De Stael Research Articles

BYRONISM AND GEORGESANDISM IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY AS SOCIOCULTURAL MYTHS OF ROMANTICISM: A TYPOLOGY OF DISTINCTIVITY

: The article analyzes the features of Byronism and Georgesandism as sociocultural myths that arose in the post-revolutionary era and embodied the totality of socio-aesthetic gender representations. On the basis of the historical-typological approach, taking into account the trends of modern comparative studies, the origins of the gender opposition of male and female — the Hero and the Heroine — are regarded in the poetics of personified myths — Byronism and Georgesandism, which acquired an all-European scale in European culture of the first half of the 19th century. At the Enlightenment stage of mastering the specifics of the intimate and the public, the development of the ideas of civil society, the destruction of the paradigms of mental and universal laws of aesthetics, in public life and literature of the 18th century there was an increase in the gender consciousness of society. In the article it is correlated with the French tradition — the sentimentalist novel by J.-J. Rousseau Julia, or the new Eloise and the romantic concepts of the hero and the heroine in the works of Germain de Stael, where the conflict, antithesis, dichotomy of the feminine and the masculine began to be artistically meaningful from the standpoint of social and psychological egalitarianism. It is proved that Byronism and Georgesandism were complementary and oppositional to each other as socio-aesthetic currents, systems, paradigms, myths, in which variously interpreted skepticism and the individualistic concept of the Hero, the poet, are opposed to optimism and utopia, the feminine myth of the Heroine — in the works and biography of George Sand. The gender originality of typologically related romantic value ideas is considered: aspiration for the absolute, spiritual maximalism with a clear priority of the male myth in the image of Byron and his work — and the female, socialistically marked in George Sand. Biographical and biographically related material, the work of each in the first half of the century formed the basis of sociocultural and romantic symbolizations that characterize and form the gender specificity of the text of romantic culture.

Germena DE stal and french romanticism

In this article is discussed Germain de Stael and French Romanticism.If we pay attention to French romantic literature, Germain de Staal was one of the first to enter the literature of the romantic period with her populist views and used the term "romanticism". In his work, he compares romantic and classical types. At the same time, the inevitability of the collapse of feudalism, which dominated Europe by the end of the 18th century, is described in detail.

Путевые записки «Россия и русские» Виктора Тиссо в контексте русско-французских отношений на рубеже XIX-XX вв.

For the first time in the national literary studies, the article examines the book of travel notes Russia and Russians (1882) by the French writer Victor Tissot (1845-1917). Tissot’s travel notes on Russia are considered in the context of Russian-French relations at the turn of the 20th century, Russia’s growing interest in France on the eve of the conclusion of the Russian-French alliance. The article proves that the basic opposition constructing the image of Russia in Tissot’s book is the opposition of Russia and Ukraine. Tissot poetizes the image of Little Russia (which is understood not without the influence of ideas of Adam Miczkevich and Cyprien Robert) as the custodian of the original “Slavicness.” Despite the poetization of Ukraine, Tissot considered Moscow the true center of the Russian Empire, the city expressing the spirit of the country. The influence on Tissot’s travel notes about Russia by Theophile Gautier, impressionism, the traditions of Germaine de Stael is shown. Tissot sought to contrast the tradition of Gautier’s “aestheticized” discourse about about Russia with a more “realistic” image of Moscow and Russia by expanding the scope of the depicted, by describing not only the ceremonial, but also the shadow life of Moscow and Russia. The characteristic feature of Tissot’s poetics is the combination of aesthetics with macabre and gothic elements in the structure of the image of Russia. The article concludes that Tissot made a significant contribution to the destruction of the myth of Russia’s closedness, created by Custine and the Paris press, and to the generation of a generally positive image of Russia on the eve of the conclusion of the Russian-French alliance. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Эстетика раннего французского романтизма и ее литературные ипостаси. Жермена де Сталь

The article reconstructs the early romantic philosophical aesthetics of Madame de Stael, which was embodied in her literary work. She made a significant contribution to the creation of the theory of romanticism, compared the romantic and classical types of creativity. De Stael was one of the first French romantics to use the term “romanticism”, define it and analyze from a philosophical and aesthetic point of view a number of key concepts for this new direction of artistic life: love, passion, enthusiasm, spirituality, sensitivity, reflection, self-reflection, melancholy, self-sacrifice, loneliness, alienation, imagination, inspiration, imagery, aesthetic pleasure, taste, talent, genius, ideal. She conceptualized the trend that would become prevalent in mature romanticism — a combination of the incongruous, sharp contrasts and tragic collisions of opposite principles — the sublime and the low, the beautiful and the ugly. De Stael attached particular importance to the national characteristics of artistic creativity, its rootedness in popular culture, and the influence of social institutions on art. She made a significant contribution to the development of aesthetic aspects of literary theory, put forward an innovative thesis about the “metaphysical” language that distinguishes the romantic style. The aesthetic vector of de Stael is directed to the future associated with the development of romantic art. All these ideas were reflected in her literary works.

