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With Mioszs The Captive Mind standing behind Cavanaghs Lyric Poetry and
Modern Politics, which has received the National Book Critics Circle Award,
there is a chance that Western critics interpretations of modern Russian and
Polish lyric will at last undergo a correction and refinement. Cavanagh engages
in a polemic with postmodern theory while providing a comparative study of
lyric poetry on both sides of the Iron Curtain: the revision of Anglo-A merican
Romanticism by Miosz, Bloks echoing of Yeats, Whitmans influence on Mayakovsky and Akhmatovas on Szymborska, the haunting of Eliot and Akhmatova
by the ghost of the past, and the assimilation of Tel Quel by Zagajewskis generation. Miosz is the unacknowledged legislator of this tradition of cross-
fertilizationsof lyrics that salvage lost and overlooked things from political
catastrophe and war. Even as Cavanagh focuses deftly on the details of particular
poems, she treats the blind eye that critics like Said have turned on the historical experience of Eastern Europe. While communist European states followed
their version of Marx, demanding that lyric poets transcend bourgeois interiorization, Marxist critics in the West praised the anti-imperialist poetry of
collective validation, though at the same time damning the communist state. As
a consequence, Western criticism simplified the status of Eastern European poets
to that of martyrsa simplification that Cavanagh resists and complicates.
Nina Pelikan Straus
doi 10.1215/0961754X-2073461

Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs,
17941854 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 361 pp.

Joseph de Maistre has long presented unusual difficulties to the intellectual history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much of his career lay
outside Europes ordinary cultural circuits, along an arc that joined the Savoyard
and imperial Russian courts. The sources of much of his thought were equally
unconventional; they included the Joachimite theology of the economy of salvation, the cosmogony of Scottish rite freemasonry, the illuminism of Louis-Claude
de Saint-Martin, the palingenesis of the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, varieties of Roman Catholic dvot piety, and theological and ecclesiological controversies within the Russian Orthodox church. Compounding these contextual difficulties was a stylistically brilliant rhetoric of apocalyptic violence that frequently
obscured the inner logic of the Maistrian universe. With impressive energy and

387

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 344 pp.

Lit tle Rev iews

Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West

38 8
C o m m o n K n o wled g e

erudition, Armenteros has overcome these difficulties to recover Maistres formative role in the articulation of a distinctively French idea of history. Maistre
made sense of his experience of the trauma of the French Revolution with a law
of alternativity. He believedhere not all that far from many Enlightenment
philosophesthat providence would ultimately lead humanity to angelize itself in
an intramundane heavenly city. Unlike these philosophes, Maistre could not, in
the wake of 1789, have providence work itself out in the mode of continuous linear improvement. Rather, providence worked itself out through a historical imitatio Christi and a necessary cycle of destructive periods of normless individualism
and remedial suffering, and of creative and curative periods of social integration.
For Maistre, the foundation of social integrationindeed the fundamental social
factwas religion, and only with the re-Christianization of Europe might the
Satanic revolution come to an end.
After 1815, Maistres theory of history clearly had its conservative uses,
whether internationally, in the creation of the Holy Alliance, or within France,
in debates over the religious character of the Restoration. But his theory of history also had uses on the Left, which he did not anticipate, in the development of
moral statistics among the prefects of the Directory, in Felicit de Lamennaiss
dramatic evolution from Roman Catholic conservative to democratic radical and
secular socialist, and, most importantly, in the various Saint-Simonian designs
for a new Christianity or a new spiritual power. Armenteros would moreover like
to find a place for Maistre in early nineteenth-century liberalism. To be sure,
Maistres ultramontane conception of the papacy as an institutional check on
royal absolutism shared with liberalism a distrust of politics. But Maistre did not
share the liberal confidence that the free market of ideas might generate sufficient
resources of moral renewal to moderate the self-interest and instrumental rationality of the free market of commodities. Maistres popes were, in Armenteross
words, so many cultural Robespierres of the future. Auguste Comte was not
wrong to have taken from Maistre the argument that dogmatism is the normal
state of the human mind. It is odd, therefore, that Armenteros so emphatically
insists that the year 1854 marks the end of the Maistrian moment. This insistence
not only tends to remarginalize Maistre. It also deflects attention from one of
the more important inferences that her history makes possible: the significance
of a modern Pelagianism for the spiritual despotisms that continue to haunt our
times.
Charles Sullivan
doi 10.1215/0961754X-2073470