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An Ancient in Catherinian Russia: Classical Reception, Sensibility, and Nobility in Princess Ekaterina Urusova's Poetry of the 1770s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2021

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev
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Abstract

This article argues for the importance of Princess E.S. Urusova's four poems published between 1772 and 1777 to scholarly discussions of both classical reception and noble culture. Urusova engages more intensively than any other Russian writer of the period with the European Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, formulating thereby unique responses to major literary and political concerns of the 1770s. In the literary sphere, the Quarrel allows Urusova to conceptualize with exceptional perspicacity the multifaceted cultural environment of the time: contributing to Russia's claim to be the direct heir of the Greeks and Romans, she also makes the interesting case that the emerging culture of sensibility ideally equips readers and writers to absorb the classics. In the political sphere, by evoking the framework of ancient virtue through classical intertexts, she envisages an alliance between the sovereign and a strong nobility based on both cultural refinement and a sense of duty and service to the nation. Urusova's case shows how imitating and reinterpreting the classics helped one woman to find her voice as a poet in eighteenth-century Russia.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 90 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Greg Brown for giving me the opportunity to present an early version of this piece at the 2018 Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference; Marcus Levitt, Andrew Kahn, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions; and Harriet Murav, David Cooper, and the editorial staff at Slavic Review for seeing the article into print.

References

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4. Wendy Rosslyn, Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women, 1763–1825 (Fichtenwalde, 2000), 54–59, 68, 118–22. On women’s contributions to classical scholarship internationally, see Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall, eds., Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly (Oxford, 2016).

5. Amanda Ewington, ed. and trans., Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Bilingual Edition (Toronto, 2014), 59–295; Catriona Kelly, “Sappho, Corinna, and Niobe: Genres and Personae in Russian Women’s Writing, 1760–1820,” in Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith, eds., A History of Women’s Writing in Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 37–61; Wendy Rosslyn, “Making Their Way into Print: Poems by Eighteenth-Century Russian Women,” The Slavonic and East European Review 78, no. 3 (July 2000): 407–38; Judith Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene, eds., Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport, 1994), 35–60. Unless otherwise indicated, translations below are Ewington’s when her edition is cited; all other translations are my own.

6. N.D. Kochetkova, “Kniazhna Urusova i ee literaturnye sobesedniki,” in N.D. Kochetkova and E.A. Ivanova, eds., N.A. L΄vov i ego sovremenniki: Literatory, liudi iskusstva (St. Petersburg, 2002), 94–103 (94–95); Frank Göpfert, “Observations on the Life and Work of Elizaveta Kheraskova (1737–1809),” in Wendy Rosslyn, ed., Women and Gender in 18 th-Century Russia (Aldershot, 2003), 163–86.

7. She is noted for her “fine elegies, songs, and other minor poems, which are worthy of praise for their pure style and tender, pleasant depictions” (прекрасныя елегии, песни, и другия мелкия стихотворении, которыя за чистоту слога, нежность и приятность изображения, достойны похвалы), in N.I. Novikov, Opyt istoricheskago slovaria o rossiiskikh pisateliakh (St. Petersburg, 1772), 230.

8. Kochetkova, “Kniazhna Urusova i ee literaturnye sobesedniki,” 97–98; see also Sandra Shaw Bennett, “‘Parnassian Sisters’ of Derzhavin’s Acquaintance: Some Observations on Women’s Writing in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes, eds., A Window on Russia: Papers from the V International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Gargnano, 1994 (Rome, 1996), 249–56 (250–51); N.D. Kochetkova, “Urusova Ekaterina Sergeevna,” in A.M. Panchenko et al., eds., Slovar΄ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, 3 vols. (Leningrad/St. Petersburg, 1988–2010), 3:296–99; and Mary Zirin, “Urusova, Ekaterina Sergeevna,” in Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, eds., Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (Westport, 1994), 683–84.

9. Marc Raeff, “On the Heterogeneity of the Eighteenth Century in Russia,” in R. P. Bartlett, A. G. Cross, and Karen Rasmussen, eds., Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century (Columbus, 1988), 666–80, and “The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment,” in J. G. Garrard, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973), 25–47; W. Gareth Jones, “A Trojan Horse within the Walls of Classicism: Russian Classicism and the National Specific,” in A. G. Cross, ed., Russian Literature in the Age of Catherine the Great (Oxford, 1976), 95–120. On Russian classicism, see Ilya Serman, “The Eighteenth Century: Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment, 1730–90,” in Charles A. Moser, ed., The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 45–91; and Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler, A History of Russian Literature (New York, 2018), 203–25.

10. Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Oxford, 2003), 1–11; Torlone, Russia and the Classics, 8–10.

11. Schönle and Zorin, On the Periphery of Europe, 33–39.

12. Andrei Zorin, By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late-Eighteenth—Early-Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Marcus C. Levitt with Nicole Monnier and Daniel Schlaffy (Boston, 2014), 24–60. See also Erin McBurney, “Picturing the Greek Project: Catherine II’s Iconography of Conquest and Culture,” Russian Literature 75, no. 1–4 (2014): 415–43, and Asen Kirin, “Eastern European Nations, Western Culture, and the Classical Tradition,” in Stephens and Vasunia, Classics and National Cultures, 141–62.

13. On translation and the eighteenth-century origins of Russian classical scholarship, see E.D. Frolov, Russkaia nauka ob antichnosti (St. Petersburg, 1999), 46–111.

14. Zara Martirosova Torlone, “Vasilii Petrov and the first Russian translation of theAeneid,” Classical Receptions Journal 3, no. 2 (2011): 227–47 (234).

15. Petr Ekimov, trans., Omirovy tvoreniia, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1776–1778); A.N. Egunov, Gomer v russkikh perevodakh XVIII-XIX vekov (Moscow, 1964), 40–64. The first translation of both Homeric epics, by K.A. Kondratovich in the 1750s–1760s, remained in manuscript.

16. Torlone, “Vasilii Petrov,” 238.

17. Stephen K. Batalden, Catherine II’s Greek Prelate: Eugenios Voulgaris in Russia, 1771–1806 (Boulder, 1982); Sophia Papaioannou, “Eugenios Voulgaris’ Translation of theGeorgics: An Introduction to the First Modern Greek Translation of Vergil,” Vergilius 54 (2008): 97–123 (118–19), and “Sing It Like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of theAeneid,” in Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone, eds., Virgil and His Translators (Oxford, 2018), 151–65.

18. Andrew Kahn, “Russian Rewritings in the Eighteenth Century of La Fontaine’sLes Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon,” EMF: Studies in Early Modern France 8 (2002): 207–25.

19. Andrew Kahn, “Russian Literature between Classicism and Romanticism: Poetry, Feeling, Subjectivity,” in Paul Hamilton, ed., The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford, 2016), 493–511 (494–96); N.D. Kochetkova, Literatura russkogo sentimentalizma (Esteticheskie i khudozhestvennye iskaniia) (St. Petersburg, 1994), 8; V.D. Rak, “Mikhail Nikitich Murav΄ev,” in Marcus C. Levitt, ed., Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Detroit, 1995), 233–39.

20. Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié, introduction to Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié, eds., Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford, 2016), 1–16 (5); Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago, 1997), ix; Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010), 116; Marc Fumaroli, “Les abeilles et les araignées,” in Anne-Marie Lecoq, ed., La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes: XVII e-XVIII e siècles (Paris, 2001), 7–218; Ourida Mostefai, “Finding Ancient Men in Modern Times: Anachronism and the Critique of Modernity in Rousseau,” in Bullard and Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe, 243–56; Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 2007).

21. Bullard and Tadié, introduction toAncients and Moderns in Europe, 6; Alain Viala, “Les Palmarès de la Querelle,” in Louise Godard de Donville, ed., D’un siècle à l’autre: Anciens et Modernes (Marseille, 1987), 171–80 (178).

