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The poetics of disillusionment: the legacy of the eighteenth-century ceremonial ode in nineteenth-century Russian lyric poetry and pastoral prose

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The poetics of disillusionment: the legacy of the eighteenth-century ceremonial ode in nineteenth-century Russian lyric poetry and pastoral prose

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Content The Poetics of Disillusionment: The Legacy of the Eighteenth-Century Ceremonial Ode in Nineteenth-Century Russian Lyric Poetry and Pastoral Prose by T.M. Watson A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE) December 2020 Thomas McGarvie Watson TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................ii Abstract...........................................................................................................................................ix Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Enlightenment, Surface and Interior.....................................................................18 Part I: The Exploration of the Interior World………........................................................18 Enlightened Interlude……….................................................................................22 The Geological Enlightenment………..................................................................29 Ignorance and Harony………................................................................................30 Skepticism and Optimism………..........................................................................32 Divinely-Directed Labor………............................................................................34 Russia as Worthy of Myth……….........................................................................36 Part II: The Ode as Geological Genre………....................................................................37 The Ode, Progress and the State............................................................................37 Hidden Treasures of the Empire and the Ode........................................................43 Subjugation and Myth............................................................................................44 The Body, the Household and the State as Mirrored Harmonies..........................49 Part III: A More Personal Science.....................................................................................54 Radishchev and the Literary Tradition..................................................................54 With a Curious Eye to Our Interior.......................................................................57 Materialism and Harmony.....................................................................................61 Part VI: A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow into the Center of the Earth……….63 I Turned My Gaze into My Interior: A Classical Scientific Investigation………63 The Epigraph and Dedication of Radishchev’s Journey as Indicative of Tension between Form and Content………………………………………………………70 The Travelogue as a Conversational Genre……………………………………...69 The Travelogue’s Conversation With the Ode……………………...…………...72 Personal, Particular, Material, Geological…………………………………….....73 Personal, Particular, Material, Pastoral…………………………………….….....79 Personal, Particular, Material, Mythical……………………….…………….…..84 The First Step……………………………………………………………….........91 Chapter 2: A Conversation Between Poets, Mountains and Genres: Lomonosov, Pushkin, and Lermontov..................................................................................................................................................94 Part I: The Publicly Governmental Ode....................................................................................95 Sublime Perspective........................................................................................................97 Deification of the Once-and-Future Monarch.............................................................97 Revealing What’s Hidden and Giving it Over..........................................................103 Part V: The Strain of a New Sense of Space..........................................................................107 The Man in the Mountain................................................................................................111 The Man as the Mountain................................................................................................116 Chapter 3: A Mode of Contrast: Pastoral Colors within the Lines of the Ode............................129 Pastoral Interlude.................................................................................................132 Why the Ode?......................................................................................................135 Part I: Gogol’s Dead Forms.............................................................................................137 Introduction..........................................................................................................137 Inherent Goodness and the Unnaturalness of Falsity: A Man of the Eighteenth- Century.................................................................................................................138 Spaces “Real” and “Imagined” ...........................................................................147 The “National” Character of Prose: Time and Space in Dead Souls………...…148 Part II: Sergei Askakov’s Nostalgia: The Pastoral as a Past That’s Passed Away……..166 From Public to Private Paradise: the Ode and the Frontier……………...……..169 Shishkov: The Reinterpretation of the Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic as Part of a Nationalist Ethic………………………………………………………………..178 Chronicle, Ode, Memoir, or Novel? Pastoral……………...……..…...……..…184 Part III: The Last Unmined Mountain...………………...………..……………...……..194 One Lyrical Outburst………………………………………………...…………199 Conclusion: Theoretical and Thematic Extensions……………...……..……………...………..214 Bibliography................................................................................................................................230 ii Acknowledgements The central idea of this dissertation seemed too large to everyone besides me. To me it feels but a slice of a larger question, a question I know will ebb and flow over the shores of consciousness until that consciousness is eventually washed away: how did the modern project fail so spectacularly to deliver humane and dignified lives to most people, only materially improving the lives of a select few while increasing the alienation and spiritual suffering of all? This question arose in me in college while reading Russian classics like Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, Solovyev’s The Meaning of Love, and Olesha’s Envy. I felt myself a kind of Kavelerov, uncomfortable with both modern society and the nostalgia that sustains most critiques of it. For my senior thesis I investigated the failure of the Modernist project in the early Soviet period, looking at the concept of целесобразность in avant-garde art and the turn back to representational art under socialist realism, art for the sake of amusement, propaganda, or sentimental feeling. How did the seemingly noble aspirations of avant-garde artists get turned against them so powerfully and completely? Not only did their utopia of expedient objects never come, most of these artists were doomed to death or disgrace under Stalin. Does working towards increased material progress annihilate the human spirit? In search of the answer to this question in graduate school, with a focus now on literary forms, my gaze crept progressively farther back, first to the nineteenth, then to the eighteenth century. The answer seemed to be yes, the further material progress and modernity encroach on the natural and spiritual world, the less space there is for humanity itself. The question is not that simple, however. First of all, with each successful invasion of another geographical or spiritual space, art rises to the challenge, ready to provide at least partial aesthetic compensation for loss and suffering, the main purpose of Romantic art, an age of art iii (the Romantic and post-Romantic) beyond which we are just moving. With no more to lose, everything is simply currency made of our debt from past losses: extinct animals, negated social relations, forgotten traditions and dissolved bonds, banknotes representing abstracted former ways of life passed around numbly, trying to spark an atavistically-felt sensation. Secondly, it became clear as I was finishing my dissertation under quarantine in an ever more dysfunctional and incapable nation that the entire notion of progress is perhaps nonsense, and that I was accepting the arguments of plunderers and thieves at face value when I should rather have been accepting the fools and artists as the true authorities. Living in a time where meaningful innovation has ground to a halt outside of new forms of exploitation, on a planet where human life will be unsustainable within the next few decades, and in a country that imprisons a larger percentage of its population than the Soviet Union ever did, all while offering scant moral or aesthetic justification outside of sterile technological spectacle, strip-mall churches and same-day delivery, it is clear that human cruelty can seemingly increase infinitely without any necessary relationship to increased technological progress: we have thus been presented a false binary. If the relationship between the two is unstable, perhaps material progress can increase without any need for a commensurate increase in human cruelty. My late grandfather Douglas McGarvie was the first man in his family with a Ph.D. He has now raised two succeeding generations of Ph.Ds. Because of this work, I missed a large part of his last years and his death. He was a lifelong special-education teacher and administrator in the public schools and believed accessible, inclusive education was the highest value of any civilized society. Although the educational system is now more of a vehicle for social inequality, debt-service, and real-estate investment than it is the pursuit of knowledge or nurturing of the human spirit, I guess I am proud to have reached its apex. My mother and father have provided iv endless material and emotional support for an endless project. No one should have to hear to so much about Oblomov from a son who so closely resembles him. In my final months of writing this dissertation, I spread dirty leggings, empty coffee cups and illegible papers across my dad’s office, and my mom proofread my entire dissertation. My sister has helped me bring voice to my anger and resentment in fruitful ways without which I would feel very isolated and alone and would probably not still be capable of much of anything. If I had not taken breaks from reading crumbling Soviet histories of gold mining to sit in Laurel Schmuck’s recliner on 776 N. Hoover Street and shoot the shit about Tolstoy, southern rap music, and archetypes in American television, there would be next to nothing interesting in this dissertation. I hope always to be the Howard to her Bob, the Kramer to her Jerry, the Leon to her Larry. I hope the Jackson Browne songs typifying our succeeding years end up being more upbeat than the ones that have echoed our feelings these past few years. Chris McGeorge was my home while Los Angeles was still foreign. I have learned more from him than I have anyone besides my own parents. We grew so much together that our roots will forever be tangled. The food I eat outside of our apartment on 1806 N. Berendo will never taste as good as what we would make together, and I will never need to hug someone as much as I did when we would spill our guts along with so much wine in that capacious co-op on 4125 S. Figueroa Street, playing sides of our shared record collection. As all American cities are, Los Angeles is a terrible place, only more so. Everyday lived experience here attests to the unnecessary cruelty of the modern project. But beauty pokes through, more stark and profound for the contrast. The wind drying my sweat as I dangled from the edge of mountains in Angeles watching the sunset burn down, or clawing through plastic packaging into the surf, wondering if my neck would snap as I tumbled v in Hermosa Beach breakers: these experiences changed me forever. Gearing up to glide down Vermont Avenue into the smog is perhaps the most epic commute possible. The rest of the mornings of my life will be a letdown, although now, fortunately, I am less certain exactly where I will die. I will miss it. Nike Nivar I admire most of all, an island of order in a storm of chaos, who was doomed to teach me the same path to Griffith Observatory a million times. JB Sivanich and Kendra Atkin are both visionaries who were able to see that my life did not have to be one of shallow depression but could rather be one of industry and investigation. I am still working on that. Kez Poole drew me out onto Los Angeles’s trails, giving me emotional and alpine perspective so needed in life, as well as always packing the water and snacks I would have suffered without. In a perfect world, Justin Trifiro and Olga Seliaznova would be the two angels on my shoulder, checking in on me and batting about deep pop songs and obscure literary classics, two chattering birds full of profundity, flattering me as if I am knowledgeable enough to talk about anything with them. Their passion and interest in the human experience show life to be worth living. Susan Kechekian is the one who put all of our lives in order. As much as I joke that every time she texts me a reminder it will be the last time she has to, but I have felt an increase of sadness each time, as I hope it never will never be the last time. Jake Hartmann and Peter Thomas showed me that life could be a waking dream, that ideas, feelings and stories were powerful enough to change my very reality, and those realizations happened mostly in the Lawrence University and Beloit College Russian Departments. I am sure that the last year of my life I will look at a lamp and see “лампочка” in masking tape flash before my eyes, and these last ten years of my life could be seen as my vi extended reawakening from the haze induced by reading Kreutzer Sonata or Russian Word Formation together. Elizabeth Carlson is all that a college professor can aspire to be. She inspired me to be a better student, enthusiastically encouraging my best thoughts and gently guiding me away from my worst. I went to graduate school in hopes of getting the opportunity to discuss ideas with people like her. I also came to graduate school picturing it as an endless series of the conversations I had on an average Thursday in college: breakfast on snowy sunny mornings with Maureen Darras discussing vegetarianism, vitamins and utopia as if we could impose them, Kool after Kool on the SigEp porch with Steve Jones jawing on pragmatism and the failures of liberalism as if nothing could ever change, and Thursday night seminars with Martyn Smith and Ben Levine discussing Islam, immigration and pristine identity over sangria as if it didn’t really matter anyway, as if observation, analysis and amusement were interesting enough. All of those illusions have been proven wrong, but those memories themselves are not illusions, they are vitally real to me still. I would not be here without Ashley Schneider, Alex Burmin, Phil Miaer, Viktoria Juharyan, Maria Yagunova, Ela Marueva and her uncle Anatoli, Edie Furniss, Karen Carr, Olya Ozhiganova, Anya Borisovna, Tatiana Akishina, Ben Hooyman, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Loodovik Dorman, Brittany Callahan, Liz Flattery, Sonya Wasielewski, James McHugh, and Liz Lipschultz. They all awakened in me the curiosity I once had in me as a child, in other words, discovering what it means to be a proper adult. As for those of them who taught me Russian, I thank them for tolerating my lazy pronunciation and jumbled vocabulary from outdated dictionaries. Even if I don’t have much chance to speak Russian again, they are a part of me, vii their words the little bricks that make up my personality. At the end of this exhausting effort, I hope I can draw inspiration from all of them and find renewed patience and curiosity. It was my interactions with the aforementioned people who made me believe there could be such a thing as an intellectual community, and with them I found shreds of one remaining. Ben Block has given me a taste for what an adulthood of curiosity could look like, pondering “what it is to be a bat,” and the imagining life in a “human-scale world.” Thanks as well to the boys in the chat, friendships that developed mostly after college. With them, I honed my methods of argumentation: Bernie or Bust. They should put us all in charge, or maybe just all of you and not me. Kevin Gabrielsen, who truly cares for me, was kind to remind me not to get fat, quit smoking, and go to the dentist, and though I am puzzled why someone as kind as Evan Tracy would ever ask someone so self-centered and short-sighted for advice, I am honored and found the stories hilarious. Sally Pratt always humored my ideas, even if they lacked the rigor of hers. It was in a class of hers on nineteenth-century poetry where this whole thing really kicked off. Reading Lydiia Ginzburg with her defined how I think about intellectual history and made intellectual history the way I think about the world. My successes in that seminar gave me the insolence to start forming universal cultural theories of my own. As an intellectual historian, it is an honor to be able to humbly count myself in the apostolic succession of Tynianov, Ginzburg and Pratt. She put almost as much work into this dissertation as I did — I cannot imagine the torture of reading the first few jumbled masses I called “drafts.” Greta Matzner-Gore read my writing with such respect that it gave me respect for myself when I most needed it: if a person that insightful and dedicated could see something worthwhile my work, maybe it was worth something. It is inspiring to watch her move the conversation viii about the classics forward through stagnation and reaction, and with any justice people like her will get what they deserve: power in their workplaces and time to write. Colleen McQuillen saved this dissertation. At a moment when I was feeling sluggish, dispirited and likely to drop out a second and final time, her energetic and incisive commentary pushed it across the finish line. I tell people that I try to bring new and innovative theoretical lenses to Russian literary analysis, but then I look at Colleen’s work and realize that there are people who can actually do that. Someone for whom I truly enjoyed teaching, Natania Meeker made me think academia could be for me: the learning I did while teaching for her was fully three-dimensional, as if I understood anew that my horizon ended only because the world was at a curve. These understandings provoked in my brain that pleasant aggravation of my intellect that sent me here in the first place. Natania has a way of penetrating quickly to the most interesting part of an argument, and in both my qualifying exams and my dissertation committee she has illuminated important aspects of this project I did not know where there. Marcus Levitt and Alik Zholkovsky always let me know my place, which convinced me that it was not in academia, the greatest favor of all. One of them always speaks his mind without reservation and produced a lot of honest and helpful perspective in me. I hope this document proves him to have been right the several times he told me: “You are not stupid.” I am smart enough to know that the meaningful creation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge is likely to take place outside of the contemporary university, and I am excited for my life there. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2020 ix Abstract Despite the fervent optimism and dizzying dynamism of eighteenth-century Russian literature, over the following century Russian literature came to be defined by a sense of alienation and loss. In many cases, this sense of loss directly correlated to the successful systems of state simplification enacted by the government in order to order literature, the landscape, and citizens’ lives. Earlier poets and scientists were explicitly hopeful in praising these changes, but as time went on, writers grew disillusioned with efforts to structure the world in order to make it more legible to the state. This dissertation maps a cycle of optimism and disillusionment, in which a positive attitude towards the systems organizing poetry, society and the landscape gives way to a more pessimistic attitude towards those efforts, made particularly evident when inherited traces of more optimistic literary genres were recycled in new generic systems, staging dramatic juxtapositions in value systems. The tightly-structured world projected by the ode was shown to be unrealized or undesirable, and later authors, whether Romantic poets such as Pushkin and Lermontov, or pastoral prose-writers such as Gogol, Aksakov or Goncharov chipped off motifs, themes and words from the ode and used them in their work to convey these realizations. This recycling of motifs was constitutive of the pastoral mode in particular, a mode defined by contrasts between spaces and temporalities, one of which was usually associated with eighteenth-century ideologies and genres. 1 Introduction [Lomonosov] looks over the whole Russian land from end to end from some kind of radiant height, admiring and never getting his fill of its boundlessness and virgin lands [nature]. In [his] descriptions, the view of a learned naturalist is heard, rather than that of a poet, but the sincere force of [his] enthusiasm transformed the naturalist into a poet. The most amazing thing is that, in confining his poetic speech in narrow stanzas of German iambs, he did not constrain the language at all: his language moves in the narrow stanzas as majestically and freely as a mighty river in unchannelled banks. He is freer and superior in poetry than in prose, and it is not in vain that we call Lomonosov the father of our poetic speech. It is amazing that an originator has already emerged as the lord and lawgiver of the language. Lomonosov comes ahead of our poets, as the introduction is ahead of the book. His poetry is the start of daybreak. Like a flash of heat lightning, it illuminates not everything, but only certain stanzas. In Lomonosov, Russia herself appears only in general geographical outlines. It is as if he cared only to sketch one outline of a colossal state, to draw out its borders with points and lines, leaving others to lay down the colors; he himself is like an initial, prophetic sketch of what lies ahead. “What in Actuality is the Essence of Russian Poetry and What is its (Defining) Characteristic,” Nikolai Gogol “Only one thing scared and attracted me in childhood. I had a recurring dream: I saw myself at the foot of a huge mountain, so high and boundless that my legs grew limp. The mountain was frightfully big. It was so big that I began to sweat and crumble like dried bread. Its summit disappeared into the blue sky. The summit was very high. So high that I was entirely bent and fell apart like bread in milk. I couldn’t do anything about that mountain. It stood there. And waited for me to look at its summit. That was all it wanted from me. But I couldn’t raise my head. How could I? I was all stooped and crumbling. But the mountain really wanted me to look. I understood that if I didn’t look, I’d crumble altogether and turn into bread pudding. I took my head in my hands and began to lift it. It rose, and rose, and rose. But I still couldn’t see the top. Because it was high, high high. And it ran away from me something terrible. I began to sob through my teeth and choke. I kept lifting my heavy head. Suddenly my spine broke and I collapsed into wet pieces and fell backward. That’s when I saw the summit. It shone WITH LIGHT. That light was so bright that I disappeared in it. This felt so awfully good that I woke up.” Vladimir Sorokin, BRO, 2008 Despite the fervent optimism and dizzying dynamism of eighteenth-century Russian literature, over the following century Russian literature came to be defined by a sense of 2 alienation and loss. In many cases, this sense of loss directly correlated to the successful systems of state simplification enacted by the government in order to order literature, the landscape, and citizens’ lives. Earlier poets and scientists were explicitly hopeful in praising these changes, but as time went on, writers grew disillusioned with efforts to structure the world in order to make it more legible to the state. This dissertation maps a cycle of optimism and disillusionment, in which a positive attitude towards organizing poetry, society and the landscape into legible systems gives way to a more pessimistic attitude towards those efforts. This cycle is made particularly evident when authors recycled inherited traces of more optimistic eighteenth-century genres in new generic systems, staging dramatic juxtapositions in value systems. The initial content of the eighteenth-century Russian ceremonial ode is well-established: empire. Russian literary language, generally, and the ode, specifically, were systemized in conjunction with the rise of the Russian empire, forever identifying the odic form with the expansion of the empire. Expansion of the empire, however, was just one thematic essentiality of the ode, in addition to wide landscapes, bloody military victories over political opponents, the advance of the sciences, and the personal near-divinity of the Tsars. This frothy optimism about the achievements of the early modern Russian state resulted in the depiction of what I will term the “world-as-it-should-be,” rather than “the-world-as-it-is.” In other words, the optimistic attitude that pushed monarchs like Catherine to transform their government, and the military, the bureaucracy and settlers to transform the lands of the empire itself inspired odists like Lomonosov to project a vision of the world in their poetry as it would be when it was transformed. The ode was so thoroughly defined by an optimistic attitude about the outcome of these revolutionary efforts that in the centuries to follow, complicating or refuting its themes and 3 structures became the most incisive way of expressing disillusionment and discontent with the “world-as-it-is.” At the beginning of his book about systems of state simplification, Seeing Like a State, James. C. Scott describes the logic behind scientific forestry, a method of managing forests that replaced incomprehensibly complex forests capable of providing near infinite uses with what amounted to essentially a field of crops. Scientific forestry spread across the world and promised to reinvigorate timber production in regions where old-growth forests had been denuded. The method really did boost timber production in the short term. Several problems later became apparent, however. “Natural” and human activity proved an impediment to the practical and aesthetic vision of thousands of trees for timber that could easily be converted into money, ships and buildings. The actual tree was replaced by an abstraction: how much lumber could this object be transformed into? The new forest and its utility were conceptualized and manifested aesthetically: endless rows of identical, thin uncluttered trunks. Fire, storms, blights, climatic changes, insect populations, and disease all tore through the newly-simplified, standardized forest. These forests also, despite trying to narrow potential uses of the forest, they were too large to effectively police, and people continued to graze livestock, poach animals, gather firewood and use the forest in ways that prevented the forest from being fully rationalized (Scott, 19). Scott notes that after almost one hundred years of scientific forestry was invented, forests began to collapse. The complex processes of soil building, nutrient uptake, and the symbiotic relations among fungi, plants, and animals had been disrupted. The standardization and legibility of the forest, desirable from the perspective of harvesting timber, turned out to eliminate the very processes that made a forest a forest. Scientists began to recognize this, and reinvented synthetic 4 ways of complicating the forest, erecting birdhouses, cultivating bug populations and using artificial fertilizers (Scott, 20). Scott’s analysis of what happened to the forest, where the state encouraged the standardization of a complex entity creating an abstract system which, although initially successful, was eventually diversified and undermined by a wider group of users than initially envisioned by that system, is analogous to what happened in other systems developed for legibility and simplification in discourses, and deeply influenced my approach to studying the development of Russian literature. The Ode and Systems of State Simplification Scholarly commonplace reads modern Russian literature as one of many outcomes of Petrine reforms, its founding beginning with Mikhail Lomonosov and Vasillii Trediakovskii and ending roughly with Aleksandr Pushkin’s death (Ram, 3). The new language of the ode, in describing this projected vision of a “world-as-it-should-be,” reflected an optimism taking place across all of society, supported at the highest levels of the court. M. P. Pogodin asked, “did not precisely the same revolution take place in language as in the state?” (Zhivov, 118): indeed, the same revolution was everywhere. Although the Petrine revolution has been mythologized as being especially violent and rapid, throughout Europe classical art was at least partially created through radical, top-down efforts to refine official forms, forms which aspired to a universal spirit for an ambitious monarch and polity (Barthes, 3). Progress of the Russian state was seen as the progress of reason and enlightenment, not merely the individual progress of a particular society, but as the universal development of a principle that comprised a collective value (Zhivov, 208). 5 This progress was represented in the imposition of “state simplifications,” through which the state rationalized and standardized what was a complex, vernacular social ways of interacting with the world into formats that were relatively simpler, more legible and administratively convenient for the state itself (Scott, 3). This optic of simplification, legibility, and manipulation related to practices as diverse as forest management, industrial farming, urban planning, rural settlement, land administration, and literary culture (3). This universalizing legibility dramatically increased state capacity. This administrative ordering of nature and society was attended by “high modernist ideology,” a faith that borrowed from the legitimacy of science and technology. These orders aspired to be uncritically and un-skeptically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production, and the “carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms.” (4) Literary genre is another one of these systems of constraints and represents one of the clearest aesthetic representations of ideological frameworks. For Lomonosov and the Russian Empire, the literary aesthetics of the ode predicted, explained and justified a future rational order that had begun to descend on Russia from the expanding administrative state. These systems are reflected in literary forms and motifs primarily through the depiction of space. Iuri Lotman claims that artistic space is not connected with real space as much as it simulates different connections to temporal, social, and ethical ideas (Lotman, 252). Art, viewed spatially, represents the transformation of space from a set of actual things into an abstract language that can be used for artistic modeling. By defining the abstract, aspirationally-totalizing language of the ode and the identifying the kinds of information contained in particular models produced using it and then proceeding to track their traces in later literary monuments, we can 6 determine the evolving constraints put on the horizons of imaginative space. Another word for these systemic constraints is literary genre: a specific system for depicting the relationship of individuals to space and time in literary texts. To extend Lotman’s theory in this way essentially puts it in line with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, the idea that space and time fuse together into one, concrete whole in the literary (or artistic) work, and it is this fused whole that defines genre and genre distinctions (Bakhtin, 84-85). The way in which these genera depict and erase certain features of space betrays something fundamental about the ideology behind a certain worldview. Different generic forms display the relationship of individuals to various chronotopes, ideal or unideal. Genera, as abstract models, can include spatial languages of different genres and types of art as subsystems, models of space created by the consciousness of different eras (Lotman, 253). The “high modern” ideology of the ode, an aesthetic system created to make state power over the landscape and people of the Russian empire legible, later became but a subsystem, one model of many used to convey ethical or political attitudes towards space. The chronotope of the ode had a long half-life, lingering on as a subsystem to be internalized, complicated, and refuted. Alloying the original generic system of the ode into a new genre usually negated its optimistic attitude, making it the best way of expressing disillusionment with the entire imperial system that rose in concurrence with the ode’s rise as a genre. By providing a history of the ode and its relationship to other state systems that arose coeval to it this dissertation is outlining a history of the genre and its half-life in lyric poetry and pastoral prose, and that history’s connection to the history of other systems of state simplification. State simplifications, as the basic givens of modern statecraft, were abridged maps: they “did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they 7 intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer[,]” (3) Scott’s concept echoes Gogol’s description of Lomonosov’s poetry as depicting Russia “only in general geographical outlines.” It was if Lomonosov “cared only to sketch one outline of a colossal state, to draw out its borders with points and lines, leaving others to lay down the colors; he himself is like an initial, prophetic sketch of what lies ahead.” (Gogol, 371) The pastoral mode of literature springs from a tension that arises from the incongruity between this sketch and the colors on the ground, between the state’s optimistic “high modernist ideology” and nostalgia for the lost complexities, between the desires of an authoritarian state and a prostrate civil society. Lomonosov’s map for Russia, “an initial, prophetic sketch of what lies ahead[,]” was not just a map, but allied with state power, a tool that refashioned the reality of literature, society and the environment. The Romantic and pastoral modes in Russian literature sprang up in reaction to this dramatic reshaping of reality in conformance with Lomonosov’s broad sketch. Viktor Zhivov has affirmed the importance of the ceremonial ode to this larger project of progress: although a focused study of the ode might seem extremely narrow, for eighteenth- century poets and academics, the general question of this particular high poetic genre was key for the entire plan to create a new literary language which, by extension, authors used to articulate their belief in the progress of the state in accordance with reason and enlightenment. The literary system concocted to praise the governmental system was of high symbolic importance. Within odes authors like Lomonosov expressed broader attitudes towards the state itself, in particular, the proper relationship of the state to its landscapes and the people who inhabit them. Russian poets did not resurrect an ancient genre because of a popular demand or a specific stylistic advantage, but because it fulfilled a governmental function, legitimizing the new autocracy with praise (Alekseeva 7). “The government ode had the governmental in the very form of the ode, or 8 the ode in its theme is governmental, and by its character panegyric.” (8) Just as debates over high stylistic discourse and poetry were where the norms of literary usage were worked out (208), ceremonial odes were opportunities for poets to articulate their positive vision of society before the highest representatives of the state, and, hopefully, earn their blessing. Classical writing, ceremonial and practical in function, implanted the writer in a particular political and social reality inextricably linked to the power of the state and its projection. In other words, the ode was the pinnacle of the process of state simplification, the sharp, visible tip of a long broad spear. The classical poet expressed him or herself in conformance to coherent technical and social conventions (Barthes, 42). Classical poetry was conceived for oral transmission among people of similar ideological and social bases, forged in proximity to power, shaped by force of dogmatic decisions, [and] jettisoning all grammatical turns of speech forged by the spontaneous subjectivity of ordinary people.” (Barthes, 57) Unlike later genres like the lyric and the novel, which are animated by self-referentiality and hermeneutic complexity, the ode and other classical forms strived not to be dense with accrued social meanings or personal confessions but to communicate directly through a system of straightforward correlations that could be used for both ornamental and functional purposes, reflected in Mikhail Lomonosov’s stature as a geologist and a poet and a government functionary. It optimistically aspired to simplification and clarity for those administering it. As thematic reverence for the monarch, the strict formal guidelines, the poet’s subservient catering to court values and female figures of authority, and the rest of the values expressed in the ode grew distasteful to nineteenth-century intellectuals (Golburt, 31), the ode quickly waned in popularity and importance. The ode seemed to transition from the leading 9 poetic genre to a ritualistic genre, a museum piece: effectively dead (Alekseeva, 6), in Nadezhda Alekseeva’s terms, a “government panegyric.” (Alekseeva, 8) The ways in which the generic form survived showed it to be a jumping-off point for expressing greater disillusionment with the greater systematizing project of which it was just one piece. The lyrical afflatus of the ode no longer found an adequate mirror in the social or cosmic order, and unable to identify with the imperial project, poets of later generations turned away from what was seen to be stodgy, subservient and boring form (Ram, 9-11). Different recent critics, however, have postulated a kind of afterlife for the ode. Harsha Ram, in his seminal study The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire, proposes that the imaginative geographies sketched out in the ode survived in mutating forms as the Russian government continued its quest for empire (24) Luba Golburt identifies “the eighteenth century self” as a whole becoming a set of distinct visions only partially tenable under nineteenth-century conditions, a mode of poetic states and attitudes towards power and creative work that was excavated by later poets (Golburt, 149) This process, the objectification of the genre, rendered it incapable of signifying on its own terms. An increasing and violent drive towards autonomy of the sign (Barthes 50-51) reflected the desire of the individual for autonomy, or at least an individual that felt adrift or stranded in a world without straightforward meaning, for whom meaning could only be recovered as an individual. This individual emerged against the backdrop of artificially straightforward and coherent system of classical forms, a map that was increasingly insufficient to depict the landscape authors saw emerging around them. Post-classical writing materialized as a reconciliation with or aversion from the objectified form met by the writer. The individual writer had to reconcile with or reject society, which now felt separate from or alien to the individual; he or she had to grapple 10 with an established classical genre system, similarly separate and alien from their preferred means of expression. For many Russian authors the primary objectified form met by the writer that had to be “scrutinized, challenged and accepted” (Barthes, 4) was the ode. Writers began consciously choosing to express their value-judgements and ethical beliefs through their writing, asserting an identity that accepted or rejected various historical precedents of language and style (13-14). Authors grappled with the historical precedent of the odic style served as a symbolic stand-in for historical societal, ethical and governmental forms. I will argue that eighteenth- century literary values, represented by the ode, became a literary subsystem capable of signifying disillusionment, pessimism and discontent when integrated into the spatial languages of nineteenth-century genres, most notably the lyric and the pastoral novel. This chronotope is inserted into later models of space to create what Gary Saul Morson calls “boundary genres,” or zones of hermeneutic perplexity (Morson, 50). The first generic zone to prominently exploit this perplexity and ambiguity in Russian literature was the lyric poem. During next major period in Russian literature, the so-called “Golden Age” of Russian poetry, poets like Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov explicitly recycled locations and language of odes in brief, fragmented lyrics and rambling, introspective travelogues that express a personal ambivalence towards empire’s ability to structure its landscapes, the lives of its subjects, and the genre of poetry into legible and utilitarian systems. The individual lyric poet’s perception of “the-world-as-it-should-be” diverged significantly not only from the ideal empire depicted in the ode, but also the world the lyric poet experienced, “the-world-as-it-is," which was a world of restrictive personal and political boundaries, government repression, and individual loss. Lyrical Maps 11 Foucault, looking at the late eighteenth-century, sees a transition from Order to History, the world ceases to be defined by static identities and differences, non-quantitative orders, universal characterization, and general taxonomy, and becomes an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function, that is discontinuous, formed of evolving series or linear sequences (Foucault, 218-220). Romantic literature ascended as this transition matured: Romantic writers valued the world as a whole made up of discontinuous parts, each performing a function in a linear or narrative whole, an individual map sometimes violently at odds with earlier cartographies put forth in optimistic state simplifications. A chasm opened between emerging private languages and dated poetic classification schemes. This disjuncture was indicative of a loss of a utopian beliefs and the utopian language that attended them. Frederic Jameson notes a similar transition in the twentieth-century, attributing it to the pressure of a new sense of space on linguistic and narrative structures (Jameson, x). The Romantic lyric straddles this chasm as a bridge between the classical and the novel. Poets had lost faith in what Iuri Lotman identified as the foundational ideas of the eighteenth century: “a belief in inherent goodness, in the unnaturalness of falsity, and that [that] simple, ingenuous view is the main criterion in the eventual triumph of good in the world” (Lotman, Lie, 48). The literary subject in lyric poem retained the formal unity of classical writing, a system of “harmonious precision” where symbols still directly correlate to intended meanings, but having lost faith in the inherent goodness of society, those meanings were formulated by the individual, who frequently had a sense of him or herself as distinct from or in opposition to society. 12 The subject in a romantic lyric, what Lydia Ginzburg terms the “lyric I,” creates a totality out of his or her particular fragment of life (Lukacs, 51). The self is elevated to a position where it can sustain the and entire unitary literary form. The neoclassical desire for wholeness and universality was abandoned in favor of heterogeneity, fragmentariness and personal lament (Greenleaf, 4-5). The form conveyed some dissonances, as lexical signifiers began to accrue second-order meanings, but in transmitting a wholistic ideology that strictly correlated to its form, the lyric retained the most important feature of classical language (Barthes, 59). This feature was just put to new use: expressing the essence of an individual soul, rather than the goals of the imperial state. Despite the preservation of a unitary world and harmony between form and ideology, the change in subject matter to “the individual soul” was radical and held far- reaching consequences. The master’s language had escaped the workshop, legitimizing using writing to express individual ethics and adding new idiosyncratic shades of meaning to old signifiers. The new depiction of space and the individual’s place in it, in line with Romantic temporal, social and ethical convictions, bursts forth in Alexander Pushkin’s and Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry, in which they explicitly recycled locations and language of odes in brief, fragmented lyrics which express a personal ambivalence towards empire’s ability to structure the lives of its subjects, landscapes and poetry. The individual lyric poet’s perception of “the-world- as-it-should-be” diverged significantly not only from the odic poet’s idea of the “the-world-as-it- should-be,” but also the actual world the confronted within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Lyric poets found revisiting the content of the odic form as the most efficient and incisive way to communicate their realization that the order of Russian society did not reflect 13 their Romantic values and their inability to reconcile their own individual place in history with the imperial project. A Mode of Particularities and Contrasts The last literary trend I analyze in this dissertation is the pastoral mode, a popular nineteenth-century strain of novelistic discourse. In most scholarship, the pastoral is referred to as a genre and a mode interchangeably. I make the argument that the pastoral is a mode, and that mode is something distinct from genre, and mode, the pastoral mode in particular, is a literary category that can help illuminate the content of particular generic systems. When I say that the pastoral is a mode this means that it is, for our purposes, distinct from a genre, and is distinct in a way that is less and not more. Novels cannot be a pastoral. Rather, the pastoral is a mode that defines particular novels semantically, stylistically and thematically, but not necessarily formally, making them pastoral novels. A Russian panegyric ode is a Russian panegyric ode both because of its formal traits, its ten-lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter, semantic and stylistic touches of hyperbole, anaphora and other baroque devices, and its subject matter, lauding Russia’s military victories, landscape, resources, etc. Pastoral prose writers talk about similar subject matter to odist, in particular the landscape and the state. They can use the same lexicon and similar outrageous hyperbolic language in describing it, frequently presenting a two-dimensional model of the ode. Odists, however, are confined to a strict poetic form, and that is what defines the text formally as an ode. Although I am examining only novels, the pastoral could be manifested in many forms, making it a mode of expression rather than a form of writing. Dead Souls and Oblomov are pastoral novels, meaning novels in a specific, pastoral mode, which I will argue is a mode of writing dependent on this two-dimensional model of the ode. 14 After one-hundred years of literary and linguistic change, the absence of ten-lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter is not the only distinction between the ode and a pastoral novel. Any written form in itself is an enactment of an ethics (Lukacs, 71). The evolving difference in individual and societal ethics translate into formal differences in the ode, the lyric and the pastoral novel, generic spaces that reflect the different connections to temporal, social and ethical ideas Lotman discusses. This ethical staging of space can be at the conscious or sub-conscious level for individual authors. In the novel, in particular, authors consciously shade old signs with an added historical depth and damn or redeem them in light of emergent individual or collective meanings. The existence of multiple viewpoints in the novel has long been recognized as its distinguishing feature, most notably in Bakhtin’s idea of “polyphony.” More than containing simply different voices, however, the novel is defined by its inclusion of different structures. The novel, with its jumbled, clashing and complimentary structures, and the irreconcilable problems of its protagonists is “the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint" (Lukacs, 16). In the immediately post-romantic era of Russian literature in the 1840s, 50s and 60s, prose rose to prominence, especially in the popular genre of the novel. The pastoral mode emerged as a mode of writing animated by contrast: contrasts between city and the country, present and past, adulthood and childhood, and poetry and prose. This mode evoked its particular atmosphere of contrast by recalling the semantic and stylistic features of the ode without adhering to the formal constraints of it as a generic system. Prose writers like Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Aksakov and Ivan Goncharov juxtaposed the optimistic world as projected in odic discourse, the “world-as-it-should be,” with the quotidian world they saw in front of them, a world rife with death, degradation and grotesquerie, staging dramatic tension on spatial, temporal and ideological levels. 15 The defining clashes and problems of the Russian nineteenth-century pastoral novels are temporal and spatial contrast, nostalgia and pessimism, evoked through the semantic and stylistic features of the ode without adherence to its strict formal constraints. These evocations come close to parody, but parody is reliant on a stricter adherence to the genre of the text being parodied. Instead of a parodic genre, the pastoral is a mode that invokes a a two-dimensional model of the ode in a novelistic form, intensifying a contrast between a the glossy utopian system of the “world-as-it-should-be,” projected by eighteenth-century odes, and the comprehensive “world-as-it-is,” disappointingly arrayed before the pastoral writer’s eyes in full detail. The pastoral is not a pure anti-utopia, but a meta-utopia, where the utopia of the ode and the anti-utopia of reality enter into an ultimately inconclusive dialogue (Morson, 111), what Gary Saul Morson calls a “boundary genre.” The Russian novel, most notably those written in the pastoral mode, presents a multi-layered, complex message, where scraps of the odic form persist inside of a novelistic form, presenting new ideological meanings by clashing with and inscribing itself upon the new materials and generic systems (Jameson, 127-128). Certain words, ideas and stylistic features of the ode became signifiers that emitted “ideological signals long after [their] original content became historically obsolete.” (Jameson, 172). The original meanings, which were forged by eighteenth-century thinkers trying to set up a system of chemical valences, now acquire complex new intellectual or emotional densities (Barthes 16-17). The purpose of this dissertation is to track the ideologemes of the ode through various genres and document what the ideological sediment that built up around them says about the ways different authors confront the ideological associations that come with these symbols and re-appropriate them to the purposes of their own time, first in the civically-minded revolutionary writings of Radishchev, then in the self-centered Romantic lyrics of Pushkin and 16 Lermontov, and finally in the melancholy pastoral prose of Gogol, Aksakov and Goncharov, who conspicuously layer second- third- and fourth-order meaning into their works by deploying ideologemes from the ode. In Dead Souls, his most famous work, Gogol employs the semantic and stylistic features of the ode in the most chaotic and poorly-organized digressions in the book. He inserts specific baroque poetic devices favored by Lomonosov into his grotesque satirical depiction of Russia, staging a juxtaposition of the ideal world that the eighteenth-century ode believed imminent with a contemporary landscape that seemed empty and desolate: perfectly pastoral. Invoking the ode and then negating it was the best way to show what Russia lacked. Sergei Aksakov leaned even more heavily on the ode than Gogol, going so far as inserting whole odes into his memoiristic prose works, just as Lomonosov inserted odes into his geological tracts. Aksakov grew up on the frontiers of the Russian Empire and saw how the subjugation of this landscape Lomonosov charted into the future despoiled the present natural wonder that surrounded him. Older than other writers of his generation, Aksakov was heavily influenced by Alexander Shishkov’s linguistic theories, which advocated relying on the lexical influence folklore, religious literature, and high poetic genres like the ode. Rather using the ode to praise the government’s expansion of control and authority bringing paradise into being, Aksakov nostalgically lamented how this expansion destroyed the paradisal countryside of his youth. Reminiscences of youth also loom large in Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. Perhaps the most characteristic example of the Russian pastoral novel, Oblomov relies on contrasts between present and past, adulthood and childhood, city and country (Platonov, 1106) that typified the genre. In face of the systems of commerce, urban development and society, the titular hero 17 retreats into his bedroom and his dreams. Goncharov, like Gogol and Aksakov, echoes and subverts the content of the ode, bemoaning the loss of his innocent, unthreatening childhood lifestyle. Oblomov shows a world that has been regimented and developed just as eighteenth- century writers and emperors hoped, unfortunately this new world offered no room for a sensitive man like Oblomov to thrive or self-actualize. What is most exciting about these pastoral authors’ use of odic language is that unlike Romantic lyric poets, who abnegated odic influence in defense of their own originality, the three of them explicitly acknowledged the influence of the Lomonosovian ode on their ideas about literature and the individual’s place in society. Gogol enviously admired Lomonosov’s ease in simplifying Russia, depicting it "only in general geographical outlines,” but it fell to pastoral prose to fill in the colors of this geographic expanse, and in color, the picture was not so sunny. The world these authors depicted as so frightening, inhuman and fallen for the most part embodied the successes of the hopes and aspirations of the empire and its odists, a world of systems that bureaucratically-ordered individuals and exploited resources. As the ode was so closely linked to other systems of state simplification, bending and twisting various formal and thematic elements of it was the best way to express disillusionment with those systems in literature. I am convinced that the dynamic between optimism and disillusionment, poetry and prose, wholeness and fragment, hope and despair, structure and chaos, is cyclical, waxing and waning throughout Russian history after the first emergence of effective and totalizing state simplifications in the wake of the enlightenment. One generation optimistically works to build up impressive structural edifices in society, landscape and the arts, but the generation who inherits them will gaze up, like Sorokin’s hero in BRO, terrified and entranced, craning his neck until he 18 breaks his spine. Once society and its heroes recover, all that is left is to impose a new structure and begin the cycle again. 