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 Epistles, that quickly emerged from circles of noble youth and were circulated in manuscript form. These texts clearly demonstrate the ways in which Sumarokovian poetic diction and notions of poetic work contributed to the collective self-fashioning of the emerging educated elite. Finally, I link the Epistles to the cultural practices of the imperial court, including court theater, which Sumarokov himself was closely involved with in his capacities as a dramatist and theater director. Mirroring official praise for the court as a space of tasteful consumption, Sumarokov derived the legitimacy of literature as a medium and as an occupation from the evolving practices and ideologies of court and state.
Part 2, “The Lyric of Power”, opens with Chapter 3, “‘By Me Kings Reign’: The Political Theology of Biblical Paraphrases”, which explores the origins and resonances of the poetic paraphrases of the Bible (mostly the Psalms but other books as well) which emerged as one of the most popular genres in mid-eighteenth-century Russian poetry. The chapter takes as its starting point an edition collaboratively published in 1744 by Lomonosov, Sumarokov, and Trediakovskii, the only active Russian poets at that moment. This edition included three different metric adaptations of Psalm 143 as well as an epigraph from Horace on the power of poetry and a preface outlining the authors’ diverging opinions in matters of versification. While earlier scholars have correctly interpreted the Horatian epigraph as a statement on the role of the newly emergent Russian poetry, I offer a new perspective on the relationship between the sacred poetry of the Psalter and the project of secular letters inaugurated by the 1744 edition. The lines of Horace selected for the book’s epigraph come from a section of Ars poetica which inscribed the poet’s art and status into a mythical narrative of the foundation of states and the invention of statehood. Given Horace’s role as a model court poet of a model empire, the epigraph can be said to style the triple psalm paraphrases as a poetic articulation of an official political theology. In this light, I use various themes of Psalm 143 as a key to the entire corpus of biblical paraphrases of the 1740s – 1750s. Chronologically, this renewed tradition begins with an ode by Kantemir which preceded the edition of 1744 by several years and also amalgamated biblical themes with a Horatian poetic language. A section of the chapter is devoted to a close reading of this ode against the background of the political and theological discourses of the Petrine and post-Petrine empire. Returning in the sections that follow to the psalm paraphrases of the 1740s, I trace their varied political resonances. First, the psalms, associated with the royal figure of David and his prayer, offer a paradigm of a divinely sanctioned monarchy, resonant with the rituals and discourses of anointment enacted during Empress Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742. Second, the psalms and other biblical songs adapted by Russian poets contain a blueprint for a political compact between the monarchy and its subjects. Lastly, the psalms, with their characteristic verbal gesture of supplication, provide a model for subjectivity and subjecthood, an understanding of the self in the framework of political hierarchies. This political interpretation of the paraphrases is supported by manifold evidence from contemporary non-literary sources, such as court sermons and Elizabeth’s coronation album, which adopt some of the same psalms for explicitly political purposes, as well as the letters and diaries of political actors of the same era, which refer to the Bible to make sense of their political existence. Poetic paraphrases of the psalms are thus construed as a manifestation of the lived culture of the Russian court’s political piety.
Chapter 4, “Theology Physical and Political: Mikhail Lomonosov’s Ode Paraphrased from Job”, offers an in-depth reading of Lomonosov’s poetic adaptation of the famous whirlwind speech from the Book of Job. A classic of eighteenth-century Russian poetry and one of the few poems of the period retained in subsequent cultural memory, Lomonosov’s 1752 ode has been subject to many interpretations which have situated it in diverging contexts, from Luther’s German translation of the Bible to Enlightenment philosophy and natural sciences. Drawing on these findings and approaches, my reading places the “Ode Paraphrased from Job” at a strategic intersection of secularized piety, moral and natural philosophy, and political theology. Their amalgamation was characteristic, as I argue, of the emerging secular culture centered around the imperial court and the Academy of Sciences (where Lomonosov studied and served) established by Peter I as a vehicle for a Westernized (re)education of the imperial elites. In this perspective, Lomonosov’s poetic masterpiece – first published in an officially sponsored edition of his works – can be seen as a potent articulation of a particular vision of authority and discipline which, as dictated by Petrine church reform, blurred the boundary between the religious and the secular. The chapter begins by outlining the links between Lomonosov’s Ode 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,