The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Chapter Two—The Moment of the Muses

C H A P T E R T w O The Moment of the Muses Lomonosov’s Odes “For Anna is a unique wonder of today’s world. In the presence of her glory all that exists becomes most glorious, In the presence of the great one everything becomes manifestly magnificent; Everything assumes its best aspect. what is bad or malicious Becomes good and amenable to love.” —Trediakovsky, “Epistle from Russian Poetry to Apollo” The desire for visibility undoubtedly plays an important part in all human activity, and especially in political culture, in which ostentatious display may bolster and legitimize an individual’s—or a regime’s—hold on power. Such self-presentation figured centrally in Russia’s early modern stage of national development. Displaying Russia “on the stage of universal fame,” as pictured in the Petrine scenario, involved an anticipatory vision of future greatness, of maturity and completeness, accompanied by a jubilant sense of self-affirming achievement. This exhilarating vision is nowhere more evident than in the triumphal ode, which expresses in most eloquent terms faith in the perfectly mirrored self, a theophanic or utopian faith in vision that also reflected Eastern Orthodoxy’s theology of sight. This analysis of the odes occupies two chapters. In the current one, Lomonsov’s odes are examined from the point of view of coming into selfhood, considering the imperative to be seen, the interplay between self and audience, the special role of the tsar, and the way in which the odes respond to the anxieties that threaten this image. In the following chapter, the revelatory power of the odes is accounted for by reference to the Eastern Orthodox mystical view of sight. The Moment of the Muses 29 Lomonosov and the “Second Revelation” of the Self The triumphal ode has long been acknowledged as eighteenth-century Russia’s most well-known and characteristic literary artifact. It played a key role in the literary process, leading the way to a new definition of the literary language and to the definition of a classicist system of genres. It also established poetry as the voice of imperial court culture, which itself sponsored and shaped high cultural activity for much of the century.1 The function of the ode as the voice of praise also accorded with Russian Orthodox religious culture, whose most basic imperative was “true glorification” (the etymological meaning of Pravoslavie—as opposed to that of the English term, “Orthodoxy,” which derives from “correct doctrine”). As Stephen Baehr, Boris Uspensky, and Victor Zhivov have argued, the ode was at the center of a new “religion of state” and “political theology” that accorded the tsar attributes formerly reserved for God (Russia’s version of “divine right” monarchy).2 Perhaps in no other sphere was the self-affirming jubilation of emergent Russian selfconsciousness as eloquent and unabashed as in the triumphal ode. The ode celebrated Russia’s political might and new-found civilization—her entrance into “the universal theater of fame”—and her victory over gloomy oblivion, to which it relegated her enemies and naysayers. L. V. Pumpiansky, examining the establishment of classicism in Russian literature, pondered the central place that the triumphal ode acquired in eighteenth-century Russian culture. In particular, he noted Lomonosov’s famous “Ode on the Taking of Khotin” of 1739, prototype for the new syllabo-tonic versification system, as a basic turning point, asking what it was that gave it such extraordinary impact. He differentiated between the Petrine revelatory moment (what we have referred to as the Petrine scenario) and this one, another moment of self-realization, an “ecstatic confession of faith in the self”: To understand the genesis of this feat of genius in 1739, we need to imagine that first moment when rapture with the West suddenly—like an explosion—turned into rapture with Russia as a western country. This was the second revelation in the history of the Russian people: first Europe’s grandeur is revealed, as something overwhelming, like the sun; then it is revealed that Russian grandeur also exists, and moreover, it is of the very same quality! This rapture thus avows a single faith, in both Russia and Europe [odnim vostorgom mozhno ispovedat’ i Evropu i Rossiiu]! we call this the “post-Petrine” revelation—the second revelation—of the Russian people. It was precisely this moment of ecstatic 30 THE VISUAL DOMINANT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA confession of faith in the self that...