Philosophical discourses on Russian poetry. Review of the book readings on Russian poetry. St Petersburg: Aletheia, 2021. 896 pp.

This review is a critical survey of the book Readings on Russian Poetry by Nikolay I. Kaliagin published in 2021. The author treats the development of Russian poetry from its emergence to the early 20th century and explores its most remarkable accomplishments as an integral part of Russian Orthodox culture. The author attests himself as “a subjective man of letters” rather than a philologist researcher and emphasizes that the book is a work of fiction rather than a scholarly treatise. The emphatically personal, subjective character of the book is revealed in its free associative structure with the use of extensive literary, philosophical and historical materials and in its reliance upon the Orthodox and Church traditions as well as on the axiological principles in its evaluation of poetic works. The central position in the book is thought to be the appraisal scale, according to which every poet has a definite value according to the scale proceeding from the assumption that each of the most outstanding poets, Pushkin, Baratynsky and Tyutchev, has a maximum scale number. This axiological approach has been carried throughout the book and the gradation of scale numbers is used as a basis for a vivid and original portrait gallery featuring a large constellation of poets active in the Golden Age of Russian literature and given in their dynamic comparison. The supreme accomplishments of Russian poetry are associated by the author with the reign of Nicholas I, which allows him to evolve an original concept of interrelationships between the flowering of Russian poetry and the conservative, monarchic regime of Nicholas’ Empire and the Uvarov formula of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Popular Spirit adopted in this period. The article asserts that Kalyagin’s highly original book, despite all its arguable points, which result, like its doubtful merits, from the subjectivism of the author’s approach, is a highly valuable contribution to the study of the history of Russian poetry.