Happy Golden Anniversary, Harvard School!

In view of current reconsiderations of the rather limiting ideas that the scholarly tradition has associated with terms such as Augustanism and Augustan literature (e.g., Farrell and Nelis 2013) the Harvard School's achievements can hardly be overestimated.

This paper seeks to explore the use of Vergil’s Aeneid in the formation and development of Russian national identity and literary consciousness. Vergil’s epic of national rebirth offered Russian men of letters an opportunity to think about and act upon national self-determination in political, religious, and cultural terms. As a result of that the reception of the Aeneid in Russia was decidedly and pointedly optimistic from its very onset in the 18^th century and up to the literary expressions of the 20^th.

As the so-called Harvard School celebrates its fiftieth birthday, this paper adds two thousand candles to the cake. ‘Pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ readings, I argue, gestated along with the Aeneid itself: its antecedent texts, internal representations of reception, and object biography conditioned even Vergil’s earliest audiences to interpret the epic dialectically.

In 1992, the static continental divide between the Harvard and the European readings of Virgil’s Aeneid was shut, rather than bridged, by Duncan Kennedy’s single – dynamic – dialectic twist.