النظریة الجمالیة وأشکال التعبیر الأدبی فی الدرسین الأوربی والعربی (من المنظور الابستمولوجی)

تعد النظرية الجمالية واحدة من أهم النظريات التي عني بها الدرس الأدبي والنقدي قديما وحديثا بداية من فن الشعر لأرسطو مرورا بالمحاولات النقدية في الأدب العربي القديم ونهاية بالفلاسفة والنقاد الأوروبيين والعرب في الدرس الأدبي والنقدي الحديث، ومن ثم نعنى ببعض محاولات النقاد العرب القدامى، ثم محاولات بعض الفلاسفة والنقاد الأوربيين المحدثين، الذين ساهموا إلى حد کبير في بلورة هذه النظرية الجمالية وارتباطها بآليات التعبير الفني والأدبي بداية من القرن 18 عند بومارتين (1718-1762) ، ونهاية برواد النظرية الجمالية في الدراسات الأوربية المعاصرة ومنهم؛ إيمانويل کانط،، وآرثر شوبنهاور، وجيامبا تيستا فيکو، ومدام دي ستال، وهيبوليت تين، وبينديتو کروتشه ، وغيرهم. وفي الدراسات الجمالية العربية عند زکريا إبراهيم ، وأميرة مطر، وعفيفي بهنسي ، وشاکر عبد الحميد ، وسعيد توفيق وغيرهم ؛ لأن علم الجمال من هذا المنظور قديم قدم الأفکار الجمالية، لکنه محدث کعلم مستقل له أسسه وأرکانه وخصائصه؛ ولذلک نتناول ثلاثة جوانب؛ الأول: الإرهاصات الأولي للنظرية الجمالية في النقد العربي القديم، والثاني: النظريات الجمالية في النقد الأوربي الحديث. والثالث النظريات الجمالية في النقد العربي الحديث، وتتم مناقشة هذه الجوانب من المنظور الابستمولوجي، محاولين معالجة الجوانب الجمالية والمعيارية لأشکال التعبير الأدبي والفني عند بعض الفلاسفة والنقاد أوربيا وعربيا The aesthetic theory is one of the most important theories which the European and Arabic literary and critical lessons were concerned with both in the past and in the modern ages; starting from the Aristotle poetry through some of the attempts by the old Arab critics, and ending with the attempts of some European and Arab philosophers and critics concerned with the old and new criticism. So we are concerned with the attempts of some old Arab critics and some new European philosophers and critics who contributed greatly in crystallizing the aesthetic theory and its connection with the mechanisms of literary and artistic expression. These attempts started in the 18th century by Martin (1718-1762), and ended with the pioneers of aesthetic theory in contemporary studies, such as, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Giambattista Vico, Madame de Stael, Hippolyte Taine, Benedetto Croce and others. We are also concerned with the Arab aesthetic studies of Zakaria Ibrahim, Amira Matar, Afifi Behansi, Shaker Abdel Hamid, Saeed Tawfiq and others. Aesthetics from this view is as old as the ideas of aesthetics, but it is updated as an Independent science which has basics, pillars and characteristics. Therefore, we deal with three aspects. First, the early symptoms of the aesthetic theory in ancient Arab criticism. Second, the aesthetic theories in new European criticism. Third, the aesthetic theories in new Arab criticism. These aspects are discussed from the aesthetics epistemological perspectives in a trial to address the aesthetic and standard aspects of forms of the artistic and literary expression of some European and Arab philosophers, secular and critics.

Women's view of the history of the Revolution (events in France at the end of the XVIII century in the works of M. Wollstonecraft, O. de Gouges, J. de Staёl)

The article is devoted to highlighting the features and common characteristics of the English and French views of women on the Great French Revolution, based on the texts of M. Wollstonecraft, O. de Gouges and J. de Stael. The author analyzes the influence of the historical context on the formation of the writers' views on the events in France at the end of the XVIII century, as well as on the interpretation of the revolution itself, its causes and consequences in the works of M. Wollstonecraft, O. de Gouges and J. de Stael. The methodological basis of the research is the historical approach, the method of historical and philosophical reconstruction, comparative analysis, political and textual analysis and analysis of documents. In the future, the results can be used in studies of both the historiography of the French Revolution and its interpretations, as well as the history of the women's issue and the feminist movement.

