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 Preface inscribed his recent works into a history of Russian language which in this version went back to Church Slavonic, the language of the Slavic Orthodox Bible, and its tradition of “church books” translated from the Greek. While seemingly disconnected from post-Petrine languages of Westernization and secularization, the Preface in fact derived its arguments from pan-European discourses of empire as a politico-theological union between church and crown. Paradoxically, secular Russian poetry emerging under court patronage should, according to Lomonosov’s manifesto, skillfully appropriate elements of Church Slavonic vocabulary, along with the public “admiration” associated with this language of liturgy. Placing his own festive odes at the core of this vision of literature, Lomonosov viewed poetry as a medium of imperial secularization, capable of transforming the church as a community of the faithful into the political nation centered around the media-shaped cult of the monarch. The theory of literature presented in the Preface masks a Hobbesian model of sovereignty and the political “commonwealth”. Published with the approval of the court, Lomonosov’s short essay firmly established literature as a medium for Russia’s imperial self-fashioning.