4.2 - The Ruler

Summary

Of all European literatures, the Russian literary canon has perhaps been the one most focused on the figure of the ruler. In the eighteenth-century odes, the relationship between the poet and the ruler was described as vertical: the poet looks up at the ruler and exalts him or her through poetry. The first attempts to shift from the vertical to the horizontal plane took place in Gavriil Derzhavin’s verse, most notably through the familiar depiction of Catherine II in his ode ‘Felitsa’ (1782). The influence of this ode can still be felt half a century later in Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836), where the titular Masha Mironova meets (but does not recognise) Catherine II, and the empress comes to personify history itself. Such images of the pre-Revolutionary ruler went on to shape depictions of the leader (namely Lenin and Stalin) in the first half of the twentieth century.