SOURCE: Vroon, Ronald. “Aleksandr Sumarokov's Ody toržestvennye: Toward a History of the Russian Lyric Sequence in the Eighteenth Century.” Zeitschrift für Slavische Philology 55, no. 2 (1995-96): 223-63.

In the following essay, Vroon attempts to show that the odes in Ody toržhestvennye, which are often radically edited versions of earlier poems, were altered not only because of Sumarokov's changing ideological concerns and attitudes toward his subjects but because he had a particular artistic vision for the collection as a whole.

In 1774 the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences published several new collections of verse by Aleksandr Sumarokov, all of them prepared and edited by the poet himself. Among them was Ody toržestvennye,¹ a series of thirty panegyrics to Peter I, Elizabeth, Peter III, Catherine II, the heir-apparent, Paul, and his bride, Natalija Alekseevna. All had been previously published, either in journals or as individual brochures, over a...