the Russian state. Not surpris63 ingly the static elements of formulaic praise often overwhelmed the historically contingent nature of the occasion of the poem. Nonetheless , the Lomonosovian ode displayed a certain capacity to evolve and change. The ode’s laudatory framework could accommodate a tacit political agenda that was distinct from the status quo, as long as it could be subsumed into the mission of the modernizing state. For all its formal inertia, the odic vision had its stylistic nuances and thematic innovations : the classical version of the odic sublime, and its variations, are the topic of this section of the chapter. Although not the first poetic work to win Lomonosov widespread recognition (it was not published, in fact, until 1751, and its status as the “founding text” of modern Russian poetry is owing less to its immediate impact than to the insight of later historians), the “Oda na vziatie Khotina” (Ode on the taking of Khotin) (1739) was Lomonosov’s earliest ode, already possessing the classic (Güntherian) odic form of a ten-verse stanza of iambic tetrameters with the rhyming sequence of ababccdeed. Intended as a programmatic illustration of his new poetics , it was quickly recognized by those who read it as a radical innovation in style. The very first lines of the poem establish the sublime as Lomonosov’s privileged idiom: Воторг в а   u л ил, В д т а в р гор в око, Гд в тр в л а шu т аб л; В доли тишиа глuбоко. Виая  что шu олчит, Которо ав гда жuрчит И  шuо ви  олов тр итя. Лавров вютя та в ц , Та лu  шит во в коц ; Дал ч д  в оля кuритя.2 h A sudden rapture has captivated the mind And leads it up a lofty mountain, Where the wind in the forests has forgotten to roar; In the deep valley there is silence. The noise, harkening to something, falls silent, [The noise] that forever gurgles And courses noisily down from the hills. There wreaths of laurel wind about, There hearing [or rumor] rushes in all directions; Further out smoke curls along the fields. 64 The Ode and the Empress The ode’s first two stanzas characterize the sublime as a purely lyrical afflatus, the relationship of a poet to his art that initially appears prior to any historical occasion or institutional affiliation. Vertical uplift is its quintessential axis: the mind is here “captivated” and thrust upward to the top of Mount Parnassus by the sudden onset of poetic rapture over which it has no control. It was this experience of “lyric disorder ,” and the dialectic of authority it enacted, that struck readers as both new and uniquely Lomonosovian: in its radicalism it certainly surpasses the models provided by Boileau, Malherbe, and the German poet Günther. In his ode on Namur Boileau can still order his “faithful lyre” to “follow his transports,” and Günther peremptorily bids his Muses to “go after” the Austrian commander Eugen.3 By contrast, the Lomonosovian sublime involves more rapid...