“Enamored of the universal quiet”: notes on the historical semantics of the state of rest

Representations of imperial pax (quiet) in Russia in the 18th and early 19th centuries are discussed in this article in light of the notion of “statist Enlightenment” put forward by Viktor Zhivov. Whereas Feofan Prokopovich prefers a heroic paradigm over passive calm, in Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Zhukovsky the concepts of quiet and calm are related to the Czar’s “trust” toward the subjects, the topoi of the golden Age and “golden times” (cf. Latin pax aurea), and the rhetoric of imperial peace-making. In Lomonosov, Elizabethan quiet is tied to the concept of happiness, as well as other affective and sociopolitical concepts, whose linkages follow the rules of the word’s inner form (the root) and rhyme (e.g., the sequence: ograda-otrada-radost’-sladost’-legkost’-vesel’e). As a result of the “emancipation of culture” (V. M. Zhivov’s term), which established a new relationship between literature and the state, components of the affective-political conceptual continuum became separated and polarized. The implications of the process are analyzed with reference to Pushkin’s lyric. In “Pora, moi drug, pora,” “peace and liberty” of the far-off abode where the lyrical subject yearns to be refer us to the last line of the youthful “Liberty” (“the peoples’ liberty and peace”), yet are contrasted with happiness. We can thus confirm V. M. Zhivov’s hypothesis that in Pushkin’s lyric political concepts stemming from the odic tradition are placed at the service of the poet’s myth.