Keats and the Russian Poets by Sonia I. s> Ketchian (review)

Abstract

5IO SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 When it comes to the treatmentofJewish themes in thewritingsof the three women who wrote in Russian, Balin finds that their attitude towards their heritage and Jewish identity was complex. While both Khin and DubnovaErlikhwere at home in the Russian culturalmilieu and made little reference to questions of Jewish identity in their writing, Feiga Kogan's work contains allusions to Jewish tradition which express an ambivalent attitude. Balin characterizes Kogan, best known for her collections of Symbolist verse and workson poetic theory, as a writerwho concealed herJewish identitybehind a Russianfront. It is not the aim of Balin's study to be a history of Jewish women writing, but to examine five literarywomen whose lives and work open up aspects of Jewish cultural history in the Russian Empire. Her exploration of a field which has hitherto received little attention shows that the role played by language and identityin the formation ofJewish women writerswas complex and fascinating.This studyopens up new scholarlyterritory;it is to be hoped that others will follow Balin and explore further,building on this interesting contributionto our understandingof women writersin Russia. SchoolofModernLanguages K. M. HODGSON UniversityofExeter Ketchian, Sonia I. KeatsandtheRussianPoets.Birmingham Slavonic Monographs , 33. University of Birmingham,Birmingham, 200 I. Vii+ 308 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Indexes. 25s.00. THEinfluence of certain English and American writerson Russian literature is well attested: Pushkin, among others, drew deeply on the work of Byron, Scott and Shakespeare, for example; Dosteovskii was much indebted to Dickens; the SilverAge writerswere inspiredby Poe and Wilde. The case of Keats, however, is rather more problematic. As Ketchian notes, Keats was and remains much less well known in Russia than many of his compatriots, partlybecause there have been relativelyfew translations,and partlybecause of a lack of critical interest in Keats's verse. There are very few explicit references to Keats in the works of Russian writers, and Ketchian supports her contention that he representsan importantintertextualsource in Russian poetry chieflythroughthe analysisof parallelsin imageryor theme. After two useful introductorychapterson the reception of Keats in Russia and on the publishedtranslationsof his poetry into Russian, Ketchian focuses more specifically on Keatsian reflections in specific Russian writers -principally Pushkin, Blok, Gumilev, Mandelstam and Akhmatova, though one intriguingchapter also traces the association of insectswith importuning thoughts through poems by Fet,Apukhtin,Annenskii, Gumilev and Briusov, linking it with the striking image of 'brain-flies' invented by Keats in his Endymion. In her treatment of individual writers Ketchian begins with a discussionof the extent to which each of themwas or could have been exposed to the poetry of Keats and continues with what she calls her 'primarily hermeneuticalapproach'(p. 5). Ketchian'sclose readingsofthe Russianpoets in the light of Keats often yield interesting resultsin themselves, as with her REVIEWS 5 I I analysis of Gumilev's 'Iz logova zmieva' and its linking of autobiographical impulse with a belief in the centralityof the ballad to acmeist poetics, or her linkingof the topos of a night-timeflight in Akhmatova's'Pobeg'with poems by earlierRussianpoets as well as Keats. However, forallheringenuity,to my mind Ketchian isnot alwayssuccessful in demonstratingthat a linkbetween Keats and her chosen Russiantext really exists. Does Pushkin'suse of the motif of the real or postponed seduction of a sleepinglover in RuslanandLiudmila reallyreflectparallelsituations(withquite different outcomes) in Keats's Endymion and 7JieEveof StAgnes,or do both authors rather draw independently on models in the classical or folkloric tradition?Is Mandelstam's I937 poem 'Kuvshin',which describesan ancient Greekjug in the Voronezh museum and perhaps hints at the simultaneous power and vulnerabilityof art, reallya responseto Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', with which Mandelstam may or may not have been familiar, or is it more productively read in the context of Mandelstam's own long-standing preoccupationwith Greekantiquity? Ketchian pays relativelylittle attentionto two pieces of evidence which link Keats and Russian poetry together much more firmly- the role of Keats's 'LaBelle Dame sansMerci' in the development of the balladas a majorgenre in Russian symbolism, and the presence of direct quotations from Keats, in English, in the poetry of Akhmatova. Both of these have admittedly been discussedelsewherein the literatureand Ketchian does considerthem briefly, but a more detailedtreatmentin the context of...