Catherine the Great’s Cultural Undertakings

1. Catherine the Great’s Cultural Undertakings • Patron of the arts, especially theater, literature, journalism. Founded the Hermitage Museum • Commissioned the urbanscape of St. Petersburg w/ palaces, canals, monuments • A prolific playwright, herself the editor-in-chief of satirical journal. • First and only Russian monarch to pen autobiography in the tradition of Rousseau

2. The martyrdom of the intelligentsia • Alexander Radishchev, 1749-1802, exiled to Siberia until 1797, committed suicide 1802. • Nikolai Novikov, 1744-1818, publicist, critic publisher, sentenced to the Schlusselburg fortress • The motif of fathers killing children, the regime destroying the intelligentsia it had sired • Writers became Russia’s secular martyrs

3. Nikolai Karamzin and Sentimentalism • Revolution in literary prose • Introduced new literary language, the “language of polite society:” pruned archaisms, simplified syntax, used calques from the French • Great Westernizer of Russian literature: -- introduced short story form -- introduced fashionable modes: Sentimentalism, Gothic -- emphasis on creating moods

4. A Melancholy Renaissance • Melancholia catch-all term that encompassed non-psychotic and less disabling mental disorders that we would now identify as obsessive-compulsive, schizophrenia, personality disorders, hypochondria (somatic disorders), depression, anxiety • Also referred to passing moods and in-born dispositions • Revival of melancholy’s positive associations during the Renaissance

5. The gentle mocker of melancholy • “I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud, nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic, nor the lady’s, which is nice, nor the lover’s, which is all of these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects.” - As You Like It (iv. I)

6. Sensibility, Sentimentalism, and Melancholy • Sensibility: sensitive feeling, tender emotion. Arose from rational deism (deity remote, individuals must rely on own feelings for guidance) • Sentimentalism: literary and cultural tendency in which individuals indulge in pity and tears to enjoy their own benevolence or self-pity. Arose in eighteenth century with belief in humanity’s inherent benevolence, affirmed by earl of Shaftesbury to counter Thomas Hobbes’ notion of essential selfishness and Calvinist notion of depravity after the Fall

7. Bliss of Melancholy • But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, 
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, 
And hides the green hill in an April shroud; 
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, 
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, 
Or on the wealth of globed peonies; 
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, 
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, 
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

8. Melancholia: Russian case histories • Consider “Poor Liza” and The Superfluous Man as Russian case histories of melancholia. What similarities do you note in the characters, situations, scenes, and language? • How would Freud and Seligman interpret them? Which interpretation (or aspects of the interpretation) do you find more convincing?

9. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1818-1883 • Born in province of Orel, idle father, despotic and sadistic mother • “Bore the scars of a painful childhood in the shape of melancholy and self-pitying hypochondria” • Belonged to “Men of the Forties” • Nicknamed “the American” for Westernizing, liberal ideas • Notes of a Hunter (1852), Fathers and Sons (1862)

10. The Superfluous Man “But I… of me nothing else could possibly be said: superfluous, that is all […] This unhappy, fifth, wholly unnecessary horse, fastened in rough fashion to the fore-end of a thick rope, which ruthlessly saws its haunches, rubs its tail, makes it run in the most unnatural manner, and imparts to the whole body the shape of a comma, always arouses my profound com-passion.”

11. Decembrist Rebellion, Dec. 14, 1825 • Aristocratic officers had imbibed the liberalism that was officially sponsored by Alexander I • Two secret societies:Northern Society (constitutional monarchy) and Southern Society (more radical, wanted Republic, eliminate entire royal family) • Uprising on December 14 wanted to restore Constantine as heir to the throne • Uprising suppressed, leaders executed, others exiled to Siberia