Review of J.E. Kalb, Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890-1940, Madison 2008, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 17 (2010) 631–5. (original) (raw)

The two works with which the non-Russian reader of this book is most likely to be familiar are Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's Christ and Antichrist (1895-1905), and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1940), discussed in the first and concluding chapters respectively. The texts develop Rome-related themes in contrasting ways to reflect on the transformation of Russian national identity. The protagonists of Merezhkovskii's trilogy seek to reconcile the aesthetic sensibility, human creativity and worldly power associated with paganism with the Christian values of love and self-sacrifice – a task doomed to failure or miscomprehension in the historical settings described in the three books, but which was conceived to hold out messianic possibilities for contemporary Russians and Russia as a whole. In Bulgakov's famous novel the prospect originally suggested by Merezhkovskii of Russia's providential rebirth as a heavenly kingdom on earth is parodied in the thematically parallel stories of an early Soviet author (the Master) and the protagonist of his book manuscript , Yeshua (Aramaic for Jesus), whose faith and livelihood are brutally shattered by the cynical logic of imperial power. Judith Kalb's book traces the literary history of Rome as a symbol of hope and despair linking these two texts through a series of less well-known Russ-ian modernist works. They span the period from the early Symbolism of the 1890s, born not least from Merezhkovskii's self-conscious rejection of the Realism of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Turgenev, through the vicissitudes of revolution and world war to the onslaught of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. To Merezhkovskii and his successors, Rome's imperial and religious history offered a semiotic kaleidoscope that enabled them to present their understanding of Russia's ambiguous position at the threshold to a new age, as a potential catalyst and eventual obstacle to universal spiritual renewal. K.'s scope and capacity prove more than a match to explain the workings of Russia's Rome as a 'mythmaking tool'. Her penetrating illustration of the topos' staying