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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments As I consider the genesis and evolution of Russia’s Rome, I am reminded of the 24 April 2006 New Yorker cartoon that features one distraught, toga-clad Roman telling another, “My contractor told me Rome would only take a day.” The foundations for my version of the city were laid in a Stanford University dissertation (1996), which benefited from the support of the Stanford University Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, a grant from the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Northern California, and an Educational Foundation Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. As I reworked the project into its current form, I was fortunate to receive funding from the Wellesley College Davis Fund for Russian Area Studies, the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. I am grateful to the staff of the European Reading Room at the Library of Congress, the Russian State Library in Moscow, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, and the Interlibrary Loan Division of the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina for valuable assistance. I would like to thank Steve Salemson for welcoming this project to the University of Wisconsin Press and Gwen Walker and Sheila Moermond for seeing it through publication. Thanks go as well to Jane Barry for meticulous copyediting. I am deeply grateful to Avril Pyman and Michael Wachtel, manuscript readers for the University of Wisconsin Press, whose detailed, insightful, and informative comments on my text inspired me and strengthened the final product considerably. I would also like to thank the many additional individuals who have read, commented upon, xi or more generally discussed aspects of my work. Among them are Stephen Baehr, Peter Barta, Nikolay Bogomolov, Caryl Emerson, Lazar Fleishman, John Malmstad, Irene Masing-Delic, Paul Allen Miller, Stanley Rabinowitz, Paul Robinson, David Sloane, and Andrew Wachtel . My undergraduate advisor at Princeton University, Ellen Chances, introduced me to the study of Russian literature and has responded to my writing ever since with her customary blend of intelligence, excitement , and encouragement. Gregory Freidin, my Stanford dissertation advisor, continues to stimulate and amaze me with his intense commitment to broad-ranging, ambitious ideas and scholarship. The late, extraordinary Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov honored me throughout the creation of this book with his careful attention to my successive drafts and his ongoing support and scholarly generosity. Yana Yakhnina, in Moscow, and Marianna Landa, Sergei Landa, and Juna Janovna Zek, in St. Petersburg, offered warm hospitality and lively and thought-provoking discussions. My former students Jana H. Copeland, Alexandra Deyneka, André Rembert, and Sara Saylor provided impeccable assistance. My parents, Madeleine G. Kalb and Marvin Kalb, and my sister, Deborah S. Kalb, instilled in me a love of books and a firm respect for the carefully crafted written word. They have contributed to this project in innumerable ways, and I am very grateful. Finally, heartfelt thanks go to my wonderful husband and fellow Slavist Alexander Ogden, who has provided constant support and intellectual companionship. Portions of chapter 1 appeared previously in “Merezhkovskii’s Third Rome: Imperial Visions and Christian Dreams,” Ab Imperio 2, no. 1 (March 2001): 125–40. Chapter 3 appeared in an earlier version as “A ‘Roman Bolshevik’: Aleksandr Blok’s ‘Catiline’ and the Russian Revolution ,” Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 413–28. Chapter 4 was published with minor changes as “Lodestars on the Via Appia: Viacheslav Ivanov’s ‘Roman Sonnets’ in Context,” Die Welt der Slaven 48 (2003): 23–52. An early draft of chapter 5 was published as “The Politics of an Esoteric Plot: Mikhail Kuzmin’s ‘Smert’ Nerona,’” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 20, no. 1 (1993): 35–49. I thank each of these journals for permission to reprint material. Illustration credit goes to Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y. (Leonardo da Vinci, Saint John the Baptist), Scala/Art Resource, N.Y. (Cesare Maccari, Cicero Denouncing Catiline before the Senate; Karl Briullov, The Last Day of Pompeii), and the Trustees of the British Museum (icon of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1450). xii Acknowledgments ...