Vasilii Petrov and the poetics of patronage

Golburt, Luba

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116449 Copy

Description

Title

Vasilii Petrov and the poetics of patronage

Author(s)

Golburt, Luba

Issue Date

2015-11

Keyword(s)

• patronage
• poetry
• occasional verse
• lyric
• apostrophe
• literary history
• Vasilii Petrov
• poetics
• panegyric
• ode
• Pindar
• Horace
• lyric subjectivity
• friendship
• power
• Romanticism
• pre-Romanticism

Abstract

This article seeks to bridge the gap between sociohistorical and aesthetic readings of Russian occasional verse by arguing that patronage itself can be seen as engendering its own poetics. The author focuses on hitherto unanalyzed features of Vasilii Petrov's lyrics addressed to various patrons. The close readings of Petrov’s odes and epistles call attention to the poet’s coordinating syntax as structuring the subordinative relationships between poet and patron, and articulating discourses of friendship, community, and the public, of civic virtue, and of social and lyric interdependence. The essay ultimately arrives at a definition of the poetics of patronage, in which the poet claims agency without insisting on his autonomy (as would his successors in the Romantic period), and in which the lyric voice relies upon an other, drawing inspiration from conditions of relationship rather than isolation.

Series/Report Name or Number

ВИВЛIОθИКА: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies, vol. 3

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2015 Luba Golburt
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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