| In the early seventeenth century, howevera time of fiercely cruel religious struggles in the WestRussia began to become involved in these spiritual confrontations and her people experienced the expansionist assault of revived, post-Trentian Roman Catholicism. Thereafter, military or friendly encounters with Catholic and Protestant Europe grew more frequent and lasting, and the seventeenth century became the age of the penetration into Russia of the Baroque, the first Western artistic and literary movement directly to influence and even to alter the destinies of Russian culture and literature. The following hundred years were dominated by the culturally revolutionary and dynamic reigns of Peter I (1682-1725) and Catherine II (1763-1796). They were years primarily of imitation of the newly discovered West European patterns, themes, genres, and poetics. From the point of view of Russian literary development, the most lasting eighteenth-century achievements were the introduction of the syllabo-tonic metric poetic system, and the rise of poetry, for Russia produced in the eighteenth century at least two native poets of majestic stature, Mixail Lomonosov and Gavriil R. Derzavin. In the West, this century was the time of Enlightenment and of classicism, which followed in the footsteps of the previously dominant school there of the Baroque. Russia, however, was ill prepared for these two movements. In most other European countries, the phenomenon of Enlightenment was the result of prolonged philosophical and other cultural trends which had their roots in the Renaissance. Russia had never experienced the latter and could hardly then catch up with more advanced Western Europe or contribute significantly to this movement. Moreover, having never undergone the effects either of the Renaissance or of the Reformation or of the entire sumptuous blooming of the Baroque, Russians in the eighteenth century borrowed from the Westprimarily, a new system of education, secularized ways of thought, and, at a more slackened pace, the latest fashions in the arts. Therefore, as Professor Dmitrij Cizevskij points out in his new introduction, written especially for this edition, classicism never developed any really deep roots in Russia. At the same time, the Russian eighteenth-century Enlightenment, being only imitative and much more |
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