Who Was Gavrila Derzhavin?
Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin (14 July 1743 – 20 July 1816) was one of the most important Russian poets of the 18th century and the leading figure of Russian literature between the death of Lomonosov and the rise of Pushkin. As a statesman, he served as a provincial governor and briefly as minister of justice under Paul I. As a poet, he brought to the Russian ode a vernacular directness and a satirical edge that broke decisively with the imitative classicism of his predecessors and made him, in the judgement of later writers including Pushkin and Tolstoy, the first truly original Russian poet.
Early life and career
Derzhavin was born in Kazan into a minor noble family of Tatar origin. He served in the army from 1762, took part in the coup that brought Catherine the Great to power in 1762, and then moved into the civil service. He held a succession of provincial posts — including, from 1784, the governorship of Olonets and then of Tambov — and became known in court circles for his ability to write poetry in praise of Catherine’s birthday and to deliver it himself in a voice that was sometimes too loud for the room.
His career at court was a series of advances and setbacks. Catherine liked his verses but disliked his lack of court polish; Paul I, whom he had satirised in a famous ode, never forgave him. He served briefly as minister of justice in 1802 under Alexander I, and spent his last years in retirement at his estate at Zvanka, near Novgorod, where he died in 1816.
The poetry
Derzhavin’s first major ode, Oda k Felitse (“Ode to Felitsa,” 1782), was a tribute to Catherine disguised as a poem in praise of an imaginary Tatar princess — a literary conceit that allowed the poet to flatter the empress and to satirise her courtiers in the same breath. The ode was an immediate sensation and established Derzhavin as the leading Russian poet of his generation. He followed it with a series of odes on the events of the reign — the annexation of the Crimea, the building of the monuments of the age — in which the official subject was always being challenged by an undertow of irony.
His range was unusually wide. He wrote a serious philosophical ode, Bog (“God,” 1784), that argued for a Deist vision of the cosmos and that Pushkin would later call “the loftiest of our odes.” He wrote the ode Vodopad (“The Waterfall,” 1791) on the death of his friend Prince Potemkin. He wrote fables, lyrics, epistles, and the long unfinished poem Pozhaluy starinam ne verit’ (“Don’t Believe the Ancients”). His poetry is uneven, and some of his odes have not aged well, but at its best it is unmatched in 18th-century Russian literature for its combination of formal ambition and vernacular force.
Style and reputation
Derzhavin’s importance in the development of Russian poetry is threefold. He was the first Russian poet to write the Russian language as Russian rather than as a translation of the Latin or French; he was the first to make the ode a vehicle for the personal voice of the poet rather than the impersonal voice of the state; and he was the first to bring to Russian literature the kind of satiric edge that would later become characteristic of the Russian tradition. The 19th-century writers, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, recognised in him a precursor of the modern Russian literary voice.
Legacy
Derzhavin is the subject of several monuments, including his own unfinished autobiography, Zapiski, and the statue in Kazan that was unveiled in 1845. His poetry was reprinted in the Soviet period and is now in the standard library of Russian literature. He is, with Lomonosov and Karamzin, one of the three names that an educated Russian reader would associate with 18th-century Russian poetry.