Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia 9780810130999, 9780810130982

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Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia

Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory Series Editors Robert Belknap Caryl Emerson Gary Saul Morson William Mills Todd III Andrew Wachtel

Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia

Ilya Vinitsky

northwestern university press / evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2015. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ͡ (Il’͡ia IUr’evich), ͡ Vini͡tskii, I. IU. 1969– author. Vasily Zhukovsky’s romanticism and the emotional history of Russia / Ilya Vinitsky. pages cm. — (Northwestern University Press studies in Russian literature and theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-3098-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3185-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3099-9 (ebook) 1. Zhukovskiı̆ , Vasiliı̆ Andreevich, 1783–1852. 2. Poets, Russian—19th century—Biography. 3. Russian literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Romanticism—Russia. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in Russian literature and theory. PG3447.Z5Z923 2015 891.713—dc23 2015000067 ♾ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

To my mother, with all her son’s love

There are sometimes secret miracles Unseen by any gaze: The hermit sisters’ voices are heard; From on high they sing A hymn in chorus. Through dawn’s curtain A cross shines bright; altars Fashioned out of light appear. And, crowned by bright Stars, the maidens stand in prayer Before their sanctuary, And hosts of seraphim teem Inside the flaming vortex. —Vasily Zhukovsky, Twelve Sleeping Maidens (1817)

Contents

Acknowledgments A Note on Transliteration and Chronology Introduction Prologue

xi xiii 3

Russian Troubadour: A Brief Survey of Vasily Zhukovsky’s Life and Work

17

Part I. Family Romance Chapter One

Breakfast at Dawn

27

Chapter Two

Holy Family

37

Chapter Three

The First Love

56

Part II. Love as Religion Chapter Four

Maria

85

Chapter Five

Heavenly Abode

110

Chapter Six

Woman’s Lot

137

Chapter Seven

The Dove and the Crocodile

153

Postscriptum

Allegro and Penserosa

165

Part III. Poet and Princess Chapter Eight

The Enchanted Tutor

179

Chapter Nine

The Flower of the Oath

198

Chapter Ten

Under the Constellation of the Crown

214

Part IV. The German Wife Chapter Eleven Sunset Love

239

Chapter Twelve The Last Supper

263

Epilogue

The Heavenly Sisters

271

Notes

285

Works Cited

355

Index

375

Acknowledgments

It is safe to say that this voluminous book has grown out of a tiny discovery which I had made a quarter of a century ago, when I was a graduate student of Professor Yurii Mann at the Institute of World Literature in Moscow— the discovery of the Miltonic origins of Vasily Zhukovsky’s philosophy of emotions, in which earthly cheerfulness (Allegro) and heavenly melancholy (Penseroso) compliment one another. This is my third book on Zhukovsky (the first two, published in Russia, had entirely different focuses). It is an attempt at an “emotional biography” of the poet considered within a context of the emotional history of Russia and the West. Most of the research and writing was done in Moscow, Tartu, St. Petersburg, and Philadelphia during my sabbatical leave from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. A shorter version of the “Postscriptum” has been originally published in Russian in Graduate Essays on Slavic Languages and Literatures, ed. Mark G. Al’tshuller (Pittsburgh, 1992), vol. 5, pp. 1–15), and I appreciate the editor’s permission to incorporate it into the text of this book. A part of the “Prologue” to this book and a couple of sections from the “Introduction” have appeared in a slightly different form in Ilya Vinitsky’s and Andrew Wachtel’s Russian Literature: A Cultural History (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2009). These sections are incorporated into this book with my coauthor’s kind permission. An abridged version of chapter 1 has been published in Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, ed. Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). I thank the editors for their permission to publish the chapter in this book. The acknowledgments, perhaps, is the most emotional section of this book. I would like to express my deep gratitude to my friends and colleagues without whose generous comments and suggestions this project would have never been realized—Mark Grigor’evich Al’tshuller, Kevin M. F. Platt, Mikhail Liustrov, Michael Wachtel, Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Caryl Emerson, Nina Perlina, Donna Orwin, Liubov’ Kiseleva, Valeria Sobol, Maria Maiofis, Catriona MacLeod, Catherine Ciepiela, Stephanie Sandler, Simon Richter, and Frank Trommler. I am particularly grateful to Timothy Portice, xi

Acknowledgments

Jordan Shedlock, David Houston, and Jerry McCausland for their marvelous translations of the book chapters and to Sarah Pratt, Michael Wachtel, Eugene Ostashevsky, Kevin M. F. Platt, Zachary King, Maya Vinokur, and Pavel Khazanov for their elegant translations of Zhukovsky’s poems into English. I especially need to thank my anonymous readers for encouraging comments and excellent suggestions for improvement as well as my editors for their professional help and support. I would like to thank my wife, Svetlana, for being my genius of pure beauty all these years, and my daughter, Anna, the wisest girl on earth.

xii

A Note on Transliteration and Chronology

In the body of the text I have used the popular transliteration scheme (e.g., Zhukovsky rather than Zhukovskii, Gogol instead of Gogol’). In endnotes and in the bibliography, however, I have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration, that is, Zhukovskii, Zeidlits, Gogol’, Vasilii, Iurii. Poetic citations of primary text are given not in transliterated form but in Cyrillic. In quotations, I use ellipses (. . .) to indicate omissions of portions of the original. Italics in quotations are from the original unless otherwise noted. In the chapters about Zhukovsky’s long stays in the West, dates are given according to both the Julian (then “Russian”) and Gregorian (“Western”) calendars.

xiii

Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia

Introduction Fate ordained that I must wander on an unknown path, In friendship with the peaceful villages, loving nature’s beauty, That I would breathe the forest quiet in twilight And that, looking down upon the foamy waters, I would sing in praise of the Creator, love, and happiness. O songs, pure offspring of the heart’s innocence! Blessed is the one, to whom it is given to enliven with the lyre The hours of this fleeting life. —Vasily Zhukovsky, “Evening” (1806)

Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852)— the father of Russian romanticism, an outstanding poet and translator, the creator of the first aesthetic philosophy in Russian literature, which influenced several generations of Russian authors from Pushkin and Gogol to Vladimir Solov’ev and Alexander Blok— lived a long life. His creative and public activity covers over a half century and is closely connected with both the history of Russian culture and with Russia’s political history. He was born during the reign of Catherine the Great, who laid the groundwork for the rapid and efficient development of Russian gentry culture. It was during her reign that oases of European enlightenment began to appear in the Russian provinces, one of which was the childhood home of the future poet. His education coincided with the reign of Emperor Paul I. The sentimental “chivalric” code, characteristic of the Pauline period, influenced the moral character of the future poet. The flowering of his creative work came during the first, triumphal phase of the reign of Alexander— the liberalism in court circles that followed upon the death of Paul; the national renewal generated by the Napoleonic Wars, the mi-

3

Introduction

raculous victory over the “ruler of the hemisphere” and the establishment of “eternal” peace in Europe. Zhukovsky was witness to the most important events of the reign of Nicholas I, who had appointed the poet as tutor to his son, the future Alexander II, despite the poet’s friendly ties to many of the Decembrist rebels. He spent the last decades of his life in Germany, was a friend of the Prussian romantic king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and was both witness to and interpreter of the stormy events of the revolution of 1848–49 in Germany. Zhukovsky’s psychological profile was and remained a product of the Alexandrine age (1801–1825), which was characterized by an exalted sentimentalism and utopian rationalism, a love of solitude and a passionate thirst for public service, an orientation toward the West and an enthusiasm for the national, the understanding of Russian history as part of European history and faith in the messianic role of Russia in Providence’s mysterious plan. In the words of George Florovsky, it was namely Zhukovsky, who succeeded “with his ingenious spectrum of sympathetic and creative transfigurations, with his intense sensibility and responsiveness, with his free and unmediated language,” in expressing the “spiritual life” of his generation.1 “My memoirs and those of men similar to me can only be psychological, that is, the history of the soul,” admitted Zhukovsky to his friend, “I would describe the present reality by means of fantasy; there would be faces without forms, and truly 9/10 of the details are lost to my memory; and what is a life history without details? A dead skeleton or an indistinct ghost.”2 Indeed, as compared with the romantic biographies of some of his contemporaries, Zhukovsky’s life was not rich in events: he did not perform feats of heroism on the battlefield, he did not rebel against society, he experienced neither exile nor imprisonment, he fought no duels, he did not lose his fortune in a card game, nor did he seduce other men’s wives. Despite these deficiencies, however, the story of his life and love, refracted in his poetry, can serve to illustrate the emotional history of Russian culture of the romantic age. Although the scholarship on Zhukovsky in Russia is extensive,3 his name is almost unknown to Anglophone readers and his rich poetic and emotional world is still terra incognita for Western scholars of Russia. In fact, the only book on Zhukovsky’s poetry in English was published in 1976— a Twayne translation of Irina Semenko’s remarkable, yet already outdated book.4 One other slim monograph by Annette Pein and a few fine chapters by Michael Katz, Sarah Pratt, William Edward Brown, Lauren Leighton, Michael Wachtel, Stephanie Sandler, Olga Glagoleva, and David Cooper cannot do justice to the significance of the poet for the development of Russian letters.5 For without Zhukovsky, Russian literature as an entity would be as unthinkable as English literature without Wordsworth.6 4

Introduction E MOTIO NA L BI O G R A P H Y F R O M A C ULT UR A L   P R O S P ECT I V E

This book is an attempt at an “emotional biography” of Zhukovsky. By “emotional biography” I mean not a fictionalized “history of the soul,” not a narrative of an individual’s creative, intellectual, or cultural evolution7 and, even less, a medical “psychography,”8 but a reconstruction of his emotional life in the cultural-historical context of the mélange of sentimentalism and romanticism that dominated many aspects of Russian culture between 1790 and 1840— a period in which emotional experience was interpreted as a fundamental ideological category.9 In other words, I am interested not in the feelings of the poet per se, but in the textual refraction and interpretation of these “feelings” in his work. Indeed, the sequence of “special, meaningful emotions” (osobennye chuvstva, in Zhukovsky’s own terminology), carefully selected by the poet in his lyrical works, diaries, and letters, form a particular biographical text or myth— the very “fantastical description” of life “without living details,” which he considered plain and uninteresting for his descendants and which, I suppose, are of special interest to scholars of the “history of emotions” of Russian culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.10 In fact, the reconstruction of this process of emotional self-making will allow us not only to trace the assimilation of Western literary forms of sentimentalism in Russian culture of this period, but also to follow almost in the style of a daily journal the formation of a specific personality type, new for Russian culture and not reducible to its varied Western sources, and of a philosophy of emotion that expresses this personality type.11 To paraphrase Mikhail Lermontov’s famous dictum, the “history of a man’s soul” is indicative of “the history of the entire people”12 in a given age not because it carries certain features shared by contemporaries, but rather because it reveals complex (and historically distinct) ways of cultural shaping of one’s emotional life into a meaningful story— a scholarly equivalent of Seelen-Geschichte or Seelenbiographie. In other words, the concept of the “emotional biography” conceived as a product of complex interactions between an individual and his or her environment can be used as an effective tool for the examination of cultural mechanisms at work in different historical periods, national traditions, or social groups. I see this book as a testing ground for a cultural approach of this kind. S UB J E C T A ND M ET H O D O L O G Y

At the center of my attention is the lyrical thread of Zhukovsky’s emotional biography— the story of his love or, more specifically, of several romantic in5

Introduction

terludes in his life. This would include his forbidden love for a close relative; his secret feelings for his pupil, a married princess; and the love of his “sunset years” for a girl twenty-seven years younger than him, who became his wife when he was aged fifty-eight. Of course Russian writers fell in love and married before and after Zhukovsky, but he was the first one to create out of the history of his feelings an integrated religious-psychological doctrine that was to exercise significant influence on the development of Russian love poetry and aesthetics (already in his youth the poet was called the Russian Petrarch). Themes peripheral to this study include Zhukovsky’s literary evolution as well as his lengthy pedagogical and civic activity, a compressed description of which the reader will find in the synopsis of his life and poetry, with which the book begins. The first attempt at a lyrical biography of Zhukovsky, from a historicalcultural point of view, can be found in the classical study of the poet’s life written at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Academician Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky, V. A. Zhukovsky. The Poetry of Feeling and of the Heart’s Imagination (V. A. Zhukovskii: Poeziia chuvstva i ‘serdechnogo voobrazheniia, 1903; published in 1904). In this excellent, exceedingly informative, and to this day methodologically relevant work, the founder of historical poetics presents the authorial personality of Zhukovsky as the point of intersection of different kinds of literary and ideological trends in the “age of sensibility,” “a socio-psychological type to which [a biographer/critic] can relate more abstractly, free of sympathies and repudiations” that so easily lead to biased conclusions.13 This positivistic approach led the scholar to the radical conclusion that the cultural personality of Zhukovsky (his “sociopsychological type”) represents a successful adaptation of sentimentalist and early romantic formulae, characteristic of the Western (above all French and German) literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Zhukovsky’s poetic worldview, according to Veselovsky, there is no place for romantic experiments (that is, invention and originality), but there is what the scholar metaphorically calls an unwavering “truth of mood” (pravda nastroeniia): the world changed around the poet, but he always remained the same— a sentimental dreamer and proponent of virtue. In the investigation of Zhukovsky’s cultural psychology, Veselovsky, as a rule, limits himself to the identification of its literary models and sources and does not ask how such borrowings actually became part of his artistic consciousness, that is, how the “foreign” text (formula, cliché, motif, expression) became infused with what for the poet was “his own” content and how that content differed from the original. It is this process that will interest us in this work: the formation of Zhukovsky’s individual emotional personality from various Western literary

6

Introduction

“material” (Rousseau’s Émile and Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse; Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers; Wieland’s Agathon and Oberon; Schiller’s dramas, and so on). Paraphrasing the title of Veselovsky’s book, we can say that the work offered here is dedicated to the hermeneutics of “feeling and imagination of the heart” in the emotional biography of Zhukovsky. Two types of research have been most influential for the methodology presented in this book: the phenomenological and the literaryanthropological. In his articles of the 1970s and early 1980s on the cultural phenomenology of literary translation, Vladimir Toporov demonstrated that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian authors (Zhukovsky, Andrei Turgenev, and, later, Konstantin Batiushkov) felt the assimilation of “alien” texts to be a path leading to the creation of one’s own personality, a kind of poetic initiation: “the alien” modeled “our own.”14 Taking as his starting point the semiotic conception of literary behavior developed by Lotman in the 1960s–1980s along with contemporary cultural- anthropological theories dedicated to the “history of emotions,”15 Andrei Zorin rather recently interrogated the role of “canonic” literary texts in the formation of the psychological reactions and behavior of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury readers. Zorin aptly calls these texts emotional patterns or matrices: Each culturally significant part of everyday life had its own European classic that set the mode of emotional reaction and subsequent behavior. The European public learned how to fall in love while reading La Nouvelle Héloïse and Werther, how to go to the countryside with Thomson and Rousseau, how to visit cemeteries with Young and Gray, how to escape from the world with Zimmerman.16

This vision of emotional formation of the man of the Age of Sensibility allows us to approach in a new way the problem of the emotional biography—“the study of the emotional world of the person in its historical development.”17 Zorin considers one of the main (and, in my opinion, most complex) tasks of such research to be the elucidation of the “logic of selection” of the emotional matrices and their “adaptation by individual personalities and mini-groups.”18 The Age of Sensibility, the context for Zhukovsky’s development, offered an entire assortment of emotional models attached to particular situations:19 special “handbooks of sensibility,” such as Études de la nature by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, were making the rounds, regulating the expression of emotions in concrete situations.20 At the same time, several authors might turn to one and the same literary matrix which, having entered the cultural repertoire of the age, could elicit variable emotional and behavioral

7

Introduction

responses. Thus the emotional reaction of the Russian “Stürmer” Andrei Turgenev, provoked by Goethe’s Werther, the arch-model of the sentimental youth of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fundamentally differed from the reaction of his friend, the Rousseauan Zhukovsky, whose reaction in turn contrasts with that of the Voltairianist Mikhail Sushkov, author of the “Russian Werther” (who eventually mimicked Goethe’s protagonist in taking his own life).21 It is logical to suppose that the individual emotional reactions of these authors were mediated not only by the literary matrices, but, on a deeper level of this cultural- psychological process, by different models of emotional-ethical attitudes, presented in the “philosophy of feeling” of the age.22 I presume that an investigation of the emotional biography of a historical personality is impossible without a close analysis of the repertoire of worldview (or, better, Welt-Empfindung) of a given cultural period. To illustrate this thesis, I will turn to an example of a peculiar “emotional dialogue” among authors representing three different modes of the romantic Welt-Empfindung in the history of Russian literature. E MOT I O NA L M O D ES

Aleksei Mikhailovich Kutuzov (1746/47–1797), a lonely man, the translator of Edward Young’s celebrated pre-romantic long poem The Complaint, or Night Thoughts, a Freemason and Rosicrucian, was sent on a secret mission to Germany by the Moscow Brotherhood. In a letter to his young friend Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826), he writes about a stroll in the Berlin Tiergarten that struck him in a powerful way: In the menagerie I found a long path lined with ancient pines; the gloom and unchanging greenery of the trees instill in my soul a certain sacred reverence. I will never forget one certain morning when, strolling alone through the menagerie and having surrendered to the will of my imagination which, as you know, tends to gloomy ideas, I sadly set off down this path. To that point the rays of the sun illuminated me; but suddenly all light disappeared. I lifted my eyes and saw before me this path of gloom. Only in the distance, at the exit, was light visible. I stopped and gazed for a long time. Finally a certain thought aroused me (producing in me a certain horror that made me shudder). Is not, I mused, this darkness a representation of your condition when you, having taken leave of your body, set upon a path unknown to you? This thought grew so strong within me that I even imagined myself to be relieved of my earthly burden, walking toward a light shining in the distance, and every time since then, when I am in the menagerie, I walk by that place and often think of you.23

8

Introduction

Kutuzov’s addressee, the young Russian traveler Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, having missed his friend in Berlin, sets off in search of this path that his friend had described in his letter: My dear melancholy friend! I myself thought of you when I entered upon this path and I stood, perhaps, at the very spot where you thought of me. Perhaps, you will again stand here in the future, but I will be far, far away from you.24

Thirty years later, while traveling through Germany, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky makes a lengthy entry in his travel journal about his stroll around Berlin: I wandered around the Tiergarten. It was a marvelous morning which had an effect on my spirit. For how long? God knows. But what is the cause of this ebb and flow? Is it really possible to be so dependent upon the sun’s ray? And is not this return of the good [khoroshego] without your knowledge the proof that it is within you and that it requires from you only the force of your will [ponuzhdenie] in order to awaken and to remain always awake[?] If the clear morning can give the soul a greater moral worth, as if against its will, then why can free will not do the same? But will lives through activity and I have completely given myself over to sloth in all respects, and it is killing all powers of the soul. Inactivity produces the inability to be active, and the sense of this inability, with which it is impossible to come to terms, produces at one and the same time spiritual despair and lethargy. Can one live with such despair? One must either eliminate it (having destroyed its cause, that is, sloth), or not live at all. That which alarms me the most is the thought of my present imperfection: instead of being able to replace most effectively that which has been lost, I only mourn the loss and stand on the ruins with arms folded, instead of rousing myself and building as much as I can. One must forsake that which is lost and say that the present and the future are mine. (Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XIII, 154)

The Russian visitors experience equally strong feelings during their strolls around the Berlin park. However, each man gave a differing interpretation of his emotional state according to his particular Welt-Empfindung: Kutuzov’s mystical break from the gloom toward the light, Karamzin’s “tenderly touching” longing for his friend, and Zhukovsky’s joyful illumination, immediately followed by his sad thoughts of “present imperfection.” Clearly, Kutuzov’s dark feelings are modeled after the allegorical poem of his favorite author, Edward Young. Thus, the symbolic picture that appears to the view of the Russian mystic with his “tendency to gloomy ideas” reproduces at its core a similar description from his translation of The Night 9

Introduction

Thoughts: the “Cimmerian valley of death,” where the Darkness dwells, the “double night” of nature and spirit, cut through by the “ray of mercy,” the world of the cemetery with its ancient cypresses.25 Kutuzov’s emotion is elevated, exalted, and universal. This is the necessary precondition for the mystical awakening from the nightmare of life— the salvation of the soul from the dark earthly dungeon. Karamzin’s stroll, in turn, is one of those sentimental strolls to places associated with the memory of lost friends or beloveds, which were introduced into literature by Rousseau. Karamzin’s reverie is elegiacally contemplative, composed, and pleasant. It elicits memories in its wake. The experience fixated in Zhukovsky’s journal is analogous to the momentary illumination (der Blitz) about which the German romantics (Novalis, Schelling, Jean Paul) repeatedly wrote. Sadness arises from the fact that this moment, which so ennobles life, is transient. This sadness elicits a striving for the eternal and demands from the individual a determined “act of will” in order “to awaken and remain always awake.” It opposes despair, born of sloth of the spirit and the weight of the past. “For Kutuzov, being present in the path of the Tiergarten resembles the wandering of the human soul beyond the grave; for Karamzin, the path is a place where a person dear to him had strolled; there, where the Freemason thinks of death, the Sentimentalist surrenders to memories of friendship,” writes a scholar of Russian sentimentalism.26 This comment is correct as far as it goes, but requires greater precision. Kutuzov worries for his friend no less than does Karamzin: they simply have different understandings of friendship and of “the other.” The Pietist Kutuzov, recalling Karamzin, turns to him with an exhortation. Karamzin represents for him a person lost in the vain world of humanity.27 The sensitive Karamzin, having found the path about which Kutuzov wrote, evokes in memory the image of his “dear melancholic friend”— a traditional figure in sentimental psychological anthropology. Kutuzov seeks to redeem his lost brother. Karamzin sympathizes with his overly gloomy friend. By placing Kutuzov’s description of his stroll through the menagerie into the text of his letter, Karamzin not only shows how his own experience differs from that of Kutuzov, but also presents yet another perspective on the world, yet another voice in the emotional chorus heard by the Russian traveler. I presume that Karamzin deliberately modeled this “emotional polyphony” after a certain scene from the novel of a prominent Prussian Enlightener, Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker (1773–76).28 One Sunday morning, the protagonist of this novel, a kind village pastor, Sebaldus, visits the Tiergarten with his companion, a gloomy Pietist. The travelers walk through dark alleys, with birches, friendly acacias, and hundred- year-old majestic oaks.29 Sebaldus admires the jolly, sunny day, the pure air and beauty 10

Introduction

of the summer park. Having left the Labyrinth, the companions run across a group of people who are basking in the lap of nature. Sebaldus is moved by this view of peaceful worldly pleasures, while his gloomy companion finds it outrageous. “Filled with spiritual irritation” (geistlichem Verdrusse), the Pietist bursts into a passionate sermon in which he describes to the passerby “the detestableness of strolling on a beautiful summer day” and calls the participants of the innocent picnic “the children of Belial,” who are sodden with “pleasures of the flesh.”30 In turn, Sebaldus (Nicolai’s mouthpiece) criticizes the Pietist’s dark fanaticism. “Good Lord!— the hero exclaims.—I find nothing sinful in the fact that these people are enjoying the magnificent day that God gives us. As far as I can see, their amusements are entirely innocent.”31 Nicolai, this irreconcilable foe of mystical Pietism, was for Karamzin one of the most authoritative German authors. The Russian traveler reads Nicolai’s popular description of the city of Berlin on the eve of his stroll in the Tiergarten and he pays a visit to the author the very next day.32 By placing Kutuzov’s account into the text of his letter, Karamzin writes the two different private visions of life into the influential literary-ideological model that contrasts the enlightened emotional perception of the world with the dark Pietistic one.33 Like Kutuzov, Zhukovsky strives to give his experience a religiousmystical meaning. He calls his condition an awakening and sees in it “a hidden proof” of the existence of the good in man.34 But the character and essence of Kutuzov’s and Zhukovsky’s experiences are completely different. For Kutuzov the earthly life is gloomy, it is barren of grace, the soul of man is a prisoner of the body and impatiently awaits its liberation (Kutuzov in mystical ecstasy already imagines it “relieved of its earthly burden” and flying to the “light shining in the distance”). For Zhukovsky the “light,” divine nature (khoroshee), is intrinsic to the soul of man; between the earthly and heavenly worlds there is an invisible connection (the dependence upon the solar ray), which justifies earthly existence and shows the way to the heavenly.35 The literary (or, more specifically, the literary-philosophical) model of this kind of experience for Zhukovsky was Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s treatise on the vocation of man, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), which the poet read on the eve of his stroll in the Tiergarten (for more, see chapter 10). In accordance with Fichte’s vision, the human “I,” in the minute of philosophical illumination, discovers its deep kinship with nature and God.36 FA MIL IA L R O M A NT I CI S M

In this book, I argue that this set of (pre-)romantic universal emotional modes was limited and canonized by the Western melancholy tradition of 11

Introduction

the age: the dark, the moving, and the dreamy dispositions.37 In turn, it was, to a great extent, determined by the specifics of the “emotional community” within which the tastes and Welt-Empfindung of a given author are formed (the Masonic Brotherhood for Kutuzov, Pleshcheeva’s friendly circle for Karamzin). Correspondingly, the starting point for Zhukovsky’s emotional biography should be the reconstruction of the socio-cultural environment in which the poet spent his childhood and adolescence— the period which Veselovsky completely ignored in his book.38 The relationship to the family as the highest spiritual value lies at the foundation of Zhukovsky’s poetic Welt-Empfindung. The masterplot of his biographical myth is the search for the ideal familial unity, which would reflect within itself the divine essence. The members of such an ideal family would be bound together not only by the bonds of blood, but by a spiritual affection that enables an almost wordless understanding between them. Hence originates the elevated suggestiveness of Zhukovsky’s writings about which we will speak more than once in this book. The poet addresses his works first of all to those— predominately female— readers who are close to him genetically or emotionally. He instructs them how best to read and understand his works. He infuses these works with hints and allusions, understandable only to the initiated, arranges his texts into a consistently developing plot, which turns his life companions into heroines of his own psychological novel. In contrast to Goethe (his vision of “das Ewig-Weibliche”) and the German romantics (Novalis, Tieck), Zhukovsky does not seek in the women with whom he binds his fate a series of changing reincarnations of the mystical ideal, but rather he imagines them to be his sisters, who reveal, each in her own way, the ideal of beauty, which he understands as the “visible and audible” form of God.39 I see here a particular type of romantic disposition, which I would call familial or kinship-related, and which, I presume, is located at the sources of the Russian romantic movement. “However variegated his poems may be in content, form, color and tone,” wrote his friend and sensitive biographer Pyotr Pletnev, “they all preserve a certain kind of familial imprint in their overall direction.”40 I consider the distinctive marker of this type of romanticism to be the combination of a Rousseauan utopian ideal of family with the cult of pure (brotherly) love that Zhukovsky found in medieval chivalric poetry and in the Neoplatonic works by Christoph Martin Wieland. S C E NA R I O S O F L O V E

The main features of Zhukovsky’s biographical myth derive from the mode of life of noble provincial families at the end of the eighteenth century, which is characterized by: 12

Introduction

• the central figure of the “kind father” or the loving mother in the raising of children and in the general organization of family life; • the patrimonial estate and familial tradition (predanie), which binds the present family to its past; • the multifaceted internal bonds among the members of the family, which provide for its social, economic, and psychological unity; • the growing role of women as the guardians of the family hearth and virtue; • the family rituals, holidays, and communal readings, that give daily life a new aesthetic dimension.41

The enlightened provincial family of the Age of Sensibility represents a specific “emotional community,” “in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value— or devalue— the same or related emotions.”42 The ideological foundation of Zhukovsky’s parental community (the family of the wealthy Tula landlord Afanasy Bunin) was a Russian modification of the “religion of Rousseau,” introduced in the 1790s by Nikolai Karamzin. Its emotional constitution included the canonic literary works of the Age of Sensibility— the fiction and journal articles of Karamzin himself, the novels of Richardson, Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the pedagogical fiction of Madame de Genlis, and other works that constituted the library of the sentimental family.43 At the same time Zhukovsky’s “original problem” springs from the fact that he was not a “legitimate” member of his family. As the illegitimate son of the Russian landowner and his Turkish concubine, Zhukovsky strove from the very beginning of his conscious life to overcome the social and psychological distance separating him from his idealized notion of kinship. The emotional biography of the poet is a peculiar kind of family romance, the moving force of which is Zhukovsky’s love for the Bunin family and his desire for a legitimate (re)unification with it. In this romance, Zhukovsky’s role was that of the foundling, from the well-known typology of the genre offered by the French scholar Marthe Robert: a dreamer, creating in his imagination the ideal family (in contrast to the rebellious Bastard, striving to foist onto society his own notions of the world).44 At the same time, in search of a solution to this genealogical conflict, Zhukovsky does not create in his imagination (or his creative work) a different family (as is characteristic of the Foundling, according to Robert), but idealizes his own (primordial) family, to which he belongs “by nature.” When his attempt at a legitimate reunification with the Bunin family fails (the second part of this book will treat his love for his “sister,” Maria Protasova), Zhukovsky tried to give his family romance a religious dimension: he presents the love between a “brother” and “sister” as a spiritual union that anticipates a future unification beyond this life, in the “dwelling of the Father.” 13

Introduction

The following stage in the story of Zhukovsky’s familial romanticism comes at the end of the 1810s, when he becomes tutor to the young wife of Grand Duke Nicholas, the Prussian princess Charlotte (after marriage, Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, the future Russian empress). Zhukovsky’s “court romanticism” between the 1810s and 1820s was the poetic idealization of his “new life,” the “secret” plot of which was his Platonic loveservice of the enchanting princess: worshipping her spiritual purity, inherited from her beautiful mother, the Prussian queen Louise; the religious-mystical interpretation of events in her life; the prediction of future happiness and greatness. This new story, which I will examine in the third part of the book, did not at all signal a rejection of his earlier idealization of the Bunin clan. Quite the contrary, Zhukovsky’s myth-making strategy is a representation not only of his own inclusion into the “dear family” of the grand duchess, but the inclusion of his nieces as well, whom he designated “synonyms” or “sisters” of the Prussian princess. As if to reinforce new familial bonds, Zhukovsky sends to the Bunin family works addressed to his augustal student, which were not meant for publication. Here a logical question presents itself: why did the hermetic poetics of Zhukovsky’s familial romanticism turn out to be so evocative to readers outside of this circle? Clearly, the answer to this question will be found in Zhukovsky’s original poetics, which is characterized by his orientation toward the “implied reader” who individualized the emotional experiences of the author, perceiving the poet’s text as her own emotional mirror. The answer is also in the historical-cultural “horizon of expectations” and in the collective of values characteristic of gentry readers, particularly of female readers of the early nineteenth century. In this sense, Zhukovsky was, as George Florovsky figuratively put it, the “Aeolian harp” of his time and society.45 The third thread in this history of Zhukovsky’s familial psychological romance, the topic of the concluding part of the book, comes in the last period of his life: his “sunset love” for the young daughter of his German friend. At the center of this story is a concept borrowed from German Lutheran and Pietistic literature, that of the family as sanctuary, a kind of internal church in which the husband and wife, unified by Providence itself, help each other in spiritual self-perfection along the path to the Heavenly Father. Zhukovsky once again does not renounce earlier scenarios, but tries to include them in the new one. He imagines his German wife to be a spiritual sister of the earlier heroines of his romance, both living (Empress Alexandra Feodorovna) and dead (Maria Protasova-Moier and her sister Alexandra). Finally, the very poetry that presents his life partners in the form of beautiful sisters, is understood by him as an “earthly sister of heavenly religion” (PSS, IV, 450). This lyrical self-reflection, passed through the prism of the emotional and ideological models of the Age of Sensibility, led Zhukovsky to create the 14

Introduction

first religious doctrine of love and matrimony beyond the bounds of Russian Orthodoxy, which he expressed in his work and tried to realize in his life. This religious-utopian doctrine served as the formative source for individual modifications of romantic ideology by the poets of 1810– 1840s, from Konstantin Batiushkov to Pushkin and Evgeny Baratynsky, to Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tiutchev, and Afanasy Fet.46 In historical perspective, we should count among the interpreters of Zhukovsky’s lyrical utopia not only romantics and symbolists, but also such ideologically distant writers as Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and especially Leo Tolstoy.

15

Prologue

Russian Troubadour: A Brief Survey of Vasily Zhukovsky’s Life and Work Zhukovsky’s vita does not contain the kind of appealing variety we have come to like in stories. It was fully centered on those thoughts and inspirations that visited him in the silence of his study. The poet spent most of his life a bachelor, with no family of his own [bessemeino]. —P. A. Pletnev

By the sheen of morn illumined, Luminiferous, bewingéd, There appeared to me an angel: Sad and limpid was his gaze, Brooding, lovely was his visage, Weightless ringlets of his hair Hovered o’er his youthful head, And white roses on his brow, Radiated as a crown. —Zhukovsky, “The Vision”

Z H U K O V S K Y WA S B O R N on January 29, 1783, in the village of Mishenskoe near the provincial city of Tula (some 100 miles south of Moscow). His father, Afanasy Bunin, was a wealthy landowner. His mother Salkha was a Turkish captive girl. According to family legend, Salkha had been given to Bunin as a present by one of his serfs, who had captured her in the storm of Bender during the Russo-Turkish War in 1770. Following his father’s wishes, says the family legend, the boy was adopted by Andrei Zhukovsky, a poor Ukrainian nobleman living at that time on Bunin’s estate. The future poet spent his childhood and youth on his father’s estate and in the home of his half sister and godmother in Tula. The boy was brought up in the spirit of provincial sentimentalism and in a circle of women with broad cul17

Prologue

tural interests, which included literature, music, and theater. But, most importantly, the Bunin family life was characterized by the kind of warmth and friendly fellowship that Zhukovsky would always prize highly. The theme of the cozy home, a protected little oasis of camaraderie and sympathy amidst the large and cold world, would become one of his favorite poetic topoi. In 1797 Zhukovsky was enrolled in the University Pension for the Nobles in Moscow, one of the most progressive and successful schools of its day, which played an important role in nurturing the talents of many Russian intellectuals of the first half of the nineteenth century (the writers Alexander Griboedov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Stepan Shevyrev, and Dmitry Venevitinov studied here, as did future statesmen Aleksei Ermolov and Dmitry Dashkov and a number of the Decembrists). At the end of the eighteenth century, the school was led by a group of pedagogue- masons who strove to provide an “Athenian” education (in contrast to the “Spartan” program of contemporary military academies and the typical “Roman” pattern of home-based schooling). The curriculum was encyclopedic, but the humanities were particularly stressed: foreign languages, literature, history, music, visual art. 1 The teachers encouraged students to experiment with their own compositions as well, even allowing them to produce a literary journal. Famous poets such as Nikolai Karamzin and Ivan Dmitriev were invited to speak with the students, and the former had a particularly strong impact on the young Zhukovsky. During his high school years Zhukovsky made the acquaintance of Andrei Turgenev (1781– 1803), son of Moscow University president Ivan Turgenev, the leading figure of Russian Freemasonry. After finishing school, Andrei Turgenev, Zhukovsky, and some other young enthusiasts founded the “Friendly Literary Society,” one of the first pre-romantic circles in Russia. They saw the activities of this group as preparation for their future moral, social, and literary work, and it seemed to them that the coincidence of their coming of age with the beginning of the new century was an omen of their future success. But Schillerian ebulliance, noble striving for heroic deeds, and great expectations for themselves were soon supplanted (in proper Wertherian fashion) by feelings of disappointment and deep melancholy which in one form or another would affect all the members of the group. Zhukovsky first achieved poetic fame with his translation of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which appeared in Karamzin’s Messenger of Europe in 1802 (many years later the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev would call this melancholy lyric “the motherland of Russian poetry”). Filled with the spirit of sentimental humanism, this elegy provided a whole complex of themes and motifs that would become the distinguishing features of Zhukovsky’s poetry: a celebration of the quiet life in the bosom of nature far from cold civilization, radiant melancholy, death as a bridge to another world, memory as a hope for a meeting over there, and a patient 18

Russian Troubadour

faith in resurrection. Zhukovsky’s poetic discovery here was the image of the “abject singer,” a sensitive lover of nature, an unknown genius doomed to an early grave. In 1803 Zhukovsky’s friend Andrei Turgenev to whom the poet had dedicated this translation, died at the age of twenty-two. Thus, the borrowed theme of the dead young poet took on personal resonance for Zhukovsky, and his poetry became associated with a prophetic gift.2 Having finished school, Zhukovsky took a job in the civil service, but soon resigned in order to devote himself full-time to literature. Beginning in 1804 he gave private lessons to his nieces, the “melancholy” Maria and the “sunny” Alexandra (their mother was Zhukovsky’s half sister) and soon fell in love with the former. Between 1806 and 1811 he dedicated a cycle of lyric poems to her and around 1812 proposed marriage. But her mother refused (Zhukovsky was, after all, their close relative, though not on paper). Tragic love would become the main theme of his poetry for years to come, as evidenced in his “trademark” poems, such as “Epistle of Heloise and Abelard,” “To Filalet,” “The Aeolian Harp,” “The Knight Togenburg,” and many others. Many of the poems of this “Russian Petrarch” would be set to music as romances, thereby making Zhukovsky’s verse a prominent feature of gentry living rooms throughout Russia.3 In 1808 Zhukovsky published his translation of “Lenore” by the German “Sturm und Drang” poet Gottfried Bürger. The poem’s atmosphere is gothic: night, a skeleton, ghosts who accompany the girl and her dead fiancé, a cemetery, open graves. Zhukovsky transferred the setting of the German ballad to Russia, changed the historical time of action from the Thirty Years War to the Livonian wars of the sixteenth century (clearly, alluding to the 1808 Russian campaign against Sweden), changed the name of the heroine (to the very Russian “Liudmila,” a name which has the further advantage of rhyming with the word mogila [grave]), smoothed out the somewhat primitive language of the original, and removed some images that might offend sentimental taste (a gibbet with a body hanging from it, for example). “And that was the beginning of Romanticism in Russia!” as the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848) would say years later. In fact, the ballad’s power derives from the way in which Zhukovsky manages to make the new world of the past— exotic, terrifying, passionate— come alive for the reader (the narrative begins in medias res and remains in the present tense throughout). This ballad became the prototype for the genre in Russian literature and the image of the melancholy Liudmila became canonical for Russian romantic heroines for years to come. Between 1808 and 1833 Zhukovsky would write (or more often translate) some forty ballads, whose central theme was generally that of crime and terrible punishment. Nevertheless, the horrors of his ballads are imaginary, a nightmare that dissipates as soon as the dreamer awakes.4 This was the 19

Prologue

mechanism of one of his most famous poems, the “Russian ballad” “Svetlana” (1811): here the vision of a corpse turns out to be a nightmare brought on by a fortune-telling session. In the poem’s finale the heroine marries her beloved who has returned safe and sound. Zhukovsky’s achievement in this ballad was the creation of an ideal female character, “a Russian soul” as he understood it. Her distinguishing features are purity, humility, submission to God, fidelity, tenderness, and a radiant sadness. Dark forces are unable to harm such a pure soul, and the implacable judgment day of the Western ballad gives way to the actions of wise Providence. More than a decade later, Alexander Pushkin would employ the ideal image of Svetlana as the basis for his Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. When war with Napoleon began in 1812, Zhukovsky signed up with the Moscow Volunteer Regiment. On the day of the Battle of Borodino, his regiment was in the reserve. In the fall of 1812, he wrote his verse cantata A Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors (Pevets vo stane russkikh voinov), which after its publication in 1813 became the most important Russian patriotic poem of the period. On the eve of the battle, the Russian bard glorifies the war heroes by name, remembers the fallen, and calls on the living to avenge them through victory. Every word resonates in the hearts of the listening soldiers, who repeat his concluding words as a refrain. Patriotic feeling is presented here as an emotional outpouring, uniting all Russians into a single family— brave warriors, their mothers, sisters, and their loves.5 In this and other patriotic poems of the first half of the 1810s, Zhukovsky set himself the daunting task of becoming a national poet, presenting the collective voice of the entire Russian people—“Tyrtaeus of the Slavs.” He achieved this effect not by turning away from a subjective point of view but rather by maximizing it, taking his sentimental lyricism to a state of mystical ecstasy, which, paradoxically, is meant to open the path to objective truth. In the second half of the 1810s, Zhukovsky gradually turned away from elegiac and patriotic poetry to verse descriptions of Alexander I’s visionary policy and mystically inspired prophecy (“The Singer in the Kremlin” [“Pevets v Kremle”]). At the very end of the decade hymns to the Christian empire, initiated by the Russian emperor, were supplanted in his oeuvre by works focusing on Russian court life and on nature. As early as 1815, Zhukovsky had begun to be a frequent guest at the “small court” of Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and at this time he wrote his elegy “Slavianka,” a poetic description and symbolic interpretation of the palace and park at Pavlovsk. Soon thereafter Zhukovsky became a kind of “personal” poet for the queen mother and he began a career at court that would span more than twenty-five years. In his “Pavlovsk poems” Zhukovsky describes the happy life of the queen mother’s “little court,” with its pavilions, chalets, gazebos, park and 20

Russian Troubadour

river, its amusements, festivals, and little disappointments. His poetic goal is to give voice to this world and his poems are a kind of aesthetic sacralization of life among the highest Russian aristocracy, a world completely hidden from the Russian public. Despite its playful, madrigal character, this poetry recalls the political romanticism of Novalis who had glorified the court of the Prussian queen Louise at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was at this time that Zhukovsky began to formulate his idea of poetry as an autonomous world, a “parallel universe,” and of himself as a dweller in “two worlds” capable of revealing their secret correspondences to a few chosen readers. In 1817 Zhukovsky became a tutor of Russian language of the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, the wife of the future Emperor Nicholas I and the elder daughter of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III and queen Louise. In 1818 the poet published several issues of his “courtly” journalalmanac Für Wenige—For the Few, which was addressed to his royal student and included his best translations, mostly, from German poetry, along with the originals. The primary goal of this almanac was pedagogical, or, more precisely, aesthetical and pedagogical: the German princess, an ardent lover of romantic poetry and addressee of many poems written by her compatriots, was to discover the beauties of the Russian language and literature. The bilingual composition of the almanac iconically rendered the very process of transformation of the original into the translation, the path from the flourishing German tradition to the “young” Russian poetry. The “Teutonic direction” of Zhukovsky’s aesthetic program of the 1810s challenged the domination of French literary tastes, characteristic of the Russian cultural elite of the 1800s. In his artistic “revolution,” the poet followed the literary choices and principles promoted by the German- born hostesses of the royal literary salons, Empress Maria and, later on, Alexandra Feodorovna, who patronized home-grown musicians, artists, and literati: orientation toward the “court romanticism” of the Prussian queen Louise; a call for simplicity, naturalness, fidelity to national traditions and religious practices; “correction” of artistic tastes and mores through imitation of classical models, as well as an adoration of nature, family values, and an exalted sentimentality. As Zhukovsky’s biographer Carl Johann von Seidlitz observed, the very presence of the famed Russian poet at the court substantially contributed to the development of interest of the high society in Russian literature and the eagerness of the Russian elite to speak in their native tongue.6 In 1821 Zhukovsky traveled with the entourage of the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna on a European tour. In Berlin he saw a luxurious court spectacle on motifs from the oriental epic poem Lalla Rookh by the English romantic Thomas Moore. Alexandra Feodorovna played the lead role— the Bukharan princess Lalla Rookh, while her husband Nicholas took the part of her fiance. In his poems “Lalla Rookh” and “The Appear21

Prologue

ance of Poetry in the Image of Lalla Rookh” (“Iavlenie poezii v vide Lalla Ruk”), Zhukovsky transformed the charming princess into a divine symbol of beauty, poetry, and love. In that same year, he wrote an article about Raphael’s Sistine Madonna— one of the first and most influential aesthetic manifestos of Russian romanticism and, later, symbolism (echoes of the central ideas of this article can be found in the work of Pushkin, Afanasy Fet, Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solov’ev, and Alexander Blok). The poet creates his mystical philosophy about the “genius of pure beauty” (or “the pure genius of beauty”) who appears on earth in order to breathe energy into it for a moment and leave a memory as a harbinger of a better world. In March 1823 Zhukovsky’s half sister Maria died. Zhukovsky interpreted the quiet death of his beloved as the apotheosis of her existence. And in fact Zhukovsky could be called the poet of death. It is highly unlikely that in the entire history of Russian literature we could find a poet who wrote more frequently about death, corpses, cemeteries, and meetings beyond the grave. Nor is it likely that we could find a poet who parted with so many loved ones in his poetry: his best childhood friend and that friend’s noble father, his beloved and her dear sister, poet and writer friends, several tsars, princesses, and even one countess’s pet bird. In 1826 Zhukovsky was appointed tutor to the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II. He took his pedagogical work very seriously, creating detailed plans for Alexander’s education. This did not prevent him from writing poetry, but it does seem to have altered his creative path; his work becomes more serious and philosophical. He begins to understand contemporary history as an alternating series of catastrophes (the Decembrist uprising, the cholera epidemic and peasant rebellions of 1830–31, the Polish revolt, the death of Pushkin) and periods of tranquility on the road to some future ultimate period of stability based on an eternal pact between a powerful Orthodox tsar and his loving pious people. The poet is no longer the emotional prophet or singer of historical victories but rather the wise and calm interpreter of contemporary events for his young pupil who is seen as fated to finish the work of his father, defend the unfortunate (the exiled Decembrists who were seen by Zhukovsky and many other members of the gentry as victims of the anger and willfulness of the young Nicholas I), and predict the future from the mists of the present.7 The crowning glory of Zhukovsky’s pedagogical program was the tsarevich’s grand tour around Russia: the future emperor needed to understand his country. This took place in the spring of 1837: the heir to the throne and his tutor (like a latter-day Telemachus and Mentor) set off on a long journey. They got all the way to Tobolsk in western Siberia, traveled through the Urals, visited Kazan on the Volga, the Crimea, and Ukraine, returning to Petersburg only in December. In 1840, Zhukovsky and the heir to the Russian throne set off on another trip, now to Europe, 22

Russian Troubadour

with a truly romantic goal of obtaining a bride for the grand duke (later on, Zhukovsky would portray this trip and the wedding of his august student in his elegant fairy tale in verse, “Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf”). In 1841 Zhukovsky completed his teaching assignment and soon afterward he left Russia. He married a young German girl, the daughter of his friend, the artist Gerhardt von Reutern (1794–1865), and resided in a comfortable home in Düsseldorf. But the Biedermeier happiness he had dreamed of for his old age proved short-lived. His wife fell ill, and his relationship with Emperor Nicholas, who demanded his return to Russia, became strained. The poet looked for peace and tranquility in religion and work. In the second half of the 1840s he wrote many articles about faith, morality, and politics, but the book containing them was not permitted by the Russian censor. He also conceived a plan for the creation of a Russian religious philosophy and for the language necessary to express it. He did, however, succeed in publishing religious and mystical tales and poems, and he began his translation of The Odyssey, which he understood as an enormous idyll expressing a patriarchal and harmonious worldview. Toward the end of the 1840s Russian idealist romantics created a new myth of Zhukovsky: he is the prophet, the spiritual father of Russian poetry, fated in his late years to fulfill a great mission— to save his child from the aggressive and materialist poetic rabble. Zhukovsky never returned to live in Russia. First there was his wife’s illness, and then the European Revolutions of 1848–49. The poet interpreted the latter events in eschatological terms, as can be seen from the reappearance of the imagery that had characterized his work during the Napoleonic Wars in his letters, articles, and poetry. History is seen once again as an apocalyptic battle in which the poet warrior is given the role of the herald of truth and harbinger of the last judgment. At this period Zhukovsky translated the second half of The Odyssey as a story about the restoration of order at the hands of the ordained monarch (in the margins of the translation he compared the suitors to contemporary parliamentary deputees fomenting revolution). He creates a verse translation of the Apocalypse of John, writes an article “On the Death Penalty,” which is filled with apocalyptic enthusiasm, translates the New Testament, and begins his final long poem Ahasueros— a symbolic epilogue to the dying epoch, his own poetry, and his spiritual biography.8 Zhukovsky had imagined the role of the poet in a variety of ways in the course of his career. In this final work the ideal poet appears in the image of a sufferer enlightened by faith (Ahasueros the eternal Jew is the incarnation of historical experience and the suffering of humanity), and the ideal poetry as a heartfelt hymn of thanks to the Creator. Zhukovsky died on April 22, 1852, in Baden Baden, having outlived his “students” Pushkin and Gogol. His body was brought to Petersburg and he was buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, next 23

Prologue

to Karamzin.9 His wife would die in Moscow in 1856. The poet’s son Pavel (1845–1912) would become a prominent artist, a close friend of Richard Wagner. Zhukovsky’s daughter Alexandra (1842–1912) would become a ladyin-waiting of Empress Maria, the wife of Alexander II. Her scandalous love affair with Grand Duke Alexis, the youngest son of Zhukovsky’s augustal student, allegedly ended with a morganatic marriage that was not recognized by the emperor. Their son Alexis received the title of Baron Sedgiano. Later on, he received the name of Count Belevsky, after the name of the town of Belev, where his grandfather had owned a tiny house in his youth.

