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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).