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114 3 ‫ﱟﱞﱝ‬ Poetry Reads Power Overcoming Patronage Ужели жаждущие славы Одни герои лишь кровавы На лирах стоят петы быть? Иль смертные одни венчанны И их дары златосиянны Жар в музах могут возбудить? —A. Bukharskii, “Ode on my Birthday” (1792) The Crisis of Charismatic Authority Derzhavin’s oeuvre attests both to the odic vision’s continued sway in the early nineteenth century and to the loosening of odic strictures in the period encompassed by the poet’s career.1 If the ode constructed history as essentially a solar system where everything revolved, depending on the particular subgenre, around God, the monarch, or some lesser patron, the blurring of its generic contours also destabilized the fixedly hierarchical relationship between its author and addressee, in addition resulting, perhaps less directly, in the ode’s rearticulation of historical process as affected by forces other than individualized figures of authority. This chapter begins by considering the chronological turn of the century as a thematic focal point for several revisions to ruler-centered historical scenarios developed in the verse of Derzhavin’s lesser-known contemporaries: Nikolai L’vov (1751–1803), Petr Slovtsov (1767– 1843), Semen Bobrov (1763–1810), and, the most famous of these, Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802). Never so implicated as Derzhavin’s writings in a positive relationship with the empress (and in some cases, quite antagonistic to autocracy), these poets’ works were not constrained by allegiances to the court and thus, at the turn of the century, reconstituted the recently expired age from its social if not philosophical margins. If Derzhavin consistently Poetry Reads Power 115 inscribes Enlightenment ideology within the reign (Catherine’s) that promotes it, these odes—some polemically, some inadvertently—move away from reignbased chronologies toward alternative conceptions of periodization. The ceremonial ode evolved in eighteenth-century Russia as a genre of complex pragmatic content: a text of imperial and individual celebration, a gesture of value within the system of patronage, and a manifesto of the fledgling Russian Enlightenment and secular literary language. Responding to the demands of a new, rapidly modernizing state, the ode was the genre most swiftly assimilated from the Classicist canon by eighteenth-century Russian poets. First to be imported and naturalized are the instruments of power. The serious tone of the ode called for the use of heightened diction and enrichment by poetic device. Especially in the pseudo-Pindaric form practiced by Mikhail Lomonosov, these odes frequently appeared incoherent in their brilliance of imagery, abrupt shifts in subject matter, apparent disorder of form within the individual sections, and emotional, exalted tone. Scholars of Pindar have identified a social function of the ode that seems to apply equally as well to eighteenth-century Russia as it did to Pindar’s Greece of the fifth century B.C.: the genre’s restorative effect upon the polis. It has been argued that by entering into a contract with his patron, the ode-writer committed his language and performance to reintegrating society’s victor(s) into the community, thus strengthening the communal ties momentarily weakened by the patron’s athletic superiority, institution-building or power-gathering.2 In eighteenthcentury Russia, fractured by the demands of modernization, repeated court coups, and other contingencies and uncertainties of nation-building, the ode bound the subjects and the patron/monarch within the same set of putative state aspirations. When the eighteenth century as a whole came under odic scrutiny at a time when the primacy of the ode and the importance of genre hierarchy began to be questioned, ode writers, as this chapter demonstrates, shifted their position in relation to their patrons and their social function within the nation.3 The poems I consider in the first half of this chapter reveal that transformations in the solemn ode occurred when the genre was used as a medium for historical reflection. In the continuum from the odic to the elegiac that in the previous chapter I posit as a necessary workspace of historical elegy, the ode itself proves not a stable and uniform generic pole, but rather a genre that expands to accommodate a tonal range, from conventional acclamation to outright criticism. This tonal range is of a different nature than the one tested by Derzhavin in the Felitsa cycle: here it has to do with a critical scrutiny of the Enlightenment as a period and ideology deserving of assessment more nuanced than rapturous idealization. Structurally, the ode preserves a stable repertoire whose main element is, as I will show, a glorifying list. This chapter ’s first half is devoted to identifying and explicating the makeup of these lists—the figures and events they posit as representative of their epoch...

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