22. Kahn et al., A History of Russian Literature, 205–8. On the Quarrel in Russia, see L.V. Pumpianskii, “Trediakovskii i nemetskaia shkola razuma,” Zapadnyi sbornik 1 (1937): 157–86 (157–59); Karen Rosenberg, Between Ancients and Moderns: V.K. Trediakovskij on the Theory of Language and Literature (PhD diss., Yale University, 1980), and “The Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns in Russia,” in A. G. Cross, ed., Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century (Newtonville, Mass., 1983), 196–205; V.M. Zhivov, “Tserkovnoslavianskaia literaturnaia traditsiia v russkoi literature XVIII v. i retseptsiia spora ‘drevnikh’ i ‘novykh,’” in L.A. Sofronova, N.M. Kurennaia, and N.V. Zlydneva, eds., Istoriia kul΄tury i poetika (Moscow, 1994), 62–82; and V.M. Zhivov and B.A. Uspenskii, “Metamorfozy antichnogo iazychestva v istorii russkoi kul΄tury XVII-XVIII vv.,” in Antichnost΄ v kul΄ture i iskusstve posleduiushchikh vekov: Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii, 1982 (Moscow, 1984), 204–85 (271–73n31a). On eighteenth-century Russian literary quarrelling, see Irina Reyfman, Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the “New” Russian Literature (Stanford, 1990), 57–69.

23. Maria Di Salvo, “V.I. Maikov na puti k russkoi iroi-komicheskoi poeme,” in Alberto Alberti, Maria Cristina Bragone, Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, and Laura Rossi, eds., Italia, Russia e mondo slavo. Studi filologici e letterari (Florence, 2011), 49–59; M. Schruba, “Russkaia bitva knig: Zametki o ‘Naloe’ V.I. Maikova,” XVIII vek 21 (1999): 185–95.

24. N.D. Kochetkova, “Nemetskie pisateli v zhurnale Novikova ‘Utrennii svet,’” XVIII vek 11 (1976): 113–24 (122).

25. “M.kh.l. M.t.v.v.ch. Kh.r.s.k.v.,” Starina i novizna 2 (1773): 203–6.

26. On Sumarokov and imitation, see Amanda Ewington, A Voltaire for Russia: A.P. Sumarokov’s Journey from Poet-Critic to Russian Philosophe (Evanston, 2010), 5.

27. M.M. Kheraskov, “K.n.zh.n. K.t.r.n. S.r.g.v.n. R.s.v.,” Starina i novizna 2 (1773): 199–203 (202).

28. “Но с нею воспевати / Мне дар мой не велит. / Не может он сравняться / Со нежностью ея, / И станет отличаться / Нестройна песнь моя.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 76–77.

29. “Гомеру подражати, / Х** мне велишь. /. . . / Гомер вспевал нам Трою, / Ты пел Чесмесский бой. /. . . / Позволь мне подражати / Торжественным стихам.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 74–75.

30. “Парнасса досязаю, / Х** мне пример.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 76–77.

31. A.V. Zapadov, Poety XVIII veka. A. Kantemir, A. Sumarokov, V. Maikov, M. Kheraskov: Literaturnye ocherki (Moscow, 1984), 200.

32. Pis΄mo Petru Dmitrievichu Eropkinu, sochinennoe kniazhnoi Ekaterinoi Urusovoi v Moskve (Moscow, 1772). On this epidemic, see John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore, 1980), and Marcus C. Levitt, “The Icon that Started a Riot,” in The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb, 2011), 195–221.

33. M. A. J. Heerink, “Ovid’s Aeginetan Plague and the Metamorphosis of theGeorgics,” Hermes: Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie 139, no. 4 (2011): 464–72.

34. Marcus Levitt, “‘Metamorfozy’ Ovidiia v russkoi literature XVIII veka—pro et contra,” in N.Iu. Alekseeva and N.D. Kochetkova, eds., Litterarum fructus: Sbornik statei v chest΄ Sergeia Ivanovicha Nikolaeva (St. Petersburg, 2012), 142–53 (144–46).

35. Natania Meeker, Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (New York, 2006), 17–58. It is unknown whether Urusova read Latin, but she undoubtedly knew French. On the bilingualism of the eighteenth-century Russian elite, see Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, eds., French and Russian in Imperial Russia, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 2015).

36. A.I. Liubzhin, Rimskaia literatura v Rossii v XVIII-nachale XX veka: Prilozhenie k “Istorii rimskoi literatury” M. fon Al΄brekhta (Moscow, 2007), 58. See also Andrew Kahn, “Epicureanism in the Russian Enlightenment: Dmitrii Anichkov and Atomic Theory,” in Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz, eds., Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2009), 119–36.

