Drews, Peter Heine und die Slaven. Die gesamtslavische Rezeption der Werke Heinrich Heines von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 348 of which was habitually discarded by those who would want any discussion of Russia’s literary achievements to stem solely from Pushkin — then her book does not quite meet the challenge of its title. Almost no attention is paid to Peter’s reforms — such as moving the Russian capital to St Petersburg, stripping the Russian Orthodox church of its patriarch, the introduction of a new calendar, the Table of Ranks and initiating Enlightenment — all of which were understood as revolutionary well before 1750 and before Derzhavin was even born. Yet, except for Lomonosov, Golburt seems to ignore the work of such writers as Prokopovich, Kantemir, Trediakovskii and the early Sumarokov, which introduced the notion of the ‘epochal’ significance of Peter’s reforms, whilst Trediakovskii’s changes to the system of Russian prosody (with Lomonosov’s enhancements) were just as epochal for modern Russian literature as anything accomplished in that century. Finally, even if one were to argue that Catherine’s rule alone was ‘epochal’ and emblematic of the entire century, as another Mikeshin Monument to Catherine the Great of 1873 might lead us to believe, it must be conceded that Golburt does not express this idea especially strongly. Nor does she focus on the writers during Catherine’s reign, for example, Derzhavin’s contemporaries Fonvinzin and Radishchev, who with respect to the Petrine period would have viewed her reign as anti-epochal. Yet, having expressed my misgivings about the book’s title, let me again stress the strength of the book’s content and its nuanced readings of key texts. I would certainly recommend it to all my students and colleagues as one of the more impressive achievements of recent scholarship. Slavic Department, Brown University Alexander Levitsky Drews, Peter. Heine und die Slaven. Die gesamtslavische Rezeption der Werke Heinrich Heines von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Slavistische Beiträge, 492. Otto Sagner, Munich, Berlin and Washington, D.C., 2013. 377 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. CD-rom. €38.00 (paperback). When was the last time any one of us in this field had a chance to employ the word ‘Pan-Slavonic’ in any other context than ironic? In his Heine and the Slavs, Peter Drews has accomplished the seemingly impossible: his encyclopedic account of one ethno-linguistic group’s infatuation with a singer of strange songs from an alien land amounts to proof that the much-vaunted all-Slavonic unity may exist not only in the minds of idealists and enthusiasts. According to this fact-driven narrative, the unprecedented wave of Heine-worship that swept over Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century was far from REVIEWS 349 endemic. By amassing evidence not only from the literary history of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Czech Republic, but also from Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria, Drews proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that a Slavonic appreciation of Heine has always been and continues to be a peculiarly durable phenomenon. As far as the annals of Slavonic cultures are concerned, it may well be without parallel, as even Goethe (and Byron, I would add) cannot rival the popularity and influence Heine enjoyed to the east of the Danube ever since he befriended a Russian diplomat by the name of Fedor Tiutchev in Munich in 1828 (see p. 11). Viewed superficially, ‘Heine in Russia’ is hardly a new subject. Numerous book-length studies, countless articles, essays and bibliographic surveys have been devoted to the explication of Heine’s formative impact on and strong presence in Russian letters. What is remarkable about the Russian section of Drews’s survey is its freedom from both the timeworn clichés of Soviet literary approaches and post-Soviet idiosyncrasies, on the one hand, and his ability to synthesize the German and foreign analyses with those executed locally, on the other. Drews’s Russian chapter will introduce those interested in the subject to the evolution of Heine’s interpretation in that culture while stressing all its highpoints, from the mass absorption, imitation and parodying of the poet to the paramount individual cases of Russian involvement with Heine (for Drews’s introductions to Innokentii Annenskii and Aleksandr...