The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire by Harsha Ram (review)

565 Ab Imperio, 3/2005 ной, поскольку работы многих художников, к примеру, Васне- цова, обращались не только к от- ечественной, но и к европейской (подчеркнем – такой же импер- ской) аудитории, восприимчивой к синкретике образа “другого”. Впрочем, этот аспект был про- игнорирован из-за того, что Эли выстроил концепцию своей ра- боты исключительно на основе культурной оси “Россия-Европа”, ничего не упомянув о порефор- менном влиянии культурной со- ставной вектора “Россия-Азия” на эволюцию рассматриваемых в его работе эстетических канонов. Действительно, деконструи- ровать имперский нарратив мож- но, но подменить его националь- ным – намного сложнее. Возмож- но, прилагательное “rural” или “peasant” в заглавии (Landscape and Identity in Rural Russia) более гармонировало бы с основными тезисами монографии. Adam FERGUS Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime : A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). x+307 pp. Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-299-18190-1 (hardback edition). In the history of any literature, certain figures, events, and devices become regarded as landmarks. While this may be natural enough, it is useful to trace the features that cross the boundaries created by the establishment of such conventions. This is what Harsha Ram’s study does, by charting the relationship between poetics and literary views of the Russian Empire from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. While it could be argued that during this period the state was less violently coercive than it would later become, concepts of the empire and imperial rule exerted a constant influence on literature, in spite of the very significant changes in poetics from the time of Pushkin onwards and the profound changes in relations between writers and the state apparent after the Decembrist uprising. Ram begins by analyzing how a hierarchy of literary norms was established, with political considerations influencing the contemporary reception of Western and classical writers such that the ode came to be seen as the 566 Рецензии/Reviews highest form in a literary hierarchy, and the exultation of the Russian Empire and its rulers as its highest attainment. Yet the poet’s growing awareness of his own authority was eventually to destroy these norms. However, the Russian Empire remained a continual presence in Russian poetry, up to and including Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s time, when responses of elegiac longing began to displace those based on the sublime, and the hierarchy of style and genre had substantially altered. As Ram indicates, these gave rise to a significantly different understanding of the power of the Russian state and Russian imperial expansion in the literature of the second part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth. He confines his study to the earlier period, and while political events from the end of the war with Sweden in 1721 to the Caucasian wars of the 1840s are given due mention, as well as those directly affecting poets, from Lomonosov’s house arrest in 1744 to Lermontov’s death in 1841, questions of poetics are kept firmly in the foreground. In his new empire, Peter the Great arrogated the sacred elements of Russian culture, Byzantine in origin , to himself and his achievements: instead of being a guardian of the faith, however, he and his empire were to be exalted. Polotskii does this by comparing Russia and her rulers to the heavens and heavenly bodies respectively, the vast extent of the Russian Empire providing the motivation for the sublime. Polotskii’s static imagery and the absence of the poet’s voice meant that he did not himself realize it: this was to come later. Ram leads the reader through the Western and classical influences on Lomonosov as he defined a suitable Russian odic style at a time when such precepts were still labile. These included Lomonosov’s reception of such influences as Malherbe’s and Boileau’s moderation of what they perceived to be the excesses of the Pindaric ode in order to produce a style in which the poet’s obligations were much more closely circumscribed by his duty to the monarch and state, as well as the Russian verse translations of odes written by German scholars resident at the Academy of Sciences during the reign of Empress Anne. This corresponded to Lomonosov’s advocacy of iambic verse as a suitable vehicle for the expression of the sublime and to his establishment of the vysokii shtil’, in which many Church Slavic elements were incorporated, thus producing a linguistic register analogous to Peter’s empire in which sacred elements were adopted for the glorification of the secular. Of further-reaching effect was the adaptation of the psalmic tradition: in 1744, Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov each attempted a 567 Ab Imperio, 3/2005 translation of Psalm 143, ostensibly as an exercise in their views of what the new poetic language should be. In so doing, however, they...