Creating the Empress

Front matter

Creating the Empress:

“Politics and “Poetry in the Age of Catherine II

ES

Chapter Eight Ridiculing the Monarch Bibliography Index

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INTRODUCTION he main topic discussed in this book is the relationship

between political and literary symbolism during the reign

of Catherine II. Much has been written about Catherine’s political and social ideas; this work, however, takes a drastically different approach. I intend to examine not the relationship between literary texts and political ideas, but the ways in which literary texts interacted with a kind of political symbolism which manifested itself in various forms of verbal and non-verbal discourse. This political symbolism created its own mechanisms of representation through an entire system of images, metaphors, and mythic allegories. Although they centered on relevant political symbols borrowed from the European tradition, they manifested themselves differently in the Russian context. I discuss these manifestations and their development in Russian culture in this work as well.

I interpret diverse forms of political imagery not as a mystification of reality, but as an important part of that reality itself, no less real than economic forces of social practices. I admire the statement of Ernst Cassirer who referred to the history of man as the actions of animal simbolicum. Cassirer rejected anthropological and psychoanalytical models for history, an approach which stemmed from the neo-Kantian opposition of the rational and irrational. He considered the myth not only a constant of all primitive civilizations, whether they are ancient or not, but an inherent essence of any modern culture as well. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe as well as the imperialistic wars definitively showed that “myths of state"