Abstract: The reform of Peter initiated an imitation of the modern European civilization on a massive scale in Russia. After 1749, the Old Rus literature, which was mainly characterized by the Russian Orthodox faith and the East Slav folk aesthetics, rapidly yielded its dominance to literature of translation and the modern Russian literature imitated from the European literature. Toward the end of 1900, however, as the European Romanticist movement, which advocated national identity, quickly spread to Russia and, particularly, Napoleon failed in his promotion of French Enlightenment in Russia through military force, the Russian Decembrists, who attempted to install the European political system, were defeated in their revolt and the system of censorship was further intensified. All this made Russian intelligentsia and literary circle to reconsider European civilization and their history of worshiping Europe and inspired Russian writers and artists to treat European literature with subjective consciousness, rewrite history for the Russian people, and imagine the Russian Empire’s greatness as compared to Europe. Soon, the aristocratic aesthetics, which was heavily influenced by the French court, lost its steam, but the secular popular literature gained its great vitality. From then on, the mechanism for literary production, circulation, and consumption was reconstructed with a growing emphasis on displaying the wonder of the Russian Empire, nurturing Russians’ identification with the nation and confidence in its literature, and hence creating the so-called “19^th-cdentury Russian literature.”

Key words: Russian literature in the 19 century, Russianizing romanticism, identification with Russian Empire, secularization of Russian literature