19 Chapter I: The Enlightenment, Surface and Interior At the same time, what are the Caucuses? Elizabeth Petrovna sat in this manner: In the fields, full of fruit, Where the Volga, Dnieper, Neva and Don, With their clear streams, Rustling, the flocks are put to sleep She sits, and spreads her legs On the steppe, where a vast wall Separates China from us; [She] turns her cheerful gaze And calculates the contentments around, Leaning [her] elbows on the Caucuses Or so Lomonosov wrote. In this kind of uncomfortable pose Elizabeth Petrovna sat. It was tough for her to spread her legs on the steppe and lean her elbows on the Caucuses, yet still turn her cheerful gaze and in spite of all this, calculate contentments. In particular it was tough to carry out calculations, because although Derbent, the gate to the Caspian, was taken by Peter in 1722, it was then snatched away by Persia, and among the persons of the female gender and children who replaced Peter, there were other concerns [besides calculating contentments]. Persia was in a musical sense a key, and the Caucuses — a string. Like she had hit a string, and the string rang out. And Debent fell, and Elizabeth drew her arms up off the Caucuses. She simply could not calculate the contentments on the Caucuses. Yuri Tynianov, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar Part I: The Exploration of the Interior World Introduction In 1761, Lomonosov published the first major geological treatise in Russian: О слоях земных прибавление втрое к первым основасниям метеллургии или рудных дел (On the Layers of the Earth: The First Principles of Metallurgy or of the Treatment of Ores). In the opening of the first chapter of its second section, entitled “О земной поверхности” (“On the 20 Earth’s Surface”), he stages the condition of man from his perspective and explains how that condition compels human beings to turn their gaze out and down into the deepest bowels of the earth: “Жительствуя и обращаясь на лице земном, естьли бы мы видеть могли, что в недрах ее под нами скрыто; всеми бы иногда возможностьми стали усиливаться протти в глубочайшие внутренности; иногдаж забыв все и наружное, побежали бы со своего природного жилища. Ибо часто скрывается от зрения и знания нашего не толстым слоем превеликое богатство, натурою произведенное, побежали бы со своего природного жилища. Ибо часто скрывается от зрения и знания нашего не толстым слоем превеликое богатство, натурою произведенное, до коего досягнуть можно бы небольшим трудом и иждивением. (Lomonosov, О слоях, 530) Living on and relating to the surface of the earth, if we could see what was hidden beneath us in her depths, we would at some point increase all our possibilities of passing into its deepest interiors; at some point having forgotten everything on the surface, we would flee our natural home. Because frequently the immense wealth produced by nature is kept from our sight and our knowledge by a not-too-thick layer [of earth], we would be fleeing from our natural home. Because frequently the immense wealth produced by nature is kept from our sight and our knowledge by a not-too-thick layer [of earth], it would be possible to reach this with small effort and expenditure. Lomonosov’s position on human beings’ relationship to the objects surrounding them in the natural world reflected views expressed in his ceremonial odes as well. The world and the objects in it were there to be used for human purposes, and those purposes were to be defined by the enlightened, absolutist government. Those views started no controversies among the court or the Empresses who were his intended audience. Just twenty-eight years later, Aleksandr Radishchev wrote a fragmented travelogue, Путешестивие с Петербурга в Москву (A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow), laying out his understanding of the landscape and its inhabitants and the obligations that understanding placed on him: Обратим взор наш на человека; рассмотрим самих себя; проникнем оком любопытным во внутренность нашу и потщимся из того, что мы есть, определить 21 или, по крайней мере, угадать, что мы будем или быть можем; а если найдем, что бытие наше, или, лучше сказать, наша единственность […] We relate our gaze to man; examine ourselves; penetrate with the curious eye into our own interior and struggle from that, which we are, to define, or at least, guess, that we will be or might be; and if we find that which our existence is, or, more precisely, our singularity (Radishchev, 227) Radishchev’s Journey caused quite a controversy in the Russian court, resulting in condemnation from Catherine II herself and the author’s banishment to Siberia. The harsh reaction is strange, if we consider how closely Radishchev’s language mirrors Lomonosov’s. Later in his travelogue, he explicitly engages with Lomonosov, concluding the book with a strangely formal and ambivalent eulogy to the great Russian enlightener. Both texts enjoin their readers to examine their surroundings in search of a hidden interior, with minor differences: rather than penetrating into the depths of the Earth, Radishchev’s gaze ended up pointing into the depths of his own soul. Both profess to want the best for Russia. How do these similarities show the progressive articulation of changing ideas about the self, the sciences and the state? How did educated Russians’ understanding of the world and their place in it change so radically within several decades, and how were these changes reflected in literary genre? How could Lomonosov’s curiosity towards what lay in the earth’s interior be so rewarded by the state, but what Radishchev’s search for what lay inside himself make his continued existence impossible under the same state? This dissertation is an investigation of the dynamic relationship between different state systems of simplifications of the landscape, language and society. What is it that literary forms or genres say about how a poet perceives the world? About the poet’s ideas about the state, the landscape, and an individual’s place in it? Literary genres create spaces that reflect different connections to temporal, social and ethical ideas (Lotman, Shkole, 253). The representation of 22 physical space and the poetic perspective from which that space is presented are constrained and enabled by the society that produces the poetic work and the individual poet’s understanding of that society. The writers of odes saw the Russian Empire as a sublime and awe-inspiring land waiting to be submitted to the divine will of the Tsar using infinitely-increasing scientific knowledge and political power of the state that could create legible, utilitarian systems for managing landscapes and the people who inhabited them. This optimism became intertwined with the poetic form of the ode itself. The content of certain forms can live on in a two- dimensional representation, torn from the systems in which they arose but retaining certain stylistic and semantic features (Jameson, Unconscious, 172). Motifs from the progenital template provided by the ode continued to emit ideological signals long after the vision it projected was shown to be hollow. The individual expressions of societal consciousness found in Lomonosov’s odes and scientific works lived on in later forms, but in Radishchev’s works these expressions’ separation from the original ideology reflected a significant rift forming between the values of the individual author and those officially professed by the society in which he lived. Radishchev’s juxtaposition of the ode with a prosaic narrative sets up some of the tensions that will later become known as the “pastoral mode” in Russian literature, an influential and nostalgic mode of writing set up around contrasts between the city and the country, wholeness and decay, past and present and childhood and adulthood, contrasts that expressed serious reservations about the capabilities and desirability of state systems of simplification and standardization. Although thoroughly identified with the period of the Enlightenment and its utopian optimism, in the decades following the innovation of the ceremonial ode, its tropes and motifs acquired second- and third-order meanings that complicated or refuted its congenital optimism as the initial temporal, social and ethical ideas held by Russian writers began to change. Writers 23 began to focus more on the individual human experience of the landscape, the government and literature, alienating them from eighteenth-century discourses about each, which tended to be more aspirational projections. This is not to say one literature was more or less “real,” only that the literature and science of the eighteenth century ended up being real to the extent that other emerging state-sponsored systems of simplification were: they shaped state policy towards people and space as well as citizens’ expectations and myths. Radishchev and later authors’ works reflected a reality of lived experience, which frequently abutted uncomfortably with state systems, while being shaped by the realities enacted by them. Charting Lomonosov’s and Radishchev’s explicitly-stated views in their geological, philosophical and polemical works and their depictions of poetic space in the high genres of the ode and panegyric, I will show how the frothy optimism inherent to Lomonosov’s eighteenth-century ceremonial odes began to curdle into subjectively-felt and subjectively-expressed disillusionment before the end of the century, sometimes exploiting and exaggerating a subtle ambivalence about the imperial project nascent in the ode itself. This marked the beginning of a centuries-long process where, as writers felt more and more alienated from state systems in government, literature and science, motifs and themes innovated in eighteenth-century textual systems, such as the ode and the geological sciences, became the most effective method for expressing disillusionment, discontent and critique of those state systems. Enlightened Interlude Though applying the periodization of “the Enlightenment” to Russia is complicated, using it as a temporal, social and intellectual category proves a useful starting point for this dissertation. Poets, scientists and philosophers who felt compelled to exhaustively explain their ideologies and explicitly justify their formal choices can help us understand the ideological 24 content of form and how they wished to impose legible systems of literature, society and the landscape. A problem in writing this dissertation, however, is that the definition of the temporal, political and philosophical bounds of the Enlightenment is contentious, especially in the Russian and Eastern European context. Both Lomonosov and Radishchev, although identified with the Enlightenment, inhabits a slightly different phase: one an earlier, more moderate Enlightenment, identified closely with official government policy and German philosophy, the other a later, more radical version, influenced both by German idealism and French empiricism. These philosophical attitudes impact each writer’s work strongly in ways that are evident in their different uses of high poetic genres like the ode and the panegyric. Western scholars such as Gary Hamburg and Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter have recently stressed the religious dimensions of the Russian enlightenment, particularly in relation to the earlier, government-sponsored, German-inflected period. Hamburg claims that the idea of the enlightenment, or “просвещение,” was almost always identified with “spiritual illumination” and carried a primarily moral weight even when it was subjected to rational testing (Hamburg, 19). In agreement with Hamburg, Wirtschafter claims that in the Russian context, the notion of a moderate mainstream or a religious Enlightenment makes more sense than a radical enlightenment (Wirtschafter, 6). In Russia, the Enlightenment was for the most part not connected to “social action and liberal democratic change,” but rather represented the blending of several waves of European influence into Muscovite traditions that eventually produced the foundations of modern Russian culture and governance (Wirtschafter, 6). This contrast between the religious and radical enlightenment is, perhaps, a more nuanced distinction than it is sometimes presented to be. Eduard Winter’s temporal frame for the German and Eastern European enlightenments, the Frühaufklärung, or “early Enlightenment,” which he 25 contrasts to the more widely-discussed, radical ideas associated with the French and American revolutions, is useful. The Russian enlightenment shares with the Frühaufklärung an emphasis on the practical application of reason to the problems of government and empire, as well as its fixation on religion, community obedience, and emotion over the Enlightenment’s most individualistic, empiricist and liberal aspects (Raeff, 618). Despite this distance from the “revolutionary” Enlightenment, controversial questions about the Enlightenment and its relationship to the making of revolutions (Israel, vi) were certainly a live ones in the Russian context, but were more frequently raised by the government in reaction to whisperings of dissent at home and news from abroad. Russian critics tend to see the Enlightenment, especially in this early period, as revolutionary, but underline the extent to which this revolution was imposed from above for the purpose of state-building (Zhivov, Myth, 251). To what degree the culture of the Russian Enlightenment was a culture of the state is up for debate, but the important point of emphasis here, as a point of distinction from the Enlightenment in Western European countries, is the instrumentality Russian rulers used in adopting Enlightenment ideas in science, literature, politics and philosophy. “The Enlightenment” in Russia was almost always in practice, if not in theory, an official ideology that supported a cult of autocracy and a pragmatic philosophy that was even more autocratic than that of the enlightened Prussian monarchical project of Frederick the Great (Israel, 310). The first scholars hired by the Russian academy in the 1720s, 30s and 40s were mostly Germans, fitting the hypothesis that the Russian enlightenment was a blending of native Orthodox traditions, imperial edicts and foreign influences, and that in the foreign component, German ideas dominated. One German philosopher, Christian Wolff, was integral in the 26 foundation of the Russian Academy and in the philosophical education of both Lomonosov and Radishchev. Although Wolff twice declined the emperor’s invitations to come to St. Petersburg, he became the academy’s first honorary member in 1725 and gave Russian rulers detailed advice about the personnel and structure of the institution (Israel, 310), making Leibnizio-Wolffianism the dominant intellectual tendency in the Russian enlightenment. Wolff was a follower of Gottfried Leibniz, the optimistic natural philosopher and mathematician (Shubinskii, 103). Wolff popularized and simplified many of Leibniz’s ideas, accentuating stress on the interconnectivity of the universe and philosophical optimism in Leibniz’s naturphilosophie. He strove to combine the positive learning of his time into a coherent and logically consistent system and presented this system in vernacular language the general reader could understand (105), a tempting package for an autocracy striving to develop the sciences and build institutions. He successfully developed a categorical apparatus for many of the more recent trends in philosophy, introducing philosophical terms for scientific concepts like psychology, ontology, and teleology. (Artem’eva/Mikeshin, 11). “Wolffianism” was the first major philosophical movement in Russia built on a fascination with Western enlightenment thought and created a paradigm in which numerous Russian followers of Voltaire, Rousseau, Mably, Hegel, and Kant would build their arguments and model their movements (10-11). Both Lomonosov and Radishchev studied in Germany. Lomonosov went to Marburg, where he became acquainted with Wolff himself and attended his lectures on philosophy and mathematics. He then studied the science of mining in Freiburg, an old mining town. Radishchev was sent by Catherine II to Leipzig, a huge university town populated both with older professors loyal to Wolffian ideas and young students like Goethe shaping early German Romantic thought. A half-century after Wolff’s death, his philosophy was considered negatively if at all on the 27 continent; Kant and Hegel eclipsed him as the most influential German philosophers. In Russia, however, likely because of his strong influence on important thinkers like Lomonosov and Radishchev, Wolffianism was taught in universities until the mid-nineteenth century (Mikeshin, 111). Wolff’s legacy is in some ways similar to the enduring influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: what had been considered passé on the continent continued to be central to philosophical and literary polemics in Russia for decades. For Wolff, and Russians educated in his thought like Lomonosov and Radishchev, the function of metaphysics, which he termed the "first philosophy,” is to show how different sciences are simply separate sides of a whole and all-encompassing reality (Shubinskii, 109). Central to Wolff’s natural philosophy was the idea of a pre-established harmony in existence, which can explain each causal relationship between things, and therefore explain the occurrence of every physical and spiritual phenomenon of the world. Nature exists objectively and has its own laws and principles. Common to Wolff and other eighteenth-century thinkers was a conviction that society is a part of nature, so the laws of society are a continuation of natural laws. This conviction was central to Lomonosov’s efforts to restructure poetry, the sciences and the empire, as well as Radishchev’s impassioned protests against injustice: society had to be brought into line with natural laws. From this perspective, the world is only dangerous and frightful because we have not yet figured out the mechanics of what is essentially “a big factory” (Shubinskii, 109), whether the problem lies inside the Earth or inside ourselves. Russian philosophers and officials, in particular Lomonosov, embraced this “Leibnizio-Wolffianism,” which could co-exist peacefully in Russia and in Prussia with a “moderate,” religiously-inflected enlightenment that enjoyed sponsorship by an autocratic government. This would be, a government that rejected the epistemological and 28 critical questionings bound up with ethical individualism, anticlericalism, and the advocacy of those rights and liberties that would lead to revolution in France and the American colonies, but a government that enjoyed the practical benefits of philosophers and scientists figuring out the workings of the vast factory of the Earth. These philosophical and civic conviction married with an aesthetic one: the Enlightenment fostered an enthusiasm for straight lines and visible order in arts and literature (Scott, 55). This faith in a rationally-comprehensible universe and a small but significant blossoming of the sciences in Russia infected the court and academy with the utopianism visible in new systems built to structure scientific, poetic and official texts. Wolffianism, in particular, encouraged a utopian discourse by enunciating that there was a logic behind every causality, thus certain political and scientific actions could afford the changes that were necessary in order to bring an ideal society into being (Vieira, 10). Utopia in literature is frequently identified with a golden past or shining future: in Lomonosov’s odes, the rapid progress of science and ebullient Enlightenment theories of infinite improvement led him to portray a resplendent present and future based on the idea that the current organization of society would surely lead to a utopian future, a viewpoint common in Enlightenment literature (14). This utopianism and Enlightenment faith in progress was melded with baroque ornament, religious imagery and Muscovite millenarian ideas, resulting in the dominant aesthetic of early modern Russia seen in Lomonosov’s poetry, Zemtsov’s palaces and Falconet’s sculptures. The close identification of the Enlightenment in Russia with the state and its more “moderate” character meant that ideas of the “radical” Enlightenment, those identified with French politics and philosophical empiricism, were, generally speaking at first condescendingly humored and then violently rejected by the state. Russian intellectual elites eventually discovered 29 radical thinkers, but they favored Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, and other thinkers who were community-oriented and sympathetic to the affective aspects of human nature (Raeff, 618), in fitting with the communitarian, emotional and religious aspects highlighted in earlier German and Russian thought. The popularity of the naturphilosopical framework of the Frühaufklärung tolerated by the state and the quashing of any radical political aspirations of the gentry led quickly to the early embrace of individualistic movements like sentimentalism and Romanticism. Members of the intelligentsia began to interiorize their aspirations of progress or dreams about utopia rather than working to enact them. Since the state sponsored almost all new scientific, literary and philosophical activity, there were no truly powerful independent institutions, meaning that intellectuals who held heterodox positions were necessarily forced to write, think and act on their own (Wirtschafter, 9). Still, the initial government embrace of moderate, religious Enlightenment ideas helps explain Russia's openness to European ideas and the longer- term centrality of morality in the history of Russian thought. Even early on, the government’s rejection of radical enlightenment ideas did not stifle all dissent. Lomonosov was able to hint at gentle critiques of the state in his odes and publicly argue for different bureaucratic, educational and scientific apparatuses: ambivalence towards certain aspects of the state project are embedded into the ode. Nonetheless, the two poet-philosophers treated in this chapter, Lomonosov and Radishchev, typify each of these two stages of the Russian enlightenment as I have broadly outlined them here. Lomonosov was an optimistic thinker who strived to further the progress of the Russian state in created legible systems across all sciences and disciplines, and by extension society in fields he saw as related, including but not limited to poetics, geology, physics, and philosophy. Radishchev, who studied in Germany only decades after Lomonosov, was influenced by Wolffian naturphilosophie, in particular the 30 understanding that data about nature is best observed experientially and described qualitatively. With this empiricist bent, he blended newer, more radical ideas about individual freedom, philosophical skepticism, sensibility and moral urgency. This contrast in Lomonosov’s and Radishchev’s ideological frameworks are analogous to changes in the generic forms each author uses to portray poetic space and the self. Lomonosov’s ideological convictions and the formal frameworks he used to project those ideological convictions over space in his geological and ideological writings formed a progenital template for later writers such as Radishchev. The strength of the bond between Lomonosov’s philosophical and civic convictions in his literary and scientific works meant that a rebellion against one was usually attended by a rebellion against the other. Part I: The Geological Enlightenment In Lomonosov’s main geological works, The First Principles of Metallurgy or of the Treatment of Ores (1763) (quoted above) and A Word on the Genesis of Metals from Earthquakes (Слово о рождении металлов от трасения земли) (1757), he lays out his understanding of the geological foundations of the earth. His worldview is shaped by many of the Enlightenment principles discussed above: a faith in the harmony and ultimate goodness of all creation, a goodness discernible and exploitable through observation and hard work, the conviction that the state is an extension of nature and thus shares its logical harmony and perfectibility, and the optimism that results from these beliefs. The veracity of his scientific theories and methodology in light of current understandings is not important to us. Rather, I am seeking to reveal how Lomonosov, as a singularly influential figure in the history of Russian science and literature, integrated naturphilosophical thought, political ideology and linguistic theories into a discourse first used effectively in service of empire, which then became a general 31 civic tongue, capable of expressing discontent and disillusionment when appropriated and subverted. Ignorance and Harmony Lomonosov’s most famous geological work is The First Principles of Metallurgy or of the Treatment of Ores. He recycled an older piece called The First Principles of the Science of Mining that he had written in 1742 and expanded it significantly, publishing the piece in 1763, (Tishkina, 184). In his treatise, Lomonosov tried to fit earth sciences into a broader understanding of the earth and human existence, congruent with Wolffian naturphilosophie, where the harmony of the natural world is discernible through concerted and wise labor, and all the different sciences are merely part of an all-encompassing harmonious whole. Progress in any one of those sciences advanced all human progress. Human governments themselves are a part of the natural order, and thus good governments, such as the Russian Empire, are systems that reflect the harmony evident in it and benefit from scientific advancement. Lomonosov begins The First Principles questioning the very purpose of scientific inquiry: Why do we study the Earth? What lies beneath? Why look into the bowels of the earth? Жительствуя и обращаясь на лице земном, естьли бы мы видеть могли, что в недрах ее под нами скрыто; всеми бы иногда возможностьми стали усиливаться протти в глубочайшие внутренности; иногдаж забыв все и наружное, побежали бы со своего природного жилища. Ибо часто скрывается от зрения и знания нашего не толстым слоем превеликое богатство, натурою произведенное, побежали бы со своего природного жилища. Ибо часто скрывается от зрения и знания нашего не толстым слоем превеликое богатство, натурою произведенное, до коего досягнуть можно бы небольшим трудом и иждивением. Напротив того утаена иногда под жительми ужасная пропасть, которыя своды содержат городы и села, сами не довольно сильными подпорами утверждаясь, кои от внутренней причины рушатся, выстояв свое время, и все что содержали, предают падению, и повергают в земные челюсти (Lomonosov, О слоях, 530) Living on and relating [only] to the surface of the earth, if we could see what was hidden beneath us in her depths [в недрах ее под нами скрыто], we would at some point 32 increase all our possibilities of passing into its deepest depths; at some point having forgotten everything on the surface, we would flee our natural home. Because frequently the immense wealth produced by nature is kept from our sight and our knowledge by a not-too-thick layer [of earth], we would flee from our natural home. Because frequently the immense wealth produced by nature is hidden from our sight and our knowledge by a not-too-thick layer [of earth], which it is possible to reach with small effort and expenditure. On the contrary, sometimes a terrifying abyss lurks under the human settlements, arches of which support cities and villages, themselves insufficiently bolstered by strong supports, which collapse because of internal causes, having outlasted their time, and all they contained are subject to fall and topple into the maw of the earth. It is clear that Lomonosov is trying to explain the layers of the earth as part of a greater effort to lessen ignorance and unveil the harmony behind human existence, which will lessen our irrational fears and open the land up to proper use. Human beings live on only the surface of the earth, and to live up to our fullest potential, we have to explore its depths, especially as those depths threaten to swallow our cities and villages whole, “giving us over to the maw of the earth.” Lomonosov obviously fears the unregulated natural processes of the Earth and human ignorance about them, setting up a justification of his efforts to make the surrounding world more legible and and standardized through scientific exploration. This “high modern ideology,” professing faith in progress that borrows from the legitimacy of science and technology, a kind of “scientism” than it is strictly science, was and remains key to state-sponsored projects almost always expressed in aesthetic terms (Scott, 4). This faith-based project holds that an abyss is only terrifying because humans have not yet grasped the principles at work in the “a big factory” that is the Earth. Terror, natural disasters and material deprivation are the result of ignorance. Despite the frightening superficial appearance of the interior of the Earth, if human beings investigated its interior depths, the “immense wealth” could draw us away from life on the surface altogether, so full is it with riches. 33 The first few lines of another text, A Word on the Genesis of Metals from Earthquakes, express the same scientism even more explicitly through a series of rhetorical twists: the roiling waves of the ocean may be terrifying, but they blow ships full of treasure to our shores; Russia’s winter cold may seem a burden, but it blunts the sharp dangers and pernicious habits of tropical climes. Lomonosov understands every phenomena on earth to have a potential purpose, human beings simply have to discern a method to harness it, like wind in their sails. “Any time I turn to the terrible happenings of nature in my thoughts [Когда ужасные дела натуры в мыслях ни обращаю], listeners, I am compelled to think that there is not a single one that is exclusively terrifying, there is not a single one that is exclusively dangerous and pernicious, that does not also bring utility and enjoyment.” (Lomonosov, о рождении, 296) Later thinkers tried to complicate or revise what they saw as an overly optimistic discourse, but Lomonosov was trying hard to argue for optimism in face of a frightening and terrifying world. Earthquakes and the perpetually burning fire under the Earth’s crust are likely no different. Lomonosov aimed to solve these natural mysteries by shining enlightenment [просвещение] on them, feeling particularly comforting and joyous when a natural phenomenon had formerly been seen as a horrible and could now been rendered useful. Skepticism and Optimism Lomonosov frequently mentions “doubt” [сомнение], in a way that affirms his lack of of skepticism and belief in progress and the positive effects of enlightened inquiry, with one conspicuous exception. Lomonosov felt that eighteenth-century laboratory and observational methods were enough to prove a hypothesis beyond a doubt. The surety was what assured him that science was capable of taking frightening, incomprehensible processes like earthquakes and demonstrating their utility for human progress, whether it is the formation of soil from organic 34 decay (Lomonosov, О слоях, 611), the varying speeds and causes of the decomposition of metals (159), or the formation of metals in earthquakes and eruptions (Lomonosov, О рожгении, 300). This utopian hope that observing nature experientially and describing it qualitatively can annihilate ignorance and improve lives clearly shows the influence of Wolffian naturphilosophie and was typical of early eighteenth-century Enlightenment science. When it comes to Biblical proofs, however, Lomonosov’s credulity finds its limits. His reason treats biblical proofs skeptically, believing more in experiments and observation: И так напрасно многие думают, что все как видом, с начала творцем создано; будто не токмо горы, долы, и воды, но и разные роды минералов произошли вместе со всем светом; и потому де не надобно исследовать причин, для чего они внутренними свойствами и положением мест разнятся. Таковые рассуждения весьма вредны приращению всех наук, следовательно и натуральному знанию шара земного, а особливо, искусству рудного дела, хотя оным умникам и легко быть Философами, выучась наизусть три слова: Бог так сотворил; и сие дая в ответ вместо всех причин (Lomonosov, О слоях, 574-575) And so, many think that everything as we see it today is just as it was established by the Creator from the beginning, as if not just the mountains, the valleys, and the waters, but all the various sorts of minerals occurred together with all of creation; and therefore we do not need to investigate the reasons why they differ in their internal qualities and where they are found. Such arguments are most harmful to the increase of any and all sciences, and therefore to genuine knowledge of our earthly sphere, and especially to the work of mining, although it’s easy for these wiseacres to be Philosophers, having learned three words by heart: “God created it thus,” and to give this as a cause for all principles.” Lomonosov was boundlessly optimistic in the capabilities of science and empire, so despite his own religiosity (Maslin, 7), this meant overturning old superstition and religious cosmologies and relying on newer methodologies where hypotheses were based on experience (Perminov, 43). Because every system mirrors every other, the nature of our geographic world, in this case mutability of the geographic world, can be discerned by the changes other systems undergo before out eyes: 35 When the greatest bodies of the world, planets, the most familiar and fixed stars change, are lost in the sky, only to show themselves once again; and the logic of our one small globe of earth’s smallest pieces; that is, mountains (these masses so terrible in our eyes) can be exempt from changes? (Lomonosov, о рождении, 305-306) For Lomonosov, geology, poetry, governance, although not perfectly synonymous disciplines, are all separate systems that reflect one harmonious system full of discernible causal relationships: “There is no doubt that the Sciences contribute very much to each other, as do the physics of chemistry, the physics of mathematics, the moral science, and the history of poetry […]” (Lomonosov, О слоях, 619) This is in line with underlying assumptions of Wolff’s naturphilosophie, that the it was necessary to integrate different realms of knowledge to understand each of them at their fullest (Askhabov, 3). Divinely-Directed Labor Lomonosov is fixated on uncovering these casual relationships and the still hidden ways in which they can enrich human life. If we remember the twice-quoted opening of The First Principles, the world beneath the surface of the earth is only terrifying because it is hidden. Lomonosov is obsessed with uncovering the hidden riches in its interior, hidden only by a “not- so-thick layer of earth, penetrable with only small effort and expenditure (Lomonosov, О слоях, 530). What opens up or discovers what is hidden in the Earth’s interior is properly-directed, specialized human labor. Even in those labors peripheral to scientific experimentation done by simple laborers or drones such as digging graves, furrows, channels, ditches, cellars, wells, and trenches, Lomonosov sees opportunities for human advancement and discovery even in menial labor, as it can uncover lucrative and useful things (Lomonosov, О слоях, 530). Lomonosov created the practice of Russian geology out of the straightforward need for a mining industry (Tishkina, 187), toiling for the state as a simple laborer. Hand in hand, the specialized work done in factories, mines and the soil can fuel new discoveries (Lomonosov, О слоях, 428). Menial 36 labor has laid bare so much of the bowels of the earth, from mines to canals to open pits, that all the world needs is more curious and informed observers (Lomonosov, О слоях, 429). Who guides this labor? The state, represented in the body of the Empress. Just as all his odes are, The First Principles is dedicated to Empress Elizabeth, staging in prose the same triumphant historical myth Lomonosov reenacted in his odes so flattering to his patroness. Enumerating an innumerably long list of superlatives and titles, Lomonosov tacks into a brief history of human industry, designed to advocate for the state’s continued support for geological research. He recounts how, as the base of society progresses beyond agricultural, pastoral or primitive fishing, it acquires new, more complex needs. Empires need militaries, merchants and seagoing ships. Before “Peter’s enlightened labors,” Russia's lack of mining equipment and know-how was what would be termed a "national security issue” today. Russia had to acquire its metals from its neighbors and frequently paid dearly in times of war. Nature opened its fertile inner depths to Lomonosov in order to satisfy Russia’s needs, even to excess [натура открыла свое обильное недро и удовольствовала наши тогдашние нужды с некоторым избытком] (Lomonosov, О слоях, 401). Elizabeth’s reign and the systematic exploitation of natural resources promise a haul of metals and stone in excess of growing contemporary needs, with enough formerly hidden excess to create all “ornaments of greatness” to the delight of society, terror of enemies and excess satisfaction of her subjects, marble and porphyry from the bowels of the earth to attest loudly to her accomplishments for all time, a veritable Russian Ofir (Lomonosov, О слоях, 402). The ode and the new literary language created a more-broadly legible tool for disseminating information about other new state systems. Russia as Worthy of Myth 37 As the references to classical architecture and biblical locales testify, geology and the other sciences were not only a part of practical plays for dominance over territory and exploitation of resources, but part of a process of myth-building. The effort to systematize the landscape and its inhabitants correlated to a new poetic system of myths and symbols. Early in his treatise, he appropriates the names Roman historians used to refer to snow-capped mountains, dubbing the Urals the Riphean mountains (Lomonosov, О слоях, 532). These mountains, along with the Caucuses and other ranges at contested imperial borders, were shown to mark perfectly logical, indisputable borders between the continents and empires of the world, mythic alpine borders full of actual mineral riches. Russia’s increasing vastness was scientifically-justified. Lomonosov was creating a framework for the Russian Empire to view itself as a European power of classical grandeur and modern prosperity. In the concluding paragraphs of A Word on the Genesis of Metals from Earthquakes, Lomonosov reorients geographical, and thus geopolitical and mythic focus from the Alps and the Pyrenees. Russia lacks the severe heights of those peaks, which are trapped in eternal winter and positioned over deep chasms with swampy bogs, but its fertile, rolling hills do not lack metals. The gentleness of the landscape and its lack of earthquakes is shown as evidence of some greater harmony between the bowels of the earth and the internal dynamics of society at large, credited to the generosity and greatness of Empress Elizabeth: Не колеблемся частыми земными трясениями, которые едва когда у нас слыханы, но как земного недра, так и всего общества внутренним покоем наслаждаемся. О коль блаженна сими свойствами Россия! Но сие всеобщее блаженство стократно увеличено беспримерными добротами великия Елисаветы! Frequent earthquakes don’t rock us, they are hardly ever heard of amongst us, but just as the bowels of the Earth, we enjoy the tranquility of inside of our society. Oh how Russia is blessed with these features! But this general felicity is increased a hundredfold by the matchless benevolence of the great Elizabeth! (Lomonosov, о Рождении, 345) 38 The virtues of nature correspond to the empress Elizabeth’s virtues and the wealth of the bowels of the Earth are attributable to her blessed reign. She was destined to tame the waters above the surface of the Earth, and the fires below. The Enlightenment was shining light on natural mysteries (Lomonosov, о Рождении, 296-297), and Lomonosov, the Russia’s most prominent scientific and literary figure, depicted the process as guided by the state, as represented by the Empress personally. He was simply her most devoted and most dedicated slave [всеподданнейший и всеусерднейший раб] (Lomonosov, О слоях, 402). All of his scientific research was a form of state service. The place he ascribes to himself in this symbolic cosmology reveals to what extent the culture of the early Enlightenment in Russia was a culture of the state, arranging the elements and citizens in the Empire to forward its own aims. Part II: The Ode as Geological Genre The Ode, Progress and The State Although in contemporary society poetics, civics and geology are radically different disciplines with little overlap, in Lomonosov’s time, progress in poetics and geology were viewed by the state as equally important for advancing its political aims and by extension, the progress of all mankind. “Progress of the state [and its science, language and literary forms] was perceived as the progress of reason and enlightenment, and not merely as the individual progress of a particular society, but as the universal development of a principle that comprised a collective value” (Zhivov 208). The ode’s importance to imperial myth-making is much more obvious and widely-discussed than geology, but his geological pursuits exercised a strong influence on his poetry. Holding Lomonosov’s poetic and geological labors up next to each other can reveal what the textual templates Lomonosov sketched out in literature an the hard sciences, which would live on as ideological signifiers for the next few centuries, meant at their moment of creation. 39 In Lomonosov’s influential treatise on rhetoric, Краткое руководство по красноречию (A Brief Guide to Eloquence) (1748), he begins framing rhetoric not as an art, but as one of the “verbal sciences (slovesnye nauki)” for which he is laying out general rules (Lomonosov, kratkoe). Lomonosov’s guide to poetic style spends time glorifying naturphilosophie and science in general as an escape from ignorance and vice. The codification of poetry is part of general scientific advancement (Hamburg, 369). Lomonosov celebrates the advance of all sciences since Peter I’s reign, and assumes that the field of rhetoric will advance as well, following Peter’s own example: “Благополучны возрастающие в России науки, к которым сам будущий их расширитель, подражая великому оных основателю, собственным своим примером поощряет сынов российских. Благополучно российское слово, которое, под тению милости Петровой отрасли произрастая, великие дела его живыми цветами изобразить достойно будет (Lomonosov, Краткое, 21). “The successful growth of the sciences in Russia, towards which in the future [act as] their own extender, emulating their great founder, whose own example encourages the sons of Russia. Happily, the Russian language, which, as industry grew under the wing of Peter’s mercy, will be adequate to the task of portraying the the great accomplishments in their living blooms.” For Lomonosov being a good writer consists of five methods: natural talent, “discipline or science [nauka],” the imitation of previous authors, practice in writing, and the knowledge of other sciences (Lomonosov, Краткое, 23). Lomonosov believed he was setting the precedent for all Russian authors to come with his Brief Guide and the odes he wrote. Eloquent writing is but one of many sciences, and its proper practice, like other sciences, “consists of the knowledge of the necessary rules, which show the true path to eloquence.” (Lomonosov, краткое, 24). Наука and the plural науки have to this day retain broader, or rather, multiple meanings in a way that “science” or “sciences” do not in English. Related to the verb “учить(ся),” broadly наука simply means, and in the eighteenth century meant, something that could be or is studied, from 40 theology, as the seventeenth-century theologian Hierodeacon Platon laid out (Witschafter, 19), to a simple “skill” or “techne,” according to Dal’. At the same time, the confusion these similarities or congruities give us in contemporary English point to a close or even similar relationship between various “sciences” that buttresses the main point of this section: hard sciences, methods of civic administration, and literary style were all linguistically “the same thing,” науки. Lomonosov applied himself to problems of state simplification: setting up systems to create utility and legibility in the arts and sciences. These systems were Lomonosov’s view of art fits with the classical idea of art as mimesis, or imitation of reality, in which each genre of which has particular set of rules for portraying that reality (Abrams, 10). Through determined labor and adherence to the proper rules, poems are made. His treatise makes clear that Lomonosov, as one of the proprietary Platos and mentally-alacritous Newtons to spring out of the depths of the Russian Empire, saw his knowledge in the hard sciences as helping make his odes even better, just as any contribution to scientific progress aided the progress of the state. Lomonosov professes the same optimistic belief in the inevitable mastery of poetry as he did the mastery of the rest of the sciences through labor directed by an enlightened autocratic government. Just as geology, geography and chemistry and other sciences were becoming objects of study at this time, so was literature, which in the classical system was largely synonymous with language (Barthes, 21). Just as geology was a science of uncovering what lay below the earth, literature and language saw themselves as uncovering a system of transparent objective correlations between the Spirit of an object and its sign (21). The naturphilosophical understanding that problems in nature, government and poetics solved in straightforward ways led to a linguistic theory that believed in straightforward correlations between the name and the named, all part of the aforementioned process of state simplification. These arbitrary yet specific 41 symbols were designed by sovereign human reason and sovereign human power with little regard for messy contingencies of matter (Reill, 28-29). This wanton arbitrariness in linguistic theory and forms of expression mirrored state violence towards particular individuals or landscapes, “contingencies” which were similarly shaped into conformance with the demands of reasonably derived “complete models,” whether Wolff’s or Lomonosov’s. Because of this theoretical conviction that all sciences were related, theories of language and the word played a central role in Enlightenment ideology (Lotman, Izbrannye, 216). The desires for one king, one science, one measure and one language were motivated and executed similarly, and the process of refining these new governmental and scientific practices was analogous to cutting a single national language from the “existing welter of dialects.” (Scott, 32) Viktor Zhivov claims that although from a contemporary perspective, the ode might seem like a tiny academic concern even in the context of linguistic debate, the general question of the ode was central to the eighteenth-century plan to create a new literary language, and the ode championed the idea that progress in poetry and the state were tightly-linked (Zhivov, 207-8). Eliminating ignorance in poetics, just like eliminating ignorance about the dynamics of geology under our feet, would help the Russian state spread reason and enlightenment across the world (208). Until late in the eighteenth century, most discussions about literature focused on the function of poetic speech (Tynianov, Oda kak) and the ode, more than any other literary form, was seen as the peak of poetic speech. Introduced under Anna, it quickly became the predominant sovereign lyric genre (von Geldern 927). The ode was “a manifesto of the fledgling Enlightenment,” each one an exemplar of the new literary language and a celebration of imperial power (Golburt, 155). This process of “language planning” was guided by the state and the same small class of people creating and consuming the ceremonial ode. 42 As written works of classicism, the ode presupposed a collective consumption, an object which circulated among people brought together on a class basis (Barthes, 49). The small social milieu gave classical language a “closed” character, endowing it with an unselfconsciousness and blissful irresponsibility. Classical authors prioritized semantic transparency and simple correlation between sign and signified over messy, dense polysemy. By transparency, I do not mean to say that the Lomonosovian ode was semantically or stylistically uncomplicated or valued clarity. Indeed, following some French authors of heroic poetry, odists like Trediakovsky and Lomonosov held “poetic license” to be a necessary feature of epic verse, as poetry was a language different from ordinary speech, in which poets are permitted to use bolder, uncommon, reptitive, shocking and ornate language (Zhivov, 174). Lomonosov’s odes are rife with these “baroque” touches, from reminders about mortality, vanity, and stunning variety to repetition and oxymorons (203). What I mean by “transparency,” “clarity” or “simplicity” is instead that Lomonosov and other eighteenth-century writers saw language as just another one of the central coordinating schemes of state simplification and legibility they strove to impose on Russian society to create conditions where “the task environment is known and unchanging” and can be treated as a closed system (Scott, 82). Creating these systems of “state simplification,” through the imposition of a single, official language in place of all others, a language that could accommodate all assigned tasks in its registers,” (72) from poetry to geology. Lomonosov and others decisively disqualified meanings and decisively set boundaries around words and genres with a careless disregard. It can be argued that this mirrored the disregard that non-noble citizens of empire and the landscape merited in Imperial Russian society and ceremonial odes: at best, they were useful cogs in a greater machine, made for a single purpose. This lack of 43 consideration for natural complexities and contingencies is reflected in the thematic and ethical expressions of eighteenth-century Russian odists. Russian poets did not resurrect an ancient genre because of a popular demand or a specific stylistic advantage, but because it fulfilled a governmental function, legitimizing the new autocracy with praise (Alekseeva 7) with a system of legible symbols for state power. In their effort to legitimatize the autocracy, odists, like other government functionaries, explicated the relationship of the state to its citizens – and to nature, including the natural resources contained within Russia’s expanse. In odes, the Russian autocrat was portrayed as having total control over both citizens and natural resources, all of which served the interests of progress. As I argue below (p. 28) any odes sounded like more tightly-structured rewritings of Lomonosov's “Dedication” to Elizabeth in The First Principles of the Science of Mining (Lomonosov, О слоях, 401). If literary genres generate spaces in accordance with different connections to temporal, social and ethical ideas, Lomonosov explicitly argues that his depiction of the landscapes, peoples and resources of the Russian Empire should be shaped by his scientific convictions and governmental edicts. Indeed, as I will show in the following section, his odes are animated by the same themes: the progress of science eliminating ignorance and increasing material standard of living, the naturphilosophical belief in similar and harmonious relationships between various sciences and systems, the productivity of well-directed labor, the new mythical enchantment and successful exploitation of the fecund Russian landscape, and the divinity of the Empress. These beliefs became inextricably tied to the ode, making the motifs and themes genre signifiers themselves, evoking this early Enlightenment ideology even after the original content became outdated. Hidden Treasures of the Empire and the Ode. 44 Just as his scientific works do, Lomonosov’s odes express a desire to expose what is hidden, resulting from the belief that science helps society progress by eliminating society’s ignorance and redounding material benefits to society. One of Lomonosov’s most famous odes, “Ода на день восшествия на всероссийский престол ее величества государыни императрицы Елисаветы Петровны 1747 года” is studded with precious stones, riven with veins of gold and marred with tall mountain peaks: Толикое земель пространство Когда всевышний поручил Тебе в счастливое подданство, Тогда сокровища открыл, Какими хвалится Индия; Но требует к тому Россия Искусством утвержденных рук. Сие злату очистит жилу; Почувствуют и камни силу Тобой восставленных наук (Lomonosov, 141-150). The great expanse of land When the Almighty entrusted To you in happy subjugation, He then uncovered the treasures, Of the sort India boasts; But Russia requires for that Тhe prowess of firm hands. That will clear the vein of gold; The sciences renewed by you They will sense the mass of stones. While its abundance of metallurgical and mineral wealth signifies Russia’s predestined power, Russian subjects are lucky that power was entrusted to such wise rulers, first Peter I and now Elizabeth on the day of her coronation. This passage not only underscores the centrality of mineral wealth and divine autocracy as justifications for state ideology but also connects geology and the ode together as practices to be encouraged by the Empress to further her realm’s prosperity and glory. Enlightenment aesthetics transferred feelings of terror and exultation from 45 the theological realm, the only place they were formerly believed appropriate, to the natural realm, in particular geological and geographical features (Klonk, 597). As the landscape was subjugated, that sublime awe was transferred a second time to the monarch who subjugated and systematized it, who seemed to herself span the wide breadth of Russia’s expanse in Lomonosov’s oddly erotic rendering of her stretching across the steppe. Subjugation and Myth Elizabeth’s subjects’ accomplishments are enabled by their subjugation to her, the poet being no exception. Harsha Ram calls this poetics of subjugation “the imperial sublime,” a mode of literature defined by the poet’s sudden and complete surrender to his inspiration, an inspiration that comes from abject submission to Russia’s conquering rulers (Ram, 64). This submission results in an ecstasy and greater perceptive ability, which Ram locates in the very first line of the very first ode Lomonosov published, which ended up being programmatic for the genre, “Ода на взятие хотина”: “Восторг внезапный ум пленил, Ведет на верьх горы высокой, Где ветр в лесах шуметь забыл; В долине тишина глубокой. Внимая нечто, ключ молчит, Которой завсегда журчит И с шумом вниз с холмов стремится. Лавровы вьются там венцы, Там слух спешит во все концы; Далече дым в полях курится. A sudden rapture has captivated the mind, And leads it up a lofty mountain, Where the wind in the forests has forgotten to roar; In the deep valley there is silence. The noise, harkening to something, falls silent, And courses noisily down from the hills. There wreaths of laurel wind about, There hearing [or rumor] rushes in all directions; Further out smoke curls along the fields. 46 Ram correctly claims that this dynamic results in a more intimate connection between the power of language and the might of empire in Russia than in Europe, but it is not just a connection between language and poetry, but all the sciences as well. What is usually noted as a “geographical focus” in the ode was an openness to all the sciences, especially geography, geology and statecraft, sciences of particular interest to Lomonosov. Lomonosov continues the mythologically recasting of the Russian Empire and its landscape found in the “Dedication” of The First Principles. He alludes here to the same classical materials that he used in the “Dedication,” specifically porphyry and marble, to demonstrate how Elizabeth’s radiance, beauty and power project all across the world: Великое светило миру Блистая с вечной высоты На бисер, злато и порфиру, На все земные красоты, Во все страны свой взор возводит, Но краше в свете не находит Елисаветы и тебя. Great light of the world, Shining from boundless heights On pearl, gold and porphyry, On all terrestrial beauty, All countries raise their gaze, But there is none under the sun more beautiful Than Elizabeth, and you [peace] The small class of people creating and consuming odes was taken to mirror the larger geopolitical landscape: if the whole court was looking up at Elizabeth admiringly, this dynamic must be analogous to the larger world. The ode’s temporal and spatial dimensions were enormous (Golburt, 118) but it catered to the desires and opinions of a small group. The Empress herself stood in for the empire, her needs taken for granted as the needs of all. 47 The mythological allusions multiply in the following stanzas. Lomonosov populates the alpine reaches of the Empire with the gods of antiquity and once again calls the Urals the Riphean Mountains, extending classical toponyms over the poetic world of the eighteenth- century empire: И се Минерва ударяет В верьхи Рифейски копием; Сребро и злато истекает Во всем наследии твоем. Плутон в расселинах мятется, Что россам в руки предается Драгой его металл из гор, Которой там натура скрыла; От блеску дневного светила (200-209) And behold, Minerva strikes, In the Ural Mountains’ mines; Silver and gold flow In all your patrimony. Pluto in crevasses trembles, That precious metal from the mountains, is turned over into Russians hands That which nature has there concealed, From the glint of the light of day In contrast to his earlier assertion that those who are ignorant of the dynamics of the earth have to be afraid their cities and towns will be given to falling into its jaws (предают падению, и повергают в земные челюсти), Lomonosov here, in his optimistic poetic vision, shows the submissive earth giving up its own assets to Russian hands (что россам в руки), from where they are hidden, waiting to shine in the light of day. The ability or impulse to open or discover (открыть) is identified as a uniquely human faculty. The riches here and in The First Principles are above all else of a terrestrial quality. This stanza is reminiscent of a line from the first paragraph of The First Principles, where Lomonosov also references this unique human faculty of discovery: “Ибо часто скрывается от зрения и знания нашего не толстым слоем 48 превеликое богатство, натурою произведенное […]” [Because frequently the immense wealth produced by nature is hidden from our sight and our knowledge by a not-too-thick layer [of earth], which it is possible to reach with small effort and expenditure.”] Certainly the effort and expenditure will not be so great if it will just be turned over into Russian’s hands! Pluto and Minerva are not giving over these metals and stones out of kindness or generosity, however. Labor [труд] is one of the most common words in Lomonosov’s odes. The increased practice of the divine sciences and hard work in post-Petrine Russia enabled Russians to reach their hands across all the natural features of Russia: Тогда божественны науки Чрез горы, реки и моря В Россию простирали руки, К сему монарху говоря: «Мы с крайним тщанием готовы Подать в российском роде новы Чистейшего ума плоды». Монарх к себе их призывает, Уже Россия ожидает Полезны видеть их труды (100-109) And then the divine sciences, Has stretched out his hands into Russia, Through mountains, rivers and seas, And say to the monarch: “With extreme zeal We will give new fruit of the mind to the Russian people The monarch waits To see their useful works” The fruits of scientists’ rationally-directed labor are gifts given to the monarch, visible for her to see. Again, these gifts are not given out of kindness or generosity, but as a matter of course. We see here a metaphorical identification of labor with natural resources. Just as Minerva, Pluto and Nature give up their resources, the scientists of Russia offer the fruits of their mind and useful works for the sake of progress. These resources, what we would now call “mental” or “human 49 capital,” will multiply with greater investment in the sciences. Lomonosov depicts this future people being dug up from the very bowels of the fatherland: О вы, которых ожидает Отечество от недр своих И видеть таковых желает, Каких зовет от стран чужих, О, ваши дни благословенны! Дерзайте ныне ободренны Раченьем вашим показать, Что может собственных Платонов И быстрых разумом Невтонов Российская земля рождать. Науки юношей питают, Отраду старым подают, В счастливой жизни украшают, В несчастной случай берегут; В домашних трудностях утеха И в дальних странствах не помеха. Науки пользуют везде, Среди народов и в пустыне, В градском шуму и наедине […](211-229) Oh you, which the fatherland Expects from its depths [от недр] And desires to see those, Which it calls from foreign lands, Oh, your days are blessed! Dare now to act boldly To show through your efforts, What is possible from your proprietary Platos And with the mind of alacritous Newtons [Who] the Russian land has birthed. The sciences cultivate our youths, They give joy to the elders, They adorn fortunate lives, And protect against the unfortunate event; In the domestic labors [give] comfort And in distant lands there is not an obstacle. The sciences they deploy everywhere, Amidst peoples and in the wilderness, In the bustle of the city and alone […] 50 Lomonosov likely sees himself as the first of many of these proprietary Platos or sharp Newtons to arise through new state systems, here to adorn Russian citizens’ lives in glory. The Russian citizen of the future is adapted to any environs, because of their proper cultivation and concerted labors. These little people’s contributions to empire, enabled by their education in the sciences, show what the glory of the state looks like on the “street” level. The Body, the Household and the State as Mirrored Harmonies In another оde marking the anniversary of the same occasion the next year, “Ода на день восшествия на престол ее величества государыни императрицы Елизаветы Петровны 1748 года,” the ode quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, the body of the Empress becomes the body of the state. Her legs stretch over the steppes, her eyes identify the limits of the horizon and her elbows rest on the Caucuses: В полях, исполненных плодами, Где Волга, Днепр, Нева и Дон, Своими чистыми струями Шумя, стадам наводят сон, Седит и ноги простирает На степь, где Хину отделяет Пространная стена от нас; Веселый взор свой обращает И вкруг довольства исчисляет, Возлегши лактем на Кавкас (160-170). Where the Volga, Dnieper, Neva and Don, In fields, laden with fruits, With their clear streams, Rustling, the flocks doze off to sleep, She sits, and spreads her legs On the steppe, where a vast wall Separates China from us; [She] turns her cheerful gaze And calculates the contentments around, Leaning [her] elbows on the Caucuses. 