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3. Sublime Dissent
- University of Wisconsin Press
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3 Sublime Dissent New Literary Ideologies Early in the nineteenth century, under the reign of Alexander I, the imperial sublime became progressively detached from its commitment to tsarist autocracy. Politically this was related to a general radicalization of expectations of what Russia could be and a concomitant crisis of faith in autocracy as an agent of progress. Socially it reflected the growth of a restricted but vibrant literary culture that defined itself , aesthetically if not always politically, outside the purview of the court and the imperial bureaucracy. New models and movements began to proliferate, and the authority of the older classicist precepts correspondingly weakened. The ode, while remaining, at least until the 1820s, the primary genre of civic engagement, was never again to enjoy a position of dominance in Russian poetry. If in the eighteenth century the “lofty tyle” had been dominant, in the early nineteenth century it was compelled to stand in polemical opposition first to Karamzinian sentimentalism and subsequently to what became the dominant current of romanticism championed by Vasilii Zhukovskii and later Pushkin . Eighteenth-century poetics were increasingly seen as an anachronism , to be rejected or revived as the case may be. The crisis of classicism became acute with the rise to prominence of the most influential of the pre-romantics, Nikolai Karamzin (1766– 1826). In a clear rejection of the lofty style, Karamzin, and shortly after him the poet Konstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855), argued for a new set of discursive norms, a “middle style” based on the conversational patterns of French polite society under the ancien régime.1 Language, they believed, did not exist to persuade or to exalt but to please: melliflu121 ousness, refinement, aesthetic perfection, and genre diversity were declared the new goals of literary discourse. The writer was no longer a public orator but the bearer of sentiment: he proffered experiences that could not immediately be assimilated to the social sphere, in a variety of genres that matched his moods. Yet far from signaling a retreat into private life, the “middle style” advocated by Karamzin and Batiushkov was, in fact, a means of socializing and regulating the recently emerged inner world of feeling. Based on propriety and good taste rather than “lyric disorder,” the theory and practice of the Karamzinists ratified a new division and correlation between the public and private sphere. Marking a sociological shift from the court to the literary salon as the arbiter of prevailing sensibility, the new poetic language was the expression of an emergent aristocratic culture, lively if limited, that saw itself as distinct from the apparatus of the state. Expelling the discourses of the church and the imperial bureaucracy from its confines, it celebrated an inner life of brooding contemplation and a social world based on exalted affective relations.2 Despite its implicit aesthetic rejection of the state, this was not the poetic idiom of social opposition: its human ideal was the refined gentleman amateur, aesthetically liberal but socially conservative. State service continued to be an important gentry vocation but was counterbalanced, as William Todd has observed, by a growing sense of personal honor. If the trajectory of the romantic poet Zhukovskii (1783–1852), who enjoyed a long and close relationship with the ruling family, made him the last of Russia’s court poets, then Karamzin’s career was perhaps more emblematic of new attitudes: twice refusing governorships in order to remain the state’s appointed historian, Karamzin “demonstrated a more acceptable mode of civil service behavior , one marked both by a spirit of independence and by a sense of national responsibility.”3 Despite its new dominance, the literary culture of Karamzin and Zhukovskii by no means neutralized all vestiges of the literary past. In addressing the sublime’s persistence into the new century, this chapter turns to the “losing side,” the archaists as the critic Iurii Tynianov once termed them, who remained faithful to a literary culture that to many now seemed reactionary, even as some of them paradoxically combined it with a radical politics.4 By the 1820s, the sublime, while remaining a sign of empire, had been freed of its unequivocal identification with the Russian monarchy. How the sublime survived, and how it changed its political valency, is the subject of this chapter. An earlier and still isolated example of this shift was Aleksandr 122 Sublime Dissent [44.220.131.93] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:13 GMT) Radishchev (1749–1802). In “Slovo o Lomonosove” (Discourse on Lomonosov) which ends his celebrated...