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

The only chapter of Part 3, “Empire, Poetry, and Patronage During the Seven Years’ War”, investigates the patronage strategies of the “Russian Maecenas” – Elizabeth’s favorite Ivan Shuvalov – and the literary production that emerged with his support in the last years of her reign. Shuvalov initiated and oversaw the establishment of Moscow University, equipped with its own press and a journal, and (as I argue) was involved in the creation of another, Petersburg-based, journal. In this chapter, I link Shuvalov’s activity as a patron of the arts to the broader concerns of the Russian court during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which Russia fought against Prussia alongside France and Austria. Shuvalov, who at the time was largely responsible for Russia’s foreign policy, viewed literature as a medium crucial to the shaping of Russia’s self-image and international reputation. Accordingly, the literary works and publications that he sponsored were, to a degree under-appreciated by scholarship, aligned with this political vision. It was Shuvalov who during these years enlisted Voltaire to write a history of Peter the Great. In 1760, Shuvalov encouraged Lomonosov and Sumarokov to produce and publish two competing translations of a French ode – a double-production which could be read as an attack against Russia’s enemy, Frederick of Prussia, and at the same time symbolized Russia’s status as an enlightened nation worthy of high status within the concert of Europe. Further French-language publications sponsored by Shuvalov regularly praised Russia’s emerging poetry as an element of its imperial dignity. A conjunction of literary theory and imperial self-fashioning underlay what was probably the most eloquent Russian literary manifesto of this period – Lomonosov’s “Preface on the Usefulness of Church Books” (1758), written on Shuvalov’s request for the Moscow edition of Lomonosov’s works that the favorite personally oversaw. Building upon a long-standing tradition of “linguistic patriotism”, Lomonosov’s Preface inscribed his recent works into a history of Russian language which in this version went back to Church Slavonic, the language of the Slavic Orthodox Bible, and its tradition of “church books” translated from the Greek. While seemingly disconnected from post-Petrine languages of Westernization and secularization, the Preface in fact derived its arguments from pan-European discourses of empire as a politico-theological union between church and crown. Paradoxically, secular Russian poetry emerging under court patronage should, according to Lomonosov’s manifesto, skillfully appropriate elements of Church Slavonic vocabulary, along with the public “admiration” associated with this language of liturgy. Placing his own festive odes at the core of this vision of literature, Lomonosov viewed poetry as a medium of imperial secularization, capable of transforming the church as a community of the faithful into the political nation centered around the media-shaped cult of the monarch. The theory of literature presented in the Preface masks a Hobbesian model of sovereignty and the political “commonwealth”. Published with the approval of the court, Lomonosov’s short essay firmly established literature as a medium for Russia’s imperial self-fashioning.