The Image of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Author

Abstract

Early in 1701 under the names of Henry Farquharson, Stephen Gwynn and Richard Grice, three British teachers of mathematics and navigation brought to Moscow by Peter the Great, a petition was sent to the Tsar requesting accommodation for their Navigation School and a supply of Russian printed books.² Among the appended list of ‘needful’ Russian textbooks — the Bible, Psalters, Gospel stories, Russian grammars and dictionaries, and the 1649 Code of Laws — one Russian writer was mentioned by name as the author of a number of texts. He was Simeon Polotskii. In the establishing of the image of the author at the dawn of the eighteenth century in Russia, this was a significant moment. Hitherto, the name and reputation of an individual author had been of little concern. Indeed even a century later, in 1802, Karamzin had to admit that ‘the name of a good author does not as yet have such value with us as in other lands’.³ But the history of Russian literature in the eighteenth century has been seen in terms of the emergence of the figure of the author, since, it has been argued, the basic problem for post-Petrine literature, as for the society it reflected, was that of the individual personality, its relationship with society and its place in history.⁴ Consequently the growth of Russian literature may be seen as the developing attitude of authors to the needs of their society, and their response to ‘those questions that history posed to the national consciousness’;⁵ the author’s judgement on persons and events changed in accord with the general movement of literary trends.

But the true age of the author began in Russia in the time of Peter the Great: for the art of writing is an act of enlightenment. Feofan and Kantemir made up its first period; then followed the period of Lomonosov and Sumarokov; the third period must be called that of Catherine the Great, already rich in the number of authors; and the fourth .. we still await …

Karamzin.¹