Придворная словесность: институт литературы и конструкции абсолютизма в России середины XVIII века - [154]

and the philosophy of Leibniz, one of the founders of the Petersburg Academy, as well as Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), a famous work of philosophical poetry published in a metrical Russian translation by Lomonosov’s disciple Nikolai Popovskii several years after the Ode. Lomonosov’s importation of authoritative Western philosophical discourses into Russian poetry was shaped by a very specific understanding of knowledge: in the framework of the post-Petrine state, poetry, philosophy, natural sciences and Christian faith all became instruments of state discipline, the monarchy’s education of its subjects. This constellation is immediately reflected in the rhetorical structure of the Ode as it reproduces God’s terrifying speech to Job on the necessity of unconditional obedience. Grand visions of the universe and the various creatures that inhabit it, which in Lomonosov’s adaptation amalgamate biblical myth with recent natural philosophy, are spectacularly subordinated to the task of subduing and regulating the subjectivity of the reader. The chapter goes on to situate Lomonosov’s poetic procedure within a broad context of aesthetic and political theory equally relevant for Russia and the West. In Hobbes’ influential exposition of absolutist politics, God’s speech to Job emerges as a crucial point at which secular and religious authority become one, as a rhetorically powerful eruption of the principle of domination unlimited by any restraints. In Russia, similar rhetoric was employed in the major propagandistic text of the Petrine reign, The Justice of the Monarch’s Right (1722). At the same time, God’s speech to Job was understood by Lomonosov’s contemporary Edmund Burke as an important example of the sublime – an aesthetic mode whereby the readers, according to Burke’s formula, are “forced into compliance”. Lomonosov’s Ode can thus be situated at the crux of a complex interaction between political, aesthetic, and philosophical thinking which informed pan-European visions of authority.

Chapter 5, “Acclamation, Allegory, and Sovereignty: The Political Imagination of the Lomonosovian Ode” contributes to the rich discussion of the poetics of Lomonosov’s signature poetic genre, the festive (or “solemn”) ode praising the triumphs and celebrations of Russia’s imperial house. Building on the far-reaching insights of earlier scholars, this chapter seeks to uncover the dialog and mutual dependence between early modern interpretations of poetry and politics that made this genre possible. At the core of their exchange we encounter the concept of representation which, at least since Machiavelli and Hobbes, signified the reliance of any political order on discourse, performance, and illusion. In the baroque age this vision of politics was reflected in the arts of ceremonial and in strategies for manipulating the newly emergent press in the interest of fashioning and controlling the ruler’s public image. Aligned with the classical concept of glory, a vision of politics predicated on representation easily made its way into classicist poetry, and, specifically, into the ode. My chapter starts by outlining some of the connections between political and rhetorical theory in post-Petrine Russia. Lomonosov himself, in a dedication of his handbook of rhetoric to the heir apparent, describes eloquence as a force that holds polities together. Next, I proceed to link Lomonosov’s odic tropes to the poetics of ceremonial glory. Largely written in praise of the coups d’état that for several decades defined Russia’s imperial succession, Lomonosov’s odes derive the legitimacy of royal rule not so much from the principle of dynastic stability as from images of a state of exception and the procedure of acclamation recognized by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben as crucial if hidden foundations of royal power. Depicting actual scenes of spontaneous acclamation that accompanied the palace revolutions, Lomonosov’s ode assumes the crucial function of involving the broader reading public in the production of absolutist sovereignty. The ode’s most spectacular tropes – such as a comparison of the ascent of Empress Elizabeth to the creation of the world – are revealed to be deeply rooted in both the aesthetics of the sublime and political theories of sovereignty from Hobbes to Rousseau.

The only chapter of Part 3, “Empire, Poetry, and Patronage During the Seven Years’ War”, investigates the patronage strategies of the “Russian Maecenas” – Elizabeth’s favorite Ivan Shuvalov – and the literary production that emerged with his support in the last years of her reign. Shuvalov initiated and oversaw the establishment of Moscow University, equipped with its own press and a journal, and (as I argue) was involved in the creation of another, Petersburg-based, journal. In this chapter, I link Shuvalov’s activity as a patron of the arts to the broader concerns of the Russian court during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which Russia fought against Prussia alongside France and Austria. Shuvalov, who at the time was largely responsible for Russia’s foreign policy, viewed literature as a medium crucial to the shaping of Russia’s self-image and international reputation. Accordingly, the literary works and publications that he sponsored were, to a degree under-appreciated by scholarship, aligned with this political vision. It was Shuvalov who during these years enlisted Voltaire to write a history of Peter the Great. In 1760, Shuvalov encouraged Lomonosov and Sumarokov to produce and publish two competing translations of a French ode – a double-production which could be read as an attack against Russia’s enemy, Frederick of Prussia, and at the same time symbolized Russia’s status as an enlightened nation worthy of high status within the concert of Europe. Further French-language publications sponsored by Shuvalov regularly praised Russia’s emerging poetry as an element of its imperial dignity. A conjunction of literary theory and imperial self-fashioning underlay what was probably the most eloquent Russian literary manifesto of this period – Lomonosov’s “Preface on the Usefulness of Church Books” (1758), written on Shuvalov’s request for the Moscow edition of Lomonosov’s works that the favorite personally oversaw. Building upon a long-standing tradition of “linguistic patriotism”, Lomonosov’s