Scholars have linked Petrov’s success in praising Catherine in his Enei with his identifying of her with Dido. The comparison with Dido already pleased another female ruler — Maria Theresa of Austria, who enjoyed very much the opera Dido performed by her court composer Niccolo Jommelli in 1748.
Catherine II had even more justifications for comparisons to Dido: both were female monarchs; both were foreigners who had arrived from abroad and strengthened their countries by expansionism and the enlightenment of the people.65 In 1778, as Petrov was in the midst of his translations of the next cantos of the Aeneid, Catherine II was being embellished as Dido on the cameos of a dinner set made by the Sevres Porcelain Factory. The set (currently in the Hermitage) was a gift to Catherine from Prince Grigorii Potemkin.66 However, it was not the love story (important for Potemkin) that drew the attention of the exceptionally insightful Russian poet and translator, but Dido’s political strategies.
Remarkably, Petrov portrayed Dido, who forgot about her deceased husband and fell in love with Aeneas, extremely sympathetically. Petrov emphasized particular episodes in the Phoenician princess’s life. She fled her homeland of Tyre after her brother murdered her husband and usurped the throne; thereafter, she successfully founded the new city-state of Carthage. Clearly, the fate of the Carthaginian Queen would have implications for eighteenth-century Russia. The classical imperial paradigm was destined to serve as a constant model for political comparisons and allegories in Russia. In this case, readers could easily detect
65 Andrew Kahn, “Reading of Imperial Rome from Lomonosov to Pushkin”, in The Slavic Review, 52:4 (1993), 752–756.
66 I. V. Riazantsev, “Ekaterina v zerkale antichnoi mifilogii,” in Russkaia kul’tura poslednei treti XVIII veka — vremeni Ekateriny Vtoroi (Moscow, 1997), 140.
the similarities between Dido’s life and Catherine’s political maneuverings.
For example, Dido cautiously explains to the stranger Aeneas and his allies that her constant efforts to increase the defense and security of Carthage stem from her swift and unstable ascension to the throne in an alien country.67 The goddess Venus completes the story by relating all the previous misfortunes which have befallen Dido. First, there was her brother Pygmalion’s unjust accession to the throne. A tyrannical, vicious person, Pygmalion ignored all the customs (including religious ones) of the country. Petrov described him as the negative protagonist from the classical canon: “Tyrant, monster, the embodiment of all evil.”68 Pygmalion murders Dido’s husband inside the temple, near the altar, during a religious ceremony. He then does not even accord the victim a proper burial.
Russian readers could easily make the connection between Dido’s persecutor, a barbaric, uneducated dictator who flouts laws and religious customs, and Peter III. At the time of the ode’s publication, the judgments on Peter III from the second (so-called “extended”) Manifesto (published July 6th, 1762) on the occasion of Catherine’s accession were still fresh in the Russian readers’ memory. Peter III was described according to the classical canon as a despot obsessed with indecent desires and passions:
“The despotism of a Ruler who wields absolute power and who is the kind of person unbridled by kind and philanthropic qualities is an evil which can lead to fatal consequences. Thus, our fatherland ran into trouble when an Emperor-Tyrant who was slave to his passions, came to the throne. Such a personality did not allow him to think of the good of the country which he ruled.”69
Readers could also recall passages from the Manifesto concerning Peter’s disrespect towards Elizabeth on the occasion of her funeral:
67 Enei. Geroicheskaia poema Publiia Vergiliia Marona. Perevedena s latinskago Vasil’em Petrovym, 1, 32.
68 Ibid, 20.
69 Put’ k tronu, 491—492.
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“He ungraciously spoke about Her (Empress Elizabeth. — V. P.) body. With none of our sense of kinship or sincere concern <…>, he did not accord this great, generous Empress the funeral she deserved <…>”70
The second Manifesto also noted that there was a real threat that Catherine would be murdered on the eve of the revolt of 1762.
There was another notable detail in Petrov’s Enei which drew readers’
attention — Dido’s secret escape from Tyre, which corresponded with the first stage in Catherine’s coup, her secret trip from Peterhof to St. Petersburg.71 Dido’s escape from Tyre and her ascension to the throne also corresponded with the events of Catherine’s coup.72
The paradigm of city-state building in barbaric locales (Carthage and Saint Petersburg) was a significant one. It connected Dido (and, at the same time, Catherine II) with the myth of a creator of civilization. By the chain of allusions to Russian events, Petrov applied Virgil’s tradition of city building to Catherine, who then acquired the features of a “cultural hero,” a founder of a new civilization.
In his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Petrov found the appropriate material with which to develop the previously approved Amazonian metaphors. The female ruler Dido, despite all her “feminine” qualities, such as her desperate love for Aeneas, was given masculine features. She was portrayed as a strong and powerful autocrat capable of governing barbaric inhabitants, and her image was enriched by Amazonian motifs. In his first canto of Virgil’s translation, Petrov saturated the text with images of the female warriors. Moreover, he depicted Virgil’s heroines using formulas taken from his Ode on the Occasion of the Magnificent Carousel. We see Venus, disguised as an Amazon, and her female companions, described as “Sparta’s brave maidens.”73 The phrase
70 Ibid, 492.
71 Enei. Geroicheskaia poema Publiia Vergiliia Marona. Perevedena s latinskago Vasil’em Petrovym. 1, 20.
72 Ibid, 22.
73 Ibid, 20.
corresponded with a very well-known line from his Carousel ode addressed to the female participants in Catherine’s event: “Are they brave Sparta’s maidens?”74 The Amazons, astride strong-willed horses, with their curls streaming in the wind all look the same in Petrov’s translation, and thus, all bore close a close resemblance to Catherine’s image in Torelli’s painting.
In his Enei, Petrov consciously emphasized the effects of female masculinity by multiplying the Amazon images and using his own clichés, which, in turn, corresponded with Lomonosov’s and Sumarokov’s odes to the Empress Elizabeth. Petrov skillfully manipulated the reader’s perceptions by constantly returning to the Amazon theme. As a result, a comprehensive image of one brave female ruler was formed. It was no accident that Petrov called Dido
“tsarina,” incorporating the Russian term into his Latin translation.
In fact, the design of Petrov’s book as a whole was to include multiple references to Catherine’s involvement. The translator even added a poetic dedication to Catherine to the book.
Catherine, however, found only the first canto of the poem, which gave a detailed account of Dido’s ascension to the throne and her glamorous years as ruler of a newly established kingdom, to be of use. Petrov’s translation of the last cantos appeared only in 1781—1786. Between the first canto (1770) and the last ones, there were many changes in both political and literary trends. The new cantos, which came out in the mid-1780s, excited neither readers nor the empress, who had already adjusted her image and charged the poets of a new generation with its depiction. But in 1770, when Petrov’s Enei came out, the situation was quite different. Petrov had translated not just a poem; he had made an enormous contribution to Catherine’s sanctification in the most suitable of forms. He had
“translated” glory, ambition, and success along the lines of the classical model to the Russian throne. By translating Virgil into Russian, the poet had symbolically postulated the paradigms of a Russian translatio imperii.
74 Poety XVIII veka. I, 327.
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