24

PART I

Family Romance

Chapter One

Breakfast at Dawn They ate their morning meals and slept till late, finding the winter season far sweeter than the summer, fall or spring. —Longus, Daphnis and Chloe

Vos chèvres sont devenues sauvages; vos vergers sont détruits; vos oiseaux sont enfuis, et on n’entend plus que les cris des éperviers qui volent en rond au haut de ce bassin de rochers. —Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie

T H E M A I N S O U R C E of information about the early years of Zhukovsky’s life are the memoirs of his niece, the children’s writer Anna Petrovna Zontag (née Yushkova; 1786–1864), which were first published in the 1849 issue of the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), and then— in an expanded version— in the 1883 issue of Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl’).1 These memoirs were to a great degree inspired by the poet himself, who saw in Zontag not only his closest childhood friend, but also a talented and observant storyteller, capable of resurrecting the lost Eden of the “sweet Past.”2 It seemed symbolic for Zhukovsky that Zontag would write her memoirs in the place where they spent the first years of their life— the village of Mishenskoe, which belonged to the poet’s father and to the grandfather of the memoirist Afanasy Ivanovich Bunin (approx. 1716–1791). By the 1840s there remained only the ruins of the family home,3 but the memory of the narrator, according to Zhukovsky, was capable of populating this deserted world with family ghosts. Zontag begins her narrative with the story of the poet’s ancestry. According to family legend, the most honorable and noble, although not the most strictly moral landowner, Bunin, master of the picturesque and rich estate of Mishenskoe, jokingly asked his peasant, who had volunteered for the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 as a civilian servant, to bring him back from the campaign a “pretty little Turkish girl.” “My wife has become completely aged,” he complained.4 The peasant brought him two Turkish sisters: 27

Family Romance

the sixteen-year-old Salkha, whose husband was killed during the storming of Bender, and the eleven-year-old Fatima. Fatima soon died, but Salkha— beautiful, dexterous, meek, and modest— survived. She considered herself Bunin’s concubine and second wife and submitted to Maria Grigorievna, the wife of her master, as her own mistress. The latter did not blame her, taking into account her Mohammedan beliefs. Once she lost hope of returning home in a prisoner exchange, Salkha converted to Orthodoxy. In baptism she received the name Elizaveta Dementievna Turchaninova. She was much loved in the Bunin household. Over the various years she performed the duties of nanny, housekeeper, and household manager. On January 29, 1783, Elizaveta Dementievna gave birth to a son, who was given the name Vasily. A poor nobleman named Andrei Zhukovsky, a dependent of Bunin’s, agreed to serve as godfather. Zontag writes that this Zhukovsky adopted the boy, who thus got his last name. For her part, Maria Grigorievna blessed the boy and “adopted [him] in her heart” because she thought of her own, only son, a student at the University of Leipzig, who had died two years earlier.5 When Elizaveta Dementievna laid the boy at the feet of the mistress, the latter, deeply moved, took him in her arms, “kissed him, blessed him, and wept.” “From that time,” writes Zontag, “little Vasily was the favorite of the entire family”: “For the elders he was a favorite son, for the younger ones, a beloved brother. In our family there were many girls, but he was the only boy.”6 Zhukovsky’s biographers established long ago that the story of the poet’s birth, which Zontag based on the words of her grandmother and Zhukovsky’s mother Elizaveta Dementievna, was very far from the truth. It was not his peasant who brought the two Turkish girls to Bunin, but rather a neighboring landowner, Johann Carl Mufel, a participant in the storming of Bender. Mufel turned them over “for education,” according to the official document, but more likely simply sold them.7 The relationship between the Bunin spouses was far from the idyllic picture painted by the memoirist, and the position of the boy, the son of a servant, was ambiguous and insecure.8 Adopting a godson was against the laws of the time, and children born out of wedlock to landowners were registered, in accordance with the legislation of the time, as peasants under their own parents of “noble birth.” 9 To obtain the dignity of gentry status for the boy meant getting around the law, and the Bunin family, influential in Tula Province (guberniia), had to use all of their connections and carry out very complex and time-consuming schemes, despite which Zhukovsky’s nobility remained in dispute until the end of the 1830s.10 The literary-mythological foundation of Zontag’s story, however, is of the greatest interest. It resembles a starting point for a sentimental family novel: the idyllic, secluded, provincial little spot in which only the far-off sounds of war are heard; a good but sinful landowner; his virtuous wife, who forgives her husband’s exotic, noble concubine; the concubine, who adores 28

Breakfast at Dawn

her mistress; the illegitimate boy, sent by God to the magnanimous mistress in exchange for the son who had perished in a foreign land. For practically every thematic element of this story it is possible to find a prototype in the sentimental literature of the late eighteenth century, in whose crucible Zhukovsky’s family myth was formed. Thus, the touching unity of the wife and concubine resembles the utopian project of the Church of Friendship, in which, according to Sir Grandison, his wife and lover ought to embrace.11 In turn, the figure of the humble, selfless Salkha corresponds to the model of the noble Turkish woman, popular in the literature of the end of the eighteenth century (see, for example, a novel published in 1780, eloquently entitled Example of Firm and True Love, or the Adventures of the Beautiful Turkish Kseminda, Christened Elisaveta, Rejecting the Marriage Offered to Her with the Royal-Born Persons for the Carrying out of the Spousal Promise Given to a Lover).12 Also traditional for the sentimental romance is the motif of the illegitimate child raised by a virtuous lady.13 This kind of literariness not only camouflages or idealizes the facts, but also “smoothes over” the rough places of real-life situations and aestheticizes personal traumas. 14 A story typical of the stormy and immoral eighteenth century is translated into the language of the Age of Sentimentalism.15 As we will see, the poeticization and mythologization of one’s own biography using the framework of the literary models becomes a key principle of the poet’s own creative consciousness. In her literary reminiscences, Zontag creates a group of “beautiful souls” living in the Russian provinces at the end of the “uncivilized century.” At the head of this mostly female “kingdom” is the grandmother.16 Next are her respectful daughters, sweet granddaughters, and the faithful female servant-friend. The hero is a marvelous boy (the only one in the family!), the son of the servant and the future great poet. “About Vasily Andreevich,” concludes Zontag, “one can say in his own words, that he was beloved by the gods before his very birth; he was also the favorite of his own family and was happy by his very nature, and his family luxuriated in the pleasure of his presence.”17 Raised in the women’s realm of the Bunin family, Zhukovsky was the product and, perhaps, the best expression of the female sentimental culture that formed in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. If Nikolai Karamzin, as Yury Lotman so convincingly showed in his works, created Russian literature for educated and sentimental women, then the educated and sentimental women “created” Zhukovsky—their own poet. F IRS T D R A M A

The tale of Zhukovsky’s first literary attempts holds an important position in Zontag’s memoirs. Events take place in the home of the parents of Anna Petrovna in Tula— a cultural oasis of Russian provincial life in the 1790s. 29

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The lady of the house—Zhukovsky’s half-sister and godmother, Varvara Afanasievna Yushkova (1768–1797)— was an intelligent, enlightened, and talented woman. At her home—“the best and most pleasant in all of Tula”18— she hosted literary readings, musical concerts, and children’s celebrations and shows. Yushkova actively occupied herself with the affairs of the Tula theater. In her home she opened a small pension in which her four daughters, Zhukovsky, and twelve other children studied.19 The influence of her personality on the formation of the future poet was, by his account, significant. “She was a gifted person . . .” he wrote at the end of his life to Anna Zontag upon reading her recollections of her mother. “She had a very poetic nature. Everything transcending a lower order of life engaged her interest. Many hidden talents remained undeveloped. This struck me clearly even then, with my lack of education. And now I still remember how appealingly she could tell stories.”20 The first literary works of the future poet, according to Zontag’s recollections, date to the winter of 1794–95. They were of a dramatic nature. In that winter the Yushkov family was expecting a visit from their grandmother, Maria Grigorievna, and Zhukovsky’s mother, Elizaveta Dementievna. For their arrival, Zhukovsky wrote and staged, with the help of a small troupe of Yushkova’s pupils, the historical tragedy “Camillus, or the Liberation of Rome.” Zontag preserved in her memory many details of this work, which has not survived. In the finale Camillus (played by Zhukovsky, of course) saved the city from the Gauls and mourned the Aurelian queen Olympia, who sacrificed herself to Rome.21 The play enjoyed thunderous success and inspired the twelve-year-old author to compose yet another drama, this time in the sentimental vein. The boy derived the theme of this new production from the famous sentimental novel of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), Paul et Virginie (1787; in Russian translation by Mrs. Podshivalova—“Pavel and Virginia”), the story of two families on the faraway Île-de-France (Mauritius)— the aristocratic Madame de la Tour and her daughter Virginia and the peasant woman Margarita and her illegitimate son Paul.22 According to Zontag, Zhukovsky entitled his play after the name of the mother of the heroine of the novel—“Madame de la Tour.” The memoirist writes very little about this piece, but as we will see, it suffices as a basis for some conclusions regarding the sources of Zhukovsky’s poetic ideology. “Here, in the first scene,” recalls Zontag, “breakfast is brought out. Madame Yushkova, wishing to comfort the author and the entire troupe, ordered, instead of breakfast, a beautiful dessert. What happened? Everyone forgot their roles, all the actors suddenly spilled out from behind the curtains and threw themselves at the dessert. Everyone was talking and eating, not listening to the director who, in sadness, took to eating together with the 30

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rest. This surprise pleased the audience more than the drama itself. The play proceeded no further.”23 These few lines from Zontag’s memoirs have elicited the attention of Zhukovsky biographers and scholars. According to Carl Seidlitz, the failure Zontag describes affected the poet: a passionate lover of theater, he preferred not to try his hand at drama. In turn, Vladimir Rezanov, a scholar of Zhukovsky’s early creative works, noted that in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Zhukovsky might have been interested by the description of children’s pantomime theater, put on in the surroundings of the majestic natural scenery of Paul and Virginia: “To be distracted by this example was all the easier because the passion for the theater was apparently a trait of his since birth.”24 The modern biographer of the poet, Viktor Afanasiev, notes that it was the melodramatic nature of the novel that attracted the young author: The misadventure of two families, trying to live outside of society on one of the distant islands, the love of a youth and maiden—Paul and Virginia, the fight against civilization’s attempt to intervene in their lives— all this touched the heart of the readers. No one was bothered by the far-fetched plot, no one looked for verisimilitude in the episodes. It was all about feelings.25

“It came as a complete surprise,” concludes the biographer, “that already on his second attempt Zhukovsky found a theme in harmony with his future literary efforts.” No less surprising was the originality of the play’s focus— at the foundation of the drama “lay the tragedy of a mother, rather than the story of two lovers’ demise.”26 This twist in the plot, the biographer suggests, was provided to Zhukovsky “by the fate of his own mother.”27 Attempts to link this no longer extant play with the life of the young author are completely justified, but the opinions given cannot be regarded as convincing. In a reconstruction of the idea of “Madame de la Tour” we ought to turn our attention to the only comment of the memoirist and, apparently, participant in the unsuccessful production: the description of how breakfast was served during the first scene. It is quite obvious that the breakfast scene, with which the young author began his play, was the climactic scene for the development of the action of the story. At this breakfast, prepared by Virginia, the governor of the island, Monsieur de la Bourdonnais, arrives. He brings Madame de la Tour a letter from her aunt, a rich French lady, who directs that Virginia be sent to her to be educated. If the girl justifies the aunt’s expectations, then she will become her heiress. The governor was pleasantly surprised by the simple and healthy food of the poor but happy inhabitants of this little spot so far from civilization.28 He was charmed by the order and cleanliness of the small hut and the harmonious relations between the two “interesting families,” as well as those 31

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between the landowners and the servants. ““I observe here,” said he, “only furniture of the meanest kind, but I see serene countenances, and cheerful minds.”29 His visit also marks the beginning of this idyll’s end. The invasion of civilization, represented by a figure of colonial power, into the life of the people, which had heretofore followed its natural laws, destroys that life. (It is telling that the governor brings a sack of money intended for Virginia’s trip.)30 Madame de la Tour reluctantly agrees to send her daughter to France. There follows a series of tense dialogues laying bare the hidden conflicts of the idyllic novel and of the conversation between Madame de la Tour and Virginia, as if ready-made for dramatic reproduction,31 their discussion with their confessor, and the dialogues between Paul and his mother, the peasant woman Margarita, and finally, Paul and Virginia. At the end of this structurally closed part of the novel, which began with an idyllic breakfast,32 Bernardin depicts the sufferings of Paul, who has learned that Virginia was forced to depart without his knowledge. I contend that Zhukovsky’s no longer extant play followed (at least, in the most general aspects) this very scheme. TH E S AV ED I DY L L

This is, apparently, Zhukovsky’s first attempt to use a “foreign” text as the model for the expression of his own experiences and manifestation of his own life situation (and, perhaps, first love), addressed to a “kindred” public. License to the biographical assimilation of the text was given by the very author of the novel. In the preface to the novel, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre writes: It was my desire to blend with the beauty of Nature between the Tropics, the moral beauty of a small Society. It was likewise my purpose, to place in a striking light certain truths of high moment, and this one in particular: That human happiness consists in living conformably to Nature and Virtue. It was not necessary for me however to compose a romance, in order to exhibit a representation of happy families. I declare in the most solemn manner, that those which I am going to display have actually existed.33

The play, written by Zhukovsky to mark the arrival of two mothers, Maria Grigorievna and Elizaveta Dementievna, was full of allusions. The title referred, of course, not to Zhukovsky’s mother, but to her noble friend, who raised Anna Yushkova together with Zhukovsky in her home at Mishenskoe. In the figure of the commoner Margarita, the mother of Paul, one could see the mother of the young author. Paul and Virginia grew up to32

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gether as brother and sister. They were christened in the same baptismal font, they slept in the same cradle. In her memoirs of Zhukovsky, Zontag wrote of their common childhood: [Vasenka] loved me very much, and he often came to me in my chamber and, when they rocked me . . . , he asked them to put him to bed with me in my cradle, and he would fall asleep next to me. In the mornings they carried me to his chamber in order to wake him, and so put me in his bed. Naturally, I cannot remember this, but he remembered and called me his cradlemate, even shortly before his death he wrote to me, recalling, how we were rocked in the same cradle.

In an early edition of her memoirs, whether consciously or unconsciously, Zontag stylizes her portrait of the twelve-year-old Zhukovsky according to the description of the youthful Paul: He was well- built and graceful; large brown eyes shone with intelligence from under long black lashes; black eyebrows were as if drawn onto elevated eyebrows, his white face was enlivened with fresh red cheeks, his thick, long, black hair gracefully curled around his shoulders; his smile was pleasant, the expression of his face was bright and kind; in his gaze could be seen, even in childhood, a kind of dreaminess. He was beautiful and no one could refuse to love him at first sight.34

Zontag in her old age not only described with enthusiasm the physical appearance of her “cradlemate” in adolescence, but also about his elevated chivalric attitude toward her, then a five-year-old girl. We shall linger a bit on the key moments of this day, fatal for the family idyll, which likely drew the attention of the young dramatist.35 After breakfast (the last communal meal of the novel’s heroes), Madame de la Tour reveals to Virginia that Paul is not her brother and says that, once she gains her fortune, she might return and marry him: I have no other motive than your happiness, and of marrying you at some future time to Paul, who is not your brother. Think, therefore, that his fortune depends on you.36

Virginia is touched and admits her feelings to her mother, but the latter asks her daughter to say nothing to Paul of her love. In her turn, Paul’s mother, wishing to disillusion her son of vain hopes, reveals to him the truth of his birth: 33

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I will no longer delay to disclose to you the secret of your life, and of mine. Madame de la Tour belongs to a high and noble family; whilst you, my dear son, are only the offspring of a poor peasant, and what is worse— you are a natural child [bâtard].37

Paul, hearing this word for the first time, asks his mother to explain its meaning to him. “Oh unhappy child!” she exclaims, “you have no one in the world other than me!” These words motivate Paul’s sorrowful monologue, certainly relevant to the experiences of the young Zhukovsky: My dearest mother! since I have no other in his world but you to care for me, how much more ought I to love you! But what is the secret you have revealed to me! I now see why Mademoiselle de la Tour has, for these last two months, kept herself so distant. Ah! I see with what disdain she looks upon me.38

Finally, after the supper, which passes in silent grief, comes the parting dialogue of Paul and Virginia. The girl says that she should submit to her mother and depart. Paul reproaches her for this decision. In reply, Virginia reveals that she is sacrificing herself for Paul’s sake: Paul, it is for you that I go; it is for you, whom I have seen everywhere, almost overpowered by fatigue, in supporting two infirm families. If I have accepted this opportunity of becoming rich, it is only to return you a thousand-fold the good which you have done us. Is there any fortune worthy of your friendship? Why do you talk to me of your birth? Ah! if it was again possible to give me a brother, should I make a choice of any other than you? Oh, Paul! Paul! you are far dearer to me than a brother! How much it has cost me to avoid you!39

Paul is prepared to travel to France with Virginia, but Madame de la Tour explains to him that, without him, both families would perish. In despair, Paul turns to the mother of his beloved: Oh! my mother, you wish to separate me from an affectionate sister; you have brought up us together; you have taught us to love each other from infancy. Would you now tear her from me and send her to Europe, that barbarous country which refused an asylum to you and to those cruel relatives, who once discarded and abandoned you? I know what your reply will be; you will say “She is not your sister and you have no control over her.” She is all to me— my fortune, my family, my birth, all unite to render her my sole good. I know none but her. We have had but one habitation, one cradle and we shall have but one grave. If she leaves this isle, I must leave with her. . . . Since I cannot exist here without her, I cast myself into the water and die before her eyes at

34

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distance from you. Brutal mother! unfeeling and unnatural woman! May this ocean, to which you would expose her, restore her to you no more!40

The novel, apparently, resonated with Zhukovsky’s situation and mood. But what was the young author’s immediate motive? Zontag dates the production of his play to the winter of 1794–95. It is quite probable that at this time in the Bunin-Yushkov family the decision had already been made to send the young Zhukovsky to the regiment that was forming in November of the following year. Turning to the theme of Paul and Virginia could have been linked to Zhukovsky’s reluctance to part with his “sister” and his family. In this case the play could have served as a kind of literary appeal to Zontag’s grandmother not to make the same mistake as Madame de la Tour and to remain the guarantor of that marvelous status quo that inheres in any idyll. As we will see, Bernardin’s novel not only gave the young author the language to express his own experiences,41 but also served as a kind of “syncretic” Ur-text for his Welt-Empfindung and biographical mythology, which is characterized by the following constant attributes: • the dream of a quiet family life “in an isolated feminine utopia,” far from corrupt civilization;42 • the selfless love of a brother and sister; • the protection of Divine Providence; • the ideal of a melancholy blue-eyed “young maiden, simple and unaffected in her perfection”;43 • the figure of a beautiful mother, making a fateful choice according to the laws of society rather than of nature; • the notion that happiness comes from following “nature and virtue” and from the elegiac experience of the transitory nature of earthly happiness; • the memory of childhood as of a golden age of life and the hope of its rebirth on the other side of earthly existence.

Clearly, the ideological roots of Zhukovsky’s poetic myth are not in the passionate preaching of the natural economy of life à la Rousseau (the social utopia of Clarens),44 but in the “quiet” philosophy of his skeptical imitator, Bernardin.45 Of course, Zhukovsky’s play could not reproduce all of its author’s selections from the novel, particularly those relating to Paul’s despair. But the members of his audience—Maria Grigorievna and the Yushkovs— knew this novel by heart. Zhukovsky’s biographer, Zagarin, supposed that the action of the play was interrupted “due to the carelessness of Madame Yushkova.” Instead, it would seem that this “carelessness” was deliberate. The tactful hostess enacted a quick-witted coup de théâtre to avoid the unwanted dem35

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onstration of the young author’s feelings (however softened they were with respect to the original). Instead of the simple creole meal, Yushkova presented a “beautiful dessert,” which easily tempted the young actors: “Everyone was talking and eating, not listening to the director who, in sadness, took to eating together with the rest of them. This surprise pleased the audience more than the drama itself.” Breakfast dragged on. The fall of the idyll did not take place.46 Or, to be more precise, it was delayed.

36

Chapter Two

Holy Family Brüder, überm Sternenzelt Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen. . . . —Friedrich Schiller, “An die Freude”

Meine Unschuld! Meine Unschuld! —Schiller, Die Räuber

I N T H E S E C O N D H A L F of the eighteenth century, the tyrannical and authoritative father figures of the French family novel gradually came to be replaced by “new-model fathers relying on affection and concern rather than unquestioned authority.”1 By the end of the century, these portraits of paternal care were in turn replaced by portrayals of loving and caring mothers. Lynne Avery Hunt links this “effacement of the father figure” to the anti- absolutist and anti- patriarchal tendencies that arose in French society on the eve of revolution.2 The women’s utopia of Bernardin’s Mauritius, for example, takes place at maximum remove from the sordid French monarchy.3 The French novels and novellas that depict idealized mothers residing in quaint remote hearths of happiness enjoyed widespread popularity among the Russian provincial nobility at the end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, however, a comparable feminization of the familial ideal in the Russian cultural context reflected not the crisis of, but the blooming of Enlightened absolutism, personified in Empress Catherine herself.4 The empress’s benevolent and authoritative maternal figure served as a model for her “children”— her subjects— and was the central symbol of the political mythology of her reign.5 The members of the happy Russian household entrusted to her care constituted a kind of enormous Île-de-France, safely removed from the godless Western power that had taken leave of its senses. Similarly, the political and moral opposition to the “depraved” (from their point of view) rule of Catherine would often take the form of “a search for the missing father” that stemmed from the patriarchal Masonic ideology that often served as its philosophical and social foundation.6 For the young Zhukovsky, the world of the Bunin family, with Maria 37

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Grigorievna as matriarch, was perceived as a “feminized paradise,” a microcosm of the reign of the magnanimous Grandmother. His departure from Mishenskoe, which coincided with the return of “male” rule in Russia, introduced a new theme into the “Bunin utopia” of the future poet: das Heimweh, a longing for the native land. Under the influence of his new teachers and friends in Moscow, this theme would soon take on the form of a religiously inspired quest for the Father. In January 1797 Maria Grigorievna Bunina brought Zhukovsky to Moscow to enroll him in the Pension (Boarding School) for Nobles at Moscow University, which at the time was one of the foremost educational institutions in all of Russia. At the school, Zhukovsky found himself surrounded by men, a drastic departure from the “feminine kingdom” of the Bunin household. During the time of his studies there (1797–1800), Zhukovsky made the acquaintance of two remarkable young men, Andrei and Alexander Turgenev. Their father, Ivan Petrovich Turgenev (1752–1802), was the director (president) of Moscow University and a well-known Mason. The highly educated and deeply pious Turgenev family was known for its devotion to its paterfamilias; unlike the Bunin household, here maternal authority held little sway over family affairs.7 In addition, in the family there also existed a particular cult of brotherhood. As Alexander once remarked, the younger generation of the family8 experienced an “inexplicable feeling” of kinship that bound the brothers to each other. In this circle, the blood tie was perceived as a prerequisite for spiritual unity, and the word “brother” acquired a particular religious and moral weight, characteristic for Masonic sacred texts and Schiller’s hymn of brotherhood from “An die Freude.”9 From 1798 to 1800, a circle formed around the charismatic Andrei (a year Zhukovsky’s senior), comprised of students from the school and university (including Zhukovsky, Alexander Turgenev, Semyon Rodzianko, the Kaisarov brothers, Aleksei Merzliakov, and Alexander Voeikov) that shared the aesthetic tastes and ideologies of their leader. These included a devotion to Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, a general orientation centered on German literature of the Sturm und Drang period, participation in the cult of friendship, an ecstatic faith in humanitarianism, moral enthusiasm, and exalted patriotism. The “unspoken hymn” of the circle was Schiller’s 1785 ode “An die Freude,” which depicts the love of a woman, or of a friend as “the general principle” of the world, which transforms chaos into harmony, “bringing disparate elements into a coherent unity, similar to how the forces of gravity organize the universe.”10 Participants of the circle quickly began to perceive themselves as members of a spiritual family, a kind of “fraternal union,” called upon to carry out a vital mission in the coming century (admittedly, at this stage the precise nature of said mission was not very clear to them). By 1801 the core membership of the group had grown into the “Literary Society of Friends,” 38

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complete with rules and regulations and regular meetings.11 Aleksei Fedorovich Merzliakov (1778–1830), the son of provincial merchant, and a future professor and dean of Moscow University, joined Zhukovsky and Andrei Turgenev in forming a triumvirate of three poets at the head of the organization. Already in 1800, the three friends had been planning to publish a literary almanac under the title “M. Zh. T.” (i.e., the first letter of each of their last names), in which their works would be published with no indication of individual authorship. Instead, the almanac was to be presented as a collective poetic text of like-minded “brothers.” In a letter to Zhukovsky from the end of October 1800, the poet’s “faithful friend and loving brother,” Andrei Turgenev, offered the following German epigraph for the publication: “[S]o kommt denn, Freunde, wenn auf unseren Wegen . . .” Turgenev believed that the epigraph would “depict a union of kind, healthy, and happy young men who could sense the value of life, who took pleasure in life, and an endearing [milyi] enthusiasm!”12 Although in the letter the epigraph is only partially cited, it is not difficult to establish its source: the first line of the ultimate stanza of Goethe’s poetic manifesto, “Zueignung,” which opened the 1788 publication of Werther: So kommt denn, Freunde, wenn auf euern Wegen Des Lebens Bürde schwer und schwerer drückt, Wenn eure Bahn ein frischerneuter Segen Mit Blumen ziert, mit goldnen Früchten schmückt, Wir geh’n vereint dem nächsten Tag entgegen! So leben wir, so wandeln wir beglückt. Und dann auch soll, wenn Enkel um uns trauern, Zu ihrer Lust noch unsre Liebe dauern!13 [Come then, my friends, and whether ’neath the load  / Of heavy griefs ye struggle on, or whether / Your better destiny shall strew the road / With flowers, and golden fruits that cannot wither, / United let us move, still forward striving; / So while we live shall joy our days illume, / And in our children’s hearts our love surviving / Shall gladden them, when we are in the tomb.]14

Both Zhukovsky and Merzliakov were familiar with this poem, in which the “God-like Woman,” symbolizing Truth, appears to the poet at the summit of a mountain. She calls upon him not to lose himself in egotistical isolation, but rather having known her, to reconcile himself with humanity (“Erkenne dich, leb’ mit der Welt in Frieden!”). The Goddess gives the poet the mantle of poetry (“Der Dichtung Schleier”) as a gift, which is capable of opening people’s eyes to truth and consolation in their sufferings: Und wenn es dir und deinen Freunden schwüle Am Mittag wird, so wirf ihn in die Luft! 39

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Sogleich umsäuselt Abendwindeskühle, Umhaucht euch Blumen-Würzgeruch und Duft. Es schweigt das Wehen banger Erdgefühle, Zum Wolkenbette wandelt sich die Gruft, Besänftigt wird jede Lebenswelle, Der Tag wird lieblich, und die Nacht wird helle.15 [Wave but this veil on high, whene’er beneath / The noonday fervour thou and thine are glowing, / And fragrance of all flowers around shall breathe, / And the cool winds of eve come freshly blowing. / Earth’s cares shall cease for thee, and all its riot; / Where gloomed the grave, a starry couch be seen; / The waves of life shall sink in halcyon quiet; / The days be lovely fair, the nights serene.]16

At a slightly later date (August 1801), Turgenev, comparing his own emotional experiences with those of Goethe, would embark on a prose translation of the opening stanzas of “Zueignung.”17 Around the same time, the “brothers” begin to discuss a group translation of Goethe’s Werther, the sacred text of their shared romantic ideology, as well as several letters from Rousseau’s Héloïse, which Turgenev had once called the “moral code” of “love, virtue, and duty in social and private life.” Such collective creative endeavors were much in keeping with the Russian Masonic tradition of translating the Western mystical legacy.18 However, for the young authors they served as a kind of aesthetic Eucharist, which would bring together “brothers” in the presence of divine Poetry. There was, however, a problem: the “sacred texts” that were to be translated were perceived by the brothers in different ways. The utopia of collective translation as the literary manifestation of spiritual brotherhood crumbled under pressure from personal Welt-Empfindung and external circumstance.19 To paraphrase the conclusion of Goethe’s “Zueignung,” the friends went to the world on different paths. The utopian idea of their common mission would soon be replaced by a new vision. Centered on the cult of “sacred Poetry,” which was capable of establishing “invisible ties” between brothers, this new utopia infused the brothers with the hope of reunion in the distant future, whether in this world or (as the conclusion of “Zueignung” would seem to indicate) the afterlife, at the throne of the Father. TH E FAT HER

As was mentioned earlier, Ivan Petrovich Turgenev, the meek and loving patriarch of the exemplary family which had embraced Zhukovsky as one of 40

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their own, was an awe-inspiring figure. As a philanthropist, a scholar of the “mysteries of nature,” and a man of deeply personal religious faith, he was to have a decided influence on the younger generation. In Zhukovsky’s case, his influence was of particular importance. Having barely known his own father, Zhukovsky viewed Turgenev as the first in what would eventually become a long line of surrogate father figures whose virtue and heartfelt sincerity would leave visible traces throughout Zhukovsky’s life and work. The poet would later describe Turgenev’s love for his children as the camaraderie of a mature, experienced man towards youths who were tied to him by means of a freely given trust, commonly shared thoughts and feelings, and the most tender gratitude (PSS, I, 635). A wise mentor,20 Turgenev was in some ways himself “a young man in a circle of young men, each of whom was prepared to tell him everything that was in their heart, having been drawn to him by his simplicity, joyfulness, fatherly concern, and sincerity” (PSS, I, 635). This sense of filial affection in the Turgenev circle was perceived as a religious archetype that often acquired poetic form (here, of course, one can perceive a certain degree of the paternal influence, stemming from Masonic hymns welcoming the Father of Worlds).21 Thus, Andrei Turgenev, while praying at the altar of the Father, would secretly whisper Karamzin’s ode “To Mercy” and Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”: Brüder—überm Sternenzelt Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.22

In this context, it is clear why Andrei Turgenev and his friends were particularly moved by a homily given by the eloquent metropolitan of Moscow, Platon (who was himself a close friend of Andrei’s father) on Christmas Day, 1800. Two years later in December 1802 Andrei would recall “that happy Christmas when we were all at Trinity Cathedral” in a letter to his friend and “brother,” Andrei Kaisarov: “Do you remember how we then listened to the beautiful sermon of Platon, which moved me to tears the moment he proclaimed the word: Father!”23 The topic of the sermon was inspired by John 17:6, which partially reads: “I have revealed your name to mankind.”24 The word “Father” (Otets), which had so moved the younger Turgenev, appeared at the end of the sermon: O new and most sweet name! A name most divine, a name of salvation! Our Father who art in heaven! Hallowed be thy name! O Father! Abba, appear to us in the son of Thy love!25

This very same sermon was to inspire the seventeen-year-old Zhukovsky to compose a poem in honor of the Metropolitan: 41

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Платон, великий муж, когда ты прославлял Нам кроткого отца в Зиждителе вселенной, Тогда я с пламенной душою, восхищенной, К Творцу Всемощному моленье воссылал: Да благостью своей Платона сохранит, И драгоценны дни Великого продлит. [PSS, I, 38] [Platon, a great man, when he gave glory / To our humble father as Architect of the universe, / Then I, with a fiery, inspired soul, / Raised a prayer to the Almighty Creator: / By your Divine goodness let Platon be preserved, / And may the precious days of the great man’s life be continued.]

This humble Father, capable of reading the hearts of his sons, giving consolation to the unfortunate and forgiving the penitent, had a clear correspondence with the image of the Divine that Zhukovsky and the other young enthusiasts had received from Sturm und Drang and sentimental literature. “Brothers! There, beyond the celestial veil, lives our good Father” wrote Andrei Turgenev in his journal, translating the lines of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” into Russian.26 In 1799 Turgenev provided the following poetic consolation to an anonymous female addressee: О ты, которую несчастье угнетает, Чье сердце горестью питается одной, Нигде, ни в чем себе отрад не обретает, Покрыта чья душа отчаяния тьмой, —Воззри на небеса с сердечным умиленьем, К небесному Отцу простри свой томный глас И с пламенной слезой моли об утешеньи . . .27 [Oh you, burdened by misfortune, / Whose heart lives on suffering alone, / Nowhere taking comfort for yourself, / Whose soul is covered by the darkness of despair, / Look to the heavens with heart-felt tenderness, / Raise your weary voice to the heavenly Father, / And with a fiery tear pray for consolation.]

Another member of the circle, Merzliakov, lauded the Almighty in the following verses: Благодарю тебя, всевышнегоТворца! Несчастных и сирот беспомощных Отца, Который, усладить хотя мои мученья, Мне слезы горькия послал для утешенья.28 [I give thee thanks, most exalted Creator! / Father of the unfortunate and of defenseless orphans, / He who turns my torments to delight, / And whose bitter tears were sent to me for consolation.] 42

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In turn, Zhukovsky appealed to the “Father of love” in his first prosaic work, “Thoughts at a Sepulchre” (“Mysli pri grobnitse”): Look towards the azure vault, there is the place of God, there the kingdom of Truth, there the Father of love. Death is a path to that blessed land.

Despite obvious similarities, it must be noted that the young men who attended Platon’s sermon in December 1800 each experienced its central theme in a specific way. The illegitimate Zhukovsky perceived the sermon both as a hymn praising divine humility, and as a call for humanity to be adopted into the Divine family through Christ: “Praised be thy mercy! Praised be thy Fatherly love! Praised be our adoption through your onlybegotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ!”29 In the case of Andrei Turgenev, however, it was Platon’s discussion of the paternal love of the Father, extended even towards the basest of sinners, that was to have the most profound effect. Indeed, the young Turgenev’s journal of 1800 contains detailed accounts of his physical and spiritual sufferings, which were caused by a recent “fall from grace,” and the illness that accompanied it.30 FA L L F R O M G R A CE

In a diary entry dated December 8, 1799, Andrei Turgenev recorded a series of observations in response to an anonymous mystical tract that had apparently been recommended to him by his father. The young man’s attention was particularly drawn to some rather obscure remarks regarding the breaking apart of the androgynous nature of the original Adam into male and female principles (represented by fire and water, respectively). Since the time of this separation, according to the text, these two principles would constantly seek each other out, and upon joining with its opposite, one would consume the other:31 But now it is known, as I have heard it from Pyotr Ivanovich,32 that water also restrains fire, as it does with any other body, simply cutting off its communication with air, from which it [fire] alone is extinguished, and if there is only a small amount of water, then it [water] turns into steam, giving fire more strength. Ask father.33

Turgenev then goes on to discuss another troubling thought, namely that “the creation of woman is already the beginning of the fall.” He justly notes, This is not in the Bible, it seems that there it is said that: it is not good for a man to be alone, let us create for him a helpmate. If one is to accept the biblical cosmology, then I am not sure how such a conclusion could be made.34 43

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Andrei then turns to his father for an explanation: Father was silent on the first matter, while to the second he responded that, as sleep is the restoration of weakening forces, this means that Adam was already becoming weak, and therefore, was not perfect. He spoke of everything clearly and truthfully.35

There is no doubt as to the source text that inspired this discussion between father and son, namely, the theosophic theories of the “Teutonic philosopher” Jakob Böhme, which served as the basis for mystical Masonry. According to this doctrine, the creation of Eve and physical attraction between the sexes was generated by Adam’s fall from grace, which led to the story of original sin in the traditional Christian teaching. In this version of events, Adam contained both male (fire) and female (water) aspects in harmony, and was in a spiritual marriage with Sophia, the Wisdom of God. But having desired the pleasures of the sensible world, he destroyed this chaste union and fell. Having put Adam into a deep sleep, God then rendered asunder Adam’s previously unified angelic nature into male and female, endowing both with the “reproductive organs of animals” (thierische Glieder)36 so that they could continue their existence in the world. Ever since this point, both men and women long for the lost heavenly Sophia but, in their blindness, seek it in each other. In order for humanity to be saved, it must turn away from self-love and carnal desires, instead seeking to love the New Adam (Christ) and entrust themselves fully to divine will. The complete restoration of the original marriage between humanity and Sophia will only become possible “after the resurrection of the dead for, according to the word of Christ, there [people] never marry or are given in marriage, but live like the angels of God.”37 Andrei Turgenev found Böhme’s thought to be lacking on two accounts: Böhme’s alchemy contradicted Turgenev’s knowledge of natural science, while the doctrine of Adam’s fall was contradicted by scripture. However, Andrei’s father’s explanation apparently convinced him of the validity of Böhme’s interpretation. Andrei’s doubts and cautious acceptance of his father’s conclusions were symptomatic of his understanding of the fall from grace, which had largely been formed under the influence of Schiller’s early dramas.38 The sanctity and depravity of woman were perceived by him as a kind of unsolvable riddle. In the remarkably open and emotionally intense entries of his diary, dreams of a helpmate alternated with a deep fear of a demonic seductress; physical desire— with feelings of shame. To this was added a certain sense of ontological guilt before woman and a longing for the “celestial” ideal, one expression of which can be found in Turgenev’s diary, in his prose translation of Goethe’s “Zueignung,” which takes the form of a dialogue between the poet and the goddess, an incarnation of truth and poetry: 44

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The Divine Woman slowly descended onto the clouds before me; I had seen nothing in my life more beautiful; she looked at me and slowly came to rest. “You do not recognize me?” she said in a voice overflowing with love and grace—“You do not recognize the one who so often poured the purest balm over the wounds of your heart? No! You do know me; your passionate heart has formed the closest, eternal bond with me. Even as an infant, you reached your hands out to me, weeping bitter tears.” “It is so!” I cried, blissful, bowing toward the earth; “I have sensed you for a long time; you brought me peace when passion raged furiously through my limbs, you sent me the best of life’s gifts; and any blessing I receive, I want to receive only from you. “I do not name you. Many give you names, and consider you their own; every eye seeks you, and for almost every gaze your radiance is happiness. “Oh! When I was misled, I had many friends; when I came to know you, I lost almost everyone; no one but myself have I to share in my joy.”39

It would be no exaggeration to claim that in this pre-romantic religion of Andrei Turgenev, heavenly Poetry took on the role of the Masonic Sophia.40 Here the Russian poet was unknowingly following in the footsteps of Goethe and Novalis and preparing the way for Russian mystical love poetry from Zhukovsky to Solov’ev and Alexander Blok. However, one important caveat must be made: Andrei was not a mystic himself and theosophical questions as such concerned him little.41 Nevertheless, the mystical vocabulary and way of thinking, characteristic of his father’s Masonic milieu, were to remain important for him, and would find expression in his poetic religion and, by extension, his emotional responses to various sorts of real situations. One case in point is Turgenev’s relationship to the tragic actress and singer Elizaveta Sandunova, who served as the object of both Turgenev’s first ardent love and his erotic fantasies. In his portrayals of her, Sandunova would occasionally appear as the incarnation of the angelic principle destined to be abused by man, only to transform into the embodiment of sin, threatening to destroy that very same man. Andrei Zorin convincingly demonstrated how, in his search for a solution to the “Sandunova riddle,” the young Turgenev turned to the “gospel” of Schiller, specifically the drama Kabale und Liebe, which served Andrei as “a kind of matrix, giving both key and register to his own amorous sufferings.”42 On a deeper level, Andrei’s doubts were often played out in terms of the religious and mystical anthropology characteristic of the “elder” Turgenev circle, as well as, implicitly, the works of the Sturm und Drang poets (such as Schiller’s “Das Geheimnis der Reminiszenz”) and the early German romantics.43 It is hardly surprising that this ardent admirer of Karl Moor44 would constantly see himself as “an Adam mid-fall” and would write with longing 45

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of the lost “fullness of being” that was only accessible “in the memories of his own childhood, a time of originary purity and innocence.”45 Similarly, Turgenev imagined his favorite literary heroines, such as Bouterwek’s Louisa and Francisca from Graf Donamar (1791–93), as suffering from an identical longing for their homelands. With their beloveds, such heroines would constantly recall the happier times of their childhood, and were always prepared to sacrifice themselves to a fate of suffering and destruction at the hands of men, who, in turn, would also perish. It is through this prism of idealized, suffering literary characters that Turgenev would evaluate the real women he was destined to meet. W OMEN

Turgenev’s diary entry from April 25, 1802, is particularly indicative of his relationship with women, and is worth citing in its entirety: Yesterday I began my translation of Macbeth. Today is Friday; I dined at Ivan Andreevich’s; I was at Svechina’s. What an amiable, or even more than amiable woman! She invited me to dine with her on Monday. Today I stopped by No. 444. Instead of despondency I found an extremely calm woman, who talks of her situation as if she had not come from Riga by foot with an infant; as if she had not given birth to another [child] here and as if she does not live in a dark and dirty corner the width and breadth of two arshins each way. Is this truly nobility of spirit? Or is it simply insensibility, having got used to such conditions? Upon arriving home, I received a letter from A[nna] M[ikhailovna] in answer to my own concerning Varv[ara] M[ikhailovna]. Is it possible not to love her? I heard from Svech[ina] about the character of Karamzin’s wife; she described her as being a cunning woman; and that she can grow and adapt to any sort of character; thank God that she wants to adapt yet again. Read “Midsummernightsdream” [sic!] in English. Am now moving on to “Elegy.”46

Let us reconstruct the series of events narrated in this entry. The action takes place in Petersburg, after Turgenev’s return from Vienna. In 1802, Turgenev was one of the first in Russia to examine Shakespearean theater in what might be called a romantic vein. Macbeth, which he was then translating from the original, was of particular interest to Turgenev, especially the “witches’ scene.” After dining at the home of a friend of his father, the respectable civil servant Ivan Veidemeer, Turgenev decided to visit Maria Nikolaevna 46

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Svechina, the niece and beloved (in a Platonic fashion) of Zhukovsky, to whom we will turn in the next chapter. Turgenev acted as confidant and messenger in his friend’s affairs of the heart while the latter was in Moscow (in turn, Zhukovsky acted as an intermediary for Turgenev in his relations with Ekaterina Mikhailovna Sokovnina, who will likewise be discussed in the next chapter). Taking his leave from this “amiable woman,” Turgenev then continues on to a house of ill repute. The “fallen woman,” whose services Turgenev apparently employed, and whose life story he listened to in great detail, leads Turgenev to reflect upon the difficulty in differentiating feminine “nobility” (velikodushie) from insensibility, anticipating the more “classical” interpretations of prostitutes in Russian literature of the latter nineteenth century, from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Kuprin and Chekhov. Finally, returning home, he received a letter from Anna Mikhailovna Sokovnina, Elizaveta’s sister and the beloved of his brother Alexander, a woman who, in the past, he had had feelings for as well, though Andrei decided to ignore them for the sake of his younger brother. In turn, this letter was a response to Turgenev’s previous missive about Varvara Mikhailovna Sokovnina (Ekaterina and Anna’s elder sister), who had formerly been an object of religious devotion for Turgenev’s generation. In 1800 this young woman, tortured by a relentless sorrow after the death of her father some three years previously, had left her parents’ home and fled to the countryside, taking along with her a Bible and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse.47 Soon after, in defiance of her mother’s will,48 she entered a convent (thus transforming her grief over her father’s death into a desire to dedicate herself to the service of the Heavenly Father). Turgenev had considered dedicating his translation of Werther to her, as well as his magnum opus “Elegy” (“The deadening arm of dismal autumn . . .”), which he recalls in the conclusion to his diary entry: Ты вспомнишь, как сама цвела в глазах его! Как нежная рука тебя образовала И прелестью добра тебя к добру влекла; Как ты все радости в его любви вмещала И радостей иных постигнуть не могла; Как раем для тебя казалась вся вселена . . . Но жизнь обман, а ты, минутой обольщенна, Хотела вечно жить для счастья, для него; Хотела—гром гремит—ты видишь . . . гроб его!49 [You shall recall how you blossomed in his eyes!/ How the tender hand created and nurtured you, / And with the charms of goodness drew you to good; / How all of your joys found a home in his love, / And other joys became

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unreachable; / How the universe seemed a paradise to you . . . / But life is deception, and you, misled for a moment, / Desired to live eternally for happiness, for him; / Desired— a roll of thunder— you see . . . his grave!]

Finally, the diary entry mentions Svechina’s remarks on the “cunningness” of her distant relative, Elizaveta Ivanovna Karamzina, and Turgenev’s own snide comments regarding her (many members of the Turgenev circle viewed Karamzin’s “sentimental” marriage of 1801 with extreme skepticism).50 This short entry mentions five women that preoccupied Turgenev’s thoughts over the course of that day: a “holy” one, an “amiable” one, a “cunning” one, a “dear” one, and a “fallen” one. It could be said that here we are presented with the “feminine spectrum” of Andrei Turgenev’s world, with each name containing one or the other kinds of love (physical, sympathetic, friendly, spiritual), familiar from the Platonic tradition that had been revived by Rousseau and German writers from the end of the eighteenth century. However, it would be a mistake to see in this a kind of Schillerian “ladder of love,” though Turgenev was well acquainted with Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters. One can say that the young Turgenev was interested in all types of love simultaneously— which may explain his turn to Shakespeare’s comedy at the end of his entry, with its broad and diverse spectrum of representation of women and love— sensual, platonic, attractive, capricious, poisonous, and dangerous.51 Conspicuous by its absence in our diary entry is the name of the main heroine of Turgenev’s short life, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Sokovnina, who only makes an appearance in the next entry. The dramatic history of their strange love affair has been extensively reconstructed by Andrei Zorin. As the scholar notes, Turgenev and Sokovnina’s relationship was modeled after Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. However, while Sokovnina saw herself as Rousseau’s protagonist from the first part of the novel, then Andrei, while “acting” the role of Saint-Preux, nonetheless felt himself to be closer to the “new” Abelard, responding to passionate admissions of love with coldness. Indeed, Turgenev’s diary entries are full of reproaches of his own coldness and egoism. To take but one example: It seems that in order to destroy this egotistical solitude I must get married and have a family; but I do not have the spirit to sacrifice my own freedom; and my sorrow, consequently, is insincere, for I have the means at my disposal, yet make no use of them.52

Fearing that matrimony might distract from his literary activity, Turgenev begins to doubt his love, and begins to see himself as being incapable of the demands of family life.53 On January 2, 1802, having read the latest in a series of passionate let48

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ters from Katerina Mikhailovna, Turgenev wrote one of his best poems on the theme of the tragic duality of the man: Ума ты светом озарен И видишь бездны пред собою; Но к ним стремишься, увлечен Слепою, пламенной душою. На небо скорбный вздох летит, Ты слаб—оно тебя терзает, В тебя отчаянье вливает И твердым быть тебе велит. Свободы ты постиг блаженство, Но цепи на тебе гремят; Любви постигнул совершенства И пьешь с любовью вместе яд. И ты терзаешься тоскою, Когда другого в гроб кладешь! Лей слезы над самим собою, Рыдай, рыдай, что ты живешь!54 [You are illuminated by light of mind, / And you see the abyss before you; But you rush toward it, carried away / By your blind, ardent soul. / A mournful sigh flies to the sky, You are weak— it torments you, / Pours despair into you / And orders you to be strong. / You understand the bliss of freedom, / But the chains on you rattle; / You understood the perfection of love / And you drink poison together with love. / And you are racked with longing, / When you put another in his grave! / Shed tears for yourself, / Weep, weep, because you are alive!]

Turgenev can see only one possible exit from this ontological duality— death, which resolves all contradictions: Забудем здесь искать блаженства В юдоли горести и слез: Там, там, на высотах небес, Жилище блага, совершенства. Там бедный труженик земной, Достигнув вечного покою, Узнает, что есть Бог благой. Но здесь, тягчим его рукою, В нем видя грозного судью, Как тень от горя исчезая, Напрасно слезы проливая, Клянет он молча жизнь свою.55

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[Let us forget to search for bliss here / In the vale of sorrow and tears: / There, there in the heights of the heavens, / The dwelling of good, of perfection. / There the poor earthly worker, / Having reached eternal peace, / Knows that God is good. / But here, oppressed by His hand / Seeing in Him the awesome judge, / Disappearing like a shadow from grief, / Shedding tears in vain, / He silently curses his life.]

Despite these misgivings, Turgenev nevertheless decides to marry Sokovnina, but in July of the very same year, he suddenly dies from “fever with stains.”56 A N UN KNO WN L A ND

Andrei’s death shocked his friends. It was the first death in their “family,” and it was the death of their best, and most beloved member. In his literary works and letters Zhukovsky creates his own particular cult in memory of his “brother.” The central lyrical theme of this cult can be discerned in the concluding lines of Andrei’s “Elegy,” which are addressed to Varvara Sokovnina, who eternally mourned the death of her father. Turgenev’s friends would come to understand these lines as his final testament: Не вечно и тебе, не вечно здесь томиться! Утешься; и туда твой взор да устремится, Где твой смущенный дух найдет себе покой И позабудет всё, чем он терзался прежде; Где вера не нужна, где места нет надежде, Где царство вечное одной любви святой!57 [Not forever, no not forever are you to suffer here! / Take solace, and cast your gaze there, / Where your troubled spirit can find peace, / And forget all, which earlier gave it torment; / Where faith is not needed, where there is no place for hope, / Where there is the eternal kingdom of sacred love alone!]

The metaphysical basis of this cult was formed by Ivan Turgenev’s extensive discourses regarding his son’s fate beyond the grave. In a letter to Zhukovsky from August 1803, he writes that Andrei was good, that he had not yet managed to sully himself in such a way that purification would have been difficult and that the stains of vice had yet to penetrate the essences of his soul: “They could easily be purged and removed.” (Turgenev, apparently assuming his son had died a virgin, knew nothing of his son’s venereal disease, which had continued to manifest itself until 1802.) Turgenev com50

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prehended his son’s life beyond the grave as a gradual process of unification with the “all-unifying Father”: Soon the properties of his eternal spirit will spread out, and in eternity he will quickly learn that which is so difficult for us to study here. His concepts will likewise broaden, and the ties between the known and unknown shall appear to them in their simplicity. He, or his essence, will be pierced by the divine light, which gives clarity to all things. He will be conjoined with our allunifying Father in harmonious and sympathetic relations, and finally unite with him and dissolve himself in him. A drop shall dissolve into the ocean, and he will not be found. God’s creation will reach its worthy end, will unite with the Creator, all of whom, like the sun in a small drop, will be reflected in him. . . . Here we do not reach this destination, but wander from place to place, not having a solid point. There we are fixed fast. Otherwise, reason rebels. Who here is happy? Who can be blessed here? No one. All is change, all is mixed. There, there is constancy. . . . O! If it were possible for us to have relations with those who have departed, they would assure us of this. But we submit to the fates [given to us by] our merciful and most-wise Father.58

Zhukovsky’s response to this letter gives the opportunity to witness the religious hopes and doubts of the young poet and to determine the metaphysical foundation for his own Welt-Empfindung: Fénelon describes God as “étendue sans bornes, dans laquelle toutes les étendues bornees existent et se concentrent.” Infinite space. But if a soul, as a spiritual atom, removed from the universal soul which encompasses all in its infinitude, must become one and drown in it, as a drop does in the ocean, then what possible consolation can the thought of a future meeting inspire in a person who has been separated from their loved ones by death? . . . In expectation of a future meeting with one’s friends we would desire to preserve those same feelings toward them that our soul had acquired in this life . . . If my soul is not to be destroyed with my earthly body, then why should it not find peace in a distant circle, why should it not honor this highest blessing as its own possession [sobstvennost’iu], sharing it with those who had been loved by it, with those with whom it had united with forever and those from whom it will never be separated?59

Here Zhukovsky envisions the beyond as a kind of conglomeration of familial circles, in which souls of a certain level of spiritual development would reside (later on, Zhukovsky would claim that the souls of the French monarch Henri IV and his murderer Ravaillac would obviously not be relegated to the same “circle”). Remarkably, there is no depiction of Hell in 51

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Zhukovsky’s afterlife, as “eternal punishment” “is not consistent with the understanding of a merciful and omnipotent Creator.” However, there is a “stairway of perfection,” understood by the young writer as “the most constant and unchanging law of creation.” Andrei would undoubtedly fall into the circle of pure souls. But is it possible that there, in the peaceful bliss of his circle, he was able to keep the memory of those who were dear here? Are the ties that bind those that love one another in this world preserved after one passes on? The pious Zhukovsky was cautious in his search for answers to these questions.60 “Let that which must be, be!” he writes to Ivan Turgenev. “Our task is to be good in this life. Death will resolve all doubts. Just imagine that for our A. I. [Andrei Ivanovich Turgenev] all has been resolved! I join you in saying that for him it is forbidden for the dead to communicate with the living; why else are their graves closed and silent?” However, these words are immediately followed by a mystical hypothesis, one that was extremely characteristic of his thought, and one that was expressed in a sentimental key: “Ach, they see us, surround us, are touched by our misfortune, and this thought alone should restrain us and turn us away from evil.” Questions of individual immortality, the possibility of communicating with the departed, the feeling of kinship with the dead and their constant presence in our life, the hope for the reunion of the spiritual family beyond the grave, all of these would become central themes of Zhukovsky’s metaphysical reflections and literary works, from his 1803 “dedication” to Vadim of Novgorod, addressed to the “joyful and sweet” shade of his departed friend, to his translation of Wieland’s “pneumatological” dialogue on immortality,61 to his elegies and ballads of unhappy lovers and his poetic requiems dedicated to his beloved women and friends, to his 1848 article “Something on Ghosts” (“Nechto o privideniiakh”).62 In other words, the place and means of the realization of Zhukovsky’s religious hypotheses from his response to Ivan Turgenev are the poetic imagination. In this sense, Zhukovsky can truly be called the first spiritualist poet of the Russian poetic tradition. It is to his poetic output that Russian poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as Batiushkov, Pushkin, Tiutchev, Polonsky, Vladimir Solov’ev, and Blok, turn to when discussing similar themes. In Zhukovsky’s interpretation, the contradictory emotional life of Andrei, irreducible to any kind of common denominator, was deliberately harmonized and placed within the context of the Neoplatonic religion of love, crowned by Christian faith.63 Departing from Andrei’s own poems and speeches, Zhukovsky translated Andrei’s life and thoughts into the language of his own religious and emotional worldview.64 Instead of a stormy genius who seeks love while being tormented by feelings of guilt and personal imperfection, there appears the image of a chaste angel ascending towards the 52

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heavens; instead of a passionate denial of earthly life, the kingdom of evil and suffering— so typical of the “late” work of Andrei— we are presented with a consolatory understanding of the overflowing of earthly existence into the beyond, concluding with a final meeting of one’s close friends and family in a fixed eternity: Прости! не вечно жить! Увидимся опять; Во гробе нам судьбой назначено свиданье! Надежда сладкая! приятно ожиданье!— С каким веселием я буду умирать! (PSS, I, 59) [Forgive me! We are not to live forever! We shall see each other again; / Fate has set for us a meeting in the grave! / Hope is sweet! Anticipation [is] pleasant! / With what happiness shall I die!]

