Russian Friends and Correspondents of Sir Walter Scott

Abstract

ERHAPS nowhere on the Continent, in the late 1820s and 1830s, was the popularity of Sir Walter Scott so great as in Russia.1 Foreign pilgrims to Abbotsford included a large proportion of Russianswriters, diplomats, soldiers. The letters which are here printed serve to illustrate this popularity. My attention was first drawn to these letters by the register of Scott's correspondents in Wilfrid Partington's book, Sir Walter's Post-Bag (London, 1932), a sequel to his earlier work, The Private Letter Books of Sir Walter Scott: Selections from the Abbotsford Manuscripts (London, 1930). Both these books include selections from Scott's private letter books (containing about 6,000 letters addressed to Scott), which were acquired by the late Sir Hugh Walpole at an auction in 1921 and after his death bequeathed to the National Library of Scotland. During World War II the Walpole collection was inaccessible to me, but Mr. W. M. Parker, who had assisted Sir Herbert Grierson in his edition of Scott's letters, kindly supplied me with copies of letters from Russian correspondents which were written in English, and with English versions of some of those that were written in French. In 1944, in response to an appeal from the editors of Literaturnoe Nasledstvo (Literary Heritage) of Moscow for material on Anglo-Russian literary relations for their projected Anglo-Russian volume (similar to the Franco-Russian volume published earlier), I sent them Russian versions of the letters of D. and V. Davydov and of A. Izmailov. In a letter, dated December 15, 1944, Mr. I. Silberstein, one of the editors of Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, thanked Mr. Parker and myself for the communication of these letters, and informed me that their volume was to include a chapter dealing with Sir Walter Scott's Russian connections, for which a great deal of fresh material had been found in Russia. This new material included a letter from Scott to Denis Davydov; five letters