In his exilic poetry Pushkin more than once recalled “the shadow of Ovid,” banished by Augustus from Rome to the Black Sea. Torlone shows that Pushkin’s “deep engagement” with ancient literature started at the time of his exile in Bessarabia (Moldova) in 1820-4 (43). In the same chapter Torlone discusses classical influences upon the poetics of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia’s most celebrated literary icon, whose “relationship to the classical heritage,” as Torlone points out, “is much more subtle than that of the representatives of Russian classicism and even Derzhavin” (38). Derzhavin, inspired by Horace and Anacreon, projected his own poetic voice as an essentially private one, though Derzhavin clearly assumed the Pindaric stance when he composed his victory odes, following in the footsteps of Lomonosov ( ibid.). Another notable literary figure of the 18th century was Gavriil Derzhavin (1743-1816), who employed Greco-Roman literature “to create his own realm of images inseparable from his private thoughts and feelings” (35). ![]() Lomonosov, influenced by Homer and Pindar (28), put the ancient heroic tradition to the service of Russia’s growing empire: he forcefully conflated the idealized grandeur of the Roman Empire with that of contemporary Russia (31). Next, Torlone addresses the works of Russian classicists, Mikhailo Lomonosov (1711-1765) and Alexander Sumarokov (1718-1777). Even when the classics were welcomed into Russia’s literary environment in the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, authentic classical sources, the author reminds, were often superseded by the French and German regurgitations of antiquity (9).Ĭhapter 2 covers the classical influences on the works of Russian poets of the 18th and the early 19th centuries, starting with Peter’s younger contemporaries, Antiokh Kantemir (1709-1744) and Vasilii Trediakovskii (1703-1769), both famous for their renditions of classical authors. Rather, the classics, imposed upon Russia’s cultural milieu by Peter the Great and his successors, were simultaneously accepted and shunned (13). ![]() Even when the classics became available, the “higher degree of heterogeneity and intermittence in classical reception” (9), as Torlone points out, was largely due to the “isolation of the Russian literary canon from the Greco-Roman heritage.” The author cautions the reader that the Greco-Roman classics never triumphed in Russia as they did in Western Europe. In Chapter 1, Torlone discusses the socio-political and religious specificities of Russian history, such as the country’s political isolation and its close ties with the Byzantine Empire until the demise of the latter. In the book, biographical data are intertwined with critical analysis of the selected works: while evaluating each poet’s relationship with the Greco-Roman classics, Torlone points out how that poet redefined and sometimes even relived classical motifs. Throughout the book, Zara Martirosova Torlone both provides the background information indispensible for understanding Russia’s cultural idiosyncrasies and also examines the lives and works of prominent Russian poets, focusing on twentieth-century literary figures. ![]() ![]() This volume, published in Duckworth’s new series ‘Classical Diaspora’, explores the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in Russian poetry during the three centuries after the Petrine reforms of the early 1700s.
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