From Rome to the Third Rome? Dante and Tyutchev in Search of Empire

Abstract

The article compares Dante’s and Tyutchev’s conceptions of empire. Despite the fact that their imperial projects are separated by six centuries, they are con­nected with the comprehension of the Roman Empire as the historical destiny of the European world. A comparison of their concepts is of particular interest due to the fact that in Dante we find recognizable features of New Age political and legal thought, while in Tyutchev we find an interpretation of their mani­fested consequences. Conceptualizing the concept of empire as interpreted by the poets, the author comes to the conclusion that empire as an idea conceived over the actual geopolitical reality was considered by them as having no fixed spatial and temporal boundaries – it is not a static political body chained in boundaries, but a sort of canon of a large political space formed by the “radia­tions” of empire. At the same time, the idea expressed by V.S. Solovyov and Y.M. Lotman of the kinship of the poets’ ideas about empire is only partially true. Dante and Tyutchev proposed fundamentally different grounds for the legit­imacy of the right (power) to empire and, accordingly, came to different conclu­sions about the subject of this right and the direction of translatio imperii. In Tyutchev’s system of ideas Dante’s justification of the autonomous political order of the empire – an “earthly paradise” within which the goals of “corrupt­ible” man are achieved – with the help of arguments to reason and the nature of things turns out to be the origin of the destructive to European civilization ten­dencies, that he witnessed.