Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception by Zara Martirosova Torlone (review)

Ever since Chrétien de Troyes proclaimed in the twelfth century that Greek learning had passed first to the Romans and then to the French, scholars have identified a translatio studii, a transfer of classical learning's cultural authority to the countries lying north and west of its Mediterranean homeland.¹ The past thirty years, for example, have witnessed numerous books on the Roman poet Vergil's reception in Italy, France, England, and Germany.² But as Zara Martirosova Torlone demonstrates in her superb monograph, Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception, that collective analysis overlooks an important exception to the westward-leading narrative of Vergil's influence. In the eighteenth century, Greek and Roman scholarship turned east as part of Peter the Great's opening of Russia to the European West. The countries that Peter and other Russians grew to admire most—England, France, Holland, and the Hapsburg Empire—had been embracing classical literature for centuries. Writers as diverse as Francesco Petrarca, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Pierre Corneille, and Jean Racine were profoundly indebted to Vergil. If Russia were to develop a literary tradition comparable to the well-established national literatures of Europe, it had to come to terms with Vergil, whose works provided a common, pan-European cultural heritage: "Vergil became . . . a part of solving the problem of Russian national identity in political, social, cultural, spiritual, and personal terms" (5).

To some extent, Russia received Vergil and other classical writers at secondhand, through the mediation of Western neoclassicism. But in 1701, Peter transformed the Orthodox Moscow Academy into the state-sponsored Slavonic-Greco-Latin Academy, with Latin as the primary language of instruction (4). Modeled on Western institutions, the academy gave Russian writers and intellectuals the linguistic tools they needed to read Greek and Roman literature in the original languages. Classical scholarship flourished, with writers undertaking the project of refounding Russian literature on ancient Mediterranean models through translation and vernacular imitation. In theory, the task should have been relatively easy. Like Latin, Russian is a heavily inflected language with a more flexible word order than such Western European languages as French, German, and English (226). But as Torlone demonstrates throughout this volume, the search for the proper linguistic and rhetorical medium that might bridge the vast gap between Roman and Russian experiences was daunting in practice. To this day, in Torlone's view, Russia has failed to produce a satisfying translation of the Aeneid.

Torlone's study is unabashedly evaluative. More than many historicist literary scholars, she judges individual translations and vernacular imitations of classical models in terms of aesthetic success and failure. While some critics might argue that such an approach insufficiently addresses changing canons of taste, Torlone carefully grounds her evaluations in the reception history of every work she discusses. Her complaint that Peter the Great's career "proved to be an insufficient focus to sustain" Mikhail Lomonosov's attempt to write "a fully developed national epic" (40), for example, has ample historical precedent. Nikolai Karamzin said something quite similar in the early nineteenth century (41). Vissarion Belinskii declared Lomonosov's poem a "tour de force of imagination, standing on its hind legs" (41). Instead of evading the history of tastes, Torlone brings it to the center of her study and fully recognizes her own responses as part of the long, still unfinished history of Russia's self-critical efforts to find a vernacular idiom to match the dignity and grandeur of Vergil's Latin.

Torlone recounts the history of Vergil's Russian reception almost as a quest romance, in which a long succession of writers and translators struggles to achieve an elusive balance between fidelity to an ancient, culturally remote, Mediterranean text and the interests and needs of an evolving Russian readership. No early writer gets the balance quite right. Those who stuck too closely to the Latin original strained Russian grammar and diction to the point of absurdity...