The religious and philosophical odes of Gavrila Derzhavin frequently attest
to his belief in the immortality of the soul. These attestations, however, are
more than simply pious expressions of accepted religious doctrine. They are
also more than merely odic formulations of devout belief, the aestheticization
of religious creed. Derzhavin instead puts forward a philosophically nuanced
position on the immortality (extratemporality) of the soul, and he consistently
does this by reference to concepts of morality. This confluence of ideas (religious,
moral and temporal) is remarkably similar to that found in the writings of Derzhavin’s
German contemporary, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argues that the immortality
of the soul must be taken as a “postulate” of moral law.
Proceeding in three stages, this paper will use Kant’s clear line of reasoning
to explicate Derzhavin’s complex neglected masterpiece “Bessmertie
dushi” (1797). First (briefly) I will provide some background on Derzhavin’s
moral stance in poetry, his assertions, characteristic of the Enlightenment,
of the immortality of virtue. Next (also briefly) I will outline Kant’s
argument for the immortality of the soul, as given in the Critique of Practical
Reason and the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Finally
(the bulk of the paper) I will turn to “Bessmertie dushi,” where
Derzhavin’s beliefs in the immortality of virtue and the immortality of
the soul become intertwined in a manner which suggests that Derzhavin, like
Kant in a different medium, had developed a sophisticated “metaphysics
of morality.” I will conclude the paper with a few words about how this
metaphysics of morality affects the developing scholarly reception of Derzhavin.