Thinking Back to Russia's Once Greatest Poet

Mikhail Kheraskov's (1733–1807) reputation has suffered a singular reversal—perhaps the most extreme and unfortunate peripety in Russian literary history. Toward the end of his life, Kheraskov's place at the very center of the national canon, in the minds of authors like Nikolai Karamzin and Andrei Turgenev, was beyond dispute.Footnote ¹ Today not even scholars of eighteenth-century Russian literature have a deep familiarity with his works; the Rossiad, Kheraskov's chef-d'oeuvre, was last reprinted in 1895.Footnote ²

There is more than one reason for the extraordinarily high regard in which Kheraskov's work was once held. He was unique among Russian eighteenth-century writers in that he contributed to all the major literary genres, including tragedy and varieties of the ode, fable, and the novel. Most importantly, however, Kheraskov was the first and arguably only Russian poet who attained the summit of the classical hierarchy of poetic forms, succeeding in the writing of epics. The only massive composition in verse that preceded Kheraskov's epics was Vasily Trediakovskii's Telemachid; that poem, however, was a translation (of Fénélon's Les aventures de Télémaque) and used unrhymed hexameters, in contrast to Kheraskov's rhymed couplets. Both Antiokh Kantemir and Mikhail Lomonosov failed to complete their epics (on Peter the Great), and Gavriil Derzhavin never attempted one. Against this background, Kheraskov's long narrative poems—most importantly, the Rossiad (first published in 1779) and Vladimir (first published in 1785)—were virtuoso achievements indeed.

In the nineteenth century, even after the “Golden Age” of Russian poetry had completely reconfigured the national canon, the admiration that the Rossiad once evoked seemed worthy, at the very least, of fond remembrance. The young protagonist of Sergei Aksakov's Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson (1858), who grew up at the very end of the eighteenth century, describes a precocious encounter with this poem:

The young Bagrov reads the Rossiad reductively, as a depiction of the siege of Kazan—the subject matter of the poem's last books (10.377–12). It is nevertheless notable that the figure that stands at the center of the poem—Ivan the Fourth, known as the “Terrible”—is not on the list of Bagrov's favorites. The foregrounding of a plurality of noblemen, with Andrei Kurbskii prominent among them, is a reflection of Kheraskov's republican-spirited poetics that becomes particularly overt in the battle sequences. As Ilya Serman has demonstrated, Kheraskov not only makes Kurbskii one of the poem's central characters but relies on Kurbskii's narrative of Ivan's reign.Footnote ⁴ Whereas the main historical source behind the Rossiad, the sixteenth-century fictionalized tale Istoriia o kazanskom tsarstve (A History of the Kazan Empire), ascribes almost no agency to Ivan's generals, Kheraskov draws on Kurbskii to reveal the extent of boyar consultation and its positive influence on the ill-tempered tsar.

Kheraskov remained on the reading list of Russian writers whose education fell in the first decades of the nineteenth century, such as Aleksandr Herzen and Ivan Turgenev. Ιn Herzen's early novella Elena (1836–38), set in the last years of Catherine's reign, Ivan Sergeevich, a man noted for exceptional honesty and a sincere lover of “Racine and Kheraskov,” is called upon to mitigate the catastrophic outcomes of a passionate affair of an aristocratic acquaintance of his, a quasi-Byronic hero who ends his life as a Gogolian madman.Footnote ⁵ Another, and far more significant reflection on Kheraskov's legacy is Turgenev's late work Punin and Baburin (1874), whose narrator, similarly to Aksakov's, is about the same age as the author. In this novella, Punin, staying at the house of the narrator's tyrannical grandmother in the notable year of 1830, gives the enthusiastic child a course in eighteenth-century Russian literature. The most exciting text on the syllabus was Kheraskov's Rossiad.Footnote ⁶

When Punin leaves the estate after his friend Baburin attempted to intervene on behalf of an unjustly punished peasant, he spends the tearful last minutes reading from the Rossiad with his pupil. Two decades later, on his deathbed, Punin recites memorized verses from the poem.

The narrator's stupefaction at the mention of figures such as Ramida (the “valorous Tatar woman”) and Sumbeka, the queen of Kazan, suggests that Kheraskov's eroticized representations of imperial power anticipate Turgenev's uses of potent feminine characters as political allegories in works like Spring Torrents and Smoke. In contrast to the boy's, Punin's preference for Kheraskov is rationalized: he favors Kheraskov over Lomonosov for stylistic, and over Derzhavin, for political reasons.Footnote ⁸ Yet the ultimate contest, as in Herzen's Elena, is that between “classicism” and Romanticism, or between Kheraskov and Pushkin.

Turgenev correlates Baburin's republicanism with Punin's fondness for Kheraskov's epic; both friends belong to the age of Enlightenment, when reasoned discourse and universal values aligned one's behavior with the common good. By contrast, Pushkin is associated with self-willed, passion-driven individuality; Punin calls him a “snake, concealed in green branches and endowed with the voice of a nightingale.”Footnote ⁹ The Slavonic phrasing of this rebuke implies that overcoming the Pushkinian temptation would demand a kind of linguistic, as well as moral-political, reformation. In one of the central scenes of the novella, the narrator reads Pushkin's Gypsies to Punin to hint at the futility of keeping a young girl chained to an unloved husband. Refusing to listen to Zemfira's song, Punin flees in horror.