In 1807 Ivan Turgenev died, and is similarly mourned by Zhukovsky in poetic form. Within a year, Anna Fedorovna Sokovnina, mother of the “beautiful enchantresses,” also passed away, and Zhukovsky commemorated her passing in verse as well. The next year saw the death of Ekaterina Sokovnina, who had earlier revealed her love for Andrei to his father and who remained faithful to her departed beloved till the end of her life. In a letter to Zhukovsky, Alexander Turgenev elaborates on his friend’s musings: Ah, my friend, look who has been taken from us . . . our circle grows ever smaller; it is almost just us two now. . . . There she will find bliss [blazhenstvo]. She had no taste of it here. There, there is her circle, her mother, her father, there is my brother, there, my dear friend, are all of our people, there too is Father, who loved her like a daughter . . . Do you remember how she consoled him after Andrei’s death? Do you remember how he loved her, how he was given solace by her heavenly passion for his son? Now they are together, all are in one circle, all those worthy of Angelic happiness. How familiar to me is this unknown land!65

On the occasion of Sokovnina’s death, Zhukovsky references a lyrical epitaph which depicts the demise of his friend’s beloved as the return of a “heavenly soul” to the land of its birth: Единый, быстрый миг вся жизнь ее была! Одно минутное, но милое явленье, Непостижимое в своем определенье, Судьба на то ее в сей мир произвела, Чтоб, счастья не узнав, увянуть в раннем цвете.

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Все то, что мило нам на свете, И сердце нежное, и ясный, твердый ум, И нежность ко друзьям, и к скорбным состраданье, И в жизни той блаженства ожиданье, Все грозная с тобой в сем гробе погребла, Лишь душу небесам обратно отдала. (PSS, I, 134) [Her whole life was a single, swift moment! / One fleeting but dear appearance, / Unfathomable in its designation, / Fate delivered her to this world / To wither in first blooming, without knowing happiness. / Everything that is dear to us on earth, / A tender heart and a clear, strong mind, / And tenderness for friends and compassion for the sorrowful, / And an expectation of bliss in that life, / All was buried with you in this coffin by menacing Fate, / Only your soul has been given back to heaven.]

Beyond the traditional images of the despondent elegy, these lines offer a clearly delineated understanding of the individual as a “temporary guest” in this world, a concept that is often found in the literary mythology of the “mature” Zhukovsky: Одна лишь смутная мечта в душе моей: Как будто мир земной в ничто преобратился; Как будто та страна знакомей стала ей, Куда сей чистый ангел скрылся. (“Slavianka,” 1815; PSS, II, 99) [There is but one vague dream in my soul: / As if the earthly world had turned into something; / As if that world had become more familiar to her, / There, where that pure angel had disappeared.]

In Zhukovsky’s poetry, this “unknown land” would gradually become populated with kindred souls, and the sweet yet sorrowful path to this blessed place becomes the central passage of his poetic work: Дай руку, брат! как знать, куда наш путь Нас приведет, и скоро ль он свершится, И что еще во мгле судьбы таится— Но дружба нам звездой отрады будь! О прочем здесь останемся беспечны; Нам счастья нет: зато и мы—не вечны! (PSS, I, 284–85) [Brother, give me your hand! How to know where our path / May lead us, and whether it shall soon be complete. / And what the mists of fate might still keep secret— / But let friendship be our star of joy! / Let us remain careless

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about other matters; / We have no happiness here: but, fortunately, we do not last forever.]

The “brothers” in this concluding work of the “Turgenev-Sokovnina” cycle of Zhukovsky’s poetry are sent not into the mundane world, as the poet in Goethe’s “Zueignung” which had so inspired Andrei at the beginning of his own life path, but rather away from the world. There, in the dwelling place of the Father (according to Zhukovsky’s poetic aspiration), the mourning wanderers had long been expected by the other members of their “holy family.” It is worth noting that in Zhukovsky’s poetic religion, crystallized in the early nineteenth century, this “vertical” striving, centered on the figure of the loving Father awaiting his spirited sons, would complement and enrich his sentimental “horizontal” utopia of the earthly sisterly family under the guardianship of the tender Mother. And the liaison between the two beautiful families would be the poet himself.

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The First Love Hope! Meek messenger of the heavens, I wish to praise you in the rapture of my soul. Hear me, friend of joy, and your angelic smile will be my reward! All live and breathe by you, o Divine one! From the laurel-bearer to the shepherd, from the most fortunate to the most dejected pauper, the entire world finds joy and pleasure in you. —V. A. Zhukovsky, “Hope” (1800)

Z H U K O V S K Y W O U L D V I S I T his “grandmother” in Mishenskoe every July while school was in recess. Bunina had nine female charges in her care at the time: the four daughters of Varvara Afanasievna Yushkova (who had died in May 1797), three daughters of Natalia Afanasievna Veliaminova (who had died in 1785), and two daughters of Ekaterina Afanasievna Protasova. Bunina’s own daughters (i.e., Zhukovsky’s half-sisters) were much older than the poet, and he tended to relate to his nieces— who were much closer to him in age— as sisters. The historian Pyotr Bartenev, drawing on the memories of Avdotia Elagina (née Yushkova), once wrote that since none of them had any brothers or uncles, “naturally they all took a liking to Zhukovsky.” The boy’s “air of mystery inherited from that Turkish woman with those thoughtful dark eyes [i.e., Zhukovsky’s mother] and the pious expression on his beautiful face was rather alluring.”1 The young poet playfully took to calling his nieces his “nine muses.” However, as was often the case, this playful sobriquet would take on a more serious mythopoetic dimension in Zhukovsky’s poetry. For example, a hill in Mishenskoe, where Zhukovsky, according to a family legend, wrote his famous translation of Gray’s elegy, was viewed by the poet and his young listeners as a reincarnation of Mount Parnassus, while a nearby spring played the role of the Castalian Spring of Delphi. This symbolic interpretation of his poetic homeland served as the foundation for Zhukovsky’s “earthly” family myth. In this myth, the poet’s “sisters” played a special role of “chosen ones.” Indeed, this

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small, intimate circle was the immediate addressee of Zhukovsky’s poetry and took precedence over any other broader readership. To be sure, idealizations of one’s “native land” were part and parcel of the sentimentalist and pre-romantic worldviews. In his diary, Andrei Turgenev would often mention his father’s estate, where he had spent his childhood. But in Turgenev’s “Schillerian” consciousness, as I have already mentioned, these memories were experienced as painful echoes of a lost Eden that was forever lost to him, a sinner. Unlike his best friend, Zhukovsky was largely uninterested in the theme of original sin. His emotional matrices— to use Andrei Zorin’s term— can be found in the first, idyllic part of Paul and Virginie, which depicted the feminine paradise of the inhabitants of the Île- de-France, and the second part of Rousseau’s Héloïse, with its “Swiss longing” for one’s homeland and the utopia of Clarens. For Zhukovsky, the image of a close-knit family, in which blood ties would take on spiritual and poetic dimensions, would become a kind of earthly Eden, and love between family members could be understood as being both natural and sacred. As a member of the Bunin family “by nature” and not “by law,” Zhukovsky would idealize this “union of kinship”2 and would often turn his poetry into a heartfelt oath of fealty to the Bunin clan. One could say that Zhukovsky’s understanding of his relationship to the Bunin family was a kind of idiosyncratic chivalric cult, based on a specific “Zhukovskian” longing for the family as a unified whole from which he had become separated at birth. However, in Zhukovsky’s understanding this “fall from grace” was not a result of any kind of sin or guilt. The poet’s “chivalrization” of a brotherly love for his “sisters” can be detected in several of his letters and works in his later period, a fact which did not escape the notice of his contemporaries.3 Thus, the romantic poet and philosopher Stepan Shevyrev, an ardent admirer of Zhukovsky’s “ideal poetry,” portrayed the latter in the symbolic image of the radiant medieval knight (vitiaz’) Vadim surrounded by a chorus of twelve loving maidens (these are the heroes of Zhukovsky’s eponymous ballad of 1817, quoted in the epigraph to this book).4 Zhukovsky’s “muses” relished their role in this chivalrous romance throughout their lives, and even competed with one another to be the “first among equals” of the poet’s affections. For example, Anna Zontag (née Yushkova) clearly considered herself to be Zhukovsky’s favorite during their childhood, as we have already seen. Zontag’s sister Avdotia, however, thought otherwise, and managed to convince Bartenev that it was actually she who was the muse of Zhukovsky’s early work. Other nieces, including Maria— who was to be Zhukovsky’s greatest love over the course of his life— and Alexandra Protasova— his beloved goddaughter— would gain importance only

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later in the poet’s life. Of course, Zhukovsky loved all of his muses in his own way. But for the period in question, it was the eldest of the muses that was to command Zhukovsky’s greatest affection, and to whom I shall now turn. K IN D A ND L O V I NG KI N

On May 13, 1798 the Moscow censorship bureau received from Zhukovsky the first part of a book manuscript under the title The Remainder of Philanthropy in France, or Anecdotes of the Republic (Ostatok chelovekoliubiia vo Frantsii, ili Anekdoty Respubliki). According to the censor’s register, the work had been translated by “the young lady Maria Veliaminova.”5 On October 12 of the same year Zhukovsky brought the second part of the composition. The first section was published in the middle of 1798, and the second came out by the end of the year.6 Each part of the work contained a dedication. The first was addressed “To His High Ancestry, the Merciful Master Nikolai Ivanovich Veliaminov, a State Councilor and Cavalier,” while the second was dedicated to “my dear friend” Ekaterina Afanasievna Protasova. Judging by the signatures accompanying both dedications (“M*** A*** V***y”), the translators were none other than the daughters of Nikolai Veliaminov, Maria (Masha, born 1781) and Avdotia (born 1786).7 Given the quality of the work, there can be little doubt that the mastermind, editor, and (in all likelihood) coauthor of this surprisingly competent translation was none other than their uncle, mentor— and secret admirer of Maria Veliaminova—Zhukovsky himself. Maria Veliaminova was born as the result of an affair between her mother Natalia Afanasievna Bunina and her lover, the governor-general of the Tula Governance, Mikhail Nikitich Krechetnikov. In order to preserve his daughter’s reputation, Natalia’s father arranged for her to be married to Nikolai Veliaminov, a former vice-governor under Krechetnikov, who seemed hardly disconcerted by the ambiguous circumstances that led to his marriage.8 At the end of the 1790s, Veliaminov was appointed the vice director of the Moscow Salt Consortium, an organization which was in charge of salt distribution throughout the Russian Empire. It was under his sponsorship that Zhukovsky joined the concern in 1800 upon graduation from the Pension. In 1785 Natalia passed away, leaving her husband three daughters. Their upbringing was entrusted first to their grandmother, Maria Bunina, and from 1796 onwards, their aunt Ekaterina Protasova, both of whom were fervent followers of sentimentalist literature. Maria Veliaminova was Zhukovsky’s first youthful obsession. In addition to similarities in character and temperament, there were also similarities between the two in their status within the family: both were “unfortunate” 58

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children, the offspring of forbidden love.9 In his biography of Zhukovsky, Veselovsky described their relationship as a “loving friendship” (amitié amoureuse): Women were the instrument by which sentiment was refined. Love insisted on its rights to friendship, at least in theory. Love was a pedagogical force: the woman was educated, [one] would read Rousseau with her, you would give her Mendelsohn’s “On the Immortality of the Soul,” she would “tune” herself in response [to man’s sentiments], hypnotized by new revelations . . . while educators would bask in the reflection of their own light.10

Judging from the scant evidence available to us today, it would seem that Zhukovsky truly did occupy himself with the moral upbringing and the aesthetic education of his niece. He discussed religious topics with her, read Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Études de la nature with her, her sister, and her cousins, and, after her marriage, recommended that she read La nouvelle Héloïse. Simply put, Zhukovsky attempted to play the role of the sensitive and wise mentor, who shapes the moral and aesthetic self of his “sister” and beloved.11 The literary expression of Veliaminova and Zhukovsky’s relationship can be found in the history of their co- translation of 1798, a work that has not managed to attract any critical interest, and to which we shall now turn. The Remainder of Philanthropy in France is the Russian translation of an uncredited work entitled La France réconciliée avec l’humanité, ou anecdotes républicaines which was first published by the Société Littéraire et Typographique de Brunswick in 1797.12 The press, founded by the Marquise Louis Dubois de Maisonfort with the financial support of the Duke of Brunswick and subsidies from the Russian royal court, largely occupied itself with releasing Royalist propaganda (by the 1790s Brunswick had become a cultural center for French émigrés). Books published with the Brunswick imprint were bought by the Moscow book dealers Ridiger and Engelsbach for the Russian public.13 Apparently, one of these booksellers ordered from Zhukovsky a translation of this latest collection of the terrors of the French Revolution, and the young man in turn offered the translation to his niece, who had an excellent knowledge of French. In this way Zhukovsky encouraged his pupil to try out her literary talents, while promising to provide assistance. Zhukovsky’s choice was hardly coincidental. The terror of the revolution was a constantly discussed topic in the Bunin household. Maria and her sister were often looked after by governesses who had emigrated from France, and who would tell their charges of the brutal acts of the Jacobins and the moral feats of the unfortunate aristocrats. Avdotia Elagina recalls one 59

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such governess, a “certain Mademoiselle Mercurinie,” who had fled France, and who, during the Jacobin days of terror had been violently forced to play the role of the déesse de la raison, “i.e., she was undressed, led to a cart, and driven through the streets, while people would bow down before her.”14 Assuming that Elagina’s memory did not mislead her, one is forced to come to the conclusion that this French governess was an impostor. The true “Madamoiselle Merkiurinie,” or, to be more precise Theroigne de Méricour (1762–1817), was an active participant in the revolution, a well-known warrior woman who appeared in public “astride a gigantic horse, armed from head to toe.” In Royalist circles she was known as “the bloodthirsty hetaira, leader of the Parisian cannibals.”15 By the end of the 1790s, she was largely remembered for her central role in the theatrical events held in honor of the Goddess of Justice and Reason that had been arranged by Robespierre. By 1793, this goddess of reason had lost her mind and would later spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum. The tall tales of the “false Mericour” (who presented herself not as a willing participant, but as an unfortunate victim of Robespierre’s godless politics)16 must have made a deep impression on the young Bunin women. Let us turn to the contents of this rather remarkable work. It contains two distinct “autobiographical” stories, which are presented as nonfictional testimonies of French atrocities, one written by a man, the other by a woman. The first (“The History of Adrian P***”) is written from the point of view of an émigré who returned to France in order to be reunited with his family and bride-to-be. The second, entitled “The Story of Cecilia de Flormont” (in the original “Thecle de Flormont”), is told from the perspective of an unfortunate wife, who has become the victim of a despicable Jacobin, who throws her husband and father into prison, and who later forces her to witness their execution. For our purposes, it is the first part of the book that is of the most interest. In terms of its major conflict it can be read as a kind of French version of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter: young nobles find themselves drawn into the maelstrom of history, and manage to survive all kinds of trials and obstacles thanks to their virtue and the assistance of an honorable and influential revolutionary. The political program at the base of this work, published in 1797 but attributed to the events of 1796, are typical for a certain segment of the French émigré community of the period between Thermidor and Fructidor. It contains the hope of a return to France and a possible reconciliation with moderate patriotic Republicans (of course, the Jacobins are described in the story as total hypocrites and monsters).17 By the time of 1798 (the time when the Russian translation came out in print) Adrian’s story could only be understood as an artifact of the total impossibility of any 60

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historical reconciliation. The coup of September 14, 1798 (Fructidor 18, V) and the establishment of the Second Directory resulted in renewed violent repressions of returning émigrés and the Catholic clergy. France was swept away by a new wave of terror. The historical veracity of the work is not the only reason that Russian translators turned to it. The sentimental- historical romance must have attracted both Veliaminova and Zhukovsky with its depictions of the relationships of its protagonists. The narrator is a young man whom the revolution separates both from his family and Sophia—“a kind and loving relative of mine who my father had hoped to match me with and whom I was prepared to marry.” In the story, Sophia is depicted as a paragon of virtue and courage: Being young and beautiful, she had a strength of spirit uncommon to her sex. Nature, it would seem, had destined her to give beauty to the world. . . . Every time when I visited them I discovered in her new virtues, and each time I would return with a love for her that had grown more ardent.18

The protagonist repeatedly emphasizes Sophia’s acceptance of self-sacrifice: “She never thought of her own life, but rather cared for those people who pleased her heart.”19 Sophia’s religious nature is likewise underlined; she is shown as having given herself fully to the will of Providence. Sophia’s innocence is put at risk when a vicious all-powerful minister in Robespierre’s government takes a liking to her and asks her to marry him. Of course, in the story the Jacobin understanding of marriage is shown as little more than a request for temporary cohabitation, existing until someone’s (in this case, probably the minister’s) passion was fully satisfied, at which point their “union” would be dissolved. Horrified, Sophia rejects the proposal. The vengeful minister then turns to persecuting Sophia’s protectors (Adrian’s family), and Adrian’s father falls victim to the guillotine. Sophia and Adrian’s mother are imprisoned for over a year, gaining their freedom only after the events of Thermidor. They leave for a provincial town near the sea, where they find Adrian. Adrian and Sophia wed secretly (the Republicans’ “freedom of conscience” quite naturally did not extend to Catholicism, and priests proved difficult to find). Meanwhile, the minister succeeds in escaping Robespierre’s fate, and receives an appointment in the same city where Adrian and Sophia are currently in hiding. Adrian is arrested and thrown in prison. He is sentenced to death, but Sophia turns to Adrian’s friend, the honest Republican Dechamps, for assistance. Dechamps saves Adrian from execution. Sophia attributes Adrian’s salvation to the “power of love and friendship,” that is, those very same “remnants of humanity” that are referenced in the title of the work. In the conclusion, the heroes leave France on a Dutch ship headed to Germany. 61

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Zhukovsky and Maria Veliaminova’s translation is not only a capable summary of the sentimentalist values shared by the young woman and her soulmate, but can also readily be seen as a model for their own experiences and relationship. Love between relatives, the poetry of virtue and selfsacrifice (the feminine ideal of sentimentalism as canonized by male sentimentalist authors), faith in Providence and fidelity to each other, care for one’s parents, and (most importantly) a dream of a peaceful family happiness, one far removed from the revolutions and cataclysms of history, and protected by a humble paternal authority, these notions and values were just as important for the young couple’s real lives as they were for their literary exploits. PL A NS F O R A F U T U R E L I F E

Zhukovsky and Veliaminova’s sentimental dreams of a requited love and quiet domestic bliss made for a stark contrast with the history of the Bunin household. Family legends, some recounted up until the second half of the nineteenth century, inevitably included the unfortunate fates of the children of Afanasy Bunin. His son Ivan, who was betrothed against his will to the daughter of Count Orlov, died on the day of his engagement from heart failure.20 Bunin’s daughter Natalia ruined her reputation through a lengthy affair with Krechetnikov, then governor-general of Tula, and her eventual husband was “of a pleasant disposition, but dull-witted, and of little substance, equally incapable of love or hatred.”21 Dismayed by his elder daughter’s misfortune, Afanasy Bunin hastily arranged the wedding of his second daughter, Varvara, to a reliable young man whom she never loved.22 Varvara’s true beloved, who discovered Bunin’s decision after it was already too late, shattered the ring she had given him “at the very same time they [Varvara and her husband] were getting married.” According to family legend, Varvara died from consumption, which she tried to cultivate in herself: “she did not want to be cured.” Avdotia and Ekaterina’s fates were similarly sorrowful.23 Zhukovsky’s reconciliation of familial ideals and historical reality takes on a form that is characteristic for his utopian consciousness: he views the future happiness of the younger generation of the Bunin family as Providence’s reward for the suffering of their parents. In his correspondence and literary works from 1800 to 1810, the poet repeatedly predicts a soon-to-befound happiness for himself and for his nieces, and interprets the present as foretelling the advent of his desired future. The ideal of happiness in Zhukovsky’s thought can be traced to the Enlightenment ethical views of Karamzin, which can themselves be traced to the master works of Rousseau and Shaftesbury. Zhukovsky’s speeches

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from the meetings of the “Friendly Literary Society” (“On Friendship,” “On the Passions,” and “On Happiness”) represent an enthusiastic exposition of Karamzinian principles. For example, “On Happiness,” which Zhukovsky read on April 28, 1801,24 is clearly indebted to the ideas laid out in Karamzin’s “Conversation on Happiness” of 1797. Karamzin’s text takes the form of a dialogue between the philosopher Filalet and the dreamer Melodor. At the climax of the story, the latter exclaims, “Can a good heart peacefully enjoy anything, when it is surrounded by a tempest of debauched passions, vice, and malice?”25 Filalet responds in a Rousseauan key that man is by nature good, and evil actions are committed by mistakes of the heart and a lack of good judgment and enlightenment. Man must be the creator of his own good fortune, bringing the passions into a beneficial balance and refining taste for true enjoyments. “Being happy,” concludes the philosopher, “[means] to be good.”26 For Zhukovsky, individual happiness is only possible by following the path of virtue and retreating from earthly evil. No matter how troubling the surrounding world might seem, each of us is capable of finding happiness inside one’s own soul, in one’s own “small circle” of friends: Who prevents me from making myself independent of people among whom sorrow and misfortune are born, who prevents me, while not completely rejecting the world, from removing from it my happiness, from drawing a circle around myself, one which the sorrows of earthly cares would not dare cross? My happiness is within me, let it be in me and remain in me, and it will be whole, despite all of the vicissitudes of fate that I will be forced to undergo.27

Drawing on Schiller, Zhukovsky’s friends Andrei Turgenev and Merzliakov would both come out strongly against this escapist notion of “inner happiness.” Addressing Zhukovsky (and by extension Karamzin), Turgenev would recast Melodor’s argument in poetic form in his 1802 “Elegy”: Напрасно хочешь ты, о добрый друг людей, Найти спокойствие внутри души твоей, Напрасно будешь ты сей мыслью веселиться, Что с мирной совестью твой дух не возмутится! Пусть с доброю душой для счастья ты рожден, Но, быв несчастными отвсюду окружен, Но бедствий ближнего со всех сторон свидетель— Не будет для тебя блаженством добродетель. Как часто доброму отрада лишь в слезах, Спокойствие в земле, а счастье в небесах!28

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[In vain do you seek, o kind friend of people,  / To find peace within your soul, / In vain you will take joy in this thought, / That your spirit will not grow indignant at a peaceful conscience! / Even if you were born for happiness, with a good soul, / You were surrounded by unhappy people everywhere, / You witnessed the adversities of your neighbor at every turn, / For you virtue will not be a blessing / How often it is that for a good person joy is only in tears, / Peace in a grave, and happiness in the heavens!]

By 1801, the ideological paths of these friends would grow further and further apart. However, it was Turgenev who had introduced the question of family happiness as one of principal importance to Zhukovsky’s worldview. In July 1799 (six months before his “fall” and a year before his affair with Katerina Mikhailovna), Turgenev informs Merzliakov and Zhukovsky of his “plans for a future life”: I would like to live in the country, with a small number of friends who for me are truly my only friends, and I imagined myself riding on horseback with them, having some money with me, and stopping at a peasant’s hut in order to lighten the burden of a poor peasant. But can this country picture be complete without . . . I imagine HER, with all of her charms, her good nature, faithfulness and love; but it is better to feel all this than to describe it. If you think about this, you shall feel as I do. So, my friends! If in our youth we could go to the four corners of the world, before finally coming back together and if each of us could sing along with Schiller: Wer ein holdes Weib errungen? Mische seinen Jubel ein!– Then in peaceful tranquility we could begin to work, live together, go to the city [Moscow] in winter for “Cabale u[nd] Liebe” and so on.29

The Karamzinian ideal of happiness in a “beautiful and clean little house,” with flowers on the windowsill and a woman at the window with “her sewing, her book, her harp” (“Conversation on Happiness”)30 is translated by Turgenev into a high emotional and stylistic register with the assistance of Schiller’s hymn to friendship and family in the second stanza of the “Ode to Joy.”31 In turn, the inhabitant of this little home is seen by Turgenev not as the beautiful sensitive youth of Karamzin, but as the passionate noble woman similar to Schiller’s Laura or Amalia. “One smile from her, one glance at her would be capable of banishing everything, would fill me with

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a rebellious feeling,” he writes in 1799. “She would sit at the clavichord and play for me ‘Lied an die Freude.’ Admiration and a living bliss would mix with a sense of sorrow. . . . Tears would pour from my eyes, I would take her hand, and see in her a guardian angel, and would throw myself in ardent rapture into her embraces.”32 It should be noted that Turgenev’s erotic fantasy here is a variation on a well-known Schillerian theme from “Laura am Klavier” (1782), in which Laura’s playing on the clavichord calls forth an enraptured state in her listener that borders on prophetic ecstasy (a state which Turgenev properly connects with Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”): Wenn dein Finger durch die Saiten meistert Laura, ißt zur Statue entgeistert, Ißt entkörpert steh ich da. Du gebietest über Tod und Leben, Mächtig wie von tausend Nervgeweben Seelen fordert Philadelphia.33

Turgenev’s dreams of living with his friends in the countryside with three ideal (in Schiller’s interpretation) wives resulted in an agitated response from Merzliakov: Your plan to spend our youths going our separate ways to the four winds out of need (note how this word is not to be found in your plan!) and to eventually come together in one place and live [together]! . . . This plan contains in it something that I can not say, something I was born with and which I will die! Dear friend! Dear friend!34

Veselovsky has noted that Zhukovsky also responded to the “Schillerian” call of his friend, but only several years later in a letter written to Turgenev after his death.35 However, traces of Turgenev’s matrimonial utopia in Zhukovsky’s writing are not limited to this letter; they can also be found in Zhukovsky’s early work, beginning from the first decade of the nineteenth century. A W E D D I NG M A NI F ES T O

In 1902 the literary historian Alexander Arkhangelsky discovered and published the manuscript of August von Kotzebue’s comedy Falsche Scham (False Shame, 1798) translated by the “provincial secretary” Zhukovsky in

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1801 (i.e., after Zhukovsky’s graduation from the Pension). The comedy was staged at the Petrovsky Theater in Moscow and was performed on several occasions.36 Though the play was a commissioned work, it nevertheless touches upon an entire series of issues that concerned its young author, including one that was to play the central role in his life and work: the search for an ideal wife and family happiness. August von Kotzebue, the “German Shakespeare,” was one of the most prolific dramatists in the history of European theater. The author of 218 plays, Kotzebue enjoyed enormous popularity in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century, and his plays, which featured a peculiar blending of the Enlightenment and sentimentalist traditions, were performed with considerable success. This was due in no small part to the fact that Kotzebue was appointed the director of the German theater in Petersburg, although he was not to remain in Russia for long (in April 1801 he left the country for Weimar). Kotzebue’s works were regularly performed in both capitals and in the provinces. The “assembly line” of the translation of his works was organized by Aleksei Malinovsky, a man of letters and one of the leading Russian paleographers of the time. Under his supervision, a number of young clerks from the Department of Foreign Affairs were commissioned to collectively translate Kotzebue’s entire oeuvre.37 Kotzebue was one of the most beloved authors of the Turgenev circle, on a par with Schiller and Goethe. Andrei Turgenev translated his Slanderers (Die Verleumder, 1795) and The Negro Slaves (Die Negersklaven, 1795),38 while his brother Alexander translated The Unfortunates (Die Unglücklichen, 1798). In addition to False Shame, Zhukovsky translated two “historical” novellas of Kotzebue: “The Boy at the Stream, or Steadfast Love” (“Die geprüfte Liebe,” 1795) and “Queen Il’degerda” (“Ildegerte, Königin von Norwegen,” 1790). The first translation contained an epigraph from Karamzin’s epistle to Ivan Dmitriev: “In response to his verses in which he bemoans the fleeting nature of happy youth” (1794). Zhukovsky might have received his commission for False Shame either from Malinovsky, or from one of the booksellers of Moscow whom he had dealings with at this time of his life. It is also possible that Zhukovsky suggested the play to his client, being fond of the work himself.39 Many of Kotzebue’s plays were either family dramas or comedies centered on one or several pairs of lovers. The lovers were often forced to overcome a series of obstacles standing in their path to the wedding altar. The virtuous bourgeois family, which served as a kind of microcosm for the state and society in Kotzebue’s worldview, was understood as having the highest moral value. This defense of the family values of the German Bürgertum distinguished Kotzebue’s dramatic output from his romantic contemporaries, who often treated the traditional institution of marriage with a withering 66

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criticism.40 However, it was precisely this conservative ideology that endeared his works to large segments of the public. The comedy Falsche Scham was first staged at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1796, and was published in 1798. The plot, though simple, is indicative of Kotzebue’s approach to comedy.41 The play takes place in the home of a 47- year- old Councilor who is married to a young and somewhat flighty woman that loves him, but who is also pursued by a haughty and dim-witted French émigré. The Councilor’s daughter, the intelligent and good-natured Minchen (Zhukovsky uses the full form of her name, “Vil’gel’mina,” in his translation), takes after her stepmother in her pursuit of the pleasures of society. Hügel (Kugel’ in Zhukovsky), a shy landowner of moderate means, is in love with her, but she does not return his affections. The Councilor’s household also includes the angelic Emma, who was brought to the home several years ago by the Councilor’s friend, Captain Erlach (Hauptmann Erlach), who found her as an orphan in the ruins of a battlefield. The valiant Erlach, who despises women and fears marriage like fire, arrives at his friend’s house and falls in love with Emma, who has grown up considerably since he last saw her. Emma, for her part, has long been in love with her savior. With the exception of the debauched French emigrant, Vicomte de Maillac (Mal’iak in Zhukovsky), all the characters of the comedy are kind, good people who are incapable of finding happiness because of a false sense of modesty or shame which prevents them from confessing their feelings, fears, and desires. The Councilor, for example, is hesitant to tell his wife of his jealousy, and Minchen does not respond to Hügel’s ardent confession of love, fearing that should he discover her physical imperfections (she has a bit of a hump to her back), he will immediately abandon her. The heavenly Emma is ashamed of her poverty, and brave Erlach is afraid to express his own feelings: “Is not this ‘false shame’ a cursed thing?” he asks in the second act of the comedy, “There would be half the number of unhappy people in the world, if only each said, without shame, what he had in his heart” (PSS, VII, 44). In the end, all of the heroes overcome their reticence, and the play concludes with a procession of the three happy couples who have mastered the lesson of Kotzebue’s “family engineering”: the Councilor and his wife decide to move to the country, as do Hügel and Minchen (Vil’gel’mina in Zhukovsky), while Erlach and Emma retire to the captain’s idyllic Swiss estate. Beyond its simple and rather artificial plot, Kotzebue’s play contains a series of themes that were quite pertinent for its young Russian translator. Zhukovsky was well acquainted with Rousseau’s remarks on the dangers of false shame.42 On several occasions Rousseau noted that false shame caused people to act stupidly, destroying their own life and the lives of others. As Lidia Ginzburg has noted: 67

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Rousseau meticulously analyzes the spiritual condition he calls “false shame” [mauvais honte] as the condition and principal source of his own reprehensible actions. “The only thing that was able to lead him to evil was false shame, against which he struggled all his life with efforts that were as great as they were futile, since that shame was linked to his timid disposition, which confounded the ardent desires of his heart and compelled him to resort to a multitude of circuitous paths that were often blameworthy” (Dialogues, 897). False shame is thus derived from the initial contradiction between Rousseau’s ardent passions and his timid disposition.43

In passing, I should note that the overcoming of excessive timidity was part of Zhukovsky’s own program of self-improvement. Indeed, this critique of false shame derived from the Rousseauan cult of “sincerity and love” professed by the Turgenev circle. Kotzebue’s constant mockery of the propriety of French manners, which the playwright juxtaposed to the honest and directness of “good Germans,” was met with approval by Zhukovsky and other patriotically inclined Russian writers. In the play discussed earlier, for example, the French “art of love” is shown to have nothing in common with the confession of the lovers’ true feelings. The main antagonist is the French emigrant Vicomte de Maillac, who tries in this provincial town to be a legislator of fashion. The Frenchman is a proponent of the outmoded institution of l’ami de la maison, where a husband would hire a male admirer for his own wife. At the conclusion of the play, Maillac is shown not only to be deeply immoral, but also incredibly ignorant, not having even read Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse! The vehicle for Zhukovsky’s own ideology in his translation is the sensitive petty landowner Kugel (a literary predecessor of Tolstoy’s Levin!), who, like Zhukovsky himself, owns a “small corner of land” far from the town. His impassioned confession of love to Vilgelmina (Kotzebue’s “Minchen”) largely consists of a sampling of Zhukovsky’s romantic ideas and, undoubtedly, has a real-life addressee as well, the poet’s childhood friend Maria Veliaminova, whose last name has a clear phonetic resonance with the heroine of the play: Am I to know your heart? I have yet to forget the happy years of our childhood! . . . O, where has that happy time gone, when we practically lived together . . . Every happy summer evening united us, you would always run up to meet me with joy, you would always call me Augustus, you would call me “thou” [ty]. And when the lively, joyful Vilgelmina left our circle of children in order to share the remains of her money with the paupers or to pick up a fallen child, when she would save some of her fruit for her father, or picked flowers for her mother, o Vilgelmina! Vilgelmina! Am I to know your heart? (PSS, VII, 63)44

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The confession soon takes on a Rousseauan turn, becoming an impassioned monologue against the depravities of civilization, which had destroyed the meaning of true love: “I love you” says the city- dweller with a funny grimace; “I love thee” says the country-dweller with an ardent gaze. The former repeats this a hundred times each day; the latter, but once in his life. For the former love serves as a distraction, while for the latter it comprises the blessing of his entire life. For the former love is like a flower that wilts in the wind; for the former, it is a tree, giving shade from the sun, a tree that will never ever whither! . . . Flee, flee from this den of vice— the air here is poison!— flee to the countryside, where each and every noble emotion can come to life and become sweet, where love and friendship are not rare, but common joys which are always renewed. There you can honor God, when you look at the clear blue sky with rapture, there prayer is sweet! —There they also help the poor, but pride does not savor its coin in giving to those who need charity. There one can find entertainment without cards, speak without offending those around you, there they are not ashamed to love, they are not afraid of openly calling a scoundrel a scoundrel! . . . (Ardently) O! I have put a tiny corner of land that I can call my own, I am peaceful and happy in my soul, and should Vilgelmina desire to add her love to all of this, o then, then I will want nothing more in the world, my dwelling would be paradise! It would only remain for me to surround it with mountains, so that the envy [of others] would be unable to penetrate it! (PSS, VII, 64–65)

Kugel’s impassioned tirade anticipates Zhukovsky’s later lyric monologues (first in prose, then in poetry) in both syntax and vocabulary. This hymn to solitude, the only place where loving spouses can find enduring happiness, is repeated nearly word for word in the poet’s articles on family happiness of 1808–09, when Zhukovsky still dreamed of marrying Maria Protasova: Think of the dwelling place like-minded spouses, of one accord in their understanding of life, in one accord in their choice of how to enjoy life, here moments of anxiety do not have that sense of agitation that persecute us when we work for ourselves alone; . . . here every noble feeling of the soul is more enlivened, more elevated, more pure . . . charity is rewarded not only by the secret approval of the heart, but is accompanied by the tender participation of a beloved being, who in your eyes is the epitome of all virtues; the prayer of the family man is gratitude.45

The conclusion of the comedy in Zhukovsky’s translation sees his utopia played out on stage, but it also “secretly” alludes to Andrei Turgenev’s 69

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“plans for the future” for three friendly families, as formulated in his letter in 1799. “Be cheerful, children”— pronounces Erlach, in the final scene of Zhukovsky’s play: Now there is an entire circle of happy people, let us sing a song! (Solo). Blessed, humble joy! Joy, blessed daughter of the heavens! Eh, musicians, play!

(Music from the beyond the stage, everyone joins hands, and forming a semi-circle, sing) Chorus He who has found a friend in this world, He who shares the burdens of life, With a kind and goodly wife . . . Let him join us, in this circle of friends!46 Blessed, humble joy! Joy, blessed daughter of the heavens! With a pure, ardent soul We step into your bridal chamber!47

(The curtain begins to fall and the last sounds are heard only when it the touches the stage) (PSS, VII, 125) The “sacred” stanza of the “Ode to Joy” thus becomes a poetic blessing on the happy couples, and Kotzebue’s comedy, in turn, a manifesto for the matrimonial dreams of its young translator. F ROM S A I NT - P R EU X T O P ET R ARCH

Let us return to the story of Maria Veliaminova. In 1801 she was married to a Nikolai Petrovich Svechin, a military man, and soon moved to Petersburg. Her relationship with Zhukovsky did not come to an end at this point, but rather took on a new form, one that responded to other appropriate literary models. Unfortunately, we know very little of their relationship from the participants themselves: Zhukovsky, unlike Andrei Turgenev, did not keep a diary during this period, and their correspondence has not been passed down to us. However, the general contours of their relationship can be at least partially reconstructed from Turgenev’s letters to Zhukovsky. Turgenev, as has 70

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already been mentioned, was a trusted confidant of Zhukovsky. He would act as Zhukovsky’s messenger, talk of Zhukovsky with Maria while Zhukovsky was away in the country, and send Zhukovsky her letters with his own advice as to how to act further. In doing so, Turgenev was playing much the same role Zhukovsky himself had played in Turgenev’s pursuit of Ekaterina Sokovnina, and much like this relationship, the epistolary love affair between Zhukovsky and the new Mrs. Svechina was also built on literary models. However, despite these formal similarities, Zhukovsky’s relationship with Maria shows a significant difference in both the biographical situations and the ideological principles of the parties involved. First and foremost, this romance was experienced by both sides as a hopeless one, much in the spirit of the galanterie of the salon, with an accent on “a spiritual love that transcends carnal desire and is in harmony with honor and reason.”48 Zhukovsky’s object of desire was a married relative, one that, moreover, lived in a distant city. Letter writing was the only means of communication available. Predominated by an overwhelming sense of melancholy, the correspondence between Zhukovsky and Maria Svechina focused on their spiritual, moral, and intellectual life. Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse served as a ready-made model, and Zhukovsky even strongly recommended that Maria read Rousseau in one of his many missives to her. At the same time, however, Zhukovsky’s own character and worldview had little in common with the Rousseauan perspective, and this dissonance between Zhukovsky’s prescribed role and his nature would result in the creation of a peculiar sort of Rousseauanism that, as we shall see, departed from his friends’ more faithful adherence to the tradition. Again, what little we know of Zhukovsky’s first love is only known to us as it is reflected in Turgenev’s words. But it is precisely such a reflection that allows us to discern how the pair of lovers wanted to appear to each other and to their friends. In his letters, Turgenev describes Zhukovsky’s beloved as a divine being. “True, in her face there was something heavenly,” Turgenev writes in December 1801, “She was in white, and [had] a sense of langour that by candlelight [ pri svechakh, perhaps an unconcious play on the name of Maria’s new husband?] made her particularly alluring.”49 Zhukovsky, meanwhile, is portrayed in Turgenev’s letters as a suffering melancholic and even misanthrope. Turgenev informs Maria that Zhukovsky had composed a new ode with a particularly despondent couplet.50 Maria responds with concern, “Why is he in such a disposition? He was not in such a way before.” She recalls Zhukovsky’s “Elegy” (the first version of “A Country Cemetery,” which she had heard previously in Mishenskoe), which was shot through with so-called white melancholy. Turgenev informs Maria that Zhukovsky had been participating in a student theater. “What has become of his timidity?” she asks. On one occasion, Turgenev informs Maria that Zhu71

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kovsky is translating Voltaire, and reproduces in a letter to Zhukovsky his conversation with her, which is reminiscent of a scene from a play, replete with pregnant pauses and terse phrases that would later make Chekhov’s dramas famous: She: “But he promised me that he would never love Voltaire.” I: “He, believe me, doesn’t love him in the least. Rousseau is his mentor.” She: “I would have never thought that Vas[ily] Andr[eevich] [Zhukovsky] was capable of liking Voltaire.” I: “Believe me, he does not like him, and is incapable of loving him in his heart.” She: “With his feelings, with the disposition of his soul” (with a certain passion and rapidity). After having fallen silent for awhile, she: “How dear he is” (with a feeling of inexplicable sweetness). I: “I know no one who has such a good and sensitive heart!” She: “But how often he falls to brooding.”51

A large portion of Turgenev’s correspondence to Zhukovsky is taken up by retellings of Zhukovsky’s literary works and his conversations with Maria on moral and religious themes. A letter from the end of March 1802 describes Maria’s reaction to Zhukovsky’s recollections of his moral paragons: her father and Varvara Mikhailovna Sokovnina, who had become a nun. “My God,” she exclaims, “How pleasant it is for me to talk freely of religion, how consoling it is for my heart! . . . My God! I am so sad that V. A. [Zhukovsky] is not here! It’s boring; I have grown so accustomed to him!”52 In keeping with the accepted literary model, Turgenev attempts to convince Zhukovsky to move into the Svechin household, emphasizing the incompatible natures of Maria and her husband: In this family there is no harmony . . . he is a balalaika, while she is a harp. I know of another instrument capable of accompanying her, but . . . let us both breathe deeply from the depths of our hearts.53

The performance of Nouvelle Héloïse continues. Turgenev is given permission by Zhukovsky to read the latter’s letters to Maria (just as Zhukovsky was to read Turgenev’s letters to Ekaterina Sokovnina). This gave Turgenev complete “transparency” as to their relationship,54 and turned the affair’s participants into a dedicated circle. Turgenev and Zhukovsky’s love affairs developed in tandem, and contained several parallels: the Sokovnina sisters in one case, the Veliaminova sisters in the other, Zhukovsky being separated from his love because he was staying in Moscow, while his “brother” 72

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Turgenev was likewise separated from his by being in Petersburg. This sense of symmetry resulted in a kind of a common space for love, one that has a largely textual, literary, and decidedly platonic nature. It is no coincidence that the friends simultaneously are considering translating Alexander Pope’s epistle “Eloisa to Abelard,” in which the correspondence of separated lovers is presented both as a tragedy, and as the highest form of expression of love. In Zhukovsky: Пиши ко мне! Писать—небес изобретенье! Любовница в тоске, любовник в заточенье— Быть может, некогда нашли блаженство в нем! Как сладко, разлучась, беседовать с пером! Черты волшебные, черты одушевленны! Черты, святым огнем любви воспламененны! Им страстная душа вверяет жребий свой! В них дева робкая с сердечной простотой Все тайны пылких чувств, весь жар свой изливает! В них все протекшее для сердца оживает! (PSS, I, 70)55 [Write to me! Writing is invention of the heavens! / A lover in sorrow, and her beloved in captivity, / That perhaps once they could have found happiness in it! / How sweet it is to talk with the pen while [we are] separated! / Magical lines, lines come to life! / Lines enflamed with holy fire! / To them the passionate soul entrusts its lot! / In them the shy maiden with simplicity of heart / Pours out her passion, all the secrets of her fervent feelings! / In them the bygone years come to life in one’s heart!]

In January 1802 Turgenev sends Zhukovsky a letter from Maria along with his own personal commentary: I read it [the letter], was touched by it and read it in such a moment, that I myself became very sad. She has a sense for her position, and is in no way blind in her consideration of her husband. As Werther said, “Überall betrognene Hoffnungen, überall zernichtete Pläne.” What kind of future can she possibly see for herself, a future that might last forever! True, even in this letter she is like Francisca von Sternach in “[Graf] Donamar.” You remember how [von Sternach] describes in her letter the years of her childhood that she had spent with him. She has the same meekness, and this meek sense of one’s innocence, and forgiveness to those who persecute her or who are the cause of her misfortunes. I can not describe how dear this feeling is for me, how I love to imagine it, how I too am now full of sorrow, yet how pleasant it is to see [such sentiment] in K[aterina] M[ikhailovna] [Sokovnina].56

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The preceding passage can be read as a key to the aesthetics of love of Zhukovsky and Turgenev’s circle. Turgenev reads Maria’s character through the prism of an idealized model of feminine behavior, one that is presented by literary models (in this case, Francisca, the heroine of Friedrich Bouterwek’s novel Graf Donamar [1792]). The lovers in this novel are childhood friends who have become separated by fate (much like Veliaminova and Zhukovsky).57 After several years pass, they find each other and embark upon a correspondence, in which can be heard an unending lament for the lost paradise of their innocence (for Zhukovsky and Veliaminova, the “lost paradise” of Mishenskoe). Francisca’s fate is a tragic one: she is deceived, betrayed, expelled, and repeatedly mocked. But she forgives her enemies, sacrificing herself, becoming a nun before finally dying from a broken heart (in the novel all of the main characters meet their end). At least within the boundaries of this amorous fantasy written in epistolary form, this is to be Maria’s role.58 In the very same letter Turgenev once more calls upon his friend to leave his duties in Moscow and move to Petersburg, if only for “Maria Nikolaevna’s sake”: She loves you like a brother, and you love her like you love nothing else. Between you there is the most innocent and sacred bond; sa vertu ne court pas l’ombre de danger, et vous pouvez adoucir son sort votre presence, et vous ne viendriez pas. Who can understand her here? You must come and be here!59

Turgenev presents Zhukovsky and Maria’s relationship as ideal love, one that has no need of “material” confirmation and which has no goal of its own. It is like the resonance of two souls, a sentimental duet of harpsichord and piano, a love of consolation, a love which does not overcome desire (as it does in Rousseau’s model, in itself a modification of the galanterie of the salon), but rather seems to be unaware of desire’s very possibility. Still, it should be noted that in another of Turgenev’s letters urging Zhukovsky to come to Petersburg, he playfully hints at the possibility of his friend fulfilling “all of those desires, which have been collecting in you”: “Read more often Prince Dolgoruky’s panegyric on the all- consoling Russian word avos’ [perhaps] and you will truly be at peace.”60 Apparently, Turgenev had in mind the following lines from Ivan Dolgoruky’s playful lyric: Супруга мужа лобызает, Твердя, что всех милее он; Скупой свою шкатулку прячет; Бродяга весь свой век маячет;

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Приказный крадет что есть сил.И всякой сам в себе смекает, Авось никто де не узнает, Что я проказу сгородил.61 [A wife kisses her husband, / Assuring that he is best of all, / The miser hides his treasure, / A vagabond wanders all his life, / A clerk steals what he can— / And everyone can figure out / Perhaps no one will ever find out / That I have been up to no good.]