51 Her responsibility is but to calculate the contentments of her realm, given up to her by the laborers, scientists and gods that populate it, an intimate, eroticized picture of a queen whose body stands in for the body of the state. Earlier in this 1748 ode, Lomonosov hopes for a world where swords are turned to ploughshares, where the fruits of metallurgical arts are engaged in peaceful labors: С способными ветрами споря, Терзать да не дерзнет борей Покрывшего судами моря, Пловущими к земли твоей. Да всех глубокий мир питает; Железо браней да не знает, Служа в труде безмолвных сел. Да злобна зависть постыдится, И славе свет да удивится Твоих великодушных дел (21-30). Arguing with able winds, With winds capable of fighting, Boreus [the cold north wind] does not even dare to stir up the seas Covered with ships sailing toward your lands Sailing towards your lands. Indeed, the whole wide world is provided for; Iron that does not know battles, Serving [the needs] in labor of the quiet villages. Indeed, evil envy is now ashamed, And glory the world will be surprised By your magnanimous deeds. Turning wise leadership and scientific expertise to peaceful purposes in even the smallest villages will turn Russia into a marvel of the world. Elizabeth, as the physical embodiment of the Empire, is the equivalent of a queen bee, all the labor of her hard-working drones rationally organized around her, gathering resources for the furtherance of society: В луга, усыпанны цветами, Царица трудолюбных пчел, Блестящими шумя крылами, Летит между прохладных сел; 52 Стекается, оставив розы И сотом напоенны лозы, Со тщанием отвсюду рой, Свою царицу окружает И тесно вслед ее летает Усердием вперенный строй (61-70). In meadows, strewn with flowers, A Queen of hard-working bees, With shiny wings rustling, [Who] fly between cool villages; Flocking, leaving the roses And vines filled with honey, Swarm from everywhere with zeal, [They] surround their Tsarina And fly behind her closely In an eager, admiring stream. Biology, geology, government, all systems can mirror each other in their harmony if organized according to the increasing understandings lent by naturphilosophie. This is, what Foucault identifies as the eighteenth-century understanding of the world as defined by static identities and differences, characterizations universally congruent across disciplines. In Lomonosov’s later odes, a harmonious world without war seemed less likely, but the interior of the empire, similar to the interior of the Earth, remained safe from enemies: a well-ordered hive full of hard-working bees. In “Ода торжественная Ея Императорскому Величеству Всепресветлейшей Державнейшей великой Государыне Императрице Екатерине Алексеевне, самодержице всероссийской на преславное Ея восшествие на Всероссийский Императорский престол июня 28 дня 1762 года,” Lomonosov depicts a world of violence and storms outside of the Russian empire, and peace and protection inside its domestic borders: Российский род, коль ты ужасен В полях против своих врагов, Толь дом твой в недрах безопасен: Ты вне гроза, ты внутрь покров. Полки сражая, вне воюешь; Но внутрь без крови торжествуешь. 53 Ты буря там, здесь тишина. Умеренность тебе в кровь бранну, В главу, победами венчанну, От трех в сей век Богинь дана (11-20). Russian race, if you are terrifying On the fields versus your enemies, Then your home in the bowels you are harmless: You are a storm outside, you are shrouded inside. Armies battle, outside you are at war; But inside, without blood you are triumphant. You are a storm out there, in here is tranquility. Moderation is lost from your blood, In your head, crowned with victories, From the three goddesses given to you in this age. This safe, harmonious interior of the home was the “недра,” which can mean both the subsoil or bowels of the earth, or a womb or home. The draws this parallel directly in the A World on the Genesis of Metals from Earthquakes “[…]но как земного недра, так и всего общества внутренним покоем наслаждаемся[,]” [[…] but just as in the bowels of the Earth, we enjoy the tranquility of inside of our society.[,]]” setting up a potentially exploitable ambivalence. Here, under the soil, there could be no storm, but at other points in his text the interior of the Earth . The substratum of the Earth, the Russian Empire and the domestic space are all connected as places of comfort and calm. Ceremonial odes advertise a perfect match between “Elizabeth’s bravery and beauty, and between inner and outer, physical and spiritual sight,” (Levitt, 61) just as Wolff’s and Lomonosov’s naturphilosophie advertised a thoroughgoing, complete, philosophically harmonious and consistent model of the workings of nature (Gascoigne, 286-7). Lomonosov’s odes proclaim the importance of eliminating ignorance through the support of science, the capacity of rationally-directed labor, the inherent harmony between various sciences and within the enlightened state, and the identification of the Empress with the actual body of that state. 54 These ideological convictions expressed in poetry by working them into what Barthes termed in relation to European eighteenth-century classicism “a freshly-defined system of symmetrical connections striving for transparency” (Barthes, 46). By transparent, Barthes and I are not discussing “simple” or “straightforward” language in a literal sense. As James C. Scott says in Seeing Like a State, terms like “simple” or “transparent” seem misplaced in conversations about modern science and governance in light of the multitude of complex and contradictory rules, but is “relatively” or “perspectively” simple in light of the diverse, complex vernacular systems these “simple” and “transparent” official systems strove to replace (Scott, 35-36). Lomonosov acknowledged the frightening current level of ignorance about interior workings of the Earth, but projected optimism about it in his poetry. As we will see, future writers were more pessimistic about the ability of the government to create a world where inner and outer worlds were in harmony. This aggressive and focused effort to invent a language of crisp, clear correlations that could supplant the multitude of local, ungovernable vernaculars formed a system where many of the same rhetorical cliches gained currency in multiple disciplines across science and literature, disciplines studied and formulated by many of the same people, all from the same class. Certain new linguistic cliches had especially close connections to two disciplines, geology and poetry. Concepts like interior and exterior, science and hard work, precious metals and human progress formed a system of connections where certain objects had ideological and emotional resonances. As discussed earlier, at certain points these resonances contained ambivalent or contradictory forces, such as in the example of the word недра, or in depictions of the Empress both as an erotic body bawdily sprawled across the empire or a saintly, serene virgin. For the most part, however, in Lomonosov’s poetry, only the Empress’s body could be identified with the state, 55 exploitation of mineral resources was an uncomplicated good, and the interior of the earth, the home, and the empire were safe compared to anywhere exterior and foreign. The metaphorical resonances of this system, and in particular its subtle ambivalences, could change in the hands of another author with another ideology, however, making the interior of the Empire full of ignorance and violence, the exploitation of the Earth morally ambiguous, and the other people’s bodies worthy of myth. Marcus Levitt identifies in Lomonosov’s poetry an anxiety about whether future readers will be able to believe the miraculous and unbelievable world of the ode at face value, or see it as a “lying fable.” (Levitt, 62) One diligent future reader, Radishchev, lauded the poet himself, admiring Lomonosov’s triumphs in science and poetic versification. He was, however, unable to see the world of the Lomonosovian ode as anything other than “servile flattery,” and molded his own mythic universe in accordance to his own ideology, deploying linguistic cliches invented to praise autocracy against it. Part III: A More Personal Science Radishchev and the Literary Rebellion Iuri Lotman ends his article “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russia” trying to resolve a puzzling question. Why, when Aleksandr Radishchev’s behavior was relatively low-profile and innocuous, did he feel so at risk of being sent into exile or imprisoned again that he was compelled to take his own life? Lotman sees in Radishchev’s tragic end a proto-Romantic approach to personal life, where each person’s life is its own plot, a consciously- regulated semiotic activity. Literary texts became more fragmented and personal because they are indecipherable and incomplete without the context of the legendary or documentary context of the author’s life. Radishchev, despite enjoying one of the safest periods of his adult life, 56 sensed that he had reached his “fifth act,” and it was time for him to complete the drama in the way the bravest tragic heroes ended their character arcs in classical drama (Lotman, 18th- century, 89-94). By enacting a literary heroism on his actual body, Radishchev showed the way forward to a literature where myths about the landscape and the government could be identified with bodies and lives other than the Empress’s. This dissertation argues that the literary form of the ode forged a coherent and comprehensive ideological explanation of Russian state’s attitude towards its landscape, subjects and literature. This explanation was clear and legible to its literate subjects. Radishchev provides a dramatic early example of one of those literate subjects who appropriated this classical form, which stood in for the official ethics of the state, and subverted it in order to express his own personal ethics. Radishchev, in other words, was the first to use the ode to radically challenge the optimism and collective aspirations of classical language, and thus the optimism and aspirations of the state in order to express his own individually-held belief system. Radishchev, straddling the threshold of the late Enlightenment period and newer intellectual movements that would blossom into sentimentalism and Romanticism, shared many similar personal experiences and intellectual convictions with Lomonosov. He studied in Germany only decades after Lomonosov, in Leipzig, another university town where Christian Wolff taught. Although Wolff died only a few years after Radishchev’s birth, Radishchev was influenced by Wolffian naturphilosophie. Radishchev and his younger cohort rankled at the popular understanding of Wolff, which used reason to reconcile men to authority (McConnell, 42), but were influenced by the naturphilosphical understanding that data about nature is best observed experientially and described qualitatively, and the idea that there was a discernible harmony to existence. While in Leipzig, he also encountered French thinkers like Helvetius, 57 Rousseau and Mably, who influenced him over the course of his life. These more radical enlightenment figures convinced him of the importance of physical sensation, subjective experience, philosophical skepticism, personal introspection, and individual virtue in every person’s life, as well as giving him political convictions, such as the equality of man and a social contract based on the consent of the governed. These ideas, attending a stronger interest in law, sociology and philosophy than what we would now refer to as the hard sciences, sharply distinguished his thought from Lomonosov’s, despite their shared naturphilosophical base. Radishchev is a complex thinker, occasionally contradictory, frequently semantically confusing, and always palpably impassioned. He experienced great personal and political turmoil in his life, and his thought evolved and changed over time. There are many comprehensive intellectual biographies of Radishchev in Russian and English, and excellent shorter treatments of his thought in historical surveys of Russian intellectual history. The thrust of this dissertation begins in Lomonosov’s geological, civic and poetic work and it cuts a meandering path through Radishchev’s work. I am not attempting an intellectual biography or a survey, I intend rather to show how Radishchev integrated and responded to Lomonosov’s influence and how his personal ideology and historical circumstance compelled him to mold previous ideas and forms into new shapes and patterns. I begin with his last major work, Man His Mortality and Immortality, a long, complex philosophical treatise, contrasting it with Lomonosov’s scientific works in its structure and conclusions, while identifying clear thematic and semantic linkages. Iuri Lotman cites how Radishchev denies the immortality of the soul in the first chapters of Man, His Mortality and Immortality before he turns to assert its immortality in the last section as a perfect example of the “contradictoriness” in the worldview of late eighteenth-century Russian thinkers. I attribute this 58 “contradictoriness” to the unhappy coexistence of an earlier, naturphilophical framework inherited from Lomonosov and Wolff with newer, skeptical ideas drawn from newer French and English philosophy. I continue on with the beginning of Radishchev’s most famous book, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Several scholars have analyzed the similarity between Radishchev’s Journey and odic discourses, in particular Ani Kokobobo’s work on odic perspective in the travelogue and Marcus Levitt’s analysis of odic vision. Russian literary scholars, in particular O. Lebeveva and O. Kuchetkova have done excellent and rigorous work tying Radishchev’s Man, His Mortality and Immortality and A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow to high classical genres and coeval religious and philosophical trends. Those arguments work to buttress my own, which shows that Radishchev’s work did not just evolve from the ode, but he consciously and explicitly saw himself as following in Lomonosov’s footsteps, repeatedly returning to the textual structures Lomonosov innovated in his geological works and his odes, but this act of return critiqued the ideology with which Lomonosov was associated by subverting key semantic and formal features of Lomonosov’s scientific and artistic work. The Journey is the culmination of this conscious and systematic response. Although it was the most vituperative, impassioned political statement against autocracy written in eighteenth-century Russia, it was written in the shell of textual forms expressly invented to praise autocracy, most notably Lomonosov’s odes and geological tracts. It could not have been the first without being the second. With a Curious Eye to Our Interior Man, His Mortality and Immortality, Radishchev’s treatise exploring the immortality of the human soul, is modeled on Lomonosov’s ambitious scientific treatises from the start. Despite coming to the conclusion that man’s soul is indeed immortal, for the majority of the treatise 59 Radishchev makes pretty compelling rhetorical arguments for why it does not seem that the soul is immortal, a clear example of what Iuri Lotman calls the contradictoriness of late enlightenment discourse in Russia. Unlike Lomonosov’s writings, Radishchev’s text is imbued with a deep pessimism and skepticism, showing that old skins can hold new wine, and when they do, it draws attention to the novelty of their content. If we remember, above, I quoted Lomonosov posing to readers of his geological treatises what wonders we could find if we turned our gaze at what was hidden inside the earth just beneath our feet. Alexander Radishchev began his 1792 treatise On Man, on his Mortality and Immortality with a similar desire to penetrate superficially observable reality and find what is hidden, but in Radishchev’s case, he wanted to look inside the human self: Обратим взор наш на человека; рассмотрим самих себя; проникнем оком любопытным во внутренность нашу и потщимся из того, что мы есть, определить или, по крайней мере, угадать, что мы будем или быть можем; а если найдем, что бытие наше, или, лучше сказать, наша единственность […] (Radishchev, О человеке, 39) We relate our gaze to man; [we] examine our very selves; [we] penetrate with our curious eye into our interior and strive from that that we are define or, at very least, guess, what we will or could be; and if we find that which is our existence, or to speak more clearly, our singularity […] Radishchev wrote his dark meditation on the immortality of the soul in exile in Siberia, where he was allowed to have books about geology, geography and history (Walicki, 38), and he was quite familiar with The First Principles of Metallurgy or of the Treatment of Ores (Usitalo, 121). The opening of Radishchev’s philosophical text is so similar Lomonosov’s geological one it is as if he lifted it and inserted his own content into that framework, an early-enlightenment naturphilosophical framework for discerning the harmonious logic of existence through observation and describing the results qualitatively, but we see the faith that there is a discernible 60 connection between inner and outer and physical and spiritual begin to fray. Despite Radishchev’s commitment to the understanding that data about nature is best observed experientially and described qualitatively, the rhetorical investigatory framework set forth by Lomonosov strained to contain Radishchev’s content: an outline of human psychology informed by philosophical skepticism, with an emphasis on subjective experience and individual physical sensation. Radishchev shared with many other late-eighteenth-century European thinkers a skepticism of earlier philosophers’ “one-sided reliance of on abstract and hypothetical reasoning in constructing a coherent picture of reality” (Reill, 29). Naturphilosophical ideas had been adopted as justifications for autocracy, religious orthodoxy and social hierarchy across the continent, and an increasing dissatisfaction with the social and political order in which naturphilosophie blossomed and spread spilled over into a critique of the order of things as propounded by that philosophy (Reill, 29). He was more interested in a psychological theory of man (Molnar, 461) that could justify reality more comprehensively through lived experience rather than straining to fit people into state systems. The idealism of the Leibniz-Wolff school of philosophy was still at the base of Radishchev’s philosophy, but in Man, His Mortality and Immortality and his literary texts draw from newer trends including as French empiricism or British sensationalist thought, as well as older currents, such as German idealism. A tension between conflicting philosophical systems ripples to the surface (Luzianina, 53), a conflict well-documented in Radishchev’s thought (McConnell, 35). From French empiricism emerged the notion that ideas were based in sensation. Newer philosophical tendencies like sensibility developed alongside this idea, which were particularly strong in England, Scotland and France among thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Whytt, and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who attempted to describe the 61 basics of the interaction between the self and the world. Radishchev was very familiar with these thinkers, and their philosophy was to have a strong influence in all of his work (Kahn, 286). Turning to a less mechanistic theory of self than that purported earlier in the eighteenth century among many empiricists or strict materialists, these philosophers of sensibility or sensation turned away from “facts” of physiology to an experiential one, based in sensory experience. Drawing on these materialist thinkers of “sensibility” or “sensuality" resulted in a more principled, long-term examination of the self as a dynamic material entity that was defined by its interactions and reactions to the broader world and other selves in Man, His Mortality and Immortality: […] сие столь чувствуе мое я продлится за предел дней наших на мгновение хотя едино, то воскликнем в радовании сердечном: мы будем паки совокупны; мы можем быть блаженны; мы будем! – Будем?... Помедлим заключением, любезные мои! сердце в восторге нередко ввергало разум в заблуждение (Radishchev, О человеке, 39). [I feel] to such a degree this feeling of mine will continue beyond our days and at a moment while as one then shout in rejoicing the heart: we are in turn cumulative; we might be blessed; we will! – Will we?... We will must slow down hesitate in our conclusions my dears! a heart in ecstasy has often lead the mind into error. In contrast to Lomonosov’s perception, sparked in a moment of rapture or ecstasy heightening his reach and allowing him to calmly perceive a wide and complex world, Radishchev urges closer examination of the self based on subjective, measured examination of feeling rather than collective rapture. He argues for close analysis of the self, before one can even get to the bowels of the Earth or the field of battle. This not only shows a difference in Radishchev and Lomonosov’s levels of skepticism, but also their priorities: Lomonosov was interested in uncovering the physical mineral wealth in the depths of the earth for the purpose of practical exploitation by the Russian Empire, whereas Radishchev was concerned with the metaphysical 62 fate of the individual soul. He is not buying into a collective civic mission but embarking on personal exploration. This kind of deep moral introspection would also prevent him from engaging in servile flattery of autocracy or being used as a cog in unjust wars. He would model this kind of exploration again in a literary form in his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where he would express the anti-autocracy and anti-war conclusions of his self-exploration more explicitly. Materialism and Harmony Despite this reliance on his own individual sense-perception as a means to truth and focus on the personal soul as an object of inquiry, Radishchev’s worldview still retained aspects of the eighteenth-century at its foundations: a belief in inherent goodness and discernible truth, however difficult it was to discern, ignorance as the root of evil, and a natural structure of universal characterizations and general taxonomy: “[е]сли кристалл, металл или другой какой- либо камень образуется вследствие закона смежности, то и части, человека составляющие, тому же следуют правилу.” [if crystal, metal or any other sort of rock is formed in accordance to the principle of contiguity, then it is so that part of man is composed following just the same principle.] (Radishchev, О человеке, 46) The inside of the earth mirrors the inside of plants, which mirrors the inside of animals, which mirrors the inside of humans, giving Radishchev’s signifiers the same kind of transferability as Lomonosov’s had, a transferability that enabled him to use words having to do with geology to be used as descriptors for the human condition. Indeed, rhetorically challenging his own assertion that the soul is immortal, Radishchev claims that humans would be boldly foolish to believe in immortality, as they can glance around and see how they are scarcely distinct from the earth itself [но воззри на свое сложение; ты едва от 63 земли отделен, и если бы око твое не водило тебя до пределов] (Radishchev, О человеке, 70) In The First Principles, Lomonosov describes human condition as “[ж]ительствуя и обращаясь на лице земном… [living on and relating to the surface of the earth…]” unable to see beneath themselves and fragile in their constitution. Radishchev sees this as the same as the condition of every other being on earth. Terrestrial plants would wither and die if they were taken from their natural home, the “bowels of the earth”: Побуждение к пище равно терзательно и усладительно для всех живущих на лице земли, не исключая и растений. Исторгни его из недра земного, или замкни токмо источники небесные, цвет увянет, иссохнет корень, отпадет листвие, и вместо красящегося зеленостию листов и всеми цветами раздробленного луча солнечного в цвету своем, узришь его поросшее мхом и плеснию подернутое, преходящее в разрушение[…] (Radishchev, О человеке, 47) The inducement to sustenance is equally tormenting and enjoyable for all who live on the face of the earth, even including plants. Uproot it [a plant] from the bowels [subsoil] of the earth, or close it off from access to the sky, the flower will etiolate, the root will wither, the foliage will drop off, and instead of the green-colored leaves and all the colors of fractalized solar rays in its bloom, you will behold moss and mold grow over it, dust cover it, it will pass into deterioration […] Deny a human being the ability to fulfill their physical needs and a similar process will happen to them. from their depths will come outward signs of death: Равномерно, отыми яства от животного и человека, возбуди алчбу и жажду в недрах его, лиша его всего того, что обновляет в нем кровь, дыхание и жизнь, ты скоро узришь страшные признаки смерти, окрест его летающие (Radishchev, О человеке, 47). To the same degree, withdraw the victuals from an animal or man, arouse in his bowels desire and thirst, of all that renews in him blood, breath and life, you will soon behold the frightful signs of death swarming all about him. Here we see Radishchev use the word “недра” for the inside of the human organism, and an early use of materialist understandings of nature to hint at a greater empathy for man and his 64 environment in Radishchev’s sympathetic description of how removing plants, animals, minerals or man from the source of their sustenance will hurt them. Lomonosov used “недра” first for the literal substratum of the Earth’s crust, and extended it to the inside of the personified fatherland and domestic space in his odes. Radishchev extends its use on a more personal level for a philosophical investigation of an individual person or organism. This concretization of metaphorical geological language in reference to human functioning and emotion is similar to the concretization of liquid metaphors in English during the same period, which bequeathed to us metaphorical turns of phrase such as turbulent emotional depths in poetry and liquid assets in neoclassical economics (Henderson, 172). An increased identification with other material in the natural world would erupt in Radishchev’s poetry as a shared sense of exploitation between imperial subject and natural resource. Human beings may live on the Earth’s surface and share properties with all its other inhabitants, but at the crucial turning point in his treatise, when Radishchev begins to list what distinguishes humans from the other creatures, he ends the list with a rhetorical question to signal humanity’s elevated impulses: Имеет ли мысленность стремление к центру земли, того не ведаю; но питание, пророждение, жизнь, любовь и ненависть что суть? (Radishchev, О человеке, 85) [If the rational faculty has an aspiration to the center of the Earth, that I know not; but what about the essence of nutrition, procreation, life, love and hate?]” Geological metaphors began to find wider semantic reach in Radishchev’s philosophical work, showing further distance from Lomonosov’s scientific, civic and poetic convictions while still clearly drawing inspiration from his work, staging a contradiction of generic systems and ideology. Part VI: A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, into Himself, Into the Center of the Earth I Turned My Gaze Into My Interior: A Classical Scientific Investigation 65 In Georgii Makogonenko’s account of Radishchev’s life and works, he notes that Man, his Mortality and Immortality is no “dry, academic tract.” Radishchev writes his general aesthetic code into it along with a multitude of autobiographical details, stamping it distinctly as his own artistic work (Makogonenko, 508). It appears to Makogonenko as more of a confession of the author’s sensitive heart. Radishchev embeds himself even more deeply in his most famous work, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The subjective, personal character of Radishchev’s writings should not, however, be understood as an anti-scientific orientation: in both texts, Radishchev uses structures and words that clearly reference Lomonosov’s scientific works. He frames his struggle to understand the soul, the self and Russian society in the terms of the scientific aspirations of the early enlightenment, a desire to understand the interior essential character of reality, motivated by human ignorance and suffering, in order to improve the human condition. This desire can be read as an early uprising against the top-down effort of the state to structure the inner and outer realities of its subjects and the landscape. We will see at the end of this chapter that Radishchev read Lomonosov’s scientific and poetic work in similarly personal terms. Marcus Levitt notes that the dialectic of vision presented in the opening of Radishchev’s Journey is based on the ocular-centric idyll of the sort pictured in Lomonosov’s odes, consisting of a visual shock, in which the initial state is overturned, “leading to a nihilistic depression; then a turning inward, marked by self-questioning and heeding inner voice of truth (as opposed to visual deceptions); a moral awakening, involving the rejection of occluded vision; and a resolution to take action," but claims it is missing the first step, the state of visual shock (Levitt 231). The simpler explanation is that Radishchev’s opening is based on Lomonosov’s scientific texts, the model he later used again in Man, His Mortality and Immortality. It is less what Levitt 66 calls the “dialectic of sight” than it is a clash of discourses and ideologies, where an older discursive framework strains to accommodate a new ideology. Radishchev turns his ideology loose in a poem featured later in the Journey, the ode “Вольность,” and in the prose chapter “Едрово,” but for now he is defining the purpose of his investigation in line with the linguistic conventions of classical scientific writing. In both the opening of A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow and the first paragraph of Lomonosov’s The First Principles, the author turns his gaze around himself to try to penetrate the unknown interior of an object. Just as in Man, his Mortality and Immortality, Radishchev turns this naturphilosophical textual structure Lomonosov set up to examine the Earth to a new task. In Man, his Mortality and Immortality he examined the interior of the individual soul to discern whether it could be immortal. Here he also looks into his interior in order to understand why man is in so much misery. In Man, his Mortality and Immortality he presented an impressive argument against man’s immortality before endorsing the idea at the end. Here, too, he provides a litany of reasons why it seems that nature is responsible for this misery, only briefly justifying his conviction that human suffering comes from inside humans themselves and is thus ameliorable. His entire account begins as a reaction to his sense perception and immediate emotional response, with sight as the preferred cognitive sense (Kahn, 291), just as it was for Lomonosov: Я взглянул окрест меня — душа моя страданиями человечества уязвленна стала. Обратил взоры мои во внутренность мою — и узрел, что бедствия человека происходят от человека, и часто от того только, что он взирает непрямо на окружающие его предметы (Radishchev, Journey, 227). I glanced around me — this soul of mine was stung by the sufferings of humanity. I turned my gaze into my interior — and beheld that man’s misery comes from man, and frequently only because he does not look directly at the objects surrounding him. 67 If, as O. V. Lebedeva and others claim, the narrative of the Journey is structured as a model of the process of cognition, and the key to understanding that model and the aims of the author is the dedication, then Radishchev’s model of the process of cognition is still structured on Lomonosov’s. He takes that model and adapts it to the stadial sequence of sensibility’s concept of knowledge: from sensation to emotions to analytical thought, and the past tense of verbs indicates that the writer himself made this journey (Lebedeva, Istoriia). The depths of the Earth seemed to be a terrifying abyss as it sometimes collapsed or shook, but these phenomena were the result of discernible internal causes (Lomonosov, О слоях, 530). Radishchev struggles valiantly to believe about human existence what Lomonosov did about natural phenomena: that none are unambiguously harmful, we are just currently ignorant of the way in which they are good. Lomonosov conclusively refutes Earth’s inherent inhospitality in one sentence. For Radishchev it takes one long travelogue to express any hope that existence is not inherently miserable. Despite having completed this cognitive journey himself, Radishchev’s narrator is less sure of man’s ability to acclimate to what seems a terrifying abyss and make it his “natural home” (Lomonosov, О слоях, 530): Ужели, вещал я сам себе, природа толико скупа была к своим чадам, что от блудящего невинно сокрыла истину навеки? Ужели сия грозная мачеха произвела нас для того, чтоб чувствовали мы бедствия, а блаженство николи? (Radishchev, Journey, 227) Could it be, I uttered to myself, that nature was so stingy to her children that she hid the truth forever from those who innocently wander from it? Could it be this terrible stepmother created us in order to feel misery, and never bliss? At first glance, caught in the rapture of his own feeling, Radishchev does not intuitively sense that the world is any kind of natural home to him, it seems rather more like a terrible, stingy stepmother. Radishchev finds comfort for this spiritual homelessness inside himself: 68 Разум мой вострепетал от сея мысли, и сердце мое далеко ее от себя оттолкнуло. Я человеку нашел утешителя в нем самом. «Отыми завесу с очей природного чувствования — и блажен буду» (Radishchev, Journey, 227). My reason trembled at the thought, and my heart thrust it far away from me. I found a comforter for man in man himself. “And blessed I will be — by pulling the shroud from the eyes of natural feeling.” Just as Lomonosov found the answer to the problems of the natural world by looking inside, Radishchev finds comfort inside, but inside the interior of man himself, rather than in the bowels of the Earth. This shift from the interior of the Earth to the interior of man represents a new preference for the particular over the abstract, a move away from totalizing systems towards individual realities. Radishchev merges an experiential sensibility, the idea that an emotional reaction to a lived or observed experience is the best way to achieve understanding, with the visual language of mystical theology. O.M. Goncharova notes the similarity of the language in Radishchev’s introduction to the visual language of contemporary theology about self- knowledge (самопознание), which also found the source of comfort being inside of man himself. This interior self-knowledge leads him to rise up in assistance of his fellow man. He is subject only to the moral imperative of his own vision and emotion. If in Lomonosov’s time, Enlightenment poets and sculptors transferred feelings of terror and awe from the theological realm to the immense natural realm, in particular geological features and monarchs, as a result of a new emphasis on sensory experience, philosophers and poets now transferred attention and exultation to the self. Lomonosov tried to think up vast systems for mapping the globe and extracting its resources, Radishchev cared about his own individual soul. This combination of the language of scientific exploration, mystical faith and philosophical sensibility gives Radishchev the tools to express a kind of optimism that he needs to arise from his despair, despite the overwhelming evidence, to battle the delusion of 69 hopelessness, and aid his fellow man. He, however, had to find a sympathetic soul to forgive his stylistic infelicities and share his compassion. Without such a person, his labors not would not bear ample fruit [не сугубый ли плод произойдет от подъятого мною труда?] (Radishchev, Journey, 227). His labors here were not directed by a divine autocrat, but by his own anxiety and conviction. The Epigraph and Dedication of Radishchev’s Journey as Indicative of Tension between Form and Content Where did Radischev find this person? There is both an epigraph and a dedication. In Lomonosov’s writings, the author’s gaze was directed into the bowels of the Earth in service of empire, and he dedicated them to the Empress, convinced that his scientific and poetic labors would bear ample fruit under her benevolent guidance. Radishchev’s epigraph seems to challenge any idea that autocracy could be the worthy object of his books’s dedication: “Чудище обло, озорно, огромно, стозевно и лаяй.” [“A monster corpulent, wicked, immense, hundred- headed and barking”] (Radishchev, Journey, 227) The quote is drawn from a section of Trediakovsky’s Телемахида in which the author describes the torments endured by evil people in the afterlife, in particular evil tsars. These rulers look in the mirror and see something more terrifying that the most vile monsters of mythology (Barskov, 479). Radishchev returns to this citation throughout The Journey. This epigraph shows how Radishchev feels about the current government of Russia. The book’s dedication, on the other hand, moves in the opposite direction, as Radishchev dedicates the book to a friend, Aleksei Mikhailovich Kutuzov, to whom he dedicated his secular hagiography of his friend Ushakov, as well. This establishes from the beginning that this text 70 was shaped by the persona of the traveler, and the language of friendship and sensibility (Kahn, 290), a literary universe where readership replaces patronage. Radishchev and his contemporaries were out to solve the problems of Russia according to what they find in their own interior reactions to their surroundings, not according to the demands of an autocratic patron. This contrast between epigraph and dedication shows the aims of the state and the forms invented to express them had become divorced from one another. Radishchev re-appropriated Lomonosov’s method of scientific investigation for his own aims, rather than purposes of which the Empress would approve. He continued to labor in an effort to uncover essential truths about existence, but as directed by himself and the needs of his friends. The Travelogue as a Conversational Genre After an introduction that sets up the text in line with scientific inquiry and personal civic duty, Radishchev sets off on a journey. The travelogue was an extremely popular form in the eighteenth century, and Radishchev integrates many of its popular devices: the opening address to friends, chance encounters and surprising conversations with coachmen and fellow travelers, sentimental praise of the countryside and condemnation of the city, and stopping in inns and manors for for lunch and coffee were all typical of the genre. Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy was Radishchev’s main inspiration, but there were thousands of other examples. Even Catherine the Great got in on the trend, writing her own Journey of Her Imperial Majesty to the Meridional Lands of Russia in 1787 (McConnell, 71-73). Even if Laurence Sterne directly inspired Radishchev to write The Journey, (de Voogd and Neubauer, 130), the text is in many important ways a direct response, formally and ideologically, to the ode. The travelogue as a genre generally had a vital role in defining what Europe was as an artistic space (Anderson, 115-120). Radishchev harshly criticizes Russia’s 71 social and political system and orientalizes it (Sobol, 242), undermining the certainty expressed in Catherine’s Наказ (“Russia is a European state”) and the emotional subtext of the ode, the establishment of and wonder at Russia as a European state (Pumpianskii, 54). Radishchev set out to learn about his own country as if it were a foreign one, as the travelogue was spurred by a desire to see the Other. As Sterne said, an English man does not travel to see English men (Sterne, 12). Radishchev’s narrator travelled in order to see something other than the self- satisfied, jubilant Europeanized segment of society who wrote odes for each other, treating provincial Russia more akin to how the way the abbé Raynal and other French materialist historians wrote about slave societies in the West Indies. Radishchev felt increasingly alienated from the government and the systems of state simplification it championed. Thus, his relationship to the earth was best depicted in a travelogue about the landscape and the people who populated it, a sort of loose and early ethnographic study rather than a scientific geological study or a programmatic ode. As a result, despite it being more literary and technically fictional, Radishchev’s text ends up being more particular and descriptive than Lomonosov’s aspirational, abstract projections. This line between the hard sciences and soft sciences and the arts will become increasingly rigid as authors feel more and more alienated from the scientific and governmental technologies structuring their lives. Along with its dedication to the Empress, the ode’s presumption of collective consumption by a small class of people is gone. Lomonosov’s odes were made to be presented orally before a gathered society, but Radishchev’s dedication shows that his text was meant for the private reader, a fellow traveler on the road to enlightenment. As well as freeing up Russian subjects to direct their labor to serve their own and their friends’ needs, this new, private address 72 opened up new, more complex avenues of interpretation and made the transparent correlation between sign and signified Lomonosov aspired to impossible. The Travelogue’s Conversation With the Ode Radishchev includes one actual ode in the travelogue, Вольность [Liberty]. He wrote the poem over 1781-1783 after reading abbé Raynal's The Revolution in America, and included pieces of it in the Journey. The content and formal presentation of the ode itself show ways in which the ode retained its original “oratorical” character (Tynianov, 49) while at the same time subverting the genre. Radishchev meets a traveler along his journey who has strong ideas about poetry, proper versification, and the Russian government, the first two of which he explicitly explains to the narrator, and the third he demonstrates through a private reading of an ode, called Liberty. In Liberty, Radishchev wrote a poem that is all at once a ceremonial ode, a paean to the idea of liberty and revolution, and at a call for revolution in Russia. In contrast to the rapturous reception of Lomonosov’s odes, Catherine II famously found his poem more threatening than Pugachev’s rebellion (Gukovskii, 519). In any case, the author of the poem voices the indignation of peasants must feel against nobles, encourages insubordination by soldiers, asks for the freedom of the serfs and even seems to evince hope that the peasants will revolt, as Pugachev did in his own childhood, maybe this time succeeding and beheading the Tsar! Just as Lomonosov praised the system of autocracy in his odes, Radishchev praises liberal forms of government, postulating that it is greater liberty, not enlightened autocracy that will unleash the genius of humanity (540), all while keeping the odic form pioneered by Lomonosov and practiced by Kheraskov and Derzhavin. 73 As I stated in the introduction, beginning this dissertation with an examination of Enlightenment thinkers is useful, because they frequently tell you directly what they are thinking. Here Radishchev’s thoughts on prosody are voiced indirectly through a sympathetic interlocutor. Radishchev’s traveling companion lauds Lomonosov for reforming versification, stripping it of the Polish syllabic system and instituting a syllabo-tonic system more natural for the Russian language. Breezing past mentions of other poets, his interlocutor portrays Lomonosov as ultimately responsible for the creation of Russian literature, an assessment Lomonosov himself would surely second. Lomonosov explained his theories in the Brief Guide to Eloquence and then demonstrated their use in odes, similar to how here Radishchev outlining his own personal critique of Russian versification and penning an ode in conformance to those theories. Radishchev’s friend is on his way to St. Petersburg to get his ode printed because in Moscow they refused to print it, saying the verses were clumsy and unclear and the meaning was unsuitable for our country (Journey, 355) He proposes that he read the ode to the narrator. Ani Kokobobo perspicaciously notes that by embedding an ode in the larger travelogue, Lomonosov stages a generic confrontation between the ode and the travelogue, and that the messy reading and experiencing of the ode fits with the larger artistic, and I would say, ideological project Radishchev undertakes in the Journey (Kokobobo, 614). Kokobobo notes how the broader prose narrative invades the ode. The classical poetic project Lomonosov undertook succeeded: literature had become an object in and of itself (Barthes, 21), but it had also become a subject of critique and debate in polemical prose. The preemptive critique of the Lomonosovian ode, the official state genre of the eighteenth century, and the continual interruption of the poem enact a disruption of the official high-modernist ideology of the empire. Radishchev’s dissatisfaction with imperial ideology is made explicit in the content of the poem 74 as it is read, but the simple reading an ode is also shown to be inadequate to express the conditions of reality. Generic space cannot accommodate real space. In Liberty’s critique of empire and disruption of the ode we see an organic synthesis of everyday and ideological depictions of the world similar to other late-enlightenment literature from Derzhavin, Fonvizin and Kapnist (Lededeva, 415), but in Radishchev it was created through the actual grafting of the genres of official state ideology onto narrative prose. In harmony with Lomonosov’s prescription that other sciences should inform the practice of poetry, the ode continued to be imbued with historical, philosophical, geographical and geological imagery as well. Lomonosov valued geography for its ability to subject “the vastness of the entire universe to a single gaze” (Ram, 66), language that makes it hard to tell if he was talking aesthetics or politics. Lomonosov’s gaze was cartographic and generalizing, reducing a large, rich and diverse space to a flat, lifeless ideograph (Kokobobo, 610). As Gogol was quoted saying in the epigraph to the introduction to this dissertartion, Lomonosov laid down general geographical outlines, only one sketch of a vast state, to map its boundaries with points and lines, leaving it to others to lay down the colors. Radishchev took it upon himself to lay down these colors, the particulars of his personal observations and feelings. Personal, Particular, Material, Geological The wide Lomonosovian scope of vision is important in setting the scene for Radishchev’s ode, but the semantic ties to Lomonosov’s odes are made clear in references, in particular in relation to economic prosperity and specific geological materials. Lomonosov colored in those specifics in his odes as well, but in a very different, much more optimist shade in than Radishchev. Radishchev draws attention to the government’s hypocrisy by once again referencing Treidakovsky’s good verse from the Телемахида about the many-headed monster. 75 The powers in charge claim heaven as their home and they command everyone to believe them against all visual evidence: И се чудовище ужасно, Как гидра, сто имея глав, Умильно и в слезах всечасно, Но полны челюсти отрав, Земные власти попирает, Главою неба досязает, – Его отчизна там, – гласит; Призраки, тьму повсюду сеет, Обманывать и льстить умеет, И слепо верить нам велит. (Radishchev, Journey, 356) Behold a horrible monster, hydra-like, with a hundred heads! It looks mild and its eyes are ever full of tears, but its jaws are full of venom. It tramples upon the earthly powers, and stretches its head up toward Heaven, which it claims as its native home. It sows false phantoms and darkness everywhere, and commands all to believe blindly. This kind of power must be held to account for having disobeyed natural law. This terrible, violent beast is different than the mythological allusions in Lomonosov of prosperous cities and pliant earth gods. When the despotic autocrat is finally hauled in front of a victorious, rebellious mass, the “lyric I” of the poem turns out to be that mass itself, and all of the deeds Lomonosov attributed to the monarch in his odes were now claimed as accomplishments by the people: Lomonosov, “Ода на день восшествия на престол ее величества государыни императрицы Елизаветы Петровны 1748 года,”: С способными ветрами споря, Терзать да не дерзнет борей Покрывшего судами моря, Пловущими к земли твоей (Radishchev, Journey, 361). The sea concealed with vessels, 76 He dares not to torment me with the cold north wind, The sea is covered with vessels, Sailing towards your lands. Radishchev, “Вольность”: Покрыл я море кораблями, Устроил пристань в берегах, Дабы сокровища торгами Текли с избытком в городах; (Radishchev, Journey, 359) I have covered the sea with ships I constructed a wharf on the coast so that treasures could flow In abundance through trade In his dedication of The First Principles of Mining or the Treatment of Ores Lomonosov credits the “abundance” to the success of labors divinely-directed by the sovereign. Radishchev sees the people as responsible for this material abundance. Lomonosov saw the empress herself as responsible for providing for the whole wide world as well as the peace and prosperity in small villages: Да всех глубокий мир питает; Железо браней да не знает, Служа в труде безмолвных сел. Да злобна зависть постыдится, И славе свет да удивится Твоих великодушных дел (Lomonosov, 25-30). Indeed, all the wide world is provided for; Iron that does not know battles, Serving [the needs] in labor of the quiet villages. Indeed, evil envy is now ashamed, And glory the world will be surprised By your magnanimous deeds. In Radishchev’s “Вольность,” the “lyric I” of the mass, the peasants themselves were responsible for a peaceful harvest through their won free labor: 77 Златая жатва чтоб бесслёзная Была оранию полезна; Он мог вещать бы за сохой: Бразды своей я не наемник, На пажитях своих не пленник, Я благоденствую тобой (Radishchev, Liberty, 6). A golden harvest so that the reaping Was tearless and useful He could have broadcast behind the plough: I am not a hireling in my reins, In my pastures I am no prisoner, I prosper thanks to you.   The labor Lomonosov portrays as painless, peaceful and voluntary would be in Radishchev’s eyes compulsory and coerced. Free labor would accomplish more than coerced slave labor. This contrast also extends to depictions of the landscape. Lomonosov mythologized the landscape in the form of ancient deities willing to give over their treasures peaceably, if a little fearfully: Ода на день восшествия на всероссийский престол ее величества государыни императрицы Елисаветы Петровны 1747 года: И се Минерва ударяет В верьхи Рифейски копием; Сребро и злато истекает Во всем наследии твоем. Плутон в расселинах мятется, Что россам в руки предается Драгой его металл из гор, Которой там натура скрыла; От блеску дневного светила (200-209). And behold, Minerva strikes, In the in the Ural Mountains’ mines; Silver and gold flow In all the your patrimony. Pluto in crevasses trembles, That precious metal from the mountains, is turned over into Russians hands That which nature has there concealed, From the glint of the light of day In Radishchev’s view, the populace peoples the armies the despot used for personal glorification, grows the crops that feed themselves and mine the metals of the earth’s bowels were taken. They 78 did this under their own consent and commanded the obedience of the governed, only to be betrayed by an avaricious and conscious-less Tsar: Своих кровей я без пощады Гремящую воздвигнул рать; Я медны изваял громады, Злодеев внешних чтоб карать; Тебе велел повиноваться, С тобою к славе устремляться; Для пользы всех мне можно все; Земные недра раздираю, Металл блестящий извлекаю На украшение твое. Ruthlessly, out of my own blood, I raised up a mighty host; I cast the bronze cannon with which to punish your external enemies. I commanded them to obey you and with you to strive for glory. For the common good, all things are permitted me. I tear up the bowels of the earth and extract the glittering metal for your adornment. In Lomonosov’s 1747 ode, the labors of Russian-born geniuses would extract metals from the fatherland’s depths that would serve to adorn everyone’s fortunate lives and protect everyone from unfortunate events. In Radishchev’s ode, on the other hand, tThe subjects of empire cast the cannons and commanded the armies that won imperial glory, and the Earth was torn up just to adorn the ruler. Russian subjects are in a similar position as the exploited inhabitants of America, who Radishchev describes earlier in The Journey as having their lands were despoiled, fertilized in blood and the bowels of their landscape torn up. Strangely enough, the evil autocrat in “Вольность” is behaving exactly as Lomonosov’s enlightened autocrat does in his odes. The difference is that material composing the autocrat’s realm, from its human subjects and to the metal in its bowels, are unwillingly exploited, and this labor only benefits one person. Utopia gives way to anti-utopia. Radishchev identifies as a material being with the material of the earth and sees that particular people, places and objects are being unjustly exploited for the glory of an autocrat. 79 The fruits of Russian subject’s labors are stolen from them, even though they are just tiny crumbs. Some of the fields between the Volga, Dniepr, Neva and Don that Lomonosov described as full of fruit are seen insufficiently full to feed those laboring in them, especially with those laborers getting only “crumbs”: Кровавым потом доставая Плод, кой я в пищу насадил, С тобою крохи разделяя, Своей натуги нещадил; Тебе сокровищей всех мало! (Radishchev, Journey, 359) "Garnering with bloody sweat the fruit I planted for sustenance, dividing my crumbs with you, I did not spare my strength. But to you all treasures are insufficient! Kokobobo describes Radishchev as “encoding the Lomonosovian odic landscape with new, negative meanings, and using its enormity to maximize his points about tyranny and the nation’s failings (Kokobobo, 613). He not only retains the form of the ode and its enormous scope, but also specific signifiers about land, labor and minerals. More than simply encoded with negative meanings, their previous meanings are reversed from optimistic to pessimistic, freeing to exploitative, prosperous to impoverished. Both the confrontation of two types of generic vision, odic and the prosaic, and the inversion of the formerly positive resonances of some the ode’s semantic signifiers are key elements of the Russian pastoral mode. Although this is not the kind of mature pastoral prose I will discuss in the third chapter of this dissertation, a contrast between the world-as-it-should-be and the world-as-it-is is an integral piece of the pastoral, usually with the world-as-it-should-be being represented by poetry, in particular the ode, and the world-as-it-is represented by prose. This is an embryonic example of the ode being deployed as an aspirational form of writing in 80 contrast to the fallen world of prose, in this case the travelogue. Radishchev’s reader, distraught by the world as it is, cannot even complete a full reading without intrusion and interruption. Although Kokobobo argues that the narrator’s experience of the road suggests a ‘phenomenological perspective,” and that this narrator is less interested in capturing things as they are and more interested in capturing his own experience Extrapolating from Kokobobo’s position, for Radishchev, one’s own sense perception is the way to truth. This is, as a particular truth that cuts through the overly optimistic, false odic perspective, erases differences and suffering for the purpose of “flattering kings.” Poetry based on a systematic and thorough self- knowledge and examination of the author’s surroundings ends up very different from poetry based on “rapture.” Personal, Particular, Material, Prosaic In two consecutive chapters of The Journey, “Едрово” аnd “Хотилов,” several of the contrasts constitutive of the pastoral are on full display. In the first, “Едрово,” the narrator centers the contrast between city and country. Radishchev sees a crowd of young women on the side of the postal road and marvels at their physical constitution, beginning with their teeth: The crowd consisted of more than thirty women. They were all in holiday attire, with their necks open, their legs bare, their arms akimbo, their dresses tucked up in front under their belts, their long shirts white, their faces happy, their cheeks glowing with health. Natural charm, although roughened by heat and cold, is delightful without any false front of sophistication. The beauty of youth was visible here in full splendor, on their lips smiles or hearty laughter, and behind them rows of teeth whiter than purest ivory. Teeth which would drive our fashionable ladies frantic. Come hither, my dear Moscow and Petersburg ladies, look at their teeth and learn from them how they keep them white. They have no dentists. They do not scour away the gleam of their teeth every day with toothbrushes and powder. Stand mouth to mouth with any one of them you choose: not one of them will infect your lungs with her breath (Radishchev, Journey, 302). Despite the fancy methods of the city for enhancing health and beauty, these village-raised women have better teeth and healthier bodies than Moscow or Petersburg sophisticates. 