The plot of the novella vindicates pre-Romantic values. Baburin's fiancée, after eloping with a young nobleman, is soon abandoned by him, to be rescued from destitution by her “old husband” to whom she meekly returns. Baburin himself undergoes a disillusionment with a politics that rests on the Romantic sensibility; rejecting the tradition of revolutionary violence that goes back to the Decembrists, Baburin celebrates the 1861 abolition of serfdom, brought about by the enlightened tsar.

At the heart of the novella is a conflict between two worldviews—one resting on concepts and shared values, the other on affects and personal yearnings. Inviting the reader to inhabit the mind of Punin, Turgenev both ironizes his inability to appreciate Pushkin and ponders the moral and political implications of such a principled devaluation of Russia's newly established greatest poet. In Gypsies, Pushkin does not, of course, celebrate Romantic individualism; yet, while ringing an alarm bell, he points no way out. The nobleman who murders Zemfira is himself a slave to passions whose ubiquity is proclaimed in the poem's famous last lines. From the perspective of 1874, the affect-ridden discourse of Romanticism appeared to provide no solid foundation for either action or speech. Still worse, Pushkin's post-Decembrist work demonstrated how easily the legitimation of personal willfulness could slide into a reactionary political ideology. In Poltava, the sublime figure of Peter as the royal modernizer excites the same kind of irrational fascination with which Russian Romantic poets cultivated the image of Napoleon. As late as 1841, Mikhail Lermontov criticized the petty Frenchmen for betraying their emperor, “like a woman betrays a man,” even as he remained unchanged “in Egyptian steppes, next to the walls of obedient Vienna, in the snows of burning Moscow.”Footnote ¹⁰ In the assessment of Baburin and Punin, Romanticism promised nothing but myopic endorsement of individual whim.

Taking its cue from Turgenev, this article attends to the political potential of Kheraskov's Rossiad. It is not my intention to analyze this unduly neglected work as a direct attack on Catherine's reign; nor will I argue that Kheraskov was a self-consciously oppositional figure. Instead, I read the Rossiad as a specimen of epic, a genre that places individual moral agency in relation to the history of the nation. Kheraskov succeeded as an epic poet because, in his own way, he was a political thinker who engaged with the Russian legacy of extremist autocracy and incipient republicanism.Footnote ¹¹ To uncover this dimension of the Rossiad, I approach it with a methodology that combines conceptual history, or historical semantics, with form-oriented literary history, or historical poetics. The former attends to changes in a given thought-world that are reflected in linguistic usage, often irrespective of the intention of particular speakers; the latter traces how literary forms evolve in time, conveying elements of social form (generally known as “content”), such as affective dispositions and political attitudes.

Kheraskov's Morality Epics

Admittedly, the revisionist stance of Turgenev's Punin seems counter-intuitive. Can Kheraskov furnish a viable political alternative to Pushkin or Lermontov? Was the epic genre not rejected by the Romantics precisely because it was imbricated in the illiberal past of various anciens régimes?

In the transformative period between 1750 and 1850, termed by Reinhart Koselleck the Sattelzeit (saddle period) of European modernity, political and literary history were poorly synchronized. The period, as most would agree, was defined by the American and French revolutions and their many repercussions. Romanticism, which supersedes classicism in the prevalent literary-historical narrative, was one such repercussion. In particular, while claiming all that is modern and revolutionary for itself, Romanticism in many ways represented a backlash against the Enlightenment. In the name of the individual subject, it pretended to liberate affect, which classicism had sought to discipline, and presumed that new bourgeois nation states can be founded on a peculiar antiquarian passion, a love for the collective past. In these respects, Romanticism undermined the Enlightenment belief in universal concepts, shared moral values, and sensus communis.

In Critique and Crisis (1959), his first book inspired by Carl Schmitt's ideas, Reinhart Koselleck blamed the Enlightenment spirit of critique for all subsequent crises of European history.Footnote ¹² He faulted the Enlightenment for importing an ethical dimension into politics, which transformed it into an arena of unceasing contestation of values. Had Koselleck dwelled on the tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the shared ground for debate, not its dangers, would perhaps emerge as the eighteenth century's most long-lived legacy. The dilemma, formulated more trenchantly by Hannah Arendt in On Revolution, is whether a politics based on shared concepts (which she derived from Roman republicanism) or a politics rooted in affect (such as the feeling of commiseration for the poor) is more likely to produce a lasting commonwealth. For Arendt, the former inspired the American, the latter, the French (and Russian) revolutions.Footnote ¹³

