The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire by Harsha s> Ram (review)
2005; Maney Publishing; Volume: 83; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/see.2005.0058
ISSN2222-4327
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoREVIEWS 515 early in the nineteenth century. Lyricpoetry subsequentlyfocused on themes ratherthan genres. There is only one remarkabout folkpoetry (p. I7). Indeed, Wachtelwrites that 'Before the eighteenth century, Russia had no viable secular literature' (p. 65). Why then did Pushkinand his contemporariesassiduouslyrecord the folk song tradition? Perhaps this blind spot explains the author's failure to highlightthe essentiallyoral qualityof Russianverse of the past two centuries. As he well knows, educated Russiansdo not merely read poetry. They recite it spontaneously,without referenceto printedmaterials,hence the high levelsof intertextualitythatpervadethe Russianpoetry tradition. The brief discussion of intertextuality itself brings to light some telling connections, such as echoes in Akhmatova of Pushkin, in Sosnora of Derzhavin, in Prigov of Pasternakand in Iskrenkoof Okudzhava (pp. 50-57 and passim). Readers new to Russian poetry might have been offered many more examplesof thistrulysignificantand characteristicphenomenon. The value of thisbook asan 'introduction'to itssubjectmustbe questioned. Despite suggestionsthat it is accessibleto studentswith only a year of Russian (p. ix), it assumes automatically that those same students are sophisticated readers of poetry. Even relatively advanced undergraduateswould find the welterof informationdaunting.ThirtyormoreRussianpoets fromTrediakovskii to Kibirov are briefly quoted each along with an English prose equivalent and several other Russian poets and novelists are mentioned. More than a dozen West European and classical poets, as well as several philosophers,composersand paintersfeaturein the exposition. My own preference would have been a larger number of substantial discussionsof a small range of lyricalmasterpiecesalong the lines of the love poetry Pushkin's'Ia vas liubil . . .', Akhmatova's'Ia ne liubvi tvoei proshu ... ' and Tsvetaeva's 'Popytkarevnosti'(pp. 96-IO9) of a selection of wellknown landscape poems and of an equivalent group of patriotic lyrics (PP. 110-45). Aside from these groups, no other single poem, even the shortest, is here given its due. Too often the discussionveers off into asides. There is a sense that the book is trying to cover too many issues in too few words or, at the very least, that the extensive section headed 'Interpretation' (pp. 65-145) shouldhave yielded space to the 'Concepts'section (pp. 15-62). Baratynskiiabove all is given shortshrift:this is strangefor a poet who almost invariablystrikesa chordwith young people. Strangely,this CambridgeUniversityPressimprintiswrittenexclusivelyin American English (spelling,punctuation, vocabulary and culturalreferences such as King Kong and AbrahamLincoln). 7The UniversityofAuckland IAN K. LILLY Ram, Harsha. TheImperial Sublime. A RussianPoetics ofEmpire. Publicationsof the Wisconsin Center for PushkinStudies. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2003. x + 307 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. THE establishmentof empire and the creation of a poetic idiom in eighteenthcentury Russia were almost simultaneousdevelopments. It is the relationship 5I6 SEER, 83, 3, 2005 between these developments, togetherwith the subsequentinterplaybetween imperial politics and poetics, that Harsha Ram explores in this stimulating monograph. Ram is concerned with what he terms 'the imperial sublime' from its eighteenth-century origins to the death of Lermontov in I84I and with the genres (firstthe ode, and laterthe elegy)which servedas theprincipalvehicles for the expression of the sublime. He begins with an examination of theories of the sublime and with definitionof varioustypes of the sublime,referringto classicformulationsof the notion by Longinus,Boileau, EdmundBurke,Kant and Hegel. He also has to consider the oriental theme in Russian literature. For representationof Russia as a European empire (theproject to which the strivingfor the sublimewas harnessed)entailed orientalization,in the Russian mentallandscape,of the southernlandsoverwhich Russiawasgainingcontrol in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ram then retracesthe origins of modern Russian literature,providing some usefulpages on Simeon Polotskii and Baroque panegyric oratory before discussing the emergence of the ceremonial ode, the poetic and linguistic revolution effected by Lomonosov, and the use made of the ode by Lomonosov and Derzhavin. Moving on to the Alexandrine and early Nicholaevan periods, and paying particularattention to Griboedov and Kuchelbecker, Ram characterizes the vision of the Decembristsasboth a revivalanda reversalof theeighteenth-centurysublime. This vision, while insurrectionary,he argues, retained 'empire as one of the definingcontexts of [... .] civic engagement' (p. 8), thus combining 'alienated dissent'with 'imperialtriumphalism'(p. I59). Next, in a chapteron 'Pushkin, Lermontov, and the elegiac sublime', Ram offersclose readings of Pushkin's 'Prophet' and his narrative poem 'The Prisoner of the Caucasus' and of a number of Lermontov's Caucasian poems, especially...
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