The Daring of Deržavin: The Moral and Aesthetic Independence of the Poet in Russia by Anna Lisa s> Crone (review)

Abstract

Reviews Crone,Anna Lisa. 7heDaringofDerzavin.TheMoralandAesthetic Independence of thePoetin Russia.Slavica, Bloomington, IN, 200I. iv + 258 pp. Figures. Notes. Appendix. Index. $24.95 (paperback). THIS is the first major English-language examination of Derzhavin's poetry and legacy in many years. Partone devotes five chaptersto central questions of Derzhavin's aesthetics, and by pulling together Derzhavin's views on tone, language, the authorityof poetry as an art form and the statusof the poet, in effect attempts to provide the treatisethat Derzhavin might have written had he produced his own artof poetry. The strengthof Parttwo lies in the breadth of coverage and depth of analysis offered in a further five chapters. These discuss his major and minor poems, weaving fascinating continuities and connections between famous and lesser-knownworks. Chapter six provides new insights on the well-worn topic of innovation in the ode, chapter seven takes into accounts the historian Richard Wortman's views in re-reading 'Felitsa',while other chaptersfollow the changing of the statusof the poet and argue forcefully that Derzhavin through his poetry and biography had a seriousimpact on the statusof poetry from the I820S. One strength of the book lies in Crone's impressive feel for formal patterning,most especially,syntacticstructures.Her theoreticalstartingpoint is a version of Jakobsonian structuralism that lays emphasis on binary oppositions. She concludes that the oscillation between high and low style constitute the basis of Derzhavin's linguistic and aesthetic innovation. Historians of the language may find her assumptionsand conclusions about the performance of Derzhavin's syntax problematic. Students of literature may conclude that the binary model is reductive and possibly obscures the rhetorical nature of Derzhavin's use of symmetry and bathos. Irony and ambivalence, the true aims of his tonal strategy,are hardly ever mentioned. Given the state of flux of the literary language in the period, and given Derzhavin's shaky grasp of European models in any language (paceCrone's contentions on p. 67), other observations about intentionality and the philosophical connotation of diction seem open to more challenge than Crone admits. The connection between syntax and aesthetics, a real problem for Lomonosov, needs to be grounded in more than chapterfourprovideson the neo-classical theories of the abbe Batteux. Some readerswho take a different approach to literary history may regret the use of once traditional divisions between Classicism,Romanticism, Age of Reason and Age of Feeling. The book driveshome an importantthesisabout Derzhavin's contribution to the image of the poet in Russian culture. It is a thesis that provokes challenge. Crone takes as her premise the widespread cliche that Russian poets enjoy a special status in Russian culture, and that Derzhavin's selfseriousness reflects and augments that status. This is an interesting and still timely topic. It is a shame that Crone does not at least reviewher assumptions (and the absence of a bibliographymakes it hard to trace her thinking)since her conclusions could helpfullybe integratedinto the spectrumof approaches. REVIEWS 319 Some recent scholarship has reasserted the hieratic role of the poet by transferringan influentialparadigm about the sacralizationof the tsar to the figure of the poet. It is an approach that risksconfusing two distinct trends joined by cognate vocabulary rather than an underlying cultural grammar. Other researchersmore empiricallysee the status of poetry as a result of the micro-historyof a particularperiod, and the cult of the poet looksincreasingly like a retrospective misreading (here Paul Benichou's seminal work on Romantic poets has a lot to offerRussianists).Is it reallytrue, as Crone states, that 'extremereverenceforpoets and poetry [. . .] has been a constantfeature of Russianeliteculturessincethemid-eighteenthcentury'(p. i)?An enormous body of evidence easily contradictsthis anachronisticstartingpoint of what is really a circular argument. The empresses Elizabeth and Catherine showed Trediakovskiiand Sumarokov anything but reverence, and Pushkin himself was reassuringly rude about many of his predecessors and wrote poems assertingthe statusof the poet preciselybecause exaltationof the poet was not a given. This is the message of recent work by G. S. Smith, S. Sandler, and Andrei Zorin (whosebook on Derzhavin's nineteenth-centuryreceptionis not noted by Crone). Derzhavin's second-hand knowledge of Enlightenment secular values, rather than a Russian cultural legacy, endowed him with a belief in the power of reason and the...