The Russian war with the Porte turned out to be remarkably in tune with the Baroque perception of the world as a series of historic events that continually repeats itself. Poets and politicians immediately found “similarities,” and started to cast Russian triumphs as modern versions of ancient Greek and Roman heroic feats. As a result, the discourse of war had turned into a mythological palimpsest in which modern episodes and their participants are viewed through the prism of ancient history and myths.
The specifics of the geographical setting contributed a great deal to the creation of such a palimpsest. The war happened to take place in legendary locations that made old historical realities and myths quite actual. The names of Crimea, Morea (the southern part of Greece), Greece, Sparta, Archipelago (the part of Aegean Sea between Greece and Asia Minor) sounded like an evocation of the past, the era of epic poetry and myth. Vasilii Petrov rightly perceives connections to Ancient times in his extended Poem on the Victories of the Russian Army over the Tatars and the Turks, gained under the command of Field-Marshal, Count Rumiantsev, near the town of Zhurzhi (1771):
Here the summit of every smoking hill Was known and cherished by the Romans.
You contain traces of the Trojan troops, You witness now the Russian victory!33
Russian poets interpreted the fight against the Porte through the prism of the Roman invasions and embroidered their military odes with Greek mythology. At the same time, Russian odes of the period quickly adopted the European tradition of the ideological and cultural palimpsest in which the figure of the warrior-king who combats the Muslims acquires a multi-layered system of representation that included Homeric and Virgilian motifs, Biblical
33 [Vasilii Petrov], Poema na pobedy Rossiiskogp voinstva, pod predvoditel’stvom generala fel’dmarshala Grafa Rumiantseva, oderzhannyia nad Tatarami I Turkami, so vremeni ego voenachal’stva nad pervoiu armieiu do vziatiia goroda Zhurzhi (Saint Petersburg, 1771), 15.
allusions, as well as the myths about the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece. Later, in his Historical Laudatory Speech to Catherine II (1801), Nikolai Karamzin, the sharpest expert in political mythology and its strategies, gave a subtle interpretation of the events of the Turkish war. He writes, recalling the unexpected arrival of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean Sea:
“The sacred chronicles of History disturbed the hearts of our sailing Heroes when they got sight of Italy. It seemed to them that the great shades of Fabritius, Camillus, and Scipio
<…> looked, with curiosity and astonishment, at Catherine’s flag, proud and unfamiliar to these seas. It seemed to them that Russia, in her splendor, was a new Rome. With such feelings, our Argonauts approached the countries, renowned in chronicles of glory since ancient times <…>”34
Karamzin does not describe a real event of war, but the fictionalized feelings of its participants. He italicizes his poetic refrain “it seemed to them” and names the Russian soldiers Argonauts with an aim to invoke the ancient myth. Eventually, as a writer and historian, he reconstructs and reveals the main cultural metaphors of the poetry of that time. Karamzin’s reading of the epoch’s belletristic discourse indicates the most significant paradigms of the military poems.
Russian poetry during the first months of the war began to experience a striking increase in allusions to the Roman Empire.
Odes, poems, even military reports and magazine articles abounded in comparisons between the Russian participants of the campaign and Roman patterns of glory and vigor. These metaphors affirmed Russia’s claim to be a world power and, on the other hand, through references to the old and well-established imperial symbolism, justified the unconditional rightness of Russia’s actions.
Catherine, in her turn, cultivated such metaphors, and even introduced one citation, which enjoyed immense popularity and became the pattern to imitate. When the Field-Marshal Peter Rumiantsev complained to Catherine concerning the numerical supremacy of the Turkish army, the empress reassured him, citing
34 N. M. Karamzin, Sochineniia, 8 (Saint Petersburg, 1835), 12.
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the Romans’ example: “The Romans <…> did not ask how many enemies they had to fight, but where the enemy was.”35 On July 21, 1770, on the shores of the river Kagul, in Moldova, the Russian army successfully defeated the Turks, and 20,000 Turkish troops perished while only 353 Russians died. Recalling Catherine’s declaration, Rumiantsev proudly reported to her:
“Let me liken this feat with the ancient Romans’ deeds which your Highness requested to imitate. Is it not so, when the army of your Imperial Majesty does not ask how big the enemy is, but only seeks where he is.”36
The witty reply by Rumiantsev also became known among contemporaries, and the military epistolary inspired poets to follow suit.
