#trediakovsky

[ruslit]

Lomonosov and Trediakovsky had written odes in praise of Peter III, now they need to curry favor with Catherine the Great and QUICK after her coup

Lomonosov: 3 days after the coup he writes his ode 'Ode on the Great Day of Ascension to the Russian Throne of Her Majesty the Great Empress Catherine II'

Catherine says that Peter insulted the church and army

Catherine didn’t exactly glow when she read it

Sumarokov’s ('Ode to the Empress Catherine II on the Day of her Ascension 1762') came out four days later: Catherine loved it so much that she said he could publish anything he wanted at the expense of the court

He had allied himself to her clique long before she actually took power, she knew he knew she was better for the country.

[ruslit]

1766: Trediakovsky’s Тилемахида

which was very prosaic in French, but he raises it up

tthis is both imitating and excelling – he shows he can do it better than the French writer Fenilon

a treatise was attached to the epic: it was called a героическая поема – you are only showing one part of a hero’s life, this is not a bildungsroman;

no supernatural, no deus ex machine

what meter? Russian equivalent is 6 foot lines that are combination of dactyls and trochees – HEROIC

This Тилемахида was made more digestible than the French by Trediakovsky

He doesn’t want to represent real speech but does want to give it a somewhat oratorical feel

The crazy meter slows you down and it’s supposed to, so that you can savour every line. It’s “ahead of its time”!

/ - - | / - - | / - | / - - | / - - | / - - | / -

it’s very artificial, it’s very archaic, high-style

It’s funny because he started out as an advocate for the low-style

It was very out of fashion at this point

[ruslit]

The Fable – The Raven and the Fox

Trediakovsky is still stuck in a 13 syllable syllabic world

Sumarokov is writing in iambs

Repeating “села” is creating an effect, an oral effect

Avoids archaisms as much as he can (дружок!); is so very low, very conversational

His archaisms seems ironic

The ethic of it is less fun than the playing with the text: literature is becoming for fun, not just for education

Хвостов: he was ridiculed for his ineptness at the beginning of the 19th century

An “archaist” who stands against Karamzin and it is weird to be archaic in a fable

By 1802 you just can’t write a fable with archaisms, and people laughed at him

Krylov was the master! What gives it that very special character?

His народный flourish! His diminutives: he became enormously famous straight away

Most of these fables had that 18th century morality mixed with fun

[ruslit]

The elegy is really important because of what it becomes

Introduced into Russian by Trediakovsky

Originates in 7th century BC by Callinus and Orch… - always an expression of sorrow (usually over death)

Elegies of Ovid, Carp., and Cap., somebody else: Boileau says that elegy should lament death or express the woes of lovers

Two groups: 1) death of someone close to you – always in first person: 2) elegies in relation to problems in heterosexual relationships; middle genre, typically written in hexameter; six feet iambs – like the French Alexandrine

It’s important because it’s first person: growing sense of psychological uncertainty, eventually it breaks from those two simple things

Zhukovsky’s translations of Gray’s Churchyards in 1801 becomes more philosophical, and becomes THE dominant genre of romanticism

[ruslit]

Trediakovsky: Стихи похвальные России ('Verses in Praise of Russia') (1728) – he is trying to rid the lanauge of archaisms, so his language sounds even more modern than what he will come up with 20 years later

Syllabic: caesuras in all the right places

They are songs, he knows that, gives it cyclical form – think of Blok

Same “ring structure” when he praises Paris

[ruslit]

Trediakovsky: the first to make the transition to a prosody based on foot count (1735)

Its not that feet were alien to them (Zizanii and Smotritskii in 1500 wrote about it) but it had never been applied

We don’t, like Greeks, distinguish our syllables by long and short, but we DO by stressed/unstressed, says Trediakovsky

He only acknowledges iamb and trochee (though he eventually realizes that ternary feet exists as well) – he also makes up some silly rules like that trochaic is better (folk and children’s poems  are almost always written in trochees, so maybe he’s on to something)

He says that 6 syllables with stress of 7 syllables is best

All rhymes should be feminine rhymes

Masculine caesura at the 7th syllable (same as Kantemir)

[ruslit]

There are scholars who claim we can see some Baroque elements in Lomonosov and Trediakovsky: its true, but honestly, they are neo-classical writers: hyperbole, for example, was permitted in some neoclassical genres

Classics -> French neo-classicism -> Russian neo-classicism (French also influence German, which in turn also influenced Russian)

It is intimately bound up with the milieu of Louis XIV

Appeal of the ancients was that you could dress your kinds in ancient garb and give your court/king some prestige, some authority that does not come from the church

Boileau’s book (L’art poetique) was a handbook for the neoclassical genres, and Aristotle’s poetics were of course also.

A rule oriented culture is getting to be super important.

“Imperial sublime” in Russian culture – very strong religious connotations

art is there to instruct society AND to please the court: it needs both, and the balance of the two often dictates its place in the hierarchy

there is fluidity in the hierarchy of genres though, always room for improvement (same way that there is fluidity in the Table of Ranks)

[ruslit]

The first aesthetic doctrine to establish itself in Russia was that of classicism. Kantemir was full-fledged classicist, who used phrases like "usefulness and entertainment", "improving human more", "healthy good sense", and "imitating the [classical] models".

Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov were all in theory classicists, though they had their philosophical differences.

Trediakovsky charged Sumarokov with sensualism and Hobbesian materialism, while he himself defined man not by his self and sensual instincts but by his rational and altruistic ones.

Actually, Sumarokov's position was was that of rationalist psychologism in the spirit of John Locke. His poetic objective was to represent the various emotional states of normal human beings. Accordingly, he saw Lomonosov's pursuit of the exalted, the heroic, and the sublime as a violation of the natural, of reason, and of vraisemblance.