“The miracle you have performed is more amazing than the miracle of Orpheus”: The literary reputation of Vasily Zhukovsky in 1813–1820

The article analyses the key period (1813-1820) in the formation of Vasily Zhukovsky’s literary reputation. The turning point in the formation was the success of The Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors, which combined the features of high odic genres, in line with the aesthetic preferences of the mass reader, with the equally popular elegiac style of Karamzinism. This consolidated young Karamzinists around Zhukovsky, which resulted in the birth of the Arzamas society, on the one hand, and granted support from the court environment, which from 1813 began to patronise the young poet, on the other. He quickly progressed from enjoying the gracious attention of Empress Maria Feodorovna to receiving the highest rescripts in 1815 and 1816, being granted a pension, and being invited to the position of, first, court reader, and then tutor to Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna. In literary terms, the union of poetry and power gave rise to the phenomenon of visionary lyricism, which endowed works of various genres - epistles (beginning with “To Emperor Alexander”), songs, idylls, ballads, landscape elegies, and album poems - with ideological or historiosophic overtones. This, in turn, facilitated the penetration of literary principles into court life - primarily in terms of its formation as a circle-like community with its own family rituals, esoteric friendly semantics, and collective creativity. Thanks to Zhukovsky’s efforts, the court was transforming into an environment of the “select few”, where the boundaries between literary and aristocratic elitism became interchangeable. Zhukovsky’s successes in both the literary and court spheres were invariably covered with attention and approval in newspapers and magazines in 1814-1820, which contributed to the consolidation and popularization of the poet’s name. In the late 1810s, he became a member of most of the prestigious literary societies: the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature at Moscow University (1816), the Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences, and Arts (1817), the Free Society of Lovers of Russian Literature (1818), the Imperial Russian Academy (1818), started his own salon (1818), and gained recognition in the Dorpat (Tartu) and later German scholarly-literary circles. A special role in Zhukovsky’s fate was played by Arzamas, where he took on the role of the chair: in a travesty-carnival spirit, the “society of unknown people” not only polemically opposed the aesthetic program of archaism but also consolidatedly represented the literary position of young Karamzinism, which by 1816-1818 had taken a dominant place in literature. Meanwhile, Zhukovsky’s rapid reputational ascent also generated a counter-reaction, initially in the form of personal disapproval of some of his works, and then in the form of parodic ridicule of his figure as a whole (the character of Fialkin in Alexander Shakhovskoy’s A Lesson to Coquettes, or the Lipetsk Waters). Subsequently, however, criticism avoided personal attacks on Zhukovsky and focused on challenging his genre models - the ballad, the elegy, the hexametric idyll (P.A. Katenin, N.I. Gnedich, A.S. Griboedov, A.F. Merzlyakov). This testified to their transformation not just into influential, but into dominant examples. Thus, by the end of the 1810s, Zhukovsky occupied an exceptional place on the literary Olympus, comparable to the position of Nikolay Karamzin. The issues of how to handle the accumulated symbolic capital and what to convert it into were for Zhukovsky to resolve at the next stage of his career in the 1820s. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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