81 Radishchev traces this urban tooth decay back to a moral one: sexual promiscuity and the resulting general disease. While yours, yes, yours may infect them with the germ…of a disease…I am afraid to say what disease, because, though you may not blush, you will be infuriated. Am I not telling the truth? The husband of one of you runs after all the sluts, and, having caught a disease, goes right on drinking, eating, and sleeping with you; another one of you is pleased to have her own yearly, monthly, weekly, or, God forbid! daily lovers (Radishchev, Journey, 303). The moral corruption of the city, which results in the oppression and exploitation of the peasants, also etches itself on the bodies of the degenerate urban elites in the form of the symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases. One of these sturdy village beauties, straight-limbed, ruddy and fit, with child-bearing hips, attracts Radishchev’s attention. Radishchev tries to attract this Annushka’s attention, but she is wary of him as a traveler from the city, afraid he will take advantage of her sexually. Radishchev, despite his creepy fixation on her physical features, claims his interest springs only from love for village women and interest in human experience. Similar to the heroine of Karamzin’s Poor Liza, this Annushka represents a pure, loving idealized woman, distinct from the women of the city who are ruined by their own and their husbands’ corruption. She is threatened everywhere with corruption, from her boyfriend who wants to go work in the city and will come back lazy, promiscuous and drunk, to the nobleman who infects those who work in his house with debauchery and pestilence. This detailed and grotesque examination of a particular peasant girl’s situation in a particular field sets up a disjuncture between the world as it is imagined in the capital and the world as it actually was, resulting in a nostalgia for the countryside, a precondition for the pastoral. Radishchev was beginning to fill in the colors of the vast landscape onto which Lomonosov laid down a general geographical outline. Radishchev wound along a dusty postal road through the boundaries, points and lines Lomonosov plotted from on high. Radishchev represents a move away from the 82 universal Enlightenment preference for the universal over the particular. His book is an early example of a reaction against increasing power of state-sponsored systems of simplification manifesting results in literary forms, the landscape and governmental institutions. In addition to his pointed attack on the regime, the author is express a vague nascent desire to return to the vernacular, the complex and the idiosyncratic away from the broad, legible and official. The climate of growing skepticism about universals was represented in philosophy by Locke, Hobbes and Hume, and in literature by emerging genres including the travelogue, the lyric and the novel, which, although staged, gave greater weight to the personal, accidental and the “real.” (Sundberg, 77). Radishchev, as a poet, travel writer and philosopher, instantiated this development across many disciplines. In the countryside and its women, Radishchev sees a potential redemption for Russia. Even if she could not redeem all of Russia, the lovely Anyuta could save him: Anyuta, Anyuta, you have turned my head! Why did I not make your acquaintance fifteen years ago? Your frank innocence, which is proof against the audacity of passion, would have taught me to walk in the way of chastity. Why was not the first kiss of my life the one I pressed upon your cheek in my soul's ecstasy? The influence of your living virtue would have penetrated to the depths of my heart, and I would have escaped the shameful acts which have filled my life. I would have kept away from the loathsome hirelings of lust, would have honored the nuptial couch, would not have violated the domestic bond in my carnal insatiability; virginity would have been for me a holy of holies, and I would not have dared to lay violent hands on it. Ο my Anyutushka! Be ever near us and teach us by your unconstrained innocence. I know that you will lead back into the way of virtue him who has begun to turn aside, and strengthen him who is tending to go astray (Radishchev, Journey, 307). This melancholy and nostalgia, the idea that city life and its progress and decadence had ruined men, became a more widespread conviction and fueled the popularity of pastoral prose. The Empire of Lomonsov’s odes, where subjects were comfortable in domestic labors, science 83 improved lives in the wilderness and the bustle of the city is shown to be false. Disease and decay attack the city, corrupt nobleman and mistrust haunt the countryside. In “Хотилов,” Radishchev sets up another contrast, here a contrast between Russia’s stated values and its current reality, a contrast drawn out by casting the semantic contents of the ode in prose. Radishchev sees Russia as a great place because its organization is not based on superstition or prejudice but an inner feeling [внутреннем нашем чувствовании] of God’s generosity (Radishchev, Journey, 311). Radishchev echoes Lomonosov’s wonder at Russia’s inner peace: “Наслаждаяся внутреннею тишиною, внешних врагов неимея; доведя общество до вышшаго блаженства гражданскаго сожития [It enjoys inner tranquility, lacking any external enemies; guiding society to the highest bliss of civil coexistence] (Radishchev, Journey, 312). Lomonosov credits this peace to the two goddesses given to rule Russia over the past century. He writes: Внемлите все пределы света И ведайте, что может Бог! Воскресла нам Елисавета: Ликует церьковь и чертог. Она! или Екатерина! Она из обоих едина! Ее и бодрость и восход Златой наукам век восставит И от презрения избавит Возлюбленный Российский род. Российский род, коль ты ужасен В полях против своих врагов, Толь дом твой в недрах безопасен: Ты вне гроза, ты внутрь покров. Полки сражая, вне воюешь; Но внутрь без крови торжествуешь. Ты буря там, здесь тишина. [All of you] heed to all the ends of the Earth And through God what is possible! 84 Elizabeth resurrected us: The Church and the palace rejoice. Her [Elizabeth]! or Catherine! She is a unity of both! Her vivacity and ascension She will lift the sciences to a golden age And will deliver the beloved Russian family From scorn. Russian race, if you are terrifying On the fields versus your enemies, Then your home in the bowels you are harmlessis safe: You are a thunderstorm outside, you are shrouded protected inside. Armies battle, outside you are at war; But inside, without blood you are triumphant. You are a storm out there, in here is tranquility (1-20) What appears on its surface an orderly, tranquil society to Lomonosov from his odic heights, appears to Radishchev from the same odic remove but a giant military camp: Воззрим, на предлежащую взорам нашим долину. Что видим мы? Пространный воинский стан. Царствует в нем тишина повсюду. Все ратники стоят в своем месте. Наивеличайший строй, зрится, в рядах их. Единое веление, единое руки манование начальника, движет весь стан, и движет его стройно. Но можем ли назвать воинов блаженными? (Radishchev, Journey,316) Let us look at the valley which thatspreads out before our view. What do we see? A great military camp. Silence reigns everywhere in it. All the warriors stand in their places. The most precise order may be seen in their ranks. One order, one motion of the commander's hand, sets the whole camp in motion, and moves it in perfect order. But can we say the soldiers are blessed? Radishchev underlines the importance of probing the inner character of entities to discern the truth. Although Russia may seem tranquil from the remove of odic distance, with a closer look, it seems just one massive military camp. Two-thirds of the individuals in it are slaves and almost all are oppressed. With a look at these particular personalities, whether they be the beautiful Annushka or an anonymous odist trying to publish his poem on liberty, the odic vision is spoiled. Just as Like the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna in Tynianov’s novel, Radishchev found it impossible to “calculate the contentments” of this broadly-sketched out realm. Radishchev’s 85 emotional responses to injustice mandate that he recount examples of particular, personal and accidental realities, which strains the broad, optimistic vision of the ode to the breaking point. Radishchev escapes the violence of the tight constraints of odic structure and the tight constraints of imperial authority, both too strict to express his personal disgust. What fails as a “late- eighteenth century organic synthesis of everyday and ideological images” succeeds as a harsh critique, in part because of its failure to be formally coherent. This prosaic deconstruction of effusive odic optimism through a profusion of negative, grotesque detail that culminated in absence anticipates the Gogolian grotesquerie of Dead Souls. Personal, Particular, Geological, Mythical In “Вольность,” “Едрово,” “Хотилов” and the rest of The Journey, Radishchev uses a pieces of a genre created for the official glorification for the state, a state which aspired to universal experience, to express his own particular ideological and experiential perspective. This personalization of a national myth made to laud the state’s successes brutally accentuates its failures, especially when Radishchev exceeds or escapes its confines, as he does by interrupting the reading of “Вольность” and prosaically describing the state as a military camp. It is underlined by the text’s pretensions to documentary reality: by ascribing authorship of sections of the text to acquaintances along the way, he guarantees their authenticity (Kokobobo, 618), and underscores his commitment to gaining knowledge through direct experience. In the last segment of The Journey, “Слово о Ломоносове,” the same section where he criticizes Lomonosov’s “flattering of kings,” Radishchev performs an opposite action, taking a personal narrative and mythologizing it rather than grounding it in documentary devices. He retells Lomonosov’s particular experience as generalized myth for enlightenment, beginning with his geological explorations and ending with his poetic accomplishments. 86 Radishchev wrote “Слово о Ломоносове” in 1780 and, just like the ode “Вольность,” it was conceived as a stand-alone piece and inserted into the completed Journey for its publication ten years later. Usually translated as “Eulogy for Lomonosov” or “A Speech on Lomonosov,” the last chapter of his travelogue was written in accordance with the standards of classical language laid out by Lomonosov. Lomonosov laid out four varieties of “public speech” in his Brief Guide to Eloquence: sermon, panegyric, eulogy and academic speech. Radishchev’s “Слово” could be considered a panegyric, very similar structurally to panegyrics written by Lomonosov about Peter the Great, as a long list of “his laudable living qualities.” (Kochetkova, Krasnorechiia 18- 21) Although the “Слово” is distinct from the rest of the narrative stylistically, from 1780-1790 a well-defined culture of civic rhetoric formed in Russia based on the national classical tradition (9). Natalia Kochetkova asserts that in his effort to gain a deeper understanding of Lomonosov’s works, Radishchev himself appropriated those principles into his own rhetoric. Radishchev’s panegyric, semantically is higher style than even Lomonosov, packed tighter with slavonicisms and high-flown language than Lomonosov’s panegyrics were (Gukovskii, 187), and, as Lomonosov would, he drew his inspiration from rapture, not disciplined self-examination. At the same time, he highlighted the novelty of the “Слово,” which tried to retain the power and social resonance of a panegyric or an ode while rejecting the traditional servility of those genres. The text is framed by typical trendy pre-romantic devices, however, ones not in Lomonosov’s Brief Guide to Eloquence: the solitary evening walk, a cemetery visit, and meditations on death and mortality. But Radishchev quickly turns back to a classical rhetorical device championed by Lomonosov and used in the very beginning of The Journey: a direct address to an interlocutor. This interlocutor, however, can still be assumed to be his friend Kutuzov, meaning it is a more direct, person and concrete addressee than the usual Empresses, favorites and generals awaiting 87 Lomonsov’s odes. Radishchev is again toying with conventions, taking a high poetic genre and complicating it for his own purposes. The opening, in a graveyard, returns Radishchev to a familiar topic of contemplation: man, mortality and immortality. Here, he finds a ways a person can aspire to immortality outside of his material soul: Lomonosov, as the creator of Russian poetic speech, will live as long as Russian is spoken: Your word, living now and evermore in your works, the word of the Russian nation, regenerated by you in our tongue, will fly on the lips of the people beyond the illimitable horizon of the centuries. Let the elements in compound fury burst open the abysses of the earth and swallow up this magnificent city whence thy loud song was borne to the far corners of Russia; let some furious conqueror destroy even the name of your beloved country: so long as the Russian word shall strike an ear, you will live and will not die. When it is no longer heard, your fame will be extinguished. It is glorious, glorious thus to die. But if anyone knew how to calculate the measure of this influence, if the finger of prophecy could point to a limit for your name, would it not be eternity? (Radishchev, Journey, 380). But the main discussion of Lomonosov’s contribution to the Russian language comes earlier, in the section surrounding “Вольность.” (Kulakova, O Radishcheve, 236) In Man, On His Mortality and Immortality, Radishchev points not to language, but the strength of man’s desire for knowledge as a characteristic that distinguishes him from animals and plants, specifically the desire to travel to the center of the Earth: “Имеет ли мысленность стремление к центру земли, того не ведаю; но питание, пророждение, жизнь, любовь и ненависть что суть? [If the rational faculty has an aspiration to the center of the Earth, that I know not; but as for the essence of nutrition, procreation, life, love and hate?]” (Radishchev, О человеке, 85) Here again, this desire for knowledge is what should be praised in Lomonosov, a drive that drove Lomonosov away from his parents’ home in a remote village, to Moscow and to Germany, where he learned about mining. There, he learned under Wolff, who taught him to 88 think logically and rationally, to draw conclusions based on observable evidence. His desires drove him further on to “the altar of nature” and “opened its mysteries unto him.” “Metallurgy and mineralogy, related sciences, attracted his attention,” and he strove to learn them (Journey). The desire to penetrate the center of the Earth, put forth by Lomonosov himself as a potential source of great knowledge and riches, allegorized by Radishchev in Man, On His Mortality and Immortality as a characteristic separating rational man from animals, is now described by Radishchev as the first step towards civilization. Radishchev zooms out to the beginning of human societies, and perhaps influenced by Adam Smith’s theory of the origin of political economy (Kahn, 280), he traces the origins of money to an original scarcity in this primitive society. Metals were important to the very beginning of human civilization: Изобилие плодов и произведений понудило людей менять их на таковые, в коих был недостаток. Сие произвело торговлю. Великие в меновном торгу затруднения побудили мыслить о знаках, всякое богатство и всякое имущество представляющих. Изобретены деньги. Злато и сребро, яко драгоценнейшие по совершенству своему металлы и доселе украшением служившие, преображены стали в знаки, всякое стяжание представляющие. И тогда только, поистине тогда возгорелась в сердце человеческом ненасытная сия и мерзительная страсть к богатствам, которая, яко пламень, вся пожирающи, усиливается, получая пищу (Radishchev, Journey, 383). The abundance of fruits and products forced people to exchange them for those things, of which there was a lack. These things led to trade. The great complications in trade “in kind” prompted people to think about symbols that could represent any kind of wealth or property. Money was invented. Gold and silver, as the most precious metals in terms of their perfection and to this point serving as decoration, were transformed into signs that could represent any accumulation. And only then, then was truly kindled in the human heart this insatiable and this abominable passion for wealth, which, like an all-consuming flame, increases as it finds fuel.” This drive to the center of the earth after gold and silver was what separated man from animal, and although curiosity was a product of high reason, it now appeared an insatiable and “abominable passion for wealth, which, like an all-consuming flame, increases as it finds fuel.” 89 Gold and silver were chosen for their universal legibility, signs that functioned how Lomonosov’s poetic word aspired to: transparently and clearly. For Radishchev, Lomonosov was just as important as a geologist as a political thinker or a poet, and just as he criticized various aspects of Lomonosov’s aesthetic theories and praise of autocracy, he also saw the terrifying eaffects of man’s continual search for precious metals on human beings and on the landscape. In his retelling of the story of economic and material progress, Radishchev was obviously parroting western liberal thinkers of the time like Adam Smith, who were coming to view markets as a “natural” economic system. Between his references to a Rousseauan state of nature “before” currency and a utilitarian justification for currency, Radishchev was formulating an explanation for political power quite different than one Lomonosov would have, but both proceeded from the principle that political and economic power sprung from control over the earth and its resources. Whereas Lomonosov described an immense wealth produced by nature just hidden by a thin layer of Earth, possible to reach with small effort and expenditure, enticing enough to draw us away from our natural home, Radishchev sees men driven away from their natural home, living like moles, shortening their lives by inhaling poisonous vapors and destroying the Earth: Тогда, презрев свет солнечный, живый нисходил в могилу и, расторгнув недра земная, прорывал себе нору, подобен земному гаду, ищущему в нощи свою пищу. Тако человек, сокрываясь в пропастях земных, искал блестящих металлов и сокращал пределы своея жизни на половину, питаяся ядовитым дыханием паров, из земли исходящих. Но как и самая отрава, став иногда привычкою, бывает необходимою человеку в употреблении, так и добывание металлов, сокращая дни ископателей, не отвергнуто ради своея смертоносности; а паче изысканы способы добывать легчайшим образом большее число металлов по возможности (Radishchev, Journey, 322). Then, scorning the light of the sun, living man went down into the grave, and, tearing up the vitals of the earth, dug a burrow for himself like the mole that seeks its food by night. Thus man, burying himself in the depths of the earth, searched for the glittering metals and shortened the duration of his life by half through breathing in the poisonous vapors 90 that rose from the earth. But even as a poison itself may become a habit and seeming necessity for man through constant use, so the mining of metals, although it shortens the lives of the miners, has not been rejected on account of its deadliness; on the contrary, methods have been devised for the extraction of the greatest possible quantity of metals in the easiest possible way. Radishchev then flashes to Lomonsov’s own individual place in the myth of man’s progress he has sketched out, a place just as ambivalent in the particular as it is in the general. In one of the longest sections of the whole chapter, Radishchev imagines a further sojourn, where Lomonosov goes into the breach in the earth, through which metals are plucked from its bowels: “Сего-то хотел познать Ломоносов деятельно и для исполнения своего намерения отправился в Фрейберх. Мне мнится, зрю его пришедшего к отверстию, чрез которое истекает исторгнутый из недр земных металл.” (Radishchev, Journey, 384). (Of this [the extraction of metals] Lomonosov concertedly wanted to know and for these intentions’ uses [he] went to Freiberg. It seems to me, I shall behold him having arrived to a chasm [in the earth], through which pours metal plucked from the bowels of the earth.”) This language is very similar to Radishchev’s vivid description of how a plant withers and dies when its roots are torn from the bowels of the earth, in Man, His Mortality and Immortality, hinting at a violence and lack of consent in the mining of these metals. Radishchev continues to imagine Lomonosov’s march down through each layer successive layer of earth as reaching a higher level of knowledge. The desire for knowledge and for metals invokes thoughts of the evils committed in pursuit of the abstract signifier of money, the harm done by exploiting nature in order to exploit fellow human beings, and the danger of his quest, but Lomonosov presses on, confident that he can steward use of these resources efficiently: 91 Исполнил первый шаг; — что делаешь? — вопиет ему рассудок. — Неужели отличила тебя природа своими дарованиями для того только, чтобы ты употреблял их на пагубу своея собратии? Что мыслишь, нисходя в сию пропасть? Желаешь ли снискать вящее искусство извлекати сребро и злато? Или не ведаешь, какое в мире сотворили они зло? Или забыл завоевание Америки?.. Но нет, нисходи, познай подземные ухищрения человека и, возвратясь в отечество, имей довольно крепости духа подать совет зарыть и заровнять сии могилы, где тысящи в животе сущие погребаются (Radishchev, Journey, 384). He took a first step — “What are you doing?” Reason cries out to him. Has nature favored you with her gifts only that you may use them to harm your fellow men? What are you thinking of as you descend into this abyss? Are you trying to discover a better method of mining silver and gold? Do you not know what harm they have done in the world? Or have you forgotten the conquest of America? . . . But no, go down, learn the subterranean devices of man, and, when you return to your country, have enough firmness of spirit to advise the closing and leveling of these graves in which thousands are buried alive." Lomonosov’s geological explorations act as an allegory for all human progress, which, as the rest of the narrative has shown, Radishchev views negatively. Just as the desire for goods spurred the invention of money, which then spurred more greed, the desire for the base symbolic commodities of gold and silver caused massacres in colonial America, which Radishchev had earlier compared to the kind of subjugation of serfs in Russia. All of progress, exploiting the gifts of nature, can be harnessed to do good or to do harm, and what Radishchev demonstrated throughout The Journey is that he thought it was doing mostly harm. It is Lomonosov who is missing a step in the investigatory process: he fails to search his feelings to see if his research was in the interest of mankind, or if it would just be digging more graves. Despite the temptations of evil and Radishchev’s own identification of knowledge with light (Levitt, 405), Lomonosov feels at home under the Earth’s surface, forgetting the appeal of light altogether, just as he predicted he would in The First Principles: “Трепещущ нисходит в отверстие и скоро теряет из виду живоносное светило. Желал бы я последовать ему в подземном его путешествии, собрать его размышления и представить их в той связи и тем 92 порядком, какими они в разуме его возрождалися.” [Tremblingly he descends into the abyss and soon loses sight of the light-giving light of the sun.] (Radishchev, Journey, 384) In what is almost a reverse cave metaphor, the progress of the state is depicted as in contradiction to the goals of the Enlightenment: the pursuit of knowledge, when done in order to strengthen the state, cast weapons of war, or exploit the labor of slaves, leads only into darkness and death. This is no doubt how Lomonosov, who referred to himself as a simple laborer and slave to the empress who worked in poetry and geology to establish universal principles, would want to be remembered. But he is doing more than simply remembering, here. In his odes and scientific writings, Lomonosov tried to elevate Russia as a the place worthy of myth, full of rich geological treasures, mythical personas, abundant harvests, and peaceful harmony. He forged a poetic language fit for expressing these optimistic convictions about the state of the Russian Empire from a distance in broad bright strokes. Radishchev was the first major author to take this language, in particular the conventions of its scientific and odic devices, and use it to express his own ideology. Fittingly, the those conventions were warped as the dissatifisfaction with other systems was best expressed by showing the inadequacy of the creative linguistic one. In accordance with his use of this mythic language for personal purposes, when telling Lomonosov’s own story, he elevated the personal to the level of a myth, the brave scientist stepping boldly into a dark deadly cave in pursuit of progress. The First Step Utilizing originally odic and scientific discourses was a uniquely effective way for Radishchev to express his own beliefs. Radishchev was nothing if not sincere — he plumbed the depths of his soul to try to find the truth. His skepticism seemed to come from his honest acknowledgement of his own ignorance. He wanted to, as he says in The Journey, remove the 93 scales from the ruler’s eyes and improve Russia’s governance. As Lomonosov designed it, the ode was genre made to reify state ideology in literature, an expression of the natural order in a natural language with transparent correlations between signifier and signified. This linguistic theory was a direct result of the naturphilosophical assurance that nature’s puzzles could be accounted for in sure, simple ways (Reill, 29). This assurance created an atmosphere where scientists and poets argued for a direct relationship between the sign and the signified, signs were “transformed into arbitrary yet specific symbols that could be ordered arranged and manipulated by sovereign human reason, freed by definition from the contingencies of matter.” (28) If those correlations were not perfect and transparent, if certain “contingencies” got in the way of their manipulation by human reason, they had to be straightened into conformance with the broad lines of the state, no matter the harm that would cause to particular individuals or landscapes. Radishchev saw that ideology as harmful and the government as corrupt and bloodthirsty, and so the best way to refute it was by re-appropriating and subverting the ode, refuting and dismantling the official ideology to by filling this official literary form with his own ideological content. At the same time, Radishchev’s aspiration was similar to Lomonosov’s: to bring reality in line with his ideology, even if his ideology was opposed to the early enlightenment desire to maximize all its resources and use them for the enlargement of the state (Dukes, 179). Radishchev’s admiration for Lomonosov is explicit in his panegyric to him and implicit in how his work follows Lomonosovian scientific and literary models. We are reminded here of Lotman’s analysis of Radishchev’s suicide. Radishchev, facing no immediate physical danger, committed suicide in order to complete the drama of his own life. Radishchev read Lomonosov’s life as a myth, an act of God-like creation, thrusting his hand into space and giving Russia science and poetry. Radishchev probably killed himself in order to be a myth on his own terms, and he 94 succeeded. Here we are hundreds of years later, assessing his life and work as he did Lomonosov’s. This was just the first major example of an author using the motifs and themes from the script of the eighteenth-century ode to undermine the official ideology of the state, however, and later authors had less direct societal critiques. They aspired less to being reality in line with their ideology. Lyric poets took the semantic and symbolic language of the ode and reappropriated it to express their own personal disappointment as discontent. Many of them lived out short, tumultuous existences, ending their lives in ridiculous duels, proving their inability to exist within the framework of society, just as they had been incapable of writing within official literary frameworks. They were not after mass change or revolution, but personal expression. Later, pastoral authors exploited the same contrasts of the city and the country, past and present, and tradition and progress that bubble to the surface of the travelogue to show a persistent dissatisfaction and spiritual homelessness. These pastoral authors were even more pessimistic about their circumstances, looking back nostalgically over their wasted lives and wasted landscapes. The generalized hope Lomonosov painted across the landscape in broad strokes in his geological treatises and odes, identifying veins of metals and great goddesses, was replaced by superfluous men like Goncharov’s Oblomov, who “morbidly felt himself as if if covered in a grave, [as if] some kind of fine, bright beginning, was maybe now already dead, or it lay like gold in the bowels of a mountain, and it was long past time for that gold to become money in circulation.” (Goncharov, 100-101). What they were superfluous to was these standardizing state systems of simplification; their interior world clashed with the increasingly regimented world around them, alienating them from the government and the practice of the hard sciences. Dissatisfaction with newly visible and increasingly powerful symbols of the state in 95 governance, the landscape and personal lives was expressed most potently by twisting the literary language fabricated as one of these very systems. A Conversation Between Poets, Mountains and Genres: Lomonosov, Pushkin, and Lermontov […] The secret Strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, Inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, if to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? “Mont Blanc,” Percy Shelley (139-140) In the nineteenth century, the popularity of the ceremonial ode faded amongst writers and the burgeoning reading public; it was supplanted by the lyric poem. The ode changed from leading poetic genre to museum piece (Alekseeva, 6). Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, the two most influential practitioners of the Romantic lyric, longed for an world that diverged significantly not only from the ideal empire of the ode, but also from the world they experienced, which increasingly seemed to be a world of rigid personal and political boundaries, government repression, and individual loss. Poets lost faith in foundational eighteenth-century ideas, belief “in inherent goodness, in the unnaturalness of falsity, and […] the eventual triumph of good in the world” (Lotman, Lie, 48). The neoclassical desire for wholeness and universality was abandoned in favor of an aesthetics of heterogeneity, fragmentariness and personal lament. The semantic and connotative contours of Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s poetry, however, were 96 neither torn exclusively from trendy Western European poetry nor created sui generis. Despite their rebelliousness and relatively-broad appeal, the two poets drew heavily on that “museum piece” of the ceremonial ode. The references to odes in their poetry heightened a tension between private languages and classification schemes, showing the pressure of a new sense of space on existing linguistic and narrative structures (Jameson, x). I will argue that components of the ode, closely linked to eighteenth-century values, became a literary subsystem capable of signifying disillusionment, pessimism and discontent when integrated into the spatial languages of Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s lyric poetry, presaging the stylistic heterogeneity and ideological juxtapositions that defined the novel. The Publicly Governmental Ode As Natalia Alekseeva notes, by the early nineteenth century, the ode had become identified primarily with the values of the imperial government (Alekseeva, 8). It sported a thematic reverence for the monarch, strict formal guidelines, and a subservient catering to court values and female figures of authority (Golburt, 31), in addition to a faith in an immanent progress resulting from the ordered subjugation of the landscapes and peoples of the Russian Empire. This Enlightenment-era utopian optimism was inextricably linked to the genre of the ceremonial ode; odists optimistically aspired to structure poetic space in a similar way that the the government’s efforts to structure physical and administrative spaces. The content and form of the ode were determined by its intended function, which was to bolster the legitimacy of the autocracy. The ode was further conditioned by its intended audience, the imperial court. Viktor Zhivov claims that although from a contemporary perspective, the ode might seem like a tiny academic concern, the general question of the ode was central to the eighteenth-century plan to create a new literary language (Zhivov, 207). Until late in the eighteenth century, most 97 discussions about literature focused on the function of poetic speech (Tynianov, 50). Russian poets did not champion the ode as a genre because of a demand from a reading public or obvious stylistic superiority, but because it effectively validated and celebrated the aims of the government (Alekseeva, 7). The Russian autocracy championed enlightenment values for their immediate practical benefits (Walicki, 1), and the ode provided these in the realm of literary art: it was a vital piece of an integrated cultural and political project. The eighteenth-century plan to create a new literary language was just one of many state- sponsored systems of standardization. The ode championed the idea that poetry and the state were inseparable (Zhivov, 208). Rationalizing poetry helped the Russian state in forwarding the progress of reason and enlightenment across all society (208). Odes, as verbal monuments to the achievements of the Empress, the state and, to a lesser extent, the poet himself, were either publicly performed or at least simulated public performance by including references to the addressee, the audience, and sometimes even their expected reaction within the poems (von Geldern, 932). The ode was not a private meditation but a public celebration. In these public celebrations of the autocracy, odists, like other government functionaries, explicated the ideal relationship of the state to its citizens and their surroundings. The Russian autocrat was portrayed as having total control over both citizens and natural resources, all of which served the interests of progress. Moreover, structuring the lives of citizens, the landscape and the literary language were all a part of the same revolution, striving towards universal progress for all mankind. In Lomonosov’s odes, the optimism foundational to the eighteenth-century worldview is on full display, from the sublime perspective, the deification of monarchs past and present, a triumphant harmony of Empire with the landscape, and a rosy view of the present and future. It 98 was related to other state-sponsored systems involved in subjugating the landscape and its peoples: the hard sciences, geology being important to Lomonosov, in particular, and statecraft. Romantic poets felt an alienation from these discourses just as they felt alienated from the world depicted in the ode, seeing rocks, mountains and subaltern peoples as individual subjectivities with whom they could identify more than objects in a world in need of structuring. Governmental and literary understandings of space become more clearly defined and interconnected: in the future, disillusionment with the government often meant disillusionment with the literary form invented to praise it, branding a lyric as a “pessimistic” form in reaction to the “optimistic” odic form that preceded it in Russian literary culture. Sublime Perspective Harsha Ram argues that a key element of Lomonosov’s poetry was “the imperial sublime.” Ram understands the spatial character of genre, and maps the ode along horizontal and vertical axes. He focuses heavily on a moment of mediation, best represented in the poet’s transit along a vertical axis that enables the poet the highest perspective that submission to imperial power can provide. The extremely wide, sublime perspective allowed the poet can reveal a wide, almost universal horizontal perspective of the landscape. On the way to describing this dynamic, Ram outlines a complex nexus, articulating the sublime as “a moment of mediation serving to negotiate and establish analogies between the formal problems of genre, lyric voice, lexical choice, and prosody and the ideology of national specificity that Russia will vindicate, yet also complicate, through conquest.” (Ram, 48). Deification of the Once-and-Future Monarch Necessary to this submission is the extreme deification of the monarch. The sublime as an aesthetic category is reliant on submission to God, nature or another outside force (Klonk, 99 603). In the Russian context, the submission to imperial power bestowed by God, precedes and enables submission to everything else. In other words, submission becomes an aesthetic category (Ram, 48). In “Ода на день восшествия на престол Ея Величества Государыни Императрицы Елисаветы Петровны 1748 года,” Lomonosov makes clear his place in the imperial order with an extended metaphor about bees. Russian subjects are drones, toiling away in an iridescent, harmonious scene: В луга, усыпанны цветами, Царица трудолюбных пчел, Блестящими шумя крылами, Летит между прохладных сел; Стекается, оставив розы И сотом напоенны лозы, Со тщанием отвсюду рой, Свою Царицу окружает И тесно вслед ее летает Усердием вперенный строй (Lomonosov, 61-70) In meadows, strewn with flowers, A Queen of hard-working bees, With shiny wings rustling, [Who] fly between cool villages; Flocking, leaving the roses And vines filled with honey, Swarm from everywhere with zeal, [They] surround their Tsarina And fly behind her closely In an eager, admiring stream. 1 The idea of work frequently appears in Lomonosov’s poetry. Lomonosov expressed the faith that all was possible under the direction of the empress (Orlov, 117) who was leading their “admiring stream.” Broadly speaking, scientists and poets of the era shared a faith in progress, large and small, across all disciplines and aspects of life (G.S. Rousseau, 784). The labors of Russian 1 Unless otherwise noted, translations of these deep-cuts from Lomonosov were made by me, with patient help from Tatiana Akishina, Olga Selziaznova, and Sarah Pratt. Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Oda na den’ vosshestviia na presto Eia Velichestva Gosudarni Imperatristy Elisavety Petrovny 1748 goda.” In Pol’noe sobranie socheninie. Tom 8. Moskva: Izdael’stvo akademii hauk SSSR. 1959. p. 215-225 100 subjects all served the goals laid out by the enlightened autocrat. The world of bees mirrors the government, which mirrors the entire universe. This reflects the general eighteenth-century conviction that the world was composed of a totality of similar structures, each eternal and static through time, not the discontinuous and continually-changing series that came to typify Romantic thought. Luba Golburt identifies this as cyclical “natural” time, where each hero or monarch renews the past in the present (Golburt, 116). It was not just the metaphorical bees witnessing the progress: Lomonosov claimed that all of Europe saw Russia’s newfound glory. Europe itself, who had laid out the formal and philosophical vision of the ode first as part of its nation’s early modern programs, had slumped into colic, only to be overtaken. Russia was an empire of varied peoples united under the enlightened vision of the autocrat, united by her vision and in her person: Европа и весь мир свидетель, Народов разных миллион, Колика ныне добродетель Российский украшает трон. О как сие нас услаждает, Что вся вселенна возвышает, Монархиня, Твои дела! Народов Твоея державы Различна речь, одежда, нравы, Но всех согласна похвала (Lomonosov, 111-120). Europe and the world are witness, Of peoples of varied millions, Size is now a virtue Russian embellishes the throne. Oh how this delights us, That the whole cosmos exalts, Monarch, Your deeds! The peoples of Your land Different in speech, clothing, manners, But all united to praise. 101 Individual subjective characteristics are superseded by the more important category of subject. The twenty-four-stanza ode climaxes in the beginning of the fifteenth stanza: Тебя, Богиня, возвышают Души и тела красоты, Что в многих разделясь блистают, Едина все имеешь Ты. Мы видим, что в Тебе единой Великий Петр с Екатериной К блаженству нашему живет. Похвал пучина отворилась! Смущенна мысль остановилась, Что слов к тому недостает, (Lomonosov, 141-150) The beauty of your soul and body elevate you, Goddess What in many, shine divided Only you have it all, We see that in You Is a unity of Peter and Catherine, Who live together for our bliss The depths of praise open up The confused mind halts That words for this do not suffice Not only is there is a direct connection between the body of empress and the groups of people who make up her empire, Elizabeth is a unified continuation of Peter’s and Catherine’s person (Мы видим, что в Тебе единой/Великий Петр с Екатериной). The eighteenth-century understanding of history as cyclical affirms that Elizabeth is a continuation of the body of the state and its movement towards this progress. The imperial body and by extension the state, which brings about this progress, is given divine dimension with a reference to Genesis in the very first line of the first stanza of the poem: Заря багряною рукою От утренних спокойных вод 102 Выводит с солнцем за собою Твоей державы новый год. Благословенное начало Тебе, Богиня, воссияло. И наших искренность сердец Пред троном Вышнего пылает, Да счастием Твоим венчает Его средину и конец (Lomonosov, 1-10) From the calm morning waters Dawn, with crimson hand Ushers in your country's new year with the sun behind it A blessed beginning You, Goddess, shone. And the sincerity of our hearts burns before the throne of the most High, Let its middle and end be crowned With your happiness Elizabeth stretches her hand over the waters, creating the landscape Russians are to inhabit. Her hand, the hand of the Russian state, extends to begin to structure the world, just as Lomonosov labored to structure poetry and the earth sciences. This hagiographic representation of the Empress consolidates the mediation between poetic genre and official ideology Ram describes. The ode is a public celebration of the empress’s power over the landscape itself. It is natural that poets would establish analogies between solving literary problems and conquering landscapes: as we saw with the extended metaphor about bees, all naturally discoverable structures and hierarchies mirrored one another. The triumphant harmony Russia reached with the landscape was analogous to the order of the cosmos, also subservient to the Empress: Да движутся светила стройно В предписанных себе кругах, И реки да текут спокойно В Тебе послушных берегах; Вражда и злость да истребится, И огнь и меч да удалится От стран Твоих, и всякий вред; 103 Весна да рассмеется нежно, И земледелец безмятежно Сторичный плод да соберет (Lomonosov, 11-20). Let the heavenly bodies move smoothly In the orbits you’ve prescribed, And let the rivers flow calmly In banks compliant to you; Let animosity and malice be annihilated, And let the fire and the sword withdraw From your lands, along with all harm; Let spring laugh gently, And let the farmer calmly Collect a his harvest hundredfold. The harmony seen metaphorically in the life of bees, citizens of empire, and the globe are congruent to the order of the universe as a whole. The universe as whole orbits around Elizabeth, as it did Peter and Catherine. The benefits of progress redound to the bees, to the planets and to the farmer collecting “his harvest hundredfold.” The progress of empire paid off to its subjects, granting that they submitted. Lomonosov proceeds to name actual places affected by the reach of imperial power, represented by the Empress herself, who, as a gigantic personified Russia, leans across mountains and rivers, casting her gaze about the Earth: В полях, исполненных плодами, Где Волга, Днепр, Нева и Дон, Своими чистыми струями Шумя, стадам наводят сон, Сидит и ноги простирает На степь, где Хину отделяет Пространная стена от нас; Веселый взор свой обращает И вкруг довольства исчисляет, Возлегши локтем на Кавкас (Lomonosov, 161-170). In fields filled with fruit, Where the Volga, the Dnieper, the Neva and the Don, Burbling with their pure streams they put the herds to sleep, [The Empress] sits and stretches her legs 104 On the steppe, where China separates A vast wall from us; Merry gaze turns And calculates the contentments, Leaning [her] elbow on the Caucasus. Europe had become peripheral witnesses to Russia’s rise, a kind of outer planet. Lomonosov places specific domestic touchstones in this sublime geography. The contents of this list of geographical points would populate later poems, Romantic poets examining them from a closer perspective. The monarch, embodying the timeless power of the dynasty, is the subject of the poem, as she is the subject of all of history and the central focal point of any landscape, from a field of flowers to the cosmos itself. This optimism, embodied in the Empress, stretches across Russia, finding temporary limit only in the Great Wall of China. Borders are minor obstacles to power this great, backed up by the loyal labor of millions, appreciated as subjects to empire, not individuals with needs and desires capable of interacting with space on their own terms. A poetic perspective centering the individual would require a new form and a new understanding of poetic space. Revealing What’s Hidden and Giving it Over This control over the landscape gave wide license to the government to exploit the natural resources in all these individual mountains and waterways. In other odes, Lomonosov catalogues the subjugation of Russia’s natural resources and future population to the empire as well. Lomonosov continues “Ода на день восшествия на всероссийский престол […] 1747 года” he details the formerly hidden gold and silver trickling from Russian mountains, about to be given up to the Russians: И се Минерва ударяет В верьхи Рифейски копием; Сребро и злато истекает Во всем наследии твоем. 105 Плутон в расселинах мятется, Что Россам в руки предается Драгой его металл из гор, Которой там натура скрыла; От блеску дневного светила Он мрачный отвращает взор (Lomonosov, 201-210). 2 And Minerva strikes Her lance in the peaks of the Riphean Mountains Silver and gold flow Throughout her whole inheritance. Pluto in the crevasses trembles, And gives over into Russian hands Precious metals from the mountain, Which nature concealed there; From glimmer of the light of day He turns his dark gaze away. An abundance of natural resources was a gift given to the future citizens of Russian empire (Orlov, 117). The minerals the gods created and guarded, in the depths of the fatherland, will be the envy of foreign countries: О вы, которых ожидает Отечество от недр своих И видеть таковых желает, Каких зовет от стран чужих, О, ваши дни благословенны! Дерзайте ныне ободренны Рeченьем вашим показать, Что может собственных Платонов И быстрых разумом Невтонов Российская земля рождать.” (211-220) Oh you, that which is awaited [By the] fatherland from its bowels And of the sort he wants to see, Those called for from foreign lands, Oh, your blessed days! 2 Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Oda na den’ vossestviia na vserossiiskii eia prestol velichestva imperitristy Elisavety Petrovny 1747 goda.” Pol’noe sobranie socheninie. Moskva: Izdael’stvo akademii hauk SSSR. 1959. p. 196-214) 106 Dare to be emboldened Your words show, What our very own Platos can do And quick Newtons with reason The Russian land will birth. The minerals in the earth are the exact kind that are desired by the most advanced nations in Europe, and under Elizabeth’s guidance, Russia will produce the kinds of geniuses necessary to exploit them. Lomonosov envisions new Platos and Newtons waiting to be born in Russia, who, nurtured on science, will extract the gold and silver through scientific knowledge and hard work, the kind of people who will find a sweet peace in labor: Науки юношей питают, Отраду старым подают, В счастливой жизни украшают, В несчастной случай берегут; В домашних трудностях утеха И в дальних странствах не помеха. Науки пользуют везде, Среди народов и в пустыне, В градском шуму и наедине, В покое сладки и в труде.” (219-230) [These future Platos and Newtons] feed the youth on science, [They] provide joy to the aged In [case of] a blessed life, they embellish, In [case of] an unfortunate event they ameliorate it; In domestic labors it is comfort And in distant lands there is not a hindrance. They use science everywhere, Among the masses and in the wilderness, In the bustle of the city and in private, Sweetness in both rest and in labor. Lomonosov augurs further success for the empire in the sciences. Lomonosov sees himself as one of these potential Newtons or Platos, and as his poetic labors are joyous, all labors will be joyous under the progress of an enlightened monarch. All labor in service of the state in all disciplines, as 107 every discipline is analogically linked, is joyfully celebrated. In his odes, Lomonosov ode continues to demonstrate how science and divine autocracy would continue to bend the landscape to Russia's will: Молчите, пламенные звуки, И колебать престаньте свет; Здесь в мире расширять науки Изволила Елисавет. Вы, наглы вихри, не дерзайте Реветь, но кротко разглашайте Прекрасны наши времена. В безмолвии внимай, вселенна: Се хощет лира восхищенна Гласить велики имена (Lomonosov, 51-60). Be silent, fiery sounds, And cease oscillating, light; Here in world science expands [As] Elizabeth permitted. You insolent winds, do not dare To roar, but humbly trumpet The beauty of our times In silence, pay heed, cosmos: The admiring lyre desires To speak the great names. The movements of the landscape, art and the sciences were all similarly controlled by the Empress’s intentions. Lomonosov draws a direct correlation between mind and matter, each malleable, shaped in interest of the progress of the state: Тогда божественны науки Чрез горы, реки и моря В Россию простирали руки, К сему монарху говоря: "Мы с крайним тщанием готовы Подать в российском роде новы Чистейшего ума плоды". Монарх к себе их призывает, Уже Россия ожидает Полезны видеть их труды (81-90). 108 Then the divine sciences Through mountains, rivers and seas Stretch their hands out into Russia, The monarch saying to them: "With extreme effort, we are prepared To apply to the Russian race New fruits of the purest reason." The monarch calls them to himself, Russia already awaiting To see their useful works. Divinely-ordained science, sponsored by the government and directing the labors of the Russian masses in all segments of society, continues to be a main theme of the optimistic ceremonial ode. The ode, through its sublime perspective that deifies each instantiation of the monarch through the cycle of time and the triumphant harmony they impose on the landscape, projects an optimistic present and future for Russia. Though the subject of Lomonosov’s poetry was almost incomprehensible in its exuberant excess and oxymorons, its regular form provided a public face for the ideology of empire and reflected the aspirational belief that space and the objects occupying it, would soon be well-ordered, from the honeybee to the cosmos. The Strain of a New Sense of Space In the nineteenth century, Russian poetry transitioned from perceiving time as cyclical to seeing it as linear and progressive, from deifying the empress to exploring the worth of the individual, from depicting a boundless poetic perspective to one which feels the increasing constraints of government power, and from a celebration of empire to general alienation from aims of the government. As all generic forms are reflections of spatial imagination, changes in the ordering of space, time and the individual’s place in them are were all reflected in changes in popular generic forms. The ode faded and the lyric and loose personal prose rose. “It is impossible to imagine a genre as a static system, because the very conscious awareness of a genre arises as 109 the result of a collision with a traditional genre (in other words, the feeling of changing, at least partially, the traditional genre with the "new" one that takes its place).” (Tynianov, Arkhiasty, 8) To a significant and under-appreciated extent, the genre of the lyric resulted from a collision of nineteenth-century ideas of space and the individual’s place in it with the ideas of space and the individual expressed in eighteenth-century odes, a collision that took place in the artistic spaces first depicted and populated by the ceremonial ode. The loss of governmentally-encouraged utopian beliefs and the utopian language that attended them meant a new sense of space began to put pressure on old linguistic and narrative structures (Jameson, x). Rather than disappearing, these old structures were embedded into the new poetic landscape and subverted, undermining the value system they were invented to champion. This move towards individualistically-derived meaning sought to upset the rigid, legible systems imposed over literature, the landscape and the individual since the early imperial period. These systems strove to create conditions where the task environment was known, unchanging and closed (Scott, 82). Romantic poets, prioritizing the personal, the spontaneous, the natural and the Other, naturally rejected these systems in all their forms, and refuted or subverted elements of the literature of the eighteenth-century state to express the completeness of this rejection. The endless landscape that Lomonosov and other imperial subjects tried so hard to subjugate began to feel stifling to the subjects of empire, and they tried futilely to escape. In 1829, almost one-hundred years after Lomonosov wrote his first odes surveying a subjugated landscape, Alexander Pushkin visited the southern edge of the Russian Empire in an effort to temporarily escape his own imperial subjugation. Pushkin begged to return to Petersburg from his forced exile in the early 1820s (when he wrote many of his early famous Orientalist works, like “Кавказкий Пленник”), but upon returning to the capital, he found the “political 110 surveillance, literary pressures, and multiple romantic commitments” stifling, and longed for the “geographically distant, un-Russian and largely male theatre of war in the south” (Greenleaf, Romantic Fashion 140), where he could feel anonymous, free and invisible. In 1829, the government denied Pushkin and his friend Petr Viazemskii permission to travel to Paris, and he bolted for the mountainous south. He turned the diary he kept into the travel narrative “Путешествие в Арзрум” about the journey, and published it in 1835 (Greenleaf, Arzrum, 940). To Pushkin, towering Mount Kazbek represented the possibility of escape. On his journey, Pushkin passed arches cut by explosions of gunpowder to form the imperial road and stopped in taverns close to the great peak, but on his first pass, the great Mt. Kazbek was invisible. Just as he had sailed past the massive Chatyr-Dag in the Crimea, he drove indifferently past Kazbek in his rush to get to Tbilisi. He almost mocks any possibility of finding the sublime: Я столь же равнодушно ехал мимо Казбека, как некогда плыл мимо Чатырдага. Правда и то, что дождливая и туманная погода мешала мне видеть его снеговую груду, по выражению поэта, подпирающую небосклон. (Pushkin, 428) I rode past Kazbek as indifferently as I had once drifted past Chatyr Dag. It is also true that the rainy and foggy weather interfered with me seeing its snowy heap, which, as a poet would say, buttressed the heavens.” The fog impairs his vision of this “snowy heap, which, as the poet says, buttressed the heavens.” The sublime of imperial subjugation and mountainous peaks are lost to Pushkin, as is their mineral wealth – for most of his journey, he cannot find himself released into either a Lomonosovian “imperial sublime” or the Romantic space of adventure. (Greenleaf, Romantic Fashion, 153). Poetic convention cannot adequately express his perceptions, so he ironically subverts it. 111 The narrative of a journey, long and rambling, fits with the new Romantic perception of time. No longer cyclical, time was experienced as an unfolding linear sequence of events (Foucault, 220). The ode was a public declaration of triumph over the landscape, a slice of cyclical time experienced from great heights; this elegiac passage from Pushkin expresses private melancholy and nostalgia: there is a sense that the poet has missed some experience or feeling in the singular experience of a particular mountain that cannot be recaptured or redeemed. In Strolls with Pushkin, Abram Tertz misattributes a Nekrasov line to Lomonosov: “It is possible to not be a poet/but to be a citizen is obligatory!” (“Поэтом можешь ты не быть/ но гражданином быть обязан!” (Tertz, 71) But what if one can be neither? Or cannot be one, without being the other? This phase of Pushkin’s life seems to ask both these questions. Those questions come from the essential overlap between these two roles in imperial Russian society at its founding: the conflation of chemistry, geology, citizenship, poetry and imperial service wove together to create an impressive career for Lomonosov (Tynianov, О Хлебникове, 5): Pushkin, on the other hand, was publishing a diary of stylized private musings. Still, that diary was read by a wider audience than Lomonosov ever reached, an audience living in a world where many were already aware of what Lukacs calls the world of the novel, where the “extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.” (Lukacs, 56). Systems of state simplification fabricated in the early enlightenment period by figures such as Lomonosov and imposed over the language, poetry, government, the sciences and the landscape strove to create a legible and controllable totality. Figures such as Pushkin, dissatisfied with this totality and feeling out of place and excluded from its benefits, rejected it philosophically and literarily. The most effective 112 way to do this was to revisit the same sites Lomonosov had mythologized and particularize those mythic spaces, inscribing the poet’s own values on that space. Because, hounded as he was by government officials and love interests, the totality of life was unclear to him, Pushkin fled. Further disillusionment emerges later in the narrative, when Pushkin crosses the Arpachi river and he believes himself to be crossing the Russian border but finds out that both sides had been conquered by “boundless Russia” (“неъобятной Росии”) (Pushkin, 438). The border is shown to be “a notional line,” (Stafford, 14) inviting discussion as to what it separates and what the possibilities and consequences of crossing it are. If Pushkin was trying to find a different self by crossing the border, he found only that it was impossible to find a space where he could exist free of the constraints of empire. The borders of imperial subjugation, which Lomonosov wishfully extended out endlessly as signs of wealth and might, were, for Pushkin, not only limited by the fog and clouds, but impediments to artistic vision as well. But this was not the end of it. Despite his earlier failure, Pushkin’s second pass of Kazbek allows him moment of rapture at the glory of nature, and he can escape his worries: Утром, проезжая мимо Казбека, увидел я чудное зрелище. Белые оборванные тучи перетягивались через вершину горы, и уединенный монастырь, озаренный лучами солнца, казалось, плавал в воздухе, несомый облаками.” (Pushkin, 461) “In the morning, passing Kazbek, I saw a wonderful sight. White, ragged clouds were stretched over the mountaintop, and a secluded monastery, illuminated by the sun’s rays, seemed as if it float in the air, borne up by the clouds. Bakhtin has another way of describing the shift into a world where the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given and the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem. In the Romantic era, two timelines emerged from one common totality: one for measuring historical and collective events, another for the experience of a personal life (Bahktin, 208). Pushkin finds 113 in a loose prose form the best genre for expressing “this maelstrom of personal life, where time is deprived of its unity and wholeness, chopped up into separate segments, each encompassing a single episode.” (Bahktin, 128). Lyrical prose fragments and brief lyrical elegiac poems emerged as the best way of conveying these new kinds of subjective experiences of space and time. These fragments expressing subjective experiences time stood in opposition to odic literary creations, which strove to embody systematically-legible aesthetic wholes. Pushkin wrote a poem in 1829, the same year as the original version of “Путешествие в Арзрум,” which describes Kazbek and betrays this Romantic subjective experience of time and space in fragmentary, individual time. Pushkin is more positive and hopeful about the possibility of poetic escape in this poem than in his “Путешествие в Арзрум.” In contrast to the collective transcendence and progress promised in the ceremonial ode, the potential escape or transcendence are strictly private. For Pushkin, the point of the journey is to find privacy, to escape the city and the empire. His poem is a negation of odic aspirations, dreaming of life in a small cell under no empress’s elbow and only clouds above it. Lomonosov was sure that Russians would be able to find sweetness in the bustle of the city or alone, in labor or at rest: “Среди народов и в пустыне,/В градском шуму и наедине,/В покое сладки и в труде.” (Lomonosov, 229-230) Pushkin envisions the romantic escape he sought high among a family of mountains, behind the clouds that formerly obscured his vision of the mountain, but now sheltered his imaginary monastic cell: Высоко над семьёю гор, Казбек, твой царственный шатер Сияет вечными лучами. Твой монастырь за облаками, Как в небе реющий ковчег, Парит, чуть видный, над горами. Далёкий, вожделенный брег! 114 Туда б, сказав прости ущелью, Подняться к вольной вышине! Туда б, в заоблачную келью, В соседство Бога скрыться мне!