Seen in this perspective, Russian intellectual history appears curiously one-sided. Not only has Pushkin completely overshadowed Kheraskov, and Vissarion Belinskii eclipsed Nikolai Novikov, even such a choice is rarely pondered—in the sense in which one may ponder the choice between Mozart and Beethoven, or Kant and Hegel. The relative weakness of the Enlightenment in Russia was one of the central concerns in the work of Viktor Zhivov, who pointed, by way of explanation, to the dominant and nefarious role of the state. In light of this, Zhivov even cast Aleksandr Radishchev's Liberty, the most radical repudiation of autocracy to emerge in Russia in the eighteenth century, as a product of an insane mind.Footnote ¹⁴ Kheraskov's is, however, a very different case. A thoroughly respectable figure who contributed to the government-sponsored Enlightenment as a long-standing curator of Moscow University, in his epics he developed an allegorical poetics that relied on various uses of personification to ponder the moral pitfalls of monarchy.Footnote ¹⁵ True to Koselleck's critical account of the Enlightenment, Kheraskov's societal ideal is a thoroughly ethicized one, with no exceptions granted: the autocratic rulers in Vladimir and the Rossiad, weakened by vices, are always on the verge of failing in their missions. Yet one may well wonder whether it was this kind of ethics-infused politics or the subsequent “Napoleonic” phenomena (which Koselleck, in his later work, attributed to sociocultural regress) that led to modernity's worst downfalls.Footnote ¹⁶

Kheraskov's moralizing poetics was by no means unusual in Russia in his time. François Fénélon's Telemaque was widely read as a critique of absolutism.Footnote ¹⁷ As Kirill Ospovat has recently demonstrated, the spectacle of the moral degradation of sovereigns was at the heart of Aleksandr Sumarokov's dramas.Footnote ¹⁸ More generally, as Punin's appreciative comment on Derzhavin's “To rulers and judges” and indeed Catherine's own moralistic writings remind us, сriticism of the vices of the powerful was mainstream rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁹ As a token of what was permitted in print, in 1762 Ivan Barkov, famous for his Priapic verse, translated the following statements on Antiokh Kantemir's “politics” from the poet's biography originally published in French in western Europe:

The moral discourse of the Russian Enlightenment also had significant blind spots: as Konstantin Bugrov and Mikhail Kiselev point out, the spread of the contractual idea of monarchical rule left thinkers like Vasilii Tatishchev and Vasilii Trediakovskii struggling with the (generally unmentionable) problem of the people's right to depose a tyrant.Footnote ²¹ Kheraskov's own novels, in particular Numa Pompilius (1768) and Cadmus and Harmonia (1787), exemplify a prevailing concern, inherited from Fénélon, with the monarch's character as a precondition of the state's well-being, most visible in abstention from war and luxury.Footnote ²²

In Kheraskov's Rossiad, three elements, all deriving from his creative use of the epic genre, give a distinct aspect to the repudiation of tyrannical tendencies inherent in autocracy: he foregrounds aristocratic agents, such as Kurbskii, de-centering the narrative of war; he places the tsar's moral failures in the context of the long history of the Russian state; and he develops new poetic means for representing the empire allegorically.

The vagaries of the reception of epic in the Romantic period can explain much in the oblivion that has shrouded Kheraskov's work. It was then that Virgil's Aeneid lost the highest standing that it had enjoyed for centuries, not just as a literary masterpiece but as a template for telling any empire's triumphant history.Footnote ²³ As the Homeric poems, by contrast, gained in stature, because they were thought to give access to a historically distant, resolutely alien world, verse epic ceased to be a form that could be imitated. This relegation of heroic epic to the past informs the notion, familiar from Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin, that there is a fundamental incompatibility between epic and the novel.

The construal of epic as a closed form, one that rehearses age-old, myth-like truths and ideologies, makes it into a convenient foil to the free, open, and individual-centered novelistic discourse.Footnote ²⁴ Yet even a quick glance at eighteenth-century uses of epic narrative is sufficient to disprove this view. Voltaire's Henriad is a work that is more interested in the conflict between moral forces, represented by elaborate allegories, than in heroic action. Klopstock's Der Messias is a religious poem in the Miltonic vein, Trediakovskii's Telemachid, a didactic work. Similarly, Kheraskov's epic poems merge stories of national becoming with examinations of moral values put to the test in the life of an individual. Kheraskov's first epic, The Fruits of Studies (Plody nauk), was expressly didactic; in the case of Vladimir, Kheraskov himself clarified the poem's meaning as a moral allegory presenting “the wandering of an attentive person along the path of truth.”Footnote ²⁵

Triumphant validation of community is the province of the solemn ode (torzhestvennaia oda), a subgenre of the Pindaric. The epic tells stories of success impeded by loss and suffering; tragedy shows the utter undoing of the hero. In Greek tragedy, Agamemnon (in the Oresteia) and Oedipus (in Oedipus Rex) are individuals that fail completely, the former for his own faults, the latter because he was destined to fail. Both are quintessential tragic figures: they lose everything. By contrast, Odysseus and Aeneas succeed in spite of many hindrances, the former due to his ingenuity, the latter because he was fated to succeed. These are epic heroes: they lose almost everything. The same holds for the protagonists of Kheraskov's two most important works. Like Odysseus and Aeneas, Ivan the Terrible and Vladimir survive in spite of seemingly insuperable challenges. In contrast to the two ancient heroes, however, at the story's beginning they are not political nobodies but moral invalids; what is demanded from them is not valor and acumen, but moral reformation.