37. See, for example, V.I. Maikov, “Pis΄mo Ego Siiatel΄stvu Grafu Grigor΄iu Grigor΄evichu Orlovu na otbytie Ego iz Sanktpeterburga v Moskvu vo vremia zarazitel΄noi v nei bolezni, dlia istrebleniia onyia,” in Sochineniia Vasiliia Maikova ili sobranie ostroumnykh, satiricheskikh, zabavnykh poem, nravstvennykh basen i skazok, teatral΄nykh i drugikh ego liricheskikh tvorenii (St. Petersburg, 1809), 268–70.

38. Diskin Clay, Lucretius and Epicurus (Ithaca, 1983), 262–63.

39. “Родители детей, жены мужей теряли, / Младенцы на руках отцовых умирали.” Urusova, Pis΄mo Petru Dmitrievichu Eropkinu, 4; Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, revised Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 587.

40. “Друг другу помощь дать никто тогда не смел, . . . / Чуждались всякаго, . . . / И должность и любовь тут каждой позабыл.” Urusova, Pis΄mo Petru Dmitrievichu Eropkinu, 4; Lucretius, De rerum natura, 587.

41. Urusova, Pis΄mo Petru Dmitrievichu Eropkinu, 9.

42. “[С]лезы радостей то слыша проливала.” Urusova, Pis΄mo Petru Dmitrievichu Eropkinu, 9.

43. Polion ili prosvetivshiisia neliudim, poema (St. Petersburg, 1774). The “Pis΄mo Eropkinu” appears on pages 57–64; this second redaction can be found in F. Göpfert and M. Fainshtein, eds., Predstatel΄nitsy muz: Russkie poetessy XVIII veka (Wilhelmshorst, 1998), 155–59.

44. Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 80 (my translation).

45. Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 122–23, 144–45.

46. Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature,” 45–47; Marcus C. Levitt, “The Polemic with Rousseau over Gender and Sociability in E.S. Urusova’sPolion (1774),” The Russian Review 66, no. 4 (October 2007): 586–601 (588).

47. “Там спящим кажется божественный Омир, / За баснословие стихи его приемлют, / Ни важности его, ни истинне не внемлют.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 84–85.

48. “Все то, что вымыслом и баснями зовут, / Сияет без цветов в природных видах тут: / Там ветров бурная Еолово пещера, / И в ад Улиссово хожденье у Гомера, / За брань Троянскую между Богов раздор, / Их раны, и коней геройских разговор, / Имеют чистое свое знаменованье.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 146–47.

49. “К Премудрости идут кривыми там стезями;” “Там споры дышущи огнем, вокруг летают;” “Там Зависть палицей стоит вооруженна, / К погибели людей охотою разженна.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 80–81 (translation modified).

50. “От мыслей отгони науки прежней тму; / Забудь их имена, порядок, толкованье.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 142–43 (translation modified).

51. Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, 1991), 44–46.

52. Iu.D. Levin, “Rannee vospriiatie Dzhonatana Svifta v Rossii,” in M.P. Alekseev, ed., Vzaimosviazi russkoi i zarubezhnykh literatur (Leningrad, 1983), 12–44 (18).

53. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge, Eng., 2010), 149. The passage is present in Jonathan Swift, Le Conte du tonneau, contenant tout ce que les arts, et les sciences ont de plus sublime, et de plus mystérieux. Avec plusieurs autres pieces très curieuses. Par le fameux Dr. Swift. Traduit de l’anglois, trans. Justus van Effen, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1721), 2:75–76.

54. Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, 150;Le Conte du tonneau, 2:81.

55. “Астрологи, / . . . / Счисляя взорами течение планет. / Но только лишь они свой взор туда возводят, / Сгустившись облака на их главы низходят, / Скрывая бег Светил, являют мрак очам.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 82–83.

56. Part 3, chapter 2. In French, seeVoyages de Gulliver, trans. Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, 2 vols. (Paris, 1727), 2:16.

57. Levin, “Rannee vospriiatie Dzhonatana Svifta v Rossii,” 26–27.

58. “[S]es fictions sont tirées du sein de la Verité.” Anne Dacier, L’Iliade d’Homère, traduite en françois avec des remarques, rev. ed., 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1712), 1:ix-x, xxi-xxii.

