The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (review)

REVIEWS 185 Stephen Lessing Baehr. The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. xiv + 308pp. US$37.50. ISBN 0-8047-1533-5. The first in a projected series on the paradise myth in Russia, this volume, which focuses on tiie period between the accession of Peter the Great in 1682 and the death of Catherine the Great in 1796, provides a new perspective on the transformation in that period from a medieval and sacred literature to a modern and secular one. As Stephen Lessing Baehr traces the early evolution of the myth in both Western Europe and Russia, his book will be of interest to comparatists as well as those interested in Russian culture. The culture gap between eighteenth-century Russia and Western Europe is shown to be even greater than usually thought, and proponents of viewing eighteenth-century Russian culture as a belated Renaissance will find support in Baehr's findings. The comparison also yields an interesting insight into the function of the paradise myth: in Russia it served mainly to support the social and political status quo, while in Western Europe it was used to criticize contemporary society. This distinction in turn leads to Baehr's discovery of a uniquely Russian genre, the "eutopia"—a cross between panegyric ode and utopia. For such discoveries alone this book is worth its price. It also serves the field well by paying attention to numerous lesser-known works. The least satisfactory section is the first chapter on Western conventions. Although Baehr displays an impressive command of Western sources, his "typology" and "grammar " are a random listing of images, motifs, and syntax, without any discernible unifying theoretical framework. This treatment might have made more sense had it been used more consistently to facilitate the discussion in subsequent chapters, but Baehr's discussion bears little relation to his theoretical introduction. This is not to denigrate individual observations—many of them, such as those upon the various mechanisms for extending the myth's vocabulary, are quite illuminating. The relationship between lexical detail, the theme of abundance, and the paratactic means for creating redundance is convincingly drawn. The second chapter investigates the way in which Orthodox theology and ideologies— Moscow as the Third Rome, for example—Russianized the paradise myth and, when combined with classical mythology, created both a religion of state and a secular literature in Russia. The appeal to broad themes, such as Orthodox iconography, shows Baehr's skill both in extracting major patterns and in selecting interesting details. Some of the central topoi introduced in the second chapter are further developed in the next two chapters. The tsar as cosmogonie creator, history as cyclical recurrence, and the translatio imperii in its Russian rendition are expertly analysed in a variety of literary and extraliterary genres. The examination of the garden as a locus amoenus is interesting as far as it goes, but it does not go quite far enough. One misses a more extensive treatment of actual gardening as a popular eighteenth-century art form, while paradisal imagery in the pastoral and idyllic traditions might have received greater attention. In this context one misses a reference to Poggioli's classic work on the pastoral, The Oaten Flute, which concludes with chapters on Gogol and Tolstoy that will be even more relevant to Baehr's sequel. (Another work by Poggioli is consulted, but the author's name is consistently misspelled.) Love as agape is reflected in the epithalamia Baehr skilfully analyses, but although erotic love, central to the paradise myth, is less emphasized in Russian than in Western literature, it is clearly not absent, and more discussion of it— or more extensive commentary on its relative unimportance—would have been welcome. In the discussion of the estate as a locus amoenus some mention of Murav'ev's works would have been appropriate. Of Karamzin's works, "The Countryside" or "Liodor" are more pertinent than "Poor Liza." 186 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 Chapter 5 is superb. Here the paradise myth, mainly in the prose fiction of Kheraskov, is connected with the Masonic emphasis on a spiritual paradise. Baehr must be...