One may ask why epic was so decisively depreciated, even though it concerned itself with individual self-constitution, as did the later genres of the Romantic longer poem and the realist novel. The dethronement of epic, as well as the decline of the panegyrical ode, was entailed by the crisis of classicizing poetic language, the rhetorical culture that subtended it, and ultimately the social system that extended the privilege of education to an elite trained to speak differently from the people. From a stylistic point of view, these two genres were conflated, but whereas the ode survived in Romantic greater lyric as a pocket of elevated diction, longer narratives now aimed to be demotic and accessible, obviating the need for the kind of glossing that Bagrov demanded from his mother as well as eschewing the comic effects evoked by Punin's archaisms. As new forms of extended narrative had to assert themselves against their direct ancestor, epic was denigrated as extended, unsalvageable ode.

In Russia, Kheraskov, along with much of the eighteenth-century literature, fell victim to this revolution of poetic language, inaugurated by Karamzin and effectuated by Pushkin. As a result, all subsequent literary developments relied principally on the legacy of Romanticism. The Russian realist novel foregrounded passions and desultory revelations of self-willed individuals, while spurning western novelistic plots of continuous Bildung and social integration; in particular, society as a site of positive, character-building habituation is often replaced by allegories of the intrusive, paternalistic state.Footnote ²⁶

As the life story of Turgenev's Baburin suggests, however, the state could be viewed not as a form of autocratic domination but as the best available conduit for realizing the Enlightenment vision of holding a life in common. From the perspective of 1874, a monarchy responding to calls for social reform could appear to be the closest Russia ever got to being a republic. Admittedly, such a republic would be an oddly quietist one, to the point of being almost completely rid of political discord, division, and debate. Itself in part a response to the French Revolution, Kheraskov's poetics was—providently, from the viewpoint of Koselleck's Critique and Crisis—both preoccupied with morality and wary of strife. Instead of anticipating, like Radishchev, the people's violent entry into an apocalyptically colored future, Kheraskov weighed the possibility of autocracy's divinely sanctioned transformation into a force for good, locked in a continuous struggle with manifold allegories of vice. In the Rossiad, as a closer look at the poem will show, such a transformation is denied by a withering imperial climate.

Viktor Zhivov and the Ethical Turn in the Study of the History of Concepts

Koselleck proposed to define modernity in terms of a distinct transformation of the structure of concepts. In particular, history came to be understood as a homogenous process of change oriented toward the future, resulting in the temporalization of concepts that previously existed as fixed values; “collective singulars” replaced pluralities grounded in estate society.Footnote ²⁷ The relevance of Koselleck's ideas to the study of concepts in Russian history has been amply demonstrated in recent work.Footnote ²⁸ Admittedly, these processes began later in Russia than in western Europe, but in the twentieth century, they had even more far-reaching implications.

In the introduction to a 2009 edited volume that made an early case for Koselleckan methodology, Viktor Zhivov sounded a note of caution.Footnote ²⁹ In particular, he suggested that Russianists interested in Begriffsgeschichte should shift their focus away from the Sattelzeit (the period between 1750 and 1850) to the first decades of the eighteenth century, since it was during the Petrine reforms that Russian culture was actively absorbing new institutions, ideas, and sentiments imported from the west. More generally, the history of Russian culture was set in its course during that time: following Peter's reforms, which were characterized by “maximum intensity and, one should add, compulsion,”Footnote ³⁰ leaving a lasting trauma on Russian society, Enlightenment under Catherine the Great was nothing but a state-sanctioned fiction; to describe this mirage, Zhivov put forward the term “state Enlightenment” (gosudarstvennoe Prosveshchenie).Footnote ³¹ In contrast to European Enlightenment, which mapped out a common future through reasoned debate, violent modernization pushed a fragmented and disoriented Russian educated class to pursue “civic sabotage” (obshchestvennyi sabotazh) of the state.Footnote ³²

On these grounds, Zhivov proposed to look beyond socio-political concepts directly impacted by the dynamic of modernization that was overseen by the state. This move is showcased by one of Zhivov's own contributions to the 2009 volume: his article “Time and its proprietor in early modern Russia” is dedicated to how Russians learned to abort the state's attempt to impinge on and control private time.Footnote ³³ It is a study of the concept of leisure as a cultural institution, not a Koselleckan analysis of how history was conceived or future competitively constructed.

