Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry 9781618115744

Citation preview

Thr ee Meta phor s for Life D er z h av i n’s L ate Po e t r y

Liber Primus Series Editor D av i d B e t h e a Editorial Board C a r y l Em e r s o n (Princeton University, Princeton) Sve t l a n a Evd o k i m ov a (Brown University, Providence) J o h n M a cK ay (Yale University, New Haven) I r i n a R e y f m a n (Columbia University, New York) J us t i n We i r (Harvard University, Cambridge)

Three Metaphors for Life Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

Tatiana Smoliarova Translated by Ronald Meyer with Nancy Workman and Tatiana Smoliarova Edited by Nancy Workman

Boston 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Smolìarova, Tat’ìana, author. | Meyer, Ronald, 1952- translator. | Workman, Nancy, 1962- translator, editor. Title: Three metaphors for life : Derzhavin’s late poetry / Tatiana Smoliarova ; translated by Ronald Meyer ; translated and edited Nancy Workman. Other titles: Zrimaìa lirika. English | 3 metaphors for life | Liber Primus (Series) Description: Brighton, MA : Published by Academic Studies Press, 2017. | Series: Liber primus | Extensive revision of the “Zrimaìa lirika”. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017002163 (print) | LCCN 2017002851 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618115737 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781618115744 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Derzhavin, Gavriil Romanovich, 1743-1816—Criticism and interpretation. | Russian literature 19th century—History and criticism. | Metaphor in literature. | Symbolism in literature. | Derzhavin, Gavriil Romanovich, 1743-1816. Fonar’. | Derzhavin, Gavriil Romanovich, 1743-1816. Zhizn’ Zvanskaìa. | Derzhavin, Gavriil Romanovich, 1743-1816. Raduga. Classification: LCC PG3312.Z5 S6613 2017 (print) | LCC PG3312.Z5 (ebook) | DDC 891.71/2--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002163

Copyright © Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moscow, 2011 Copyright © 2018 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved.

ISBN 9781618115737 (hardcover) ISBN 9781618115744 (electronic)

Cover by Alexander Brodsky.

Published by Academic Studies Press in 2018 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents Introduction to the English Edition Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

6 10

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection) Chapter 1. A Text in Performance Shadows Only “Pregnant Moments” An Attempt in the Dramatic Field

30 41 45 48

Chapter 2. Lanterns and Lanternists Laterna Magica Citizen Robertson The Fantasmagoria

55 55 60 62

Part II. Rainbow (Refraction) Chapter 1. Unweaving the Rainbow The Meteorological Cycle From Allegory to . . . Allegory Magic Made Simple, or Do-It-Yourself Chapter 2. The Limits of Imitation The Artist The Dark Heart, or the Camera Obscura The Child of Thaumas

76 76 79 84 94 94 95 103

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Chapter 1. The Keys to Zvanka “Beatus, My Brother” Essay on Man The Art of Memory A Peculiar Vision: Approaches to the Text

108 108 111 122 126

Chapter 2. Nine Views Pleasures of Imagination Choral Vision Fifteen Stanzas of Solitude

128 128 160 197

Chapter 3. The Poet’s House The Bard Lived There... Zvanka’s Echo

217 218 223

Pindar, Derzhavin, and the Twenties: In Place of a Conclusion

232

Notes References Index

253 292 307

Introduction to the English Edition

I put the finishing touches on this book in New York City in July 2016, precisely two hundred years after Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin passed away at Zvanka, his beloved estate in the Novgorod region of Russia. If the widely commemorated centennial of the poet’s death—in the middle of World War I, on the eve of the Revolution—brought Derzhavin back from a period of relative obscurity, the bicentennial passed almost unnoticed. And yet, this chronological “rhyme,” two hundred years separating the moment when Derzhavin scribbled his last words on the slate on his deathbed and the moment when I finished editing my conclusion on the computer and headed to the maternity ward to deliver my third child, was extremely meaningful to me. Derzhavin wrote his late poetry in the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century; I worked on my book about him in the early years of the twenty-first. As it turned out, these two periods had more in common than one might suppose: not merely their difficult parting with the previous century but also the rise of state-sponsored jingoism and the attendant anti-Western sentiments not infrequently held by quite educated people yet fundamentally at variance with the very essence of a culture built on Western models. In Derzhavin’s time, such sentiments were explained and to some extent justified by Russia’s war with Napoleon; their rampant blossoming in Russia in our own century has been a sadder spectacle. In my book, I trace one example of the struggle between official ideology and the internal logic of a culture’s development. I wanted to show how, even when that struggle takes place within a single person, as happened with Derzhavin, cultural momentum prevails over dogma. Looking at the early nineteenth century as a chapter in the contradictory development of Russian modernity, at once “progressive” and “regressive,” helped me better understand my own time. It was important to share this sense of the ultimate predominance of culture over ideology with my non-Slavist friends, colleagues, and students. This, at least in part, is why I decided to publish my book in English. 6

Introduction to the English Edition

Another reason was my humble hope to contribute to an important series of publications that began in 1998 with David Bethea’s Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet, the first book in English to show so explicitly that neither Pushkin nor the rest of nineteenthcentury Russian literature can be read without glancing back at Derzhavin. Four further titles from the first decades of the new millennium have been particularly helpful in making the poet accessible to English readers. Derzhavin's Poetic Works: A Bilingual Album (2001), by Alexander Levitsky and Martha Kitchen, was the first comprehensive English-language version of Derzhavin’s poetry—a remarkable achievement, given how difficult his vocabulary, syntax, and imagery can be. The very title of Anna Lisa Crone’s study The Daring of Derzhavin, also from 2001, showed the right perspective to take on his art. Angela Brintlinger’s excellent translation of Vladislav Khodasevich’s Derzhavin: A Biography (2007), prefaced with her profound and subtle essay on the author of the biography and its subject, played a crucial role in introducing Derzhavin’s personality, refracted through another poet’s eye, to an English-speaking readership. Last but not least, Luba Golburt’s The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (2014) did a wonderful job of contextualizing “Derzhavin’s moment” in the history of Russian culture. My work was informed and inspired by all of the abovementioned books and their authors. The main difference between this translation and the Russian edition is that the English version is half as long. With an English-language audience in mind, I took out many of the Russian version’s numerous “excursions” explaining various names and concepts from the European Enlightenment, which followed the eighteenth century’s own ramified modes of thinking yet risked distracting the reader. In the course of its abridgment, the book naturally reshaped itself, each of its three parts coalescing around one of the key metaphors Derzhavin “lived by” in his later years, and the book as a whole around the use of metaphor, “the shorthand of the spirit,” as Boris Pasternak once defined it. This reshaping and rethinking provided new titles for parts and chapters of the book, as well as a new title for the whole. This is also why the concept of metaphor, its treatment by Derzhavin, and its reception and understanding by the Russian culture of the 1920s became the focus of the concluding chapter, the only substantial addition to the book and the only part originally written in English. I have included 7

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

this discussion of the parallels between Derzhavin’s poetry and Russian modernism to help readers better contextualize my subject, placing him within the larger map of Russian culture. It is impossible to name all the colleagues and friends who have helped me in the long process of preparing the Russian and English versions of this book. I would like to mention three people who are no longer living, but who played a crucial role in my formation as a scholar. Alexey Mikhailovich Peskov, with whom I studied at Moscow State University, kindled my interest in the eighteenth century and the Russian ode. My mentor Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov taught me how to read poetry (and so much more). Lastly, reading and conversing with Ilya Zakharovich Serman, with whom I’ve never had a chance to study, helped me to understand and appreciate Derzhavin, especially his late works. I would also like to thank Andreas Schönle, Andrey Zorin, and Bill Todd for their steady collegial help and friendly support over the years. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues and students from the three universities where I have worked, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Toronto. The translation and publication of this book wouldn’t have been possible without generous grants from the Harriman Institute and Columbia University Schoff Publication Fund. My very special thanks go to Ronald Meyer of Columbia University, who was the first to believe in this project and fearlessly took on the task of translating the book, and to Nancy Workman, also of Columbia, who joined us later, but whose participation in translating and editing the text has been invaluable. I will never forget the hours we spent together on the interlinear translations of Derzhavin’s intricate, subtle, and, at times, bone-rattling verse, which I now understand better even in Russian due to Nancy’s translator’s gift and poetic sensitivity. This book would never have seen the light of day without the incredible patience and support of David Bethea, Kira and Igor Nemirovsky of Academic Studies Press, and their wonderful, thoughtful and devoted editors Meghan Wicks and Faith Wilson Stein. I would also like to thank my friend the eminent Russian architect Alexander Brodsky for offering me his painting for the cover. This painting, inspired by the architecture of Andrea Palladio, fulfills the main requirement of an ideal illustration as formulated by Derzhavin’s friends Nikolai Lvov and Alexei Olenin, who claimed that the image should never repeat, but rather complement the text, “fleshing out with the artist’s 8

Introduction to the English Edition

pencil” something that was implied, but never explicitly stated. Brodsky’s image of a cypress alley leading, at the vanishing point, to a tiny, almost invisible Palladian villa gives an immediate evocative sense of Derzhavin’s self-awareness in his later years, which the three hundred pages of my book attempt to explicate. I dedicated the Russian version of my book to my son. Since then, my two daughters have joined the family, but it doesn’t feel quite right to dedicate an adaptation, new only in part, to such wholly new and original creatures. Needless to say, however, my work would never have been possible without the love and support of those closest to me – my husband, our three kids, my father, and, first and foremost, my mother, who read me my first poems and taught me my first English, who was happy to see the Russian version of my book published and who passed away shortly after. The chain of births and deaths that marked my own life while I worked on this book affected the way I saw Derzhavin’s late poetry, and vice versa.

Preface

In Search of a Metaphor In Place of an Introduction

By far the greatest thing is to use metaphors. —Aristotle, Poetics, 1459ab

I

The turn of the nineteenth century in Russian history was Russia’s first turn of a century in the literal sense of the expression, at least as it was understood in Europe. While it somehow seems right that Shakespeare’s Hamlet first appeared on the stage in the momentous year of 1601—the first year of a new century, the coeval memorable events in Russia derived no extra significance from their place in the calendar: in pre-Petrine chronology Europe’s 1601 was Russia’s 7109 (usually reduced to simply 109 in all the documents of the time). If 1701 marked an absolute beginning dictated by legislative and mythological considerations, a move “from nothingness into being” (iz nebytiia v bytie), to use the expression formulated by Peter the Great’s chancellor Gavrila Golovkin, then 1801 became the first pivotal moment in Russia’s history that was recognized as such by contemporaries. This did not take place right away: the idea of a chronologically defined marker and the experiences that went with it, not to mention the rhetorical appeal to celebrate this designation, were imported from Europe and took root on Russian soil only gradually, during the course of the first decades of the new century. In the life of Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin this “boundary between the two centuries” fell during the winter of 1803–4, one of the saddest winters in his life. On October 8, 1803, Derzhavin was forced to resign his ministerial post in the government of Alexander I, “the beloved son of the sweet heavens,” in the poet’s own words, whose birth he had hailed a quarter century earlier and on whose happy rule so many hopes had been pinned 10

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

just a short time ago. Five days after Derzhavin’s resignation, on Tuesday, October 13, the St. Petersburg News (Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti) published a notice of His Imperial Highness’s decree to the Senate: 1. Deigning to grant the petition of Actual Privy Counselor and Minister of Justice Derzhavin, We most graciously relieve him of all duties, with the retention of his full salary and a 6,000-ruble annual allowance for provisions. 2. We hereby order that Actual Privy Counselor Prince Lopukhin shall be minister of justice or generalprocurator.1

A few months later, in December, Derzhavin’s friend and relative, Nikolai Lvov, the eminent Russian architect and poet and a true “Enlightenment man,” died. Derzhavin responded with bitter words of disillusionment, which did not apply to “dear Lvov” alone: Друг мой! Увы! озлобясь Время Его спешило в гроб сокрыть, Что сея он познаний семя, Мнил веки пользой пережить . . .2 1 My friend! Alas! Embittered Time Hurried to hide him in the grave; By sowing seeds of knowledge He thought to live out his life usefully.

Overwhelmed with feelings of “embittered time,” of not being able to live a useful life in the new century, Derzhavin was now a retired government official, a poet living on a pension, and he found his new status as a person “most graciously relieved of all duties” intolerable. From an active and energetic participant in the historical process—for so he saw himself—Derzhavin had become a silent observer, not only unable to influence the course of events but gradually ceasing to understand what was actually taking place. What words can describe this feeling? What images can be deployed to express it? Admiral Alexander Shishkov’s Discourse on the Old and New Style of the Russian Language (Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge rossiiskogo iazyka), one of the most notorious books in Russian history, appeared in 1803. The fundamental thrust of the “Discourse” centers on 11

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

a contrast between the spiritual richness of Old Church Slavonic literature and the anarchic spirit of foreign literature, French in particular.3 At first Derzhavin was relatively restrained in his response to the admiral’s work, but over time he came to realize that Shishkov’s linguistic patriotism spoke to his own sense of injury and bewilderment. Derzhavin’s rapprochement with the archaists took place gradually: by 1805 he had become rather close to them; by 1807 he was hosting gatherings of the future “Lovers of the Russian Word” in his own residence on the Fontanka Embankment, and the group’s first official Reading took place in his grand hall on March 14, 1811.4 This story of Derzhavin’s entry into the Shishkov camp has political and aesthetic aspects as well as purely mundane ones. The aesthetic side is characterized by a shift from the cultural “universalism” of the so-called “Derzhavin-Lvov Circle,” a Renaissance-spirited community of poets and artists, musicians and architects, to the logocentric orientation of the Shishkovists.5 By the mid-1810s, the desire to “flesh out with the artist’s pencil that which the poet could not or did not wish to say in words” (the basis for the large-scale semiotic project of illustrating Derzhavin’s Works, which was launched and developed by his “interdisciplinary” friends in the 1790s but not realized in full until Iakov Grot’s marvelous edition of the 1860s6) was replaced by the desire to comment on and disseminate words by means of other words. Derzhavin was eager to tell his audience that he was not to blame for the situation in which he now found himself. He wanted to make sure everyone knew that he had always been a faithful and true servant of the State, treating his verse as merely a secondary endeavor (at least so he claimed), and hence he had been unjustly insulted. A suitable opportunity to tell his side of the story offered itself in 1805 when His Grace Evgeny (Evfimii Bolkhovitinov), who would later become the metropolitan of Kiev but was at that time bishop of Staraya Russa and vicar of Novgorod, asked Derzhavin for biographical information for his dictionary of Russian writers. One of the best-educated people of his time, Bolkhovitinov combined the qualities necessary for his confident ascent up the hierarchical ladder of the Russian Orthodox Church with a curiosity, wit, and skepticism worthy of the French Encyclopedists.7 His biographical dictionary was the first attempt to collect and systematize information about religious and secular 12

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

authors who wrote in Russian: “The history of writers is a vital part of literature, as they compose its epochs and periods,” wrote Bolkhovitinov in the introduction. “Knowing foreign writers is a side issue for us; but not to know our native writers shames us.” Short extracts of a page or two from the dictionary appeared on a monthly basis in the Friend of Enlightenment (Drug prosveshcheniia), a conservative periodical published by Count Dmitry Khvostov.8 In the spring of 1805 Evgeny wrote to the publisher: You’re an intimate of Gavrila Derzhavin. But I don’t have a single thing about his life. The letter “D” is fast approaching. . . . Do me a favor, write to him and ask him in the name of all the writers who admire him to communicate to you some notes on his life [. . .]. And perhaps he would also communicate some personal Stories that touch on literature. He now lives forty versts from Novgorod, but he never comes here, and I’m not acquainted with him.9

The count carried out the bishop’s request: Derzhavin sent Evgeny a detailed “Note” (Zapiska, sometimes translated as “Memorandum”), in which he answered the questions that had been put to him and added quite a lot of his own accord. (“He sent me a detailed Viography [sic!] and extensive commentary on the circumstances and allusions in his odes,” Evgeny wrote to Khvostov on September 30, 1805. “This is an invaluable treasure for Russian literature.”)10 The article on Derzhavin appeared in the first issue of the Friend of Enlightenment in 1806;11 the friendship between the poet and the priest continued for ten years, right up to Derzhavin’s death in 1816. In summer they would meet at Zvanka, Derzhavin’s estate in the Pskov region of central Russia, which belonged to Evgeny’s diocese. Derzhavin also visited Evgeny at the Khutynsky Monastery. In winter it was more difficult to meet: Derzhavin would return to Petersburg, while Evgeny lived in Novgorod. They did the best they could and corresponded. The “Note” prepared at Bolkhovitinov’s request inspired Derzhavin to compose more extensive explanations of his deeds and texts.12 Since his contemporaries had already experienced difficulties interpreting his poems, he feared that it would be even harder for future generations. The poet therefore took up the task himself, having decided not to leave the “finer points [. . .] to the reader’s own understanding.”13 In the early years of the nineteenth century, Derzhavin began work on multiple variants 13

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

of commentaries and explanations “on his own compositions,” which in time came to form a kind of multifaceted and heterogeneous text.14 The fundamental thrust of this text is the affirmation of the authenticity behind his writings, “the feelings experienced during the creation of one poem or another,” assuring present and future readers that everything had happened “just so” in the life of the poet and his milieu. My focus in this book is Derzhavin’s lyric poetry of 1803 to 1808. The constant flow of auto-explications and prose paraphrases of his own poetry did not exclude the birth of new allusions (often even more convoluted than the earlier ones), the search for new metaphors, and the creation of unprecedented allegories. Quite the contrary: Derzhavin experienced a particularly strong need for these new means of expression. A characteristic trait of his work during these years, therefore, came to be a combination of the archaic “Russian style” with unprecedented metaphors and similes that expressed the new European outlook. Even as he became sympathetic to Shishkov and his followers, mining the Time of Troubles for noble and patriotic subjects, outfitting his lyrics and dramas with images from Russian folklore and tedious archaic vocabulary, Derzhavin shared the latest enthusiasms and obsessions of his contemporaries, Europeans as well as Russians. One might call the Derzhavin of the first decade of the new century “a European in spite of himself ” (to rephrase the title of Molière’s famous play), the generally accepted picture of his arch-Russianness notwithstanding. Shishkov’s linguistic ideas proved insufficient for Derzhavin’s needs: the admiral’s militantly archaic lexicon and folkloric imagery could not adequately embody the poet’s obstinate agitation. Now it was a matter of developing a completely different rhetoric, a “rhetoric of the turn,” which had gradually come to Russia from the West along with the philosophical interpretation of the turn of the century. II

Europe, still reeling from the revolutionary shocks of the previous decade, bore witness to a war that was both old and new. Half a year before Derzhavin’s retirement, in the spring of 1803, Napoleon broke the shortlived armistice with England, and the two countries were once again at war. In 1804 the first consul became emperor; in 1805 the French army was 14

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

proclaimed the Great Army (la Grande armée). England, for its part, had gathered the Third Coalition against France, joined this time around by Russia, which was nevertheless still unable to express her feelings, including her patriotic feelings, in any language but French. In August 1806, Franz II of Hapsburg renounced the German crown and title of emperor, and the Holy Roman Empire ended its almost nine-hundred-year existence (the famous portrait by Ingres of Napoleon on the Imperial Throne, a pictorial apotheosis of imperial grandeur, dates from this same year). The Berlin Decree of November 1806 laid the foundation for the Continental blockade of the British Isles; during the course of 1807 some countries that had earlier belonged to anti-French coalitions were forced to join the blockade—including Russia, in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Tilsit. Separated from the Continent by the invisible wall of embargo, England became a symbol of resistance to Bonaparte, which could not but elicit some interest in this country and its culture even, or, perhaps especially, within the nations that had joined the blockade. In 1805 the journal Northern Herald (Severnyi vestnik), edited by Ivan Martynov, an eminent Russian classicist also known for his progressive views, published An Essay on Great Britain (Opyt o Velikobritanii), an apologia for the British governmental structure, national consciousness, and liberal values. The anonymous author of the “Essay” characterized the British thus: In my opinion, no other people in our time deserve our attention more than the people of Great Britain. All the beneficial results of the observations of thousands of years have been incorporated into its governmental structure: a positive appreciation of man has been incorporated [. . .]. But when, on top of all this, he [the Briton] indeed ascertains that in this residence one can enjoy all the best comforts, pleasures, and advantages for one’s moral and bodily existence, then of course there arises in him a boundless attachment to and partiality for his country, albeit a praiseworthy one, for it is founded on truth, as comprehended by common sense. The love of every true son for his Fatherland ought to consist of the same: it does not tolerate exception.15

The British citizen’s “praiseworthy attachment” to his country is posited in the article as a model for any and all kinds of “rational patriotism.” 15

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

One cannot imitate patriotism: one must and ought to learn it, after first relinquishing the habit of blind imitation. This is the call the author issues to his fellow countrymen: To you, Russians, to you, my dear fellow countrymen, I now address my words. [. . .] But oh! The spirits of Dmitry, Alexander, Pozharsky, and Minin groan—the shades of the Dolgorukys, Matveevs, and Sheremetevs weep when they now see Russians flying more swiftly than an eagle past alien peoples! Only luxury, dissipation, and thoughtlessness attract them. The brilliant dress, spectacle, and cosmopolitanism of the foreigners, in the eyes of their [i.e., Dmitry’s, Alexander’s, et al.—TS] fellow countrymen, have the appearance of national virtues. Whenever the noble shades of these unforgettable men appeared among us, could they hear with indifference the incessant, corrupted, half-French conversation of the Slavonic Russians, whose native language surpasses the sheer abundance and variety of Nature herself? Her variety, pleasantness, and unexpected turns do not surprise, delight, astonish as instantaneously and sweetly as the flexible, luxurious, and ever-changing SlavonicRussian language.16

Most of the “Essay” dealt with the rights and freedoms of citizens of “all classes” and seemed quite bold to Russians of the time. The passage hymning the “Slavonic-Russian language,” however, held some appeal for conservative circles of society, even though less than a year earlier, in 1804, the Northern Herald had famously published an article denouncing Shishkov’s Discourse and overturning its ideas. The “Essay’s” mingling of notions attractive to Russians of the most diverse views is typical of the Russian approach to England in the Mid-1800s. Fascinated by the country and its political experience, many Russians attempted to engage with its cultural heritage directly, bypassing the linguistic and cultural intermediacy of the French, inescapable in the previous century.17 The importance of England’s status as the birthplace of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the text that laid the foundations for enlightened conservatism in Europe, should also not be underestimated. Published in enormous print-runs in London in the 1790s (released eleven times in the course of a single year), and immediately translated into all the major European languages, the Reflections not only defined the perception of what was happening but actually influenced the 16

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

course of events.18 At the turn of the nineteenth century this text endured as an inexhaustible source of metaphors and similes for those thinking and writing about the hidden and manifest sources of revolution, as well as about the direct and indirect consequences of radical political change, chief among them the headlong rise of Napoleon. The graphic and at times shocking imagery of Burke’s arguments tied his views to an important weapon of political struggle: the art of caricature— a “‘hyperrealist’ answer to the ‘hyperidealist’ longing to attain the calm realms of the Beautiful,” as Jean Starobinski defined it. 19 England was the source not only of concrete representations disseminated throughout Europe at the turn of the century but also of the very phenomenon of “caricature vision,” mastered by the British long before the events of the 1790s and exemplified in works stretching from William Hogarth’s mid-century pictorial narratives to the devastating satire of James Gillray’s revolutionary caricatures. But what was most important, and characteristically British, about British caricature was not the specific nature of “caricature vision” as such but the very fact of its coexistence with fundamentally different views and types of representation, all within a single culture. The fact that it was the visual component of British culture that came to the forefront and was first perceived and “digested” in Russia in the early years of the nineteenth century can be explained in part by Russians’ wish to reduce French intermediacy and in part—and this is perhaps the main reason— by England’s reputation as the legislator of visual fashion, a reputation consolidated in the preceding century. III

Eighteenth-century England became the center of a new “visual idiom” that was not immediately grasped and assimilated by continental Europe.20 In addition to Hogarth’s satirical canvases, the components of this idiom included the timeless classicism of John Flaxman, the multifaceted antiquity of the Palladian villa, a trademark of English architecture in the 1720s and 1730s, and the famous “conversation pieces,” group portraits of people engaged in conversation or some activity (a genre that can be traced to Dutch painting of the seventeenth century but which was made famous by the British and considered an especially English phenomenon).21 The British “visual dominant” in Europe included the English garden and the 17

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

culture of the picturesque largely engendered by it, the amazing theater of optical effects known as the “Eidophusikon,” invented by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, a Frenchman who gained his fame as a British artist, and last but not least, the first panoramas of cities, patented in the late 1780s by the Scotsman Robert Baker.22 By the time panoramas became widespread, first in England and then on the Continent, the “panoramic view,” capable of encompassing an enormous space all at once and reconciling multiple points of view with the laws of perspective, as well as the “bird’s eye” view, were no longer abstract concepts: at the turn of the century people could survey boundless space on board hot-air balloons. The theory and practice of air navigation had received scant treatment in the pages of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie—it had finished publication three years before the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon went up, in the fall of 1783, at first carrying a rooster, a goose, and a sheep, and later piloted by the fearless Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier. Had the Encyclopédie not been completed, this subject, so well suited to the spirit of their intellectual enterprise, would surely have inspired the Encyclopedists. The balloons, however, did succeed

Figure 1. Julius Caesar Ibbetson, George Biggins’ Ascent in Lunardi’s Balloon, 1785. Neue Munich.

18

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

in inspiring the last poets of the Enlightenment. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the great naturalist, dedicated to the balloon the following lines of The Botanic Garden (1791), a poem that enjoyed great popularity in the 1790s: The calm Philosopher in ether sails, Views broader stars, and breathes in purer gales; Sees, like a map, in many a waving line Round Earth’s blue plains her lucid waters shine; Sees at his feet the forky lightnings glow, And hears innocuous thunders roar below. —Rise, great MONGOLFIER! Urge thy venturous flight High o’er the Moon’s pale ice-reflected light; High o’er the pearly Star, whose beamy horn. Hangs in the east, gay harbinger of morn.23

In these lines of Darwin, a doctor, biologist, and poet, flight in a hot-air balloon is transformed into a metaphor for all-encompassing knowledge. In the same year Darwin wrote these lines, 1789, in far-off Russia, Derzhavin compared the Montgolfier brothers’ invention with human happiness (“To Happiness” [Na schast’e, 1789]): Но ах! как некая ты сфера Иль легкий шар Монгольфиера, Блистая в воздухе, летишь. (Derzhavin 1:255)

1 But oh! You, like some sphere Or the light balloon of Montgolfier, Fly, shining in the air.

During the last years of the eighteenth century Xavier de Maistre and Prince Deligne ascended into the skies, and in the early 1800s one could see the balloons of the French aeronaut André-Jacques Garnerin and the Belgian physicist Etienne-Gaspard Robertson fly over the rooftops of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The visiting balloonists often took curious natives on board. The ability to look down and see the world spread out below made the terrain seem like a map made real—a sensation otherwise most closely associated with war. 19

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

The spherical vision of an aeronaut was just one of the new “types of vision” mastered at the turn of the nineteenth century, when all of Europe was seized by an “opticomania” that had spread mainly from England. The mass enthusiasm for optical instruments that equipped the human eye with properties and possibilities exceeding those granted by nature can be understood as a result of a certain intensification of reality itself. One consequence of the initial impulse to explore “applied” optics was a renewed interest in Isaac Newton’s Opticks, published a century earlier, in 1704. The revived debate on the nature of light and color famously engaged Goethe in creating his own theory of the spectrum, later expounded in his treatise Theory of Colors (Farbenlehre, 1810). Goethe was also interested in “applied” optics: for a production of Faust he proposed using a magic lantern, and provided detailed guidelines for employing it to create supernatural effects.24 During this same period the physiology of vision and the nature of optical illusions, the theory of refraction and other theories set forth in Newton’s Opticks also excited the imagination of the English Romantic poets, above all William Wordsworth.25 Wordsworth employs optical imagery in both his early lyrics and his mature works, namely in The Prelude and The Excursion, but his scientific interests were not limited to optics: in 1802 he and Coleridge were often seen at Humphry Davy’s public lectures on chemistry.26 Coleridge is often quoted as admitting that he had attended those lectures “in order to renew [his] stock of metaphors.” In all likelihood, Wordsworth was pursuing similar aims, if one is to judge by the voluminous preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800): The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.27

The Lyrical Ballads, one of the manifestoes of English Romanticism, was Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s joint “project.” Wordsworth saw the goal of this undertaking as the description of “incidents and situations from common life” in ordinary language, conveying the sublimity of an object without recourse to lofty style: 20

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way [. . .]. There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it.28

Wordsworth’s renunciation of “poetic diction” in favor of “ordinary language,” like Coleridge’s appeal to the world of chemistry in his search for new metaphors, marked the end of the rhetorical era, which coincided with the end of the eighteenth century. With the new century came a break with the old idea of tradition as a stable state—the notion that every new text came into being as part of a pre-existing corpus. This shift secretly accumulated new possibilities for the word, especially the poetic word, which was liberated from its systemic connections, redeemed, as it were, from complete isolation in a system of meaning based on and inseparably tied to ancient models. Now, it seemed to the innovators, the word could arise from situation and subject, from the here and now, and touch directly upon reality. Metaphors too, and not only chemical ones, are capable of overcoming stability as a form of existence for language and, to a certain extent, easing the perception of a new, unstable, apparently incomprehensible world. At the turn of the nineteenth century Goethe and Wordsworth, Louis-Sébastien Mercier and the Brothers Grimm all took part, each in his own way, in this “search for metaphors”— not necessarily specific expressions, but, more broadly, unexpected combinations of meanings that would have seemed incompatible before. IV

At the turn of the nineteenth century, news reached Russia with variable speed. Radio waves had yet to be discovered, the telegraph would be created quite soon, but the attitudes of the time crisscrossed the world like waves, penetrating each and every person. Wartime tend to intensify these 21

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

processes. And here we return to the subject of this book—the paradoxes of the late Derzhavin. Despite his own ideological stance, Derzhavin found himself nearly in the mainstream of Western aesthetics. Of course, he was far from renouncing “poetic diction,” the absence of which Wordsworth warned his readers about in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, but, likewise, he was constantly in search of words that belonged to reality (as mentioned above, the connection of his works with “real life” marked the spirit and novelty of Derzhavin’s multiple “Explanations”), and yet represented “ordinary things [. . .] in an unaccustomed aspect.”29 Like Goethe, Derzhavin was interested in optics and meteorology; like Coleridge, he wanted to renew the current “stock of metaphors”; like Wordsworth, he sought to expand the parameters of what can be called “poetic subjects.” Derzhavin followed the latest achievements in industry, science, and technology with keen interest. Cutting-edge optical devices and spinning machines, imported to Russia from England, occupy as important a place in his poetic “husbandry” as in the real husbandry of Zvanka. But learning how to use new metaphors and similes in poetry is as hard as mastering new contraptions in everyday life: one does not get the hang of them all at once. It is no coincidence that the poems with the most irregular stanzaic structure and the most complex language are the same ones in which one finds images “removed from the obvious province of poetry” (to quote AnnaLaetitia Barbauld’s words on Darwin’s “Botanic Garden”). Yet, surprisingly, the old-fashioned style of Derzhavin’s later poems comes to seem like a whimsical affirmation of his up-to-date interests. Thus, for example, “Magic Lantern” (Fonar’, 1804), the modernity of whose worldview is striking, features a rare profusion of archaisms (the intricate gerundives “catching sight of a meek lamb” [ozetia agnitsu smirenny] or “making fertile the furrows with dung” [i tukom ugobzia brazdy], phrases barely intelligible to Derzhavin’s own contemporaries). As Alan Richardson has demonstrated in his studies of the poetic diction of the British Romantics, Wordsworth, too, after renouncing lofty style, did not disregard the modernizing potential of archaisms but made wide use of them.30 In his “Explanation” of the poem “Monument” (Pamyatnik, 1795), Derzhavin writes about himself (in the third person, as was his custom in his autobiographical prose):31 22

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction His book might serve posterity as a monument of the affairs, customs, and manners of his time and [. . .] all his works are nothing but a picture of the era of Catherine II.32

The idea that Derzhavin’s poetry, including his late works, represented, first and foremost, a monument to the eighteenth century was caught up and developed with much enthusiasm by his younger contemporaries. This idea was then applied to the poet himself, whom many in the nineteenth century esteemed as a man of the previous era. The most striking instance of this idea is to be found in the well-known lines of Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, the author of an obituary published in 1816 in Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva): Derzhavin’s songs have rung out during the course of three reigns. But the brilliant age of Catherine, that poetic age of Russia’s glory (of which Derzhavin, it would seem, was among us a vivid and eloquent monument) was the era when he was most renowned. He was then in his full glory and power. The present times, full of thundering storms and great exploits of the people’s courage, were witness to the sunset of his genius worn down by age. But the feats of Suvorov’s sons often woke the Bard from his sleep and coaxed from his lyre, already grown cold, sounds worthy of days now past.33

The myth of a poet comprises several submyths. The myth of Derzhavin the hermit, “worn down by years” and subsisting on ideas from the past century, is only one of the myths and legends surrounding his name during the last years of his life which then became ossified after his death. This notion acquired poetic force one hundred years later in Vladislav Khodasevich’s biography of Derzhavin (1931), and became accepted fact in the scholarly literature of the twentieth century. It received further development in the seminal studies of Mark Altshuller, Ilya Serman, and Boris Uspensky, to name only the most important.34 But the strategy of “soliciting difficulty,” which the above-named scholars all refer to by various names, was, like the myth it engendered, merely one of several diverse literary strategies of the late Derzhavin (their coexistence in one and the same stratum of his work is of particular interest). Moreover, in taking into account all these tactics and strategies, we should not lose sight of the importance of “atmosphere.” In one of the most often-quoted and truly dazzling 23

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

passages from the final pages of Khodasevich’s book, the author considers precisely this: Although mirroring its era is not the goal of poetry, a poet is only alive if he breathes the air of his epoch, hears the music of his time. Even if this music does not correspond to his own ideas of harmony, even if the music is disgusting to him, his ears must be as full of it as his lungs are full of air. This is the law of poetic biology. That law is no more pronounced in civic poetry than in any other, although it reveals itself there more obviously.35

Derzhavin’s poetry is above all a monument to the air of the two centuries in which he lived. It is also a monument to that which could be read, heard and, most important of all, seen during his lifetime. Palladian villas and English gardens, widely acculturated in central Russia (in Derzhavin’s friends’ estates, in particular), the eleven volumes of plates of Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encylopédie (preserved in many of those estates’ libraries), the European paintings acquired by Catherine for the Hermitage and the famous Green Frog service made by Josiah Wedgwood at the empress’s special request and used at the dinners at the Chesme Palace; the cheap lubok prints on sale at village fairs, and the domestic amateur paintings of Derzhavin’s own steward Evstafy Abramov, the devoted keeper of Zvanka: all this could not but impress the poet and penetrate his lyrics, rarely in the form of recognizable descriptions but often in a circuitous or even unintended way. Restoring the poet’s visual impressions on the basis of minute textual “clues,” contemplating how these impressions informed and shaped his thinking and writing, is even more challenging a task than looking for allusions, hidden quotations, and other “intertexts.” And yet this inevitably hypothetical restoration is necessary if we are to reconstruct, if only partially, the atmosphere that gave birth to Derzhavin’s works and the cultural landscape in which they flourished and were read. V

Of course, such attempts have been made before (although one might have expected more of them in the course of almost two centuries, given the primary importance of the visible world in Derzhavin’s poetry).36 For a long 24

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

time the only work devoted to this topic was Elena Danko’s fundamental study The Fine Arts in Derzhavin’s Poetry (Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo v poezii Derzhavina, 1940).37 A porcelain artist and historian of porcelain manufacture, writer and dramatist, pupil of the eminent Art Nouveau artists Mashkov and Rerberg, and friend of Anna Akhmatova, Elena Danko (1898–1942) was a woman of broad education and rare subtlety. The main focus of her study was the pictures, sculptures, architectural monuments, and objects of interior décor (porcelain above all!) “to be found in Derzhavin’s field of vision.” To this day her work remains the most complete survey of the “visual subtexts” of Derzhavin’s poetry. And yet one qualification should be made. In the introductory pages of her article, Danko discusses in some detail the influence on the Derzhavin-Lvov circle of G.-E.Lessing’s ideas on the mutual “untranslatability” of word and image, which the members of this artistic society widely acknowledged, not least in their own work on the illustrated edition of Derzhavin’s works. Nevertheless, Danko in fact presumes that images can be and are indeed translated into words, at least in the poetry of Derzhavin. She mentions but does not take into account the fact that in the pre-Romantic era, the time of Derzhavin’s late work, word and image were coupled less and less often as description and illustration, and were less and less often “mirrored” in each other. The topic of “the visible world” in Derzhavin’s poetry is far from exhausted by a listing of works of art that he might have seen, or by the celebrated “pictorial” quality of his own poetry: no less important is the poet’s interest in the faculty of vision and the process of observation. In the same years that Khodasevich was formulating the laws of “poetic biology,” and Danko was attempting to reconstruct and describe the visual analogues of the “music of the times,” which suffused now not the poet’s hearing but his gaze, Lev Pumpiansky, one of the most original literary historians of his day, addressed similar concerns from yet another point of view. In the pages devoted to Derzhavin in his uncompleted magnum opus Toward a History of Russian Classicism (K istorii russkogo klassitsizma, 1923–24), Pumpiansky regards the definition of the “peculiar type” of Derzhavin’s vision to be the key to his poetry and poetics. In the pages dedicated to Derzhavin, Pumpiansky’s telegraphic style of exposition reaches its climax. He writes about his poetry with particular concision and brevity: the incomplete sentences and frequent use of italics, 25

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

ellipses, and question and exclamation marks seem to show the scholar as if first pondering, and then being filled with excitement at a sudden illumination: One can collect a number of texts about how he studied the visual world—“To the Lover of the Arts” (Liubiteliu khudozhestv), stanza 6 (Ivan Dmitriev’s well-known story; and that was how Derzhavin’s new epithets were born!); “Hymn to the Sun” (Gimn Solntsu) presupposes the long Farbenlehre of an entire life, the republic of colors—stanzas 6 and 9; the connection of flowers to a single source of light—“Rainbow” (Raduga), stanzas 6, 7. For the characterization of a deeply experienced artificial light—“Magic Lantern,” “Life at Zvanka,” stanzas 31–32 (rather typical is the interest in the magic lantern, the “optics,” etc.). These are scattered indications of his methods des Blickes scharfe Sehe. Perhaps these methods hold the key to understanding such strange results: we seem to see the entirety of Derzhavin’s visual world through “optics,” so that the poem becomes a magic lantern, and Grot’s edition of his works becomes a panopticon. Perhaps this unconscious psychological lanterne magique is the reason for the propensity for literary forms with “appearances” (“Magic Lantern” [Fonar’]: “Appear! / And there came to be” [“Iavis’! / I byst’”]; The Cure of Saul [Tselenie Saula]), or a series of paintings (“Morning” [Utro], “Life at Zvanka”). The source of this peculiar type of vision remains obscure.

In the passage quoted above, the mixture of French and German (and in subsequent lines, not cited here, Latin as well) Pumpiansky uses to describe Derzhavin’s “methods” of studying the visual world, by means of quotations from Goethe’s treatise on color (Farbenlehre) and a line from his poem “Liebliches,”38 attests not only to the author’s particular passion for his material but also to how he reads it. Of course, Pumpiansky is writing notes for himself, a genre that does not require logical transitions and carefully constructed phrases, but the foreign words and phrases in the given instance prove to be the most natural signifiers for his idea of the nature of Derzhavin’s vision, its sources and parallels. The quotations from Goethe are a shortcut to understanding Derzhavin’s poem.39 Finally, the identity of the “source of this peculiar type of vision” seems to be not so much “obscure” as incompletely formulated. In my discussion of Derzhavin’s late poetry I have devoted a chapter to each of the three poems listed by Pumpiansky: “Magic Lantern” (1804), 26

Preface. In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction

“Rainbow” (1806), and “To Evgeny: Life at Zvanka” (1807). On the one hand, these three texts do indeed provide perfect examples of Derzhavin’s “studies” of the visual world; on the other, at the center of each we find a metaphor for human existence, an attempt by Derzhavin to define his own place in the world in the last years of his life. These metaphors are taken from the fields of optics, meteorology, and the art of the garden— changeable, unstable spheres, inescapably linked with the illusory. The logic of the poet’s transition from one metaphorical image to the next forms the plot of my book, while the “peculiar type” of Derzhavin’s vision constitutes its main topic.

Part I 1

Magic Lantern (Projection)

We are no other than a moving row Of visionary Shapes that come and go Round with this Sun-illumin’d Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show —Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, no. 73

In July of 1804, the first summer of his forced retirement, Derzhavin turned 61. That same month, two new poems by him appeared in The Friend of Enlightenment: “Magic Lantern” and “The Chariot” (Drug Prosveshchenia. 1804, VII, 3-11; several months later, the two poems appeared in a separate brochure). “The Chariot” is an extended metaphor, representing society as a chariot pulled by spirited horses. At first the horses are reined in by the chariot’s vigilant driver (a wise ruler), but when they are spooked by the loud caws of ravens (false ideas, boldly asserted), they run wild and smash the chariot. It is schematic and easy to decipher; “Magic Lantern” is not. If it is mentioned at all, it is usually in comparison to some better-known texts, ones considered philosophically more significant. Derzhavin describes the circumstances surrounding the composition of “Magic Lantern” thus: A public optical show and the author’s dismissal from his post occasioned this work. In order to endure this latter circumstance with equanimity and to defer all to the will of Him on high, he wrote this piece as his own consolation, in which he mocked the world’s vanity, for everything in this world is subject to the will of the ruler on high, whose will he performs without complaint, as he sinks or soars. (Derzhavin 9:258)

After reading these lines, we are confronted by two major questions: what particular “optical show” influenced Derzhavin when he wrote this poem, and why did he find consolation in the life of man and world history as depicted by the magic lantern? In the pages that follow we will attempt to answer these two questions.

Chapter 1

A Text in Performance

“Magic Lantern” is twelve stanzas long. The introductory first stanza describes the setting of the “optical spectacle”: Гремит орган на стогне трубный, Пронзает нощь и тишину; Очаровательный огнь чудный Малюет на стене луну. В ней ходят тени разнородны: Волшебник мудрый, чудотворный, Жезла движеньем, уст, очес, То их творит, то истребляет; Народ толпами поспешает Смотреть к нему таких чудес. (Derzhavin 2:465)

1 The pipe organ thunders on the square, Piercing the night and silence; An enchanting wonderful light Paints a moon on the wall. In it wander diverse shadows: The wise, wonderworking magician With a movement of his staff, lips, eyes, First creates them, then destroys them; Crowds of people hurry To him to see these wonders.

Since we do not see the mechanism itself but merely surmise its existence, it is the title that prepares us to understand what object is being described in this stanza. All is darkness save the spot of light on the wall, but again we know its source only from the title. The following eight stanzas describe eight “tableaux,” although it might be more accurate to say that rather than describing these pictures, these stanzas present and perform them. The barely noticeable switch from the descriptive register to the 30

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

performative takes place in the transition from the first stanza to the second and plays a key role in the poem’s composition. This switch might be best described in terms of the difference between a “performance for the eye” and a scenic “performance”—something between a “picture” in the usual sense of the word and a theatrical “scene” (cf. Russ. iavlenie).1 Derzhavin is able to transcend the limits of description and enter the world of the theater using various means, including the unusual, whimsically baroque arrangement of the text on the page. However, the primary device in this staging of “Magic Lantern” is the eight appeals (imperative verbs), each paired with and resolved by a corresponding performance (verbs in the aorist). Each of the eight “scenes” is bracketed by formulas addressed simultaneously to the magic lantern, the text, and the world of spells and incantations: Appear! And there came to be and Disappear! And it disappeared (Iavis’! I byst’. . . . Ischezn’! Ischez); these eight scenes are framed by the introductory first stanza and the three concluding stanzas.

Figure 2. Illustration to “Magic Lantern” from Sochinenia Derzhavina, edited by Ia. Grot (St. Petersburg, 1865), II, 465. 31

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

In the second stanza, the subject of the picture, a lion attacking a “meek grazing lamb,” reinforces the biblical connotations of the imperative that urges it to appear and the aorist that announces its appearance: lions are often mentioned in Holy Scripture, as are their sharp teeth, terrifying gaze, fearless pursuit of prey and swift leaps over it (even the Word of the Lord, with its startling effect on the human heart, may be likened to a lion’s roar): Явись! И бысть. Пещеры обитатель дикий, Из тьмы ужасной превеликий Выходит лев. Стоит,—по гриве лапой кудри Златые чешет, вьет хвостом; И рев И взор его, как в мраке бури, Как яры молнии, как гром, Сверкая по лесам, грохочет. Он рыщет, скачет, пищи хочет И меж древес Озетя агницу смиренну, Прыгнув, разверз уж челюсть гневну . . . Исчезнь! Исчез. 1 Appear! And there came to be . . . Wild inhabitant of the cave, From out of the terrible darkness Cometh an enormous lion. He stands, the golden curls of his mane He grooms with his paw, his tail lashes; And his roar And his look, like a storm in the dark, Like dazzling lightning, like thunder, Flashing in the trees, rumbles. Hungry, he roves, bounds, And spying among the trees a meek lamb, He leaps, jaws agape, enraged . . . Disappear! He disappeared. 32

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

In the vignette accompanying Derzhavin’s poem, the magic lantern is projecting the image of a lion—“jaws agape,” with “lashing tail”—on a white canvas thrown over a crumbling wall. In Derzhavin’s text, this image serves as an additional reference to the emblematic tradition and at the same time sharpens the poem’s visual impact.2 The visual orientation is emphasized by the use of abstract epithets in their primary lexical meaning (for example, the adjective prevelikii here indeed means “very large” rather than “great”): Явись! И бысть. Средь гладких океана сткляных, Зарею утренней румяных, Спокойных недр, Голубо-сизый, солнцеокой Усатый, тучный, рыбий князь, Осетр, Из влаги появясь глубокой, Пернатой лыстью вкруг струясь, Сквозь водну дверь глядит, гуляет: Но тут ужасный зверь всплывает К нему из бездн, Стремит в свои вод реки трубы И, как серпы, занес уж зубы . . . Исчезнь! Исчез. 1 Appear! And there came to be. In the ocean smooth and glassy, Made rosy by the morning dawn, Amidst the calm depths, A blue-gray, sunny-eyed Whiskered, fat, princely fish, A sturgeon. Appearing from the deep waters, Curving its feathery frame around, It looks through the water’s door, gambols: But then a terrible beast swims up Toward him from the abyss, Piping fountains of water he charges And, his scythe-like teeth agape . . . Disappear! He disappeared. 33

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

The eight micro-subjects presented in Derzhavin’s “Magic Lantern” are all constructed according to one and the same plan: they reach the point of highest intensity—the acme—only to immediately break off, subside, disappear. The emotional intensity is in keeping with the internal “storyboard” of each of the pictures (the anachronistic use of cinematic terms is conscious: in the given example it is less a theatrical device than a cinematic one, moving from a wide shot to a close-up), from the triumphant emergence of the lion from a den to his “jaws agape,” from the panorama of the ocean at daybreak and the “silver sturgeon, eyes aglow . . . appearing from the deep waters” to the “scythe-like teeth” of this “terrible beast,” from the full-sized portrait of “a brave and daring leader” “who reaches out his right hand for the crown.” The call to “disappear” saves the reader and spectator from the bloodcurdling outcome of the drama in only a few instances; more often, the fatal consequences prove irreversible: Явись! И бысть. Чета младая новобрачных— В златых, блистающих, безмрачных Цепях своих— Любви в блаженстве утопает; Преодолев препятства все, Жених От радости в восторге тает И в плен отдавшися красе, Забыв на ложе прежни скуки, В уста ее целует, в руки И средь завес Коснулся уж забав рукою: Но блещет смерть над ним косою . . . Исчезнь! Исчез. 1 Appear! And there came to be A young newlywed couple— In golden, gleaming, unbesmirched Chains of matrimony— drowning in love’s blessedness; Having overcome all obstacles, 34

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance The groom, Delighted, melts with joy, And, captivated by her beauty, Forgetting in their bed his former sighs, He kisses her lips, her hands, And, among the drapery, He caressed her playfully with his hand: But the scythe of death glitters above him . . . Disappear! It disappeared.

The similar construction leads one to consider the possible influence of the eighth stanza of “Magic Lantern” (and the entire poem, for that matter) on the famous scene of the abduction of the new bride in Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liudmila: Вы слышите ль влюбленный шепот И поцелуев сладкий звук И прерывающийся ропот Последней робости? . . . Супруг Восторги чувствует заране; И вот они настали . . . Вдруг Гром грянул, свет блеснул в тумане, Лампада гаснет, дым бежит, Кругом все смерклось, все дрожит, И замерла душа в Руслане . . .3 1 Can you not hear the lovelorn whispers, The dulcet sounds of kisses there, The gently intercepted lisping Of final shyness? . . . Tokens fair Of ecstasy beforehand given, The groom now tastes it . . . Flash! By glare Of lightning, thunder peal, is riven The dusk, the flame dies, smoke is drifting, All’s sunk in sooty murk, all shifting, Ruslan struck senseless in the gloom . . . (trans. Walter Arndt)4

The appearance of each subsequent vision in “Magic Lantern” is prepared for by the disappearance of the one before; their coexistence is 35

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

inconceivable. Here Derzhavin is making use of one of the most archaic theatrical archetypes, derived from ancient folkloric practice—the archetype of appearance/disappearance (shining forth/growing dark). In many ancient mysteries, the subject comes out of the shadows into the light, only to return to the shadows once again.5 Derzhavin’s entire poem revolves around such alternation. In the fifth stanza light becomes a theme in its own right. Явись! И бысть. Спустилось солнце;—вечер темный Открыл на небе миллионы Горящих звезд. Огнисты, легки метеоры Слетают блещущим клубком От мест Превыспренних,—и в мраке взоры, Как искры, веселят огнем; Одна на дом тут упадает, Раздута ветром, зажигает, И в пламе город весь! Столбом дым, жупел в воздух вьется, Пожар—как рдяны волны—льется . . . Исчезнь! Исчез. 1 Appear! The sun has set—the dark evening Revealed in the sky millions Of burning stars. Aflame, swift meteors Fall, a sparkling tangle, From the most high-flown places, And in the darkness, they cheer the gaze, Like sparks, with their fire; One falls here on a house, Blown by the wind; it catches fire, And the whole town’s aflame! A column of smoke and brimstone wavers in the air, The fire pours out like scarlet waves . . . Disappear! It disappeared.

36

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

The true subject of “Magic Lantern” is not each scene taken individually but rather their swift succession. In its first publications the uninterrupted flow of metamorphoses was emphasized by the fact that the poem was not divided into stanzas—the entire poem was presented as a single unit, interrupted only by the exclamations of the lanternist. The stanzaic division first appeared in the two-volume collection of 1808—that is, with Derzhavin’s knowledge—and became the norm for all subsequent editions.6 Most probably, the new arrangement of the text on the page was occasioned by the desire to redirect the reader’s attention away from the central motif to the individual images, to compel the reader to mull over each episode in the optical spectacle as a separate unit, and emphasize the design behind their selection. One way to read Derzhavin’s fantasmagoria is to see it as two symmetrical halves, each comprising four stanzas or scenes. In the first part (stanzas 2–5) the poet enumerates the Four Elements: the lion attacks the lamb on the Earth; the “princely” sturgeon does battle with the “terrible monster” in the sea, i.e., Water; the eagle swoops down upon the swan in the Air; and, finally, in the fifth stanza Fire sets the town ablaze. Such comprehensiveness is enhanced by presenting the fire as a struggle between the elements, which are then mixed up in the two last lines by means of tropes—a metaphor and a simile: “A column of smoke and brimstone wavers in the air / The fire pours out like scarlet waves.” (Curiously, “waves” are not mentioned in those stanzas where Water is the subject: the poet mentions only “depths” [nedra] and “abysses” [bezdny], while the expression “scarlet waves” [rdyany volny], referring to fire, seems to effect a transformation of one element into its opposite.) Having thus presented God’s creatures—animals, birds, and fish— to the mental gaze of the reader and spectator, in the following four stanzas (6–9) Derzhavin turns to “God’s highest creation,” Man. The poet speaks of man’s vices (the miserliness of the merchant, 6), virtues (the farmer’s industriousness, 7), passions (the newlyweds’ desire, 8), and, finally, the mortal sin of pride, embodied by the figure of the arrogant leader who “reaches out his right hand for the crown” (9), a figure who is not named but obviously evokes Napoleon: 37

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection) Явись! И бысть. Отважный, дерзкий вождь, счастливый, Чрез свой пронырливый, кичливый И твердый дух Противны разметав знамены И на чело свое собрав Вокруг С народов многих лавр зеленый И царские права поправ, В чаду властолюбивой страсти У всей народной силы, власти Взял перевес; Граждан не внемлет добрых стону, Простер десницу на корону . . . Исчезнь! Исчез. 1 Appear! And there came to be. A brave and daring leader, fortunate Thanks to his brash, haughty And hard spirit, Having scattered the enemy banners And having gathered To encircle his brow Green laurels from many peoples And disregarding kingly rights, Intoxicated by love of rule, He usurped all the people’s strength and power; Heeding not the groaning of good citizens, He reached out his right hand for the crown . . . Disappear! He disappeared.

Napoleon assumed the title of emperor in May 1804—not long before the first publication of “Magic Lantern.” On learning that Bonaparte had declared himself emperor, Beethoven famously removed his name from the dedication of his just-completed Third Symphony, also known as the Eroica. The words intitolata Bonaparte were struck from the title page of the finished score with such fury that the page tore.7 “No more! No more . . .” The coronation itself took place a half-year later, on December 2, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, in the presence of Pius VII. Whereas it had 38

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance Figure 3. Title page of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (“Eroica”).

been customary for French rulers about to ascend the throne to travel to the Vatican, Napoleon, who claimed he was “descended” not from Valois and the Bourbons but directly from Charlemagne, demanded the presence of the pope at his coronation. One of the most scandalous episodes in the ceremony, reported by many witnesses and then fixed in numerous histories of Napoleon, occurred when Napoleon grabbed the crown from the pontiff ’s hands, not waiting for him to place it on his head. Derzhavin’s close-up, the metonymy that crowns the ninth stanza and the entire show, the hand reaching out for the crown, turned out to be prophetic. The ninth and tenth stanzas, following the disappearance of the final vision, mark another change in the mode of description, as they lead the reader-spectator away from the tangible reality he or she has just experienced. The philosophical meditation that closes Derzhavin’s text is as replete with visual images as the nine previous stanzas, but here elements of customary “symbols and emblems” are intermixed with images that are seemingly about to be seen, but are in fact unrepresentable: Figure 4. Jacques-Louis David, sketch of Emperor Napoleon crowning himself. Preparatory drawing by David for his Coronation of Napoleon, 1807. Musée du Louvre, Paris. 39

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection) Не обавательный ль, волшебный Магический сей мир фонарь? Где видны тени переменны, Где веселяся ими Царь Иль Маг какой, волхв непостижный, В своих намереньях обширный, Планет круг тайно с высоты Единым перстом обращает И земнородных призывает Мечтами быть иль зреть мечты! 1 Isn’t this world a charming, mystic magic lantern? Where changing shades are visible, Where the King, entertaining himself with them, Or some kind of Mage, an inscrutable magician, His purposes vast, Secretly from on high the circle of the planets Turns with but a finger’s touch, And summons Earth’s denizens To be dreams, or to see them.

The framing function of the first and tenth stanzas, which sets off the central eight, is underscored by the resemblance between the following lines: “In it wander diverse shadows” (V nei khodiat teni raznorodny [1]) and “Where changing shades (shadows) are visible” (Gde vidny teni peremenny [10]), as well as the image of the “wise wonderworking” Magician, who both creates and destroys wonders in the first stanza, and the Tsar-Mage, who “entertains himself ” with shadows in the tenth. Derzhavin’s poem is ruled by three completely different demiurges: the wise Magician in stanza 1 is no match for the inscrutable and terrible Sorcerer in stanza 10, and neither of these two coincides with the “Architect”—the creator of “this world so fair”—in the final two stanzas. Each of these creators has his own realm: the first is almost domestic, doubly delimited: the external boundary runs through the town square (“the organ thunders on the town square” [gremit organ na stogne trubnyi]), while the internal boundary coincides with the walls of the room on which the “enchanting wonderful light paints . . . a moon on the wall.” The “course of the planets,” one of Derzhavin’s favorite images, serves as the natural boundary of the Sorcerer’s “vast purposes.”8 No spatial boundaries are 40

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

erected for the third realm, that of the Architect/Creator. The only thing that connects these three expanses is the sense of illusoriness and the lack of distinction between the subject and object of the spectacle: “And He [the Creator—TS] summons earthly beings / [Either] to be dreams / Or to dream [lit. ‘see dreams’]” (I zemnorodnykh prizyvaet / mechtami byt’ ili zret’ mechty). Are we watching or are we being watched? Who is looking out for whom? This failure to distinguish between subject and object of seeing captures the new fatalism of the Russian ode: Так будем, будем равнодушно Мы зрительми его чудес; Что рок велит, творить послушно, Забавой быв других очес. Пускай тот управляет нами, Кто движет солнцами, звездами; Он знает их и наш конец! Велит:—я возвышаюсь. Речет:—я понижаюсь. Сей мир мечты; их Бог—творец! 1 So let us, let us be the indifferent Observers of his miracles; Let us obediently do what fate commands, Ourselves amusing others’ eyes. Let that one direct us, Who moves suns and stars; He knows them and he knows our end! If he command, I rise up. If he speak, I sink down. This world is made of dreams, and God is their creator!

S h a d o w s O nly Lines similar to the closing stanzas of “Magic Lantern” can also be found in Derzhavin’s earlier works. For example, one of his best-known poems, “On the Return of Count Zubov from Persia,” dated 1797 but first published almost at the same time and in the same review as “Magic Lantern” (Friend of Enlightenment, 1804, no. 9), ends with the following sentiments: 41

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection) Как страннику в пути встречаться Со многим должно, и идти, И на горах и под горами, Роскошничать и глад терпеть: Бывает так со всеми нами, Премены рока долг наш зреть.* Но кто был мужествен душою, Шел равнодушней сим путем, Тот ближе был к тому покою, К которому мы все идем. (Derzhavin 2:38)

1 As a wanderer must encounter Many things in his path, and walk Up mountains and down them again, Experience riches and endure hunger: So it is for all of us, Our duty is to behold changes of fate. But he who is courageous in heart, Walked this path with composure, And was closer to that peace Toward which we all tread.

Despite their apparent similarity, Derzhavin’s two appeals—“our duty is to behold changes of fate” (ode to Zubov) and to be calm “spectators of the wonders” performed by the “inscrutable Mage” (“Magic Lantern”)—in fact correspond to two distinct metaphors for human life that can be traced to antiquity but which were elaborated to a greater extent in the eighteenth century: “life as a journey” and “life as theater.” While the former metaphor is based on the representation of human life as an essentially teleological forward movement (i.e., one that always has a course, purpose, and goal, whether it is achieved or not), the latter is much better suited to a person who is “philosophically” prepared—in other words, one who looks on events with a certain degree of detachment, reconciled to the role assigned to him in this performance.9

*

42

Italics here and in the English translation are mine.—TS.

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

Derzhavin’s poem is of course not about the theater in general but explicitly refers to magic lantern shows, optical illusions, Chinese shadows—those typically “marginal” genres of the theatrical arts that come to the forefront and are loaded with metaphorical meaning only during those historical periods that view themselves as gaps or interruptions in the historical process. The concluding stanza of “Magic Lantern” calls to mind lines from Denis Fonvizin’s famous “Epistle to My Servants” (1764), in which the Creator is likened to a puppeteer:10 Создатель твари всей, себе на похвалу По свету нас пустил, как кукол по столу. Иные резвятся, хохочут, пляшут, скачут, Другие морщатся, грустят, тоскуют, плачут. 1 The Creator of all creatures, to his glory Set us on the earth, like puppets on a table. Some romp, laugh, dance, jump, Others frown, grieve, pine, weep.

Both Fonvizin and Derzhavin make use of the ancient version of the teatrum mundi metaphor rather than the more famous, and widely abused, Shakespearean one. The images of the shadow puppets and projected theater can be traced to the same “hyper-image” of world culture (to use W. J. T. Mitchell’s term),11 namely, the Allegory of the Cave, which opens the seventh book of Plato’s Republic. By the late eighteenth century the majority of Plato’s Dialogues had been translated into Russian. Derzhavin and his contemporaries had access to the three-volume quarto edition of Plato’s works, published in the early 1780s, the second volume of which included a translation of Republic.12 If it is slightly stretching a point to speak of Derzhavin’s familiarity with Plato’s Dialogues, in the case of Nikolai Karamzin there is no doubt whatsoever about his interest in Greek philosophy, in general, and his familiarity with Plato, in particular. On more than one occasion in the 1790s and first decade of the nineteenth century, Karamzin made use of the metaphor of life as “Chinese shadows of the imagination,” an image that has its roots in Plato’s cave.13 The following speech of Count NN in Karamzin’s novella “My Confession” (Moia ispoved’, 1802) is but one example: 43

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection) “These circumstances and unpleasant happenings might have distressed another, but I was born a philosopher—I bore it all with indifference and repeated my favorite saying: ‘Chinese shadows! Chinese shadows!’”14

Life is like the “random play of Chinese shadows” not only for the amoral protagonist of “My Confession,” but for the writer himself (or, at least, his closest alter ego): the final edition of Letters of a Russian Traveler (1801), one of the most influential Russian texts of the 1790s, closes with the following address to the reader: And you, my dears, quickly ready for me a tidy little cottage where I will be free to amuse myself with the Chinese shadows of my imagination, to let my heart grieve and to find comfort in friends! (italics in the original—TS)

In his comprehensive commentary to Letters of a Russian Traveler, Yuri Lotman discusses possible origins of this metaphor which became “one of Karamzin’s favorites in both his thinking and language” at the turn of the century. Lotman suggests that Karamzin may have been deeply impressed by the Theater of Chinese Shadows (Théâtre des Ombres Chinoises), founded and made famous by François Seraphin in the early 1780s.15 First located in Versailles, then moved to the Palais-Royale, in 1790 the Theater of Chinese Shadows was situated on the Boulevard du Temple, where Lotman believes the Russian Traveler may have attended some of its shows. Why doesn’t Karamzin mention this theater in the lengthy “Letter 100,” devoted entirely to a detailed account of numerous Paris theaters on the eve of the Revolution? The author’s silence on this point may very well be a “marked absence” that merely confirms the symbolic status of the shadow theater in Karamzin’s depiction of the world. The Traveler’s experience being internalized, a vivid impression transforms into a recurrent metaphor. The lack of direct references to the optical realia in Derzhavin’s commentaries on “Magic Lantern” may have similar explanations. Derzhavin and Karamzin were particularly close in the last decade of the eighteenth century. In 1791–92 Karamzin was actively promoting the publication of works by the members of the Derzhavin-Lvov circle in the Moscow Journal; toward the end of the decade he oversaw the publication of Derzhavin’s Collected Works, which came out in 1798. Over the course 44

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

of those ten years Derzhavin and Karamzin were frequent correspondents. The year 1803 was a critical one for both of them, though in different, incomparable ways. Both mourned the passing of people close to them: Derzhavin had suffered the loss of Nikolai Lvov, while Karamzin grieved the untimely passing of his wife Elizaveta Ivanovna. It was at this time, in 1803, that he published his “Discourse on the Happiest Time of My Life”, the thoughts and mood of which were the exact opposite of the sunny tone of the earlier “Conversation about Happiness” (1797). Now Karamzin sounds grim and desperate: Let’s stop deceiving ourselves and others, let’s stop trying to prove that all the actions of nature and all its phenomena are beneficial— perhaps that is so in the general scheme of things; but since this is known to God alone, man cannot discuss things in this regard. Optimism is not philosophy, but merely an intellectual sport [. . .] Leibnitz and Pope notwithstanding, the world here and now remains a school for patience.16

Their careers were going in different directions: Karamzin was appointed court historian (“granted the title of historian and a salary of 2,000 rubles”) only three weeks after Derzhavin’s dismissal from his position as minister of justice. One was ascending the government ladder, while the other, despondent, was descending it, without any hope of returning to the top. Both shared a sense of the unpredictability and uncertainty of the world, and the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the imaginary.

