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2.2 - The Court

from History 2 - Mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Alexei Evstratov
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Throughout the imperial period, but especially in the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial court held a quasi-monopoly on the production, circulation, and conservation of literary artefacts. As the dominant political and economic force in the Russian Empire, it was able to introduce a new type of public sphere by shaping the social mission of literary texts and dictating the norms according to which literature was to be created and judged. This chapter focuses on the reign of Catherine II in order to show how the court promoted social engineering through literature, in particular through the genres of panegyric poetry and neoclassical drama. Celebrated authors in turn benefited from the court’s support. As a result, the imperial palace combined political and aesthetic functions: it introduced a new ceremonial culture and deployed princely patronage to glorify the court’s policies and to impose an absolutist social and aesthetic order.

Keywords

Russian courtmonarchy and artsEnlightenmentaesthetic propagandaprincely patronagepublic sphereCatherine IIceremonial culturepanegyric poetryGesamtkunstwerk
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 241 - 257
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

de Madariaga, Isabel, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Keenan, Paul, St Petersburg and the Russian Court, 1703–1761 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Joachim (ed.), ‘18th-century literature’, special issue, Russian Literature 75 (2014).Google Scholar
Lotman, Iurii M., ‘Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul'tury XVIII – nachala XIX veka’ [Essays on the history of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Russian culture], in Kuzovkina, Tatiana D. and Gekhtman, Vlada I. (eds.), Iz istorii russkoi kul'tury [From the history of Russian culture], 5 vols. (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul'tury, 1996–2002), vol. IV, pp. 11–346.Google Scholar
Proskurina, Vera, Creating the Empress: Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ram, Harsha, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Whittaker, Cynthia H., Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Zhivov, Viktor M., ‘The myth of the state in the age of Enlightenment and its destruction in late eighteenth-century Russia’, Russian Studies in History 48.3 (2009), 10–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhivov, Viktor M., ‘Pervye russkie biografii kak sotsial'noe iavlenie: Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, Sumarokov’ [The first Russian biographies as a social phenomenon: Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, Sumarakov], in Razyskaniia v oblasti istorii i predystorii russkoi kul'tury [Investigations into the history and prehistory of Russian culture] (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul'tury, 2002), pp. 557–637.Google Scholar
Zorin, Andrei, By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Russia (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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