SOURCE: Gleason, Walter. “Sumarokov's Political Ideals: A Reappraisal of His Role as a Critic of Catherine II's Policies.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 18, no. 4 (December 1976): 415-26.

In the following essay, Gleason argues that Sumarokov's political ideals of a civil monarch restricted by moral and legislative restraints were at odds with his support for some of Catherine the Great's practices and policies.

For a writer considered by his eighteenth-century followers to be “our Racine, Moliere, LaFontaine [or] Boileau,”¹ Aleksandr Sumarokov has frequently been of less interest to historians than his successors such as Nikolai Novikov or Denis Fonvizin. The scholarly attention paid to these younger writers has served to obscure the contribution of their most prestigious contemporary and senior in providing an initial definition to the political relations between Catherine and the littérateurs of her reign. Many influential Soviet analyses have either shunted Sumarokov to the domain of the literary...