In the history of any literature, certain figures, events, and devices become regarded as landmarks. While this may be natural enough, it is useful to trace the features that cross the boundaries created by the establishment of such conventions. This is what Harsha Ram’s study does, by charting the relationship between poetics and literary views of the Russian Empire from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. While it could be argued that during this period the state was less violently coercive than it would later become, concepts of the empire and imperial rule exerted a constant influence on literature, in spite of the very significant changes in poetics from the time of Pushkin onwards and the profound changes in relations between writers and the state apparent after the Decembrist uprising. Ram begins by analyzing how a hierarchy of literary norms was established, with political considerations influencing the contemporary reception of Western and classical writers such that the ode came to be seen as the highest form in a literary hierarchy, and the exultation of the Russian Empire and its rulers as its highest attainment. Yet the poet’s growing awareness of his own authority was eventually to destroy these norms. However, the Russian Empire remained a continual presence in Russian poetry, up to and including Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s time, when responses of elegiac longing began to displace those based on the sublime, and the hierarchy of style and genre had substantially altered. As Ram indicates, these gave rise to a significantly different understanding of the power of the Russian state and Russian imperial expansion in the literature of the second part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth. He confines his study to the earlier period, and while political events from the end of the war with Sweden in 1721 to the Caucasian wars of the 1840s are given due mention, as well as those directly affecting poets, from Lomonosov’s house arrest in 1744 to Lermontov’s death in 1841, questions of poetics are kept firmly in the foreground.
In his new empire, Peter the Great arrogated the sacred elements of Russian culture, Byzantine in origin, to himself and his achievements: instead of being a guardian of the faith, however, he and his empire were to be exalted. Polotskii does this by comparing Russia and her rulers to the heavens and heavenly bodies respectively, the vast extent of the Russian Empire providing the motivation for the sublime. Polotskii’s static imagery and the absence of the poet’s voice meant that he did not himself realize it: this was to come later.
Ram leads the reader through the Western and classical influences on Lomonosov as he defined a suitable Russian odic style at a time when such precepts were still labile. These included Lomonosov’s reception of such influences as Malherbe’s and Boileau’s moderation of what they perceived to be the excesses of the Pindaric ode in order to produce a style in which the poet’s obligations were much more closely circumscribed by his duty to the monarch and state, as well as the Russian verse translations of odes written by German scholars resident at the Academy of Sciences during the reign of Empress Anne. This corresponded to Lomonosov’s advocacy of iambic verse as a suitable vehicle for the expression of the sublime and to his establishment of the vysokii shtil’, in which many Church Slavonic elements were incorporated, thus producing a linguistic register analogous to Peter’s empire in which sacred elements were adopted for the glorification of the secular.
Of further-reaching effect was the adaptation of the psalmic tradition: in 1744, Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov each attempted a translation of Psalm 143, ostensibly as an exercise in their views of what the new poetic language should be. In so doing, however, they could not avoid putting themselves in the place of the psalmist, King David. Being both a ruler but also bound by the same divine laws as his subjects meant that they could assume a role in which they could be morally superior to the monarch and ultimately portray the latter’s right to rule as being conditional on his or her obedience to these laws. Thus the static framework and fixed planes and planets of Lomonosov and Polotskii’s earlier imperial sublime became mobile and prepared the way for the poet to find his place in relation to the monarch. As Ram says, “Ontological mobility was the psalm’s greatest legacy to the Russian poet. The poet-prophet, as the divine agent of retributive justice, could aspire to a more exalted status than that accorded to him by the state” (p. 59). This led to no sudden changes in the role of the poet, but the introduction of a sense of hierarchy including the monarch, the poet, and the reader began to broaden artistic horizons and eventually paved the way for the incorporation of the politics of dissent into the model of the sublime. Ram demonstrates this process using Derzhavin’s “Felitsa” (1782) as an example. In the poem, Derzhavin develops Catherine’s character of Felitsa into Khlor’s moral mentor, and in “Videnie Murzy” she appears to the Murza, the indolent aristocratic figure with whom Derzhavin identifies himself, to admonish him on the value of writing what she considers worthwhile poetry:

... Когда
Поэзия не сумасбродство,
Но выший дар богов, тогда
Сей дар богов лишь к чести
И к поучению их путей
Быть должен обращен, не к лести
И тленной похвале людей.

