1. On the reception of the French Revolution in Russia, see Fridlender, G. M., ed., Velikaia franlsuzskaia revoliutsiia i russkaia literatura (Leningrad, 1990)Google Scholar, Mikhail Mikhailovich Shtrange, Russkoe obshchestvo i frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1956). The massive French royalist immigration to Russia was one of the symbolic markers of Catherine's insistence on the tenuous continuance of the ancien régime. Aleksandr Pushkin's contemporary Nikolai Grech recalls as a childhood memory that all Russian residents of French descent were required to pledge allegiance to Louis XVII, a lasting symbolic power only outside his iconoclastic fatherland. Nikolai Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni (Moscow, 2002), 46. See also Baldensperger, Fernand, Le Mouvement des idées dans l‘émigration française (1789-1815) (Paris, 1925).Google Scholar

2. The opposition between Grand Duke Paul's lesser court, with its center in Gatchina, and the empress's main court, centered in the capital and in Tsarskoe Selo during the summer, had been in place ever since Paul's first marriage in 1773. After his longdesired accession to the throne, Paul's residences, which had before been associated with painful political marginalization, conspicuously advertised his new independence as emperor. These residences carried a symbolic value: they became the sites of regular parades, processions, and a multitude of other ceremonies. Richard Wortman notes, for instance: “After the coronation, Paul contrived excuses for additional ceremonies. He moved back and forth from the Kremlin to his suburban residence as often as possible in order to multiply the occasions for processions.” Wortman, Richard, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy (Princeton, 1995), 1:180.Google Scholar

3. As an aside, ironically, in 1836, when the age of Catherine could be dubbed “starina” (as in, for instance, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin), the first Russian railroad connected precisely Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk.

4. Cf. Catherine's own distaste for her predecessor's architectural preferences. In a recent article, Vera Proskurina writes of the correlations between Catherine's architectural and political program. As soon as Catherine gains power, “Elizabeth's architectural ‘splendor’ is also transferred to the semantic field of ‘before': Catherine remodels and transforms the palaces of her precursor. Elizabeth's baroque tastes provoke an open aversion: Catherine does not conceal her dissatisfaction with [Francesco Bartolomeo] Rastrelli, who symbolized the style of the previous reign. The aesthetic shift from Rastrelli to [Etienne Maurice] Falconet and [Giacomo] Quarenghi reflected not only the stylistic turn from the baroque to classicism but also die political strategy directed at excluding Elizabeth's reign from participation in the Petersburg myth.” Proskurina, Vera, “Peterburgskii mif i politika monumentov: Petr Pervyi Ekaterine Vtoroi,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 72 (2005): 110.Google Scholar

5. Old Russian architecture was definitively identified as such a domain only with the emergence, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, of full-fledged archeological expeditions, such as were, for instance, sponsored and conducted by several generations of the Uvarov family.

6. Let the leading historian of Russian late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architecture, Dmitrii Shvidkovskii, introduce Tsarskoe Selo: “The ‘castles in the air’ of Russian thought in the age of Enlightenment were embodied here in the constructions of architects. Tsarskoye Selo was the unique locus and laboratory of new ideas in Russian eighteenth-century architecture… . Tsarskoye Selo is a whole constellation of artistic worlds brought to life by the different nuances of aesthetic thought in the eighteenth century.” Shvidkovskii, D. O., The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven, 1996), 41.Google Scholar

7. Russian antiquity at this point was also a matter of much discussion and yearning on the part of Russian sentimentalists and amateur historians. One can recall, for instance, the multiple interpretations of die Novgorod story by such audiors as Iakov Kniazhnin, Nikolai Raramzin, and Cadierine II herself (Aleksandr Sumarokov was the first to broach the subject in Sinav i Truvor, 1750). The fascination with national history also manifested itself in the appearance of amateur historical circles, e.g., that of A. I. Musin-Pushkin, whose work resulted in, if one is to follow the commonly accepted scenario, the discovery of The Lay of Igor's Campaign and other texts of a lesser renown. For more on this circle, see Kozlov, V. P. and Buganov, V. I., Kruzhok A. I. Musina-Pushkina i “Slovo o polku Igoreve“: Novye stranitsy istorii drevnerusskoi poemy v XVIII v. (Moscow, 1988).Google Scholar

8. Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994), 59.Google Scholar

9. For theorizing on the link between “ruins” and “modernity” in a different context, see Andreas Schönle, “Mezhdu ‘Drevnei’ i ‘Novoi’ Rossiei: Ruiny u rannego Karamzina kak mesto Modernity,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 59 (2003).

10. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1:169.

