Letters From Royal Persons to Vasily Zhukovsky and the Semantics of “Family Monarchy”

The article reviews the letters from royal persons to Vasily Zhukovsky. Based on these letters, the character of the epistolary dialogue between the poet and representatives of the Romanov dynasty and of the German dynasties is reconstructed completely for the first time. Zhukovsky was not the only writer who was warmly welcomed at court, but his case was unique. The poet organically joined the context of the new emerging ideology of “family monarchy”, in which a small circle of the imperial family, professing family and domestic values, acted as a prototype of the all-imperial unity of subjects symbolically included in the sphere of paternal relations. Moreover, Zhukovsky was one of the co-creators and translators of this ideology. In addition, Zhukovsky, originally a reader under Empress Maria Feodorovna, entered the circle of royal persons as a poet and remained so until the end of his life. It was his tireless work that designated a new stage in the interaction of power and literature. The system of literary patronage, which determined the sociocultural functioning of the 18th-century literature, gradually faded into the past and was replaced by a system of literature friendly communities, in which informal groups were the centers of the literary process. The poet transferred these forms of communication to the court, transforming Pavlovsk and the circle of Maria Feodorovna, and then the circle of Alexandra Feodorovna, into a kind of a literary community. “Family monarchy” under the aegis of Zhukovsky acquired a distinct literary and aesthetic dimension. Art here became a necessary part of everyday life, which, on the one hand, set the standard for the royal persons’ thinking and behavior, and, on the other, opened up channels for interaction with friendly communities outside the court. The conceptual framework of “family monarchy” legitimized private and home-centered topics of communication becoming a powerful filter that set etiquette forms that hindered the possibility of discussing many issues, be it business problems or politics. Based on the letters of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, the article shows how such etiquette communication worked, including how Alexander reacted to Zhukovsky’s political reflections. On the other hand, the letters of the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, demonstrate strategies for bypassing etiquette communication and going to informal friendly reflection. The appendix to the article is a chronological index of all known letters of the royal persons to Zhukovsky.

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