Придворная словесность: институт литературы и конструкции абсолютизма в России середины XVIII века - [152]
Part 1, “The Principles of Courtly Taste”, opens with Chapter 1, “‘Useful and Agreeable’: Poetry, Statehood, and the Court in the Mid-Eighteenth Century”, which aims to explore theoretical visions of literature developed in the surprisingly numerous normative texts of the 1730s, ‘40s and ‘50s. While the most recent discussions of these texts have focused on the biographical circumstances of the authors and the conflicts between them, what has remained under-appreciated is a consistent effort by virtually all secular writers of these decades to establish the role of literature as a crucial institution of the monarchic state and its court society. Working with the support of sponsors at court (and, occasionally, of Empress Elizabeth herself), these writers sought to derive the value of literature from the visions of royal rule and social discipline that dominated official discourses and policies. Originally rooted in the few post-Petrine educational institutions such as the Academy of Sciences with its press, university, and gymnasium, and the Noble Cadet Corps, literature – both in a broad sense, encompassing moral philosophy and history, and in the narrow sense of poetry and fiction – was styled as a medium for educating the broader public, the nation of subjects. This effort was inaugurated in the 1730s by Antiokh Kantemir, an influential poet strategically situated at the crossroads of court aristocracy and the spheres of humanistic learning mostly populated by commoners. His original verse satires, along with translations of the epistles of Horace, provided an authoritative – if not easily imitable – normative model of literature imbued with lessons of practical morality and aligned with visions of empire and of the imperial court associated with Horace’s Augustan Rome. A similar understanding of literature was expounded by Vasilii Trediakovskii in his 1752 collection, which included his translations of Horace’s Ars poetica and its eponymous French adaptation by Boileau, L’Art poétique, several other original and translated works of moral philosophy and literary theory, and a series of shorter verse adaptations from the Bible and from several classical and more recent authors. Published alongside Horace’s and Boileau’s classics, Trediakovskii’s original essays linked their prescriptions to concepts of courtly existence such as leisure, to the royal patronage of the arts which was only emerging in Russia at the time, and to official interpretations of education as civic duty and a foundation for successful service. The general concept of literature and the specific forms of writing represented in Trediakovskii’s volume were connected to evolving post-Petrine notions of imperial statehood and discipline associated with the court society and state service, and to particular modes of subjectivity which were to be shaped by practices of writing and reading. In its final pages, the chapter turns to a major poet and statesman of the next generation, Gavriil Derzhavin, who admitted to having learned the art of poetry from Trediakovskii’s book, and shows the ways in which this theoretical model of courtly literature functioned, and was enforced, in historical practice.
Chapter 2, “An Apology for Poetry: Aleksandr Sumarokov’s Two Epistles”, explores the Russian and European contexts of Sumarokov’s Two Epistles: The First on Russian Language, and the Second on Poetry (1748). Well known to scholars as an explicit imitation of Boileau’s L’Art poétique and “the manifesto of Russian classicism”, this work has attracted surprisingly little attention outside of cursory surveys. How could such a lengthy theoretical manifesto emerge in an era when public interest in poetry was minimal? If Sumarokov, an officer of the royal guards and a career-minded courtier, did not have a developed literary field to rely on, what was the social and ideological background that made his literary enterprise worthwhile? I approach these questions by first investigating the (admittedly rudimentary) place of poetry in the emerging educational canon of the Russian nobility (more specifically, of the Noble Cadet Corps where Sumarokov himself was schooled), and in the forming culture of high-society leisure, where Sumarokov first met success as an author of love songs. In this light, his First Epistle on Russian Language can be seen as mirroring official views on the necessity of proficiency in writing, clear style, and translation skills for service nobility. In turn, the much longer Second Epistle on Poetry extends the ideology of noble education and leisure into the realm of poetry. Quite possibly the first text to introduce into Russian the notion of taste as an aesthetic concept, the Second Epistle employs tropes derived from classical Western literary theory (Quintilian, Boileau, J. Ch. Gottsched) and literature of courtly conduct (Gracian) alongside normative discourses of state service, in order to fashion literature as a medium of both enlightened leisure and state ethics. This interpretation is supported by a reading of the early imitations of Sumarokov’s
