Literary Projections of French Culture in 18th-Century Russian Writing: Between Gallomania and Gallophobia

Abstract

Using the example of the literary projections of French culture on the Russian literature of the eighteenth century, this article examines the evolution of Gallomania as the most important phenomenon of Russian noble culture. The aim of the article is to study the main stages of Gallomania in Russian literature from A. Kantemir to I. A. Krylov. An analysis of these stages makes it possible to trace how Russian literature, through ridiculing various types of Russian Gallomaniacs and types of Gallomaniac behaviour, made a decisive turn from Gallomania in its full sense to Gallophobia as an almost complete rejection of French culture and refusal to follow the precepts of Paris in all spheres of life — from politics to fashion. The main methods used in this work are the methods of cultural-historical, typological, and conception-character analysis of texts. The typology of the image of the Gallomaniac as a “Russian Frenchman”, which received various cultural forms in the 1730s–1750s, 1760s–1770s, and 1790s–1800s, determined various concept-character orientations of literary texts of the eighteenth century. Between the 1730s and 1750s, the dominant image of the Gallomaniac was the petit maître, for whom Gallomania was associated with objects of the “fashionable vocabulary”. The image of such a petit maоtre can be found in the satires of A. Kantemir, epistles, and comedies of A. P. Sumarokov. In the 1760s–1770s, fashionable Gallomania was replaced by ideological Gallomania, which included both the philosophy of Voltaireanism and the reaction to the creation of a cultural myth about Eastern Europe in Western Europe, of which Russia was an example. This stage in the development of Gallomania is characterised by the emergence of a pronounced Gallophobic mood, which is reflected in the works of D. I. Fonvizin and N. I. Novikov. Finally, the third period of Gallomania in the context of an aggravated military and political confrontation between Russia and France is characterised by accentuating the gender component, when mainly fashionable women and girls (Fashionable Wife by I. I. Dmitriev, comedies by I. A. Krylov) became the medium of Gallomanic mentality, who do not have corresponding male parallels.