“ANTIQUISING IMAGINATION” IN THE SERVICE OF POLITICAL EXPANSION: ON THE EVE OF THE “GREAT GREEK PROJECT” OF CATHERINE II

The paper explores the materials of the correspondence of Voltaire and Catherine II for examination the schemes of Enlightenment historical imagination and arguments to history used for conceptualizing and legitimation of current political events and actions during the Russian-Ottoman war of 1768 – 1774. Tropological analysis reveals, among the series of sustained historical arguments having been developed by the “patriarch of the Enlightenment” in his aspirations to persuade the Russian empress to become the “queen of the Greeks” and European countries to support Catherine in her struggle against the Ottoman Empire, an especial type of classicist imaginative schemes (schemes of “antiquising imagination”) which were emerging in the correspondence during the discussion of the Balkan issues. The paper demonstrates how in these schemes, the territories of the Northern Pontic, the Balkans and the Archipelago were imagined and described by the participants of the correspondence in terms of the language which goes back to the texts by Greek classical authors included in the circle of classicist modern European education; analyses the political functions of this language in the texts of the French philosopher and the Russian empress; describes the first outlines of the future “Byzantine idea” in Russian political imagination.