Luba Golburt: The First Epoch. The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. XI, 387 S., 6 Abb. = Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. ISBN: 978-0-299-29814-2

Luba Golburt: The First Epoch. The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. XI, 387 S., 6 Abb. = Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. ISBN: 978-0-299-29814-2.

In Russian culture there’s no escaping the eighteenth century. Luba Golburt postulates that in one way or another – perhaps in multiple ways – Russian culture is still attempting to come to grips with that epoch more with than any other in its history. Not only was there the shock of Peter the Great violently removing Russia from one track of development and placing it on another, but there was also the fact that after Peter the direction of Russia was guided by female rulers for almost all of the remaining three quarters of the century. The most significant part of that was the overarching presence of the long reign of Catherine the Great, followed by the multiple ways in which meaning could be ascribed to her reign. How to interpret to itself the female-dominated century has played a major part in Russia’s ever shifting sense of itself. Golburt suggests at the end of her study that multiple uses continue to be made down to the present day of the Catherine-dominated eighteenth century.

The discussion of the cultural imagination is confined to a detailed analysis and explication of selected works penned by a limited number of writers starting in the mid-eighteenth and running to the late nineteenth centuries, with a number of points also illustrated and elaborated through discussion of six eighteenth-century portraits – the majority of them of Catherine II herself – by five different artists (illustrations included). Golburt elucidates the tensions within the eighteenth century over how to understand and interpret itself and the various ways nineteenth-century authors grappled with the legacy of the earlier age. In the eighteenth century Golburt concentrates especially on explications of poetical texts by Vasilii Trediakovskii, Mikhail Lomonosov, and the bridge with the nineteenth century, Gavriil Derzhavin. For the nineteenth century poetry gives way to prose in Golburt’s examination of posterity’s reexamination of the Catherinian epoch through specially selected works of Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev, with more than a passing nod to Lev Tolstoi.

Underlying the whole is the postulation that a male-dominated nineteenth century, especially from the time of Catherine’s grandson Emperor Nikolai I, looking back uncomfortably at the female-dominated eighteenth century, was developing a gendered response to the first epoch, a theme recently explored by a number of literary scholars. Yet as Golburt demonstrates, the eighteenth century itself was by no means monochromatic in the meanings it ascribed to itself. The odes of Trediakovskii and Lomonosov glorifying the reigns of Elizabeth and Catherine II yielded to the elegies of Derzhavin, who even before Catherine’s death began to look back on the age with a bit of the sense of “what might have been”. As Golburt points out, odes and elegies serve entirely different purposes. Indeed, the transitional period featuring Derzhavin dominates the first half of the book, which is even labeled “Derzhavin’s Moment”.

From Derzhavin, as every student of Russian culture knows, the torch passed to Alexander Pushkin. Derzhavin’s oeuvre defines the denouement of the first epoch of Golburt’s title. Prologuing the second half of the book with an excerpt from the Notebkooks (Zapisnye knizhki) of Prince Petr Andreevich Viazemskii, Golburt posits that Viazemskii identified two modernities in Russia: the first was Catherinine’s and hence political; the second belonged to the nineteenth century and was literary, which also made it political. Golburt carries her analysis into works specifically reflecting back on the Catherinian era, referring to them as the “verisimilar eighteenth century”, works penned by Pushkin and the other writers who could not have known Catherine personally. In contrast with the eighteenth century, during the nineteenth the Catherinian era in particular was described more prosaically than poetically. Golburt analyzes Pushkin’s treatment of Catherine herself as seen in The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaia Dochka) and the wizened countess in Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama), a faded beauty whom time had passed by, a character who has often been viewed as a stand-in for Catherine herself. Golburt sees a strong influence from Walter Scott (she makes use of Waverley in particular) on Russia’s historical fiction of the period, first in Ivan Lazhechnikov’s novel The House of Ice (Ledianoi dom), set in the last full year of Anna Ioannovna’s reign, and then in Pushkin, drawing comparisons between the two. Queen of Spades is discussed in the context of fashion, with the argument that Pushkin deliberately made the old-fashionedness of the countess’s clothing the center of her repugnance to the reader. The revelations of her undressing before the eyes of the hidden Hermann made her even more loathsome.

Ivan Turgenev made references to eighteenth-century personages in a number of his works. Those characters can hardly been taken seriously, for they – like the century that bore them – are trivialized, marginalized, diminished. For him, according to Golburt, the eighteenth century was preserved only in Russia’s backwaters, on run-down noble estates and in provincial towns. Far too young to have known that century himself, Turgenev gained his acquaintanceship through the generation of Pushkin, emphasizing a fault line between the two centuries. In a literary sense the eighteenth century continued to trouble Russia’s sense of self-identity. Golburt would argue that the century of Catherine still haunts Russia’s sense of its cultural identity.

George E. Munro, Richmond, USA