[When
Poetry is not a whim
But the highest of the gods’ gifts, then
this gift of the gods should be used
only for honor
And for teaching their ways,
Not for flattery
And the perishable praise of people.] (P. 110)

Thus the poet arrogates to himself if only momentarily – the morally educative role otherwise attributed to Felitsa, and, by extension, Catherine. The introduction of the concept of the validity of the monarchy being contingent on ethical factors, and the personalization of the ode, marks for Ram the start of the decline of the association of the imperial sublime with autocracy. He goes on to demonstrate how it remained intact as its political and stylistic parameters broadened.
The extension of the latter was in part brought about by an expansion in literary culture and readership, which was no longer necessarily attached to the court. Karamzin and Batyushkov argued for the establishment of a “middle style,” based on the refinement and elegance of the discourse of ancien régime France. While this reflected the growth of the literary salon’s influence compared to that of the court, it demonstrated their continued belief in a stylistic hierarchy. Likewise, the reassessment of the Russian literary language by Shishkov and the Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word, with their advocacy of the incorporation of the lofty, Church Slavonic-derived elements of the vysokii shtil’ into Russian together with popular colloquialisms, was at once conservative and radical, bringing together as it did elements from within an established paradigm but also displaying the beginnings of a romantic interest in popular language. This did not, however, result in the demise of the ode but merely a change in its subject matter: the individual, especially his freedom, could now be its subject, not necessarily the expanses of the empire. In realizing this poetically, the Decembrist poets appropriated much of the vocabulary of the imperial sublime, even if they did not always assert the superiority of civic romantic values over imperial and military ones as explicitly as Ryleev did in “Grazhdanskoe muzhestvo” of 1823:

Но подвиг война гигантский
И стыд сраженных им врагов
В суде ума, в суде векое –
Ничто пред доблестью гражданской.

[But the gigantic feat of a warrior
And the shame of the enemies he vanquished
In the judgment of the mind, in the judgment of the ages –
Is nothing before civic valor.] (P. 128)

Ram uses the term Decembrist Romanticism to identify this peculiar blend of still fairly conservative poetic norms and dissenting political beliefs. His discussion of previous generations of writers is especially useful here, given the emphasis Soviet critics placed on the revolutionary aspects of the Decembrists’ writings. He contends that in spite of their criticisms of the tsarist regime, which included certain aspects of imperial policy, the Decembrist Romantics remained essentially committed to the concept of empire. None other than Pestel’ vigorously made the case for Russia’s colonization of the Caucasus and Turkey in his manifesto Russkaia Pravda (c. 1823). The tensions created by this ambivalence toward the imperial government gave rise to further developments in the poetics of empire, as Ram demonstrates, using Griboedov’s Khishchniki na Chegeme (1825) as an example. While Griboedov’s portrayal of the capture of the Caucasus as a difficult task for Russia was acceptable to the censor, the following lines were not when the poem was first published in 1841:

Узникам удел обычный, –
Над рабами высока
Их стяжетелей рука.
Узы – жребий им приличный;
В их земле и свет темничный!
И ужасен ли обмен?
Дома – цепи! в чуже – плен!

[Prisoners will suffer the usual fate, –
High above the slaves
Is the arm of those who have acquired them.
Chains are a lot that befits them;
In their land even the light is that of a prison!
And is the exchange so terrible?
Chains at home, captivity abroad!] (P. 141)

