Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia by Ilya Vinitsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia by Ilya Vinitsky Peter Orte Ilya Vinitsky. Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2015. xi + 375 pp. ISBN 978-0-810-13098-2. Drawing insightfully from the history of emotions as well as on a deep knowledge of French, German, English, and Russian literary culture in the Age of Sensibility, Ilya Vinitsky treats Zhukovsky's life in terms of the texts the poet read, translated, and recreated to formulate his own emotional world as well as the first aesthetic philosophy of Russian literature. This study sheds light not only on how the intimate life of the human soul is shaped by cultural forms but also on the larger context and meaning of the work of a poet who, in spite of his canonical status, has been largely overlooked in English-language scholarship. While Zhukovsky himself—to recall Vinitsky's introduction—refrained from the acts of heroism, adultery, and dueling that made the lives of his contemporary noblemen exciting and, at times, tragically short, the story of Zhukovsky's long and seemingly uneventful life, when viewed in relation to the texts that informed and were transformed by his poems and translations, passes like a magnifying glass over a map of the literary and cultural world of his age. It also suggests how certain aspects of that world were uniquely significant to the poet himself. The first part of the book, which reconstructs the "emotional communities" of Zhukovsky's childhood and youth, illustrates Vinitsky's method in this regard. The section takes its title from the mode that serves as the "master-plot" of Zhukovsky's life as he and his kindred souls represented it to themselves and others: the sentimental "family romance." Beginning with the memoirs of Anna Zontag, one of Zhukovsky's nieces, Vinitsky recounts both the idyllic mythology and the more ambiguous truth of the poet's early life. According to Zontag, Zhukovsky—the illegitimate son of the Russian nobleman Afanasy Bunin and Salkha, a sixteen-year-old captive from the Turkish wars—is accepted and raised as the favorite of the enlightened women of the Bunin household, including Bunin's wife, together with his foreign mother. Pointing out the inaccuracies of Zontag's rosy picture, and particularly the legal thorns and emotional traumas that it conceals, Vinitsky argues that this idealized, sentimental image of the family serves as the "literary-mythical foundation of Zhukovsky's story" (28). Zhukovsky's life will consist of repeated attempts to legitimize relations to an idealized family to which he belonged by nature, or else, in his poetry; Vinitsky interprets Zhukovsky's platonic love for his niece Maria Svechina (née Veliaminova) and his later failed attempts to marry his other niece, [End Page 193] Maria Protasova, precisely in this context. Moreover, citing Zontag's story of the comedic failure of Zhukovsky's boyish attempt to stage a scene from Bernadine de Saint-Pierre's sentimental novel Paul et Virginie, Vinitsky suggests that the "mythologization of one's own biography using the framework of literary models becomes a key principle of the poet's own creative consciousness" (29). That is, he shows how this novel, which treats the relationship between an illegitimate boy and a noble girl raised as siblings in the sentimental, "feminine" utopia of Mauritania—much as Zhukovsky and his sibling/niece Zontag were raised in the feminine paradise of Mishenskoe—resonated with the poet's experience of his life, particularly when the prospect of being enrolled in a military regiment threatened to put an end to his family idyll. Another important aspect of Vinitsky's approach is illustrated by his account of Zhukovsky's religious search for figures of enlightened male authority and brotherhood after his departure from the family home, a search that coincided with the return of male authority to the throne. The chapter "The Holy Family," for example, recounts Zhukovsky's relations with the Turgenevs, with their orientation toward Masonic mysticism and cult of brotherhood. Drawing on letters, diary entries, and the lyric poetry of Ivan Petrovich Turgenev's elder son, Andrei Turgenev, and Zhukovsky, the chapter...