P r e g n a n t Moments In the introduction to his History of the Russian State, Karamzin writes, But even a common citizen ought to read history. It reconciles him to the imperfection of the visible order of things . . . comforts him in state disasters . . . it cultivates a moral sense and by its righteous judgment it disposes the soul to fairness, which secures our wellbeing and the concord of society. That is its use: and how many pleasures for the heart and mind lie therein!17 45

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

Introductions, by and large, are composed when a work is already essentially complete—they summarize what will follow. According to Karamzin, the historian should first reconcile himself to the “imperfection of the visible order of things”—and only then provide support for “the common citizen” beset by “state disasters.” Karamzin didn’t hit upon what would become the axis of his major work—the thread on which he would string the events of Russian history—right away. It didn’t acquire definite shape until 1812, when this first symbolic date in Russian history created a bridge to the events of two hundred years before, when the Romanov dynasty came to power. (As is well known, Mikhail Romanov did not ascend the throne until 1613, but the “chronological rhyme” of 1612/1812 silenced any quibbles about precise dating.) In the early 1800s Karamzin did not yet perceive history as a series of connections but rather as one of ruptures and unrelated scenes, which the historian must organize and reconcile. “On the Events and Persons in Russian History That Might Lend Themselves as Subjects of Artistic Representation: A Letter to Mr. NN,” the note Karamzin compiled in 1802 at the request of Count Alexander Stroganov, president of the Academy of Fine Arts, and published soon thereafter in Herald of Europe, seems quite revealing in this regard. The intense dramatic quality of the proffered “artistic programs” stands out: each “performance” is chosen to show a certain historical scene at a moment when the heat of passion is at its highest. Nothing irreversible has happened yet, but it is just about to take place. This, for instance, is how he renders one of the most emblematic scenes in Old Russian history—the moment when Prince Oleg of Novgorod, the tenth-century Russian ruler, died of a snake bite: I would portray Oleg at the moment when, with a look of scorn, he pushed aside the skull, and the snake has shown his head, but has not yet bitten him (emphasis mine—TS).18

The composition of the scenes described by Karamzin becomes particularly striking when juxtaposed with the static, monumental nature of Mikhail Lomonosov’s selection of “Ideas for Artistic Scenes from Russian History” (Idei dlia zhivopisnykh kartin iz russkoi istorii)—a much earlier work (1764) pursuing a similar goal.19 A text of crucial importance both for the history of European culture and for Karamzin’s future vision of historical painting appeared two years 46

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

after Lomonosov’s “Ideas” were published, in 1766, the year of Karamzin’s birth: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön Revisited. Karamzin’s choice of scenes “That Might Lend Themselves as Subjects of Artistic Representation” is absolutely in keeping with Lessing’s theory of “pregnant moments” (der prägnantesten Augenblick). For Lessing, a choice of a single moment that should “metonymically” stand in for the rest of the story is the only way to reconcile the contradiction between verbal and visual mediums: Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment (der pragnantesten Augenblick) and the most fruitful aspect of that moment must be chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see. But no moment in the whole course of an action is so disadvantageous in this respect as that of its culmination. There is nothing beyond, and to present the uttermost to the eye is to bind the wings of Fancy.20

Lessing then proceeds to discuss specific examples from antiquity and focuses on the art of Timomachus, who, among the artists of the antiquity, “seems to have been the one most fond of choosing extremes for his subject”: He did not paint Medea at the moment of her actually murdering her children, but just before, when motherly love is still struggling with jealousy. We anticipate the result and tremble at the idea of soon seeing Medea in her unmitigated ferocity, our imagination far outstripping anything the painter could have shown us of that terrible moment. For that reason her prolonged indecision, so far from displeasing us, makes us wish it had been continued in reality. We wish this conflict of passions had never been decided or had lasted at least till time and reflection had weakened her fury and secured the victory to the maternal sentiments. (Ibid.)

Even if we have much less pity for Prince Vladimir, about to be killed by Rogneda, the wife he first raped and then abandoned, than for Medea’s poor children, Karamzin’s suggestions on how to tell this famous story and 47

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

to represent Rogneda’s “prolonged indecision” seem to follow Lessing’s advice quite straightforwardly: Rogneda takes up the knife—tarries—and the Prince, after awakening, snatches the deadly weapon from her hands [. . .] Vladimir gets up from the bed and holds the knife he has snatched; he listens to Rogneda so attentively that it is clear her words have already deeply touched his heart. I think that this subject is touching and picturesque.21

The means of presenting reality in “Events and Persons” is also echoed in the principle of action in Derzhavin’s “Magic Lantern”: the primary “vehicle” of what takes place is the adverb “suddenly” (vdrug), either pronounced, implied, or anticipated. History here is placed not in the supposedly “unfamiliar” subjunctive mood but on its threshold, allowing the reader/spectator to believe that the course of events can still be altered by exclaiming “Disappear!”, sighing, "Disappeared,"—and turning the page.

A n A t t e mpt in the Dramatic Field Most of Derzhavin’s forays into the theater date from the years 1804–8. On January 30, 1804 (that is, during the composition of “Magic Lantern”), Derzhavin writes in a letter: I want to have a go at the dramatic field now and I would be much obliged if you would make some notes or plans from Metastasio’s operas and communicate a summary of them to me so that I could familiarize myself with their arrangement and spirit and thus could more confidently enter into this profession, for these important lyrical pieces, it seems to me, are more in my line than others. (Derzhavin 4:577)

In his dictionary of Russian writers, Bolkhovitinov listed Derzhavin's significant works by year of composition, following the poet's own judgment. Among his most important works of 1804, alongside “Magic Lantern,” “The Chariot,” and the translations from Pindar, Bolkhovitinov named Dobrynia, a Magical Opera from Russia’s Epic Times: “But of greatest importance in this year is the work Dobrynia, a theatrical presentation from Russia’s ancient times in five acts with songs, choruses, and ballets.”22 48

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

Among the works written in the following year, Bolkhovitinov notes the opera Pozharsky, or the Liberation of Moscow (incomplete when the entry was written). Derzhavin’s historical dramas were, first and foremost, jealous attempts to overshadow the theatrical triumphs of Vladislav Ozerov, the most eminent Russian tragedian of the early nineteenth century, “the last ray of a tragic dawn,” as Osip Mandelstam would call him about a century later. Ozerov’s tragedy Oedipus at Athens (1805), which enjoyed particular success with the public, was dedicated not without a sense of mockery “to the poetic genius” of Derzhavin. Oedipus was followed by the tragedies Fingal (1805) and Dmitry Donskoi (1807), which brought particular pleasure to the emperor. Pozharsky, “a heroic play in four acts, with choruses and recitatives,” was Derzhavin’s answer to the writings of the “Russian Racine,” as Ozerov had been readily dubbed by the theatergoing public. And yet it was not entirely a matter of competing with Ozerov: in the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century, the theater became for Derzhavin a major means “to revive in the memory of the dear Fatherland [. . .] a celebrated heroic event.”23 In his address “To the Reader,” the poet explains the nature of the genre he has employed: and in order that this triumphant deed that assured the prosperity of the Empire which flourishes even to this day, would not be a tedious and gloomy spectacle, like tragedies, I have ornamented it with a splendor characteristic of operas, by giving it various settings, music, dances, and even forms of the utmost magic. (Italics in the original.—TS)

Derzhavin’s stage directions are extremely detailed; the complicated sets and their frequent changes are in keeping with European theater practice of the time, where French melodrama with its visual dominant reigned supreme. He devotes particular attention to lighting, a practice he began in Dobrynia, where he gives the following direction at the point when the sorceress Dobrada suddenly appears in the clouds to save the heroes unjustly sentenced to death: With this word, fiery inscriptions appear on the chests of X, Y, and Z; the first one has “villain” [zlodey] while the other two both are announced as “biased” [pristrasten].24

49

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

In Pozharsky, lighting effects were also employed to show onstage “forms of the utmost magic.” For example, scene 8 is prefaced by the following description: With this word the grove and castle are lit up, the latter of which, transparent, shines through; in the middle of the grove the firs and pines disappear, and there instead, a bit to the side, appears a sofa. Cupids with quivers sit in the remaining trees. Sylphs, sylphides, nymphs, satyrs, and other spirits, who in the ballet present the amusement of Armida and Rinaldo, descend the stairs in front of the house. (Italics are mine.—TS)

In Derzhavin’s mid-1800s picture of the world, it is sorcery and magic, rather than consistency and logic, that have the ability to direct the historical process—and to explain it to contemporaries and descendants. This is why in the list of dramatis personae for Pozharsky Marina Mniszek appears as “wife of the False Dmitry, a sorceress.” Throughout the entire work she plays on a magic zither, like other “wonderworkers,” magi and “inscrutable wizards.” The image Derzhavin creates has the following motivation: when Marina, after being kept under surveillance in Yaroslavl, was released unharmed, she again had recourse to diverse intrigues; recognizing several pretenders as the False Dmitry, her own husband, she had conjugal relations with them; trying to secure the throne by all means possible, she moved from place to place, at times dressing in men’s military uniform, and would set off into danger on horseback: how could she be portrayed as anything but an enterprising, power-seeking, cunning, beautiful woman and enchantress, as legend would have it?25

Curious as it may seem, one of the shortcomings that Derzhavin and Shishkov found in Ozerov’s tragedies was their antihistoricism.26 However, it was a question of the characters’ historical and psychological authenticity—or rather its absence—and not the vision of history as such. Derzhavin’s avowed orientation toward opera, with its emphasis on visual spectacle (as opposed to tragedy, a literary genre par excellence requiring scenic constancy and narrative coherence), was not confined to his attention to stage design. In his “Discourse on Lyric Poetry,” written a few years later, Derzhavin defines opera as an almost Platonic endeavor: 50

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance [Opera], I believe, is an enumeration or distillation of the visible world as a whole. I will go even farther: it is the living realm of poetry; the exemplar (the ideal), or the shadow of that pleasure, which is neither seen by the eye, nor heard by the ear, nor felt by the heart, at least by mere mortals. [. . .] In a word, you see before you the magical, enchanting world in which the gaze is enveloped in splendor, the hearing in harmony, the mind in incomprehensibility, and you see all this wonderful nature by means of an art that has been created, and, what’s more, in a reduced form—and man thus comes to know all his majesty and dominion over the universe. Indeed, after a magnificent opera you experience a certain sweet rapture, similar to that of waking up after a pleasant dream; you forget every unpleasantness in life (emphasis mine.—TS; Derzhavin 7:601–2).

Creating opera allowed Derzhavin to feel that he was not just a common spectator, as he was in relation to Ozerov’s tragedies, not an observer (“a viewer of dreams”) and/or observed (“amusement for the eyes of others”). It enabled him to “recognize his majesty and dominion over the universe”—or, at the very least, to temporarily “forget every unpleasantness in life.” When viewed in the context of a broader historical prospective, Derzhavin’s turn to the theater in the early years of the nineteenth century might be explained by the popularity of theater, visual theater in particular, at certain moments in history. Over a century later, in the mid-1920s, the Russian artist and puppeteer Nina Simonovich-Efimova described the logic of her move from easel painting to the puppet theater in an era of revolutionary upheavals in the following words: In 1917 it became psychologically impossible for me to continue my work as a painter. All my life, no matter the circumstances, I had felt myself to be a painter—and there I was, left without the power to create, imagine, or even think of art. The Revolution had done this. I’ve never tried to explain it in a more detailed fashion, so it’s probably more complicated; I see only that suddenly I glimpsed days—which, it seems to me, you are given every morning when you open your eyes—in the form of a beautiful new silk ribbon, a rather large one, about a foot long. You could make a lot of things out of it. But various empty and bothersome matters, which suddenly multiply, cut it in two, and then in two again, and again, and again . . . . 51

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection) Figure 5. From “The Court of Empress Catherine II”.

By the end of the day all that remains are bits no more than an inch long, which could still be used for something, and then suddenly, without fail, bang! A knock at the door—another piece of ribbon— and you no longer have a ribbon but a hodgepodge that’s not good for anything. But it turns out that during this hodgepodge of time it is not only possible to work in the theater but that the first condition even favors the second.27

If we leave the confines of the theater, a vivid example of the same tendency is the art of the silhouette, which flourished at the turn of more than one century.28 “The silhouette is a formula and a hint at that which cannot be seen, a barely perceptible story about something, the telling of which has been started but not finished [. . .]. The silhouette is as laconic as a shadow,” as Erikh Gollerbakh, an eminent Russian art historian of the early twentieth century, wrote in 1922, in the wake of the unique flourishing of the silhouette genre in the 1910s, just when Nina Simonovich-Efimova felt the urge to move from the easel to the puppet and shadow theater.29 “Narration is created by conceptual thought,” wrote Olga Freidenberg. “Conceptual thought leads to the proposition of goal, cause, condition, which moves the plot forward and fills it with connections with real processes, presents dependence and leads to certain results. A ‘picture’ cannot portray the ideas ‘if,’ ‘when,’ ‘so that,’ ‘because,’ etc.; speech, however, creates with these expressions a logically developed story.”30 The turn of the century weakens “conceptual thought”. History moves away from complex and compound sentences to sentences without conjunctions. In the case of both Derzhavin and Karamzin, who had not yet adopted the smooth style and measured 52

Chapter 1. A Text in Performance

The essence of the silhouette, whether painted on white paper or cut out and moved behind a screen, is anti-nominative: it hints without naming; it brings the main thing into relief, revealing the hidden, but without giving details. In 1799 Count Piotr Razumovsky, under the personal supervision of Paul I’s widow, Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, put together a “gallery of shadows”— a collection of silhouettes by the French artists Sideau and Atting. It is probably no coincidence that the print edition of this “gallery” waited exactly a hundred years to be published by Paul’s great-grandson, Prince Georgy Meklenburg-Strelitsky, in the sumptuous two-volume edition The Court of Empress Catherine II, 189 Silhouettes. The year 1799 also saw the publication of the fables of Ivan Khemnitser, illustrated with silhouettes and prepared for publication by members of the Derzhavin-Lvov circle. Juxtaposing the unsaid of the fable with the unseen of the silhouette, complementing the verbal hint with the visual one was yet another case of “fleshing out with the artist’s pencil that which the poet could not or did not wish to say in words.” The famous Paris cabaret Le Chat Noir, a direct descendant of François Seraphin’s Chinese Shadow Theater that had so impressed Karamzin in the 1790s, flourished in Paris a century later. One of the cabaret’s most celebrated shows was L’Epopée (1888), a shadow play in fifty pictures, dedicated by the author—the French graphic artist and caricaturist Emmanuel Poiré, Russianborn and known by the witty pseudonym of Caran d’Ache—to the history of Napoleon’s military campaigns. Thus Napoleon’s miraculous emergence out of the shadows into the light of history was celebrated with the same optical theme. The “shadow posters” of Toulouse Lautrec should also be recalled here, along with the spread of portable shadow theaters for the home in the 1890s–1900s in France, Germany, and Russia, and the extreme popularity of the art of the silhouette among artists of the Russian Silver Age. This symbolic context accommodated the great number of “magic lanterns,” “Chinese shadows,” and other optical metaphors in the titles of works, both prose and poetry, from the turn of the twentieth century, for example, Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse cycle “Only Shadows” (Tol'ko teni, 1910), with its epigraph taken from Napoleon: “L’imagination gouverne le monde . . .”—not to mention her book of poetry titled Magic Lantern (1912).

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tread of the “last chronicler,” as Pushkin called him, we are dealing with images, not concepts, with pictures that come and go rather than a logically constructed story. The sense of discontinuity in time, the tenuous nature of the fabric of life, and the unreliability of the world require a correspondingly fragmented form of expression. For this reason, at the turn of centuries and in times of social upheaval the “metaphoric weight” falls on what in other times are marginal, secondary theatrical genres, such as melodrama, the puppet theater, the shadow theater, or optical shows like the magic lantern.

Chapter 2

Lanterns and Lanternists

L a t e r n a M agica The creator of the magic lantern, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) considered the primary task of this optical device to be the enlargement and projection on a horizontal or vertical surface of images attained through the use of either a microscope or a telescope: sun spots, craters on the moon, or a microscopic section of a mosquito’s wing. Pursuing scientific and educational aims, and assigning the lantern a role that was for the most part auxiliary, those who perfected and improved on his invention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were not pleased by the itinerant artists, rogues, and charlatans who went about armed with the laterna magica and used it merely for entertaining, fooling, or frightening a gullible public. But it was precisely these itinerants, trading in the poetic powers of the magic lantern, who made it popular among the common folk. French dictionaries first fixed the word combination lanterne magique in 1690. Antoine Furetière’s dictionary gives the following definition, which includes two important points: the juxtaposition of the “enlightened” versus the “benighted” public (the latter, of course, believing in the optical illusions and taking them for supernatural phenomena) and the characterization of the subject of the slides as the monstrous and the mystical: Lanterne magique est une petite machine d’optique qui fait voir dans l’obscurité sur une muraille blanche plusieurs spectres et monstres si affreux, que celui qui n’en sait pas le secret croit que cela se fait par magie. Elle est composée d’un miroir parabolique qui réfléchit la lumière d’une bougie, dont la lumière sort par le petit trou d’un tuyau, au bout duquel il y a un verre de lunette et entre deux on y coule successivement plusieurs petits verres peints de diverses 55

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

Figure 6. “Laterna Magica,” from Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671), 768.

figures extraordinaire et affreuses, lesquelles se représentent sur la muraille opposée, en plus grande volume.1

In the France of the second half of the eighteenth century, optical shows were extraordinarily widespread and popular. The lanternistes were also known as “Savoyards”—after the peddlers from the Savoie, one of the poorest regions of France, who went from town to town lugging the heavy wooden box of a magic lantern, with a monkey or marmot on their shoulder. The image of the itinerant lanternist survives in our memory thanks to cheap engraved depictions of the Savoyard, which as a rule were accompanied by a rhymed text, and sometimes the notes of a simple melody: 56

Chapter 2. Lanterns and Lanternists Trala, deri, Traderi, dère; La, la, la Traderi tradére! Demandez la Curiosité ! Faites montrer chez vous la belle Lanterne Magique, Il ne vous en coutera Pas plus que Cinquante-cinq sous . . . Vous verrez le Bon Dieu Et monsieur le Soleil, Madame la Lune, Mademoiselles les Etoiles, Le Roi, la Reine, Le Gendarme, le Bourreau, Le Matin, le Midi, le Soir, Les sept péches capitaux, Les éléments.

Figure 7. Giacomo Francesco Cipper, also known as Il Todeschini, A Lanternist and a Boy with a Marmoset, first half of the eighteenth century. Private collection.

The lanternist presented to the view of the amazed audience the entire spectrum of the world’s phenomena: natural elements, social types, and so forth. The world had been catalogued, and this catalogue invariably aspired to comprehensiveness; the essence of the presentation was in the breadth of its scope. Distant towns, foreign countries, and amazing, wondrous creatures were to be found on the lantern slides, glass or mica (less often—ivory) plates, a great variety of which were kept in the lanternists’ oblong boxes.

Figure 8. A Lanternist. Engraving, eighteenth century. Private collection, France.

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The Monkey Who Shows Chinese Shadows Lanternists, like organ grinders, were often accompanied by monkeys, as in the well-known fable by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian “Le Singe qui montre la lanterne magique” (1792). The story of a monkey who imitates his absent master was one of the most widespread satirical subjects of prerevolutionary and revolutionary France. After gathering the animals together in a darkened room for a magic lantern show, the monkey gesticulates energetically, getting carried away as he tells his audience about the pictures—just like the lanternist usually does. The animals peer into the darkness but don’t see anything—the monkey forgot to turn on the lantern’s light. Florian’s fable engendered an entire corpus of woodcuts cheaply and widely disseminated throughout Europe at the turn of the century, also reaching Russia. “Le Singe qui montre la lanterne magique” was the first of Florian’s nine fables, translated by Vasily Zhukovsky in 1806, during his short-lived but intense enthusiasm for the genre, and published in Herald of Europe as “The Monkey Who Shows Chinese Shadows”: “Ñìîòðèòå: âîò ëóíà, âîò ñîëíöå!—âîçãëàøàåò.— Âîò ñ Åâîþ Àäàì, ñêîòû, êîâ÷åã è Íîé! Âîò ñëàâíûé öàðü-ãîðîõ ñ ìîðêîâêîþ öàðèöåé! Âîò Æóðêà-äîëãîíîñ îáåäàåò ñ ëèñèöåé! Âîò íåáî, âîò çåìëÿ . . . ×òî? Âèäíî ëè?” Ãëÿäÿò, Ìîðãàþò, ìîðùàòñÿ, êðÿõòÿò! Íàïðàñíî! Íåò ñëåäà âåëèêîëåïíîé ñöåíû! 1 “Look: Here’s the moon, and here’s the sun!” he proclaims. “Here’s Adam and Eve, the beasts, Noah and his ark! Here’s Prince Pea and Princess Carrot! Here long-nosed Crane is eating with a fox! Here’s the sky, and here’s the earth . . . What? Can’t you see it?” They look, Blink, knit their brows, wheeze! All in vain! There’s not a trace of the splendid scene!

Zhukovsky’s introduction of scenes from popular prints (lubki) into the subject matter of the magic lantern and alteration of the name of the monkey (the traditional French Jacquot becomes the Russian Potap) are the only differences between the Russian fable and its French original. The optical performance described in the fable is the same. “Chinese shadows” and the “Magic Lantern”—at least in Russian usage in the early 1800s—turn out to be two signifiers for the same signified, a peculiar show about the world presented in absolute darkness and comprising pictures that follow one after the other without a break.

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Figure 9. Le Singe qui montre la Lanterne Magique (The Monkey with a Magic Lantern). Engraving. Illustration from Fables de Florian, 1822.

The unprecedented dissemination of magic lanterns during the French Revolution furthered the wide-ranging scope of the shows and developed their satirical and propagandistic tendencies. These tendencies gave rise to the appearance in France in the early 1790s of works of a particular, paraliterary genre, whose roots can be traced to both literary and oral traditions—that is, the “printed lanterns,” political satires and pamphlets of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years. Presented in the form of magic lantern libretti, they either told the story of the revolution as a whole or concentrated on its significant episodes and figures—as if they were to be read by magic lantern operators, explaining the content of the show to the audience. The title of each brochure carried the obligatory phrase “magic lantern” in connection with an attributive (“La lanterne magique de . . .”) and almost always the subtitle “pièce curieuse.”2 Some of these “amusing pieces” may have indeed been used for this purpose, but the majority of the so-called scenarios were actually literary or, to be more precise, journalistic works. The conceit of the “magic lantern” stood here for the category of tense—that of praesens historicum, a way of vividly narrating, and, hence, living through past events, while the principles of literary composition were replaced by the random arrangement of slides.3 59

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The historical events and their participants for the most part appear here in the same form as they do in the real magic lantern shows: in lists, catalogues, scenes—none of which has any set order or connection with what comes before or afterward, except for the exclamation (Ah! Oh! Eh!), promises of something incredible (Vous allez voir), and commands that the viewers watch, not miss, and pay attention (Voyez! Regardez! Remarquez!), as well as deictic turns of phrase (Et voici! Et voilà): Vous allez voir ensuite la nouvelle création du monde, l’an premier de la liberté, Adam et Eve dans le plus beau château et le plus beau parc qu’un aristocrate ait jamais eu [. . .] remarquez le serpent jaloux comme un démagogue, rampant comme un courtisan [. . .] Il répète sans sesse: “Mangez, Madame, Mangez!” [. . .] Eh! Vous allez voir présentement le fameux siège de Bastille, la gloire des Parisiens, l’admiration des campagnes!

The number of printed copies of publications of this kind rose sharply toward the end of the century, reaching its peak during the final two years. “Tout est optique ou jeu d’optique!” (Everything is optics or an optical game!), exclaimed Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the author of the celebrated Le Nouveau Paris, in 1799, as the century was coming to an end.

C i t i z e n Robertson In that same penultimate year of the century another event took place that had a direct effect on our subject: a patent was registered in Paris for a new, improved type of magic lantern called the Fantascope. The invention differed from traditional lanterns in three ways: first, it was almost twice as large; second, with the aid of a tall wooden frame the fantascope was set up on a four-wheeled cart, which moved along a rail affixed to the floor behind the screen; third, the lantern was separated from the audience by a screen— the images were projected from behind, not from the front. The movement of the fantascope on the rail, toward and away from the screen, created the additional effect of focusing, reducing, and enlarging the image. The inventor of the new optical machine was Étienne-Gaspard Robert, a native of Liège, who had come to Paris in the early 1790s. By the age of thirty-three, Robert had managed to change professions three times: he had been a priest, a painter, and a university professor of 60

Chapter 2. Lanterns and Lanternists

physics. It was his interest in applied optics, as well as a desire to be of use to the new republic, that had brought him to revolutionary France. The Belgian physicist had come to offer the government of the Directoire an improved model of an Archimedes burning mirror, with which he proposed to destroy the navy of France’s greatest enemy—at the moment, England. The proposal was favorably received and discussed at one of the meetings of the French Academy but never realized. Robert was disappointed. However, new possibilities offered themselves: Count de Parois, former tutor of the dauphin and intimate of Marie-Antoinette, a man who had remained true to the court until the last possible moment and yet managed to survive, proposed to Robert that he work on refining the magic lantern. In the count’s opinion, this relatively simple instrument ought to serve not merely to entertain but also to educate, and therefore required further modernization.4 Putting aside all thoughts of annihilating British ships with the mighty power of Archimedes’s mirror, Robert followed the count’s advice, changing his French name to the English Robertson—since in the turn-of-the-century optical trade, things British had a special cachet—and remaining in Paris.5 In the final years of the eighteenth century, Robertson became famous. Le tout Paris considered it its duty to visit his Fantasmagoria, which opened in 1798 in the abandoned chapel of a Capuchin monastery. According to Louis-Sébastien Mercier, not only the spectacle but also the word “fantasmagoria” (fantasmagorie), which we are accustomed to use in its metaphorical sense, were invented by Robertson.6 Mercier writes the following on fantasmagoria in Néologie, his wonderful dictionary of the “new words for the new century”:7 Fantasmagoria is an optical game that presents to our gaze the battle between life and shadow, at the same time dethroning the old tricks of the priests. [. . .] These illusions created by masters of phantoms amuse the ignorant and cause the philosopher to fall to thinking [. . .] O specter! O illusoriness! Who are you? What are you?

Jacques Delille, the celebrated author of The Gardens; the dramatist and spy August von Kotzebue; the famous culinary authority Grimod de la Reynière, and even René de Chateaubriand—all wrote down their impressions of the Fantasmagoria. The stunned audience, locked, to ensure 61

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absolute darkness, in the cellar of the dark monastery, was treated to blood-chilling visions of monsters and skeletons, as well as the phantoms of people who had left this world but had supposedly been resurrected by Citizen Robertson, as he would introduce himself. Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau, and Lavoisier were all numbered among the newly resurrected, but most often Robertson “called back to life” Robespierre and other heroes, witnesses and victims of the Revolution.

T h e F a ntasmagoria The screen that separated the audience from the fantascope was soaked in a special chemical solution that made the cloth invisible in the dark: the images projected from behind seemed to grow right out of the columns of smoke with which Robertson and his assistants filled the closed cellar (here they made use of the “magical technology” of the well-known German mystic and freemason Karl von Eckartsthausen). Phantoms wandered about the room, growing larger in size, or smaller, or dissipating altogether in the dark. According to eyewitness accounts, the illusion was so convincing that the audience tried to touch the incorporeal figures, sometimes attempting to embrace the visions. Here is how one of them described the spectacle: Robertson pours over the fire in the brazier situated right there some sort of essences, he throws on two issues of the Newspaper of Free People and one issue of the Friend of the People, and amid the smoke of the burning essences appears a pale phantom wearing the red cap of a Jacobin. The man for whom the phantom had been summoned seems to recognize the specter as Marat and dashes forward to embrace his beloved leader, but the phantom makes a terrible face and disappears [. . .]. Delille timidly requests a meeting with the shade of Virgil—and summoned by this wish alone on the part of the translator of the Georgics a shadow appears, approaches his happy imitator with a laurel wreath, which he places on his head [. . .]; then the translator of several tragedies requests the appearance of the shade of Voltaire, hoping to be granted the same honor.8

Robertson was constantly improving his show and making it more elaborate: phantoms appeared amid gusts of wind and bolts of thunder and to the accompaniment of the otherworldly sounds of the glass harmonica. 62

Chapter 2. Lanterns and Lanternists

This instrument, invented in the middle of the eighteenth century by Benjamin Franklin, consisted of a series of glass bowls of graduated sizes attached to a long spindle fastened horizontally across a wooden trough full of water. As the spindle was turned, either by hand or by means of a foot pedal, the player touched the spinning glass with moistened fingers. The friction caused by touching the wet glass with wet skin produced strange, ethereal sounds, which well suited the incorporeal cast of Robertson’s mysteries. The glass harmonica was outlawed in some European cities, because the sounds it produced had caused people to lose their minds (which didn’t stop Mozart from writing an adagio for the instrument in the momentous year 1791, short before the death). Robertson designed fantasmagoria shows on a variety of themes, but they all had two traits in common: “necromantic” imagery (almost all of them ended with a colossal skeleton holding a scythe) and an educational tendency.9 In his short address to the audience at the end of the performance, the laternist invariably insisted that the main goal of his show was to fight ignorance and debunk prejudice and superstition—in this sense Robertson saw himself as the heir of such enlighteners as Leonardo da Vinci, Athanasius Kircher, and Giambattista della Porta. This is why a visit to the Fantasmagoria was always preceded by a presentation on “experimental physics”: Robertson demonstrated and explained the newest

Figure 10. Robertson’s fantasmagoria in the Capuchin Monastery. Engraving after Robertson’s drawing, reproduced in his Memoirs (Robertson 1831).

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The financial success of his experiments underground allowed Robertson in the late 1790s to turn his sights skyward, to experiments in aviation: the celebrated lanternist also became one of the first balloonists. In 1799, the same year in which he registered the patent on the Fantascope, Robertson first ascended into the sky over the famous Tivoli Gardens in Paris. The view of an aeronaut, capable of embracing the unembraceable, leaving Earth’s surface and ascending into the atmosphere, presented a unique alternative to humdrum everyday life. It has been said that the history of ballooning has much more to do with the history of vision than with the history of aviation. It’s scarcely a coincidence that the registration of the Fantascope, Robertson’s flight in a hot-air balloon, and the opening of Robert Fulton’s first panorama in Paris all happened in the same year, 1799. The balloon Robertson acquired shortly before he left France had a name and a biography: christened the Entreprenant, it had taken part in the famous battle between the French and Austrian armies near Fleurus in June 1794. French generals headed by Jean-Baptist Jourdan went up in the balloon and observed the movements of the Austrian troops through spyglasses. The Entreprenant did not perform particularly well on its reconnaissance mission and was subsequently decommissioned on Napoleon’s personal order—but it had well and truly frightened the Austrians and been immortalized in the annals of military history.Robertson particularly cherished this retired balloon.

Figure 11. Imaginary balloon “Le Minerva,” an engraving after Robertson’s drawing from his Memoirs (Robertson 1831).

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discoveries in the spheres of acoustics, mechanics, and electricity. The physics experiments and the horror shows of the fantasmagoria constituted two acts of the same play, two parts of the same statement. Soon after the patent for the fantascope was registered in Paris, a scandal broke out, which came to be known as the affaire de la Fantasmagorie—one of Robertson’s assistants claimed that the invention was his, thus casting doubt on its originality. As a result of the subsequent investigations and arguments, a large number of “Robertson’s secrets” were revealed. “All Paris is the Elysian Fields: there are so many shades walking about, and the Seine has turned into Lethe,” Robertson writes in his diary.10 Fantasmagorias became widespread not only throughout Paris but in all of France as well, so that the Capuchin monastery shows lost their mysterious allure, and their master, disenchanted but with his native curiosity intact, decided to leave Paris for a time and set out on a “long European journey,” having decided that it was “easier to change the audience than the program.”11 Bidding farewell to his public from the pages of the Journal de Paris on the eleventh of Vendémiaire, according to the Republican calendar (October 4, 1802), Robertson announced his impending departure for St. Petersburg, where he had received both an official invitation from the Russian Academy of Sciences and a personal one from Pavel Demidov, the famous naturalist and patron of the arts and sciences. In Russia Robertson was about to also enjoy the patronage of his old acquaintance Arkady Morkov, the former Russian envoy to France, who had been recalled from Paris at approximately the same time. It was Morkov who had recommended Robertson as a scientist and aeronaut, at a time when the Russian Academy was thinking of using balloons to study the chemical composition of the atmosphere. All this could not but gratify a man who had so recently defended himself against charges of plagiarism and charlatanism. On his journey Robertson was accompanied by Eulalie Coron, his girlfriend, and their little son. They had a great deal of baggage: in addition to the balloon, the “learned Savoyard” (as Robertson was quickly dubbed by his enemies and rivals) took with him a fantascope, a glass harmonica, and other workings of the fantasmagoria, as well as the entire “laboratory of experimental physics.”12 “To acquaint the Scythians with the phenomena of light and electricity,” Robertson would later write about his hopes and aspirations, “would represent a miracle in the progress of civilization.”13 65

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As it turned out, Robertson stayed in Russia longer than he had anticipated when he made his way there in the fall of 1802. Traversing the empire’s expanses and going outside its boundaries on a regular basis, he lived there for almost seven years: from the fall of 1803 to the fall of 1809. It was there that he married Eulalie, who in the meantime gave birth to three more children. After the famous ukaz of November 28, 1806, mandating that all French citizens residing in Russia either leave or swear allegiance to the Sovereign Emperor, Robertson chose the latter and became a Russian subject. Robertson describes his life in Russia in the second volume of his remarkable memoirs, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques d’un physician-aéronaute E. G. Robertson, connu par ses experiences de fantasmagorie et par ses ascensions aérostatiques dans les principales villes de l’Europe; ex-professeur de physique.14 Robertson’s recollections, which correspond exactly to the characterizations given in the title (“amusing, scientific, and anecdotal”), are the principal source of information about his life and activities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Apart from the announcements of Robertson’s shows, flights, and lectures published in St. Petersburg News and later Moscow News (not to mention the notices that appeared in the Moscow Courier, the Moscow Observer, and several other periodicals), we find mentions of Robertson in the letters of Martha Wilmot, the young British companion of Ekaterina Dashkova, who lived with her as she was getting old from 1803 to 1808, and the letters and diaries of the Preobrazhensky officer and poet Sergei Marin.15 But of particular interest for us is the description of the Fantasmagoria in Stepan Zhikharev’s Diary of a Student, an invaluable source of information on Russian cultural (first and foremost, theatrical) life under Alexander I. Zhikharev happened to see the Fantasmagoria dedicated to the “doctor and poet [Edward] Young” or, to be more precise, the reenactment of the well-known blood-curdling legend of the burial of the poet’s daughter, who had met an untimely death. Robertson’s arrival in Russia coincided with the publication of yet another edition of Young’s Night Thoughts (this time issued in the free translation of Sergei Glinka [Moscow, 1803]); perhaps this explains why Robertson ran this show particularly often. You know, there’s something about this spectacle that’s not fit for children. You’re in a room covered in black cloth; it’s pitch black, 66

Chapter 2. Lanterns and Lanternists dark and gloomy, like a grave. Suddenly in the distance a point of light appears that comes closer and closer, all the while becoming larger until finally it turns into an enormous bat, owl, or demon that blinks, flutters its wings, flies about the room, and then suddenly disappears. Young, the poet and doctor, then appears, carrying on his shoulders the corpse of his daughter; he places her on a stone and begins to dig her grave. This nonsense is called a fantasmagoria. Oh, this fantasmagoria! Right before the appearance of that crybaby Young such a hue and cry was raised in the darkness, heaven help us! They’re shouting “Ah!”—over here “Goodness me!”—lips smacking over there—complaints about the uncouthness of it all amid the cries of mothers and aunties: “What’s going on, Masha?” and “What’s wrong with you, Liza?” [. . .] There were more than two hundred in the audience [. . .]. I still haven’t come to my senses after this amusement!16

We find the names Robertson and Derzhavin on adjacent pages of Zhikharev’s Memoirs: he visited the poet on the eve of his visit to the Fantasmagoria and once again several days later. The detailed account of the “spectacle not fit for children” and Zhikharev’s very emotional reaction to what he had witnessed might lead one to suppose that one of Robertson’s shows was the “public optical spectacle” that inspired Derzhavin to create “Magic Lantern,” if only . . . if only Zhikharev’s note had not been written on December 30, 1805, that is, almost two years later than the poem. However, we do know that Robertson began showing his Fantasmagoria in the late autumn of 1803. On November 10, 1803, the News (Izvestiya), which was published as a supplement to the St. Petersburg News, reported: Mr. Robertson will show his fantasmagoric experiments in scenes, in the Kusovnikov House, located on Nevsky Perspective [later known as Nevsky Prospekt—TS], tomorrow—that is, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—at 6:30. Price of admission: 10, 5, and 2 rubles (for seating in first, second, and third sections). One can also see his experiment the “invisible woman” daily.17

“The Fantasmagoric Experiments in Scenes” (the last word invariably set in italics on posters and in announcements) were performed from November 1803 through May 1804. As mentioned in the announcement quoted above, the Scenes took place in one of the best-known buildings in Petersburg, the so-called Kusovnikov House, which had belonged to several 67

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noble Russian families since the mid-eighteenth century and was known for hosting concerts, balls, masquerades, and other entertainments. Topped out with an additional story, the mansion originally designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the 1760s can still be seen on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Griboedov Canal (Nevsky 30/16). Several times during the winter of 1803–4 Robertson demonstrated his “experiments” at court, in the library of the Hermitage, where his chief admirer, Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna (La Federowna, as Robertson calls her in the Mémoires), did not miss a single performance, becoming an effective promoter of the fantasmagoria. In both the Kusovnikov House and the Hermitage library, as had been the case in the cellar of the Capuchin monastery in Paris, the Fantasmagoria was preceded by physics and chemistry experiments interspersed with short lectures. If one is to believe Robertson, St. Petersburg optics merchants maintained that in the first two months of his shows and experiments they sold as many optical instruments as they had sold in the previous ten years. In 1805 Robertson and his growing family made their way to Moscow. To get settled here turned out to be more complicated. Robertson was unable to rent a building or apartments,18 and at first, to his great surprise, the only people who came to his Fantasmagoria performances were “peasant men in sheepskin coats.” Only after their masters were convinced that their servants and serfs had returned from the performance alive and well did they attend performances themselves. In Robertson’s opinion, the superstitious Muscovites suspected him of being “direct kin to the devil,” which sentiment was enhanced by his name, Robert, firmly associated with the medieval figure of Robert le Diable. Curiously enough, in the early twentieth century folk etymology similarly interpreted and fictionalized the mystical figure of the “Demon Strator,” or film projectionist, a direct descendant of the fantasmagore.19 Derzhavin spent the winter of 1803–4 in Petersburg. A variety of factors suggests that he either attended one of Robertson’s shows, or at the very least was well aware of them, but the absence of definitive evidence requires that we retain the subjunctive mood. Even if our hypothesis were to be confirmed, we still could not speak of Derzhavin as describing a particular spectacle in “Magic Lantern”; the poem does not evince the specific traits of the fantascope. In the poet’s own words, a “public optical 68

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spectacle” “occasioned” the writing of the poem. The occasion seems to have been a powerful one, but the pictures shown by Derzhavin’s “lantern” are a matter of speculation. Perhaps only the first stanza of the poem “Magic Lantern” is tied to reality. The “thundering” organ in the quiet darkness; the light of the lantern that “paints a moon on the wall”; “black waves” flowing “from all sides” and most likely describing the clouds of smoke”; the madly gesticulating “magician”; the “crowds of people who hurry” to see the show—these circumstances correspond to how contemporaries described the experience of attending Fantasmagorias. The first version of “Magic Lantern,” quoted in Iakov Grot’s commentary, was even closer to the eyewitness accounts of contemporaries. Instead of the “thundering” organ, we hear a “merry” organ (Derzhavin 3:739): Орган веселый, возглашая, Пронзает ночи тишину, И луч, средь фонаря блистая, Рисует на стене луну.  В ней ходят тени разнородны, Отвсюду волны льются черны; Распялив, смотрят очеса: Жезлом волшебник потрясает И громогласно возглашает: Придите, зрите чудеса. 1 The merry organ, exclaiming, Pierces the quiet of the night, And a ray, shining within the lamp, Draws a moon on the wall. In it wander diverse shadows, Black waves flow from all sides; Fixed upon them, eyes gaze: A magician waves his wand And loudly proclaims: “Come in, see wonders!”

The first stanza confines itself to the descriptive layer of “Magic Lantern.” But in the three stanzas of the philosophical conclusion, where the world is compared to a magic lantern, and history to a fantasmagorical play, one 69

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

hears the echo of the monologues with which Robertson would end his performances: Vous qui avez éprouvé quelques moments de terreur, voici les seuls spectacles vraiment terribles, vraiment à craindre: hommes forts, faibles, puissant et sujets crédules ou athés, belles ou laides, voilà ce que vous est réservé, voilà ce que vous serez un jour. Souvenez-vous de la Fantasmagorie!

With regard to this feature of Robertson’s spectacles, the first version of the poem expressed a similar idea more precisely than the final one: Сей мир ничто, как представленье Волшебной скрытою рукой. В различных образах движенье Всем тени видимой какой. Вертет волшебник, появится, Махнет жезлом и затемнится Одна другу сменяет тварь. 1 This world is no more than a performance By a magical hidden hand. In the various images, the movement Of some kind of shade visible to all. The magician gestures, and something appears, He waves his wand and all goes dark— One creature succeeds another.

The ontological terms of reference in “Magic Lantern” permit us to correlate this poem with one of the Derzhavin’s most important philosophical lyrics, the one that opened the first volume of the 1808 Collected Works, namely, the ode “God” (Бог), written twenty years earlier, in 1784:20 О, Ты, пространством бесконечный, Живый в движеньи вещества, Теченьем времени превечный, Без лиц, в трех лицах Божества! [ . . .] Себя собою составляя, Собою из себя сияя, Ты свет, откуда свет истек. 70

Chapter 2. Lanterns and Lanternists Создавый все единым словом, В твореньи простираясь новом, Ты был, Ты есть, Ты будешь ввек! Ты цепь веществ в себе вмещаешь, Ее содержишь и живишь; Конец с началом сопрягаешь И смертию живот даришь. 1 O Thou, of measureless expanse, Alive in matter’s every movement, Eternal through time’s constant passage, No form, yet in three forms divine. [ . . .] Just of Thyself Thyself consisting, Just of Thyself unaided shining, Thou art the light from which light flowed. Having with mere word all created And merged into this new creation, Thou wast, Thou art, and e’er shall be! The chain of [matter] dwells within Thee— ’Tis by Thee given breath, sustained. The end Thou joinest to beginning And givest life along with death.21

Consisting of itself and shining from itself, creating all with “mere word,” God the Pantocrator of the ode “God” is more comprehensible, trustworthy, and reliable in his trinity than the three demiurges in “Magic Lantern”—the wonderworking Sorcerer, the omnipotent Architect, and the inscrutable Magician. For Derzhavin, the early 1780s had been a time of peace with himself and his surroundings, both poetic and political. At that time, he had been the renowned author of the “Felitsa” ode, a successful government official, living in love and harmony with his young wife, the intelligent and charming Ekaterina Iakovlevna Bastidon. This set of circumstances was entirely in keeping with the profound optimism of “God.” At its foundation lies the neo-Platonic understanding of the interconnectedness of everything in the world, what Derzhavin called the “chain of matter,” also known in the history of ideas as the Great Chain of Being.22 71

Part I. Magic Lantern (Projection)

Newton’s theory of gravity, as formulated in his fundamental Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), was yet one more piece of evidence to support the premise of the Great Chain of Being. The gradual extrapolation of the law of gravity to other spheres—its migration from natural philosophy to social philosophy, its transformation from a mathematical law into a feeling—has led cultural historians to talk about “social Newtonianism” as one of the century’s emotional dominants. The gradual weakening of this all-embracing gravitation (manifestations of which included not only stable ties within communities but also the notion of historical continuity so important for traditional, conservative societies), taken to its logical conclusion by the social upheavals in France in the 1790s, became the harbinger of a new era, usually labeled with the fraught term “modernity.” The aesthetic dominant of the new era was the feeling of rupture and fragmentation—the absence or deterioration of accustomed cause-andeffect connections. It seems natural that the magic lantern, with its random and quickly changing slides, became such a powerful metaphor at this very moment. In it historical realia met philosophical archetypes: plunged in the darkness of the Platonic cave, the distant echo of the “monstrous spectacle” described by Edmund Burke and the rough and ready plays of the itinerant lanternists were transformed into images of History itself. That’s why in the final years of the century, along with the hourglass and

Figure 12. A German New Year postcard (1808).

72

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scythe, the magic lantern became one of the perennial attributes of Saturn, “Father Time,” famously described by Erwin Panofsky in his Studies in Iconology. During the winter of 1803–4, this phenomena experienced throughout Europe—the weakening of social bonds, coherent sense of history, and even of logic itself—took on a deeply personal meaning for Derzhavin, for these signs of dissolution coincided with abrupt changes in his own life. In “Magic Lantern,” the only force capable of linking the end with the beginning turns out to be the force of the gaze. “To be dreams or to see dreams”—that is all that man has left under the given circumstances.

Figure 13. An engraving with Father Time, accompanying the poem “Time” (Vremia [1805]) in Iakov Grot’s edition of Derzhavin’s works (Sochineniia, II, 535).

Part II 1

Rainbow (Refraction)

And in lone splendor, through the tumult there, The rainbow’s arch of color, bending brightly, Is clearly marked, and then dissolved in air, Around it the cool showers, falling lightly. There the efforts of mankind they mirror Reflect on it, you’ll understand precisely: We live our life amongst refracted color. —J. W. Goethe, Faust, 2:4721–27

In 1806, the same year Goethe began the second part of Faust, Derzhavin penned his poem “Rainbow” (Raduga). He grouped it with “Cloud” and “Thunder” to form a minicycle of “meteorological” poems, published that year in a separate edition and then included in the second volume of Derzhavin’s Works of 1808. They have appeared together in all subsequent editions with any claim to completeness. Usually the hospitable guide in the labyrinth of his own work, Derzhavin is uncharacteristically chary with his explanations of these poems, and of “Rainbow,” in particular. The poet refrains from not only verbal commentary but visual as well: not a single vignette was ever suggested for any of these texts. The only additional information Derzhavin gives us is the exact date of composition for each of the three poems. The “meteorological” poems were written in the course of a single month, in March and April 1806.1 The previous summer Russia had gone to war, after concluding an alliance with England (in which Austria, Sweden, and the Kingdom of Naples soon joined), and that fall came the three famous battles of Ulm, Trafalgar, and Austerlitz. “Roll up that map, it will not be wanted these ten years,” William Pitt the Younger famously said on his deathbed, in January 1806, referring to the map of Europe. And indeed, maps were constantly being redrawn; war shifted and blurred the boundaries, turning cartographic “legends” into historical narratives. Leaders and even entire countries behaved like the images in Derzhavin’s magic lantern spectacle: “Appear! And there came to be”—“Disappear! And it disappeared.” The arrival of spring brought with it hopes for certain changes in domestic and foreign politics. Moreover, spring naturally drew the poet’s attention to atmospheric phenomena. The water cycle presented itself to Derzhavin as an apt metaphor for human dramas.

Chapter 1

Unweaving the Rainbow

T h e M e teorological Cycle The “meteorological” cycle presents us with two visual images (cloud and rainbow) and one aural representation (thunder). The order of the poems within the cycle follows their order in nature: cloud, thunder, and rainbow. “Cloud” and “Thunder” share the same compositional structure: first, Derzhavin names and partially describes the atmospheric phenomenon, and then he compares it to a political situation (e.g., in “Cloud,” “Do we not see here a Grandee / A living portrayal of the Tsars?” [Ne vidim li Vel’mozh, Tsarei / Zhivogo zdes’ izobrazhen’ia?]). Next, he addresses a pathetic monologue to the tsars, a threatening warning to the “confidants of tsars” and “all-powerful atheists,” and a gesture of approval to those who have been slandered (among whom Derzhavin, of course, includes himself). Both poems contain a motto-like moral the length of a quatrain. In “Cloud” it appears in the compositionally unmarked seventh stanza, which precedes the address to the tsar: Но добродетель красотой Cвоею собственной сияет; Пускай несчастье помрачает,— Светла она сама собой 1 But virtue shines With its own beauty; Let misfortune darken— Virtue is bright all by itself.

Whereas in “Thunder” it appears in the “correct” penultimate, summarizing stanza: 76

Chapter 1. Unweaving the Rainbow Но тот, кто почитает Бога, Надежду на него кладет, Сей не боится время строга, Как холм средь волн не упадет. 1 But he who reveres God, And places his hopes in him, Does not fear harsh time, As a hill will not collapse among waves.

A direct source of Derzhavin’s allegorical meteorology is The Visible World in Pictures (Svet zrimyi v litsakh, 1773), one of the many translated collections of emblematic “sketches,” published in Russia in the final decades of the eighteenth century. The popularity of The Visible World, translated from German and accompanied by hundreds of engravings, is evident from its four printings: 1773, 1789, 1805, and 1817. It presented all the diversity of the world in a series of images and anecdotes, at once didactic and entertaining, combining popular science and the moral interpretation of natural phenomena. For example, “cloud” was explicated as follows: When a cloud is at a high altitude, dividing and reuniting, its shape changes: then when it collapses under its own weight it falls, and separating into little drops it pours out again there where it was conceived. [. . .] Thus, slaves of happiness, does your well-being quickly fly up into the heavens. But your arrogant dreams and the pressing weight of your evil deeds cause it to lose its equilibrium [. . .]. O you phenomena of the political heavens, how quickly has the year passed since you were elevated, neither by your own efforts nor on your own merits!

The likeness between this and Derzhavin’s “Clous” is too obvious to need any comment at all. The “Rainbow” also obviously borrows from The Visible World: The daytime luminary, depicting the rainbow, surpasses all artistic paintings, all the shining splendor of precious stones, and the adornments of gardens. The wet and dark cloud is the board on which it traces this arch; its paints are made of light; and its brush is the rays of the sun. Gaze upon it, o Universe entire! 77

Part II. Rainbow (Refraction)

Derzhavin’s poems about atmospheric phenomena are versified versions of the three “pictures.” Identifying the source might have been sufficient commentary, were it not for three things. First, Derzhavin chooses precisely these three emblems from the great many contained in The Visible World. Second, each of the emblems in his poems expands into a more complex, multipart allegorical composition. Third, while “Cloud” and “Thunder” comprise extended political allegories and are composed in a regular meter with a traditional rhyme scheme and stanza form, “Rainbow,” with its half-voiced shadowy moral, represents a bold experiment typical of the late Derzhavin (among other things, the visual effect of the unique stanzaic structure in “Rainbow” permits us to view this text in the context of “concrete” visual poetry). Unlike “Cloud” and “Thunder,” Derzhavin completely revised “Rainbow” after its first publication and included the amended version in the second volume of his Collected Works (1808), prepared by Alexander Labzin. The first two poems establish certain rules for how the third one should be approached, to some extent setting the reader on a false scent: having read “Cloud” and “Thunder,” he expects from “Rainbow” a traditional, easily decoded text that can be broken down into the simple elements of an allegory. These expectations are frustrated. The isolated position of “Rainbow” within the meteorological cycle prompts us to pause and think about the place allotted to this natural phenomenon in science, philosophy, and poetry of the eighteenth century and about the possible reasons for Derzhavin’s special interest in it. “Rainbow” is made up of ten stanzas, each of which concludes, or rather, is crowned with a verbal vignette, a three-syllable word or combination of three one-syllable words. In this relatively short poem we find all of the subjects most important not only for Derzhavin’s poetry but for poetry in general: Nature, Art, God. These three subjects are distributed among the ten stanzas as follows: (1) the first three stanzas (1–3) are dedicated to the rainbow as natural phenomenon; (2) the four central stanzas (4–7) constitute a conversation with the artist about the possibilities and boundaries of imitation; (3) the final three stanzas (8–10) conclude with an allegorical construction that puts “Rainbow” in the same company as Derzhavin’s most complex religious and philosophical works. However, the final stanza, which contains the poem’s 78

Chapter 1. Unweaving the Rainbow

only direct political allusion, stands somewhat apart, much as “Rainbow” itself stands apart within the meteorological cycle. “Rainbow” is considered one of Derzhavin’s most “picturesque” poems. But its imagery cannot be reduced to traditional picturesqueness: it is multilayered and not uniform. Various generic conventions that shape the interplay of word and image, such as those of emblem, allegory, and ekphrasis, are applied one after another in this text. “Rainbow” can be read as a poetic representation, as a poem about the process of representation, and, finally, as a representation of the process of creating a poem.

F r o m A l l e g ory to . . . Allegory “The final stanza conceals a hidden allusion to the special role of Russia, summoned to make peace among the warring European powers,” Derzhavin writes in his “Explanations” about by far the most transparent of the poem’s ten stanzas. The political allegory with which “Rainbow” ends, and which commentators often treat as encapsulating the entire meaning of the poem, is somewhat heavy-handed: Светлая чтоб радуга мира, В небе явясь в цвете зарей, Стала в залог тихих дней мира, К счастию всех царств и Царей. Он всех их один просветит, Примирит. 1 So that the bright rainbow of peace, Having appeared in the sky in the color of dawns, Might become a pledge of peaceful days on earth, To the good fortune of all kingdoms and Kings. [God] alone sheds light on all and Reconciles [them].2

The majority of the rainbows in Derzhavin’s odes appear in emblematic surroundings: in the wake of a thunderstorm, for example. In his description of Dmitry Levitsky’s portrait of Catherine the Great in the poem “The Mirza’s Vision” (Videnie murzy, 1784), Derzhavin likens the blackand-red ribbon of the Order of St. Vladimir that decorates the empress’s bust to a rainbow: 79

Part II. Rainbow (Refraction) Из черно-огненна виссона, Подобный радуге, наряд С плеча десного полосою Висел на левую бедру. 1 Of black-and-flame byssus, Rainbow-like, the decoration Hung in a band from the right shoulder To the left hip.

The rainbow is not simply a frequently occurring element of complex allegorical constructions in ceremonial portraits of rulers and their poetical descriptions but one of the more effective means for allegorizing the portrait genre (cf. the famous “Rainbow Portrait” of England’s Elizabeth I [1603] or the later portrait of Catherine by Levitsky [1787], where the empress is represented both wearing the “black-and-flame” sash Derzhavin describes as rainbow-like and actually pointing her laurel-wreathed scepter at a real rainbow in the background. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1923), Walter Benjamin defines Baroque allegory as follows:3 In its most developed form, the baroque, allegory brings with it a court; around a figural center, which, in contrast to conceptual circumlocutions, is never lacking in authentic allegories, the emblems are grouped in their profusion. They seem to be arbitrarily arranged: “The Confused ‘Court’ ”—title of a Spanish mourning play—could be cited as the [exemplary] scheme of allegory.

About ten years later, in the 1930s, in his disquisition on the “verbal” nature of Lomonosov’s odic imagery, Lev Pumpiansky writes,4 One of the best methods for distinguishing between the verbal and psychological origins of a poetic system is to analyze the portrayal of nature. In the odes of the 1740s [. . .] nature is either: (1) allegory (the best variant), or (2) allegorical decoration (the worst) [. . .]. Nature is subordinated to history, thematized in the ode and transformed into a series of signifiers. [. . .] The entire difficulty of our understanding of the old ode can be gauged by this auxiliary position of nature. Rapture is a wind that rushes by without brushing against nature. 80

Chapter 1. Unweaving the Rainbow

In both Derzhavin’s early and late lyrics the rainbow is not a fullfledged Baroque allegory; it is not even the “figural center” of one but merely a detail of the “allegorical decoration,” one of the “ladies-in-waiting at the allegorical aourt.” However, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a unique period in Derzhavin’s working life, not a transition to vivid impressions but rather a period of searching for new allegorical meanings. In 1801, in the ode “On the Accession to the Throne of Emperor Alexander I,” Derzhavin compares the rainbow not to a detail of the empress’s clothing (as in “The Mirza’s Vision”) but to her own appearance/ disappearance in the “heavenly door,” a traditional locus in the ode. The natural-scientific element of the allegorical picture is now allotted one and a half lines in the final stanza: Catherine’s shadow is concealed “in the brilliance” like a rainbow, which is also obscured not by darkness but by light: Стоит в порфире—и вещает, Сквозь дверь небесну долу зря: “Се небо ныне посылает Вам внука моего в Царя.— [. . .] Pекла. И тень ея во блеске, Как радуга, сокрылась в свет. 1 She stands, purple-clad, and prophesies, Looking downward through the door of heaven: “This sky now sends you My grandson to be Tsar.” [. . .] She spoke: And her shadow in the brilliance, Like a rainbow, hid itself in the light.

In the ode “Hymn to the Sun,” written a year later (1802), the allegory, while remaining for the most part political, even more strongly represents an interpretation of the physical nature of light and color. Though the comparison of a ruler with a heavenly body is entirely traditional, one is struck here by the complication of this comparison with the optical motif of refraction—that is, the separation of white light into the colors of the spectrum: 81

Part II. Rainbow (Refraction) Как в первый раз на трон вступило Ты, тихия зари в венце, Блистаньем холмы озлатило,— Земное расцвело лице [ . . .] Так, света океан чудесный! Кто истины не видит сей, Того ума пределы тесны, Не знает сущности твоей; Не зрит, чем боле разделяешь Себя ты на других телах, Любезнее очам сияешь На холмах, радугах, морях. Ты образ доброго Царя, Край ризы твоея заря. (italics mine—TS; Derzhavin 2:415)

1 When you ascended the throne for the first time, You, in a wreath of quiet dawn, Made the hills golden with your brilliance; Earth’s face burst into blossom. [. . .] So, o wonderful ocean of light! He who does not see this truth Must have a very narrow mind, Does not know your essence; He does not see that the more you separate Yourself into different bodies, The more kindly you shine On hills, rainbows, seas. You are the image of a good Tsar, The hem of your garment is the dawn.

Like “Hymn to the Sun,” “Rainbow” has an allegorical dimension, but here, unlike in the earlier poem, Derzhavin places optics in the foreground and politics in the background—here it is precisely the optical effects, the power of illusion over perception that the poet finds attractive in the rainbow. The rainbow in “Rainbow” is not so much an image as a motif; what we get is not a static picture of a rainbow but a depiction of the process by which it is created, namely, the refraction of the rays of the sun that produces the spectrum in the wet layers of the atmosphere. 82

Chapter 1. Unweaving the Rainbow Только одно солнце лучами, В каплях дождя, в дол отразясь, Может писать сими цветами В мраке и мгле, вечно светясь. 1 Only the sun’s rays, In drops of rain, reflecting the vale, Can paint with these colors In darkness and gloom, shining forever.

In “Rainbow,” Derzhavin actualizes the meanings connected to the semantic spectrum of the Greek ἶρις (“rainbow,” “retina”) and the image of the Greek goddess Iris, Hera’s winged messenger. The meteorological theme in Derzhavin’s poetry is inseparable from the theme of vision. Thus, it is no accident that “Rainbow” opens with a call “to look” and “to see,” addressed to Apelles, the great artist of antiquity: Взглянь, Апеллес! Взглянь в небеса! В сумрачном облаке там, Видишь, какая из лент полоса, Огненна ткань блещет очам . . . 1 Look, Apelles! Look into the heavens! There in a dark cloud, Do you see, what a band of ribbons, A fiery fabric, sparkles before your eyes?

The religious and symbolic interpretation of the rainbow was commonly used to distract the reader from the real world—the point was not to create a vivid sensory impression but to keep the focus on what the rainbow alluded to. The perception of the rainbow as an aesthetic object in its own right has a different effect: the reader is not distracted but rather lingered in contemplation of the natural phenomenon. This contemplative mode is only strengthened when one comes to understand the nature of the spectrum, and with it, their own ability to perceive, differentiate, and produce color.5 Representations of the physical nature of the rainbow and of the number of its constituent colors changed from century to century.6 The 83

Part II. Rainbow (Refraction)

only thing that did not change was the rainbow as a sign; its appearance in a text or painting referred the reader or viewer to a defined complex of ideas and representations connected with sight, its susceptibility to be deceived by the divine illusion, and the possibility of reproducing it.

M a g i c Made Simple, or Do-It-Yourself In the late 1780s, most articles about the rainbow published in the Russian press showed readers how to “imitate nature through art” by creating small, indoor rainbows. For example, the Magazine of Natural History (Magazin natural’noi istorii) published a description of the following experiment in its second issue for 1788: If one should wish to imitate nature using art and acquire an understanding of this phenomenon, he should hang in the middle of a dark room four vials made from very thin glass, marked A, B, C, D, filled with water. He should then admit a ray of sunlight into this chamber through a specially made slit in the window covering.

Experiments to create a “small rainbow in your own room” numbered among the optical amusements offered to the educated public in the popular collection The Art of Being Amusing in Conversation, or 300 Original Tricks, Both Surprising and Useful (Isskusstvo byt’ zabavnym v besedakh ili trista samorodnykh fokusov, udivitel’nykh i poleznykh), which appeared in Petersburg in 1791:7 After performing this experiment once, it is quite simple to repeat it and to see the same thing one sees in the clouds.

If in the titles of these “original tricks” one encounters time and again the adjective “magical” (volshebnyi), while in their descriptions, the most common epithet is “simple” (prostoi): The magical actions of the “catoptric box” are based on such a simple premise that anyone can understand how they are made.8

All the experiments recommended to the Russian public in the 1780s–90s for creating the color spectrum at home in one way or another 84

Chapter 1. Unweaving the Rainbow

reproduce Isaac Newton’s experimentum crucis from the 1660s, which was frequently repeated and hailed as demonstrating the truth of one of the most important theses expounded in his Optics. Newton was not the first to create a rainbow in his home, as many before him, including Descartes, had described this optical effect. Rather, it was Newton who proved that a prism doesn’t alter the quality of the light, coloring it in some way, as many in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thought, but instead “separates” the light into its components. He proved this by placing a second triangular prism in the path of the sunray that had already been separated into seven colors; this second prism reversed the effect of the first, resulting in a ray of white light. After Newton, white light could be understood as a “visual cacophony,” while in the rainbow that cacophony was transformed into an orderly scale—that is, into a metaphor for the entire experiment.9 That the simple magic of this modest experiment allowed one to understand and reproduce the divine illusion astonished Newton’s contemporaries and compatriots, and Russians of the late eighteenth century as well. The possibility of understanding the phenomenon by the use of primitive, makeshift objects (for example, “an ordinary clothes brush”) caused one to ponder the nature of imitation and the limits of the knowledge that made it possible. This vexed relationship between imitation and knowledge became the “question of the age” for English poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century, an “age more curious than devout,” to use the apt definition put forward by Edward Young.10 Poets of Young and Thompson’s generation drew new inspiration from Newton’s theories and sang the praises of the “great Columbus of the heavens,” as John Hughes, author of the philosophical poem “The Ecstasy” (1717), referred to him. Thanks to Newton, they averred, poetry had regained the themes of Light and Color of which Descartes had deprived it.11 A hundred years later, John Keats in his “Lamia” (1820) would contrast the “unlawful magic” of poetry to the “cold philosophy” of science, which strives to “empty the haunted air” and “unweave a rainbow.” In the 1730s and 1740s, however, the principles of refraction as formulated by Newton represented a sublime, even poetic explanation of “universal painting.” As the science of optics developed, the “streak of ribbons” hanging in the air, the “gorgeous train of parent colors,” in James Thomson’s words,12 underwent a new allegorical interpretation. In the last decade of the eighteenth century 85

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this “second allegorization” that began in Europe, came to Russian poetry, to Derzhavin’s verse, in particular. One of the mediating texts between English “Newtonian” poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century and its Russian iterations at the end of the century was Evgeny Bolkhovitinov’s 1788 prose translation of Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination (1744).13 When Bolkhovitinov’s translation came out in 1788, forty-four years after it appeared in English, the future metropolitan was barely twenty, the same age Akenside was when he composed it. Both Akenside the medical student and Bolkhovitinov the seminarian were fascinated by the ideas of the English empirical scientists of the early seventeenth century, Newton and Locke above all. In the prose “design” that precedes his poem, Akenside gives the following definition of these most important human faculties: There are certain powers in human nature which seem to hold a middle place between the organs of bodily sense and the faculties of moral perception: they have been called a very general name, The Powers of Imagination. Like the external senses, they relate to matter and motion; and, at the same time, give the mind ideas analogous to those of moral approbation and dislike.14

Although Bolkhovitinov’s Pleasures of the Imagination appeared long before his first meeting with Derzhavin, their subsequent close association allows us to surmise that the poet was acquainted with the text of this long descriptive poem, or at the very least had heard about it from Evgeny. In Russia, Akenside’s name was firmly associated with the descriptive genre and the very concept of imagination. Thus, in the introductory lines to his poem Tauride (Tavrida, 1798), perhaps the only authentic descriptive poema in the Russian language at the time, Semyon Bobrov mentions Akenside along with Helvetius, Thomson, and Addison.15 In the brief outline of the European tradition he is following, Bobrov addresses the Muse: Сладко-поющая Камена! Вдохни мне Аддисона силу! Дай насыщенно вображенье Чувствительного Экензайда, И Томсона,—жреца природы, Дорический напев и строй! (author’s italics—TS)16

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1 Sweet-singing Camena! Inspire me with the strength of Addison! Give me the overflowing inspiration Of the sensitive Akenside, And of Thomson—priest of nature— The Doric melody and order.

