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The Persistence of Panegyric Discourse Catherine II’s death on November 6, 1796, and her heir Paul I’s subsequent symbolic repudiation of her legacy created a peculiar crisis for panegyric discourse.1 On the one hand, it was difficult to represent Catherine’s muchcelebrated thirty-four-year reign as darkness or winter, redeemed only through the light and spring of Paul’s succession, a contrastive topos we have seen Lomonosov exploit in his accession day odes to Elizabeth. If anything, uncertainty regarding the direction the new rule would take could only foster anxieties over its representation. A given panegyric ode’s distribution of attention and praise between the Catherinian past and Pauline future could be construed as expressing the ode writer’s personal biases and thus endanger his position at court. On the other hand, Russian literary culture in the 1790s was quite distinct from that surrounding the accession of Catherine II in the 1760s or Elizabeth in the 1740s: the spread of Sentimentalist and early Romantic notions of authorial authenticity implied new restrictions on the adaptability of panegyric poets’ political values, which previously wavered, depending on the genre framing them or fluctuations in court politics. If there was only one authentic position a poet could adopt, then Paul’s accession required a new type of rhetorical elasticity, one allowing the panegyrist to praise both monarchs within a single text, and gloss over or rearticulate, while not entirely ignoring, Paul’s antithetical relation to his mother. Although there is little evidence to suggest that Paul was particularly receptive to, or encouraging of, poetic nuance, there is no question that he paid great 72 2 ‫ﱟﱞﱝ‬ Catherine’s Passing Hybrid Genres of Commemoration Хотя бы окружен был тмою сей кумир, Но в нем владычицу свою познал бы мир. —G. R. Derzhavin, “To the Statue of Catherine II” (1797) attention to the symbolic representation of his power. Countess V. N. Golovina recalls, for example, that hours before Catherine’s death Paul had already arranged his reception room in such a way that officials who had come to resolve the most trifling matters would casually pass his dying mother. This act of deliberate profanation by Catherine’s heir virtually sanctioned a deflation of her posthumous status before the fact.2 This episode portends the precarious position of any who would celebrate the new ruler as successor of the preceding one. The not yet dead body of the queen is left as a mere furnishing on the way to her imminent successor’s office. Yet, the attraction of her legacy is also implicitly acknowledged in the very deliberateness and impropriety of this arrangement. Moreover, as her legitimate though ideologically and personally disgruntled heir, Paul appears to share Catherine’s quarters; his accession is not nearly as disruptive as was Catherine’s own, his legitimacy not subject (as was Catherine’s) to doubt; and his strategy in fact is to emphasize “hereditary right” as guaranteeing both his own rule and the future reigns of his successors.3 This kind of intricate figurative demotion—highlighting the endurance and continuity of the system and, at the same time, a shift in the new ruler’s values away from his mother’s—was to cue the court, and by extension court poets, to the representational demands of the newly-enthroned. Paul’s downgrading of Catherine’s legacy was furthermore linked to his deep-seated distrust of the European, primarily French, Enlightenment she had promulgated, and hence bound up with his attempts to ward off the threat of a Russian political upheaval similar to the French Revolution or the coup that had ousted his father in 1762. While care should be taken not to overstate Paul’s shift of political direction, his succession and concomitant disavowal of the Catherinian Enlightenment offer perhaps the first native signpost of the end of the eighteenth century (or at least of the Age of Enlightenment) in Russia. The Russian government—both Catherine’s and Paul’s—took great pains to distance the country from the single most important such signpost in Europe, the French Revolution, and it might be intriguing (precisely because not entirely accurate) to consider Paul’s enthronement as the alternative Russian watershed for the end of the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. In addition to slighting the memory of his mother by banishing her adherents and returning those she had banished to favor, or by crowning the remains of his ill-fated father, Peter III, and reinterring him side by side with Catherine, Paul almost immediately began to wage war on the upper classes’ reliance...

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