Such actions, while completely fine for Turgenev, had no place in Zhukovsky’s chaste moral code. In the end, Zhukovsky chose not to come to Petersburg. Again, it must be emphasized that in their game of love, the participants were using one and the same literary sources, but, due to differences in character, positions in life, and (most importantly) personal WeltEmpfindung, they interpreted these sources differently. Consequently, this led to a variety of results. If we take Isaiah Berlin’s famous dichotomy and apply it to the world of love, Turgenev was a fox, knowing “many things,” while Zhukovsky was a hedgehog, knowing “only one thing, but the most important one”— an ideal feeling. Zhukovsky’s “sublime sentiment” for Maria soon became a topic of discussion among his friends. Saint-Preux, Werther, not even Schiller’s Karl Moor and Ferdinand had demonstrated such emotion. Instead, Alexander Turgenev, who had been studying at the University of Gottingen since 1802, offered a different cultural archetype. He found it in a lecture by his professor, Friedrich August Bouterwek (the very same author of Graf Donamar): Today Bouterwek described in his lecture Petrarch and his platonic love for Laura. What a striking similarity to Zhukovsky’s character! If I had to describe Zhuk[ovsky], I would simply repeat what Bouterwek said of Petrarch. And Zhuk[ovsky] is in precisely the same relation to Sv[echina] as Petr[arch] was to his Laura or Madame de Sade. (184)

This note has often been cited by Zhukovsky’s biographers, but it is still of some interest. What, precisely, did Bouterwek say about Petrarch? There is an entire section of the professor’s History of Poetry and Rhetoric since the End of the Thirteenth Century (Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit seit dem Ende des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts) dedicated to the Italian poet, containing the following summary of Petrarch’s ideal love: Petrarch loved his Laura with all the ardor of which only a soul like his is capable, but he loved her only as the fairest appearance. He had oft seen her,

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and perhaps even spoken with her from time to time. To him, her figure was the embodied divine that he had yearned to behold, her voice the voice of angels that he had longed to hear. Thus he saw and heard her both waking and in dreams. His fantasy had found an idol, his heart a point of rest for his wishes. And for twenty years, he directed his love towards her in a cycle of dreams and desires— whereas Laura de Sade and her spouse, as it seems, found happiness in a satisfying marriage with eleven children. Petrarch had lost nothing from her death. But ever thinking of her dying gave his fantasy new life, and thus he continued to romanticize and dream of his idol for ten more years until the flame— which had long enough drawn its strength from nothing more than imagination— finally extinguished itself.62

Alexander Turgenev’s pairing of Zhukovsky with Petrarch is symptomatic of the literary and aesthetic context of the period.63 Interest in the Italian poet was high. The most important novel of the time, Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, contained an epigraph from Petrarch’s Sonnet 338, “On the Death of Madonna Laura”: “Non la conobbe il mondo, mentre l’ebbe: / Conobbill’ io ch’a pianger qui rimasi.”64 From here the epigraph was taken by Karamzin for his 1796 edition of his short story “Poor Liza.” Precisely these very words were carved into a tree at “Liza’s pond” by an ardent follower of Karamzin (and Rousseau), Vasily Lvovich Pushkin.65 And it is from La nouvelle Héloïse (and not, as some have suggested, Pushkin’s carving)66 that Andrei Turgenev includes in a diary entry the similarity in character between Elizaveta Sandunova and Louisa Schiller (Cabale und Liebe).67 In the perception of the time, Julie was not only a new Héloïse, but a new Laura as well. Her bard was not the invented Saint-Preux, but the author of the novel himself (Rousseau). Similarly, in the consciousness of his friend, Zhukovsky was associated with the selfless poet of the Beautiful Lady, whose existence illuminated her beloved’s world. Zhukovsky was to be a new Petrarch. The idealized relationship between Zhukovsky and Svechina was manifested in their correspondence (unfortunately, no longer available to us) as well as in several references in Zhukovsky’s poetry from 1800 to 1805. The love lyrics of this “Russian Petrarch” appeared later, in connection with a new and even greater love for Maria Protasova (see part II of this volume). However, even this early love bore witness to the character and future direction of Zhukovsky’s philosophy of love. D E C E I V ED HO P ES

As we know, in the end, Zhukovsky did not move to Petersburg (much to the delight of “grandmother” and mother alike, both of whom had feared such 76

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a turn of events). Meanwhile, the poet’s mood became increasingly sullen, a change of which Turgenev constantly kept Maria Svechina aware. In letters to his friends Zhukovsky had been complaining of his lot for some time, and cursed his pointless occupation at the Salt Consortium (where his patron and protector was Maria’s father, Nikolai Veliaminov). Zhukovsky claimed that such work was ruinous for his poetic talent: I write this in the decrepit office, on a pile of large accounting books, around me there ring out the voices of big-bellied, filthy scribes; the quills scrape and rattle in the hand of these salted anchovies and leave inkblots on the paper; around me there is the chaos of clerks; I am the only heavenly body that floats above this hideous structure of a uniformed herd, and thinks audessus du vulgaire and composes this letter to you (letter to Merzliakov, August 22, 1800).68

His mother and “grandmother” have been advising him to reconcile himself to his state. Calm was also advised by Andrei Turgenev, who argued that as the job was not difficult, it was possible to find time for poetry, and in the summer it was possible to return home to the country while on leave. Meanwhile in April 1802, Zhukovsky manages to get into a conflict with Prince Tsitsianov, the solicitor of the Salt Consortium, is soon arrested, and— to the surprise and horror of his friends and relatives— immediately submits his resignation from his post. Andrei Turgenev writes, “I am most disturbed that you are still under arrest. Well, brother! Why do you not wish to serve? If you want my advice, then I would advise you to work. It is possible to serve and practice our common craft [at the same time].” Ivan Petrovich Turgenev promises to find a more acceptable position for Zhukovsky. Maria Svechina plans to write him a letter: “It pains her greatly that you will resign your position.”69 But Zhukovsky is insistent. “My friend, there is nothing to say. I will only say that I am deeply saddened,” writes Maria Grigorievna Bunina in response to Zhukovsky’s desperate letter. “I have not given mother your letter. She will be greatly saddened, better that you come yourself, then she will be calm . . . forgive me. Come.”70 In May 1802, Zhukovsky returns to Mishenskoe with the firm conviction of never entering the service again, but to work on his own education and dedicate himself entirely to literary activity. Of course, Zhukovsky’s decision was the result of concrete biographical circumstances that we know little about. However, even while remaining ignorant of the details of the conflict, we can reasonably conclude that it was perhaps somewhat preordained by literary considerations. Indeed, Zhukovsky resigns from his position in a manner reminiscent of Werther. In the beginning of the second part of Goethe’s novel, Werther, having saved 77

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himself from the love of the married Lotta by acquiring a government position, recounts his fate in the city. His dissatisfaction with the local elite and bureaucracy swells into a crescendo. He is particularly vexed by his immediate supervisor, a pedant and gossip. The final straw to break the camel’s back is a rumor that has been started about him in the city. Without informing his friends and relatives, Werther resigns his position and immediately sets out for home: I shall enter at the same gate through which I came with my mother, when, after my father’s death, she left that delightful retreat to immure herself in your melancholy town.71

Below is the full text of Werther’s letter from May 9, which was constantly cited by Andrei Turgenev in his letters to his friends,72 and which, by all appearances, served in their circle as a kind of manual for expressing their feelings of nostalgia: I have paid my visit to my native place with all the devotion of a pilgrim and have experienced many unexpected emotions. Near the great willow tree, which is a quarter of a league from the village, I got out of the carriage, and sent it on before, that alone and on foot I might enjoy vividly and heartily all the pleasure of my recollections. I stood there under that same elm which was formerly the term and object of my walks. How things have since changed! Then, in happy ignorance, I sighed for a world I did not know, where I hoped to find every pleasure and enjoyment which my heart could desire, and now, on my return from that wide world, O my friend, how many disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans have I brought back! As I contemplated the mountains, which lay stretched out before me, I thought how often they had been the object of my dearest desires. Here used I to sit for hours together with my eyes bent upon them, ardently longing to wander in the shade of those woods, to lose myself in those valleys, which form so delightful an object in the distance. With what reluctance did I leave this charming spot, when my hour of recreation was over and my leave of absence expired! Every step produced some particular impression. A pilgrim in the Holy Land does not meet so many spots pregnant with tender recollections and his soul is hardly moved with greater devotion. One incident will serve for illustration. I followed the course of a stream to a farm formerly a delightful walk of mine and paused at the spot where when boys we used to amuse ourselves making ducks and drakes upon the water. I recollected so well how I used formerly to watch the course of that same stream, following it with inquiring eagerness, forming romantic ideas of the countries it was to pass through, but

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my imagination was soon exhausted, while the water continued flowing farther and farther on, till my fancy became bewildered by the contemplation of an invisible distance. Exactly such, my dear friend, so happy and so confined were the thoughts of our good ancestors. Their feelings and their poetry were fresh as childhood.! . . . Man needs but little earth for enjoyment and still less for his final repose.73

It would appear that it was this letter that served as the emotional and behavioral model for Zhukovsky in the spring of 1802. It is in this context74 that we should understand Zhukovsky’s return to his major work of this period— the second, canonical, translation of Gray’s elegy, which should be seen as a return to the home where the poet had spent his childhood and where he first fell in love, where the simple graves of his ancestors were kept, speaking of the vanity of earthly cares— the family chapel contained the resting place of his father, his godmother, “auntie” Varvara Yushkova, and an unknown serf of the Bunins who had died in the sixteenth century.75 There he could find peace in nature, at his favorite resting place “beneath a slumbering willow” (the willow comes from Werther; in the original, Gray speaks of an elm). There he could experience the separation from history and a devotional religious melancholy, reconciled to death in the absence of earthly happiness. Zhukovsky’s elegy, which Vladimir Solov’ev deemed the cradle of Russian poetry, concludes with an epitaph, which was most likely read in the early nineteenth century within the context of Werther: Здесь пепел юноши безвременно сокрыли, Что слава, счастие, не знал он в мире сем. Но музы от него лица не отвратили, И меланхолии, печать была на нем. Он кроток сердцем был, чувствителен душою— Чувствительным творец награду положил. Дарил несчастных он—чем только мог—слезою; В награду от творца он друга получил. Прохожий, помолись над этою могилой; Он в ней нашел приют от всех земных тревог; Здесь все оставил он, что в нем греховно было, С надеждою, что жив его спаситель-бог. (PSS, I, 57)76 [Here a youth’s ashes are untimely interred,  / In this world he knew neither fame nor happiness. / But the muses did not turn away from him, / And the seal of melancholy was upon him. / He was meek at heart, sensitive of soul— / The Creator rewards those who are sensitive. / He [the youth] gave

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the unfortunate— what he could— a tear; / In return from the Creator he received a friend. / Passerby, pray upon this grave! / He found in it shelter from all earthly cares; / Here he left all that was sinful in him, / With the hope that his Savior-God yet lived.]

C ON CL U S I O N

Zhukovsky and Svechina’s idealized affair apparently continued, before gradually coming to a close in 1804. On February 3, 1802 Andrei Turgenev informed his friend that Maria regretted that the poet was always despondent and composed poems expressing his “melancholic and despondent” condition. Turgenev calls upon Zhukovsky to cast off his sorrow and find “greater nourishment and pleasure” in literature and poetry: You must be satisfied with your situation; I judge by the shape of your thoughts: find a secluded corner for yourself and a copy of Rousseau; you have all this. What else do you want? True pleasures are not to be found here; and what kind there could be on this dark planet are given to you by poetry and friendship, and your good heart makes use of both of them. Brother, put an end to your being sad.77

In all likelihood, Turgenev was speaking of the melancholy verses Zhukovsky had composed on his birthday: Мое младенчество сокрылось; Уж вянет юности цветок; Без горя сердце истощилось, Вперед присудит что-то рок! (PSS, I, 58) [My childhood is over; / My youth is already fading; / My heart has wasted away without sorrow, / Fate has a judgment in store for me!]

Clearly, concerns about Zhukovsky’s condition were widespread among his friends. “Zhukovsky is kind, very kind,” writes his “brother” Alexander Turgenev in July 1802, if only the dreary wickedness of people did not leave such an impression on his heart, if only it did not “carve in his heart such distrust, such hatred for people.” From his kindness he will either come to hate or adore humanity; “but it seems that he can not bear an enduring, uninterrupted disgust at people; this emotion could suffocate him,” and so, while he will constantly be disillusioned by people, he will also “love them always.”78 Meanwhile, we can see from his birthday poem that Zhukovsky was

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already beginning to rise up out of his “Wertherian” crisis. The Filaret in him had managed to vanquish the Melodor. Happiness once more seems possible in a quite life of solitude, in friendship, in poetry, but not in love: Не нужны мне венцы вселенной, Мне дорог ваш, друзья, венок! На что чертог мне позлащенный? Простой, укромный уголок, В тени лесов уединенный, Где бы свободно я дышал, Всем милым сердцу окруженный, И лирой дух свой услаждал— Вот всё—я больше не желаю, В душе моей цветет мой рай. Я бурный мир сей презираю. О лира, друг мой! Утешай Меня в моем уединеньи; А вы, друзья мои, скорей, Оставя свет сей треволненный, Сберитесь к хижине моей. Там, в мире сердца благодатном, Наш век как ясный день пройдет; С друзьями и тоска приятна, Но и тоска нас не найдет. Когда ж придет нам расставаться, Не будем слез мы проливать: Недолго на земле скитаться; Друзья! увидимся опять. (PSS, I, 58–59) [I have no need of the crowns of the universe,  / I value your laurels, my friends, instead! / What use have I of the golden palace? / A simple, humble corner, / Alone in the shadows of the forest, / Where I would breathe free, / Surrounded by all those dear to my heart, / And delight my spirit with my lyre,— / That is all. I want for nothing more, / In my soul my paradise blossoms, / And I despise this tumultuous world. / O lyre! My friend! Console me / In my solitude; / And you, my friends, quickly, / Leave this life of agitation, / And come gather yourselves in my hut. / There in the blessed world of the heart, / Our lives shall pass like a clear day. / With friends even sorrow is pleasant, / But not even sorrow shall find us. / When it comes time to part, / We will not shed tears: / We are on earth but for awhile; / Friends! We shall see each other again.]

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This is still the same utopia of communal life with brothers and friends that recalls Andrei Turgenev’s project. But in the new Horatian variant of this utopia, we see that there is no place for a beloved. Maria Svechina did not become Zhukovsky’s Laura, Julie, his Lotte, or his Francisca. Svechina’s life, in keeping with the “Bunin karma,” contained little joy. In 1806 she separated from her husband. They had no children. Her beauty (judging by Alexander Voeikov’s poem “No, my dear, you have yet to conquer all passions”)79 had faded, while her religious fervor strengthened. She remained on friendly terms with Zhukovsky, but refused to support him in his pursuit of Maria (Masha) Protasova out of religious concerns. There is reason to suspect that Veliaminova was jealous of her “childhood friend’s” nieces, but she claimed that it was “not jealousy,” but “despair, which alone is destined to feed my emotions and oppress me.”80 Judging from a letter she sent to Zhukovsky in the summer of 1821, she maintained her sentimental and melancholic outlook that had so attracted Zhukovsky and Andrei Turgenev to the end of her life: “Farewell, dear comforter of sorrow and traveler to dreamlike lands. Long ago, I declared war on imagination, and I would like to say the same to emotion,” and, “having affixed the seal of silence, I take up the Mechanism of life.”81 According to a memoirist’s account, Maria Svechina was unusually kind and simplehearted. Allegedly, on one occasion Zhukovsky wanted to prove just how credulous and kind she was, convinced her that he had had an affair and that a child had been born, and he didn’t know what to do with it, saying he wanted to raise it, but didn’t know how. Maria burst into tears and immediately offered to take this child and raise it as her own. All of this, claims the memoirist, was told to her by Maria herself, who entrusted it to her as a secret, which she swore to keep: “Then, they [Zhukovsky and Co.] gave her [Maria] a swaddled piglet. She was prepared to ruin her reputation and pass off the child as her own. Despite the fact that she was agitated for a long time and cried a lot, she did not get upset when she found out [later] that it had all been a hoax.”82 Poor Maria!

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PART II

Love as Religion

Chapter Four

Maria What awaits me further on life’s path? What has mysterious fate set in store for me? —Zhukovsky, “Verses on Maria’s Grave”

I think that by expressing in his poetry certain new concepts and feelings, he has brought something new to poetic language. His poetry is a faithful depiction of his personhood, it has attracted interest because in a certain sense they are echoes of his life and the feelings that have filled it. —Zhukovsky on himself, “Outline of the History of Russian Literature”

Z H U K O V S K Y ’ S D I A R Y E N T R Y from June 13, 1805, reveals the twenty-two-year-old poet’s plans for the next ten to fifteen years of his life (PSS, XIII, 13–14). Using the funds he hopes to receive from Anton Prokopovich-Antonsky, the director of the Pension for Nobles, Zhukovsky intends to study in Paris for a year, before spending a year at either Göttingen or Jena University, followed by a year of traveling through Europe. By 1809, he expects to begin publishing a literary journal, the profits of which will allow him to repay his debts within four years. After this, Zhukovsky plans to write “some kind of major work” which will further improve his standing and reputation in the literary world (13). At the same time, Zhukovsky also considers an alternative plan, should going abroad prove to be unfeasible. In this variant, he plans on repaying his debts by 1806, and beginning the journal by 1807. In four years, he believes he will have amassed enough capital to live comfortably off the interest, allowing him to undertake “something of importance” and to dedicate himself completely to literature. The success of both of these plans, in Zhukovsky’s view, would require “diligence, constant patience, shrewd frugality, and moderation” in his way of life (13). Zhukovsky’s attitude to his future takes the

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Karamzinian ideal of a “modest happiness” and applies it to his own personal circumstances: I desire a peaceful, innocent life, to not have want of anything. I would like neither myself nor mother to be unhappy, and [would want] that we would have all that we needed. I would like to experience certain pleasures that are available to any person, rich or poor: pleasure from work, from a moderate yet constant activity, from a peaceful, well-ordered family life. (PSS, XIII, 14)

The simple pleasures of domestic bliss, according to Zhukovsky, should include reading, gardening, and “—should God will it—the company of a faithful friend or a faithful wife” (XIII, 14).1 Simultaneously sentimental and pedantically rationalistic, Zhukovsky’s plans for his future life would soon come to be expressed in a lyrical key. Thus, the poet’s diary entry from July 1, 1805 describes an “unaccountable” state of excitement, which Zhukovsky associates with the anticipation of positive changes in his own life: Today I am in a kind of pleasantly melancholic state. Thinking of nothing, yet pensive. It was pleasant to look out into the distance draped by the shadow of evening. This [sense of] distance and lack of clarity always had a touching influence on my heart: it is as if you can see your own fate, still unknown, yet not completely unfamiliar. A kind of mysterious anticipation speaks of it and reveals its goodness through its transparent curtain. Nothing is more pleasing than these touching moments, when the heart is filled with . . . but what is it filled with? You don’t know! Then everything acts on you to greater effect. You look with feeling at the sky; at every moment you want to throw yourself down onto your knees! You love God, that is, you feel him intensely . . . Happiness is nothing more than this quiet clear condition of ours, continued for the duration of one’s entire life, or, at the very least, for a large portion of it. (PSS, XIII, 15–16)

Although Zhukovsky is undoubtedly recording his own psychological state here, his description is clearly oriented towards certain literary models, some of which have already been discussed in previous chapters, such as Werther’s reflections on gazing into the distance in his letter from May 9 or the description of the sublime landscape that greets the reader in the opening passage of Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse. Jean Starobinski has noted that the image of the curtain in Rousseau’s works contains the essence of his religious worldview, “his desire for a purer sky, more open hearts, and a world at once more intense and more diaphanous.”2 Although Zhukovsky’s description shares the theme of religious illumi86

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nation with the passages mentioned above, it also departs from the models proposed by Goethe and Rousseau. First and foremost, Zhukovsky’s landscape is an evening one, with washed-out colors and lines that awaken in the reader not an image of paradise lost (Werther), nor a revelation of the ideal world (Rousseau), but rather the premonition of an as of yet unknown— but happy— future. Following Starobinsky, one might say that Zhukovsky is a poet of translucency; he is drawn to the undulations of the veil that bear witness to the fact that the mysterious and the sublime are both present and immanent, a sentiment that is intimated to the poet via his moral sense. This secret premonition transfigures the earthly life of the contemplative poet, calling forth a feeling of deep appreciation and gratitude towards the Creator (“You love God, that is, you feel him intensely”).3 A later entry from July 1805 reads: I looked at the sky with a special kind of feeling: I envisioned immortality! . . . There . . . what a word, [all] that is contained within it, this word brings tears to my eyes! Friends, hopes, joy, bliss, it is all there! O, great Being, [the] great Being who has destined humanity to be immortal! (PSS, XIII, 21)

This “magical there” (tam) would soon become one of the central “signal words” in Zhukovsky’s poetry. Zhukovsky’s reflections from 1805 manifest the initial phase of his religious and aesthetic philosophy, which would crystallize in his correspondence and criticism by the early 1820s. Its lyrical expression can be found in many of his works, from the elegy “Evening” (1806) to his article on Raphael’s Madonna from 1821. Characteristically, Zhukovsky insisted that this sentimentalized, Neoplatonic “religion of the heart” had nothing in common with the religious upbringing of his childhood, which he now describes as being founded on “empty words with neither sense nor action.” Instead it flowed out of his individualized ecstatic experience of the beauty of God’s world and the gained knowledge of his own soul, which was kin to all that was beautiful and sublime. In this picture of a world revealing itself to its beholder, “our quiet, clear state” presents happiness as a temporarily unknown, yet inherently familiar feeling, one that stands on the threshold of heavenly bliss, yet one that can also continue for the majority, if not the entirety, of one’s life. Following Rousseau, Zhukovsky posits that human striving towards happiness is nothing less than “the law of nature” (PSS, XIII, 19). In this sense, Zhukovsky’s own concrete, practical plans for the future would naturally be included in his religious worldview. The “peaceful, innocent life” shimmering on the horizon was understood by him as the natural conclusion to his own path in life, and his heartfelt faith functioned as a compass that would lead him to his “secret aim” just beyond the borders of earthly 87

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existence. The only element lacking in Zhukovsky’s spiritual life plan was a soulmate, a faithful female friend. It is precisely in this religious and spiritual context that the poet begins to describe a new love, one that was to play an exceptional role in his life and work, and— via the latter— one that would come to play a vital role in the creation of Russian lyric poetry and philosophy in the nineteenth century. W IF E I N P R O G R ES S

On the evening of July 9, 1805, Zhukovsky confesses this new love in his diary: What is happening to me? Sorrow, agitation of the soul, some kind of unknown feeling, some kind of unclear desire! Is it possible to be in love with a child? In thinking of her, changes have taken place in my soul! For the third day I am sad, despondent. And from what? From the fact that she has gone! A child! But I see her in the future, in that time when I will return from my travels, in great perfection! I see her not as she is now, but as she will be then. With a certain impatience I envision this. (PSS, XIII, 15)

Describing his emotional state as spontaneous and lacking in any external cause, Zhukovsky nevertheless finds himself drawn to it: It fills me, it compels me to dream, to imagine the future with a certain agitation; should it grow stronger, it will make me better, the hope or desire to receive this happiness forces me to think of the improvement and perfection of my own character; the thought of what will await me at home will give me support and joy during my travels. Of course I would be happy with her! She is intelligent and sensitive, she would understand the value of family happiness and would have no desire for the distractions of society. (PSS, XIII, 15)

The “she” mentioned above is Zhukovsky’s twelve- year- old niece Maria Andreevna Protasova, the elder daughter of the very same Ekaterina Afanasievna Protasova to whom the young poet and the Veliaminov sisters had dedicated the second part of their translation. In 1805 Ekaterina had become a widow, and her husband left numerous debts behind, forcing her to sell a significant portion of her property in order to placate the creditors. Left without a city home, Protasova rented a modest house in the small town of Belev, which was located three kilometers from Mishenskoe, where Zhukovsky was living at the time. Zhukovsky had agreed to give lessons to her daughters, Maria and Alexandra. Before moving to Belev himself, Zhukovsky would often make the journey to his “dear pupils” by foot. 88

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Zhukovsky’s first mentions of Maria describe her as an ideal bride whom he could marry after returning from his European journey (judging from the above, Zhukovsky seems to have given little thought to what her feeling toward him might have been).4 Somewhat remarkably, Zhukovsky seems absolutely certain that Maria’s family will have no serious objection to such a match: “Only for empty reasons and the antagonisms of pride would Katerina Afanasievna sacrifice both my and her happiness. Of course she [Maria] would be happy with me” (PSS, XIII, 15). These “antagonisms of pride” must be understood as a hint at Zhukovsky’s dubious social status, while the “empty reasons” should be read as referring to Zhukovsky’s ties of kinship to Maria. Even at this stage it would seem that Zhukovsky is rehearsing his future conversation with Maria’s mother, declaring that “the pleasure of family life” is his first and foremost goal: Literature would be my occupation, my love for my wife and towards her, my most tender and peaceful respite. The tranquility and happiness surrounding me was my happiness, my reward . . . I would be happy home, with my wife, with Katerina Afanasievna, with those close to me: then my [literary] activity would be greater, I would have close relationships, I would know that I was truly loved and would have the right to love, the consequence of my love. (PSS, XIII, 16)

It is worth noting that for this Russian follower of Rousseau, happiness was not imagined as the union of two lovers, but as a small enclosed society, secured by the heartfelt attachment of its constituent members, with a place both for Zhukovsky’s potential mother-in-law and other relatives. For the moment, Zhukovsky contented himself with Maria’s education and “the formation of her soul.” He gives his diary to her to read (which her mother reads as well) and fills Maria’s own notebooks with madrigals, well- wishes, and excerpts from moralistic literature, directs her own reading and discusses with her and her sister “exemplary” works of literature.5 In the course of Maria’s education, Zhukovsky would occasionally come into conflict with her mother and his half-sister Ekaterina, whose authority in the family was unquestioned (Zhukovsky himself called Ekaterina “matushka,” “dear mother”). Maria’s younger sister Alexandra once wrote in her album that their mother inspired respect through her “directness, her virtues, and that tone of prudence and good judgment she held in her entire bearing.” The daughters were convinced that their mother would not do or wish anything that was not good for them. Ekaterina’s pedagogical Bible was Madame de Genlis’s three- volume epistolary novel Adèle et Théodore, which she had practically memorized in her youth (the novel was first translated into Russian in 1791)6 and which her 89

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daughters examined assiduously. In the novel, Adele’s mother (the Baroness d’Almane), plays a central role in her daughter’s upbringing and moral education.7 A dominating figure, the Baroness would control not only the behavior and moral development of her daughter,8 but her daily experiences as well, deciding which books she should read, and which tutors she should have. These tutors, in turn, were instructed to teach Adele in accordance with her mother’s own understanding of the goals and tasks of education. In Genlis’s novel, the mother’s commands are absolute (one modern critic described the pedagogical system of the novel as a “panopticon”)9 and, at least according to the author, such a system is entirely effective: by the end of the novel Adele becomes an ideal wife (the mirror image of her mother), and continues to be an ideal (i.e., obedient and grateful) daughter. Although Zhukovsky largely agreed with the pedagogical principles of the novel (education should be founded on experiences; a constant supervision of the moral, intellectual, and emotional development of the pupil; the leading role of the mother),10 he often disagreed with how Ekaterina Protasova pursued these goals in practice. Perhaps even unbeknownst to himself, Zhukovsky begins to “reform” (or “Rousseauify”) Genlis’s schema, including now the figure of the “brotherly teacher.”11 Zhukovsky’s diary from this period clearly demonstrates that the young poet had chosen for himself the role of an honest and loving advisor and partner to Ekaterina Protasova in the education of her daughters. In entries that he would give his potential future mother- in-law to read, Zhukovsky writes that a mother should not scold a loving daughter for trivial things (PSS, XIII, 24–25), as “the image of the mother” should be connected in the child’s mind with “all of the sweet impressions” of childhood (PSS, XIII, 46).12 At the same time, a virtuous girl (as he addresses Maria in an entry given to her to read) must always take heed of the “teaching friend” who loves her. An example of this change in the source of educational authority attempted by Zhukovsky can be found in an entry from August 12, 1806, where he upbraids Maria for continuing to carry her dog Rozka in her arms, despite Zhukovsky’s repeated demands that she cease doing so: Carrying a dog is no sin, but when you are asked not to carry her, and when you are told the reasons not to carry her, how can you start doting on Rozka for your own pleasure, [in the process] creating displeasure for the person who loves you so! (PSS, XIII, 32)

Switching to French, Zhukovsky addresses his pupil by name, and claims that though he has no desire to be a tyrant, he asks that she always take heed of his counsel and strive to give him satisfaction even in petty matters, as he understands every one of her wishes and desires as sacred. 90

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“I don’t want to see you being whimsical, capricious, or lacking in spirit,” Zhukovsky concludes in his lengthy moralistic tirade on the “true friendship” (d’une vraie amitié) that bound teacher to student.“I greatly desire that you appeared to me precisely as you truly are, and that I did not deceive myself with you” (PSS, XIII, 32). Maria would thus grow up under a dual dictatorship of “loving educators”: her sentimental tiger mother and her romantic teacher-uncle-brother-friend. Many have noticed that Zhukovsky’s relationship to Maria reproduces the model of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Yet this relationship also has some other aspects. In this case the young man in love was not only a teacher, but a relative as well, and his feelings for his beloved came into being before she had even left childhood. This love, however, was of a thoroughly idealized character, one that was deferred to the distant future, thus avoiding the conflict between passion and reason that was central to Rousseau’s hero. Maria was a beloved niece and potential wife that Zhukovsky was attempting to shape according to his own vision and likeness. She was his companion in youth, his “spiritual daughter,” his Galatea, a reward and the path to a happy (re)union with the Bunin family. The issue of social disparity in Rousseau’s novel did not come to bear on their relationship, since Zhukovsky was a nobleman, though of a somewhat dubious pedigree. However, their close blood ties would prove problematic. The cornerstone of Zhukovsky’s lyrico-pedagogic utopia was, after all, the family. His decision to marry Masha in four years forces the poet to reevaluate his life’s plan. In the new version, entitled “Future life,” Zhukovsky notes his central task is to determine who Masha is now, and who he desires her to be. Recent scholarship has quite correctly connected this diary entry to one of Zhukovsky’s first poetic epistles to Maria from October 9, 1806,13 which presents the poet’s plans for Masha’s life and his own matrimonial ideal in all of its fullness and “artless” simplicity: Младенцем быть душою; Рассудком созревать; Не тела красотою, Любезностью пленять; Ценить златое время; Считать весельем труд; И праздной муки бремя Навеки скрыть под спуд; Не в свете, но в природе, В простом кругу семьи В порядке и свободе Утехи зреть свои;

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Быть в дружбе неизменной; Любя, душой любить. Супруги сан священный Как дар небес хранить; Струи благодеянья На скорбных проливать; В обители страданья Отраду посылать; Приятных муз игрою Пленять себя под час, И нежной к ним душою Любить их сладкий глас. В бедах не быть унылой; На радость уповать; И мощной веры силой Печали отражать; Собою наслаждаться; Свой рай в душе хранить; За призраком не гнаться. И путь житейский чтить. К бессмертию стезею, Где жизни сей венец, Куда любви рукою Нас всех благий Отец Ведет неоткровенный: Вот цель сих быстрых лет, Вот счастье, друг бесценный. Другого счастья нет.14 [To be a child at heart, / To ripen one’s mind; / To captivate others / Not by bodily beauty, but by courtesy; / To value time that is golden; / To rejoice in labor; / To forever conceal from the light of day / The burden of painful idleness; / To see one’s joys / Not in society, but in nature, / In the simple circle of family, / In order and in freedom; / To be constant in friendship, / And in loving, to love with one’s soul. / To guard like a gift from heaven, / The sacred station of one’s wife; / To pour out streams of good deeds / On those who sorrow; / To send relief / To the abodes of suffering, / To captivate oneself at times / In play with agreeable Muses, / To love their sweet voice / With your soul endeared to them; / To be not despondent in misfortune; / To trust in [the coming of] joy: / To ward off sorrows / With the mighty power of faith; / To enjoy your own company, / To keep your own paradise in your soul; / To not chase after phantoms / And to honor the path of everyday life. / Towards

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immortality, / The crown of this life, / Along the path where / With the hand of love / The blessed Father obliquely leads us all: / This is the aim of these rapid years, / This is happiness, my priceless friend. / There is no other happiness.]15

Spiritual (and not physical) beauty, a passion for good works, kindness, diligence, musical talent, fidelity to one’s husband and relatives, self-sufficiency, trust in Providence and faith in an immortality that leads to the throne of the heavenly Father, these are the qualities that will lead to the happiness of the “priceless friend.” It is hardly difficult to note that Zhukovsky’s description almost completely reproduces the characteristics of the ideal wife from the fifth book of Rousseau’s Emile, dedicated to the education of Sophie. In the four years remaining until his anticipated wedding, Zhukovsky plans on perfecting his own character. Following Benjamin Franklin’s method of “a moral algebra,” he creates a list of his own qualities, including “equanimity of the soul,” a quick temper, pride, moderation, prudence, humility, and chastity. In another entry, he writes that the most important thing is “to acquire the ability to be happy” (PSS, XIII, 24).16 His future marriage is understood as the result of mutual moral and spiritual development of those on the path towards the “secret aim” of life: immortality. It is during this time that Zhukovsky recalls the Schillerian testament of the deceased Andrei Turgenev, adapting it to his own religious and moral utopia. In his letter to Andrei’s younger brother, Alexander, Zhukovsky writes: A friend, a wife, these are the helpers in the attainment of happiness, and happiness is an internal, spiritual elevation. Wem der große Wurf gelungen Eines Freundes Freund zu sein, Wer ein holdes Weib errungen . . . I have a strong sense for these lines now. And how much more that earlier had passed by my ears, has now become important and significant.17

Zhukovsky almost immediately begins to celebrate his future marriage in his poetic imagination. His 1806 comic opera Alyosha, the Priest’s Son, or the Terrible Ruins (Alyosha Popovich, ili Strashnye razvaliny, a Russified version of Carl Friedrich Hensler’s Die Teufelsmühle am Wienerberg), concludes with a prayer that is addressed more to Hymen than it is to Eros: Бог любви нас да хранит, Наш союз венчает! Огнь его сердца живит,

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Душу восхищает! Где любовь, там счастья трон, Там в тоске—отрада, О любовь! ты—наш закон, Счастье и награда! (PSS, VII, 215)18 [Let the God of love keep us, / And crown our union! / The living fire of his heart / Enraptures the soul! / Where there is love, there is happiness’ throne, / There in sorrow, joy, / O love! You are our law, / Happiness and reward!]

A N UN KNO WN F EEL I NG

Let us return to Zhukovsky’s diary from 1805. The young man describes his psychological state as a pleasantly sad disposition, given to bouts of deep thought and sweet sorrow, as well as the presence of an unclear desire. In the lexicon of sentimentalism, such a condition would have been defined as love melancholy. However, Zhukovsky had good reason to describe his particular state as “unknown.” Depictions of love melancholy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were strictly prescribed, featuring a limited range of themes and images and a singular scheme for the development of sentiment. The melancholic in love was understood as a victim of Eros, an unfortunate individual who knew no joy, one who ran away from the world, thinking only of his beloved and calling forth compassion from sentimental people. An example of such a character can be found in Ivan Dmitriev’s romance “The Melancholic” written in 1805: Как сын проклятия, скитаюсь Издавна я по всем странам; Уйти от горести стараюсь, Но горесть всюду по следам. Увы! лишь вспомню страсть несчастну . . . Прости, мой ум! прости, покой! Я вижу фурию ужасну, Бегу ее—она за мной! Всю молодость провел в стенаньи; Состарелся, а всё влачу Любови цепь в тоске, в изгнаньи, И тщетно смерти я хочу! “Ступай далеко—мне сказали— Там знают жалость.” Что ж? и там

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Безумца лишь во мне искали, Смеялись бедного слезам! О дети счастья, грех смеяться! Я без ума, но я ваш брат; Что мы предвидим? Может статься, Несчастней будете стократ. Страшитеся любви опасной И пожалейте вы о том, Кто, розою пленясь прекрасной, Уколот был ее шипом.19 [Like a cursed son, I have long / wandered throughout the world; / I try to leave my sorrow, / But sorrow’s traces are everywhere. / Alas! If only to recall my unfortunate passion . . . / Forgive me, my mind! Forgive me, peace! / I see a terrible fury, / I run— and she behind me! / All my youth I spent lamenting; / Growing older, I still drag / The chain of love in sorrow, in exile, / I long for death in vain! / “Go far,” they said, / “There they know pity.” And? Even there / They took me for a madman, / And laughed at the tears of a poor man. / O children of happiness, it is a sin to laugh! / I have lost my mind, but I am your brother; / What can we foresee? It might come to pass, / That you will be unhappy a hundred times over. / Fear dangerous love, / And take pity on the one, / Who, captivated by a beautiful rose, / Was pierced by its thorn.]

The sufferings of Gavriil Derzhavin’s protagonist in his 1798 translation of Petrarch’s renowned nineteenth sonnet (which was published under the title “Melancholy”) can also be read within this greater tradition: Так, помощи себе иной между людями Не зрю и не ищу, как лишь оставить свет: Веселье коль прошло и грусть владеет нами, Зол внутренних печать на взоре всякой чтет.20 [Thus, I neither seek nor see among people any aid, / But only to leave the world. / If cheerfulness has past and sorrow commands us, / One reads the mark of inner evils in (our) every glance.]

Zhukovsky’s fellow student from the Pension, Mikhail Kaisarov, likewise found himself drawn to the same Petrarchian sonnet: Но средь лугов, средь гор высоких, Где ни таил печаль свою, Нигде от стрел любви жестоких, Нигде не скрыл я грудь мою.21

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[But among the meadow, among the tall mountains,/ Where my sorrow might hide, / Nowhere did I shield my breast, / Nowhere did I shield it from the cruel arrows of love.]

The prolific sentimentalist Pavel Lvov, in his elegy “Melancholy” (inspired by Milton’s “Il Penseroso”), calls out to the “compassionate goddess,” the “daughter of love and mother of strong thoughts”: Come and relieve my torment, come and heed my cries. Goddess, who loves silence! You shall find me seated in dark-colored clothes, bowing my aggrieved head on the pale palm of a withered arm; you will see me wiping my swollen eyes with my white cloth, eyes that once rested on the full, fiery breast of Milena; in the weak light of a flickering lantern you will hardly recognize my obscure image: my lips are baked from flaming heat of a sorrow which burns me. The pale ray of the moon appearing through a cloud will show you my solitary, cold abode, which is guarded by sleeplessness.22

Karamzin, Zhukovsky’s mentor in both literature and morality, shows love melancholy as a touching, yet dangerous condition, one capable of driving the melancholic to suicide (in the case of the character of Raisa, protagonist of an eponymous ballad) or insanity (such incidents were mentioned by Karamzin in the “English” section of Letters of a Russian Traveler). In 1803 Karamzin published in his Messenger of Europe a translation of Madame de Genlis’s novella “Melancholy and Imagination.” The narrative’s protagonists, Nelson and Elmine, become victims of a “dangerous pensiveness.” Elmine dies as a result, while Nelson is left in a deep and inconsolable depression: “In the past he could find only cruel memories, while the future for him was nothing more than a terrifying presentiment.” In the notes to the second part of the work, which was published in the July issue of the journal, Karamzin indicated that the first twenty pages were not translated by the publisher, but by a certain young man, whose pleasing style will, with time, be noted by the public.23 In all likelihood, the translator of these twenty pages was none other than Zhukovsky, a close acquaintance of Karamzin who had been working for the journal since 1803. Indeed, the “pleasing style” of this excerpt recalls Zhukovsky’s later works: it is the most agitated and lyrical section of the novella, transmitting a veritable storm of emotions in the souls of the lovers. Zhukovsky’s section differs significantly from the later passages translated by Karamzin, whose depiction of the sufferings of the melancholic lovers are decidedly more calm, even-tempered, and contemplative.24 In the understanding of most poets at the turn of the nineteenth century, love melancholy held no joy and was viewed as a sickness, one connected with the older baroque notion of a cruel fate, which persecuted unhappy lov96

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ers. In Zhukovsky’s interpretation, however, it becomes a spiritual “messenger” of a joy that is impossible in earthly life, and a “cure” from despondency and boredom. First “caught” by the poet in July 1805, this feeling would soon become the object of countless pressing questions aimed at divining its nature and its significance for Zhukovsky’s soul. For Zhukovsky, thought did not transform into emotion (to paraphrase Irina Semenko’s witty formula),25 but rather emotional experience gave rise to thought. “Reflection is the consequence of sensation,” he writes (PSS, XIII, 20). Meanwhile, for the poet such a reflective emotion does not result in a revelation of something new; rather, as a rule, it serves as a confirmation, the proof of that which the poet yearns to believe in, of that which he doubts in times of spiritual weakness or despondency. This can be discerned from the rhetorical structure of the poet’s own reflections on the “exceptional” moments of his spiritual life: This certainty of the temporary nature of earthly things, is this not the secret, inherent proof of immortality in man? (PSS, XIII, 21) This quiet, complacent presentiment of future joys, is this not His secret voice, which says to me: “Believe in the depths of your heart, and take pleasure in the anticipation without trepidation? 26 And this return of the good without your knowledge is this not proof that it is within you and that all is required is compulsion in order to stir oneself and open one’s eyes? (PSS, XIII, 154)

“Melancholy is neither sorrow, nor joy: I would call it the shade of joy on the heart of one who feels sorrow, the shade of despair on the heart of one who is happy,” says Zhukovsky in an extended polemic note to a letter from one woman “who had never experienced melancholy.”27 This definition, which approaches Karamzin’s well-known formula of melancholy (“the most tender overflowing from sadness and sorrow into the comforts of pleasure” [“Melancholy,” 1800]) nonetheless has a completely different meaning for the young romantic Zhukovsky, than it does for the mature sentimentalist Karamzin. In Karamzin’s melancholic lexicon, “joy” (“veselie”) means to enter a contemplative silence (“zadumavshis’ molchat’ ”) and to cast one’s gaze to things past. For Zhukovsky, however, this joy is not so much oriented towards recalling the past, as it is in the expectation and anticipation of the future. Karamzin’s melancholy is philosophically contemplative (similar to Montaigne’s understanding of the term). Zhukovsky’s contemplation, however, is decidedly lyrical and closer to the loving melancholy of early German romantics such as Novalis or Jean Paul. “You are happy, yet strive towards a greater happiness,” explains Zhukovsky, “consequently in your very own intoxication you can feel a kind of lack [nedostatok], which pours into the soul a quiet despondency, giving your 97

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pleasure even greater vivacity.”28 This “incompletion” (lack of clarity, lack of form, or mysteriousness) of “mixed feelings” gives them the character of a pre-sentiment: the sensation of lack in this Neoplatonic worldview bears witness to a sense of “fullness” somewhere in the beyond (“melancholy is in a certain sense a lack,” notes Zhukovsky).29 This detailed psychological analysis leads Zhukovsky to a mystical interpretation. Several years later, explaining in his diary the reason and significance of such a “life-giving [zhivotvornoi] and sweet” sorrow, which does not lead to despair, he summarizes: In these moments of an anxiously enlivening sentiment you do not pursue where it came from or what is before you, but rather to something better, mysterious, and distant, that which it is connected to and that which is not in it, but that which somewhere exists for your soul alone. And this striving is one of the inexpressible proofs of immortality, otherwise why in this moment would pleasure not have the fullness and clarity of pleasure? (PSS, XIII, 156; italics added)

In other words, in Zhukovsky’s interpretation this “special” feeling is the romantic analogue of mystical illumination or enlightenment. It is the most strained moment of the emotional and creative condition of the soul— the “poetry of revelation”— when earthly life becomes endowed with spirit, and the heavenly “as if it was earthly” becomes familiar. Appearing suddenly, “the unknown, or perhaps even better to say the unusual,” this kind of feeling is “a phenomenon which can not always be renewed freely.”30 From here there arises the desire to prolong this momentary sensation “for one’s entire life, or at the very least for most of one’s life.” It must become calm and steadfast, independent of the accidental causes that give rise to it. The temporary “illumination” must be transfigured into a constant faith. The “joyful sorrow” (or “sorrowful joy”) of the emotional state, which in the 1800s Zhukovsky would call melancholy and connect first and foremost with his sudden love for his young niece, in the 1810s and 1820s becomes one of the most striking proofs of immortality and a major component of Zhukovsky religiopoetic Empfindung. J OUR NA L A S U T O P I A

Zhukovsky did not manage to travel to Europe. Instead, in the middle of 1807 he took on the responsibilities of editing the Messenger of Europe which had been founded by Karamzin in 1802, and which had been edited by Mikhail Kachenovsky since 1805. By this time, Zhukovsky was known by the public mainly as the author of two first-rate elegies published in the Messen98

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ger (“A Country Cemetery” and “Evening”) as well as his patriotic lyric poem entitled “Song of the Bard over the Victorious Slavs’ Grave,” dedicated to the “fearless defenders of the Fatherland” during the Austerlitz campaign. The first issue of the journal edited by Zhukovsky appeared in January 1808. Its opening piece was the programmatic “Letter from the Countryside to the Publisher” (“Pis’mo iz uezda k izdateliu”), in which the young editor summarized the tasks and principles of the journal (largely following the tradition set out by Karamzin), while also attempting to create a model for the ideal journalist, whom he described as an enlightened enthusiast and noble dreamer. It should be noted that Zhukovsky’s takeover of the journal provoked a variety of reactions among his contemporaries. Ekaterina Protasova informed her stepbrother of the opinion of one acquaintance, who felt that the editor of the journal should be more experienced, having “relationships with all of the governmental committees,” knowing the secrets of “all of the noble houses,” whereas Zhukovsky “has seen nothing further than the end of his nose.”31 Zhukovsky takes up his defense in the very title of his opening piece, a “letter from the Countryside,” written from the point of view of a “provincial,” to be understood as an acquaintance or relation of the young editor. The larger part of this “letter” consists of a lengthy programmatic monologue of a certain “Mr. Oldthoughts” (gospodin Starodum), a lover of truth and a dreamer, who has a reputation in his circles for being an eccentric. It is no coincidence that Zhukovsky names his protagonist after a character from Denis Fonvizin’s neoclassical comedy The Minor (Nedorosl’, 1782) who appears as a conscientious citizen, a “friend of honorable people,” and a proponent of beneficial reading and supporter of women’s education.32 As the publisher’s “correspondent” reports, Zhukovsky’s Mr. Oldthoughts wanted to give his opinion on the new role their common friend (Zhukovsky himself) had taken up, as well as a series of thoughts on the Enlightenment in Russia and the tasks of true journalism. Oldthoughts feels that in contemporary Russian society there is an enormous interest in Russian books. Despite this, he claims, Russian readers are drawn to worthless boulevard literature: “horror,” didactic, sentimental, and satirical novels have flooded the Russian market. Books are read only for entertainment, with no thought given to their content. It is therefore of the utmost necessity that education work to change how the youth of the country understand reading, transforming it from entertainment into a serious occupation that develops both the intellectual and spiritual capabilities of the individual.33 Mr. Oldthoughts goes on to describe a utopia founded on a proper and purposeful understanding of reading. If there will be good books— and publishers willing to print and promote them— then people will acquire a desire 99

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to read them. Enlightenment will correct their morals, their understanding of life and happiness. A more noble activity will bring their minds to life, and enlightenment will show people that happiness is to be found in the circles that the hand of Providence has given us. Oldthoughts goes on to predict that in such a society, all social classes will come into harmony: The farmer, the merchant, the landowner, the official, each is equally active in his own circle, and in the activity his happiness is enclosed, they are each equally assured of their personal advantages in their particular calling . . . they compare among themselves their drive to one and the same object, in the drive to form, beautify, and bring their human nature closer to the Divine.34

The rich and the poor will have one and the same moral goals. People will prefer the “peaceful and closely knit circle of the family” to cacophonous society, and it is there that they shall seek true happiness: The understanding of matrimony will become pure, it will no longer be the observation of certain decencies, but rather a joyful, inseparable partnership on the path to happiness, in one active, united search for perfection. The home of two spouses will not be a place for the meeting of those given to idleness, but a peaceful shrine of invisible happiness, where innocence makes its home, and where friendship flies, and where love is kept by thankfulness, where an adored husband, having fallen at the feet of his wife, gives thanks with a deep silent emotion for those joys, for that enchantment which pour forth from her presence.35

In this family idyll, the father will not neglect the education of his children, a sacred duty reminiscent of the Creator caring for his children. Maternal love will not be an “inborn, inescapable feeling, but rather an enlightened activity based on rules, one whose great goal is the formation [obrazovanie] of perfection.” Young women will not prefer mindless entertainment to their mother’s care and the “indifferent mercenary” will not take the mother’s place. The misfortune of refusing humanity’s greatest pleasures, the pleasures of a father or of a mother, will not be purchased by gold. From the “edge of life” Oldthoughts predicts the advent of a “golden age” in Russia.36 In order for this golden age to come into being, Oldthoughts claims that Russia is in need of good journals led by enlightened editors capable of promoting beneficial ideas. A true journalist must help create the “discrimination of taste” of his readers, leading them to “more difficult” and beneficial tasks. Addressing the young editor of the Messenger, Oldthoughts calls on him to “love the true and the beautiful,” and in finding pleasure in them, have the ability to depict them, to strive for them himself and with 100

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the strength of his eloquence draw others along. It is necessary to reject the petty cares of society and the desire for empty fame. Finally, “it is necessary to marry,” so that in time family life can “fulfill all of [your] best dreams, which will illuminate your soul in times of solitary reflection.” Until that time arrives, the “sweet anticipation” of matrimony can assist the young editor of virtue in dismissing: the boredom of temporary solitude, imagining that you are acting before the eyes of one chosen and worthy of love, one that is bound to you by the heart of a being which follows you with their gaze, understands you, shares your hope, lives and is formed by your thoughts, and who will award you for all of this someday with happiness, you will act with success, pleasure, inexorably. Nothing ignoble will touch your soul, your pen will depict only lofty thoughts, worthy of your contemporaries, and which will not die for your descendants.37

True fame, according to Oldthoughts, consists of objective, deserved praise of the chosen, whose great opinion directs the common view and who are capable of changing it. Should it come to pass that our young author is not destined for family happiness, than he can replace it with beneficial activity and feats of virtue. Thus, from the very beginning of his editorial duties, Zhukovsky creates the image of a young editor and author who is sensitive and driven to achieving perfection and happiness and who addresses his journal to kindred souls. A FA MIL I A L T H EM E

It would be no exaggeration to claim that during Zhukovsky’s tenure at the Messenger of Europe it was the concept of the family that he valued above all others. This belief can be traced to the influence of Karamzin’s pronouncements regarding the importance of family, as well as the thought of a number of English and German moralists (including Shaftesbury, Hume, Addison, and Garve). In an article entitled “Who Is a Truly Good and Happy Person?” Zhukovsky gives his reply in the very first sentence: “Only he who is capable of enjoying family life.” Later in the article Zhukovsky asks, “Where else could this happiness be, if not in the family, and what is its source if not a calm, innocent, and good heart?” Here the family is described as that “small society,” in which we must fulfill on a smaller scale all of our various duties that are placed upon us by society at large.38 In an article entitled “The Writer in Society” Zhukovsky claims that for an author in particular “even more so than for someone else” family ties are necessary, for “in his isolated habitation,” he must constantly hear the touch101

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ing voice of those whom he loves, gain respite in their company, and thus find new strength for work. “The universe, with all of its joys,” concludes the still-unmarried author, “must be contained in that peaceful dwelling where he thinks and where he loves.”39 Alexander Turgenev, who was aware of his friend’s future plans (he himself feared the matrimonial altar like a devil fears the censer), responded to his friend’s aspirations: You have once more touched upon the happiness of family life and once more captivate yourself and others with the depiction of that happiness which should be included in a peaceful existence. In return for such beautiful descriptions of family life, I wish you with all my heart that you would experience this happiness and find near yourself a universe with all of its pleasures, while we for our lack of faith will search eternally for happiness without finding it.40

This “familial theme” runs like a thread through the pages of the Messenger, connecting works of various disparate genres and authors. Zhukovsky’s translations of romantic stories would often conclude with the happy unification of lovers, a stark departure from the sentimental tradition. Zhukovsky’s friends and acquaintances would likewise publish in the Messenger hymns to a family life far removed from the cares of society: And so with you I fly to the country, Having forgotten the sad cares of society, The society life, and the fashionable rules! Oh how many joys lie in wait for us there!41 My friend! You too, leaving the evil city, In solitude, in wordless silence, Each day partake of joy alone! Wandering through the meadows, walking through the forest, Giving praise to Clymene with your lyre.42

In this context, the religious and moral principles seen in Zhukovsky’s diary entries from 1805 to 1807 came to be reflected in the editorial program of one of Russia’s most serious literary critical journals. Indeed, Zhukovsky’s Messenger can be seen as the accessible, public manifestation of the editor’s internal development.43 Addressed to contemporaries and touching upon the most varied moral, aesthetic, and political issues, the journal simultaneously addressed the circles of the editor’s friends and relatives in Moscow and the provinces, those “elected” bound to him through familial ties or friendship.44 First and foremost among these “chosen few”— as we shall soon see— was his desired companion in life.45 “With what impatience we await the Mes102

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senger, it is impossible to convey,” writes Maria (Masha) Protasov, under the vigilant supervision of her mother. L OVE ’S M ES S ENG ER

In Fonvizin’s The Minor, the enlightened character of Mr. Oldthoughts (Starodum) served as a mentor figure for his beloved niece, Sophia. It is very likely that Zhukovsky’s recasting of Oldthoughts in the pages of the Messenger had a “biographical” dimension: following Fonvizin’s raisonneur, the poet teaches his niece, Maria, the right way of reading.46 A second (and equally important) piece featured in the Messenger’s January 1808 issue was a translation of the German moralist Christian Garve (1742–1798), entitled “A New Year’s Gift” (the original title was “Das Weihnachtgeschenk”). A manifesto in its own right, the translation concretized the paean to the Enlightenment contained in “Letter to the Editor from the Countryside,” but was written in an entirely different key. “The Gift” begins with a small “autobiographical” prologue: Yesterday, while visiting the Klimen faimly, I saw a book, bound in leather on the dressing table of their daughter, the sweet, modest, good-hearted Maria. I wanted to take it, but Maria warned me not to, and with some embarrassment hid the book in a knapsack. I was surprised, and looked in her eyes. Maria blushed, feeling that she had given me cause for suspicion, took out the book, opened it, and showed me the first pages, which were written in the hand of her mother and read them out loud herself. I asked for a piece of paper, and the indulgent Maria copied the following for me in her own hand: This white book, my dear friend, is of course no expensive gift; but I am sure that no one in the world has yet given you a New Year’s gift which such kind wishes as those that your mother gives you, nor such a beneficial thing, as this white book may be (italics added).47

There follows a short treatise on a particular method of reading, which requires the person to discern the meaning of beneficial texts, to be able to summarize their essence briefly (in two or three words), to apply their meaning to themselves and to gradually shift roles from that of a reader to that of an author, expressing one’s own thoughts as the continuation of that which has been acquired. As we know, such a method was consistently employed in Zhukovsky’s friendly circles.48 Its aesthetic expression can be found in his translations, which attempt (and succeed) to express the poet’s own thoughts through a “foreign” text. Such an “acquisition” (or assimilation) of a poetic text is manifested in his translation of Garve. In the original, the mistress of 103

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the book is anonymous, there are no epithets that characterize her, and the book is given to her not by her mother, but her father.49 It is entirely clear that Zhukovsky’s translation, while intended by the editor to be beneficial to all sensitive and proper young women, was also “secretly” addressed to a narrower circle of readers, to whom it is dedicated. The opening fragment of the translation plays out the pedagogical strategy, influenced by Madame de Genlis, that was practiced in the Protasova household, and features a wise, caring mother, and a virtuous, sensitive daughter. Moreover, the absence in the original of a leather-bound book gives the story an even more intimate and personal character. The backstory can be traced to January 1807, when Zhukovsky gave his pupil and beloved a book bound in red leather. This book, bearing the title Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1807, and dedicated to love and friendship (“Der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet”), has been kept in Zhukovsky’s archive. Its contents include a collection of aphorisms by Jean Paul Richter, which included numerous mentions of romantic love, something that must have drawn Zhukovsky’s attention.50 It is only in moments of separation and reunification, wrote Jean Paul in this volume, that lovers are capable of experiencing the full feeling that fills their hearts, similar to how the Memnon statue is only capable of producing its harmonious sounds at sunrise or sunset.51 From this it is tempting to surmise that it was this aphorism in particular that was to serve as the “Memnon theme” of Zhukovsky’s poetry (PSS, I, 659):52 Пока заря не воссияла– Бездушен, хладен, тих Мемнон; Заря взошла—и дышит он! И радость в мраморе взыграла! Таков Любви волшебный свет, Великих чувств животворитель, К делам возвышенным стремитель! Любви нет в сердце—жизни нет! (PSS, I, 330) [Until the dawn has broken, / Memnon is silent, cold, and without breath; / The sun had risen: he breathes!/ A joy surges from the marble! / Such is the magic light of love, / The life-giver of great emotions, / that yearns for feats sublime! / If there is no love in the heart, there is no life.]

