Кормя двуглавого орла… Русская литература и государственная идеология в последней трети XVIII – пер-вой трети XIX века по Андрей Зорин (review)

516 Forum AI логические конструкции на основе аналитического изучения и интер- претации текстов Священного Писания, церковного права различных конфессий, статистики, богословских толкований, европейских право- вых документов, то есть широкого комплекса текстов, не относящихся к belles-lettres современной им эпохи. Образы, стилистика, форма этих текстов, а также читатель были иными. В этом смысле я склоняюсь к мнению, высказанному в редакционном введении: если метод Зорина работает на материале XVIII века, он оказывается гораздо менее при- годным для изучения более поздних эпох. Так что исследование Зорина – не вызов существующей историогра- фической традиции, а дополнение к ней, один из возможных вариантов исторического изучения государственной идеологии в императорской России. И еще одно. Настоящая дискуссия вызвала у меня противоречивые ощущения: обсуждается хорошая книга, представлены яркие рецензии. Плохо то, что я – профессиональный исследователь имперской России, не знаю работ Александра Эткинда об александровской эпохе, а он, судя по его рецензии, не знаком с моими работами, где высказываются созвучные его пониманию этой эпохи мысли.2 Кажется, не знает моих работ по периоду и Андрей Зорин. Либо мы – истрорики и литературо- веды, исследователи культуры – не читаем друг друга, либо виновато “расстроенное” российское коммуникативное пространство. В любом случае это – грустный вывод, а по большому счету – это сдерживающий фактор развития современной отечественной историографии. Хорошо, если инициатива редакторов AI эту ситуацию поколеблет. 2 Е. А. Вишленкова. Религиозная политика: официальный курс и общее мнение России Александровской эпохи. Казань, 1997; Ее же. Духовная школа России первой четверти XIX века. Казань, 1998. Richard STITES A FEW NOTES TO ANDREI ZORIN’S FEEDING THE DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE Andrei Zorin’s rich and provocative book, “Feeding the Double-Headed Eagle” is a goldmine of information and a model of what used to be called intellectual history or Ideengeschichte. Whereas that older style often limited itself to conventional, almost canonical, texts by established thinkers, Zorin 517 Ab Imperio, 1/2002 reaches out to sources previously little-used by historians, especially poetry and drama. I will limit my brief remarks to the topic I know best: the role of the stage in the formation of ideology. They are meant not so much as a critique of the work as a whole, but to add some details to the story. In the chapter entitled “National [Narodnaya] War: the Events of the Time of Troubles in Russian Literature”, Andrei Zorin analyzes a series of patriotic odes and plays, sometimes with intertextual discussion of nonbelletristic works, in terms of the struggle with Napoleonic France. (It might be noted that wartime in general almost always produces overheated formulations, and this in itself partly explains the “hot” temperature of Russian ideologies throughout the period 1805-1815, compared with the “cooler” constructions of Sergei Uvarov a few decades later.) Zorin treats the works that culminated in Mikhail Kryukovsky’s “Pozharsky” (1807) which in an earlier piece he characterized as Kryukovsky’s “bloodless victory”. The chief theme he develops with great skill and immense erudition is the ideological “twinning” of early 17th -century Poland with Napoleonic France, reinforced by other parallels such as geopolitical factors, the common religion of the Poles and the French, and their frequent hostility to Russia. The theme of the Smuta as inspiration for generalized patriotic constructions was not new, but in the 1800s became a flurry or even a flood. Zorin shows that, at least for a time, the 1613 events replaced the reign of Peter I as the Foundation Tale of Russian history. One might add to Zorin’s list the opera “Ivan Susanin” (1815) with music by Caterino Cavos and libretto by Alexander Shakhovskoi, a forerunner of Mikhail Glinka’s masterpiece. Audiences were delighted by the fact that Shakhovskoi distorted history even more than was usual in opera and drams: Ivan Susanin is saved from the Poles in the finale. Zorin persuasively argues that Vladislav Ozerov´s historical drama of 1807, “Dmitry Donskoi”, did not possess the resonance of Kryukovsky’s “Pozharsky” and other works on the Smuta because it was much more remote than the ideologically fused Polish (1613 and the 1790s) and French (current) events, and that “Donskoi”, dealing as it did with a “struggle of princes” against the Tatars, lacked the all-class content of stories surrounding Minin, Pozharsky, Hermogen, and company. There is no reason to doubt Stepan Zhikharev’s account of the tumultuous emotional response of the audience at the performance of “Pozharsky”. And yet, though one of the themes of the Smuta genre was national unity, this is not reflected dramaturgically in Kryukovsky’s play (which appeared on stage a few months after “Donskoi”). Kuzma Minin, the Nizhny-Novgorod butcher who raised money and troops 518 Forum AI to liberate Moscow and who actually chose Prince Pozharsky as commander, as commander, has only six brief lines in this play.1 As to “Donskoi”, though this is outside the scope of Zorin’s investigation, readers might want to ask the question: what kind of resonance did these plays have and for whom? Judging from contemporary reactions, Donskoi was as potent as “Pozharsky” in whipping up patriotic emotions to those who saw it. Opening night was a smash success, with the great tragedian Alexei Yakovlev in the title role. The furor and the triumph of “Donskoi” stemmed in no small part from its performance at the time when Russian armies had just suffered a chain of major defeats in the wars of 1805-1807 against Napoleon. “More fitting to die in battle than endure a shameful peace!”2 , Dmitry exclaims to his fellow princes. Yakovlev’s patriotically inflected utterance of Donskoi’s language elicited a storm of emotion in the...