The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia

From the reign of Peter the Great through that of Catherine the Great, visions of an earthly paradise recurred in a wide variety of Russian sources: panegyric and pastoral poetry, portrait painting, the utopian novel, allegorical fireworks and masquerades, Masonic ritual and literature, and even the winter garden. In this rich, many-faceted work, the author traces how, at a time when Russian culture was being transformed from sacred to secular, the paradise myth provided a bridge between the two.
Most Western writers of the period, influenced by the scientific and critical worldview of the Enlightenment, used the conventions of the paradise myth to idealize faraway lands and hence criticize existing reality. The author shows that in eighteenth-century Russian, however, most writers used these conventions to idealize, mythologize, and "utopianize" the Russian status quo and the Slavic past. These writings were thus closer to the literature of European Renaissance courts than to that of the contemporary Enlightenment, reflecting a "culture gap" between Russia and the West that is significantly larger than has heretofore been realized.
Instead of using utopian methods to oppose governmental opposition to promote the rights of individuals, Russian writers often used them to glorify existing authoritarian structures. The author contends that this tendency to propagandize the status quo through paradisal imagery has been a constant current in Russia from its Christianization through socialist realism, reflecting an "urge to utopia" among the populace that was frequently abused by those in power.
In analyzing the ways in which the paradise myth helped to shape eighteenth-century Russian literature and culture, the author begins with a typology of paradise, focusing on Western paradisal conventions that were to become omnipresent in Russian culture. He discusses the paradise myth in terms of the impact of Peter the Great's secularization and westernization and of two other myths that were also central to it: the rebirth or renaissance of Russia and Russia as an Edenic garden. The author examines in detail the influence of the paradise myth on the allegorical rituals and literature of Freemasonry and on the Russian utopia and "eutopia" (a hybrid of the panegyric ode and the utopia that is virtually unique to Russia). Finally, he deals with the reactions against the paradise myth during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and its replacement by the myth of the iron age

Stephen Lessing Baehr is Associate Professor of Russian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
Title The paradise myth in eighteenth-century Russia: utopian patterns in early secular Russian literature and culture
Author Stephen Lessing Baehr
Edition illustrated
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1991
ISBN 0804715335, 9780804715331
Length 308 pages


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