Byron's Turkish Tales and Russian Byronism: Pushkin and the Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Reception of Byron

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) The almost universal recognition of Byron's poetry and the fame of his personality in Russian literature and culture is a well-known fact. A passionate interest both in his poetry and in his biography began to appear in Russia in the second decade of the nineteenth century and has existed ever since. As Nina Diakonova and Vadim Vatsuro have pointed out, 'his life and his works are as much studied, published and translated at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium as they were at the beginning of the nineteenth century'.1 While the first translations of his poetry appeared in Russia in 1819, the last one (The Prisoner of Chillon by G. Usova) was published in 1989; while the first Russian literary works about Byron date from the 1820s, the 1990s saw at least three Russian studies of the poet. In 1815, in the journal Rossiiskii Museum (The Russian Museum), V. V. Izmailov, a follower of Karamzin, mentioned Byron's name for the first time in the Russian press, reviewing The Corsair and noting the growing fame of both Byron and Walter Scott. Up to that time the Russian public had primarily been acquainted with a limited list of British writers: Milton, Shakespeare, Young, Gray, Ossian, Sterne and Richardson. Indeed, up until the 1770s, Russian culture was mostly orientated towards French models, and Russians knew almost nothing about British authors, except for some essays and allegorical tales by Addison, Steele and Dr Johnson. A. A. Bestuzhev, a Decembrist and a prominent man of letters, noted in 1833 that England 'was lying then for us at the sea-bottom'.2 The next review that mentioned Byron appeared a year later, in 1816, and was written by another Karamzin follower, V. I. Kozlov, in the journal Russkii Invalid (The Russian Invalid). The two journals represented the Russian sentimentalists' circle and gave the first interpretation of Byron's poetry as 'sensitiveness ever tender and vivid'. The anti-Karamzinist journal, Vestnik Evropy (The Messenger of Europe), which began to publish papers on Byron's work in 1818, stressed another feature of Byron's art - the 'bleak colouring' and 'rebellious passions' of the heroes. This point of view revealed the pre-romantic, 'Ossianic' understanding of it.3 Byron became famous in Russia in the 1820s and 30s among a new generation of critics, writers and readers. Byron became the most important figure of contemporary European poetry for people whose minds were shaped by the French Revolution, which inspired optimism in the liberal-thinking Russian aristocracy and gave rise to the political reaction of the tsarist government. The Napoleonic War of 1812 influenced Russian society no less. The event was followed by rebellions among peasants and soldiers in the next decade and by a strong liberation movement among the nobility, which led some of them to the Senate Square in Saint Petersburg on 14 December 1825 and to the scaffold or Siberia after the Decembrists' failure. The following extract from a letter written in 1819 by Count Petr Viazemskii, a poet, critic and close friend of Pushkin, gives one of the earliest examples of this new, and very enthusiastic, attitude towards Byron's poetry: I am bathing in the depths of poetry, reading and rereading Lord Byron, certainly, in pale French translations. What a rock, from which the ocean of poetry is spurting! [...] Who reads English and writes Russian in Russia? Bring him to me! I'll pay him with my life for each Byron verse.4 Byron, both as a personality and a poet, became a symbol of the new epoch for Russian readers. As Viazemskii declared in 1827, in 'Sonety Mitskevitcha' ('Mickiewicz's Sonnets'), 'it is impossible in our time not to sound Byronic. [...] He set to music the song of the whole generation.'5 The reception of Byron's poetry proved to be inseparable from interest in his life. As a contemporary writer and a conspicuous figure in European politics, Byron attracted people's attention to the smallest details of his life. …