… (Pushkin) High above a family of mountains, Kazbek, your majestic canopy Shines with everlasting rays. Your monastery is beyond the clouds, Like a floating ark in the sky, Sailing, barely visible, over the mountains. Distant, longed-for shore! There, having bid the gorge farewell, To raise myself to unbounded [вольной] heights! There, to cells beyond the clouds, Conceal me in the company of God!… There are no minerals or precious metals in Pushkin’s mountains, waiting to be given up to the state: of any object in the odic order, Pushkin’s “lyric I” is most similar to the minerals that Lomonosov describes hidden in the depths of the mountain, as both Pushkin’s “lyric I” and the minerals are hidden away from the light of the sun, longing for escape from the systematizing, totalizing urges of the modern state: Плутон в расселинах мятется, Что россам в руки предается Драгой его металл из гор, Которой там натура скрыла; От блеску дневного светила.” Russia’s most popular poet casts himself as an object in a similar to an object Lomonosov would represented as pitiable, that tremble in mountain gorges, hidden from the light of day, soon to be given over to Russia. Kazbek’s former invisibility and impenetrability that caused Pushkin to write it off as if “gora kak gora” in his travelogue now augment its value. 115 The perspective in Pushkin’s poem is simple: he longs for the transport Lomonosov achieves, and Kazbek’s peak is the only object mentioned capable of transporting him to a higher, sublime perspective. Lomonosov was trying to make a standardized system for poetry to attend the standardization of the empire more generally. i]In a lyric poem, the imaginary space comes from the poet's subjective consciousness and his inner experience. Regardless of whether he is speaking about a subjective experience or about a concrete event, his inner perception dictates the representation of space (Ginzburg, 343). According to Yuri Lotman, “the space represented in an artistic work does not always correlate to some actual space,” but rather reflects a picture of the world in its temporal, social, ethical aspects (Lotman, 252). Russia’s features in a given genre are as much territorial or geographical as they are ethical or religious. As Lydia Ginzburg claims, the subjective consciousness of a lyric poet expresses general societal consciousness, which here was fearful, private and fragmented. Pushkin’s depiction of Kazbek comes close to personification in its direct address of the mountain and attribution of possession to the mountain itself: Romantic space was populated by subjectivities more than it was objects. The mountain has more consciousness to Pushkin than a farmer or a bee would to Lomonosov, who sees minds simply as more matter to be molded by the state. The poem is a model of the world of the author, and Pushkin, in his world, was feeling the tension between private languages and convictions and the totality classified in eighteenth- century systems. He revisits parts of the empire drawn by Lomonosov as miraculously subjugated. Instead of leaning over them, Pushkin can only hope for a fragment of a moment to get inside them, away from the empire Lomonosov praised. The victories of Imperial Russia that enchant the perspective in Lomonosov’s odes are precisely what disenchant Pushkin’s world, with only a remote, occasionally visible monastery to 116 provide a potential respite from empire. This poem’s treatment of the mountain is typical of Pushkin’s treatment of former odic material. Unlike the Lomonosov, who was subsumed by the subject of his poetry, Pushkin in his elegiac poems looks longingly at Kazbek but survives it and reconstitutes his almost sublime experience later as befits the typically mournful mood of the elegy. This longing is the impetus behind Orientalist adventuring and the elegy itself (Ram, 190). What is remarkable about Pushkin’s late poetry, what Lidiia Ginzburg terms the “Poetry of Actuality,” is that he is capable of describing objects like Kazbek simultaneously as both spiritual metaphors and concrete objects. The difference between the mountains in Lomonosov’s and Pushkin’s poems can be seen in Pushkin’s polemic with Viazemskii about Vziamskii’s “Нарвский Водопад.” For Viazemskii, a follower of Lomonosov’s poetics as they concerned metaphorical speech, the waterfall in his poem was a man, in other words, purely allegorical, subject to metaphors rationally chosen based on poetic precedent. Similarly for Lomonosov, Parnassus was purely a metaphor for the power and reach of empire – it existed purely as a symbol. Pushkin of course saw the waterfall as the psychological analogy for a man, but also as a waterfall (“это – также и водопад) (Ginzburg, 32 -38)). Objects in space did not serve purely as a symbolic tool for the constitution of an imperial polity, but as a way of expressing the subjective experience of an individual. Lomonosov’s poetry was bolstered by the fact that it was a part of a broader system of scientific progress: Pushkin was depicting things as they subjectively appeared to him (Tynianov, О Хлебникове, 11). Just as Pushkin saw the waterfall as both a metaphorical man and an actual waterfall, in “Monastyr na Kazbek,” Kazbek is successfully depicted as both a potential spiritual transport and a real mountain of gorges and monastic cells (here as гора, как гора). No longer relying on the poetic clichés Lomonosov helped to create and upon which Viazemskii relied (Ginzburg, 32) 117 “mature Pushkin freely chose and named non-predetermined earthly phenomena — spiritual and material, for the first time turning them into aesthetic facts” (Ginzburg, 221) as they corresponded with singular events, like his later encounter with Kazbek, rather than as they simply corresponded with poetic tradition, a poetry of correspondence to subjective experience, not scientific classification systems. After establishing the actuality of the mountain with its physical description, he wishes simply to climb to the real monastery on the mountain, with the actual verb used for climbing mountains or stairs (Туда б, сказав прости ущелью,/Подняться к вольной вышине!/Туда б, в заоблачную келью,) rather than the sudden and forcible transport of Lomonosov’s poetic persona across the landscape, enabled by his submission to imperial will. Kazbek, animated and enchanted with poetic meaning, “the shells of [Pushkin’s] ‘naked’ words having absorbed into themselves all the emotionality, all of the ideological meanings of the themes the Russian people, Russian nature,”(Ginzburg, 234) and in this case, some of Russian colonial expansion, while still retaining its objectivity, was ready for Lermontov’s poetic treatment. Here, as in other poems, Pushkin had prepared this spot of empire as grounds for the staging of “a psychological dilemma” (Ram, 196). Lermontov’s “Спор” is a dialogue or quarrel on high between two mountains, 3 one of them Kazbek, the other Elbrus (called “Shat” in the poem), both now on the border between Georgia and Russia. Written in 1841 and set in an ambiguous but loosely present time (Pumpianskii, 414), it grapples with the same steady expansion of Russian imperial reach as in Pushkin’s and Lomonsov’s poems. 3 This is not Lermontov’s first poem with a discussion between inanimate objects. Written in 1839, “Tri Palmy” dramatizes the dangers human beings present to nature – the three oasis palms, after pining for the excitement of civilization, get chopped down and burnt. 118 Lermontov, like Pushkin, was very familiar with the southern border of the Empire, traveling there several times in his youth (Kelly, 26) and fighting in two military campaigns there in his short life. Lermontov, more than any other Russian author, is identified with the violent borderlands. As Stathis Gourgouris suggests of Byron in Greece, “in a psychoanalytic sense, we could say that [Lermontov] becomes himself the object of the gaze — as if the gaze flies through the air like a boomerang — which is tantamount to saying that he falls right into the abyss of his own field of vision” (Gourgouris, 138). In other words, he is perceived as one of those he orientalizes in his depictions, seen in his flamboyantly exotic poems like “Кинжал” and “Сон.” This image of himself fits with the hero Lermontov creates in Герой нашего времени. Like Pushkin, Lermontov circles around specific locations in poetry and prose, revisiting them and reinterpreting them, fitting with the Romantic chronotope of time chopped up into separate segments, each encompassing a single episode that could only testify to a specific moment. What is most important to us is observing the shift in depiction of space and the individual’s attitude towards it, and Lermontov’s character finds a version of the escape that eluded Pushkin: The view which meets my gaze on three sides is wonderful: westward towers five-peaked Beshtau, blue as “the last cloud of a dispersed storm,” and northward rises Mashuk, like a shaggy Persian cap, shutting in the whole of that quarter of the horizon. Eastward the outlook is more cheery: down below are displayed the varied hues of the brand-new, spotlessly clean, little town, with its murmuring, health-giving springs and its babbling, many-tongued throng. Yonder, further away, the mountains tower up in an amphitheater, ever bluer and mistier; and, at the edge of the horizon, stretches the silver chain of snow-clad summits, beginning with Kazbek and ending with two-peaked Elbruz... Blithe is life in such a land! A feeling akin to rapture is diffused through all my veins. The air is pure and fresh, like the kiss of a child; the sun is bright, the sky is blue—what more could one possibly wish for? What need, in such a place as this, of passions, desires, regrets? 4 4 На запад пятиглавый Бешту синеет, как "последняя туча рассеянной бури"; на север поднимается Машук, как мохнатая персидская шапка, и закрывает всю эту часть 119 A fleeting moment of rapture: surrounded by a silver chain of peaks, Lermontov’s hero finds escape from the melancholy and nostalgia that shade Romantic poetry and one might even say, escape from the new, oppressive notion of the heroic and tragic anti-hero that replaced the state as the final arbiter of value. Lermontov’s prose descriptions share a lot with the descriptions in one of his poems, in particular personifications and dialecticisms. The landscape will speak to his readers far more directly than it speaks to him here. Lermontov’s “Спор” begins with lines that, similar to the lines in Pushkin’s poem about Kazbek, describe mountains with a familial connection: “One day in front of a mob/Of kindred mountains” (“Как-то раз перед толпою/ Соплеменных гор” (Lermontov, 1-2). Two of the related peaks proceed directly into a blustering quarrel: first Shat warns Kazbek of human encroachments from the East. The older Kazbek then replies that he is not afraid of the somnolent empires of the East, enjoining that the “white sultans” to the north in Russia are yet more of a threat. Kazbek is proven right by the approaching armies of Russians and the formerly proud Shat falls silent. The poem ends with Kazbek sweeping his despairing gaze over their tribe (племя) (94). The listener, as part of the crowd of witnesses to the quarrel, is on a level perspective with the worried mountains – it is only the observed peoples of the East and Russia that are satirically recast as below the mountains’ and readers’ high gaze. This level gaze shares some небосклона; на восток смотреть веселее: внизу передо мною пестреет чистенький, новенький городок, шумят целебные ключи, шумит разноязычная толпа, - а там, дальше, амфитеатром громоздятся горы все синее и туманнее, а на краю горизон татянется серебряная цепь снеговых вершин, начинаясь Казбеком и оканчиваясь двуглавым Эльборусом... Весело жить в такой земле! Какое-то отрадное чувство разлито во всех моих жилах. Воздух чист и свеж, как поцелуй ребенка; солнце ярко, небо сине - чего бы, кажется, больше? - зачем тут страсти, желания, сожаления? (Lermontov, 52) 120 similarities to Shklovskiian ostranenie, in that by recasting objects as phenomena, it forces the reader to accept them anew, on their own terms, no longer inherently high or low. Tynianov cites the way Khlebnikov uses this level perspective to convey attitudes towards the village or the East that are neither excessively respectful nor condescending (Tynianov, Хлебникове, 13). Like the classic examples of ostranenie Viktor Shklovskii plucks from Tolstoi, there is a moral element to this perspective – recasting objects in different contexts or with different valences leads us to sympathize with the village, animals, or in this case, the East and its mountains. Here, in line with new Romantic ideas of the landscape as a space for the subject to pass through in a collection of linear moments, and that passage as restricted by the encroachments of the imperial Russian state, the mountains are given a subjectivity and they express fears and concerns about the Russian Empire. As with Tolstoi’s prose, in Lermontov’s 5 poem we pass out from the detachment of Pushkin and into a new empathetic enchantment. Here, neither Europe nor odic poet are needed as witnesses, the landscape is witness to itself. The poem’s subject was the object of Pushkin’s poem, and the two poems share the rhyme “келий” / “ущелий,” although in different cases in each poem. Lermontov’s poem’s salty speech further distinguishes the two – instead of the exotic “шатёр,” or tent with which Kazbek is crowned in in Pushkin’s poem, Kazbek wears a “шапка,” or cap in Lermontov’s, reflecting the actual terminology of mountaineers for the clouds around its peak, 6 using the “creative verbal coloring” of contemporaneity (Ginzburg, 235). Like Walter Scott’s invocation of local ballads, Lermontov here uses terms of local 5 For a greater discussion of the connection between Lermontov and Tolstoi, see Semenov, “Lermontov and Lev Tolstoy Lermontov, M. Yu. “Cpor,” 1832. http://feb-web.ru/feb/lermont/texts/lerm05/vol02/l522123-.htm 121 expression that became safe for polite world of print after the ultimate subjugation of the people who originally used them (Stafford, 16). It is not just simply in that it uses Pushkin’s poetics as a jumping off point or in its poetic perspective that Lermontov’s “Спор” is distinguished from Pushkin’s “Монастырь на Казбеке.” His style, the “metaphorical style of the late romantics [,] at its base operates by means of words already part of the institution of poetic speech, not here in the choice of known poetic words as much as in the poetic transformation of meanings.” (Ginzburg, 232) This metaphorical style could not enjoy the isolation and impermeability that rational poetry demanded. As further detached from the rational poetic tradition than Pushkin, Lermontov reached out into the folk speech and farther back into formal odic poetic traditions to achieve a completely different feel in his poem. L.N. Pumpianskii identifies these two features as some of the uniquely Lermontovian traits in “Spor.” This dialogization of the direct address of the ode, however, is a common manipulation of the odic technique, similar to Derzhavin’s “Фелица” poems. The folkloric or simple feel is most certainly related to Ginzburg’s identification of the tendency in Lermontov’s late poetry for the “poetic word [to] try not only not to be more, but to be less than its subject, to understate itself […] testifying to the strength of objectively naming objects” (Ginzburg, 236), the way that Lermontov calls objects, people and places by their true names in “Спор.” In the poem, major questions of world history are discussed by mountains that sound like plain-spoken villagers (“Покрылся человеку/ты недаром, брат!”; “Не хвались еще заране!) (Pumpianskii, 413). This folkloric and at times familiar feel (“brat”) only increases the poetic audience’s feeling of being on a level with the mountains. The naturalness and lightness of speech despite the semantic weight of the topic testifies to Lermontov’s uncovering of a method 122 for using conversational speech to internalize deep, meaningful ideas and weave them into folk tradition (Pumpianskii, 411-12). In contrast to Pushkin, Lermontov links his poem to contemporary reality through conversational speech and “rehistoricizes” the poetic discussion of mountains and empire in a way more similar to Lomonosov’s odes than Pushkin’s elegies (Pumpianskii, 414). Putting Lomonosov’s odes in conversation with Lermontov’s ballad-like long poem yields close connections and juxtapositions of perspective, wording, and attitudes toward empire, the “collisions” between narrative systems that yield new genres and betray new attitudes towards literary space. Lermontov’s poem is not an ode, as the space Lermontov inhabited and his place in it disallowed him from expressing his thoughts in an odic form. He takes the political and imperial motifs of the ode and reinterprets them through his Romantic lens, identifying with the aspects of the landscape that were previously there exclusively to be mined, extracted and exploited. Since he presents a perspective level to the narrative voices in the poem instead of in distant sublime rapture and provides a more visceral identification with and description of the mountains, Lermontov situates many objects and people that were located far away in Lomonosov’s ode within a closer proximity or even inside the mountains themselves. This increases the identification between the listener of the poem and the alpine speakers. The Caucuses are not far away wedged under an empress’s elbow but they are speaking directly before us. The far-off minerals and precious metals are situated inside the breasts of the subjects of the poem: Покорился человеку Ты недаром, брат! Он настроит дымных келий По уступам гор; 123 В глубине твоих ущелий Загремит топор. И железная лопата В каменную грудь, Добывая медь и злато, Врежет страшный путь.” (Lermontov, 7-11) Not without reason, brother [Have I] surrendered to man! He will erect smoky cells Along mountain ledges; In the depths of your ravines Axes will rattle. And iron shovels In [your] stone chest, Mining copper and gold, Will cut a fearsome path. Furthermore, even Pushkin, so pessimistic about the possibility of escape in the increasingly subjugated imperial south, saw the high hidden monastic cells of Kazbek as a final retreat. Just over a decade passed between Pushkin and Lermontov’s poems, but the cells (“келии”) along Kazbek’s gorges were now smoking, axes and shovels mining the mountain’s very depths, subjugated by Eastern conquerors and miners in search for copper and gold, cutting their terrible way, like the arches Pushkin saw in his travel memoir blown into the mountain with gunpowder, and darkly echoing Lomonosov’s prophesies about conquest and resource extraction in other odes. Simple laborers were soon to cut their way up the very gorges via which Pushkin dreamed of escaping. The Platos and Newtons of Russia had finally been born; armed with science and accompanied by invading armies, they were here to pick out the gold and silver lying in the breast of the fatherland. The conquering of empire that appears as an eagle soaring freely in Lomonosov’s poem, is the very thing restricting the eagles’ flight in Lermontov’s “Spor’,” (albeit not yet the Russians but the by first, less threatening wave of Eastern conquerors of the mountains described by Shat). 124 Eagles, the former lone Tsars of the mountains, were now joined by crowds of caravans, miners and soldiers. Через те скалы, Где носились лишь туманы Да цари-орлы. Люди хитры! Хоть и труден Первый был скачок, Берегися! многолюден И могуч Восток! (Spor, 18-24) Over these cliffs, Where only mists scampered And yes, the eagles, their kings. People are wily! Though difficult Was the first leap, Take heed! Populous And mighty is the East! Here ends Shat’s convincing argument about the expanding East, the first salvo of the quarrel. In juxtaposition with the Lomonosovian ode, “Спор” completes a perspectival shift in which objects and peoples are referred to as singular and which are referred to in the plural: in Lomonosov’s odes, Russia is represented as singular and unified, the interchangeable Asiatic enemies always plural and indistinguishable: “Chasing off foes, the Hero [Russia] is smoking” (“Гоня врагов, Герои откурлся” (Lomonosov, Khotin, 90)) or the Empress herself stands in for the whole country, with the enemy multitudes of “Hagarites”: Kiss that leg in tears That you, hagarites, can reach Kiss the hand, that is fearful to you, She showed you with a bloody sword Целуйте ногу ту в слезах, Что вас, агаряне, попрала, Целуйте руку, что вам страх Мечем кровавым показала. (Lomonosov, Khotin, 161-164) 125 Russia remains singular as it morphs into disembodied “force” (“Коль росская ужасна сила (Хотин, 140)) or a lion, fighting off a pack of wolves (Как сильный лев стада волков (Хотин, 35)). The East is only made singular in reference to the geography that defines them, beyond named rivers and specific shores (За Тигр, Стамбул, своих заграбь,/Что камни с берегов сдирает). Just as in the odes cited above, the Russian Empire as Lomonosov sees it is boundless and infinite (Таких препон на свете нет (56)). In Lermontov’s poem, the bickering mountains view their potential but lazy Eastern conquerors in the particularity – the sleepy Georgian (32) and forgetful Bedouin (45). Pumpianskii notes that each Eastern nation is imagined in its own shade: Egypt and the Nile in yellow, Arabia midnight blue, Persia pearl, and the Georgians in chromatic. In Lomonosov’s vast visually-focused poem there is but one color, “багрыный” (78), describing the bloodied Turkish army washing into the sea like the setting sun. While the East was without face or personality in Lomonosov, Lermontov’s East is home to particular beautiful and storied traditions (Спор, 48). The Russians, “white sultans,” are the ones appearing as vast faceless armies, waving like grass on the steppe: Колыхаясь и сверкая Движутся полки. Веют белые султаны Как степной ковыль, Мчатся пестрые уланы, Подымая пыль. (Spor’ 67-72) Swaying and glittering Moving shelves. White sultans are blowing Like a grasshopper, Motley lancers are rushing, Kicking up dust. 126 It is the Russians who are now uncountable hordes: more than just multitudinous, they appear as uncountable or unquantifiable like grass and clouds. Such reversals show the advantage of using odic discourse: it is the most convincing and complete way to subvert official ideology. No longer orderly bees harmoniously gathering pollen, the “white Sultans” are threatening and destructive. Yet more ominously, they are last shown slowly advancing like storm clouds (87). The darkness in Lomonosov’s odes was usually brought by swarming foreign armies threatening Russia (К российской силе так стремятся,/Кругом объехав, тьмы татар; 27-28) but Lermontov’s north represents the darkness in the eyes of the mountains (И, смутясь, на север темный/Взоры кинул он; (59-60). Their violence is now bounded by rivers (Видит странное движенье,/ Слышит звон и шум./ От Урала до Дуная, (63-65)) just like the Turks or the Europeans: just another bloodthirsty nation, guilty of the same violence, limited by the same kind of boundaries. Pushkin’s tightly structured, highly metaphorical poetry could not indulge in this heterogeneous sourcing of ode, romantic elegy and mountaineer slang, a heterogeneity that will become a hallmark of Russian prose in Gogol and Aksakov’s work. The collision of subsystems would expand out further as memoirists and novelists tried to incorporate both more realia and more literary influences into their work. Here several traditional genres collide with fantastical personification and realia. Nineteenth-century ideas of space and the individual’s place are spoken over the ideas of the ceremonial ode, in landscapes named by those odes, by the elements of the landscape themselves. The 1957 Soviet Edition of Lermontov’s works felt this anti-Imperialist tension, and although confirming his discerning socio-historical vision, whitewashed his deep reservations about the imperial project: 127 Стихотворение «Спор», изображающее вступление на Кавказ русской армии под начальством А. П. Ермолова («генерал седой»), является выражением зрелости общественно-исторических взглядов Лермонтова. Сочувствуя народам Кавказа, живо интересуясь их культурой и бытом, поэт в то же время убежден в том, что присоединение Кавказа к России и приобщение его к экономической и культурной жизни ее исторически неизбежны и прогрессивны. The poem “An Argument,” portraying the Russian army’s entry into the Caucasus under the command of A. P. Yermolov (General Gray-Hair), is an expression of Lermontov’s mature socio-historical views. Sympathizing with the peoples of the Caucasus, keenly interested in their culture and life, the poet is at the same time convinced that the annexation of the Caucasus to Russia and its introduction to the economic and cultural life of its historically inevitable and progressive. In reality, this tepid endorsement of the conquest of the Caucuses fits with Pushkin’s gentlemanly endorsement of General Ermolov’s bloody campaign: “Ermolov has filled [the Caucasian region] with his name and beneficent genius.” (Ram, 194) His elegiac reservations were also gentlemanly and tempered. Something so radical as Lermontov’s giving voice to mountains cannot be written off as simple interest in their “culture and everyday life” but a full and complete Tolstoian sort of literary empathy. Indeed it seems clear that Lermontov was not convinced that Russia’s conquest was better, but maybe a rare effort to constitute other entities as selves in and of themselves, at once threatened and majestic, sensitive and proud – a depiction of a full human Other in the Kazbek. Lermontov, in response to changing ethical ideas about the landscape and the subjective individual, redeemed parts of the landscape as individuals. Anthropomorphizing is a way of acknowledging what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject,” an object like a mountain, a lake, or an ecosystem, that is so vast it vexes any attempt at full understanding, a vexation that seems akin to the sublime. Morton also acknowledges place as a function of suffering, a question that arises through its assertion. 128 Kazbek, and all for whom it stands, “struggle to achieve a state in which the question of place, the question that is place, can emerge as a question.” (Morton, 116) Progress exists in Pushkin and Lermontov as common fear, positioning them against the social political or imaginative constrictions of their own societies (Greenleaf, 114): that means the whole imperial project, and by inclusion, the ode. In Lermontov’s case, he did not fall victim to the tendency to “perpetuate the terms of opposition between East and West, [but] rather blur[red] the quantitative and qualitative distinctions between them.” Kazbek as a location in space displays Lermontov toying with Pushkin’s poetic legacy in a way very typical of him, while at the same time opening up more interesting and variegated questions of influence and ethics. In reality, Pushkin’s poem just gave the Russian imperializing and modernizing project the same kind of muted dissent found in other romantic reactions to modernization from Shelley to Byron. While it inhabits the same location and some of the same language as Pushkin’s attempt, Lermontov’s poem does something altogether more radical, fancifully animating a place about to be lost, cementing it in a dark contemporary reality and deeply engaging with past poetic traditions. Lydia Ginzburg’s argues that Pushkin’s late poetic output, “Poetry of Actuality,” enables the development of the novel by doing away with the contradiction between the expression of ideas and the depiction of things, making the everyday word the potential carrier of lyrical meaning and thus preserving both the objective meaning of the word and its many potential semantic and connotative shades. However, as, if not more vital for the development of the heterogenous subject matter, multiple perspectives and fragmented sense of space that generate the novel are the inclusion and refutation of 129 old genres and their their attitudes towards space in lyric poetry. The most prominent and productive example of this is that old “museum piece,” the ceremonial ode. The challenges to state systems and their effects on the landscape and the individual changed over time: Radishchev’s challenges in the ode and philosophy, discussed in the first chapter of this dissertation, represented a first skirmish in literature between the state and its subjects, focusing on the optimism and skepticism about the individual’s ability to know himself and the world around him, and how that ability could allow him to create a better society for all. Pushkin and Lermontov engaged on a more individual level, having lost the Enlightenment conviction that improving the state was possible, focusing only on their own inner lives. The state and its totalizing desires were not static, however, as we will see in the next chapter. It maintained a dynamic relationship with its subjects and their dissent, eventually giving them more control over the imperial project. These subjects internalized some formerly official responsibilities of the state: settling new lands, setting up estates, taking on government service in censorship, surveying and education. The three authors I examine in the next chapter of this dissertation represent a more complicated relationship with a state that seemed to hand over some of its responsibilities to its subjects, letting them carry out some of the standardization schemes under the aegis of exploration, bureaucratic duties, exploration, settler colonialism, and capitalist exchange. This new, less centralized functioning of state systems opened up strange and complex new uses of old odic motifs in Russian literature, in particular in pastoral prose. 130 A Mode of Contrast: Pastoral Colors within the Lines of the Ode In what genre I’ll get to Petushki, God knows…All the way from Moscow it was philosophical essays and memoirs, everything was poetry in prose, like it was with Ivan Turgenev….And now it starts to be a detective story. I glanced inside my little suitcase: is it all in there? It’s all there. But where is the 100 grams? And who do I blame? Venedikt Erofeev, Moskva—Petushki, 1973 Where is he, who would be able to say in the native tongue of the Russian soul, this omnipotent word “forward?” Ages pass after ages, half a million decumbent, sluggish oafs doze dead to the world, and rarely in Russia is born a man who can pronounce it, this omnipotent word [forward]… Gogol, as quoted in Dobriliubov, “What is Oblomovitis?” In the half century after Lomonosov revolutionized Russian poetry, he and other neoclassical poets succeeded in creating a generic foundation for Russian literature going forward. This odic foundation was created in conjunction with other state-sponsored systems of simplification which manifested themselves in real effects on the landscape and people lives, as well as in literary structures. Other authors could accept or reject this foundation in their work, 131 but it was a tradition with which they would always have to contend. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter of this dissertation, even as poets gravitated towards lyric forms of poetry associated with European romanticism, their gaze lingered on similar the very same landscapes caressed by the gaze of the odic poets, and they likewise grafted semantic elements from odic poetry onto those landscapes, merging eighteenth-century myth and nineteenth-century pathos. They felt an increasing separation from the hard sciences and could never have practiced both poetry and geology, as Lomonosov did. Just as romantic poets, obsessed with ideas of individual self-expression, national character, and natural wonder flipped Lomonosov’s odic language to fit their vision, the generation immediately following them returned to the words and forms of early modern Russian literature to depict their own world-view. Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Aksakov, and Ivan Goncharov, three loosely-defined conservative novelists identified with the Russian pastoral mode, epitomize this generic movement and its attention to the odic tradition. Gogol, in his wicked satires, used the semantic symbols of the ode to draw a contrast between the ode’s optimistic mapping of the future, which had so shaped the official imperial imagination, and a fallen and unimpressive countryside filled with venal bureaucrats and ignorant noblemen. Aksakov used the odic form and its stylistic and semantic signals to glorify a landscape and way of life that had been lost to the successful encroachments of the imperial project, showing a world that was being degraded as time marched on, not being improved. And Goncharov, the last of the three, found a world so lacking in possibility that the only landscape worth mapping in literature was the un-mined, unexploited individual spirit and its memories, a spirit increasingly threatened by a terrifying world of commerce and urban civilization. A century after the Lomonosovian ode’s primacy, its semantic and formal features remained a primary reservoir of meaning when conveying attitudes about the Russian landscape and society. 132 Because of the Russian ode’s ebullient boosterism and extravagant flattery, the strongest and most efficient way to convey negative associations about the landscape and government was twisting or refuting its components, thematically, semantically and formally. The ode was part of a package of reforms and remained forever associated with the original process of modernizing the state, its space and its sciences whether consciously or subconsciously. This association was dynamic: as we will see in this chapter, in particular, the new, Romantic preference for the individual was humored by a state that sponsored individual nobles to conquer and transform the boundaries of empire themselves. Authors reacted by personalizing aspects of eighteenth-century discourses to express new value-systems and perspectives. This contrast threw the optimistic projections of the ode into harsh relief against new blank, bleak lonely views of the Russian landscape and life. In the process of expressing a pessimism about specific parts of contemporary Russian society and the imperial project, these authors created the pastoral mode of Russian literature, a mode both wholly novel but largely dependent on reinterpretations of the older forms built to express the eighteenth-century paradise myth, in particular, the ode. The greed of the gentry and local bureaucrats living in gross squalor in Gogol, the endless march of time and colonization destabilizing natural, familial and economic structures in Aksakov, and the deep canyons cutting through St. Petersburg’s new construction in Goncharov: all of these realities were the result of a modernizing project that strove to create an ideal landscape. Lomonosov’s effort to modernize Russian literature with the ode was part of the same modernizing project that colonized the far reaches of empire and built tall new buildings in the capitol, pointing to a reason all three of these authors used the ode as a starting point for their critical interpretive depictions of the Russian landscape and its inhabitants. The ode was the progenital template for describing the Russian landscape. It also described the 133 submission and ordering of that landscape in optimistic terms. What Gogol, Aksakov and Goncharov saw clearly and viscerally as failures represented, from the odic perspective, successes, explaining how their reliance on odic conventions maximized feelings of contrast, failure and decay. There was nothing subtle about the disjuncture between the real and the ideal in Gogol’s literary world. The overt discomfort in the paradoxes he depicted erupted between a “world-as-it- was-supposed-to-be” and the “world-as-it-is.” Because of the obviousness of this tension in Gogol, scholars have extensively examined discursive and generic paradoxes as they applies to his work: his odic imagery and lexicon almost always evokes an ideal “world-as-it-was- supposed-to-be,” or projected reality, versus a disappointing “world-as-it-is,” or a descriptive reality. I will begin this chapter with a definition of what I term the pastoral mode, in order to articulate a category that is useful in determining the place of eighteenth-century poetic genres in nineteenth-century prose. Then, building on this definition in addition to other scholars’ work on discursive paradoxes and perspectival complexity in Gogol, I will begin my discussion of the afterlife of the odic tradition in Russia’s early period of widely-distributed popular prose with Gogol’s Мёртвые души (Dead Souls). In discussion of Dead Souls and each of the following author’s texts, I will demonstrate how each author stages a contrast with various literary components of the ode and how that contrast drawing attention to a social or political problem as it is reflected in the landscape. Pastoral interlude This dissertation has been spiraling around towards an expansive, explicit and accurate definition of “the pastoral,” and here it is. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I note the relationship of Radishchev’s travelogue A Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg to the tensions 134 between city and country, morality and immorality, adulthood and youth that animate certain episodes in the travelogue. Importantly, these contrasts fed on odic discourse: Radishchev cast contemporary Russian reality in negative relief against the optimistic image of the Russian Empire that Lomonosov had created, Radishchev did this by deploying the aesthetic conventions of the Lomonosovian ode and then refuting its moral assumptions (see Chapter 1, p. 59-70). This emerging mode of writing, defined by a clash of the increasingly-archaic but still foundational genre of the ceremonial ode with newer genres and ideologies, grew increasingly popular over time. Some of Russia’s first popular prose writers, Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Aksakov, and Ivan Goncharov, made it into a distinct mode of writing that dominated literature in the 1840s and 1850s. A mode of contradictions, in the context of Russian literature, the pastoral relies on the semantic and ideological markers of the eighteenth-century ode to create those contradictions. The Russian pastoral is distantly related to the classical poetic genre of the idyll, which depicted a bucolic landscape of shepherds, small towns and green hillocks, but never really established itself in Russia (Drage, 110). The pastoral generally, and in Russia in particular, was “fraught not just with death but also with degradation and strife, being contaminated by the common, the grotesque, and even the sordid” (R. Platonov, 1105). In the Russian pastoral, these grotesque aspects seem more inherent to Russia than any of the landscape’s more beautiful and tranquil aspects. Pastoral works of literature, unlike the idyll, generally do not take place in a rural landscape, but in an intermediary space, which heightens the contrasts off of which the mode feeds. It is a space between present and past, adulthood and childhood, city and country, boundless horizons and borders (1106). These contrasts are frequently staged between categories that I have termed “the world-as-it-was-should-to-be” and “world-as-it-is.” In the pastoral, the 135 ode’s semantic and stylistic markers are usually, as they are in Gogol, Aksakov and Goncharov, evoked to signify the “world-as-it-should-be,” which contrasts to a prosaic, grotesque and fallen “world-as-it-is.” In light of this disjuncture, the pastoral frequently approaches satire or parody. The panegyric ode, as a utopian genre, had always lent itself to satires, anti-utopias or eutopias (Baehr, 157-160). Pastoral prose rarely verges into strict parody, as parody is reliant on a fairly straightforward attack on the genre of text being parodied, and the pastoral mode, as mentioned earlier, almost never includes the all the semantic, stylistic, thematic, or formal features of the ode itself. When it does, as it does in moments of Aksakov’s Family Chronicle, its attack on odic morals is subtle and conflicted. So, even if it is an exaggeration to say that the pastoral is an anti- ode, it is accurate to call it a “mode” of discourse that usually negatively invokes a model of the ode in a novelistic setting. When I say that the pastoral is a mode this means that it is, for our purposes, distinct from a genre, in a way that is less and not more. Term it whatever you wish, Gogol’s novel, поэма (long poem or epic), novella, or prose poem, Dead Souls is not a pastoral, but rather the pastoral is a mode that defines parts of the text semantically, stylistically, thematically, or formally, but not in all five ways, and never in all five ways at the same time. The ways in which the text is defined as pastoral are usually refutations of odic discourse. A Russian panegyric ode is a Russian panegyric ode because of its ten-lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter (ode), semantic and stylistic touches (both odic and panegyric) and subject matter (a paean to Russia, its victories, landscape, resources, etc.). Both pastoral writers and Lomonosov talk about the Russian landscape and use the same lexicon and similar hyperbolic language (semantic and stylistic) in describing it. Aksakov even inserts long poems in iambic 136 pentameter directly into his text! Lomonosov, however, simultaneously conforms to all the trademarks of the ode, defining his text formally as such.The pastoral subtly undermines odic discourse by leaving it wobbling uncomfortably and temporarily on a few of its legs: it discusses vertiginous landscapes, but prefers gentle hills over fearsome peaks; it ponders Russia, but substitutes feelings of paralyzing fear for sublime awe when thinking of its endless borders, it sees in the endless march of linear time decay and degradation, not progress. The generic tension this mode of literary discourse sets up intensifies the rest of the contrasts between a utopian “world-as-it-should-be,” projected by eighteenth-century odes, and the “world-as-it-is,” disappointingly arrayed before the pastoral writer’s eyes. The ode projects an imminent utopia. The pastoral is not a pure anti-utopia, but what Gary Saul Morson calls a meta-utopia, where the utopia of the ode and the anti-utopia of reality enter into a mixed and ultimately inconclusive dialogue (Morson, 111). The pastoral is a mode that, when invoked, pushes texts into a “boundary genre,” as it confronts the reader with a hermeneutic perplexity. A boundary genre, or “threshold literature,” as Morson defines it, is a text that, purposefully or accidentally, creates a kind of uncertain status and exploit resonance between two types of reading (Morson, 50). As Nabokov noticed, Gogol injects lyrical interspaces into Dead Souls along with characteristics of what Gogol himself referred to as “smaller genera of the epic,” in order to punctuate and inform the mood of the text. How these lyrical interspaces create the pastoral mode is by creating a tension between the real and ideal, the majestic and the quotidian, the vertical and the horizontal, etc. Why the Ode? The establishment of the ode as a genre, as discussed in detail the first chapter of this dissertation and passingly above, was coeval to the establishment of the Russian Empire and the 137 formation of the modern Russian literary language. This historical conjunction was no accident: the ode as a form was created by writer who wanted to glorify the empire, its actions and its rulers for audiences containing those rulers. Odists filled the long, tightly-structured poetic form with iambic tetrameter about wide landscapes, dramatic military victories over geopolitical opponents, the expansion of education and the sciences, and praise of emperors and empresses. As an official state genre, the semantic, stylistic, formal and thematic features of the ode were inextricably bound to the optimism of the early imperial era, where “the new Russian world order of peace and perfection was filled with divine grace and celebrated as the sanctification of God’s image on earth (Baehr, x). Stephen Lessing Baehr describes this blend of different classical, biblical and Slavic traditions as a “paradise myth.” This edenic paradise was to bear many fruits: learning and scientific advances, peace and military victories, earthly riches and prosperity. The identification of the Russian landscape with paradise also prefigured the elegy and the idyll, two genera where Russian authors found peace and sublimity in the landscape. The Russian landscape was sublimely beautiful and abundant, and imperial efforts served only to improve it (Baehr, 84). Baehr’s idea of the “paradise myth” encapsulates most of the odic values challenged in pastoral prose: nineteenth-century writers in the pastoral mode believed that the landscape was no longer sublime or abundant, and that efforts to improve it only degraded it further. The landscape of the pastoral is the landscape of the paradise myth, demythologized. The motifs of the ode, in particular those related to Baehr’s “paradise myth,” are most important to the stylistic, thematic transmissions of the pastoral mode in Russian literature. These motifs acquired second-order meanings as time wore on, giving them complex new intellectual or emotional densities, most of them in direct opposition to the convictions expressed 138 in the writing of the original odic paradise. The neo-classical genres of the eighteenth-century aspired to new, straightforward and transparent meanings, so the very existence of new complications and individual interpretations of these motifs were inherently an affront to the literary and linguistic system of the ode. Many authors also overtly used these motifs to express ideological content at odds with its original stated ideology. This process, whereby ideologies of an optimistic, collective literature were interiorized and twisted into their own refutation, was similar to cultural analogous movements across the world, including the transcendentalist movement in the United States, a process of what Quentin Anderson calls the process of “imaginative de-socialization,” dubbing what were formerly positive characteristics in a person or society as negative (Anderson, 4). The forms imperial societies invented to subjugate its land and peoples by an end up oppressing more than just their intended targets, and are eventually broken and harness by a population disillusioned and oppressed by those same forms. Gogol’s Dead Forms In an analysis of Dead Souls, Iuri Lotman says that the space (пространство) represented in an artistic work does not always correlate to some actual space (Lotman, 252). Nabokov agrees, claiming Dead Souls to be as useless in providing an authentic picture of the Russian landscape as Hamlet is at painting a picture of Denmark (Nabokov, 70-71). Space in a work of art simulates different connections to a picture of the world: temporal, social, ethical, etc. (Lotman, 252). Gogol’s work fits this concept of artistic space particularly well. Molly Brunson notes that in Dead Souls, rather than using a word for a concrete “place” or “spot,” Gogol uses a more abstract word for “space” (пространство), a space that is almost always unbounded or undefined. This tended to be Gogol’s favorite word for space, and it is used in all 139 of the artistic, personal and polemic texts examined below. This hints at the idea that Gogol imagined space abstractly, and saw its construction as a key piece of his artistic project. Another word for these systems for depicting space defined by temporal, social, political and ethical constraints is literary genre: genera are specific systems for depicting the relationship of individuals to space and time in literary texts. To extend Lotman’s theory in this way essentially puts it in line with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, the idea that space and time fuse together into one, concrete whole in the literary (or artistic) work, and it is this fused whole that defines genre and genre distinctions (Bakhtin, 84-85). In the case of Dead Souls, that model is a combination of distinct or opposed models, the generic tension resulting in a meta- utopia, where the utopia of the ode and the anti-utopia of novelistic reality clash, creating a zone of hermeneutic and systemic confusion (Morson, 40, 111), reflecting a confusion and disillusionment with the imperial project that the ode’s utopian vision portrayed and that was being implemented from the black earth of Ukraine to the Primorsky Krai on the Pacific coast. Gogol’s perception of nineteenth-century provincial Russia as a chaotic, neutral, formless and impersonal space was juxtaposed to the eighteenth-century world, defined by a belief in inherent goodness, in the unnaturalness of falsity, and that this simple, ingenuous perspective is the main criterion in the eventual triumph of good in the world (Lotman, “Lie,” 48) These eighteenth-century beliefs were foundational to national literary models, in particular the ode, the official state genre of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. The tension between the conventions of the eighteenth-century genera and Gogol’s perception of the Russian empire was key in creating Gogol’s artistic space. The formlessness in Gogol’s depiction of space and the location of objects within it displayed a profound disenchantment, a disjuncture, as stated earlier, between “world-as-it-was-supposed-to-be” and “world-as-it-is.” The world of Мертвые души 140 serves to depict this disjuncture much better than it does to depict any actual or documentary “reality.” Using Gogol’s own words and building on the analysis of other scholars, I will show how Gogol, a thinker deeply influenced by eighteenth-century thought about genre and politics, staged a confrontation between eighteenth-century ethics and their spatial perspective with emerging ethical and spatial perspectives in his contemporary Russia. Inherent Goodness and the Unnaturalness of Falsity: A Man of the Eighteenth-Century Gogol is remembered most for his fantastical satires of provincial Russia: Old-World Landowners, The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. Dead Souls, which Gogol titled a poema, or long poem, lampooned Russian provincial society, describing ridiculous small landowners and their foibles from the perspective of a traveling picaro who buys up their “dead souls” for the tax credits. The plot itself has frequently been held up as unimportant. Gogol himself claimed it was the product of a long improvisation taken up at his friend Pushkin’s request, including only whatever would make the author himself laugh (Fanger, 25). The peculiar plot and unusual artistic structure of Dead Souls, however, loosely organized around three links: landowners, city officials and the gaze of the hero, Chichikov (Mashinskii, 228-229), was informed by Gogol’s deeply-seated ideological and artistic beliefs. Gogol was invested in an ideology that gave preference to earlier poetic forms like the epic and the ode, while troubled and preoccupied with the newer understandings of society that produces novelistic spaces and the heroes who navigate them, setting the stage for a confrontation between the two. Gogol wanted to write an epic, but the world in which he lived was a fallen space, more fit to the novel than the heroic epic. In Dead Souls, he staged a confrontation between newer ideas of a society and landscape defined by 141 national character and “Russianness,” connected to novel and its chronotope, and older “national” forms borne out of eighteenth-century ideology, creating a pastoral tension throughout the text and forming a uniquely Gogolian atmosphere. Despite the way Gogol’s bluster about the lack of predetermined plot or structure for Dead Souls was parroted by later critics, Gogol did seriously consider the difference between different genera over his lifetime and spent a lot of time deciding which genre was appropriate for his masterwork. In letters to Pushkin, when the work was still inchoate, Gogol referred to it as a novel. Over time, he began to refer to it more and more as a “poema,” which is frequently translated as poem but also means a long or epic piece of writing, sometimes in verse. He laid out his understanding of these and other genera in a collection of short essays, which demonstrate the thought process behind his choices while writing Dead Souls. The essays also show how eighteenth-century genera, in particular the epic and the ode, played a role in that choice. In Gogol’s youth, his gymnasium textbook was “The Basis of Russian Literature,” by A. Nikol’skii, which stressed the importance and beauty of eighteenth-century poets like Lomonosov, Kheraskov, Khemnister, Dmitriev and Derzhavin. His teachers apparently scorned newer elegiac poets (Mann, 108-11). Gogol wrote his own school primer in the 1840s, titled Учебная книга словестности для русского юношесва [A Textbook of Literature for Russian Youths], which remained unpublished during his own lifetime. In it, he confirmed the same kind of generic hierarchy he had learned as a child, similar to the one Mikhail Lomonosov laid out in his own short instructional essay, A Brief Guide to Eloquence. In the first place, Gogol agrees with Lomonosov. (Lomonosov, 96, Gogol, 470). Lomonosov said: 142 Language [the word] can be depicted in two ways: in prose, or as a poem. Prose is language [the word], which has no definite meters or syntax, no rhyme, no particular pronunciation, but rather all utterances are arranged in it in such an order, as clear everyday speech would demand. A poem consists of parts defined by a known meter, and moreover one that must be exact; the order of syllables is in accordance with their accent or pronunciation. The first way [prose] is to compose sermons, stories, and educational books; the other way [poetry] is to compose hymns, odes, comedies, satires, and other kinds of lyrics.” (Lomonosov, 96) Lomonosov comes out and says explicitly that there are two kinds of artistic speech: poetry and prose. Each is suitable for depicting different kinds of spaces. Prose, as a clear, everyday form, is suitable for sermons, stories, and educational books. Poetry, with its exactitude and strict form, is suitable for hymns, odes, comedies, satires, and other kinds of lyrics. Eighteenth-aesthetic beliefs were generated by eighteenth-century ethical beliefs: the genera of the eighteenth-century were explicitly created to bolster the optimistic, universalist worldview of eighteenth-century absolutism. Eighteenth-century thought was based on the belief in the naturalness of goodness and the artificiality of falsity, and Gogol understood aesthetics as linked to ethics in this way (Lotman, “Lie,” 48). This aesthetic and ethical worldview held that human beings were capable of seeing the straightforward difference between the natural good and unnecessary falsehood and thus capable of transforming of the world in accordance with the good was possible and even probable. This belief’s instantiations in poetic and political discourses mirrored one another. The political conviction averred that a system of enlightened absolutism would allow a good tsar to create an ordered, paradisal kingdom (Baehr, 29). This political conviction was confirmed by the ode, an artistic form where an enlightened poet created an image of paradise within the lines of the exact and harmonious structure of the odic genre. The depiction of objects and space in the ode and other high poetic genres is inextricably tied to these ethical and political principles. Gogol agreed that there are two kinds of literature, poetry and prose, one high, one low, and he related ethical ideas about a general worldview to literary systems: 143 There are two languages of literature, two kinds of words, two distinctly different types of expressions: one that is distinctly exalted, entirely harmonic, which not only through lively, pictorial representations strengthens the representation of every thought, with the most miraculous combination of sounds thus more portrays with yet more vitality of all expressed — [is the] sort [of expression] accessible only the very few, and even to that very few only in moments of deep emotion, which is called the poetic, the highest language of man, or, as every people have called it, the language of the gods […] Есть два языка словесности, две одежды слова, два слишком отличных рода выражений: один слишком возвышенный, весь гармонический, который не только живым, картинным представлением всякой мысли, самыми чудными сочетаниями звуков усиливает силу выражений и тем живей выдает жизнь всего выражаемого, — род, доступный весьма немногим и сим даже немногим доступный только в минуты глубоко растроганного состояния душевного настроения чувств, называемый поэтическим, высшим языком человеческим, или, как называли все народы, языком богов […] (Gogol, 471) Poetry is the form fit for expressing rapture, emotion and a harmonious vision of the world, while prose is a: […] simple form of expression, not searching for overly vivid images, or overly picturesque expressions, or harmonious combinations of sounds, giving in to the natural course of their thoughts in the most tranquil order of the soul, [a form of expression] any and everyone is capable of finding — the prosaic sort. It is accessible to all, although it can elevate subtly to a poetic composition and harmony, as it is carried