11. For a comprehensive and illuminating study of the English influences on Russian architecture and landscape design, consult Shvidkovskii, The Empress and the Architect.

12. Indeed, Paul's version of the Enlightenment, with his attraction toward occult and Masonic practices, his exaggerated worship of Frederick the Great, and his frequent sentimental outpourings, stood in stark contrast to the values of Catherine's Enlightenment.

13. Peter Hayden, the historian of imperial gardens, mentions this episode in his overview of the landscaping history of Tsarskoe Selo in Lev Loseff and Barry P. Scherr, eds., A Sense of Place: Tsarskoe Selo and Its Poets (Columbus, Ohio, 1993), 28. Shvidkovskii relates how Paul discharged Catherine's foremost architect, Charles Cameron: “Paul's coronation meant a change of personnel surrounding the monarch, including the court architects. Several days after Catherine's death, Cameron was dismissed.” Shvidkovskii, The Empress and the Architect, 33.

14. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations of Derzhavin's verse are taken from G. R. Derzhavin, Poetic Works: A Bilingual Album, trans. Alexander Levitsky and Martha T. Kitchen (Providence, 2001). The Russian texts are cited from G. R. Derzhavin, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 2002).

15. Wormian, Scenarios of Power, 1:173.

16. A similar fate befell, among others, Princess E. R. Dashkova, who provides a famous account of her house arrest in E. R. Dashkova et al., Mon histoire: Mémoires d'une femme de lettres russe á ;'époque des lumières (Paris, 1999).

17. For a recent discussion of the poem in light of Derzhavin's treatment of civil service, Catherinian grandees, fate, and the sublime, see Ram, Harsha, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison, 2003), 96–97.Google Scholar

18. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 275. The translation is mine.

19. D. S. Likhachev calls the Garden of Eden “the most important semantic prototype of all European gardens.” Likhachev, D. S., Poeziia Sadov: K semantike Sadovo-Parkovykh stilei: Sad kak tekst, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg, 1991), 38.Google Scholar Derzhavin's evocation of Tsarskoe Selo certainly plays on this association. Stephen Baehr observes that garden imagery, especially common in ceremonial odes, became a prominent metaphor of the flourishing Russian state. He devotes the chapter “The Happy Garden State” to exploring this metaphor. Baehr, Stephen Lessing, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, 1991), 65–89.Google Scholar

20. Anna Lisa Crone also connects the two poems; however, to my mind, she overstates the case for Derzhavin's political “independence” and subversive “daring.” Crone, Anna Lisa, The Daring of Derzhavin: The Moral and Aesthetic Independence of the Poet in Russia (Bloomington, 2001), 175-76.Google Scholar Partly following Derzhavin's own self-serving autobiographical statements, Crone considers the odes Derzhavin addressed throughout the 1790s to the grandees who lose royal favor as signs of the poet's sovereignty: Grigorii Potemkin, Petr Rumiantsev, Grigorii Orlov in Catherine's times, and Platon Zubov during the reign of Paul I. “The Ruins,” dedicated to the past glory of Catherine the Great in 1797 can also be seen in this context. While it would be difficult to argue against the fact that Derzhavin was intent on constructing his poetic and civic persona as an autonomous seeker for the truth, I would also like to stress that this was a constructed and in many ways culturally encouraged behavior, and that, furthermore, within the Derzhavin corpus, it is easy to find works that celebrate precisely those in power, including odes that pay tribute to Paul I. For instance, “Na novyi 1797 god” (On the New Year 1797,1797); his translation of the ode composed by the Jews of Shklov “Na konchinu Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, i na vosshestviie na prestol Imperatora Pavla I” (On the passing of Empress Catherine II and the accession of Emperor Paul I, 1799); “Na Mal'tiiskii Orden” (On the Order of Malta, 1798).

21. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 613.

22. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1:111. I would like to thank Monika Greenleaf for sharing her astute observations on Catherine's ideology of love.

23. J Hunt, ohn Dixon, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1976), 200 Google Scholar.

24. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 410; Derzhavin, Poetic Works, 147.

25. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 411; Derzhavin, Poetic Works, 149.

26. Quoted from Voltaire, Catherine, and A. Lentin, Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence (Cambridge, Eng., 1974), 117. It is curious that Catherine II compares the sculptural layout of her garden to skittles, a game whose entire purpose is to knock the identical, faceless pieces down, to disperse them. Perhaps in this very simile lay Catherine's playful premonition of her sculptures’ short—physical or symbolic—life, a pleasurable fantasy of speechless ruins.

