Zorin Andrei. By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Russia

Translations by Marcus C. Levitt with Nicole Monnier and Daniel Schlaffy. Boston [Brighton], MA: Academic Studies Press (Ars Rossica), 2014 ‒ xii + 406 p. ‒ ISBN: 978-1-61811-346-7 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-61811-357-3 (electronic).Academic Studies Press presents the translation of a collection of essays by Andrei Zorin (Андрей Леонидович Зорин, born in Moscow in 1956, professor at the university of Oxford since 2004). This volume includes several essays that have never before appeared in English. The subject of this book is the history of Russian state ideology of the last third of the eighteenth through the first third of the nineteenth centuries, beginning with Catherine II’s “Greek Project” and continues down to S. S. Uvarov’s proposed doctrine of “Orthodoxy—Autocracy—Nationalism”. Somewhat of an exception is made for the ideology of the people’s body and popular war that was put forward by oppositionist literary men grouped around Admiral A. S. Shishkov that was officially adopted after he was appointed state secretary just before Napoleon’s invasion of 1812. The ten chapters offered here have been constructed in quite different ways. At the center of some are a particular work of poetry, such as an ode by V. P. Petrov or an epistle by V. A. Zhukovskii, or a group of such works, such as odes on Russian victories in the war with Turkey in 1768–1774, or the poems and tragedies written in the early nineteenth century on the theme of the Time of Troubles. Other chapters are dedicated to official and semi-official publicism — Shishkov’s manifestoes, sermons by Filaret (Drozdov), Uvarov’s memorandum. Two chapters concern state ceremonies and rituals — Catherine II’s Crimean journey and the celebration that G. A. Potemkin staged in the Tauride Palace. Finally, two other chapters examine the cultural mechanisms of specific historical conflicts — Speranskii’s fall from power and the publication of the treaty creating the Holy Alliance. Of course, these are only the main issues that are investigated and within each chapter the subjects under analysis may be similarly diverse. This heterogeneity stems mostly from the book’s basic conception. The author’s goal was not to describe the regular transmission of ideological ideas from one institution to another — indeed the very existence of such regularity seems highly doubtful — but to trace the historically concrete dynamics of the working out, crystallization, and change of basic ideologems. In such an approach the ideological sphere of culture functions as a kind of reservoir of metaphors which people of various professions and types of activity both draw from and replenish.