More broadly, Zhivov's interest in historical semantics, which he developed in the early 2000s, was linked to his changing views on the object of historical and philological knowledge. Zhivov was looking for a way to think beyond the contextualist hegemony of the 1990s, which asserted the primacy of the ideological conditioning of cultural production, toward a method which would make it possible to study “the space of symbolic forms” (prostranstvo simvolicheskikh form), in which history and literature trade plots and narratives, and ultimately, the “dispositions that define human experience” (ustanovki, kotorye opredeliaiut chelovecheskii opyt).Footnote ³⁴ Whereas the focus of the 1996 book was on the “state Enlightenment,” Zhivov's last monograph, which he planned at the time of his death in 2013, was to explore the notions of morality, sin, and salvation in those societal strata that escaped the state's modernizing efforts.Footnote ³⁵ An early premonition of this change of tack can be found in his 1998 study of the rise of the intelligentsiia out of the marginalized older religious culture as a revolt against the state-sponsored modernization of Russian society.Footnote ³⁶ In sum, as Zhivov puts it, “for the Russian history of concepts, the Enlightenment can in no way serve as a turning point,” because what in western Europe was a process of society's coming into its own, in Russia was another phase of the undignified treatment of the educated class at the hands of the state.Footnote ³⁷

For the same reason, Russian cultural historians should not restrict themselves to studying the ways in which literature and culture nourished state ideology. To borrow a formulation from Zhivov's review of Andrei Zorin's book Feeding the Double-headed Eagle (2001), we can do better than study “the diet of this creature.”Footnote ³⁸ An interest in state ideology inevitably leads us to the central figures of this or that reign, to the projects and penchants of tsars and empresses. We should not forget, however, that a focus on representations that had autocratic support occludes structures and processes that, in the longue durée, are of far greater moment. Granting that Zorin “has a right not to speak” of the Decembrist uprising “inasmuch as it embodies an anti-state (antigosudarstvennuiu) idea,” Zhivov pointedly takes issue with Zorin's relegation of literature “to the periphery, like an outbuilding in which the metaphorical dishes of ideological projects are fried and boiled.”Footnote ³⁹ In the method of Begriffsgeschichte, Zhivov found a way to rewrite Russia's history with a difference: as history of a culture common to all speakers of the language. That was not, however, a history of linguistic usage sensu stricto but of practices that are made sense of, admired, or repudiated by these speakers by means of words and concepts.Footnote ⁴⁰

Developing Zhivov's insights, one might envision an ethical turn for Russian historical semantics. Needless to say, ethics was also a domain targeted by the Enlightening state; under Catherine the Great, church penance became a form of correction for suspected and convicted criminals, the compilation “On the duties of man and citizen” (O dolzhnostiakh cheloveka i grazhdanina) was widely propagated, and the Empress herself dabbled in moralizing allegoresis.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, it appears that in the competition for control over ethical concepts the state lost its major bets; as with the ownership of dosug, the concepts of dobrodetel΄ ‘virtue, good act,’ dolg ‘duty’ and delo ‘life's work’ eventually slipped out of the reach of state ideology. The former was deflated and ridiculed, while the latter two came to be associated with social duty that was often at odds with the government's demands.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, the concept of dostoinstvo ‘dignity’ or ‘worth,’ which, due to its association with rank and prestige, could have been the state's mainstay, became instead a rallying point for aspirants to republican liberty and a sore spot for those left out of the system of rewards administered by the state.Footnote ⁴³

Literature, due to its general investment in the longue durée, furnishes significant testimony on the history of ethical concepts. In Punin and Baburin, Turgenev insightfully emplots dignity's place in the opposition between “classical” shared values and Romantic affects. The aristocrat who will seduce and then abandon Baburin's fiancée speaks of him as follows: “Inside he has nothing, in fact; not a single thought in his head—only the sense of his own dignity.” When the narrator interposes with the words “That in itself is something that commands respect,”Footnote ⁴⁴ he proves, over the long term, to have correct intuition: in modern Russian “the sense of one's dignity” (chuvstvo sobstvennogo dostoinstva), always under risk of being impugned or denied, developed into a central moral concept.Footnote ⁴⁵

When we turn our attention to the domain of ethics, we gain a new perspective on the efficacy of Enlightenment discourse, which itself could be used to “sabotage” the state's policies of violent modernization. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, writers did not have to feed the double-headed eagle; they could ignore it or even appropriate some of its fodder. There also existed a still more quixotic possibility. Political concepts and historical narratives associated with the state could themselves become fodder for intellectual and literary work that was polemical toward nefarious forms of autocracy. Seen in this light, the Russian Enlightenment acquires a new density, far beyond that of a mere mirage.

Kheraskov's Images of Autocracy: The Pandemonic Catalogue

Kheraskov's Rossiad is a poem ostensibly dedicated to Ivan's victory over Kazan; this is how the boy narrators of Aksakov and Turgenev read it. As Olga Goncharova has argued, however, such an interpretation misses the mark; in fact, Kheraskov, a prominent member of the Russian masonic community, intended the work as an allegory of the individual's moral “resurrection.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Admittedly, Goncharova's discussion of Kheraskov's epics draws mostly on Vladimir; the plot of the Rossiad can hardly be read as a story of ascent to truth.Footnote ⁴⁷ In contrast to the Ivans of Nikolai Karamzin and Sergei Eisenstein, who begin well and end badly (or to the Ivan of Kazanskaia istoriia who is a paragon of Christian virtues throughout), Kheraskov's begins badly, improves, and then relapses into vice. Furthermore, the image of the protagonist, as I will argue, must be read allegorically not only on the moral but also on the meta-historical plane, in keeping with the tradition of heroic epic reaching back to the Aeneid.