27. Andreas Schönle explores the connection of the Minerva image to Catherine's gardening strategies in Tsarskoe Selo. He reminds us that “Catherine had finally solidified this connection when in 1789 she had placed in a Tsarskoe Selo grotto a statue of herself as a colossal Minerva.” Schönle, Andreas, “Prostranstvennaia poetika Tsarskogo Sela v Ekaterininskoi prezentatsii imperii,” Tynianovskii sbornik: Deviatye Tynianovskiie chteniia, no. 11 (2002): 63.Google Scholar Here Baehr's remark that “under Catherine II, Russia was often referred to as Minerva's garden” lends support to Schönle's analysis. Baehr, Paradise Myth, 82. In this context, Derzhavin's choice of a different goddess is all the more revealing.

28. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1:169.

29. Toward the end of Catherine's reign, the associations with Venus were increasingly interpreted as subversive because they alluded to Catherine's sexual rapacity, which was seen as unsuitable for her age and detrimental to the success of her government. Her last favorite, Platon Zubov was particularly perceived as dull and unfit for the prominent positions he earned through his proximity to the aging empress. In his allegory, Derzhavin redeems the Venus image from these associations, which were exaggerated by some of his literary rivals, for example, I. A. Krylov. See Proskurina, Vera, “Krylov i Ekaterina II: Stikhotvoreniie ‘Umiraiushchaia Koketka’ v kontekste russkogo libertinazha,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 45 (2000).Google Scholar

30. Here the translation is mine.

31. Basing his claims on the analysis of multiple contemporary sources, Baehr confirms these observations: “in the eighteenth century, when Russia was frequently at war, the image of a quiet garden … celebrated peace… . As in many other works using the garden image, there is perfect unity here between man and nature; the garden is an emblem for man's ‘natural’ condition of peace—a condition that had flourished along with nature in Eden.” Baehr, Paradise Myth, 67.

32. See Levitsky's commentary in Derzhavin, Poetic Works: A Bilingual Album, 146.

33. See Gasparov, M. L., Ocherk istorii russkogo slikha: Melrika, ritmika, rifma, strofika (Moscow, 1984), 54–55.Google Scholar

35. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 412; Derzhavin, Poetic Works, 150.

36. Ram, Imperial Sublime, 178. In his chapter on the “elegiac sublime,” Ram examines the intricate relationship between the ode and the elegy and traces the problem to Konstantin Batiushkov's historical elegies.

37. Ibid. Another generic prism, which might inform a reading of Derzhavin's poem, is furnished by oraisons funebres, a sermon-type genre popular in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this genre, the mourner publicly inventories the idyllic virtues of a deceased person and at the end arrives at the overwhelming loss shared by the entire audience. Some of the most famous practitioners of the genre include Jacques Bossuet, Louis Bourdaloue, and Jules Mascaron. The printed versions circulated widely during the eighteenth century. I am thankful to Viktor Zhivov for alerting me to this textual tradition.

38. Ibid.

39. Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Notre Dame, 1986), 62.Google Scholar Several decades later, the selfsame Burke reacted with “sublime horror” to the French Revolution, which should be kept in mind as a key framework for all late eighteenth-century narratives of epochal change.

40. G. R. Derzhavin, Zapiski, 1743-1812: Polnyi tekst (Moscow, 2000).

41. Sacks, Peter M., The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, 1985), 6.Google Scholar

42. In his commentary on the poem, Alexander Levitsky suggests that “orphaned Love” might be a reference to Catherine's grandson and Paul's future successor, Alexander. See Derzhavin, Poetic Works: A Bilingual Album, 146. More significantly, this might be an allusion to Catherine's court ideology of Love that is embodied in Derzhavin's conversational odes to the empress and that was eradicated by Paul I. Furthermore, in light of the new polarization of love imagery, which contrasted Catherine's carnality and Paul's sentimentality, Derzhavin's assertion of Love's new orphanhood can be interpreted as a further refutation of Paul's ideology of authenticity and sentiment.

43. At this relatively late point in his career, Derzhavin time and again returns to the question of historical commemoration, pondering its most lasting media (sculpture, poetry) and its significance for the human experience (of the self, of the past, of posterity). See such poems as “Pamiatnik geroiu” (A monument to the hero, 1791); “Monument Petra Velikogo” (The monument to Peter the Great, 1776); “Petru Velikomu” (To Peter the Great, 1776); “Moi istukan” (My idol, 1794); “Pamiatnik” (The monument, 1796) and many more up until his last, arguably unfinished ode, “Reka vremen” (The river of time, 1816). See Golburt, Luba, “Derzhavin's Monuments: Sculpture, Poetry and the Materiality of History,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 13 (Summer 2005)Google Scholar, and Golburt, Liubov, “O chem svidetel'stvuiut pamiatniki?” in Obatnin, Gennadi, ed., Isloria i povestvovanie/History and Narration (Moscow, 2006).Google Scholar

