The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Chapter Four—The Staging of the Self

C H A P T E R F O U R The Staging of the Self “Let us look to ancient times The Russian past is full of themes. Already a legion of Great Men Is coming forth from darkness into light, Led up into an all-illumined theater, Clothed in the sunny dawn.” —Lomonosov, “Ode to Empress Elizaveta Petrovna . . . On the Most Radiant Gala Holiday of Her Highness’s Ascension to the All-Russian Throne, November 25, 1761” “I see everything . . . but want to see nothing.” —Mstislav, in Nikolev’s Sorena and Zamir Russian classicist tragedy, which dealt predominantly with historical subject matter, represents a further stage in the dynamic of Russian self-consciousness. The mirror-stage model again offers a compelling framework, insofar as this development is experienced as “a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history.”1 History emerges as a crucial arena, a laboratory in which the inner world of the self can test itself against the outer world of objective reality. However, breaking out from the inner world into the outer is not a simple, instant, unambiguous progression. Picturing the self as whole and independent also implies separation, alienation, and as in Jane Gallop’s description, this movement into history carries tragic implications, likened to the expulsion from Eden. Thus in eighteenth-century Russia, realizing a national history assumed an ambiguous The Staging of the Self 79 role. On the one hand, it promised to ground national identity in something real; on the other, it exposed a potentially fatal lack—a tragic fall from grace. Bridging this gap constituted the task of Russian classicist tragedy. As the Lacanian model emphasizes, the historical self is always largely a retroactive fiction, projected backwards and shaped by one’s currently anticipated future. The child’s image in the mirror represents the anticipated, future self, but also projects backwards (onto the “void”) to create an idealized retroactive image of the self “as it was before.”2 At the start of the process there is much less history against which the self may be tested, and the retrospectively mirrored self more clearly manifests its fictional roots, and is still close to that initial, ecstatic sense of national greatness that is so eloquently expressed in Lomonosov’s odes.3 The past appears not so much an objective confrontation with Otherness as another facet of self-mirroring. Early modern Russian consciousness posed the question of what came before as a serious challenge to national identity. The potential exposure of the emptiness of the past, and hence the nullity of the present, was inherent in the Petrine scenario, which after all posited Russia before Peter as a blank slate, as a state of oblivion or non-being. Foreign commentators, who, as noted, spoke to both extremes of the self-other polarity, quickly spotted this potential weak spot in the Petrine myth of origins. where, for example, Voltaire supported the positive vision of a new, childlike nation, the “glory of the young world” that exposed the corruption of the old (i.e., old regime Europe), Russia-bashers like Rousseau could give an opposite interpretation.The same biological metaphors that stressed Russia’s youth and anticipated its grand future could be marshaled to describe a state of infantilism or even premature senility. Russia’s birth onto the European stage could thus be described as fatally overdue or prematurely forced, depriving the nation of the necessary time for natural development. Probably the most inflammatory of such statements was by Rousseau in The Social Contract of 1762. He began with what was perhaps the most sensitive point, damning Russia to eternal infancy for failing to reach genuine youth: Youth is not infancy. There is for nations, as for men, a period of youth, or, shall we say, maturity, before which they should not be made subject to laws; but the maturity of a people is not always easily recognizable, and, if it is anticipated, the work is spoilt. One people is amenable to discipline from the beginning; another, not after ten centuries. Russia will never be really civilized, because it was civilized too soon. Peter [the Great] had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing. He did some good things, but most of what he did was out of place. He saw that his 80 THE VISUAL DOMINANT IN EIGHTEENTH...