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

Chapter 4, “Theology Physical and Political: Mikhail Lomonosov’s Ode Paraphrased from Job”, offers an in-depth reading of Lomonosov’s poetic adaptation of the famous whirlwind speech from the Book of Job. A classic of eighteenth-century Russian poetry and one of the few poems of the period retained in subsequent cultural memory, Lomonosov’s 1752 ode has been subject to many interpretations which have situated it in diverging contexts, from Luther’s German translation of the Bible to Enlightenment philosophy and natural sciences. Drawing on these findings and approaches, my reading places the “Ode Paraphrased from Job” at a strategic intersection of secularized piety, moral and natural philosophy, and political theology. Their amalgamation was characteristic, as I argue, of the emerging secular culture centered around the imperial court and the Academy of Sciences (where Lomonosov studied and served) established by Peter I as a vehicle for a Westernized (re)education of the imperial elites. In this perspective, Lomonosov’s poetic masterpiece – first published in an officially sponsored edition of his works – can be seen as a potent articulation of a particular vision of authority and discipline which, as dictated by Petrine church reform, blurred the boundary between the religious and the secular. The chapter begins by outlining the links between Lomonosov’s Ode and the philosophy of Leibniz, one of the founders of the Petersburg Academy, as well as Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), a famous work of philosophical poetry published in a metrical Russian translation by Lomonosov’s disciple Nikolai Popovskii several years after the Ode. Lomonosov’s importation of authoritative Western philosophical discourses into Russian poetry was shaped by a very specific understanding of knowledge: in the framework of the post-Petrine state, poetry, philosophy, natural sciences and Christian faith all became instruments of state discipline, the monarchy’s education of its subjects. This constellation is immediately reflected in the rhetorical structure of the Ode as it reproduces God’s terrifying speech to Job on the necessity of unconditional obedience. Grand visions of the universe and the various creatures that inhabit it, which in Lomonosov’s adaptation amalgamate biblical myth with recent natural philosophy, are spectacularly subordinated to the task of subduing and regulating the subjectivity of the reader. The chapter goes on to situate Lomonosov’s poetic procedure within a broad context of aesthetic and political theory equally relevant for Russia and the West. In Hobbes’ influential exposition of absolutist politics, God’s speech to Job emerges as a crucial point at which secular and religious authority become one, as a rhetorically powerful eruption of the principle of domination unlimited by any restraints. In Russia, similar rhetoric was employed in the major propagandistic text of the Petrine reign, The Justice of the Monarch’s Right (1722). At the same time, God’s speech to Job was understood by Lomonosov’s contemporary Edmund Burke as an important example of the sublime – an aesthetic mode whereby the readers, according to Burke’s formula, are “forced into compliance”. Lomonosov’s Ode can thus be situated at the crux of a complex interaction between political, aesthetic, and philosophical thinking which informed pan-European visions of authority.