The Spiritual Origins of the Petrine Myth

Abstract

The overarching argument in each of the three chapters of this dissertation is that an effective examination of the Petrine scenario of power must take into account its rootedness in seventeenth-century court ritual, political contingency, the influence of individual cultural actors at the court, and the role that the Eastern Orthodox Church played in the justification, edification, and perpetuation of power in late Muscovy. What emerges from this examination is a picture of court culture at the time that shows how a unique synthesis of baroque aesthetics and humanistic rhetoric realized in the sermons, theoretical writing, and spiritual poetry of Simeon Polotskii, Stefan Iavors’kyi, and Teofan Prokopovych shaped representations and understandings of the tsar cum Imperator, empire, and power leading up to and during the reign of Peter I (r. 1682-1725). These forms provide insight into how the Petrine scenario of power took shape — not from the mind of the ruler in a demiurgic act of creation ex nihilo nor through the sober ecstasies of the poet, but as a reaction to the discrete exigencies of political life at the Russian court that was well within the horizons of the possible in the given cultural environment.