English Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Abstract

Dear colleagues! There is no necessity whatever to tell this audience of the importance of international, cultural, and literary connections in the spiritual development of mankind. But I fear that my Presidential Address will disappoint my listeners. I have not invented any original, significant, and intricate conceptions, such as those which, as I have learned, abound in the addresses of my predecessors. Mine is based on concrete historical and literary facts I have gathered over many years of research. These numerous facts certainly cannot be presented fully in one lecture, so in many cases I have to limit myself to the bare listing of some general tenets. But let me pass on to my subject. As is generally known, political and then cultural connections between England and Russia were established and more or less developed from the middle of the sixteenth century. In I553 the English navigator Richard Chancellor, on his ship Edward Bonaventure, arrived on the shores of the White Sea, went to Moscow, where he was received by the Russian Tsar Ivan IV (known as Ivan the Terrible) as an envoy, and returned to England a year later. Later, commercial, diplomatic, and (to a certain extent) cultural connections between the two countries were established. It is significant that Muscovy (as Englishmen called Russia then) and Muscovites were more than once mentioned by English playwrights at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries: by Marlowe, Shakespeare (in Love's Labour's Lost), Webster, Fletcher (The Loyal Subject), and others. English bibliophiles assiduously collected Russian manuscripts. In 1682 (before he lost his sight) John Milton wrote A Brief History of Moscovia, and so on. On the other hand, an obvious interest in Britain became apparent in Russian written works. Britannia, by the prominent English geographer William Camden, was translated from Latin into Russian. We also know of the mid-seventeenth-century anonymous Rospis' gorodu Lundanu i vsei Aglinskoi zemli ('Description of the City of London and All the English Land'). Russian book-lovers gathered an abundance of information about England, its nature, population, and historical events, in translations of geographical, historical, and publicistic works. An interest in English belles-lettres appeared only later. A detailed and profound scientific survey of the period is given in the work of my teacher, the late Russian Academician Mikhail Alekseev (1896-198I): RussianEnglish Literary Connections (XVIII Century-First Half of the XIX Century), Chapter I, 'The First Literary Meetings'.1 The decisive period for the expansion and consolidation of Russian connections with Western Europe was, as is well known, the reign of Peter the Great (I6721725), who was proclaimed tsar in I682, but whose reign effectively began in 1689. Peter was, of course, the tsar-reformer, who, it should be mentioned, spent more