Матрица «культурного неблагополучия»

The article analyzes the matrix as a special form of understanding and describing the phenomena of a foreign culture. The principles of the formation of ideas about the "cultural disadvantage" of Russians are analyzed. Over time, the "Western" discourse about Russia becomes more sophisticated and harsher; it can take the form of economic sanctions, political pressure, recommendations, and clothe itself in the form of "soft" and "hard" power. But its structure remains unchanged, which allows us to see the matrix basis of this kind of representations. The matrix construction is used as a set of initial assessments in the attitude of "cultural disadvantage". To analyze the matrix construction as an organization of ideas about a different culture, the authors of the 19th century Germaine de Stael and Astolphe de Custine are involved, who, to varying degrees, expressed their ideas about the "cultural disadvantage" of Russians. In modern discourse, this practice has found expression in the Eurocentric theoretical constructions of S. Huntington and L. Harrison. The contradiction between the Eurocentric thesis about the uniqueness of Western culture and tactical, pragmatic, applied programs of reforming and reformatting non-European cultures according to the European model is shown. The article analyzes the main points of criticism of Eurocentrism by E. Said in his concept of "orientalism". The concept of the "east", in a broad sense, is formed in the European tradition not as an alternative to the West, but as its invention, its quasi-object. "East" is a special tactic of opposing the "center" and the periphery, of historical progress beyond historical immobility. The East does not correlate with the usual scale of periodization of European culture. It always remains backward by definition, due to the absence of Western stages of development (the Enlightenment, as an option – the Renaissance, modernity, imperialism and similar historical periods).

Improvisation in Sarah Grand’s New Woman Fiction

Abstract Rationalizing women’s participation in public and political spheres, Sarah Grand sublimates Germaine de Stael’s legacy of woman genius and improvisation in her narratives of New Woman, exp...

« Chaque esprit est maçon » : l’Art Royal et l’idée de religion universelle dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle

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Storia di una riscoperta: Dante, la Francia e Jacqueline Risset

French reception of Dante throughout the centuries is generally marked by rejection, at least until the first generation of Romantic poets, led by Madame de Stael, rediscovered the Divine Comedy through Rivarol’s translation. Dante’s fame, however, remained mostly connected to the idea of a dark and unreadable poet. This article aims at showing how Jacqueline Risset’s translation of the Divine Comedy , as well as her essay Dante ecrivain , might have led the way to a new vision of the poem.

Germaine de Stael: A Political Portrait, by Biancamaria Fontana

Biancamaria Fontana seeks to showcase Germaine de Stael’s originality and depth as a political thinker. She makes a convincing case that, despite de Stael’s reputation as a novelist and literary critic, scholars have overlooked the writer’s political ideas. Many have tended to view her political engagement in terms of her biography and to see her ideas as derivative of the men she associated with, especially her father, Jacques Necker, and her friends and lovers, Louis de Narbonne and Benjamin Constant. De Stael’s commitment to political moderation has also probably dissuaded scholars of the French Revolution more intrigued by radicalism than constitutional monarchy. Fontana seeks to remedy this relative neglect by offering a sustained analysis of de Stael’s own political writing during and after the Revolution. The book is organised chronologically; chapters also focus on key political works. It begins in 1791, with what seems to have been de Stael’s first published work of political analysis. It then continues through Napoleon’s ascent to power and de Stael’s subsequent turn to literature, with a final chapter on her posthumously published 1818 reflections on the revolution and hopes for the future.

Природные образы в романе Ж. де Сталь «Коринна, или Италия»

The artistic relationships of landscape space and national character in the novel by a French writer of the 19 th century G. de Stael are examined. The research urgency is caused by the interest of representatives of different areas of the humanities, including literary critics, to the comparative study of peoples in the context of the rapid development of intercultural communication. It is shown that nature as a whole as “the phenomenon of the poetic image” is of great interest from the point of view of analysis of its impact on the character and emotional state of the characters of the novel. Not less important role plays the analysis of specific natural images of Sun, Moon, Earth, Mountains, Water and Fire that are the deepest archetypes, rooted in the collective unconscious. The author comes to the conclusion that these archaic concepts are reinterpreted by the writer under the influence on the formation of national identity, character and habits of the individual, therefore, it becomes possible for the reader to understand the national mentality through the natural archetypes of the novel. It is shown that in the novel the author creates a verbal-based acceptance of “collateral characteristic of mood,” which will then be actively used in the cinema. It is noted that the functions of the landscape in the novel by the French writer would later become the example for the following generations of authors in the description of the southern Italian landscape.