The prose preface to the poem, dedicated to Catherine, informs the reader that the slavery of “the dreary yoke of rapacious Hordes” was caused by “the land's lack of unity and the love for power on the part of multiplied princes.”Footnote ⁴⁸ It fell to Ivan's lot to mend this piteous condition of the imperial oikoumene. The overcoming of vice is emblematized by his triumph over Kazan. According to this largely ceremonial preamble, “inordinately severe acts of the Tsar” (bezmernye Tsarskie strogosti) do not belong in the narrative of the Rossiad since they occurred after his wife's death and “much later than the capture of Kazan.”Footnote ⁴⁹

It was no secret, however, that an indirect outcome of Ivan's reign was the Time of Troubles, brought to an end by the installation of the Romanov dynasty. Both historical veracity and ideological expediency demanded that Ivan never become a perfect human being, even after Kazan is overcome. In the climactic scene, modelled on Aeneas's vision of the future of Rome in Book 6 of the Aeneid, Ivan beholds Catherine the Great, recognizing himself not as a prefiguration but as an inferior forerunner. In the text of the poem, Kheraskov goes further than that; he establishes a direct link between the struggle with Kazan and Ivan's eventual degradation. In particular, Ivan's murder of his son, the vile act that led to the eventual dynastic crisis (anticipating Peter's analogous blow to the male line of the Romanov dynasty), finds its etiology in the incursion into Tatary.

In Book 8, Ivan sees a seductive image in his sleep: a “wondrous vision” with a sword in his hands and the moon on his forehead, which tells him of “milk-flowing Tigris and dulcet Euphrates.” Upon the vision's invitation to convert to Islam, Ivan is ready “to incline his head”—at which point a magical object comes to the rescue: a shield received from a mysterious elder in Book 7. Whereas the shields of Achilles and of Aeneas provide divine sanction for their heroic feats, Ivan's shield is a different sort of instrument, in part modelled on Rinaldo's mirror-shield in Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated (Bk 14–15); it is a diagnostic tool, which darkens when “a heavy sin sows weed” in Ivan's heart (7.259–60). Observing that his shield grew darker while he lent his ear to the tempting words, Ivan is roused, assaults the vision with a sword and strikes, thereby transforming it into a full-fledged personification allegory (8.109–26):

By joining battle with Kazan, Ivan, his philosophical shield notwithstanding, is infected with evil; all of his life to follow would be marred by sin. Yet Kheraskov's hero was also preconditioned for becoming a tyrant and his own son's murderer. In Book 1, we see him in the fallen state, overcome by flattery, falsehood, and sloth (analogously, in Vladimir, the prince is mastered by lust, a vice that will pursue him to the end of the poem). His awakening to moral life takes place in Book 2, in which he addresses the boyars with a speech on their joint high calling (2.63–66):

The recognition of his duty is enabled by an elaborate chain of visions, which include his heroic forebears and the allegorical image of suffering and moaning Russia. Adashev, the tsar's good-natured counsellor (a figure borrowed from Kurbskii's narrativeFootnote ⁵²), refers back to this image (2.235–40):

The country's rulers, a group that includes the tsar as primus inter pares, must agree with each other, for discord leads to the country's subjugation to an external force, represented by the Golden Horde. This meta-historical narrative, both moralistic and republican-minded, warps the autocratic reality of Ivan's rule.Footnote ⁵⁴

Discord (Razdor), the chief allegorical antagonist of good, assumes an anthropomorphic shape when it comes to Kazan's rescue in Book 9. Following the ancient tradition (Il. 20.48, Aen. 8.702), Kheraskov treats it as a structural evil that sets the epic plot in motion (9.228–40):

Discord's superior is Impiety (Bezbozhie), who appears in the scene of Ivan's failed conversion to Islam. It is to Discord that Impiety turns for assistance (9.279–82):

The genealogy of Discord in epic poetry begins with the bad Strife (ἔρις) in the opening of Hesiod's Works and Days and leads to the Aeneid (discussed below); in Voltaire’ Henriad, La Discorde is a sister of Love, a morally ambivalent force. In Kheraskov, Razdor is accompanied by minor allies, listed in mini-catalogues such as “Feud, Riot, Perfidy and War” or the description of Ivan's initial illumination in the beginning of Book 2 (2.9–19):

In the use of this device in Russian poetry, Kheraskov had Trediakovskii's precedent. In the Telemachid, hexameters filled with malignant concepts occur in Book 12 in the lists of troubles that issue from excessive drinking, of the various passions that trample upon the “hostile power” of a bad king, and in the pacifist passage that condemns “Murder, Confusion, Fear, Trembling, Horror, / All kinds of Disease, Hunger, and Despair that is more bitter than Death,” which all attend on military action.Footnote ⁵⁸ Punishments of unjust monarchs take the personified form of “Spiteful Suspicions, Vain Fears, and Distrusts” that fly around their victims “like night owls.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The moralistic and anti-tyrannical orientation of these catalogues is retained in Kheraskov.