These are the lines of the mountain-dwellers, speaking of the Russians they have captured. The subversive suggestion that the captives would be no freer at home might suggest that Griboedov doubted the value of Russia’s southern expansion; indeed, from his correspondence it is apparent that he had misgivings about the brutally repressive methods used by General Ermolov in the Southern campaign. However, his “Proekt uchrezhdeniia Rossiiskoi Zakavkazskoi kompanii” of 1828, according to which trade and industry were to be encouraged in the empire as an alternative to unrelenting military opposition, shows that Griboedov believed in the validity of the empire, but believed equally strongly that reform was necessary.
This harmony between political and poetic beliefs was not to last: if empire is still a vital force in Küchelbecker’s Evropeiskie pis’ma (1820), in which an American visitor to Europe in the twenty-sixth century sees how the then dominant powers – Asia, Africa and America – have taken over Europe, the transience of individual realms is emphasized by the work’s setting in the distant future. This may also suggest that the poetics of the imperial sublime were no longer applicable to contemporary debates on empire, although this may have been exacerbated by Küchelbecker’s staunch defence of Longinus’s views on the sublime and his own espousal of them. As a result, the original aim of the imperial sublime appears to have been turned on its head: empires come and go, but what remains is poetry, as we see in “Smert’ Bairona” of 1824. A succession of visions ends with one of the distant future, in which Great Britain has ceased to exist as a political entity and is ruled by a despot – yet Byron’s genius remains.
This reversal of the two tropes present in the odic sublime of empire almost from the very beginning of the genre might have brought about its demise were it not for Küchelbecker’s dedication to the ode, which so distressed Pushkin. Pushkin’s break with the ode arose from his refusal to identify rapture as a prerequisite for poetic inspiration and formal perfection. Nevertheless, the legacy of the imperial sublime persisted. By comparing Derzhavin’s “Na vziatie Izmaila” (1783), Pushkin’s “Kavkazskii plennik” (1822) and “Prorok” (1826), Küchelbecker’s “Prorochestvo” (1822), and Lermontov’s “Son” (1841), Ram demonstrates how “Prorok” draws much from it stylistically. In all the poems, a Russian lies asleep in a primitive place, often somewhere in the Caucasus, his captivity being apparent to him only through his dreams. Whether challenged by a conventional imperial enemy or God (Küchelbecker and Pushkin’s “Prorok”), the hero’s awakening represents a fundamental change in the hero and that which he represents. Whereas in most cases he stands for the Russian Empire, in “Prorok” the absence of imperial imagery is notable: the lyric subject becomes the receiver of an undefined prophesy.
With this dismantling of the previously strictly-defined imperial sublime, the concept of a fixed hierarchy of styles began to disappear, and less formal associations of particular genres for particular purposes arose. Attaining the sublime became a matter for personal reflection, to which the intimate nature of the elegy was well-suited, as Pushkin’s “Ia perezhil svoi zhelan’ia” exemplifies. Where, then, does the flexibility of the imperial sublime come to an end? Ram shows how the last remaining element – that of prophecy – is not present here in the only poem to follow “Prorok” chronologically, Lermontov’s “Son.” The soldier dreams only of home and of his being mourned before he dies of his wounds. The personal and the elegiac have supplanted the imperial and even the prophetic.
Having thus shown how the association of empire, the sublime, and the ode ended, Ram concludes by briefly contrasting the imperial sublime with an alternative literary conception of Russia, which he terms the “Eurasian sublime.” He begins his account of this alternative path with Pushkin’s “Klevetnikam Rossii” (1831), for its assertion of Russia’s particular cultural role against the criticisms of the West. Just as military might is an external manifestation of Russia’s particular mission, so the monarchy was the external aspect of Russia’s mythical mission for Tiutchev. Though the prophetic element is present in his poetry, politically there is no sympathy for the Decembrists’ cause, and the spiritual and prophetic aspect of her mission erodes Russia’s concrete existence elsewhere in Tiutchev’s oeuvre.
This concept was further developed by Solov’ev in his discussion of the particular role of Russian Christianity in reconciling East and West in the third of the Tri rechi v pamiat’ Dostoevskogo (1881-1883). This formed part of a wider program for the attainment of “total unity” (vseedinstvo). Solov’ev came to realize that achieving this union by purely spiritual means was impossible, and he began to see Russia’s imperial policy as having a part to play in bringing it about. His poems “Drakon” and “Panmongolizm” (both 1900) show Russia as a vital bulwark against a serious military threat in the Far East, which necessitates her fighting a holy war in order to preserve Christendom, whereas “Kratkaia povest’ ob Antikhriste” (also 1900) shows Russia and Europe as being defeated and eventually succumbing to the rule of the Antichrist. Thus the uncertainty of the viability of Solov’ev’s spiritual program is echoed by the variable position of Russia at various stages in its development. Initially, Russia is a necessary complement to the West; then Russia and Europe unite to preserve Christianity; finally both are destroyed. At each stage, Russia’s position on a horizontal, East-West axis is slightly different.
The Eurasian sublime, then, fluctuated between spiritual and imperial authority, whereas the imperial sublime is concerned with the validity of the moral authority of the emperor and the poet. In the former, the vast horizontal expanses of the Russian Empire become, at times, a mystical entity embodying a collective cultural mission, whereas the vertical perspective dominates the imperial sublime, from Polotskii’s view of Russia’s rulers as heavenly bodies, through views of the Empire from above, to the association of individual strivings for freedom with the mountains of the Caucasus.
The emphasis on the dynamic of these different dimensions demonstrates that the cultural and geographic “other” of the territories being colonized by Russia is eventually to be subsumed into her culturally, rather than remaining as a separate entity. However, this useful counterpoint provided by the Eurasian sublime is one of several possible contrasts: examining the development of the social aspect of Russian literature through the nineteenth century or perhaps the historical breadth of Tolstoy’s War and Peace are obvious examples. The concept of Eurasia, however, has been of interest since the downfall of the USSR and so serves to emphasize the enduring influence of views of empire in Russian literature. Any of these successors to the imperial sublime would make excellent subjects for complementary studies to Ram’s book.
In presenting a wider view of relations between political authority and literature, rather than merely a survey of a succession of individual political events and interventions in various writers’ lives, Ram draws attention to features common to what are customarily regarded as different periods of Russian literature. That the last of these is the Pushkin era means that this study provides an interesting opening for those wishing to know more of the preceding literary tradition; but its greatest achievement is surely the way in which detailed aspects of individual poems, particular political events and citations from both the texts being discussed and from previous critics’ views of them all take their place in the wider debate about the nature of Russia’s empire, its effect on poetics and responses to this. This book can thus be recommended to anyone with an interest in the individual authors it deals with, as well as to those concerned with the more general questions it addresses.