One of the most famous and frequently quoted meditations contained in Akenside’s poem is the description of the rainbow in the second book: For man loves knowledge, and the beams of Truth More welcome touch his understanding’s eye Than all the blandishments of sound his ear, Than all of taste his tongue. Nor even yet The melting rainbow’s vernal-tinctur’d hues To me have shone so pleasing, as when first The hand of science pointed out the path In which the sun-beams gleaming from the west Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil Involves the orient; and that trickling show’r Piercing thro’ every crystalline convex Of clust’ring dew-drops to their flight oppos’d, Recoils at length where concave all behind Th’ internal surface of each glassy orb Repels their forward passage into air; That thence direct they seek the radiant goal From which their course began; and, as they strike In diff ’rent luster, thro’ the brede Of colours changing from the splendid rose To the pale violet’s dejected hue.17

By the end of the century English publishers and commentators found Akenside’s lines on the rainbow to be difficult to understand and too intricate even for didactic poetry,18 but in the 1740-s the hybrid language of versified science was celebrated as a special poetic idiom, for which the rainbow constituted the ideal subject. In 1744, the same year Akenside published his Pleasures, Thomson revised his description of the rainbow in the “Spring” section of The 87

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Seasons for the second time, seeking greater scientific precision.19 As they did with Akenside, Russian translators of Thomson’s poem tried to soften his scientific language. In the first full translation of The Seasons, by Dmitry Dmitrevsky, published in 1798 and reissued in 1803,20 the appearance of the rainbow (Spring, ll. 203–12) is described as follows: Meanwhile there appears at an immeasurable height in the sky, reflected by a cloud in the east and embracing the earth, a great ethereal arc, and each color from red to violet is depicted in it with elegant proportionality. Here, wonderful Newton! The spreading clouds, standing opposite the sun, form your prism of raindrops, here for enlightened eyes they unravel a manifold thread of light, since you show it [i.e., the thread] the way out of this labyrinth covered in white.

In his description of the discovery of the spectrum of sunlight in Tauride, Bobrov has no choice but to make use of Thomson’s celebrated lines (though with the somewhat surprising yet wonderful substitution of the name of Mikhail Lomonosov for that of Newton!): Здесь!—остроумный Ломоносов! Списатель таинств естества! Сии разтопленные тучи Влечась против лица светила Тебе в дождях явили призму, И в поясе желто-зеленом Те показали нити света, Которых седмеричны роды Ты столько тщился развязать. (author’s italics—TS)21

1 Here!—Witty Lomonosov! Recorder of the enigmas of nature! These melting clouds Moving against the Sun’s face Displayed to you a prism in the rain, And in a belt of yellow-green They showed you threads of light, Whose sevenfold varieties You strove so hard to unweave. 88

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For Akenside, Thomson, and their contemporaries, a ray of light and its refraction were both signifier and signified—at once an object of reflection and a metaphor. The lines dedicated to the rainbow became something of a calling card for both poets.22 The physical and teleological explanations of the origins of the rainbow served in both instances as the best proof of the “delight of understanding”: only a person who could picture the causes and conditions of a natural phenomenon’s origins could appreciate its beauty. There are many sharp shafts In the quiver under my arm. They speak to the understanding: For most men, they need interpreters.

This is how Pindar defines the target audience of his sophisticated, enigmatic poetry in one of his most famous odes, Olympian 2 (82-85).23 In English society of the early eighteenth century the fundamental principles that defined the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the customary class divisions were superseded to a certain extent by a new division, between those who were “visually educated” and those who were not. The superiority of vision over the other human senses is the basis for Akenside and Thomson’s presentation of the “sage-instructed Eye.” For several generations in eighteenth-century England this idea, which can be traced to antiquity, became the touchstone of how one ought to perceive the world. No conversation about sight and spectacle in European culture of the eighteenth century failed to mention Joseph Addison (1672–1719), poet and journalist, parliamentarian and playwright, as well as popularizer of the ideas of Locke and Newton.

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Addison and His Pleasures In the summer of 1712, in eleven issues of the Spectator, Addison published a series of articles under the general title Pleasures of Imagination (nos. 411–21). It was these articles, based on Addison’s interpretation of some of the tenets of Locke’s “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” which thirty years later would inspire Akenside to write his poem on the same topic. In Russia the chronology of the “Pleasures” was reversed: the translation of Akenside’s poem was published first, in 1788; five years later, Addison’s essays were translated and printed in issues 10–12 of the journal Reading for Taste, the Mind, and Feelings (Chtenie dlia vkusa, razuma, i chuvstvovanii). In the essays of 1712, which for the first time collected the ideas of Addison’s ethics and aesthetics into a single system, vision is allotted a place of paramount importance: Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments. [. . .] Our sight [. . .] may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of touch, that spreads itself over an infinite multitude of bodies, comprehends the largest figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote parts of the universe.

Addison understands imagination in profoundly visual terms, as a diffuse kind of sight raised to the highest possible degree: It is this sense that furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the pleasures of the imagination or fancy (which I shall use promiscuously) I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.

The division into “primary and secondary pleasures of imagination” proves to be of major importance: I must therefore desire him [the reader—TS] to remember, that by the Pleasures of Imagination, I mean only such pleasures as arise originally from sight, and that I divide these pleasures in two kinds: my design being first of all to discourse of those Primary Pleasures of the Imagination, which entirely proceed from such objects as are before our eyes; and in the next place to speak of those Secondary Pleasures of Imagination which flow from the ideas of visible objects, when the objects are not actually before the eye, but are called up into our memories, or formed into agreeable visions of things that are either absent or fictitious.

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The difference between primary and secondary pleasures, which goes back to the difference between mimetic and nonmimetic arts proposed by Aristotle, is even more distinctly drawn in Akenside’s treatment. The primary kind are those “that we gain from the apprehension of culture”; the secondary, those “offered by the arts that imitate.” But perhaps Addison’s greatest influence on the aesthetics of the eighteenth century turned out to be his formulation of the fundamental triad of the great, the novel, and the beautiful, which altered and supplemented the great and the beautiful, associated with the name of Shaftesbury; this itself had replaced the traditional opposition of the beautiful and the ugly. In the introduction to his Pleasures, Akenside writes about his predecessor, These properties Mr. Addison had reduced to the three general classes of greatness, novelty, and beauty; and into these we may analyse every object, however complex, which, properly speaking, is delightful to the imagination.

Akenside’s Russian translator, however, interpreted the triad slightly differently: To begin with, I will discuss the pleasures of the imagination that result from actual examination and external objects. These amusements all result from viewing that which is great [veliko], extraordinary [neobychaino], or beautiful [prekrasno].

Akenside is developing Addison’s ideas: Know then, whate’er of nature’s pregnant stores, Whate’er of mimic art’s reflected forms With love and admiration thus inflame The powers of fancy, her delighted sons To three illustrious orders have referr’d; Three sister-graces, whom the painter’s hand, The poet’s tongue confesses; the sublime, The wonderful, the fair. I see them dawn! I see the radiant visions, where they rise, More lovely than when Lucifer displays His beaming forehead through the gates of morn, To lead the train of Phoebus and the spring. (The Pleasures 1, ll. 139–50)

Although both authors seemingly talk of the same triad, they name its components differently: the great, the novel, and the beautiful (Addison); the sublime, the wonderful, and the fair (Akenside). The “novel” (“wonderful,” in Akenside’s terms) was associated with curiosity, thirst for knowledge and passion for diversity. Addison supposed that a person’s natural reaction to a manifestation of the novel would be pleasant astonishment and delight at being taken unawares by something truly surprising and hitherto unknown; in this way, the entire complex of emotions was conveyed by the expression

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“agreeable surprise,” which only partially lent itself to Russian translation (in the eighteenth century the clearest way to express these emotions was to use the old-fashioned verbs chudit’sa [to wonder] and divit’sa [to marvel]). Despite the suddenness of the initial reaction, the correct and fitting perception of the novel, according to Addison, presupposed gradual understanding. The sublime and the majestic stagger one once and for all, while the curious, novel, and peculiar cause him to ponder. As illustration Addison gives what he considers the best example of an encounter with a surprising discovery that allows one to view the surrounding world in a new way. A “visually-educated” reader is acquainted with the great modern discovery which is at present universally acknowledged by all the enquirers into natural philosophy: namely, that light and colors, as apprehended by the imagination, are only ideas in the mind and not qualities that have any existence in matter. As this is a truth which has been proved incontestably by many modern philosophers, and is indeed one of the finest speculations in that science, if the English reader would see the notion explained at large, he may find it in the eighth chapter of the second book of Mr. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The fundamental tenets of the theory of perception Addison outlines in the pages of The Pleasures of the Imagination merged in his contemporaries’ consciousness with Newton’s optical discoveries. Addison did more than just glorify Newton: in the pages of the Spectator the Newtonian method (gradual, experimental, developing comprehension of phenomena through an unhurried analysis of processes) proved to be a metaphor for the new “de-geometrization” of the life itself. It was based on the rejection of any postulates or preconceived schemes in favor of one’s own impressions, visual impressions first and foremost: “To enjoy the Pleasures of Imagination [. . .] is but opening the eye, and the scene enters” (no. 412). The close association of Addison and Newton in the public imagination can be seen in Russia as well, for example, in the placement of Pope’s famous “Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton” immediately after the conclusion of Addison’s Pleasures in the pages of Chtenie dlia vkusa: Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid by night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. These lines by Pope, here placed immediately under Addison’s concluding words, as if summing up what he had said, became a kind of motto for the whole tradition of the scientific glorification of the Creator, not only in Russia,

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but throughout Europe. Line 3 of the Book of Genesis (“And God said, Let there be light, and there was light”), which Pope uses as the basis for his epitaph, is a classic example of the “sublime,” cited by all of its theoreticians from Pseudo-Longinus to Burke. In the Enlightenment era, Newton’s aesthetic perception vacillated between the “sublime” and the “novel” (peculiar, unusual, but explainable); in the final decades of the century these two categories came to engender the synthetic notion of a “new sublime,” which we will address more fully in Part III.

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The Limits of Imitation

“Rainbow” is the last of five verse “programs” in the Anacreontic tradition of “advice to artists” that Derzhavin wrote between 1789 and 1806. It is Apelles, the legendary ancient Greek artist, that the poet addresses here with a call to “compose a semicircle of colors.”1

T h e A r t ist It is no coincidence that the poem addressed to Apelles is about light, color, and radiance. The only more or less specific advice that the Poet gives to the Artist is “to pour light into darkness”: Только одно солнце лучами В каплях дождя, в дол отразясь, Может писать сими цветами В мраке и мгле, вечно светясь.— Умей подражать ты ему, Лей свет в тьму. 1 Only the sun, with its rays Refracted in the vale in drops of rain, Can paint with these colors In darkness and gloom ever shining. Learn to imitate it, Pour light into darkness.

The three monosyllabic words making up the brisk imperative Lei svet v t’mu reflect two closely related tendencies in Russian culture at the turn of the eighteenth century: the emancipation of aesthetics as an independent sphere of knowledge with its own vocabulary and the habitual use of complex Masonic subtexts and allusions in aesthetic discourse.2 94

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The three central stanzas of “Rainbow” (5–7) are devoted to the motif of the futility of imitation. The fifth stanza is a call to the artist not to attempt to compete with the Creator: Нет, Изограф!—хоть превосходишь Всех мастерством дивным твоим; Вижу, что средств ты не находишь С Мастером в том спорить таким, Чей взгляд все один образует,— Рисует. 1 No, Artist, even though you exceed All men with your wonderful mastery; I see that you do not have the means To dispute with such a Master Whose gaze alone forms everything,— Draws [everything].

With the motif of the Creator’s all-embracing, all-portraying gaze, Derzhavin refers to and complicates a particular instance of the ancient topos of Deus Artifex (God the Craftsman)—namely Deus Pictor (God the Artist). Though the details of His depiction vary from country to country, epoch to epoch, and author to author, in its essence Deus Artifex is a stable concept: God may be presented as an artist, architect, or watchmaker, but he is always the Maker and Master.3 Derzhavin’s use of the topos of Deus Artifex is an important link between “Rainbow” and “Magic Lantern,” published two years earlier, in which the Creator is likened to the enigmatic manipulator of a magic lantern.

T h e D a r k Heart, o r t h e C a mera Obscura In his article Derzhavin in the New Century, Ilya Serman cites stanza 8 of “Rainbow” as an example of Derzhavin’s “impossible” syntax.4 But the syntactic ambivalence merely reflects “Rainbow’s” verbal ambivalence, the culmination of which is the image of the “dark, corporeal heart”: 95

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Apelles and His Lines The number of references to Apelles (352–308 BCE) among ancient authors is enormous, although none of his work has survived. Descriptions of his works and anecdotes about his life have often served as “programs” for artists of the early modern era. The primary source of information about Apelles is Book 35 of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, on the arts and sciences. In the eighteenth century Pliny had not been translated into Russian (to this day, a complete Russian translation of Natural History has yet to appear). Nevertheless, his discussion of the fine arts was known in Russia, thanks to French and German translations of Natural History, as well as educational anthologies containing numerous extracts from Pliny, and various journal publications of amusing anecdotes from the lives of great artists of antiquity. Î Àïåëëåñ! Âçÿâøè îðóäüå, Êèñòè ñâîè,—äåðçêîé ðóêîé Ñ ðàçíûõ öâåòîâ âìèã ïîëóêðóæüå Cäåëàé, ñîñòàâü òâåðäîé ÷åðòîé;— Ñîñòàâü,—è ñçîâè çðåòü Àôèíû Êàðòèíû. 1 O, Apelles! Having taken up your tools— Your brushes—with daring hand, Make a semicircle in a flash From different colors, compose it with a firm line— Compose—and summon Athens to behold The paintings. “He exhibited his finished works on the balcony to be viewed by passersby,” writes Pliny, “and he would hide behind the painting to hear the shortcomings that were noted, since he believed that the people were a more attentive judge than he” (Book 35, 84–85): This is one of the best-known legends about Apelles, and Derzhavin recalls it in his “Explanation” when commenting on the fourth stanza of “Rainbow”: “In Athens, the main city in Attica, it was customary to display paintings on

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the square for the judgment of experts.” The motif of exhibiting canvases to be judged by the public was particularly dear to Pliny, who in the section of Natural History devoted to artists emphasized the public and state importance of art, as well as the political function of artistic illusion. Various stories of how Apelles’s works charmed (or deceived) Alexander the Great acquire particular resonance as stories about power over power. In Pliny’s opinion, it was Apelles’s sense of measure that set him apart as an ideal painter and an ideal courtier: He also asserted his claim to another great point of merit: admiring a picture by Protogenes, which bore evident marks of unbounded laboriousness and the most minute finish, he remarked that in every respect Protogenes was fully his equal, or perhaps his superior, except in this, that he himself knew when to take his hand off a picture (manum de tabula tollere)—a memorable lesson, which teaches us that over-carefulness may be productive of bad results.

The intuition that showed Apelles the right moment to stop work on a painting was the same as that which allows a courtier to please his emperor without crossing the line of open flattery. The renewed interest in the Greek artist (or rather, in the image created by Pliny) in the last third of the eighteenth century was tied to the pre-Romantic interpretation of the beauty of the unfinished and the suggestive, as well as the preference for the sketch and fragment rather than the quiet completeness of a finished work. It was this artistic lightness, the unique skill of non finito, that let Apelles paint “some things, which in reality do not admit of being painted—thunder, lightning, and thunderbolts” (Book 35, 97). In his magnum opus, Venus Anadyomene, in which he portrayed Alexander’s favorite concubine Campaspe, Apelles shows Venus drying her hair in the sun after bathing. Ernst Gombrich thought that this work set the course for the development of European art (hence the title of one of his most famous books on Renaissance painting, The Heritage of Apelles [1976]). According to Gombrich, for European culture the name Apelles symbolized not just “the perfect artist” but, more specifically, the creator of a special visual language, “the language of light and luster.”

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Figure 14. Camera obscura. Illustration from Athanasius Kircher’s 1671 Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae.

Может ли кто в свете небесном Чтиться равно солнцу тому, В сердце моем, мрачном, телесном, Что озарив тяжкую тму Творит его радугой мира? Пой, лира! 1 Can anyone in the celestial world Be held in the same esteem as that sun, Which in my dark, corporeal heart, Having illuminated its heavy darkness, Has created the Rainbow of peace? Sing, lyre!

In Derzhavin’s lines the camera obscura, that is, the dark room into which the rays of the sun penetrate through a small aperture, is not an eye or man’s understanding but the poet’s own heart. Is this imagery original with Derzhavin? As it happens, the answer is both yes and no. The image of the “dark heart,” like the entire poem, had its source in one of the three emblematic drawings from the collection The Visible World 98

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in Pictures, which is where I began my discussion of “Rainbow,” quoting the first half of the description and interpretation of the spectrum. The second half of this description reads, The wet and dark cloud is the board on which it traces this arch; its paints are made of light, and its brush is the rays of the sun [. . .]. So is our heart the foundation and board on which is portrayed the Divine Being; Virtue is the paint, and the light of the Most High is grace. If God gazes at your heart, there is nothing more beautiful; when he turns away the radiance of his virtue, there is nothing darker and gloomier than our heart. Then we are merely a shadow, or nothing at all.

The similarity between stanzas 7 and 8 in “Rainbow” and the passage cited above is clear; nevertheless, the way Derzhavin elaborates this motif bears investigation. With the exclamation that concludes stanza 8 (“Sing, lyre!”), the poem makes a decisive turn: the idea of the impossibility of adequately imitating nature gives way to the call for self-expression with reference to the lyre (in the poem’s first edition, this call was not an exclamation but a question: “Sing, lyre?”). In his seminal work The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), Meyer Abrams views this turn from imitation to expression as the essence of European poetry’s turn to Romanticism. According to Abrams, the direction of the Romantic movement was determined in the eighteenth century, and Akenside was among its forerunners: Formulations of the mind as projective of aesthetic qualities are particularly common among those eighteenth-century theorists who infused their Locke5 with a tincture of Neoplatonism. Thus Akenside cried, echoing Plotinus’ favorite metaphor: “Mind, mind, alone, (bear witness, earth and heaven!) / The living fountains in itself contains / Of beauteous and sublime—” though, in a later edition of the Pleasures of Imagination, he prudently substituted “He, God, most high” for “Mind, mind, alone” as the well-spring of the aesthetic fountains.6

The central idea of Derzhavin’s poem is in complete agreement with Akenside’s notion of the “circulation” of heavenly light: 99

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Camera Obscura The optics of the camera obscura are just like those of a magic lantern, but its function is opposite. In a magic lantern the source of light and the reflector are located inside the closed body and direct the ray of light outward through a single aperture; a camera obscura, on the contrary, is an enclosed location (a darkened room, a specially constructed pavilion, or a portable box), into which the light penetrates from outside through an aperture in one of the walls. If the aperture is small, the camera obscura functions like a human eye, projecting an upside-down reflection of outside objects on the interior wall. Indeed, for two hundred years, until the beginning of the twentieth century, the camera obscura served as the most widespread model of the eye, which, like the room-sized versions of the optical device, was thought of as containing an “internal observer.” In St. Petersburg in 1788 (the year Bolkhovitinov published his translation of Akenside, with its apologia for “enlightened sight,” the famous Russian writer, mathematician, and philosopher Yakov Kozelsky published his Discourse of Two Indians, Kalan and Ibrahim, on Human Knowledge. In his explanation of human sight, Kozelsky also made a comparison with the camera obscura: Eyes or the instruments of seeing, which move by means of special muscles, have six layers of clothing or skins; [. . .] the sixth and innermost damp skin [. . .], which is called the retina, is made up of clear veins, the optic nerve [. . .]; on this skin, as in a darkened room (camera obscura) is depicted all that we see. In the 1780s, the concept Kozelsky describes in purely anatomical terms became a subject for poetry as well. Visual perception is the central theme of Mikhail Muravyov’s poem “Sight” (Zrenie [1776, 1785]), a work to which he kept returning over the course of a decade: Ñî ñâåòîì ñðîäñòâåííî îòâåðñòèå çåííèöû, Ãäå ïåðñò íàïå÷àòëåí âñåñèëüíûÿ äåñíèöû, Âñå÷àñíî ëüþùèñÿ ïüåò ñîëíå÷íû ëó÷è È èõ, ñêâîçü âëàæíîñòåé êðèñòàëüíîñòè íåñó÷è, Íà ñåòü, ñïëåòåííóþ èç íåðâîâ, íèçëàãàåò, Ãäå, ñêðûòûé çðèòåëü, äóõ âñåëåííó ñîçåðöàåò. Îòâñþäó îí áåðåò ïîíÿòüå î âåùàõ, È íåò òîãî â äóøå, ÷òî íå áûëî â î÷àõ. (Muraviev 1967, 160–61)

1

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The aperture of the pupil has a kinship with light, Akin to light, the aperture of the pupil, Where the finger of the almighty’s hand is imprinted, Hourly drinks the flowing rays of the sun And, carrying them through the moisture of a crystal, Deposits them onto a net plaited from nerves, Where, a hidden spectator, the spirit contemplates the universe. From every quarter he takes in an understanding of things, And there is nothing in the mind that was not in the eyes. In both Muravyov’s poem and Kozelsky’s treatise, the “hidden spectator,” situated inside the eye like a man inside a camera obscura, is not equated with the human observer: The eyes see when rays of light from things that are seen penetrate the eye’s pupil, and, once refracted, fall on the net of thin skin behind, and portray things similar to those seen, which the mind senses by means of the optic nerve.

John Locke made the camera obscura (which he calls “the dark room”) an epistemological model, turning it from a metaphor for seeing into a metaphor for understanding: For methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left to let in external visible resemblances or ideas of things without: would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them (Book 2, chap. 11, 17).

Together with Plato’s cave, Locke’s camera obscura became one of the “hyper-images” of European culture (to use W.J.T. Mitchell's expression). In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke managed to formulate what Newton had guessed at first, and which he was later able to demonstrate: the eye of the observer exists independently of the mechanism that forms images and likenesses. After all, even Newton, who had voluntarily shut himself up in the Cambridge “dungeon” and observed with fascination the depiction of the sun on the opposite wall, had played the role not of the human viewer, the subject of seeing, but of the “hidden spectator,” that is, the mechanism of the process itself.

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Part II. Rainbow (Refraction) Бога воспой, смелым пареньем Чистого внутрь сердца взноси Дух мой к нему утренним пеньем, Чтобы Творец, вняв с небеси, Влиял чувств моих в глубину Тишину. Светлая чтоб радуга мира, В небе явясь в цвете зарей, Стала в залог тихих дней мира, К счастию всех Царств и Царей. Он всех их один просветит, Примирит. 1 Praise God, with bold flight Of your pure heart within raise up My soul to him with morning song, So that the Creator, having heard from the heavens, Might pour into the depth of my feelings Stillness. So that the bright rainbow of peace, Having appeared in the sky in the color of dawns, Might become a pledge of peaceful days on earth, To the good fortune of all kingdoms and Kings. [God] alone sheds light on all and Reconciles [them].

“Rainbow’s” finale is much more optimistic than the finale of “Magic Lantern,” written two years earlier: instead of fatalism and meek acceptance of the need “to be dreams and see dreams,” “to rise up” and “fall down” at a single word of the Creator, the concluding stanzas of “Rainbow” place hope in an individual’s creative powers. The context in which they appear, however, is somewhat unexpected. The poet addresses his lyre: “with bold flight / Of your pure heart within, raise up / My soul to him with morning song.” The mention in the two rhyming lines of “bold flight” and “morning song” (paren’em / pen’em) in combination with the final word of stanza 9—“stillness” (tishinu)—is a direct reference to the Lomonosov tradition, which Derzhavin professed to have left behind in 1779.7 The final stanza (no. 10) contains a direct allusion to these well-known lines of Lomonosov:8 102

Chapter 2. The Limits of Imitation Царей и царств земных отрада, Возлюбленная тишина, Блаженство сел, градов ограда, Коль ты полезна и красна! 1 The delight of earthly kings and kingdoms, Beloved stillness, The bliss of villages, the delight of cities, How useful and beautiful you are! (italics mine—TS)

The triumph of the Word over even the most perfect image, in the final stanzas of a poem so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of eighteenthcentury optical poetry, is a striking example of the way Derzhavin’s poetry of the “new century” filled old images with new content.

T h e C h i l d of Thaumas “My heart leaps up, when I behold / A rainbow in the sky,” wrote Wordsworth. Rainbows strike us as extraordinary. At once sublime and ephemeral, they set us musing on the transitory nature of beauty. Though rainbows are natural phenomena, they do not “exist” except in the eye of the beholder, since the perception of a rainbow depends on the location of the observer, the angle of reflection between his eye, the sun, and the drops of rain. We all see the same moon, but no two people will ever see the same rainbow. Perhaps this is why the rainbow has historically been a point of intersection for experiments in poetry, philosophy and science. In Plato’s Theaetetus, a dialogue on wisdom and knowledge, Socrates mentions the origins of winged Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, daughter of Thaumas, a sea god whose name recalls the word for “wonder” (thauma). In his conversation with the mathematician Theaetetus, a pupil of Theodorus, Socrates discusses “wonder” as belonging to the poetics of thought itself: I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. 103

Part II. Rainbow (Refraction) He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris [the messenger of heaven] is the child of Thaumas [wonder].9

The Russian translator of Plato in the 1780s summarized the contents of this paragraph in the margins with the phrase: “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” At just about the same time, Goethe was proposing that poetry always precedes rational knowledge. Long before his friendship with the great British meteorologist Luke Howard and his enthusiasm for cumulus, stratus, and cirrus clouds, Goethe devoted several years to the study of geology: this constant back and forth between science and poetry is a leitmotif of his life and work. In this case, Wordsworth’s famous lines from his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) seem particularly apropos: “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.” Unlike Goethe or Wordsworth, Derzhavin never devoted himself to science. In his works we hear only distant echoes of contemporary scientific theories and investigations. At the turn of the century the real source of Derzhavin’s poetry remained as before the various iconological lexicons, ranging from Nestor Maksimovich-Ambodik’s Symbols and Emblems to The Visible World in Pictures. But by the early 1800s century Derzhavin was more and more interested in the conjunction of set symbolic meanings and new, empirical, engaging science, with which he became acquainted for the most part from popular science publications in Herald of Europe, Friend of Enlightenment, Northern Herald, and other periodicals. The combination of his “odic” habits with emblematic imagery and an intensive search for new metaphors and allegories gave birth to the three “meteorological” poems. Derzhavin’s younger contemporary, the English painter John Constable, who made atmospheric phenomena the main subject of his work, wrote: “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?” In all likelihood, Derzhavin’s poem should also be viewed as “a branch of natural philosophy.” The metaphor of scientific experiment became one of the topoi of European poetry of the eighteenth century; this is, perhaps, why Derzhavin saw the rainbow as a fruitful field for metrical experimentation. 104

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It is no accident that Derzhavin was swept up in the interest in mutability and heightened attention to phenomena that develop in time. The first decade of the new century witnessed his passion for Pindar’s odes; his strong desire to offset the “tragedy boom” in Russia with “magical operas,” replete with wondrous transformations; and, finally, his attempts to formulate his theory on the “blended ode,” unthinkable in the literary space of Classicism, in his “Discourse on Lyric Poetry, or About the Ode.” Derzhavin aspired to break free of these limits and create an alternative to normative poetics and the “schoolboy division of poetry according to subject.”10 Derzhavin might have said, with Henry Fielding, “I am not writing a system, but a history.” In his “Discourse on the Ode” he is much more interested in the evolution of lyric poetry than in any classifications or typology, “the pedantic divisions of lyric verse.”11 A similar “de-geometrization” of the literary space, the vestige of a profound “de-geometrization” of the cultural space of the eighteenth century, would find a more complete realization in the poem “To Evgeny: Life at Zvanka” (1807), which Pumpiansky called “Derzhavin’s main bequest to the next generation.”12

Part III 1

Garden of Memory (Reflection)

I was left alone Seeking this visible world, nor knowing why... (W. Wordsworth)

On Sunday, May 5, 1807, Stepan Zhikharev noted in his journal: Yesterday’s literary evening at A. S. Khvostov’s was the last one, and there will be no more until autumn. Gavrila Romanovich is going away to his Zvanka, on the banks of the Volkhov, and wants to devote his leisure to a verse description of his country life. ‘I no longer have the strength for the lyre,’ he says; ‘I want to take up the reed pipe.’ But it seems he’s just saying that, while he thinks otherwise, and at the first opportunity he won’t be able to resist taking up the ode: no matter how much a person may weaken, he can’t go against his own calling. ‘A leopard can’t change his spots.’1

The young friend of the aging poet was only partly right: the shepherd’s pipe did not replace the lyre in the hands of Derzhavin, but having left the capital, he did immediately devote his time to a “verse description of his country life.” Three months later, in August, the poem “To Evgeny: Life at Zvanka” (Evgeniiu. Zhizn’ Zvanskaia) was published in Herald of Europe.2 One of Derzhavin’s longest poems, “To Evgeny: Life at Zvanka” (252 lines, 63 stanzas) is remarkable for the laconicism of its title, at once peculiar and sublime. A mere three words make up the Russian title, which nevertheless comprises two sentences. At first, Derzhavin intended to title his work “Life at Zvanka” (Zhizn’ na Zvanke), with no reference to the addressee; he later added the possessive pronoun “my” (Zhizn’ moia na Zvanke), but soon was leaning toward “A Picture of Life at Zvanka” (Kartina zhizni Zvanskoi). Though commentators inevitably mention as a precipitating event the visit of Evgeny Bolkhovitinov, the eventual addressee of the poem, to Zvanka, soon after Derzhavin arrived there in the summer of 1807, in fact, the poet conceived the project, a small-scale poem in the descriptive genre, earlier, while still in St. Petersburg.

Chapter 1

The Keys to Zvanka

Unlike the texts analyzed in earlier chapters, “Life at Zvanka” has long attracted the attention of scholars. Indeed, no other nineteenth-century work by Derzhavin has garnered so much scholarly attention. It was traditionally thought that “Life at Zvanka”, one of the last flights of Derzhavin’s genius, was a masterwork whose singularity served only to confirm his decline. A poem about secluded life in the country, “Life at Zvanka” occupied a rather secluded place in Derzhavin’s poetic oeuvre. Focusing on the features that make this poem stand apart has often resulted in its being read without respect to its immediate context—that is, Derzhavin’s late works and the culture of Russia and Europe in the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century. One of the few elements of its immediate context that did attract critical attention was Vasily Zhukovsky’s 1806 poem “Evening” (Vecher). The time of composition of the two poems (1806–7) and their apparent emotional accord (based on the correspondence of both texts with the European pre-Romantic tradition of “evening poetry”), as well as the similarities in general stanzaic structure and metrics, make it possible to speak of “Life at Zvanka” as Derzhavin’s poetic response to Zhukovsky. Scholars viewed the poem’s deliberate flouting of the rules of grammar and prosody as a stylistic challenge hurled by Derzhavin at the inordinate “purity” and “smoothness” of Zhukovsky’s style, incompatible, in Derzhavin’s opinion, with true poetry.3 The significance of the Zhukovsky context is indisputable, but it represents only one among many lines of intersection that inform Derzhavin’s poem.

B e a t u s , My Brother Lev Pumpiansky characterizes “Life at Zvanka” with a model precision and succinctness: “‘To Evgeny. Life at Zvanka,’ 1807, an ‘ode’ so overloaded with elements of post-odic poetry that it ceases to belong to its own tradition.”4 108

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And yet he does ascribe “Life at Zvanka” to the category of “the nationalHoratian ode,” similar in terms of its literary origins and “national” content to the ode “On the Death of Prince Meshchersky” (Na smert’ kniazia Meshcherskogo, 1779). According to Pumpiansky, the unusual stanzaic structure of this ode (quatrains rather than the usual eight- or ten-line stanzas; iambic hexameter with one additional “shortened,” four-foot line rather than the expected iambic tetrameter) points to the fact that it is weighted more toward the Russian, non-Horatian ode. Блажен, кто менее зависит от людей, Свободен от долгов и от хлопот приказных, Не ищет при дворе ни злата, ни честей И чужд сует разнообразных! Зачем же в Петрополь на вольну ехать страсть, С пространства в тесноту, с свободы за затворы, Под бремя роскоши, богатств, сирен под власть И пред вельможей пышны взоры? 1 Happy is he who least depends on others, Who’s free from debt and from official cares, Who doesn’t seek at Court for gold or honors, And who’s remote from bustle of all kinds. Why thirst to go to Petropolis willingly? Trade space for confines, freedom for a cage, Emburdened by luxury and wealth, beneath the Sirens’ sway, And place yourself before the grandees’ sumptuous gaze?

Horace’s second epode opens with quotation marks; with the exception of the last four lines, the entire text is presented as an extended quotation, namely, the moneylender Alfius’s meditations: “Happy the man who, far away from business cares, like the pristine race of mortals, works his ancestral acres with his steers, from all money-lending free; who is not, like a soldier, roused by the wild clarion, nor dreads the angry sea; he avoids the Forum and the proud thresholds of more powerful citizens.”5

The European tradition of imitations of the Second Epode frequently ignored both Alfius and the quotation marks, thus removing the poem’s 109

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ironic frame and putting the famous “Happy is he who” into the mouth of Horace himself, or those of his imitators. Russian poetry is no exception, and this tendency manifested itself quite distinctly in Derzhavin’s works.6 The opening lines of the poem tie it to both Latin poetry and the biblical tradition: through Horace’s Beatus ille qui procul negotiis we see a gleam of “Blessed is the man” (Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas) from Psalm I (Derzhavin’s own adaptation of Psalm I dates to 1789). As far as the Horatian context is concerned, it includes more than the Second Epode Derzhavin so obviously invokes: no less significant to “Life at Zvanka” is the Horatian concept of ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry), perhaps indirectly alluded to by one of the poem’s working titles: “A Picture of Life at Zvanka.” Why did Derzhavin change the title? Does the change represent at least a partial rejection of the idea of a “verse description”? And if that is indeed the case, why is Derzhavin rejecting it? In calling “Life at Zvanka” a “national” Horatian ode, Pumpiansky contrasts it with Derzhavin’s other imitations of Horace, characterized as “mechanical” (cf., for instance, “In Praise of Country Life” [Pokhvala sel’skoi zhizni, 1798], an earlier adaptation of the Second Epode). Derzhavin’s interest in Horace developed from two elements of his poetry: (1) imagery and themes, and (2) formal matters (versification). While the first “Horatian landscapes” begin to appear in his poems in the 1780s, immediately following the famous “turning point” of 1779 (when, according to the poet’s own admission, he “chose an absolutely particular path,” having repudiated Pindar’s “soaring flight” in favor of Horace’s reverie), Derzhavin’s first attempts to master the forgotten Latin versification begin later and come less easily; the difficult isometric stanzas don’t appear in Derzhavin’s lyrics until the early 1800s. The first “meeting” of Horatian theme and form, however, takes place only in the poetic space of Zvanka. This union of theme and form, imagery and stanzaic organization, the verse and the everyday life of two cultures separated by eighteen centuries, is clearly what made “Life at Zvanka” for Pumpiansky an “ode in the national Horatian” tradition.7 In the eighteenth century the very concept of a Horatian ode “conforming to certain national customs” was associated above all with the name of Alexander Pope, whose Imitations of Horace (1733–38), significantly departing from the texts of the Latin originals and replete with English toponyms and allusions to British history, laid the groundwork for new ideas about the nature of imitation and the laws governing the 110

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adaptation of poetic and cultural models.8 Pope wanted the reader to know precisely what had been excised and what added to the text of the Latin original, so that “Horace is made to talk English.”9 Thus, he insisted that the imitation-cum-translation and the Latin text be printed en face, line for line, with the deletions and additions marked, so that the reader could see for himself that although Pope departed from Horace in the details, he coincided with him in the main thing: his love of feeling free, dependent on no one (especially the powers that be), and content with the day at hand and his own secluded patch of earth: Know, all the distant Din that World can keep Rolls o’er my Grotto, and but sooths my Sleep. There, my Retreat the best Companions grace, Chiefs, out of War, and Statesman, out of Place. There St. John mingles with my friendly Bowl, The feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul. (Imitations of Horace, Satires 2:1)

By St. John Pope here refers to his friend and mentor, Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). One of the leaders of the Tories, a major opponent of George II and Robert Walpole, and the author of the influential neo-Platonic treatise On the Idea of a Patriot King (1738), Bolingbroke spent many years in exile. He believed that exile (as well as voluntary self-seclusion) was extremely beneficial for self-cultivation and education.10 Pope worshiped Bolingbroke’s philosophical and political ideas and dedicated to him the most famous of his writings and one of the most influential books of the the “long” eighteenth century: the Essay on Man (1730).

E s s a y o n Man The Essay opens with an apostrophe to St. John and a reflection developing, among other things, the Beatus ille topos: Awake, my St. John! Leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of Kings. Let us (since Life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) 111

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man; A mighty maze! But not without a plan; A Wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot, Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar. (Epistle 1, 1–12)

In 1762 there appeared in Amsterdam a hefty volume collecting under one cover translations of the Essay on Man into five European languages. Although there was no Russian translation in this volume, one had been published five years earlier. Nikolai Popovsky, favorite pupil and follower of Lomonosov, penned this remarkable, witty, and precise translation, which to this day retains its poetic force. Popovsky was known, first and foremost, for his translations of Horace, which served to link the Roman lyric poet and his English “imitator” even more closely in the minds of the Russian reader. His verse translation of the Essay, executed on the basis of Etienne de Silhouette’s French prose translation, which by the end of the century had seen five editions (1757, 1763, 1787, 1791, 1802), became a classic in Russia. During the last decade of the century the demand for Pope’s “vindication of the ways of God to man” increased. In the tragic year 1793, which shocked the world with the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Evgeny Bolkhovitinov, then a newly ordained priest in Voronezh, began his work on a new translation of the Essay on Man, a poem that was “thoughtful and pleasing to the despondent heart.”11 The French Revolution gave Pope’s Essay a special meaning. Faith in the triumph of good over evil and the rationality of the established laws of man had been shaken—contemporary society seemed to many like a dark abyss with no apparent way out, but Bolkhovitinov seemed to find answers to the questions that were worrying him in the poetic images that Pope had painted with such a deft hand in the Essay. Bolkhovitinov thought of Pope as the last great English poet, finding the Essay so sensitive and touching that it made death itself seem less burdensome. Bolkhovitinov worked on the translation in fits and starts. He began in 1793 but later put the work aside, returning to it only at the turn of 112

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the century, in 1799. In a letter to his Voronezh friend and constant correspondent Doctor Vasily Makedonets, Evgeny wrote: “I translated it in the last dull months of my residence in Voronezh in order to console myself and later, having amplified the commentary, submitted it for publication.” It is to the “memory of [their] friendship” that the translation of the Essay was dedicated.12 Regarding his work on the Essay on Man, Bolkhovitinov says almost verbatim what Derzhavin would say a few years later on the circumstances of his writing “Magic Lantern”: “And in order to bear all this with equanimity and to put everything in the hands of the Almighty, I wrote this piece for my own consolation” (Derzhavin 9:258). As we know, the immediate occasion for writing “Magic Lantern” was Derzhavin’s removal from the post of minister of justice and the death of Nikolai Lvov, his friend and relative. Evgeny had incommesurably more reasons to require consolation: during the course of 1798 alone, all three of his children died; a year later, he was widowed and had lost all interest in worldly life. He returned to his translation of Pope after becoming a monk and while awaiting his appointment to the Alexander Nevsky Seminary. While it is impossible to speak of the losses suffered by Bolkhovitinov and Derzhavin in the same breath, what awaited them both was the same: a sense of hopeless disconnection within the Great Chain of Being, which to Pope had seemed unshakable, as he makes plain in the rhetorical question, addressed to Man, in the opening of his Essay: Is the great chain, that draws all to agree And drawn supports, upheld by God or thee? (Epistle 1, 33–34)

By 1804, when Bolkhovitinov was at last ready to publish his translation and Derzhavin was finishing his “Magic Lantern”, both the poet and the priest had diverged from Pope’s comforting and stable worldview. It took Bolkhovitinov seven years to get his translation into print. The lengthy delay was due to a number of circumstances, including the appearance in 1801 of another prose rendition of the Essay, this one by Fyodor Zagorsky, who had worked from the English original.13 Evgeny found the new translation to be too literal, but he was obliged to look over his own work, which had been based on five French translations, once more.14 Finally, in the summer of 1806, Bolkhovitinov’s Essay on Man, with 113

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an introduction as well as a “historical and philosophical commentary,” was published in Moscow.15 The opening lines of the first epistle translated word for word back from Russian read as follows: Awake, dear St. John! Leave all trivial subjects to base ambition and the arrogance of rulers. If in this short life we hardly have time to look around us and to die: then let us at least look at this spectacle of man.—Wonderful labyrinth!—However, there is in it an arrangement, a field, in which flowers grow amid the thistles!— A garden with captivating forbidden fruits!—Let us walk together across this broad field, let us survey what is in the meadows, and what is hidden in the ravines, let us penetrate the dark paths of man who blindly creeps along.16

The key word in the English original is the verb “expatiate,” which seems to defy an exact translation: Let us (since Life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man.

The verb “expatiate,” which Oxford English Dictionary now defines as “speak or write in detail about,” also has the secondary meaning of “to wander at will.”17 All three of Pope’s Russian translators, including Bolkhovitinov, choose the latter, which is also the rarer of the two. They would seem to be following the lead of Etienne de Silhouette’s French translation: “Puisque la vie ne s’étend et ne se termine guères à regarder ce qui nous environne et à mourir; parcourons donc au moins cette scène de l’Homme.”18 Nevertheless, the identification of the route of the philosophical ramble with the movement of human thought, conveyed in the semantics of this English verb, is reflected in the text of all three Russian translations. Likewise, the conversations between Derzhavin and Bolkhovitinov, who met at Zvanka in the summer of 1807, unfolded in two fields: the natural and the philosophical. What did the poet and the priest so “freely talk about,” what did they discuss and what did they recall as they crossed the “broad field” at Zvanka? One plausible topic was the new Russian editions of Pope (the first complete translation into Russian of yet another major text, An Essay on Criticism, appeared almost simultaneously with Bolkhovitinov’s translation 114

Chapter 1. The Keys to Zvanka

Figure 15. Portrait of Alexander Pope, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1716.

of the Essay on Man. This new edition was executed by Sergei Shikhmatov, another of Derzhavin’s interlocutors during this period.)19 In his letters from the summer of 1806 Evgeny complains to Makedonets that he has received only five copies of his own translation (“I sent one to the metropolitan, kept one for myself, and I am forwarding the other three to you”).20 Bolkhovitinov got the next batch of books in September, which means that Derzhavin could not have received his copy until the autumn. He spent the winter in Petersburg, while Evgeny was in Novgorod; consequently, the meeting at Zvanka in June 1807 was the first since the poet’s presumed acquaintance with the new translation of the Essay on Man. Derzhavin knew Popovsky’s translation well, and given that in 1806–7 Evgeny was one of his chief correspondents, we can be almost certain of the poet’s interest in the new book. In the introduction to the long-delayed publication, Bolkhovitinov discusses Pope’s poem in detail and gives some information about the poet himself: [The epistles] are among the best of his compositions. He also wrote odes, fables, epitaphs, prologues and epilogues, which the English consider to be models of their kind. They esteem Mr. Pope as their most beautiful and most exacting versifier, and what is more important, the most harmonious of them all. According to the reckoning of the English, he transformed the harsh squeal of the English trumpet into the tender sound of the flute. 115

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Pope loved his kin and was steadfast in friendship. His sense of honor was unyielding; however, it must be admitted that he had a Philosophical Mind, rather than a Philosophical Heart. His sensibility often led him beyond the bounds of decency. But it is true that great men generally are extraordinary in both extremes. His health was weak, and he often appealed to art to ameliorate it.21

Derzhavin and Pope overlapped in the eighteenth century for just a few months. Derzhavin was born in 1743; Pope died “from water in the chest” in 1744, at the age of fifty-six. Legendary already during his lifetime and even more so after his death, the figure of Pope seems to have served as a point of orientation for Derzhavin late in his life. It is not simply a matter of being the embodiment, far beyond the borders of England, of the idea and genre of the praise of country life: Derzhavin could not but take to heart certain details from Pope’s biography, set forth by Bolkhovitinov in the section explaining the “occasion that prompted the writing of An Essay on Man.” As he tells the story of how the poet was hounded after the publication in 1715 of his famous translation of the Iliad, Evgeny writes, It contained the abundance, force, and grandeur of the poetry of the Greek Homer, and the time of this book’s publication was the time of Pope’s greatest fame; but at the same time it earned him a great number of enemies. Critics surrounded him like a swarm of insects. Some of them were so base as to criticize his figure and bearing (and indeed Mr. Pope was far from handsome). They wanted to prove that he did not know Greek, because he was vile, stingy, and hunchbacked. These crude gibes deeply wounded Mr. Pope’s pride and distressed him. He wrote a satire on his enemies entitled The Dunciad [. . .], in which he examined one by one his critics and even the booksellers. During the process of writing this cantankerous poem Pope had second thoughts and in the presence of Dr. Swift, he threw it into the fire. But Swift managed to retrieve it and to Pope’s shame he saved it. If Pope had ignored his critics, he would have avoided a great deal of distress. However, the very act of confronting this swarm of pernicious critics stirred them to buzz around him even more [. . .].22 He wished to add a few new traits to his satire in The Dunciad. However, his friends persuaded him not to reply to his critics except with new, excellent, model compositions; this is the occasion that gave birth to Pope’s Essay on Man.23 116

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The excerpt cited above is almost a word-for-word translation of the introduction to the 1796 French edition. The only thing Bolkhovitinov added and put into italics was a few sentences on the senselessness of petty revenge (even if poetic!) against one’s enemies (even if literary foes!): “swarms of pernicious critics,” who are inclined “to buzz the more,” the more you pay attention to them.24 As we recall, Derzhavin’s acquaintance with Bolkhovitinov in 1805 was brought about by the good offices of Count Dmitry Khvostov. In reply to Khvostov’s request for information for the dictionary prepared by Bolkhovitinov Derzhavin wrote, I have just received Your Highness’s letter dated the 15th of the present month. I thank you most fervently. From it I see that His Grace Evgeny in Novgorod requires my biography. I would gladly make the acquaintance of the esteemed archbishop. I shall write to him and invite him to visit me. It is a matter of 30 versts; perhaps he will deign to visit me in my hut. Then I can talk with him about this matter in person; for it is not very comfortable to put oneself on paper, in particular certain stories about things that have happened to me. As far as literature goes, when the occasion has arisen, in passing, I have told Count Alexei Ivanovich Musin-Pushkin certain things. In due course these can be supplemented, but I will say to you now: Who led him to Helikon And directed his steps? Not the uproar of rhetorical schools: Nature, Need and Enemies.25 The explanation of these four lines contains the story of my verse, the reasons for it and its necessity; while I meanwhile remain with the most sincere respect, and so forth.

The word “enemies” (vragi), standing in a strong, rhymed position in this quatrain, proves to be nearly the main reason of the three which motivate Derzhavin’s literary career. The final line, later used by Bolkhovitinov in both his personal correspondence and his essays on Derzhavin, defined the general tone of the Note of 1805, which he would later painstakingly edit. As Evgenii aptly put it in the Note, Derzhavin “alluded to too many living heroes.”26 “But he demands,” Bolkhovitinov wrote to Khvostov, “that all of this be published. Let’s make our esteemed Horace happy. Epictetus’s earthenware lamp has come to be greatly valued by posterity. But Biography 117

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is not History and can tolerate all kinds of trifles about the people being described.”27 The introduction to An Essay on Man¸ unlike the translation itself, was written by Bolkhovitinov immediately prior to publication, that is in 1805, practically simultaneously with the note about Derzhavin. In this connection, the lines from the introduction quoted above regarding Pope’s friends, who had advised the great poet to ignore the enemies “buzzing around,” might be read as an echo of Derzhavin’s “self-definition,” a cautious piece of advice which the priest gave to the poet, without forgetting his place as a younger friend. A Retired Poet, cultivating his garden and answering “his enemies by no means other than new, excellent, model compositions,” a statesman, who had renounced the bustle of the capital in favor of a solitude shared only with the great poets of antiquity and a few friends—these traits from the life and works of Pope gave shape to a social construct, a program for how to conduct one’s literary and everyday life, which must have helped Derzhavin, at least in part, come to terms with the current state of his affairs.28 But the main thing is that Pope’s name and his estate in Twickenham were inextricably connected with the concept of the “Poet’s House”—a locus and its genius—one of the most important topoi of European poetic biographies. “You may Trace [a man] . . . in the Place where he has lived,” Addison writes in one of his essays in the Spectator (583). The house, rebuilt according to Pope’s own designs, the garden on which he worked with William Kent, a leading architect of the time, the weeping willow (the first in England, as legend has it) brought from afar and planted on the banks of the Thames with his own hands; the famous Grotto, on the construction of which he worked for more than two decades, right up to his death—all these elements engendered a system of coordinates on which the diverse nature of Pope’s poetry was inscribed. “Gardening is . . . nearer God’s own Work than poetry,” asserts Pope.29 The aesthetic program most clearly formulated in An Essay on Man, which elevates diversity to the ranks of a universal artistic principle, proved to be equally applicable to both literature and landscape design. Gardens and texts, organized in accordance with the principle of variety, share a common metaphoric potential. Satires and epistles, translations and imitations of ancient texts, creativity as a process proved to be localized in a particular 118

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space, which in turn acquired sacred status. As James Thomson, younger contemporary of Pope and author of The Seasons, put it: Slow let us trace the matchless vale of Thames; Fair-winding up to where the muses haunt In Twit’nam bowers, and for their Pope implore The healing god, to royal Hampton’s pile. (Summer, ll. 1425–28)

From the poet’s death in 1744 to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pope’s house and park remained an object of constant pilgrimage, one of the “must go” places on the literary map of England. In the third song of Jacques Delille’s Gardens, or the Art of Laying out Grounds (Les Jardins, ou l’Art d’embeillir les paysages, 1782, 1801), a model work of the descriptive genre, and thus organized around model objects of description, Twickenham is mentioned as an example of a solicitous, anxious attitude toward a place in which everything reminds one of its great resident (this description was included by Delille only in the later, 1801 edition of the poem). Tel j’ai vu ce Twicknham, dont Pope est créateur; Le goût le défendit d’un art profanateur; Et ses maîtres nouveaux, révérant sa mémoire, Dans l’œuvre de ses mains ont respecté sa gloire. Ciel! avec quel transport j’ai visité ce lieu Dont Mindipe est le maître, et dont Pope est le dieu! Le plus humble réduit avoit pour moi des charmes. Le voilà ce musée, où, l’œil trempé de larmes, De la tendre Héloïse il soupiroit le nom; Là, sa muse évoquoit Achille, Agamemnon, Célébroit Dieu, le monde, et ses lois éternelles, Ou les régles du goût, ou les cheveux des belles; Je reconnois l’alcove où, jusqu’à son réveil, Les doux rêves du sage amusoient son sommeil; Voici le bois secret, voici l’obscure allée Où s’échauffoit sa verve en beaux vers exhalée. (Chant 3, 553–72)30

Alexander Voeikov began his work on the Russian translation of Gardens in 1806. The first excerpts were published in the same August issue of Herald of Europe as “Life at Zvanka”;31 two poetic landscapes were separated by only ten pages. 119

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Figure 16. Alexander Pope's villa in 1736 (engraving).

Most likely, however, Derzhavin had become acquainted with Voeikov’s translation earlier. He was also familiar with the description of the visit to Twickenham contained in one of Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler. A great admirer of Delille, Karamzin incorporated fragments of his own translations of Gardens into the text of his Letters; therefore, the close correspondence of his reminiscences about the “pretty village where the philosopher and poet Pope lived and died” with lines from Delille is not so surprising: From Richmond I went to Twickenham, a pretty village where the philosopher and poet Pope lived and died. There are many handsome country houses here, but I was most interested in seeing the poet’s house, now the property of Lord Stanhope. I saw his study, his armchair, the bower where, on summer days, he translated Homer—the grotto with its marble bust of him, and from which the Thames is visible—and finally, the century-old willow, which has bifurcated in a wonderful manner, beneath which the philosopher loved to think, the poet to dream. I tore off a twig for a keepsake. In the village church is a marble monument to Pope’s memory by his friend Dr. Warburton. Above is the bust and beneath the inscription written by Pope himself: Heroes and Kings! Your distance keep; In peace let one poor Poet sleep, Who never flattered folks like you, Let Horace blush and Virgil too!32 120

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Artistic representations of Pope’s villa high above the Thames were even more numerous than written descriptions. Watercolors, engravings, and prints of Twickenham were sold throughout Europe by the hundreds. These representations gradually formed a composite, emblematic image: the house on the river; a few sailboats dotted the river; miniature human figures scattered on the sloping banks “for scale.” For still more features of this iconographic type, one need only consult the albums of “picturesque views” published in large quantities in England at the end of the eighteenth century.33 This was how a poet’s house was supposed to look. Pope acquired a particular significance in Derzhavin’s eyes on account of one other important circumstance. Both Delille and Karamzin mention the names of the new owners of Twickenham (Lord Claire and Lord Stanhope, respectively). “All this is mine but till I die: / I can’t but think ’twould be more clever / To me and to my heirs forever,” Pope wrote not long before his death. Unlike Horace’s Sabine estate, presented to him by Maecenas, neither the house nor the garden belonged to Pope: a Roman Catholic, he was forbidden to own private property (nor could he live within a ten-mile radius of Westminster). Pope rented the Twickenham villa in 1718 and lived there, by and large funded by the royalties from translations and income from his literary ventures. After his death the villa changed hands a number of times. This fact must have alarmed Derzhavin, since he was not the real owner of “his estates” either, and was uncertain about their future. Derzhavin married his second wife, Darya Alekseevna Dyakova, on January 31, 1795; the following year she acquired Zvanka and the adjacent lands on the banks of the Volkhov River. Contemporaries remembered Dyakova as a thrifty, sensible, and commanding woman: By nature Darya Alekseevna was in many regards the opposite of the late Ekaterina Iakovlevna; she was self-absorbed, restrained, and cold in her dealings, even with people who were close to her, she was frequently impolite to her husband’s friends, but at the same time she could be charitable, just, and magnanimous, and therefore, despite her shortcomings, she was respected by those who lived with her.34

Darya Alekseevna bought the estate from her mother, and it always remained decidedly her own personal possession. To the poet’s continual thoughts about the need “to defeat Saturn,” that is, to withstand the 121

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transitory nature of the world, was added his bitter disappointment at the impossibility of saving the places dear to his heart from ruining. Nor could he leave the Poet’s House (one of Nikolai Lvov’s last and best creations) to his heirs, since the poet had no children from either of his two marriages. This circumstance made it all the more urgent that he make a record of it, down to the smallest detail. If a monument was not to be erected, then something, at the very least, had to withstand destruction.

T h e A r t of Memory

Figure 17. View of Derzhavin’s house at Zvanka from the Volkhov River. Engraving from the Herald of Europe, no. 2 (1810).

In late June 1807, when he sent the recently completed text of “Life at Zvanka”to Bolkhovitinov, Derzhavin enclosed a small watercolor by his clerk, who was also the household’s artist, architect, and organizer of fireworks, Evstafy (Astafy) Mikhailovich Abramov. The watercolor, executed in accordance with the iconographic canon of the “Poet’s House” outlined above, portrayed the manor house high on the bank above the majestic Volkhov, village huts on the hills, and sailboats on the river. Subsequently, the same Abramov made several engravings from the watercolor “for posterity” (one of these was published as a supplement to Herald of Europe, no. 2, for 1810). 122

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The inscription on the reverse of the watercolor, in Derzhavin’s hand and dated June 22, ran as follows: На память твоего, Евгений, посещенья, Усадьбы маленькой изображен здесь вид. Гораций как бывал Меценом в восхищеньи, Так был обрадован тобой мурза-пиит. 1 In memory of your visit, Evgeny, A view of the little estate is here portrayed. As Horace was delighted by Maecenas, So did the Tatar poet rejoice in you.

Word and image, text and drawing augmented, explicated, and to a certain extent doubled one another, forming a tripartite whole (poem— watercolor—poetic inscription to the watercolor), similar in its semantic structure to an emblem and all directed to one purpose: remembrance. Like the solemn odes cannot be studied outside the cultural and political context that occasioned them, the poetics of “Life at Zvanka” cannot be appreciated in isolation from its pragmatics. Therefore, one of the most productive contexts for examining the poem is “the art of memory,” as formulated and explored in Frances Yates’s seminal study of the same name.35 “Almost all the elements from Derzhavin’s poetry are represented in “Life at Zvanka,” writes Pumpiansky; “one may look at it, to a certain extent, as a summation if not of all his poetry, then of its best (odic) part.”36 The poetic stroll through the environs at Zvanka outlines the contours of a mnemonic map, which the poet can consult at any moment to bring to life, in his own memory and that of his reader, not only the ideas and people with which he associates certain places but also the main images and motifs of his own poetry. “Life at Zvanka” is addressed to His Grace, Evgeny Bolkhovitinov. If during their meeting in June 1807 at Zvanka, Derzhavin and Bolkhovitinov did discuss An Essay on Man and its author—a peevish dwarf who wore a black velvet hat and a knitted wig, a man whose quiet belief in world harmony held all of Europe in thrall for an entire century—then it is completely logical to suppose that the poem composed “on themes” from 123

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this meeting (like the watercolor created by the clerk Abramov in memory of His Grace's visit) should be replete with echoes of the Essay on Man—or echoes of this conversation. Let’s reconsider the lines of Pope, as translated by Evgeny: If in this short life there is just sufficient time for us to look round us and to die: then let us look at the very least at this spectacle of man.— Wonderful labyrinth!—However there is in it an arrangement, a field, in which flowers grow amidst the thistles!—A garden with captivating forbidden fruits!—Let us walk together across this broad field . . .

It would be an exaggeration to see in Derzhavin’s poem a condensed translation of Pope, rather it is a matter of “variations on a theme,” of following the compositional model set in the opening lines of An Essay on Man (not without reason did the stern Gotthold Ephraim Lessing call Pope’s Essay a “rambling work”): a philosophical stroll inscribed upon the real space of a scenic park. The same could be said about the poetic itinerary in “Life at Zvanka”. Let’s not forget that the special pride of Zvanka was the enormous English garden that began right outside the manor house and was called “the ramble” (progul’nyi). Derzhavin’s “essay” is more about himself than about man in general, but he does raise questions about the place of man in the universe, his position in society, about pride, and, above all, about the nature of happiness. Can one discern in “Life at Zvanka” the four-part structure characteristic of not only An Essay on Man but also the majority of didactic and descriptive poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The answer to that is “yes and no.” Sixty-three stanzas cannot be divided by four without a remainder, so the parts cannot be precisely equal in length. There is no thematic turning point or stop in the flow of “Life at Zvanka” after the first “quarter.” Nevertheless, the central stanzas (31–32), which bring optical instruments into the picture, are compositionally marked and set apart, while the final fifteen (49–63), in which the poet remains alone with himself, assume a completely different tone from the rest of the poem.37 It is more accurate, therefore, to speak of traces of a fourpart composition, which can be glimpsed through the irregularity of the physical and poetic landscape of “Life at Zvanka”. In a very similar way Pope’s beloved creation, his Ars Poetica—the garden in Twickenham— 124

Chapter 1. The Keys to Zvanka Figure 18. Friedrich Strass’s historical map, the River of Time (detail; 1805)

combined a symmetrical design with eclectic contents; elements of a regular park with a picturesque “variety.”38 Pope’s name appeared on Friedrich Strass’s historical map, the famous River of Time, acquired by Derzhavin in 1805, which decorated the wall of his study. The map was accompanied by a “guide,” a small book titled Handbook for the Use of This Map and a Short Survey of World History for the Explication of its Emblematic Representation.39 Pope was mentioned on the map of the eighteenth century along with Newton, Addison, Euler, Buffon, and Linnaeus. Each of these names stood for some of the surmises, doubts, experiments, discoveries, triumphs and disappointments that defined the eighteenth century. An Essay on Man represented its time in a similar, metonymic, fashion. The part stood for the whole, the text for the context that produced it: Palladian villas; English gardens moving farther and farther away from the regularity once so typical of them; Boyle’s chemistry and Newton’s physics, Locke’s psychology and Addison’s aesthetics—the list could be continued. Which of the characteristic traits, signs, and attributes of the eighteenth century, both named and unnamed above, find reflection in “Life at Zvanka”? We can answer this question only by expatiating with Pope and Boling-broke, following in the footsteps of Derzhavin and Bolkhovitinov, 125

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and making our way through the “wonderful labyrinth” of the poem and its environs, jumping ahead and retracing our steps, looking into nooks and crannies and wandering into dead ends, as we constantly stray from the path.

A P e c u l iar Vision: Approaches to the Text “Life at Zvanka” is “the first country house in Russian literature,” claims Pumpiansky:40 it indirectly borders on the English country house poem, which flourished in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and was crowned by Pope’s Epistle to Lord Burlington (1731), with its mingling of Horatian topoi and architectural criticism. This “thin but clearly defined tradition,” as one of the first and most perceptive historians of country house poetry, George Richard Hibbard, characterized it, did not exist outside England and comprised poems that sang of country life and deliberated on the relationship between poetry and society;41 by and large, its authors dedicated their verse to their hospitable patrons.42 Tracing its roots back to that same Second Epode, country house poetry grew out of the intersection of several traditions: in addition to the Horatian tradition, it absorbed traits from Virgil’s Georgics and Martial’s Epigrams, Latin epideictic epistles and sixteenth-century English satires, and contributed quite a bit on its own. The defining characteristic of the genre is the catalogue of the patron’s possessions (or, much more rarely, the poet’s property): each work describes the surrounding natural landscape, the adjoining holdings and local products/specialties, if any, as well as the house’s architectural characteristics and interior. The only thing that changes from poem to poem is the proportion of these various kinds of description.43 As mentioned above, Derzhavin did not feel himself to be the master of the Zvanka estate. What he could allow himself was the “kind of property in everything he sees,” about which Addison writes in one of his articles from Pleasures of the Imagination: A man of polite imagination is let into a great many pleasures, that the vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion in a statue. He meets 126

Chapter 1. The Keys to Zvanka with a secret refreshment in a description, and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows, than another does in the possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude, uncultivated parts of nature administer to his pleasures: so that he looks upon the world, as it were in another light, and discovers in it a multitude of charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of mankind.44

Two hundred years later Vladimir Nabokov would express something very similar when he spoke of the “unreal estate of memory.” Nothing could hinder Derzhavin from seeing and recalling his surroundings just as they appeared to him, and by the same token allowing others to see and remember them in the same way. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that the catalogue in “Life at Zvanka” is not only and not primarily an inventory of Derzhavin’s holdings but also a listing of the various means of apprehending reality, above all visual ones. The number and variety of verbs of visual perception in the text— 18 percent, or almost one-fifth of all the verbs—show the poet’s heightened interest in the visual. The thematic transitions are accompanied by shifts in the “descriptive register”: every object has its own type of view, and every type of view has its own descriptive language. Alongside a penetrating “mental glance” (directed either to the past—“into the mirror of time”—or addressing the future: “This house will fall in ruins”) and pastoral somnolence (“What doesn’t enter my somnolent mind?”) we find a maximally focused “sharp” vision (des Blickes scharfe Sehe, in Goethe’s words); a glance that skims along the tops of objects as if parallel to the earth’s surface (“over the bowl of waters under the sky”); broad “panoramic” view; and finally, the picturesque spots of the Zvanka estate as seen through an “optical glass”—mediated not by the glass itself but by the idea of the picturesque principle in nature. The variety and great number of these visual experiments should be examined and catalogued as manifestations of Derzhavin’s “peculiar” vision, the study of which was advocated by Pumpiansky. Let’s attempt to realize this goal by detailing the principal methods of looking and seeing about which Derzhavin writes in “Life at Zvanka”.