Un roman sur et pour l'Italie: Une analyse de la réception de Corinne par le monde culturel italien

The purpose of this article is to highlight and discuss the impact of Germaine de Stael's novel Corinne (1807) on early nineteenth-century literary debates in Italy. In particular, this essay intends to investigate the reception of the novel by the Italian intelligentsia in an era of major cultural and political change. Influential in raising national consciousness in Italy, Corinne became widely popular and controversial among Italian hommes de lettres , sparking philosophical and literary debates about the very nature of Italian literature. In this regard, this article devotes particular attention to two eminent literary figures: Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) and Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837). While the former particularly focuses on the interrelationship of literature and institutions, the latter develops a remarkably fecund intellectual dialogue with Stael's writings, citing Corinne as one of the primary causes of his philosophical conversion. (In French)

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

ABSTRACTThis article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by Francois Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Stael and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polytheisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this ...

A Damned Mob of Corinnes: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Daughters of de Staël

Consider the biography of a typical mid-nineteenth-century American woman writer: Born on the fourth of July, she grew up fatherless, living with her mother and sister in a large, cold household dominated by wealthy uncles. Early on she showed intelligence but not much practical ability, and so eventually her uncles sent her to one of New England's newly-established colleges. She made a few good friends, but seemed to live mostly in her own world. When she returned home with her impractical degree, she retreated to a gloomy attic bedroom, where she settled into a routine of scribbling through the nights, occasionally burning her writings because of her increasingly intense shyness. She wrote a novel based on her college years. A few copies were published, but she was so embarrassed by its publication that she destroyed every copy she could find. After ten years of seclusion, she gradually emerged, anonymously publishing a few delicate stories that won her some encouragement from the literary world. She married late, and shortly after her marriage published a collection of short stories that earned some real critical acclaim. Despite the praise, she continued to belittle her own writing as scribbling. But she was encouraged by her ventures into the public sphere and desperate for money to feed her growing family, and so she tried her hand at another novel. Eventually she would publish four major novels centered on the great issues facing of the era: sexual freedom, family and domestic economy, social reform, and finally a Corinne-themed novel about American artists in Rome. This thumbnail biography uses feminine pronouns to describe the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is a small pronoun switch, but the trick works. Hawthorne's writing career fulfills almost all of the critical commonplaces about nineteenth-century writers, from the decade of lurking in an attic to the rewriting of Germaine de Stael. Does all this imply that Nathaniel Hawthorne considered himself a literary woman? No, probably not. Despite the congruency between Hawthorne's literary career and many nineteenth-century American writers' careers, I am not arguing that Nathaniel Hawthorne should be reclassified as a literary woman. It is not my business to adjudicate the gender identification of a long-dead stranger. Nor is it my intention to shame Hawthorne as a sissy. But I do suggest positioning Nathaniel Hawthorne as a member of the d--d mob of scribbling women who dominated American fiction in the 1850s. When we place Hawthorne's work into a female dominated--or at least female-identified--field of cultural production and read Nathaniel Hawthorne as a participant in a female tradition, many of the questions that are central to Hawthorne scholarship turn sideways. Is Hawthorne's writing Romantic or sentimental? Reactionary or revolutionary? Masculinist or feminist? For this essay, the central question is: Does Nathaniel Hawthorne belong within or outside of the female tradition? Or, to put it more sharply: Was Nathaniel Hawthorne one of the American Corinnes? Although may be somewhat obscure today, according to Ellen Moers, Corinne stands alone ... in its enormous influence upon literary women (174). Since everyone read Corinne, none of the lists quite do justice to the novel's central importance. Nonetheless, Toril Moi offers a partial list: Jane Austen, Mary Godwin Shelley, George Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller (The Yankee Corinna), Kate Chopin--all of them read Corinne, passionately (145). Even readers today who may not be familiar with would recognize some elements of de Stael's plot, which was refracted through so many nineteenth-century novels. is a beautiful, dark-haired romantic genius who declaims her own improvised poetry on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. The crowds cheer and a visiting British aristocrat falls in love with her. …

Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment by Anahid Nersessian

130 BOOK REVIEWS Anahid Nersessian. Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment. Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 273. $39.95. “Real tennis,” says 1996’s dystopian Infinite Jest, is about “wof-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty” (80). David Foster Wallace—who came to Harvard to write a dissertation on Kant, the philosopher of limits—would go on to say the same thing about art, and ethics, and economics, and addiction, and the environment. The trick is in setting the boundary conditions so as not to replicate capital’s unbridled pleasure and growth. How, in other words, to define limits—on the self, on a nation, on ways of thinking and feeling and consuming, on our expectations—that produce joyful, elastic potential rather than austerity or beleaguered constraint. Anahid Nersessian’s Utopia, Limited argues that these have been ethical and artistic strategies since at least the late eighteenth century. Those strate­ gies, further, are not incompatible with a strain of social improvement, what she calls a limited utopianism. More specifically, her book makes the case that “Romantic literature functions as utopian thought insofar as it takes its own formalism to mime a minimally harmful relationship between human beings and a world whose resources are decidedly finite” (16). Her argument and method of reading are worked out from within a network of interdependent terms and concepts: form, limit, resource and environ­ ment, liberalism and political economy, secularism, utopia, and Romanti­ cism. A final member of this set, most closely related to limit, evades dis­ cursive articulation, like a Kantian judgment without a concept. It is named by a scatter of evocative words and phrases: loss, grief, damage, diminishment , “positive bondage” (6), suffering, tarrying, slightness, curtail­ ment, “learning to manage with less” (22), disappointment, decorum, di­ vestment, winnowing, “the renuciatory art of the diminuendo” (25), attentiveness, “a principled relation to imperiled life” (13), and, most im­ portantly, what she calls “Rcsm” and adjustment. Such is the “native lan­ guage of this book” (9), wherein she “gathers up a vocabulary of restraint in an effort to describe and to salvage Romanticism’s own pedagogy of utopian limitation” (6) for “our own restricted present” (13). Utopia, Limited is a book about limits that seems dissatisfied with the lim­ its imposed on it by the discipline of Romanticism: it transforms the Romantic period into a Romantic century, 1750-1850; it wonders openly about whether its chapters need to be tied to single authors and time peri­ ods; and it speaks directly to contemporary global problems, particularly poverty, scarcity, and climate change. Allying itself early on with Kevis Goodman’s claim that Romanticism can never exhaustively describe itself, Utopia, Limited strives to define and create its own system rather than be SiR, 55 (Spring 2016) BOOK REVIEWS 131 subdued by the one it inherits. I would suggest that Utopia, Limited’s grap­ pling with how form works in the Romantic era (or century) is equally a grappling with how form and history are treated within Romantic criti­ cism. In this way Utopia, Limited begs a kind of metaquestion: to what ex­ tent should it create its own forms and rhythms of reading, and what should we expect from them? It is a pleasure to watch the book grapple with concerns like these. The first chapter, “Rcsm, an Introduction,” begins just where one might expect, with Blake’s account of the bounding line. It ends with a quick, careful analysis of the form of the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence. If these bookended accounts of Blake are the chapter’s ostensible “form,” a space is opened in between them where Nersessian grapples with an array of thinkers—-Jameson, Cavell, Wittgenstein, Rousseau, de Stael, Laura Kipnis, Ranciere, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, and a dozen more, but especially the Frankfurt School, and Frye’s late, unfinished “third book.” That’s where Nersessian gets “Rcsm,” Frye’s notebook shorthand for “Romanticism,” but which she uses to circumscribe her pro­ gram for creatively adjusting oneself and one’s art to a given environment or set of resources. A clear example Nersessian gives is George Herbert’s “Paradise,” where end rhymes are progressively pared...

Feofan Prokopovich’s Pravda voli monarshei as Fundamental Law of the Russian Empire

