The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Writing about the sublime is frequently less sublime than living it, yet this book is also the outcome of a prolonged love affair with the Russian language and its poetry, an experience that has certainly afforded me many moments of rapture. Let me then begin by thanking all the teachers who have transmitted to me the passion they felt for the Russian language . Of my early teachers I would single out Michael Ulman in Sydney , Australia, whose classes granted me not only my first systematic insights into Russian literature but dramatized what I soon understood to be the best qualities of the Russian intelligent: an unswerving commitment to culture in the face of brute force and a caring relationship to the word, spoken and written. Although my interest in Russian poetry dates back to my teenage years, the topic of this book emerged during my time as a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Let me thank my dissertation adviser Michael Holquist for supporting my work with unflagging enthusiasm and real insight, Tomas Venclova for sharing his great love for the poetic traditions of eastern Europe, Monika Greenleaf for providing a splendid example of how to engage the Russian poetic canon both seriously and innovatively, and Sara Suleri, without whom my turn to orient and empire would have scarcely been possible . I also wish to thank Katerina Clark and Christopher Miller for the care and attention with which they read my dissertation. If the book’s bare bones were already in place at Yale, then it acquired flesh and blood at the University of California at Berkeley. A semester’s fellowship at the Townsend Humanities Center and a Humanities Research Grant, both granted at Berkeley, gave me the much needed time to fill in the many conceptual and narrative gaps of the book. I have the ix great fortune to be working in one of the most congenial as well as intellectually serious Slavic programs in the United States. Every one of my colleagues has played a significant role in guiding this book to completion : even as I thank them all, let me single out Olga Matich for her warm and sustained interest in my work, Viktor Zhivov for sharing with me his vast knowledge of the eighteenth century, Robert Hughes for his poetic culture and his close scrutiny of the manuscript, and Irina Paperno for her confidence in my abilities and the high standards to which she held me. Thanks must also be given to Berkeley’s Slavic graduate students for providing much-needed help with library research and translation as well as for their willingness to exchange ideas. In this context I would like to mention Gabriel White, Anne Dwyer, Polina Barskova, Boris Wolfson, Chris Caes, Ingrid Kleespies, Michael Kunichika, and Stiliana Milkova. On completion, this book swiftly found a home at the University of Wisconsin Press. I owe this to David Bethea, whose kindness and enthusiasm as reader and editor I shall always recall with gratitude . Finally let me not forget the numerous anonymous reviewers, both within and outside Berkeley, who gave me my first real taste of peer review and the giddying sense of community it can afford. This book is, at least in its post-dissertation phase, the same age as my son Nissim. Not just for the sake of this shared chronology, I dedicate it to him. x Acknowledgments The Imperial Sublime ...