The importance of this theme in Zhukovsky’s work can also be observed in the title page of his 1815 collection of poetry, which features an image of the Memnon statue. The reverse of the title page of the January 1807 issue of the Messenger contains a poetic dedication by Zhukovsky to “M*** upon the presenta104

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tion of a book on New Year’s,” a text which takes on additional meaning in the context of the lyrical aphorism of Jean Paul contained in this issue: На Новый год в воспоминанье О том, кто всякий час мечтает о тебе! Кто cчастье дней своих, кто радостей исканье В твоей лишь заключил, бесценный друг, судьбе! (PSS, I, 115) [On New Year’s in memory, / Of he who dreams of you every hour! / Whose life’s happiness, whose search for joy,  / O priceless friend, consists only of your fate!]

In this sense, the publication of “A New Year’s Gift” in the first issue of the Messenger of Europe was a symbolic present to Masha as well as a veiled confession of love. Moreover, the excerpt from Garve— the emergence of the Author from the Reader— also took on a personal significance for the “chosen few”: at the time, Zhukovsky had invited Masha and her cousin Avdotia Kireevskaia to participate in the journal, and they went on to translate Genlis’s short story “The Prussian Vase” (admittedly, the published version of the translation was largely reworked by Zhukovsky himself).53 The name “Maria,” which Zhukovsky introduces into his translation of Garve, soon becomes a secret lyrical addressee of the journal. From 1808 to 1809, Zhukovsky includes a number of pieces containing the name of his beloved, including the story “Maria (Excerpt from Arthur’s Journal),” in which nearly every page the protagonist says the name of his beloved; the story “Maria’s Grove”; as well as a translation of August von Kotzebue’s essay on melancholic verses written by Mary Queen of Scots. The name “Maria” is constantly associated with the epithets “virtuous,” “sensitive,” “meek,” “sweet,” “witty,” “pensive,” and so on. In Zhukovsky’s translation of a story “Lionel to Elmina,” intended for the Messenger but never published for unknown reasons, the age of the main heroine is changed from 16 to 15, Masha’s precise age at the time. In addition, Zhukovsky’s manuscript bears the initial “M.” at several points in the body of the draft. In the conclusion of the story “Maria” the protagonist takes a vow that will soon become a leitmotif in Zhukovsky’s future correspondence and diary entries: “to live for Maria’s happiness!”54 “Theoretical” discussions of love occupied a prominent place in the Messenger’s ideology, many of which were also addressed to Maria. True love, Zhukovsky writes, is that which encompasses the heart, giving no space for any other feeling. Such a love is “inseparable from melancholy” and has nothing in common with “the desire to please.” True love is the ideal sacrificial feeling, akin to faith. “Cecilia! The pleasure of true love, is it not some105

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thing sacred, or even heavenly?” asks Rousseau in his “Letter,” published in the first issue of the Messenger: Is it possible to seek out in it even one momentary satisfaction of feeling? O god! What deception! The beauty of these glorious moments is entirely contained in that pure innocent flame which gives life to the heart; and what lover in such a moment takes pleasure in himself? No! No! At that moment he is not existing in himself, he is enraptured by HER, he sees, he feel only HER (italics added).55

The man who loves, exclaims Rousseau, believes in immortality. Love thus shares a kinship with the state of immortality, which is itself an attempt to stop time and to return the past. Zhukovsky’s epistle “To Nina” (“К Nine,” Messenger, 1808, no. 23) is a programmatic statement of the poet’s new philosophy of love. In it, the earthly sentiment that connects the two lovers is presented as the guarantee of their heavenly union in the afterlife: О! первыя встречи небесная сладость— Как тайные, сердца созданья, мечты, В единый слиявшись пленительный образ, Являются смутной весельем душе— Уныния прелесть, волненье надежды, И радость и трепет при встрече очей, Ласкающий голос—души восхищенье, Могущество тихих, таинственных слов, Присутствия сладость, томленье разлуки, Ужель невозвратно вас с жизнью терять? . . . О Нина, я внемлю таинственный голос: Нет смерти, вещает, для нежной любви; Возлюбленный образ, с душой неразлучный, И в вечность за нею из мира летит— Ей спутник до сладкой минуты свиданья. (PSS, I, 131) [O! Of the first meeting the heavenly sweetness— / It is as if secret dreams, the heart’s creations, / Having melted into a single captivating image, / Appear like joy to the murky soul— / The charm of melancholy, the agitation of hope, / Joy together with trembling when the eyes meet, / The caressing voice (a rapture of the soul), / The power of quiet, mysterious words, / The sweetness of presence, the disquiet of separation, / Am I to irrevocably lose you along with life? / . . . O Nina, I hear your mysterious voice: / It says there is not death for tender love; / The image of the beloved, unable to part with the soul, / It flies with [the soul] even out of this world and into eternity, / Its companion until the sweet moment of meeting.]56 106

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Another of Zhukovsky’s “literary gifts” to Masha contributes to the poet’s “religion of love”— a story written on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday. The second issue of the Messenger in 1808 contains the allegorical composition “Three Sisters: Minvana’s Vision,” in which the narrative occurs from the point of view of the heroine. While in a green oak grove, Minvana comes across three girls completely identical in appearance and beauty: One sits beneath an old oak, leaning on an urn covered in lilies, forget-menots, and cypress; the other lies carelessly on the grass by a rose bush, while the third looks at the setting sun.57

In the eyes of the third girl there shone a kind of mysterious flame, and her majestic face seemed supernatural. Minvana discovers that the beautiful women are sisters. The eldest is called the Past, the middle, The Present, the youngest, The Future. They are also called in another way: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. The eldest says: “Sweet Minvana, beautiful creation of nature, you will be kind and useful to us. You are born for happiness, sacred Providence will keep you in your path in life.” The sisters will accompany Minvana on her life’s path. Friendship with Today will prepare her for love of Yesterday and Tomorrow. Happy Tomorrow will be the refuge of “pretty, quiet Minvana.” In moments of trial and spiritual loneliness, she will be accompanied by the Past. And when it comes time to leave this sweet life, then the three sisters will appear before her together “in their full radiance, transformed, and forever inseparable.” Minvana’s entire life will be a preparation for this minute, when hopes and faith are justified and immortality will come. This “vision” concludes with the sisters’ parting from Minvana, promising her earthly happiness: Heavenly Providence is your guardian. Trust in its presence, have faith in its gifts. Happiness is the inevitable lot of purity: but where? and when? . . . It is a mystery.58

Significantly, Zhukovsky imagines Minvana’s guardian angels in the form of three beautiful sisters, an allusion not to the Three Graces of antiquity, but to the three Pauline virtues of faith, hope, and love. This allegorical model can easily be read as a literary incarnation of the “beautiful household” of Zhukovsky’s relatives: “The Past” is his half-sister Ekaterina Protasova, “Today,” her elder daughter Maria, and “Tomorrow” the younger daughter Alexandra (Sasha). The prophecy regarding Minvana’s earthly happiness alludes to the author himself, her mentor, “brother,” friend, and secret fiancé. A year and a half later in the May issue of the Messenger, Zhukovsky published “The Hymn” on the occasion of Masha’s name day. This poem can be justly called the summa summarum of his philosophy of love from 1805 to 107

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1808 and one of the most exceptional works of Russian lyrical poetry from the early nineteenth century: Мой друг, хранитель-ангел мой, О ты, с которой нет сравненья, Люблю тебя, дышу тобой; Но где для страсти выраженья? Во всех природы красотах Твой образ милый я встречаю; Прелестных вижу—в их чертах Одну тебя воображаю. Беру перо—им начертать Могу лишь имя незабвенной; Одну тебя лишь прославлять Могу на лире восхищенной: С тобой, один, вблизи, вдали. Тебя любить—одна мне радость; Ты мне все блага на земли; Ты сердцу жизнь, ты жизни сладость. В пустыне, в шуме городском Одной тебе внимать мечтаю; Твой образ, забываясь сном, С последней мыслию сливаю; Приятный звук твоих речей Со мной во сне не расстается; Проснусь—и ты в душе моей Скорей, чем день очам коснется. Ах! мне ль разлуку знать с тобой? Ты всюду спутник мой незримый; Молчишь—мне взор понятен твой, Для всех других неизъяснимый; Я в сердце твой приемлю глас; Я пью любовь в твоем дыханье . . . Восторги, кто постигнет вас, Тебя, души очарованье? Тобой и для одной тебя Живу и жизнью наслаждаюсь; Тобою чувствую себя; В тебе природе удивляюсь. И с чем мне жребий мой сравнить?

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Чeгo желать в толь сладкой доле? Любовь мне жизнь—ах! я любить Еще стократ желал бы боле. (PSS, I, 129)59 [My friend, my guardian angel, / O you who are without compare, / I love you, I breathe you, / But how can I express my passion? / In all the beauties of nature / I encounter your dear image; / When I see [other] charming [women], / I imagine only you in their features. / I take a quill. I can trace with it / Only the name of the unforgettable [you]; / I can praise you alone / On my enraptured lyre: / With you, [when] alone, close by, far away. / To love you is my only joy. / For me you are all that is good on earth. / You [bring] life to my heart, [and] sweetness to [my] life. / In the desert [or] in the roar of the city, / I dream only of listening to you; / When I fall asleep, your image / Melts together with my last thought; / The pleasant sound of your speaking / Does not leave me in my dreams; / I awake, and there you are in my soul / Even before the day touches my eyes / Ach! Am I to know separation from you? / You are my invisible companion everywhere; / When you say nothing, I understand your gaze / Which everyone else finds inexplicable. / I receive your voice in my heart; / I drink love in your breath . . . / Who can comprehend you, O raptures?  / [Who can comprehend] you, [O] enchantment of [my] soul? / By you and for you alone / Do I live and find pleasure in life; / You make me feel myself, / In you am I astonished by nature. / And to what can I compare my lot? / What [else] to desire in such sweet fate? / Life is love to me— ach! I would only wish / To love a hundred times more.]60

This exultant manifesto of platonic Seelenliebe marks a new stage in the history of Russian lyrical consciousness. The meaning of life itself is justified and determined by the lover’s feeling for his beloved (“love is life to me”). In love, the poet finds his own individuality (“I feel myself through you”) and the surrounding world becomes transformed into an enormous mirror, in which every appearance is a reflection of his beloved’s image. In a word, love presents itself as a new, life-affirming religion.61 In the Messenger this romantic doctrine of love is no mere abstract theory, but rather the personal credo of the poet, which defines both his experiences and his behavior. Zhukovsky gradually introduces Masha into literature, calls her by name in his journal, praises the features of her character, and confesses his idealized love for her (she who “follows you with her gaze, understands you, shares your hopes, lives and is shaped by your thoughts, [she] who will for all of this reward you someday with happiness”). He sketches the drawing of their future family happiness together and, finally, dedicates to her all of his work. In the history of Russian culture there now begins the first romance to connect poetry and life in an inseparable, mythologized, and religious whole. 109

Chapter Five

Heavenly Abode I believe and believe with feeling, that God protects me and that He is ready to include me in the family of His chosen ones, who are fortunate to come to recognize Him. —Zhukovsky, diary from February 1813 (PSS, XIII, 59)

Here is Masha’s family . . . but she is not there for me in this family. —Zhukovsky, diary from April 12, 1815 (PSS, XIII, 100)

Z H U K O V S K Y ’ S L I F E seemed to go according to his “program.” In the summer of 1810, he left the Messenger of Europe, returned to Mishenskoe and, as he had planned to in 1805, concentrated his efforts on creating “something significant,” which would increase his standing in the world of Russian literature. For some years, this project was to be Vladimir, a chivalric epic in verse fashioned in the late baroque rococo style, in which Zhukovsky recounted the feats of Prince Vladimir, who the poet considered to be the Russian Charlemagne.1 The genealogy of this ultimately unfinished poem presents a complex cocktail of literary influences and sources. Among its “models and guides” Zhukovsky mentioned the works of Homer and Virgil, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberate, Wieland’s Oberon and Klelia und Sinibald, English and Scottish ballads from Mathew Gregory Lewis’s Tales of Terror, Robert Southey’s Thalaba, Richard Hole’s Arthur or the Northern Enchantment, Russian fairy tales, and many others. Zhukovsky collected material for the poem from Greek history, Scandinavian and Russian mythological sources, medieval Russian chronicles and The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, histories and geographical descriptions of the Crimea, and Karamzin’s monumental History of the Russian State, which was then being prepared for publication. The list of “sources” for the work would constantly be renewed, revealing the changing tastes and interests of the author. 110

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Zhukovsky was particularly fascinated by the doctrine of courtly love that was part of the chivalric code. This can be seen from his excerpts from Rene Chateaubriand’s Le génie du christianisme and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Geschichte der Künste und Wissenschaften. According to the German theorist, the knights of the Middle Ages often fell in love, but the numerous obstacles preventing love’s realization (inequality in social status, poverty, the rules and regulations of the church), would give their emotions a decidedly idealized character: Those hearts which had found each other were often condemned to difficult separation by the severe laws of the church. Such cases sublimated the unearthly language of love on the lips of every member of the knighthood.2

The theme of love was to play a significant role in Vladimir. In his introduction to the epic Zhukovsky claimed his aim was to praise “love and its enchantment,” “friendship,” and, of course, “happiness in matrimony.” The poem was to conclude with the “triumph and joy” and the “wedding and wedding night” of the mighty Russian knight (vitiaz’) Dobryna and the beautiful Ksenia. The realization of his own ambition in the near future would, for Zhukovsky, be his own feat, one worthy of his beloved. TH E TEM P E O F T H E NO RT H

In 1810 Ekaterina Protasova was planning to build a townhouse for herself in Muratovo. Zhukovsky drew up the construction plans and took upon himself the task of supervising the work. Not far from Muratovo, Zhukovsky purchased a small village with the funds remaining from his inheritance, and built himself a small house, moving into, as his friend and biographer once deemed it, “his very own Tusculum,3 where he was often visited by his friends from childhood, the young maids from the Yushkov and Protasov families.”4 After the deaths of “grandmother” Bunina and his mother, which occurred almost simultaneously, Zhukovsky asked Ekaterina Afanasievna to allow him to live with her household. She accepted. This time, from the second half of 1811 to the beginning of 1812, was, by the poet’s own admission, the happiest of his life. In 1810–11 Zhukovsky formed a close relationship with the family of his neighbor and distant relative, Alexander Pleshcheev, a wealthy, welleducated, intelligent, and aristocratic man.5 His estate Chern constantly served as a location for various celebrations and spectacles. A characteristic feature of this “paradise,” one that continued the tradition of the “intimate circle” of Karamzin in Pleshcheev’s estate Znamenskoe,6 was the chi111

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valric cult centered around the mistress of the estate, the beautiful Anna Pleshcheeva, known as “Nina.” In her honor, countless impromptu performances, allegorical presentations, madrigals and songs were performed. This atmosphere of literary games, of friendly amateur poetry and music was very dear to Zhukovsky, who brought the neighboring estates of his nieces, the Protasovs and Avdotia Kireevskaia (then living in Muratovo and Dolbino, respectively) into the cultural fold of the Pleshcheev household. “Here, in the depths of Russia, in the Orel Governance,” wrote Carl Seidlitz, “there came into being that which Goethe, at the very same time, was describing in his Wilhelm Meister, and what Goethe had seen in the magnificent and enlightened court of Weimar.”7 In an 1812 epistle to Pleshcheev,8 Zhukovsky gave an excellent formula for his poetic transformation of provincial everyday life into an enchanted poetic land. Here he describes a frigid and dull Russian winter, Но . . . и зимой фантазия крылата! Украсим то, чего не избежим, Пленительной игрой воображенья, Согреем мир лучом стихотворенья И на снегах Темпею насадим! (PSS, I, 116–17) [But . . . even in winter fantasy takes flight! / Let us make beautiful that which we can not escape, / By our captivating play of imagination, / We will warm the world through rays of poetry / And place Tempe on the snows!]

Zhukovsky’s mention of Tempe is not only a reference to the beautiful valley in Thessaly that was praised by the authors of antiquity. More importantly, it is an allusion to the final lines from Karamzin’s article “On the Sciences, Arts, and Enlightenment” (1793): Though I live on the edge of the north, in a land of terrible Aquilons, I am still with you, sweet muses! With you everywhere is the valley of Tempe, you only have to reach out with your hand, and the sorrowful pine turns into the laurel of Apollo, you have only to breathe with your divine lips, and on the cold yellow sands the flowers of Olympus burst into bloom. . . . You are nature, both nature and the love of good souls, this is my happiness, my joy in sorrows! . . Ach! At times I shed tears and am not ashamed of them!9

Pleshcheev would have been well aware of the text Zhukovsky was referring to, and could have easily understood it as an oath of fealty to the literary legacies of Karamzin. However, Zhukovsky’s actual stance (again unbeknownst to the author himself) in this poem is quite distinct from the 112

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Karamzinian position. Here Zhukovsky speaks not of fleeing a world of sorrow for literary fantasy (i.e., Karamzinian escapism), but rather the transfiguration of life through the power of poetic imagination. In this sense, Zhukovsky’s imagination was a theurgic one. The poet’s humorous texts from this period create the image of a “heavenly abode,” one that is removed from tempestuous historical time, one that is populated by angels who spend their days in merriment and mutual love. The programmatic definition of this placid life is given in Zhukovsky’s humorous epistle to his “dear friends” then located in Orel: Скорей, скорей в дорогу, В Муратово село. Там счастье завело Колонию веселья; Там дни быстрей бегут Меж дела и безделья! (PSS, I, 254) [Quickly, quickly to the road, / To the Muratovo abode. / There happiness has rung / The colony of merriment; / There the days pass quickly / Between affairs and idleness!]

In a handwritten journal with the characteristic “homemade” title “The Muratovo Cricket,” Zhukovsky composes a “hymn” to the colony: Аркадии ты нам милее, В тебе и тихо, и светло, В тебе веселье веселее, Муратово село. . . . В тебе Жуковский баснь склоняет, Хоть неискусен он зело, Тобой Дементьич управляет, Муратово село. (PSS, I, 165) [You are dearer to us than Arcadia, / You are quiet, and bright, / In you happiness is happier, / Muratovo village. . . . In you Zhukovsky writes fables, / Though he is quite unskilled, / You are managed by Dementich, / Muratovo village.]10

Not only were the related families of Muratovo, Doblino, and Chern drawn into the orbit of this poetic paradise, but numerous guests and servants participated as well. The petty events of domestic life here were elevated to a great significance, while events of great significance, in turn, became domesticated. Unlike Karamzin’s idyllic space, which was restricted 113

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to a narrow circle of sympathetic individuals spending their life in “philosophical” solitude, the utopia created by Zhukovsky was full of “captivating” emotions. It was open to new participants (given that they were kindred souls), and it was not limited to the description of quiet “hours of solitude,” having its own burlesque tradition (and, one might argue, cosmogony). The infamous comet of 1811, which struck fear in the hearts of the general public, transforms in Zhukovsky’s humorous poetry into a firework in honor of his goddaughter Sasha’s birthday.11 Each and every detail of the Muratovo world— whether of nature or of the home— is described by Zhukovsky as a part (or relative) of the whole and bears on it the traces of the general spirit of the colony: the merry Muratovo pies and omelettes, the Muratovo elders, the Muratovo cricket and louse, the Muratovo Empire, the Muratovo comet. The comet not only arrives as a birthday greeting for one of the Muratovo Graces, it also, like a polite guest, foretells a happy future for her: Комета, Бог с тобою! Иди своим путем! Будь славною звездою, Да нас не тронь хвостом! А ты, Александрина, Наш мир не покидай! Будь счастья в нем причина! Собою всех пленяй И жизнью веселися, Невинная душой! (PSS, I, 163) [Comet, God be with you! / Go along your path! / Be a glorious star, /Just don’t catch us with your tail! / And you, Alexandrina, / Do not quit our world! / Be the cause of its happiness! / Make everyone / Take joy in life, / You, innocent in soul!]

Zhukovsky’s Muratovo utopia presents itself as a world of eternal childhood,12 one that knows no sin and which is granted immunity from vice by virtue. In the center of this world are the Three Graces or Angels (the Protasova family), who are praised by the Pindar of Muratovo, Zhukovsky. Time is measured by the passing of family celebrations, which flow together to form an incredibly peaceful and undisturbed way of life. At the same time, the most important characteristic of this “feminized idyll” in Zhukovsky’s depiction is its future. Muratovo was a kind of preparatory or beginning phase, or, to be more concrete, a prototype for the future happiness of its inhabitants. The only difficulty for Zhukovsky, however, was that his path to his own personal paradise was blocked by an austere and severe guardian. 114

Heavenly Abode A F TE R T H E T EM P ES T

In January 1812, Zhukovsky once more asks for Masha’s hand. Ekaterina Afanasievna once more rejects him and demands not only that he cease thinking of this “illegal” marriage,13 but also that he not mention his love to anyone. Such demands lead to the development of a kind of lyrical “Aesopian language” in Zhukovsky’s poetry from 1812 to 1814, which in veiled form play out the drama of his love. In August 1812, Zhukovsky, who was an able amateur singer, performs his romance “The Sailor” (“Plovets”) on the occasion of Pleshcheev’s birthday. The poem, as we shall see, contains an allegory of the poet’s fate: Вихрем бедствия гонимый, Без кормила и весла, В океан неисходимый Буря челн мой занесла. В тучах звездочка светилась; “Не скрывайся!”—я взывал; Непреклонная сокрылась; Якорь был—и тот пропал. (PSS, I, 221) [Pursued by the whirlwind of misfortune, / With neither helm, nor oar, / Into the ocean an inescapable / Tempest carried my boat. / A star shone in the storm clouds; / “Don’t disappear!” I cried; / Unyielding, it disappeared; / I had an anchor, yet it too is gone.]

Salvation from the fearsome tempest is brought by faith in Providence, which was secretly leading him to a dock: Вдруг—все тихо! мрак исчез; Вижу райскую обитель . . . В ней трех ангелов небес. О спаситель-провиденье! Скорбный ропот мой утих; На коленах, в восхищенье, Я смотрю на образ их. О! кто прелесть их опишет? Кто их силу над душой? Все окрест их небом дышит И невинностью святой. (PSS, I, 221) [Suddenly, all is silent! The darkness parts; / I see paradise’s shelter . . . / And in it three heavenly angels.  / Providence! My Savior!  / My sad mumbling

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ceased. / On my knees, enraptured, / I look at their image. / O! Who could describe their beauty? / Their power over the soul? / All around breathes with their sky, / And their holy innocence.]

These three angels (the allegorical virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love) are clearly meant to be Protasova and her daughters. In typical fashion, in Zhukovsky’s imagination they all melt into one beautiful image. The following lines are a variation of the motifs familiar to us from “The Song” dedicated to Masha, extending them to include her entire angelic family: Неиспытанная радость— Ими жить, для них дышать; Их речей, их взоров сладость В душу, в сердце принимать. (PSS, I, 221) [Unknown joy— / To live by them, to breathe for them; / Their speech, the sweetness of their glances / To take them into one’s soul, into one’s heart.]

This is then followed by a conclusion that reveals to us precisely why the poem was written: О судьба! одно желанье: Дай все блага им вкусить; Пусть им радость—мне страданье; Но . . . не дай их пережить. (PSS, I, 222) [O Fate! One desire: / Let them taste of all that is good; / Let me suffer yet they be ever happy; / Never let them know it.]

Protasova felt that the final stanza was an all- too-overt reference to Zhukovsky’s sufferings after her refusal, and, according to the family legend, compelled the poet to leave Muratovo the next day.14 The final two lines truly did carry a kind of generic dissonance that was completely unacceptable in the idyllic discourse that had been created by Zhukovsky and sanctioned by his half-sister. In the conventional space of the Muratovo paradise, there was no room for tragic love and elegaic suffering. On August 12, 1812, Zhukovsky enlists as a lieutenant in the Moscow militia to fight against Napoleon (his plan on escaping to the army had, of course, come to him at an earlier date). Within two weeks he participates in the Battle of Borodino, if only in a secondary role; his regiment was held in reserve. In October he composes “Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors,” which brings him fame throughout all of Russia.15 Finally, in January 1813, after spending a month in the hospital in Vilno, he returns to Muratovo. His 116

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relatives meet the triumphant warrior- poet with great excitement and the previous idyllic life is renewed as if it had never ceased. It is at this time that the idealization (or mythologization) of the Muratovo “merry colony” reaches its apogee in Zhukovsky’s work. In the playful poem “Paradise,” the poet “refutes” the old legend of the awe-inspiring angel with the flaming sword who guards the gates of the earthly Eden (in Zhukovsky’s “Aesopian” language, this is a gentle rebuke to Ekaterina Afanasievna) and depicts the innocent life of the happy realm waiting for an exhausted traveler: Нет, друзья! вы в заблужденье! Есть на свете Божий рай! Есть! и любит Провиденье Сей подобный небу край! Там невидим грозный мститель— Ангел с пламенным мечом— Там трех ангелов обитель, Данных миру божеством! Не страшит, но привлекает Их понятный сердцу взор! Сколь улыбка их пылает! Сколь их сладок разговор! В их приюте неизвестно— Что порок, что суета! Непорочностью небесной Их прекрасна красота! Ты, который здесь уныло Совершаешь путь земной, К ним приди—их образ милый Примирит тебя с судьбой. Ах! друзья, кто здесь их знает, Кто им жертвует душой, Тот отдать не пожелает За небесный рай—земной! (PSS, I, 267) [No, my friends! You are mistaken! / There is God’s heaven on earth! / There is! And Providence loves this heaven-like land! / The dread avenger is seen nowhere, / The angel with the flaming sword, / There is the home of three angels, / Given to the world by divinity! / Their gaze, clear to the heart, / Does not frighten, but entices! / How radiant is their smile! / How sweet is their speech! / In their shelter, / Neither vice nor vanity is known! / Their most beautiful beauty / is kept by their heavenly purity! / You, you here despon-

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dently / Complete your earthly path, / Go to them, their dear image / Will reconcile you to fate. / Ach! Friends, those who know them, / Those who give their souls to them, / Would never want to change their / Earthly paradise for a heavenly one!]

TH E CHO S EN FA M I LY

On February 15, 1813, Zhukovsky leaves Muratovo for Savinskoe, the estate of Ivan Vladimirovich Lopukhin, a close friend of the Turgenev household, a leading figure in Russian Freemasonry, and an “apostle” of the Russian spiritual awakening of the 1800–1810 period. Zhukovsky was hoping for Lopukhin’s support in his quest for Masha’s hand, and his hopes did not deceive him. The “true Christian” approved of the match, gave Zhukovsky his blessing, and promised to convince Ekaterina Protasova that there was nothing wrong with this marriage. Zhukovsky spent several days at Lopukhin’s and described his stay in a diary entry from February 22, 1813. Remarkably enough, the poet said nothing of the content of their discussions; instead, his attention was centered on his own soul: the agitated anticipation of his meeting with the Teacher (the first part of the entry) and the consequences of the visit for his soul (the concluding part). The inner awakening of the poet is the central theme of this “confession,” a coming to consciousness that revealed to him a living faith in God, which in turn convinced him of the purity and righteousness of his attempt to wed Masha. Similar to the July entries from 1805, this revelation begins with a description of the sky, but one where the sky is now described as a clear portent of happiness that is close at hand: “calm, spiritual quiet, trust in Providence.” Extremely characteristic of Zhukovsky’s religious sentiment is that this revelation is described by him not as a vision of the future, but as the sense that he himself is in God’s field of vision (PSS, XIII, 57). His future marriage to Masha is seen as a spiritual union by Zhukovsky, in which the Creator is the “third.” Life in such a relationship would be “paradise or a faithful preparation for paradise” (from here one can derive the imperative for self-perfection). The earlier-existing utopia now is injected with a strong dose of mystical emotions. A future life with Masha and her mother now takes on the image of family under the protection of the Creator himself: O, how clear to me now is the best name of God: Father! It will be in my family, it will be her defender, it will be the foundation of our life (PSS, XIII, 58).16

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Moreover, marriage with Masha was nothing other than the means chosen by Providence, “to give me the chance to be a worthy citizen in the City of God” and to enter into “a family of chosen ones,” who are known by their happiness (PSS, XIII, 58).17 In Zhukovsky’s next diary entry from February 25, the poet compares his new sense of living faith to the “dead faith” professed by Ekaterina Protasova, an opposition at the center of his dilemma. If an absolutely impartial person was forced to choose which of these two approaches to Christianity was correct— one which destroys happiness, or one that facilitates it— then he would choose the latter, for truth is justified by happiness. However, the poet writes, the problem here consists of the fact that we do not have a dispassionate observer: “our judge is a mother.” In other words, in the religious context Zhukovsky sees his struggle for happiness as a duel between a loving enlightened Father (who is represented for him on earth by Lopukhin) and a mistaken, superstitious mother. Moreover, this fight for personal happiness is, in the end, a struggle for the enlightenment and spiritual awakening of the mother herself. She is the one who must make the correct decision, give her blessing to the marriage between Zhukovsky and her daughter and become part of the “chosen family,” dedicated to the Father of Heaven. It is worth mentioning that a typologically similar conflict between the enlightened faith of the father and the dark superstition of the mother can be found in Mozart’s “masonic” Singspiel The Magic Flute. While Zhukovsky does not mention the content of his conversations with Lopukhin, beyond his descriptions of his own personal transfiguration we can see the fundamental tenets of Lopukhin’s theosophical teaching, such as belief in a direct address to divinity through prayer (the prayer of the heart), the idea of an “inner church” as the antithesis of the “outer church,” the “awakening” of the soul that strives for perfection, the birth within one’s self of a “new Adam” that replaces the old, the spiritual marriage of a knight of wisdom with his Sophia, the return of the lovers to the Father’s embrace. To be more precise, Zhukovsky translates the ideas and images of Lopukhin’s Masonic teachings into his own religious poetic language. S ( O) URI NA M

Inspired by Lopukhin, Zhukovsky met the Muratovo New Year’s celebrations of December 31, 1813, with hope. At some moment it had seemed to him that his success in poetry and the intervention of his relatives and friends would eventually cure Ekaterina Protasova of her stubbornness and she would agree to his marriage to Masha. In addition to the Protasovs and Zhu-

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kovsky, the festivities were attended by the Pleshcheevs, Avdotia Kireevskaia, Anna Yushkova, and two Frenchmen: the steward of Chern, Boucillion, and the captive military surgeon Fauvre, then living at the Pleshcheevs (in passing, it should be mentioned that he was later to treat Masha for her “love sickness,” and would go on to write a highly critical account of Russia upon his return to his homeland).18 A new guest was the poet Alexander Voeikov, an old friend of Zhukovsky’s, who had arrived at the former’s invitation. Intelligent, talented, and cynical, Voeikov, pursuing his own search for a wife, quickly made himself at home in the “Muratovo community.” Following Zhukovsky, he likewise described the place as a “paradise, inhabited by angels,” and composed several appropriately ecstatic poems dedicated to it. In his journal, which he kept in the margins of one of the volumes of Ivan Dmitriev’s collected works, Voeikov gives us the following witty and somewhat cruel description of one of the idyllic days in Muratovo, paying particular attention to the euphoric state of his friend: We ate lunch and spent the entire day in Maria Andreevna’s room. Ekaterina Afanasievna prepared dinner herself. Zhukovsky was in the heavens, I was still beneath the clouds in this chorus of a madhouse, and when the poet, seeing everyone in ecstasy, innocently asked: what mood and tense is this? I responded: The mood is happiness in the heavenly tense.19

The major surprise of the New Year’s festivities was the appearance of the two- faced Roman deity Janus, with the mask of an old man on the back of his head, a paper crown on his head, the year “1813” written on his forehead of his “old” face, while the year “1814” was written on his “other,” younger face. Turning his “old face” to the audience, he would read the first four stanzas of a poem written by Zhukovsky for the New Year, which expressed good tidings and a poetic listing of all the Muratovo delicacies awaiting the guests: suckling pig, various pies and pastries, and goose with mustard. The fourth and fifth stanzas of Zhukovsky’s New Year’s missive recounted the happy life of the village Surianovo, which had been purchased by the Protasovas in 1813. As a joke, Ekaterina herself had renamed it Surinam, a macaronic pun from the French “sourire” and the Russian “nam” (i.e., “smile at us”). Zhukovsky immediately turned this pun into a lyrical theme: И будет Суринам— Убежище веселья, Меж дела и безделья Промчатся годы там. Лишь в этот Суринам

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Вы вступите ногою, Подписанный судьбою Контракт отдастся вам: “Всегда веселью быть, Считать дни за мгновенья, Прошедшие ж мученья Навеки позабыть.” (PSS, I, 293) [And Sourinam will be / A shelter of merriment, / Between affairs and idleness, / Years shall pass there. / Merely by placing one’s / Foot in Surinam / You will be given a contract / Signed by fate: / “Always be merry, / Count the days as moments / And forget forever, / The torments that have already passed.”]

Zhukovsky and the young people sympathetic to him had supposed (completely erroneously, as it would turn out) that Surianovo had been purchased by Ekaterina Afanasievna as a dowry for her daughter Masha, and that Zhukovsky and Masha would move there after their wedding. In a letter to Voeikov, who had already begun to court the younger Protasova, Zhukovsky hastens to complete the picture of his future happiness, and of their life together in the “little corner of Sourinam”: Brother, brother! Imagine our life in Sourinam, imagine our close bond, our peace, based on spiritual calm and lit up by spiritual joys, imagine our constant and beneficial labor, with no distractions from the cares of society, which continues and is rewarded in our closely knit circle of the very best people, imagine that we, in addition to being faithful friends . . . imagine that we will have all of the pleasures of honor, with none of its drawbacks, imagine that we will be able to work together, will lay out and make our own happiness, will serve as support for each other in sadness. Imagine all this and give thanks to Providence.20

As we can see, the “Schillerian” domestic utopia of Andrei Turgenev once more bursts in Zhukovsky’s consciousness, but here under the name of Sourinam. In the poet’s thoughts, Andrei Turgenev’s “brotherhood,” which had gathered in Voeikov’s home at the turn of the century, was to be reborn in his new family21 which would serve as the capital of his imagined “republic of poetry,” whose “banner” would include the demands of “simplicity and good taste,” whose citizens would be his friends and fellow writers (Alexander Turgenev, Viazemsky, Batiushkov, Uvarov, Dashkov, Pleshcheev), whose “ministers of enlightenment” would be the legislators of literary taste Karamzin and Dmitriev, and whose “parish priest” would be the archbishop of Moscow, Filaret, who was then actively pursuing religious reforms.22 The literary 121

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precedents for Zhukovsky’s utopia have been traced to the French poet JeanBaptiste-Louis Gresset’s “petite République,”23 while its ideological roots can be found in the spiritual unions professed by contemporary mystics.24 The very name “Sourinam” is worth further commentary. Although the nineteenth-century historian Viskovatov finds the pun to be somewhat lacking, it is more complicated and refined than it appears at first glance. It is no coincidence that Zhukovsky seizes upon the name and turns it into an entire poetic theme. In the literary mythology of the time the word “Surinam” referred to one of the first sentimentalist utopias, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1680), which had been translated into Russian by 1796.25 The novel tells of the love of an African prince for an Indian beauty, and depicts a “utopian society whose primitivism makes them metaphorically like the inhabitants of Eden in ‘the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin.’”26 The local inhabitants live in harmony with nature and in the world of English merchants: We live in perfect Tranquillity and good Understanding, as it behooves us to do, they knowing all the places where to seek the best food of the country and the means of getting it, and for very small and unvaluable trifles, supply us with what ’tis impossible for us to get.27

The Muratovo “colony of merriment,” mentioned earlier, is transformed by Zhukovsky’s poetic imagination to Surinam, where “past torments” are forgotten for all eternity and simple life and common merriment and labor lead to earthly happiness. We should note that this utopian “colonial” project of Zhukovsky’s, which draws upon the exotic idylls of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the Swiss utopia of Rousseau, brings the poet close to the religious reformers of 1800–1810, who were writing constantly on the “union of hearts” and spiritual communities. Thus, it is no coincidence that in 1814 Zhukovsky demonstrates a keen interest in Sarepta, a community founded by the Moravian Brethren in 1765, and which Voeikov had visited during his travels through the south of Russia.28 S OME O NE EL S E’ S PA R A D I S E

Zhukovsky’s hope for a “personal Surinam” was in vain, but a new more modest hope soon came to take its place. In the spring of 1814 Zhukovsky discovers that the wedding between Voeikov and Sasha Protasova is to take place on July 2. The match had been significantly facilitated by Zhukovsky himself, who believed that his friend would be able to convince Ekaterina Protasova to let Zhukovsky marry Masha in his new role as head of the Protasova 122

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family. However, this wedding was to mark the end of the Muratovo utopia, as the new Voeikov-Protasova family was destined to move to Dorpat, where, thanks to the efforts of Zhukovsky and Alexander Turgenev, Voeikov had received a position as a professor of Russian literature. In a letter to his confidante Avdotia Kireevskaia on April 16, 1814, Zhukovsky plays out his situation in the form of a dialogue with his constant “companion” Hope who binds his heart and follows after him “on crutches, often falling behind”: —Well, comrade, what have you to say? —What have I to say? We don’t have long to drag ourselves along this bright world. After the second of July— no matter what happens— we will part! Either I will leave you and you can wander as you see fit! Or I will leave you my sister, who is better than me and who (but only for those who are good) is much better at her tasks. . . . She will prepare you for the promised land, Where faith is not needed, where there is no place for hope, Where there is only the kingdom of sacred love!29 —And if I remain alone! —Then! Prepare yourself as you can, to be taken to this new land! But it is unlikely you will receive an entrance ticket! Truly, will a miracle show the path To this magical land of miracles!30 —But to wait for a miracle? Who could wait for one? —I am of the same mind! —Then what should I do? —I know not! For me all that is known is that we shall part!31

Meanwhile, the marriage that Zhukovsky had made possible32 was having the opposite effect of what he intended: “Voeikov has joined the family, and I have left it.”33 Ekaterina Protasova’s distrust of Zhukovsky only grew stronger, and the poet’s friend even went so far as to encourage this new development. “It is much easier,” Zhukovsky wrote to Kireevskaia, “to be alone with the beasts in the forest or to be in prison in chains, than around that dear family that I would like to throw myself into, but which I find myself being thrown out of.”34 This feeling of fatal alienation from the “dear family” after witnessing a “stranger’s happiness” becomes an emotional leitmotif of his correspondence and literary output, in which the image of a distant, yet unachievable paradise becomes a definitive feature. “I will wander around the gates of paradise, not daring to look in before Voeikov’s arrival,” he writes to Kireevskaia on May 5, 1814.35 123

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This new psychological dilemma is expressed by Zhukovsky rhetorically: “How can I rip from my heart the regret that . . . I am not a participant in the happiness of those people who give it?” From here there follow feelings of “noble” envy and mumblings of discontent at fate, which Zhukovsky addresses with the help of “high” literature, namely the descriptions of the sufferings of Klopstock’s fallen angel from the second canto of Der Messias: “Can Abbadona be forbidden from looking at beautiful paradise with regret?”36 At the end of 1814, Zhukovsky translates this canto into Russian. In Zhukovsky’s version, Abbadona’s monologue significantly departs from the original, and gives a summary of the real-life sufferings of its translator: Сладостный вход в небеса для чего загражден Аббадоне? О! для чего не могу я опять залететь на отчизну, К светлым мирам Вседержителя, вечно покинуть Область изгнанья? . . .  Ныне стою, помраченный, отверженный, сирый изгнанник, Грустный, среди красоты мирозданья. О небо родное, Видя тебя, содрогаюсь: там потерял я блаженство; Там, отказавшись от бога, стал грешник. О мир непорочный, Милый товарищ мой в светлой долине спокойствия, где ты? Тщетно! одно лишь смятенье при виде небесныя славы Мне Судия от блаженства оставил—печальный остаток! Ах! для чего я к нему не дерзну возгласить: “Мой Создатель”? (PSS, IV, 12–13) [Why is the sweet entrance to the heavens closed off for Abbadona?  / O! Why can I not once more fly home, / To the bright worlds of the Almighty, to forever quit / This land of exile? . . . / Today I stand, sombre, rejected, an orphaned exile, / Saddened among the beauty of creation. O native sky, / Seeing you, I tremble: there I lost bliss, / There, turning from God, I became a sinner. O untouched world, / My dear friend in the bright valley of tranquility, where are you? / In vain! The Judge has left me of bliss only a glimpse of heavenly glory—a pitiful remainder! / Ach! Why do I not dare to proclaim to him “My Creator”?]

This monologue would become one of the key texts for those involved in Zhukovsky’s romantic drama. In a letter from June 6, 1815, Zhukovsky’s “sister from Dolbino,” Avdotia Kireevskaia, quotes the first two lines from the text above, underlining the word “home.” A year later, Maria Protasova writes to Kireevskaia about her own condition: “I am [faring] worse than Abbadona!”37 Humiliated by Ekaterina Protasova’s growing suspicions and Voeikov’s role in encouraging them, Zhukovsky leaves Muratovo. Voeikov sends

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a lengthy and craftily composed letter after him, in which he explains his behavior as an attempt to bring harmony to the family now under his protection, and asks Zhukovsky to sacrifice his feelings for the sake of common peace: Thirty-year innocence, a divine talent, humility and obedience to fate without compare . . . My friend! You alone are worthy of the unique Masha, your heart alone is worthy of being the altar of this Angel. And is it for me to tear this feeling from your heart? I would only want to find a means to reconcile your love with Mother’s conscience, and with the consciences of our common relations. It would seem to me that it is necessary to transform it [love] into friendship, the purest, most ardent friendship, to bind the wings of your desires, to relinquish your demands, and to fasten closed your mouth to murmurings and complaints.38

Such humility, according to Voeikov, would best correspond to his friend’s character and to the Petrarchian spirit of his poetry (see chapter 3): Your love is the most pure, the most sacred, the most elevated. For you, a genius, it is your riches, your Glory and virtue. And to suffer from it is a kind of pleasure that is a hundredfold more beautiful than the indifference of that vulgar relation that we see daily, that people would like to pass off as love, but which, to spite those who are lacking in sensitivity, remains earthly, blackened, and burdensome.39

Here, on the lips of a cunning manipulator, the poetic conception of an idealized, chaste love based on suffering, at which Zhukovsky had arrived by the 1810s (see below) became a death sentence to the hopes for the poet’s own personal happiness. Finally, the Protasovs’ departure for Dorpat introduces a new theme in Zhukovsky’s myth of the family: the diaspora of the Bunin household. From this time forward, the poet considers one of his central tasks to be the reunification of its separated parts “under one roof” in Dorpat, Mishenskoe, or Muratovo. Zhukovsky created various utopian projects and plans of rejoining the “colony of merriment” in “the promised land” and proposed them to his relative right up until the final years of his life. IN N E R ED EN

Naturally, the longing of a fallen angel for an unreachable paradise was not an acceptable resolution to the pious poet’s personal drama. “My God!” he writes Masha in June 1814:

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The place where I thought I had it all, my earthly paradise, will now be empty or closed to me. But why torment myself? My paradise is your heart; it will never be closed to me. . . . In my own corner of the world I will think, have faith, and gain solace from the thought that I live for your happiness! I will not allow anyone to deprive me of my right. This cruel discord can yet be made beautiful. . . . Think, feel, do, write— all for you! . . . Be my solace, my guardian, my companion in life! (PSS, XIII, 71–72)

In other words, Zhukovsky’s earlier image of the “inhabitant of paradise” takes on spiritual characteristics, and is carried over into the world of the heart and memory, one that is shared by the two lovers and their faithful sister allies: И заключен святой союз сердцами: Душе легко в родной душе читать; Легко, что сказано очами, Устами досказать. (PSS, III, 64) [And the holy union is sealed by hearts / It is easy for the soul to read in a familiar soul / What is said with the eyes is easy / To complete with the lips.]