The catalogue from Book 2 is extended into the description of Impiety's associates who take part in the war on Kazan's side (7.484–94):

Catalogues of personified vices go back to ancient epic. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Virgil describes the creatures that reside at the gates of Hades (6.273–81):

Already in antiquity, readers of Virgil interpreted some items on this list as ethical concepts.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet such mini-catalogues of malicious entities include not only negative characteristics or vices, but also undesirable conditions for which the person is in no way responsible, such as Old Age or Labor. Collectively, they can be kinsfolk who inhabit a distinctive hellish chronotope, as the children of Night in Hesiod's Theogony, neighbors in the underworld in Virgil, “infernal sisters” of the Fury Allecto who are also “children of Night” in the opening of Claudian's Against Rufinus, associates of Chaos and his consort Night in Milton, underlings gathered under the throne of Pluto in Trediakovskii's Telemachid (and in Fénelon's original), residents at the court of Love in Voltaire's Henriade (9.50–54), and officers of a commanding evil, such as Kheraskov's Impiety in the Rossiad or Suesviatstvo (Superstition/Paganism) in Vladimir.Footnote ⁶² Invariably, they are single-hearted collaborators. The evil is conceptualized as a pandemonium of hostile forces, some of which assault the person from without, as old age does, while others infiltrate the soul. To struggle with such a demonic host requires constant effort; and even with divine aid, of which there is plenty in the Rossiad, they cannot be quite overcome.

The device of mini-catalogue can be contrasted with that of personification allegory. An extended allegory describes a vice as an anthropomorphic creature that pursues particular goals; one can speak to it and fight with it (as Ivan does when confronted by Impiety). The pandemonium invoked in epic catalogues represents a collective, even cosmic image of evil.

Herzen's My Past and Thoughts contains a likely covert reference to Kheraskov's Rossiad, presented (and reconceived) as an evocation of the epic technique of the pandemonic catalogue:

Artfully embedding one epic device within another (simile), Herzen is describing the machinations that brought about Garibaldi's early departure from England in 1864. While the figure of Discord/Strife, among other “decorations and horrors of classical poems,” most likely originates from Kheraskov, the phrase “in the gloom of night” (“во тьме ночной”) refers to the scene in Pushkin's Poltava where Mazeppa, spurred on by a “plenipotentiary Jesuit,” is plotting to betray Peter: “in the gloom of night, like thieves, they conduct their interviews” (во тьме ночной они как воры / Ведут свои переговоры).

This Herzen passage can be read not only as a token of the continued utility of Kheraskov's device for making sense of insurmountable evil, but as an implicit commentary on Pushkin's somewhat mechanical reliance on quasi-epic imagery. Representing Mazeppa as a Romantic self burning with “untiring criminal heat” (“В нем . . . / Неутомим преступный жар”), Pushkin merely demonizes an individual. Herzen, by contrast, marshals the conceptual force of the pandemic catalogue to capture the invisible workings of class antagonism.

In 1863, Herzen's Kolokol included five installments of a rubric entitled “Rossiada,” which comprised miscellaneous reports on the “degradation of the officialdom-, barracks-, chancellery-, emperor-, Guards-, military-, German-, palace-, police-Russia.” The “Kheraskovian title” seems apropos to the task of exposing the sheer multiplicity of crimes being committed under Nicolas's regime. In a gesture that may be both a slip of the pen and a sleight of hand, Herzen's “Rossiad” bears the epigraph that mocks militaristic rhetoric (“Russia, the warrior realm!” [Россия, бранная держава!]) and is taken from Pushkin's “Napoleon,” but attributed to Derzhavin.Footnote ⁶⁴ While creating a collage of elements drawn from poetic works that pledged allegiance to the state, Herzen retains Kheraskov's association of the empire with wicked plurality.

Kheraskov's Images of Empire: The Reigning Winter

In light of Kheraskov's interest in the prevalence of evil, Ivan's struggle with Kazan cannot be reduced to a masonic version of “pilgrim's progress.” The Rossiad is rather a metahistorical allegory: the story of enlightened reason that fails to suppress its Other (glossed as the archaic, the heathen, the Oriental) because it is itself corrupted. The opposites of light and dark, good and evil, civilized and barbaric cannot be mapped on particular agents familiar from historiography. Instead, the plot of Moscow's struggle with a Tatar citadel, in which the historical roles of the oppressor and the oppressed are shared by both antagonists, allows Kheraskov to cast imperialism tout court as a manifestation of tyranny. The attempt to destroy the evil that threatens the imperial oikoumene cannot succeed because that evil is endemic to empire. Worst of all, the putative agent of the Enlightenment, the tsar, has succumbed to it.

If any rhetoric of modernity depends on the image of that which is—or should be made—the past, in the Rossiad the archaic other is, unquestionably, tyranny. In Book 4, the Tatar princes betake themselves to hell in order to observe the posthumous fate of “proud tsars” abused by the people and viewed with disgust by the descendants (4.565–78).