up to such an affective, spiritual mood, a mood every person is capable of approaching in sincere, spiritual moments. простой, не ищущий слишком живых образов, картинности выражения, ни согласных сочетаний в звуках, предающийся естественному ходу мыслей своих в самом покойном расположении духа, в каком способен находиться всякий, — род прозаический. Он всем доступный, хотя между тем может неприметно возвыситься до поэтического состояния и гармонии, по мере, как доведется к такому растроганному настроению душевному, до которого также может достигнуть всякий человек в душевные, истинные минуты (471). Gogol, having learned well from his school primer filled with eighteenth-century masters, clearly believed in the existence of high, poetic genres that depicted life with divine vitality, and prosaic genres whose description followed the order of everyday life, in what Lomonosov would have called “clear, everyday speech.” Gogol’s world, and the genres used to depict it, however, 144 became more convoluted and perplexing, opening the way for all sorts of variations and in- between modes of expression: Само собою разумеется; что как в том роде, так и в этом есть тысячи оттенков и ступеней, высших и низших, из которых одни даютс<я> в удел только необыкновенным гениям, другие — счастливым талантам и наконец третьи — почти всем сколько-нибудь способным людям. Само собою также разумеетс<я>, что иногда тот и другой род врываются в пределы друг друга, и то, что иногда поэзия может снисходить почти до простоты прозаической и проза возвышаться до величья поэтического. Но тем не менее они составляют два отдельные рода человеческой речи. Отдел этот слишком явствен и резок. Слова поэзия и проза произносятся в таком же противуречащем друг другу значении, как слова день и ночь. It goes without saying that in this and that form [of expression, i.e. poetry and prose] there are thousands of shades and grades, higher and lower, both in this form [of expression] and in the other, of which are accessible only to extraordinary geniuses, others only to fortunate talents, and moreover other [forms accessible] to almost all men of any capabilities. It is also self-evident that sometimes one form and the other [i.e. poetry and prose] break through the boundaries of the other, and so sometimes poetry can descend almost to the simplicity of prose and prose ascend to the majesty of poetry. (471-72) Consistent with his general pattern of thought, Gogol walks up to the edge of a sensible realization that challenges his idea and then walks back, as if it is too horrible to accept, claiming despite this messy blurring of genres and discourses: “they are nevertheless two separate kinds of human speech. This division is distinct. The words poetry and prose are pronounced in the same contradictory sense as the words day and night.” A literary system where one form of speech can break from the other or descend into it all of a sudden does not sound like one defined by “night and day,” but this messy reality, full of its complex mixtures of genera, provides an enlightening backdrop to Gogol’s decision to write Dead Souls as a poema. In further discussion of specific poetic genre, Gogol discusses the ode in terms that make clear that theoretically, he believes in this night-and-day distinction between poetry and prose. Lomonsov claimed that odes were the only proper place for noble and important matter (Zhivov, 145 207), while Gogol said that the ode is “[…]the highest, grandest, fullest, and most harmonious of all poetic creations.” It is a genre where the author expresses thoughts that arise from being overly imbued with the divinity of the poetic object, and focuses solemnly on it “in equal and uniform stanzas, and under its freedom, preserving a strict order.” (Gogol, 473) Once again walking his argument up to places where the strict categorization and order he desires in the written word and the world it depicts become untenable, Gogol acknowledges the messy places in between the high genre of the ode and prose. He resolves these complications by inventing a form of expression he dubs the “lyrical appeal,” which he claims is the lowest of all high poetic modes of expression. The “lyrical appeal” is nothing more than “a cry, a cry, an exclamation, an inducement, or a scream that excites others to something. It can be short, fast but nevertheless sublime, sometimes even overly elevated in its laconic power, and thus has the right to take its place among the high lyric genera, coming into line with the ode.” This lyrical appeal will define the most impressive and distinctive passages in Dead Souls, blurring the distinctions between genera. At points in the poema where Gogol aspires to depict a harmonious, poetic world in the style of the ode using a “lyrical appeal” he falls short, left only with an effusion of empty signifiers and empty space. Gogol also lauds the epic, calling it “the greatest, the most complete, the most enormous, and the most versatile of all dramatic-narrative creations,” as opposed to the novel, a form that does not examine the whole of life, but rather just a certain episode from it, as it is too concerned with individual personalities and their banal everyday life. Gogol proclaims that “[t]he novel does not take all of life, but [just one] remarkable incident in a life, one that made life appear in a brilliant form, without considering the agreed-upon space” where the narrative takes place. This seems to anticipate Lukaçs’s understanding of the novel as a genre that gives only one subjective 146 aspect of the totality of life (Lukaçs, 75), rather than the concrete relation of a typical individual’s destiny to the communally objective totality, as the epic does (67). In the novel, the world and the individual are out of harmony, and this is reflected in the problematic, fractured subjective experience conveyed through the novel. The world appears as nothing more than a backdrop for the petty quests and passing subjective phenomena of the plot (Gogol). The novelist is responsible to the objects and people in front of them, and above that, the inner perspective of the hero, rather than a communal or state ideology. Gogol was torn between his responsibility to depict the messy world in front of him and the orderly world of ode and empire. Lomonosov and others like him championed poetic forms, such as the ode and the epic, that were well-ordered, tightly-structured forms that reflected the eighteenth-century belief in the possibility of a harmonious political and social order. Eighteenth-century Russian literary forms were genetically tied to the political ideology of the time, which lauded a “new Russian world of order, peace and perfection was filled with divine grace and celebrated the sanctification of God’s image on earth.” (Baehr, 29). Gogol’s discomfort with the novel was cast in these terms. He claimed to be rejecting a form unable to depict a perfectible, orderly world and individuals in harmony with that world. Again unable to avoid discussing degraded, mixed literary genera despite his insistence on two and only two types of literary expression, Gogol dedicates a whole section to the “Lesser Forms of Epic,” a new kind of narrative for a new age. This lesser epic was “a middle ground between the novel and the epic,” which preserves some of the vivid and sincere truth of higher verbal arts to capture a totality of human experience. In this new generic “middle ground,” the hero retained the private, invisible qualities of the novelistic hero, but if that hero was an astute observer of the human soul, he could present a vivid, sincere picture of the world that included 147 all the shortcomings, abuses, vices of the earth at the time, rather than simply focusing on their own personal problem of meaning. Gogol cites Don Quixote and Orlando Furiuso (Gogol, 479) as positive exemplars, which, despite of their humorous tone and perceived lightness, took on the character of the epic. Both “lesser epics” take place along the road, which Gogol hints is the best place for such a work, as the road can lead the hero through a chain of adventures and events that present the significant character and customs of the time, capturing the totality of human experience in a particular place. Similar to in other picaresque novels of “the road,” such as Don Quixote, Gil Blas and The Pickwick Papers, the string of episodes which constitute the “plot” of Dead Souls are held together by the involvement of a picaro (Lavrin, 98-99). Cervantes also termed his novel an epic. Dead Souls’ main character, the picaro Chichikov, seems a characterless mirror reflecting the views along the road from the arrival and departure that bookend the narrative (Fanger, 27) until it ends with a panegyrical “lesser epic,” which collapses time and space into the road itself. In Lomonosov’s panegyric odes, the perspective on space was also dynamic, but organized vertically, not horizontally, yet the “lyric I” was also collapsed into the landscape of empire itself, a pure vehicle for rapture at the God, the Empress and Russia. In Gogol’s prescription for the “lesser form of the epic” in Textbook, the hero is also reduced to an invisible observer of reality rather than the bearer of a real but subjective problem, giving the text a flavor more poetic than prosaic. Odic poets and Gogol’s “private, invisible hero” take a back seat to the spatial totality itself. In Dead Souls, Gogol aspired to write the kind of narrative that, although written in prose, can still be considered a poetic creation. The poet aspired to a perspective beyond the subjective and submitted itself to greater authority. In Lomonosov, those authorities were 148 explicit. Gogol’s problem was that his world appeared to be without an appropriately sublime authority to totalize space. Lukaçs identifies a split between critics of the novel: those see it as having a problematic and those who see it as being a problematic [emphasis mine]. Although the difference is hard to parse, many ninetieth-century writers saw themselves as simply reflecting the problematic society around them. They saw their works as having a problematic. Eighteenth-century aesthetics encouraged both art and society to strive for order and reason, a goal Gogol shared. He saw the novel as messy and overly-focused on one character’s problems, thus only subjectively relating reality. That is a genre that is itself a problematic. Gogol tried to resolve this problematic by mixing in elements of the epic and the ode. Problems remained and if anything, fell into starker relief. How can a writer represent novelistic society in a nobler way without ignoring the vices of contemporary society? How can a writer in a fallen, prosaic age recapture “the lightness of great epic literature?” (Lukaçs, 58) How can Russia be great if the best way to depict it is through absurd and acerbic satire? In Dead Souls, in accordance with his theorizing in his Textbook, Gogol returned to conventions from older genera of the ode and the epic in an effort to depict noble and important matter, to give prosaic society a more harmonious, poetic expression. These older genera, in particular the ode, were vital to the creation and perpetuation of the “paradise myth” of Imperial Russian society. Trying to use these aspects of these forms of expression to depict a decidedly un-paradisal society resulted in a narrative form of tension and contradiction, a clash between a problematic generic space and a paradisal one, and thus an excellent example of “pastoral” literature. Spaces “Real” and “Imagined” 149 As shown in his descriptive and prescriptive Textbook of Literature, Gogol shared the ideas about genre and society essential to the eighteenth-century and was aware of the inherently “problematic” nature of the novel. He also conceived of this problem as a spatial one that had to do with the relationship between the hero to the space in which the narrative took place, along with the other events and inhabitants of that space. The frame of Lotman’s and Bakhtin’s ideas of literary form buttress this relationship between Gogol’s imagined literary space and literary form: literary form was a simulation of space constrained by temporal, social, ethical, and political ideologies; space, time and ideology merge together into one, concrete whole in the literary (or artistic) work. The “National” Character of Prose: Time and Space in Dead Souls In his “Authorial Confession,” Gogol describes his aim in writing Dead Souls as akin to the highest aims of what he described earlier as “a lesser form of the epic”: I wanted it to be that after reading my work, an entire Russian man would appear, as if unwittingly, with a full diversity of the treasures and blessings that have fallen among his allotment, above all in front of other peoples [народами: also “nations”], and with all the great many shortcomings in him, also above all in front of other peoples. I thought the lyrical force of which I had in stock would help me to depict these virtues so that it will spark a love for the Russian man, and the force of laughter, of which I also had a stock, would help me depict so vividly his faults that the reader would come to them hate, even if he found them in himself. (Gogol, 442) Despite his distaste for the novelistic genre and preference for the above expressive form, what Gogol describes is strikingly, but not wholly similar to Benedict Anderson’s description of the early novel. Anderson, examining the imagined space or chronotope of an early creole novel sees: [t]he 'national imagination' at work in the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside. This picaresque tour d’horizon — hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes - is nonetheless not a tour du monde. The horizon is clearly bounded: it is that of colonial Mexico. Nothing assures us of this sociological 150 solidity more than the succession of plurals. For they conjure up a social space full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness of this colony. (Contrast prisons in the Bible. They are never imagined as typical of this or that society. Each, like the one where Salome was bewitched by John the Baptist, is magically alone.) (B. Anderson, 31-32) Gogol’s “private, invisible” hero moves through a sociological landscape, one that would contain an “entire Russian man” [emphasis my own], a representing a member and many members of the increasingly intentionally and comprehensively imagined community that was “Russia.” In many ways, however, Gogol’s poema resists the sort of landscape enabled by this novelistic spatial imagination. We will return to concepts from the above quote to show how “the lesser form of the epic” and “lyrical appeals” undermine the hegemony of that imagined space. Gogol’s universe does not always include a bounded horizon, a profusion of knowable plurals, sociological or even material solidity, and a universe of representative objects. It is by merging these two chronotopes, (1) the underlying background of the emerging nineteenth-century novelistic world of the fledgling nation, linear time, and a particular sociological space, with (2) interjections of the eighteenth-century chronotope of the paradise myth, imperial power, cyclical time, and universal values that enacts the tension of the Russian pastoral in Gogol’s “lesser epic” of Dead Souls. One of the first noteworthy examples of the emerging nineteenth-century novelistic world was Evgenii Onegin by Gogol’s friend Pushkin. Belinsky’s description of Onegin as “an encyclopedia of Russian life” is well-known to the point of being cliche: in Onegin Russian society was for the first time presented at a critical moment in its development and the emerging social and national spirit (Forsyth, 165). This analysis of the “novel” is congruent to Anderson’s understanding of a novelistic space as filled with sociological important and verifiable objects. Many prominent theorists of the novel, from Lukaçs to Bakhtin to Ginzburg, count Onegin as a 151 novel, but Anderson’s idea of the novel as a form where the national imagination is at work in the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity dovetails quite well with a literary text considered an “encyclopedia of a nation’s life.” Gogol’s insistence that Pushkin thought up the idea of Dead Souls and requested he undertake the project betrays a deeper connection between the national character of the novel and Gogol’s ideas on form. Boris Groys traces the legitimacy of the myth that Pushkin provided the plot of Dead Souls with his usual zeal for dramatic overstatement. Groys, although not citing her, confirms and extends Lydiia Ginzburg’s argument about Pushkin’s “poetry of actuality” (see last chapter p.#) to its furthest logical extent. Groys claims that by providing an encyclopedia of Russian life in Onegin, “Pushkin deadened dead souls with his poetry, turning them into a lifeless collection of character traits, habits and bodily symptoms.” (Groys, 140). Lomonosov and eighteenth- century poets created a system of pure symbol, where words became tools for expressing metaphorical meaning based on poetic precedent. In Pushkin, Ginzburg identifies as a metaphorical shift that takes places behind the poetic word where objects in space can be seen as more than symbolic components of a metaphor or myth, but as a way of expressing the subjective experience of an individual (Ginzburg, 32-38). What Groys and Ginzburg are describing is the world and language of the novel: a textual space legible to a national community because it is filled with a succession of sociologically solid, concrete, recognizable plurals. Although Onegin itself was in verse, and according to Ginzburg holds onto its spiritual and metaphorical meaning in spite of its concrete objectivity, its space was still a novelistic, as it depicted a the society of a nation. It was not a space defined by odic myths or the lyrical individual spirit. Whether Pushkin, as Russia’s great national poet, was documenting or 152 inventing this novelistic space is unimportant for this discussion. Either way, he created the prototypical signification of novelistic, imagined literary space. It is because of this novelistic space inherited from Pushkin (141) that Gogol could have claimed to have taken the idea for Dead Souls from him. The Russia Gogol made of the world Pushkin created, like that described in Pyotr Chaadaev’s famous “Philosophical Letter” is neutral, formless, ‘unpicturesque,’ a space beyond everything historical and impersonal (143). How this collection of objects was ordered not only would “seem unpoetic to Pushkin,” as Groys claims, but to virtually everyone. To use Lomonosov’s words about the language of prose in the Rhetoric, it was a world where all utterances, all objects were “arranged in it in such an order as clear, everyday life would demand.” Gogol inherited this world of petty quests and insignificant quotidian problems from Russia’s early novelists, but strove to inject into it a perspective that could yield a comprehensive presentation of the nation as a whole, about its life, people, morality and history, as well as its representational systems and artistic experiences (Mashinskii, 21-26). This was, in fact, closer to the poetry of the epic, a space less sociological than it was moral, poetic and transcendent. Gogol wanted his poem to be a place where Russia as a nation spoke about itself in its own artistic language, not just a place documenting a succession of problems, trends and objects in their typical banality. He took the novelistic space and reinserted certain motifs from the paradise myth, meaning they acquired new, sometimes dissonant, second-order meanings corresponding to concrete places and things. Molly Brunson’s interpretation of Gogol’s language in Dead Souls also sees the poema as a clash of perspectives on reality. She argues that Gogol strove to filter Russia’s peculiar modernity through different perspectival systems. These conflicting visual perspectives indicated 153 a struggle to represent Russia and its particular national identity, which I would argue are analogous to the clash between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century generic systems. Ideas of “perspective” themselves were European and acquiring these “correct” scientific forms of visual perspective “promised not only to bring Russian culture in line with the aesthetic conventions of Western realism, but also to propel Russia itself into Western European modernity.” (Brunson, 377) Gogol trained as a visual artist; his visual descriptions are known for their dizzying variety, surprising novelty and disorienting absurdity. Brunson sees the perspectival incongruities and unevennesses in Gogol’s verbal perspective as mirroring Russia’s incongruous and uneven modernization (Brunson, 387). Lomonosov laid down the points and lines, but in filling them in with local colors, Gogol noticed that this “correct” perspective could not contain the variety, novelty and absurdity of the colors required. Gogol uses this “European,” renaissance perspective and even the language of trained draftsman in describing the “points,” “marks,” and “lines” of the landscape, flattening it out into comprehensible space, before overturning it by cluttering it with absurd and subjective descriptions of objects and people. This is an adroit and illuminating frame for interpreting Dead Souls, and I agree with Brunson that Gogol’s prose is defined by this sort of perspectival clash. This dissertation, however, is a more strictly literary investigation, and the perspective that Brunson puts forth as “renaissance visual perspective” (389) I prefer to interpret as the language of eighteenth-century Russian enlightened absolutism and its trademark genre, the ode, with its urge to structure, define, flatten and subjugate. It is an essentially a projection over space, as is the “correct” perspective in art, whereas Gogol’s attention to particulars is descriptive in a way that is distorts the ability to see space with any kind of “objective” perspective. This objective perspective coexists unhappily with a novelistic world of empty of sublimity and full of dead 154 peasants, stupid bureaucrats and blank-faced girls, made necessary by the emerging logic of everyday life. The rapture of the ode, as Pumpianskii said, was the rapture at the moment Russia understood itself as Western country (Pumpianskii, 54). Gogol’s effort to depict the whole of Russia, warts and all, while maintaining the rapture, harmony and comprehensibility of the enlightened odic perspective was untenable. In Dead Souls, Gogol evoked the possible context of odic poetry and empire in a way that was common to his contemporaries, many of whom penned “prosaic hymns to Russia in the rhetoric of official nationality” (Vajskopf, 102). Unfortunately, the Russian countryside of the nineteenth century was an impoverished, deserted and unprotecting corner of the country (Vajskopf 103) if it was judged from the ethical and aesthetic standards of the ode, with that genre’s emphasis on dramatic mountain peaks, celebrations of bloody military victories and awe at bustling commerce. The glorious future projected by the ode and the bleak national present Chichkov perceives on his journey along the road became contrasting and mutually dependent tropes, the “world-as-it-is” that is seen not as the “world-as-it-should-be.” These contrasting tropes are most famously present in the passage below, the main lyrical aside of Dead Souls, where “the idea of Russia as Gogol saw Russia (a peculiar landscape, a special atmosphere, a symbol, a long, long, road) looms in all its strange loveliness through the tremendous dream of the book.” (Nabokov, 107) This poetic digression, interspersed with memories of Chichikov’s childhood and his ouster from town, are not part of the general narrative or pattern of the book, but rather serve to highlight these contrasting tropes about the Russian landscape. As efforts to ascend to the harmony and sublimity of high poetic genera, they are clearly the “lyrical appeals” referenced in Gogol’s Textbook, which despite their brevity can be as elevated as the ode. In the first segment of his poetic cry, Gogol’s narrator emphasizes the 155 empty, impoverished, and unimpressive aspects of his country, while at the same time calling the nation by its poetic and archaic name: “Русь! Русь! вижу тебя, из моего чудного, прекрасного далека тебя вижу: бедно, разбросанно и неприютно в тебе; не развеселят, не испугают взоров дерзкие дива природы, венчанные дерзкими дивами искусства, города с многооконными высокими дворцами, вросшими в утесы, картинные дерева и плющи, вросшие в домы, в шуме и в вечной пыли водопадов; не опрокинется назад голова посмотреть на громоздящиеся без конца над нею и в вышине каменные глыбы; не блеснут сквозь наброшенные одна на другую темные арки, опутанные виноградными сучьями, плющами и несметными миллионами диких роз, не блеснут сквозь них вдали вечные линии сияющих гор, несущихся в серебряные ясные небеса.” (Gogol, 220) “Ah, Russia, Russia, I see you, from my wondrous, beautiful far-away I see you! In you everything is poor and disordered and uncozy; in you the eye is neither cheered nor dismayed by temerities of nature which a yet more temerarious art has conquered; in you one beholds no cities with lofty, many-windowed palaces, lofty as crags, no picturesque trees, no ivy-clad ruins, no waterfalls with their everlasting spray and roar, no beetling precipices which confuse the brain with their stony immensity, no vistas of vines and ivy and millions of wild roses and eternal lines of shimmering mountains which look almost unreal against the clear, silvery background of the sky.” Source? You might as well use a published translation and amend it as needed. No quotation marks for block quotations Gogol was writing from abroad in the “wondrous, beautiful far-away” of Italy, the birthplace of European visual perspective and host to the ruins of the classical civilizations whose gods and place-names had been integrated into the paradise myth of the ode. He negates the language of the paradise myth and the ode as an artistic model concurrent to his deployment of it. The poetic solution of Western classical, biblical and patristic traditions concocted by eighteenth-century poets to flatteringly portray the Russian empire appears unstable, the “megamyth” separating out into its original component parts, the paradisiacal component flowing back to Europe, Russia keeping only the empty praise. The wonder and the beauty of classical Rome and its gods stays in Europe and Russia holds no cities, no mansions, no trees, no ruins, no precipices. The eye is neither cheered nor dismayed, and one wonders what is even visible if there are no vistas. All that remains is the rapture, but rapture at what? 156 With a cursory look at a typical Lomonosovian ode, we can see how Gogol is referencing odic discourse and the ways in which the paradise myth is unravelling. In "Ода, в которой Ея Величеству благодарение от сочинителя приносится за оказанную ему высочайшую милость в Сарском Селе Августа 27 дня 1750 года” (“Ode, in which the writer offers thanks to Her Majesty for the supreme grace shown him at Tsarskoe Selo on the 27th of August, in the year 1750”), Lomonosov presents the paradise myth as a collection of static identities and differences, with universal metaphorical meanings transferable across contexts. Ancient Slavic glory, the Nile of Egypt, the Garden of Eden and the Neva coursing along golden temples appear as the same place, the capitol of the Russian Empire. Russia appears, in contrast to its essential emptiness in Gogol, full of these symbolic representations of power, glory and fertility. The poet knows just his place, as his individual spring is to flow into the greater course of Russian history and society as it is directed by human hands and Elizabeth’s care: Где, древним именем Славена Гордяся, пролились струи, Там видя Нимфа изумленна Украшенны луга свои, Златые кровы оком мерит И в ужасе себе не верит, Но, кажду обозревши часть, С веселием сие вещает: "То само небо созидает Или Петровой Дщери власть”. Рекла и, влагу рассекая, Пустилась тщательно к Неве; Волна, во бреги ударяя, Клубится пеною в траве. Во храм, сияющий металлом, Пред трон, украшенный кристаллом, Поспешно простирает ход; Венцем зеленым увязенной И в висе, вещает, облеченной Владычице Российских вод: 157 "Река, которой проливают Великие озера дань И кою громко прославляют Во всей вселенной мир и брань! Ты счастлива трудом Петровым; Тебя и ныне красит новым Рачением Елисавет, Но малые мои потоки Прими в себя, как Нил широкий, Который из рая течет. Мои источники венчает Едемской равна красота, Где сад Богиня насаждает, Прохладны возлюбив места, Поля где небу подражают, Себя цветами испещряют. Не токмо нежная весна, Но осень тамо - юность года; Всегда роскошствует природа, Искусством рук побуждена. (4-7) Where, in the ancient name of the Slavs They take pride, streams were spilled, There the Nymph is amazed, seeing The decoration of their meadows, Golden blood is measured by the eye And in awe does not trust itself, But, having reviewed every part, With gladness, proclaims: “The very sky, or Peter's Daughter Creates this power.” Flowing and, dividing the waters, She carefully descended to the Neva; A wave, breaking at the bank, Swirling into foam at the grass. Into the temple, shimmering with metal, In front of the throne, decorated in crystal, Hurriedly extends the procession; Linked together by a green crown And in glory clothed, proclaimed As sovereign of Russian waters: "The river that great lakes Great lakes overflow in tribute 158 And which is loudly glorified Across all the world, known and unknown! You are made fortunate from Peter's labors; You are adorned by the new care of Elizabeth, But my own small streams You absorb into yourself, wide like the Nile, Which from Paradise flows. My springs are crowned With beauty equal to the Edenic, Where a garden the goddess plants, Cool beloved places, Fields where the sky is mirrored, Streaked with flowers. Not only in the mild spring, But autumn there is the adolescence of the year; Nature always luxuriates, Awakened by the art of [human] hand. The wisdom and care of Peter and Elizabeth are made evident in the fertility and abundance of the landscape and the cathedrals shimmering with metals. If those are absent in Gogol, and the concrete, specific places and objects composing the paradise myth are returned to their original locations, what is to be made of Russia’s glory? Gogol’s speech disappears it, along with the odic form and the paradise myth itself. Previous poets deployed the landscape of this odic language in a new context, only to metaphorically re-imbue it with meaning. In “Водопад,” Derzhavin personified crags and canyons as sleeping quietly, and the clouds and moon as respectfully afraid of the coursing waterfall, which was meant in fact to be a dead Potemkin. Lermontov saw himself in an old crag where a wet remnant of a storm-cloud lingered, crying alone, the romantic hero alone against the world. Both these contexts gave a geological feature a meaning more personalized than geologic than geological features had in the Lomonosovian model, but neither completely erased the feature. If anything they actualized the features more: Lermontov seemed to be staring at a real 159 crag. Gogol looks around for a crag and sees nothing sublime, anywhere, and thus erases the feature twice in the passage above: first upon comparing it to a palace, and second upon realizing there is no palace and no crag. It is not there of, nor in, itself. Gogol’s belief in those “foundational ideas of the eighteenth century” and invocation of the language of their artistic model meant immediate disillusionment when confronted with a real world with no crags and no mansions, odically metaphorical or concretely actual. Gogol, the erstwhile art student, held a conception of beauty that was sculptural, one of three-dimensional objects in physical space (Lotman, “Lie,” 32). He did not see objects as metaphors of some dead grandee or fading youth, inhibiting his ability to effectively exploit the poetic universe of the eighteenth-century paradise myth, defined as it was by objects as spiritual metaphors rather than actual objects. Continuing on about Russia, Gogol’s narrator sees none of the tall peaks on top of which the odic poet oriented himself, only a dizzying flatness. Speaking to “Rus’,” he says: “In you everything is flat and open; your towns project like points or signals from smooth levels of plain, and nothing whatsoever enchants or deludes the eye. Yet what secret, what invincible force draws me to you?” In this aside, Gogol attempts to overcome what Groys terms a lifeless collection and Lotman calls the chaotic world crumbling into un-joinable pieces (Lotman, “Lie,” 31). What is terrible, funny, or in any way anomalous for Gogol is something that destroys boundaries, and in accordance with his summary of the plot, the terrible, funny and anomalous are the things he included in Dead Souls. When he tries to describe space without this succession of ugly, everyday objects, the world appears a blank plot of points situated on perspectival lines that negates the universalized collection of metaphorical places and objects presented in the ode. 160 If Lomonosov set boundaries, and Pushkin and Lermontov felt the effect of those boundaries viscerally as individuals, then Gogol feels nothing but their lack in Russia’s endless expanse. With the disappearance of the objects constituting the paradise myth, there is no point of reference for his eye to orient the narrative, and space seems to stretch on endlessly: Почему слышится и раздается немолчно в ушах твоя тоскливая, несущаяся по всей длине и ширине твоей, от моря и до моря, песня? Что в ней, в этой песне? Что зовет, и рыдает, и хватает за сердце? Какие звуки болезненно лобзают и стремятся в душу и вьются около моего сердца? Русь! чего же ты хочешь от меня? какая непостижимая связь таится между нами? Что глядишь ты так, и зачем всё, что ни есть в тебе, обратило на меня полные ожидания очи?.. И еще, полный недоумения, неподвижно стою я, а уже главу осенило грозное облако, тяжелое грядущими дождями, и онемела мысль пред твоим пространством. Что пророчит сей необъятный простор? Здесь ли, в тебе ли не родиться беспредельной мысли, когда ты сама без конца? Здесь ли не быть богатырю, когда есть место, где развернуться и пройтись ему? И грозно объемлет меня могучее пространство, страшною силою отразясь во глубине моей; неестественной властью осветились мои очи: у! какая сверкающая, чудная, незнакомая земле даль! Русь!.. (Gogol, 220) “Why does there ceaselessly echo and re-echo in my ears the melancholic song, hovering throughout your whole length and the breadth, from sea to sea? What is in that song? Why does it call and sob and clutch at my heart? What notes agonizingly caress and pierce my soul, and flutter around my heart? Rus! What is it you want from me? What incomprehensible bond which remains between us? Why do you look upon me as you do, and how come everything that is not in you, turns on me the full yearning of your eyes? And yet, full of perplexity, I stand frozen, and already a terrible cloud draws a shadow over my head, heavy with forbidding rains, and the thought becomes dumb before your space. What augurs this boundless expanse? Is it not here, in you, that limitless idea is born, when you yourself are endless? Is it not possible for a bogatyr to be here when there is a place where he can turn back and walk through? And it is terrible, bounding me in, the powerful space, with a fearsome force reflecting itself in my depths; an unnatural power lights up my eyes: Ooo! what a shimmering, curious, unfamiliar stretch of earth! Rus!.. The sad song mentioned in this “lyrical appeal” is the demystified paradise myth, limping along without the full support of the genera made to depict it and debunked through the depiction of novelistic objects. The question naturally emerges: what does Russia want of the hero. The odic poet had a clear vision of what empire required: glorification through word and deed. As we see above, the juxtaposition of two abstract models, an strict, old odic model with a poorly- 161 organized, newer chaotic model, comes to the fore in Gogol’s poetic digressions, which as Nabokov noted were not a part of the “general narrative or pattern of the book,” but rather existed to highlight contrasting tropes about the landscape (Nabokov 107). This insertion of a poetic digression that imbibes in the semantic and ideological world of the eighteenth-century ode stages a juxtaposition of two contrasting tropes, a juxtaposition typical of the pastoral mode in Russian literature, and through it the narrator communicates that he knows not what his nation requires of him or even what composes that “unknown stretch” of nation. Despite his voiding of the metaphorical meaning of the ode, Gavril Shapiro notes that Gogol frequently employs specific baroque devices identified with the classical ode that were explicit favorites of Lomonosov (Shapiro, 188). Gogol uses several popular baroque poetic devices common to Lomonosov in the previous passage alone, including asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions between similar parts of a sentence, betrayed by the multiplication of semicolons (Shapiro, 194). He also uses anaphora, most of the sentences beginning with interrogative pronouns, in particular “что.” Lomonosov’s anaphora tended to emphasize “objectives for Elizabeth’s reign didactically, in the guise of divine assurances to the newly crowned Empress,” (Shapiro, 188) Gogol’s use of these devices underscored his confusion, his questioning more in line with the bleak inscrutability of the world in Ecclesiastes than the ordered world of Deuteronomy. The Empress and the grandiose future Lomonosov and others projected in the ode is evoked but unfulfilled, a dream of castles in the sky, its ordered poetry breaking out of formation to gallop off towards an unknown horizon. This ideological juxtaposition is shown through the descriptions of smoke and dust in Dead Souls versus the symbolic use of smoke and dust in the Lomonosovian ode. In the Lomonosovian ode, smoke always signifies a victory. It is the signal that an enemy has been 162 destroyed and left in ruins by a conquering Russia on a faraway battlefield. In his first published ode, “Ода на блаженныя памяти Государыне Императрице Анне Иоанновне на победу над Турками и Татарами и на взятие Хотина 1739 года,” Lomonosov describes the smoke rising from the battlefield after Russia defeats the Turks and Tartars: “Там слух спешит во все концы; Далече дым в полях курится. (“There word spreads to the ends of the earth/Smoke rises from afar in the fields” The poet admires the destruction from the top of a mountain. No sound can travel that far, but the distant streams of smoke are visible. Let the earth everywhere howl, A black smoke veils the light, Moldavan mountains drown in blood But it cannot harm you, Oh Russia, fate itself shields you, In accordance with the fortunate Anna’s desire. Пускай везде громады стонут, Премрачный дым покроет свет, В крови Молдавски горы тонут; Но вам не может то вредить, О Россы, вас сам рок покрыть Желает для счастливой Анны. Gogol’s hero leaves smoke smoking along the road (Дымом дымится под тобою дорога), but has no idea what the future holds for him. In Lomonosov’s ode, the brutal and shocking violence is justified, as fate is executing the vision of the Empress as articulated by the poet, evidenced by the smoke and blood drowning the earth and blocking the sun. If anything, while lacking the strict four-footed iambs, Gogol’s language in his lyrical asides is more odic than Lomonosov’s. The narrator speaks in what Aleskandr Shishkov termed the “высокое косноязуче (high tongue-tiedness)” of the ode, by which he mean tautologies, repetitions, hyperboles, and oxymorons (Zhivov, 203), the same baroque devices cited above by Shapiro underscoring this anti-odic confusion about where Russia is meant to go: 163 “Не так ли и ты, Русь, что бойкая необгонимая тройка, несешься? Дымом дымится под тобою дорога, гремят мосты, всё отстает и остается позади. Остановился пораженный божьим чудом созерцатель: не молния ли это, сброшенная с неба? Что значит это наводящее ужас движение?… Русь, куда ж несешься ты?” (Gogol, 247) Is it not so with you, Russia, that bold, uncatchable troika, speeding along? Is not the road smoking with smoke beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear, and the spectators, impressed with a divine miracle, halting to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt hurled from the heavens? What does that terrifying movement of yours mean?…Oh Russia, where do you lead?” Ostentatious baroque ornamentation tells us only tautologies: that smoke is smoking, everything remains and continues to remain. Using hyperbolic metaphor or conceit, a device Lomonosov saw a basic to poetic thinking (Shapiro, 219), the carriage is described as a divine miracle, a lightning bolt from the heavens. Our invisible hero’s journey along the road is cast in epic terms befitting the grand victories of imperial armies. But unlike the fearsome sights of blood and smoke in the ode, which show that fate is indulging all of the desires of the wise empress, the terrifying movement of the troika is scattered and confused. Without the privilege of verticality that informs the odic personae’s perspective, the perspective in this lyric appeal has no idea where in the endless horizontal expanse he will end up. Instead of answers, guided by a divinely- ordained monarch, Gogol’s narrator offers only questions, questions that pop up with every demythologized symbolic signifier and device. In the ode and Dead Souls, smoke signifies inexplicable forces, wither from either the destruction of the battlefield or the thunderous path of the carriage along the road. In each case it obscures vision, but the odic poet has faith in the reason and myth behind the charring of the landscape. In an later ode commemorating Elizabeth Petrovna’s succession to the throne, “Оda на день восшествия на Всероссийский престол Ея Величества Государыни Императрицы Елисаветы Петровны, Самодержицы Всероссийский, 1746 года,” Lomonosov describes 164 Peter I’s vision and the hazy, uncertain world he saw before beginning his mission. Smoke emerges from Mt. Etna, a classical referent typical of the paradise myth, and a haze emerged from her jaws (челюсти a word Lomonosov frequently uses in reference to the geological phenomena) and darkens the sky: Я духом зрю минувше время: Там грозный злится исполин Рассыпать земнородных племя И разрушить натуры чин! Он ревом бездну возмущает, Лесисты с мест бугры хватает И в твердь сквозь облака разит. Как Етна в ярости дымится, Так мгла из челюстей курится И помрачает солнца вид. I perceive times past in my soul The tribes of the earth scattered And the order of nature shattered Raging into the abyss, He seizes the woods of places with hills And the hills linger over the firmament. As Etna smokes in fury A haze smokes from her jaws And darkens the sun from view We saw earlier that in Gogol’s chaotic world there were not even tall mansions, much less epic smoking volcanoes, just pathetic collections of small houses. Gogol describes a town as organized only by the tortuous and structureless road, and, all towns being the same, horizontal space seems to stretch on forever. Every town is characterless, veiled in the smoke from little factories and workshops, all a part of that succession of concrete interchangeable objects that form the imaginary worlds of novel and nation: “Similarly does the entry to every town—the entry even to the capital itself—convey to the traveller such an impression of vagueness that at first everything looks grey and monotonous, and the lines of smoky factories and workshops seem never to be coming to an end…” 165 Въезд в какой бы ни было город, хоть даже в столицу, всегда как-то бледен, сначала всё серо и однообразно: тянутся бесконечные заводы да фабрики, закопченные дымом… Russia’s auspicious fate, supposedly secured by Peter I and his successors in fields of autumn flowers and golden temples, is still deferred, the six-story houses and beautiful cathedrals whose absence is mentioned in the lyrical aside still only anticipated: “…а потом уже выглянут углы шестиэтажных домов, магазины, вывески, громадные перспективы улиц, все в колокольнях, колоннах, статуях, башнях, с городским блеском, шумом и громом и всем, что на диво произвела рука и мысль человека. (Gogol, 241) “…but in time there will begin also to stand out the outlines of six-storied mansions, and of shops and balconies, and wide perspectives of streets, and a medley of steeples, columns, statues, and turrets—the whole framed in rattle and roar and the infinite wonders which the hand and the brain of men have conceived.” This is reminiscent, again in absence, of the “future Newtons and Platos” anticipated by Lomonosov in one of his odes, who will adorn Russian lives with fortune and toil in the depths of the wilderness and the bustle of the city. The fruit of Peter’s revolution and its the brains to build it are still out there somewhere in that endless future. Unfortunately for aspiring epic- writers, that future stretches out endlessly with the dusty road. Some goals of Peter’s revolution, however, have already come to be. The question raised by the bivalence of Gogol’s title (if it is the peasants or the landowners who are dead) (Rowe, 151) reflects a world where the value of life and the land are already defined. Boris Groys invokes Paul de Man’s idea of prosopeia, or substitution of a person with an epitaph: when a person is named, language kills the living person and substitutes it for a name (Groys, 144). In Dead Souls, “half-drunk and corrupt bureaucrats read these epitaphs and hide them in dusty archives for the nourishment of mice.” Worse than even a gravestone, which in a Baroque rebuke 166 of vainglory or Romantic elegy would blend back into nature, the dead souls in Gogol are written into a potentially endless bureaucratic text, which as a result turns out to be the equivalent of a poetic text (Groys 145-146). Hearing them read gives Chichikov flights of ecstasy and puts the whole town on holiday: bureaucratic text as oratorical genre: “The government bureaucracy and its archives replace for Gogol the sun of earlier poetry; to remains as the only guarantee of poetry after the loss of all metaphysical foundations.” No person’s poetic text could compete with the poetic text formed by the collective efforts of the government bureaucracy Peter founded. The foundation of a bureaucracy was one of many prongs of the modernization effort including a modern literary language and a vast empire. The universal structure of empire had been found, only it was falsified lists of the dead. More than simply equating bureaucratic texts to poetic ones, Gogol voices eighteenth- century motifs through Chichikov, in ways that clearly mimic common criticisms of the ode. Chichikov, like Lomonosov, is a flatterer, willing to say anything to charm local government authorities. To Sobakevich, one of the landlords from whom he is buying dead souls, Chichikov claims it is wrong to burden government offices with any inquiries about how many serfs are dead because Russia is too large: larger even than the Roman Empire, so large it amazes foreigners – all tropes typical of Lomonosov’s odes (Baehr, 155), although here that size is shown as ridiculous, dehumanizing and useless. As his opinions hardened later in his life, Gogol explicitly agreed with the perception of his work that I just outlined: that space was an ethical and aesthetic category defined genre, and that in the context of Russian literature, the Lomonosovian ode acted as an introduction or outline for how space was to be mapped by all the poets to follow, and took this stance even further, aestheticizing bureaucratic writing, showing a world in which the state bureaucracy 167 could have the final say in questions ethical and aesthetic (as if they were different questions, anyway). In the thirty-first chapter of his frantically-written, poorly-received collection of reactionary screeds, Выбранные места из переписки с друзьями, “В ЧЕМ ЖЕ НАКОНЕЦ СУЩЕСТВО РУССКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ И В ЧЕМ ЕЕ ОСОБЕННОСТЬ” (WHAT IN ACTUALITY IS THE ESSENCE OF RUSSIAN POETRY AND WHAT IS ITS [DEFINING] CHARACTERISTIC), Gogol expresses his appreciation for Lomonsov as the founder of Russian poetry, lauding his passion for scientific, useful subjects, despite finding no creativity in the style of Lomonosov’s German-inspired odes. Lomonosov admired Russia not from the shabby present, as Gogol did, but from “the angle of her radiant future destiny.” (Gogol, 371). Observing an “infinite and virgin” Russia (Gogol, 371) from luminous heights, Lomonosov’s sincere naturalist’s eye depicts the country in poetry that flows freely and majestically within the strict constraints of European poetic conventions. Gogol seems to resent the seeming ease and freedom Lomonosov shows in his poetry, where he sketches this virgin country "only in general geographical outlines [… and] he cares only to sketch one sketch of a vast state, to map its boundaries with points and lines, leaving it to others to lay down the colors; he himself is like an initial, prophetic outline of that which lies ahead.” (Gogol, 371) This space, observed from the radiant future, is the eighteenth-century paradise myth, and Gogol sees how it was distilled into points and lines: what Brunson would call a renaissance perspective and we can see is typical of the subjugating, aspirationally-western European gaze. Gogol’s analysis of Lomonosov clearly shows that he understood a writer’s task as one related to the mapping of space and saw the implications of that task as ethical, not just simply geographical. Gogol struggled against the chaotic, formless and impersonal picture he 168 perceived as he tried to map Russia’s national character onto Lomonosov’s sketched-out boundaries. Sergei Askakov’s Nostalgia: The Pastoral as a Past That’s Passed Away Gogol, weighing the conundrum of choosing a genre that could find harmony in reality when he saw contemporary reality disgusting and absurd, wrote: The present is too lively, it stirs too much, it arouses too much. . . . [B]eing situated among others and more or less acting along with them, you see before yourself only those people who stand near you; you do not see the whole crowd and masses, you cannot take in everything. I began to think of how I could extricate myself from others and stand in such a place, from where I could see all the masses and not just those close to me […] (Gogol, 449) Above, we discussed how Gogol pined for what he considered a more objective, detached, eighteenth-century point of view instead of the messy novelistic point of view of an author embroiled in everyday life. This incongruence created a tension in his text, the tension that defines the pastoral mode. Gogol articulates here that he would not only prefer a distant spatial perspective, but also a distant temporal perspective, since someone in the present looking back on the past could maintain more objectivity, the events of the past not stirring or arousing his emotions too much. Gogol only passingly contrasted the past and present in Dead Souls, as he was more preoccupied with the contrast between ordered and chaotic spaces as were are rendered in literature, but this contrast was an important aspect of the pastoral mode, and other authors writing in the pastoral mode exploited it. The author Sergei Aksakov, especially, constructed his works in large part around this temporal contrast tension. Unfortunately, Gogol’s feeling that a future perspective would allow him more objectivity turned out to be wrong: in Aksakov’s Семейнная хроника (A Family Chronicle), the past is nostalgically depicted in the terms of the odic paradise myth and contrasted to our present, fallen, despoiled world. This past certainly stirred and aroused lively feelings. Aksakov used a clash between two different kind of time to 169 reverse the cosmogony of the ode, where the future was relived in cycles, each supposedly better than the last, as science, literature, society and empire would advance in accordance with the good. Aksakov’s depiction of Orenburg Governorate puts forth an entirely different perspective, where time is lived forward and circumstances degrade rather than improve. Nonetheless, this spatial and temporal reality stems from odic discourse. A Family Chronicle, Sergei Aksakov’s most famous work, is a prototypical example of a text that overtly and pointedly invokes the Lomonosovian ode in prose in order to stage the tensions of the Russian pastoral mode. Nabokov notes that Dead Souls is punctuated by lyrical outbursts which are not “really parts of the solid pattern of the book; they are rather those natural interspaces without which the pattern would not be what it is”; Aksakov’s text is defined even more heavily by those lyrical asides and dotted with speech in almost purely odic forms. The author even inserts an ode in one of its earliest chapters to create the inconclusive dialogue of the meta-utopia. Although he only began publishing artistic prose later in his life, Aksakov’s upbringing and education in provincial Russia in the early 1800s deeply influenced the subject matter and style of his writing, and he was uniquely influenced by the eighteenth-century ode, creating complex texts in an undeniably pastoral mode. Aksakov uses the motifs of the paradise myth to cast the landscape and the ordinary people inhabiting it as the true constituent elements of paradise, while imbuing that paradise with a sense of foreboding and loss. I will start this conversation of Aksakov’s work with a discussion of the odic paradise myth’s sense of time and how it depicted features in the landscape, a landscape he was familiar with as an inhabitant but also as a surveyor, having spent some years as an inspector at a government school for geodesy and cartography. I will continue on with an explanation of the literary and historical forces shaping Aksakov’s life and work. Then, I will 170 explain how those literary and historical forces factor into Aksakov’s Family Chronicle and identify his engagement with the ideologies of the paradise myth and how it works to create a potently pastoral mode. From Public to Private Paradise: the Ode and the Frontier Likely because of its temporal and aesthetic distance from what we now enjoy as art, the Russian ceremonial ode has primarily been analyzed for its functional determinants more than its aesthetic value. The ode was just one piece of what Richard Wortmann termed the “scenario of power” produced by the imperial court, in which “the pace and direction of Russia’s political, military and cultural development were set by emperors and empresses who presented themselves as transcendent forces standing outside society” (Wortmann, 9) [emphasis mine]. This preordained direction is affirmed in the ode but shown above to be lost in Gogol’s questioning asides, despite their aspirations to harmony and grandeur. Authors deeply steeped in the eighteenth-century system of genre and the symbolic universe of the paradise myth tried to impose it on landscapes and situations from inside, warping it in interesting ways. The ode’s translation of this myth packaged it for public consumption (Baehr, 43), although the “public” consuming secular belletristic literature in Russia at the time was quite small. In Mikhail Lomonosov’s “Ода на день брачного сочетания Их Императорских Высочеств Государя Великого Князя Петра Феодоровича и Государыни Великий Княгини Екатерины Алексеевны, 1745 года,” written forty-six years before Aksakov’s birth to celebrate the marriage of Peter III to Catherine II (the future Great), the couple’s marriage, in reality loveless and unspectacular, is mythologized in accordance with the paradise myth as a re- instantiation of the first marriage between Adam and Eve, a palace in imperial Russia standing in for Eden: 171 Не сад ли вижу я священный,  В Эдеме вышним насажденный,  Где первый узаконен брак?  В чертог богиня в славе входит,  Любезнейших супругов вводит,  Пленяющих сердца и зрак.  В одном геройской дух и сила  Цветут во днях уже младых,  В другой натура истощила  Богатство всех красот своих (1-10). Is it not the sacred garden I see Planted in the highest Eden Where the first marriage was sanctified The dearly beloved spouses are ushered in To the palace of the goddess Of captured heart and eye [Together] in one heroic soul and strength They are already blooming in youthful days In another, nature has already exhausted The riches of all its beauty Fitting with cyclicality of classical time, this new Adam and Eve is also a new Peter and Catherine, Russia’s first Emperor and Empress: Исполнил бог свои советы  С желанием Елисаветы:  Красуйся светло, росский род.  Се паки Петр с Екатериной  Веселья общего причиной:  Ликуйте, сонмы многих вод.  Рифейских гор верьхи неплодны,  Одейтесь в нежный цвет лилей;  Пустыни и поля безводны,  Излейте чистый ток ключей (10-20). God fulfilled his agreement With Elizabeth’s desire Adorn with light, Russian people This new Peter and Catherine The shared joy for this reason: Rejoice, [you] hosts of many waters Riphean mountains of barren heights You garment yourselves in the gentle hue of lilies You pour out clear flow of streams Into arid deserts and fields. It is contested whether odes were always performed publicly – but this private marriage was definitely a theatrical public event. For their 1745 marriage, Peter III and Catherine the Great had fireworks were designed by famous German polymath Stahlin, and an wide arcade stretching 172 across the Neva decorated with busts of preceding monarchs Aleksei Mikhailovich, Mikhail Fedorovich, Elizaveta Petrovna, and Peter the Great (Wortmann, 930). In Lomonosov’s ode, read at the public event, the imperial reach is even wider than the Neva’s span – the betrothed themselves seem to merge with the most majestic features of the landscape: a multitude of waters flowing over wastelands, and one of Lomonosov’s favorite geographical features: the Riphean Mountains, cold, rocky, mineral-rich peaks mentioned in Roman histories, which Lomonosov believed to be the Urals: Russian geography merging with classical history. The image of this pair will last forever, just as if it were a mineral or metal deep in Turkey’s high Tauride mountains, the ancient landscape where humans first gathered in cities, they will be protected from the vicissitudes of the elements and wear of natural history: Усердна верность принимает Носимый лик и поставляет  На крепких мраморных столпах, Сребром чистейшим обведенных  И так от века утвержденных,  Как в тяжких Таврских нутр горах,  Бурливых вихрей не боится  И презирает молний блеск,  От мрачных туч бежать не тщится,  В ничто вменяет громов треск (110-120). Zealous fidelity captures The countenance worn and stands it On sturdy marble columns, Circled by pure silver And is thus passed on from our age, As if it were in the grave depths of the Taurid mountains, Unafraid of turbulent cyclones And scornful of lighting’s glare, Doesn’t strive to flee dark rainclouds, And never infected with thunder’s crack. Turning his earlier rhetorical surprise into reassuring anaphora, Lomonosov remarks with wonder at the appearance of Orpheus, conducting a symphony of trees and rocks to serenade the 173 couple. The entire capital is not enough of an audience, nature itself has to sing Peter’s and Catherine’s praises. Не сам ли в арфу ударяет  Орфей, и камни оживляет,  И следом водит хор древес?  