Russian elegists and Latin lovers in the long eighteenth century

Kahn, Andrew

doi:10.1017/cco9781139028288.028

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 297 publications

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“…The image of the ruler remains central: as Andrew Kahn has shown, although Urusova embraces sensibility more heartily than the empress ever did, her praise of Catherine in the proem prepares the reader to view the Heroides as participating in Catherine's Enlightenment project to reconcile passion and reason. 98 Classical motifs combine with sentimental values to guide the text's portrayal of the noble-sovereign relationship. In an exchange of epistles based on a recent Russian tragedy, A.A. Rzhevskii's Podlozhnyi Smerdii (The False Smerdis, 1769), the future Darius the Great claims that love, law, and duty demand that he murder the false Smerdis, who has usurped the Persian throne and tyrannically taken Darius's beloved Fedima as his wife.…”

Section: Slavic Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Ancient in Catherinian Russia: Classical Reception, Sensibility, and Nobility in Princess Ekaterina Urusova's Poetry of the 1770s

Rubin-Detlev¹

2021

Slavic rev.

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This article argues for the importance of Princess E.S. Urusova's four poems published between 1772 and 1777 to scholarly discussions of both classical reception and noble culture. Urusova engages more intensively than any other Russian writer of the period with the European Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, formulating thereby unique responses to major literary and political concerns of the 1770s. In the literary sphere, the Quarrel allows Urusova to conceptualize with exceptional perspicacity the multifaceted cultural environment of the time: contributing to Russia's claim to be the direct heir of the Greeks and Romans, she also makes the interesting case that the emerging culture of sensibility ideally equips readers and writers to absorb the classics. In the political sphere, by evoking the framework of ancient virtue through classical intertexts, she envisages an alliance between the sovereign and a strong nobility based on both cultural refinement and a sense of duty and service to the nation. Urusova's case shows how imitating and reinterpreting the classics helped one woman to find her voice as a poet in eighteenth-century Russia.

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Section: Slavic Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Ancient in Catherinian Russia: Classical Reception, Sensibility, and Nobility in Princess Ekaterina Urusova's Poetry of the 1770s

Rubin-Detlev¹

2021

Slavic rev.

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Ovid and Russia's Poets of Exile

Kahn¹

2014

A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid

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Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska

Dickinson

2015

Biblioteca Di Studi Slavistici

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This article reviews the evolution of toska in eighteenth-century literary discourse to demonstrate this sentiment's profound connection with notions of femininity. That century's use of toska culminates in Aleksandra Xvostova's then popular Otryvki (Fragments, 1796), the emotional emphases of which were one of the reasons for its success. In fact, we argue that Russian women's writing contains a tradition of emotional expression that is lexically distinct from the male tradition. Xvostova’s emphatic and reiterative use of toska participates in a larger debate about gender and the 'ownership' of personal emotions and it was relevant to literary arguments about "feminization" that involved writers such as Nikolaj Karamzin and Vasilij Zukovskij, but also a number of women authors (e.g. Ekaterina Urusova, Anna Turčaninova, Elizaveta Dolgorukova, Anna Volkova), whose work asserts the right of the female subject to both suffer strong emotion and to express it.

show abstract

Russian elegists and Latin lovers in the long eighteenth century

Cited by 3 publications

References 297 publications

An Ancient in Catherinian Russia: Classical Reception, Sensibility, and Nobility in Princess Ekaterina Urusova's Poetry of the 1770s

An Ancient in Catherinian Russia: Classical Reception, Sensibility, and Nobility in Princess Ekaterina Urusova's Poetry of the 1770s

Ovid and Russia's Poets of Exile

Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska

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