Chapter 2

Nine Views

P l e a s u r es of Imagination The Creation is a perpetual Feast to the Mind of a Good Man, everything he sees cheers and delights him. —Joseph Addison

One prevailing interpretation of “Life at Zvanka” regards the text as a microcosm—a metaphor for human life, translated, as is often the case in country house poetry, into the language of the four seasons, which are represented in the poem in succession. This reading of the text, taken together with its nature as a summation, as Pumpiansky characterized it, allows us to view the unfolding of the “pictures of life at Zvanka,” from the first stanzas to the last, as a unique synopsis of the development of Derzhavin’s poetry. Though this model of the poem is rather abstract, it allows us to better understand its dynamics, in which the day lived from morning till night becomes a metaphor not only for a man’s lifespan but also for a poet's career. The text moves from the lofty to the amusing, from the whole to the fragmentary, from the explicitly rhetorical to the direct and lifelike, following in general outline the biography of Derzhavin’s muse. The guiding principle of this movement (which, however, is not taken to its logical conclusion) is the displacement of readymade meanings, turning from the public view to his own personal one, filling (and sometimes overfilling) figures and tropes with new sensory content. To put it another way: Derzhavin’s poem moves from the “humble glance” to the searching, mistrustful, deconstructing gaze. “Life at Zvanka” represents not only a “dynamic summation” of Derzhavin’s work but also an abbreviated version of the path taken by European aesthetics from neoclassicism, all-embracing and sublime, to preRomanticism, fragmented and shattering everything in its way. Derzhavin’s mastering of this path from the 1770s to the middle of the first decade of 128

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the nineteenth century lies at the heart of the turn from the signifier to the signified, from the readymade word to the word from which one must “extract the meaning.”

View 1: “A humble glance at the sky” The landscape drawn in the opening stanzas of “Life at Zvanka” is allegorical through and through. The “Picture of Life at Zvanka” afforded by the poem only gradually rises above a collection of poetic clichés. If the first three stanzas can be viewed as a curious summary of images and motifs connected to the Horatian topos of Beatus Ille, then the following four present a roll call of Russian poets of the preceding century. This gaze admits the surrounding reality through the prism of stock epithets and expressions: Восстав от сна, взвожу на небо скромный взор; Мой утренюет дух Правителю вселенной; Благодарю, что вновь чудес, красот позор Открыл мне в жизни толь блаженной. Пройдя минувшую, и не нашедши в ней, Чтоб черная змия мне сердце угрызала, О! Коль доволен я, оставил что людей, И честолюбия избег от жала! Дыша невинностью, пью воздух, влагу рос, Зрю на багрянец зарь, на солнце восходяще, Ищу красивых мест между лилей и роз, Средь сада храм жезлом чертяще. Иль накормя моих пшеницей голубей, Смотрю над чашей вод, как вьют под небом круги; На разноперых птиц, поющих средь сетей, На кроющих, как снегом, луги. 1 I rise from sleep and cast a humble glance at the sky; My soul offers morning prayers to the Ruler of the universe; I give thanks that once again the sight of marvels and beauty He has revealed to me in this life so blest. Examining my past, not finding in it The black snake [of remorse] that gnaws the heart, 129

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) O! How happy am I that I have left behind society And escaped from the sting of ambition. Breathing innocence, I imbibe the air, the dewy damp, I see the crimson dawn, the rising sun, I seek beautiful places among the lilies and the roses, Tracing a temple in the garden with my walking stick. Or having fed my doves with grains of wheat, I look at them circling in the sky, above the chalice of the waters; And at the birds of varied plumage singing among the nets And blanketing the meadow like snow.

In eighteenth-century Russian poetry, the dawn is always crimson. Let us recall, for example, the well-known lines from Lomonosov’s ode of 1747: И се уже рукой багряной Врата отверзла в мир заря, От ризы сыплет свет румяный В поля, в леса, во град, в моря. 1 And with its crimson hand Dawn opened the gates into the world, From its raiment a rosy light pours Into the fields, the forests, the cities, and the seas.

Poets wishing to parody Lomonosov, from Alexander Sumarokov to Pyotr Vyazemsky, found their material in these visual metaphors. The glance cast by Derzhavin at the “crimson dawn” in “Life at Zvanka” belongs to this rhetorical tradition but is implemented here to revive the dead metaphor. Despite the fact that the landscape of these “morning” stanzas is verbal in essence, vision as a theme is being moved to the foreground. “The humble glance” (skromnyi vzor) cast on the Ruler of the Universe (moi utreniuet dukh Praviteliu Vselennoi)—Derzhavin’s variation of “morning meditations on God’s majesty”—in fact represents a reference to this genre of “meditations” (razmyshleniia) and to the poetic tradition associated with it, which on closer examination turns out not to be so humble after all.1 The opening stanzas of “Life at Zvanka,” like the concluding ones in “Rainbow” examined above, stand at the crossroads of the “physicotheological” context of Lomonosov’s “Meditations” (1743) and the daring 130

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tradition of active, creative, almost aggressive vision—a “Zoroastrian” one, to use Derzhavin’s own definition.2 This potent tradition shines through the meek intonations of the “morning stanzas” of “Life at Zvanka”. The distinctive apogee of this kind of vision in Derzhavin’s poetry of the “new century” is the poem “To the Publisher of My Songs” (Izdateliu moikh pesnei). Written a year later, in 1808, this “optical variation” on the “Exegi Monumentum” theme was addressed to Alexander Labzin, a prominent Freemason and long-time Master of the “Dying Sphinx” lodge, then busy preparing the publication of the four volumes of Derzhavin’s Sochineniia: Так, чрез тебя я прольюся Целого света вокруг; В книгах, как в стеклах, возжгуся, Узрят далече мой дух: Что ж воспрещал ты Брамину Сеять в Лапландцах лучи? Жег фимиам, иль лучину, Свет проливал ты в ночи.— Долг Саламандра жечь: долг поэта В мир правду вещать. 1 So, through you I will be diffused ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­throughout the entire world; By books, as if by burning-glasses, I will be kindled They will see my spirit from far away: Why did you prohibit a Brahmin From sowing sunrays among Laplanders? You burned incense, or a rush light, You shed light into the night— The duty of a salamander is to burn; the duty of a poet, To speak truth to the world. (Derzhavin 2:679–80)

The topicality of the Masonic symbolism in “Life at Zvanka” is attested by a strange gesture made either by the rising sun or the poet-observer himself in the sixth stanza. Is it a ray of the sun or the poet’s cane that is “tracing a temple” in the middle of the garden (sred’ sada khram zhezlom chertiashche)? The labyrinth of Derzhavin’s syntax makes it unclear whether 131

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the word chertiasche (tracing) is a gerund modifying the verb ishchu (I seek) or a short-form participle which agrees in gender, number, and case with the participle voskhodiashche (rising) referring to the sun (yet separated from it by the third line of the quatrain). Temples and chapels (affectionately called tempietti)—an integral part of English gardens and landscape parks, the focal point of countless literary allusions and one of the numerous manifestations of Masonic ideas in architecture—were intended for solitary meditation (for example, an important element of the сonceptual space created by Pope in Twickenham was the Shell Temple).3 Zvanka had neither temples nor chapels: one could only trace them with a staff or divine them in the outlines of the “shrinelike house” (khramovidnyi dom). Derzhavin’s lines, which tie the image of the temple drawn on the ground to solar symbolism, serve as a reference to a number of emblematic depictions (including the illustrations used to accompany his own works), as well as the idea of the “temple of the sun” that figures prominently in Nikolai Lvov’s architectural fantasies: I had always thought of building a temple to the sun, not so that the sun would be inscribed on it, but so that during the better part of the year the sun would set or return to its own house to rest. This temple must be open-ended, and in the center a portal with crosspiece, with both sides enclosed by walls, and forest on either side.4

From the temple whose outline has been traced in the dust the poet raises his eyes upward, to “look over the waters, / as they [the domestic doves, just fed with grain—TS] circle in the sky.” Derzhavin's visual experiment begins here, though very cautiously. Departures from customary optics are minimal: the poet almost imperceptibly alters the prepositional government of the verb smotret’ (to look): smotriu nad chashei vod (the prepositions normally used with this Russian verb would be na [at] or kak [as]). Against the background of the numerous new lexical combinations and agrammatical constructions in the text, often occasioned by the verbal formulation of a new, unexpected point of view, this scarcely catches the reader’s attention. Nevertheless, this way of seeing takes on supplementary, almost material, characteristics and structures the space in a particular way. Placed symmetrically in the same line in relation to the caesura, the prepositions nad (over) and pod (under) frame the point of view by means of two surfaces—the surface of the water and 132

Chapter 2. Nine Views

the sky, parallel to which is positioned the “visual ray,” which has been transformed into a broad, horizontally unfurled, and motionless “visual ribbon” (in contrast to Aristotle’s headlong opsis—an arrow flying toward its goal). The following stanza concentrates on the transmission of aural impressions: Пастушьего вблизи внимаю рога зов, Вдали тетеревей глухое токованье, Барашков в воздухе, в кустах свист соловьев, Рев крав, гром жолн, и коней ржанье. 1 I hear the nearby summons of the shepherd’s horn, In the distance the grouse’s indistinct mating call, Fleecy clouds in the air, the whistle of nightingales in the bushes, The cattle’s low, woodpeckers’ thunder, and the horses’ neigh.

Space is rendered in perspective, and the sounds serve to define its boundaries. Interestingly, the final verse is almost unpronounceable.5 The four one-syllable words, which seem to have been devised as a disquisition on the letter “r,” force the reader to think about the nature of articulation, about the picture of a sound, so that even this line, with its intense focus on sounds and soundplay, retains a visual component. If the space of an estate is often seen as an “extract” of the universe,6 then the focal point of life at Zvanka is the parlor (svetlitsa), where the hosts receive servants and guests. From here the poet could turn his gaze not only to the picturesque surroundings but to the affairs of bygone days as well. Window frames alternate with picture frames: О славных подвигах великих тех мужей, Чьи в рамах по стенам златых блистают лицы, Для вспоминанья их деяний, славных дней, И для прикрас моей светлицы. 1 Of the glorious feats of those great men, Whose faces shine in golden frames along the walls, In memory of their acts, those glorious days, And for the embellishment of my parlor. 133

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Derzhavin devotes seven “centripetal” stanzas to his front room, each beginning with a subordinate clause—the windows and doors of the room translated into the language of grammatical categories. (Pumpiansky ranked this stanzaic grouping among the most noticeable stylistic lapses in Derzhavin’s text: he talks about “the incorrect construction of stanzas 10–17, where the incidental detail of ‘my front room’ in stanza 10 is followed by seven [!] long subordinate clauses whose importance is paramount.”)7 Pumpiansky’s disapproving analysis aside, the parlor (literally, “bright room”), a conventional folklorized interior, though pushed into the very last corner of stanza 10, into the syntactical position of modifying the word “embellishment” (prikras), cannot truly be called an “incidental detail.” The world of Zvanka revolves around the poet sitting in his armchair—it would seem that he has almost come to terms with his position as a curious observer, who can but “marvel” at the latest news of the war: В которой поутру, иль ввечеру, порой Дивлюся в Вестнике, в газетах, иль в журналах, Россиян храбрости, как всяк из них Герой, Где есть Суворов в Генералах! 1 In which room morn and night from time to time I marvel at stories in the Herald, the newspapers, or the journals Of the bravery of the Russians, how each of them is a Hero, As long as Suvorov is his Commander.

No matter how hard Derzhavin tries to remain within the boundaries of the pastoral chronotope, no matter how he strives to shut himself off from time with eternity, and despite the fact that, to quote Dryden’s translation of Horace, “nor trumpets summon him to war, / Nor drums disturb his morning sleep,” in the summer of 1807 he cannot help but hear the echoes of that martial music, all too audible on the banks of the Volkhov.

Chapter 2. Nine Views

View 2: “Or into the mirror of time, shaking my head” In November 1807, two months after the publication of “Life at Zvanka,” Bolkhovitinov wrote Derzhavin about the unfortunate consequences of the Treaty of Tilsit: in accordance with the agreement signed on the Neman, Russia was obliged to break with England and join the Continental blockade. The declaration about the break with England reached us. Here I will recall your poem— Or I look into the mirror of time, shaking my head, At passions, at affairs of times ancient and modern, Seeing nothing but self-love And men’s strife.8

Despite this comment by the poem’s direct addressee, and perhaps even recalling it, the poet considered it his duty to elaborate in his “Commentary” on the less-than-obscure image of the “mirror of time”: “History here is called the mirror of time.” Conjunctions of space and time and experiments in visualizing history never left Derzhavin indifferent; he was particularly enthusiastic about them now, in this era of tectonic shifts and ruptures in the European historical consciousness. This is why he was so attracted and inspired by the River of Time, Friedrich Strass’s historical map. In 1805, soon after the appearance of the Russian translation of the map and the guide that accompanied it, the Journal of Russian Literature published a note devoted to this event, which begins as follows: No History can so attract the attention of a person as this map. No history can engender in the soul of a sensitive person that inexplicable sense of sorrow at the sight of the quick flight of all-destructive time, which comes into being at the sight of all the World’s changes. Every person will be amazed by this history of nations and the destiny of kingdoms.9

The affinity these lines share with lines from “Life at Zvanka” is clear. In all likelihood, Derzhavin thought it necessary to elaborate that “history here is called the mirror of time” precisely because the image of the “mirror of time” in his poem grew out of the confluence of two established phraseological 135

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and emblematic combinations: the “river of time” and the “mirror of truth.” Optics was accorded a special place in baroque emblematics. The rhetorical construction of the emblem, which by means of images from the visual world made it possible to comprehend higher moral truths, to see the large in the small and the small in the large, was often compared to an optical device.10 The opposition between the true and the imaginary, the straight and the distorted that lies at the bottom of many emblematic constructions found material embodiment in the depictions of prisms, magnifying glasses, and telescopes. Mirrors were especially popular emblems, expressing the idea that sometimes only the fleeting, artificial image of a reflection allows one to differentiate between the true and the false, to discern perfidy masked as piety. The image of the mirror of time, in which one cannot see anything but “self-love and men’s strife,” is closely linked to the theme of pride and self-admiration, as embodied in the myth of Narcissus. In the elegant trilingual (Russian-French-German) edition of Iconology, or Emblematic Figures Explained (Ikonologiia, ob”iasnennaia litsami), engraved in Paris and released in Petersburg in 1803 (i.e., the edition closest in time to Derzhavin’s poem), the complicated concept of amour-propre is explained in the following way:11 It’s worth considering another possible source of Derzhavin’s metaphor of the “mirror of time,” which becomes particularly relevant in the context of a solitary journey combining real and imaginary impressions. Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (Voyage around My Room, 1794), a typical work of the turn of the century, an “essay on man” of its time, reduced the “broad field” of human experience to the narrow space of a single room. The Russian translation of the Voyage, by Vasily Kriazhev (the first Russian publisher of Addison and Steele), appeared in 1802, two years after de Maistre himself settled in Russia. The Voyage enjoyed enormous success in Moscow and Petersburg. Moving about the “oblong rectangle” of his room “without rules or method” and moving from one picture to another, from one engraving to the next, the “traveler” finally comes to the mirror, which is considered “one of the marvels of this country in which he is strolling”:

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Chapter 2. Nine Views It is an indulgence that we allow ourselves, and our blindness to our own faults. This weakness, which is characteristic of young people, and the fair sex in particular, is depicted by a young woman carrying a full bag, which she covers with the same hand in which she holds a staff with an inscription in Greek: Philautia, that is, Self-Love. In the other hand she has a flower called a Narcissus.12

Clothed in optical metaphors, Derzhavin’s meditations on selflove and the separateness of people bring us back to The Essay on Man. The poem’s second epistle, titled “Argument of the Nature and State of Man with Respect to Himself, as an Individual,” contains extended considerations of self-love and reason—two forces that, in Pope’s opinion, direct a person’s life: Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole. Man, but for that, no action could attend, And, but for this, were active to no end: Fix’d like a plant on his peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot; Or, meteor-like, flame lawless through the void, Destroying others, by himself destroy’d. (Essay on Man, Epistle 2, 59–66)

“The mirror, being always impartial and truthful, shows to the observer the roses of youth and the wrinkles of old age, without scandal and flattery. Of all the grandee’s advisors it is the only one that tells him the truth. This advantage caused me to wish that someone had invented a moral mirror in which all people could see their faults and virtues. I even thought of offering a reward to some academy or other for making this discovery, but as I gave it more thought I became convinced of the impossibility of this. [. . .] In vain do mirrors multiply around us and with geometric exactness reflect light and truth at the moment when the rays penetrate our eyes for the depiction of us as we are; self-esteem holds up its deceptive prism between us and our image, and presents us as a deity. But of all the prisms that have existed since the time of that first one which came from the hands of the immortal Newton, none has had such great power of refraction, or produces so many living and so many pleasant flowers as the prism of self-esteem.”

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In his commentary, Bolkhovitinov thought it necessary to pay particular attention to what he considered a less than obvious point: From the description above of self-love and the mind, it follows that they both lead to one and the same goal, that is, to man’s well-being, although they are not equally capable of selecting the means for it. The difference arises from the fact that self-love ardently attaches itself to everything that has the appearance of goodness, while reason examines what is truly good. This reveals the foolishness of the Scholastics, who considered reason and self-love to be two opposites, which they called good and bad.13

Derzhavin most likely would be grouped with the Scholastics—his reflections on the “love of ‘man’ for himself,” which inevitably leads to “battles,” bear witness to his antinomic perception of reality. However, the mind and self-love are juxtaposed by Derzhavin not so much as “good” and “bad” but rather as the subject and object of vision. This view breaks up the central motif of the Essay on Man’s Second Epistle and may represent a latent polemic with it. But the most established significance attributed to the mirror in Christian emblematics remains the transitory nature and vanity of existence—vanitas vanitatis—a central topos of European culture. The image of the “mirror of time” in Derzhavin’s poem brings us to this theme, but in such a way as to leave it behind immediately: Все суета сует! я воздыхая мню. Но бросив взор на блеск светила полудневна, О коль прекрасен мир! Что ж дух мой бременю? Творцем содержится вселенна. 1 All is nothing but the vanity of vanities! I think, sighing. But having cast my gaze at the splendor of the noonday sun, O how awesome is the world! Why do I burden my spirit? The universe is maintained by the Creator.

The unsteady harmony of the world once again appears as a dialogue of views—the ode to the Creator is compressed into one tiny stanza: 138

Chapter 2. Nine Views Да будет на земли и в небесах Его Единаго во всем вседействующа воля! Он видит глубину всю сердца моего И строится моя им доля. 1 On Earth and in Heaven, let His omnipotent will Alone be done in all things! He sees all the depths of my heart And it’s He who allots my portion.

The movement of Derzhavin’s thought—from the bitter meditations on amour-propre and the hopeless sigh about the vanity of vanities to the conclusion about the futility of such reflections and the glorification of the Creator—once again turns our attention to Pope: All Nature is but art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good. And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, One truth is clear, “Whatever Is, is RIGHT.” (Essay on Man, Epistle 1, ll. 289–94)

In stanza 21 of “Life at Zvanka”—that is, precisely at the “turn” from the first third of the poem to the second—the “Harmony not understood” suddenly becomes at least partly audible.14 The stanza’s final line “And it is He [the Creator—TS] who allots my portion” (I pravitsia mia im dolia) confirms the connection between Derzhavin’s poem and the First Epistle of the Essay on Man, which addresses the interrelationship of the part and the whole in the world system: Heav’n from all creatures hides the Book of Fate, All but the page prescrib’d, their present state: From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer being here below? [. . .] All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body, Nature is, and God the soul; 139

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) That, chang’d thro’all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth, as in th’ ætheral frame. (Epistle 1, ll. 77–80; 267–70)

In “Life at Zvanka,” the all-penetrating gaze of the Creator (“He sees all the depths of my heart”) is followed immediately by the cunning penetration of the peasant children: Дворовых между тем, крестьянских рой детей Сбираются ко мне, не для какой науки, А взять по нескольку баранок, кренделей, Чтобы во мне не зрели буки. 1 Meanwhile, a swarm of peasant children Gathers round me, not for any kind of lesson, But to take a few rolls and pretzels each, So they don’t take me for a boogeyman.

In the microcosm of the village, the peasant children still view the retired Derzhavin as a “minister of justice”: he continues to “exhibit his fairness,” to hear complaints, and to help the injured.15 The poet then returns to the glorification of country life—which means that he resumes his looking and gazing. A still life comes to take the place of the landscapes and genre scenes.

“ A P a t t erned Flower Garden” The three stanzas devoted to the description of setting the table are among the most famous and most often quoted stanzas not only of “Life at Zvanka” but of all Derzhavin’s poetry: Бьет полдня час, рабы служить к столу бегут; Идет за трапезу гостей хозяйка с хором. Я озреваю стол—и вижу разных блюд Цветник, поставленный узором: Багряна ветчина, зелены щи с желтком, Румяно-желт пирог, сыр белый, раки красны, Что смоль, янтарь—икра, и с голубым пером Там щука пестрая—прекрасны! 140

Chapter 2. Nine Views Прекрасны потому, что взор манят мой, вкус, Но не обилием иль чуждых стран приправой, Но что опрятно все и представляет Русь: Припас домашний, свежий, здравый. 1 The clock strikes noon, the servants dash to serve at table; The hostess conducts the chorus of guests to the dining table. I survey the table—and see a patterned flower garden Made of various dishes. Crimson ham, green shchi with an egg yolk, A rosy golden pirog, white cheese, red crayfish, Jet black, amber caviar, and the sky-blue fin of The mottled pike—how fine! Fine because they tempt my eyes, my taste, But not with abundance or spices from foreign countries, But everything is tidy and characteristic of Russia: The victuals are home-grown, fresh, and healthy.

Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the hero of Nabokov’s The Gift, writes the following about the hero of his novel, Nikolai Chernyshevsky: Like words, things also have their cases. Chernyshevski saw everything in the nominative. Actually, of course, any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror. [. . .] “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!].16

The pike’s blue fin displayed in profile is one of the images from which the entire “Picture of Life at Zvanka” grew. In his commentary Grot refers to the well-known episode, described by Derzhavin’s contemporary and friend, the poet Ivan Dmitriev, who recalls sitting at table next to Derzhavin and hearing the poet mumble something to himself: Once I noticed him at the dinner table looking at the poached pike and whispering something; I asked him the reason for this. “I was thinking,” he said, “that if I had occasion to invite somebody to my house for dinner in verse, that in the enumeration of dishes that the 141

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) host intended to treat his guest with, I could say that there would be “blue-finned pike.” And a year or two later we heard this line in his epistle to Prince Alexander Andreyevich Bezborodko.17

Dmitriev makes a typical slip here: he confuses the three stanzas from “Life at Zvanka” with the poem “Invitation to Dinner” (Priglashenie k obedu, 1795), written twelve years earlier, and indeed addressed to Prince Bezborodko and Count Shuvalov (Derzhavin 1:665–68). Stanzas 24–26 of “Life at Zvanka” and, the “Invitation to Dinner” both invoke the Horatian subgenre of the “invitation to dine” (invitation ad cenam, invitation ad vinium). Invitatio ad cenam Invitations to dinner are encountered not only in Horace but also in the epigrams of Philodemus, found in the Palatine Anthology (11:49), and Catullus (13). They are particularly numerous and detailed in Martial (1, chap. 10, 48; 1, chap. 11, 52), who expounds on the menu, including the order of the courses, as well as the setting. In ancient Rome poetic invitations to dine had their own visual counterparts: still lifes depicting sumptuous dinners were one of the most widespread subjects of wall painting in Roman and Pompeian villas, the space of which was to a large extent organized around the ideas of hospitality and the patron-client relationship. A still life incorporated into the interior, along the “visual axis” of the villa that allowed the guest to see the entire house from end to end as soon as he crossed the threshold, was considered a sign of “architectural hospitality.” There is also the special type of ekphrasis known as xenia: colorful descriptions, sent ahead of time to invited guests, of the dishes which the master of the house would be serving them later. As is the case for the genre of ekphrasis as a whole, the model for the xenia was the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder—see the description of “Gifts” (Xenia) in the first book of the Imagines (1:31): It is a good thing to gather figs and also not to pass over in silence the figs in this picture. Purple figs dripping with juice are heaped on vine-leaves; and they are depicted with breaks in the skin, some just cracking open to disgorge their honey, some split apart, they are so ripe.

The primary moving force for such a poem, addressed to a faraway friend or patron, is the use of the imperative, employed to persuade the addressee to surmount the difficulties of distance, to come, to visit, to travel.

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Composed at the height of the Derzhavin-Lvov circle’s activity and belonging, in Pumpiansky’s classification, to the category of “mechanical” Horatian odes, “Invitation to Dinner” should be regarded as one of the numerous satellite texts of “Life at Zvanka”. It is no accident then that Dmitriev, in his memoir, conflated the “blue-finned” pike with the “golden sterlet” from “Invitation to Dinner” (Derzhavin 1:665–66): Шекснинска стерлядь золотая, Каймак и борщ уже стоят; В графинах вина, пунш, блистая То льдом, то искрами, манят;

The imperative “Come!” (Priidi), repeated three times in Derzhavin’s “Invitation to Dinner,” serves to emphasize the poem’s belonging to this genre: Прийди, ìîé áëàãîäåòåëü äàâíèé, Òâîðåö ÷ðåç äâàäöàòü ëåò äîáðà! Прийди,—è äîì, õîòü íå íàðÿäíûé, Áåç ðåçüáû, çëàòà è ñðåáðà, Ìîé ïîñåòè: åãî áîãàòñòâî— Ïðèÿòíûé òîëüêî âêóñ, îïðÿòñòâî, È òâåðäûé ìîé, íåëüñòèâûé íðàâ. Прийди îò äåë ïîïðîõëàäèòüñÿ, Ïîåñòü, ïîïèòü, ïîâåñåëèòüñÿ Áåç âðåäíûõ çäðàâèþ ïðèïðàâ. (emphasis mine—TS; Derzhavin 1:666–67) 1

I beg you come, old benefactor, Doer of good for twenty years! Come, grace my home with a visit. Although by no means elegant And without carvings, gold, or silver— Its wealth lies only in pleasantness and neatness And my firm, plainspoken character. Come, cool yourself off from your affairs, Eat, drink, and be merry Without harm to your health.

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Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) С курильниц благовонья льются, Плоды среди корзин смеются, Не смеют слуги и дохнуть; Тебя стола в круг ожидая Хозяйка статная, младая, Готова руку протянуть.18 1 Gold sturgeon from the river Sheksna, Kaimak, and borsht already wait; Shining with ice, reflecting crystal, Wines in carafes and punch allure. Perfuming pans diffuse aromas, Fruits gaily laugh among the baskets. The servants cannot catch their breath Awaiting you about the table. The hostess, dignified and youthful, Is set to take you by the hand.19

In both these still lifes the ideal of moderation, which to a certain degree is appreciated by all followers and imitators of Horace (“moderation is the best feast”), coexists with abundance and superfluity of color. The brightness of the colors seems to “realize” the word tsvetnik (flower garden), forcing the reader to think first of the root of the word (tsvet, color), rather than the usual meaning of “garden.” The absence of any information about how the dishes on the table at Zvanka taste is compensated for by their artistic characterization. The palette of stanza 25 of “Life at Zvanka” and the emotions it summons forth for the poet-observer are comparable to the exquisite color scheme of “Rainbow”: Пурпур, лазурь, злато, багрянец, С зеленью тень, слиясь с серебром, Чудный, отливный, блещущий глянец Сыплют вокруг, тихим лучом Зениц к утешенью сияют, Пленяют! 1 Purple, azure, gold, crimson, A verdant shadow, merging with the silver, Wonderful, colorful, sparkling luster 144

Chapter 2. Nine Views Pour forth, in a quiet ray of sun The eyes shine in consolation, They captivate!

Derzhavin’s use of color in the description of Zvanka’s table has prompted scholars to compare it to a seventeenth-century Flemish painting. One may or may not agree with this point of view, but if we do, we should not forget that the symbolic still lifes of Frans Snyders and his contemporaries assumed the possibility of multiple interpretations—from superficial and everyday readings to concealed allegories.20 This same expectation of a multiplicity of readings should probably be applied to Derzhavin’s “talking painting.” Like the empty, smoked-out tobacco pipes and the hourglasses tucked away unobtrusively among the splendors of Flemish and Dutch still lifes, thoughts about the vanity of existence and the transitory nature of this world are the underpainting beneath even the most carefree and optimistic strokes of “Life at Zvanka”. It is not accidental that a mere three stanzas separate the description of the sumptuous dinner table from the sorrowful exclamation “All is vanity of vanities!” The genre of the still life, which had become obsolete in Derzhavin’s time, experienced a renaissance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once again performing its own kind of dematerialization upon its main subject, the tangible world. While the “pictorial parables” of the seventeenth century endowed each object with a symbolic meaning, in the still lifes of European modernism things also point beyond their own boundaries. They either dissolve in color and light or thicken into clots of matter, forming combinations of the simplest volumes. Imagining the abundant, elegantly set table as a series of colorful spots, which almost loses its topical and gustatory concreteness but possesses a heightened degree of spatial organization (“patterned flower garden”), Derzhavin is both heir to the seventeenth century and precursor of the twentieth.

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View 3: “Through the cunning of art” Stanzas 31 and 32 are the compositionally marked center of “Life at Zvanka”. In them, the theme of vision is presented in a maximally condensed, concentrated fashion, its ontological status brought to a climax.21 Иль в стекла оптики картинные места Смотрю моих усадьб; на свитках грады, царства, Моря, леса,—лежит вся мира красота В глазах—искусств через коварства. Иль в мрачном фонаре любуюсь, звезды зря Бегущи в тишине по синю волн стремленью: Так солнцы в воздухе, я мню, текут, горя, Премудрости ко прославленью. 1 Either through optic glass I view picturesque places On my estate; on scrolls cities, kingdoms, Seas, and forests—all the world’s beauty lies before My eyes—through the cunning of art. Or in a dark lantern I marvel, watching the stars Dash in silence along the blue surging of the waves: So must suns in the air, I imagine, flow ablaze To the glorification of Wisdom.

Let’s attempt to unravel, at least in part, Derzhavin’s tangled thoughts and associations—but first of all, the words and expressions in which they are presented: Stanza 31. The poet is gazing at the environs of his estate through an “optic glass” (i.e., some sort of optical instrument). On the scrolls (seemingly of paper) are seas and forests, cities and countries: the poet’s eyes behold “all the world’s beauty,” made visible to his gaze “through cunning,” i.e., through the cunning assistance of art. Stanza 32. The poet feasts his eyes on the stars, which “dash . . . along the blue surging of the waves” (i.e., they are reflected in the river) in the “dark lantern” (?), and meditates on the fact that the planets (“suns in the air”) must in similar manner “flow ablaze” (i.e., like the movements of the shining planets and stars). The 146

Chapter 2. Nine Views poet believes that to see and distinguish these worlds in all their variety is to praise the wisdom of the Creator (or, perhaps, human knowledge).

That is the general course of the poet’s reflections, which flow from his availing himself of an optical instrument. But what sort of “glasses,” “scrolls,” and “cunning” does the poet have in mind? In his “Explanations,” Derzhavin answers this question in the following manner (Derzhavin 3:590): Either through optic glass I view picturesque places on my estate: An optical apparatus into which one puts plates that depict views of various cities, embankments, and the like, which, presented in a magnified view, afford the viewer a great deal of pleasure. Or in a dark lantern I marvel: In a camera obscura, in which various natural objects are presented in reduced size in an altogether lifelike manner, and along the river, particularly when there’s a mild breeze, little jets, illuminated by the sun, race along the blue water likes stars.

Commenting on Derzhavin’s own commentary, but without clearing up much in the process, Grigory Gukovsky writes that the “optically constructed machine” is, “presumably, a kind of magic lantern.”22 These lines occasion a certain amount of confusion for all subsequent commentators and scholars of Derzhavin’s poem (e.g., Anna Lisa Crone writes that the instrument is a “type of telescope, microscope or binoculars”—a rather large range of possibilities).23 The use of the word “kind” (rod) or “type” (tip) in the identification of an object expresses uncertainty. But this hesitation is understandable, since the author’s commentary contains obvious contradictions. If in the first of the stanzas under consideration the poet has in mind an “instrument into which plates are inserted”—“a kind of magic lantern” in Gukovsky’s interpretation—then how is it possible to gaze through its glass at the estate’s “picturesque places”? If the second stanza is describing the standard mechanism of the camera obscura, then why does the poet call it a “dark lantern” (mrachnyi fonar’), thus setting his readers off on a false scent? One thing is clear: these lines combine several optical instruments into one. 147

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Does this mean that in the three years that separate the writing of “Life at Zvanka” from the time when Derzhavin began to dictate his Commentaries to his niece the poet simply forgot what kind of glass and optical instrument he had in mind? Or did an exact attribution not seem necessary? While the second alternative seems more plausible, nevertheless it is worth saying a few words about the instruments to which Derzhavin’s lines might refer. “Through an optic glass.” On the balcony of the house at Zvanka there stood a telescope, into which, according to eyewitnesses, Derzhavin often spent long hours gazing of an evening. Invented in 1610, the telescope, or Occhiale (little eye), as Galileo tenderly called his creation, was as important for the history of art and literature as it was for the history of science and technology.24 The possibility of contemplating both large, infinitely distant objects and incomprehensibly small ones right under our noses seemed to bring man closer to God. Galileo’s younger contemporary, the famous theoretician of Baroque wit and apologist for metaphor, Emanuele Tesauro, wrote in his Cannochiale aristotelico (1654), I don’t know whether it was by human or superhuman invention that that Dutch master was moved, who not long ago with two mirrored lenses, like two magical wings, lifted human sight to the bounds of distance which even a bird in flight fails to reach. . . . All that the Lord preferred to hide from us opens itself up to our gaze thanks to a trifling piece of glass.

In Russia this “trifling piece of glass” had become a subject of poetic reflection long before Derzhavin. In his remarkable, albeit half-forgotten poem “Feoptiia—or Proof of the Contemplation of Things of Created Matter” (Feoptiia, ili Dokazatel’stvo o bogozrenii po veshcham sozdanogo veshchestva, 1753), Vasily Trediakovsky describes the new horizons that have been opened to man’s view and mind:25 Чрез микроскоп живых мы тьмы усмотреваем, Которых чрез простый глаз зреть не возмогаем 1 Through the microscope we observe living multitudes, Which we cannot see with the naked eye.

The central stanzas of “Life at Zvanka” refer neither to a microscope nor to a telescope: we detect an indirect reference to Galileo’s “little eye” 148

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only in the concluding lines of stanza 32, where the poet discourses on the “flowing” suns in the air. However, this reminiscence of gazing at the night sky is merely a parallel which comes about by association with another optical diversion. The poet’s attention is now focused on two instruments of projection: the magic lantern and the camera obscura. The difference between the magic lanterns in “Magic Lantern” and “Life at Zvanka” lies both in the subject of the projected images and in the type of projection. The transparent slides, changed by the “wonderworking” hand of the mysterious magician in “Magic Lantern,” presented to the enchanted gaze of the viewer/reader a progression of scenes, each constituting a miniplot that reaches a certain climax and then breaks off (a beginning leading to a culmination without a denouement: “Disappear! And he disappeared”), while the poet in “Life at Zvanka” marvels at static pictures of nature engraved on “prints,” that is, on paper rather than glass. The “optical instrument” in this particular instance refers to the process of enlarging the image and transferring it from the horizontal surface to the vertical, a process in which the succession of images is not subordinated to any narrative goal. Instead of bated breath and the tense expectation of a denouement that fails to materialize, we have curious and calm contemplation. It would not be stretching a point to see in the difference between these two “optical shows” a metaphor for Derzhavin’s changing frame of mind, or the alterations that took place in his worldview from 1804 to 1807. However, the optical amusement Derzhavin describes in stanza 31 is linked to the poetics of the “Savoyard” magic lantern shows, in particular, their tendency toward comprehensiveness. The lens of the magic lantern brings into focus not merely a concrete image—whether from a slide or from an engraving—but “all the world’s beauty.” The poet is presented with “cities, kingdoms, seas, and forests,” certainly not the “picturesque places on his estate” at which he gazes through the “optic glass.” Even the cleverest optical instrument is not capable of such a feat of anamorphosis. We can assume, therefore, that in the first stanza we are dealing with two different devices. Nevertheless, what kind of “glass” does the poet use to view his surroundings? He may be referring to simple eyeglasses, a spyglass, or binoculars (cf. Crone’s interpretation). But the adjective “picturesque,” which Derzhavin uses to characterize the landscape at Zvanka, alludes to yet another possibility. 149

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“Picturesque places.” The adjective kartinnyi (picturesque) and its synonym zhivopisnyi (pictorial, picturesque) entered the Russian literary language during the last third of the eighteenth century. A typical use of the epithet kartinnyi may be found in the writings of Andrey Bolotov, who is forever tied to the history of garden and park culture in Russia in the 1770–90s.26 In one of his numerous articles devoted to the theory and practice of the gardening, which appeared in the Economic Magazine (Ekonomicheskii magazin, of which he was also the publisher), he writes, “...if even a small building crops up somewhere, then all the environs are revived, and all the places are given better and more picturesque views.”27 The idea of a landscape that is “picturesque” (cf. French pittoresque, Italian pittoresco), that is, worthy of being painted and/or recalling a finished painting, is an integral part of the aesthetics of the picturesque.28 Though the word pittoresco appeared first in Italian, was later adopted by the French, and only then borrowed from French by the English (precisely by Pope!), nevertheless the English can claim precedence in the elaboration of the theory of the picturesque and its practical application. The transformation of the concept of the picturesque into an independent aesthetic category is tied to the names of three Englishmen: William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, whose works appeared in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth.29 The combinatory approach to landscape is inherent in the picturesque aesthetic, which allows one to pick and choose elements, recombining them into a new, edited whole. This is the force of Derzhavin’s use of partitive genitive (ishu krasivykh mest)—instead of the expected accusative—in the following lines: “I seek beautiful places among the lilies and the roses.” This aspiration to see pictures in nature and nature in pictures attests to the penetration of ideas about the picturesque into Russian culture in the early nineteenth century, in general, and in Derzhavin’s worldview, in particular. It is no coincidence that the draft of “Life at Zvanka” is followed in the same manuscript notebook by a four-line variation with its own title, “Strolling in the Garden at Gruzino” (Na progulku v Gruzinskom sadu): О как пленительно, Умно там, мило все, Где естества красы Художеством сугубы 150

Chapter 2. Nine Views 1 Oh, how captivating, Wise and lovely everything is there, Where the colors of nature Are doubled through art. (Derzhavin 3:400)

Ultimately, the optical instrument through which “Life at Zvanka” looks at the world in these central stanzas is the picturesque principle itself, as embodied in nature and revealed by art. “In a dark lantern.” In Part II, we discussed the use of camera obscura as a model of human vision, understanding, and, ultimately, even of human heart. We have also addressed its connection with the magic lantern. First described in detail by Athanasius Kircher in the mid-seventeenth century, these two mechanisms might serve as visual models of an optical cycle involving reality and representation. Mutual reciprocity of the magic lantern and camera obscura is reflected in Nikolai Yanovsky’s New Dictionary (Novyi slovotolkovatel’), the second volume of which appeared in 1804: The camera obscura is a machine composed of a box, the sides of which are all locked; an aperture is located in the back for inserting various objects, portraits, and pictures; on the side opposite the aperture a small tube is attached, into which a convex glass is placed on both ends: this tube moves so that the glass can be moved closer or farther away from the object, as needed. If the object is sufficiently illuminated, an image is produced behind the glass, and if a white board is placed there, then an exact copy of the object will be depicted on it, which will become lighter if the object is more brightly illuminated. This machine is called a magic lantern.30

The term “camera obscura” entered the Russian language in the first half of the eighteenth century. Andrey Bolotov, the famous landscape designer, agronomist, and memoirist, who in 1758 was living in Königsberg, nextdoor to a glass grinder also skilled in “making optical machines and other physical instruments,” describes the impression made on him by the camera obscura: 151

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Picturesque The fundamental novelty of the category of the picturesque consists in the removal of the ontological opposition of nature and art which is the basis for mimetic theory and traditional aesthetics. Picturesque nature is nature that approaches art as closely as possible, being “that kind of beauty that would look well in a picture.” Man finds his bearings in a portrait, nature in a landscape. As models of taste and bases for new landscapes, both manmade and imaginary, the theoreticians of the picturesque suggested the works of French and Italian artists of the preceding century: Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain (Richard Payne Knight owned one of the most valuable collections of paintings by Lorrain). The golden-brown, twilight tones, the variety of different planes—sea and forest, cottage and ruins, hills and valley—peopled by scattered small figures made Lorrain’s paintings among the most influential for the creators of “picturesque places.” Gardeners and landscape designers were required to observe the rules of aerial perspective: the foreground of the landscape should be in brown tones, the next plane in greens; the distant background was portrayed in blues. Mastery of the picturesque paradigm to a certain extent put Russia in synch with European culture in the final decades of the eighteenth century, since the enthusiasm for the picturesque in nature and art was the first that Russia shared with contemporary Europe, rather than adopting it readymade. The concept of the picturesque took the place of the formula “ut pictura poesis,” which posited a single mimetic nature for both poetry and painting. In the mid1760s Lessing denied descriptive poetry the right to exist, because there was in the subject matter being described no temporal sequence of events that would correspond to the temporal sequence of words. But the “picturesque” space, which could be understood only by traveling through it and observing it as it unfolded, did not contradict the conditions posited by the author of Laocoön for the subject of poetic description. This largely explains the “second wind” of the descriptive genre in European poetry of the 1780s, the prime example of which is Jacques Delille and his Gardens (1782): Un jardin, á mes yeux, est un vaste tableau. Soyez peintre. Les champs, leurs nuances sans nombre Les jets de la lumiére & les masses de l’ombre, Les heures, les saisons, variant tour-á-tour Le cercle de l’année & le cercle du jour, Et des prés émaillés les riches broderies, Et des riants coteaux les vertes draperies, Les arbes, les rochers & les eaux, & les fleurs, Ce font-lá vos pinceaux, vos toiles, vos couleurs. La nature est á vous; & votre main féconde Dispose, pour créer, des éléments du monde.

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1 A garden one vast picture should appear. See with a painter’s eye. The fields array, The numerous tints their varying hues display, The gleams of light, the masses of the shade, The changes by the hours and seasons made, The bright enamel of the grass-clad ground, The laughing hills with golden harvests crowned, The rocks, the streams, each various shrub and tree, These should your colors, canvas, pencils be; Nature is yours, and your prolific hand Must, to create, her elements command. (Delille 1801, 125)

At the turn of the nineteenth century so-called picturesque travels were enormously popular. As was the case with the entire culture of the picturesque, these travels began in England and spread quickly throughout Europe. Such journeys were defined not only by their choice of particular “picturesque” routes but also by their use of a particular method of encountering the places on that route. The English “picturesque traveler” of the 1780s and 1790s participated in an aesthetic experiment that involved “hunting” for a suitable landscape and selecting from it the elements of a future picture, in which the real landscape would be edited and tamed. Therefore, as he set off on his journey, such a traveler needed to have a number of so-called picturesque knickknacks, which would facilitate this selective and transformative vision. In addition to a barometer, a guidebook, a notebook for drawings, and watercolors, the obligatory set of “means of production” for a picturesque landscape included a pocket edition of Thomson, Cowper, or Gray (the language of descriptive poetry served as the first, literary prism through which the gaze of the traveler was refracted) and several portable optical instruments, the most common of which were a small collapsible telescope and the “Claude glass.” This simple device, which helped tell the tale of England’s hills and lakes in the language of Claude Lorrain, enjoyed widespread popularity with both travelers and professional artists. Inside a box lined with leather or velvet was a round, oval, or square glass set into a wooden frame, which as a rule was slightly convex and covered in a special brown or carrot-colored amalgam. By taking this “mirror” out of his pocket or travel bag and looking through it, the traveler could see in any fragment of the surrounding landscape a readymade picture, ideal in both composition and color, and moreover, inaccessible to any other observer. In the early nineteenth century the Claude glass was readily available throughout Europe; it was well known in Russia as well. Knowing as we do of Derzhavin’s lively interest in all manner of technical novelties, above all, in optics for everyday use, it seems not unlikely that this object was utilized at Zvanka.

153

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) I had not quenched my curious sight, when the crystal prisms and other optical instruments and experiments made with them sent me into raptures and astonishment; but I cannot describe the delight I experienced at his camera obscura. I was truly beside myself with joy and pleasure when I saw how finely and with what inimitable art nature itself can draw on paper the most beautiful pictures, and, what was most surprising of all to me, in the most vivid colors.31

Derzhavin experiences similar emotions when he sees “the most beautiful pictures” drawn by the rays of the sun on the wall of a dark room. Let’s read his “commentary” one more time: Or in a dark lantern I marvel: The camera obscura, in which the natural objects in front of it are presented in reduced size in an altogether lifelike manner, and along the river, particularly when there’s a mild breeze, little jets, illuminated by the sun, race along the blue water like stars.

The lively optical impression that Derzhavin describes is also a reference to a literary topos of the eighteenth century, closely connected with the philosophy of the picturesque, and, more broadly, with the problem of imitation discussed at some length at part II. Among the best-known treatments of this theme is the passage from the fourth essay of Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination: If the products of nature rise in value according as they more or less resemble those of art, we may be sure that artificial works receive a greater advantage from their resemblance of such as are natural; because here the similitude is not only pleasant, but the pattern more perfect. The prettiest landscape I ever saw, was one drawn on the walls of a dark room, which stood opposite on one side to a navigable river, and on the other to a park. The experiment is very common in optics. Here you might discover the waves and fluctuations of the water in strong and proper colors, with the picture of a ship entering at one end and sailing by degrees through the whole piece. On another there appeared the green shadows of trees, waving to and fro with the wind, and herds of deer among them in miniature, leaping about upon the wall. I must confess, the novelty of such a sight may be one occasion of its pleasantness to the imagination, but certainly the chief reason is its near resemblance 154

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Figure 19. Pope in his grotto. A sketch probably by Alexander Kent. Twickenham Museum, London.

to nature, as it does not only, like other pictures, give the colour and figure, but the motion of the things it represents.32

Pope, a lifelong enthusiast of applied optics, made similar experiments. In contrast to Addison, he conducted his experiments at home in Twickenham, using as a natural camera obscura his beloved grotto with its gloomy arches. This grotto was a bifurcated underground passage cut from the garden and park at the back of the house to the bank of the Thames, of which it afforded the visitor a pleasant vista. The walls of “Pope’s cave” were decorated with bits of glass, shards of mirror, cockleshells, stones, and minerals, as well as fragments of rare rocks given to the poet by his friends; these keepsakes gradually became one of the best geological collections in England. All this mirrored and mineralogical splendor allowed Pope to achieve effects (subsequently recreated by Bolotov in a handmade “cave” on Bogoroditsk, the crown estate where he worked as bailiff from 1776-1797), described in an often-cited letter to his friend Edward Blount: From the River Thames you see thro’ my Arch up a Walk of the Wilderness to a kind of open Temple, wholly composed of Shells in the Rustic Manner; and from that distance under the Temple you look down thro’ a sloping Arcade of Trees, and see the Sails on the River passing suddenly and vanishing, as thro’ a Perspective Glass. When you shut the Doors of the Grotto, it becomes on the 155

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura; on the walls of which the objects of the River, Hill, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture in their visible Radiations.33

In the damp grotto on the banks of the Thames three key metaphors of European philosophy, three “hyper-images” that had worried and delighted Pope, found their spatial realization: Plato’s dark cave with its imprisoned spectators, Plotinus’s radiant soul, independently creating images of the surrounding world, and, finally, Locke’s camera obscura. Likewise, Derzhavin’s description of Zvanka’s optical amusements seems yet again, as in both “Magic Lantern” and “Rainbow,” to combine personal impressions with certain commonplaces of European philosophy and aesthetics of the preceding centuries. The delight with moving images, created by Nature as if in imitation of Art, shared by Addison and Pope, Bolotov and Derzhavin, brought their readers back to the question of imitation and its boundaries, the eternal argument over Art versus Nature.34 “Suns in the air.” Like Addison and Pope, Derzhavin was most excited by the impossibility of separating illusion from reality and vision from speculation. The stars dashing “in silence along the blue surging of the waves” here remind the observer of a picture of the movement of the heavenly bodies in the sky: Так солнцы в воздухе, я мню, текут, горя, Премудрости ко прославленью. 1 So must suns in the air, I imagine, flow ablaze, To the glory of Wisdom.

The most likely source of the image of the “suns in the air” that “flow ablaze” in the central stanzas of “Life at Zvanka” is Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s (1657–1757) Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686): So all the suns are daytime suns for the vortex in which they’re placed, and nighttime suns for all the other vortices. In their own 156

Chapter 2. Nine Views systems they’re unique, one of a kind, but elsewhere they only add to the multitude. [. . .] Here they’re gathered around their sun like a little platoon, beyond which a great void extends. [. . .] I wish you could view this anthill of stars, this seeding of worlds, if these expressions are permitted, with a telescope.35

Antiokh Kantemir’s enormously influential Russian translation (1730) of this important philosophical dialogue had gone through three editions by the early nineteenth century and was known to Derzhavin. Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds opens with a picture of the stage machinery in an opera theater, the structure of which is likened to the structure of the world itself:36 On this subject I have always thought that nature is very much like an opera house. From where you are at the opera you don’t see the stages exactly as they are; they’re arranged to give the most pleasing effect from a distance, and the wheels and counter-weights that make everything move are hidden out of sight. You don’t worry, either, about how they work. Only some engineer in the pit, perhaps, may be struck by some extraordinary effect and be determined to figure out for himself how it was done. That engineer is like the philosophers. But what makes it harder for the philosophers is that, in the machinery that Nature shows us, the wires are better hidden—so well, in fact, that they’ve been guessing for a long time at what causes the movements of the universe.37

In the Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns, a central cultural and ideological dispute in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (from the 1680s to the 1710s), Fontenelle headed the party of the “moderns.” One of the cornerstones of the debate was the concept of the sublime and the marvelous (merveilleux). For the moderns, nature seemed all the more sublime and marvelous when the “wheels and the counter-weights” of an “Opera House” were more visible and better accounted for. As he paints in his Conversations the delightfully funny picture of a group of wise philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and others) discussing possible causes for the “flight of Phaeton” unfolding on stage,38 Fontenelle has the narrator ask the Marquise G*** a key question that touches on the nature of the falsely wonderful (le faux merveilleux) and the truly wonderful (le vrai merveilleux): 157

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) “They want the world to be merely, on a large scale, what a watch is on a small scale, so that everything goes by regular movements based on the organization of its parts. Admit it! Didn’t you have a more grandiose concept of the universe, and didn’t you give it more respect than it deserved? Most men esteem it less since they’ve come to know it.” “Well, I hold it in much higher regard,” she answered, “now that I know it’s like a watch; it’s superb that, wonderful as it is, the whole order of nature is based upon such simple things.”

Galileo’s telescope allowed one to contemplate the distant and the unbounded; Fontenelle introduced a new attitude to infinity: once the province of the sacred and inexplicable, it now became the realm of the curious and the amusing.39 One could argue or joke about infinity; it seemed alive, pulsing, and almost palpable. A year after the publication of the Conversations, Newton published his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). The law of universal gravity, formulated in the Principles, nullified the spirited Cartesian vortices—the turbulences so beloved by Marquise G***—as well as the ideas on the formation, existence, and interconnection of worlds which form the basis of the Conversations. But one thing connects Fontenelle and Newton: a deep conviction that the “wonderfulness” of the world increases in direct, not inverse, proportion to its accessibility to understanding. In the words of the marquise, “It’s superb that, wonderful as it is, the whole order of nature is based on such simple things.” Were it not for the presence of Fontenelle’s “six evenings” in the storehouse of world literature, it would have been much more difficult to popularize Newton’s ideas in eighteenth-century Europe. The Conversations anticipated the poeticization of scientific learning and established the legitimacy of the genre of worldly discussion, chatter (causerie), a playful dialogue about the secrets of the universe. Without the light, lucid language with which Fontenelle speaks about the sublime, we would not have the Astronomical Dialogues between a Gentleman and a Lady (1719), by John Harris; nor Neutonianesimo per le Dame (1737), by Francesco Algarotti; nor Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (1736), by Voltaire. Without the high spirits of Fontenelle’s infinity, the range of the Pleasures of the Imagination as described by Addison would be much narrower. Both in the Spectator series and elsewhere, he constantly returns to the subject of the 158

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vastness and immensity of Nature and the numerous worlds that compose it. In the tenth, penultimate article of the Pleasures, Addison writes (Spectator, no. 420): We are not a little pleased to find every green Leaf swarm with Millions of Animals that at their largest Growth are not visible to the naked Eye. There is something very engaging to the Fancy, as well as to our Reason, in the Treatises of Metals, Minerals, Plants, and Meteors. But when we survey the whole Earth at once, and the several Planets that lie within its Neighborhood, we are filled with a pleasing Astonishment, to see so many Worlds hanging one above another, and sliding round their Axles in such an amazing Pomp and Solemnity.

The best illustration to all these conversations, discussions, and dialogues about the universe is Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous painting A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp Is Put in Place of the Sun (1766).

Figure 20. Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp Is Put in Place of the Sun, 1766.

In stanzas 31 and 32, Derzhavin looks “into the optical glass” alone; he shares with no one the beauty his eyes behold, the stars rushing in silence. But in stanza 33 of “Life at Zvanka,” which is connected to the preceding three by the repetition of the conjunction il’ (or), the solitary “I marvel” (liubuius’) is replaced by the collective “we look” (smotrim): a verb of seeing in the first-person plural. The point of view has shifted. 159

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A Philosopher Giving a Lecture The painting, executed in Joseph Wright’s characteristic “dramatic chiaroscuro,” portrays a man who remotely resembles Newton, demonstrating to his listeners a mechanical model of the solar system, an orrery. These tabletop planetariums, set in motion either by hand or with the help of a clockwork mechanism, became fashionable in England in the 1710s and retained their popularity for the remainder of the century. The Newtonian aspect of Wright’s painting comes not from the external appearance of the philosopher giving the lecture, nor even from the subject of his deliberations; much more important here is the sense of a general internal, almost gravitational connection among disparate elements and a unified means of explaining the various phenomena of the world. The model for new ways of representing the structure of the universe is not so much the orrery itself as the shared contemplation of the people who gathered to listen to the philosopher: two middle-aged men, a thoughtful youth, a doubting girl, and three children (one of whom is standing with his back to us—his silhouette is difficult to make out in the darkness, but it is precisely he who closes the ring). Although Wright’s painting is a perfect example of a “coversation piece”, everyone is plunged into silence: even the lecturer isn’t talking. The faces of those present express the whole gamut of emotions, from enchantment and enthusiasm to boredom. The viewer identifies with each of them in turn and becomes involved in the process of collective scrutiny. It is precisely this object of Wright’s artistic reflection in this and other paintings—that forges the indissoluble, almost gravitational bonds among the figures portrayed; it is no coincidence that the painting’s most prominent figures, the two children whose faces are illuminated by the sun lamp, are embracing.

C h o r a l Vision We look at a forest and say: Here is a forest for ships and masts... —Osip Mandelstam, “The Horseshoe Finder” (1923)

The description of the “patterned flower garden” of dishes on the Zvanka table is anticipated by the sight of serfs “rushing to serve” and “the chorus of guests” walking behind the hostess to the table: “Noon has struck, the servants rush to serve at the table; / The mistress leads the chorus of guests to 160

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sit at table” (italics mine—TS). We do not know how big this chorus is—in Derzhavin’s time the word did not imply a great number of participants.40 Whatever its size, the group, conducted by the “master,” will spend the next fifteen stanzas observing, gazing at and scrutinizing the details of the landscape at Zvanka. The third “quarter” of the poem—sixty lines, sandwiched between the enchanted contemplation of the Zvanka dam and the dreamy glance cast at the participants in the children’s performance—is dedicated to collective contemplation, “choral vision.” The objects being viewed include ultracontemporary industrial scenes, as well as archaic pictures of farming, hunting, and fishing. The allegorical spectacle of the “village warriors” (sel’skie ratniki) rushing to defend the fatherland also appears to the author and his companions in this part of the poem: the collective feelings and experiences, the national consciousness and general anxiety about the war permit even scenes viewed in the mind’s eye to be shared by several people. This recalls one of Addison’s definitions of a healthу, self-conscious society: “a fraternity of spectators.” As the viewer of Joseph Wright of Derby’s canvases representing collective study becomes part of this process himself, so the reader of the “choral” stanzas of Derzhavin’s poem shares in the act of communal observation.

View 4. “Like thundering water flowing over the dam” The description of Zvanka’s domestic production is incorporated into the twelve lines at the dead center of the huge poetic canvas of “Life at Zvanka” (stanzas 33–35): Иль смотрим, как вода с плотины с ревом льет И, движа машину, древа на доски делит; Как сквозь чугунных пар столпов на воздух бьет Клокоча огнь, толчет и мелет. Иль любопытны, как бумажны руны волн В лотки сквозь игл, колес, подобно снегу, льются В пушистых локонах, и тьмы вдруг веретен Марииной рукой прядутся. Иль как на лен, на шелк цвет, пестрота и лоск, Все прелести, красы берутся с поль царицы; 161

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Сталь жесткая, глядим, как мягкий, алый воск, Куется в бердыши милицы. 1 Or we watch as water falls from the dam, thundering, And moving the machinery that cuts timber into planks; How the steam forces its way out into the air through cast-iron columns, How it pounds and grinds the seething fire. Or we look on with curiosity as the waves of cotton pour Into the troughs through needles and wheels, like snow, In fluffy curls, and multitudes of spindles suddenly Are set to spinning by Maria’s hand. Or we see the flax and silk of many colors with shining luster, All delights and colors gathered from our Tsarina’s fields; We see the hard steel melt like scarlet wax, As it is forged into poleaxes for the home guard.

What is being portrayed here? Anticipating the questions of future generations, Derzhavin provides a detailed commentary on these twelve lines in his “Explanations”: •  I, dvizha mashinu, dreva na doski delit: water-powered sawmill. •  Kak skvoz’ chugunnykh par stolpov: fire-powered steam machine. •  Marininoi rukoi priadutsia: Empress Maria Fyodorovna ordered a spinning loom from England, at which a single person could operate more than a hundred spindles. •  Vse prelesti, krasy berutsia s pol’ tsaritsy: a reference to a dyeworks where silk, wool, linen, and paper are dyed with vegetable dyes, which are gathered from the tsarina of the fields, that is, Flora. •  Kuetsia v berdyshi militsy: at this time, by the order of Emperor Alexander, a militia was raised for the defense of the empire’s borders from the French; to this end, poleaxes were forged, as well as all manner of weaponry.

Thus, these stanzas all concern domestic objects: a sawmill that runs on water power, steam and spinning machines, a dyeworks (evidently also mechanized), and finally the smithy, where light weapons are produced. At first glance, everything seems clear, but something prompts us to reread these lines and try to further decode them. Is our interest piqued by the 162

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objects themselves or the manner in which they are described—by what is seen or how it is seen? The appearance of machines in Derzhavin’s text, and in Russian lyric poetry of the early 1800s in general, is both somewhat unexpected and, at the same time, altogether natural. Small cloth factories, sawmills, and brick- and glassworks were a fairly common sight on the majority of Russian estates at the time. Previous poetry had sometimes mentioned domestic work, but the process of production itself had never been the subject of poetic reflection, except perhaps in Lomonosov’s “Letter on the Usefulness of Glass” (Pis’mo o pol’ze stekla, 1752). In this sense, Derzhavin’s innovation is not only beyond dispute but also more significant than it might seem. The machinery is spellbinding. Though Derzhavin left the actual running of the estate and its home industry to his wife, Darya Dyakova, simply observing the works as he did was also a kind of work, exhausting in its own way, thus making the artist something of an artisan with definite tasks to perform.41 The regulated design of each uncomplicated mechanism inspires in Derzhavin the same lively cheerfulness as the “homegrown, fresh, and healthy” victuals (pripas domashnii, svezhii, zdravyi) laid on the table. What attracts the poet most of all in the “water sawmill” is its regularity and predictability.42 In contrast to the destructive and wild power of Derzhavin’s Waterfall (1791), which, sixteen years earlier, was “breaking pine trees into bits and grinding down rocks into sand,”43 the operations of the Zvanka dam are both calculated and constructive. The thundering flow of the water from the dam “moves the machine,” which, in its turn, saws trees into boards. It would seem that the elemental force of nature is completely subordinated to the civilizing operations of man. But that is not the case. The primary feeling that arises from reading the “machine” stanzas is the sense of a resistant milieu. The steam “beats” (b’et)—that is, forces—its way through a series of “cast-iron columns”; the waves of the cotton yarn “flow” into troughs, but this is also done “through,” that is, after encountering obstacles in its path in the form of needles or wheels (or perhaps wheels of needles). The preposition “through” (skvoz’) appears twice, separated by two lines, which creates a certain circular rhythm that likewise drives the reader to force his way through the text. The resistant physical material is rendered by means of resistant verbal material. The complex syntactical construction 163

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Doctor Darwin and Sir Arkwright One of the most celebrated poetic descriptions of the spinning machine is to be found in yet another garden—The Botanic Garden, by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the great naturalist. In the second part of the poem, The Love of the Plants, Darwin, a doctor, biologist, and poet, managed to incorporate a great variety of industrial inventions and scientific discoveries. The emerging confrontation between nature and technology was smoothed over by the harmonious coexistence of anthropomorphized plants and technical devices in Darwin’s verses. One of the founding members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, Darwin did not forget his fellow “Lunartics”: in the lanes and alleys of The Botanic Garden, alongside James Watt’s steam engine and Josiah Wedgewood’s refinements in the manufacture of pottery, the reader could also encounter a new spinning machine, recently patented by yet another member of the Society, Sir Richard Arkwright. Arkwright’s innovation, later disputed in court by his competitors, consisted in using waterwheels as the power source of the mechanical spinning machine. Darwin describes the machine in an excerpt dedicated to the nymph Gossipia, named after a cotton bush bearing the same name: The Nymph, Gossipia, treads the velvet sod, And warms with rosy smiles the watery God; His ponderous oar to slender spindles turns, And pours o’er massy wheels his foamy urns! With playful charms her hoary lover wins, And wields his trident,—while the Monarch spins. —First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull From leathery pods the vegetable wool; With wiry teeth revolving cards release The tangled knots, and smooth the ravell’d fleece; Next moves the iron-hand with fingers fine, Combs with wide card, and forms the eternal line; Slow, with soft lips, the whirling Can acquires The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires; With quicken’d pace successive rollers move, And these retain, and those extend the rove; Then fly the spools, the rapid axles glow, And slowly circumvolves the laboring wheel below. (author’s emphasis—TS)

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Figure 21. Joseph Wright of Derby, Sir Richard Arkwright, c. 1783–85. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Darwin’s contemporaries viewed this description as a model example of the interconnection of technology and art, imagination and science. It is with reference to these lines that Anna-Laetitia Barbauld, an influential Romantic writer and poet (who, incidentally, studied chemistry with Joseph Priestly, another member of the Lunar Society), opens her meditation on the fate of descriptive poetry in the “post-Laocoon” age in the preface to the new edition of Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, which she prepared for publication in 1795. Barbauld notes that this description, although removed from the “obvious province of poetry,” nevertheless “becomes a source of pleasure.” The sketch of Arkwright’s spinning machine, for Barbauld, represents “the happiest marriage” of the object being described with the language of description: Who does not admire the infinite art with which Dr. Darwin has described the machine of Sir Richard Arkwright? His verse is a piece of mechanism as complete in its kind as that which he describes.

We do not know which of these two “pieces of mechanism” may have influenced the appearance of the spinning machine in Derzhavin’s lines: the object itself, or its poetic counterpart. The French prose translation of The Botanic Garden, published in 1800 by Joseph Philippe Deleuze, made its way to Russia in the early 1800s, where it was well known and widely referred to. The first translation of the “Loves of the Plants” in Russian came out fairly recently, in 2016, under auspices of the State Darwin Museum in Moscow.