This “inner Eden” which no one is capable of taking away from the lovers, in Zhukovsky’s interpretation serves as an archetype for their future reunion— either on earth or in heaven. On the eve of his departure from Muratovo he secretly exchanges rings with Masha and explains the significance of this symbolic act: We are betrothed in the name of God for virtue, for a good life, which, if not together, will at least be spent equally and as one. (PSS, XIII, 69)

“One roof, one sky, is it not the same?” asks Zhukovsky. (He uses these words, which apparently come from a monologue by Paul from Bernardin’s novel,40 in a letter to Kireevskaia).41 Far from his beloved, he will still be closer to her, as no one can forbid him from loving her: “My angel! Guardian of my heart! You are my shelter!” He rapturously proclaims: Are we truly dead to each other, now that we have parted? Do we not have one common hope, one faithful defender? Is the destination to which he leads us not beautiful? .  .  .  No! No! Have faith in Providence! Believe in each other! Everywhere and always be worthy of each other— that is all! The future will not be bad! Give me your hand! Be an example to me! A friend! A guardian angel! (PSS, XIII, 70)

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Love now demands full submission of one’s self to the will of Providence, which gives a timid hope in this world, and promises complete happiness in the next world. Zhukovsky’s letter journal from June concludes with an extended citation from the seventh canto of Wieland’s Oberon, which relates the story of the knight Huon and Amanda (Rezia), the daughter of the Caliph of Baghdad. In the story, the lovers are fated to wander the earth and pass several trials and obstacles to their love: . . . Was unser Schicksal ist, hilft deine Liebe mir, Hilft meine Liebe dir ertragen; So schwer es sei, so unerträglich— hier Ist meine Hand— ich wills mit Freuden tragen. (PSS, XIII, 75–76)

Zhukovsky interprets his relationship with Masha through his favorite of Wieland’s works, one that, in the end, promises its protagonists happiness as a reward for their faithfulness. In Wieland’s theodicy of love, however, the protagonists’ sufferings are the result of their guilt: Huon and Rezia broke Oberon’s prohibition on sexual love before marriage and are then forced to earn forgiveness for their action. In this sense, Wieland is clearly not a viable model for Zhukovsky’s situation, as the poet’s relationship with Masha was purely platonic. In Zhukovsky’s romantic myth, the suffering of lovers is not caused by their sin (they are innocent and submissive to their fate), but by the tragic error of a mother. Consequently, the alleviation of suffering could not stem from the lovers’ recompensing their guilt (which didn’t exist), but in “correcting the heart” of Ekaterina Protasova, who would witness their torments and fidelity to each other (for more detail, see chapter 7). In Zhukovsky’s theodicy of love, suffering itself is an ethical choice. It is nothing less than the “means to the most beautiful.” TH E VIR G I NI T Y T ES T

As we recall, in his disingenuously consoling letter to Zhukovsky, Voeikov professes admiration of his “friend’s” “thirty-year innocence,” comparing the poet to both Christ and the vestal virgins of Rome. Voeikov attributes Zhukovsky’s “virginity” to both the poet’s “pure” soul and his lyric poetry that was its expression. It is true that in his works Zhukovsky not only praised platonic love, but also avoided “inappropriate” or “seductive” images (in fact, he often “purified” the works he translated), a stance that had already in the 1810s earned him a reputation as “the bard of innocence, love, and beauty” (PSS, I, 29). In what follows I will attempt to ascertain the ideological (i.e., the 127

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ethical, medical, religious, and literary) sources typical of Zhukovsky’s code of chastity and examine how his cultural status as a “bard of innocence” came to be reflected in the reception of his contemporaries. Zhukovsky’s friend and biographer Carl Seidlitz has explained the “personal” and poetic “purity” of his friend as the result of Zhukovsky’s “feminine surroundings,” which were distinguished by their strict sense of morality: “tender criticism” of the “virgin Areopagus,” to whom the poet had addressed his first works, “led him to the path of chastity and pensive verse.”42 In the sentimental tradition, chastity was considered to be first and foremost a feminine virtue, giving women a particular aesthetic attractiveness. In the typical sentimentalist plot, the heroine’s loss of virginity before marriage is punished by fate (thus, poor Liza’s “fall,” in Karamzin’s tale, is accompanied by a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder, foreshadowing the tragic conclusion). In Rousseau’s Emile, the ideal characteristics of a woman were modesty, obedience, self-control, chastity, and “solid moral judgment.”43 The mission of “la femme aux grands sentiments” did not only consist of being a good wife to one’s husband, but also in softening masculine mores and correcting corrupted hearts through feats of high morality. In one of the chapters of Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), the narrator, deeply impressed by the purity of the peasant Aniuta, gives a bitter monologue on his own lost virginity: Aniuta! Why did I not know you 15 years ago . . . I would have distanced myself from the noisome mercenaries of lust, would have honored the marital bed, would not have destroyed the bond of family with my carnal insatiability. Virginity would have been for me the Holy of Holies, and I would not have dared to touch it. O my Aniutushka! Sit forever at the gates of your hut and preach the moral of your proud innocence. I am sure that you will return to the path of virtue the one who has started to divert from it and that you will strengthen in morality the one who is inclined to abandon the path.44

Meanwhile, the image of the pure youth (as Zhukovsky’s niece, Anna Zontag, recalled him in her memoirs) is a fairly common occurrence in the pages of literary works of the Age of Sensibility, with its mixture of Rousseauistic “psychology of postponed sexuality”45 and strict Masonic ethics. Male chastity was often interpreted as one of the main Christian virtues of a man of feeling, as “inner beauty,” which was united with modesty, bashfulness, and affection.46 Both Christ and his earthly father, Joseph, served as worthy models to be imitated by pious sentimental men. Thus, the espousal of earthly chastity and purity of the heart occupies an important place in the moral program of Mikhail Kheraskov’s Masonic epic Vladimir Reborn 128

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(1785). The ideal monarch, depicted in Kheraskov’s utopian novel Cadmus and Harmony (1787), attempts to surpass his subjects in his own qualities— “meekness and chastity.” In general, the human struggle with passion comprises a central place in the conflict of the Masonic ethical plot: anyone searching wisdom must bring his will and desires into the order of chastity, the restraint of emotion, and all other virtues.47 In the Pension for Nobles, which was directed by the Masons of Moscow University, the preservation of “purity of morals and innocence of the heart” of its wards was considered a most important task of “true education.” Its realization demanded that the “vibrant and ardent” imagination of its young people be kept strictly under control. In a speech on education, the Pension’s director, the Mason and Rousseauist Prokopovich-Antonsky proclaimed, “As far as a correct and purified imagination brings both pleasure and profit to a person, so too does an unrestrained and corrupt imagination do harm.”48 As a result, the imagination of the Pension’s young male students found nourishment exclusively in images from “appropriate” translated works, which were to serve the students as grammars of virtue. Naturally (or, perhaps, unnaturally?), the young Zhukovsky’s moral development was shaped by the cult of innocence in the household of the director of Moscow University, Ivan Petrovich Turgenev. The young men of this house were required to remain chaste until marriage, a prohibition that “was often accompanied by intensive intimidation— the youths were constantly reminded of the unavoidable consequences of debauchery.”49 At his father’s request, Andrei Turgenev translated pastor Feddersen’s Christliches Sittenbuch für den Bürger und Landmann (1783),50 in which chastity is shown as the path to the soul’s salvation. “Voluptuousness shortens life,” claims the author, “disease torments those who love its poisonous charms.” As we know from Zorin’s studies, Feddersen’s book frightened Andrei Turgenev, but failed to protect him. Zhukovsky was a much more successful product of the Pension’s sexual education program.51 If one is to believe his biographers, he remained a virgin right up until his marriage at the age of fifty-seven.52 Zhukovsky’s “Franklin plan” of self- perfection (recorded in his diary of 1806) is but one example of how chastity entered into the poet’s moral codex. Another example, more literary in nature, was the Western platonic tradition, which Zhukovsky discovered through Rousseau’s and Schiller’s cult of the “schöne Seele” and Wieland’s theodicy of love manifested in his novel Geschichte des Agathon (1766–67) and the romantic epic Oberon (1780). Thus, the relationship between Agathon and Psyche provided the Russian poet with a literary prototype for his feelings for Maria Protasova (see chapter 7). In turn, Zhukovsky perceived the motif of the broken vow of chastity in Oberon as a kind of literary warning. 129

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Besides literary models, the young poet’s drive to maintain his purity until marriage was apparently fortified by authoritative medical (i.e., ethicalhygienic) theories of his age. In 1805 Zhukvosky read and summarized a medical best seller by Christoph-Wilhelm Hufeland, a German doctor and a proponent of healthy lifestyles. Entitled Makrobiotik oder Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (1796), this book attempted to prove that the “life force” (Lebenskraft) of organic beings could weaken or increase under the influence of external conditions. This life force, according to Hufeland, could be developed through “good physical descent, prudent physical education, active and laborious youth, happy married state, sleep, bodily exercise, the enjoyment of free air, rural and country life, traveling, cleanliness,” and so on. One of the most important means to maintain one’s physical and moral health mentioned in the book was refraining from physical love in one’s youth. In a chapter dedicated to this topic,53 the author directly connects the heroism, bravery, and nobility of the medieval German knights to their chastity, and the weakness, incompleteness, and early aging and moral degradation of their contemporaries— to the abuse of physical love. Hufeland finds a poetic ideal of a young and healthy body and soul in Gottfried August Bürger’s poem “Männerkeuschheit” (“Chastity,” 1778) which serves as the epigraph to the chapter: He who in Pleasure’s downy arms Ne’er lost his health or youthful charms, A hero lives; and justly can Exclaim: “In me behold a man.”54

Hufeland goes on to claim that medieval knights became real heroes largely because of their strict control over their passions: The youth of these men was destined to great exploits and undertakings, not to voluptuousness and dissipation; the physical propensity to love did not among them sink into mere animal enjoyment, but was exalted to a moral incitement to noble and heroic actions. Each bore in his heart the image of his beloved object, whether real or imaginary; and this romantic love, this indissoluble attachment, was the shield of his continence and virtue, strengthened the powers of his body, and communicated to his mind courage and unalterable resolution, continually directing its attention to his fair one smiling to him at a distance, and whose favor could be gained only by glorious achievement.55

Unfortunately, observes Hufeland, in our times young people aspire to enter a union of the flesh as soon as possible; satisfaction in the animal fash130

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ion has become their only goal, and the very virtue of chastity, “the principal foundation without doubt of moral firmness and manliness of character, has become a subject of ridicule, and is decried as old- fashioned pedantry.”56 But all is not lost. The restoration of the life force of humanity is possible, if young men, having recognized the central cause of the physical and moral superiority of their ancestors, begin to imitate the latter in their chasteness. In other words, sexual restraint is a school that each young man must pass through in order to become a physically and intellectually strong man— a knight of our times.57 The image of a paladin burning with unearthly love as the embodiment of the ethical and hygienic ideal finds its reflection both in Zhukovsky’s poetic worldview and his code of behavior in life. In the beginning of the 1810s, this chivalric ideal of a chaste youth finds a mystical and religious basis in Zhukovsky’s consciousness. As we know, it is at this time that the poet was attracted to Ivan Lopukhin’s theosophy, which had been derived from the teachings of Jakob Böhme. The central subject of this teaching was the path of the Spiritual Youth, vested with the “robe of chastity,” which eventually led to the divine wisdom of Sophia.58 Adapting Lopukhin’s worldview to his own circumstances, the young poet imagines his love for Masha as a path to spiritual perfection: This possible transfiguration of one’s self gives me joy equal to the hope which sees my Masha as my angel-companion, as a partner in a pure innocent life. (PSS, XIII, 58)

It should be noted that in Zhukovsky’s theodicy of love the preservation of chastity is not the goal, but rather the means for acquiring his beloved, a condition for achieving family happiness, here understood, in accordance with Hufeland’s teaching, as a reward for restraint.59 It is precisely from such a perspective that Zhukovsky examined his relationship with Masha in expectation of her mother’s approval. This necessitated platonic love was sublimated into an entire body of works on the theme of pure love (“Elvina and Edwin,” “The Aeolian Harp,” “The Knight Togenburg,” and so on), the most telling of which is the “tale in two ballads,” entitled Twelve Sleeping Maidens (1811–17). The innocent youth Vadim, the protagonist of the concluding part of this tale, is given a mighty task: to wake the twelve sleeping daughters of the great sinner Gromoboi from their eternal sleep, and to marry one of them— namely the one that appeared to him three times in a vision during the twentyfirst “spring” of his life. Having explained to Vadim the nature of his quest, a mysterious elder gives him a magic bell intended to remind the knight of his purpose. The source for Zhukovsky’s “tale” was the lengthy “novel with spirits” of the German writer Hans Christian Spiess, which recounted the 131

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adventures of a chaste deliverer whom numerous women tried to seduce at the urging of Satan. Instead of the countless lurid episodes and allusions that fill the German novel, Zhukovsky’s ballad has only a single erotic scene, and even this one scene is covered by the veil of innocence (though the veil in this case at least is fairly transparent). On the road to the dwelling place of the twelve sleeping maidens Vadim saves a beautiful princess from Kiev from the clutches of an “enormous giant.” In order to warm the beautiful maiden, Vadim embraces her, and senses how her young virgin breast is heaving, how she is filled with warmth and with a “quiet tremble” touches his lips. Unlike Spiess’s beauties, who serve Satan, here the rescued princess is innocent herself and has no notion of how tempting she is to the young knight: Лазурны очи опустя, В объятиях Вадима Она, как тихое дитя, Лежала недвижима; И что с невинною душой Сбылось—не постигала; Лишь сердце билось, и порой, Вся вспыхнув, трепетала; Лишь пламень гаснущий сиял Сквозь тень ресниц склоненных, И вздох невольный вылетал Из уст воспламененных. (PSS, III, 120) [Dropping her azure eyes, / Into Vadim’s embrace / She, like a quiet child, / Lay unmoving; / And what had happened to her innocent soul / She could not grasp; / Her heart was just beating, and at times, / All a blush, she would tremble / And the dying flame would shine / Through the shadow of her lowered eyelashes, / And an involuntary sigh flew out / From her inflamed lips.]

Her sweet glances, her pure breast heaving in his arms, her sparkling cheeks, the heat of her half-open lips, “the quiet voice and sweet agitation” ignite the knight’s passion and Уже, исполнены огнем Кипящего лобзанья, На девственных ее устах Его уста горели И жарче розы на щеках Дрожащей девы рдели . . . (PSS, III, 121)

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[Already full of the fire  / Of a blazing kiss,  / On her virgin lips  / His lips burned / And brighter than a rose / Did the cheeks of the trembling maiden turn red . . .]

But here, to the good fortune of the twelve sleeping maidens (as well as Zhukovsky’s morality), the bell of Providence rings out, and the knight comes to his senses. Having overcome the temptation of earthly love, he continues on his quest. In the conclusion of this “mystical ballad,” the pure youth awakens the beautiful maidens, and marries his chosen one, and they ascend together to the heavens, along with the maidens who have been freed from their curse and now sing their praise to the Lord of Light and Grace:60 . . . сквозь занавес зари Блистает крест; слиянны Из света зрятся алтари; И, яркими венчанны Звездами, девы предстоят С молитвой их святыне, И серафимов тьмы кипят В пылающей пучине. (PSS, III, 133) [Through dawn’s curtain / A cross shines bright; altars / Fashioned out of light appear. / And, crowned by bright / Stars, the maidens stand in prayer / Before their sanctuary, / And hosts of seraphim teem / Inside the flaming vortex.]61

Zhukovsky’s Twelve Sleeping Maidens, which was completed already after the poet’s beloved had married another man, can be considered the lyrical apotheosis of the doctrine of chaste love which is crowned in marriage. This image of a pure youthful dreamer, the champion of the beautiful maidens who entrusts his life to the use of divine Providence, has entered into the canon of Russian literature. It is also the lyrical alter ego of its author. This kind of hero, new for Russian culture, was received by readers in the 1810s as an ethical model (“the idol of chaste hearts”) and called forth an entire wave of imitations in literature and in life (Pushkin’s Lensky was but one of the artistic reincarnations of this idealized type). However, by the second half of this decade this image of “an ideal youth” frequently began to take on a comic dimension in the literary and social consciousness, and was often associated with the traditional sentimental figure of the charming and virtuous woman. The result of this overlap was a certain degree of “feminization” of Zhukovsky’s public image,62 one that was to a large extent caused by the poet himself. In his works from this period, Zhukovsky constantly sang praises to beautiful maidens— from tender nuns to Schiller’s 133

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Virgin of Orleans— and repeatedly dedicated these works to his pious female readers— from his Muratovo nieces to the Dowager Empress Maria. In 1815 the playwright Alexander Shakhovskoi, a literary opponent of Zhukovsky and his literary friends, mocked the poet by employing the image of the effeminate poet Fialkin (Mr. Violet), an author of silly ballads addressed to “sweet” maidens. The response of Zhukovsky’s supporters to this satirical attack was the formation of the parodic literary society “Arzamas,” which united the “knights of good taste” around their leader, who had been attacked by a “barbarian.”63 Yet it is rather revealing that in the comic mythology of this literary “Order” Zhukovsky receives the female nickname “Svetlana” (after the heroine from his “Russian ballad” of 1812) and is called “the beautiful maiden.”64 In fact, by the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century Zhukovsky’s friends’ appreciation of his “virginal” poetry becomes more strained and double- sided. While he remains their unconditional leader as Russia’s first poet, they begin to detect in his poetry a certain tendency towards inertia, preventing creative development. Repetition, a lack of originality, an orientation towards noble (i.e., affected) tastes, a retreat from the passions of contemporary political and social life for a world of pure fantasy were among their many objections. The “Asmodeus” of “Arzamas,” Prince Viazemsky, voices the following complaint: The poet, much like the maidens of his ballads, needs assistance in waking from his dreamy slumber, he needs to be yelled at in order to get through to him, he needs to be shaken awake, returned to reality, to acquaint himself with the energetic and multifaceted poetry of Byron.65

“Here is the hideous skeleton of his beauty,” notes Alexander Turgenev, having read yet another one of the “virginal” ballads of his friend, which features “two prisoners separated by a wall who have never seen each other, yet love each other, and one is dying from despair after the death of the other.”66 Jokes about Zhukovsky’s virginity soon take on a polemic character in the lips of his friends. “Send me some of Zhukovsky’s virginity,” writes Viazemsky in the fall of 1818, either referring to Zhukovsky’s works, or to the attempts of friends to make the poet return to real life. “Zhukovsky’s virginity is in Pushkin’s hands,” replies his addressee, hinting at either some pranks of the young poet, who was then clearly attached to his literary “teacher,” or to Pushkin’s parodies of his mentor’s beloved poetic themes. In fact, Pushkin’s literary strategy towards his mentor’s works was two-sided. On the one hand, he occasionally imitated Zhukovsky’s “beautiful and innocent” poetry (see, for example, his epistles to Zhukovsky from 1815 to 1818); on the other, he also composed humorous (and often times, blasphemous) reworkings of 134

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Zhukovsky’s “innocent” works (the parody of Twelve Sleeping Maidens in the pornographic “Barkov’s Shade,” as well as the burlesque epic poem Ruslan and Liudmila).67 These reworkings of Zhukovsky’s poetry are openly erotic. The monastery of the twelve sleeping maidens becomes a filthy bordello in “Barkov’s Shade,” while in the fourth canto of Ruslan and Liudmila, it becomes an upper-class house of tolerance. The sublime love melancholy of Zhukovsky’s “mystical ballads” turns into open physical desire. Thus, the virgin monk from Pushkin’s 1819 lyric “Rusalka,” which parodies Zhukovsky’s “Fisherman” (1818), is effectively seduced by the water nymph mentioned in the elder poet’s ballad. The thought behind this seduction of innocence of course was purely literary: it represents the collision of two systems. The older, “platonic” system must voluntarily surrender itself to the “younger,” more “earthly” one, focused on the liberation, rather than taming, of sexual desire and “unrestrained and corrupt imagination.” Let us turn for a moment to Pushkin’s humorous missive to Zhukovsky from the end of 1819 which is indicative of this relationship. Having come to Zhukovsky’s home when he was away, Pushkin leaves him a note in verse, in which he presents himself as “a lazy pupil of the divine Parnassian virgins,” and directs a question to the heavens: “Which saint, what procuress / Will bring together Zhukovsky and me?”68 In other words, Pushkin’s attempt to visit the elder poet is seen as an unsuccessful attempt at “seduction.” The beauty had already flown off. Zhukovsky’s further preoccupation with mystical ideas at the turn of the 1820s was cause for grave concern among his younger friends. In Pushkin’s parodic mythology, this development would lead Zhukovsky’s image as a “beautiful maiden” to take on religious connotations: the poet is identified with the Maid of Orleans (the heroine of his translation of Schiller’s romantic drama), or even the Virgin herself. The comic peak of this literary theme of seducing the innocent can be found in the openly sacrilegious Gavriiliada (1823), in which Pushkin merrily mixes motifs from a number of Zhukovsky’s “mystical” ballads: the fight between archangel Gabriel and Satan parodies the struggle between a devil and the saintly old man in Zhukovsky’s Twelve Sleeping Maidens;69 the description of the dove which covers Mary’s lap in Pushkin’s story is a comic recasting of the dove that alights on Svetlana’s breast;70 comic reinterpretation of “innocent” imagery of Zhukovsky.71 Frivolously, Pushkin associates himself at times with the “procurer” Gabriel, and at other times with the seductive Satan. In the end, the pure, mystical poetry of Zhukovsky, exemplified in the image of Mary, freely gives itself up to its conqueror. One might say that Pushkin’s relationship to the older poet’s muse is similar to Voltaire’s (one of Pushkin’s favorite writers) relationship to La pucelle d’Orléans. Yet the purpose of this literary courtship was different, as it was purely aesthetic. 135

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The significance of Pushkin’s parody of Zhukovsky consists of “revealing” the poetic system of the older poet and “taking possession” of it, or, in Pushkin’s metaphorical language, in the victory of a talented and ambitious “idle pupil” over his mentor’s “virginal” (in the terminology of Zhukovsky’s friends) ideal.72 Pushkin’s literary strategy can serve as a fascinating illustration for Harold Bloom’s revisionary ratio (“creative misprision”) of tessera described in his Anxiety of Influence. It is indicative that after Gavriiliada the image of the older poet maintains its feminine connotation in Pushkin’s mind but it is associated now not with a beautiful virgin, but a literary wetnurse that has already played its role (see, for example, “Why should we bite the breast of our nurse?”). This playful switch in imagery related to Zhukovsky accentuates an important moment in the history of love in Russian literature: the birth of a new, romantic religion of passion, including a physical one, out of the spirit of the earlier, sentimental cult of chastity and pristine brotherly feeling.

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Woman’s Lot Gehorsam ist des Weibes Pflicht auf Erden, Das harte Dulden ist ihr schweres Los, Durch strengen Dienst muß sie geläutert werden, Die hier gedienet, ist dort oben groß. —Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans

Only too happy to pay with my life the right to love thee still without crime. —Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse

I N T H E C O R R E S P O N D E N C E and diaries of Zhukovsky and Masha, the theme of the ultimate reward for love sufferings is associated with the recurrent image of the mystical kingdom of Cachemire. Connected with the notion of placing trust in Providence, Cachemire would appear at key moments in the development of their love affair. Attempting to buoy Zhukovsky’s spirits in a moment of despair, Masha writes, My friend, you need to be above fate, . . .— you need to climb the mountain in order to see the kingdom of Cachemire.1 If God wishes to try us with yet greater unhappiness, Basil, I will be happy in keeping your heart. (PSS, XIII, 88)

“That heavenly together we will leave to God,” responds the poet, “for now there is one thing: we live for each other. To be worthy! In that word all spiritual forces awaken, et il ne semble deja voir le royaume de Cachemire [and it seems that you have already seen the kingdom of Cachemire]. . . . oui! Montons la montagne! Life is ahead! What happiness: resignation et courage! Si tu veux mon exemple, tu l’auras” (PSS, XIII, 91). The image of a desired yet unreachable Cachemire also appears in a letter from Zhukovsky to Kireevskaia on December 17, 1815: At certain moments . . . the spirit of God comes upon me and it is as if you feel closer and closer to the mountain’s summit, but you need only to open

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your mouth to cry out “There is Cachemire!” and everything becomes dark once more, as it was.2

Contemporary commentators admit that the source of this image in Zhukovsky’s writings from 1814 to 1815 is not completely clear (PSS, XIII, 430). Thomas Moore’s Oriental tale Lalla Rookh, which canonized the image of the beautiful Indian lake in the Western poetic tradition, appeared only in 1817. However, it is more than likely that the poet and his beloved borrowed this image from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s 1790 sentimental novella, La chaumiert Indienne (1790), which was immensely popular in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century (the first Russian translation appeared in 1794). The novella’s protagonist is an English doctor who sets out to discover the philosophical keys to happiness on the orders of the Royal Society. Along the way he visits a synagogue in Amsterdam, a synod in Dordrecht, converses with learned scholars at the Sorbonne and the French Academy of Science, spends time in the museums and libraries of Italy, reads ancient Egyptian texts in the archives of the “mosque Sancta Sophia” in Constantinople, speaks with Maronites in the Levant, visits Arabia, Isfahan, Kandagar, and Delhi, yet nowhere can he find a valid and cogent philosophy of happiness. Reaching India, the “cradle of the arts and sciences” and the final destination of his scientific expedition, he talks with a great Brahmin, and asks him three questions: how to find truth, where to find truth, and should truth be known to all people. To the first the Brahmin responds that truth is only open to warrior Brahmins, the messengers of God on earth. To the second, he responds that the truth can be found only in the four Vedas, written in Sanskrit, which is only known to Brahmins. To the third question, he responds that truth can only be entrusted to Brahmins such as himself. These answers do not satisfy the enlightened doctor, and he leaves the temple in indignation. Seeking shelter from the rain, he comes upon a small hut located deep in a forest, which is occupied by an impoverished pariah, his wife, and a son. Charmed by his host’s hospitality, his simplicity, and his happy life, the doctor asks him the same three questions. The pariah answers, saying that truth can only be found by those who have an honest heart (the mind and emotions are capable of error, but a simple heart, though it may be deceived, never deceives), and that truth is located in nature and is open only to good people (“gens de bien”). “But what of the numerous unhappy people, who debase human nature?” asks the doctor. “This occurs only with those who have not drunk deeply enough from the chalice of suffering,” responds the pariah. “Unhappiness,” he says, “is like the black mountain Bember, which is on the border of the burning kingdom Lagor: until we climb the mountain, we see nothing 138

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but cold stones, but when we reach the summit, the heavens open over our heads, and at our feet lies— the kingdom of Cachemire.”3 Struck by the “justified and appropriate comparison” of human life to ascending a mountain, the English doctor confides to the pariah that he has traveled the world over, but was only able to find truth and happiness in his hut. Upon returning to England he relays the three answers of the pariah to the president of the Royal Society, while adding a fourth: “No one can be happy without a good wife.”4 It is not surprising that Zhukovsky and Masha appropriated the image of the happy valley of Cachemire from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s tale. They must have read the pariah’s monologue as a kind of catechism of happiness that is achieved through suffering.5 In Zhukovsky’s lyrical mythology the image of Cachemire is seen as a reward for spiritual torments, a symbol of the promised land which appears only after a long ascent up the mountain of misfortune. “Every fulfillment of responsibility is a separate road along the cliffs,” writes Zhukovsky in his diary from 1815, “but if you complete it, the sky opens above your head, and Cachemire is before your eyes” (PSS, XIII, 98–99). For Masha, who was predisposed to religious resonances, this path to Cachemire quickly takes on the significance of the road to death and peace in the afterlife.6 PA RIA H

In 1800 the French writer Madame de Staël used the pariah’s story of the kingdom of Cachemire as an epigraph for her chapter on the fate of talented women in contemporary society in her tract De la literature. The male dictate, claimed de Staël, condemns the exceptional woman to a vulgar and frivolous existence. She has no possibility of telling the world the truth of her life, her civil rights are undefined, and the public is prejudiced against her; the hostility of men and a majority of women evoke fear and apathy. “Like the pariahs of India,” conludes De Staël, “such a woman parades her peculiar existence among classes she cannot belong to, which consider her as destined to exist on her own, the object of curiosity and perhaps, a little envy: what she deserves, in fact, is pity.”7 Maria Protasova has been seen by Russian historians as “an example of a truly rare Russian woman”8 and a woman who was deeply unhappy. Her circumstances were incomparably more trying than Zhukovsky’s, as she was completely dependent on her mother, her relations, public opinion, and the strict system of values and rules of behavior which was a central part of her upbringing. The situation had only worsened with the almost pathological suspiciousness of her mother, which resulted in a strict supervision of Masha 139

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that the latter found humiliating, the threats and slander of Voeikov, and the impossibility of expressing her own emotions openly. Her family constantly demanded of Masha various admissions, promises, guarantees, and vows. Her words, emotions, and even her physical condition would repeatedly serve as objects for conflicting interpretations of the various participants in her life drama. Ekaterina Protasova attempted to convince herself and others that Masha did not love Zhukovsky, and that her feelings for him were nothing more than Christian compassion for a dear and kind relative. Meanwhile, Masha’s favorite cousin, Avdotia Kireevskaia, reprimanded Masha for failing to fulfill the lofty mission of being Zhukovsky’s beloved. Protasova did not see her daughter’s serious illness as a result of her feelings for Zhukovsky (which was the poet’s and Kireevskaia’s interpretation), but rather as a feeling of guilt before her mother. Voeikov even went so far as to mock the onset of Masha’s illness, which had renewed itself in Dorpat (she was experiencing bleeding in her throat), as the consequence of her ruined and deceptive nature. In these exceptionally difficult circumstances, Masha was not only able to assert her own individuality; she was also able to find what was, in all likelihood, the only possible exit from her tragic situation. Her journals and letters, first published at the turn of the twentieth century,9 give us the opportunity to hear her own voice in the “Zhukovsky affair” and to reconstruct, with relative precision, her experience. The “inner life” of Maria Protasova, according to her biographer Nikolai Sakulin, was remarkable for its utter typicality for the first quarter of the nineteenth century.10 Sakulin presents Protasova as a “living equivalent” of her contemporary, Pushkin’s Tatiana from Eugene Onegin, whom Belinsky had once described as “a remarkable creature: loving, passionate, with a deep character.”11 In his study, Sakulin reconstructs Protasova’s reading experience, which, in his opinion, demonstrates her education, taste, breadth of interests, and exceptional nature.12 However, he also argues that Masha was the mere product of Zhukovsky’s imagination and upbringing, a passive reflection of his ideal: All of Maria Andreevna’s most fundamental views— her general understanding of life and the purpose of man, her understanding of moral responsibility, the “reworking” and purification of the soul through trials, her relationship to friendship and love— . . . [they] are all a faithful reflection of the ideas of Zhukovsky’s poetry.13

One of Zhukovsky’s acquaintances, Filipp Vigel, left the following literary portrait of Maria Protasova in his Notes, having only met her on one occasion: 140

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She was hardly a beauty. . . . I even found that she was rather plain. But in her being, in her voice, in her gaze, there was something inexplicably enchanting. In her smile there was neither joy nor sadness, but rather something docile. She combined an unusual modesty and humility with a great mind and degree of intelligence. Beginning with her name everything was simple about her, natural, and at the same time delightful . . . Truly, it was as if she was not of this world. “How could you manage to see all this in one day?” they will ask me. I was well warned on account of this woman, and I managed to confirm all that I had heard of her, finding no exaggeration, but rather an understatement, of the truth.14

It is patently clear that this portrait of an ideal woman, of a “heavenly soul,” clearly reflects (and confirms, at least according to this account) the poetic image of Masha as created and propagated by Zhukovsky. However, these twin characteristics of Maria Protasova, in which she is considered to be both an exceptional human being and a passive reflection of Zhukovsky’s poetic ideals in no way contradict each other. In what follows, I will show how the personality type that Maria Protasova represents is one that itself offers creative assimilation, the adaptation of “an other,” much in the same way that the poetry of her beloved was realized through translations and commentaries of the Western literary tradition. A L IV IN G I D EA L

We are already familiar with the sentimental ideal of woman which Zhukovsky “instilled” in his beloved: concern for inner, and not outer, beauty, a cult of virtue, faith in Providence, a readiness for self-sacrifice, moral and spiritual perfection through reading beneficial books and reflecting upon their content, sincerity, a mastery over the literary language idiom in order to be capable of expressing one’s emotions and thoughts, a profound aesthetic sensibility, and so on. In Zhukovsky’s family circle, the poetic formula for the lofty mission of woman was found in the words of Schiller’s Maiden from Jungfrau von Orleans, often cited by the Protasov sisters: “Gehorsam ist des Weibes Pflicht auf Erden, Das harte Dulden ist ihr schweres Los, Durch strengen Dienst muß sie geläutert werden, Die hier gedienet, ist dort oben groß.” (Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, I, 10)

In Zhukovsky’s translation of 1818: 141

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“Удел жены—тяжелое терпенье; Возьми твой крест, покорствуй небесам; В страдании земное очищенье; Смиренный здесь—возвышен будет там.” (PSS, VII, 264) [The lot of a woman is burdensome patience; / Take your cross and submit to the heavens; / Earthly purification is in suffering; / If you are humble here, there you shall be raised up.]

In many ways, Masha was both Zhukovsky’s “masterpiece” and “echo.” Stylistically and ideologically her correspondence and letters from 1814 almost serve as doubles to Zhukovsky’s own letters to her. They feature the same exultant, literary-religious tone, a plethora of rhetorical questions and exclamations, a consistent use of key words and expressions (as can be seen from the earlier discussion of Cachemire), and a number of variations on the themes of Zhukovsky’s poetry (each of her letters includes an epigraph taken from the poet’s works). Take, for example, the concluding phrases from two of their letters: Zhukovsky: “My angel, forgive me! May God bless you! I am alive, and you are mine! In these two words lies my entire fate.” (PSS, XIII, 86) Masha: “My angel! God will bless you! I haven’t the strength to say: farewell [lit. forgive me]! And I must not. We will not be separated. I bless you, I pray for you every moment of the day! My life! (PSS, XIII, 90)

Historically speaking, Masha’s correspondence belongs to the epistolary tradition stemming from Rousseau and Goethe, but it demonstrates a much higher level of individual refinement and personal understanding than the letters of her contemporaries, such as Veliaminova and Sokovnina. Maria Protasova’s relationship to Zhukovsky was, to a significant extent, defined by Rousseau’s model of “the enthusiastic teacher and his faithful pupil.” In this model, the teacher was to formulate a sublime doctrine of love, which the latter would creatively assimilate and “return” in her own language. Maria and Zhukovsky’s correspondence and diaries can be viewed as an example of this model, with one important exception: Zhukovsky not only “taught” (i.e., gave expression to ideas), he also left for Masha the rules of how his own teaching should be received. A clear example of the hermeneutic process is Zhukovsky’s and Protasova’s recently published marginalia from the brochure of J. H. B. Dräseke’s Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung: Ein Handbuch für junge Freunde und Freundinnen Jesus, which had been presented to Maria by Zhukovsky on the eve of their separation in 1815.15 Zhukovsky included in his copy a poetic dedication to Masha, one that she 142

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had first heard in 1806 (in this sense, Zhukovsky’s dedication was a sign of faithfulness to his idea). Next to the depiction of Christ on the very same page of the brochure (Dräseke was a preacher as well as a Mason) there is a silhouette of Zhukovsky’s beloved drawn in pencil. Dräseke’s brochure was intended by the author as a beneficial, collaborative reading exercise aimed at “a young man and a young woman.” Following the author’s directions, Zhukovsky left in the text of the brochure his own marks and commentary, inviting his beloved to respond. Thus, the text of the book became “a space for communication between the lovers, for whom Dräseke’s sermon would serve as an intertext for the metatext of their personal relationship and circumstances.”16 Zhukovsky’s attention was mostly drawn to Dräseke’s discussion of Christian love, to which each human soul aspires. In the margins, he consequently applies Dräseke’s remarks to his own situation, as evidenced in the following underlined statement: Ich suche einen Gegenstand, der es verdiente meines Lebens Mittelpunkt zu sein. Ein Wesen mögt’ ich finden, dem ich mich ganz ergeben, an das ich mich verlieren, dem ich durch nichts entrissen werden, dessen Eigentum ich bleiben könnte ohne Wechsel: ich liebe.17 [I seek an object that would deserve to be the epicenter of my life. I’d like to find a creature to whom I could give myself over entirely, in whom I could lose myself, from whom nothing could tear me, whose property I could remain without change: I love.]

Zhukovsky underlines for Masha the words “to be the epicenter of my life,” and leaves a short commentary in German: Die Liebe zum Göttlichen auf der Erde führt gerade zur Liebe Gottes im Himmel. Liebe ist um dort zu lieben und leben zu können.18 [The love of the godly on Earth leads precisely to the love of God in Heaven. Love has to be able to love and live there.]

Next to the words: “Der gute Engel will ich sein, o hilf mir Gott! der die Verlornen sucht, die Schwachen stärkt, die Strauchelnden ergreift und die Gefallenen emporhebt” (“I wish to be the good angel, so help me God! The one who seeks the lost, who strengthens the weak, who catches those who stumble and lifts up the fallen”), Zhukovsky leaves the following remark: “Das bist du ja” (“This is surely you”). Disagreeing with Dräseke’s thesis on the external rewards of love (“aüßere Belohnungen”), Zhukovsky remarks: “What external rewards? I believe in God and the divine in my heart and in 143

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my mind— that is the only reward!” To the preacher’s words regarding nostalgia for one’s homeland, Zhukovsky adds: . . . und nach welchem Vaterlande! wo alles reines, hier nie ersehntes Glück wird zu Wirklichkeit im Schosse eines Liebendes Vaters und ohne Ende? und mit wem!19 [And toward what Fatherland! Where all pure happiness, never to be longed for here, becomes truth in the bosom of the loving Father, and without end? And with whom!]

The theodicy of Christian love described by Dräseke is interpreted by Zhukovsky as the history of his own personal feelings: his love for Masha turns into philotheia, a love of God. He invites his beloved to participate in a similar religious interpretation of their romance that would further unite their feelings. In turn, Maria Protasova’s comments are fewer, much briefer, and written in unison with the thoughts of her beloved. She comments on Dräseke’s statement regarding one’s merging with the divine (“and both [lives] are one whole. When I finish [life] here, I will begin [life] above. I will continue my own life, and not any other”), by adding in German: “You are continuing your life and no Other!” To the words “My happiness is safe, even if the world is destroyed. It is immortal, just as I am,” Masha adds the single world “Wir” (“We”). Dräseke writes, “I am still on this earth, but I do not live as if I am on this earth, I live with faith in the Beloved, who loved me.” Masha adds, “in spite of everything.” Finally, to the statement, “I so want from this moment to write in my journal,” she adds in German, “under your [i.e., Zhukovsky’s] supervision.” From Dräseke’s teachings she underlines for herself the following Quietist moral: “Wholehearted dedication to Providence, even up until the loss of the ability to desire.”20 It would be both hasty (and anachronistic) to conclude that the role Zhukovsky had created for Masha was forced upon her and interfered with her ability to express her own individuality. On the contrary, judging from her letters to Zhukovsky and Kireevskaia, this role added an important aesthetic and moral status to her existence in her own eyes. The life and work of her beloved (the greatest poet in Russia at the time) were dedicated to her; for her sake he was prepared to experience suffering; the “sacred love” led her to a higher stage of spiritual perfection; by her torments and sacrifices she was to achieve pristine happiness. It should be noted that Masha took to her role naturally and freely, often departing from Zhukovsky’s high style, expressing his ideas in her own, extremely idiosyncratic, language:

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It’s bad for me, my Duniasha [i.e., Kireevskaia], and my heart has respite with no one. With what joy I would give up my tempestuous remaining life so that my dear angel, my guardian, would now arrive. I suppose I shall bravely go forward, if I must still go on.21

Moreover, during the most stressful period in the history of their relationship, when Masha was living in Dorpat, she acted not as a passive object, but as the coauthor of the poet’s doctrine of love. In her version of Zhukovsky’s religious scenario she asks the poet to call her mother, thus not only symbolically adopting her beloved, but also implicitly introducing into their religion of love the image of the Mother of God as comforter. In her letters and correspondence, she repeatedly calls upon her despairing friend to take active participation in life, and foretells their future happiness: “God speaks this to me!” (PSS, XIII, 89) According to Veselovsky’s theory, Zhukovsky’s poetry is not romantic (i.e., it is neither experimental, nor individual), but should rather be understood as the realization of the cultural potential of the “Age of Sensibility.” One could add that this notion could also be applied to the “passive lifecreation” (passivnoe zhiznetvorchestvo) of Maria Protasova: her letters, diaries, psychological type, behavior, and worldview can be seen as a particular kind of entelechy of the feminine myth of the sentimental period. She willingly took a complex cultural role, and brought it to life. At the same time it is necessary to note that the personality that appears from the pages of Protasova’s writing is more complicated than the poetic function created for her by Zhukovsky and which she fulfilled up to the end. In her letters to Kireevskaia, Masha appears as a witty, ironic, clear-thinking and observant interlocutor, one endowed with a readily apparent gift for artistic expression. She effortlessly takes to literary stylizations and parodies of her beloved Jean Paul Richter and Tieck, and her humorous sketches of people’s characters and depictions of comic situations are particularly vibrant and convincing. Thus, her first letter from Dorpat opens with a phrase from Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien (1793) and satirically describes life in a German university town. “You will not be surprised,” she writes to Kireevskaia regarding the philistine morals of the “spiritual, hilarious” city, “that I write to everyone using their titles. I live in Dorpat, and here if you want to inquire as to someone’s health, you say: How is the health of the wife of the Court Councilor, the mistress Voeikov?”22 In one of her letters Protasova allows herself the following humorous response to Zhukovsky and tells her sister: “Have a laugh and don’t write of this to Zhuk[ovsky], he will devour me, he has forbidden to make fun of him; I asked for permission to write to you, and he promised to break the hand

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that would do so.”23 In another letter to a friend Maria composes a literary sketch of the monotonous life of Dorpat: Dorpat, June 1, deadly heat, the curtains are closed, in my room Sasha is ill on the settee, and we are near her, each one of us more annoying than the next. Moreover, I forgot to add: Voeikov is reciting “the desired cell is near.” Well if it’s near, then go ahead . . .24

The comic dimension of the situation becomes clearer once we realize Voeikov is reading Zhukovsky’s ballad, “The Hermit” (“Pustynnik,” 1813; translation of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem), which begins with the following monologue by the wanderer: “Веди меня, пустыни житель, Святой анахорет; Близка желанная обитель; Приветный вижу свет. Устал я: тьма кругом густая; Запал в глуши мой след; Безбрежней, мнится, степь пустая, Чем дале я вперед.” (PSS, III, 20) [Lead me, desert-dweller, / Holy anchorite, / The desired cell is near: / I see its greeting light. / I am tired: the surrounding thick darkness / Has blown away my trail, / It seems the empty steppe becomes even vaster / The further I go ahead.]

Protasova’s light tone in her letters often fulfills the function of an ironic counterpoint to her melancholic mood and is intended to give comfort to her addressees. This is to say that her deeply religious attitude toward life is accompanied by a surprisingly ironic one as well. In one of her letters she expounds the philosophy of reconciliation so typical for herself and Zhukovsky: And so, my friend, life can and must make something important without happiness, without exultation, but simply out of obligation. This life must be important, for it gives the eternal [life]! Why be afraid of this? Why grumble against it? Why be disappointed? Heureux qui est pret a tout, et qui attend tout de Dieu.25

Masha’s next philosophical reminiscence is called forth by the ringing of church bells for a funeral. In keeping with the Dorpat custom, she observes, the bells are rung for so long that the deceased’s relations manage to return 146

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from the cemetery before they are over. With a sad surprise, Masha notes, “What a funny and strange thing life is.”26 TH E L A S T S A CR I F I CE

In the citation from Oberon from his letter to Masha from June 1814, Zhukovsky underlined his favorite line: “Ein einiziger Augenblick kann alles umgestalten” (“One single moment can transform everything”). Belief in “miraculous moments” capable of unexpectedly changing the unfortunate circumstances of his life for the better was one of the foundational tenets of Zhukovsky’s Welt-Empfindung. In September 1814 Ekaterina Protasova suddenly allows Zhukovsky to join the family in Dorpat. This permission was received in exchange for certain concessions, namely those that Voeikov had mentioned earlier in his letter to Zhukovsky: bind the wings of your desires, to relinquish your demands, and to fasten close your mouth to murmurings and complaints. Zhukovsky returned to the family not as Masha’s future husband, but as her “friend” and the “brother” of her mother. He considered these concessions to be an act of religious self-denial which would further elevate his love for her. At a later date, he wrote Masha about what transpired in the moments when he was making his decision: The thought of sacrificing all I have for you came to me like inspiration from God. With this thought a new life opened up to me: my family, family relations, and that which is more dear to me than anything, you under my supervision, you in complete dependency on me! (PSS, XIII, 96)

In return for his sacrifice, Zhukovsky hoped that Protasova and Voeikov would recognize his right to participate in the family’s life on the same footing as its other members, that is, first and foremost, to care after Masha as a “younger sister”: “that she was happy with me, that she belonged to me as the daughter of my sister, that her fate was dependent on me” (PSS, XIII, 98). As in years past, Zhukovsky composed a grandiose plan for his future life, a “plan of happiness” for the Dorpat household. The central principle of the plan was “life for others,” “so that in our family there was always peace, activity, and sufficiency” and that “Ekaterina Afanasievna was happy” (PSS, XIII, 62). The path to this goal was “mutual perfection.” With his typical organizational zeal, Zhukovsky writes out the future relationships between family members in great detail, and comes up with a meticulous program for each member’s activities: common and private, beneficial to the family, and generally beneficial, group and individual.27 He speaks of the necessity of creating a “plan for every day,” which could “prepare material for discus147

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sion,” and to invent a way so that time spent together was not boring. One of the most important directives of this family community was the requirement that each member of the family keep a journal and make remarks in the journal about other members of the family and that these journals be read to each other, so that everyone would know what the others thought of him or her. Rousseauan “transparency” finds its ultimate expression here in this plan for the communal life of five individuals. To use Zhukovsky’s expression, here all members come together to form one image, a kind of free circulation of the “familial” soul (as Zhukovsky understood it).28 Naturally, Zhukovsky pays particular attention to the regulation of his relationship with Masha. Their aim, he notes, is “to be as happy together as is possible.” The new aspect of their love must correspond to the promise that has been given: To love now means for us to have accord in emotions and thoughts. But remember that we have given our word. All of our actions must be brought into accord with this promise. The difference between what is allowed and what is not. What is allowed: all the tenderness of a brother and sister. What is not allowed: all that which should be hidden. To find satisfaction in the fact that we are not separated; that we are sure of each other. Not to desire for our present anything more. To not have a care for the future . . . (PSS, XIII, 63)

As opposed to previous plans, which were directed toward the future, the plan from 1814 is an attempt to conserve time (“to limit one’s self to the present”) and features the complete subordination of the family’s life to the rationally demarcated ethical household rules of Zhukovsky’s program. Moreover, Zhukovsky here works out for himself a personal regime of the strictest emotional discipline placing his love of Masha and “the requirements of eros” in a submissive position before “the requirements of order.”29 A distinctive characteristic of these rules is their negative character: in order not to become jealous, Zhukovsky is to remember the past; in order not to feed his despairing thoughts, he is to take a more simplistic view of things; in order not to take things too close to heart, he is to not desire change; in order not to spend nights in doubt and vexation, he is not to forget that he lives with others and is not to separate himself from the others; he is not to allow his sorrow to destroy his daily activities. The “positive” part of his program features calls only for moral self-perfection and general philanthropy (PSS, XIII, 66–68). The literary and ideological source for Zhukovsky’s Dorpat utopia is the “intimate society” of Clarens which took in Saint-Preux after his long separation from Julie. But the differences between Zhukovsky’s project and its Rousseauan source are significant. The Clarens community of belles âmes was the result of the diligent activity of the honorable Baron of Wolmar; 148

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its spiritual center was the baron’s wife Julie, an “expansive soul” who “ignites joy in those around her.”30 Zhukovsky (the Russian Saint-Preux) perceives himself simultaneously as the legislator and the “soul” of the family community. In Clarens, Saint-Preux’s passion is transformed into a feeling of friendship towards his former beloved, into a higher state in Rousseau’s hierarchy of love. The external aim of Zhukovsky’s project was the preservation of peace and harmony in the household; its secret aim, however, was the establishment of an eternal union of hearts with Masha in exchange for his hopes for marriage. For Zhukovsky the 1814 plan was not a social utopia, but a religious one, a kind of monastic order, in which their love, having purified itself of all earthly things (especially egoism and its final stronghold— hope for an earthly reward) is compelled to transform into an emotion that was religious in nature. In January 1815 the household moves to Dorpat. Zhukovsky joins them in March. “I was suddenly in a family of relatives, with complete freedom to love them and to feel loved,” he says in a letter to Masha (PSS, XIII, 96). However, as was to be expected, the reality of life in Dorpat was starkly different from what Zhukovsky had planned. Ekaterina Protasova, at Voeikov’s urging, suspected Zhukovsky of meeting with Masha secretly, they inaccurately interpret his diary entries, and it seemed to him they were laughing at his emotions. “One [Voeikov] has on his lips base jokes which tear at the soul, while having vulgar [feelings] in their hearts,” he writes to Masha in his “secret” diary, “while the other does not put herself in our place, shares nothing with us, and only demands sacrifices, sacrifices which she accepts without believing them!” (PSS, XIII, 100). The very existence of secret diaries and letters clandestinely sent from one room to another speaks clearly as to the crisis in Zhukovsky’s family utopia: Here is a family, composed of four individuals, and about each and everyone everything is known to the others (or at least it should be so) as far as what is transpiring in the soul of another, and they all play before each other a comedy, one of them against his will, and the others simply because they are incapable of anything else, and meanwhile they themselves go so far as wanting to make certain that it is not a comedy, but rather something real. . . . All of these notes scattered in books, which can be inadvertently seen and read by anyone, they apparently have something extremely suspicious to them. One wants to open their feeling and at the same time stand aside, in order to instill trust in themselves. (PSS, XIII, 109)

The shelter of paradise, which was founded on the principle of “transparency” in relations between “beautiful souls,” had turned into an inferno, a “nest of intrigue, envy, and wickedness.”31 149

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The only escape from the given circumstances, he writes Masha, is his departure: “Separation will give us the freedom to love each other, to trust each other, to be in each other’s thoughts, as it was before” (PSS, XIII, 102). The replacement for their own happiness was to be their correspondence: “Write me your thoughts, pour out your heart. To think and express one’s thoughts on paper— this is happiness” (PSS, XIII, 103). The final words of this citation are a variation on a theme from Heloise’s epistle to Abelard by Pope, which we cited in the first part of this book: Write to me! To write is the invention of the heavens! A lover in sorrow, and her beloved in captivity, That perhaps once they could have found happiness in it! How sweet it is to converse with the pen while [we are] separated!

But even this epistolary substitute for happiness turns out to be an impossible utopia.32 More and more, Masha falls under Voeikov’s influence, becoming, in essence, the hostage of his own ambitions and material interests. In the end, Zhukovsky arrives at the necessity of one final, general sacrifice: “You must have family happiness. The most important thing is that you are happy in your household” (PSS, XIII, 66). In 1816 Zhukovsky, with great reluctance, gives his blessing to Masha’s decision to marry a good man, a doctor from Dorpat, Johann Moier, a man with a “beautiful soul” who was then treating Masha and her sister.33 Writing Kireevskaia about her impending marriage, Masha confesses: Listen my soul, I am happy with my lot, but even if there were nothing to expect other than unhappiness, even then I would not agree to change my fate and return the old. Zhukovsky is calm and happy now, he loves me like a sister, and he truly is better now than he was before. His love for me gave him nothing but sorrow and torment, but now he is certain of my happiness and is at peace. I am just as sure as he is that everything is for the better, and is better than I could have expected.34

Despite this, the thought of having trinary union à la Rousseau does not leave Maria Protasova even after her marriage: in her letters to the poet she constantly asks him to move into her Dorpat home, her little family commune, which she and Moier had managed to turn into a cultural and philanthropic center of the city. It is somewhat remarkable that Masha read Rousseau’s novel for the first time only after four years of marriage (Zhukovsky and her mother had considered the book to be dangerous for a girl). Julie left Masha in a state of rapture. “One who has read the story of Madame de Wolmar,” she writes to Avdotia Elagina, “can not be corrupted by the example 150

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of Julie.”35 In the very same letter, Masha compares her lot with the fate of Rousseau’s heroine. Masha’s final letter to Zhukovsky, written as she felt her death approaching (she died in childbirth in March 1823), shows the deep impression La nouvelle Héloïse had made on the married woman. Without a doubt, the text of this letter is sown from the same cloth as Julie’s letter to SaintPreux, which he receives only after her death: When you see this letter, the worms will be preying upon your lover’s features and upon her heart, where your image will exist no more.36

In this letter, Madame de Wolmar admits that she loves Saint-Preux as much as she did previously, and that she does not repent of her love, that she is leaving this world with a joyous feeling of liberation, and commanded her friend to be happy, to not abandon her orphaned husband and to become the teacher of her sons, and, finally, to foretell her reunion with her beloved in the next world: No, I do not leave you; I go to wait for you. The virtue which separated us on earth will unite us in the eternal dwelling. I am dying in this sweet hope, only too happy to purchase at the price of my life the right of loving you forever without crime and of telling you so one more time.37

In her letter, Maria Moier replays Julie’s parting letter: “My friend! You will receive this letter when I will already not be near you, but when I will be even closer to you in soul,” “[A] present que c’est de la tombe que je t’adresse ma lettre, je puis aussi te montrer le coeur tel qu’ il a été, sans que cela offense quiconque” (“Now that it is from the tomb that I address my letter to you, I can also show you my heart as it was, without offending anyone”). She admits that she still loves Zhukovsky and leaves this life with a feeling of gratitude towards the Creator: I am indebted to you for the most vibrant happiness that I have ever felt. You have taught me to adore my Father Creator in a worthy way, He, who has taken me to himself so that I might know even greater bliss.38

Like Julie, Masha admits that she has been a faithful and loving wife to her virtuous husband, but that every joyful feeling, every noble thought, every memory— in a word everything that brought her closer to God— she dedicated to her beloved.39 Maria Protasova-Moier wrote her own death in the style of the literary tradition that was sacred for her generation, but she wrote it in her own 151

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hand, reflecting her own character and her understanding of her own personal mission. The themes of sin and virtue, passion and reason, reality and illusion, all of which were so important for Rousseau’s novel, had no significance for the doctrine of the idealized religion of love that was professed by Masha and Zhukovsky. Thus, Masha’s letter does not express the joy of liberation from this world, but rather gratitude to her beloved for the spiritual happiness that he gave her in this life: “Having your soul in my arms, my life was enviable!” In memory of herself, she leaves him her diaries (“the notebooks in which the aim of my life was contained”), a parting “confession of a beautiful soul,” whose entire life had sought to fulfill its moral duty.40 In the final lines of her unfinished letter she requests that Zhukovsky become the second father to her child and the son of her mother.41 In other words, her death was to make her beloved her husband-brother, a legitimate member of her family.

