(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.