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does not so much describe the technical construction as translate it into the language of a new literary concreteness. Derzhavin’s imperious treatment of language has been noted by a number of his readers. The subtlest of all, Iakov Grot, writes in his essay The Language of Derzhavin, included in the ninth and final volume of Derzhavin’s Sochineniia, “He is not afraid of mistakes in grammar and syntax if they serve to render his idea through a clear and sharp image, and indeed he often achieves his goal this way more certainly than if he had striven for impeccably pure language, thereby cooling his fiery flights of fancy” (9:335). A somewhat different explanation of Derzhavin’s “incorrectness” is given by Sergei Aksakov, the future author of The Family Chronicle (1856) and Years of Childhood (1858), in his memoir On My Acquaintance with Derzhavin (1852): Impatience, I believe, was his main character trait, and I think it caused him a great deal of unpleasant annoyance in his domestic life, and even hampered him in producing smooth and correct language in his verse. As soon as inspiration left him, he was overcome by impatience and treated the language without any respect whatsoever: he brought syntax, word stress, and even word usage to their knees [gnul na koleno sintaksis, slovoudarenie i samoe slovoupotreblenie].44

The number of grammatical and syntactical “mistakes” in “Life at Zvanka” sets a record even for late Derzhavin, and the “machine lines” stand out for their level of reading difficulty in comparison with the remainder of the text. The word “machine” itself falls into the hopper of the poetic machine: the stress, which normally (and in the eighteenth century it was already fixed) falls on the second syllable, is moved to the first—máshina—in emulation of the Latin machina. Nevertheless, action holds sway over counteraction. The irregularities in style oppose the regularity of the motion of the saw as it cuts trees into boards and the internal pressure of the steam striking the air. In his Derzhavin pages, mentioned on more than one occasion, Lev Pumpiansky contrasted the “verblessness of Lomonosov’s enthusiasm” with the “agitation of the predicating capability” of Derzhavin. According to Pumpiansky, the world created by Lomonosov is static, while Derzhavin is obsessed by motion and its linguistic rendering.45 Indeed, processes generally interest Derzhavin more than subjects. In this sense, as in many others, “Life at Zvanka” stands somewhat apart: of the poem’s 252 lines, 166

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only 15 end with a verb, and only 10 of these rhyme; thus, verbal rhymes compose slightly less than 4 percent of all the rhymes in the poem. However, this is not evidence of a Lomonosovian verblessness but of a conscious, thematic attempt to create a timeless, static quality (remember the poem’s original title—“A Picture of Life at Zvanka”).46 A similar sense of the gradual dissipation of the gaze in the “machine” stanzas is aided by the increased percentage of metaphorical text—an increase in the number of tropes and words used in a figurative sense. The poet is armed now not with “optical glasses” but with optical rhetoric: metaphors, metonymies, and similes. Though all the words in the stanza describing the operation of the sawmill and steam engine are used in their direct meaning (perhaps with the exception of the gerund klokocha [gurgling, bubbling, boiling up], used in connection with the steam), the description of the spinning machine that follows presents us with the peculiar metonymy of “spun by Maria’s hands” (Mariinoi rukoi priadutsia) and the developed metaphor of the “flowing waves of cotton.” This traditional metaphor, which goes back to the ancient comparison of yarn to waves, is complicated by the lexical reshuffling of fleece of waves (runy voln), instead of waves of fleece (volny run) (this reshuffling can hardly be explained by the demands of rhyme, since the rhyme voln— vereten is inexact, even by the standards of Derzhavin’s late poetry); the anthropomorphic metaphor “fluffy curls” (v pushistykh lokonakh); and the complex simile “fleece of waves [. . .] like snow flows/streams” (snow does not flow/stream; the basis of the comparison is not the action but the quality—the whiteness of the cotton fiber). These examples serve as a striking illustration of Yuri Tynianov’s famous concept of the “compactness of the verse series” (tesnota stikhovogo riada), which results in a semantic give-and-take within the verse line and is enhanced by the boundaries of the verse line and the restrictions imposed by meter.47 Mikhail Gasparov thought that the “compactness of the verse series” was a beautiful idea but hard to illustrate. In his opinion, the restrictions of the verse line could not influence the “lexical coloring” directly but first distorted the syntax and only then, as a result, the semantics.48 In Derzhavin’s late poetry, the distorting influence of syntax on semantics increases as a result of his general orientation toward stylistic incomprehensibility and obscurity, which, among other things, is expressed in the abundance of inversions introduced into the text.49 167

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Inversion, one of the most powerful expressive devices for poetic language, can perform various functions in a poem: it can be ornamental, prosodic, or mimetic.50 The transposition of words that complicates our understanding of the “machine” lines in “Life at Zvanka” (and there is no straightforward word order in any of these lines!) plays a mimetic— that is, a graphic—role. Syntax does not influence the semantics here but rather becomes semantic—or to be more precise, it becomes iconic and even performative. In their writings on language, Denis Diderot and Louis-Sébastien Mercier equated the lack of inversions in French with the absence of what Roman Jakobson would later call the “poetic function” of language. The impossibility of inversion, in Mercier’s opinion, results in the impossibility of reflecting in the language any nonlinear processes: We bring the words together, we chain them one to another; we do not construct them, we only accumulate them, we wouldn’t know how to put them in such a way that they would mutually support each other; circular and (oblique) movements are also forbidden for us; we can only follow the straight line.51

In Derzhavin’s poem, inversions serve to structure nonlinear images. If we translated the machine lines from agrammatical to ordinary language, if we restored the usual word order and assigned all subjects their appropriate predicates, objects, and modifiers, not only would the poetic text be destroyed, but the image would disappear as well. This disappearance would come about because the object of depiction is not a separate subject and not even a combination of subjects but rather a design, a collection and order of operations that has been carried out. It is precisely this image—the image of motion—that Derzhavin creates in these twelve “machine” lines of his poem; it is precisely this that he is attempting to convey to our shared imaginations. “And suddenly multitudes of spindles / are spinning thanks to Maria’s hand.” The reader who has not specially consulted the author’s commentary, which is printed in some, but not all, editions of Derzhavin, would hardly guess the true sense of the word combination “Maria’s hand.” Whose hand is capable of spinning “multitudes of spindles” with a single movement?52 The most natural assumption would be that the reference is to a maiden named Maria—one of the Derzhavins’ laborers. Or one might look 168

Chapter 2. Nine Views Figure 22. Annunciation of Ustyug, unknown artist, c. 1120–30, Novgorod. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

to the religious or mystical sphere for an interpretation, in which case it would be the hand of Virgina Mary, particularly since purple thread and a spindle are among the most ancient and steady elements in the iconography of the Annunciation. However, it is more than likely that the reader will not pause here to consider the meaning of this trope, since it is inserted so harmoniously and inconspicuously into the compound construction of Derzhavin’s poetic machine. The preceding and following lines are complex and barely pronounceable. But we need to determine exactly what this figure of speech is, what function it performs in the text, and how it relates to Derzhavin’s poetics in general. The lines dedicated to the “multitudes of spindles” that are put into the hands of the enigmatic Maria resonate with some classic examples of the sublime in Russian poetry, such as Lomonosov’s exposition to “Evening Meditation on the Divine Majesty on the Occasion of the Great Northern Lights” (Vechernee razmyshlenie o Bozhiem Velichestve pri sluchae velikogo severnogo siianiia, 1743): Открылась Бездна, звезд полна; Звездам числа нет. Бездне—дна.53 1 A star-filled vault has opened up; No number is there to the stars. No bottom to the vault.54 169

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They also resonate with lines from his later ode (“On the Day of the Ascension to the All-Russian Throne of Her Majesty the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the Year 1747”), describing the amazing multitude of islands spread across the Pacific Ocean: Там тьмою островов посеян, Реке подобен Океан . . .55 1 There sown with multitudes of islands The Ocean like a River is . . .56

The multitudes of spindles in Derzhavin’s poem are as numberless as Lomonosov’s stars or islands, and the poet realizes their multitude just as suddenly and with just as much delight as his predecessor did. This appeal to the world of machines in search of what is new and wonderful, and the transformation of technical progress into a source of poetic inspiration, is typical of European culture in the second half of the eighteenth century.57 As far as the object itself goes, the new spinning machine “immortalized” by Derzhavin was a direct descendant of Arkwright’s “water-frame,” the improved version known in the history of technology as Crompton’s “spinning mule.”58 In the first years of the nineteenth century, the dowager empress Maria Fyodorovna ordered several of these machines from England. In 1804 one of them was installed in the Alexandrovsky textile mill “in the care of the empress herself,” while others were offered to members of the empress’s inner circle.59 This is the source of Derzhavin’s enigmatic explanation, quoted in the opening lines of this chapter: Marininoi rukoi priadutsia: The Empress Maria Fyodorovna ordered a spinning machine from England, at which a single person could operate more than a hundred spindles.

For Derzhavin and his contemporaries, the English spinning machine purchased on the empress’s initiative represented a case of “double optimism.” A reliable, tested mechanism—moreover, one that was not overly complicated—each part of which was found to be in harmony with the others, and could be operated with a flick of the wrist, represented 170

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simultaneously a metaphor and metonymy of orderly governmental structure, a symbol of a certain universal efficiency that united all spheres of British life, from politics to manufacturing.60 And yet some riddles remain unresolved: although it seems unlikely that Derzhavin had firsthand knowledge of Erasmus Darwin’s “model description” of the multispindled machine (due to his lack of mastery of either English or French), there are some similarities in the two texts that seem more than coincidental. The adjacency of the (rhyming!) images of the “wiry teeth” and “raveled fleece” in two neighboring verses in both poems (cf. “Il’ liubopytny, kak bumazhny runy voln / V lotki skvoz’ igl, koles, podobno snegu, l’iutsia”) may be explained by the mechanism itself and the logic of the process, but the appearance of the “spinning Monarch” in Darwin’s poem,61 and, several lines below, the “technical metonymy” of the “iron-hand with fingers fine,” turning the “tangled knots” into “the eternal line” of the thread, does seem to be echoed in Derzhavin’s lines. However, in “Life at Zvanka,” the image of a “spinning Monarch” and the pars pro toto trope of the “spinning hand” come “two in one.” Maria’s Hand. The substitution of the hand for the whole person is one of the most frequently encountered types of metonymy. The example is cited by all who have ever written on the theory of tropes—from Aristotle and Pierre Fontanier to Lakoff and Johnson (with the exception of those for whom the distinction between metonymy and synecdoche is fundamentally important; for them, the semantic shift from the signified “man” to the signifying “part of the body” represents a classic case of synecdoche). Examples of hands living an independent life in literature and art are too numerous to count, particularly since “in contrast to metaphor, which always strives for a certain originality, force, and significance, metonymy always adheres to the traditional.”62 Let’s suppose that “Maria’s hand” is the usual sort of metonymy, “the designation of an object or phenomenon by one of its attributes, when the literal meaning is combined with figurative.”63 But the hand that sets in motion the “multitude of spindles” is only indirectly connected to the empress who imported the new spinning machine into Russia: one can connect the literal meaning to the figurative only with a great deal of difficulty. To make your way from this “part” (pars) to the “whole” (toto) requires a great many more steps than usual. Nevertheless, in the given 171

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context, this logical structure looks almost natural. Why? To answer that question, we must first consider the possible sources of this image, both literary and visual. Emblematic imagery (literal references to established visual representations) combined with pictures that are completely unrepresentable is one of the genre-forming signs of the Russian ode. This capacity of the ode, and Lomonosov’s odes in particular, to oscillate freely between representations and concepts and “word concepts”—that is, to move from the referential understanding of the thematic word to the signifying word—was first formulated in the later 1920s by Grigory Gukovsky and recently studied by Kirill Rogov, who established the principles of how a “baroque panegyric visual quality” works in Lomonosov’s poetry.64 Strange as it may seem, the three “machine stanzas”—thematically the most contemporary—are the closest to the stylistics of the ode (at least in this particular manifestation, as an organic mixing of what is represented with what is not). The “machine” stanzas might be called visual but not descriptive, since no whole, finished picture arises from reading them—only visual fragments and details and something of an outline of their interconnection, barely formulated but palpably felt in the text. In the “machine” stanzas, “Maria’s hand” represents the allegoricalemblematic layer mentioned above and refers the reader to a definite visual source. The “ekphrastic orientation” in the odes of Lomonosov relied on the fact that the reader could quickly supply the corresponding emblem from one of the widely circulated lexicons of emblems, above all, Symbols and Emblems, first published in Amsterdam in 1705 and then reprinted in 1719, 1788, and 1811.65 Although the 1788 edition of Symbols and Emblems, by Nestor Maksimovich-Ambodik (the one Derzhavin and his contemporaries would have had at hand), is the best known, at the turn of the nineteenth century this book could no longer lay claim to being the undisputed source of all visual subtexts. The perception of iconology as a constant—and singular—collection of references, ready at any moment to communicate an essential visual quotation from the subconscious to the conscious mind, had already been disputed by another source that could be found in the majority of private libraries among the Russian aristocracy, namely, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, or rather its eleven volumes of plates, containing some three thousand engravings on miscellaneous subjects. 172

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Didactic explicative illustration appeared in Europe much earlier— at least two centuries before the Encyclopédie. In the Baroque era, it was associated above all with the development of applied optics and geological studies (cf. the numerous illustrations to Kircher's works), but it was to Diderot and d'Alembert that it owed its wide popularity, which transformed a type of representation into the model of a worldview. It is the peaceful and equal coexistence of science and craft, art and engineering structures, farming and weapons manufacturing within the poetic world of Zvanka that brings the philosophical universe of the Encyclopédie to mind. Encyclopedic knowledge differs from the academic one in that it does not construct new hierarchies; instead, it regards existing ones with mistrust and scorns nothing or almost nothing. Consequently, it has neither center nor periphery; interest in an object’s parts, proportions, and architectonics does not depend on its purpose.66 Diderot believed that a good dictionary was capable of changing one’s way of thinking. It is precisely the Encyclopedist’s image of ideas and his “ability to come to judgments” about the world that becomes the chief object of illustration on the pages of the Encyclopédie.67 The majority of the illustrations have a two-part structure: the page is divided horizontally into two unequal sections. The top depicts people at work—on the street or inside a room, but in either case inside an extensively detailed genre scene; while the bottom part, which as a rule takes up two-thirds of the space allotted to the illustration, focuses on the tiny components. In one of the subtlest readings of the Encyclopédie plates, Roland Barthes likened the functioning of these bipartite illustrations to the existence of natural language according to Roman Jakobson.68 Barthes compared the upper part (the “vignette”) to the linguistic syntagma (here the objects are represented in their wider social context, or narrative), while he called the lower part the “visual paradigm,” which explained the structure and the principle of operation of one or another device by the “declination” of its parts and the “conjugation” of its functions. The only connecting links between the two components (or, in Jakobson’s terminology, “the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination” and back) are freestanding, or, rather, free-floating human hands, separated from the body and yet threading a needle, plaiting nautical cord, adjusting optical instruments. The hands hovering over the objects are associated with the human 173

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Figure 23. Techniques of Textile, from Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert.

presence in the “analytic” part of the illustration (it is precisely this part that is obligatory, structural, and creates meaning, while the genre picture, the “synthetic” part, is missing in many illustrations). The hands serve as a signal of movement, an act, an action. “This mystical, simultaneously natural and supernatural phenomenon,” writes Barthes, “forces a person to marvel again and again at the simple fact that he has hands.”69 The appearance of the peculiar metonymy in Derzhavin’s stanzas, linking science, art, and technology—three derivatives from the ancient Greek idea of τέχνη—begins to seem natural as soon as we remember the encyclopedic hands. Moreover, the very presence of this rhetorical figure (taking into account its optional status, the possibility of easily doing without it) ought to be taken as a reference to the single context, without which it would scarcely be possible to contemplate or imagine the harmonic coexistence of man and machine in the period under discussion—the world of the Encyclopédie.70 The inversions in the “machine” stanzas acquire an additional meaning as well. It was frequently noted that changing the normal order of verbal or visual elements leads to the exposure and isolation of these elements.71 Inversion as a stylistic device can be read as an analogue of the disjointing vision that underlies the illustrations in the Encyclopédie. Elements of a once-unified text stand in the same isolated, emphatic position as the parts of a mechanism that has been disassembled in the lower, “paradigmatic” compartment of the two-part illustrations. In this way, Derzhavin captures both the Encyclopedists’ interest in and their approach to the mechanical organism. 174

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The multistaged system of “tropological communication,” which permits us to connect “Maria’s hand” with the crowned head of its owner, corresponds in all respects to a complex system of mechanical gears, which make it possible to put into motion a multitude of spindles, all under the control of one person.72 The hand, which almost seems to have forgotten about its own body, is in perfect harmony with its larger context. Derzhavin’s poetic machine, where accents become detached from their ordinary positions, where steel and wax exchange their physical characteristics, and words change place and meaning.

View 5. “The hard steel we view, like soft, crimson wax” Derzhavin’s departure for Zvanka in the spring of 1807 was clouded by the tsar’s lack of consideration for his strategic ideas. In his “Notes” the poet writes, Accustomed to constant labors, he was not able to be without occupation, and therefore took up literature [. . .]. But in 1806 and early 1807, when the French advanced into Prussia, he could not restrain himself, and wrote the Tsar two memoranda about measures to be taken to curb the impertinence of the French and defend Russia from Bonaparte’s attack, [. . .] which he explained to him verbally, asking permission to create a scheme, for which he had already collected ideas and outlined a plan; the only thing that was required was some information from the military collegium and other places in regard to the details of soldiers, fortresses, arms, and things of that nature. The Sovereign met his proposal with favor and wished to summon him, but upon his return from traveling to the army near Friedland, he changed his former gracious treatment of him, and no longer bowed or even spoke to him. (Derzhavin 6:827–28)73

In the autumn of 1806 Russia was rocked by the order of Alexander, dated November 30, calling for the formation of a “temporary militia,” whose members were to be drawn from the “petty bourgeoisie, smallholders, and government and gentry peasants under the age of fifty and no younger than seventeen, of the thirty-one Russian provinces.”74 It is to this “life-saving” and “essential” measure that Derzhavin refers in the fifth stanza of “Life at Zvanka,” which almost imperceptibly moves from the description of 175

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peacetime to wartime production. The “ode to private life” suddenly turns from the timeless chronotope of the idyll to the fates of the empire: Иль как на лен, на шелк цвет, пестрота и лоск, Все прелести, красы берутся с поль Царицы; Сталь жесткая, глядим, как мягкий, алый воск Куется в бердыши милицы. 1 Or we see the flax and silk of many colors with shining lustre. All delights and colors gathered from our Tsarina’s fields; We see the hard steel melt like scarlet wax, As it is forged into poleaxes for the home guard.

An Iron Forge Viewed from Without The canvas depicts a small village smithy, housed in an old stable or barn on the banks of a rushing river (most likely Wright’s native Derwent). The water sets the big wheel in motion, which in turn powers the hammer, which strikes the anvil. The foreground, the “fourth wall” of the smithy, is removed, as in a theater or a cross-section in an analytical illustration. The absence of the wall allows the viewer to situate himself within the room. The anvil is not in view: it is blocked by the figure of the blacksmith, who stands with his back to us (a device Wright often uses). In the center of this theatrically structured composition stands an elegantly dressed middle-aged man, leaning on his cane (perhaps, the master of the forge), who is deep in thought as he watches the transformation of the red-hot metal. Two others (a man and a woman) also observe the proceedings. In An Iron Forge, as in The Philosopher Giving a Lecture, painted seven years earlier, the process of observation—concentrated, collective looking—itself becomes the focus of representation. Reflections of the fire light up the viewers’ faces and glimmer in the dark corners of the smithy. Anxiety and comfort are mingled in Wright’s painting and vie with one another like light and shadow. An Iron Forge Viewed from Without is one of five “smithy” canvases painted by Wright between 1771 and 1773. An important source for these paintings, apart from the numerous portrayals of Vulcan’s forge, was the iconography the iconography of the Nativity, evoked by the direct reference to the worshippers of the Christ Child, the stable, and the magical shining light thrown by the piece of red-hot metal in the center. Transferring the accent of light from the

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Chapter 2. Nine Views Figure 24. Joseph Wright of Derby, An Iron Forge Viewed from Without, 1773. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

seminal Christian mystery to a thoroughly material one, the displacement of a production scene to a religious context is a typical device in Wright’s pictorial rhetoric. It is no accident that his work became one of the symbols of the Age of Enlightenment a rare book dedicated to the period does not sport a fragment from one of Wrights' nighttime paintings either on the cover or as an illustration inside. A deeper and more philosophical subtext of the forge (and Wright of Derby’s numerous caves, seen both from without and within—from darkness to almost blinding light) is Plato’s cave. The metaphorical potential of this image, as discussed in the first chapter, reached its apogy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1774, when Josiah Wedgwood was working on the Green Frog service ordered by the Russian empress, and Matthew Boulton, another member of the “Lunar Society,” received an order for a new incredible clock from the same quarter, Catherine also acquired for the Hermitage Wright’s Forge, straight from the easel. An Iron Forge is thought to be the first contemporary British painting to become part of the empress’s collection. In the second half of the 1770s Catherine bought two more canvases by Wright: La Girandola and Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples, which the artist himself called the “most effective” of his works. The three paintings were put on public exhibition in the Hermitage and were always favorites with visitors. Johann Gottlieb Georgi, the German ethnographer and traveler, wrote about them in his popular guidebook to St. Petersburg, published in German in 1790, and in Russian in 1794. Georgi considered "An Iron Forge" the best of the three.

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Though the reigning harmony at Zvanka is disturbed by external circumstances—the war with Napoleon, which Derzhavin does not forget for a moment—within the universe of the poem, the preceding machine stanzas, jam-packed with metonymies and inversions, indirectly prepare the reader for the shift.75 Whenever encyclopedic knowledge begins to dismantle the world into its individual components, the process is fraught with the potential for aggression. In “Life at Zvanka” the transition from the placidity of the whole to the anxiety of the part is depicted by means of a twofold visual expression. In stanza 35 we see at its highest point the figurativeness of Derzhavin’s style and its inclination for transposed epithets: “We see the hard steel melt like scarlet wax, / As it is forged into poleaxes for the home guard.” The crimson color of the molten steel is transmitted to wax, which is soft but never red. Thanks to what Tynianov calls the “mutual infection” of the words, as well as the semantic and syntactic ambivalence of the conjunction and/ or adverb kak (“as, like”: “the steel like wax” [stal’ kak vosk]; and/or “how”: “we see how steel is forged [gliadim, kak stal’ kuetsia]), Derzhavin creates a unique, dynamic image of the process of fusion. The fact that Zvanka as atemporal locus amoenus starts to crack precisely here, in the lines addressing the products made by the forge, is not an accident either. Here what is significant is not just the steel, which will become halberds for the militia, but also the very concept of the forge in cultural mythology and iconography, which can be traced back to the images of Vulcan’s forge in Virgil’s Aeneid and the appearance of this subject in the visual arts throughout the ages. If we look at the artistic tradition contemporary to Derzhavin and in many respects in harmony with his works, we should recall An Iron Forge Viewed from Without (1773), one of the most famous canvases of Joseph Wright of Derby, the painter whose A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery we discussed above.76 Although it seems almost certain that Derzhavin knew Wright’s canvases, it would be stretching a point to see in the Forge a direct pictorial source for one of the fragments of “Pictures of life at Zvanka.” At the same time, Wright’s “new sublimem,” rising from the juxtaposition and then merging of industrial, engineering, and scientific imagery with the traditions and iconography of religious painting, profoundly resonates with the principles of Derzhavin’s aesthetics. 178

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The village smithy, an indispensable part of agrarian life, did not necessarily handle the manufacture of light weapons. The biblical appeal “to beat swords into ploughshares” is turned on its head in Derzhavin’s poem. The sight of the red-hot steel, which will soon become “white, cold steel,” forces the poet to put an end to his contemplation of domestic production and paints for his “mental gaze” an allegorical picture that for one stanza interrupts the catalogue of realistic scenes from life on the estate: И сельски ратники как, царства став щитом, Бегут с стремленьем в строй во рыцарском убранстве, “За Веру, за Царя, мы”, говорят, “помрем, Чем у Французов быть в подданстве.” 1 And [we see] how village warriors, the shield of our kingdom, Run in knightly armor, intent to join the ranks; “For Faith and Tsar,” they say, “we’d rather die Than live subjected to the French.”

This last picture is connected to the previous three by its continued use of the conjunction kak (“we see how,” etc.). The common denominator of this syntactic construction allows the poet to move through several types of gaze that lead to “mental vision” and indirect observation without drawing attention to the discontinuities involved (we see how the colors come from the fields, how the steel is forged, and how the village warriors race). The the focus of the “battle scene” is a metonymy charged with metaphorical significance: “village warriors, the shield of our kingdom.” Yet unlike “Maria’s hand,” here the metonymical and metaphorical components are more conceptual than pictorial. The world created by metonymy and synecdoche extends almost infinitely. The metonymic view of a subject, focused on an isolated element, yet implying more, takes the observer far beyond the realm of the observable. The type of vision that reconstitutes scattered parts into a whole is a peculiar combination of near- and farsightedness. Thus, the image of the village warriors that presents itself to the mental gaze of the poet looking into the village smithy creates a bridge from the pastoral Zvanka-Sabinum to the Zvanka situated in Novgorod province of the Russian Empire in 1807. 179

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View 6. “We watch the splendid day spread out upon the water” After devoting the five middle stanzas of the poem to the achievements of physics and engineering, Derzhavin moves to occupations both primordial and immutable: the picture of the forge is followed by scenes of hunting, fishing, and agriculture. The intense gaze of the “machine” stanzas, oriented toward dissection and analysis, gives way to a panoramic, unfocused, and dynamic type of vision. In the first lines of stanza 37 the observer walks “along” (vdol’) the landscape, as if he were walking past it rather than within it; his point of view and the means of conveyance and speed are constantly changing: Иль в лодке вдоль реки, по брегу пеш, верхом, Качусь на дрожках я с соседей вереницей; То рыбу удами, то дичь громим свинцом, То зайцев ловим псов станицей. Иль стоя внемлем шум зеленых, черных волн, Как дерн бугрит соха, злак трав падет косами, Серпами злато нив,—и ароматов полн Порхает ветр меж Нимф рядами. 1 Or in a boat down the river, or along the shore, on foot or on horseback, Or riding in a droshky with a train of neighbors; Now we fish with hooks, now rout game with lead, Or catch hares with a pack of dogs. Or standing we hear the sound of the green and black waves, As ploughs pile up mounds of turf; the grain is mown with scythes, The golden corn with sickles—and the fragrant breeze flutters Among the rows of Nymphs.

An important genre requirement of country estate poetry is met in these stanzas: comprehensiveness, an attempt to accommodate in the limited space of the estate and the poem the four elements of the universe and the five human senses. The very catalogue of the objects of the hunt and fishing—fish, fowl, rabbits—serves as an indirect reference to water, air, and earth, respectively.77 In the following stanza (38) these three substances are mixed together, as in the process of apprehending the perceptible world. “Or pause and hear the rolling waves”—it would seem that here sight is 180

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yielding to sound, but in the second half of this line the color epithets (“green and black waves”) synthesize these two senses, while the “nautical” metaphor of the ploughed earth combines in our imagination two of the four elements; a third is soon added, namely, air (“and the fragrant breeze flutters / Among the rows of Nymphs”), to which then is added a fourth sense—smell.78 The sense of the world’s universal harmonic connectedness is reinforced by the repeated use of Derzhavin’s beloved instrumentalis—a slightly unusual condensed, latinized version of the instrumental case: “the grass is mown with scythes, / The golden corn with sickles” (zlak trav padet kosami / serpami zlato niv). The movement of the observer and his companions along the river gives way to a horizontal displacement of elements in the landscape in relation to one another: Иль смотрим, как бежит под черной тучей тень По копнам, по снопам, коврам желто-зеленым И сходит солнышко на нижнюю степень К холмам и рощам сине-темным. 1 Or we watch as, under a dark cloud, a shadow runs Along the haycocks, the sheaves, the yellow-green carpets And the sun descends to its lowest position Toward the blue-dark hills and groves.

The “wide-format” landscape in motion is contemplated from a distance and perceived pictorially. The “pointillist” juxtaposition of colors in the preceding stanza (“green and black waves”) is followed by their amalgamation: yellow-green rugs and dark-blue groves are much more in keeping with Derzhavin’s palette. The interplay of light, color, and shadow connects the four lines of stanza 28 with the three poems of the “meteorological cycle.”79 In the next stanza the companions’ point of view changes once again— they are now sitting down, watching the changes taking place in nature through the smoke of a bonfire: Иль, утомясь, идем скирдов, дубов под сень; На бреге Волхова разводим огнь дымистый; Глядим, как на воду ложится красный день, И пьем под небом чай душистый. 181

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) 1 Or, fatigued, we walk in the shade of hayricks and oaks; On the bank of the Volkhov we start a smoking fire; We watch the splendid [or red] day spread out upon the water, And we drink fragrant tea beneath the skies.

To earth, water, and air, the fourth element is added—fire, both metaphorical and associative (compare the line “And watch the splendid [krasnyi, both red and beautiful] day spread out upon the water” with the stock image of the day “burning to an end”) and the real, “smoking” bonfire. Smoke, a product of fire and air, has its own color and smell, which, moreover, stings the eyes. Vision in these lines is accompanied not only by smell and to some degree touch but taste as well, evoked in the phrase “In open air, sip tea so fragrant.” Stanza 40 brings to a close a section of ten stanzas threaded together by the repetition of the conjunction “or” (il’). In the line “Or, fatigued, we walk in the shade of hayricks and oaks,” the author-observer shares with the reader his sense of exhaustion, but nevertheless continues his visual experiment. Stanzas 41–43 are not so much about the process of contemplation as the effects created by the rural views: Забавно! в тьме челнов с сетьми как рыбаки, Ленивым строем плыв, страшат тварь влаги стуком; Как парусы суда, и лямкой бурлаки Влекут одним под песню духом. Прекрасно! тихие, отлогие брега И редки холмики, селений мелких полны, Как, полосаты их клоня поля, луга, Стоят над током струй безмолвны. Приятно! как вдали сверкает луч с косы И эхо за лесом под мглой гамит народа, Жнецов поющих, жниц полк идет с полосы, Когда мы едем из похода. (author’s emphasis—TS) 1

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Chapter 2. Nine Views Diverting! How fishermen, in a host of boats with nets, Floating by in lazy formation, scare creatures of the deep with their rumble; How, like the sails that power ships, barge haulers drag The towrope as they sing as one. Beautiful! How the quiet, sloping banks And scattered little hills, brimming with small settlements, Incline their striped fields and meadows, And stand above the current of the stream in silence. Pleasant! How in the distance the light from a scythe sparkles, And the echo of people’s voices roars beyond the forest in the dark, The regiment of singing harvesters leaves the field When we ride home from our outing.80

In the three exclamatory adverbs to which the description of the world of Zvanka is reduced (Diverting! Beautiful! Pleasant!), we have a curious alteration of the eighteenth-century aesthetic triad discussed in the second chapter, with its obligatory beautiful and sublime, and the variable third term, rendered in different periods and by different authors as either new, fair, peculiar/strange, or picturesque. One should not seek to impose outside aesthetic categories on the fragments of the landscape at Zvanka or attempt to generate ironclad rules according to which the poet uses the terms beautiful, pleasant, or diverting. But it is certainly of the utmost importance that the term sublime, traditionally associated with the majestic, inexplicable, and often terrible, is absent here, replaced by “diverting/amusing.” We have already considered the emotional nature of the “new sublime” when comparing the “agreeable surprise” embedded in the “machine stanzas” (“In fluffy curls, and multitudes of spindles suddenly / Are set to spinning by Maria’s hand” [I t’my vdrug vereten / Mariinoi rukoi priadutsa]) with Lomonosov’s “star-filled vault.” The words “Or we look on with curiosity as the waves of cotton pour / Into the troughs through needles and wheels, like snow” (stanza 34; Il’ liubopytny, kak bumazhny runy voln . . .), which prepare the way for the spectacle of the modernization of the spinning process, are in keeping with the exclamation “Diverting!” in stanza 41, where the reader is treated to a different kind of knowhow of a more archaic bent: “fishermen, in a host of boats with nets, / Floating by in lazy formation, scare creatures of the deep with 183

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their rumble.” In his “Explanations” the poet provides the following commentary: In this type of fishing several dozen small boats move slowly; there are two men in each; after putting their nets in the water, they beat the boats with sticks, and the frightened fish throw themselves into the nets. (Derzhavin 2:641)

“Multitude of spindles” (t’my vereten) and “multitude of boats” (t’my chelnov) are no less surprising than a Lomonosovian “abyss of stars” (bezdna zvezd): phenomena that are sublime in their incomprehensibility give way to phenomena that are fascinating and diverting in their comprehensibility. This exchange, even if it is mediated, of the sublime and lofty for the amusing and curious represents a fundamentally important concept for Derzhavin’s poetics in general: his famous repudiation of Pindaric soaring in favor of the bel esprit of the “amusing” (veselonravnaia) ode, traditionally dated to 1779 and tied to the heyday of the Derzhavin-Lvov circle, was indeed in many respects a turn from the traditional understanding of the sublime as awe-inspiring to one that was elegant and amusing. “My shrine-like house burns with glass ablaze.” When depicting, praising, or even simply mentioning buildings and monuments in his poems, Derzhavin is very specific in his use of architectural terminology.81 What does the poet tell us about his house at Zvanka? Very little. The interior is reduced to two images that border on the abstract: a vaguely folkloric “front room” with portraits of military men on the walls, and the poet’s study—“sanctuary of the muses”—completely isolated from the realities of everyday life. We don’t learn much more about how the house looks from the outside; we should remember, however, that the poem’s addressee, Evgeny Bolkhovitinov, received Abramov’s watercolor together with the poem: the house on the high bank of the Volkhov River was fixed not only in his memory but before his eyes.82 Стекл заревом горит мой храмовидный дом, На гору желтый всход меж роз осиявая, Где встречу водомет шумит лучей дождем, Звучит музыка духовая. 184

Chapter 2. Nine Views 1 My shrine-like house burns with glass ablaze, Illuminating the yellow slope among the roses, Where in greeting the fountain rings with a rain of rays, And the music of the brass band sounds.

As the poet rides home “from his rambles,” the house greets him with “glass ablaze”: the sunset is reflected in the windows. The optical effect once again renders nature and culture (architecture in particular) inseparable.83 The effect is achieved through the use of rhetorical optics— the imposition of several tropes: double metonymy (windows instead of house, glass instead of windows) in conjunction with the metaphorical image of the “blaze” (zarevo), a visual effect that is intensified when we recall the “red/splendid day” that lay on the water three stanzas earlier. The architectural details of the house virtually dissolve in the play of light and color; the look of the house is allotted, but one trait, one word: “shrinelike” (khramovidnyi). This epithet implies many more characteristics, meanings, and allusions than it might seem. Both of Derzhavin’s houses, the one on the Fontanka River in St. Petersburg and the house at Zvanka, were designed by Nikolai Lvov, who more than once, both as a joke and in all seriousness, called himself the poet’s “domestic architect” (Derzhavin 1:519).84 In an unfinished poem titled “House” (Dom), a version of the Anacreontic “advice to artists,” Derzhavin addresses his architect friend with the following words: Зодчий Аттики преславный, Мне построй покойный дом, Вот чертеж и мысли главны, Мне написаны пером. 1 Most glorious Attic architect, Build me a tranquil house, Here are my plan and my main thoughts, Written down with my pen.

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Both the city house and the country house were “tranquil.”85 And Derzhavin spoke the truth when he called them “shrine-like”: Lvov built houses that looked like churches and churches that looked like houses. In this he was following the theory and practice of the great Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. In 1792, as Derzhavin was working on the verse epistle to Lvov, his addressee was laboring over his translation of Palladio’s theoretical treatise I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture, 1570), rightly considered a monument not only of architectural thought but also of Italian humanism.86 The first and, as it turned out, only book of the four that Lvov ended up translating appeared six years later, in 1798, published in an edition the same size as the original with parallel Italian text.87 In 1799 Lvov presented a copy of his Palladio to Derzhavin, with the inscription “To my dear friend Gavrila Romanovich from an admiring publisher. 1799 Nov. 8. St. Pburg.” In his introduction Lvov informs the reader that after eight years of preparatory work “he has copied all four books of Palladio’s Architecture, containing more than two hundred drawings, in the exact size and likeness of the original.” A few lines later follows the famous declaration-cumexclamation: In my fatherland may the Palladian taste reign; there are enough imitators of French curls and English subtlety without us [. . .]. Let the English stoneworkers teach ours how to build solidly, cleanly, and straight; while the French architects will take on the building’s interior, where we cannot find in the ancient Architects anything that fits our present-day needs. (“From the Publisher of the Russian Palladio,” Palladio 1798, ii–iii)

Counting on English and French knowhow in practical matters, Lvov thought of Palladio more in connection with the metaphorical concept of taste. The instinctive, irrational nature of this concept and the possibility of its wide application made it especially attractive to Lvov the polymath: in his mind, the term “Palladian taste” pertained to much more than architecture.88

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The Four Books and the Four Epistles: The Architecture of Virtue. On the engraved frontispiece of the first Venetian edition of Palladio’s Four Books of 1570 we see two female figures, who stand at the foot of a massive triumphal arch, holding out architectural instruments— compasses, rulers, plumb lines—to the allegorical figure of Regina Virtus, seated on her throne under the vault of the arch. The idea behind this allegory runs like a red thread throughout the entire text. For Palladio, the history of architecture is the history of human relations, a reflection of the primary stages in the development of society. The theory that he created was a system of rules and prescriptions, worked out over the course of the the artisan's life, a search for a spatial formula for human happiness— if there is one. Palladio’s Four Books move from the general rules of the building art (Book 1) to advice on the arrangement and structure of private homes (Book 2), then to the social organization of public spaces (streets, bridges, squares, and public buildings) (Book 3), and, finally, to the architectural and moral legacy of ancient temples (Book 4). Scholars are inclined to view this arrangement as a direct source for the outline of the Essay on Man, a key to the sequence and interior logic of the four epistles: man in relation to the universe, to himself, to society, and to his personal happiness.89 One of the concluding stanzas of the fourth epistle, “Argument of the Nature and State of Man with Respect to Happiness,” proclaims, God loves from Whole to Parts, but human soul Must rise from Individual to the Whole. Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake; The center mov’d, a circle strait succeeds, Another still and still another spreads, Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, His country next and next all human race, Wide and more wide, th’o’erflowings of the mind Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind; Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest, And Heav’n beholds its image in his breast. (Epistle 4, ll. 361–73)

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Palladio and Palladianism Andrea Pietro della Gondola (1508–80), a stonemason from Vicenza, owed his upbringing, education, and striking name Palladio to Count Gian Giorgio Trissino, a humanist, philosopher, poet, and scholar. In his epic poem L’Italia liberati dai Gati (The Deliverance of Italy from the Goths, 1548), Trissino likened the interior arrangement of a palace to the structure of human consciousness. Many years later, Palladio, true to the ideas of his enlightened benefactor, as well as the principles of Renaissance anthropomorphism, developed this idea in the opening chapters of his treatise: The Beauty will arise from the Harmony and Correspondence between the Whole and its various Parts, and of the various Parts between themselves; for then the Building will appear one complete and perfect Body, in which one Member answers to another, and all together to the Whole; so that it may seem absolutely necessary to its Existence (Palladio 1735, 8).

The most famous of all the villas built by Palladio near Vicenza, Villa Almerico Capra, better known as Villa Rotonda, has served as the model for innumerable buildings throughout the world. Each of its four facades is decorated with an identical six-columned portico, and one might think that the building would look identical from all four axes, but this is not the case. Palladio arranged Villa Rotonda in such a way that the symmetry of the design merely emphasized the variety of the views. Pavel Muratov, the eminent Russian art historian and tireless traveler, provides us with one of the best descriptions of the Rotonda and its place in Palladio’s art, in his Images of Italy (1911): It is one of the most pure places for contemplation that the world has to offer. The appeal to nature, which in Palladio’s country architecture is always rendered with exceptional force, is expressed in the creative idea of the Rotonda. For does Palladio not tell us with the greatest simplicity that the villa’s four porticoes were conceived as they were because he could not bring himself to choose over all the others just one of the landscapes that can be viewed from the four different sides? (Muratov 1994, 3:399)

Palladio’s visual experiment, based on the impossibility of making a choice or stating a preference, whether it be of landscape, angle, or point of view, is quite close to the use of “montage” in Derzhavin’s poem. The arrangement of many-columned porticoes, more characteristic of a temple than of a private residence, on the anterior side of the building (or, in the case of the Rotonda, on all four sides) was a very important compositional design for Palladio, a time-honored ancient tradition, but one he thoroughly reconceived and modernized.

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Figure 25. Andrea Palladio, plan of Villa La Rotonda, in I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (1570).

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Palladio sincerely believed that private homes in the ancient period were like this—that the ordered facades of private homes had been transferred in antiquity to temples and other public buildings. Thus, according to him, houses and temples were diachronically related. The “shrine-like” pediments of Palladio’s buildings were occasioned by the desire to further the home’s grandezza e magnificenza, while the broad staircases leading to the pedestal intensified the solemnity. The portico of the classical order was not only transformed into a peculiar metonymy for the whole legacy of the Italian architect but also became one of the most important visual leitmotifs of the “cultural memory” of Britain, which stood at the forefront of European Palladianism. One man is responsible for bringing the Palladian villa to England, whence it found its way to Russia: Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington (1694– 1753), who inherited enormous property in England and Ireland while still a child and later became a generous patron and publisher, friend of Locke, and addressee of Pope’s famous Epistle. Burlington was not immediately taken with Palladio. On his first journey to Italy, when he was twenty—the traditional Grand Tour—he passed through Vicenza without stopping. A few years later he happened upon the Four Books in Giacomo Leoni’s English translation and three volumes of Vitruvius Britannicus, by the Scottish architect Colin Campbell. After becoming acquainted with these books, Burlington made a second trip to Italy, where he made a detailed study of Palladio’s architectural legacy, buying up all the available collections of his drawings and an Italian edition of the Four Books. It was in Italy that Burlington made the acquaintance of the self-taught artist William Kent (1682–1731), who would become his closest friend and comrade-in-arms, responsible for realizing the majority of his architectural ideas. Thanks to the taste and generosity of Burlington (who in the end spent his entire enormous fortune) and the exceptional talent of Kent, by the mid-1720s Palladianism was already perceived as the British national architectural style and later acquired the status of a particular aesthetic paradigm, with applications in art, literature, and even music. Palladianism in architecture and “conversation pieces” in painting shared a common philosophy of collective viewing and discussion. Palladianism set itself less against the Baroque vortex than the forced symmetry of Continental neoclassicism. It honored another antiquity. Palladio’s treatment of classical images (like Burlington’s, Kent’s, and Campbell’s treatment of his legacy in its turn) was not a matter of copying but rather a free and easy dialogue, sometimes even an argument, with the original. Burlington’s villa at Chiswick, built in 1725 with the assistance of Campbell and Kent, is recognized as the culmination of British Palladianism—both in the narrow, architectural sense of the word and in its broader, philosophical meaning.

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It was at Chiswick that the Burlington-Kent artistic circle regularly met, and it gradually became an emblem of enlightened leisure and cultural universalism. The tripartite façade, the six-columned portico, and the semicircular Venetian window under the lamp with its semicircular “Venetian” window—the villa’s architectural look as a whole seemed to speak of what was going on behind its walls: the host’s hospitality, the guests’ liberal views, the combined pursuits of architecture and painting, and the general enthusiasm for the literature of republican and early imperial Rome (particularly that of the Augustan era). The imperfect correspondence of original and copy, Villa Rotonda and Chiswick, a miniature version with only one portico on the anterior façade, merely served to confirm the idea of Palladianism as a paradoxical case of a normative poetics that not only did not exclude but almost prescribed divergence from the norm. Reviving the architectural forms of ancient Rome from literary sources no less than visual ones, the villas of Palladio and his British followers had a special connection with the Word. (Let’s not forget that Burlington’s enthusiasm for Palladio started with texts and moved to buildings, and not the other way round.) On the one hand, Palladian villas were perceived as three-dimensional illustrations to the poetry of Horace and the Letters of Pliny the Younger; on the other, they contained a certain literary potential, the promise of a text. In the eighteenth century, the names of Palladio and Horace were connected by a single complex of aesthetic signifiers: balance, symmetry, decorum. In their attempts to construct the history and theory of architecture in parallel with literary history and theory, Palladio’s English and French apologists frequently took The Epistle to Pisos as the basis of their treatises. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Alexander Pope occupies a special place in the history of literary Palladianism. A bust of Palladio graced the library at Twickenham, and it was there that the poet studied the Four Books of Architecture and examined the numerous drawings of Palladio in the collection of Lord Burlington. Rightly considered one of Pope’s aesthetic manifestoes, his Epistle to Lord Burlington (1732) concludes with the following farewell: You too proceed! Make falling Arts your care, Erect new wonders, and the old repair, Jones and Palladio to themselves restore, And be whate’er Vitruvius was before. In Pope’s opinion, one should restore Palladio’s architectural legacy alongside the cultural and moral position of the Italian master. The didactic pathos of the Four Books was of prime importance for Pope, as it would later be for Lvov.

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The higher purpose of Palladian architecture was very much in the same spirit as the design of the Essay. It is no accident that Pope describes his goal in structural and topographic terms, since the Essay on Man was to be a “general Map of Man, marking out no more than the greater parts, their extent, their limits, and their connection, but leaving the particular to be more fully delineated in the charts which are to follow.” Pope could almost be proposing a caption for the frontispiece of Four Books when he writes: “Know then this truth (enough for Man to know) / ‘Virtue alone is Happiness below’” (Epistle 4, ll. 310–11). With its neo-Platonic aspirations toward symmetry, simplicity, and harmony, Palladianism, or, rather, its literary equivalent, was for Pope the language into which the great poem of the preceding century, Milton’s Paradise Lost, should be translated, as its purpose was also to a significant degree an attempt “to justify the ways of God to man.”90 The four relatively short verse epistles, in rhyming couplets with a regular caesura, of the Essay on Man made the text easy to understand and memorize and helped convey to the reader the epic themes, images, and ideas of Paradise Lost in a more elegant and harmonious form, better suited to the post-Newtonian tastes of the eighteenth century.91 The house in Twickenham was not just a place for Pope to live and write but also the architectural equivalent of an epistolary poem. As the Essay on Man was addressed to St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, so too the house had its addressee. The audience was vitally important for the ideology of the villa since the time of Horace and Pliny the Younger.92 In one of his Letters, addressed to Domitius Appolinaris (Letter 5, 6), Pliny writes: I should have ended before now, for fear of being too chatty, had I not proposed in this letter to lead you into every corner of my house and gardens. Nor did I apprehend your thinking it a trouble to read the description of a place which I feel sure would please you were you to see it; especially as you can stop just when you please. [. . .] Homer, you know, has employed many verses in the description of the arms of Achilles, as Virgil has also in those of Aeneas, yet neither of them is prolix, because they each keep within the limits of their original design. Aratus, you observe, is not considered too circumstantial, though he traces and enumerates the minutest stars, for he does not go out of his way for that purpose, but only follows where his subject leads him. In the same way (to compare small things with great), so long as, in endeavoring to give you an idea of 192

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Figure 26. Lord Burlington, William Kent. Chiswick House (Chiswick, c. 1725).

Figure 27. Nikolai Lvov, Derzhavin’s House at Zvanka. An illustration from Iakov Grot’s edition (“Volkhov-Kubre”).

my house, I have not introduced anything irrelevant or superfluous, it is not my letter which describes, but my villa which is described, that is to be considered large. (emphasis mine—TS)93

Pliny the Younger’s canonical strolls about his villas placed the object being described on the same footing as the language used to describe it, thus transforming the villa as a genre into a kind of epistle in stone. Perhaps this circumstance explains, at least in part, Derzhavin’s change from the self-contained “Pictures of Life at Zvanka,” a “short poem in the descriptive manner,” to a verse epistle addressed to the translator of Pope’s four epistles. As we recall, Bolkhovitinov’s translation also had its own addressee, Dr. Makedonets of Voronezh, an old friend with whom he corresponded until 1810. In his letter, dated June 26, 1807, Evgeny writes Makedonets, “Last week I visited my neighbor Derzhavin who lives on the Volkhov, and he has dedicated [pripisal] to my name an ode, which will soon be published in the Herald of European in Moscow. Read it there.”94 The verb pripisat’, which literally means “to attach” or “to attribute,” was carefully chosen by Evgeny to emphasize the notion that he perceived the dedication as something of an afterthought. Derzhavin’s switch in genre 193

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from ode to epistle was fairly notional (after all, the address to Evgeny does not appear until five stanzas from the poem’s end). Evgeny sensed this inconsistency of genre and probably had it in mind when, with some embarrassment, he wrote to Derzhavin (in connection with a planned epistle to Grand Princess Ekaterina Pavlovna “on the protection of the native language”): Allow me to be frank one more time—verses in an epistle ought to be as simple and smooth as possible and without any transposition of words that might make it more difficult to understand. In the ode the phraseological structure is produced by soaring ideals, while an epistle is a friendly, candid conversation. (November 2, 1807; Derzhavin VI, 186)

Derzhavin sensed the need for a “friendly, candid conversation” more acutely than ever before; but he could not convey it simply or smoothly. The Palladian harmony of the Essay on Man belonged to the preceding century.95 To return to Pope’s poem in 1807 did not seem possible, but Derzhavin very much wanted to draw nearer to it. Distant echoes of a bygone harmony, the name of the addressee in the poem's title and the "shrine-like" aspect of the house, these seemingly minor touches are in fact important clues to the poet’s secret aspirations. Following in the footsteps of Burlington and Kent not only in their architectural passions but also in their efforts to revive the atmosphere of lively artistic dialogue and collective creativity, which the habitués of Chiswick House took from the Italian academies of the sixteenth century, Nikolai Lvov naturally intended to revive the same atmosphere for his friends and clients (Lvov’s work on his translation of Palladio coincided with the collective “composition” of the vignettes to accompany Derzhavin’s poems). In Derzhavin’s Zvanka home, a miniature and simplified variant of Chiswick, Lvov incorporated the principal Palladian themes: a building in the shape of a cube, the entry staircase at its foundation and a cupola on the roof; serliana on the first floor and thermal windows on the second and third floors; a three-part façade, and a four-columned portico topped by a belvedere balcony.96 Visitors to Zvanka noted that the balcony, onto which the drawing room looked out, was Derzhavin’s favorite spot in the entire place. 194

Chapter 2. Nine Views You could see in all four directions from the balcony, and he [Derzhavin—TS] was much inspired by the marvelous natural scenery. There he would sit with guests, and alone, either taking in the flowing of the river and the vessels sailing by one after another, or listening to the family chorus singing in the garden on feast days. Right there stood six iron cannons, and a telescope through which he liked to look at the more distant views. There was a fountain on the second terrace of the porch.97

Palladian construction of a villa’s space “from inside to outside” was extremely important for Lvov, who kept returning to the idea of “architectural hospitality” and the house as a gesture. The porticoes and balconies in Lvov’s buildings seem to advance to greet visitors and at the same time to remind them of what awaits them inside. This sort of portico is more than anything reminiscent of the eyepiece of a magic lantern. Incidentally, the depiction of the magic lantern used to ornament the poem of the same name in Grot’s edition compels us to consider the astonishing architectural similarity between the magic lantern and the Palladian villa. In both instances the main form is cubic, with an expansive portico/eyepiece, crowned by a cupola on a small cylinder (a lantern [!], to use the architectural term). Moreover, both the magic lantern and the villa not only are objects of contemplation but also project a certain internal image to the outside. Likewise, the epithet “shrine-like” in Derzhavin’s poem is metonymically connected not only to the exterior view of the house but also to its interior, to the way of life of its residents and, genetically, to the world of European Palladianism. Palladio’s legacy incorporates to a significant degree, both practically and theoretically, the speculative, nonmaterial conceptions of Renaissance architecture. In this context, certain features of Derzhavin’s style—the absence of detail in the description of the house at Zvanka and the poem’s multilayered metonymies—begin to take on new connotations. The house’s inviting gesture and its movement from inside to outside is conveyed in the stanza describing the windowpanes, the “blaze” of which “illuminates the yellow slope among the roses”: the climb up the hill. And from the five human senses we once again, for a short while, pull on the thread of sound. 195

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Из жерл чугунных гром по праздникам ревет; Под звездной молнией, под светлыми древами Толпа крестьян, их жен вино и пиво пьет, Поет и пляшет под гудками. 1 From iron muzzles thunder roars on holidays; ’Neath starry lightning and resplendent trees. A crowd of peasants and their wives drink wine and beer, And sing and dance to the sound of strings.98

The theme of village amusements is developed in the following three stanzas as well, but the circle of participants gradually narrows, while the “amusements” themselves are moved into the house: the action of the interior space greeting the exterior is now rendered in reverse, the raucous peasant celebration making way for the “amusements of the capital”: a children’s concert and an amateur theater.99 Of the happy-golucky impression created by the peasant songs and dances there remains in these delicate lines only the incongruous construction pialim vzory (we hold them in our gaze), an expression that in Russian combines a markedly low-style verb with a noun that smacks of the sublime: Амурчиков, Харит плетень, иль хоровод, Заняв у Талии игру и Терпсихоры, Цветочные венки пастух пастушке вьет: А мы на них и пялим взоры. 1 Cupids and Graces circle in a dance, Taking up the playful ways of Thalia and Terpsichore; A shepherd braids his shepherdess flowered wreaths While we hold them in our gaze.

The sounds gradually fade away: the music and the cannonade (“the thunder of iron muzzles”) and the piercing shriek of the peasant gudki yield to the noble “thunder” of the harp, and later the “pliant” tones—a “quiet thunder” (tikhogrom) of a piano. A soothing sense of universal harmony, inspired by the contemplation of the bucolic scenes enacted in the “shrinelike house,” crowns the pastoral part of Derzhavin’s poem. The chorus of guests disperses; the poet is left behind, alone. 196

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F i f t e e n S t anzas of Solitude I was left alone Seeking this visible world, nor knowing why. —William Wordsworth

Landscape is the result of an encounter between material reality and the human gaze. The gaze divides it into parts and organizes it in accordance with a particular, individual perception, on the one hand, and with certain established norms prevalent in society, on the other. The landscape at Zvanka, which so far has been rhetorically ideal, dramatically industrial, and anamorphically detached, in the course of fifteen stanzas (32–48) is collectively observed by a group of viewers, while in the following two stanzas (49–50) it once again becomes the object of contemplation of a single pair of eyes, which are falling asleep: Но нет как праздника, и в будни я один, На возвышении сидя столпов перильных, При гуслях под вечер, челом моих седин Склонясь, ношусь в мечтах умильных; Чего в мой дремлющий тогда не входит ум? Мимолетящи суть все времени мечтаньи: Проходят годы, дни, рев морь и бурей шум, И всех зефиров повеваньи. 1 But the holiday passes, and on weekdays I am alone, Sitting at the summit of the columned railing; Toward evening to the accompaniment of gusli, my gray temple Bowed, I take wing in tender dreams; What does not enter then my slumbering mind? All the reveries of time are flitting past. Years pass, and days, the roar of seas and din of storms, And all the zephyrs’ rustle.

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View 7: “What does not enter then my slumbering mind?” Pushkin chose a line from “Life at Zvanka” as the epigraph to his poem “Autumn” (Osen’, 1833). The effect of an epigraph comes from its being taken out of context, but not every epigraph ends up changing the image of the work from which it was taken. As we have seen, the old man’s “mental gaze", unable of halting, or even slowing down, the “fleeting” pictures, is merely one of many modes of looking and seeing tried out in this poem. But why did Pushkin choose this very line, describing summer at Zvanka, for his poem about autumn in Tsarskoe Selo? The Poet’s Dream. In the 1830s, those who boasted a personal acquaintanceship with Derzhavin remembered him as an old man in a constant state of half-sleep, on the verge of waking up. Here is how Stepan Zhikharev describes his first meeting with the poet, in December 1806: An old man of about sixty-five, pale and sullen, wearing a white cap and a squirrel coat covered with a blue silk material, was sitting in an armchair at his desk, which stood in the middle of his study, absorbed in the reading of some book. The head of a little white dog, so sound asleep that she didn’t notice my arrival, peeked out from the breast of his coat. I coughed. Derzhavin—because it was he—glanced at me, straightened the cap on his head, and after letting out a yawn as if he were half-awake, said to me: “Excuse me, I was so engrossed in my reading that I didn’t notice you. What can I do for you?”100

And several pages later: After lunch Gavrila Romanovich sat down in a chair by the door to the drawing room and immediately began to nod off. Vera Nikolayevna [Lvova, Derzhavin’s niece—TS] told me that this was his usual practice. [. . .] While our Bard dozed in his chair, I examined the famous portrait of him by Tonci.101

In Zhikharev’s account, the poet’s characteristic state is one of nodding drowsiness punctuated by short bursts of wakefulness. Nevertheless, in this portrait of the “Bard,” meditativeness and aloofness somehow coexist with the liveliness and even passion attested to by all who knew him: 198

Chapter 2. Nine Views Figure 28. Gavrila Derzhavin. Engraving after A. Vasilyevsky’s drawing.

He walks about in his coat with Bibishka at his chest, knitting his brows and smacking his lips, thinking and dreaming, and apparently not paying attention to anything that is happening around him. But as soon as he hears about some injustice or harm coming to someone, or, on the contrary, some sort of human triumph and good deed—his cap immediately askew, he becomes lively, and his eyes sparkle.102

Practically every memoirist who wrote about Derzhavin in the nineteenth century mentions the white cap, velvet coat, or Bukhara dressing gown. The poet was captured in this garb in several portraits painted in the 1810s. Derzhavin’s great-nephew Vladimir Panayev, who was born and raised in Kazan, writes about one of his first visits to the capital: This was soon followed by the exhibition at the Academy of Arts [. . .]. I go there, and to my great pleasure I find a portrait of Derzhavin, painted by the artist Vasilyevsky, and as they told me, a very good likeness. The famous old man was depicted in a crimson velvet coat, trimmed in sable, wearing a straw-colored jersey, a white shawl on his shoulders, and a white cap. Infirmity and declining strength marked his wrinkled face [. . .]. After several days I went to visit him. [. . .] I entered the study of the great poet with reverence. He was standing in the middle of the room, just as he was in the portrait, except, instead of a velvet coat, he was wearing a gray, silvery Bukhara dressing gown, and he slowly walked toward me with a shuffling gait.103 199

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Ivan Khrushov, the author of the biographical study Milena, Derzhavin’s Second Wife, published in the Russian Messenger in 1903, also writes about Derzhavin’s celebrated sleepiness: He often would suddenly fall into thought and trace on his plate the beloved initials of the late K.D. with his fork. His second wife, once she noticed this inopportune drawing, would always call him out of his silence with the stern question: “Ganyushka, Ganyushka, what are you doing there?” He would usually quickly answer, wiping his eyes and forehead as if he were only half-awake, “Nothing, dear.”104

The indefinite modality of these narratives, the oft repeated “as if ” (kak budto), in all likelihood points to the fact that Derzhavin’s constant drowsiness was not so much a sign of physical weakness as a pretext—yet another means of isolating himself from the external world. Recalling his encounters with the poet in the early nineteenth century, Ivan Dmitriev describes his behavior as follows: Often, in the company of guests, particularly at his own house, he would fall into thought and become drowsy, but I always suspected that he was pretending, so that he wouldn’t be hindered from being engaged with something of his own that was more important than the usual empty talk.105

“Blessed is he who is less dependent on people.” Having retired, Derzhavin was no longer obligated to “observe the niceties,” and as time went on he enjoyed more and more his role as an eccentric and original: Derzhavin’s velvet coat in which he would usually greet his visitors, the ever-present dog, Bibishka, wrapped up in his bosom, cannot but remind us of Pope’s velvet cap, as well as Diderot’s house slippers, in which he liked to appear in public, or even the Russian futurists’ yellow cardigans. “Slumbering Mind.” As the poet becomes more and more drowsy, the verse becomes smoother; the feverish spondees of the “machine stanzas” are left behind (although we encounter some extra stresses in these lines as well). Having completed the pastoral part of his poem, and finding himself alone as he asks questions and answers them, in these lines of 200

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stanza 50 Derzhavin seems to recall the recommendations of Charles Batteux, one of the main theorists of the pastoral genre, in whose steps, by his own admission, the poet had been following since 1779.106 “The eclogue ought to delight gently, quietly,” writes Batteux. “The reading of it ought to resemble the condition of being half-asleep.”107 In the history of the pastoral in Russia, the year “Life at Zvanka” was composed, 1807, holds a special place, for not only did the second volume of Batteux’s Principles of Literature (including the “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry”)108 appear, in the translation of Dmitry Obleukhov, but also Alexei Merzlyakov’s translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, which rendered antiquity in the language of Russian folklore. Merzlyakov prefaced his translations from Virgil with the programmatic essay A Few Words on the Eclogue (Nechto ob ekloge), in which he wrote of the vicissitudes of the bucolic genre, as well as establishing the importance to the state of translating Latin eclogues into Russian.109 Does not the eclogue bring us closer to the peaceful, quiet, innocent life that we enjoyed in the embrace of Nature? Does it not awake in our heart revulsion for our real life, filled with sorrows, cares, and boredom? Does it not give us pause—at least for a moment—amid vain desires, tantalizing advantages, false desires? Gesner sensed this and seems to have expanded the boundaries of the eclogue further than all the ancient and modern Writers.110

During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the question of the scope of the pastoral genre figured as one of the central questions of literary theory. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the “boundaries of the eclogue,” to use Merzlyakov’s formulation, became larger. Nevertheless, the “memory of the genre” made it impossible to engage it in any sort of dialogue without direct or indirect reference to the Virgilian tradition. Poets most often turned to the first and ninth eclogues, perhaps because, unlike the ideal landscapes of the other bucolics, the locus amoenus of these two works is shaken by the intrusion of the real world, history, and unease. Thus, in the first eclogue the shepherd Meliboeus complains to the shepherd Tityrus that his house and land have been expropriated (Tityrus has successfully defended his own property): 201

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Happy old man, who ’mid familiar streams And hallowed springs, will court the cooling shade! Here, as of old, your neighbour’s bordering hedge, That feasts with willow-flower the Hybla bees, Shall oft with gentle murmur lull to sleep, While the leaf-dresser beneath some tall rock Uplifts his song, nor cease their cooings hoarse The wood-pigeons that are your heart’s delight, Nor doves their moaning in the elm-tree top.