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Chapter Seven

The Dove and the Crocodile Brother! Is it possible that in the nineteenth century, in the reign of Alexander, when you and the virtuous Prince Golitsyn hold your holy knives in their scabbards and prevent fanatics from spilling the blood of their brethren, that the tears of innocent sufferers should flow, and two angels be sacrificed to a devil of superstition? No! You will not suffer this, you will hurry to their aid— and to hold shut the jaws of the crocodile. —A. F. Voeikov to A. I. Turgenev

I couldn’t agree with you more. One should not have the prejudice, rather than simply ignore it. But do you call the superstition the commandment of my Church whose head is Christ and in which I was raised? —Ekaterina Protasova to her relatives

Death is near . . . but The little white dove is not sleeping. —V. A. Zhukovsky, “Svetlana”

E K AT E R I N A A FA N A S I E V N A P R O TA S O VA (née Bunina) was an intelligent, educated, and emotional— at times to the point of exaltation— woman, who held a strong belief in her religious convictions to the point of stubbornness. Her personal life story was not a happy one. She spent seven years in Siberia in the household of her fickle and capricious older sister, Avdotia. Avdotia’s husband has received an appointment as the head of a customs post on the Chinese border, and Avdotia had asked her parents that they give her her sister Katerina, so that she might be entertained during her stay. At the time, Ekaterina was twelve years old. According to family legend, Ekaterina hated twilight, as it reminded her of her 153

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difficult voyage home from Siberia, which had taken more than six months to complete. Along the way she read the only book she had available to her, Madame de Genlis’s pedagogical novel Adèle et Théodore, which was vital in forming her belief that mothers should play the central role in the education of their daughters.1 In 1792 Ekaterina Bunina married a wealthy landowner, Andrei Protasov, a man of noble pedigree. A decent man, Protasov nevertheless suffered from a wandering eye (he had several children out of wedlock), and had an inclination to gamble. After her husband’s death, which had placed the family on the brink of destitution, Ekaterina dedicated herself entirely to the upbringing of her daughters, whom she wanted to live close to her, married to the closest landowners, since she didn’t want them to be captivated by “the charms of life in the capital.”2 This bucolic ideal of life was naturally found by her in the works of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (in her daughter’s album she wrote out lengthy descriptions of the pleasures of quiet existence far from urban corruption). As has already been mentioned, her daughters worshiped her, while Zhukovsky, who had spent his summer vacations from the Pension at Mishenskoe, called her “auntie” or “chère maman.” Ekaterina herself would admit that she began to love him even before he was capable of understanding what love meant.3 In Protasova’s sentimental scenario, Zhukovsky was to play the role of a “dear friend,” an enraptured admirer of her household (and, first and foremost, of her in her role of matriarch) and a faithful champion of the family’s interests.4 One of Protasova’s relatives felt that she was trying to keep Zhukovsky “on a leash”: she did not prohibit him seeing Masha and even allowed him to live in their home, but in return demanded that he reject his feelings for her, and placed him under constant surveillance.5 By all appearances, Protasova learned about her half-brother’s feelings for her older daughter as early as 1805. Judging by her later memoirs, she perceived this love as the poetic fantasy of a young author: He needed to fall in love so there would be someone to praise in his poetry. This lot fell to my poor Masha. She was then 11 years old.6 She could not have drawn him to her through coquetry, nor through the radiance of her excellent virtues, as then she still had nothing of her own, but was truly a child (italics added).7

Once, having left Belev for Moscow, Zhukovsky wrote Protasova a letter in which he asked for Masha’s hand. This “romantic thought,” in Protasova’s words, greatly disappointed her and in her response to Zhukovsky she left him no hope that his request would be granted. Zhukovsky apparently gave his word to never think of this marriage again and requested that 154

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Protasova not mention his feelings to his mother Elizaveta Dementievna or “grandmother,” Maria Grigorievna. “I lost my mind from happiness at his letter,” Protasova wrote ten years after the event, “I believed in his promise and burnt all of the letters so that his momentary mistake might be hidden from the entire world.”8 After the deaths of his mother and “grandmother” in 1811, Zhukovsky wrote to Protasova a “charming letter,” in which he asked to move in with her family, and gave her his word to be her “true brother.” Loving him dearly and empathizing with his loss, Protasova agreed. However, Zhukovsky had not given up on his plans to marry her daughter. Protasova recalls one occasion when she happened to come upon a letter to Masha from their neighbor, Anna Pleshcheeva, in which Zhukovsky’s love for Masha was mentioned.9 When Protasova confronted her daughter, Masha fell at her feet “and gave her word that not only would she not agree to such an illicit marriage,” but also assured her that she loves Zhukovsky as a brother and as a kind person “without any passion, with a pure innocent Christian love.”10 This fateful letter from Pleshcheeva may well have “happened” to come into Protasova’s possession, but there is little doubt that she “read” this event through the prism of Rousseau’s novel,11 in which Madame d’Etange discovers her daughter’s love for her teacher from an accidentally intercepted correspondence, and then dies from the shock. It should come as no surprise that this Russian reader of Rousseau understood her daughter’s illness not as a result of her unfulfilled love of Zhukovsky (which was, of course, the poet’s reading), but rather her moral suffering for having so disappointed her mother. Zhukovsky’s attempts to convince his sister to allow the marriage, a thought that “terrified” her, continued, according to her, up until the summer of 1815.12 Ekaterina Protasova’s vision of her brother’s love as illicit and godless was supported by her pious relative’s spiritual advisor, the zealous Moscow hieromonk Filaret (1758–1842),13 who threatened the lovers with hellfire in case of their marriage. Zhukovsky did all he could to prove to his sister that her religious fears and anxieties were nothing but dark prejudices and blasphemous obstacles to the happiness of two innocent loving beings. By the mid-1810s, this process of persuasion of the “Mother” turned into an intense public ideological campaign that involved Zhukovsky’s friends and relatives, as well as prominent religious figures, statesmen, and members of the imperial family. Indirectly, it also engaged Russian readers, who enjoyed Zhukovsky’s romantic elegies and ballads about the poor victims of parents’ superstitions. Characteristically, the poet and his allies interpreted his battle for personal happiness as an integral part of Alexander I’s Christian enlightenment which should have effectively destroyed, in the name of the God of love, the dark (gothic) prejudices of “monks” and cold formalism of the 155

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traditional, “external,” church. The poet’s (treacherous) confidant Alexander Voeikov wrote to their mutual friend and influential figure in the spiritual revival of Alexander’s reign, Alexander Turgenev, Is it possible that in the 19th century, in the reign of Alexander, when you and the virtuous Prince Golitsyn [the ober-procurator of the Holy Synod and promulgator of the church reform] hold your holy knives in their scabbards and prevent fanatics from spilling the blood of their brethren, that the tears of innocent sufferers should flow, and two angels be sacrificed to a devil of superstition? No! You will not suffer this, you will hurry to their aid— and to hold shut the jaws of the crocodile.14

In turn, Protasova responded to the defenders of Zhukovsky: You argue that it is all about happiness or, rather, about saving the lives [of two lovers]; and, in this case, prejudice can be disregarded. I couldn’t agree with you more. One should not have the prejudice, rather than simply ignore it. But do you call superstition the commandment of my Church whose head is Christ and in which I was raised?15

In the present chapter, I examine the poet’s battle with “the crocodile of prejudice” within the early nineteenth-century ideological and literary debates concerning the “illicit love.” I argue that Zhukovsky’s dovelike “religion of love,” which was introduced in his poems and letters of the 1810s as the antithesis to the gothic “religion of law and patriarchal authority,”16 represents a particular type of romanticism centered on the idea of reunification with the primordial family, which, in turn, reflects Zhukovsky’s own position within the Bunin household. It also reflects “a major shift to endogamous marriage practices,” which “took place progressively after the mideighteenth century throughout Europe.”17 This type of familial or kinshiprelated romanticism, I contend, lies at the foundation of the Russian lyrical tradition of the nineteenth century. IL L ICI T L O V E

Ekaterina Afanasievna Protasova was certain that even if Zhukovsky and Masha were to marry in secret (perhaps by bribing a priest), there was no way their incestuous marriage would ever be officially recognized by the church.18 Her suspicions were well founded; the time of Zhukovsky’s relationship happened to coincide with a period when both civil and church policies were becoming more strict in their regulation of marriages between relatives. 156

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Russian laws concerning marriage were extremely convoluted and complex, and there were several attempts to clarify and unify them over the course of the eighteenth century. The Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi Reglament) from 1721 instructed the religious authorities to arrive at a “firm decision” concerning the “difficulties of dubious marriages,” first and foremost in regards to the degree of blood relationship between spouses. Empress Elizabeth gave a special edict commanding the establishment of clear rules, so that no one would dare enter into a marriage of a forbidden nature. Catherine the Great’s Nakaz likewise mentions the necessity of strong and non-contradictory marriage regulations. In the report of a commission created for just this purpose, one can find the moral and legal definition of incest: Incest [krovosmeshenie, lit: mixing of blood] is nothing other than the bodily coupling of two persons of opposite sex who are in such close relation to one another that lawful marriage between them is forbidden. This name alone, without any interpretation, depicts quite clearly already, it seems, not only the deed itself, that is, the mixing of the blood or the confusion arising from this deed in the degree of relatedness and the subordination connected with the latter, but shows at the same time, and even more so in cases of incest among people directly related, the natural disgust at this deed and the extreme depravity of manners.19

According to this definition, consanguineous marriages not only broke moral norms, they also threatened the traditional economic and legal relationships within the family: Such vile and utterly extreme shamelessness and the violation of natural purity and propriety, moreover, utterly ruins the most natural condition of these transgressors.20

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the issue of marriage legislation was once more taken up by the Holy Synod and the State Council. On May 26, 1806, a majority of members of the State Council voted that it was most important that the laws on marriage were made uniform, and that from the many rules regarding marriage one clear standard should be created, which with utmost clarity it would be determined which degrees of kinship would be permissible for marriage and which would not. In 1809, detailed plans for a civil law regarding marriage were included among the tasks for a committee in charge of drafting legislation. The law was to be in accordance with the rules of the Russian Orthodox Church, which would be represented by the Holy Synod. On January 19, 1810 the Synod arrived at a definition of 157

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marriage in regards to kinship and other relationships that was distributed to all bishops as a secret directive (ukaz) on February 17 of the same year. According to the new definition, marriage among relations was forbidden between individuals related by four degrees or less. Uncles and nieces were considered to be third-degree relations, and marriages between them were categorically forbidden. Violators of the law would face exile to Siberia or imprisonment in penal colonies for a period from 11 to 21 years. Although the new directive said nothing about illegitimate relations, it was understood that for the purposes of marriage they were to be treated the same as legal ones. The Civil Code of the Russian Empire, published in Petersburg in 1814, clearly stated: “Children born from an illegitimate liaison are to be considered as being in the same degree of relation as legal children, should their origin become known.”21 As far as civil and ecclesiastical law were concerned, Zhukovsky truly had no chance of entering into a marriage with Masha.22 However, inasmuch as his relation to E. A. Protasova had not been confirmed legally, he still thought there were no formal obstacles to the marriage. Moreover, there had previously been consanguineous marriages in the Protasova family before, although none of those married had been as closely related as Zhukovsky and Masha. In fact, such unions were hardly a rarity in enlightened Europe. Zhukovsky believed that the only problem was his half-sister’s reluctance to give her blessing to his plans to marry her daughter. Although Protasova was against such a union from the outset, a letter she received in the spring of 1814 was to play a fateful role in Zhukovsky’s courtship. The letter was composed by Avdotia Nikolaevna Arbeneva (née Veliaminova, the younger sister of Zhukovsky’s first love).23 The poet himself had requested that Arbeneva take up his cause. A deeply devout woman, Arbeneva had sought counsel regarding the matter from a monk by the name of Filaret from the Novospassky monastery. Filaret was a famous ascetic, led the life of a hermit, and kept a vow of silence for several years. We know his reply to Arbeneva’s queries from Zhukovsky’s recounting of them. Apparently, Filaret told Arbeneva that such a union was impermissible and would call down God’s punishment: “He threatened her with heaven’s wrath and scared her with superstitious fear.”24 Filaret’s warnings only served to strengthen Protasova’s resolve. In a response to family members who had accused her of being coldhearted, she explained her reasons for not allowing the marriage: I cannot go against my conscience and the laws according to which I was raised, and I see clearly that my approval would not result in their happiness. Illicit marriages are punished in this life [zdeshnei zhizni] as well.25

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It is possible that the final remark was more than fine words, it might very well have been a reference to some concrete events that had taken place, and were known to the addressees. In a letter to A. P. Kireevskaia (since 1817, Elagina), an ardent supporter of Zhukovsky, Ekaterina Protasova recalls the fate of her aunt, Alexandra Grigorievna Bezobrazova, who repented for her offense for all of her life. We know nothing of the fate of this woman, but from the context of the letter it is clear that there had been some sort of incident involving incest that had tragic consequences. One repeatedly comes across the topic of consanguinity in the Protasovs’ family history. The memoirs of Ekaterina Elagina (the daughter of Maria Protasova who later married Avdotia’s son) begin with the story of her great-grandfather Vasily Ivanovich Protasov, who had married a relative with the last name Yushkova. The priest who performed the ceremony was allegedly struck by the groom’s piety, and promised to pray for him at the altar on his wedding day. The prayers proved effective. Protasov fathered several children with no complications, while his brother’s (who had also married a relative) were nearly all born deaf and mute.26 In general the male line of the Protasov family was known for its easy morals and penchant for debauchery. Their exploits even managed to penetrate the family legends of their neighbors, the Tolstoys. In his memoirs, Lev Tolstoy mentions a certain unfortunate Liubov Sergeevna— the offspring of a Protasov’s incestuous affair (and here he adds “from the same people as Zhukovsky,” a characteristic error which suggests that, for Tolstoy, Zhukovsky was ever to be connected with the notion of illicit love). The description of this girl is a true collection of horrors that typically can be found in portrayals of the offspring of incestuous relations: she was dirty, physically repulsive, and mentally sick.27 This chilling story of incest, which took place at the turn of the nineteenth century, was preserved in the family chronicle of the Protasov’s neighbors, the Lutovinov family (it was later included in Ivan Turgenev’s story “Three Portraits” [1846]). Protasova’s fear of the possible consequences of such an “illicit marriage,” then, were one of the reasons for her refusal. In response, Zhukovsky’s allies pointed to examples of happy marriages between relatives that had taken place within Bunin’s family. A scholar of consanguineous marriages in France notes that such unions, which were widespread in France during the sentimental period, often led to greater emotional and economic cohesion in the “maternal” family and resulted in the creation of a kind of “sibling archipelago” in the center of which could be found: the brother-sister dyad, for the children of siblings are of course cousins, their grandchildren second cousins. Without the warmth of the brother-sister . . .

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relationships, a consanguineous marriage system would be most unlike. Close siblings made for close marriages.28

It was precisely this model of family relationships that Zhukovsky found so attractive. B ROT H ER A ND S I S T ER

As David Warren Sabean has aptly noted, if Freud had been alive during the Sentimental Era, it is quite possible he would have been more interested in the sexual dynamic between brothers and sisters than between mother and son: One did not leave the mother in search of her replacement, but one left the sister to find her double: “the love of a brother and his sister is at once the strongest and purest of all attachments.”29

Contemporary accounts of love between relatives, which found expression both in private correspondence and literary fiction of the time, portray a conflict between the traditional (vertical) and new (horizontal, intrafamilial) models of marriage.30 In Western literature of this period, romantic love between siblings was often interpreted either as a natural expression of human passion forbidden by the false laws of civilization, or as a daring transgression of the true laws of society and religion, an act that would draw punishment from the heavens above.31 The first interpretation was characteristic of the Enlightenment cult of natural emotions. According to this school, “savages” and representatives of the lower classes were particularly likely to engage in such acts. JeanFrancois Marmontel, in his conte morale “Annete et Lubin” (translated into Russian by Pavel Fonvizin in 1764), justified the actions of his simplehearted protagonists (who, of course, knew nothing of the social prohibition on incest) on the basis of the purity and naturalness of their emotions.32 Sibling love is examined in a more complex manner in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96), in which Mignon is the unfortunate offspring of the love between the monk Augustine and his sister Spherata.33 In the 1810s, apologies for brother-sister incest became programmatic for the French and English romantics (Chateaubriand, Shelley, Byron) as “the ultimate expression for the Romantic Movement of the tradition of courtly or ‘romantic’ love.”34 This Enlightenment conception of “natural love” penetrated Russian literature fairly early. Thus, Derzhavin’s first published work, “Heroida, or 160

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the Epistle of Vivleda to Kavn” (“Iroida, ili Pis’mo Vivlidy k Kavnu”; translated from German in 1773), features a protagonist who delivers a fiery monologue in defense of her brother, who has been condemned by society.35 The opposite interpretation of sibling love could be widely found in the English gothic tradition, which proffered a varied assortment of incestuous liaisons in numerous permutations. In Russian literature, “illicit love” between brother and sister served as the central object of interest in Karamzin’s gothic tale “Isle of Bornholm.”36 Protasova was certainly familiar with Karamzin’s tale,37 as she was a voracious reader of gothic novels. Such works not only provided her with nourishment for her refined sensitivities; they also presented her with a picture of the world that was in concert with her strong sense of piety. This sense of piety could perhaps be best expressed in the conviction that one should not depart from virtue even for the briefest of moments, for the Devil is strong, he acts through the passions and those that have lost control of reason and faith. In Protasova’s favorite didactic novel, Madam de Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore, the world which surrounds the happy little island of proper maternal care is depicted as a gothic realm, in which the young protagonists are faced by perilous dangers to their moral character at almost every turn. This “big” world is inhabited “by wrathful fathers, vengeful husbands, and suffering daughters,”38 the last of which, it should be noted, suffer largely because of the absence of maternal love and protection. In the text of the novel, Genlis inserts a tragic Gothic tale entitled Histoire intéressante de la duchesse de C***,39 which features the traditional motif of incest. The goal of the inserted story is to caution the reader; as one scholar of the work has noted, “gothic terror shores up daughterly virtue.”40 Only a virtuous, enlightened, and vigilant mother is capable of protecting the purity of her daughter and guaranteeing her happiness. Protasova undoubtedly considered herself to be precisely this kind of mother. Protasova likely took Zhukovsky’s claims— that obstacles standing in the path of true love were mere prejudices— to be dangerous conclusions typical for apologists of debauchery. If Protasova were to look for similar ideas in literature, she would find a ready example in the Marquis Montalt from Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, who not only tries to seduce his niece41 but who also formulates a theory that justifies the satisfaction of forbidden passions on the grounds of the natural law of self-preservation.42 Of course, Zhukovsky (her “dear brother”) bore little resemblance to a demonic libertine. But for Protasova that simply made his arguments against “superstition,” so similar to the godless sophistry of the criminal Marquis, all the more terrifying. However, it should be noted that in his discussions with Protasova, Zhukovsky did not make reference to the Enlightenment theory of natural passions. Instead, he referred to the doctrine of religious awakening, which 161

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in his view eliminated the issue of the blood ties between himself and Masha. From his point of view, there was no possible transgression, not only because there was no formal evidence of his blood relationship to Masha— which only his family was aware of— but also because their “holy” pure love transcended the ties of family and the jurisdiction of the church and society. It should be emphasized that in his theodicy of love, the poet in no way denies his kinship with Masha; rather he transfigures it into a spiritual phenomenon. Moreover, Zhukovsky argued that their relationship was the condition on which their future happiness— as a family and in their eternal life— was dependent.43 When Zhukovsky was working on translating Alexander Pope’s epistle “Eloise to Abelard,” which he began in 1806 and returned to in 1814, he was particularly drawn to two lines in which the “rhetoric of love” is conveyed through the “rhetoric of kinship.” In the margins of the English original he sketches out the following translation in pencil: “Come thou, my father, brother, husband, friend! / Your spouse, daughter and your lover implores you.”44 The cultural framework that was most commonly used for such relationships in the sentimental tradition featured a chaste love that would grow between a young man and woman (usually brother and sister).45 The canonical description of such a relationship can already be seen in the story of Paul and Virginie from the eponymous novel of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,46 although in this case the couple is not bound by blood relations. In December 1805, a period in which Zhukovsky was considering his feelings for Masha from a “theoretical” point of view, the poet reads Christoph Martin Wieland’s Bildungsroman Agathon, which he describes in a letter to a friend as a “holy book.”47 As his margins in his copy of the book demonstrate, Zhukovsky’s attention was drawn to the description of an idealized love between two adepts at the temple in Delphi, the virtuous philosopher- enthusiast Agathon and Psyche. The young couple grew up together, understood each other without words, and felt an unbreakable bond between them. A forced separation and the misfortunes of fate proved incapable of destroying their feelings for each other. In a later meeting, they discover that their feelings for one another still bind their souls together: My discourse, how abstracted, ideal, and poetical it might be, was merely the echo of her own sensations and ideas, which lay concealed like embryos in her soul, and only wanted the warm influence of a more cultivated spirit to make them unfold themselves, and by their native simplicity disgrace the most sublime and ingenious opinions of the philosophers.48

In the novel, Psyche is presented as Agathon’s original and eternal love.49 It should be emphasized that the titular hero of the novel constantly remembers his childhood as a lost paradise and the source of his “most in162

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timate identity, particularly emphasizing the living wholeness of the religiously interpreted universe in which he moved, a universe animated and held together by a world-soul (= psyche).”50 In the third part of the novel, Agathon discovers that Psyche is his sister, and the mutual attraction is thus explained through the bonds of kinship. This “revelation” is by no means a mere tribute to the old traditions of the adventure novel; it is of vital importance for Wieland’s philosophical principles, according to which the moral nature of a man is shaped in relationship to his sister.51 In Wieland’s novel, which attempts to reconcile the rational and emotional dimensions of human identity, Psyche and Agathon are not joined by the bonds of matrimony; Psyche becomes the wife of Agathon’s friend, who happens to look a lot like her brother. Meanwhile, the philosopher renews his friendship with his former lover, the hetaira (i.e., courtesan) Danae, who by the end of the novel has embarked on the path of virtue. In turn, Danae (who has changed not only her profession, but also her name; her new name is Chariklea), becomes Psyche’s closest friend, her “sister,” and “second mother” to her children. In other words, Wieland’s novel ends with a kind of familial commune, based on the principles of virtue and friendship. The idealist Zhukovsky makes a symptomatic “corrective” to Wieland’s philosophy in his own version of the Agathon and Psyche myth: true family happiness is only possible for Agathon when he is reunited with his other “half,” to whom he is related. In his letters and journals Zhukovsky calls Masha his guardian angel and comforter of his soul, his companion “in both life and eternity,” the guardian of his heart, and his sister in faith. Their love— pure, faithful, and eternal— seems to him a feeling illuminated by God himself, who sees them both and in whose love they are inseparable (PSS, XIII, 75). In this way, Zhukovsky effectively translates the “voice of blood” into the “voice of God.”52 Ontologically, Zhukovsky’s thoughts on kindred love can be viewed in the context of the androgynous nature of the biblical Adam, which served as a central theme for the romantic imagination.53 As we discussed earlier, this myth attracted the attention of a friend from Zhukovsky’s youth, Andrei Turgenev, who was an avid admirer of Schiller’s “rebellious” dramas. The notion of a destroyed originary unity formed the basis for the religious and poetic nostalgia for this Russian proponent of Sturm und Drang, but Turgenev felt that there was no returning to the lost paradise of childhood. The fate of Turgenev’s “robber-hero” is to weep over the past that was lost because of original sin, to take vengeance on the world for the separation from the ideal, and to imagine for himself an eternal life where the contradictions of earthly existence fall to the wayside. For the chaste, dovelike Zhukovsky, the return to this idyllic “prelapsarian” state was not only desirable, but also possible, through a marriage to one’s “sister” Psyche. 163

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M. H. Abrams has identified the “circuitous journey” of the prodigal son as a master plot of romanticism.54 In the case of Zhukovsky, this journey was imagined as the path leading towards the lawful reunification with his own primordial, natural family. Indeed, the emotional biography of Zhukovsky represents a specific family romance that is driven by the poet’s enamorment with the Bunin clan and his everlasting desire to merge with it by marrying his “sister.” Unlike both the foundling and the bastard types of Marthe Robert’s neo-Freudian classification of the genre,55 Zhukovsky does not invent a new, idealized “regal” family, nor does he rage against the unjust world to redeem his mother’s sin. Instead, he idealizes the family, to which he belongs “by nature,” rather than “law,” and dreams of the state of the future incestuous paradise sanctified, he tends to believe, by the loving God.56 If one were to speak of such a worldview in socio-psychological terms, one could say that here we are presented with the romantic utopia of the illegitimate son. All of the participants of the Zhukovsky family drama came out of it for the worse. The poet’s hopes for personal happiness were destroyed; Masha, though she found peace in her marriage to Moier, was hardly happy. Ekaterina Protasova, for whom foiling Zhukovsky’s plan was a raison d’être, lost her role as family matriarch with both of her daughters married. Having outlived her children, she was slowly withering away in the family of her son-inlaw, Dr. Moier (she died at the age of seventy-seven). The marriage between Alexandra and Voeikov, which had been arranged by Zhukovsky and Masha, was utterly unhappy. In turn, Voeikov’s reputation was irreparably destroyed by his relationship with Masha, his wife, and his mother-in-law. The “scattered” Bunin family, despite the many attempts on Zhukovsky’s part, was never again gathered “under one roof.”57 In the sentimentalist ideology that was espoused by members of this household— albeit to differing degrees of intensity and sincerity— the destruction of utopia could be explained as a result of exclusively “external” actors: the invasion of civilization into their home, the entropy of life, the will of Providence, and so on. “Inner” factors, such as personal mistakes, false ideals, or even weaknesses of character among the family members, were not admitted to the discussion. Adhering to this way of thinking, Zhukovsky transformed the sad story of his love into a symbolic text, which contained its own religious plot (theodicy) and interconnected themes. In addition, it also contained an unhappy “earthly” ending, a requirement for the sentimentalist tradition (Masha’s death in 1823 was to be the “text’s” conclusion), and a mystical apotheosis: the “liberation” of Masha from earthly bondage and her transformation into an angel waiting in expectation of Zhukovsky’s eventual arrival among others like her, his dear heavenly “sisters” and “brothers.” 164

Postscriptum

Allegro and Penserosa Non la conobbe il mondo, mentre l’ebbe: Conobbill’ io ch’a pianger qui rimasi. —Epigraph from Petrarch to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse

Silent sorrow finds comfort And frolicsome joy falls into thought. —A. S. Pushkin, “To a Portrait of Zhukovsky”

I N T H E FA L L O F 1832, almost a decade after Maria’s death, Zhukovsky arrived in the small town of Vevey on the shore of Lake Geneva (Léman), whence he intended to leave for Italy, where Alexander Turgenev awaited him. However, renewed paroxysms of the illness characteristic of “people who never leave the office”1 forced the poet to abandon his long-planned and deeply desired journey. Italy remained a dream, and it was here that Zhukovsky remained: first in Vevey, known among travelers for its “Italian climate” and medicinal grapes, and later in neighboring Vernay, spending several months to attend to his health. “My principal need is absolute physical peace, combined with mental peace,” he wrote to Turgenev in Italy. “One cannot have the former while traveling, and can hardly have the latter in a land where one is occupied at every step by a new attraction . . . It’s not for a sick man to enjoy travel.”2 Having burrowed here “like a mouse into Swiss cheese,”3 as his friend Viazemsky wittily observed, Zhukovsky enjoyed a practically ideal poetic solitude. Léman, the mountains, clean air, and the dear family of his friend, the artist Gerhardt von Reutern, were all that surrounded the Russian poet. The place chosen by Zhukovsky, between Rousseau’s Clarens and Byron’s Montreux, may be justly called the homeland of the European romantic myth. In his letters, the poet constantly pointed out that he was walking along the same road as the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. His hikes along the lakeshore and in the mountains reminded him of the famous descriptions of Rousseau, who placed his characters here and secured the high poetic stature of this spot in his Confessions. In Vernay, Zhukovsky reread the works of 165

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Rousseau and Byron, constantly relating his fate and poetry to the life and works of the arbiters of two literary epochs, as if “writing himself into” the cultural landscape. “The poetic fruits” of a calm and proper life in Geneva, noted the poet’s observant biographer Carl Seidlitz, were several ballads from Uhland, Schiller, and Herder, and an excerpt from the Iliad. From this point, however, Zhukovsky “ceased to write ballads, but began his famous Undine.”4 It is significant that all the works from the Swiss period published since have very meaningful annotations, a sort of poetic passport stamp: “Vevey,” “Vernay, near Vevey,” or “Vernay, on the shore of Lake Geneva.” The last work in the notebook of Vernay poems is a strange draft excerpt, most likely written in late February or early March 1833: Прочь отсель, Меланхолия, дочь Цербера и темной Ночи, рожденна во мраке Стигийской пещеры, при диких Воплях и криках, меж призраков смертных, сокрыта в глубокой Бездне, где хмуро-угрюмая тьма распростерла ревнивые Крылья, сидит и каркает ворон ночной без умолку. Там под Эбеневой тенью среди безобразных утесов Страшных, как кудри твои взгроможденны, во мгле Киммерийской Вечно живые. А ты молодая, свободная дева, Ты в небесах Эфрозиной слывуща у смертных своих, Дочь Киприды и пышно плющом венчанная Вакха, Третьей с другими двумя Харитами, или как о том Перешло к нам предание . . . (PSS, XIII, 381) [Away from here, Melancholy, daughter of Cerberus and the dark / Night, born in the gloom of the Stygian cave, to wild / Howls and cries, between the ghosts of mortals, hidden in a deep / Abyss, where the sullen, gloomy darkness spread its jealous / Wings, where the night raven sits and crows without cease. / There beneath the ebony shadow, amid the abominable crags, / Frightful, like your heaped curls, in the Cimmerian gloom/ Ever alive. But you, young, free maiden,  / In the heavens, seeming a Euphrosyne to your mortals,  / Daughter of Cypris and splendidly ivy- crowned Baccha,  / Third with the other two Charites, or as that / Tradition came down to us . . .]

As we discovered, this dark, ponderous text5 is a translation of the first lines of John Milton’s “L’Allegro,” which, together with “Il Penseroso,” makes up his celebrated 1631–1633 poetic diptych:6 Hence loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born, In Stygian Cave forlorn

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’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy, Find out som uncouth cell, Wher brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings, And the night-Raven sings; There under Ebon shades, and low-brow’d Rocks, As ragged as thy Locks, In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. But com thou Goddes fair and free, In Heav’n ycleap’d Euphrosyne, And by men, heart-easing Mirth, Whom lovely Venus at a birth With two sister Graces more To Ivy-crowned Bacchus bore . . .7

In Zhukovsky’s biographic myth, this small draft fragment, ending his “cycle” of Vernay works, occupies a particular place. TH E RA P Y

Zhukovsky arrived in Switzerland in the fall of 1832 and left Vernay in early April 1833. December 31–January 1, the New Year, divides this period into two approximately equal parts. As we have seen, the New Year always played a significant role in Zhukovsky’s consciousness. The poet was drawn by its symbolic ambivalence (the death of the old and birth of the new), as well as its role as a marker reliving the eternal repetition: “Each New Year is a step up on the stairway leading to the Father’s house.”8 The theme of parting with the past and a mystical homecoming became the defining one in his Swiss ruminations of early 1833. The arrival of a new year was inseparable in Zhukovsky’s mind from sorrowful thoughts and memories. On January 29, he turned fifty: “and already I must be an old man, though not yet old.”9 March 19 was the tenth anniversary of the death of Maria Protasova-Moier, who died in childbirth at the age of thirty. New Year’s Eve itself was associated with memories of her. Two years prior, in a letter to Avdotia Elagina,10 Zhukovsky quoted a long excerpt from one of Masha’s letters, with which “she met her last New Year:” It’s already the last day of the year here. An absolutely peculiar feeling seizes your heart at the thought that you are present for the last breath of a dying man, who will be buried in several hours. . . . I am entering the New Year with very particular feelings. My soul feels so good, as if I should begin a new life

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for myself. . . . Who has more reason than I to be thankful? I will bring all of my wishes there! Here I want to love and give thanks.11

Thirty years before, Zhukovsky’s friend Andrei Turgenev had died. Four years had gone by since Alexandra Protasova-Voeikova’s passing. Now, in Vernay, Zhukovsky learned of the death of another friend, the poet Nikolai Gnedich, translator of the Iliad. “Many, many of our fellow travelers have left for home!” he wrote to Turgenev in Italy. “And somehow the idea of death keeps turning over in my head: now we are no longer walking forward, but rather towards the end.”12 Oppressive thoughts of age and death, mourning for a lost friend or beloved, fear of the future, and loss of faith in oneself have long been associated with a melancholy state. Zhukovsky’s despondency was deepened by his unsuccessful battle with an illness which treatment was itself traditionally considered a common cause of black melancholy: “Many men unseasonably cured of the haemorroids have been corrupted with melancholy, seeking to avoid Scylla, they fall in Charybdis.”13 Meanwhile, the coming year demanded from Zhukovsky new physical and mental strength to fulfill his “sacred duty”: this was the year in which his most august pupil, the Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, reached adulthood, the year of the young man’s entry into a “responsible and beautiful state.” In order to return to an active life, the poet had not only to regain his health, but also to throw off the yoke of the past. Zhukovsky settled into a house with windows overlooking Lake Geneva; just beyond the threshold ran the Simplon Road, connected in his mind with historical memories of the time of the Napoleonic Wars; over it rose the majestic Alps. The seclusion of the place, its surprising beauty, and its high cultural status created a perfectly unique poetic environment: “One can live here for a year and see something new every day, never leaving the close confines of the canton.”14 The image of the mountains and lake, or the mountains reflected in the lake, unifies the poet’s letters and his diary entries. The limpid Léman seemed to him a wonderful Cachemire, revealing itself to the weary traveler. “As you walk alone along the road,” he wrote to Anna Zontag, “the mountains stand before you under a cloudless blue sky, in striking solemnity; the lake is like glass; it doesn’t move, but breathes; the road seems crimson from the light of the sun . . . smoke streams in a light-blue ribbon across the dark blue of the cliffs, and each bird flying through the air shines, each sound is heard clearly . . . all this is a delight.”15 Zhukovsky compared Lake Geneva to the Euxeinos— the Black Sea— on whose shores the recipient of his letter was located.16 He depicted the former as his own, familiar: calm, quiet, with easily calmed storms that were 168

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“toylike” in comparison to those of the Euxeinos (where the ancient land of melancholy, Cimmeria, was located). The lyrical descriptions of landscapes in the poet’s letters and diary act as a sort of barometer of his constantly changing mood. Over time, his health improved, his strolls grew longer, and although calm and cheer still alternated with alarm and low spirits, the general tendency was one reflected in the poet’s letter to the grand duke: I can compare my current situation with the state of a person recovering after an illness: for several days everything was gloomy, the past and the present and the future, and now everything has become clear, the spirit is calm, one can look around himself with cheerful eyes, and there is no fog ahead.17

The very season of Zhukovsky’s Vernay episode— late fall to early spring, that is, the death of the old year and the birth of a new one— takes on a symbolic meaning related to the poet’s system of views. He may have seen his struggle with despondency, his striving to throw off the yoke of the past and bring calm, to put his spirit at rest, as a struggle against black melancholy, and his appellation to the first poem of Milton’s diptych is perfectly understandable from a psychological standpoint. On March 3, 1833, Zhukovsky recorded his impressions of his trip to Vevey in his diary: Sunset behind the Jura, a column on the water. . . . The bright blue sky below the illuminated peaks. Various evening noises: voices on a boat, the sound of oars, the singing of rowers; the cleanness and freshness of the evening air. Purple in space. A feeling of cheer. (PSS, XIII, 350)

If one prefaces the dark fragment about melancholy, written about this time, with the name of Milton’s poem—“L’Allegro”— and recalls that, chasing out Melancholy, Milton calls out to Euphrosyne—Joy, then it takes on an entirely different mood. Milton’s poem takes place in spring, the same time that the Russian translator turned to it, in view of scenic mountains, where tired clouds rested (the Swiss Alps). Spring, having arrived “in spite of all sorrows,” glances into the poet’s window, covered in vines (Vernay grapevine). The landscape and the season coincide, making it easier for him to relate to a “foreign” text and introduce his own content. Correspondingly, the translation of this poem can be understood as a sort of poetic therapy, an attempt to rid oneself of unhealthy melancholy and gain a solid footing in the joyful view of the world established by Milton. This method goes back in the melancholic tradition to the time of Robert Burton, who asserted in his famous foreword to The Anatomy of Melancholy that he wrote about melancholy in order to free himself from it.18 169

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However, Zhukovsky’s translation ends just after the call to Euphrosyne and does not return to that fragment. Why? One can only give a conjectural answer to this question: apparently, all was far from clear, even to him, and he likely felt and hoped for rebirth, but there was also the fear that it was, perhaps, a mirage . . . Finally, Milton’s diptych itself was bound up in Zhukovsky’s mind with personal memories, both fond and tragic. S IS T ER S

The names of Milton’s poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are mentioned in Zhukovsky’s work only once. In 1811, during the “golden” Muratovo period, Zhukovsky wrote jocular poems addressed to the Protasov sisters: Аллегро милая, будь весела, как радость, Храни беспечную, святую сердца младость, И, горя не узнав, свой жребий соверши! Смотря, как с жизнию невинно ты играешь, Невольно сердце вслед тебе увлечено; Как будто сам наверно знаешь, Что жизнь и счастие—одно! О, Пенсероза! ты у входа в свет, как гений, Стоишь пленительна! Высокою душой Ценишь манящие призраки наслаждений! И кажется, что все угадано тобой! Ты создана быть выше света! И чтоб не привели с собой грядущи лета, Не в жизни будешь ты прекрасного искать, Но все прекрасное—ты жизни дашь собою! “Не изменись”—тебе не нужно мне сказать; Твой Ангел прелести—с тобою! (PSS, XIII, 176–77) [Allegro dear, be cheerful, like joy,  / Keep your carefree, sacred youth at heart, / And, never knowing sorrow, play your fated role! / Watching as you play innocently with life, / The heart is unwittingly carried away after you; / As if you know for sure / That life and happiness are one! / O, Penserosa! At the world’s gate, like a genius, / You stand, captivating! With your lofty soul / You take the measure of the beckoning specters of delights! / And it seems that you have divined it all! / You were created to be above the world! / And whatever coming years might carry with them, / You won’t have to look for beauty in life, / But instead will give all beauty to life yourself! / “Don’t change”—I have no need to say this to you, / Your Angel of delight is with you!]

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“Penserosa” here refers to the fanciful Maria Protasova, while Allegro is her sister Alexandra, Zhukovsky’s goddaughter. Each was called into the world, by the poet’s thinking, to play her own role: one to bring happiness and joy to worldly life, the other to be a reminder of heavenly life. This joking verse, in its serious part, is a poetic foretelling and parting speech to Zhukovsky’s traveling companions, typical, as we recall, of his lyrics of the early 1810s. Alexandra Andreevna Protasova-Voeikova played a unique role in Zhukovsky’s life and work, comparable to Masha’s. “Far more poems are addressed to her than to her older sister,” write contemporary researchers, “and this addressing is direct, open (while Zhukovsky wrote joking, ‘domestic’ verse to Masha, other types of poems were addressed to her only tacitly).”19 Among the poems dedicated to Sasha is one of Zhukovsky’s best and, probably, most celebrated works: the ballad “Svetlana” (1811). Sasha, or as she came to be called, Svetlana, was the poet’s “kindred spirit” and ideal friend (they grew particularly close after Masha’s death, “united by a common grief”).20 Like her sister, she took her philosophy of life from Zhukovsky: “[I] live in this world for the enrichment of my soul, not for my happiness.”21 In the 1820s Alexandra Voeikova became the object of a particular romantic cult, initiated by Zhukovsky. Among her devotees were Zhukovsky’s friends Alexander Turgenev, Vasily Perovsky, and Carl Seidlitz, the poets Nikolai Yazykov, Ivan Kozlov, and Evgeny Baratynsky, the French writer Xavier de Maistre, and even the elderly Swiss historian and philosopher Charles Bonstetten. Among Svetlana’s “spiritual friends” were Emperor Alexander and his sister-in-law, Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, Zhukovsky’s pupil, to whom the next part of our book is devoted. Voeikova died of consumption in 1829 at the age of thirty- three; her contemporaries attributed the disease’s rapid development to the “excesses” of her unstable and debauched husband. She was buried in Livorno. Concern for her memory runs through almost all of Zhukovsky’s letters from Vernay to Alexander Turgenev, who was hopelessly in love with her for many years. Zhukovsky, forced by illness to put off his trip to Livorno, asked Turgenev to place a bronze plaque on Sasha’s grave with the same inscriptions from the Gospel as on Masha’s: Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,

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and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

The thought of Voeikova’s death, Zhukovsky wrote to Seidlitz,22 awakens in the heart all that is beautiful in life: “you hear a sort of clear music when your imagination carries you to that minute. From now on, all beauty will be a synonym for death to me.”23 The end of 1832 was marked for Zhukovsky by memories of Sasha, who had visited Switzerland not long before her death, and called it her last joy. On November 28, 1832, the poet visited Voeikova’s son Andrei in Geneva. “The similarity in the features, in the maniere d’être, the gait, the grin,” Zhukovsky recorded in his diary (PSS, XIII, 339). Then Andrei himself came to Vernay. Even this corner of Switzerland, where Zhukovsky spent the winter and early spring, was tied with memories of Sasha. In one of her last letters to the poet from Geneva (August 1829) she asked him: Write to me about Mont Blanc, about the lake. Tell me that which I feel so strongly, express that incomparable beauty of the calm, quiet Léman, when the sun has already set . . . when Mont Blanc is already fading, the stars beginning to glow, your wonderful friend quietly rolling with her bright star, and the Rhône stirs, never calming, like eternity, like time, which passes noticeably and imperceptibly. And all the memories on the shores: Jean-Jacques’ house—Ferney in the distance— right on the shore, the house where Byron led his raucous poetic life . . . and wrote lofty, wonderful stanzas . . . It’s remarkable how all of this touches the soul.24

Zhukovsky seemingly consciously picked the place described in these lines. “My house,” he wrote to his friend, the poet Ivan Kozlov, “is in a poetic spot on the northern shore of Lake Geneva: to the left are Montreux and Chillon, to the right are Clarens and Vevey. These places remind me of both Julie, and Byron.”25 (Knowing about his addressee’s platonic love for Voeikova, one can confidently add “and Sasha.”) “Voeikov says that you’re writing in hexameter,” Alexandra continued. “For God’s sake, send some. Nowhere, even in Muratovo, have I felt such a need to read you as I do here.”26 The many prose “excerpts of the Swiss landscape” from 1832 to 1833 are a sort of answer to Sasha’s request to describe this wondrous world. The hexametric translation of the fragment of the Milton poem associated with her name may also be understood as a posthumous fulfillment of her wish. “Cheerful” and “joyful” are the most frequent epithets in descriptions of Alexandra Protasova.27 Compare the following, from Zhukovsky’s poems addressed to her: “O, heaven, may she walk the path of happiness,” “be the joy of the world,” “mirth . . . is the friend of your days,” “Joy, the winged god, 172

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came into the world with you, she is your guide,” “purity is your companion, and cheer your genius.” In a letter to Turgenev of March 16, 1829 (that is, written after the poet learned of Alexandra Voeikova’s death), Zhukovsky remembers her “bright” image: At first like a charming, blooming infant, in whom the eyes delighted while the soul rejoiced; then cheerful, lively, carefree, as if fated for the greatest worldly happiness, like clear hope itself  .  .  . Like a genius of the air, with whom I was so happy in my village solitude.28

Sasha found her own cheeriness surprising and tried “to explain this aspect of my character with Zhukovsky’s motto-like poem “My Secret”: Вчера дарю забвенью, Веселью нынче отдаю, А завтра—Провиденью. (Solov’ev, vol. 1, 12) [I make a gift of yesterday to oblivion, / Give today to quietude, / And tomorrow to Providence.]

A depiction of Sasha in her biography by Nikolai Solov’ev borrows from Zhukovsky’s joking 1814 poem: “a cheerfully smiling little face, framed by light brown curls,” “spinning,” “like a cricket,” “over stools and about windows,” “amusing all with her shenanigans.” They called her a Grace, Venus, and a Sylph.29 Compare this with the description of the grace Euphrosyne in Milton’s poem: “so buxom, blithe and debonair,” always smiling; “Quips, and Manks, and wanton Wiles,” with a light, fluttering gait. In Vernay, Zhukovsky read his niece and close friend Anna Zontag’s fairy tale “Olinka,” which portrayed, in slightly veiled form, the Protasov sisters’ childhood in the village of Mishenskoe (rendered as the P*** sisters in the settlement of Nishchenskoe in the story). In the description of the main character, one can recognize without difficulty Sasha’s endearing features: rosy cheeks, a cheerful, intelligent gaze, a pleasant, tender smile. This tale awakened in the poet memories of his youth, incorporated into the poetic myth created by Rousseau: I want to sit at the foot of the Swiss mountains, on the low hill where our Mishenskoe home stood with its humble church, where my poetry began with Gray’s elegy.30

Zhukovsky was Sasha’s godfather both in life and in poetry. But “Svetlana” was not only her poetic name, but also the poet’s own “Arzamas” nickname: it unified Zhukovsky’s life and work with his niece’s life. We have seen 173

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how the name Allegro, given to Sasha in 1811, splendidly captured the essence of her character. As a synonym for “Svetlana” (bright, joyful), it was rooted in ancient tradition and had an ideological basis. Zhukovsky turned to Milton’s poem in late February and early March of 1833. A possible explanation is that this time was the fourth anniversary of Alexandra Voeikova’s death (March 9). Memories of Sasha probably also summoned up her allegorical name, given to her back in the “Muratovo period” (compare the phonetic similarity of the names “Alexandra” and “Allegro”), and influenced the choice of a poem for translation. That said, the reverse may also be true: Milton’s poem, which suited the poet’s mental state, unexpectedly threw into relief memories of his youth. The Italian name “L’Allegro” itself would have taken on particular relevance for Zhukovsky: Sasha’s remains were there, in Italy, in Livorno, where he could not travel. “If I can’t have Italy, then at least I will have poetry, whose dreams will let me regain my lost Italy,” he wrote to Turgenev (note another possible reference to Milton: paradise lost and regained).31 One cannot rule out the possibility that he found a special, secret meaning in the final lines of “L’Allegro,” which include an allusion to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Untwisting all the chains that ty The hidden soul of harmony. That Orpheus self may heave his head From golden slumber on a bed Of heapt Elysian flowres, and hear Such streins as would have won the ear Of Pluto, to have quite set free His half regain’d Eurydice. These delights, if thou canst give, Mirth with thee, I mean to live.32

In one of his diary entries in the autumn of 1832, Zhukovsky mentions “moments in which, by a magical force, memories awaken and all the faces known to you become clearly visible. You hear voices, feel that which you have felt, the air, the land, home, the feeling of bygone life” (PSS, XIII, 340). Apparently it was in just such a moment that he recalled the Protasov sisters, his earlier feelings, and “bygone life.”33 On the reverse side of the dust jacket of the notebook of poems, where the fragment on melancholy is found, one can faintly see a list of works, written in pencil, that Zhukovsky had translated or marked for translation. Listed among these works are “Allegro and Penseroso.” Thus the poet had planned to translate Milton’s whole diptych, connected in his mind, as we

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have seen, with the names of Maria and Alexandra Protasova. If the 1811 poem addressed to them was, as has been stated, a poetic parting speech and foretelling of a happy future, then this translation could have become a sort of poetic monument, enhancing and explicating the symbolic sense of their identical tombstones. In a letter to Turgenev, Zhukovsky explained the single epitaph on both graves thus: Both sisters have the same tomb and the same inscription: their souls were the same, albeit in different forms; and one can say that there is the same difference between their graves as between their appearances. One departed has the Livonian sky and a quiet place near a large road, beyond which is a harvest-covered field, simple and pleasant nature, like her quiet qualities; over the other is the blue Italian sky with its bright stars and the aromas of the South, enchanting like her sweet, delightful, childlike nature, the poetry of her heart.34

Maria and Alexandra Protasova— the two “angels” of the Muratovo paradise— are an antinomic pair, occupying one of the principal places in Zhukovsky’s family myth. The poet’s contemporaries often noted a “strange,” in Viazemsky’s words, “physiological and mental coincidence” in his character: In his ideal, fanciful, somewhat mystical nature, there were reserves of cheer and an inclination to humor.35

“How strange that many consider me a poet of despondency,” the poet himself wrote, “although I’m very given to good cheer, joking, and even caricature.”36 Alexander Veselovsky saw in this combination of “melancholy and fancy with sudden bursts of cheer” a “rather typical psychological phenomenon: the alternation of light and darkness.” Zhukovsky’s laughter, in the scholar’s opinion, is not the “creative laughter that penetrates phenomena, illuminating them with its light and life”; it is just an “interruption of melancholy” that makes his lyrics sincere.37 The poet himself regarded the “cheerful” side of his work manifested in his “childish” poetic pranks and hilarious Arzamasian parodies (including self-parodies) as no less significant than the “sorrowful” side: One had to see and hear with what self- assurance, with what selfcontentedness the generally modest and humble Zhukovsky spoke of his works in that vein, and with what genial and childlike laughter the bard of the “Country Churchyard,” melancholy, and all sorts of witches and ghosts quoted places that were particularly close to his heart.38

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He saw “quiet sorrow” and “childlike cheer” as equally poetic conditions, one sometimes shading the other, at times flowing into one another, and most often organically combining in a single feeling. The sad, thoughtful Maria and the happy, joyful Alexandra embodied these “opposing” features of his character and poetry. The real sisters with whom fate had joined him first became characters in his poetry (Minvana and Svetlana), secured their places in an individual system of forms, where they took on the role of the two “geniuses” of his work, and finally were ideologically defined as symbols of the two symbiotic sides of his joyful/sorrowful outlook on life. The earlier joking comparison of the sisters to the antinomic poems of Milton’s diptych could later be perceived as prophetic. Biography and poetry blended, and the life of the soul was explained through forms that had been consecrated by the Western literary tradition. The translation of Milton’s diptych in such a case could become not only a poetic requiem for the departed, but also a symbolic portrait of the poet’s soul itself. It is safe to say that Milton’s canonical poems, in Zhukovsky’s perception, play the role not only of a unique matrix for the expression of his own feelings, but also of material for the creation of an original poetic WeltEmpfindung on life, in which earthly “cheer” and heavenly “thoughtfulness” are not opposed to one another.39 Whereas Milton only juxtaposed the divine Euphrosyne and Pensiveness, Zhukovsky, in keeping with his family myth, interprets them as sisters: “the same, albeit in different forms.”