59. G.V. Kozitskii, “O pol΄ze mifologii,” Trudoliubivaia pchela 1 (January 1759) (reprint St. Petersburg, 1780): 5–33. On Sumarokov’s journal, see Marcus C. Levitt, “Was Sumarokov a Lockean Sensualist?,” in Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston, 2009), 158–72, and “Zhurnal A.P. Sumarokova ‘Trudoliubivaia pchela’: Kompozitsiia i napravlenie,” in A.Iu. Veselova and A.O. Demin, eds., Dar druzhestva i muz: Sbornik statei v chest΄ Natal΄i Dmitrievny Kochetkovoi (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2018), 69–77. On the Quarrel’s significance for Russian views of classical mythology, see Zhivov and Uspenskii, “Metamorfozy antichnogo iazychestva,” 234–41, and Marcus Levitt, “O pol΄ze mifologii: Mifologicheskie siuzhety sumarokovskikh oper,” in Petr Bukharkin, Ulrike Jekutsch, and Evgeniy Matveev, eds., “Blessed Heritage:” The Classical Tradition and Russian Literature (Wiesbaden, 2018), 27–35 (29–31).

60. “Который баснословным, / В невежестве слывет. / . . . И таинства священны / В Троянской брани пел.” Kheraskov, “K.n.zh.n. K.t.r.n. S.r.g.v.n. R.s.v.,” 200.

61. “Когда премудрости, кто в храм войти желает, / Пусть сердце наперед, неразум изправляет.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 88–89.

62. “[С]ладкий Цицерон лишался там прятства, / . . . / Все то, что с нежностью певал Анакреон, / . . . щитали там безделкой пустословы.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 86–87.

63. Ursula Stohler, Disrupted Idylls: Nature, Equality, and the Feminine in Sentimentalist Russian Women’s Writing (Mariia Pospelova, Mariia Bolotnikova, and Anna Naumova), with translations by Emily Lygo (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2016).

64. Gitta Hammarberg, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 44. OnPolion as pastoral, see Levitt, “The Polemic with Rousseau over Gender and Sociability,” 593–601.

65. “Мы Ею спасены и Ею ободренны, / Ея законами от смерти свобожденны.” Urusova, Pis΄mo Petru Dmitrievichu Eropkinu, 5, 7.

66. The image of the heroic sovereign cultivating her subjects’ heroic virtues was central to Catherine’s self-fashioning. See Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Liverpool, 2019), 151–57, 172–77.

67. “Ты общих благ всегда сам истинный рачитель / И в должности своей законов исполнитель; / Не однократно ты жизнь нашу сохранял.” Urusova, Pis΄mo Petru Dmitrievichu Eropkinu, 10.

68. Joachim Klein, Puti kul΄turnogo importa: Trudy po russkoi literature XVIII veka (Moscow, 2005), 185. Judith Vowles proposes breaking the name into the syllables “pol + i + on,” which translates to “the sex and he.” Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature,” 45.

69. Wendy Rosslyn, Anna Bunina (1774–1829) and the Origins of Women’s Poetry in Russia (Lewiston, 1997), 98.

70. A.F. Merzliakov, trans., Eklogi P. Virgiliia Marona (Moscow, 1807), 29–38. On Merzliakov and theEclogues, see Andrew Kahn, The Classical Roman Tradition in Russia c.1750–1840: Studies in Its Sources and Character (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1992).

71. Wendell Clausen, A Commentary on Virgil: Eclogues (Oxford, 1994), 121–22.

72. Alongside the Christian identification of the child with Jesus as the Messiah, Marcellus (Octavia’s son from a previous marriage), Drusus (Augustus’s stepson and possible biological child), and a son of Pollio himself were candidates frequently cited by eighteenth-century commentators. See, for example, Eclogues de Virgile. Traduction nouvelle, avec des notes historiques et critiques. Où l’on a inseré les endroits que Virgile a imitez de Théocrite. Avec un discours sur la poësie pastorale. Par M. Vaillant (Paris, 1724), 134–39; Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, ed. and trans., Les Œuvres de Virgile traduites en françois, le texte vis-à-vis la traduction, ornées de figures en taille-douce, avec des remarques, 4 vols. (Paris, 1743), 1:48–62; andLes Œuvres de Virgile, en latin et en françois, rev. ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1769), 1:38–39.