“According to the ancient Grammarians, this eclogue reflects Virgil’s personal circumstances,” Merzlyakov writes in his commentary. “Personal circumstances” here refer to Augustus’s redistribution of land to veterans and the annexation of Mantua by Cremona, as a result of which Virgil “along with some others was to be deprived of his property; but [. . .] he set out for Rome, petitioned that his lands be returned to him, and lived in peace and quiet. And he is here represented in the figure of Tityrus.”111 In the late eighteenth century, Wordsworth transformed Virgil’s Tityrus into the “dreaming man” sitting in the shade in the opening stanzas of his “Ruined Cottage” (1797–1804). The story of poor Margaret, wife of a ruined weaver, a “hard pastoral” deliberately based on Virgil’s first eclogue, disputes with the pastoral tradition in its own language. To Wordsworth’s (unnamed) contemporary Tityrus in the shade, everything now seems “soft and distant”: Who on the soft cool moss Extends his careless limbs beside the root Of some huge oak whose aged branches make A twilight of their own, a dewy shade Where the wren warbles while the dreaming man, Half-conscious of that soothing melody, With side-long eye looks out upon the scene, By those impending branches made more soft, More soft and distant.112

In the final stanzas of “Life at Zvanka,” Derzhavin positions himself as both Meliboeus and Tityrus rolled into one. Subconsciously avoiding the fate of the dispossessed Meliboeus, the poet can still choose to be the 202

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drowsy Tityrus, a dreamer for whom the “the days roll on, the years,” and “the roar of seas and wind” all seem, as they do for Wordsworth’s dreamer, “soft and distant.” By choosing Derzhavin’s diffuse line as the epigraph to his “Autumn,” Pushkin, who in the 1830s was deeply influenced by the Lake Poets and, namely, by Wordsworth, was drawing a parallel between the Russian and English eclogue.113 Distant echoes of the two “half-dreams” (recall Batteux’s definition of the pastoral genre), Derzhavin’s “slumbering [dremliushchii] mind” and Wordsworth’s “dreaming man,” come together in “sweet silence” (v sladkoi tishine) in stanza 10 of Pushkin’s poem: И забываю мир—и в сладкой тишине Я сладко усыплен моим воображеньем, И пробуждается поэзия во мне: Душа стесняется лирическим волненьем, Трепещет и звучит, и ищет, как во сне, Излиться наконец свободным проявленьем— И тут ко мне идет незримый рой гостей, Знакомцы давние, плоды мечты моей. 1 And in sweet silence I forget the world, Imagination drugs me with its sweet slow current, And poetry is in my soul unfurled: It grows embattled with its lyric warrant, It stirs and throbs and, yet in slumber curled, It gropes to clear its way, and uncurbed current— And then guests call on me, invisible swarms, My fancy’s fruit, in long familiar forms. (trans. Walter Arndt)114

Pushkin’s “Autumn” consists of eleven stanzas, plus one that was discarded and another that remained unfinished. The long poem is subtitled “Fragment”: the reader is left to imagine that the poet’s original plan was much more extensive.115 Metonymy works this way, using a part to suggest the whole; so do ruins, provoking a meditation on a former time of which they are mere traces. And so does memory: a fragment, fleshed out by the imagination, can resurrect a lost past. In Pushkin’s lines the poet is lulled by his own imagination; Derzhavin, sitting on his “metonymical balcony” (“atop the span of newel railing” [na vozvyshenii stolpov peril’nykh]), becomes plunged into thoughts of bygone days. 203

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“Dormant pictures.” In his Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke describes the nature of human memory as follows: The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colours; and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. [. . .] In this secondary perception, as I may so call it, or viewing again the ideas that are lodged in the memory, the mind is oftentimes more than barely passive; the appearance of those dormant pictures depending sometimes on the will. The mind very often sets itself on work in search of some hidden idea, and turns as it were the eye of the soul upon it; though sometimes too they start up in our minds of their own accord, and offer themselves to the understanding. (italics mine—TS; 2, bk. 10, 8)

What kind of “dormant pictures” offer themselves to Derzhavin’s understanding? Ах! где ж, ищу я вкруг, минувший красный день? Победы, слава где, лучи Екатерины? Где Павловы дела?—Сокрылось солнце,—тень! . . . Кто весть и впредь полет орлиный? Вид лета красного нам Александров век: Он сердцем нежных лир удобен двигать струны; Блаженствовал под ним в спокойстве человек, Но мещет днесь и он перуны. (author’s italics—TS)

1 Oh where, as I search round me, is the splendid past The victories, glory, and radiance of Catherine, where? Where are Paul’s deeds? The sun is hidden—shadow! . . Who can foresee the eagle’s flight? The age of Alexander seems to us a splendid summer, He moves the strings of tender lyres with his heart; Under him, man has enjoyed a state of blissful peace, But even he now hurls thunderbolts.

Stanza 52 returns us to the world of the “readymade word”: ten stanzas earlier, the “splendid day” (krasnyi den’) spread out along the waves” before the gaze of the poet-observer and his companions, the word krasnyi serving 204

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merely as a stock epithet meaning “splendid, beautiful,” as its other, more specifically visual meaning, “red,” recedes, forgotten. In the following stanza the idiomatic sense is repeated with “splendid summer” (leta krasnogo). In stanza 51 and the five subsequent stanzas, however, the key metaphor for what is taking place is the juxtaposition of light and darkness, where one is extinguished by the other.116 The “historical stanzas” in “Life at Zvanka” are closest in spirit to the dialogue between the Poet and his Muse in Derzhavin’s wonderful Anacreontic poem “Winter” (1805):117 Поэт Что ты, Муза, так печальна, Пригорюнившись сидишь? Сквозь окошечка хрустальна, Склоча волосы, глядишь; Цитры, флейты и скрыпицы В белы руки не берешь; Ни божественной Фелицы, Ни Плениры не поешь? Муза Что мне петь?—Ах! где Хариты? И друзей моих уж нет Львов, Хемницер в гробе скрыты, За Днепром Капнист живет. Вельяминов, лир любитель, Богатырь, певец в кругу, Беззаботный света житель, Согнут скорбями в дугу. Поэт Да! Фелицы нет, Плениры, Нет Харит, и нет друзей: Звук торжественныя лиры Посвятишь кому твоей? Посвятишь ли в честь ты Хлору, Иль Добраду в славе ты? Труб у них не слышно хору, Дни их тихи, как листы. (Derzhavin 2:527–29)

1 205

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Poet Why, Muse, such sadness, As you sit downcast? Why, gazing through the crystal window, Your hair disheveled, Neither zithers, flutes, nor violins Do you take into your white hands; Nor sing of either divine Felitsa or Plenira? Muse What is there for me to sing? Ah! Where are the Graces? And my friends are no more! Lvov, Kheminitser are hidden in their graves Kapnist lives beyond the Dnepr, Veliaminov, that lover of the lyre, A bogatyr, a singer in a circle of friends, A carefree inhabitant of the world, By his sorrows double bent. Poet Yes! Felitsa is no more, nor Plenira, Nor the Graces, nor the friends: To whom will you dedicate The sound of your triumphant lyre? Will you dedicate it to Khlor, Or Dobrada in her glory? The choir of trumpets does not sound for them, Their days are as quiet as leaves.

In the three years that separated “Winter’s” winter of 1804–5 from “Life at Zvanka” ’s summer of 1807, the remarkable comparison of quiet days with leaves (or days with quiet leaves?) had lost its topicality. “At the time there was still no war, and life at court was very quiet,” Derzhavin writes about the final line of “Winter” in his “Explanations” (Derzhavin 2:259). In “Life at Zvanka” the young emperor’s reign is compared not with winter but with the splendid summer, although one might attribute the “seasonal” variance between these poems simply to the fact that the first was written in winter, the second in summer. Derzhavin composed the lines “ man has enjoyed a state of blissful peace, / But even he now hurls thunderbolts” at almost the same time that Merzlyakov, in his introduction 206

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to the Eclogues, was drawing out the parallels between Alexander and Augustus. This dialogue with himself continues in the following stanzas: Умолкнут ли они?—Сие лишь знает тот, Который к одному концу все правит сферы; Он перстом их своим, как строй какой ведет, Ко благу общему склоняя меры. Он корни помыслов, он зрит полет всех мечт И поглумляется безумству человеков: Тех освещает мрак, тех помрачает свет И днешних и грядущих веков. 1 Will they grow silent? Only He knows, Who directs all the spheres to a single end; With his finger he keeps them in some sort of order, Taking measures for the common good. He sees the roots of intentions, the flight of all dreams And mocks the insanity of mankind: Some are lit by darkness, some darkened by the light Of both the present and the coming ages.

Stanzas 53–54 send us back to the poems of 1804 yet again—this time to recall the “optical fatalism” of the “Magic Lantern”: Is not this world a magic play, Wherein the lantern shadows change, Enchanting and deceiving men? Does not some lord or sorcerer Or mighty mage divert himself Thereby, his prowess vaunting, As he with idle finger sets The planets’ course? Does he call All earthly creatures to behold His dreams—and they but dreams themselves?

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According to Iakov Grot, the vignette preceding the “Magic Lantern” was supposed to represent the finger of God “setting the planets’ course.” Later this project was rejected in favor of a detailed representation of the optical show itself (Derzhavin 2:465). Грудь россов утвердил, как стену, он в отпор Темиру новому под Пультуском, Прейсш-лау; Младых вождей расцвел победами там взор, А скрыл орла седого славу. 1 The breast of Russia he strengthened, like a wall, to rebuff The new Timur at Pultusk and Preussisch-Eylau; The gaze of young leaders there was wreathed in triumphs And eclipsed the gray eagle’s glory.

The Battle of Preussisch-Eylau, which united the Russian and Prussian forces against the French on January 26–27, 1807, was one of the most horrible and bloody battles of the 1805–7 campaigns.118 The outcome of the battle was not straightforward, and each side had its own interpretation.119 Zhikharev describes a meeting that took place on February 3, a week after the battle, at the home of Admiral Shishkov: The old men discussed for quite some time the blood shed at Eylau and the consequences that might arise from our victory. They said that Bonaparte needed a certain amount of time in order to adjust to the first jolt that he had ever experienced; others maintained that while the French army had experienced a great upset, we had also suffered quite a bit as well, that our victory came at the cost of defeat, because out of sixty-five thousand artillery troops, almost half were put out of action.120

Derzhavin shared the first point of view, and he called the poem he wrote that same spring “Perseus and Andromeda” (1807), a “cantata on the victory by the Russians over the French in 1807.” But in the lines he dedicates to Preussisch-Eylau in “Life at Zvanka,” something else is more important for the poet. 208

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“The gaze of young leaders there was wreathed in triumphs / And eclipsed the gray eagle’s glory”: in his reference to “youthful leaders,” Derzhavin had in mind Generals Bennigsen, Bagration, and Barclay de Tolly; the “gray eagle” refers to Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky, hero of the Russo-Turkish War, a field marshal who, in Derzhavin’s own words, “lost his glory on account of illness or losing heart for some reason, since his command was transferred to his subordinate General Bennigsen, who was the leader in significant battles” (Derzhavin 2:644). Derzhavin’s jeremiad resembles Pushkin’s famous “Commander” (Polkovodets, 1835), a poem written almost thirty years later describing George Dawe’s portrait of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly in the War Gallery at the Winter Palace. Both urge that, as one praises the men who bring an action to its successful conclusion, one should not forget those who began it. Curiously enough, Barclay de Tolly, the aged, underappreciated hero of Pushkin’s poem, who distinguished himself at the Battle of Pultusk and was badly wounded at Eylau, is one of “youthful leaders,” in Derzhavin’s lines.121 Derzhavin had written about the habitual arrogance of the young toward the old as early as 1797, in his ode “On the Return of Count Zubov from Persia” (Na vozvrashenie grafa Zubova iz Persii), in which he praises the man “who with open heart / Received both friends and strangers, / And did not distress the elderly / With his arrogant views” (kotoryi s serdtsem otkovennym / Svoikh i chuzhdykh prinimal / Stareishikh vkrug sebia nadmennym / Vozzreniem ne ogorchal [Derzhavin 2:35]). The lines from “Life at Zvanka” have a more bitter and personal ring: by 1807, Derzhavin felt that he himself had become a “gray eagle,” his fame overshadowed by the victory of the “youthful leaders” who not infrequently hurled their “arrogant views” his way.

View 8. “This house will fall apart”: Pre-vision and In-sight The somnolent sequence of “daydreams of time”—historical meditations and philosophical generalizations, which have no distinct visual component whatsoever—are brought to a resolution in stanza 56 with an allegorical vignette: 209

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Figure 29. Nikolai Lvov, Entryway in the Shape of a Ruin, 1789.

Так самых светлых звезд блеск меркнет от нощей. Что жизнь ничтожная? Моя скудельна лира! Увы! и даже прах спахнет с моих костей Сатурн крылами с тленна мира. 1 Thus the radiance of even the brightest stars is dimmed by night. What is this paltry life? My fragile lyre! Alas! And the very dust of my bones Will be swept from this mortal world by Saturn’s wings.

The archetypal image of Saturn as Father Time and the motif of destruction are further developed in the following stanza. “The recollection of times gone by and a certain feeling of melancholy mixed with regret are the essence of the general function of ruins,” writes Andrei Bolotov in his commentary on the works of Christian Hirschfeld, the most influential theoretician of the art of the garden in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century.122 If a picturesque park or garden did not have a structure that had fallen apart naturally, then its owner needed to have one built (or present some geological formation as a ruin).123 As well as recalling bygone times, ruins in the picturesque garden or park served as a focal point and thus were known as “eye catchers.” Well-known lines by 210

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Prince Ivan Dolgoruky show the significant role played by ruins in the garden of a Russian country estate:124 Сколь пленительна предметов, Разнородна всюду смесь! Там затвор Анахоретов, Аполлон с Олимпом здесь; Тут сквозь новую руину Воря старая бежит; Иль к поддельному овину Русский пахарь сноп тащит. 1 How captivating is this Diverse miscellany of objects! Here the anchorites’ cell, Apollo and Olympus there; There through the fresh-built ruin The old Vorya River races; Or to the counterfeit barn The Russian ploughman drags his sheaf. (“A Stroll in Savinskoe”)

The ruin as form and subject also attracted the attention of Nikolai Lvov (think, for instance, of “the ruin structures” in Bezborodko’s garden or his famous “Entryway in the Shape of a Ruin” of 1789. At Zvanka, just as there were no temples or tempietti, there were no ruins, whether old or new: one might suppose that what Bolotov terms the “feeling of melancholy mixed with regret” did not appeal to the industrious and strict nature of the actual owner of the estate, Milena, Derzhavin’s wife. In “Life at Zvanka” the poet does not contemplate ruins, either natural or manmade; rather, he foresees the destruction of Zvanka itself. The rhetorical exercise of chronography (the description of the present) is followed by prolepsis (the prevision of the future): Разрушится сей дом, засохнет бор и сад, Не воспомянется нигде и имя Званки; Но сов, сычей из дупл огнезеленый взгляд, И разве дым сверкнет с землянки. 1 211

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) This house will fall apart, the wood and garden wither, And nowhere will the very name of Zvanka be recalled; But rather, from a hollow tree the owls’ fire-green gaze, And at most some smoke might shimmer from the cottage.

One obvious literary source for the image of Zvanka’s impending destruction is Psalm 102, also known as the “Jeremiad,” an adaptation of which Derzhavin worked on in the spring of 1807 (this adaptation, titled “Lamentation” [Setovanie], should thus be viewed as yet another sketch for the epic canvas of “Life at Zvanka”): Услышь, Творец, моленье И вопль моей души; Сердечно сокрушенье, Вздыхания внуши, И слез моих от тока Не отврати лица. [ . . .] Ты видишь: исчезают Все дни мои, как дым; Все силы умирают; Как злак под зноем злым Падет, бледнеет, вянет,— Изныло сердце так. [ . . .] Как птица в мгле унывна, Оставленна на зде, Иль схохлена, пустынна Сидяща на гнезде В ночи, в лесу, в трущобе, Лию стенаньем гул. Друзья днесь уклонились, Враги меня теснят, И те, что мной хвалились, Клянут меня, бранят За то, что пища—пепел, А слезы мне питье. [ . . .] Воззри же на смиренну Молитву Ты мою, 212

Chapter 2. Nine Views И жертву воскуренну Не уничтожь сию, Да в роды возвестится Твое спасенье мне. (Derzhavin 2:670–71)

1 Hear, Creator, my prayer And the wailing of my soul; Attend to the distress of my heart, Be not deaf to my sighs, And from the flood of my tears Do not turn away. [. . .] You see: all my days Disappear, like smoke; All my strength dies away; As grass in fierce heat Droops, grows pale, withers,— So languishes my heart. [. . .] Like a bird oppressed in the haze, Left here, Or puffed up, deserted, As it sits on its nest In the night, in the forest, in a hollow, I pour forth the rumble of my moans. Friends now shun me, Enemies crowd ’round me, And those whom I praised Curse me, abuse me Because my food is ashes, And tears my drink. [. . .] Look upon My humble prayer Do not destroy The sacrifice I’ve made And generations will proclaim My salvation at Your hands. 213

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The transparent allusions in “Lamentation” to Derzhavin’s own circumstances as the object of undeserved insults did not please the emperor. On his return from Friedland in 1807, he reprimanded Derzhavin for the adaptation, which the poet himself described as depicting “David’s lamentation on the impoverishment of his fatherland”; “Russia is not impoverished,” retorted Alexander, simultaneously acknowledging Derzhavin’s Aesopean intent and repudiating it.125 The final line of the Psalm reads as follows: “The children of thy servants shall dwell secure; their posterity shall be established before thee.” In Derzhavin’s rendering, the hope for salvation is much more personal, summarized by the words of the poem’s last two lines: “And through my descendants / Your salvation will be proclaimed to me” (italics mine—TS). Tidings of the salvation of the Afflicted, he asserts, should concern future generations—and speak of the future. A similar turn from mute despair to cautious optimism takes place in “Life at Zvanka”. This swing of the lyrical pendulum makes us think anew about Horace and Pope, and Derzhavin’s genuine and deep regard for both.

View 9. “Regarding not the whirl of glad and gloomy days” In the concluding stanzas Derzhavin at last turns to his addressee—not to God but to His earthly representative, Evgeny Bolkhovitinov (whom Derzhavin, in the verse inscription accompanying his amanuensis’ watercolor, compared to Mæcenas visiting Horace).126 In the poem’s finale the Horatian and biblical traditions, almost mechanically brought together in the formulaic opening “Blessed is he,” are indissolubly linked to and embodied in the figure of the Priest: Иль нет, Евгений! ты, быв некогда моих Свидетель песен здесь, взойдешь на холм тот страшный, Который, тощих недр и сводов внутрь своих Вождя, волхва гроб кроет мрачный. От коего, как гром катается над ним, С булатных ржавых врат и збруи медной гулы Так слышны под землей, как грохотом глухим, В лесах трясясь, звучат стрел тулы. 214

Chapter 2. Nine Views Так, разве ты, отец! святым своим жезлом Ударив об доски, заросши мхом, железны, И свитых вкруг моей могилы змей гнездом Прогонишь,—бледну зависть,—в бездны. Не зря на колесо веселых, мрачных дней, На возвышение, на пониженье счастья, Единой правдою меня в умах людей Чрез Клии воскресишь согласья. Так, в мраке вечности она своей трубой Удобна лишь явить то место, где отзывы От лиры моея шумящею рекой Неслись чрез холмы, долы, нивы. Ты слышал их, и ты, будя твоим пером Потомков ото сна, близ севера столицы, Шепнешь в слух страннику, в дали как тихий гром: “Здесь бога жил певец,—Фелицы”. (stanzas 58–63)

1 Or no, Evgeny! You, who sometime were Witness to my songs here, will climb that dreadful hill, Which hides within its hollow depths and vaults The gloomy tomb of warlord and magician. From within which, just as above it thunder rolls, So rumbling of rusty steel gates and copper harness Is heard beneath the earth, like a muffled roar, Shaking the forest trees, with noise like arrows in a quiver. Then perhaps, Father, you will strike with holy staff On the iron slab, overgrown with moss, And drive the snake coiled round my grave— Pale envy—into the abyss. Regarding not the wheel of glad and gloomy days, The rising and subsiding of success, You shall revive me in people’s minds By Truth alone and with Clio’s accord.

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Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Thus in eternity’s gloom she [Clio] with her trumpet Can show the place where the echoes Of my lyre, like a roaring river, Ring over hills, valleys, and fields. You heard these echoes, and, waking posterity From slumber with your pen, near the northern capital, You will whisper in the traveler’s ear like far-off quiet thunder: “Here lived the bard of God, and of Felitsa.”

The first three books of Horace’s odes form a unit, framed by first and last poems that are clearly connected to each other. In a collection that employs many meters, Horace pointedly reserves one, the First Aesclepiad, for the first ode of Book 1, an address to his patron Maecenas, and the last of Book 3, the celebrated “Exegi Monumentum,” addressed to the Muse.127 In “Life at Zvanka,” however, both the address to friend and patron and yet another monument raised by the poet to himself are found together in the final six stanzas, which represent a “denial of ruin.” These stanzas prompt us to consider yet another possible source of the “ruins” topos in Derzhavin’s poem and to recall once again the Poet’s House, a stop on the literary path from Horace’s Sabine villa to Zvanka, namely, Alexander Pope’s villa in Twickenham.

Chapter 3

The Poet’s House

Figure 30. Frontispiece of The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. (London, 1745).

The frontispiece of the first posthumous edition of Pope in 1745 presented the author of the Essay standing with an open book against a background of ruins, which according to the author of the commentary, William Warburton, was taken from a drawing by the poet himself. In the fall of 1743, just a few months before his death, Pope was visited by one of his most devoted friends, the well-known man of letters Robert Dodsley, publisher of Defoe, Swift, Johnson, and others. The mortally ill poet continued making refinements to his beloved grotto, spending most of his time there, describing it in verse and letters, and showing it to all his visitors. After visiting what he termed the “platonic” grotto with the poet, Dodsley memorialized the occasion with the poem “The Cave of Pope: A Prophesy”:1 217

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) When dark oblivion in her sable cloak Shall wrap the names of heroes and of kings; And their high deeds submitting to the stroke Of time shall fall amongst forgotten things: Then (for the Muse that distant Day can see) On Thames’ bank the stranger shall arrive With curious wish thy sacred Grot to see. Thy sacred Grot shall with thy Name survive. Grateful posterity, from Age to Age With pious hand thy ruin shall repair: Some good old man to each enquiring Sage, Pointing the place shall cry, the Bard liv’d there, Whose Song was Music to the listening Ear, Yet taught audacious Vice and Folly, Shame; Easy his Manners, but his Life severe; His Word alone gave Infamy or Fame. [. . .] Then some small gem, or moss or shining ore, Departing, each shall pilfer, in fond hope To please their friends on every distant shore: Boasting a Relic from the Cave of POPE.

Dodsley’s poem about Pope’s grotto has become an integral part of English cultural history: when quoting from it, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury poets normally did not consider it necessary to name the source. The stanza that begins “Grateful posterity, from age to age” enjoyed particular popularity, quoted without fail by authors of guidebooks about picturesque spots along the Thames.2 Dodsley was known for his intuition with regard to literature, history, and life in general. In his “Prophesy” he not only foretold the passion of future generations for taking some small object away from the grotto as a souvenir,3 but also the impending destruction of these places.

T h e B a rd Lived There... As mentioned above, Pope’s villa did not in fact belong to him, as Roman Catholics were forbidden to own land. After the poet’s death the house changed hands, but subsequent owners (even Lord William Stanhope, 218

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Figure 31. Pope’s Villa at Twickenham. Anonymous, engraving, after 1745.

who made fundamental alterations to the building, and his son-in-law, British statesman Welbore Ellis, first Baron Mendip) either truly wished to honor his memory or, taking the existing situation as a given, attempted to extract the largest possible profit from it. Thus, for example, Lord Stanhope personally supervised the distribution of cuttings of “Pope’s willows” throughout the world, including one sent to the Russian empress.4 In any event, the steady stream of visitors to the Poet’s House, the grotto, and the famous willow on the riverbank did not abate from the second half of the eighteenth century through the first years of the nineteenth. In 1792 one of the “literary pilgrims” dedicated to the legendary tree lines that became even more famous than Dodsley’s poem (the identity of the author, however, has been lost): Weep, verdant Willow, ever weep, And spread thy pendant branches round: Oh may no gaudy flow’ret creep Along the consecrated ground! Thou art the Muses’ favorite tree They lov’d the Bard who planted thee. The wintry blast assails in vain; The forked lightning passes by, To stretch the oak upon the plain, 219

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Whose tow’ring branches brav’d the sky: The Muses guard their fav’rite tree; They lov’d the bard who planted thee. [ . . .] But all the Muses’ tender care Cannot prolong the final date: Rude time will strip thy branches bare, And thou must feel the stroke of Fate; E’en thou, the Muses fav’rite tree, Must fall like him who planted thee. But still the Muse shall hover near; And, planted there by hands unseen, Another willow shall appear, Of pensive form, upon the green; To grace the spot, when thou no more Shalt overarch the hallow’d shore. 5

The willow perished in 1801; the lightning which had spared it on so many occasions finally hit its mark. The maimed remains of the trunk were left untouched for quite some time.6 The death of the tree could be seen to foreshadow the events that took place six years later. In 1807 the villa was put up for auction. It was said that the poet Samuel Rogers, author of the famed Pleasures of Memory (1792), was planning to acquire it, in order to immortalize Pope and turn the Poet’s House into a working museum. But the enormous price originally asked by the auctioneers (later reduced by half) scared the poet off and led him to abandon this noble venture.7 In the end, the house and land was purchased by Sophia Charlotte Howe, Baroness of Langar (1762–1835). The baroness had no use for poetry and no need of a supplementary income. She found the crowds of literary pilgrims to be a nuisance, and therefore the first thing she did was to have the house torn down and a new one of contemporary design built. Then she razed the garden. Within a few months, by late 1807, almost nothing remained of Pope’s country estate. The only thing to survive was the grotto, but even here the baroness ordered the removal of all the mirrors, shells, and minerals with which the poet had so lovingly decorated it.8 The news of the demolition of the villa quickly spread throughout England and beyond—the British and European press, as well as the 220

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personal diaries of contemporaries, was full of indignant outcries. The English writer and traveler Mary Berry made the following entry in her journal on visiting Twickenham in 1807: “Went into Pope’s back garden, and saw the devastation going on upon his quincunx by its now [sic] possessor Baroness Howe. The anger and ill humor expressed against her for pulling down his house and destroying his grounds, much greater than one would have imagined.”9 Baroness Howe was christened the “Queen of the Goths,” accused of vandalism and compared to other destroyers (or, on the contrary, preservers) of cultural monuments throughout world history. A commonplace in these publications was the story that, in ravaging Thebes, Alexander the Great spared only one house: that of Pindar.10 According to the Greek historian Arrian, Alexander ordered that the house not be burned to the ground out of respect for its legendary resident. The Byzantine theologian and rhetorician John Chrysostom describes this episode in more detail: in his rendition, the young emperor himself scrawled on the doors of the house, “Do not set on fire the roof of Pindar, the composer of songs.” Great commanders, however, are at times more sentimental than little-known baronesses. And so the destruction of the symbol became a symbol of destruction. Did Derzhavin know what happened to Pope’s villa? If so, then the image of the “impending ruin” of Zvanka should clearly be read as a reference to the fate of Twickenham after the death of Pope. As enormously alluring as it would be to answer this question in the affirmative, we cannot, unfortunately, do so. The destruction of Pope’s villa took place in the spring and summer of 1807—that is, precisely at the moment when Derzhavin was picturing to himself the upcoming destruction of Zvanka. It is unlikely that any news of Baroness Howe’s barbaric actions could have reached the shores of the Volkhov by May or June of that year; it is probably more accurate to consider this a remarkable coincidence, a magical convergence of literary and geographical topoi. An intermediate link in the complex diachronic mechanism of echoes and allusions might be found in the lines from Dodsley quoted earlier, which are remarkably in tune with the final stanza of Derzhavin’s poem.11 I will quote the two stanzas side by side in order to underscore their affinities: 221

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Figure 32. View of Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, during its Dilapidation. Engraved by John Pye after J.M.W. Turner (1807).

Dodsley Grateful posterity, from age to age With pious hand thy ruin shall repair: Some good old man to each enquiring sage, Pointing the place shall cry “The Bard lived there!”

Derzhavin You heard these [echoes], and, waking posterity From slumber with your pen, near the northern capital, You will whisper in the traveler’s ear Like far-off quiet thunder: “Here lived the bard of God, and of Felitsa.” 1 (Ты слышал их, и ты, будя твоим пером Потомков ото сна, близ севера столицы, Шепнешь в слух страннику, В дали как тихий гром: “Здесь Бога жил певец,— Фелицы.”)12

The fact that these two excerpts have so much in common (imagery, meter, even the pointing gesture embedded in the text) does not seem to be mere coincidence. 222

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Z v a n k a ’ s Echo In his later years, though he had long ago forsworn Pindaric “soaring,” Derzhavin turned his hand to translating some of Pindar’s odes. This renewal of interest in the Greek poet was largely due to the key motif of his lyrics—the power of the Name to save its bearer from the “cloud of oblivion.” “If the blessed voice of memory / Resounds beyond the grave— and resurrects the works of / great men in chronicles and songs (Edin glas pamiati blazhennoi / Zvuchit za grobom,—i dela / Muzhei velikikh voskreshaet / Vo letopistsakh i pevtsakh [“Pindar’s First Pythian Song” (Pervaia Pesn’ Pindara Pificheskaia, 1800) (Derzhavin 2:341)]). A year after this translation of Pindar’s “First Pythian Ode” and a year before receiving an important post in Alexander’s government, in the poem “Quietness” (Tishina, 1801), Derzhavin writes, Не колыхнет Волхов темный, Не шелохнет лес и холм; Мещет на поля чуть бледный Свет луна, и спит мой дом. Как—я мнил в уединеньи— В хижине быть славну мне? Не живем, живя в забвеньи: Что в могиле, то во сне. [ . . .] Я пою,—Пинд стала Званка; Совоплещут Музы мне; Возгремела Балалайка И я славен в тишине! (Derzhavin 2:367–68) 1 The dark Volkhov will not heave, The forest will not stir on the hill; The pale light of the moon Plays on the field, and my house is asleep. How—I imagined to myself in solitude— Can I find fame in this hut? We are not alive when we live in oblivion: It’s either the grave or sleep. 223

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) [. . .] If I sing—Zvanka becomes Pindus; The Muses applaud me; The Balalaika resounds And I am famous in quietness!

In his commentary to the poem, Grot writes, “Instead of the drawing that is found above the title of this poem [i.e., Cupid holding a trumpet—TS], which requires no explanation, at first there was to be represented ‘the moonlit facade of Zvanka; in front of the house, Anacreon plays his lyre; a big river and the distant beyond. There’s a balalaika in the last drawing’” (ibid., 2:367). The last six stanzas of “Life at Zvanka” constitute yet another variation of the notion of a “monument.” No longer sure his own lyre (balalaika, trumpet) will suffice to keep his memory alive, the singer turns to the chronicler: Не зря на колесо веселых, мрачных дней, На возвышение, на пониженье счастья, Единой правдою меня в умах людей Чрез Клии воскресишь согласья. 1 Not looking at the wheel of glad and gloomy days, The rise and fall of good fortune, You shall revive me in people’s minds By Truth alone and with Clio’s accord.

The hope for “Clio’s accord”—the restoration of that historical logic and continuity, the absence of which so tormented Derzhavin from 1803 onward—he pins on his addressee, Bolkhovitinov. The metonymical image of “grateful posterity’s pious hands” from Dodsley’s poem is broken down here into two metonymies formed by the instrumental case, each of which serves as a reference to a certain sphere of Bolkhovitinov’s work. First, the religious and almost magical: Так, разве ты, отец! Святым своим жезлом Ударив об доски, заросши мхом, железны, И свитых вкруг моей могилы змей гнездом Прогонишь,—бледну зависть,—в бездны. 224

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Turner and Pope The destruction of the Poet’s House made an indelible impression on William Turner, who in 1807 was made a member of the Royal Academy of Art and acquired a small plot of land in Twickenham, not far from the former villa of Pope, of whom the artist remained a lifelong ardent admirer. Turner’s wellknown elegiac canvas Pope’s Villa at Twickenham during Its Dilapidation is dated 1808. In its composition and use of color, the painting is in the spirit of Claude Lorrain, and thus it emphasizes the continuity of aesthetic ideals from Lorrain’s time to Pope’s to the culture of the picturesque of Turner’s own day. It features magnificent ruins in a hazy distance, while in the foreground fishermen retrieve their nets from the river and sheep doze peacefully on the bank. In the lower left corner one can see a young couple: a man with a walking stick and a woman dressed for traveling, absorbed in the scrutiny of fragments of ancient columns and capitals (apparently brought there by the peasants engaged in the dismantling of the building). Two obscure figures remain unfinished: we do not see their faces, but is this accidental or intentional? The peasants sit astride the mangled trunk of the poor willow tree, which is pointed toward the viewer. In his notebooks of the period Turner would frequently return to the image of the fallen tree—a natural ruin of sorts and a symbol of the inevitable ravages of time. Several stanzas in Turner’s River Sketchbook seem to be spoken by the Spirit of the River, the Genius Loci: Dear Sister Isis tis thy Thames that calls See desolation hovers o’er those walls The scattered timbers on my margin lays Where glimmering Evening’s ray yet lingering plays There British Maro sung by Science long endear’d And to an admiring Country once rever’d Now to destruction doom’d thy peaceful grott Pope’s willow bending to the earth forgot Save one weak scion by my fostering care Nursed into life. In 1811 John Pye made an engraving from Turner’s painting. Although given the more reticent title Pope’s Villa, the images of decline and destruction in the engraving were intensified from the original. The engraving was accompanied by an extensive text, penned by John Britton, a well-known critic and art historian: “This once sacred spot, however, is now desecrated: the dwelling of the poet is now leveled to the ground, and his favorite haunts have been despoiled of their local charms [. . .]. A most memorable crisis.” This was followed by Dodsley’s line about “grateful posterity.” The eighteenthcentury engravings that had made a three-story building on the bank of the Thames famous throughout Europe were replaced by various versions of Pye’s representation of its ruins, thus both preserving the memory of the demolition of the Poet’s House and, at least to some degree, resisting it.

225

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Figure 33. Athanasius Kircher, “Campus Antropomorphicus,” early 17th century.

1 Then perhaps, Father, you will strike with holy staff On the iron slab, overgrown with moss, And drive the snake coiled round my grave— Pale envy—into the abyss.

And second, the worldly sphere of literature and history: Ты слышал их,—и ты, будя своим пером Потомков ото сна . . . . 1 You heard these echoes, and, waking posterity From slumber with your pen . . . .

In late August, Bolkhovitinov writes Derzhavin, Your Excellency! Dear Sir! I ardently thank you for your most delightful letter of August 21 and for the promised landscape of Zvanka. My imagination is already at work drawing it from the very best vantage point. Cicero’s Asclepius, Virgil’s Mantua, and Horace’s Venusia have been made famous by their poets. Zvanka will resound with your songs, just as it resounds 226

Chapter 3. The Poet’s House with its echo. These two sounds will ring on for posterity, a bell summoning the republic of Russian poets to assembly. Perhaps on that hill, beneath which lies the Sorcerer of whom you sing in your songs, they will raise a statue to you with an inscription something like this, for example: Amidst these swamps and marshes With the immortal echo of the eternal cliffs Our immortal singer Derzhavin Repeated his immortal songs. Your “Life at Zvanka” has already been published in the sixteenth issue of the Herald. I read this in the Moscow News, which I received yesterday. Now through the fame of your works I too shall be known to posterity by this single line, for which I most sincerely thank you, and once again I ask your muse not to lapse into daydreams, and may the echo at Zvanka amuse her friend there (Khutyn, August 24, 1807).13

The marvelous echo at Zvanka had been a constant motif in the poet’s correspondence with Bolkhovitinov from his very first visit to Zvanka in 1805. Thanking Khvostov for making it possible, Bolkhovitinov writes,14 I read and talked to my heart’s content and hope to make use of my acquaintance with our Horace in the future; I heard with my own ears the thousands of echoes that exist in his environs, and only now do I understand what “the echo thunders” [“grokhochet Ekho”] means in his works. Really, perhaps in all of Russia only his village boasts this wonderful phenomenon of Nature, which you have to hear to believe.

Both “Life at Zvanka” and the correspondence between the poet and Bolkhovitinov from the summer of 1807 were themselves echoed four years later in Derzhavin’s “The Echo” (Ekho, 1811). Grass and flowers growing among the stones of a ruin can blur generic boundaries: what was once a building becomes a landscape. In “Echo,” Derzhavin goes a step further, creating something akin to Solomon de Caus’s or Athanasius Kircher’s anthropomorphic landscapes: О мой Евгений! Коль Нарциссом, Тобой я чтусь,—скалой мне будь; 227

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) И как покроюсь кипарисом, О мне твердить не позабудь. Пусть лирой я, а ты трубою, Играя, будем жить с тобою, На Волхове, как чудный шум Тмой гулов удивляет ум. Увы! Лишь в свете вспоминаньем Безсмертен смертный человек: Нарцисс жил Нимфы отвечаньем; Чрез Муз живут Пииты в век. Пусть в персть тела их обратятся, Но вновь из персти возродятся, Как ожил Пиндар и Омир От Данта и Петрарки лир. (Derzhavin 3:69)

1 Oh, my Evgeny! If a Narcissus I am to you, then be my rock; And when I am hidden in cypress Do not forget to speak of me. Let us, as I the lyre, and you the trumpet, Play, live on, like the wondrous noise [i.e., the echo—TS] That resounds on the Volkhov river, Delighting the mind with myriad rumblings. Alas! Only in the light of memory is Mortal man immortal: Narcissus lived in the Nymph’s [Echo’s—TS] reply; With the aid of the Muses poets live forever. Let their bodies turn to dust, But from the dust they will be born again, As Pindar and Homer were revived By the lyres of Dante and Petrarch.

By a curious coincidence, Derzhavin’s “Echo” alludes to the very same legend about Alexander the Great sparing Pindar’s house in Thebes that European poets recalled in connection with the sad fate of Pope’s villa in Twickenham: 228

Chapter 3. The Poet’s House Так, знатна честь за гробом мрачным Останется еще от нас, А паче свитком беспристрастным, О ком воскликнет Клиин глас: Тогда и Фивов разоритель Той самой Званки был бы чтитель, Где Феб беседовал со мной. Потомство воззвучит—с тобой. 1 Thus splendid repute beyond the dismal grave Will yet remain from us. And more so for the one about whom, With an impartial scroll, Clio’s voice will exclaim: Then even the destroyer of Thebes Would have respected Zvanka, Where Phoebus conversed with me. Posterity will resound—with you.

Derzhavin could have learned the story about Alexander the Great and Pindar’s house from any number of sources—Alexander Sumarokov, for example, mentions it in a footnote to his Epistle on Writing Verse (Epistola o stikhotvorstve, 1748):15 Pindar: Greek poet and leader of the lyric poets, a native of Thebes. He lived some three hundred years before the birth of Christ. He was the author of many books; however, the only works to survive are his odes, written at the Olympian, Isthmian, and Nemean games. He was greatly revered in Greece, and both he and his descendants were held in high regard. As Alexander the Great laid waste to Thebes, more than one hundred years after the great poet’s death, he did not touch the house in which the poet lived, out of respect.16

By 1811, when Derzhavin’s “Echo” had already been written, news of the destruction of the Poet’s House had reached Russia, and hundreds of prints of Turner’s painting had made their way throughout Europe.17 1

Zvanka fell into decline and neglect long before the October Revolution, that is, long before the destruction and desecration of the majority of Russian country estates. Iakov Grot, who visited it in the early 1860s, described what he saw:18 229

Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) Now there’s nothing left: one can only see remnants of the porch; on the site of the house itself are scattered bricks and a heap of stones. The poet’s prophecy, uttered in “Life at Zvanka,” came to pass early. [. . .] Only a few structures were intact: the bathhouse, where at times some of the numerous guests visiting Zvanka were put up; the carriage house, and the chapel. The textile workshop, situated below and to the right of the house, which produced coarse cloth and canvas, has disappeared completely. But behind the spot where the manor house stood, you could now see an awning, under which were stacked boards and beams that had been collected, and also two unwhitewashed outbuildings, built as cells for the proposed monastery. Everything here is silent, deserted, and gloomy; but there was a time when this spot teemed with carefree and noisy life. [. . .] As for the echo which Evgeny mentions, [. . .] no one living in the neighborhood today could satisfy my curiosity when I asked about the echo: “What do you want with it?” a peasant woman on the Sosninskaya pier (by the Volkhov station) asked me: “Around here we think of it [the echo—TS] as a wraith,” that is, something evil. “What echo?” one of the peasants observed with scorn. “Perhaps in the old days, when there was a forest there, but now what sort of forest is left? It’s all been cut down, it’s completely bare!”19

Zvanka had all but disappeared, taking its famous Echo with it. The house in ruins, the pine forest and garden dried up—Derzhavin’s gloomy predictions had come true. And yet the presence of Derzhavin’s “Echo” can be felt in Anna Akhmatova’s verses about Tsarskoe Selo: Вижу я . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ., не бабочек брачный полет Над грядой царскосельских нарциссов В тот какой-то шестнадцатый год . . . . А застывший навек хоровод Надмогильных твоих кипарисов. 1 I see [. . .] [. . .], not the nuptial flight of butterflies Above the bed of snow-white narcissus In that certain year sixteen But the forever-frozen circle dance Of cypresses above your grave.20 230

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Akhmatova wrote this poem (“Esli pleshchetsia lunnaia zhut’ . . .”) in December 1928, two years after she had devoted herself to a careful reading of Derzhavin, as the many notes in the margins of her copy of his works attest.21 The rhyme “nartsissov/kiparisov” (“narcissuses/cypresses”), a direct allusion to “Echo,” suggests that Derzhavin was indeed on her mind as she wrote these lines.22 Akhmatova returned to the concluding stanza of Derzhavin’s “Echo” many years later, toward the end of her life, in one of the octaves from “A Small Page from Antiquity” (Antichnaia stranichka, 1961), written in the hospital during the fall and winter of 1961–62, when she was recovering from a heart attack. The two poems that make up “the small page” are both concerned with revelations that come to ancient kings when they are forced to deal with a poet’s legacy. The first, untitled poem refers to a legend from the “Life of Sophocles,” which relates how the siege of Athens was suspended on the day of his funeral so that it would not interfere with the burial rites. The second is called “Alexander at Thebes.”23 Наверно, страшен был и грозен юный царь, Когда он произнес: “Ты уничтожишь Фивы.” И старый вождь узрел тот город горделивый, Каким он знал его еще когда-то встарь. Все, все предать огню! И царь перечислял И башни, и врата, и храмы—чудо света, Но вдруг задумался и, просветлев, сказал: “Ты только присмотри, чтоб цел был Дом Поэта.” 1 To be sure, he was frightening and ferocious, the young king, When he announced: “You will annihilate Thebes,” And the old commander beheld that proud city, Which he had known since the olden days. Everything, everything—to the flames! And the king enumerated: Towers and temples and gates—the wonder of the world, But suddenly he grew pensive, then, brightening, said: “Just make sure that the Poet’s House is spared.”24

Pindar, Derzhavin, and the Twenties In Place of a Conclusion

And so, although individual poems, such as epistles or dedications, may be addressed to concrete persons, poetry as a whole is always directed toward a more or less distant, unknown addressee, whose existence the poet does not doubt, not doubting his own. —Osip Mandelstam, “On the Addressee” (1913)1

When one writes verse, one’s most immediate audience is not one’s own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one’s predecessors. Those who gave one a language, those who gave one forms. —Joseph Brodsky, “Letter to Horace” (1995)2

Life’s brevity forces us into poetry. This is what Boris Pasternak talks about in his 1956 “Remarks on Translations from Shakespeare”: The use of metaphor is a natural consequence of the shortness of man’s life and the vastness of his tasks planned for a long time ahead. Because of this discrepancy he is obliged to look at things with eagle-eyed keenness and to explain himself in momentary, instantly understandable flashes of illumination. This is what poetry is. The use of metaphor is the stenography of a great personality, the shorthand of the spirit.3

Captivated by the idea of metaphor as the shorthand, Pasternak then turns from poetry to painting: The tempestuous vitality of Rembrandt’s, Michelangelo’s, Titian’s brush is not a result of deliberate choice. Assailed, each one of them, by a stormy, insatiable thirst to draw the entire universe, they had no time for other kinds of drawing. Impressionism has been 232

Pindar, Derzhavin, and the Twenties characteristic of art since time immemorial. It is the voice of man’s spiritual wealth, pouring out over the edge of his doom.4

The list of artists and writers thirsty to “draw the entire universe” with a limited number of words or brush strokes, explaining themselves with “flashes of illumination,” should also include Pindar, whose poetry is entirely dominated by metaphor.5 Covering huge semantic distances, bringing together remote ideas and phenomena, and oftentimes making no immediate sense, Pindaric metaphors can definitely be seen as “the stenography of a great personality, the shorthand of the spirit.” Stenography and shorthand are not easy even for contemporaries to decipher, and so much the less for later readers. That is precisely what Evgenii Bolkhovitinov complains about in a letter to Derzhavin, written shortly after their regular correspondence began, in the fall of 1805, in response to the poet’s request for help in translating Pindar word for word (although Derzhavin published translations of only his two most famous odes, the First Pythian [1800] and the First Olympian [1805], in the second half of the 1800s he worked on several others, including the Second and Sixth Olympian, which Bolkhovitinov is commenting on in the following lines):6 I am not blaming the Germans and the French for their loose, inadequate translations of Pindar. Of all the Greek poets, I must admit, he is the most difficult and incomprehensible. Not only is his train of thought particularly wild, but the very words and phrases he uses are uncommon and borrowed from provincial dialects. This is a real challenge for a translator, even one armed with the best available manuals; and it is only into Russian that Pindar can be translated literally. No other languages can follow his turns of phrase, especially when it comes to compound words, for which Pindar had a special predilection. But even Russian sometimes wriggles and bristles under the exuberant tension of his verse. (Derzhavin 6:171)7

Intricate and obscure as it is, Pindar’s poetry never lost its relevance and appeal, and his house in Thebes was, as we recall, spared from devastation even by the pitiless Alexander. This could not but attract the aged Derzhavin, with his taste for obscurity combined with “racing against oblivion, disappearance, lack of attention, and ultimately against 233

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decomposition” (to quote Olga Sedakova’s words, written about Dante, not Derzhavin, but equally applicable to him, and to other great poets— “champions of poetic memory”).8 After twenty years of following in Horace’s, rather than Pindar’s, footsteps (1779–99), in his later years Derzhavin harks back to the Greek lyrist. To be more precise, after his early attempts to “pindarize” (pindarizirovat’)—that is, to imitate Pindar and/or those who imitated him—he now takes a deeper interest in Pindar’s own poetics, for which metaphoric compression and the overall tangibility of the world turn out to be more important than the proverbial yet barely definable soaring. Derzhavin’s self-awareness in the last decade and a half of his life may be described in terms of a three-dimensional space, where each dimension is defined by one of Pindar’s three key metaphors. The hyper-image of his poetry—the quiver under the poet’s elbow full of arrows that speak only to “the wise” (“the understanding”) and leave the profane puzzled, needing an interpreter (Ol. 2, ll. 82–85); the threads (or strands) “of many tales” spun together tightly and in season, and thus protecting the poet from the grudges and envy of others (“Say enough and no more, / And spin in a slender twine / The threads of many tales, / And men shall carp less at your heels” [P. 1, 82–83]); and, finally, “a shadow in a dream,” the evanescent picture of human life from Pythian 8, the last surviving ode of Pindar, performed shortly before his death: “Man’s life is a day. What is he? / What is he not? A shadow in a dream / Is man: but when God sheds a brightness, / Shining life is on earth / And life is sweet as honey” (P. 8, ll. 95–98).9 This complex optical metaphor, which famously influenced Shakespeare’s vision in Macbeth (“Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more” [Act V, Scene 5, ll. 23–26]), is also remarkably in tune with Derzhavin’s imagery in the “Magic Lantern,” especially its concluding stanzas. In Pindar’s view, lyric poetry is a highly compressed version of epic that not only came after it but also preceded it.10 While a “Singer of Tales,” an epic rhapsode, assumes no previous knowledge in his listeners and tells the story continuously and in its entity (however sophisticated the composition of his narrative may be), a lyric poet reports the myth only in hints and allusions, momentary “flashes of illumination.”11 Many of Pindar’s metaphors (including the lines just quoted from Pythian 1) seek 234

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to convey and visualize this message, the urge for density and compression. Having translated and published Pythian 1 in 1805, in his own writing of this period Derzhavin also strives to “spin in a slender twine / the threads of many tales.” This results not only in his appetite for far-fetched metaphors and abstruse allegories but also in his “wild,” bone-rattling syntax and his unsettled rhythms and rhymes. Derzhavin at once counts on his reader’s capacity to receive his “sharp arrows” and doubts it. As we have seen, these alternating hopes and doubts make him now compress and now dilate, now “pack” and now “unpack” his poetry. The attempts to “unfold” lyric back into epic lead (at best) to the copious yet wonderful “Explanations of [His] Works” (a parody of future learned commentaries, as Boris Eikhenbaum called them a hundred years later), or (at worst) to such notorious texts as the overwhelmingly patriotic “Lyro-Epic Hymn on the Expulsion of the French from the Fatherland” (Gymn lyro-epicheskii na prognanie frantsuzov iz otechestva [1812]), racking up no less than 650 hermetic lines, into which Derzhavin works images and motifs from his earlier works, including some distant echoes of “Magic Lantern” (now entirely stripped of its performative and meta-phoric dimensions). Perhaps the “brutal oblivion”12 (or, rather, a certain out-of-dateness) into which Derzhavin’s poetry was eventually plunged in the second half of the nineteenth century arose from the dominance of the epic worldview in Russian literature of the period. Or, to put it in Roman Jakobson’s and Dmitry Chizhevsky’s terms, with the prevalence of the “emphatically metonymic” stylistic means of prose over the metaphoric essence of poetry. The emergence of epic is preconditioned, among other things, by epic events of national scale. Juxtaposing War and Peace and the Iliad and their places in their respective literatures is a commonplace, but it is all the more interesting to see how, on Russian soil, the lyric (compressed and fragmented) grasp of historical events supplanted their epic (ordered and continuous) rendering—as happened with Homeric poetry, edited and digested in three different ways by Greek lyric, drama, and history in the fifth century BCE. In Russia this process also took a while, although not several centuries—just a couple of decades. When, in 1922, Mandelstam wrote in his “Letter on Russian Poetry” that Akhmatova’s genesis lay “entirely in the realm of Russian prose, not in poetry,” he was talking about this very oscillation between the epic and lyric “poles” of 235

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literature, the swing between extensive and intensive types of writing, not necessarily reducible to the prose/poetry “shifts” in the course of literary evolution.13 In one of the climactic moments of War and Peace, on the eve of the battle of Borodino, Prince Andrei is depicted lying “propped on his elbow in a broken-down shed in the village of Knyazkovo, at the edge of his regiment’s disposition” and looking back at his past as if “into” a magic lantern: The whole of life presented itself to him as a magic lantern, into which he had long been looking through a glass and in artificial light. Now he suddenly saw these badly daubed pictures without a glass, in bright daylight. “Yes, yes, there they are, those false images that excited and delighted and tormented me,” he said to himself, turning over in his imagination the main pictures of his magic lantern of life, looking at them now in that cold, white daylight—the clear notion of death. “There they are, those crudely daubed figures, which had presented themselves as something beautiful and mysterious. Glory, the general good, the love of a woman, the fatherland itself—how grand those pictures seemed to me, how filled with deep meaning! And it’s all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold, white light of the morning that I feel is dawning for me.” (War and Peace [Book 3, part 2, chap. 24])14

Tolstoy’s understanding of the magic lantern seems to be pretty vague (as we know, nobody ever looked “into” the lantern but rather at the images projected outward). Although in the lines quoted above, the sequence of projections symbolically stands for Memory and Reminiscence, in the 1860s, when the novel was written, the Magic Lantern had temporarily lost (or at least suffered a diminution of) its power as a trope—for both the Russians and the French. Only in 1913 would Marcel Proust reanimate the metaphorical possibilities of this contraption (even if his was a different kind, set on a lamp top and projecting pictures nonstop on the walls). Commenting on the role of this optical device in the structure of À la recherche du temps perdu, Michael Riffaterre writes, “The magic lantern [. . .] belongs in the grammar [of the narrative]. [. . .] [It] displays no image that appears immediately metaphorical per se. Instead, the magic lantern signifies a function, the projection of the self onto the other. It signifies [. . .] as syntax signifies.”15 The magic lantern plays a similar “syntactic” role in 236

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Marina Tsvetaeva’s book of poetry by that name, published a year earlier, in 1912, when Proust was still working on his novel and Russia celebrated the centennial of Borodino. In Tsvetaeva’s collection, too, the random change of slides “signifies a function”—that of a book of (women’s) poetry, a series of discrete images meant to be taken as they come, not amalgamated into something larger. (The notion of Chinese shadows in Tsevetaeva’s earlier poetic cycle Only Shadows [Tol’ko teni, 1910], with its epigraph borrowed from Napoleon [“L’imagination gouverne le monde”], is more closely associated with the “discourse of History”—appropriate for a work published in the year of Tolstoy’s death.)16 Several decades later it would be through Magic Lantern projections that Memory would speak in Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, looking back at the 1910s.17 Of course, it would be a stretch to say that between the 1810s and the 1910s Derzhavin was entirely disregarded: his poetry was published and republished throughout the century: hardly a decade went by without a new edition of his works. Publishers followed different editorial practices and were inspired by different ideas, some of them quite experimental (see, for instance, Nikolai Polevoi’s 1845 edition, which arranged Derzhavin’s œuvre “by theme and genre,” presenting a new, somewhat estranged version of the Bard to the mid-nineteenth-century Russian reader and infuriating Vissarion Belinsky with its complete abolition of chronology). The apogee of the literary “preservation” of Derzhavin’s works was undeniably reached in Iakov Grot’s monumental edition—as if, after visiting and witnessing the devastation of Zvanka in 1860 (cf. the bitter account of his trip, quoted at the end of part 3), Grot decided to protect the “Poet’s House” in another way, providing its Master with a safe conduct of sorts. Coming out over the course of almost twenty years (1864–83), the nine volumes of Works with Explanatory Notes by Ia. K. Grot (Sochineniia s ob’’iasnitel’nymi primechaniiami Ia. K. Grota) constituted (or, rather, reconstructed) the universe of Derzhavin’s poetry, with all its multiple contexts and subtexts, verbal and visual. Concurring with the heyday of the Russian novel, Grot’s editorial project was fundamentally epic in its scope and philosophy: an epic monument to the lyric. It was the centenary of the poet’s death that brought him back to life. A hundred years had passed since Pyotr Vyazemsky published his obituary, which established and canonized the image of Derzhavin as the crowning figure of the “long eighteenth century”: 237

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry The image of Derzhavin, an image illuminated by the ardor of the genius, has been preserved for us by the famous painter Tonci. [. . .] The painter-poet riveted to canvas the divine sparks of inspiration radiating from the poetic face of the northern bard. [. . .] The portrait depicting Derzhavin in the kingdom of winter will remain forever a precious monument both for art and for those close to him, who mourn the great and good-natured old man.18

1916 marked a pivotal point in Derzhavin’s posthumous biography, turning him from the “great and good-natured old man,” deep-frozen in the icy waves and cliffs of Tonci’s magnificent winter landscape, into a living source of inspiration for both poets and scholars. Born and dying in July, he was, after all, a midsummer child.Vyazemsky himself compared Derzhavin’s poetry to “a hot summer midday” (zharkii letnii polden’) in his article on Karamzin’s poems, written in 1866—that is, fifty years later, precisely halfway between 1816 and 1916. In 1916, on the brink of yet another era, Derzhavin newly became an addressee, an object of diachronic comparisons and symbolic equations (it was in that year that Tsvetaeva gave the soubriquet “young Derzhavin” to the young Mandelstam, addressing him, admiringly, in her own “ill-bred verse” [“Chto Vam, molodoi Derzhavin, / Moi nevospitannyi stikh?”]). Among numerous papers delivered orally or published individually and collectively on the occasion of the centennial, Boris Eikhenbaum’s essay “Derzhavin” stands out as one of the first approaches to formalist aesthetics, on the one hand, and one of the first attempts to shift the focus of looking at Derzhavin’s poetry, on the other.19 First published in the review Apollon, this essay is deeply Acmeist in spirit and style (cf., for instance, the discussion of stone “as an integral part of the being, rather than the material” [of a statue], which coincides almost verbatim with Mandelstam’s views on the subject, and the very definition of style as “thinking conjointly with the material” [dumat’ zaodno s materialom]).20 Eight years later “Derzhavin” was reprinted as the opening chapter of Eikhenbaum’s most famous collection of the 1920s, Through Literature (Skvoz’ literaturu, 1924). And indeed, it was Derzhavin’s treatment of poetic language, language that lives by completely different laws, habits, and goals from its prosaic counterpart, that shaped the prism through which Eikhenbaum (and his fellow formalists) looked at the subsequent stages of literary evolution—or moved across it (depending on how one translates the Russian adverb skvoz’). 238

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In a terse and sarcastic, somewhat jerky manner, the thirty-year-old Eikhenbaum insists on the dire need for new literary terms and concepts: in his view, the existing apparatus of literary scholarship is simply insufficient, inadequate to discuss Derzhavin. If we turn this thought the other way around, we can say that Derzhavin’s poetry was one of the major catalysts in the development of the “formal method.” Along with Tolstoy’s prose (and here metaphors and metonymies stand together), it is a victory of cognition over recognition, the epitome of breaking with automatism of any kind, including the rhetorical poetics of the early modern period with its stock epithets and other readymade words and expressions. That’s why Eikhenbaum insists on the nonarbitrary nature of Derzhavin’s Word, presenting it as “neither symbol, nor sign, but as the exact knowledge of the surrounding world.”21 Surprisingly enough, given the difference in time, genre, and tone of Viazemsky’s and Eikhenbaum’s appraisals of Derzhavin’s poetry, there are significant parallels between the two, both of which were among the first influential works of their relatively young authors. First, both are focused on the pictorial qualities of the odes (making a reference to Derzhavin’s portrait by Tonci, quoted above, Viazemsky discusses the lucky match of the painting’s object and subject, a “poet-painter” (poet-zhivopisets), captured by skillful brush of a “painter-poet” (zhivopisets-poet); Eikhenbaum talks a lot about Derzhavin’s “visions,” and vision (videnie) becomes one of the key words of his essay (“poetic vision is [. . .] a worldview, not just a dream”; “that’s why his visions are so tangible and joyfully specific”). Second, Viazemsky and Eikhenbaum unanimously describe Derzhavin’s genius as one that “lives by flares, by strokes” (“oftentimes, some four lines, like a lightning bolt, illuminate the world”).22 According to Eikhenbaum, Derzhavin’s poetry lacks integrity (tselostnost’); his best lines are barely connected with the theme of the ode announced in the title; that’s why many of his most amazing images should be studied out of their immediate context. And yet it is the “intuition of an integral reality” (intuitsiia tselostnogo bytiia)23 that underlies his overall poetics and brings us back to Pasternak’s understanding of metaphor as a remedy against the atomism of the world and an efficient means of quenching the “insatiable thirst to draw the entire universe.” The quotes that Eikhenbaum uses to illustrate Derzhavin’s search for an “integral reality” and the utter “materiality” of his poetic language come, 239

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for the most part, from the later lyrics, namely, from “Magic Lantern,” “Rainbow,” and “Life at Zvanka,” discussed in the three parts of this book. In each of these poems not only is poetic language truly “emblematic” (in Diderot’s sense of the word: “what allows things to be uttered and represented all at the same time, [so that] just as the understanding grasps them the soul is moved by them, the imagination sees them, and the ear hears them”);24 in all three of them Derzhavin tries to piece together the fragmented visions of the world: spin them into the spellbinding sequence of an optical show; twist them into a multicolored rainbow, previously unwoven; or, finally, plant them in the lanes and alleys of an English garden.25 One example provided by Eikhenbaum goes all the way back to the 1790s. It is taken from “The Swallow” (Lastochka, 1792, 1794), one of the finest poems Derzhavin ever wrote. Mourning the untimely death of his beloved first wife, Ekaterina Bastidon, in the later, revised version of the poem (1794) Derzhavin envisions an upcoming metamorphosis that would forever reunite his own soul with that of Plenira. The culminating stanza of the poem, which also crowns Eikhenbaum’s essay, contains a feverish series of questions and exclamations on the theme of future resurrection: Душа моя! гостья ты мира: Не ты ли перната сия?— Воспой же бессмертие, лира! Восстану, восстану и я,— Восстану,—и в бездне эфира Увижу ль тебя я, Пленира? 1 O Soul of mine, through this world wending! Are thou not this bird to mine eyes? Then, Lyre, sing of life never-ending! I too then, I too shall arise: Arise—and in fathomless Ether Shalt see thee once more, my Plenira? (trans. M. Kitchen and A. Levitsky)26

Here and in many other poems, Derzhavin’s desire for immortality is pictured as “being on the air,” emerging in the “fathomless Ether” (the word Ether is among the most frequent in his poetic vocabulary). These metaphoric expressions would be realized eighty years (to the month) after Derzhavin’s death, in July 1896, with Guigliemo Marconi’s first demonstration to the 240

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British government of his system of wireless telegraphy, which became what we know as radio. The realization would reach its fullest and beget new metaphors (for the most part revolving around the imagery of waves) with the development of radio broadcasting.27 The topicality of this subject among artists of the early 1920s concurs with the poets’ and critics’ interest in Derzhavin’s voice. Yuri Tynianov, for example, claims the acoustic qualities of poetry to be the common denominator between Derzhavin and Mayakovsky: Mayakovsky’s clamouring poetry of the mass-meeting, designed for the resonance of public squares [just as Derzhavin’s verse was constructed for the resonance of palace salons], was no relative of the verse of the nineteenth century; this verse gave birth to a particular system of verse meaning.28

It is through this time coincidence and the multitudinous nature of the word and notion of Ether that Derzhavin’s lyrics could be (and eventually were) associated with the phenomenon of radio. A particularly moving case of such remote association can be found in Anna Akhmatova’s Notebooks. In mid-February 1966, during her last stay in the hospital and less than a month before she died, Akhmatova heard a romance (Sergei Esenin’s verse set to Georgii Sviridov’s music) broadcast on the radio, liked it, and wrote down the following day, “something very archaic, full of slavonicisms, very sublime. . . . What was it? Derzhavin? Batiushkov?” Roman Timenchik explains this “affinity of the radio and Derzhavin’s lyre” (soprirodnost’ radioefira derzhavinskoi lire) by the unintended later resonance of Derzhavin’s use of the word Ether and the association of Derzhavin and the 1920s in Akhmatova’s mind: as we may recall, it was in 1925 that she received a copy of Derzhavin’s Works from Pavel Luknitsky and started perusing it, pencil in hand.29 Puns and quibbles aside, one might imagine that, had Derzhavin lived to see (or, rather, to hear) the radio, he would have loved not only to “be on the air” but also to bend an ear to it, turn the controls, switch from short-wave to long, tune in to a late-night program on a distant station, and discern barely audible voices through the static. “What does not enter then my slumbering mind?..” Along with the magic lantern and the camera obscura, in Derzhavin’s hands radio might have become yet another powerful metaphor for human thought (after all, Tiutchev, whom 241

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both Eikhenbaum and Pumpiansky considered to be Derzhavin’s most immediate and important poetic heir, took much inspiration from radio’s predecessor, the telegraph).30 The metaphoric foreknowledge of radio was just one of Derzhavin’s divinations. The riddles and puzzles he left behind turned out to be enough to perplex the entire subsequent century. Arguably the best known and most amazing was the mystery surrounding Derzhavin’s brief parting message—an octave titled “On Perishability” (Na tlennost’), written three days before his death and published a few months after:31 Река времен в своем стремленьи Уносит все дела людей И топит в пропасти забвенья Народы, царства и царей. А если что и остается Чрез звуки лиры и трубы, То вечности жерлом пожрется И общей не уйдет судьбы! 1 Time’s river on its mighty current Will sweep away all words and things And drown in Lethe’s endless caverns Great nations, kingdoms, and their kings. And even the facts remembered With sound of trumpets and the lyre Will not escape the common ending And will be swallowed in the mire! (trans. M. Halle)32

It was not until 1951 that Morris Halle, then Roman Jakobson’s student at Harvard, later a renowned linguist, observed that the initial letters of the eight lines of this poem formed an acrostic that underscored the theme of the poem as expressed by its title. The acrostic, consisting of two words (RUINA ČTI), enciphers a message, which has been interpreted in at least three different ways. Depending on various possible readings of the second word (čti), it can mean “the ruin of glory” (Halle’s reading, approved by Jakobson);33 “read: a ruin”; or, else, “a ruin. Hold in esteem.”34 (Whichever variant we choose, it has something oxymoronic about it, for the very essence of the acrostic word or phrase consists in bringing in 242

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some additional solidity to the text as a whole.) Once Halle published his discovery in 1958, it seemed so obvious that no one could understand how it had failed to catch anyone’s eye for so long.35 The “built-in” ruin of Derzhavin’s last poem can be seen not only as his personal lament and farewell but also as a ruin of the centuries-old structure of the European ode, the foundation for which was laid by Pindar himself, in the opening lines of the Sixth Olympian (the one Derzhavin asked Bolkhovitinov to help him translate), where the composition of a poem is likened to architectural construction: We shall set golden pillars Under the chamber’s well-made porch And build, as it were, a marvelous hall; When work is begun, The front must be made to shine afar.

(Ol. 6, ll. 1–3; trans. C. M. Bowra)36

From ancient times to the early modern period, the genre of the ode “lived by” architectural metaphors. It is all the more fascinating to see that it was on the very site of the yet unnoticed ruin, long before the architectural subtext of Derzhavin’s poem was revealed, that Mandelstam started raising the structure of the new Russian ode.37 The first time he mentioned the slate onto which Derzhavin’s slack hand scribbled the last eight lines of his life was in the programmatic article “Word and Culture” (Slovo i kul’tura, 1921): The life of the word has entered a heroic era. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering. People are hungry. The State even hungrier. But there is something still hungrier: Time. Time wants to devour the State. The threat that Derzhavin scratched on his slate resounds like a clarion call.38

A year later Mandelstam returned to it: On the threshold of the nineteenth century, Derzhavin scratched several lines on his slate which could serve as the leitmotif for the entire coming century. [. . .] Here, in the rusty language of a doddering age, the latent thought of the future is expressed in all its power and perspicacity—its loftiest lesson abstracted, its keynote sounded. This lesson is relativism, relativity: “But if something should happen to remain. . .” (“The Nineteenth Century,” 1922)

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The theme of all-devouring Time and the Art that tries to resist it through the “sounds of the lyre and the trumpet” underlies Mandelstam’s “two great odes” of 1923, “The Slate Ode” (Grifel’naia oda) and “The Horseshoe Finder (A Pindaric Fragment)” (Nashedshii podkovu [Pindaricheskii otryvok]). Both odes are among his most complex, obscure, and condensed poems, which scholars are still deciphering and interpreting to this day. Both open with the motif of construction. In the “Slate Ode” the golden pillars from the Sixth Olympian are replaced with the “mighty juncture” of the stars, transforming the entire universe into a huge scaffolding: Звезда с звездой—могучий стык, Кремнистый путь из старой песни, Кремня и воздуха язык, Кремень с водой, с подковой перстень, На мягком сланце облаков Молочный грифельный рисунок— Не ученичество миров, А бред овечьих полусонок. 1 Star with a star, a mighty juncture A flinty path from the old song, The language of flint and air, Flint with water, a ring with a horseshoe. On the soft slate of the clouds A milky graphite sketch— Not the apprenticeship of worlds, But fleecy somnolent raving.

In “The Horseshoe Finder,” instead of pillars, we deal with their natural antecedents, trees: Глядим на лес и говорим: —Вот лес корабельный, мачтовый, Розовые сосны, До самой верхушки свободные от мохнатой ноши, Им бы поскрипывать в бурю, Одинокими пиниями, В разъяренном безлесном воздухе. 1

244

Pindar, Derzhavin, and the Twenties We look at woods and say: Here is a forest of ships and of masts, The pink pines Stand free to their tops from mossy accretions, They should creak in a storm, As do lone-standing stone pines In the infuriated forestless air.39

In “The Horseshoe Finder” Mandelstam treats the world of Pindar’s odes in the same way that Pindar himself treats myth: evoking it now and then, tossing out hints and allusions, juxtaposing disconnected episodes, and counting on the reader’s capacity to use the “keyboard of references.” The main features of his poetics are summarized in the famous question, С чего начать? Все трещит и качается. Воздух дрожит от сравнений. Ни одно слово не лучше другого, 3емля гудит метафорой. 1 From what should we begin? Everything splits and sways. The air’s atremble from comparison. No single word is better than any other, The earth is buzzing with metaphor.

Although allusions to Derzhavin in the “Pindaric Fragment” are not as obvious and explicit as those in the “Slate Ode,” its closing lines, filled with the bitter feeling of a certain shortage of himself, sound like a paraphrase of “The River of Time”: Разнообразные медные, золотые и бронзовые лепешки С одинаковой почестью лежат в земле, Век, пробуя их перегрызть, оттиснул на них свои зубы. Время срезает меня, как монету, И мне уж не хватает меня самого. 1

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Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry All kinds of copper, bronze, and gold wafers, Equally honored, lie in the earth. The age has tried to chew them and left on each the clench of its teeth. Time clips me like a coin, And there isn’t enough of me left for myself.

It was just around 1923 that the Russian Pindaric ode bifurcated, split into the genre’s pragmatics and poetics, into its celebratory function (intended for the many) and sophisticated contents (intended for the few). The former was embodied by Mayakovsky with his occasional poems, filled with “mighty images,” dedicated to revolutionary anniversaries and “designed for the resonance of public squares”;40 the latter by Mandelstam, with his deploring, rather than extolling, odes, his “poetics of difficulty,” and the feeling of “the earth buzzing with metaphors.” To some extent, this split between pragmatics and poetics (which can also be seen as a division between speaking to Time and to Eternity) resembles the two approaches to Pindar in Derzhavin’s own poetry: his early attempts at Pindaric, or, rather, Lomonosovian, soaring (which he declared unsuccessful in 1779) and his later, “chamber” interest in the semantic intricacies of the ode. Together with Pindar himself, Derzhavin (and, more specifically, Derzhavin in his later years) served as a common denominator for completely different poets, representing diverging branches of Russian modernism— the poets “squandered by their generation,” to paraphrase the title of Roman Jakobson’s famous essay, those who emerged or were shaped by the Interval, to use the title of another great literary testimony of the epoch. “The fact remains a fact: prose has won,” wrote Tynianov with bitter confidence in the opening lines of his remarkably subtle study of the poetry of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Esenin, and other poets, all active in this period of historical turmoil and feverish poetic experimentation.41 No matter what they were experimenting with, the key feature shared by the first Greek lyrist, the last Bard of Russian Enlightenment, and the poets of Russian modernism was a demand for full involvement, active co-creation, almost co-authorship on the part of the reader. It was there that the “sharp arrows” from Pindar’s Second Olympian met Mandelstam’s “keyboard of references”; but such a diachronic encounter would never have occurred without the poetic intermediation of Derzhavin.42 246

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Derzhavin’s influence on the poets of the 1920s has been quite extensively studied, although a comprehensive, unifying analysis has yet to appear.43 Notwithstanding that such a goal is well beyond the scope of the concluding pages of this book, it is interesting to think about how such a study should—or could—be organized. I will allow myself to evoke just one possibility. It was around the same time, in 1925–27, that Boris Iarkho, a Moscow formalist, suggested that the composition of each lyric poem consists of three levels: the level of images and ideas (further subdivided among ideas and emotions and images and motifs); the level of style (vocabulary and tropes, on the one hand, and syntax, on the other); and, finally, prosody (including meter, rhythm, rhyme, stanzas, assonances, and alliterations). According to Iarkho, whose ideas were promoted and developed half a century later by Mikhail Gasparov, any close reading and/ or scrutiny of a poem should start with distinguishing these three “levels of construction.” If, just for a second, we take the liberty of thinking of the entire poetic production of the 1920s as one big poem, we will be surprised to see that Derzhavin’s impact is palpable on all three levels. In the cases of Mayakovsky and Mandelstam, each of whom was exploring the generic horizons of the ode for his own purposes, his impact is mainly perceived on the first level (that of ideas and images). Akhmatova, aspiring to the utmost brevity and suggestiveness of the lyric form, in her marginal notes to Smirdin’s edition of Derzhavin’s Works pays foremost attention to his archaizing vocabulary and choppy syntax (second level). As for the third, phonic level of his poetry, it seems to be particularly appealing to such poets as the young Nikolai Zabolotsky and Boris Pasternak. Surprisingly enough, in these last two poets we can see that the sound of poetry is tightly connected with its optics, inspired, among other things, by Derzhavin’s “peculiar vision.” What “peculiar vision” and “peculiar sound” have in common is the utmost freedom of perception. The eye is as ready to give up on the dictate of the vanishing point, due foreshortenings, and other laws and effects of the linear perspective as the ear is ready not to meet firmly established rhythmic expectations. Eikhenbaum discusses Derzhavin’s freedom in his shifting from dactyls to amphibrachs, to the ultimate loosening of the metrical patterns in “The Swallow,” quoted above.44 This example of how, in the early 1790s, Derzhavin’s freedom in the visual realm cross-fertilizes with his free play with sound may be complemented by the vertiginous lines from the 1791 poem “To the Lover 247

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of the Arts” (Liubiteliu khudozhestv). Here the constant swinging between different metric and rhythmic patterns is interposed with seemingly “smooth” iambic lines that insidiously introduce quasi anamorphic views of the clouds aslant crossing the Ether: Лазурны тучи, краезлаты, Блистающи рубином сквозь, Как испещренный флот богатый, Стремятся по эфиру вкось.

Derzhavin’s “curious perspective,” created and supported by the free treatment of language, is probably best paired with Zabolotsky’s crazy viewpoints, embedded in inverted sentences—for instance, in the “People’s House” (Narodnyi dom, 1928), with its dramatically distorted images and rhythms: Другой же, видя преломленное Свое лицо в горбатом зеркале, Стоял молодчиком оплеванным, Хотел смеяться, но не мог. Желая знать причину искривления, Он как бы делался ребенком И шел назад на четвереньках, Под сорок лет—четвероног. 1 Another, seeing his face reflected In a distorting mirror, Stands there mortified, Tries unsuccessfully to laugh it off. Wanting to find out how the thing deforms, He turns himself into an infant, Backing away on all fours, A close-on-forty quadruped. (trans. Daniel Weissbort)45

If we turn to Pasternak, we will also see that some of his lines are almost as unpronounceable, as tangible, and yet as hard to visualize as those of the late Derzhavin. It is as if during the revolutionary summer of 1917 (following that of the centennial of Derzhavin’s death and his partial poetic resurrection), in the poems of My Sister, Life, the book which Pasternak considered most important for his development as a poet, he was in 248

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a way resuscitating the main features of Derzhavin’s poetry, observed and described by Eikhenbaum. As if in “Storm, Instantaneous Forever” (Groza, momental’naia navek) and “Mirror” (Zerkalo), probably the two most widely quoted poems of this book, we recognize all the optical illusions, all the struggles of reflection and refraction, captured through the intense metrical experiments, which constituted the very core of Derzhavin’s “meteorological cycle”: 46 А затем прощалось лето С полустанком. Снявши шапку, Сто слепящих фотографий Ночью снял на память гром. Мерзла кисть сирени. B это Время он, нарвав охапку Молний, с поля ими трафил Озарить управский дом. 1 After this the halt and summer Parted company; and taking Off his cap at night the thunder Took a hundred blinding stills. Lilac clusters faded; plucking Off an armful of new lightnings, From the field he tried to throw them At the mansion in the hills. (trans. Lydia Pasternak Slater)47

Or, in the compressed space of shifting planes of “Mirror”: В трюмо испаряется чашка какао, Качается тюль, и—прямой Дорожкою в сад, в бурелом и хаос К качелям бежит трюмо. 1 In the mirror is steaming a cocoa cup, A lace curtain sways, and along The path to the chaos of garden and steppe The mirror runs to the swing. (trans. Jon Stallworthy and Peter France)48

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Quoting these same verses in the Interval, Tynianov said of Pasternak something that could be applied equally well to Derzhavin: Childhood, not the childhood of the anthology, but childhood as a turning-point in vision, mixes the thing and verse, so that the thing comes to stand beside us, while verse can be explored with the hands. Childhood justifies and makes necessary images which weave together the most incommensurate, varied things. [. . .] Hence also the strange visual perspective, which is characteristic of the invalid—attention to things close at hand, beyond which there immediately extends an endless expanse [. . .] the same as any chance angle of vision: The cup of cocoa evaporates in the pier-glass, The Tulle sways,—and—by a straight Path, into the garden, into the wind-fallen trees and the chaos To the swing runs the pier-glass. It is for this reason that Pasternak’s stock of images is special, taken at random. The things in it are somehow not very closely linked, they are only neighbors, they are close only in contiguity (the second thing in the image is always very humdrum and abstract); and the chance element reveals itself as a far stronger connection than the densest logical one.

The history of culture may be conceived not only as the alternation of Lyric and Epic worldviews (intensive/extensive types of writing) but also as an alternation of Word and Image, their never-ending Paragone. Paintings and sculptures enter texts through ekphraseis; ekphraseis imperceptibly become “instructions for painters”; taking these suggestions from poets and writers, artists produce new images that, in turn, inspire new texts; and so on. One of the most powerful discussions of this everlasting, mutually illuminating sequence of verbal and visual representations is to be found in Mario Praz’s influential study Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (1970).49 Although his title uses the word “parallel,” Praz describes the “sisterly emulation” of literature (mainly poetry) and the visual arts (mainly painting), not so much in terms of competitive coexistence, but rather like the passing of a baton in an endless relay, a continuity of sorts. (To give just one example, the design, color schemes, 250

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and implied messages of the neoclassical landscapes of Poussin, Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and others would be borrowed, developed, and appropriated by eighteenth-century descriptive poetry—for instance, by James Thomson, who in turn would famously inspire some of Turner’s paintings.)50 As we remember, the ambitious project of illustrating all of Derzhavin’s works, launched by Alexey Olenin in the 1790s but not realized until Iakov Grot’s edition, revolved around the idea of the complementary functions of Word and Image. Illustration should be anything but tautology. The illustrator should not retell visually what was expressed verbally but rather (and here I repeat the wonderful formula for the ideal illustration already quoted in the introduction) “flesh out with the artist’s pencil that which the poet could not or did not wish to say in words” (domolvit’ karandashom to, chto slovami stikhotvorets ne mog ili ne khotel skazat’ [Derzhavin 1:xxx]). This urge for visual circumlocution formulated in the preparatory note for the might-have-been edition of Derzhavin’s lyrics, titled Meaning of the Sketches (Znachenie chertezhei), authored either by Olenin himself or by Nikolai Lvov, is at the very core of Tynianov’s article Illustrations, published in the significant year of 1923: “Only by not illustrating, by not imposing a forced, objective connection [predmetnaia sviaz’] between word and picture can the drawing become a text’s environment.”51 The 1790s’ views on the proper relationship between the comparative arts is very much in tune with the 1920s’ ideas of the desired connection between the verbal and the visual—especially as conceived in the futurist books. Of course, unlike the poets and philologists of Russian modernism, who were directly influenced and inspired by Derzhavin’s “peculiar vision,” each in his or her own way, the artists of the 1910s and 1920s were not. But, in Mario Praz’s words, “poets may anticipate painters in the discovery of new realms of the imagination.”52 Inspired by this assumption, on the one hand, and the principle of “fleshing out with the artist’s pencil” what was implied but never uttered, on the other, one might dream up a strange album of anachronistic (or, rather, diachronic) illustrations. In this imaginary album, Derzhavin’s poems of the 1800s and 1810s would be “fleshed out” with various images, both Russian and Western, from the 1910s and 1920s. His admiration for machines of all kinds, with the machine ornaments of Louis Lozovick, Francis Picabia, or László MoholyNagy; “Maria’s hand” magically setting up “multitudes of spindles,” with Natalia Goncharova’s ecstatically cubistic Weaver (Loom+Woman) (1913) 251

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or with the flickering hands and spindles of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Turning to this groundbreaking movie, we may also think of the possible teaming of the wise, wonder-working magician” from “Magic Lantern” and the projectionists of the 1920s, including the one half-shown, half-implied by Vertov (it seems that the very idea of “moving pictures,” which Sergei Eisenstein saw as the only way to overturn Lessing’s thesis that pictures, unlike words, should stand still, would be as dear to Derzhavin’s heart as the idea of radio waves crossing the world). The uneven rhythms and dizzying syntax of Derzhavin’s poetry could be visualized by Alexander Rodchenko’s dramatic manipulations with perspective, the famous “Rodchenko angles,” sometimes interposed by a calm, detached, bottom-up observation of trees—compare the photograph of the “Pines in Pushkino” (1927), recalling Derzhavin’s “humble glance at the sky” that led into a whole sequence of anamorphic gazes in “Life at Zvanka” one hundred and twenty years before. The list of illustrations for this album could go on and on, and—who knows?—may even be realized one day.

Notes In Search of a Metaphor: In Place of an Introduction 1 2

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Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 1803, no. 82 (1803): 2673. “Pamiat’ drugu” (Derzhavin 2:459), Sochineniia Derzhavina s obiasnitel’nymi primechaniiami i predisloviem Iakova Grota, 9 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1864–83). Henceforth all citations to this edition will be given in the text as “Derzhavin” with volume and page number supplied. On the place of Shishkov’s treatise in the history of linguistic studies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the role the Discourse played in the history of Russian literature, see Mark Al’tshuller’s seminal study of the cultural phenomenon of the Lovers of the Russian Word, the “Forerunners of Slavophilism in Russian Literature” (Al’tshuller 2007, 29–49.) Also see Uspenskii 1985; and Martin 1997, 31–35. A detailed chronicle of Derzhavin’s growing intimacy with Shishkov’s circle can be found in the Diaries of Derzhavin’s younger contemporary and friend Stepan Zhikharev, as well as in his Reminiscences of an Old Theatregoer (Vospominaniia starogo teatrala). For a historical account of the gradual development of Derzhavin’s relations with the Lovers of the Russian Word, see Al’tshuller 2007, 41–64; Faibisovich 2006, 209–19; and Martin 1997, 110–17. On the “Derzhavin-Lvov circle,” its history, ideas and ideals, see Bennett 2011. Shishkov and his kindred spirits shared a reverently respectful attitude toward the word and regarded it with mystical respect. As Al’tshuller has observed, for Shishkov “the word embodied the national spirit and materialized the idea, which it was capable of both creating and destroying. Therefore, he was ready to forbid the harmful word with no less ardor than to defend the true word” (Al’tshuller 2007, 27). In his introduction to the first volume of his edition of Derzhavin’s works (Sochineniia Derzhavina, 1864), Iakov Grot thus explained the idea behind “Derzhavin’s vignettes”: “Derzhavin’s friends Nikolai Lvov and Vasily Kapnist helped a great deal in creating the program for the illustrations. A great many traces remain from the painstaking care with which they together thought up subjects for these drawings. Among Derzhavin’s papers were found special notebooks and separate sheets entirely devoted to the explanation of the drawings, written at various times and in various hands, among which 253

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we recognize the handwriting of all three friends. [. . .] In preparing the program it was generally accepted as a rule not to repeat the contents of the poems in the drawings, but rather to express by hint or allegory ideas that were similar and related” (italics mine; Derzhavin 1:xxix–xxx). The reference to the Derzhavin-Lvov circle’s views on the desired relationship between a text and its illustration and their work on the programs of the vignettes is at the core of Yuri Tynianov’s article Illustrations, quoted above on p. 51 (Tynianov 1977, 316). The fascinating history of this edition has been well researched and is thus excluded from my study. In particular, on the history of the illustrated edition as planned by Derzhavin and his friends in the mid-1790s, see Zorin 1987. In 1805 Bolkhovitinov was made an honorary member of Moscow University, and in 1806 he became a full member of the Russian Academy. The periodical publication of the entries reached the letter “K” (Evgeny had not abandoned the work, but the journal ceased publication in 1806); in 1820– 21 some biographical entries were published by Nikolai Grech in yet another patriotic periodical, Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva). The dictionary was published in full only after Bolkhovitinov’s death. Perepiska 1868, 67. Grot supplies the following commentary: “That a poet was living in the vicinity Evgeny had learned not long before from Khvostov, who wrote to him: ‘Visit the Bard!’ Unable to guess to whom he might be referring, the Right Reverend replied that in the local forests there were cuckoos and owls, but no Bards” (ibid., 68). Perepiska 1868, 70. Evgenii Bolkhovitinov, “Novyi opyt istoricheskogo slovaria o rossiiskikh pisateliakh. Derzhavin,” Drug prosveshcheniia, no. 1 (1806): 274–88. In his letter to Alexei Merzlyakov, Derzhavin explained his idea as follows: “Being a poet by inspiration, I had to speak the truth; as a politician in my service at court, I was forced to conceal the truth with inference and allusion, which has resulted in the fact that today many who read some of my works do not understand them completely [. . .]. Those who will comment on and examine my life without the special notes that I am leaving on the event of my death will judge wide of the mark” (Derzhavin 1:652). “The understanding that the reality was not fully recognizable in his poems led Derzhavin to the creation of this peculiar genre of ‘Explanations of My Works’” (Alekseeva 2005, 337). Cf. Andrei Zorin’s account of this enterprise: “Derzhavin sensed that the novelty of his poetry was closely

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connected to the circumstances of his own life, and he made efforts so that this connection would not remain unnoticed by future readers” (Zorin 1987, 15). The best known of Derzhavin’s autocommentaries are “Notes on WellKnown Events and True Happenings, from the Life of G. R. Derzhavin” and “Commentary on Derzhavin’s Works, Written by Himself in 1808.” On the difference between Derzhavin’s “notes,” “commentary,” and “explanations,” their relationship to one another and the reality to which they refer, as well as the nature of Derzhavin’s autobiographical writing, see Wortman 1973; Fomenko 1983; and Levitt 2011. For a subtle reading of the Explanations, see Loewen 2005. Severnyi vestnik, no. 1 (1805): 150–51. Severynyi vestnik, no. 3 (1805): 250. Many years later the writer and influential literary critic Alexei Galakhov reflected in the pages of the famous review Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski): “Lord Macaulay justifiably calls France the ‘interpreter’ between England and the rest of mankind. England holds first place in the intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—it has originality on its side; France occupies a secondary position— its significance is to adopt a foreign accomplishment and communicate it to the rest of Europe” (Galakhov 1858, 114). Cf. Ronald Paulson’s analysis of the relationship between the historical reality of the French Revolution and its representation in Burke’s “Reflections”: “The referent, the actual French Revolution, was a situation in which historical actions were reported and known and had their effect on the emergent models and metaphors. . . . Once Edmund Burke’s ‘French revolution’ itself became a referent, for which the revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries found their own signifiers and signified, we reach the point where literature and the process of ‘making’ have taken over, only to be ‘matched’ (to use E. H. Gombrich’s terms) from time to time against historical events” (Paulson 1983, 5). These reflections were developed by W. J. T. Mitchell, in his reading of Burke (cf. the chapter “Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility,” in Mitchell 1986, 148–49). The reception of Reflections in Russia has been treated in great detail in Sergei Karp’s scholarship (see especially Karp 1988). For more about the “caricature vision” of the French Revolution, see the appendix “Venice at Sunset” in Starobinski 1982, 235–36; on the connection 255

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between English caricature and the representation of the revolution in Burke, see Paulson 1983, 57–73; on English caricatures of Russian reality at the turn of the nineteenth century, see Cross 2004. This expression was introduced in Ogée 2001. For the vast panorama of visual practices in the history of British culture, see British Vision 2007. Tadié 1995. Comment 2000, 18–24. “No description can give you as exact and as broad an understanding about the situation and—if one can express it in this way— the physiognomy of a city as a good Panorama. All the large buildings, all the environs are there before your eyes,” writes the author of the anonymous article “The Panorama,” published in the most popular and influential Russian journal of the time, Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy, no. 12, pt. 21 [1805]: 294–300). The Botanic Garden comprised two parts. What appears in the completed work as the second part, The Loves of the Plants, from which the quoted lines are taken, was actually written before the first, in 1789, and was then published anonymously (Darwin 2007, 43). On Goethe’s polemic with Newton, see Burwick 1986; on his stage experiments with the magic lantern, see Burwick 1988, 694–702; and Sepper 1988. During Wordsworth’s years of study at Cambridge University (1787–91) his tutor at St. John’s College was the physicist James Wood, the author of several well-known works on optics and mechanics, including The Elements of Optics (1799), in which, though he remained a loyal adherent of Newton’s theories, he nonetheless contested certain of his propositions (Burwick 1986, 183). About Wordsworth’s interest in applied optics, see King 1993; Galperin 1993; Wright 1980; and Burwick 1986, 177–209. In 1802 Davy read two sets of lectures at the Royal Institution: in the morning he lectured on general chemistry, and in the evening on “The Connexion of Chemistry with the Arts.” The latter created a great impression on both poets (Burwick 1986, 181; Dawkins 1998, 40). Wordsworth 1965, 456. Ibid. Cf. Goethe’s confession to Eckermann: “All my poems are occasional poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation. I attach no value to poems snatched out of the air. [. . .] Reality must give the motive, the points to be expressed, the kernel, as I may say; but to work out of it a beautiful, animated whole, belongs to the poet” (Conversations with Eckermann 1901, 19).

Notes 30 Richardson 1994. 31 Marcus Levitt describes Derzhavin’s third-person writing as “creating the impression that he is admiring himself in a mirror” (Levitt 2011, 127). On Derzhavin’s use of third person in his “Explanations,” see Loewen 2005. 32 Cited in Kononko 1972, 75. The art historian Fyodor Buslaev developed the idea of the “monument” by calling the illustrations to Derzhavin’s Works “a magnificent cemetery of the Catherine era” (Buslaev 1886, 165). 33 Viazemskii 1816, 169. On the topos of Derzhavin as a monument, used by both his contemporaries and his descendants, see Bethea 1998, 150ff. 34 Al’tshuller 2007; Serman 1997; Uspenskii 1996. 35 Khodasevich 2007. 36 This theme has started receiving a lot more attention in recent times, with their keen interest in various aspects and forms of visuality (resonating in that respect with the turn of the nineteenth century). Of various studies dedicated to sight, vision, and visibility in Derzhavin’s poetry, I would like to mention just two, which serve as a kind of frame to the first decade of the twentyfirst century: Crone 2001, the first scholarly work to draw attention to the role of optics in Derzhavin’s metaphorical world; and the pages dedicated to Derzhavin in the groundbreaking Levitt 2011, where the visual dimension of Russian eighteenth-century culture is treated with a subtlety and detail never before attained. 37 The next article devoted to the topic of Derzhavin’s treatment of the fine arts, Serman 1974, appeared some thirty years later. 38 Pumpiansky repeatedly quotes this poem by Goethe, from the East-West Divan collection; he cites the same lines (“Morgennebelung verbindet / Mir des Blickes scharfe Sehe”) in his seminal study of Tiutchev’s poetry (1928) (and even makes the same mistake in his quotation: umdichtet instead of verbindet), precisely when he is comparing Tiutchev’s interest in the visual with Derzhavin’s. 39 Perhaps it is no coincidence that the only book-length study in the twentieth century entirely dedicated to the theme of light and color (as well as sound) in the poetry of Derzhavin was written and published in German (Kölle 1966).

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The Russian theatrical term iavlenie (scene) and the verb “to appear” (iavit’sia) are related. The emblematic image of the roused lion connects “Magic Lantern” to the previous odic tradition, in particular to Lomonosov’s ode “On the Taking of Khotin” (Na vziatie Khotina, 1739), where a roused lion, whose tail “stirs up the sand and dust,” is compared to the Russian army surrounded by the enemy host: “Kak sil’nyi lev stada volkov, / Chto kazhut ostrykh iad zubov, / Ochei goriashchikh gonit strakhom, / Ot revu les i breg drozhit, / I khvost pesok i pyl’ mutit, / Razit, izvivshis’ sil’nym makhom” (Lomonosov 1965, 64); “Like some fierce lion, eyes ablaze, / Drives off in fear a flock of wolves / Which show their sharp fangs’ poisonous venom. / Its roar makes tremble woods and shores; / And sand and dust stirs with its tail / Which when all coiled strong blows delivers” [Segel 1967, 1:184]). Lomonosov, in turn, refers his reader to a commonplace of European emblematics. The description of the fierce lion whose tail whips from side to side can be traced back to the Iliad, where it is used in an elaborate simile characterizing Achilles' fury as he rushes to the fight (20, 165-75); we find it as well in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and beginning with Andrea Alciato Emblematum Liber (1531) the depiction of a lion with a raised tail, surrounded by dogs and horsemen who hold back from attacking the beast, with the motto “Ira” (anger, rage), becomes part of the emblematic tradition. Pushkin 2007, 12. Pushkin 1984, 133. Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955) is well known for her correspondence with her cousin, Boris Pasternak, but largely underestimated as one of the most original classicists of Soviet times. In her study of the ancient genre of mime, Olga Freidenberg characterized these performances thus: “Anarrative images, represented in the form of practically immobile ‘personae’—i.e., things, masks, or people impersonating things—had neither plot nor action. Their essence lay only in the ‘appearance’ or ‘departure’ of incarnated luminaries. The instant of shining or ‘miracle’ evoked ‘phainómenon,’ that is, luminescence, light—they marveled at the wonder. Incarnations of light had their ‘inverse,’ their likeness in the form of shadow—shades, darkness, fog, clouds, etc.” (Freidenberg 1997, 95).

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It’s interesting to note that stanzas 1, 10, 11, and 12, which constitute a philosophical frame to the poem, and the eight stanzas of the “optical spectacle” are set in different type: the “framing” stanzas are set in larger type than the “optical” ones (Derzhavin 1808, 2:170–77). Steinberg 1995, 12. The first vignette in “Magic Lantern” was originally to have depicted the rings of planets, guided by God’s spear hand. On the development of these two metaphors in the ethics and aesthetics of the eighteenth century and their transformation into fundamental narrative structures of the English novel in mid-century, see Paulson 1976. Fonvizin 1983. See as well the image of the puppet theater in the poem “Das Spiel des Lebens” (The Game of Life, 1796) by Schiller, whose poetry was well known to Derzhavin. Mitchell 1986, 93. Platon 1783, 2:417–902. On the topos of “the Chinese shadows of imagination” and its roots in Karamzin, see Cross 1971, 117. Karamzin 1964, 1:736. Bordat 1956. Vestnik Evropy, 10, no. 13 (1803): 51–52. Karamzin 1989, 1:13. Ibid., 56. Compare this similar passage in Lomonosov: “Oleg, ugryzen ot zmeia, umiraet. Predstavit’ golovnuiu loshadinuiu kost’, koiu Oleg pkhnul nogoiu. Boiare i slugi podderzhivaiut so strakhom. Volkhvy predskazavshie delaiut raznyi vidy svoego vernogo predveshchaniia” [Oleg, bitten by the snake, is dying. Show the horse’s skull that Oleg bumped with his leg. The boyars and servants are propping him up fearfully. The wizards who predicted it make various signs of their true prophecy]. Lessing 2005, 16–17. Karamzin 1964, 2:158–59. Compare the lack of intensity and suspense in Lomonosov’s sluggish rendering of the same dramatic scene: “As Vladimir went to her bedroom to murder her, his young son Izyaslav, Gorislava’s child, at the prompting of his mother suddenly leapt out from a hiding place with a naked sword and said, in tears, ‘My mother is not alone. I must protect her while I live. Kill me first, so that I may not see her death.’ Vladimir, having softened, 259

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lowered his hands and afterward took Gorislava and her son to the estate in Polotsk, to her father’s land”. Drug prosveshcheniia, no. 1 (1806): 285. Derzhavin 1847, 2:426. Ibid., 2:412. Derzhavin 1808, 4:275. Al’tshuller 2007, 153. Simonovich-Efimova 1925, 40. In the English translation of the book, Adventures of a Russian Puppet Theater (1935), this passage is missing, or, rather, reduced to only two phrases: “In 1917 it became psychologically impossible for me to continue studying art. All my life, no matter what befell, I had felt myself an artist. And there I was, left without power to create, imagine, or even think of art. I turned to dramatic activities” (SimonovichEfimova 1935, 38). Forgione 1999; Gombrich 1976, 2:310. Gollerbakh 1922, 26. Freidenberg 1997, 90. Chapter 2. Lanterns and Lanternists

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‘A Magic Lantern is a small optical machine that lets us see in the darkness, on a white wall, a number of phantoms, specters, and monsters so awful that those who are not in on the secret think they are created by Magic. A Magic Lantern consists of a parabolic mirror that reflects the light of a candle in such a way that this light is directed toward a small hole in a tube, at the end of which there is a lens. Between the mirror and the lens one slides one after another a set of thin glass plates painted with various extraordinary and terrifying figures, which appear, increasing in size, on the opposite wall.’ Here are just a few of the titles: La lanterne magique de la France (1789); Ch.A.-G. Pigault-Lebrun, Le cordonnier de dames, ou, La lanterne magique, pièce curieuse, en trois actes, en prose . . . (Paris: Barba, 1798); A-J. BarruelBeauvert, La lanterne magique républicaine (Paris, 1799); C. Périco, Les grandes marionnettes républicaines, suivies de la fameuse lanterne magique, et de la grande scène du Rentier (qui tire le diable par la queue) (1799); [Anon.] Voici, voila! La grande lanterne magique où l’on voit la bravoure de l’ex-ministre et général Schérer, les comptes de l’ex-ministre des Finances Ramel, la bonhommie de l’ex-ministre de la police Duval, entouré de ses inquisiteurs (Paris, 1799).

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On the rhetorical principles and poetics of the “printed lanterns,” see TatinGourier 1996, 101–3. In 1905-6 in Saint-Petersburg there was a journal titled “ML”, devoted, in the words of its editor, a playwright Iganty Potapenko, to social and political satire. Comprising almost exclusively feeble lampoons, this weekly periodical had a permanent rubric, “Talking shadows” (Govoriashie Teni), illustrated with silhouettes. The literature on the history of magic lanterns and other forerunners of the cinema is quite extensive. I list here only four most influential works in which the reader will find bibliographies on the subject: Mannoni 1995; Stafford and Terpak 2001; Robinson 1993; Tatin-Gourier 1996. The only comprehensive and detailed biography of Robertson in existence was penned by the Belgian documentary filmmaker Françoise Levie (Levie 1981). “I’d like to speak about Fantasmagoria,” Robertson writes in his memoirs. “From my earliest childhood a lively and ardent imagination made me a subject of the Empire of the Wonderful: everything that trespassed the normal boundaries of the natural—boundaries that from century to century corresponded to the limits of our knowledge—engendered in me curiosity and a fire that forced me to do everything possible to realize the effects I had envisioned. Father Kircher, they say, believed in the devil; so much the worse: the examples are infectious” (Robertson 1840, 1:35). Mercier 1801, 259–60. On the history of the fantasmagoria, see also Heard 2006; Mannoni 1995, 144–68; Milner 1982; and Stafford and Terpak 2001, 301–3. On the metaphorical sense of the word and its history, see Castle 1988. Quoted from Oznobishin 1929, 55. Milner 1982; Heard 2007. Levie 1981, 150. Robertson 1840, 1:342. In 1805, before Robertson’s move from Petersburg to Moscow, the “laboratory of experimental physics” was bought from him by the Russian Academy of Sciences for 70,000 francs (for a report on the sale, see Moniteur universel de Paris, September 3, 1805, and Istoriia AN SSSR 1964, 2:57). The room in the Kunstkamera that had been allotted for the laboratory turned out to be too damp even for simple storage, and the laboratory disappeared into the depths of the academy. Not all the “Scythians” shared the enthusiasm of this would-be enlightener. Sergei Marin, an officer of the Preobrazhensky regiment, participant in the 261

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Napoleonic campaign, wrote Count Vorontsov about one of Robertson’s public physics experiments, which took place in the fall of 1803: “It was very annoying that he believed he was in Lapland and confronted us with ‘stale old jokes’; but we ourselves are to blame: anybody with a foreign surname can do with us what he will” (Marin 1948, 294). On the other hand, the artist Fyodor Tolstoy (1783–1873), famous for, among other things, his interest in optical effects in painting, recalled, “After seeing the physics and mathematical entertainment laboratory (of which I am a great enthusiast), which so enthralled the Petersburg audiences of Mr. Robertson, who only recently arrived in our capital, I decided to build a similar laboratory in my studio, which was done with great success, so that everybody who sees my laboratory finds it very curious and entertaining” (Tolstoy 2001, 201). Robertson’s memoirs came out in 1831 and enjoyed widespread popularity in France; in 1840, three years after the death of the “aeronaut and physicist,” they were reissued. This second edition (Robertson 1840) is of particular interest as it is accompanied by a large number of engravings, made after the author’s drawings. (This edition is now available online, at https://archive. org/details/mmoiresrcratifss02robe.) In 1985 Philippe Blon, a French cinema historian, prepared a nice pocket edition of the first volume of the "Memoires", that is, the scientific part; the second volume, almost wholly taken up with Robertson’s sojourn in Russia, was never published in the twentieth century (Robertson 1985). Wilmot 1934, 214; Marin 1948, 294–95. Zhikharev 1955, 147–48. Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, no. 90 (1803): 2911. In the end, Robertson had to buy a private residence. The house cost exactly twice as much as the “laboratory of experimental physics,” which he had sold to the Academy of Sciences before his departure from Petersburg (Robertson 1840, 2:319). Tsivian 1994. Derzhavin 1:195. Segel 1967, 2:282–83. Lovejoy 1964.

Notes

Part II. Rainbow (Refraction) 1

“Cloud” (March 20, 1806); “Thunder” (April 1, 1806); “Rainbow” (April 25, 1806). Chapter 1. Unweaving the Rainbow

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The didacticism of these lines appeared even starker in the poem’s first edition in the booklet of 1806, due to the greater metrical regularity: “I svetlaia b raduga mira, / Vozstav nad Evropoiu vsei, / Zalogom spokoistviia, mira, / Byla vsekh narodov, Tsarei / On vzgliadom odnim ikh mrak prosvetit. / Pomirit” (Derzhavin 1806, 11). Benjamin 1990, 189. Pumpiansky 1983, 315. Along with their political connotations in ceremonial portraits of rulers, rainbows in European painting often evoke the sphere of sight and color (e.g., the rainbow in Dosso Dossi’s Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue, also known as Jupiter Painting Butterflies [1523]; Rubens’s Juno and Argus [1611]; or Angelica Kaufman’s Allegory of Color [1779]). Boyer 1987; Gage 1999. The popular volume was reprinted the following year and the year after that. Isskusstvo 1791, 101. One of the most famous inventions of the eighteenth century, namely, the ocular harpsichord of L.-B. Castel (‘le clavecin pour les yeux’), was based on a musical “adaptation” of Newton’s optical theories. About the influence of Newton’s discoveries on English poetry of the eighteenth century, see the seminal study and articles by Marjorie Hope Nicolson (Nicolson 1946, 1973). Nicolson 1946. James Thomson, “To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton” (1727). Evgeny Bolkhovitinov, then a student at the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy and an auditor at Moscow University, made his prose translation in 1788 from the French prose translation of Baron d’Holbach. Bolkhovitinov’s first literary endeavor, the ten notebooks titled Pièces mêlées sur les diverses sujets tirés de diverses livres François . . . , opens with two definitions drawn from the the “Diogène de d'Alembert,” a collection of philosophical maxims by A.-P. Le Guay de Prémontval: “Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? La physique expérimentale de l’âme; Qu’est-ce que c’est que l’homme? L’optique du cœur et 263

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14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22

264

de la vérité” (What is philosophy? The experimental physics of the soul; What is man? The optics of heart and truth.) Akenside 1788. Blagonamerennyi, no. 17 (1822): 11, 410. In the second edition, Tauride was renamed Khersonida (Bobrov 1804). On the reasons the descriptive genre failed to take root on Russian soil, despite inspiring translators at the turn of the century, and on the manner in which it was absorbed by the epic poem, see Levin 1970, 268–69. Bobrov 1798, 4. Akenside 1788, 110-111. In his preface to the translation, Bolkhovitinov cites the words of Lord Chesterfield, who called Pleasures “the best of the books he never understood.” See also Anna-Letitia Barbauld’s introduction to her new edition of the Pleasures (1794–95): “The Poet proceeds to consider the accession to the Pleasures of the Imagination from adventitious circumstances of which he gives various instances: that of the Newtonian theory of the rainbow seems too abstruse even for a philosophical poem; it may be doubted whether, if understood, it is of a nature to mix well with the pleasure of colors; it certainly does not accord well to that of verse” (italics mine—TS; Akenside 1795, xvii). Nevertheless, Barbauld found Akenside’s blank verse better than both Thomson’s and Milton’s. McKillop 1942, 59. It was this later edition that Derzhavin and his circle knew. Bobrov 1798. The interpretations of the phenomenon of the rainbow differ, however, on one essential point. Thomson and Bobrov are interested above all in refraction and the creation of prismatic colors, while Akenside and Derzhavin are more concerned with the role of reflection and the appearance of the rainbow in the sky. Most scholars of Akenside's poetic heritage agree on the following interpretation of the rainbow image in the Pleasures: the Platonic triad of Beauty, Truth, and Good lies at the center of Akenside’s representation of “rainbow’s vernal-tinctur’d hues.” God is likened to the sun, whose rays fall on the material world of the cloud and as a result lose their original, undiluted clarity and whiteness as they separate into the colors of the spectrum. In the process of reflection, the rays of light are returned to their source: thus, it is as though the material world sends the divine light back to its divine source (Whitely 1996).

Notes 23 Trans. R. Lattimore (Pindar 1976, 7–8). Chapter 2. The Limits of Imitation 1

2

3

4 5 6 7

The first of these is the “Portrait of Felitsa” (Izobrazhenie Felitsy, 1789), addressed to Raphael, the “portraitist of the Divine Being”; the second is the verse epistle “To Angelica Kauffmann” (1796), in which Derzhavin addresses the artist, then at the height of her fame, with a “request to paint the portrait of his wife [. . .] in the ‘ancient style.’” “To Tonci” (Tonchiiu, 1801), the third poem of the series and the only one that resulted in an actual painting by the addressee, is a verbal self-portrait of Derzhavin. The fourth epistle, “To Olenin,” followed three years later, in 1804, occasioned by one of the many failed attempts to publish an illustrated edition of Derzhavin’s works. In it, Derzhavin addresses Alexei Olenin, future president of the Academy of Arts, who was to illustrate his poems. The fifth and final “advice to the artist” is “Rainbow.” Derzhavin’s attitude to Masons is too important and multifaceted to speak about in passing. Although on more than one occasion Derzhavin “disowned” Freemasonry, the vast majority of his friends were active members of the lodges, and he could not help being influenced by them. We know that Derzhavin’s library had a selection of books by Karl von Eckartshausen, one of the eminent European Masons. This is not surprising, since Eckartshausen was translated by Alexander Labzin, Derzhavin’s publisher and founder of the Dying Sphinx, a well-known Petersburg lodge (Zorin 2001, 305–6; Serkov 2000, 57–59). The topos of Deus Artifex is described in detail by Ernst Robert Curtius in his classic study European Culture and the Latin Middle Ages (Curtius 1990, 544–47, 559–70). Curtius cites as an example Dosso Dossi’s painting Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue (also known as Jupiter Painting Butterflies, 1523), mentioned earlier in connection with the rainbow and other attributes of seeing. Serman 1997, 60. That is, his metaphor of the camera obscura. Abrams 1953, 64. Cf. Derzhavin’s “Notes”: “In expression and style he attempted to imitate Mr. Lomonosov . . .  but, though he wished to soar, he could not endure continually the elegant verbiage characteristic only of our Russian Pindar of splendor and 265

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry magnificence. And therefore since 1779 he has chosen a path all his own” (Derzhavin 6:443) 8 More than likely, Derzhavin's rejection of the poem's first version, where stanza 10 (quoted on p. 263, note 2) reads more smoothly, was prompted by the desire to preserve, though in reverse order, the word combination “kings and kingdoms” (tsarei i tsarstv) and thereby underscore the allusion to one of the most famous Lomonosov's verses. 9 Edman 1928, 499. 10 Zapadov 1986, 243–44. 11 “I have no respect for pedantic divisions of lyric verse,” Derzhavin writes in a letter to Bolkhovitinov, who believed that building a literary theory “by [poets’] names” as Derzhavin had proposed was unacceptable. 12 Pumpianskii 2000, 122. Part III. Garden of Memory (Reflection) 1 2

Zhikharev 1955, 504–5. Vestnik Evropy 34, no. 16 (1807): 268–82. Chapter 1. The Keys to Zvanka

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 266

See Stepanisheva 2004, 62. Pumpianskii 2000, 122. Horace 1914, 365. Studies of the Second Epode in Russian poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the place of the “Russian Horace” in the European tradition of translations and imitations include Busch 1964; Mazur 2005; Alekseeva 2006; and Veselova 2007. Unlike the majority of his predecessors, Derzhavin had no knowledge of ancient languages; Vasily Kapnist executed a linear translation at Derzhavin’s request. Alekseeva 2005, 312. Moskovit 1968; Stack 1985; Hunt 1989, 49–54, 75–77. Hunt 1989, 76. It was in 1802 that Bolingbroke’s “Thoughts on Exile” came out in a Russian translation by Pavel Kaisarov. Russkii arkhiv (1870): 845. Shmurlo 1888, 191. Pope 1801.

Notes 14 Discussed in Shmurlo 1888, 195. 15 Russkii arkhiv (1870): 850. 16 Cf. in Russian: “Пробудись, любезный Сен-Джон! Оставь все мелкие предметы подлому любочестию и надмению обладателей. Если в сей краткой жизни почти только нам и времени, чтобы обозреть около себя и умереть: то обозрим по крайней мере сие позорище человека.—Чудный лабиринт!—Однако ж есть в нем расположение, поле, произращающее цветы между волчицами!—Вертоград, обольщающий плодами запрещенными!—Пройдем вместе сие обширное поле; обозрим, что есть на лугах, и что сокрыто в пропастях, проникнем во мрачные пути слепо пресмыкающегося человека; вознесемся до несмысленного его воспарения, в коем он теряет мысли свои; последуем стезям природы; поразим буйство на самом его полете; воззрим на нравы при самой минуте их рождения; где должно, посмеемся; где должно, посудим чистосердечно; наипаче же оправдаем пути Божии перед человеком!” (Pop 1806, 3). 17 Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, deluxe 2nd ed. (Cleveland, 1979), 643. Compare Addison’s use of “expatiate” in his conversation about the imagination: “to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views, and to lose itself amidst the Variety of Objects that offer themselves to its Observation” (Spectator, 413). 18 Pope 1796, 3:23. 19 Pope 1806a. 20 Russkii arkhiv (1870): 851. 21 Pop 1806, vii–viii. 22 This phrase seems particularly evocative in Russian due to the soundplay with the buzzing sounds: “Esli by g. Pope prezrel svoikh vragov, to by chrez to ves’ma mnogikh izbavilsia ogorchenii. Naprotiv togo samoe ego protivoborstvie semu roiu zlotvornykh sushchestv vozbuzhdalo ikh tem bol’she tol’ko zhuzhzhat’ okolo ego.” 23 Pop 1806, vii–viii. 24 In April 1806 Vestnik Evropy published a selection of “Thoughts from Pope, the English Poet,” which Derzhavin very likely was acquainted with. I will cite only one example: “A man wishes to cross to the other side of the river and sees around him a crowd of boatmen. Each offers him his services; one might think that they had all forsworn their own affairs and were thinking only of him. But when this man swims to the other shore, the noise dies down, 267

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25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44

268

and nobody is the least concerned about the traveler. Is it not the same for a minister when entering office and on being dismissed?” (Vestnik Evropy, pt. 26, no. 8 [1806]: 272–78). “Kto vel ego na Gelikon / I upravlial ego shagi? / Ne shkol vitiistvennykh sodom: / Priroda, Nuzhda i Vragi.” Perepiska 1868, 68. Ibid., 71. The complete text of the Note was not published until 1859. Ibid, 72. See Pope’s letter about “sweet retirement,” published in 1712 in the Spectator (Spectator 3 [1965]: 592–97). One of the best and liveliest accounts regarding Pope’s retirement is Mack 1969. Pope 1956, 2:296. Delille 1801, 59. Vestnik Evropy, pt. 34, no. 16 (1807): 254–58. Karamzin 1957, 326. Compare, for example, Cooke 1818. Khrushov 1903, 563. Yates 1966. Pumpianskii 2000, 123. This circumstance has led some critics to speak of the turn “from the idyll to the elegy” that takes place at precisely this point (Serman 1968, 149), while others believe them to “detract greatly from the otherwise distinctive nature of his composition” (Hart 1978, 131). Charlesworth 1987, 65. Strass 1805. Pumpianskii 2000, 124. Hibbard 1956, 11; see also Dubrow 1979; and Fowler 1994. Thus, in the epistle To Penhurst (1612), Ben Jonson, the founder of the country house genre, addresses his friend and patron, Sir Robert Sydney (or to be more precise, as we see from the title, his house); Andrew Marvell appeals to Lord Fairfax, whose family estate he had the pleasure of visiting (Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax), and Pope to Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington. Fowler 1994, 25. Addison 1793, 10:489; my italics—TS.

Notes

Chapter 2. Nine Views 1 2

On the philosophical context of “Meditations,” see Levitt 2006, 63–64. At the turn of the nineteenth century Derzhavin was interested in Eastern mythology (Indian in particular) and various sun cults. In 1800–1802 he published two “diptychs” that includes versifications of ancient hymns: “Morning” (Utro, 1800) and “Hymn to God” (Gimn Bogu, 1800); and “To Tsarevich Khlor” (Tsarevichu Khloru, 1802) and “Hymn to the Sun” (Gimn solntsu, 1802). “The Campaign of Osiris” (Pokhod Ozirida, 1805), replete with ancient Egyptian solar imagery, is also related to this group of texts. 3 Paulson 1975, 26–34. 4 Citation from Budylina, Braitseva, and Kharlamova 1961, 52. Lvov did manage to realize this idea, at least in part, in the Alexander Dacha near Pavlovsk, where he built the temple of the “Rose without Thorns” (an architectural rendering of the “Tale of the Tsarevich Khlor,” written by Catherine II for her grandson, the future emperor Alexander I), encircled by seven columns (the seven virtues), and with an Altar of Wisdom in the center (Shvidkovsky 1996). 5 In Russian it sounds somewhat like Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line “With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím” does in English (thanks to Nancy Workman for this observation). 6 Cf. the rhetorical question addressed by Ivan Dolgorukov, an early nineteenth-century Russian poet, to Ivan Lopukhin, a retired senator and a famous freemason, the owner of an amazing country estate: “Who figured out how to create on an acre an extract of the entire universe?!” (Kto sumel na desiatine / Sniat’ ekstrakt vselennoi vsei?!). These lines were so popular and widely cited that they almost became a cliche. 7 Another eminent Russian literary historian, Pyotr Bitsilli, on the contrary, saw in these “enumerations and these repeated beginnings” one of the most striking traits of Derzhavin’s poetic style, leading to call him the “Russian Rabelais.” 8 Иль в зеркало времен, качая головой, На страсти, на дела зрю древних, новых веков, Не видя ничего, кроме любви одной К себе,—и драки человеков. 9

Zhurnal russkoi slovesnosti, no. 2 (1805): 214. 269

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry 10 Reeves 1997. 11 A more exact translation of the French term amour-propre into Russian is probably sebialiubie. On the concept of narcissism in classical anthropology, see Jean Starobinski’s article “On Flattery” in Starobinski 1993. 12 Ikonologiia 1803, 2. 13 “Commentary to Epistle II,” Pope 1806, 45. 14 Alexei Galakhov, yet another nineteenth-century Russian translator of Pope, has rendered “Harmony not understood” as “the unheard concert” (kontsert, nami ne slyshimyi). This translation was inserted in his article on Karamzin’s reception of Pope (Galakhov 1858, 131). 15 One of Derzhavin’s nieces, Praskovia Nikolaevna Lvova, recalls the following: “In the morning, after breakfast, my uncle usually went to his study, where a crowd of children would gather round to which he would give pretzels on weekdays and spice cookies on Sundays. It was interesting to watch my dear uncle in the midst of these little children; he displayed the same sense of justice everywhere and in everything; it would sometimes happen that there would not be enough pretzels for everyone; Uncle could not bear that one should get less than the rest; he would institute a search throughout the house for some pretzels and would not calm down until everybody had received an equal portion. Then he would send them on their way: everyone was happy and promised to return the next day. I often managed the distribution, and it was a true pleasure to feast my eyes on the venerable appearance of my uncle, whose face expressed an angelic goodness amid these children. He would talk with them, his every word breathed his goodness; sometimes he would assume the role of their judge. When they would come to him with their complaints, he would patiently hear them out and after examining the testimony of both sides he would render a light sentence to the one who was not in the right, and the children who had quarreled would make up” (Italics are mine. T. S.; Derzhavin 9:222). 16 Nabokov 1991, 240. 17 Dmitriev 1974 [1895], 37. 18 Segel 1967, 2:305. 19 Ibid. 20 “The inclusion of a skull—an emblem of death and the transience of everything of this world—in the composition, as well as a clock, jewels, and money (symbolizing wealth) gives this kind of still life the quality of an encoded communication. It is not viewed but read. But it is not 270

Notes

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34

35

simply read—it is deciphered: its code is for the initiated who speak this esoteric language” (Maier-Mentshel 1984). For more on allegorical still lifes, see Lotman 2002 [1984], 344–46; Alpers 1983, 73–109; and Bryson 1990. Crone 2001, 104–5. Derzhavin 1935, 288. Crone 2001, 273. Nicolson 1946; Panofsky 1954; Reeves 2008. Trediakovsky 1963, 256. On the life and works of A. T. Bolotov, see Newlin 2001; see also Schönle 2007, 116–64. “Nekotorye prakticheskie zamechaniia o sadovykh zdaniiakh” (Some practical notes on Garden Buildings), Ekonomicheskii magazin 29 (1787): 34. The literature on the subject of the “picturesque” is quite extensive and has become a particularly popular subject of late. To quote only seminal studies, Andrews 1989; Bermingham 1986; Hipple 1957; Hunt 2003; Hussey 1927; and Price 1965. On Picturesque Beauty, Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape (1792); Essays on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794); An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) by Gilpin, Price, and Knight respectively. In 1807, in one of his Letters from England, Robert Southey writes about a new science—the “science of the picturesque”: “While one of the flocks of fashion migrates to the sea-coast, another flies off to the mountains of Wales, to the lakes in the northern provinces, or to Scotland; some to mineralogize, some to botanize, all to study the picturesque, a new science for which a new language has been formed, and for which the English have discovered a new sense in themselves, which assuredly was not possessed by their fathers” (emphasis mine—TS; Letter 30 [1807], in Southey 1951, 164–65). Ianovskii 1803–6, 2:78. Bolotov 1871, 687–88; my italics—TS. Addison 1712 (414), 67. Pope 1956, 2:296. Describing Diana’s grotto in the third book of his Metamorphoses, Ovid exclaims, “[It is] not one of art’s attainments; rather, nature in her ingenuity imitates art.” Fontenelle 1991, 10. 271

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry 36 On the role Kantemir’s translation played in the development of the Russian literary and scientific languages, and more broadly, in the formation of a new cultural paradigm, see Yuri Sorokin’s seminal work (Sorokin 1982). 37 Fontenelle 1991. 38 “One of them would say: ‘Phaeton has a certain hidden property that makes him lighter.’ Another: ‘Phaeton is composed of certain numbers that make him rise.’ Another: ‘Phaeton has a peculiar attraction to the top of the theater, and he is uneasy if he’s not up there.’ Still another: ‘Phaeton wasn’t made for flying, but he would rather fly than leave a vacuum in the upper part of the stage.’ And there are a hundred other notions which I’m astonished haven’t destroyed the reputation of the whole of Antiquity. Finally, Descartes and some other moderns would come along, and they would say: ‘Phaeton rises because he’s pulled by wires, and because a weight heavier than he is descends’” (Fontenelle 1991). 39 Infinity maintained these qualities not only in the Conversations (where it might have been possible to ascribe them to the playful style of the work itself) but also in the Elements of the Geometry of the Infinite (Éléments de la géométrie de l’infini, 1727), a much more serious work. 40 Dmitry Bortniansky, an eminent eighteenth-century composer, the conductor of the court choir, and a member of the Derzhavin-Lvov circle, was famous for his “choral concertos,” written for four voices. 41 The French literary historian Edouard Guitton, the author of several monographs on descriptive poetry in France, explains the interest in machinery in French poetry of the mid-century as follows: “Primarily a symbol of technical progress, the machine compelled poets in the 1750s through the 1770s to dream, think and create. These dates coincide with the time of the industrial renaissance [. . .]. The poet, a mechanic of words and images, competes with the mechanism he sees before him. Does he adopt technical language or, on the contrary, does he distance himself from it?” (Guitton 1982, 96). 42 Yuri Norstein, the renowned Russian animator, writes similarly about being mesmerized as a child by the rhythmic motion of the looms at a woolen mill. According to Norstein, it is the tapping sound of the looms and the “perpetuum mobile” of the looming frames that gave birth to his famous yet unfinished animated pantomime—a reading of The Overcoat—more so than Gogol’s story itself (Norstein 2008, 10). 272

Notes 43 “Vetrami l’ sosny porazhenny?— / Lomaiutsia v tebe v kuski; / Gromami l’ kamni ottorzhenny, / Stiraiutsia toboi v peski; / Skovat’ li vodu l’dy derzaiut, / Kak pyl’ stekliana nispadaiut” (Derzhavin 1:460). 44 Aksakov 1856, 390. 45 Pumpianskii 2000, 97. 46 The only stanza in the entire text in which all four lines end with a verb is the first of the “machine” stanzas (33). Moreover, all the rhyming verbs here are verbs of motion (the one-syllable pair l’et—b’et [pours—beats] and the two-syllable pair delit—melet [splits—mills]). The verbs’ position at the end of syntactically inverted phrases creates the impression that they can appear only after a long syntactic struggle. Whereas in stanza 33 the verbal rhymes set a rigid structure, there is only one pair in stanza 34 (l’iutsia—priadutsia [pour—knit]), but the rhyme feels less sharp because the verbal forms are reflexive. Verbal rhymes seem to disappear altogether in stanza 35 (but in fact, verbal assonance is present here as well: berutsia—kuetsia [take—forges]; it is concealed in the middle of the lines, but intensified by the syntactical parallelism). The consistent transition from the “verbalness” of the description of the machine’s motion back to verblessness creates an image of vision itself: concentrated on the effect created by the machine’s motion in the beginning, a bit less attentive in the middle, and once again directed at historical allusions and philosophical generalizations at the end. 47 Tynianov 1981, 102. 48 Gasparov 2004. 49 On Derzhavin’s use of inversions, see Serman 1997, Uspenskii 1996, Crone 2001. 50 For possible “functional classifications” of poetic inversion, see Bivens 1979; Eekman 1983.  51 “Nous rapprochons les mots, nous les enchainons les uns aux autres; nous ne les construisons pas, nous les accumulons; nous ne saurions les disposer de manière à se preter mutuellement de la force et de l’appui; les mouvements circulaires et les mouvements obliques nous sont également défendus, nous ne pouvons parcourir que la ligne droite” (Mercier 1801, xli). In his introduction to Neologisms, Mercier writes that his next and last literary project, “the final offering to versification and versifiers,” will be a treatise on inversion, which in his opinion is essential for the “dynamic needs of a new century.” Unfortunately, this wonderful plan has never been realized. 273

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry 52 For now, we’ll leave aside the tautological use of the verb “to spin” in connection with “spindles” (verténa)—rather than thread or yarn—yet another violation of linguistic norms. 53 Lomonosov 1965, 219. 54 Segel 1967, 1:203. 55 Lomonosov 1965, 136. 56 Segel 1967, 1:200. 57 See Klingender 1947; Guitton 1982, 95–109. The poetics of describing technical devices in the Age of Enlightenment might be called the “poetics of effectiveness”: the truly wonderful mechanisms and apparatuses are those that are useful to mankind. As strange as it may seem, neither Jacques de Vaucanson’s famous mechanical flutist, nor Castel’s Optical Harpsichord, nor any of the other amusing automatons so popular at the time inspired the poets of the mid-century. Instead they were attracted by improved clock mechanisms, firefighting carts with unusual water systems, clever cannon fuses, or even a deftly made prosthesis (the “silver hand” that replaced a soldier’s hand lost in battle was the subject of an early lyric by Jacques Delille, the future author of the famed Gardens [Delille 1761]). 58 Manchester 1823; Tseitlin 1940; Lake 1996. 59 Villamov 1836, 23. 60 It is not a coincidence that Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) saw inefficiency seeping into manufacturing as one of the threats of revolutionary upheaval. A Russian variation on Burke’s Reflections, presumably authored by Aleksei Naryshkin (1742–1800) and entitled Thoughts of an Impartial Citizen on the Violent Changes in France, develops Burke’s ideas and at times brings his metaphorical strategy to the extreme: “The simplest machine breaks down or grinds to a halt as soon as the main spring ceases its despotic rule over its subordinates, and as soon as those latter take to managing beyond their office; hence in all social movements it is absolutely essential that autocracy be on one side and subordination on the other—otherwise society, no longer being in a condition to exist, will once again fall into anarchy and collapse” (Naryshkin 1793, 72, 77). 61 “With playful charms her hoary lover wins, / And wields his trident,—while the Monarch spins.” 62 Zhirmunskii 1996, 343. 274

Notes 63 This definition is taken from Literaturnaia entsiklopedia terminov i poniatii (the Russian version of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, LETiP 2001, 535). 64 Gukovskii 1927; Rogov 2005. 65 For an English annotated edition of this book, see Maksimovich-Ambodik 1989.  66 For an original account of encyclopedic “leveling” epistemology, see Apostolides 1990. 67 For an annotated English edition of the Illustrations, see Diderot 1959. The bibliography on the subject is quite vast, but two editions are particularly important: Proust 1985; and Barthes 1989. 68 Barthes 1989, 32. 69 Ibid., 32–33. 70 An interesting use of the same rhetorical device can be found in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the fourth part of which is wholly devoted to the fruitful interrelationship between man and machine. In his commentary on this part of the film, Yuri Tsivian writes, “Frames 110–14 are made up almost entirely of closeups of hands executing different kinds of work: the hands of a typist, laborer, pianist, cashier, hairdresser, camera man, editor, and so forth. Moreover, as is the case throughout the film, the choice of these ‘moving hands’ is not accidental and their sequence is not haphazard, but visually develops and comments on a certain motif. [. . .] Thus part IV of the film Man with a Movie Camera is remarkable for being structured according to a metonymic principle. The proclaimed theme of ‘labor’ is accompanied by the theme of ‘participation,’ here given in the very principle of the construction of film language—a part instead of the whole” (Tsivian 1991, 372). For the English translation of this very important book on early Russian cinema, see Tsivian 1994. However, the quotation above is translated directly from the original Russian text, as the entire section dedicated to a “close reading” of Man with a Movie Camera did not make its way into the significantly abridged English version. 71 Boris Tomashevsky writes, “In inverted constructions a redistribution of the logical accent and the intonational isolation of the word takes place [. . .] the words resound more expressively, with more weight” (Tomashevskii 1996, 75). 72 For this image of the “tropological communications” of the text, I am indebted to Alexander Zholkovsky. My entire approach to Derzhavin’s texts was much inspired by Zholkovsky and Sheglov’s studies of the “poetics of expressiveness” and especially by Zholkovskii 1996. 275

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry 73 To cite only one of the proposals from Derzhavin’s Thoughts on the Defense of the Empire in the Event of an Attack by Bonaparte (1807): “All Frenchmen who do not become subjects of the Russian Empire shall be exiled from the empire; and the death sentence meted out to those who remain behind and are found to be conducting a traitorous correspondence” (Derzhavin 7:486). The measures ultimately taken by the government were in accord with the spirit of Derzhavin’s ideas. 74 Ivan Dmitriev, sent from Moscow to assist the governors-general of the seventh district, composed of the Kostroma, Vologda, Nizhegorodsky, Kazan and Vyatsk provinces, wrote in his Memoirs, “In so far as this was war, after the defeat of our allies, the entire burden fell to us alone and consequently required extraordinary measures and great efforts; therefore, by imperial manifesto of November 30, 1806, it was ordered that a temporary people’s militia, composed of 612,000 militiamen, be formed for the reinforcement of the army and the defense of internal security; this arming in the manifesto is called a ‘life-saving measure that is essential.’” The required number of militiamen has been seen as an allusion to the year 1612, the year of the end of the Time of Troubles, which served as a constant historical and ideological background for events in the early nineteenth century. 75 “As soon as we leave behind the comfortable world of the vignette,” writes Barthes, “and turn to the illustrations and images with analytical properties, tranquillity abandons us. The harmony of the world around us is subject to violence” (Barthes 1989, 15). 76 Egerton 1990, 556; Klingender 1947, 60–61; Paulson 1975, 184–203. 77 Cf. the presence of the four elements and the apocalyptic visions in The Magic Lantern, as well as the obligatory references to earth, water, air, and fire in European (particularly Dutch) allegorical still-life painting of the seventeenth century. 78 In one of the essays in Pleasures of the Imagination, Addison writes about the effect of synesthesia: “As the Fancy delights in every thing that is Great, Strange, or Beautiful and is still more pleased the more it finds of these Perfections in the same Object, so it is capable of receiving a new Satisfaction by the Assistance of another Sense. Thus any continued Sound, as the Musick of Birds, or a Fall of Water, awakens every moment the Mind of the Beholder, and makes him more attentive to the several Beauties of the Place that lye before him. Thus if there arises a Fragrancy of Smells or Perfumes, they heighten the Pleasures of the Imagination, and make even the Colours and 276

