Russia's Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. This quotation from the Translatio Sancti Clementis or Legenda italica of Leo of Ostia, composed in approximately 1100, is cited in Leonard Boyle, A Short Guide to St. Clement’s, Rome (Rome: Collegio San Clemente, 1989), 33. 2. Boyle, Short Guide to St. Clement’s, 5, 8. See also Tat’iana Iashaeva and Mariia Motovilina, Krestnyi put’ sviatogo Klimenta: Rim—Khersones (Sevastopol: Inkermanskii Sviato-Klimentovskii Monastyr’, 2002). 3. “‘The Tale of the Vladimir Princes,’ composed in the first half of the sixteenth century, introduced into the historical record a brother of Augustus, Prus, who presumably ruled the Prussian lands and was a direct ancestor of Riurik. It then traced the lineage of the Moscow princes back to Riurik” (Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000], 1:26). See, too, G. S. Knabe, Russkaia antichnost’. Soderzhanie, rol’ i sud’ba antichnogo naslediia v kul’ture Rossii. Programma-konspekt lektsionnogo kursa (Moscow: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Gumanitarnyi Universitet, 2000), 100–101: Knabe notes that drawings at the Moscow Kremlin dating to the seventeenth century feature Augustus and his descendants. 4. Aspects of the respective associations of Moscow, Rome, and Constantinople have been discussed by historians, cultural semioticians, and others. See, for instance, Joel Raba, “Moscow—the Third Rome or the New Jerusalem ,” Historische Veröffentlichungen: Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 50 (1995): 303, on the complex “character components” of the “triad RomeConstantinople -Moscow”: “the rulers of pagan Rome, who nevertheless were the masters of the world, become the forefathers of the rulers of Muscovite Russia; the rulers of Christian Byzantium transmitted the symbols of their power to the forefathers of the Russian autocrat elected by God.” See, too, William K. Medlin, Moscow and East Rome (Geneva: Librarie E. Droz, 1952), 79, 203 on the legacy of Byzantium for Russian rulers: “temporal head of Orthodox Christendom and defender of the universal faith.” Semioticians Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii argue that “the idea of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ brings together two tendencies—the religious and the political. When the second aspect was being considered the connection with the first Rome was emphasized, this entailed a suppression of the religious aspect and underlined the secular or ‘imperial’ one. The primary figure in this case is Caesar Augustus, not Constantine ” (Ju. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskij, “Echoes of the Notion ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ in Peter the Great’s Ideology,” in their The Semiotics of Russian Culture , ed. Ann Shukman [Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures , University of Michigan, 1984], 54). See, too, Lotman’s discussion of St. Petersburg as characterized by “two archetypes: the ‘eternal Rome’ and the ‘non-eternal, doomed Rome’ (Constantinople)” (Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman, intro. Umberto Eco [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990], 194). 5. Tsvetaeva’s essay “Geroi truda,” devoted to Valerii Briusov, characterizes Briusov as a “Scythian Roman” (Marina Tsvetaeva, “Geroi truda [Zapisi o Valerii Briusove],” in her Proza, intro. Valentina S. Coe [Letchworth, U.K.: Bradda Books, 1969], 88). 6. For a helpful example of such a study, see Aleksei Kara-Murza, ed., Znamenitye russkie o Rime (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 2001), which contains reactions of Russian visitors in Rome from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Kara-Murza has compiled similar volumes on Venice (Znamenitye russkie o Venetsii [Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 2001]) and on Florence (Znamenitye russkie o Florentsii [Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 2001]). 7. “Just as the dimension of depth has vanished from the sphere of visual creation, so the dimension of historical depth has vanished from the content of the major works of modern literature. Past and present are apprehended spatially , locked in a timeless unity that, while it may accentuate surface differences , eliminates any feeling of sequence by the very act of juxtaposition” (Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991], 63). Frank notes (62–63) that modern works “maintain a continual juxtaposition between aspects of the past and the present so that both are fused in one comprehensive view.” 8. Cited in Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 6. 9. Ovid called the area “a barbarous land” and “the remotest part of the world” (Ovid, Tristia, in Ovid in Six Volumes, vol. 6, Tristia, Ex Ponto, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass...