496 Forum AI Cynthia Hyla WHITTAKER Andrei Zorin has written a rich and remarkable book with a rather intriguing title. Beginning with the now-mandatory flourish of theory, he examines the links and interplay between literature and political policy, and how the former can “overcome, transform, naturalize, embody, popularize” the latter, especially during periods of war preparation (p. 26). The book focuses on three separate instances that span the period from the 1760s to the 1830s: Catherine II’s “Greek Project”; the shifting sands of Alexander I’s policies; and the tripartite formula of Sergei Uvarov. The descriptions of the episodes and of the major protagonists provide such abundant detail that the narrative acquires the texture of a novel. Most remarkably, while the book spotlights very well-known events in Russian history, Zorin’s investigation elaborates the context and weaves together the strands in such an original way that he creates a seemingly new tapestry. The Greek Project The first section of the monograph explores the symbolic meaning of the Greek Project. This imaginative, audacious, quixotic set of goals became the linchpin of Russia’s Eastern policy and had as its objectives: freeing Constantinople, the Second Rome and home of Orthodoxy, from the Turks; establishing a new Greek Empire supposedly independent of Russia; and installing Catherine’s carefully-named grandson, Constantine, on a throne that would be inherited by his descendents, making the Romanovs rulers of quite a chunk of the globe. This project naturally met with hostility from the other powers of Europe, and the empress enlisted the support of Vasilii Petrov, a gifted poet, to support Russia’s aims. Zorin’s analysis of Petrov’s lengthy ode celebrating the peace treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji (1774) is a tour de force. He places the composition in the context of Newton’s physics, Rousseau’s naturalism, the rise of Freemasonry , and the diplomacy of the balance of power, among other panEuropean ideas and forces. Further, Zorin explains Catherine’s presentation of herself as the bearer of civilization, an image she had cultivated since the calling of the Legislative Commission and the banning in France of her preliminary instructions, or Nakaz, to the delegates. Not only would the empress champion the ideas of the Age of Voltaire throughout all Europe, she would also free the Crimea, and other Ottoman-dominated areas, from 497 Ab Imperio, 1/2002 tyranny, while taking protection of the treasures of classical civilization located in those regions. Under Catherine, Russia clearly aspired to political and cultural equality with, if not hegemony over, the other European countries. Zorin’s explication is masterful, but the reader should be warned that Petrov’s place in the literary world of Catherinean Russia was unusual. He was regarded as the empress’s “pocket poet,” and, because of this subservience , other poets held him in disdain. They believed he trivialized the ode, whose aim, as apotheosized in the work of Lomonosov, was not to curry favor but to carry a message to the monarch, with the poet acting as civic spokesman. Few versifiers, novelists, playwrights, and journalists in the eighteenth century regarded themselves as mouthpieces of government policy, even when they agreed with it. Instead, litterateurs engaged in an intense, although non-confrontational, dialogue with the empress about the direction of her domestic and foreign policy and the style of her leadership . This exchange took place on the pages of the many publications that arose during the print explosion of the era, and both writers and the prolific empress-author participated. Ahost of authors – I have counted over 100 in this reign – hoped, through their writings which they knew the empress read, to mediate between the needs of the state and its subjects, and they regarded publication as a form of participation in political life. Litterateurs sought to mold public opinion, to instruct their readership in systematic political thought, to guide their expectations of government, and to set the standards of what people should approve or disapprove; they tried, in Rousseau’s words, to “dominer les opinions.” At the same time, especially in the first decade of Catherine’s reign, writers saw themselves as acting in partnership with the empress, and they, too...
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Jul 29, 2012
Alaa Zuhheir Al- Rawashdeh + 2
Open Access