73. Besides the scholarly editions cited above, a possible source might be Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset’s fairly free imitation in French alexandrines, since Gresset inserts a reference to naiads absent in the original: Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset, Les Poésies de M. G. (Blois, 1734), 61–67 (63). However, naiads feature also in Urusova’s late lyrics “Ruchei” (The Brook, 1796) and “Stepnaia pesn΄” (Song of the Steppe, 1798–99), so Naida’s name may reflect simply the poet’s personal affinity for these water nymphs. Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 278, 288.

74. Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, revised G. P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1999–2000), 1:51.

75. “Невидно там садов, ни виноградных лоз, / . . . / Единым былием другое задушил, / И жизни Полион природу всю лишил.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 108–9 (translation modified).

76. “Цветы отдать лугам, пастушек не смущать. / Узнав, что больше нет в его селеньях стона, / Пришли к нему опять Церера и Помона: / Оне в поля его престол перенесли, / И класы желтые на нивах возрасли, / Плоды на древесах.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 150–51 (translation modified).

77. Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, 1991), 45.

78. “Мне зрится щастие ходяще здесь в венце, / У всех написано спокойство на лице; / . . . / Везде Астреин век исчез, но здесь он длится.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 138–39 (translation modified).

79. “Оставим здесь чины, . . . / Тебя как друга я, не как раба, звала.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 138–39.

80. Image reproduced in Kahn et al., A History of Russian Literature, 247.

81. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1995–2000), 1:113.

82. “Я ближним никогда злодейкой не была, / И тайну к щастию сию употребила, / Что благо я свое во благе их любила; / . . . / Кто сеял у тебя отраву ту в крови, / Что человеческий не стоит род любви[?]” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 140–41 (translation modified).

83. Levitt, “The Polemic with Rousseau over Gender and Sociability,” 590–91.

84. W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov: Enlightener of Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), 26–27.

85. “Везде он видел тут пороки, где другие. . .на силу приглядеть могли слабости, и слабости весьма обыкновенныя человечеству.” Vsiakaia vsiachina no. 53 (1769): 141.

86. “1) Никогда не называть слабости пороком. 2) Хранить во всех случаях человеколюбие.” Vsiakaia vsiachina no. 53 (1769): 142.

87. Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 142–43.

88. A.N. Pypin, ed., Sochineniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II na osnovanii podlinnykh rukopisei, 12 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1901–1907), 5:299–300, 331.

89. On imperial policing of elite sociability, see Igor Fedyukin, “Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg,” Slavic Review 76, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 907–30.

90. M.N. Makarov, “Materialy dlia istorii russkikh zhenshchin-avtorov,” Damskii zhurnal 29, no. 7 (February 1830): 98.

91. Fumaroli, “Les abeilles et les araignées,” 37–38, 48–49, 87; Jocelyn Royé, La Figure du pédant de Montaigne à Molière (Geneva, 2008), 194–96.

92. Larry F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2011), 71–73.

93. M. Poludenskii, ed., “Podlinnyia bumagi, do bunta Pugachova otnosiashchiiasia,” Chteniia v imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete 2 (1860), part 5, 31–92 (65).

94. “[Т]олько сказать мы можем, что сии Ироиды проистекли от одного пера с Поемою Полионом, или просветившимся нелюдимом.” E.S. Urusova, Iroidy muzam posviashchennyia (St. Petersburg, 1777);Sanktpeterburgskiia uchenyia vedomosti 6, no. 22 (June 2, 1777): 174–76 (175).

95. Yuliya Volkhonovych, Russian Heroides, 1759–1843: Translations and Transformations (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2014), 12.

96. Hoogenboom, Hilde, “Sentimental Novels and Pushkin: European Literary Markets and Russian Readers,” Slavic Review 74, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 553–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar (570).

97. “Там был младый Еней, спасающий Анхиза; / А здесь отца спасла, от гибели Флориза.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 212–13.

98. Kahn, Andrew, “Russian Elegists and Latin Lovers in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Thorsen, Thea S., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy (Cambridge, Eng., 2013), 336–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar (340–42).

99. Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 168–69, 182–83.

100. “Тот Скиптра и сердец бывает лишь владетель, / Примером в подданых кто сеет добродетель.” Ewington, Russian Women Poets, 180–81 (translation modified).

101. Barker and Gheith, introduction toA History of Women’s Writing in Russia, 2.