Creating and Performing Civil Rituals and Ceremonies at the Court of Peter the Great.

Tsar Peter I can be considered a conservative in the first stage of his reign (until the death of his brother Ivan in 1696), when he faced the task of abolishing the regency of Sofia Alekseevna (this happened in 1689) and freeing himself from the influence of the Naryshkin provincial clan on the part of his mother Natalia Kirillovna (she died in 1694). The triumph during the Azov military campaigns, which was the beginning of the formation of Russia as a naval and maritime power, and especially the Grand Embassy as a way to understand the new European culture gave Peter an impulse to carry out cultural reforms. The beginning of the transformations almost coincided with the outbreak of the Great Northern War, which, unexpectedly for the tsar himself, lasted too long. Therefore, it might be assumed that all his reforms, including the cultural ones, were carried out in the paradigm of war and peace. I would say that Petrine culture was not interested in war in itself, but in its "sense" and its impulse towards "enlightenment" (as Peter himself puts in Gistoriia sveiskoi voiny). Victor Zhivov has argued that the creation of a highly politicized ritual allowed Peter to propagate and affirm new cultural values and discredit the old ones. As a matter of fact, all the ceremonial innovations should be interpreted "as all part of a single larger complex that is united by the ideas being propagated and the interconnections among the concrete acts themselves". I propose a possible version of this kind of interpretation in the first part of my essay, referring to the 1700 ceremony of the signing of peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire and of the declaration of war against Sweden. Peter used ceremony to unveil his new foreign policy program. For creating and performing civil rituals, the tsar employed the symbolic language and political imagery which informed and entertained the Western absolutist courts (Richard Wortman). The Russian state provided explanatory texts of the allegorical decorations and scenery. The personages of the new iconography such as classical gods Mars, Neptune, Jupiter, Venus, Minerva, etc. were associated by the Russian Orthodox viewers with the early Christian church and with the Christian martyrdom organized by pagan emperors. For that reason, the authors of such texts had to explain to the receptors that they do not take part in a church ritual but in a civil one. Just two weeks before Peter's death (January 1725), in Moscow was published Bibliotheca by Pseudo-Apollodorus. Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich provided a preface about the benefit of reading about the gods worshipped by the ancients. Feofan continued the traditional line of the Byzantine theology, descending from the Church Fathers who considered a good part of classical philosophy as a prefiguration of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]