Notes Verdure of the Landskip (sic!) appear more agreeable; for the Ideas of both Senses recommend each other, and are pleasanter together than when they enter the Mind separately: As the different Colours of a Picture, when they are well disposed, set off one another, and received an additional Beauty from the Advantage of their Situation.” 79 Addison considered the contemplation of the rising and setting sun to be a pleasure of the imagination of the first order: “Among these several Kinds of Beauty the Eye takes most Delight in Colours. We no where meet with a more glorious or pleasing Show in Nature, than what appears in the Heavens at the rising and setting of the Sun, which is wholly made up of those different Stains of Light that shew themselves in Clouds of a different Situation. For this reason we find the Poets, who are always addressing themselves to the Imagination, borrowing more of their Epithets from Colours than from any other Topic” (Spectator, no. 412, June 23, 1712). 80 A curious parallel to these three stanzas can be found in a strange poem that Derzhavin also wrote at Zvanka, “Girl at the Harp” (1805), a free translation of Schiller’s “Laura at the Piano” (Laura am Klavier, 1781). Derzhavin’s bumpy vers libre has little in common with the melodic harmonies of the German original, much as the “thundering” of the harp differs from the peals of the harpsichord, but the associative nature of aural perception is conveyed through the “well-tempered” adverbial sequence: Приятно,—как сребристый ключ, Журча, по камешкам катится; Великолепно, важно, вдруг, Как грома с облаков органы; Стремительно—вдали с утеса Как шумный, пенистый поток; Отрадно—как меж лип Тенистых, благовонных, И шепчущих осин Влюбленны ветерки дыхают; Уныло, мрачно, тяжело— По мертвым дебрям как ужасный шорох нощи; И вой, протяжно исчезая, Влечется слезною Коцитовой волной. (my italics—TS)

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The nine adverbs that describe the spectrum of musical moods in Derzhavin’s variation on Schiller’s poem are reduced to just three in the description of the landscape at Zvanka: Diverting! Beautiful! Pleasant! This characteristic allows Pumpiansky to speak of “Derzhavin’s architectural world” (along with his treatment of color [kolorism]) as an important lexical and thematic field in Russian poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century. Pumpianskii 2000, 247–48). The landscape colorism and the architecture are to be found side by side in these particular stanzas of Life at Zvanka. “The banks of the Volkhov coming from Novgorod are low and even, but here the land rises into a rather long, oval hill,” writes Iakov Grot in his commentary to the poem, in an attempt to see the Zvanka landscape just as Derzhavin saw it. “In the middle of this hill rises the house; the façade facing the river was ornamented with a balcony on columns and a stone staircase, with a fountain in front of it; below, along the spurs of the hill a tranquil entrance was built” (Derzhavin 2:412). On the use of this effect in contemporary architecture, see Di Palma 2006. The first, unrealized, plan for Derzhavin’s house on the Fontanka dates from the mid-1780s. The house on the Fontanka Embankment (no. 18) was erected after 1790; the construction of the Zvanka country estate took place from 1797 to 1800. Separated from the Fontanka embankment by a broad cour d’honneur, that is, a three-sided courtyard, the poet’s Petersburg house formed its own spatial ensemble, and therefore it too seemed to exist as if apart from the city. One might say of it what Derzhavin said in his “Explanations” to describe Lev Naryshkin’s “shrine-like” house: “Lev Alexandrovich had something like a cheerful country house there on the Moika.” For more details about Derzhavin’s house on the Fontanka (now the poet’s house-museum), see Bennett 1992. The first free translation of Palladio into Russian was done by Prince Dolgoruky in 1699. On the fate of Lvov’s edition of the Four Books and the cultural and historical significance of this work for Lvov’s aesthetic program, see Medvedkova 2002; Grashchenkov 2005; Evsina 1994, 92–119; Il’in 1973; and Nashchokina 2001. The term “Palladianism” was first used in Russia in the early 1910s in publications of the journal Mir iskusstva (The World of Art). The engraving on the frontispiece, executed by A. I. Ivanov after a drawing by Olenin (which naturally recalls the illustrations in Derzhavin’s Sochineniia

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89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96

97

[Works]—the same slightly elongated figures, simultaneously weightless and monumental; the same fierce Father Time with his hourglass and shaggy beard) consisted of an obelisk with a bas relief portrait of Palladio, crowned with an image of St. George, and on the monument’s pedestal, a female figure, dressed in tunic and sandals, wearing a Russian woman’s headdress and carrying a small plumb line. As far as architectural components are concerned, Lvov did not follow all of Palladio’s precepts. For example, in the introduction to the Four Books, he explains that he does not think it possible to imitate Palladio when it comes to a building’s interior configuration, because the Italian mastrer respected the strict symmetry and simplicity of his time, which the contemporary householder would not find “pokoinyi” (restful, tranquil, comfortable) (Palladio 1798, iv). The idea of a “tranquil” house is central to Lvov’s architectural theory and practice, whence this concept finds its way into Derzhavin’s lines. Knapp 1990, 74–79; Mack 1969, 32ff. For a detailed analysis of An Essay on Man as a Palladian version of Paradise Lost, see Damrosch 1987, 268ff. Curiously, Fyodor Zagorsky, author of the first published Russian prose translation of An Essay on Man (Pope 1801), had six years earlier published the first complete Russian translation of the Paradise Lost (Milton 1795). Thus, consciously or not, Zagorsky followed the logic and chronology of the development of English poetry. On the cultural phenomenon of the villa throughout the centuries, see the seminal and unsurpassed study by James Ackerman (Ackerman 1990). Pliny, Harvard Classics, 1909–14. Russkii arkhiv (1870): 858–59. It is no accident that, of the two Russian translations of Pope published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, both are in prose. To visualize this description, see the vignette to the poem “From the Volkhov to the Kubra” (Volkhov Kubre, 1804), a poetic dialogue between the two rivers that Derzhavin addressed to Khvostov (the latter’s estate was situated at the bank of the river Kubra). This vignette gives a more complete and precise representation of the look of the poet’s house than Abramov’s panoramic watercolor and the engravings made from it (Derzhavin 2:483). Kozhevnikov 1994, 27. 279

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry 98 Though to the modern Russian ear the word used here, gudok, suggests a kind of whistle (by association with the verb gudet’), Derzhavin’s gudok is actually a chordophone, a three-stringed folk instrument played with a bow. 99 Derzhavin himself wrote several plays for children to perform at home, the most famous of which is the one-act comedy A Commotion of Kondratys (Kuter’ma ot Kondrat’ev, 1806). 100 Zhikharev 1955, 277. 101 Ibid., 280–81. 102 Ibid., 286. 103 Panaev 1859, 116–17. 104 Khrushov 1903, 565. 105 Dmitriev 1974 [1895], 38. 106 On the reception of Charles Batteux in Russia, see Kochetkova 1994, 81–84; on Derzhavin’s handling of Batteux’s literary theory and practice, see Alekseeva 2005, 319–20; and Crone 2001, 63–85. 107 Batteux 1802, 2:58. 108 Batteux 1807, vol. 4, 100–202. 109 The pastoral genre defined the contours of an important historical parallel: Alexander I was compared to the emperor Augustus as a peacemaker. 110 Virgil 1807, xvii–xviii. 111 Ibid., 7. On the image of Tityrus in Virgil’s first eclogue and the perception of him by his contemporaries and successive generations, see Leach 1974, 113–43. 112 Wordsworth 1979, 42–43. 113 On Pushkin’s growing interest in the Lake Poets in the 1830s, and the influence of the poetic and political ideologies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, see Dolinin 2007, 44–50. Dolinin observes that Pushkin made a literal translation of the beginning of Wordsworth’s Excursion, later incorporated into the opening lines of Ruined Cottage. On the place of “Autumn” in a number of other Pushkin “fragments,” see Izmailov 1974, 249–50; on the ties between this genre in Pushkin’s lyrics of the 1830s and the Romantic cult of the fragment, see Greenleaf 1994. 114 Pushkin 1984, 112. 115 Greenleaf 1992, 264-292 116 For example: “gde, luchi Ekateriny,” “Sokrylos’ solntse,—ten’” (51; the radiance of Catherine, where?; The sun is hidden—shadow!), “Tekh osveshchaet mrak, tekh pomrachaet svet” (54; Some are lit by darkness, some darkened by the light), “Mladykh vozhdei rastsvel pebedami tam vzor / A skryl Orla sedogo 280

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slavu” (55; The gaze of young leaders there was wreathed in triumphs / And eclipsed the gray eagle’s glory), “Tak samykh svetlykh zvezd blesk merknet ot noshchei” (56; And thus from night to night the brightest stars now blur). This last stanza contains references to four addressees of Derzhavin’s earlier poetry. The names Felitsa and Khlor, which Derzhavin used in several poems, were invented by Catherine the Great for herself and her eldest grandson, the future Alexander I, in the fairy tales she composed for him in his childhood. By the Graces, he means Alexander’s two younger sisters, Alexandra and Elena, who died young. Finally, the fairytale name of Dobrada refers to Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, widow of Paul I, to whose circle Derzhavin belonged (cf. his 1808 cantata “Dobrada’s Cell” [Obitel’ Dobrady]). Preußisch Eylau, an ancient city in eastern Prussia, is now the city of Bagrationovsk in the Kaliningrad district. In his attempt to fit the ponderous German place name into his chosen verse meter, Derzhavin calls it PreisshLau. Pumpiansky classed this error among Derzhavin’s mistakes and agrammatical constructions: “The word Preissh-Lau, like militsei, does not exist” (Pumpianskii 2000, 123). The famous painting by Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau, was clearly commissioned to interpret the event in a certain way, that is, in Bonaparte’s favor (Griener 1984). Zhikharev 1955, 348. Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, one of the most prominent and tragic figures of the 1812 campaign, was famous for, among other things, his idea of luring Napoleon into the depths of Russia, known as the “Scythian plan.” The first time he suggested this plan to the emperor was back in 1807, right after the battle of Preussisch-Eylau, where he gained both laurels and serious wounds: Barclay wore his right arm in a sling for several years afterward, and for the remainder of his life had the habit of supporting it with his left, precisely as he is portrayed by George Dawe in the portrait that inspired Pushkin. In August 1812, “halfway” through the campaign, the emperor yielded to those who accused “the Scottish general” of betrayal, replacing Barclay de Tolly with Kutuzov, who pursued the very same strategy, safeguarded from similar accusations both by his impeccably Russian name and by the fact that the “Scythian plan” ultimately proved successful. In “Commander,” influenced by various writings of his contemporaries and his own historical thinking, Pushkin attempts to “rehabilitate” his fame, name, and glory, for which he was famously accused of implicitly denigrating Kutuzov. In his 1836 poem “To 281

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the Artist” (Khudozhniku), addressed to the sculptor who made the statues of Barclay and Kutuzov that stand in front of the Kazan Cathedral, Pushkin called the former “the beginner” (zachinatel’) and the latter “the accomplisher” (zavershitel’). Bolotov 1787, 178. Schönle 2007, 137–38, 223–25. Dolgorukov 1849, 1:146. Derzhavin 6:828. Some scholars of Derzhavin’s work find the concluding stanzas of Life at Zvanka to be superfluous—too dissonant with the mood of the text as a whole, “leaving the reader at a dead end.” For example: “The concluding appeal to Eugene to assist him [i.e., Derzhavin—TS] in his quest for immortality is so distinctly anticlimactic as to leave the reader wondering about the poem’s basic purpose” (Hart 1978, 131). Gasparov 1997, 1:140. Chapter 3. The Poet’s House

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Anderson 1795, 11:103. Cooke 1818; Cobbett 1872, 292. A typical example of these sentimental pilferers is Nikolai Karamzin, who on his return home (“from every distant shore”) admired the modest trophies collected during his travels: “With what delight did I unpack my treasures: notes, bills, books, pebbles, dried grasses and twigs, which brought back for me either la perte du Rhone, or the grave of Father Lawrence, or the thick willow under which the Englishman Pope wrote his best poems! You must agree that all the riches of Croesus are nothing in comparison!” (Karamzin 1984, 388). Pope 1853, 123. The poem was printed without attribution in Rudolph Ackermann’s threevolume Microcosm of London (1808–13), a “social diorama” of London and its environs (Microcosm 1808, 3:276). Karamzin writes about the willow in the first issue of Vestnik Evropy, published in January 1802, in notes to the essay “A Touching Remembrance” (Trogatel’noe vospominanie), translated from the Gazette de la France. Carruthers 1853, 122–23. Cobbett 1872, 208.

Notes 9 10

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Extracts from the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the Year 1783 to 1852, ed. Lady Theresa Lewis (London 1866, 2:334). Gentleman’s Magazine 61 (1807): 624, 988; Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 61 (1860): 553; Gentleman’s Magazine 18 (1842): 44; Notes and Queries 10 (1896): 21–22. The popularization of this episode in the early nineteenth century prepared the way for its mention in the entry pindarique, penned by Diderot, in the Encyclopedie. Alongside Pindar’s house in Thebes, the authors of notes about the destruction of the Twickenham villa often mention Petrarch’s house, which was rebuilt by its new owners, much to the consternation of the town’s residents. In Russia Dodsley was best known for his didactic composition The Preceptor, Containing a General Course of Education (1748), twelve parts of which were translated into Russian and published in 1789–92. On Dodsley in Russia, see Levin 1990, 28, 53, 94. “You heard my songs—you with your pen shall rouse and warn / Our heirs from sleep, in that metropolis due Northward;/And whisper to the trav’ler, like a distant storm;/ ‘Here dwelt God’s bard—Felitsa’s prophet’” (Levitsky 2001, 134). Quoted from Mstislavskaia 1981, 219. Perepiska 1868, 78. Sumarokov 1957, 114. Sumarokov 1957. Pope’s Villa at Twickenham is usually included in the small cycle of Turner’s canvases from 1800 to 1811 which share an elegiac mood, a certain coloring, and the image of the Thames that is compositionally significant in each of these paintings. The second painting from this “river cycle,” created immediately after Pope’s Villa, which can be viewed as the second piece of a diptych, is the painting Thomson’s Aeolian Harp (1809), which is dedicated not so much to the author of the Seasons (in his notebooks, Turner time and again cites him and writes about his desire to become the “Thomson of painting”) as to the idea of connection between poets and artists—an Echo capable of creating images as well as words. See also the relatively recent reiteration of Grot’s pilgrimage by the participants of the international project Following in the steps of Radishchev: A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow. The impressions of the group, led by Anthony Cross, from their travels in Derzhavin’s footsteps to a great extent echo Edward Newton’s report on visiting the Twickenham grotto in 1936. 283

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry 19 Grot 1863, 3. 20 Akhmatova 1990, 2:77. 21 The two-volume Smirdin edition of Derzhavin’s works (1847), given to Akhmatova in 1925 by Pavel Luknitskii, can still be consulted at the library of Fontannyi dom, Anna Akhmatova’s literary museum in Saint Petersburg. The study of Akhmatova’s copious marginalia to Derzhavin provides illuminating insights into the poetics of them both. I am grateful to Roman Timenchik, the eminent Akhmatova scholar, for this information and to Natalya Pakshina, the chief librarian at the Fontannyi dom, for her help. 22 Timenchik writes that “Echo” exemplifies one of Akhmatova’s “favorite thematic frameworks: a verse portrait of a reality that will live on forever, the model of which long ago ceased to exist,” citing Akhmatova’s famous line “Etoi ivy listy / V deviatnadtsatom veke uviali” (“The leaves of this willow withered in the nineteenth century”) as a particularly clear example. The connection— though indirect—of the image of the dying willow with the Derzhavin layer in Akhmatova’s poetry is particularly interesting (Timenchik 2004). 23 “Alexander at Thebes” first appeared on January 16, 1962, in the Literary Gazette (Literaturnaya gazeta), with the heading “The Poet’s House” (Dom poeta). It was later published in the collection The Flight of Time (Beg vremeni) as part of “A Small Page from Antiquity.” 24 Akhmatova 1990, 2:303–5. Pindar, Derzhavin, and the Twenties 1 2 3 4 5

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Mandelstam 1991, 73. Brodsky 2014, 266. Pasternak 2004, 72–73. The translation is quoted after Angela Livingstone (Livingstone 2008, 238–39). Livingstone 2008, 239. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that every scholar who ever studied Pindar’s poetry has examined the role of metaphor in it. Although it makes almost no sense to point to specific studies, I would refer the reader to three books in which the discussion of metaphor in its relation to other tropes goes well beyond Pindar: Bowra 1964, 239–77; Nagy 1990; Steiner 1986 (especially 1–28). On Derzhavin’s translations from Pindar and his capacity to weave the circumstances of his own life and turn of the century Russian history into

Notes Pindaric metaphors, see Koplan 1922—yet another subtle study of Derzhavin’s poetry that appeared in the early 1920s. 7 The characteristic of Pindar’s style sketched by Bolkhovitinov in these lines is so expressive and picturesque that I would like to provide the Russian original: “Я не виню немцев и французов за недостаточные переводы Пиндара. Признаюсь, труднее и непонятнее всех греческих стихотворцев этот автор. У него, кроме того что особенный дикий какой-то ход мыслей, самые слова и фразы необыкновенны и прибраны из разных провинциальных греческих диалектов. Сие крайне затрудняет переводчика и с самыми лучшими пособиями, а буквально перевести его можно разве только на русский язык. Прочих же языков обороты неспособны следовать ему слово за словом, а особливо в сложных словах, которые он отменно любит. Да и русский язык под его многословным напряжением иногда щетинится и корчится.” 8 Sedakova 2014, 136. 9 All three quotes from Pindar’s ode are given here in C. M. Bowra’s translation (Pindar 1969, 83, 135–36, 237). 10 On several occasions, Pindar claims that praise poetry was praising heroes even before the events recorded by epic (“There were hymns of congratulation / long ago, / before / the strife of Adrastos and the Kadmeians” [Nem. 8:51–52]). On the epinician seen as the compressed origin of epic, see Nagy 1990, 429). 11 This is how Mikhail Gasparov summarizes the treatment of myth in Pindar’s lyrics (as opposed to epics): “In lyric, a myth is recounted for the sake of a specific contemporary event; not all of its details are of interest, only those associated with the event, and variant myths are not subordinate to the primary one, but equal to it. [ . . . ] Therefore, Pindar discards the linear plot and proportionality of storytelling; he shows myths as if in momentary flashes, snatching out of them the moments and episodes he needs, leaving it to the listener to fill in the rest” (Gasparov 1980, 371). 12 This expression is used by Pumpiansky in his seminal essay on Tiutchev’s poetry and poetics (introduction to the famous almanac Urania [1928]), one section of which is dedicated entirely to Derzhavin’s legacy: “But the question [of Derzhavin-Tiutchev continuity—TS] could not be precisely posed, due to the brutal oblivion [varvarskoe zabvenie] to which Derzhavin’s poetry had generally been consigned by the people of the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular the poetry most important in 285

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the given instance, that of his old age” (italics mine—TS; Pumpianskii 1928, 37). I borrow the opposition of “intensive” and “extensive” writing from Italo Calvino’s essay on the “visibility” of literature—one of Six Memos for the Next Millennium—Calvino’s Norton Lectures, prepared but never delivered at Harvard in the mid-1980s. Juxtaposing Balzac’s early prose (namely, “Unknown Masterpiece”) and his later epics, Calvino writes, “As a writer of fantasy, Balzac tried to capture the world soul in a single symbol among the infinite number imaginable; but to do this he was forced to load the written word with such intensity that it would have ended by no longer referring to a world outside its own self, like the colors and lines in Frenhofer’s picture. When he reached this threshold, Balzac stopped and changed his whole program: no longer intensive but extensive writing. Balzac the realist would try through writing to embrace the infinite stretch of space and time, swarming with multitudes, lives, and stories” (my italics—TS; Calvino 1988, 98). Tolstoi 2007, 769. Riffaterre 1988, 453. In the opening lines of the introduction I mentioned the appearance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the English stage in the pivotal year of 1601 (which was yet another “regular,” undistinguished year in the history of Russia, unmarked by any special emotion). Once the chronology was changed and the idea of the turn of the century was digested and domesticated (even if often moved from the actual, numeric turn), it was almost inevitably accompanied by the acute feeling of the Time being “out of joint.” Art’s mission to “set it right” (or as Osip Mandelstam wrote, to “fit together [. . .] the knees of gnarled and knotted days”) led, inter alia, to an outburst of metaphoric thinking in poetry—not to mention the legendary 1912 staging of Hamlet by Stanislavsky and Edward Gordon Craig. “In choosing our tutors, my father seems to have hit upon the ingenious idea of engaging each time a representative of another class or race, so as to expose us to all the winds that swept over the Russian Empire. I doubt that it was a completely deliberate scheme on his part, but in looking back I find the pattern curiously clear, and the images of those tutors appear within memory’s luminous disc as so many magic-lantern projections” (my italics—TS; Nabokov 1989, 153–54). In her poignant essay Vyazemsky—Man of Letters Lydia Ginzburg juxtaposes the quoted passage from Derzhavin’s obituary (which she lists

Notes among the “solemn articles,” a special genre practiced by Vyazemsky in the 1810s–30s) with the entirely different, almost sarcastic treatment of the same theme in his Notebook (Ginzburg 1985, 103). Cf. the description of Tonci’s portrait (Khodasevich 2007, 220). 19 Eikhenbaum 1924, 5–36. This essay, as well as other major articles on Derzhavin’s poetry and poetics that appeared in the 1910–20s, are reprinted in the annex to the second Russian edition of Khodasevich’s Derzhavin, prepared by Andrei Zorin (Khodasevich 1988, 342–75). See also Rechi 1917. 20 In her detailed study of Eikhenbaum’s scholarly evolution, Carol Any writes, “Eikhenbaum’s three major articles of 1916, on Gavrila Derzhavin, Fyodor Tiutchev, and Nikolai Karamzin, were conceived as the first building blocks of his own theory of artistic knowledge. In these articles, he set himself the task of discovering the particular kind of artistic knowledge possessed by each writer” (Any 1994, 19–20). It’s curious to see that the “stone” (or, rather, “building block”) metaphor is taken up on the “meta” level—in the discussion of Eikhenbaum’s own method. As for Mandelstam’s treatment of Stone, one should think not only and not that much of his 1913 poetic collection of the same name that might have influenced Eikhenbaum in 1916 but about the famous passage in the Conversation about Dante (1934), which, conversely, was much indebted to the formalists’ philology and their “theory of artistic knowledge”: “Dante’s poetry is formed and colored in precisely this geological manner. Its material structure is infinitely more significant than its celebrated sculptural quality. Imagine a monument of granite or marble whose symbolic function in intended not to represent a horse or a rider, but to reveal the inner structure of the marble or granite itself. In other words, imagine a granite monument erected in honor of granite, as if to reveal its very idea. Having grasped this, you will then be able to understand quite clearly just how form and content are related in Dante’s work” (Mandelstam 1991, 407) 21 “Derzhavin’s word, as poetic material, is unbelievably exact—it almost loses its symbolic nature and becomes weighty and palpable. [. . .] All abstraction is so alien to the archaic force of his writing that it never becomes truly poetic. He takes pleasure in the word as a vivid image of a thing. [. . .] The yearning for the word that would make Zhukovsky ask whether ‘the Inexpressible may be expressed’ and lead to Tiutchev’s statement that ‘the expressed thought is a lie’ is utterly foreign to him. He has no use for the aesthetics of reticence, reserve, and hint. [. . .] Looking at a phenomenon, he sees a word equivalent in its materiality” (Eikhenbaum 1924, 12–13). This insistence on the 287

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

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materiality of Derzhavin’s word and its very special “sound visibility” may be paired with the discussion of the “sound gesture” in Eikhenbaum’s landmark study “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made” (1919), rightly considered to be one of the manifestos of Russian formalism (also included in Through Literature). Although the narratological concept of skaz and the “sound gesture” as one of its key components belong to the realm of purely verbal phenomena, it is curious and thought-provoking to see that in the twentieth century, Gogol’s short story has been mainly staged and filmed as a pantomime (i.e., expressed through the language of actual, bodily gestures)—from Kosintsev’s silent movie of 1926 and one of the earliest pantomimes of Marcel Marceau (1951), all the way through Yuri Norstein’s unfinished animation, already mentioned in the book, and the recent, almost wordless production at the Sovremennik Theater, starring Marina Neelova as Akakii Akakievich. This description is surprisingly close to the following characteristics of Pindar’s poetics, given by a French classicist, Gustave Merlet, in the 1880s (i.e., roughly between the two texts under discussion): “One must admire [. . .] splendor of imagery [. . .] quick flashes of light thrown on the mystery of life” (Merlet 1908, 119). Expression borrowed by Eikhenbaum from Semyon Frank. Diderot from the “Lettre sur les sourds et les muets” (“Letter on the deaf and dumb”). Eikhenbaum 1924, 34–35. Derzhavin 2001, 81. Gough 2005, 114–18; Aitken 1985, 4–5. Tynianov 1979, 116. Timenchik 2004, 305. On Tiutchev and the telegraph, see Leibov 2004. For a similar approach to the question of literature (namely poetry) and technology, see Timenchik on the telephone and tram symbolism in the twentieth-century Russian poetry (Timenchik 1987, 1988). It appeared for the first time in Syn otechestva, no. 31 (1816). As discussed by Morris Halle, the goal of this translation was to illustrate his own and S. J. Keyser’s theory of the correlation of Russian and English iambic meters and not to reproduce the acrostic contained in its first letters (Halle 1984). Of several existing translations, we have chosen this as the one that best renders the spirit of the poem (for which iambic pentameter seems crucial).

Notes 33 Halle 1958. 34 “The discovery of ruina čti is correct in connecting the protracted inattention to this acrostic with the old surmise of viewing Derzhavin’s octet as merely an uncompleted fragment. This surmise in turn is based on the unusualness of short poems in Derzhavin’s legacy. Yet it must be taken into account that it is precisely the singular brevity of Derzhavin’s farewell poem that explains and expiates its extraordinary condensation of artistic devices” (Jakobson 1984, 6). 35 Actually, as it happens, it had not. In his famous memoir, Notes and Excerpts (Zapisi i vypiski), Mikhail Gasparov wrote that a couple of years before Halle published his article, he had noticed the acrostic “RUINA” in the first five of Derzhavin’s eight lines, but thought that the weakening poet had wanted to produce an acrostic but failed—the last three lines did not spell out any existing word (Gasparov was not persuaded by Halle’s later interpretation of čti either). But the mystery of Derzhavin’s last poem didn’t stop here. Gasparov tells the story of a graduate student in Classics with whom he happened to be traveling to a conference. On the plane, the young woman showed him her translation of “On Perishability” into Latin. When Gasparov read it, he was stunned to realize that, if one word were changed, an acrostic would appear. At his request, the translator, totally unaware of the acrostic in the Russian, changed flumine to turbine and the lines spelled out AMOR STAT, roughly “Love survives the ruin.” “The word ‘miracle’ is not in my vocabulary,” concludes Gasparov, “and yet I don’t know what else to call it” (Gasparov 2001, 66). 36 Pindar 1969, 122. 37 The utmost importance of Derzhavin’s architectural imagery is discussed by Pumpiansky in his seminal essay on Fyodor Tiutchev’s poetry: “That brings us to the exceedingly important question of architecture. The fact is that, especially toward the middle of the 1790s, architectural thematics and even terminology were some of the most important distinguishing features of Derzhavin’s poetry. Pyramids, monuments, pillars, threshholds, columns, idols, marble, ruins, obelisks—all of these are incessantly crammed into his poetry, and after the Potemkin celebration, and especially in the years 1794– 97, come so thick and fast that ‘architecture,’ no less than his treatment of color [kolorizm], becomes the enduring signature of Derzhavin’s style. This is also one of the most important issues for the scholarly task of reconstructing the true history of Russian poetry; it is connected to nothing less than the 289

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39 40

41 42

43 44

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question of the origins of the whole statuary element of The Bronze Horseman (the very title of the poem belongs to Derzhavin’s lexicon). Only then will it be possible to clarify the place of Tiutchev in the history of Derzhavin’s architectural poetics, the variant he established himself, and the path of transmission” (Pumpianskii 1928, 45). Mandelstam 1991, 115. The article was first published in the almanac Guild of Poets (Berlin, 1922) and then reprinted, with some changes, in Mandelstam’s collection of essays On Poetry (1928). Mandelstam 1991, 120. “Mayakovsky revived the mightiness of image which been mislaid somewhere since the time of Derzhavin. Like Derzhavin, Mayakovsky knew that the secret of the mighty image lay not in its ‘loftiness’ but simply in the extremity of its interlinked levels—the high and the low, in what the eighteenth century called ‘the closeness of unequally elevated words,’ and also ‘harnessing together of quite remote ideas’” (Tynianov 1979, 116). Ibid., 106. “We can still learn from Derzhavin, and I am sure that for poets of the nonsymbolic school he has a lot to give. Anyone who wants to talk about the world through things, who feels the real fullness of a living word, will find much to value in his poetry” (Eikhenbaum 1924, 16). Cf. the characteristics of Pindar’s imagery by C. M. Bowra: “His chief use of images is to convey such remoter association in their own right, to make the impalpable and the invisible perceptible in mass and contour and color [. . .] he likes a brilliant splash of color in his visible scenes. [. . .] In applying colors to objects and actions and the spirit behind them Pindar starts many associations in the mind and achieves unique effects through them” (Bowra 1964, 245–46). See, e.g., Ivanov 1995; Kutik 1994; Smirnov 1969; and Timenchik 2004. In a recent reading of The Swallow, Irina Surat calls these rhythmical irregularities “the metric equivalent of a heart throb [. . . ,] kind of a poetic aphasia, a sign of breath interrupted by tragedy and coming out in gasps” (Surat 2006). Vassily Kapnist, Derzhavin’s friend and relative, was as puzzled by this mixture of different meters (which he tried to “fix”) as, almost two decades later, Evgeny Bolkhovitinov would be about Derzhavin’s attempts to produce a “theory of mixed ode” in his Discourse on Lyric Poetry or on the Ode (Rassuzhdenie o liricheskoi poezii ili ob ode [1811–15]). Even these two subtle and exceptionally understanding people, Derzhavin’s great admirers, one belonging to the earlier and the other to the later periods of his life,

Notes

45 46

47 48 49

50

51 52

could not share and/or approve of his eagerness to break with all possible systems. Zabolotsky 1999, 57. If we compare Pasternak’s “Storm” to Derzhavin’s “meteorological cycle,” we may also think of Nabokov’s Gift, already quoted in part 3 (in the discussion of Derzhavin’s image of “a pike with a blue fin”), where the author describes the stages of a visual all-in-one experience in a remarkable, single long sentence: “As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van—a dresser with mirror across which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying not arboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade” (Nabokov 1991, 6). Pasternak 1990, 124. Pasternak 1983, 64. “In English tradition one may trace the same trend [of alternating verbal and visual representations—TS] from Chaucer’s description of the monuments of the worthies in [the] House of Fame [. . .] down to Keats’s passages inspired by Titian, Poussin, and the Elgin marbles, and even to John Martin’s spectacular compositions” (Praz 1970, 5). “Thomson did nothing other than transfer into poetry themes common to seventeenth-century landscape painters, not only Claude Lorrain and Salvatore Rosa, but also other masters who used the natural scene as a manifestation of heroic, pastoral, or religious ideas” (ibid., 12). Tynianov 1977, 316. Praz 1970, 11.

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Index Abramov, Evstafy Mikhailovich 24, 122, 124, 184, 279n96 Abrams, Meyer 99 The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition 99 Academy of Fine Arts 46 Academy of Sciences 65, 261n12, 262n18 Ackerman, James 279n92 Ackermann, Rudolph 282n5 Microcosm of London 282n5 Addison, Joseph 86, 89–92, 125, 126, 128, 154–156, 158, 159, 161, 267n17, 276n78, 277n79 Pleasures of Imagination 90, 91, 92, 126, 154, 158, 159, 276n78 Aitken, Hugh G .J. 288n27 Akenside, Mark 86–89, 91, 99, 100, 165, 264n18n22 Pleasures of Imagination 86, 87, 91, 99, 165, 264n18 Akhmatova, Anna 25, 230, 231, 235, 241, 246, 247, 284n21n22 “Alexander at Thebes” 231, 284n23 “Esli pleshchetsia lunnaia zhut’...” 230, 231 The Flight of Time 284n23 “A Small Page from Antiquity” 231, 284n23 Notebooks 241 Aksakov, Sergei T. 166 The Family Chronicle 166 On My Acquaintance with Derzhavin 166 Years of Childhood 166 Alciato, Andrea 258n2 Book of Emblems 258n2 Alekseeva, Nadezhda 254n13, 266n6n7, 280n106

Alexander I 10, 66, 162, 175, 207, 214, 223, 269n4, 280n109, 281n117 Alexander the Great 97, 221, 228, 229, 231, 233, 284n23 Algarotti, Francesco 158 Newton for ladies 158 Alpers, Svetlana 271n20 Allegory Political 78, 79, 81 of vision 43 Altshuller, Mark 23, 253n3n4n5, 260n26 Andrews, Malcolm 271n28 Annunciation (iconography of) 169 Any, Carol 287n20 Apelles 94, 96, 97 Venus Anadyomene 97 Apollon 238 Apostolides, Jean-Marie 275n66 Archimedes 61 Architecture 132, 185, 190, 191, 192, 195, 278n81n83, 289n37 as metaphor 186, 243 Aristotle 10, 133, 157, 171 Poetics 10 Memory and Reminiscence 236 Arkwright, Richard 164, 165f, 170 Arndt, Walter 203 Arrian 221 Augustus 202, 207, 280n109 Bagration, Pyotr 209 Baker, Robert 18 Balloons (Ballooning) 18, 19, 64, 65 Balzac, Honoré de 286n13 “Unknown Masterpiece” 286n13 Barbauld, Anna-Laetitia 22, 165, 264n18 Barclay de Tolly, Mikhail 209, 281n121 Barthes, Roland 173, 174, 275n67, 276n75 Bastidon, Ekaterina Yakovlevna (Plenira), Derzhavin’s first wife 71, 121, 240

307

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry Batiushkov, Konstantin 241 Batteux, Charles 201, 203, 280n106 Principles of Literature 201 Beethoven, Ludwig van 38, 39f Third Symphony (“Eroica”) 38, 39f Belinsky, Vissarion 237 Benjamin, Walter 80 The Origin of German Tragic Drama 80 Bennett, Sandra Shaw 253n5, 278n85 Bennigsen, Leontii 209 Bermingham, Ann 271n28 Berry, Mary 221 Bethea, David 7, 8, 257n33 Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet 7 Bezborodko, Alexander 142, 211 Bitsilli, Pyotr 269n7 Bivens, William P. 273n50 Blay, Michel 263n6 Blon, Philippe 262n14 Blount, Edward 155 Bobrov, Semyon 86, 88, 264n22 Tauride 86, 88, 264n15 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John 111, 125, 192, 266n10 On the Idea of a Patriot King 111 “Thoughts on Exile” 266n10 Bolkhovitinov, Evgeny 12, 13, 48, 49, 86, 100, 107, 112–118, 122–125, 135, 138, 184, 193, 194, 214, 224, 226, 227, 233, 243, 254n7n8n9n11, 263n13, 264n18, 266n11, 268n26, 282n126, 285n7, 290n44 Essay on Man (transl. from Alexander Pope) 112-116, 118, 124 Pleasures of Imagination (transl. from Mark Akenside) 86 Bolotov, Andrey 150, 151, 155, 156, 210, 271n26 Bonaparte, see Napoleon Bonaparte Bortniansky, Dmitry 272n40 Boulton, Matthew 177 Bowra, C. M. 243, 284n5, 285n9, 290n42

308

Boyle, Richard, 3rd Earl of Burlington (Lord Burlington) 190, 191, 193f, 194, 268n42 Boyle, Robert 125 Brintlinger, Angela 7 Britton, John 225 Brodsky, Joseph 232 “Letter to Horace” 232 Bryson, Norman 271n20 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 125 Burke, Edmund 16, 17, 72, 255n18, 256n19, 274n60 Reflections on the Revolution in France 16, 255n18, 274n60 Burwick, Frederick 256n24n25n26 Busch, Wolfgang 266n6 Buslaev, Fyodor 257n32 Calvino, Italo 286n13 Six Memos for the Next Millennium 286n13 Camera Obscura 98, 100, 147, 149, 150, 154, 155, 156, 241 as metaphor 27, 42, 75, 101, 265n5 Campbell, Colin 190 Vitruvius Britannicus 190 Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré) 53 L’Epopée 53 Castel L.-B. 261n7, 263n9, 274n57 Catherine II 23, 24, 79, 81, 177, 269n4, 280n116, 281n117 Catullus 142 Caus, Solomon de 227 Cave, allegory of 43, 72, 101, 156, 177 Charlemagne 39 Chateaubriand, René de 61 Chaucer, Geoffrey 291n49 Chesterfield, Lord 264n18 Chinese shadows 43, 44, 53, 58, 237, 259n13 as a metaphor for imagination 43, 44, 53, 237 Theater of (François Seraphin) 44 Chizhevsky, Dmitry 235

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

“On Perishability” (“The River of Time…”) 242, 245 “On the Accession to the Throne of Emperor Alexander I” 81 “On the Death of Prince Meshchersky” 109 “On the Return of Count Zubov from Persia” 41, 209 “Perseus and Andromeda” 208 “Pindar’s First Olympian Song” 233 “Pindar’s First Pythian Song” 223, 233 “Portrait of Felitsa” 265n1 Pozharsky, or the Liberation of Moscow 49, 50 “Quietness” 223 “Rainbow” 26, 27, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 94, 95, 99, 102, 130, 156, 240, 263n1, 265n1 Sochineniia, see Works “Strolling in the Garden at Gruzino” 150 “The Swallow” 240, 247, 290n44 Thoughts on the Defense of the Empire in the Event of an Attack by Bonaparte 276n73 “Thunder” 75, 76, 78, 263n1 “Time” 73f “To Angelica Kauffmann” 265n1 “To Evgeny: Life at Zvanka” 26, 27, 105, 107, 108, 110, 119, 122–129, 131, 135, 139, 140, 142–146, 148–151, 156, 159, 161, 166–168, 171, 175, 178, 193, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 216, 224, 227, 230, 240, 252, 278n81, 282n126 “To Olenin” 265n1 “To the Lover of the Arts” 247, 248 “To the Publisher of My Songs” “To Tonci” 265n1 “To Tsarevich Khlor” 269n2 “Waterfall” 163

310

“Winter” 205, 206 Works (1798) 44 Works (1808) 70, 78 Works (1845) 237 Works with Explanatory Notes by Ia. K. Grot (Sochineniia s ob’iasnitel’nymi primechaniiami Ia. K. Grota) (1864-1883) 12, 73f, 75, 131, 166, 237, 241, 247, 253n6, 257n32, 278n87 Derzhavin-Lvov circle 12, 25, 44, 53, 143, 184, 253n5, 254n6, 272n40 Descartes, René 85, 272n38 Descriptive Poem 86, 124, 152, 165, 251, 272n41 Di Palma 278n83 Diderot, Denis 18, 24, 168, 172, 173, 174, 200, 240, 275n67, 283n10, 288n24 Encyclopédie (with J. d’Alembert) 18, 24, 172, 173, 174f, 283n10 Letter on the deaf and dumb 240, 288n24 Dmitrevsky, Dmitry 88 The Seasons (transl. from James Thomson) 88 Dmitriev, Ivan 26, 141–143, 200, 270n17, 276n74, 280n105 Memoirs 276n74 Dodsley, Robert 217, 218, 221, 222, 224, 225, 283n11 “The Cave of Pope: A Prophesy” 217 The Preceptor,Containing a General Course of Education 283n11 Dolgorukov, Ivan 211, 269n6, 278n86 Dolinin, Aleksandr 280n113 Dossi, Dosso 263n5, 265n3 Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue (Jupiter Painting Butterflies) 263n5, 265n3 Dryden, John 134 Dubrow, Heather 268n41 Dyakova, Darya Alekseevna (Milena), Derzhavin’s second wife 121, 163

Index

Eckartsthausen, Karl von 62, 265n2 Eckermann, Johann Peter 256n29 Eekman, Thomas 273n50 Egerton, Judy 276n76 Eikhenbaum, Boris 235, 238, 239, 242, 247, 249, 287n19-21, 288n21n23n5, 290n42 “Derzhavin” 238-240 How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made 288n21 Through Literature 238 Eisenstein, Sergei 252 Ekaterina Pavlovna, Grand Princess 194 Elizabeth I of England 80 Ellis, Welbore, 1st Baron Mendip 219 Encyclopédie (ed. Diderot and d’Alembert) 18, 24, 172, 173, 174, 283n10 Esenin, Sergei 241, 246 Euler, Leonhard 125 Evsina, Natal’ia 278n86 Faibisovich, Viktor M. 253n4 Fairfax, Lord 268n42 Fantascope 60, 62, 64, 65, 68 Fantasmagorie 61–63, 65–68, 70 Fielding, Henry 105 Fitzgerald, Edward 29 Flaxman, John 17 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de 58–59 “Le Singe qui montre la lanterne magique” 58–59 Fomenko, Irina 255n14 Fontanier, Pierre 171 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 156–158, 271n20, 272n37n38 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes) 156–158, 272n39 Elements of the Geometry of the Infinite (Éléments de la géométrie de l’infini) 272n39 Fonvizin, Denis 43 “Epistle to My Servants” 43 Fowler, Alastair 268n41n43 France, Peter 249

Frank, Semyon 288n23 Franklin, Benjamin 63 Franz II of Hapsburg 15 Free Masons (Free Masonry) 62, 131, 265n2, 269n6 Freidenberg, Olga 52, 258n5 Friend of Enlightenment 13, 29, 41, 104 Fulton, Robert 64 Furetière, Antoine 55 Gage, John 263n6 Galakhov, Alexei 255n17, 270n14 Galilei, Galileo 148, 158 Galperin, William H. 256n25 Garnerin, André-Jacques 19 Gasparov, Mikhail 8, 167, 247, 282n127, 285n11, 289n34 Notes and Excerpts 289n34 George II 111 Georgi, Johann Gottlieb 177 Gillray, James 17 Gilpin, William 150, 271n29 On Picturesque Beauty 271n29 Ginzburg, Lydia 286n18 Vyazemsky—Man of Letters 286n18 Glinka, Sergei 66 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 20, 21, 22, 26, 75, 104, 127, 256n24n29, 257n38 East-West Divan 257n38 Fahrbenlehre (Theory of Colors) 20, 26 Faust 20, 75 “Liebliches” 26 Gogol, Nikolai V. 272n42, 288n21 Golburt, Luba 7 The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination 7 Gollerbakh, Erikh 52 Golovkin, Gavrila 10 Gombrich, Ernst 97, 255n18, 260n28 The Heritage of Apelles 97 Goncharova, Natalia 251 Weaver (Loom+Woman) 251

311

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry

Gondola, Andrea Pietro della, see Palladio, Andrea. Gough, Maria 288n27 Grashchenkov, Viktor N. 278n86 Gray, Thomas 153 Great Chain of Being 71, 72, 113 Grech, Nikolai 254n8 Greenleaf, Monika 280n115 Gros, Antoine-Jean 281n119 Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau 281n119 Grot, Iakov 12, 26, 31f, 69, 73f, 141, 166, 193f, 195, 208, 224, 229, 237, 251, 253n6, 254n9, 283n18 The Language of Derzhavin 166 Guitton, Edouard, 272n41, 274n57 Gukovsky, Grigory 147, 172 Halle, Morris 242, 243, 288n32, 289n35 Harris, John 158 Astronomical Dialogues between a Gentleman and a Lady 158 Hart, Pierre R. 268n37, 282n126 Heard, Mervyn 261n7n9 Helvetius, 86 Herald of Europe 46, 58, 104, 107, 119, 122, 193, 227 Hibbard, George Richard 126 Hipple, Walter John, Jr. 271n28 Hirschfeld, Christian 210 Hogarth, William 17 Holbach, Baron d’ 263n13 Homer 116, 120, 192, 228, 235 Iliad 116, 235 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 269n5 Horace 108–112, 117, 120, 121, 126, 134, 142–144, 191, 192, 214, 216, 226, 227, 234 Ars Poetica (Epistle to Pisos) 191, 278n86, 279n87n88 “Exegi Monumentum” 131, 216 Second Epode 110 Howard, Luke 104 Howe, Sophia Charlotte, Baroness of Langar 220, 221

312

Hughes, John 85 “The Ecstasy” 85 Hunt, John Dixon 266n8n9, 271n28 Hussey, Christopher 271n28 Iarkho, Boris 247 Illustration didactic (explicative) 77, 173 of Derzhavin’s works 31, 33, 73, 257n32, 278n87 Il’in, Mikhail M. 278n86 Imagination 21, 47, 86, 90, 91, 92, 126, 154, 165, 168, 203, 240, 261n6, 267n17, 277n79, Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 15 Infinity, the concept of 158, 272n39 Ivanov, A. I. 278n87 Ivanov, Viach. Vs. 290n43 Jakobson, Roman 168, 173, 235, 242, 246, 289n34 Johnson, Mark 171, 217 Jonson, Ben 268n42 To Penhurst 268n42 Kaisarov, Pavel 266n10 Kamensky, Mikhail F. 209 Kantemir, Antiokh 157, 272n36 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (transl. from Fontenelle) 157 Kapnist, Vasilii 206, 253n6, 266n6, 290n44 Karamzin, Nikolai 43–48, 52, 53, 120, 121, 238, 259n13, 68n32, 270n14, 287n20, 282n3n6 “Conversation about Happiness” 45 “Discourse on the Happiest Time of My Life” 45 History of the Russian State 45 Letters of a Russian Traveler 44, 120 “My Confession” 43, 44 On the Events and Persons in Russian History That Might Lend Themselves as Subjects of Artistic Representation: A Letter to Mr. NN 46, 48

Index

Karp, Sergei 255n18 Kauffman, Angelica 263n5 Allegory of Color 263n5 Keats, John 85, 291n49 “Lamia” 85 Kent, William 118, 155f, 190, 193f, 194 Chiswick House 193f, 194 Kharlamova, A. M. 269n4 Khemnitser, Ivan 53, 206 Khodasevich, Vladislav 7, 23–25, 287n18n19 Derzhavin: A Biography 7, 287n19 Khrushov, Ivan 200, 268n34 Milena, Derzhavin’s Second Wife 200 Khvostov, Aleksandr 107 Khvostov, Dmitry 13, 117, 227, 254n9, 279n96 Kircher, Athanasius 55, 56f, 63, 98f, 151, 173, 226, 227, 261n6 Kitchen, Martha 7, 240 Derzhavin’s Poetic Works: A Bilingual Album (with A. Levitsky) 7 Klingender, Francis D. 274n57, 276n76 Kneller, Godfrey 115f Knight, Richard P. 150, 152, 271n29 An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste 271n29 Kochetkova, Natal’ia D. 280n106 Kononko, E. N. 257n32 Koplan, Boris 285n6 Kosintsev, Grigorii 288n21 Kotzebue, August von 61 Kozelsky Yakov 100, 101 Discourse of Two Indians, Kalan and Ibrahim, on Human Knowledge 100 Kozhevnikov, A. P. 279n97 Kriazhev, Vasily 136 Kutik, Ilya 290n43 Kutuzov, Mikhai 281n121 Labzin, Alexander 78, 131, 265n2 Lake, Hazel 274n58 Lakoff, George171

Lattimore, R. 265n23 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent 62 Le Guay de Premontval, A.-P. 263n13 Leach, Eleanor 280n111 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm 45 Leibov, Roman 288n30 Leoni, Giacomo 190 Four Books of Architecture (transl. from Andrea Palladio) 190 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 25, 47, 48, 124, 152, 252 Laocoon Revisited 47 Levie, Francoise 261n5n10 Levin, Yuri D. 264n15, 283n11 Levitsky Dmitry 79, 80 Levitsky, Alexander 7, 240 Derzhavin’s Poetic Works: A Bilingual Album (with M. Kitchen) 7 Levitt, Marcus 255n14, 257n31n36, 269n1 Linnaeus, Carl 125 Livingstone, Angela 284n3n4 Locke, John 86, 89, 90, 92, 99, 101, 125, 156, 204 “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” 90, 92, 101, 204 Loewen, Donald 255n14, 257n31 Lomonosov, Mikhail 46, 47, 80, 88, 102, 112, 130, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 258n2, 259n19n21, 265n7, 266n8, 274n53n55 “Evening Meditation on the Divine Majesty on the Occasion of the Great Northern Lights” 130, 169, 269n1 “Letter on the Usefulness of Glass” 163 “Ode in Blessed Memory of Her Majesty the Empress Anna Ivanovna on the Victory Over the Turks and Tatars and the Taking of Khotin, 1739” 258n2

313

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry “Ode on the Day of the Ascension to the All-Russian Throne of Her Majesty the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, 1747” 170 Lopukhin, Ivan V. 269n6 Lopukhin, Pyotr V. 11 Lorrain, Claude 152, 153, 225, 251, 291n50 Lotman, Yuri 44, 271n20 Louis XVI 112 Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de 18 Eidophusikon 18 Lovejoy, Arthur 262n22 Lozovick, Louis 251 Luknitsky, Pavel 241, 284n21 Lvov, Nikolai 8, 11, 45, 113, 122, 132, 185, 186, 191, 193f, 194, 195, 206, 210f, 211, 251, 253n6, 254n6, 269n4, 278n86, 279n88 “Four books of Architecture” (transl. from A. Palladio) 186 Lvova, Praskovia N. 270n15 Lvova, Vera N. 198 Mack, Maynard 268n28, 279n89 Machine imagery 164, 165, 175, 178, 272n41, 273n16, 274n60 Spinning machines 22, 162, 164, 165, 170, 171 Magazine of Natural History 84 Magic Lantern 20, 26, 29, 31, 43, 53, 55–73, 95, 113, 147, 149, 150, 195, 236, 237, 241, 256n24, 260n1, 261n4, 286n17 Lanternists (Savoyards) 37, 55–73 Maier-Mentshel (Mayer-Meintschel), Annaliese 271n20 Maistre, Xavier de 19, 136 Voyage around My Room 136 Makedonets, Vasily 113, 115, 193 Maksimovich-Ambodik, Nestor 104, 172 Symbols and Emblems 104, 172 Manchester, Richard G. 274n58

314

Mandelstam, Osip 49, 160, 232, 235, 238, 243–247, 286n16, 287n20, 290n38 Conversation about Dante 287n20 “The Horseshoe Finder (A Pindaric Fragment)” 160, 244, 245 “Letter on Russian Poetry” 235 “The Nineteenth Century” 243 “On Poetry” 290n38 “On the Addressee” 232 “The Slate Ode” 244, 245 Stone, 287n20 “Word and Culture” 243 Mannoni, Laurent 261n4n7 Marat, Jean-Paul 62 Marceau, Marcel 288n21 Marconi, Gugliemo 240 Maria Fyodorovna, Paul I’s widow 53, 68, 162, 170, 281n117 Marie Antoinette 61, 112 Marin, Sergei 66, 261n13, 262n13 Martial 126 Epigrams, 126 Martin, Alexander M. 253n4 Martin, John 291n49 Martynov, Ivan 15 Marvell, Andrew 268n42 Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax 268n42 Mashkov, Il’ia 25 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 241, 246, 247, 290n40 Mazur, Nataliia 266n6 Medvedkova, Olga 278n86 Meklenburg-Strelitsky, Georgy 53 The Court of Empress Catherine II, 189 Silhouettes 52f, 53 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien 21, 60, 61, 168, 273n51 Néologie 61, 273n51 Le Nouveau Paris 60 Merlet, Gustave 288n22 Merzlyakov, Alexei 201, 202, 206, 254n12 Eclogues (transl. from Virgil) 201 A Few Words on the Eclogue 201

Index

Meyer, Ronald 8 Michelangelo Buonarroti 232 Milner, Max 261n7n9, 264n18 Milton, John 192 Paradise Lost, 192, 279n90n91 Mirabeau, Honoré G. R. 62 Mitchell, W. J. T. 43, 101, 255n18 Mniszek, Marina 50 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 251 Moliere, Jean-Baptiste 14 Montgolfier, brothers 18, 19 Morkov, Arkady 65 Moscow Courier 66 Moscow Journal 44 Moscow News 66, 227 Moscow Observer 66 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 63 Mstislavskaia, E. P. 283n13 Muratov, Pavel 188 Images of Italy 188 Muravyov, Mikhail 100, 101 “Sight” 100 Musin-Pushkin, Alexei 117 Nabokov, Vladimir 141, 127, 237, 270n16, 286n17, 291n46 The Gift, 141, 291n46 Speak, Memory 237 Nagy, Gregory 284n5, 285n10 Napoleon Bonaparte 6, 14, 15, 17, 38, 39, 53, 64, 175, 178, 237, 281n119n121 Naryshkin, Aleksei 274n60 Thoughts of an Impartial Citizen on the Violent Changes in France 274n60 Naryshkin, Lev 278n85 Nashchokina, Maria 278n86 Neelova, Marina 288n21 Newlin, Thomas 271n26 Newton, Edward 283n18 Newton, Isaac 20, 72, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 101, 125, 137, 158, 160, 192, 256n24n25, 263n9n10

Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 72, 158 Opticks 20, 85 Social Newtonianism 72 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope 263n10, 271n24 Norstein, Yuri 272n42, 288n21 The Overcoat 272n42 Northern Herald 15, 16, 104 Obleukhov, Dmitry 201 Ode 8, 13, 41, 42, 71, 79, 80, 81, 89, 105, 108–110, 123, 130, 143, 170, 172, 184, 193, 194, 209, 216, 223, 229, 234, 239, 243, 244, 245, 246, 258n2, 285n9, 290n43 Ogée, Frédéric 256n20 Olenin, Alexey 8, 251, 265n1, 278n87 Omar Khayyam 29 Optics 20, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 54, 68, 84, 100, 124, 136, 146, 149, 236, 274n57 and poetry 146, 147 Archimedes’ mirror 61 Claude glass 153 Eidophusikon 18 Light Refraction 81, 82, 85, 89, 137, 249, 264n22 Mirrors 127, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141 Panoramas and Dioramas 18, 64 Ovid 271n34 Metamorphoses 271n34 Ozerov, Vladislav 49–51 Dmitry Donskoi 49 Fingal 49 Oedipus at Athens 49 Oznobishin, Nikolai 261n8 Pakshina, Natalya 284n21 Palladio, Andrea 8, 9, 17, 24, 125, 186, 187, 189f, 190–192, 194, 195 Four Books of Architecture, 186, 187, 189f, 190–192, 278n86, 279n88 Villa Rotonda 188, 189f, 191 Palladianism 188–192, 195, 278n86 Panayev, Vladimir 199

315

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry Panofsky, Erwin 73, 271n24 Studies in Iconology 73 Parois, de, Count 61 Pasternak, Boris 7, 232, 239, 246–250, 258n5, 284n3, 291n46 “Mirror” 249 My Sister, Life 248 “Remarks on Translations from Shakespeare” 232 “Storm, Instantaneous Forever” 249, 291n46 Pasternak-Slater, Lydia 249 Paul I 53, 281n117 Paulson, Ronald 255n18, 256n19, 259n9, 269n3, 276n76 Peskov, Alexey Mikhailovich 8 Peter the Great 10 Petrarch 283n10 Philodemus 142 Philostratus the Elder 142 Imagines 142 Picabia, Francis 251 picturesque 48, 79, 121, 125, 127, 133, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 183, 210, 218, 271n28n29, 285n7 picturesque travels 152, 153, 225 Pigault-Lebrun, Ch. A.-G. 260n2 Pilatre de Rozier, Jean-Francois 18 Pindar 48, 89, 105, 110, 184, 221, 223, 228, 229, 233, 234, 243, 245, 246, 283n10, 284n5n6, 285 n7n9n10n11, 288n22, 290n42 “First Olympian Ode” 233 “First Pythian Ode” 223, 234, 235 “Second Olympian Ode” 89, 246 “Sixth Olympian Ode” 233 Pitt, William the Younger 75 Pius VII 38 Plato 43, 72, 101, 103, 104, 156, 157, 177 Republic 43 Theaetetus 103 Pliny the Elder 96, 97, 258n2 Natural History, 96, 97, 258n2

316

Pliny the Younger 191, 192, 193 Letters 191 Plotinus 156 Polevoi, Nikolai 237 Pope, Alexander 45, 92, 93, 110–116, 118, 120, 121, 124–126, 132, 137, 150, 155, 156, 190–194, 200, 214, 216–221, 225, 228, 267n13n16n22n23n24, 268n28n42, 270n13n14, 279n91n95, 282n3 “The Dunciad” 116 “Epistle to Lord Burlington” 126, 191 “Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton” 92 Essay on Criticism 114 Essay on Man 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 123, 124, 125, 137, 138, 139, 187, 192, 194, 279n90n91 Imitations of Horace 110, 111 Works 1745 217f Popovsky, Nikolai 112, 115 Potapenko, Iganty 261n3 Potemkin, Grigorii 289n37 Poussin, Nicolas 152, 251, 291n49 Praz, Mario 250, 251, 291n49 Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts 250 Price, Uvedale 150, 271n29 Essays on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful 271n29 Priestly, Joseph 165 Protasova (Karamzina), Elizaveta Ivanovna 45 Proust, Jacques 275n67 Proust, Marcel 236, 237 A la recherche du temps perdu 236 Pumpiansky, Lev 25, 26, 80, 105, 108–110, 123, 126–128, 134, 143, 166, 242, 257n38, 278n81, 281n118, 285n12, 289n37, 290n37 Toward a History of Russian Classicism 25

Index

Pushkin, Aleksandr S. 7, 35, 54, 198, 203, 209, 280n113, 281n121 “Autumn” 198, 203, 280n113 The Bronze Horseman 290n37 “Commander” 209 “To the Artist” 281n121 Ruslan and Liudmila 35 Pye, John 222f Pythagoras, 157 Raphael 265n1 Rastrelli, Francesco Bartolomeo 68 Razumovsky, Piotr 53 Reeves, Eileen A. 270n10, 271n24 Rembrandt van Rijn 232 Rerberg, Ivan I. 25 Reynière, Grimod de la 61 Richardson, Alan 22 Riffaterre, Michael 236 Robertson, Etienne-Gaspard 19, 60–68, 70, 261n5n6n12, 262n13n14n18 Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques 68 Robespierre, Maximilien 62 Robinson, David 261n4 Rodchenko, Alexander 252 “Pines in Pushkino” 252 Rogers, Samuel 220 Pleasures of Memory 220 Rogneda 47, 48 Rogov, Kirill 172 Romanov, Mikhail 46 Rosa, Salvator 152, 251, 291n50 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 62 Rubens, Pieter Paul 263n5 Juno and Argus 263n5 Schiller, J. C. F. 259n10, 277n80 “The Game of Life” 259n10 “Laura at the Piano” 277n80 Schönle, Andreas 8, 271n26, 282n123 Sedakova, Olga 234 Segel, Harold B. 258n2, 262n21, 270n18, 274n54n56

Seraphin, François 53, 44 Théâtre des Ombres Chinois 44 Serkov, Aleksandr 265n2 Serman, Ilya 8, 23, 95, 257n34, 268n37, 273n49 Derzhavin in the New Century 95 Shakespeare, William 10, 43, 286n16 Hamlet 10, 286n16 Shikhmatov, Sergei 115 Shishkov, Alexander 11, 12, 14, 16, 50, 208, 253n3n4n5 Discourse on the Old and New Style of the Russian Language 11, 16 Shmurlo, Evgenii 267n12n14 Shuvalov, Ivan I. 142 Shvidkovsky, Dmitri 269n4 Silhouette, Etienne de 112, 114 silhouette, art of 52, 53, 261n3 Le Chat Noir, cabaret 53 L’Epopée 53 Simonovich-Efimova, Nina 51, 52, 260n27 Adventures of a Russian Puppet Theater 260n27 Smirdin, Alexander 247, 284n21 Smirnov, Igor P. 290n43 Snyders, Frans 145 Socrates 103 Sorokin, Yuri 272n36 Southey, Robert 271n29, 280n113 Letters from England 271n29 St. Petersburg News 66, 67 Stafford, Barbara M. 261n4n7 Stallworthy, Jon 249 Stanhope, William 120, 218, 219 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 286n16 Starobinski, Jean 17, 255n19, 270n11 “On Flattery” 270n11 Steinberg, Michael P. 259n7 Steiner, Deborah 284n5 Stepanisheva, Tatiana 266n3

317

Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry Strass, Friedrich 125, 135, 268n39 Handbook for the Use of This Map 125 River of Time (Historical map) 125, 135 Stroganov, Alexander 46 Sumarokov, Alexander 130, 229 Epistle on Writing Verse 229 Surat, Irina 290n44 Suvorov, Alexander 23 Sviridov, Georgii 241 Swift, Jonathan 217 Sydney, Robert 268n42 Tadié, Alexis 256n21 Tatin-Gourier, Jean-Jacques 261n3n4 Terpak, France 261n4n7 Tesauro, Emanuele 148 Il cannocchiale aristotelico 148 Thomson, James 85–89, 119, 153, 251, 263n12, 264n18n22, 291n50 The Seasons 87, 88, 283n17 “To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton” 263n12 Timenchik, Roman 241, 284n21n22, 288n30, 290n42 Timomachus 47 Titian 232, 291n49 Tiutchev, Fyodor 241, 257n38, 262n13, 285n12, 287n20, 288n30, 289n37, 290n37 Todd, William Mills III 8 Tolstoy, Fyodor P. 262n13 Tolstoy, Lev N. 236, 237, 239 War and Peace 235, 236 Tomashevsky, Boris 275n71 Tonci, Salvatore 198, 238, 239, 287n18 Portrait of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin 198, 238, 239, 287n18 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 53 Trediakovsky, Vasily 148 “Feoptiia—or Proof of the Contemplation of Things of Created Matter” 148

318

Trissino, Gian Giorgio 188 The Deliverance of Italy from the Goths 188 Tsivian, Yuri 262n19, 275n70 Tsvetaeva, Marina 53, 237, 238 Magic Lantern 53 Only shadows 237 turn of the century 14, 17, 18, 20, 52, 58, 104, 136, 284n6, 286n16 Turner, J. M. W. 222f, 225, 229, 251, 283n17 Pope’s Villa at Twickenham during Its Dilapidation 222f, 225, 283n17 River Sketchbook 225 Thomson’s Aeolian Harp 283n17 Tynianov, Yuri 167, 178, 241, 246, 250, 251, 254n6, 290n40 Illustrations 251, 254n6 Interval 246, 250 Uspensky, Boris 23, 253n3, 273n49 Vasilyevsky, Aleksandr 199 Vaucanson, Jacques de 274n57 Vertov, Dziga 252, 275n70 Man with a Movie Camera 252, 275n70 Veselova, Aleksandra 266n6 Virgil 62, 120, 126, 178, 192, 201, 202, 226, 280n111 Aeneid 178 Eclogues, 201 Georgics 62, 126 Vladimir, Prince 47, 48 Voeikov, Alexander 119, 120 Gardens or the Art of Laying out Grounds (transl. from Delille) 119 Voltaire 62, 158 Elements de la philosophie de Newton 158 Vyazemsky, Pyotr 23, 130, 237, 238, 239, 287n18 Derzhavin’s obituary 23, 237, 286n18 Notebook 287n18

Index

Walpole, Robert 111 Warburton, William 120, 217 Watt, James 164 Wedgwood, Josiah 24, 164, 177 The Green Frog Service 24, 177 Weissbort, Daniel 248 Wilmot, Martha 66 Wood, James 256n25 The Elements of Optics 256n25 Wordsworth, William 20, 21, 22, 104, 107, 197, 202, 203, 256n25, 280n113 The Excursion 20, 280n113 Lyrical Ballads 20, 22, 104 The Prelude 20 “Ruined Cottage” 202, 280n113 Workman, Nancy 8, 269n5 The World of Art 278n86 Wortman, Richard S. 255n14 Wright of Derby, Joseph 159–161, 165f, 176–178 La Girandola 177 An Iron Forge Viewed from Without 176, 177, 178 A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp Is Put in Place of the Sun 159, 161, 176, 178

Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples 177 Yanovsky, Nikolai 151 New Dictionary 151 Yates, Frances 268n35 Young, Edward 66, 67, 85 Night Thoughts 66 Zabolotsky, Nikolai 247, 248 “People’s House” 248 Zagorsky, Fyodor 113, 279n91 Zapadov, Vladimir 266n10 Zhikharev, Stepan 66, 67, 107, 198, 208, 253n4 Diary of a Student, 66, 253n4 Reminiscences of an Old Theatregoer 253n4 Zhirmunskii, Viktor 274n62 Zholkovsky, Alexander 275n72 Zhukovsky, Vasily 58, 108, 287n21 “Evening” 108 “The Monkey Who Shows Chinese Shadows” (transl. from J.-P. C. de Florian) 58, 59f Zorin, Andrey 8, 254n6n13, 265n2, 287n19