In Russia, the government is a despotism mitigated by strangulation. This sarcastic definition of constitution, attributed to Germaine de Stael, reflects both contemporary and modern perceptions of 18th-century Russia. (1) An of palace revolutions followed Peter's reign, and between 1725 and 1801 most Russian rulers gained or lost power as the result of palace coups. Three tsars were killed by their successors' supporters: Ivan VI, Peter III, and Paul I. This record of political instability considerably damaged the reputation of the post-Petrine Russian Empire, an age that well-educated Russians began to regard with marked disdain in the late 18th century. (2) Vasilii Kliuchevskii dedicated one of his famous harangues to Peter the Great's unworthy successors: Peter was succeeded by his widow, Catherine I, who was followed by the grandson of the reformer, Peter II, whose successor was Anna, duchess of Courland, the niece of Peter I and daughter of Tsar Ivan, who was succeeded by the infant Ivan Antonovich, son of her niece Anna Leopoldovna of Brunswick, daughter of Catherine Ivanovna, duchess of Mecklenburg, sister of Anna Ioannovna. The overthrown infant Ivan was succeeded by Peter Is daughter, Elizabeth, who was succeeded by her nephew, Peter III, son of Anna Petrovna, duchess of Holstein, who was overthrown by Catherine II. It seems that never before, either here or anywhere else, had the line of succession been fractured so severely. The line was crushed along the way, which led these persons to supreme power. None of them owed their reign to any settlement based on and custom whatsoever, but to hazard, palace revolution, and court intrigue. (3) Why could the Romanovs not simply be a normal hereditary monarchy, like the Habsburgs, Hanoverians, Wittelsbachs, or Bourbons? Kliuchevskii, like most other historians, was convinced that Peter the Great's Law of Succession, signed on 5 February 1722, had caused the mess. (4) According to this law, the tsar gave himself the authority to disinherit his children and freely select his successor, without any regard to blood relationship. (5) Historians have characterized this decision as an act of cultural violence by which Peter demolished customary primogeniture, causing all the trouble that later resulted in the many palace coups. (6) The commonly accepted narrative begins with Tsar Peter the Reformer, who accomplished great things but failed to regulate his own succession, and ends with his great-grandson Paul, who was an incapable ruler but at least bequeathed to the fatherland three sons and a reasonable house law (his 1797 reestablishing a clear-cut line of succession)-in all respects a flourishing dynastic family. It is believed that Peter's decision was the product of particular circumstances regarding his personal relationship to his wayward son Aleksei. (7) Driven by disappointment and fear that his heir apparent would one day destroy his life's work, it is said, Peter made a decision that proved fatally wrong in the long term, for the lack of a clear line of succession hampered the evolution of a constitutional, legal order and of the kinds of institutions that could have facilitated Russia's emancipation from autocracy. Because they were not legal heirs but rather usurpers, Russian tsars felt constrained to base their rule on violence instead of on law. The classical view, most recently defended by Igor' Kurukin, stipulates that the absence of legal norms induced the Guards regiments to make the final decision and, if necessary, carry it out by armed force: might made right. (8) As a consequence, for contemporary observers as for historians, 18th-century Russia temporarily seemed to move toward oriental despotism rather than European enlightened monarchy. (9) For liberal constitutional historians such as Kliuchevskii the failure of dignitaries to select Peter's successor by drawing on regulations of private inheritance was a grave error, one that stripped the succession of a positive legal foundation. …

Madame de Stäel y la Constitución del año III: el nacimiento del republicanismo liberal

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, during the stormy days between Termidor and Brumaire, Mme. de Stael played a fundamental role in the formation of liberal republicanism. Her book, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Revolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la republique en France, presented a template for a moderate and pluralistic republic, as much as it showed how to reform the Constitution de l'An III in order to fix those mistakes which forced the Directoire to sustain the republic by means of coup d'etats and political violence. Fecha de envio / Submission Date: 10/03/2015 Fecha de aceptacion / Acceptance Date: 14/04/2015

Mme de Staël: Literatura e Tradução

This paper presents, at first, a theoretical reflection on the concept of Comparative Literature, mainly connected to the otherness and foreign dimension. We then show how and why the book De la litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les Institutions sociales [On Literature Considered in its Relations with Social Institutions] from Madame de Stael is considered a real comparative work. Finally, we will examine how interculturalism and perfectibility according to the writer point of view involve translation in order to contribute to the development of Letters by the knowledge of other liteculturas.

La traduction française de Woldemar , « roman philosophique et sentimental » – une médiation avortée ?

This study proposes to reassess the only translation in French of the novel Woldemar, published soon after it appeared in Germany but which quickly sank into oblivion. As the first attempt of Franco-German mediation by the publicist Charles Vandenbourg, who, at the time, had emigrated to Germany, it represents an enlightening example of the philological and philosophical stakes specific to the Franco-German intellectual transfer around the 1800s. The current article analyses the initial conditions and the publishing modes of the transfer, the translation strategy of Charles Vandenbourg as well as the revealing role played by the text in resetting the intellectual fields under the Directoire. Although it was a failure, this translation lead up to the penetration of Jacobi’s philosophy in France, in a context of the philosophical debates opposing the Idealists and the Ideologists, later echoed by Madame de Stael.