Vasilii Petrov mentions the phrase several times in his Poem on the Victories of the Russian Army <…> near the town of Zhurzhi (1771):
Oh, ancient Rome, the father of invincible warriors, The school of the most glorious heroes under the sun <…>
The empress appreciates your disciples,
Upon her order her zealot strives to imitate them;
He gallops toward dangers, spears, fires, He does not observe the number of enemies, But only seeks where they are.37
The author of the lyric drama The Russians in the Archipelago (Россы в Архипелаге; 1772), Pavel Potemkin (a distant relative of Grigorii Potemkin), echoes this pattern. The poem portrays Aleksei Orlov, who was recently appointed commander-in-chief of the Russian fleet sent to the Archipelago, as the main protagonist;
he lead a very successful attack in which the far superior Turkish navy was completely annihilated at Chesma. The poem reflects the official propaganda, which presented the war as a clash between civilization and barbarity, with the Russian army undertaking a war of liberation. There are two characters, Sophronym and Bukoval, the
35 S. M. Soloviev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen. 1766– 1772, 27– 28, 479.
36 Ibid, 481.
37 [Vasilii Petrov], Poema na pobedy Rossiiskogp voinstva, 15.
leaders of the Greek partisans, who fight under the Russian command to liberate their Christian compatriots from the Muslim yoke.
The author implies the motif of the Russian military campaign as a sacred war; he excessively emphasizes the merciful quality of the Russian soul, especially by including the liberation of the captive chief of the Turks, Osman.
Summing up all the most significant ideological motifs of Catherine’s military propaganda, Pavel Potemkin, as a result, invokes the Empress’s famous Roman comparison. He makes Aleksei Orlov the bearer of Catherine’s lucky saying. Thus, Orlov replies to the English general Elphinstone who hesitated to attack the Turks because of their numerical supremacy:
While the Romans did not observe the number
of their enemies,
The Russians were not less in courage,
When they chased the Turkish fleet down to Chesma, Everyone recognized the Turks’ majority,
But who was frightened looking at this multitude?
You recently witnessed an example of Russian courage, Why should we discuss the large numbers?
We are used to triumphing over quantity with bravery.38 Moreover, the comparison with Rome was immortalized as a slogan of the epoch when it was engraved on the pedestal of the Morea Column in Tsarskoe Selo. The column commemorates the successful operation in Morea, the southern part of the Greek peninsula. Troops under the command of Fedor Orlov (the youngest of the four Orlov brothers, an admirer of ancient Greece) successfully occupied the territory in February 1770. The Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi (1710–1794) designed the column according to the Roman Doric order, combining a massive Roman base with a Greek style pillar. It corresponded very well not only to the symbolic translatio of imperial power, but also, as we will see further, to a rising taste for an amalgam of Greek and Roman culture. The engraved inscription on the base states: “<…> the Russian troops numbered only six
38 Pavel Potemkin, Rossy v Arkhipelage (Saint Petersburg, 1772), 20–21.
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hundred; they did not ask how many enemies they had to fight, but only where they were.”39
Rinaldi flooded the empress’s country residence with triumphant arches and obelisks: besides the Morea Column, he erected his most famous Kagul Obelisk. The Orlov Gates opened way to the residence. Though the Gates were not directly connected with the war (they glorified Grigorii Orlov’s suppression of the Plague Riot in Moscow in 1771), they reproduced the strong and impressive forms of the Arch of Titus, built to celebrate the Roman emperor’s demolition of Jerusalem in 70 AD.40 The event, since the Medieval Ages, had been an emblem of Christian triumph over the Muslims. In this way, the victory over the bubonic plague, which had originated from the Ottoman Porte’s dominions, became equal to military triumphs over the Muslim adversary. It is very characteristic that later, in 1789, Catherine ordered the use of the Orlov Gates for another ceremony, already during the second Turkish war. The gates, redecorated with new inscriptions that were more appropriate to the event, assisted in celebrating the triumphant entrance of Grigorii Potemkin into Saint Petersburg after several victorious campaigns against the Turks. 41
Roman obelisks, columns, and arches invaded Russian territories during the wars with the Turks, thus organizing the symbolic space of the empire. In Europe, their construction began to flourish at the end of the sixteenth century, in the time of Henri the Fourth, which was praised by Voltaire.42 At the beginning of the 1770s, Catherine initiated the building of a whole park of such monuments. The processions of emperors and troops under the triumphant arches, as always, signified a transition from a real area to a mythological one, thereby supplying the state with additional symbolic capital. In erecting obelisks and columns in her territories,
39 S. Ia. Lastochkin, Iu. F. Rubezhanskii, Tsarskoe Selo — rezidentsiia rossiiskikh monarkhov (Saint Petersburg, 1998), 182.
40 A. Kuchariants, Antonio Rinaldi (Saint Petersburg, 1994), 122.
41 M. I. Pyliaev, Zabytoe proshloe okrestnostei Peterburga (Saint Petersburg, 1889), 466– 468.
42 Roy Strong, A Splendor at Court. Renaissance spectacle and illusion (London, 1973), 30– 31.
the Russian power associated herself with history: all events of the state were to be considered not only in the context of real politics, but also in that of eternal historic triumphs. At the same time, as in a palimpsest, through the Russian events in Moldavia, Morea and the Archipelago, contemporaries sought to read the fading features of the ancient age.