The Queen is Dead, Long Live the King: Paul I's Accession and the Plasticity of Late Eighteenth-Century Panegyric

This article examines panegyric texts written in the first months after Paul I's accession by four Russian poets of diverse poetic and political backgrounds: Vasilii Petrov, Gavrila Derzhavin, Nikolai Karamzin, and Ivan Dmitriev. The article makes a case for reading the rhetorical and formal flexibility of their evaluations of Catherine II and projections for Paul's reign in the context of concurrent developments in Russian poetry: the destabilization of the Classicist genre hierarchy, sentimentalist emphasis on interiority, and poetry's expanding social ambit.