Придворная словесность: институт литературы и конструкции абсолютизма в России середины XVIII века - [151]

Summary

Courtly Letters: Russian Literature and Visions of Absolutism in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

This book explores an area that, while popular in Russian literary studies in the past, has rarely been addressed in recent scholarship: the emergence of secular Russian literature as a set of discourses and a cultural institution in the mid-eighteenth century, mostly under the rule of Empress Elizabeth (1741–1761) and the auspices of her long-time favorite, Ivan Shuvalov, proudly known as the “Russian Maecenas”. Involving only a small number of writers – Antiokh Kantemir, Vasilii Trediakovskii, Aleksandr Sumarokov and Mikhail Lomonosov were for some time almost alone in that category – this moment nonetheless warrants attention as the starting point for a rich literary and cultural tradition that transformed secular letters into an important element of the post-Petrine reformed statehood. In my book, this moment is analyzed through several interconnected perspectives. A close reading of specific poetic texts allows me to situate them, along with their authors and audiences, within the cultural context of the Russian court and state; to establish their links to the West European models and cosmopolitan cultural trends behind them; and, further, to raise conceptual questions such as the place of literature as a practice within early modern court society, and the role of fiction in emerging modern statehood. Accordingly, my discussion builds on the rich disciplinary tradition of Russian literary historiography associated with such scholars as G. A. Gukovskii and L. V. Pumpianskii, as well as on the theoretical work of Yury Lotman and Western theorists such as Norbert Elias, Ernst Kantorowicz, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, amongst others.

The book includes an Introduction outlining its theoretical premises and goals, and six chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, “The Principles of Courtly Taste”, contains chapters 1 and 2, which investigate emerging discourses of literary theory centered around adaptations of Horace. Through Horatian precedent, these discourses establish secular poetry and fiction as a necessary element of both life at court and the political existence of a successful empire. Part 2, “The Lyric of Power”, includes chapters 3–5, which explore the mid-eighteenth century lyric – or more specifically, its dominant modes, the Biblical paraphrase and the secular political ode – as a medium which shaped and articulated symbolic visions of power and subjectivity. Chapter 6, the only chapter in Part 3, “Literature and Courtly Patronage”, uncovers the patronage strategies of Ivan Shuvalov, who directed and promoted the efforts of Russia’s major poets, aligning them both with Russia’s imperial project and with the pan-European debates and propaganda battles of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).

The Introduction articulates the theoretical framework behind the individual readings that constitute the bulk of the book. This framework emerges at the crossroads of the Russian tradition of literary and cultural history, from Gukovskii and Pumpianskii to Lotman and V. M. Zhivov, on the one hand, and theoretical interpretations of early modern culture which emerged over the last century in the West on the other. Highlighting significant conceptual similarities between the work of Soviet scholars carried out behind the Iron Curtain and that of their Western contemporaries, I reconstruct the outlines of a shared inquiry into the relationship between literature, the royal court, and the emerging “absolutist” statehood in early modern Russia and Europe. This reconstruction centers on several interrelated issues and perspectives. First among them is a recognition of the fundamental affinity of early modern literary forms with the evolving pan-European languages of absolutist politics. Succinctly articulated in Soviet Russia in Pumpianskii’s few articles from the 1930s, this dependence has, in the West, become the subject of a rich and manifold theoretical and historical inquiry. From Pumpianskii’s contemporary Walter Benjamin to the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and Victoria Kahn, scholars have uncovered the political origins and effects of the early modern poetic imagination and, conversely, the dependence of political order on the resources of narrative and fiction. Pumpianskii’s insights concerning the attachment of eighteenth-century Russian literature to the imperial court, supported by the findings of his Soviet colleagues Gukovskii and P. N. Berkov, resonate, moreover, with the conclusions of a somewhat different school of thought – the historical sociology of Norbert Elias, the author of “On the Process of Civilization” (1939) and “The Court Society” (1969). Investigating the emergence and evolution of European court society as a specific “figuration” of social existence, Elias situates early modern modes of literary production and consumption, as well as the social position of the authors themselves, within its framework. These claims provided the following generation of scholars with a basis for a more general inquiry into what came to be designated as the early modern “disciplinary revolution” and “governmentality”. The American historian Marc Raeff and his Soviet-based contemporary Yury Lotman both inscribed the cultural policies of the eighteenth-century Russian monarchy in the large-scale process of top-down disciplining of the nation of subjects. In this perspective, literature in the broadest sense can be seen as a central institution of the evolving statehood, a medium which shaped and reproduced visions of authority as well as modes of obedient or emancipated selfhood. This approach to literature, articulated by Lotman and his collaborators in the Moscow-Tartu School of cultural semiotics (Zhivov, B. A. Uspenskii), corresponds to Michel Foucault’s simultaneous investigation of the centuries-long “great process of the governmentalization of society”, and its counterpart, the emergence of Enlightenment critique as the “art of not being governed like that”. At the same time, Lotman’s analysis of absolutist authority as a semiotic form derived from a secular reappropriation of religious elements resonates with major Western discussions of secularization, first and foremost in Ernst Kantorowicz’s