By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late-Eighteenth - Early-Nineteenth-Century Russia (Ars Rossica) (in English)
Synopsis "By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late-Eighteenth - Early-Nineteenth-Century Russia (Ars Rossica) (in English)"
'By Fables Alone...' is a welcome English version of Andrei Zorin's 2001 groundbreaking volume containing a number of expert and imaginative examinations of ideological models produced during Catherine II's, Alexander I's, and Nicholas I's reigns. Zorin, a leading scholar of Russian literature and culture of period, begins, in Chapters One to Four, with the incisive discussion of the so-called Greek Project masterminded by Catherine the Great; moves, in Chapters Five to 9, to the analyses of several politically significant cultural developments in Alexander's time; and ends, in Chapter 9, with a brilliant examination of the central ideological formula of Nicholas I's reign, "Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Nationality," conceived and articulated by Sergei Uvarov. Equally at home with literature, culture, and politics of the time, Russian as well as Western, Zorin moves effortlessly between these fields to explain the formation of Russian cultural myths, some of which are relevant even today. Expertly translated by Marcus C. Levitt, the book is a fascinating read for any scholar interested in the process of formation of cultural symbols serving ideological purposes.