Любовь, и с нею восклицают  Леса, и громко возвышают  Младых супругов до небес.  В пригорках бьют ключи прозрачны,  Сверькая в солнечных лучах,  И сыплют чрез долины злачны,  Чем блещет Орм в своих краях (110-130) Is it not Orpheus himself plucking a harp and animating rocks And leading them through a chorus of trees Who exclaim, and loudly exhalt, The young spouses to the sky In the hills clear streams pound glimmering in the sun’s rays and pouring through golden valleys Through which Hormuz shines to the ends of its territory Lomonosov wrote this ode at Russian classical culture’s height, depicting a paradise worthy of the myth, combining classical, orientalist, Christian and scientific symbols into a paradisal, optimistic vision. But what happened to the odic paradise myth after Elizabeth and the early, optimistic piece of Catherine’s reign? The common narrative is, disillusioned first by Catherine’s repressive turn and then the quashing of the Decembrist revolt by Nicholas I, Russian literary culture began to change from a centripetal, court-centered culture, epitomized by the ideal tsar, to a more centrifugal culture, epitomized by the Romantic individualist – frequently an artist or poet who accepts no gods (Baehr, 157), as seen in the second chapter of this dissertation. The paradise myth and the odic language created to describe it survived only in parodies and the stodgy odes of sycophantic “hack writers.” (Baehr, 145). 174 There is truth to this, but the turn to a centrifugal culture was not simply the result of disillusionment and disgust, but a top-down change in the official “scenario of power” under Catherine also contributed to and harnessed the cultural shift. Seeking to use noble society to invigorate and discipline rural Russia, Catherine the Great and her advisors encouraged noble families to see their provincial private lives as an extension of the world of power and culture they had earlier known in the capitals (Randolph 24): secular literary and artistic culture was no longer only made for small circles. In order to tame an empire that suddenly stretched to the Pacific and contained hundreds of peoples and languages, Catherine’s imperial government sought to foist governmental functions onto an enlightened citizenry whose internal self- discipline would lead them to willingly align themselves with Empire’s interests. The imperial government attempted to push its authority and ideas deeper into the provinces, using the private energies of its new noble citizens a wedge (Randolph, 33). The orientation of culture under Catherine changed slightly from this entirely top-down model. As indicated by her eventually empty, but much ballyhooed relationships with enlightenment philosophers and her writing of a law code, Catherine intended in some measure to have a society of citizens. Under Catherine, noble society was mobilized by encouraging nobles to view their private lives and economic activities as taking place in theater of distinction (Randolph, 35): a space where it could and participate in the success of the imperial project. This new “noble citizenship” expressed itself in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, but its most obvious and straightforward manifestation was the “privatization of modes of distinction heretofore associated primarily with the throne.” (Randolph, 39) Freed from compulsory service, nobles were supposed to work for empire voluntarily in their private lives. Fifty years earlier, Lomonosov had praised the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine for remaking 175 the Russian Empire according to their new understanding of science and civilization: now nobles on small provincial estates were making root cellars with fanciful pyramid entrances and domestic chapels in the style of the Pantheon (Randolph, 38). Lomonosov’s dream of empire as a paradisal “Gartenreich” cultivated by plans of wise rulers could be reproduced on every domestic estate (Randolph, 44). In the 1740s and 50s, Sergei Aksakov’s family was moving east, as retold in his memoiristic trilogy, of which A Family Chronicle was the first book written (but not the first chronologically). This period saw intensive colonization of the area which is now the autonomous republic of Bashkortostan, but was then a part of Orenburg Province. When Aksakov’s grandfather moved his household, a mass land-grab from the Bashkirs was underway, as recorded in the first chapter of A Family Chronicle (Durkin, 215). An unstable mix of Russian noble families, escaped peasants and native and refugee populations of Turkic tribes led to a complicated and tense political situation, which boiled over in a series of Bashkir rebellions (1662, 1664, 1704, 1709, 1711), culminating in the Pugachev Rebellion from 1773-1775 (Mudarisov, 23). The Ural Mountains, which step down to their end in northern Bashkortostan, turned out to be just as rich in mineral wealth as Lomonosov had predicted when he saw the first heavy development of bronze and ironworks in Russia there. Securing land, building factories, and finding a workforce was difficult there, and the land was mostly stolen from Bashkir tribes and worked by state peasants and dispossessed Bashkirs (Fatkullina, 92). The state mobilized its administrative power to send money, experts and prison labor to assist private industry there (Fatkullina, 94). Nowhere was the Catherinian turn towards a cultural and economic centered on private industry and households more apparent than in the industrial development of the Urals: the settlement of the territory was spearheaded by “припущенники,” and all of this unfree labor, 176 state money and foreign expertise was directed by the noble “landlord-factory-owners” (Помещики-заводовладельцы) who followed (Shaikhichlamov, 321). By the time Lomonosov was writing his epithalamium for Elizabeth, thirty-eight metallurgical factories had been built in the Orenburg province, and by Sergei Aksakov’s birth, well over half the bronze and just under half the iron smelted in Russia was smelted in Bashkortostan (Mudarisov, 23). The Urals had been transformed into the center of the metallurgical industry, and the Southern Urals in particular had become a material and strategic center of the mining industry (Shaikhislamov, 320). It was a process of “industrial colonization”: the metallurgical and mining industries were important to the modernization of Russia, and the modernization of the region was important to those industries. Landlords like the Aksakov’s were the key part of this process modernizing what was Ufa Territory and became the Orenburg Governorate. In short, the Orenburg Province developed in accordance with Catherinian imperial project – a combination between heavy top- down investment in industrial development and the subjugation of the landscape and its inhabitants by enthusiastic noble family units who felt a part of the imperial project as individuals, the kind of individuals Aksakov would mythologize in A Family Chronicle. I argue that this process, whereby the imperial project was appropriated on an individual level, was mirrored in Aksakov’s texts, which took the language of the ode and projected it onto their personal lives and landscapes. In his work, however, the aesthetic and the practical had become completely divorced from one another, showing that despite his involvement in state enterprises, he was alienated from official scientific and governmental ideologies and discourses. Lomonosov and others famously signed their odes as “slave,” a representation of their place in society. In their odes these “slaves,” and especially Lomonosov, broadcasted the importance of natural resources, in particular mineral wealth. Earlier, I discussed how the spatial perspective of 177 Gogol’s narrator was built off of contrasts to odic perspective, resulting in a confusion and void. One of the factors that contributed to this change in perspective was a change from an author who felt he was just fulfilling the divine vision of the Empress to an author seeing a scattered and confused train of objects along the road, with no idea where or what to do. Akaskov’s perspective was different from Gogol’s, but he also repurposed motifs from the ode to reflect an ideology that was not officially the state’s ideology. These motifs tended to be those from discourses depicting temporal, mineral and personal objects and concepts. By making the ode a part of centrifugal culture, Aksakov took a form written in subservience to an absolutist government structuring society and turned it into a way of depicting his own, individual understanding of the landscape and described its aesthetic importance from his personal perspective, not its mineral importance to the state from a scientific perspective. Its language no longer described a wide, deterritorialized, paradisal totality of universal symbols, but a specific landscape threatened by the endless and fracturing march of history. Aksakov himself took part in the mapping of the landscape and the bureaucratic restructuring of Russians’ linguistic, cultural and geographical experience of reality, not just as a literary exercise. As a relatively incompetent farmer with a large family who, despite his romantic descriptions of the provincial landscape, preferred to live with them in the capital, Aksakov was reliant on a government salary (Churkin, 374). The famous critic Aleksander Shishkov, a friend of Aksakov’s, secured a job for him as a government censor through patronage (Durkin, 15), and the six years he worked intermittently as a censor were politically complicated. Nicholas I was fairly active personally in debates about literary censorship, and even just within the short period Aksakov worked as a censor the laws governing literary censorship changed twice (Churkin, 379). Aksakov was dismissed twice, the final time for 178 permitting publication of “several allegedly scurrilous items.” (Durkin, 15) He secured a job as the first inspector of the newly-opened Mezhevoi Institute (the lower University of Geodesy and Cartography). From this brief experience in the main school of land-surveying in Russia, Aksakov was surely exposed to ways of mapping other than the literary. He retired in 1838 to live on his parents’ inheritances and nurse his fragile constitution (Durkin, 16). Born on September 20, 1791 in Ufa, at the high point of this colonial period, Aksakov spent an uneventful childhood on his family estate. Young Sergei had a hard time in separation from his family at the gymnasium, and his interests there were mostly extra-curricular: the theater, literature, socializing with his peers. During the time he was there, the literary debate between the Karamzinian “innovators” and Shishkovian “archiaists” was in full tilt, and the hubbub reached his college in Kazan. Aksakov flirted with sentimentalism but was set on a more traditional path by the professor Ibragimov, who emphasized, following Shishkov, the importance of decorum, the avoidance of subjective indulgence of feeling, and the lofty diction of Lomonosov’s odes as key to proper style. Aleksandr Shishkov’s literary theories illuminate Aksakov’s later artistic trajectory as they influenced the young author strongly; Shishkov was the most important conservative theorist of aesthetics in early nineteenth-century Russia, and played a huge role in reinterpreting and re-popularizing certain aspects of what we have been referring to as the paradise myth and the motifs of the ode. Shishkov, a personal acquaintance and mentor to Aksakov, seriously influenced Aksakov’s literary texts. As we will see below, Aksakov, through his encounter with Shishkov’s ideas, inherited the understanding that the aesthetic characteristics of eighteenth- century genres were intrinsically related to certain spatial and ethical realities. Aksakov’s work, similarly to Gogol’s, was defined by tension between the older aesthetic theories and ethical 179 convictions on which he was raised and the world in which he lived and the new literary trends emerging to express the feeling of living in it. He channeled this tension to create texts in the pastoral mode that conveyed what it meant to live in a Russia that was modernizing. Shishkov: The Reinterpretation of the Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic as Part of a Nationalist Ethic Shishkov has been written off as a simple political thinker, nothing more than a crude nationalist fighting to stop a natural linguistic process already underway. Tynianov argues, however, that Shishkov’s arguments do not just take place on the societal and political plane, but also the practical, historical and linguistic plane (Tynianov, 91-92). In other words, Shishkov’s political and societal arguments were linguistic and literary arguments, and vice versa. In his treatise about patriotism and linguistics, “Рассуждение о любви к Отечеству” (“Discourse on the Love for the Fatherland”), Shishkov begins by making a primarily historical argument, citing Lomonosov, who gently lamented how subtle penetration of foreign words into Russian spoiled the proprietary beauty of the Russian language. Shishkov seconds and intensifies this statement, saying what was a subtle penetration has violently accelerated, becoming what is akin to a Biblical flood of slavish imitations (Shishkov, page?). The Shishkovites, or archaizers, were fighting against uniformity, smoothness and aestheticism in literary language, a language conforming universally to a middle style, never indulging in lower or higher styles or the diversity of genres eighteenth-century thinkers used for different purposes, a whole arsenal of different modes, genres, semantics and structures (Tynianov, 100-103). He pulls no punches condemning the “elegance” of this Karamzinist middle style carried over from francophone literature, saying the French word elegance should be translated into Russian as “чепуха” (nonsense). (Shishkov). Russians should express native feelings with their 180 own words, he argues, otherwise they will be expressing strange (чужие) feelings with strange words. This idea is what gives a nationalist tint to his linguistic argument (Shishkov). In a Russian context, these borrowed words would essentially be sterile, devoid of any meaning given by historical usage or cultural associations (Cooper, 57). Each language is a cultural organism, nationally specific, and not corresponding cleanly or clearly to any other semantically in derived or abstract meanings (55). Even more menacing, this great flood of language could result in adverse political outcomes: if the French have had a revolution, and Russians slowly adopted more and more French words, would Russians not have the kind of thoughts that led to revolution (53)? Shishkov avers that linguistic choices have societal and political implications. Instead of enabling such a terrifying outcome with reckless acceptance of foreign words, Shishkov called for Russians to reach back to their nation’s three great literatures: the sacred literature of the church, folk songs, and belles-lettres, in particular the Lomonosovian language with its bold metaphors and high tongue-twistedness (62). Resultantly, his original semantic argument had specific generic conclusions. It was, in some ways, an effort to confirm the success of Lomonosov’s literary project by proving that the modern Russian literary tradition had been consciously and successfully (re)constituted in the middle third of the eighteenth century on a classical literary model and with its strict hierarchy of distinct genres (Cooper, 3), and that all those genres had use today. The Shishkovites’ stance towards poetic genres was, as stated earlier, against those that employed only the more homogenous and elegant “middle-style,” and favored genres marked as high or low, such as the folktale, the ode, formal epistles (Tynianov, 103). This is similar in some ways to Gogol’s rejection of what he perceived as the banal style of the novel. We saw earlier that rejection was related to Gogol’s effort to depict Russia as a national entity. Shishkov makes an explicitly nationalist argument about language and genre: the Russian 181 language is the best language to use to depict Russia, and the high and low genres invented before the nineteenth century are the best genres for that language. These genres, not coincidentally, as those which reappeared as fodder for Sergei Aksakov’s works of poetry and prose throughout his life. Just as Gogol, influenced by the aesthetic arguments from the gymnasium and reactionary ethical beliefs believed that eighteenth-century genres of the epic and the ode were best suited to conveying a harmonious and well-ordered world, Aksakov, influenced by Shishkov, kept returning to the ode when he wanted to depict a harmonious or paradisal landscape. Unlike the ode in Lomonosov’s time, however, which created an optimistic vision of a paradise that lay ahead, the high genre of the ode and the paradise it depicted were, for Aksakov, things of the past, about to be ruined by the flood of landowner-factory-owner- pripushchniki flooding the Urals and bringing modernity with them. The influences of both Karamizinists and Shishkovites reveal themselves in Aksakov’s work. He was Karamizinist sentimentalist in his fixation on childhood, the centrality of subjective experience and perception to his work, and above all, in his worship of nature. The semantic and stylistic strictures of the archaists, however, held a powerful sway over the author. Aksakov maintained a belief in the importance of semantic exactitude, independence of national idioms and the continuing resonance of past usages of words his whole life (Durkin, 49). The ode, along with other forms of neoclassical art, created a mythology of power and prosperity that influenced not just Aksakov, but the whole milieu of settlers and gentry along Russia’s frontier. An early intimate epistle Aksakov wrote in 1816 describing his native region of the southern Urals, “Вот родина моя,” betrays the influence of the Lomonosovian ode: Вот родина моя... Вот дикие пустыни!.. Вот благодарная оратаю земля! 182 Дубовые леса, и злачные долины, И тучной жатвою покрытые поля! Вот горы, до небес чело свое взносящи, Младые отрасли Рифейских древних гор, И реки, с пеною меж пропастей летящи, Разливом по лугам пленяющие взор! Вот окруженные башкирцев кочевьями Озера светлые, бездонны глубиной, И кони резвые, несчетны табунами В них смотрятся с холмов, любуяся собой!.. Приветствую тебя, страна благословенна! Страна обилия и всех земных богатств! Не вечно будешь ты в презрении забвенна, Не вечно для одних служить ты будешь паств. (Aksakov, 1-16) Here is my homeland…Here is the wild wilderness!.. Here is a blessed land for the farmer! Oak forests, and golden field, And fields covered in fat harvests Here are the mountains, whose brow is drawn up to the sky, Young offshoots of the ancient Riphean mountains, And rivers, foamy, flying between the canyons, Flood across the meadows captivating the eye! Here the Bashkirs nomads surround Bright lakes, bottomless in depth, And frisky horses, countless in herds In them they look from the hills, admiring themselves!.. I greet you, blessed country! A land of abundance and all earthly riches! You not be forever carelessly forgotten, You will not forever serve shepherds alone. The poem is undeniably similar to a Lomonosovian ode, missing only the ten-lined stanzas. It is in iambic hexameter and stays in a high style, full of slavonicisms like the unpolyphonated “младый” and “злачный,” which are mixed in with no words of lower stylistic valence. Despite its idyllic stillness (Cross, 86) and passing attention to individual figures in the 183 landscape, this sheet of high-style words and geological imagery shows direct stylistic inspiration from the ode. The ode was just one small piece of the influence of neoclassical culture that trickled down into the lives of Russian provincial gentry during Aksakov’s lifetime. Although obviously an ode in the Lomonosovian style, the Karamzinian touches are also visible, intimating at subtle changes in ideological orientation. The language may be high, but the perspective is level. Despite not eschewing the high and low styles for the pure and mellifluous language of sentimentalism (Cross, 78), as Karamzin did, Aksakov sends an acknowledging glance towards “little people.” The poet’s perspective is closer to his subjects than Lomonosov would have been: he is not far away aloft on some mythical mountain peak. He is also not in the imperial court, writing for an Empress: he is in his own, freshly-conquered steppe. In Karamzin’s idyllic prose, the author often lyrically chronicled the observance of the fresh morning air, a sea of fragrances extending over earth and sky, and the idyllic morning activities of shepherds and shepherdesses (Hammarberg, 84), and here we see some of those sentimental touches here. These devices hint at actual personalities who are participants in this landscape, similar to the earthy landscapes of Lermontov. These pre-Romantic figures are unlike the little people of the the Lomonosovian ode who, whether shepherds or members of indigenous tribes, were acknowledged only as uncountable, vanquished and orientalized creatures brought into existence to be arranged in line with the demands of ode and empire. Aksakov’s subjects here are extended a type of particularity similar to that in the Romantic elegies of Pushkin and Lermontov. In a culture that is not so “top-down,” they actually have a certain amount of agency: they might be doing some of the arranging of the landscape. If we remember Lomonosov's ode to Catherine and Peter, the imperial palace was symbolically portrayed as a paradisiacal garden, abundant with natural riches and classical 184 cultural symbols due to the reappearance of divine authority in the form of the blessed imperial couple. In Aksakov’s ode, the paradisiacal, abundant garden is the actual unspoiled countryside where he was raised. The Urals, which rose above this countryside, have merged in actuality with the Riphean mountains of myth, where state copper and iron mines were taking advantage of “all earthly riches” (“всех земных богатств”). The new lofty subject is not the Empress or empire, but nature itself, and the lyrical abundance applies directly to that new subject. Most shocking, when considering the form, is the reversal of the ode’s usual boundless optimism. The Russian Empire has extended into vast territorial holdings, as the Lomonosovian ode prescribed, but in this individual instantiation, this extension does not augur a bright future, but rather a one vaguely threatening to the shepherds and pastoralists it now serves. Although we will see a more foreboding disquiet creep into Aksakov’s prose later, what is important here is the attitude towards time that enables those later expressions of pessimism and is foreign to the ceremonial ode as it was written in the eighteenth-century. Aksakov writes in a world where time is experienced linearly: it is not the cyclical time underpinning the paradise myth of the ode. The ode’s cyclical history, where divinely preordained mythical roles are fulfilled by Empresses and Emperors, from Adam and Eve to Peter I and Catherine I to Peter III and Catherine II. The cyclical mode is supplanted by a progressive, romantic view of history, in which the earth can be spoiled, and any golden age, past or present, is fragile and temporary. Even if the disappearance of a horse or a tribe of Bashkirs would not keep Aksakov up at night, his poem takes place in the homogeneous, empty time of the modern world (B. Anderson, 29), not the renewable (Baehr, 43) or absent (10) time of the paradise myth. This creates the possibility of loss. The scene Aksakov’s ode describes exists once, and once only, unable to be revived eternally – as imperial power was – through marriage 185 or ascension in each new generation. The last two lines of his ode underscore this inevitable degradation: You won’t forever be carelessly forgotten,/ You won’t serve only shepherds forever." (“Не вечно будешь ты в презрении забвенна, Не вечно для одних служить ты будешь паств.”) Neither the idyllic nor the paradisiacal elements of Aksakov’s world would hold forever. Awareness of the degradation of the landscape comes with understanding the mountains as real, tangible mountains in empty, linear time. The chronotope of the ode was one of eternal metaphorical mountains and renewable, cyclical time and imperial authority. Russian glory, awe-inspiring landscapes and material abundance would be reborn continually with greater and greater majesty. When describing the permanence of Catherine II’s and Peter III’s matrimony, Lomonosov puts it deep in a Turkish mountain locked away from the ravages of time: “and is thus passed on from our age/as if it were in the grave depths of the Taurid mountains.” In Aksakov’s southern Urals, none of the earthly riches were safe from the state copper and iron mines moving in. Even if Aksakov’s style is in line with that of the classical ode, its sense of historical time is more in line with that of the newly popular personal elegy, where inevitable loss and tragedy of human existence is can only be partially compensated by aesthetic achievement (Greenleaf, 126): although it will not last forever, he is able to chronicle how the "rivers, foamy, flying between the canyons,/Flood across the meadows captivating the eye!” Chronicle, Ode, Memoir, or Novel? Pastoral In A Family Chronicle, the complex and contradictory mix of older genres and newer ideological ideas about space and time are even more pronounced than the mild incongruences between old and new found in the ode above. By calling it a chronicle (хроника), Aksakov gestures to an ancient East Slavic tradition of logging events in a chronicle, stylizing the work as 186 something other than the memoirs or novels that were just becoming popular in the 1840s when he was beginning work on the book. This gesture to older forms of traditional or folkloric literature fits with Shishkov’s hierarchy of genres and a nostalgic preference for archaic, cyclical over modern linear time. Aksakov’s book is neither simply a chronicle (indeed, it is very far from one) nor a novel, but an exemplar of the aforementioned “threshold literature,” which creates hermeneutic perplexity not by generic ambiguity but by generic incompatibility, that is, by embedding or juxtaposing sections of radically heterogeneous material (Morson, 50), a juxtaposition that in this case creates the thematic, spatial, temporal and ideological tensions constitutive to the pastoral, especially in those moments that in which Aksakov deploys odic language. A Family Chronicle is organized in fragments, which are not in chronological order and do not provide a straightforward narrative. Aksakov [or Aksakov’s narrator?] instead jots down little snapshots that give a the feeling or lesson of a tale. The first fragment of A Family Chronicle, “Переселение” (Resettlement) tells the fictionalized story of Aksakov’s grandfather emigrating to the frontier and includes portraits of the tribesmen who inhabit it when he arrives that would be too specific and too unsavory for a Lomonosovian ode. As Aksakov portrays it, colonization, or resettlement, is not a smooth process observed from lofty heights, but a space of drunken bribery, cultural miscommunication and conflict. In Orenburg Governorate at least, Russia was not conquered by epic battles in smoking fields, but by bringing two or three fat sheep for the Bashkirs to slaughter and waiting out a drunken feast for week until they could all truck and trade in land. [Quotation?] The Russian pripushchenniki who settled the frontier were not epic soldiers but normal Russian people with their characteristic “ловкостию и 187 плутовством” (“finesse and trickery). Settlers come off as something close to conmen and thieves, pulling the Bashkirs’ land out from under them. The second fragment (отрывок) in Aksakov’s Family Chronicle begins by deploying the descriptive overload typical of the ode, weaving together adjectives that invokes the baroque ebullience of a Lomonosivan ode or Gogolian lyrical appeal: Боже мой, как, я думаю, была хороша тогда эта дикая, девственная, роскошная природа!.. Нет, ты уже не та теперь, не та, какою даже и я зазнал тебя — свежею, цветущею, неизмятою отвсюду набежавшим разнородным народонаселением! Ты не та, но все еще прекрасна, так же обширна, плодоносна и бесконечно разнообразна, Оренбургская губерния!.. Дико звучат два эти последние слова! Бог знает, как и откуда зашел туда бург!.. Но я зазнал тебя, благословенный край, еще Уфимским наместничеством!(Aksakov, 83) My god, I think, how good it was then that wild, pristine, luxuriant nature!.. No, you are already not the same now, not the same, as even I came to know you to be-fresh, in bloom, untrammeled with a motley mass of populations born all over having rushed in! You are not thus, but you are still beautiful, as well as expansive, fertile and endlessly varied, Orenburg province!.. How wild these last two words sound! God knows how and from where the “burg” snuck in there! .. But I got to know you, blessed land, when you were still Ufa Territory! The initial difference between the Lomonosovian ode and Aksakov’s prose fragment is its temporal contingency: “Боже мой, как, я думаю, была хороша тогда” “My god, I think, how good it was then [emphasis mine].” The land was wild, pristine, magnificent, fresh, diverse, beautiful, rich, fertile, varied, blessed, in bloom! It was not that now, not as it was when Aksakov was first introduced (зазнал) to it. If in Dead Souls, when Gogol echoed the panegyric language of the eighteenth century parodically, highlighting inconsistency or discordance between odic discourse and observable reality, Aksakov used it elegiacally, to describe a past he once knew. In Russia, the panegyric form of the paradise myth was first displaced by early elegiac forms, which documented a feeling of personal loss and moral decline (Baehr, 145-46). 188 Both Gogol and Aksakov as pastoral prosaists indulged in asyndeton, seen here in the panegyric flights discussing not a bright future, but the past: “how good it was then, that virgin, luxuriant nature!” (“была хороша тогда эта дикая, девственная, роскошная природа!”) The short form adjectives continue, stressing the temporal contingency of this beauty: “Ты не та, но все еще прекрасна, так же обширна, плодоносна и бесконечно разнообразна […]” (83)(“You are not thus, but you are still beautiful, as well as expansive, fertile and endlessly varied.”) Orenberg is still beautiful, for now. Just as in Gogol, the most compelling difference between Aksakov’s and Lomonosov’s ode is in the spatial and temporal perspective. In the process of naming, dead souls were turned to epitaphs, and in Aksakov’s poem all the defined objects are just temporary. As he fills in the vast boundaries Lomonosov drew, Aksakov is eulogizing a landscape from Russia’s and his own past. Aksakov then immediately proceeds into panegyric poetry, shackling the looser prose of his lyrical appeal into a strict odic form inserted it directly into the narrative: Чудесный край, благословенный, Хранилище земных богатств, Не вечно будешь ты, забвенный, Служить для пастырей и паств! И люди набегут толпами, Твое приволье полюбя, И не узнаешь ты себя Под их нечистыми руками! Помнут луга, порубят лес, Взмутят в водах лазурь небес! И горы соляных кристаллов По тузлукам твоим найдут И руды дорогих металлов Из недр глубоких извлекут! И тук земли не истощенный Всосут чужие семена, Чужие снимут племена 189 Их плод, сторицей возвращенный! И в глубь лесов и в даль степей Разгонят дорогих зверей! (Aksakov, 83) Wonderful territory, blessed, Depository of earth's riches, Not forever will you, O forgotten one Serve only shepherds and their flocks! And people will arrive in droves, Having come to love your spaciousness, And you will not recognize yourself Under their unclean hands! They will trample the meadows and cut down the forest, Muddy in the waters of the azure [reflection] of the sky! And mountains of salt crystals For their brine they will find, And precious metal ores From the depths of the deep they will extract! And the natural fertility of the earth that has not been exhausted Will imbibed by alien seeds, Others tribes will harvest Their fruit, returned a hundredfold! And into the depths of the forests and into the distance of the steppes They will drive away valuable creatures! Russians, like Aksakov’s grandfather himself, flooded into Orenburg Province in hordes (И люди набегут толпами), to despoil the landscape, making the it no longer a forgotten home of pastoralists (Не вечно будешь ты, забвенный,/Служить для пастырей и паств). The precious metals that drove Lomonosov’s and the Russian government’s interest in the fecund and abundant province only served to lure developers to despoil the beauty of nature there. Unlike the image of the imperial marriage in the epithalamium above, which was as safe as if in the depths of southern mountains, none of the earthly riches in Aksakov’s southern Urals were safe from exploitation. Nature, which had been exploited by imperial Russia, was also opened to being mined for personal and aesthetic value by private noble families moving into it. 190 Lomonosov himself was a proponent of inserting high-style verse into prose texts in order to elevate the subject matter and show seemingly eternal truths about humanity and the landscape. In his geological treatise, The First Principles of Metallurgy or Mining, discussed at length in the first chapter of this dissertation, he inserts a translation of a selection from Lucretius’ “The Nature of Things.” (Lomonsosov, 1123). In contrast to Aksakov’s ode, Lomonosov’s effusive stylings laud the progress associated with advances in technology and resource extraction: Железо, злато, медь, свинцова крепка сила И тягость серебра тогда себя открыла, Как сильной огнь в горах сжигал великой лес, Или на те места ударил гром с небес, Или против врагов народ, готовясь к бою, Чтоб их огнем прогнать, в лесах дал волю зною, Или чтоб тучность дать чрез пепел древ полям И чистой луг открыть для пажити скотам; Или причина в тома была еще иная: Владела лесом там пожара власть пылая; С великим шумом огнь коренья древ палил; Тогда в глубокой дол лились ручьи из жил, Железо, и свинец, и серебро топилось, И с медью золото в пристойны рвы катилось. (Lomonosov, 1-15) Iron, gold, copper, lead are a strong force And a lode of silver then showed itself, As a strong fire in the mountains burned down a great forest, Or thunder struck from heaven in those places, Or, preparing for battle against their people’s enemies Let the blaze run rampant in the woods in order to drive them away with fire Or to impart the fields with fertility through the ashes of the trees And clear a virgin meadow for pasturing livestock; Or there could yet have been another reason: The power that owned the forest was burning the fire; With a great fury fire scorched the roots of the trees; Then into a deep valley streams flowed from veins, And lead, and silver melted forth, and with copper gold rolled down into sturdy ravines. Lomonosov (through his translation of Lucretius) is narrating the discovery of metallurgy, which Lucretius speculates came from a moment of great destruction, where people, purposefully 191 destroying a forest, created a blaze that melted and purified metal. This creative destruction was a thing to be celebrated, not feared, as later authors, such as Aksakov, would. If we look to Lomonosov’s 1747 ode, Ода на день восшествия на всероссийский престол ее величества государыни императрицы Елисаветы Петровны 1747 года, he anticipates the future mining of the “Riphean” mountains for precious metals, seeing Roman gods hand over Russia’s rightful patrimony: И се Минерва ударяет В верьхи Рифейски копием; Сребро и злато истекает Во всем наследии твоем. Плутон в расселинах мятется, Что россам в руки предается Драгой его металл из гор, Которой там натура скрыла; От блеску дневного светила (200-209) And behold, Minerva strikes, In the Riphean Mountains’ mines; Silver and gold flow In all your patrimony. Pluto in crevasses trembles, That precious metal from the mountains, is turned over into Russians hands That which nature has there concealed, From the glint of the light of day Lomonosov filled poetic space with mythical features, but it was otherwise only the sketch of general geographical outlines and boundaries: a poetic and not actual space. This carefully- constructed poetic chronotope allowed him to sidestep any problematics in the real landscape. Gogol filled his artistic space with the problematics, present shades of corruption and disorder, while Aksakov fills his space with temporal objects that will soon not be there, using the motifs of the ode to paint a world torn between two visions, at once both a paradisiacal world from the past that no longer is, and the immanent chaotic and despoiled future. The relationship to space 192 was fundamentally changed by the personal and proprietary relationship of Aksakov’s characters to the land and a new temporal awareness. Aksakov’s characters owned and worked the same land for decades, and could thus observe the changes happening over time, changes they inflicted within the boundaries Lomonosov laid out. This space is ambivalent, as it is populated with characters who knew the unspoiled paradise of the past and see its current degradation. The narrative is torn, stretched athwart the temporal progression of calendrical time, marking the space in which it takes places as a pastoral space. Marcus Levitt discusses these changes in the perception of time in relation to the work and improvements characters put into the landscape in A Family Chronicle, but in his discussion he conflates the pastoral with the idyllic. Levitt focuses on Aksakov’s description in the first fragment of the mill his grandfather built. This grandfather, who acquired the land after bringing the local Bashkirs their two expected sheep, built a mill that worked in harmony with nature, subjugating the Buguruslan River with a mill that Aksakov claims is still running. Levitt then jumps to the third chapter, examining the despoiling of “Mossy Lakes,” ponds that were over- exploited by the new, uncountable settlers, whose activities showed man to be an “inveterate and triumphant alterer of the face of nature! They [the settlers] ceased to believe in ancient tradition, unconfirmed by new events, and little by little the Mossy Lakes grew foul through the soaking of flax and the watering of cattle on their shores, and they became shallow and even began to dry up as the surrounding forest.” (Levitt, 199) Levitt claims that the “paradox or tension between the two models, (1) the "pastoral" of the founding of the mill, and (2) the "anti-utopia" of the Mossy Lakes, lies at the heart of Family 193 Chronicle and its unique literary qualities.” (Levitt, 200). In the Family Chronicle, the past is described in the trappings of the utopias the Karamizinian idyll and Lomonosovian ode, and then juxtaposed against the spoiled future. The pastoral is not one of two models, but rather this paradox itself constitutes the pastoral. Maybe there is an easy overlap between the idyll and the pastoral in other national literatures, but in the Russian context, the pastoral mode represents a richer range of attitudes, expressive techniques and settings that do not correspond to the simple idealization of the rural, but rather feast on vulnerability, the common, decay, and squalor, all results of the passage of linear time. The subjugation of the wild Buguruslan River does symbolize a new Arcadian order, what Levitt calls “an image of a perfect, unchanging balance between man and nature” (Levitt, 198), a state he deems “pastoral,” but is in reality closer to the idyllic nature depicted in Karamzin’s unthreatening and unthreatened nature. The perfect balance in which the Buguruslan River is depicted is the idyll, which is untenable over the course of linear time, and likely eventually to be despoiled in a prosaic expression of the paradise myth. I dwell on this difference because it is necessary for understanding the Russian pastoral mode as a whole. The pastoral is a mode because it is not a generic classification, but rather a mood evoked through the deflation or reduction of motifs of the paradise myth as it was portrayed in the ode and the idyll. The pastoral element in Aksakov is the looming doom itself, the knowledge that ruin will come, that the Mossy Lakes have dried up and withered away. Scholars like Levitt stress that Aksakov was trying to “capture vanishing world of oral culture in print” (Levitt, 201). That oral culture was just part of the disappearing world Aksakov was trying to capture before the utter disappearance of its breadth, fertility and unending variety (“так же обширна, плодоносна и бесконечно разнообразна”). The cartographic and spatial qualities of 194 the land lost in a process that mirrored the loss of certain kind of speech. Aesthetics, ethics and landscape all appear as connected points in a worldview. The Lomonosovian sketch of the landscape and its straight endless lines converging in perspectival points could never convey the diversity and richness of the Russian countryside. In a perverse way, this perspective is shared by the scientific, economic and geopolitical forces tearing up the mountains and slaughtering the tribes. The pastoral mode of discourse is not the image of the mythical perfect mill, but the anxiety about loss of variety and balance recorded in the narration of the tale about the mill that exists. Out of this anxiety sprang a revival of revival of old aesthetic forms and the ethical preference for things traditional and Russian. Similarly to elegaic poets like Pushkin and Lermontov, Aksakov personalized the formerly official form of the ode to his subjective experience of the landscape, but he did not overtly project his own feelings or persona onto it, appreciating the landscape on its own merits. Aksakov succeeded in personalizing the ceremonial ode, just as noble families constructed root- cellars in the style of a classical pyramids (Randolph, 56). Aksakov repudiates the grand imperial hero in closing of the last fragment, putting forward an image of the hero that is a collection of fragments itself: Прощайте, мои светлые и темные образы, мои добрые и недобрые люди, или, лучше сказать, образы, в которых есть и светлые и темные стороны, люди, в которых есть и доброе и худое! Вы не великие герои, не громкие личности; в тишине и безвестности прошли вы свое земное поприще и давно, очень давно его оставили: но вы были люди, и ваша внешняя и внутренняя жизнь так же исполнена поэзии, так же любопытна и поучительна для нас, как мы и наша жизнь в свою очередь будем любопытны и поучительны для потомков (Aksakov, 279). Farewell, my images both light and dark, my people good and bad, or, it’s better to say, images in which there are both light and dark sides, people in whom there are both good and bad! You are not great heroes, not loud personalities; you passed your earthly campaigns in silence and obscurity and left it very long ago: but you were people, and 195 your external and internal life is as full of poetry, as curious and instructive for us, as we and our life in turn will be curious and instructive for posterity. In Aksakov's novelistic mix of writing, nobles became individuals with light and dark sides. They were not great heroes or reinstantiations of Adam and Eve. Aksakov tried to depict a person whose “outer and inner life is also full of poetry, just as curious and instructive to us as our life and we in turn will be curious and instructive for posterity.” In other words, each individual noble’s life was as compelling, if not more compelling, because of the tragic loss that attended their individual personal gain. These swindlers, settlers and grandfathers were worthy of poetry. Unlike Lomonosov’s scientific, totalizing eye, which we saw in the first chapter of this dissertation wanted to penetrate the very center of the earth to find what was there hidden, Aksakov contented himself with recording fragments from his family’s past, the idyllic nature soon to disappear and the inner lives of silent, obscure individuals. Aksakov was turning his gaze to the same kinds of people and objects that are important to the novel: successions of concrete objects and people with endless domestic problems. He resists, however, seeing them as simple successive objects and projects their lives as full of poetry, much as Gogol tried to reject the banality and ugliness of provincial Russia. Each author turned to the motifs of the ode to signal this rejection and ended up with an at least partially pessimistic depiction of contemporary reality written in the pastoral mode. The only cycle to be enacted would be the characters’ partial compensation of their life and loss by aesthetic achievement. Andrew Durkin claims that the popularity of Aksakov’s work endured despite the explicit ideological stances of many of his friends and family, noting his slavophile sons in particular. Aksakov himself refrained from expressing explicit ideological commitments in his work in favor of a “generalized nostalgic or pastoral orientation.” (Durkin, 34) This generalized pastoral orientation, however, betrayed an attitude towards space and the government’s efforts to regulate 196 it that had definite ideological implications, as I have been demonstrating for over sixty pages. The breakdown of genre in Aksakov’s work, into a mix of the ode, the memoir, the fragment and the idyll, recycles and undermines the official art of the eighteenth century no less than Gogol’s cutting parodies do. Aksakov’s work, however, reflects an empowerment of the individual Russian noble persona in line with official ideology, instead of the flea-bitten inns and dusty potholed roads the idiosyncratic Gogolian eye sees. The rub is, however, that the idyllic world would soon pass. The shrinkingly individualized experience of the landscape, fright before the encroachments of society, creation of poetic worlds to compensate for the loss of cyclical time, and the feeling that in face of those trends that all that was worthwhile was contained in the individual self would come to a head in Ivan Goncharov’s pastoral novel Oblomov. The Last Unmined Mountain The main tension running through Gogol’s Dead Souls is spatial: how can one reconcile the harmony of an abstract, odic perspective with modern Russia as it was experienced through a carriage on a bumpy road? In Aksakov, the tension is around the progression of linear time: the author tries to capture the beauty of his homeland, but the dual marches of linear time and hordes of settlers mean that his artistic works contain a depiction of both the paradisal before and the frightening after of colonization and development. Despite the subtlety and directionlessness of its plot and the seeming lack of external action, astute readers of Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov feel some kind of tension bubbling beneath the surface of the text: between subjective illusion and objective reality (Reeve, 255), poetry and prose (Ehre, 147), whole or fragmentary worlds (Testa, 400), archaic and modern time (Borowec, 562), or dueling chronotopes (Tiupa, 68). Different critics trace this discrepancy to different sources, but the text makes a perfect climax in our argument about the pastoral mode. All of these discrepancies are valid 197 interpretations, and they spring from different generic systems that conceptualize time and space in different ways coming into contact with one another: the system of the ode and the system of the novel. Although he was not a flashy “man of the forties” like Herzen, Stankevich or Belinsky, whose conversations and writings fueled vibrant and contentious intellectual debates in Russia for decades, the thoughts to which Goncharov was exposed in student years formed the foundation of his thinking throughout his life. He remained an "incurable romantic, an idealist" who had waged "a thirty-year Don Quixote struggle with life.” (Ehre, 22) In a piece of his writing from his youth, “Хорошо или дурно жить на свете?” (“Is it good or bad to live on the earth?”), Goncharov sets up the dualism that will ripple throughout his literary work throughout his life: “Life consists of two distinct halves: one practical, another ideal.” (Goncharov, 507). Nikolai Stankevich, Aleksandr Herzen and other people of Goncharov’s generation were influenced by Hegel, becoming famous dialecticians. Although the dreamy Goncharov was a less disciplined thinker than these two famous intellectuals, the Hegelian dialectic influenced his most famous novel. This basic contrast between the real and the ideal structured Goncharov’s thought throughout his life and provided an easy abstract frame onto which Goncharov could hang the contrasting poles of the pastoral. Goncharov’s life was similar to Aksakov’s in that he joined the Russian bureaucracy and worked as a censor for a part of that time. Unlike Aksakov, he managed to make a long career in government service, rising through the ranks from 1834-1867. His time as a censor is of particular importance to his story. Goncharov became the butt of all jokes and the target of intense hate from liberal and radical writers, who wrote “satirical epigrams, caricatures, and direct attacks.” (26) Goncharov was sensitive and paranoid, and this bitter period fed into the 198 increasing and painful alienation he felt at the end of his life. Because of the demands of his salaried government service, Goncharov worked slowly, only releasing three novels over the course of his life. In describing his process, the author describes how a landscape appeared to him in terms similar to the odic authorial perspective Harsha Ram describes for the odic poet in The Imperial Sublime, with the author looking down from a mountain peak and making out the general aspects of the landscape from afar: Я писал медленно, потому что у меня никогда не являлось в фантазии одно лицо, одно действие, а вдруг открывался перед глазами, точно с горы, целый край, с городами, селами, лесами и с толпой лиц, словом, большая область какой-то полной, цельной жизни. Тяжело и медленно было спускаться с этой горы, входить в частности, смотреть отдельно все явления и связывать их между собой. (Petrov, LII). I wrote slowly because a solitary character, a solitary action never appeared in my imagination. Instead, an entire landscape with mountains, villages, forests, and a crowd of characters, in a word, a large province of some sort of full, complete life opened suddenly before my eyes as if seen from a mountain peak. It was difficult and slow to descend from this mountain, to enter into particulars, to look at all the phenomena separately and tie them together. (Translation Ehre, 22). It is almost as if Goncharov had to reenact the history of Russian literature beginning with Lomonosov: starting on the highest mountain peak and descending into the same gritty particulars in which Gogol got bogged down. This commitment to portraying the details of life and landscape led Goncharov to the novelistic form: "Life is a deep and boundless sea; it and art, its true reflection, cannot be exhausted or directed into some narrow channel!” (Petrov, LII) The novel is the only genre that can express the variety and breadth of this reality. Oblomov’s one major non-novelistic work, Frigate Pallada, shows how Goncharov’s binary between the real and the ideal is expressed along with the kinds of pastoral contrasts we saw in Gogol and Aksakov. Goncharov elected to go on a Russian government expedition to open up trade with Japan and inspect Alaska. The mission ended up coming home by land 199 through Siberia. The sights Goncharov sees on this long and fantastic journey never overwhelmed him, but he was aware that his readers will expect "wonders, poetry, fire, life and color” from his account. Unfortunately, Goncharov experiences a world incapable of creating the same kinds of beautiful and majestic poetic images that were in odes: […] авторитеты, начиная от Аристотеля до Ломоносова включительно, молчат; путешествия не попали под ферулу риторики, и писатель свободен пробираться в недра гор, или опускаться в глубину океанов, с ученою пытливостью, или, пожалуй, на крыльях вдохновения скользить по ним быстро и ловить мимоходом на бумагу их образы; описывать страны и народы исторически, статистически или только посмотреть, каковы трактиры, — словом, никому не отведено столько простора и никому от этого так не тесно писать, как путешественнику […] Там всё одинаково, всё просто […] Всё однообразно! И поэзия изменила свою священную красоту. Ваши музы, любезные поэты, законные дочери парнасских камен, не подали бы вам услужливой лиры, не указали бы на тот поэтический образ, который кидается в глаза новейшему путешественнику. И какой это образ! Не блистающий красотою, не с атрибутами силы, не с искрой демонского огня в глазах, не с мечом, не в короне, а просто в черном фраке, в круглой шляпе, в белом жилете, с зонтиком в руках (Goncharov, 14-15) […] rhetoricians, from Aristotle through Lomonosov, are silent; travel literature does not fall under the rod of rhetoric, and the writer is free sneak into the bowels of a mountain or the depths of the sea, with a learned curiosity, or, perhaps, on the wings of inspiration slip down quickly and catch their images on paper in passing; describing peoples and countries historically, statistically or only observe what sort of taverns — in a word, no one is given so much to write about but is so constrained in writing as the traveler…There, everything is the same, everything is simple…everything is monotonous! And poetry has changed its sacred beauty. Your muses, dear poets, the lawful daughters of the Parnassian marbles would not proffer to you the obliging lyre, would not point out to you that poetic image which throws itself in the eyes of the contemporary traveler. And what an image! Neither of brilliant beauty, nor with attributes of power, nor with a spark of demonic fire in his eyes, nor with sword or crown, but simply in a black frock coat, round hat, white vest, and with an umbrella in his hand. The strict laws governing classical rhetoric as set up by Lomonosov or Aristotle have nothing to say about travel writing and give Goncharov no guidance in writing his travelogue. Goncharov puts the world he sees on his travels in explicit conversation with the world projected by the ode, and relates that conversation to the relationships between the genre of the travelogue and the 200 classical genre of the ode. He can creep into the bowels of a mountain, but no wings of inspiration will set him there and put him atop the mountain peak so he can start descending into his narrative. Ehre asserts that the man wearing a black coat and carrying an umbrella who pops up across the text is a reoccurring joke, appearing everywhere from Africa to tropical islands, as “a symbol of the increasing uniformity and prosaicness of the world.” (Ehre, 147). Goncharov voices a fear akin to that expressed in Aksakov’s short-term, short-form adjective разнообрана (is varied), with its implication of temporal contingency: the world will lose its variety. Not just in Orenburg, but all over the world, everything has become prosaic and monotonous (однообразно). Both authors inherited this sense of elegiac loss from the romantics, but it nonetheless feeds on ideolegemes inherited from the ode, now deflated, reduced to empty signifiers of a world that is no longer boundless in mystery or an optimistic projection, but a real and accessible place. Oblomov Few novels express the prosaic and monotonous as clearly and famously as Oblomov. The thin plot of Oblomov revolves around the titular character who refuses to leave his apartment or get out of his tattered bathrobe, who is served by Zakhar, his manservant from childhood, a childhood spent in idyllic surroundings at the estate of Oblomovka. He is juxtaposed to his childhood friend, Schtoltz, a successful merchant who ends up growing and thriving as his friend wastes away. Schtoltz marrying their shared love interest, Olga, while Oblomov himself ends up married to his old housekeeper, Agafya. Goncharov threads the same pattern of deflation or reduction of the sublime by its juxtaposition to an ordinary and prosaic reality through Oblomov, the same juxtaposition Goncahrov mentioned in the Frigate Pallada 201 Oblomov, even more so than Dead Souls or A Family Chronicle, is defined by a lyrical outburst, one of those Gogolian “natural interspaces without which the pattern would not be what it is.” (Nabokov, 107) In Oblomov, there is one lyrical appeal, the writing of which preceded the rest of the novel and overshadowed the rest of the work: “Oblomov’s Dream.” “Oblomov’s Dream” was published separately in 1849, ten years before the rest of the narrative was released. The pattern of "deflation" and "reduction" of the sublime through juxtaposition with prosaic reality is particularly strong in the dream (Ehre, 175). Just as Gogol’s asides, it is tied to the text not by a narrative plot line, but through certain repeated patterns and images, the sun and its rays and the transition of the seasons. The reader is transported to the idyllic estate that exists in Oblomov’s head:“Где мы? В какой благословенный уголок земли перенес нас сон Обломова? Что за чудный край!” (“Where are we? In what blessed corner of earth has Oblomov’s dream taken us? What sort of wondrous territory!) (Goncharov, 102) The language could be torn from Aksakov’s ode in Семеинная хроника, which opens with the line: “Чудесный край, благословенный […]” This shared language signals that he is referencing a similarly precarious space, one that is lost or soon to be lost, or maybe never even was. Next, in a manner similar to Gogol’s negation of the odic landscape in Dead Souls, Goncharov lists all of the things that are not: no seas, tall mountains, cliffs or precipices, nothing grand, wild or threatening: Нет, правда, там моря, нет высоких гор, скал и пропастей, ни дремучих лесов — нет ничего грандиозного, дикого и угрюмого. Да и зачем оно, это дикое и грандиозное? Море, например? Бог с ним! Оно наводит только грусть на человека: глядя на него, хочется плакать. Сердце смущается робостью перед необозримой пеленой вод, и не на чем отдохнуть взгляду, измученному однообразием бесконечной картины (Goncharov, Oblomov, 79). 