Was there petrarchism in Russia?

Abstract

The turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the period of the most active interest of the well-educated Russian audience in Petrarch. Analysing the ways his biography and writings were adopted and familiarized in the country, the author of the article attempts to answer the question whether the notion petrarchism is applicable to Russia. The author comes to the conclusion that with regard to Russia, the term petrarchism could be applied only with a number of reservations and only as a very broad term for denoting various forms in which Petrarch’s writings and biography affected the Russian writers of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Unlike in other European countries, in Russia Petrarch had become neither the topic of popular admiration nor the subject of general imitation, and his legacy was accepted in the general context of western European culture. At the same time, Russia, in spite of all its uniqueness, in certain ways followed the experience of the ‘classical’ petrarchist countries. One of the ways this was manifested was in the specific features of the first translations. Another way that European petrarchism was similar to that in Russia was in the combination of an interest in imitating Petrarch with a desire to boost the development of the national language.