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

Part 2, “The Lyric of Power”, opens with Chapter 3, “‘By Me Kings Reign’: The Political Theology of Biblical Paraphrases”, which explores the origins and resonances of the poetic paraphrases of the Bible (mostly the Psalms but other books as well) which emerged as one of the most popular genres in mid-eighteenth-century Russian poetry. The chapter takes as its starting point an edition collaboratively published in 1744 by Lomonosov, Sumarokov, and Trediakovskii, the only active Russian poets at that moment. This edition included three different metric adaptations of Psalm 143 as well as an epigraph from Horace on the power of poetry and a preface outlining the authors’ diverging opinions in matters of versification. While earlier scholars have correctly interpreted the Horatian epigraph as a statement on the role of the newly emergent Russian poetry, I offer a new perspective on the relationship between the sacred poetry of the Psalter and the project of secular letters inaugurated by the 1744 edition. The lines of Horace selected for the book’s epigraph come from a section of Ars poetica which inscribed the poet’s art and status into a mythical narrative of the foundation of states and the invention of statehood. Given Horace’s role as a model court poet of a model empire, the epigraph can be said to style the triple psalm paraphrases as a poetic articulation of an official political theology. In this light, I use various themes of Psalm 143 as a key to the entire corpus of biblical paraphrases of the 1740s – 1750s. Chronologically, this renewed tradition begins with an ode by Kantemir which preceded the edition of 1744 by several years and also amalgamated biblical themes with a Horatian poetic language. A section of the chapter is devoted to a close reading of this ode against the background of the political and theological discourses of the Petrine and post-Petrine empire. Returning in the sections that follow to the psalm paraphrases of the 1740s, I trace their varied political resonances. First, the psalms, associated with the royal figure of David and his prayer, offer a paradigm of a divinely sanctioned monarchy, resonant with the rituals and discourses of anointment enacted during Empress Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742. Second, the psalms and other biblical songs adapted by Russian poets contain a blueprint for a political compact between the monarchy and its subjects. Lastly, the psalms, with their characteristic verbal gesture of supplication, provide a model for subjectivity and subjecthood, an understanding of the self in the framework of political hierarchies. This political interpretation of the paraphrases is supported by manifold evidence from contemporary non-literary sources, such as court sermons and Elizabeth’s coronation album, which adopt some of the same psalms for explicitly political purposes, as well as the letters and diaries of political actors of the same era, which refer to the Bible to make sense of their political existence. Poetic paraphrases of the psalms are thus construed as a manifestation of the lived culture of the Russian court’s political piety.