Придворная словесность: институт литературы и конструкции абсолютизма в России середины XVIII века

The Introduction articulates the theoretical framework behind the individual readings that constitute the bulk of the book. This framework emerges at the crossroads of the Russian tradition of literary and cultural history, from Gukovskii and Pumpianskii to Lotman and V. M. Zhivov, on the one hand, and theoretical interpretations of early modern culture which emerged over the last century in the West on the other. Highlighting significant conceptual similarities between the work of Soviet scholars carried out behind the Iron Curtain and that of their Western contemporaries, I reconstruct the outlines of a shared inquiry into the relationship between literature, the royal court, and the emerging “absolutist” statehood in early modern Russia and Europe. This reconstruction centers on several interrelated issues and perspectives. First among them is a recognition of the fundamental affinity of early modern literary forms with the evolving pan-European languages of absolutist politics. Succinctly articulated in Soviet Russia in Pumpianskii’s few articles from the 1930s, this dependence has, in the West, become the subject of a rich and manifold theoretical and historical inquiry. From Pumpianskii’s contemporary Walter Benjamin to the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and Victoria Kahn, scholars have uncovered the political origins and effects of the early modern poetic imagination and, conversely, the dependence of political order on the resources of narrative and fiction. Pumpianskii’s insights concerning the attachment of eighteenth-century Russian literature to the imperial court, supported by the findings of his Soviet colleagues Gukovskii and P. N. Berkov, resonate, moreover, with the conclusions of a somewhat different school of thought – the historical sociology of Norbert Elias, the author of “On the Process of Civilization” (1939) and “The Court Society” (1969). Investigating the emergence and evolution of European court society as a specific “figuration” of social existence, Elias situates early modern modes of literary production and consumption, as well as the social position of the authors themselves, within its framework. These claims provided the following generation of scholars with a basis for a more general inquiry into what came to be designated as the early modern “disciplinary revolution” and “governmentality”. The American historian Marc Raeff and his Soviet-based contemporary Yury Lotman both inscribed the cultural policies of the eighteenth-century Russian monarchy in the large-scale process of top-down disciplining of the nation of subjects. In this perspective, literature in the broadest sense can be seen as a central institution of the evolving statehood, a medium which shaped and reproduced visions of authority as well as modes of obedient or emancipated selfhood. This approach to literature, articulated by Lotman and his collaborators in the Moscow-Tartu School of cultural semiotics (Zhivov, B. A. Uspenskii), corresponds to Michel Foucault’s simultaneous investigation of the centuries-long “great process of the governmentalization of society”, and its counterpart, the emergence of Enlightenment critique as the “art of not being governed like that”. At the same time, Lotman’s analysis of absolutist authority as a semiotic form derived from a secular reappropriation of religious elements resonates with major Western discussions of secularization, first and foremost in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (1957). These interrelated lines of inquiry inaugurated by Soviet-era scholars and their Western contemporaries inform the subsequent chapters of my book.