44. In dating the appearance of the genre of historical elegy in Russia, most critics agree with Vissarion Belinskii who placed Konstantin Batiushkov at the origin of this tradition, apparently expressing a widespread opinion: “In Russian literature, Batiushkov is reputed to have given rise to the specific genre of historical or epic elegy. The poet here goes so far as to introduce an event in the form of a recollection suffused with sadness.” Belinskii, V. G., “Razdelenie poezii narody i vidy,” in Polnoesobraniesochinenii (Moscow, 1955).Google Scholar To my mind, if the historical elegy is to be read as an intermediary genre between the ode and the elegy, its origins can be traced back to Derzhavin who not only perfected but also destabilized the ode by introducing elements of subjective recollection.

45. Haley, Bruce, Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure (Albany, 2003), 23.Google Scholar

46. “He replaced the system of a ‘beautiful assortment of words’ [krasivogo nabora slov] with a system of pictorial figurativeness [zhivopisnoi obraznosti], and in bringing into poetry the devices of painting, stepped onto that ‘new untrodden path’ that stunned his contemporaries.” Dan'ko, E. Ia., “Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo v poezii Derzhavina,” XVIII vek: Stat'i i materialy 2 (1940): 181.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., 207-8. Unfortunately, Dan'ko does not explore her well-researched pairings of the pictorial “inspirations” and Derzhavin's poetic reactions beyond positing these fruitful connections.

48. Diderot, Denis, Oeuvres esthetiques, ed. Verniere, P. (Paris, 1965), 461.Google Scholar

49. Yates, Frances A., The Art of Memory (London, 1999).Google Scholar Some of Yates's treatments of her medieval sources have since been disputed.

50. For a discussion of gardening and politics in the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, see Pogosian, E. A., “Sad kak politicheskii simvol u Lomonosova,” Uchenye zapiski tarluskogo universiteta: Trudy po znakovym sistemam 24 (1992).Google Scholar On the complex semantics of Tsarskoe Selo for Catherine the Great, consult Schönle, “Prostranstvennaia poetika.“

51. I should note in passing that “islands of love” or “islands of Venus” were a frequent feature in aristocratic garden design. Marked as sites of pastoral bliss within an already bucolic space, these islands accented the contrast between their intended Utopian unreality and the recognizable reality of the surrounding familiar world with its concreteness of pastoral vistas and pleasures. In Derzhavin's text, the pleasure of imagining oneself both transported to another realm and rooted in one's own estate is amplified and causes an acute experience, not only of a spatial, but also of a historical rift between Cythera's islet and Tsarskoe Selo as well as, on another plane, between Catherine's Tsarskoe Selo of the Golden Age and the same locale in its visible contemporary decline.

52. Joachim Klein records a similar proliferation of deictics in the idyll, where “[A shepherd] lists everything that had comprised his former happiness, beginning with the original encounter, the first kiss, and finally the moment of separation. Here the lyrical subject deliberately resorts to pointing (deictic) expressions, mostly pronouns. These words delineate a spatial axis that connects the speaker with the elements of the locus amoenus, which are nevertheless in no manner connected with each other. Therefore, in this case it is impossible to speak of a spatial continuum or a landscape.“ Klein, Joachim, Puti kul'turnogo importer. Trudy po russkoi literature XVIII veka (Moscow, 2005), 92.Google Scholar What distinguishes Derzhavin's elegy from the idyll is the deictic capacity and indeed commemorative imperative for recreating a lived and recognizable landscape.

53. One should recall that the Horatian privileging of verbal monuments over material ones was frequently reiterated by Russian eighteenth-century poets and especially by Derzhavin. One can read an implicit confirmation of this idea in “Ruins.” For more on Russian appropriations of Horace in this period, see Busch, Wolfgang, Horat in Russland: Studien und Materialien (Munich, 1964).Google Scholar

54. Aleksandr Pushkin was only the most famous of Derzhavin's heirs. In his precocious “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo” (1814), one discovers a poetic voice that, like Derzhavin's, conjures up a reminiscing community, this time constituted by rememberers who had no direct access to the age of Catherine II, save for their proximity to Tsarskoe Selo, which they experienced, not as courtiers but as schoolboys, not as characters but as readers of history. For a recent take on Pushkin's manipulations with Derzhavin's topoi, see Bethea, David M., Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, 1998).Google Scholar

55. Baehr, Paradise Myth, 87.

56. In post-Derzhavin Russian poetry, Tsarskoe Selo as a poetic locus would be paired with the genre of historical elegy, where it functioned as a space of alternative visibility, illuminating the past while blurring the present.