202 It’s true, there there’s no sea, no tall mountains, cliffs or crags, no dreamy woods — there is nothing grand, wild or threatening. Yes and for what purpose is all that wilderness and grandiosity? The sea, for instance? Who cares about the sea! It leaves a person with only sadness, pressing on him, making him want to cry. The heart is ashamed in timidity before the boundless stretch of water, and it’s impossible to rest your gaze on it, tortured by the monotony of an endless picture. Unlike in Gogol’s description, however, where the narrator bemoans the endless horizon and the absence of any distinguishing natural features, Goncharov’s narrator says “Who cares [about the sea]?” It only causes sadness and is torturously monotonous. The sea contains none of the messy, particularizing details identified with the novelistic individual moving through linear time, it is simply a huge mass mapped over lines and points. The kinds of majestic features of the land found in the ode are listed and found to be too frightening to be of any use: Бессилен рев зверя перед этими воплями природы, ничтожен и голос человека, и сам человек так мал, слаб, так незаметно исчезает в мелких подробностях широкой картины! От этого, может быть, так и тяжело ему смотреть на море. Нет, бог с ним, с морем! Самая тишина и неподвижность его не рождают отрадного чувства в душе: в едва заметном колебании водяной массы человек все видит ту же необъятную, хотя и спящую силу, которая подчас так ядовито издевается над его гордой волей и так глубоко хоронит его отважные замыслы, все его хлопоты и труды. Горы и пропасти созданы тоже не для увеселения человека. Они грозны, страшны, как выпущенные и устремленные на него когти и зубы дикого зверя; они слишком живо напоминают нам бренный состав наш и держат в страхе и тоске за жизнь. И небо там, над скалами и пропастями, кажется таким далеким и недосягаемым, как будто оно отступилось от людей (Goncharov, Oblomov, 79-80) Yes, beside it man's form looks so small and fragile that it is swallowed up amid the myriad details of the gigantic picture. That alone may be why contemplation of the ocean depresses man's soul. During periods, also, of calm and immobility his spirit derives no comfort from the spectacle; for in the scarcely perceptible oscillation of the watery mass he sees ever the slumbering, incomprehensible force which, until recently, has been mocking his proud will and, as it were, submerging his boldest schemes, his most dearly cherished labors and endeavors. In the same way, mountains and gorges were not created to afford man encouragement, inasmuch as, with their terrible, menacing aspect, they seem to him the fangs and talons of some gigantic wild beast--of a beast which is reaching forth in an effort to devour him. 203 Too vividly they remind him of his own frail build; too painfully they cause him to go in fear for his life. And over the summits of those crags and precipices the heavens look so remote and unattainable that they seem to have become removed out of the ken of humanity. Powerless is a beast’s roar in face of these howls of nature, man’s voice is insignificant, and man himself so small, so weak, so imperceptibly [he] vanishes into the small details of the wide picture! It is possible for this reason that it is burdensome for him to look at the sea. No, to hell with the sea! That very calm and placidity of it does not give birth to a gratifying feeling in the soul: in scarcely noticeable oscillations of the liquid mass, a person still sees the same boundless, although slumbering force, which sometimes so venomously mocks his proud will and so deeply buries his courageous plans, all his jobs and labors. Mountains and crevasses are not created for human entertainment either. They are terrible, fearsome, like the claws and teeth of a wild beast extended and set upon him; they remind us too viscerally of our mortal constitution and keep us in fear and nostalgic longing for life. And the sky there, above the cliffs and precipices, seems so distant and unreachable, as if it has given up on people. What had been desirable and necessary features of the Russian Empire’s myth about itself had become frightening and fearsome. Those mountains and crags represented obstacles to be conquered by the Russian Empire to Lomonosov, frightening natural features whose very existence proved the majesty of Russia’s empire and were likely full of precious metals. Lomonosov looked forward to mining those mountains and subduing them with his genius and labor. Goncharov’s narrator found these various natural features so frightening and imposing that they mocked his labors, and no one’s labors could come close to subduing them. What had been necessary for collective glory now appears superfluous to human “entertainment,” the boundless horizon that made Russia an enviable and powerful geopolitical force only curled back in on its subjects, making them afraid for their lives. The sublime, the main constituent piece of the poetics of empire, still held its central place, but from the now privileged perspective of a 204 novelistic hero, denied flights of inspiration for humble sleepy reveries, the sublime was an undesirable, fearsome feature, reminding him of his own mortality and insignificance. In the realm of the ode, Russia was an imperial power because of its Caucasian mountains, higher than the Alps, and its Riphean Urals, jam-packed with nuggets of gold and silver. To Goncharov’s narrator, however, A world without mountains is better than with them, because such menacing structures remind men of their frailty and mortality. Immediately we can see that this space is depicted in the pastoral mode, as the aesthetics of the ode and the ethics they presuppose are evoked and rejected in dialogue with Oblomov’s fears and apprehensions, creating a meta-utopia, where the utopia of the ode and the anti-utopia of the nineteenth-century Russian subject enter into an ultimately inconclusive dialogue (Morson, 111). This dialogue takes place in the middle landscape of the pastoral, where two discourses meet. Again, vital to acknowledge that this is not the Karamzinian middle space of the idyll, but a generic middle space where discourses come into dialogue. This middle place lies between the city and the countryside, the real and the ideal, the ode and the novel. But Oblomovka is more “a state of mind than an actual social or geographical location, a retreat into fantasy instead of into the countryside.” (Ehre, 181). Oblomov, more than the other prose analyzed above, exemplifies the synergy of perceptual boundaries and physical ones (Platonov, 1116). Oblomov is limited by his his perception of space more than any actual space, ideal constraints and not real ones. Goncharov’s hero is unlike Gogol’s Chichikov in that he does not allow himself to get lost in the endless, blank horizon of Russia: small hills and ravines are frightening enough, and he sees no use for anything more. These conceptual limits the hero places on himself are reflected in the geological metaphor Oblomov uses to describe himself: 205 А между тем он болезненно чувствовал, что в нем зарыто, как в могиле, какое-то хорошее, светлое начало, может быть, теперь уже умершее, или лежит оно, как золото в недрах горы, и давно бы пора этому золоту быть ходячей монетой (Goncharov, Oblomov, 100-101) Yet with this there went an aching feeling that, buried in his being, as in a tomb, there still remained a fine, bright element, now already moribund, or lying there, as gold lies in the bowels of the earth, long ago the time having passed for that gold to have been minted into a coin in circulation. The language in this metaphor is drawn directly from the landscape of the ode, but now that landscape is limited to the Oblomov’s soul. The writer sneaks into the soul, like the Goncharov sneaks into the depths of a mountain in the banal reality of the travelogue to see where the last un-mined depths of empire seemed to be. In “Ода на день восшествия на Всероссийский престол Её Величества Государыни Императрицы Елисаветы Петровны 1747 года,” cited above, Lomonosov also discusses precious metal hidden in the bowels of a mountain: И се Минерва ударяет В верьхи Рифейски копием; Сребро и злато истекает Во всем наследии Твоем. Плутон в расселинах мятется, Что Россам в руки предается Драгой его металл из гор, Который там натура скрыла; От блеску дневного светила Он мрачный отвращает взор. О вы, которых ожидает Отечество от недр своих И видеть таковых желает, Каких зовет от стран чужих, О, ваши дни благословенны […] (Lomonosov, 201-215) And behold, Minerva strikes, In the Ural Mountains’ mines; Silver and gold flow In all your patrimony. Pluto in crevasses trembles, That precious metal from the mountains, is turned over into Russians hands 206 That which nature has there concealed, From the glint of the light of day Oh you, which the fatherland Expects from its depths [от недр] And desires to see those, Which it calls from foreign lands, Oh, your days are blessed! The sensation Goncharov’s hero feels expresses a deep ambivalence about the imperial project and his own place in it. That fine, bright principle in him could have been circulating in society, as a thing of some use, but the reader also gets the feeling that had that nugget of gold been torn out and pressed into coin it might have lost what made it fine and bright. In Lomonov’s ode, noble Roman gods are conscripted into the paradise myth, fearfully giving over the precious metals hiding inside mountains’ depths. Oblomov, in his indolent refusal to be useful and keeping the treasures the fatherland expects hidden deep inside his soul, maintains what is valuable about himself. In contrast to the pessimistic vision of human labors in Обломов, where all human labors will be swallowed by the sea or seem insignificant in the shade of mountain peaks and crags, Lomonosov believed that the sciences and other human endeavors would create a better empire: Науки юношей питают, Отраду старым подают, В счастливой жизни украшают, В несчастный случай берегут; В домашних трудностях утеха И в дальних странствах не помеха. Науки пользуют везде, Среди народов и в пустыне, В градском шуму и наедине, В покое сладки и в труде (Lomonosov, 221-225) 207 This subtle conversation with the ode and the vital geological motifs that I documented in the first chapter of this dissertation shows that even when it was not specifically referenced, the stylistic and semantic markers of the ode were woven into the fabric of the Goncharov’s text, and the intertextual conversation creates a pastoral meta-utopia. Precious metals, forbidding mountains and hard labor are reinterpreted away from their optimistic, aspirationally-collective meanings in the Lomonosovian paradise myth, and the imperial subject begins to identify with the landscape itself in a purely metaphorical sense. In other words, in the ode, words signified objectified metaphors aspiring to totalizing meaning that could imbue Russia with the grandeur and majesty of an Empire; in the elegy, the” lyric I” writing the poem could identify the signified landscape with a real, concrete, subjective experience. In the novel, on the other hand, the landscape was filled primarily with concrete objects as they were subjectively experienced. Rather than mountains held by the state, full of vast riches, metaphorically linked to Roman volcanoes and icy peaks, Oblomov is a novel of feelings, mostly fear, anxiety and boredom, and feelings are subjectively-experienced, personally-held treasures. The similarity is drawn between the hero, who, dejected, perceives himself as akin to one of these treasures in an odic mountain to be used and abused. In Oblomov’s extreme, pastoral mode of perception, the only positive that remained was an idiosyncratically understood metaphor, semantic currency made of our debt from past losses: destroyed, negated social relations, forgotten traditions and dissolved bonds, gold coins long ago forged whose origin was forgotten, representing abstracted former ways of life. Olga, the love interest Oblomov left behind for his lifestyle of endless indolence, sees this golden goodness in Oblomov where others cannot: За то, что в нем дороже всякого ума: честное, верное сердце! Это его природное золото; он невредимо пронес его сквозь жизнь. Он падал от толчков, охлаждался, заснул, наконец, убитый, разочарованный, по теряв силу жить, но не потерял честности и верности. Ни одной фальшивой ноты не издало его сердце, не пристало 208 к нему грязи. Не обольстит его никакая нарядная ложь, и ничто не совлечет на фальшивый путь; пусть волнуется около него целый океан дряни, зла, пусть весь мир отравится ядом и пойдет навыворот — никогда Обломов не поклонится идолу лжи, в душе его всегда будет чисто, светло, честно. Это хрустальная, прозрачная душа; таких людей мало; они редки; это перлы в толпе! (Goncharov, Oblomov, 362, translation my own) Shall I tell you what is more precious than any mind? An honest, trustworthy heart. That heart is natural gold; he has carried it unsullied through all his life. Under life’s stress he fell, lost his enthusiasm, and ended by going to sleep—a broken, disenchanted man who had lost his power to live, but not his purity and his intrinsic worth. Never a false note has that heart sounded; never a particle of mire has clung there to his soul; never a specious lie has he heeded; never to the false road has he been seduced by any possible attraction. Even were a whole ocean of evil and rascality to come seething about him, and even were the whole world to become infected with poison and be turned upside down, Oblomov would yet refuse to bow to the false image, and his soul would remain transparent soul, as radiant, and as without spot as ever. That soul is a soul of crystal, transparency. Of men like him but few exist, so that they shine amid the mob like pearls. His heart is the kind of rare precious treasure one would find in a mountain: golden, transparent, and crystalline. He sticks out like a pearl in a mob of unremarkable men who conform to the standardized, monotonous world. Inside of Oblomov is an un-mined goodness already closed up in a grave, defined and dead, a stubborn precious metal that the structured world of the empire did not expend enough labor to retrieve. Oblomov’s experience is defined through adding negating, second-order meaning to these motifs. Goncharov uses the mineral and geographical signifiers of the ode, but to signify opposite ideas. Rather than richly varied, the world is monotonous; rather than sublime, mountains are frightful; rather than promising collective future prosperity, what is precious stays private, hidden and threatened. Goodness was apparently not as self-evident as eighteenth-century ideals believed: Goncharov’s hero was a man of private goodness who could not find a place amongst the nineteenth-century public. Hélène Melat sees in Oblomov a trait characteristic of the epic hero: radicalism. He remains unbending, and courageously resists any attempt to oust him from his 209 state of quiet tranquility (May, 41). This unbending, epic character shows an inability of the odic and imperial system to mine the most hidden and most precious assets in the empire: a person’s soul. Despite his novelistic alienation and problematic relation to society, he retains this self- assured worth and totality of the soul. Carlo Testa seconds this reading of Oblomov, seeing him as issuing a formal declaration of war against mindless, superfluous society (Testa, 400). Oblomov retreats into a small corner of the world where wholeness is possible, trying to avoid the fragmentariness and disorder of the nineteenth century's arrogant and aggressive banality. This banality, as it is in Aksakov, is connected to linear time. Christine Borowec notes the contrasting perceptions of time in Oblomov, averring that its hero has based his life on an archaic conception of time that is ahistorical, and interpreting reality through a cyclical repetition of archetypes (Borowec, 562). In the same way that time in the paradise myth is constantly renewed by new marriages, victories and coronations, time in Oblomovka is a reoccurrence of eternal cycles, inhabited by local legends rather than ancient or Mediterranean myths. Oblomov is left behind in his dream-world of Oblmovka by historical time and Schtolz. The narration is warped by Oblomov’s idiosyncratic ordering of time, which allows him to daydream all day long and conjure up the idyll of his youth, just as Aksakov’s sense of a non- linear past time remembered from childhood causes him to invoke the ode. The novelistic world in which Oblomov is the sort Benedict Anderson describes as hypnotically confirming “the solidity of a single community, embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward through calendrical time.” (Anderson, 27) This, for Anderson is typical of time in the novel. What makes Oblomov a novel in the pastoral mode is Oblomov’s cyclical, sheltering chronotope projected in opposition to that single community moving forward through calendrical time. He is utterly unfit for the novelistic world, and thus is only himself when he escapes it. 210 If Oblomov’s odic internal richness and epic stubbornness exist in the cyclical time, Oblomov’s foil, Schtolz, a childhood friend who kindly manages Oblomonov’s estate, stands in for the novelistic character navigating a modern world. The space Schtolz inhabits is a modernizing Russian nation that L. C. Geiro shows in her astute commentary to be comprehensively fleshed-out, full of Siberian gold mines, foreign wheat markets, domestic joint- stock companies and the department of the treasury. The forces systematizing the polity had changed: no longer was it a purely top-down effort, it now relied on individual capitalists in Schtolz’s mold. Schtoltz and Oblomov, as characters that inhabit different generic spaces, enact a meta-utopia on a personal level. When one character visits the other character's chronotope, the contrast is palpable. When Schtoltz drops by Oblomov’s squalid apartment, the reader feels as if he is breathing the dust of a messy flat, and when Oblomov joins Schtoltz for lunch and a walk, the sun seems to antiseptically purify the narrative. Each character is accompanied by different aesthetic systems and ethical universes, Schtoltz showing his disappointment and disgust at Oblomov’s squandered life, Oblomov betraying his discomfort before retreating to his paradise. Similarly to Oblomov, Schtolz is also closely linked to precious metals, but he has no metaphorical gold hidden away in his soul. Schtolz interacts with real, actual gold from the purely prosaic perspective of a man who lives a public life in harmony with society’s linear succession of events and the burgeoning capitalist ethics of the nation-state. Geiro follows the trail of breadcrumbs that Goncharov leaves the reader, allowing us to see where the industrious Schtoltz was making his money. Whereas Oblomov was unable to marry Olga because of his epic stubbornness, that fidelity to the unpressed coin in his soul, Schtoltz eventually married her, despite his concern that his love for her might keep him from his gold: as a married man he might not be able to go to Siberia to dig up gold or serve in the Treasury (Goncharov, Oblomov, 211 534). Oblomov’s gold is kept private in his heart, while Schtolz tracks after other stores of gold all over the world. After noting these coincidences, Geiro does some digging into gold mining in Russia, discussing who was permitted to search for gold and how much they could extract, providing facts and figures that show that Goncharov was linking Schtoltz’s activity to actual places and industries, going on to claim that Goncharov gave “a deep and precise sociological picture of Russian society at the onset of capitalism in the creation of his novel.” (534) This material and economic reality was a pivotal backdrop to the creation of Oblomov. In Pereverzev’s famous Soviet reading, Oblomov was superfluous because the encroachments of capitalism had negated his position in society as an idle serf-owner and the social arrangements on which he relied (Pereverzev, 744). Expressed in the literary terms that arose coeval to this economic reality, Oblomov is the metaphorical, universal symbols of the paradise myth distilled in one individual, a believer in poetic paradise made obsolete by the modern project, resisting the standardization and materiality that came with the modern project. Schtolz is the product of that modern project, for whom life is a tangible reality and succession of solid objects and events through linear time. The jumbled glorification of Russia put forth in the ode evaporated when confronted with the novelistic life of an individual, leaving only inhumane lines and marks. Solid objects laid out along those lines and marks multiply around Oblomov throughout his lifetime. Gogol, in one of his lyrical appeals, envisions the future of Russian settlements, from the small town all the way up to the capital. The “outlines of six-storied mansions, and of shops and balconies, and wide perspectives of streets, and a medley of steeples, columns, statues, and turrets” Gogol predicated have come to be, along with a “rattle and roar and infinite 212 wonders” which the hand and the brain of men have conceived. In these lines, Gogol was imitating odic optimism of the sort Lomonosov expressed when he predicted a world where: [...]Науки юношей питают, Отраду старым подают, В счастливой жизни украшают, В несчастной случай берегут; В домашних трудностях утеха И в дальних странствах не помеха. Науки пользуют везде, Среди народов и в пустыне, В градском шуму и наедине […] (Lomonosov, 211-229) […]The sciences cultivate our youths, They give joy to the elders, They adorn fortunate lives, And protect against the unfortunate event; In the domestic labors [give] comfort And in distant lands there is not an obstacle. The sciences they deploy everywhere, Amidst peoples and in the wilderness, In the bustle of the city and alone […] The urban development projected by Lomonosov and Gogol in their literary works was now here, replacing the sleepy neighborhood where Oblomov once lived: “Прошло лет пять. Многое переменилось и на Выборгской стороне: пустая улица, ведущая к дому Пшеницыной, обстроилась дачами, между которыми возвышалось длинное, каменное, казенное здание, мешавшее солнечным лучам весело бить в стекла мирного приюта лени и спокойствия.” (Goncharov, Oblomov, 311) “Five years have passed, and more than one change has taken place in the Vyborg District. The street which used to lead, unenclosed, to Pshenitsyn’s home is now lined with villas. In the midst of them a tall stone prison building rears its head between the sunlight and the windows of that quiet, peaceful little house which the sun's rays once warmed so cheerfully.” New buildings, and specifically a tall, tone prison, block out the rays that run through the novel and trickle into Oblomov’s apartment, and orderly villas line new long straight roads. Oblomov’s epic quest to insulate the pure, secret treasure of his heart became harder and more isolating with 213 each passing year as tall buildings blocked the sun from the windows of the apartment he never left. The looming doom of Aksakov’s liminal temporality has arrived: Oblomov’s sheltered apartment and sunny naps, blocked out by a penitentiary, are just one victim of the ruin that modernity promises us. Schtolz, in his last conversation with Oblomov, calls him a poet. Oblomov answers “Yes, a poet in life, because life is poetry. People are at liberty to warp it!” Oblomov, living in the cyclical time of the paradise myth, sees the poetry of this myth warped by the march of linear time each time he steps outside. Ironically, the very future predicted in the paradise myth of an ordered, powerful empire full of hustle, bustle, science and industry is the world warping that poetry into prose. Pastoral prose depicts a world where its heroes are most at home in in-between spaces because the increasing regulation and subjugation of the natural world. They depict this discomfort through an uncomfortable and sometimes unstable juxtaposition of the odic form and bleak prose. The negation of majestic features of the landscape evokes Robert M. Pyle’s idea of the “extinction of experience,” the increasing estrangement from the richly-textured actual natural world with the two-dimensional world of books or television (Soga, 3), and the extinction of actual species reduces the possibility for such contact, ever. This poverty of experience implies a cycle of disaffection that can have disastrous consequences. The complete interiorization of the paradise myth seen in Oblomov is what happens when the dream of modern society and the progression of history sparked by the modern world begin to curl back in on themselves, seeming newly false and frightening. Lukaçs sees Oblomov as a novel “doomed to failure” (Lukaçs, 120) a literary effort to fit the magnificently, truly and profoundly whole character of Oblomov into the broken totality of the novel as impossible. 214 Perhaps Lukaçs did not understand that the defining drama of the Russian pastoral novel was to stage this uncomfortable opposition, a confrontation of totalities: one a metaphorical vision, inheriting the language and harmony of the ode, increasingly privatized and imperiled, and a novelistic, sociological world of commerce and reproducible objects. Oblomov is the epic hero for whom Gogol searched, the ordinary man out of time that Aksakov longed to be: unfortunately, living in this mode took inhuman strength, and eventually prematurely ends the hero's life. Although he is the victim to the same modernizing vision that created both the ode, the empire, the urban environment of the city and the mining industry, this hero nonetheless expresses his inner world in odic terms. In his desire to present a paradisal vision of a time outside this linear progression and inside a world of metaphorical and mythic being, Goncharov turned to the odic motifs, thoroughly refuting its optimism. The way in which these ideologies acquired second-order meanings traced a tension through language, landscape and society. This tension ripples through life to this day. Oblomov is a hero of our time as much as his own, a prophetic vision of life in a world of increasingly leveled and flat experience, marching forward through linear time into the extinction of all things, engineered by an imperial need to structure everything along straight lines and points and subjugate or destroy everything resistant to this structure. Soon we will live in a monotonous world of only lines and points, the remaining un-mined treasures those we keep privately in our hearts, safe against the onslaught of time and technology, for now. This knowledge that ruin will come, the looming doom itself, the feeling being already mortally estranged from the impersonal structures of the modern world and interpreting old genera in an effort to salvage shards of metaphorical meaning: our lives take 215 place in a pastoral mode. The best we can hope for is to know, as Schtolz does, that we and he are no titans, just an ordinary people, and face life with firmness and serenity (Oblomov, 358). Conclusion: Theoretical and Thematic Extensions At the beginning of this project, I hoped my theory of genre and ideology in Russian literature would spiral up through the twentieth century; I pondered a long discussion contrasting the optimistic odic visions of early Soviet poets and the confusing, generically jumbled pastoral novels of Pilnyak and Platonov. The scope of my dissertation as it exists, however, has almost defeated me several times, and it might have taken another eight years to complete the project in conformance with the grand designs I have for it. The argument of this dissertation, however, that the pastoral mode is a mode of discourse emerging from basic tensions emergent at the genesis of modern project, beautifully compliments broader theories of Russian intellectual history, critical theory and provides an apt interpretive framework for contemporary Russian literature. By drawing these theoretical connections, I will show how the concept of “the pastoral” that I have outlined mirrors elements of the dynamic we have come to call post- structuralism or the postmodern and resonates beyond Russian literature of this period. In addition, my analysis of two contemporary novels will show the extent to which “pastoral” critiques of the modern project continue to animate Russian literature in form and content. In their famous article “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture,” Iuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky argue that Russian culture can be divided into clear stages that replace each other dynamically; as every new period is oriented towards a decisive break with the preceding one, these stages are always either progressive or reactionary and never essentially conservative (Lotman/Uspensky, 31). It has historically been a culture without a “neutral” sphere, so these 216 progressions or reactions are enacted and understood as total eschatological transformations (32). The new results from the transformation of the old in a process of “turning inside out,” thus, repeated transformations can in fact lead to the regeneration of archaic forms, and the same conceptions can appear at each stage furnished with new content depending on the point of departure, lending what Lotman and Uspensky see as a “unity” across Russian cultural memory (33). Two last examples the two authors provide of this dynamic whereby the new becomes old and the positive becomes negative are coeval with the cultural developments that I examine in the first chapter of my dissertation. Both take place in the eighteenth century: Peter I’s orientation towards the advanced West, not the holy East as a site to emulate, and his jettisoning of traditional Muscovite Orthodox culture, making what was formerly “new,” i.e. Christian Russia, old and outdated (62). In second half of the eighteenth century, culture once again flipped inside out. Lotman and Uspensky cite Radishchev and his literary idylls, which rejected Petrine culture in favor of a projected past utopia that amalgamated the natural world, pagan tradition, Orthodox values, and classical pasts in an exercise of “memory making.” (62). When Lotman and Uspensky claim that this process cause the same conceptions to appear at each stage furnished with new content, the post-structuralist theory of the Tartu School echoes theories of post-modernism, where the sign exists as a product of other signs, always polysemantic and never straightforward. That this interpretation of Russian history, as one of drastic reversal, recycling, repudiation and resurrection of ideas, would fit with a Western post-modern critic’s theory of cultural dynamics would not surprise Mikhail Epstein, who reads the post-modern into Russian history back to the conversion in 988. Epstein claims that the “system of secondary stimuli 217 intended to produce a sense of reality,” (Epstein, 3) or “simulation” that is understood to be the condition of post-modernity may be relatively new to the West, but Russia has been engaged in the active “production of reality” throughout its history. Imitation and representation were real and influential concepts in the early modern period in Europe, but in Russia, ideas always tended to substitute for reality. Epstein cites the two examples most pivotal to Lotman and Uspensky’s argument: Vladimir I converting Russia in 988, and Peter the Great embarking on his great modernization project (3): […] reality as such has gradually disappeared throughout Russian history. The entire reality of pagan Rus' disappeared when Prince Vladimir ordered the introduction of Christianity and briskly baptized the whole nation. Similarly, the entire reality ofMoscow Rus' vanished when Peter the Great ordered his citizens "to become civilized" and shave their beards. The reality of "tsarist" Russia dissolved when Lenin and Bolsheviks transformed it into a launching pad for a communist experiment. Finally, all Soviet reality collapsed within several years of Gorbachev's rule, yielding to a new. still unknown system of ideas. Probably, the ideas of the capitalist market and free enterprise now have the best chance in Russia, though, once again, they remain as pure conceptions against the back-ground of a hungry and devastated society. Epstein could add several systemic reversals of certain constellations of signs in literary discourse to his list of “reality-substituting” events in Russian history. If, as Baudriallard’s famous axiom goes, sometimes “the map becomes the territory,” then when the semantic valences of the markings on the map change, so does the shape of the territory. Quickly and decisively, Lomonosov and other eighteenth-century writers had put forward a new system of literary symbols and genres, composed of the paradise myth documented by Stephen Baehr, a mixture of Orthodox, classical and Muscovite signifiers that came to represent the new, Westernized “systematic simplification” (Scott, 8) of culture. A second reversal occurred, in which the signifiers present in the paradise myth, and particular the ode, which was formulated to publicly celebrate Russia’s expansiveness, frightening natural features, violent conquests and 218 the inevitable cyclical renewal of imperial power, acquired negative valence in the pastoral novel. As Gogol, Aksakov and Goncharov filled in the “general geographical outlines” Lomonosov left them, they transformed the Russia he left them from an optimistic land of opportunity and abundance to an empty, despoiled and oppressive space. This map warped to express a private timid fear of borders, aversion to sublimity and lament for lost time. The resolute, arbitrary and aggressive creation of literary, scientific and governmental systems in Russia’s early Enlightenment period was systematically deconstructed in later literature by pastoral novelists who, instead of exploring the interior of mountains or creating new systems of literacy meaning whole cloth retreated to map their own inner landscapes of disappointment and disillusionment. It is not just within the realm of Russian cultural theory where this dynamic evolution from the classical to the pastoral finds resonance, but also in Western post-structuralist and Marxist literary theory. What I am have defined in terms of the Russian ode went beyond identifying its main thematic or structural specificities, which are already exhaustively documented, and is similar to what Frederic Jameson terms the “content of form.” As described by Jameson in Anglo-centric terms, twentieth-century criticism was defined by two camps: on one side, the aesthetically-oriented “New Critics” of the twentieth century, stereotyped as only interested in pure form as such to the extent that they advocated for “the elimination of content as such,” and the so-called “historical reductionists” on the other, critics who wanted to reduce society and its cultural products to nothing more than a network of relations of power (Jameson, Modernist, x-xiii). Jameson argues that the seeming contradiction between these two trends should be resolved not though a simplification or elimination of one perspective, but with a complication of the opposition between the two that allows the analysis of the “form of content” 219 and the “content of form.” (xiv) The content of form can be discerned through the reconstruction of interactions between historical pasts and the forms used to depict them. Music, literature, all forms of art, and all other artistically-staged “situations,” are ways of constructing the dynamic of human activity: they convey both information about a given present and information about how information is organized in particular historical presents (xiv). The way that information is organized shows the horizons of reality prescribed by the dominant cultural system (Fisher, 12), made evident in the types of temporal and spatial realities it is willing and capable of depicting. The ode defined the limit the horizons of reality within a certain aspect, and the pastoral was the end result of a long process through which authors twisted, subverted and reversed those symbols. These certain words, ideas and stylistic features of the ode became signifiers that emitted “ideological signals long after [their] original content became historically obsolete.” (Jameson, 172), inherited narrative unities Jameson dubs “ideologemes” (172). A second- (or third-, or fourth-) order memory persists in the midst of new meanings, certain words turning into a pile of signifiers, increasing their density and polysemy. This idea of an increasing polysemy and complexity fits with Deleuze’s analysis of literature after the Baroque. In Deleuze’s famous work, The Fold, he discusses Gottfried Leibniz and his conception of the world as a pure emission of singularities, and individuals and objects as convergences of a certain number of these similarities. The first of any singularities are purely events, and then begin to act in the world, becoming predicates. (Deleuze, xxv). Literature became modern when, in the realm of literature, linguistic predicates were able to free themselves from pure, virtual singularities and assume validities of their own, that is, act as independent predicates (xxvi-xxvii). This leads to an instability in space and time in literature, creating and erasing objects at the same time. This description of “the modern” in literature 220 seems tailor-made to pastoral prose, a literary space where odic signifiers became “rhizomes,” multiplicities newly connected to other signifiers, causing dissonances and unresolved chords, a “polyphony of polyphonies.” (xxvii). The unstable harmony of Lomonosov’s late Baroque world mirrored Liebniz’s world of simulated harmony, and it fell apart similarly to other late Baroque cultural constructions. Another way of examining the role of the ode in pastoral discourses is Genette’s idea of paratextuality. Odic signifiers could be seen as a necessary “paratext” for the pastoral, reinforcing and strengthening their meaning. Without understanding Lomonosov’s preoccupation with the Riphean Mountains and their mineral wealth, Aksakov’s private odic performances would have only a shadow of their meaning. The scientific, imperial and poetic discourses of early empire echoed through this later work as a rich implied universe of meaning (Genette, 261). The implied universe of meaning, inherited from the ode and its geological connections, continues to inform Russian literature, and continues to create a mood that expresses disillusionment in systems of governmental, environmental and cultural management, as seen in two recent Russian novels, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 and Vladimir Sorokin’s BRO. Each of these novels addresses the brokenness state of contemporaneity in pastoral terms, exploiting the geological motifs first used in Lomonosov’s writing and exaggerating the apocalyptically wide disjunctures between real and ideal in speculative fiction. In the first 2017, the characters scrounge through the landscape of the Riphean mountains, which seem to be what we now call the Urals, a region both actual and mythic, governed by attachments to imagined pasts, the laws of pure economic necessity, and the waxing and waning desire people have for each other, for gems, and for what might turn out to be 221 spiritual beings. In Slavnikova’s 2006 projection of where post-Soviet Russia was headed in 2017, myth creeps back in through the decay, and the state and individuals scavenge for meaning among arboreal myth and soviet history. Slavnikova sets the book in what seems to be the Urals, but never calls them that, returning to Lomonosov’s mythic term, “the Ripheans.” The land has suffered a severe ecological crisis, poisoning and depopulating it. We later find out the crisis was partially caused by the irresponsible business practices of the main character’s estranged wife, who owned a stake in Sverzoloto, a post-Soviet mining venture, and spilled cyanide into the mountain range’s riparian system. The landscape is defined by picturesque mountains, picturesque in such a way that they cannot be imbued anew with metaphorical meaning. The lack of disjuncture between sign and signified, between the lines and points on a map and the objects populating that map, between a possible painting and the landscape to be painted presents the Ripheans as a jumbled world of obsolete signs: The Riphean Mountains, windswept and blanketed by smoke that passes through hundreds of gradations of gray, look like decorative park ruins. There’s nothing left for a painter to do amid this ready-made lithic beauty. Every landscape, no matter where you look, already has its composition and basic colors, a characteristic correlation of parts that combine into a simple and recognizable Riphean logo. The picturesqueness of the Riphean Mountains seems intentional. Horizontals of gray boulders green with lichen and softened by slippery pillows of rusty needles are intersected by verticals of pines huddled in tight groups, and like everything in the landscape, they elude simplistic uniformity […] the place erases the boundary and distinction between the named geographical location and the unnamed object […] (Slavnikova) The landscape is the sole and only reality, where myth and concrete reality merge into one: The Riphean range is in one of those enigmatic regions where the landscape directly affects people’s minds. For the true Riphean, the land is rock, not soil. Here, he is the possessor of a profound—in the literal and figurative sense of the word—geologically grounded truth. At the same time his land is also fruitful. Just as the inhabitant of Central Russia goes out “into nature” to pick berries and mushrooms, so the Riphean drives his old jalopy out looking for gems; to him, a place without deposits and veins makes no sense. Far from everyone who grows up in the Riphean range later joins the community 222 of rock hounds—unlicensed prospectors who, while having other professions, often intellectual ones, in town make it so easy to assemble the components of a recognizable landscape on canvas have always encouraged amateur rather than professional painters. Realism, be it a method of art or, more broadly, a way of thinking, has here been a characteristic of fundamentally superficial people, well-intentioned dilettantes who take the use of ready-made forms for a type of patriotism. In this sense, the Ripheans have been cunning. From the very beginning, there has been all the ready-made material you could ask for. As a result, a specific stratum of artists, poet-songwriters, collectors, and ethnologists formed who were seized by splendid impulses. These serious-minded fellows, who were old by the time they were thirty, who wore the ubiquitous sardine-gray jacket and carried various membership cards in their inside pockets, had the vague feeling something was expected of them by all this stone and industrial might, the loaded sky above it that kept transporting tons and tons of clouds without end—but they never got past the surface, which seemed to satisfy the demand for artistry and Riphean originality (Slavnikova). The art or science of the region are dictated, as Lomonosov’s art was, by the practical needs of the population, whether that is a large industrial mining concern leeching cyanide into the water or individual “rock-hounds” combing the polluted, pictures wastes of the range for gemstones. Industrialists, rock-hounds, artists and poets all relied on the superficial beauty of the range. The landscape has returned to a state where there is a clear, uncomplicated correlation between signifier and signified. Although no new meanings can be mined from the landscape, it life there was stagnant and retired reinterpretation, so people turned to the past. This first becomes clear on in the flora and fauna. The natural landscapes, once entirely picked-over and denuded, began to revive, and the straightforward attitude towards the land cannot hold for long: […] Riphean places where the deposits anticipated by their geological “address” were clean gone had in recent years been acquiring a visible authenticity, a density of vegetative, animal, and fish life. The impression was as if hundreds of square kilometers had existed in the form of copies, with intentionally decorative cliffs and trash accumulating in the ferns. The land began to reclaim itself, just as ancient myths started to come back. A mysterious mythic woman, the lady of the mountain, started to appear with more frequency, and Krylov, the main character, a misanthropic rock-hound, becomes involved with a secretive woman who has no 223 known home address, only an alias, and they meet daily, but never at each other’s home: maybe the lady of the mountain. He was at risk of being one of the many rock-hounds lost to this mysterious spirit, the kinds of cases recorded in police files, where: […] you’ll find quite a few puzzling suicides, when the deceased was found with a blissful smile on his petrified lips—that is, his mouth had literally turned to mineral, a hard stone flower, an eternal adornment on his sunken face. Somewhere nearby, in an obvious spot, lined up parallel to the furniture and room, there would be a document from the deceased—his suicide note, addressed to a woman and consisting for the most part of mediocre verse. He and the mysterious new woman in his life, who went by Tanya, met at a different random spot on the map every single day, his emotional journey covering the entire space of the decaying city in which he lived: The journey he had taken hand in hand with this woman was, in his case, a literally physical journey across the Riphean land, whose look and composition made it unlike any other land on earth. No matter how built up or paved over the Riphean land was, its crumbled stone teeth and the profound cold of its native rock could be felt through any sole. Their life was determined by random points on a map, showing it to be a pure abstraction imposed on the infinitely complex and decaying landscape. Never knowing each other’s names, where the other lives, or their contact information, one day they lose each other at a holiday parade, where agitators cosplaying as Red and White army members clash with one another. Just as ferns, spirits and mineral riches were regrowing over the Riphean landscape, the forces of history came to repopulate Russia as well. Slavnikova’s world is the end result of the one Epstein describes, where “all Soviet reality collapsed within several years of Gorbachev's rule, yielding to a new, still unknown system of ideas. […] a hungry and devastated society.” Thousands began to dress as Bolshevik revolutionaries and White vigilantes, raiding historic stores of moth-eaten uniforms, stitching new ones, and brawling in the streets. The fallen world post-Soviet world, bereft of a governing ideology, was open for reinterpretation and 224 reversal, forming a pastoral space, where characters try to carve of individual meaning with outdated and discarded ideologemes from the past. The Ripheans, that “old, stretched-out scar,” became re-inscribed with the fights that had defined it one hundred years ago, but only as they were emptily reenacted by individual citizens, showing, just as pastoral novelists did centuries before, that at the dead end of the modern projects, reinterpretation is the only avenue of interpretation. Krylov, the main character, is a rock-hound but spends most of his life polishing and burnishing stones, motivated by a lifelong desire for “transparency,” a state he sees as “a substance’s highest, most enlightened state. Transparency was magic.” It becomes clear that Krylov longs for transparency because the scar of the Riphean mountains is a world of occluded motivations, polluted streams, overgrown mountain passes, and clandestine relationships. His whole quest throughout the novel seems to be to find that transparency, whether it is through polishing rocks, in defining his confused relationships with women, or by discerning the mysterious forces behind the pollution of the mountain range. In the end, he finds this transparency in his relationships, but is left all alone, and the world around him descends into senseless chaos. Once meaning is lost, once the transparency of the world is occluded and it cannot be regained — the solitary self is the only way to inscribe meaning on the world. The second piece of contemporary speculative fiction with pastoral themes is BRO, the first novel in Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, which chronicles the ascendence of a ur-utopian, anti-human organization of 23,000 individuals who are the hosts of true light. They strive to bring the failed experiment of life and human civilization, which they see as based on greed and violence, to an end. BRO, the main character of the first novel, is born as Aleksandr in 1908 on his father’s sugar-beet plantation in Ukraine. He senses the greed, violence and fallenness of 225 contemporary society late in his childhood, that most pastoral of temporalities, on his father’s country estate, that most pastoral of places. His personality, indolent, dreamy, and questioning, could be drawn from Oblomov, and his father, a withdrawn, heroic homesteading sugar baron prone to drunken binges where he berates “but never beats” his wife, is strikingly similar to Aksakov’s Old Bagrov. His soporific fantasies reoccur in a frightful dream: I had a recurring dream: I saw myself at the foot of a huge mountain, so high and boundless that my legs grew limp. The mountain was frightfully big. It was so big that I began to sweat and crumble like dried bread. Its summit disappeared into the blue sky. The summit was very high. So high that I was entirely bent and fell apart like bread in milk. I couldn’t do anything about the “mountain. It stood there. And waited for me to look at its summit. That was all it wanted from me. But I couldn’t raise my head. How could I? I was all stooped and crumbling. But the mountain really wanted me to look. I understood that if I didn’t look, I’d crumble altogether and turn into bread pudding. I took my head in my hands and began to lift it. It rose, and rose, and rose. And I looked, and looked, and looked at the mountain. But I still couldn’t see the top. Because it was high, high, high. And it ran away from me something terrible. I began to sob through my teeth and choke. I kept lifting my heavy head. Suddenly my spine broke and I collapsed into wet pieces and fell backward. That’s when I saw the summit. It shone WITH LIGHT. The light was so bright that I disappeared in it. This felt so awfully good that I woke up (Sorokin). The fear before a sublime element of an odic landscape is a key element of pastoral discourse, as well. The features of his psyche are conveyed in geological images. The outbreak of the First World War shatters his childhood idyll: his brother returns poisoned by mustard gas, his father profits off the dysfunctional Duma and its inefficient munitions acquisitions. Landing homeless and orphaned in the capital, Aleksandr enrolls in the university and becomes obsessed with space, minerals and rocks, feeling a sublime connection to stones as he studied them: I was excited by the planets and the infinity of the starry world that surrounded the Earth. Sometimes I took out books on mineralogy: I didn’t read them, just spent long stretches looking at the color illustrations of stones. I could do this for hours, lying on my rug. I didn’t read books on mathematics and physics at all, making do with what I heard in lectures. Literature didn’t interest me: the world of people, their passions and ambitions — all that seemed petty, fussy, and ephemeral. You couldn’t rely on that like you could 226 on stone. The world of Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky was really no different from the world of my neighbors who fought and swore in the kitchen over Primus stoves or the slop bucket. The world of planets and stones was richer and more interesting. It was eternal (Sorokin). He has a sensual connection to the stones he finds everywhere in the imperial capitol, caressing the geologic remnants of imperial history: I liked to place my hands on the cold granite. The stones exuded a calm that didn’t exist in people. I touched the battered pedestals of building, stroked the smooth columns of St. Isaac’s, touched the manes of granite lions, the polished toes of Atlases, the breasts of marble nymphs, and the wings of marble angels. Stone sculptures calmed me (Sorokin). He insinuates himself into a crowd of scientists and sets off on an expedition with the mining institute of St. Petersburg. There, for the first time, he is able to appreciate the endless breath of the borderless Soviet state: “After the low Ural Mountains, that view was replaced by the incomparable Siberian landscape. From Chelyabinsk all the way to Novosibirsk the depths of an ancient sea, according to Kulik, stretched in boundless breadth, overgrown with pine and larch. Gazing at these expanses I fell asleep.” (Sorokin) The longing and pining Aleksandr felt in his youth increased as they trek across Siberia towards a meteorite. He understands he must unite himself with the meteorite, and slams his chest into the icy hunk from space until he awakens and realizes that he is one of 23,000 elect, and “[w]e created the Universe. And it was sublime.” These individuals are not simply “meat machines” like the rest of us, but hosts of the one true light that created the universe. They are all persistently but vaguely expectant of their awakening, having been nagged throughout their lives by sublime dreams of ice, mountains and water. BRO takes the pastoral modes disquiet with the modern experiment to one possible logical conclusion: the 23,000 brothers and sisters of ice acknowledge that human civilization, 227 and the violence and pain it causes were a mistake, and must be destroyed. Lying exhausted atop the giant hunk of ice, BRO understands what must be done: “I clutched the Ice to me. In it lay the destruction of this disharmony. In it was the Power of Eternity. It was time to strike a blow. It was time to correct the mistake. I would be the one to do it.” (Sorokin) The pastoral results from a similar sense of disharmony, and that disharmony will be resolved in BRO through a decisive, destructive blow. Humans, that “great mistake,” who “gave birth and killed, killed and gave birth,” and crucified or destroyed anyone who proposed a different lifestyle, deserved to be annihilated. BRO sets off to awaken the rest of the beings of the lights. He finds hundreds, and each and every one of them felt same longing, had the same inkling something was off, and had various reoccurring dreams that hinted at their reunion with the space ice. Among the newly awakened are historically-important figures like Terenty Deribas, head of the OGPU and a German train engineer. They spread their influence across the globe and created a cyber-punk future, where agents of the forces of light and ice cruise Moscow in Lincoln navigators; having lost the pair of brethren who help them magically see ice hearts, they kidnap random bond-haired blue-eyed individuals, smashing their hearts with specially-produced ice hammers kept in refrigerator briefcases, killing most of them with brutal bashes, only a hearing the desired beat of a new name from a select few. Instead of retreating, the sense of disharmony and disjuncture between real and ideal, the 23,000 elect offer a solution: the destruction of the universe. This dissertation exists as a critique of systems literary, governmental and environmental. I hope to have shown a way forward towards a scholarship that can interrogate and criticize all systems of simplification, and point to the way in which certain literary genres point to a critique 228 of these systems more as a whole, and that this conclusion shows the validity of my approach by how it mirrors other approaches. This scholarship aspires to interrogate all systems and look for renewal and resistance in how human beings inhabit its structures and turn modernity’s inhumane elements to its their own usages. The pastoral mode, whether hinted at by liberal reformers like Radishchev, indulged by reactionary censors like Aksakov and Goncharov, or toyed with by romantic narcissists like Lermontov, exists in opposition to what Scott calls “high-modernist ideology […] best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mas-tery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.” Scott begins his Seeing Like a State with a discussion of scientific forestry. He describes a process by which an actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber of firewood. I began this project with a similar discussion of geology, whereby mountains, rocks and natural features of the landscape were understood in terms of their potential use for the state, and linguistic forms were understood similarly: “in terms of a utilitarianism confined to the direct needs of the state.” (Scott, 12). Eighteenth-century Russian science and official culture are most coherent when viewed “as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure cus-toms or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.” These attempts always betray the same boundless optimism and arrogance as Lomonosov did (4), and always expressed itself “in remarkably visual aesthetic terms.” Straight rows of trees, regular square cornfields, 229 lines of soldiers, massive angular buildings all express this “high modernist ideology.” In relief, aesthetic movements such as the pastoral emerge, which prioritize the individual, the hidden, the immature, the unquantifiable, the lost, the past, the curvilinear, the irregular, and the nostalgia that accompany them. This is what gives the pastoral currency outside of the slow, hundred-year process documented in the preceding pages — it is a mode of discourse that emerges in response to high modernist ideology and its violent imposition. In response to this blind violence, state subjects cry out that the state seems to know “precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity.” There is no administrative system that can represent any social community without an absurd degree of abstraction and simplification. When governments turned to simple, universal systems such as national languages over the existing array of dialects, row-planted Norway pines over diverse forests, regular farms over collective farms strips, this led to people such and Goncharov’s Oblomov feeling as if they were “quaint idioms [who] would be replaced by a new uni-versal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism.” When Scott talks about the com-pleteness of the cadastral map [which depends] on its abstract sketchiness, its lack of detail—its thinness[, that is] it is essentially a geometric representation of the borders, he is voicing the same nagging feeling Gogol felt, when he was annoyed by how Lomonosov’s poetry sketched only abstract lines and points, leaving him to fill in the grotesque and unflattering colors of the actual countryside. This arrogant high modernist ideology, which compels governments to push overly- abstracted and over-simplified solutions to problems only they see is still causing problems across the world: California’s “scientifically-managed” forests are ablaze, acres of “industrial agriculture” are causing the extinction of insects and massive dead zones in the ocean, and our 230 systems for regulating temperature cool buildings’ interiors while heating the atmosphere itself. It is hard not to feel ourselves like Oblomov, or like the single tree, who, “[o]utside of the nat-ural habitat, and when planted in pure stands, the physical condition of the single tree weakens and resistance against enemies decreases.” (Scott, 21). 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Creator Watson, Thomas McGarvie (author)

Core Title The poetics of disillusionment: the legacy of the eighteenth-century ceremonial ode in nineteenth-century Russian lyric poetry and pastoral prose

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Slavic Languages and Literatures)

Publication Date 12/13/2020

Defense Date 12/11/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anarchism,ceremonial ode,classicism,eighteenth-century,genre studies,Geology,Gogol,Lomonosov,modernity,OAI-PMH Harvest,pastoral,Poetry,Radishchev,Russia

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Pratt, Sarah (committee chair), McQuillen, Colleen (committee member), Meeker, Natania (committee member)

Creator Email mac.watson26@gmail.com,tmwatson@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-408318

Unique identifier UC11669025

Identifier etd-WatsonThom-9210.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-408318 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WatsonThom-9210.pdf

Dmrecord 408318

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Watson, Thomas McGarvie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA