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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
In this essay, Aaron Beaver argues that the poetry of Gavrila Derzhavin routinely and consistently connects metaphysical beliefs with moral ones, and that, at its most sophisticated, this connection amounts to a full “metaphysics of morality” much like that developed by Derzhavin's contemporary, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Beaver begins by exploring Derzhavin's belief in the immortality of virtue; he then examines how Derzhavin's famous monument poems assert the poet's immortality because he verbally pays tribute to those who are virtuous; finally he analyzes Derzhavin's 1797 poem “Bessmertie dushi,” in which the poet realizes the connection between the immortality of the soul and morality. The latter part of the article examines Derzhavin's poetic expression of this connection in light of Kant's two postulates of the moral law—the immortality of the soul and the existence of God—and finds that Derzhavin's poetry expresses a similar position with genuine philosophical rigor.
1. Kant's ideas will be taken up in the third part of this essay, though no claim of direct influence will be made. Aside from this comparative aspect, I argue from an internal perspective (i.e., from within the body of Derzhavin's works) rather than by external comparison (i.e., to other Russian authors or to the cultural or religious contexts of the ideas treated). This restriction is intended, in part, to force the trajectory of ideas to stand out more clearly in its positive aspect, rather than by comparison to what does not occur in other writers or contexts. A necessarily incomplete (because too brief) survey of external contexts is given below and pointed out in the notes where it seems imperative.
2. See especially the work of Anna Lisa Crone, who has made the most sustained case for this in several articles and a monograph: Crone, “'Evgeniiu. Zhizn’ Zvanskaia’ kak metafizicheskoe stikhotvorenie,” in Efim Etkind and Svetland El'nitskaia, eds., Gavrila Derzhavin, 1743-1816 (Northfield, Vt., 1995), 268-82; Crone, “The Chiasmatic Structure of Derzhavin's ‘Bog': Poetic Realization of the ‘Chain of Being,'” Slavic and Eastern Europeanjournal 38, no. 3 (1994): 407-18; Crone, , The Daring of Derzhavin: The Moral and Aesthetic Independence of the Poet in Russia (Bloomington, 2001)Google Scholar. Tat'iana V Artem'eva has also made a strong case for taking Derzhavin's philosophical and theological ideas seriously. Artem'eva, T. V., Istoriia metafiziki vRossii XWIIveka (St. Petersburg, 1996), 272-87Google Scholar. Odierwise only individual poems have been treated this way, e.g., Efim Etkind, “Dve dilogii Derzhavina,” in Etkind and El'nitskaia, eds., Gavrila Derzhavin, 234-56.
3. Derzhavin, G. R., Sochineniia, ed. Iakov Grot, 2d academic ed., 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1868-78), 3:205-38.Google Scholar
4. Crone, Daring of Derzhavin, 119. For a treatment of the Chitalagai odes as a sbornik, see Ronald Vroon, “Chitalagaiskie ody,” in Etkind and El'nitskaia, eds., Gavrila Derzhavin, 185-201.
5. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 3:221. Derzhavin's presentation makes use of rhetorical formulae common in his day but at the same time pushes the ideas beyond the confines of rhetoric. This process of surpassing rhetoric in the direction of seriously interrogated ideas is incomplete at this early stage in Derzhavin's career, but by the time he comes to write “Bog” some eight years later, he is clearly working with the ideas as much as with their inherited formulations. Thus Artem'eva can justify her claim that Derzhavin “adduces a whole system of proofs of God's existence” which Svas characteristic neither of Orthodox theology … nor of Russian philosophy.” Artem'eva, Istoriia metafiziki, 278.
6. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 3:226. These lines survive, unaltered, in this poem's more famous later (1794) reworking as “Vel'mozha.” Ibid., 1:431-43.
7. Khodasevich, V. F., Derzhavin (Moscow, 1988), 82 Google Scholar: “Derzhavin karabkaetsia na svoi Parnas.”
8. Crone, Daring of Derzhavin, 13.
9. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:8-11. “Na smert’ Bibikova” was published separately under this title; originally it was number seven of the Chitalagai odes, under the title “Oda na smert’ general-anshefa Bibikova” (3:227-30). Harris discusses a similar attitude of humility in another early poem, “Oda Ekaterine II“; see Harris, Jane Gary, “Before ‘Felitsa': The First Signs of G. R. Derzhavin's Odic Voice,” Russian Language Journal 41, nos. 138-39 (1987): 70–74 Google Scholar.
10. Hart, Pierre R., G. R. Derzhavin: A Poet's Progress (Columbus, 1978), 24 Google Scholar.
11. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:150-56,304-9.
12. Khodasevich succinctly formulates this dynamic as history “conquering time— but only within time.” Khodasevich, Derzhavin, 232.
13. The poem was first published anonymously in Moskovskii zhurnal in 1791 with an editorial note explaining that, by this anonymity, die author would disavow his own striving for glory. In other words, Derzhavin here took the next logical step, following the Bibikov and Rumiantseva odes, in seriously pursuing a humble attitude in deference to his poetic subject.
14. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:308-9.
15. The poem's lofty tone and abstract/metaphorical arc mitigate against a literal interpretation of “descendants,” as does the fact that Nikolai Repnin's son, the poet Ivan Petrovich Pnin, was illegitimate.
16. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:153.
17. Blagoi, D. D., “Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin,” in Derzhavin, G. R., Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1957), 41 Google Scholar. See also G. A. Gukovskii, Russkaia literatura XVIII veka (1939; reprint, Dusseldorf, 1971), 414-18. For a recent literary history that hews to this wellestablished line of thought, see Lebedeva, O. B., htoriia russkoi literatury XVIII veka (Moscow, 2000), 291-93, 306-9.Google Scholar
18. Crone, Daring of Derzhavin, 14.
19. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:310-15.
20. Hart, for example, takes the position that this question is open. Hart, Derzhavin, 86.
21. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:421-31.
22. For details about the sculpture and sculptor, see E. V Karpova, “O skul'pturnykh portretakh G. R. i E. la. Derzhavinykh raboty Zh.-D. Rashetta,” Derzhavinskie chteniia: Sbornik nauchnykh dokladov (St. Petersburg, 1997), 1:173-80.
23. Hart, Derzhavin, 84.
24. Serman, I. Z., Derzhavin (Leningrad, 1967), 80–81.Google Scholar
25. When Hart speaks of “reflected glory,” it is in line with pride of authorship and means almost the opposite of what I intend by the same phrase. Hart, Derzhavin, 25.
26. Ibid., 84.
27. The ending of “Moi istukan” has also been read in line with Derzhavin's anacreontic verse as a valuation of the private over the public sphere; see, for example, Luba Golburt, “Derzhavin's Monuments: Sculpture, Poetry, and the Materiality of History,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 13 (2005), available at http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/13/golburtl3.shtml (last consulted 1 March 2007). I. I. Podol'skaia generalizes this view with her thesis that Derzhavin valued the small joys of life more than his poetic immortality; see Podol'skaia, “Prekhodiashchee i ‘vechnoe’ v poezii Derzhavina,” Izvestiia AN SSSR: Seriia literatury i iazyka 41, no. 4 (1982): 359-68. Such readings do not seem mutually exclusive of the one given here.
28. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:534-36.
29. Joachim Klein makes a strong case for the lyrical subject's humility and derived glory in “Pamiatnik,” though on a purely sociocultural basis; see Klein, “Poet-samokhval: 'Pamiatnik’ Derzhavina i status poeta v Rossii XVIII veka,” in Koshelev, A., ed., Puti kul'turnogo importa: Trudy po russkoi literature XVIII veka (Moscow, 2005), 518-20Google Scholar.
30. Toward different ends, Crone, Blagoi, and Khodasevich all make this point. Crone, Daring of Derzhavin, 7; Blagoi, “Derzhavin,” 43-44; Khodasevich, Derzhavin, 157.
31. This is hinted at already in the ode to Bibikov; see “Na smert’ Bibikova,“ Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:9 and 3:228.
32. Ibid., 1:228.
33. Crone, Daring ofDerzhavin, 180.
34. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:383.
35. Ibid., 1:432.
36. Crone holds that Derzhavin re-theorizes the notion of stylistic level (inherited from Mikhail Lomonosov) so that “the words retain their dictionary meanings, but the moral qualities of ‘high’ and ‘low’ inhere in and derive from the referent.” Crone, Daring of Derzhavin, 54. What she calls a “metalinguistic” level thus emerges in line with Derzhavin's developing metaphysics of morality, in particular the shift to claims of truth, to the absolute dimension of moral values: “In the mouth of a truthful poet, all Slavic and vernacular words could equally be bearers of Truth.” Ibid., 55.
37. Harris, “Before ‘Felitsa,'” 76.
38. Il'ia Serman points to the moral dimension most clearly. Serman, Derzhavin, 47-48, 80-81. Zapadov comes nearest to making the metaphysical dimension apparent; see Zapadov, A. V, Masterstvo Derzhavina (Moscow, 1958), 169-70, 179-81Google Scholar. Cf. Blagoi, “Derzhavin,” 40.
39. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 3:386.
40. The poem's full title is “Na kovarstvo frantsuzskogo vozmushcheniia i v chest’ kniazia Pozharskogo“; Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 1:223-37.
41. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 2:437-39. After the 1790s Derzhavin writes almost no other monument poems, though some (e.g., “Evgeniiu. Zhizn’ Zvanskaia“) contain metapoetic passages.
42. The spiritual overtones of the poem are present from the first stanza: Sionid (Zionid) is shorthand (borrowed from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock) for “the Muses in relation to spiritual poetry,” Grot explains. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 2:439. Apparently it combines Mount Zion with Mount Helicon and/or Parnassus.
43. It is worth noting that Derzhavin extends immortality to his publisher, which has the effect of decentering his own lyric persona. As in “Pamiatnik,” he “shares” the limelight of immortality.
44. On Derzhavin's combination of the rational and the religious, see, for example, Joachim Klein, “Religiia i Prosveshchenie: Oda Derzhavina ‘Bog,'” in Koshelev, ed., Puti kul'turnogo importa, 489-97. On Bobrov, see Reyfman, Irina, “Imagery of Time and Eternity in Eighteenth-Century Russian Poetry: Mikhail Murav'ev and Semen Bobrov,” Indiana Slavic Studies 8 (1996): 99–114.Google Scholar
45. Aleksandr Radishchev “appeals to the principle of the conservation of energy to show that this force cannot be destroyed. Rather, the soul survives the body and is reincarnated in a more perfect state.” “Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev,” in James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin, eds., Russian Philosophy (Knoxville, 1965), 1: 66. Otherwise Radishchev's argument is hardly more than one of association; for example, to the states of sleeping and wakefulness: A. N. Radishchev, “O cheloveke, o ego smertnosti i bessmertii,” in Radishchev, , Polnoesobranie sochinenii, ed. Gukovskii, G. A. and Desnitskii, V. A. (Moscow, 1941), 2:100 Google Scholar. V V Zenkovskii summarizes Radishchev's thinking this way: “In ontology Radishchev was a warm defender of realism, and this turned his sympathies toward the French thinkers“—rather than, for example, toward the German transcendental idealist Kant. Zenkovskii, , A History ofRussian Philosophy, trans. Klein, George L. (New York, 1953), 1:90 Google Scholar.
46. Karamzin, N. M., Izbrannye sochineniia v dxmkh tomakh, ed. Berkov, P. (Moscow, 1964), 1:100–102, 363Google Scholar. Karamzin's apparent bewilderment in the face of Kant's ideas may be, in part, a pose; but in the wake of meeting and conversing with Kant, Karamzin states outright that he had not read the Critique of Practical Reason. Ibid., 102.
47. Artem'eva, Istoriia metqfiziki, 272, 273, 282.
48. Sullivan, Roger J., Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory (New York, 1989), xi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
49. See Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Cassirer, H. W. (Milwaukee, 1998), 154 Google Scholar.
50. Beck, Lewis White, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago, 1960), 252.Google Scholar
51. Copleston, Frederick, A History of Philosophy (New York, 1959), 4:60.Google Scholar
52. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 153, 156.
53. Beck, Commentary, 261-62; emphasis in the original.
54. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 2:1-8.
55. Much in Derzhavin's presentation in stanzas 2-6 suggests an Orthodox understanding of the immortality of the soul. Derzhavin's contemporary, Platon (Levshin), metropolitan of Moscow, had succinctly described the soul as a faculty distinct from the body, possessed of powers to know itself and the world, immortal, insubstantial, created in the image of God, and, though closely connected to God, distinct from divine nature itself; see Platon's Pravoslavnoe uchenie, ili sokrashchennoe khristianskoe Bogoslovie (1765), translated by Robert Pinkerton as The Present State of the Greek Church in Russia (New York, 1973), 42-43. In these same stanzas, however, Derzhavin also departs from an Orthodox understanding and moves, as I argue below, in the direction of Kant's presentation of the immortality of the soul. Indeed the secular and religious overlap that many have noted in Platon's writings could well be seen as having paved the way for Derzhavin's own fusion of the rational and die religious.
56. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 2:334-35.
57. Ibid., 2:335.
58. Cf. Beck, Commentary, 254.
59. Morality and immortality are similarly linked with fearlessness in “Na kovarstvo.” The lines are cited above: man is given “Bessmertnyi dukh—kovarstvu zlomu / Bez uzhasa protivostat'” (An immortal spirit to stand against / vile treachery without fear).
60. Here Derzhavin again approaches Platon in his language, although he diverges from the metropolitan in the substance of his thought. Platon writes that an innate desire for the good rather than for worldly vanities “cannot be in vain; it must be gratified by some perfect and unchangeable good; and this chief good is God.” Platon, Present State, 32.
61. Stanzas 3-4 of “Vremia” also present a clear statement of this, in similar terms. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, 2:334.
62. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 154.
63. Beck, Commentary, 270.
64. Of course in making this distinction, Derzhavin destroys the parallel with Kant in some of its specifics. Kant's postulate about the soul's immortality is framed entirely in terms of an infinite afterlife. That Derzhavin rejects the infinite for the eternal makes his own “argument” for the immortality of the soul dependent on morality in a way that is different from Kant's theory, though similarly bound up with the postulate of God's existence.
65. William Edward Brown, A History of Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature (Ann Arbor, 1980), 404. Brown is referring to Derzhavin's work in general, not to this particular poem, but his comment is illuminating.
66. Beck, Commentary, 261.
67. Ibid., 263. Cf. Copleston, History, 4:343.
68. See Viazemskii, P. A., Zapisnye knizhki (1813-1848) (Moscow, 1963), 35 Google Scholar. In the critical literature this tendency to label Derzhavin a philosophical poet seems to coexist uneasily with a tendency to dismiss him as “not really” philosophical. E. A. Maimin is representative: “Of course Derzhavin's philosophy itself was not terribly profound, not terribly original.” Maimin, “Derzhavinskie traditsii i filosofskaia poeziia 20-30-kh godov XIX stoletiia,“ XVIII vek 8 (1969): 133. Cf. Podol'skaia, “Prekhodiashchee i ‘vechnoe,'” 363; and Brown, History, 404. Many project the “philosophical” dimension exclusively onto Derzhavin's stylistics; this gives rise to the usual link between Derzhavin and Fedor Tiutchev, whose philosophical ideas are, in themselves, so obviously divergent. As noted above, Crone and Artem'eva are notable exceptions to these tendencies.
69. For Kant and Heinrich Jacobi as “grandfathers” of the philosophical debate between reason and understanding as the basis for apprehending reality, see Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Reason, the Understanding, and Time (Baltimore, 1961), 1–33.Google Scholar