Gavriil Derzhavin on Russian Civilization: Russia as “The North”

Abstract

This article examines the role of poet and statesman Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816) in the development of the “Russian northerndom” idea, a rich concept of identification that played a major role in the history of Russian geopolitical and philosophical-ideological thought from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, receding to the background only in the mid-nineteenth century with the arrival of the “classical” Russian opposition of “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles.”