Rothe, Hans (comp., ed.) Gottfried Ernst Groddek und seine Korrespondenten (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 326 In his concluding chapter, ‘Russian Culture as a Mirage’, Levitt demonstrates the exceptionally traumatic paradigm shift that overwhelmed Russia as it began to ponder its own uniqueness over its former adherence to universal and ‘self-evident’ truths. Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals began to devalue nearly everything that the Russian Empire highlighted among its supreme achievements. They viewed the former visual accomplishments of the Empire as ‘servile imitations’ of foreign models, Petersburg as a source of menace, rather than an object of admiration, and most former Russian verbal arts as irrelevant, unoriginal and pseudo-classicist. The last subsection, ‘Potemkin Villages’, briefly details the origin of ‘one of the most effective slanders in history’, as Levitt calls it (p. 266). In substance, the term refers to the presumably staged or artificially propped up villages that Catherine supposedly saw on her famous Crimea tour of 1787, arranged by her life-time partner Potemkin. Foreign diplomats and enemies of Potemkin, who were not invited to join this magnificent tour, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Catherine’s reign, spread the vicious rumor of such ‘mirages’ in retribution. Their lie spectacularly cast a shadow on whatever the Russian throne attempted to accomplish in the eighteenth century. Apropos of the actual accomplishments of Russia’s turn to Enlightenment, it could have been helpful to close this study by revisiting the agency of sight itself. As Hannibal Lecter famously says in The Silence of the Lambs (a film of 1991), ‘we begin by coveting what we see every day’. The point being that in spite of all the negative attention St Petersburg received in Russian nineteenthcentury writings, the city never lost the millions who coveted seeing its objective magnificence every day. Levitt considered it ‘tempting’ at the outset to write about Petersburg ‘as a supreme monument to Enlightenment visual culture’ (p. 12), but turned his focus on other aspects of seeing. Now that he has so convincingly prepared the ground with this study, let us hope he will succumb to his stated temptation. Department of Slavic Studies Alexander Levitsky Brown University Rothe, Hans (comp., ed.). Gottfried Ernst Groddek und seine Korrespondenten. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Neue Folge, 39. De Gruyter Akademie Forschung, Berlin and Boston, MA, 2015. vi + 381 pp. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Indexes. €109.95: $154.00:£82.99. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries intellectual contact between Germany and Poland flourished, and Gottfried Groddek (1763–1825) REVIEWS 327 was to some extent an emblematic figure. Best known as the teacher of Adam Mickiewicz, he was in contact with some of the leading scholars of this period and his prodigious correspondence, admirably assembled and presented here, offers a fascinating history of ideas and their lively exchange in north-east Europe at this time. This extensive collection is mainly drawn from the archives of Tartu and Crakow but, as the compiler is well aware, it is far from complete, since a number of letters have undoubtedly been lost or not yet located, and Rothe has deliberately not included Groddek’s family correspondence. The collection is divided into four sections: ‘The Göttingen Circle (1786–1818)’, comprising one letter from Christian Daniel Beck, a prominent classical scholar from Leipzig, to Groddek dated 1786; correspondence between Groddeck and Gottlieb Hufeland (a distinguished Polonist) dated 1786 and 1792; many letters from the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Buhle, written between 1787 and 1811 that range from high ideas to student pranks (some of which the compiler recognizes from the present day); and finally letters from classicist and archaeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne dated 1804 and 1810. The second section consists mainly of two representatives of the Polish aristocracy with whom Groddek was so closely associated: a great body of letters to Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski written in the years 1790 to 1817, and from his son Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski between 1787 and 1822. Also in this section are two letters from the Englishman Joseph Saunders (1773–1845) who moved to St Petersburg in 1793, and in 1815 became a professor of engraving in Vilna. The third section is correspondence dated 1805 and 1824 between the German philologist Johann Karl...