The scenes of torture that tyrants endure in hell are beyond the powers of poetic representation. Yet tyranny cannot be consigned to the past: it is Ivan's and therefore Russia's future. The plot of Ivan's incomplete, foiled ascent to morality enables Kheraskov to reflect (on) the insufficiency of a state-driven Enlightenment and the impossibility of living virtuously under a nefarious autocracy even when it parades commitment to the good. To suggest the perception of absolutism as a conceptual regime inimical to morality, which the Rossiad shares with Radishchev's and Shcherbatov's denunciations of Catherine's reign, Kheraskov lays aside the topos of Discord, the analogously constructed image of Impiety, and his favored device of the pandemonium of concepts.

A new kind of allegorical figure is called for to represent a deficiency distinctive to Catherine's rule—the evil not as a malicious agent or a commander-in-chief of demonic forces but as an ontological condition, a state of being that insidiously undermines life itself, a climate to which each organism must adapt. This idea is conveyed by the allegory of Winter, Kheraskov's poetic tour de force (12.1–43):

Kheraskov's elaborate personification lacks obvious precedents in Russian literature.Footnote ⁶⁷ It may have been inspired by James Thomson's image of Winter in Seasons as a “grim tyrant” whose reign reaches “eastward to the Tartar's coast.” Notably, Thomson's poem ends with a panegyric to Peter, “the frantic Alexander of the north,” whose effect on what used to be a “huge neglected empire” was such that “Sloth flies the land, and Ignorance, and Vice.” While tacitly accepting Thomson's political reading of the geography of Winter, Kheraskov does not foresee a thaw and a spring; Winter for him is not the period of storms that “quickly pass,” but a static regime, not easily dislodged.

Winter is Kazan's last and ultimate hope; “an impious magician,” Nigrin, appeals to her using a striking genealogical metaphor (12.55–56):

“The impossibility” consists in freezing the dynamic technological reason, manifested in the saltpeter placed in a mine excavated underneath the city. On the eve of the final assault on the city, the metaphorical Winter that has installed herself within is oxymoronically juxtaposed with the extreme temperature of the bomb about to explode (12.109): Подъ градомъ адъ лежитъ; во градѣ мразъ и хладъ! (Beneath lies Hell, in Town are Frost and Cold). Rhythmically and stylistically, this line evokes early Lomonosov, but omits the militaristic triumphalism of the solemn ode. The equation between the two thermal extremes unambiguously indicates that to be victorious in this struggle one has to bring hell and be hell.Footnote ⁶⁹

Kheraskov's poem invites the reader to extend the conventional criticism of tyranny into a critique of imperialism. The conceptual regime of empire is faulty precisely because of its inherent militarism; empire (from Lat. imperium) is a “power” that only knows the law of force. In a sense, it embodies the very principle of Discord. Instead of bringing light to darkness, the modern empire counteracts inertia with hellish heat or—in its unenlightened, archaic hypostasis—extends its destructive frost wherever it can reach.

Kheraskov's epic implicitly denies imperious autocracy a moral legitimacy, thus undermining the Petrine ideology of enforced Enlightenment. Instead of passively “sabotaging” the state, however, Kheraskov makes a case for aristocratic dignity, collective decision-making, and a penitential recognition of the monarch's failure to envision and realize an ethically superior future. In Vladimir, the evil inherent in autocratic power is counterbalanced by the Orthodox Church. In the last books of the Rossiad, a kind of heroic togetherness draws attention away from the tsar, whose vices have doomed the country to disaster.

In nineteenth-century Russian literature, Pushkin, similarly to Kheraskov, imputes an intrinsic, infanticidal immorality to solitary rule in Boris Godunov, relating the cancerous growth of a criminal “stain” in the ruler's conscience to the onset of the Time of Troubles. Another important text that likely responds to the Rossiad is Fedor Tiutchev's “December 14, 1825.” Tiutchev's ambivalent image of “iron Winter,” which “breathed” on the Decembrists, who were themselves “corrupted” or “debauched” by “Autocracy,” is probably inspired by Kheraskov's allegory of Winter.Footnote ⁷⁰ While decrying the absurd hope that one's blood would suffice to unfreeze a “north pole,” Tiutchev hardly celebrates the status quo. Like Kheraskov's, his Winter is a paralyzing force to which those who live under an empire must submit.

In “December 14, 1825” Tiutchev offers no prospect of a thaw and no plot of overcoming. The Rossiad adumbrates such a plot by welding together two intellectual strands: a quietist Masonic and a Roman republican one. It is this dual legacy that Turgenev explores in Punin and Baburin. The rejection both of Pushkin's Romantic poetics and unreasonable revolutionary zeal marks the novella's two characters not as political conservatives, such as Tiutchev was (in his journalism and part of his poetic output), but as unflinching believers in a eighteenth-century vision of a moral republic.Footnote ⁷¹ That vision furnished a seemingly impractical, paradoxical challenge to the violent modernization initiated by the Petrine reforms. With no public sphere to support their aspirations, Baburin and Punin inhabit a phantasmatic modernity that is of their own making. And yet the contours of republicanism in Kheraskov, Herzen, and Turgenev bear telling similarities. In favoring morality over imperialism, dignity over autocratic will, and universally shared concepts over the passions of the self, these works offer well-considered responses to the wintery conditions of Romanov rule.