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PART III

Poet and Princess

Chapter Eight

The Enchanted Tutor Oh heart, what’s come over you? Why this ache? Why this boiling and burning again? How can I understand you? —V. A. Zhukovsky, “New Love—New Life”

O N J A N U A R Y 1 4 , 1817, Maria Protasova became Dr. Moier’s wife. Zhukovsky attended the wedding. On April 25 he writes a long confessional letter to his friend Alexander Turgenev, who had been deeply disturbed by a letter he had received from their common acquaintance, Maria Svechina-Veliaminova (who, as we recall, had previously served as the object of Zhukovsky’s affections). Svechina, reflecting her sentimental vision of unhappy love, claimed that Zhukovsky was in a constant state of despair. In his letter, Zhukovsky calms his friend, writing that he had not corresponded with Svechina for the past six months, and that his condition is certainly different. “I have drunk from the waters of Lethe and feel that it has had a soporific effect. My soul has settled. Fortunately, no mark has been left, it is white as paper on which nothing has been written.”1 In describing his current condition, Zhukovsky employs an image characteristic of the master plot of his own biographical myth: the end of one period (or “epoch”) of life is always described by the poet as the soul’s falling into a state of sleep, which anticipated the arrival of a new awakening. In this letter Zhukovsky informs Turgenev of a proposition he had recently received from Professor Grigory Andreevich Glinka, who had formerly served as a tutor of Russian for the imperial family. Princess Charlotte, the bride-to-be of the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, will need a Russian tutor. The position offers a salary of 3,000 roubles from the emperor and 2,000 roubles from the grand duke, an apartment in the palace of the grand duke and other benefits. The lessons would be one hour every day. The rest of the time Zhukovsky would be free. Due to his commitments, Glinka must refuse the position2 and he would like to know whether the poet could take this responsibility on himself, and demands a swift response, so that he could present him in his place. “I said neither yes nor no— writes Zhukovsky to 179

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Turgenev.—Without your counsel and the advice of Nikolai Mikhailovich [Karamzin] I would never make such a decision.”3 Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhem III and Queen Louise, was to arrive in Russia in June 1817. Karamzin supported Zhukovsky’s nomination for the tutoring position, having managed to convince Nikolai’s mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, that her beloved poet was the most suitable candidate, despite his relative (in the eyes of Maria) young age of thirty-four years. His role as tutor to the grand duchess promised several benefits for Zhukovsky: a useful and noble occupation that would leave time for poetry, financial independence, and the possibility of entering the “circle of beauty,” in which he could “without worry” make use of the advantages that come with the highest social circles, without being carried away by them.4 Despite these advantages, Zhukovsky expressed concerns regarding his own abilities, and questioned whether he had enough talent to be a good language tutor. The poet was also uncertain of his German, which was needed in order to communicate with the Prussian princess. He modestly placed the solution to his dilemma in the hands of his friends and patrons, Turgenev and Karamzin. Naturally, both reassured him and advised that he accept the position. In the summer of 1817 Zhukovsky receives an official offer of employment from the empress, and in October of the same year assumes his new duties. A NEW LIFE

On October 22, 1817, Zhukovsky gives his first Russian lesson to the nineteen-year-old grand duchess at the Moscow Kremlin.5 Within five days he manages to formulate the goals of his pedagogical approach. In addition to making his lectures interesting and useful, Zhukovsky strives to ensure that they include “food for thought” and beneficial lessons for his young pupil’s soul— an attempt at the “aesthetic education” of the Russian tsarevna. The poet describes his new position as both “attractive” and “pleasant,” one that has opened for him the possibility of “Karamzinian” independence both “inside one’s soul and outside as well.” He writes in his diary, “I am completely given over to the present, and look at the future without any anxiety or desire”6 (PSS, XIII, 124). The poet’s interest in his “responsibilities” soon turned to enamorment with his most august pupil. Princess Charlotte was a dreamer, someone who valued poetry highly (the Winter Palace collections contain her albums with her favorite poems) and who attempted to write poetry herself. She sang and drew well, and possessed what was known as a romantic nature. “A sweet, heavenly creature,” writes Zhukovsky in October 1817 to Alexandra Voei180

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kova, whom he considered to be the princess’s spiritual “twin” since they were both characterized by the same “simplicity, a kind nature and childlike charm.” Every passing hour, he writes in his diary on November 6, he discovers more and more pleasing, innocent charms in his pupil’s heart. Her soul is “as forthright as a child’s”; she has a wonderful mind, one that “has not yet been frightened by experience.”7 In January 1818 an ironic Karamzin, who was familiar with the events of Zhukovsky’s intimate life, asks him: “How fares your blessed enchantment? Does teaching give you as much joy as before?”8 These words of a blessed enchantment, perhaps, are a reference to Zhukovsky’s programmatic poem “New Love—New Life” (a translation of Goethe’s “Neue Liebe— neues Leben”), which was written at the end of 1817 and included later in the journal Für Wenige—For the Few.9 In this new utopia, which rose from the ashes of the previous one, the poet sees himself not only as a bard of the “beautiful soul” of his pupil, but part of her “beautiful family” as well.10 Princess Charlotte was received in Russia first and foremost as the daughter of her “great” mother, Queen Louise, a national heroine of Prussia, “the lofty ideal of a German woman,”11 an object of chivalric veneration for the Emperor Alexander I. The biographical myth of Queen Louise had begun to take shape during her life, and fully took hold after her untimely death on July 19, 1810.12 She almost immediately became an object of fascination for her daughter’s tutor. Already by October 25, 1817 (i.e., three days after his first lecture), Zhukovsky mentions reading the “biography of Queen Louise.” By all appearances, the poet had come across the classic account of Louise’s life composed by her friend, the Countess Carolina von Berg, entitled Louise, Königin von Preussen: Der Preussischen Nation gewidmet (1814). Excerpts from this biography are contained in Zhukovsky’s diaries from the beginning of the 1820s (they shall be discussed at a later point). In his lectures, Zhukovsky constantly uses the image of Louise as an ideal worthy of imitation.13 On November 6, 1817 the poet writes in his diary that he spoke with the grand duchess of her lofty aim and of the beautiful example she has in her mother. This “beautiful example” was to take on no less of a significance for the princess’s tutor. As we shall attempt to show later, the romantic figure of Louise, the “Prussian Madonna,” played an important role in the formation of the aesthetic cult of Weiblichkeit in Zhukovsky’s work at the turn of the 1820s. Zhukovsky was also aware of other biographical accounts dedicated to the Prussian queen. Of the greatest interest for him in these works, naturally, were mentions of the Princess Charlotte. In a diary entry from December 2, 1817, the poet includes a German quotation on the princess’s grief on the occasion of her mother’s death and the word of consolation offered by a royal relative: 181

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Deine Mutter würde dir gesagt haben: sei tugendhaft! Ich will dir in dem Namen deiner verklärten Mutter sagen, sei so tugendhaft, wie sie war! Du hast die Gabe deiner Mutter empfangen, lebe auch in ihrem Geiste und nach dem Vorbilde dieses Engels. Dann wird der Segen deiner Mutter auf dir ruhen! (19 July 1810, 9 Uhr) (PSS, XIII, 128) [Your mother would have told you: be virtuous! I want to tell you in the name of your glorified mother: be as virtuous as she was! You have received your mother’s gift, now live in her spirit and according to the example of this angel. Then your mother’s blessing will rest upon thee! (July 19 1810, 9 o’clock)]

Current scholarly opinion asserts that the text cited above is an excerpt from the diary of the grand duchess’s governess, Fräulein von Wildermeth, whose acquaintance Zhukovsky had made at this time (PSS, XIII, 487). However, its ultimate source is somewhat more concrete. The text comes from a brochure written by a certain Carl Hahn, entitled Die letzten Lebensstunden Luisens (1810), which was dedicated to the final hours of Louise’s life.14 This somewhat enigmatic brochure was published in 1810 in an extremely small print run (each exemplar was numbered), was never brought to sale, and was intended for distribution among the relatives and close friends of the queen. According to some sources, the actual author was Charlotte’s beloved uncle, Duke Georg Friedrich Carl Joseph von Mecklenburg-Strelitz.15 Remarkably, immediately following this excerpt in Zhukovsky’s diary is a text written in the handwriting of the grand duchess herself. It contains a recollection of how on the day following her mother’s death she made a wreath for her mother’s grave out of white roses that had been collected by her brothers and sisters. Zhukovsky’s romantically inclined pupil was willing to entrust her tutor with her cherished past. The biographical facts gathered by Zhukovsky from books and stories about Louise soon became themes for poetic interpretation. Carolina von Berg’s account of a dying Louise not being able to finish reading her daughter’s letter16 is carried over in its entirety by the poet into an album given to him by the grand duchess in 1821, and is reworked into a small essay on the spiritual kinship between Louise and her daughter: This unfinished letter would appear to be of great portent! As if everything earthly had ended for her, as if there was a connection to the earth, a visible connection, still remained. . . . She could not finish reading her daughter’s letter, but today she can read her daughter’s life! And this life must give her as much pleasure as those tender lines . . . that were read a minute before death. . . . Eternity is nothing but memory; the soul is there where it loves and has loved— and so hers must be in the life of her daughter.17

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In Zhukovsky’s sublime philosophy, the sufferings of the mother are seen as a pledge for her daughter’s happiness, “and this will be, as it is just!” After these words follows another telling excerpt from von Berg’s biography of Louise: Wenn gleich die Nachwelt meinen Namen nicht unter den Namen der berühmten Frauen nennen wird, so wird sie doch, wenn sie die Leiden dieser Zeit erfährt, wissen, was ich durch sie gelitten habe, und sie wird sagen: sie duldete viel und harrte aus im Dulden. Dann wünsche ich nur, daß sie zugleich sagen möge: aber sie gab Kindern das Dasein, welche besserer Zeiten würdig waren, sie herbeizuführen gestrebt und endlich sie errungen haben.18 [Posterity will not place my name among those of celebrated women, but when people think of the troubles of these times they may say: “She suffered much and endured with patience,” and I only wish they may be able to add: “She gave birth to children who were worthy of better times, and who by their strenous endeavors have succeeded in attaining them.”]19

Zhukovsky includes Louise’s “bequest” among his own remarks on dying parents who prayed for their children’s happiness. In doing so, this “old” concept of happiness receives an additional historical dimension. The time of troubles associated with the Napoleonic Wars had already passed; now a new era of peace and well-being (“besserer Zeiten”) was to arrive, and would serve as a symbol for the fate of the martyred queen’s daughter. Departing from the Prussian romantic tradition, Zhukovsky sees Queen Louise as the embodiment of a beautiful Weiblichkeit, which was continued by her daughter. From the national Luisenkult the poet moves towards the creation of a “private” Charlottenkult (or, to be a bit more precise, an Alexandra-Kult, since in Russia she was given the name Alexandra Feodorovna), one addressed to the “small circle” of relatives and close friends of the grand duchess: her new Russian family.20 The central theme of this “secret” romantic cult turns out to be the remembrance of the beautiful mother, who looks upon the life of her beloved daughter from the heavens. Zhukovsky’s reflections on Charlotte’s unread letter later became the basis of a well-known romantic fragment on the theme of “sacred memory.” First recorded in a diary entry in 1821, these thoughts were then rewritten, with some small changes, in the album of Alexandra Voeikova (“Svetlana”), and, much later, included in the article “Remembrance.”21 In its diary version, this fragment concludes with the aphorism: “Memories of a mother such as yours are the same as the feelings of St. John looking at the heavens” (here the reference is to Domenichino’s painting St. John the Evangelist, interpreted by Zhukovsky as the apotheosis of remembrance which reconciles humanity with earthly life in anticipation of the heavenly one). 183

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The article concludes with a verse translation of a prose fragment from Jean Paul which Zhukovsky had already completed in 1818. This piece is dedicated to the posthumous transfiguration of Louise, who was mourned “not only by her homeland, but by the entire German people,” who had seen in her “the ideal of feminine beauty” (“In that minute, when you are in wedding dress . . .”).22 The theme of a new homeland and a secret mission entrusted to Louise’s daughter in Russia— a Russian equivalent of the “patriotic theme” of Louise’s legend— is another focal point of Zhukovsky’s Alexandra-Kult. Alexander I had arranged the marriage between Nikolai and Charlotte not only because of its value as a symbolic embodiment of the unity between the Russian and Prussian ruling dynasties that would guarantee peace in Europe. Neither Alexander nor the official heir Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich had any children. Under certain circumstances, the son of Alexandra and Nikolai and the grandson of the king of Prussia could become the Russian emperor (as happened in 1855). Thus the birth of Alexander Nikolaevich in April 1818 was treated as an event of national significance by Alexander I.23 Zhukovsky’s reaction to this auspicious event can be found in his epistle “To the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna on the Birth of the Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich,” in which the poet provides perhaps the only romantic description of royal childbirth (the physical sufferings of the mother are allegorically interpreted as a guarantee for her child’s happiness).24 The poem foretells a glorious future for the newborn prince and describes his mother’s love for her child as a “sacred blessing.” The theme of the lofty, though unnamed, mission of the princess is also manifested in Zhukovsky’s poetic inscription “To the Portrait of Alexandra Feodorovna,” which is contained in his pupil’s album, dated November 6, 1818”25 Для нас рука судьбы в сей мир ее ввела; Для нас ее душа цвела и созревала; Как гений радости, она пред нами стала, И всё прекрасное в себе нам отдала! С веселой младостью мила, как упованье! В ней дух к великому растет и возрастет; Она свой трудный путь с достоинством пройдет: В ней не обманется России ожиданье! (PSS, II, 63)26 [Unto us did the hand of fate bring her into this world; / For us did her soul flower and blossom; / As the genius of joy did she stand before us, / And she gave to us all that was most beautiful within her! / In her cheerful youth she is sweet like hopeful anticipation! / In her the spirit grows and will rise to great-

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ness; / She will complete her trying path with dignity: / In her Russia’s expectations shall not be deceived!]

Finally, the third— and most personal— theme of Zhukovsky’s AlexandraKult becomes the poet’s own involvement with the object of his admiration. Slowly but surely, Zhukovsky begins to incorporate his own emotional biography into the princess’s poetic legend, and the model for their spiritual union becomes the chivalric cult of the beautiful lady, one that was well known by Alexandra via the novels of her beloved authors, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and Ludwig Tieck. As Alexandra Feodorovna’s biographer August-Theodor von Grimm remarked, Zhukovsky was “the first who frequented the Court to discover the eminent feminine qualities of Alexandra and through all ensuing years she continued to be the beau ideal of this poet.”27 At least in his own eyes, Zhukovsky perceived his role as a tutor as being gradually supplanted by a new role as a faithful and— according to the rules of courtly love— secretly enamored troubadour.28 A UN ION O F HEA RT S

In the winter of 1817, a small familiar circle (kleine Gesellschaftskreis) of no more than twelve persons had come together, with the grand duchess serving as the center. As Grimm noted, “Instead of the stiff etiquette of the Empress mother, the most refined and easy demeanour prevailed here; the most serious conversations, as well as the most playful jests and innocent jeux de societe, were carried on in the same good taste and made the evenings pass rapidly and pleasantly.”29 Later, Alexandra Feodorovna would recall that in the evening her petit cour gathered in her study, where they read and played. For Zhukovsky— particularly in the first years of his service at court— the salon of the grand duchess was the very incarnation of the “beautiful circle” in which it was possible to “make use of the amenities of the best society” without losing one’s own independence. It was in this cultural milieu that Zhukovsky’s idea for a new journal, Für Wenige—For the Few (January–June 1818), matured. This “halfjournal, half-miscellany”30 was published anonymously, and mostly included Zhukovsky’s translations of German poetry which were addressed to his most important reader, his pupil, the grand duchess herself.31 In total, six elegantly published issues of approximately thirty-two pages each were created.32 Zhukovsky’s Russian translations were printed parallel to the originals (the authors’ names were not indicated, since the intended addressee knew these works by heart, as they constituted her entire poetic world). Among them we can find some of the most exemplary instances of Zhukovsky’s lyrical output 185

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in the 1810s, including “The Knight Togenburg” (the princess’s favorite ballad), “The Fisherman,” “New Love—New Life,” “To the Moon,” “The Forest King,” “Count Hapsburg,” as well as the already mentioned epistle to the princess and the prologue of Schiller’s Maid of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans). Zhukovsky had considered continuing publication after June 1818, but decided against it for unknown reasons. The journal was not available for purchase, instead being intended for the intimate circle of Zhukovsky’s friends. Recipients were given copies according to a “register” which Zhukovsky himself had composed.33 The precise number of copies made is unknown. In 1828 the Moscow Telegraph journal mentioned 50 copies, the poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker mentioned 80, and the bibliographers SmirnovSokolsky and Kovalevsky put the amount anywhere from 25 to 100.34 In fact, Zhukovsky had been considering a “German miscellany” as early as the beginning of 1817, with the goal of introducing the Russian reader to contemporary German literature.35 In a letter to Dmitry Dashkov he outlined his general plans for the journal in the near future and chose a potential name, The Teutonica. Authors to be translated included Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Tieck, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Jean Paul, Novalis, Schlegel, Schubert, Fichte, Humboldt, and other German writers. Zhukovsky planned on opening the first issue of the journal with an engraved portrait of Schiller, with accompanying translations of Schiller, Goethe, Hebel, Herder, Fouqué, and an article from “Conversations-Lexicon” on the history of German literature. The journal was also to include information on the authors themselves, including contributions from Zhukovsky’s fellow Arzamasians Dashkov, Turgenev, and Uvarov, which allowed Zhukovsky to focus on the poetry section. Although this ambitious project was never completed, it served as the basis for Zhukovsky’s later, more “elitist” journal, which was closely tied with his teaching duties. It should be noted that the topic of German literature, which the poet had been interested in since his days at the Pension, was particularly pertinent in 1817, when Alexander I succeeded in creating a dynastic union between the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns. German literature was in fashion at the time as an alternative to French culture. Zhukovsky varied in his descriptions of his new journal, at some times calling it a journal of poetry, while at others claiming it was a collection of songs (a number of the translated poems did, in fact, comprise the princess’s favorite songs and romances, which she performed at the evening gatherings of the circle). Overall, the aim of the journal was “mostly pedagogical.”36 Zhukovsky used his translations of well- known German poets in order to explain the rules of Russian grammar to his charge, hoping to develop in his most august pupil the skill of reading Russian verse,37 and creating for her her own personal reader in the language of her new home. In a letter to Turgenev, Zhukovsky wrote that his pupil was studious and enjoyed rewrit186

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ing his Russian poems into German prose and her own Russian prose into German: she “translates Karamzin’s letters with a dictionary, sings my songs and is very hard-working.”38 In addition to the journal’s explicitly pedagogical intentions (i.e., its role as “sustenance for reflection [aimed at] acting on the heart in a beneficial manner” of its primary addressee),39 For the Few also provides a window into the aesthetic world of Zhukovsky’s closest friends and followers. As the poet’s friend and biographer Pletnev noted, Zhukovsky included in the journal translations that were particularly important to him. These “special” translations “were guarded by him as something sacred, and were thus printed in very small quantities” for “certain persons, close to his heart.”40 In addition to the grand duchess and the other members of the salon at court, this small group included Zhukovsky’s relatives, Karamzin, members of “Arzamas,” friends from Moscow and Dorpat, and admirers and poets from St. Petersburg (Pushkin, Küchelbecker, Delvig).41 In the context of this “elitist” journal, the language of “the circle” or “the home” was “translated” into a high emotional register, and the poems included in the publication acquired an almost sacramental character. For the Few created a special relationship of trust between the chosen readership and the author, as well as a special approach to reading: From “the few” it was required that they go from one correct solution to the next, to try to discover not only “their own” codes and ciphers, but those of others as well. They were also given the task of reflecting on the religious and moral problems that were included in the connotations or particular images.42

Let us look at one example of the reading of Zhukovsky’s poetry by “the few.” On February 26, 1818, Zhukovsky’s niece, Avdotia Elagina writes a letter in which she thanks the poet for sending two issues of the journal to her in Dolbino. Reading these, Elagina confides, nearly made it possible for her to forget “not only Voeikov’s hideous actions, but all that is bad in the world.” At the same time, the deep sadness expressed by her dear friend in certain poems made a profound impression upon her: How I would like to surround you with hearts filled only with the strongest friendship for you, this would make you look at your beautiful life with more joy: this is more than the smile of a friend, who brightens our lot. My dear, my brother, how it seems that it would be so easy for us to make you happy. I know the place! Zhukovsky, our hearts! and this is not a dream! . . . Listen, friend, write immediately whether the choice of the poems is yours. What a joy this translation of “To the Moon” is for me, here a large part is yours and not what was in the original: it tore my soul. The lines have stayed in my

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memory from the first reading, but this is the memory of the heart, I raved about them against my will all night.43

This fragment is shot through with quotations from and references to two poems from For the Few, “To the Moon” (No. 2, a translation of Goethe’s “An den Mond”) and “Mina” (No. 1, Goethe’s “Lied der Mignon”).44 Clearly, Elagina experiences Zhukovsky’s translations as the lyrical confessions of her friend and reads his poetic texts as being filled with biographical facts known only to the small family circle. In doing so, she also includes herself and her sisters in the picture of the “magical place” that the poet is called to by his dream. In this letter, Zhukovsky’s poems are appropriated by a “kindred soul.” The central question for Elagina is whether the poems were chosen by Zhukovsky or the grand duchess (in other words, she seeks to know to whose soul these lyrical confessions belong). Although it is impossible to determine how the princess herself received these works, it could be that she too filled them with her own memories, of which she told the poet herself (as will be discussed in the next chapter). In turn, Zhukovsky’s translations, which she learned by heart for her musical performances, “introduced” Alexandra, as was the author’s intent, not so much to the Russian language and Russian poetry (though they did this as well) as to the poet himself, to his “soul,” which was kindred to her own. For the Few was an attempt to introduce into Russian literature new aesthetic principles which brought together the souls of its readers into a single spiritual (and intercultural) family. POE T A ND CR O WD

As fate would have it, this journal, intended by its creator to remain a “secret” publication directed at a chosen readership, provoked a sustained polemic that touched upon several vital questions for Russian literature in the 1810s and 1820s. Nikolai Grech, the publisher of Son of the Fatherland, was the first to inform the public of For the Few in the January 1818 issue of his journal: Under this title there are collected selected German romances and ballads in Zhukovsky’s translation. What a pleasing event! Unfortunately, it is said that the collection is truly intended for the few, i.e., for a small number of the poet’s friends. We are in a position to take issue with him and are ready to confirm that if he wanted to write for those that love him and his talent, then it would have been better to give it the title for the many. Among this many are the readers of Son of the Fatherland. For them we have excerpted the translation of Schiller’s beautiful ballad “[Knight] Togenburg.” . . . We envy the few. One must give this book its due: it is beautifully and tastefully printed.45 188

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Here Grech juxtaposes Zhukovsky’s friends with Zhukovsky’s admirers among the general reading public (i.e., those subscribed to Grech’s own journal).46 Zhukovsky was greatly annoyed by Grech’s utter lack of tact. In a letter to Turgenev, he writes that Grech should not have brought up the publication, as if it were a book printed for the public, and said nothing of his current aim. To be sure, it would have been better if Grech had not mentioned the journal at all.47 It is difficult to imagine that Grech was unaware of the primary addressee of For the Few. Under his mask of feigned ignorance there was a fairly biting polemical attack, expressing the political position of an editor of a popular journal. On the same page where his review had appeared, Grech had placed a positive review of Fyodor Glinka’s Luka and Maria, a pious pedagogical work intended for “the most simple people.” This review included an extended excerpt from Glinka’s programmatic preface, which claimed that the enormous bookshelves of the rich and famous can barely hold any more books, “yet there are not even ten or even five books that a good country man could find for himself both consolation and edification.” “Readers seeking entertainment and a way to pass the time,” concluded Grech, “will find little sustenance and pleasure in this little book, but followers of the people’s true Russian language and country customs will see in it a detailed and expressive picture of both the former and the latter, and the simple folk and country villagers will read it with enjoyment and good use.”48 The contrast is hardly coincidental: the editor, who at the time was inclined to democratic principles, juxtaposes literature “for the simple folk and country villagers” and “elitist” literature. Of course, as we have seen, this juxtaposition did not prevent our entrepreneurial editor from “borrowing” one of the finest translations from Zhukovsky’s journal. In the future, Grech and his coeditor, Voeikov, would continue to “pilfer” poems from this collection, justifying their “thievery” in the following fashion: “if Parnassus should think to condemn us for this literary theft, then we shall refer them to several hundred of our Attorneys— our Readers.”49 As Alexander Turgenev would later remark, the publishers of Son of the Fatherland stole Zhukovsky’s work, so that their journal “would not remain for the few.”50 This widespread publication threatened to destroy the “sacred” character of these poems completely. The phrase “for the few,” chosen by Zhukovsky as the title of his journal, quickly became the source for many jokes and puns in Russian educated society. Karamzin, while thanking Zhukovsky for the “notebooks of wonderful poetry,” offered that “instead of For the Few,” the journal should be called “not much, but good.”51 Ivan Dmitriev, in a cutting remark, responded to the question of whether he had read Zhukovsky’s collection with the following: “For the few, but not much.”52 “Zhukovsky writes for the few, while you write only for yourself,” responded Prince Viazemsky to one of his friend’s critics. 189

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Remarkably, the members of “Arzamas,” who had recently elevated Zhukovsky to the role of national poet,53 received his collection of “chamber poetry” with skepticism. Batiushkov was dissatisfied with the lack of seriousness in its goal and its affectation in tone. Viazemsky disapproved of the “courtly romanticism” and monotonous didacticism: “What is with For the Few? It seems it has been published ‘not for any.’ ”54 In another letter to Turgenev he jokingly offers to give Zhukovsky an epigraph to translate and include in For the Few, namely, Galiani’s thought from a letter to Madame d’Epinay: Il faut compter pour quelque chose l’honneur, car il cause un certain chatouillement de plaisir, qu’on pourrait très bien appeler l’onanisme de la vertu.55 [Honor must count for something, because it causes a certain tickling of pleasure, which one could very well call the onanism of virtue.]

Characteristically, both Batiushkov and Pushkin compared Zhukovsky’s “private” journal with Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, which had just begun to be published, and which was addressed to the entire nation.56 Zhukovsky’s choice of title was interpreted by radical writers of the 1820s as a credo of escapist art that was politically reactionary. The poet and future Decembrist Küchelbeker, who had proudly received his copy of For the Few, used Zhukovsky’s journal as an example of a false and dangerous tendency in contemporary poetry in an article from 1824: Out of the rich and powerful Russian word, they attempt to extract a moderate, well-behaved, affected, artificially meager language, suitable for the few, un petit jargon de coterie.57

Later in the article, the author juxtaposed the salon-based poetry of For the Few with civic and patriotic verse. All in all, Zhukovsky’s contemporaries interpreted the title of his journal as a kind of motto for elitist art and analyzed it on the basis of their own aesthetic, political, and commercial understandings of the purpose of literature. However, it is utterly clear that the poet himself did not place such programmatic significance on the title as his opponents did. The expression “for the few” in the title of a journal not intended for sale should not be understood as a confrontational opposition between “chosen ones” and “the crowd.”58 Rather the title should be read as the idealization of “quiet,” private poetry shared between friends and family members, who are walled off from the cares of the world. This poetry, to use Zhukovsky’s own words, was intended for the chosen reader, 190

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Кто делит с душой родной, Втайне от людей, То, что презрено толпой Или чуждо ей. (“To the Moon”) [Who shares with a kindred soul in secret from the people that which is disdained by the crowd or is alien to it.]

POUR L E P ET I T NO M BR E

At first glance, this difference in opinions between Zhukovsky and his friends, the “geniuses” of “Arzamas,” might seem strange. In order to understand it, a small excursus into the cultural context of the concept of “the few” in the 1810s must be undertaken. For Zhukovsky’s immediate literary surroundings, the expression “for the few” was first and foremost connected with a neoclassical aesthetic of Enlightenment, which was most clearly expressed in the works of the French critic Jean-François Marmontel.59 In Marmontel’s interpretation, the notion of “for the few” (pour le petit nombre) referred to amateur authors who possessed good taste, which was understood as the true value of art. In Marmontel’s entry for “amateur,” written for the Encyclopedie, he compared the opinions of experts to the praise of the unenlightened masses. Blessed, he writes, is the author who heeds the counsel of these honest and severe judges, for he who has learned to write for the few, has learned to write for posterity (“à écrire pour le petit nombre, il lui apprit à écrire pour la postérité”).60 Marmontel’s aesthetics (both directly and via Karamzin) had had a considerable influence on Zhukovsky. “What is glory?” he asks in the opening article of the first issue of Messenger of Europe under his editorship, “General approval, the quiet verdict of the few, which the countless masses obediently repeat aloud  .  .  . The constant deserved praise of the chosen, whose powerful opinion guides the general [one] and which can change it: this is true glory, a continuing, dignified quest!”61 And further: “No, my friend, he who is not capable of relying upon the noble sentiment of one’s own dignity, he who will not be satisfied with the consoling praise of enlightened judges, though they be few in number—[such praise] is necessary because human weakness demands support— . . . such a person must reject their right to glory!”62 This understanding of fame can also be discerned in one of the most important of Zhukovsky’s texts from the early 1810s, his 1814 epistle to Viazemsky and Vasily Pushkin. In the prose section of this epistle, Zhukovsky postulates: “The voice of the few— this is the glory from which the heart and tranquility draw their sustenance! Here let Karamzin 191

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be our example” (PSS, I, 704). This juxtaposition of the chosen few and the opinions of the masses is also given poetic form: Подале от толпы судей! Пока мы не смешались с ней, Свобода друг нам благодатный; Мы независимо, в тиши Уютного уединенья, Богаты ясностью души, Поем для муз, для наслажденья, Для сердца верного друзей; . . . Внимай избранным судиям: Их приговор зерцало нам; Их одобренье нам награда, А порицание ограда От убивающия дар Надменной мысли совершенства, Хвала воспламеняет жар; Но нам не в ней искать блаженства– В труде . . . О благотворный труд, Души печальныя целитель И счастия животворитель! Что пред тобой ничтожный суд Толпы, в решениях пристрастной, И ветреной, и разногласной? (PSS, I, 346) [Away from the crowd of judges! / Before we mix with it, / Freedom is our blessed friend; / Independently, in the quiet / Of comfortable solitude, / We are rich with a clarity of the soul, / [We] sing for the muses, for pleasure, / For faithful hearts of our friends; / . . . Heed the chosen judges: / Their verdict is a mirror for us; / Their approval is our reward, / And their reproach is a barrier / against the arrogant thought’s perfection / Which destroys talent. / Praise inflames inspiration; / But we shall not search for bliss in praise, / But rather in labor . . . Oh, blissful labor, / The healer of sad souls and the enlivener of our happiness! / What is the worthless court of the crowd before you / The crowd that is biased in its decisions, / Both flighty and dissonant?]

In addition to Karamzin, Zhukovsky included among those “few” his friends and writers as well as his beloved nieces and other relatives. In February 1814 he proposes to Voeikov to create a fraction or a “closely knit circle” comprising his addressee, Viazemsky, Batiushkov, Uvarov, Pleshcheev, and himself, “under one banner: simplicity and good taste.”63 Two and a half years 192

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later he writes to Turgenev that the society which he has made for himself is very small in numbers: “you, Karamzin, Viazemsky, Bludov, and a few dear women— these are my judges, against whom [I can offer] no appeals.” Happiness is impossible without giving thought to their approval.64 The unaffected admiration of the few, Zhukovsky concludes in a poem dedicated to one of his female relatives, “is for you more pleasant than radiance before the crowd” (PSS, I, 121). Clearly, Zhukovsky’s vision of the relationship between “the few” and “the crowd” formed the basis of Arzamasian poetic understanding on the topic, and predetermined how the members of this society would receive the “courtly journal” of their leader. Perhaps the best example of the Arzamasian reaction to For the Few can be found in an epistle addressed to Zhukovsky by Alexander Pushkin, which was first published in Son of the Fatherland in 1821: . . . Ты прав, творишь ты для немногих, Не для подкупленных судей, Ревнивых милостью своей, Не для сбирателей убогих Чужих суждений и вестей, Но для друзей таланта строгих, Священной истины друзей. Не всякого полюбит счастье, Не все родились для венцов. Блажен, кто знает сладострастье Высоких мыслей и стихов! Кто наслаждение прекрасным В прекрасный получил удел И твой восторг уразумел Восторгом пламенным и ясным.65 [You’re right, you sing for just the few / And not for jealous connoissseurs / Or all that wretched, capering crew / Who love to parrot what they’ve heard, / But only for the loyal friends / Of sacred truth and talent’s ends. / Good fortune doesn’t shine on all, / Not all were born to wear a wreath; / But blest who hears the subtle call / Of lofty thought and poet’s speech! / Who took delight in beauty’s spell / When beauty hovered near / And understood the joy you felt / With joy as fierce and clear.]66

In other words, Pushkin, in his attempt to remove Zhukovsky’s poetry from its courtly milieu, relies upon his poetic tutor’s own canonical texts, which had emerged from the French literary tradition. But for Zhukovsky, the 193

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French literary tradition already belonged to the past. Instead of “pour le petit nombre” of the French Enlightenment, he was moving toward the romantic “für Wenige.” F ÜR W ENI G E

The semantics of the German title of Zhukovsky’s journal have to be considered within the historical and cultural context of the author and its main addressee, Princess Charlotte. For the latter, “Für Wenige” was most likely understood against the background of a series of “addressed” journals from the turn of the nineteenth century: für Damen; für egle Weiber und Madchen; für Freunde; für Schöne Geister; für Liebende; für Freunde der Poesie des Südens; für wenige Leser. To this list can be added the 1788 Magdeburg “pocket book” (Taschenbuchlein) of poems, entitled Für Wenige. Irina Semenko has argued that Zhukovsky’s title refers the reader to the German translation of the eighty-second line of Horace’s Tenth Satire: “Not desirous of the astonishment of the masses, but rather sustenance for the few.”67 However, in the German translations of the satire available to Zhukovsky at the time (Wieland, Voss) the expression “für Wenige”68 is absent. It is also absent from the Russian translations of Horace available at the time.69 In all likelihood, Zhukovsky had adopted the phrase from some kind of intermediary source, such as Johannes von Müller’s Universal History (Vierundzwanzig Bücher allgemeiner Geschichten). A favorite author of Zhukovsky and Alexander Turgenev, Müller used Horace’s phrase to describe the creative process of the ancient historian Thucydides, who departed sharply from the approach of his mentor, Herodotus: Thucydides neither attained during his life, nor desired to attain the fame of a popular historian; he wished rather to be studied thoroughly than to become of a sudden generally applauded, and wrote more for the few [für Wenige] than for the many. Therefore he merely hints at what others would have explained; he is often harsh and obscure but the trouble of penetrating his sentiments is well repaid.70

The figures of both of these historians of antiquity were quite pertinent at the time, as Russian society was witnessing the publication of Karamzin’s History. Batiushkov, drawing on the legend of Thucydides’s tears after hearing Herodotus read his History, compared the latter to Karamzin, and the former to himself: И я так плакал в восхищеньи, Когда скрижаль твою читал, 194

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И гений твой благословлял В глубоком, сладком умиленьи . . . Пускай талант—не мой удел! Но я для Муз дышал недаром, Любил прекрасное и с жаром Твой гений чувствовать умел.71 [And I cried so in admiration, / When at first I read your scroll, / And blessed your genius as a whole, / Out of profound, sweet adoration . . . / Let talent be— it’s not my destiny! / With good reason, I breathed for Muses’ inspiration, / Passionately loved pure splendor’s invocation / I knew how to feel your genius in me.]72

By drawing on Müller’s use of Horace, Zhukovsky was able to find a way to underline the difference between his personalized, suggestive poetry addressed to chosen readers, and Karamzin’s History which was addressed to the entire nation. To be sure, the general opposition of “for the few / for all” played an important role in eighteenth-century German culture. In the middle of the century the composer Georg-Philipp Teleman used this phrase to criticize what he saw as an obsolete, elitist art (“Wer vielen nutzen kan, / Thut besser / als wer nur für wenige was schreibet”).73 In turn Klopstock and poets of his school praised the familiar circles of “chosen poets”— those very same “friends of the beautiful” “chosen by fate,” in the words of Pushkin’s Lensky, who considered himself a fellow member, having been educated in “misty Germany.” The juxtaposition of writers “for the few” and “for all” was prominent in Goethe’s and Schiller’s writings on contemporary literature. In the 1780s, collections of poetry addressed to a “few” friends and sympathetic authors were fashionable. In a short poem addressed to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner (1785), Schiller summarizes the aesthetic principle behind such anthologies: Ihr waret nur für Wenige gesungen, Und Wenige verstanden euch. Heil euch! Ihr habt das schönste Band geschlungen, Mein schönster Lorbeer ist durch euch errungen— Die Ewigkeit vergesse euch.74

Finally, by the end of the century romantic writers in Jena and Berlin created an entire theory of art for the initiated few. Novalis, for example, begins his treatise Glauben und Liebe, oder der Konig und die Konigin, which was dedicated to the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Louise, with an aphorism about a secret language, known only to the initiated: 195

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If one intends to speak of something secret with a few others, when one is in a greater, diffused society, and the group is not close together, then one must discourse in an extraordinary language. This extraordinary language can be either in overtones, or after the image of a foreign language.75

It should be noted that this “extraordinary language” full of allusions and symbols was used by Novalis to describe the ideal court of Friedrich and Louise, in which the poet discerned the archetype of Germany’s Golden Age. The romantic cult of the Prussian court established by Novalis was later developed by the favorite authors of Louise and her daughter: Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Jean Paul, and others. This “secret language” known only to a few initiates was typical of the letters and albums of Princess Charlotte. One of its interpretive keys was Fouqué’s “Ritter-Roman” Der Zauberring, which Louise’s older children had read incessantly in 1813. This “special language” can not be limited to verbal expression alone: it also incorporates works which the participants in communication “for the few” had read in childhood, the dried flowers in an album which bore memories of beloved places, the motifs of their favorite musical compositions which were capable of bringing the past to life, and countless family relics, from treasured gifts to locks of hair. This tradition of “for the few” was literally brought by Princess Charlotte to Russia in the form of literary and drawing albums, family relics, a “prayer book” with her mother’s letters, and so on. Zhukovsky becomes the “translator” of this tradition into the language of Russian culture. The very choice of texts included in the journal demonstrates that Zhukovsky responded not only to the demands of good taste, but to the princess’s memory as well. For example, Goethe’s “Wer nie sein brot mit Tränen aß,” which appears in the first issue of the journal, was supposed to recall in the princess memories of her mother, who, according to von Berg’s biography, had written these lines in desperation in her diary after Prussia’s defeat at Jena. The concluding lines of Zhukovsky’s translation of Schiller’s “Berglied” were also supposed to remind Charlotte of her mother, as they illustrate the iconographic theme of transfiguration of the Prussian queen: Кругом облака золотые кипят, Эфира семейство младое; Ведут хороводы в стране голубой; Там не был, не будет свидетель земной. Царица сидит высоко и светло На вечно незыблемом троне; Чудесной красой обвивает чело И блещет в алмазной короне;

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Напрасно там солнцу сиять и гореть: Ее золотит, но не может согреть. (PSS, II, 88)76 [The golden clouds are teeming around, / The youthful airy family; / They dance in circles in that golden land, / Where no earthly witness will ever be. / The Tsarina sits above and in the light / On the ever unshakable throne; / Her magic beauty winds her brow / And she sparkles in her diamond crown; / The sun shines and burns for no avail there: / It irradiates her, but is unable to warm her.]

It remains to be added that Zhukovsky probably learned of the tradition of “courtly” journals intended for a small readership (Privatdruck) from his royal pupil.77 Here Hahn’s brochure relating Louise’s final hours before death plays an important role. The brochure opens with a paraphrase of a text from the Gospels in Luther’s translation: “Nur wenigen Auserwählen ist dieses Andenke an Luisen bestimmt”—“Denn viele sind berufen, aber wenige sind auserwählt” (“For many are called, but few are chosen”; Matthew 22:14).78 As we know, Zhukovsky had first been introduced to Hahn’s brochure in December 1817, when he was working on For the Few. The religious connotation contained in the author’s notion of “the few” in relation to Louise’s passing was vitally important for Zhukovsky’s poetic hermeneutics. “The few” addressees of his journal were not only kindred souls. They were also an aesthetic “family of the chosen,” which had gathered together around the beautiful princess. This was its own kind of religious and spiritual (as well as Prussian and Russian) order, sealed by the memory of the grand duchess’s glorious, martyred mother. Zhukovsky’s journal was short-lived. The sixth, the June issue, which included Schiller’s prologue from Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, was the final one. Clearly, this union of the few, on which he had been counting, did not come to pass. Neither Viazemsky, nor Pushkin, nor Batiushkov accepted the poet’s invitation to the “table” of the Russo-Prussian court. His Dorpat relatives, while not relinquishing the desire to return the poet to the family, experienced something akin to jealousy in relations to Zhukovsky’s position at court (the princess, writes Masha, is more interesting for you than we are).79 Even in “le petit cour” of Alexandra Feodorovna, the poet did not feel himself to be completely at home. In May 1818 Zhukovsky had been shown— with his very own words turned against him!— the line between himself and “the few.” On the occasion of Alexander Nikolaevich’s christening, Grand Duke Nikolai received a “wonderful letter” from Emperor Alexander I. Zhukovsky asked to read it. Nikolai responded that “it was not for everyone.” Perovsky, Nikolai’s adjutant and Zhukovsky’s friend, playfully suggested that it was at least a letter for the few. Nikolai “looked at Zhukovsky, smiled, and changed the subject.”80 197

Chapter Nine

The Flower of the Oath How glorious our Lord is in Zion The tongue can not express. He’s great in heavens on the throne, In blades of grass on earth he’s great. —Mikhail Kheraskov

If only you knew the rubbish From which poems grow, not knowing shame, Like a yellow dandelion by the fence, Like burdock or goosefoot. —Anna Akhmatova

I N T H E P R E S E N T C H A P T E R , I will discuss how Zhukovsky’s innovative poetics of emotional communion actually work. The testing ground for my analysis will be one of the most enigmatic texts in his entire literary career. In the summer of 1819, the poet wrote in the grand duchess’s album (which included her favorite works) a poem in octaves with the German title “Ländlergrass” (sic!) and indicated the place and date of composition: Pavlovsk (that is, the residence of the grand duke’s court), July 1, 1819 (that is, the birthday and wedding day of Alexandra Feodorovna, according to the Julian calendar). The autograph of the poem was preceded in the album by his strophe- by-strophe prose translation into German.1 Zhukovsky first published the poem as “Flower” (“Tsvetok”) in the fifth issue of The Contemporary for 1837, and then again three years later in the journal The Kievan (Kievlianin) as “Flower of the Oath” (“Tsvet zaveta”). This “old, as yet unknown poetic sin,” he wrote to the editor of the journal, could not be “clearly understood by readers,” for the verses were “written on request, on an assigned topic, and would be of particular interest were it possible to give them a proper commentary” (cited in PSS, II, 542). The poet, however, did not think it possible to explain the poem’s meaning to a profane readership. For a long time this “secret” poem was known literally to very few: the grand duchess and her circle, Zhukovsky’s relatives in Dorpat and Dolbino, 198

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and several of his friends. On July 30, 1819, Alexander Turgenev sent the poem, accompanied by a brief commentary, to Prince Viazemsky. The poem, he wrote, had been composed at the request of the grand duchess on the topic of “Ländler-Gras, German for ‘flower of the oath.’” In this “Flower,” remembrance of the past is combined with “the mysteriousness of the future.” It often signifies some sort of epoch or moment in life, for instance, a meeting or a parting: “Its meaning [znamenovanie] is easier to comprehend than to explain. But to us, Germans, all the mysticism of sensitivity [mistitsizm chuvstvitel’nosti] is comprehensible.”2 The poem-remembrance, written from the perspective of the grand duchess, struck Viazemsky: To feel keenly, to give such loyalty to the language of the soul when you speak on behalf of another soul (one born to the crown [porfirorodnuiu], no less)—I cannot comprehend this! Do you know what the surest sign of Zhukovsky’s magic is? The ability with which he transports himself, that is, poetry, to all inaccessible places. For him the court is transformed into a sacred place, before him everything filthy is purified. He speaks to his anointed audience: “Very well, I will speak to you, but in my own way [po-svoemu],” and the anointed heed him.3

In 1844 Zhukovsky’s friend Pyotr Pletnev described in further detail the history of the poem’s composition in a letter to Yakov Grot: Zhukovsky’s verses on the Flower, the empress’s favorite, which back in Berlin she bequeathed to her sisters as a pledge of their mutual remembrance. In 1819, she found such a flower here, and Zhukovsky used the opportunity to develop the idea in verse. A marvelous thing [chudnaia prelest’]!4

In turn, Zhukovsky’s niece, Avdotia Elagina, told the bibliographer Efremov that the grand duchess arranged with her sister to send one another the first flowers of spring which each of them would see.5 Finally, in 1904, Veselovsky published a short article in which he fleshed out the history of the poem’s creation. In the poet’s album, begun in Berlin on December 16 (28), 1820, Veselovsky discovered Alexandra Feodorovna’s letter, dated July 22, 1819, in which the history of “Ländler-gras custom” was described. Two dried branches of the plant were stuck to the letter. The grand duchess’s letter is cited in full: The grass which we loved we call Ländlergras because when I was giving it out to my female friends, it was a marvelous evening in a charming area, a charming time, and meanwhile the tender sounds of Ländler already reminded us of past days, albeit less happy than the current moment. The grass

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was supposed to be a memento of just one evening, but since then thousands of other memories have joined it. The war parted us sisters and brothers, and then, from the battlefields soaked with blood, stems flew to my sisters, and they sent their distant brothers the flowers of the country. When at last we were together again, we loved to pick this grass, and in spring we would start to become anxious: who of us would be the first to see the flower in blossom, about which each joyfully informed the other. Not the war, but other life circumstances plucked a few flowers from our merry circle of brothers, sisters, and friends from youth, but, faithful to old love, each of us would seek in his own corner the quivering blade of grass in order to send it to a distant friend. Thus even now it carries the silent greeting of love from north to south, from south to north, and speaks without words what cannot be expressed in words (italics added).6 Written in Krasnoe Selo, six years since the initiation of the Ländlergras custom, two years since I left my country. June 22, 1819.7

Zhukovsky, Veselovsky wittily concluded, “glanced not only into another soul, but also at the Grand Duchess’s letter.” Indeed, his “Flower” represents an extensive poetic paraphrase of several lines from Alexandra Feodorovna’s letter (p. 499). Interpretations of this enigmatic poem have tended in two directions. One, hailing from Viazemsky, treats it as an example of the poet’s court romanticism, giving language to a “soul born to the crown.” The other, going back to Seidlitz’s observation, views the poem as the poet’s remembrance of his former life in Muratovo (see chapter 4). These interpretations, as we shall try to demonstrate, not only do not contradict one another, but also supplement one another. The remembrances of “others” turn out to be kindred to the poet’s own, and in this way a deep connection is established between the Prussian princess, her Russian tutor, and his favorite relatives. TH E CHA R M I NG A R EA

From the grand duchess’s note it is easy to establish the beginning of the Hohenzollern family custom: the summer of 1813. This period occupies a special place in Prussia’s history: the beginning of the victorious war of liberation from Napoleon. In June 1813, a brief armistice was announced, during which time the Prussian court stayed in Silesia, the king in Landeck, and his children in the neighboring castle Kunzendorf [Kunzendorf an der Biele, today Trzebieszowice], which belonged to Commander Blücher.8 On July 13 (1), 1813, Princess Charlotte turned fifteen, and a festival was organized at Kunzendorf in honor of her birthday, which she remembered to the end of her life. Celebrations in remembrance of the princess’s stay at 200

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Kunzendorf were organized in 1816 (Charlotte’s last birthday in her paternal home)9 and in 1829, and the most precious gifts for Charlotte were the musical works and souvenirs from Silesia.10 In Charlotte’s album, begun in Kunzendorf on July 19, 1813, there are several drawings of this castle and the park surrounding it, and on three pages of the album, remains of flowers from Kunzendorf are preserved with the inscription, “the year 1813.”11 According to Zhukovsky, the drawing of Kunzendorf hung in the princess’s room in the Kavalierhaus in Sans Souci: “a dear, isolated place, similar in its attractiveness to her pure soul.”12 The grand duchess, one has to suppose, told her teacher (Zhukovsky) about the “secret” meaning of this place that was “sacred” to her. On the evening of October 10, 1818, Alexandra Feodorovna wrote in her diary about the melancholy memories that came flooding back to her of her life in Kunzendorf: I have just received some lines from Aunt Luise, Fritz, Wilhelm, and Radziwill from Kunzendorf; upon glancing at them, my heart heaved with wistful melancholy, with a surge of memories of those blessed creatures. Ah, time that shall never return! Ever is it so inexpressibly dear to my soul, how the love stands there before me, and so much has since happened, I have found such pleasure in it, ah, and that shall remain for all eternity. Fifteen years and twenty years is a difference. Ah, Kunzendorf, Kunzendorf, unforgettable, most beloved, dearest and most fair Kunzendorf!13

The summer of 1813 turned out to be a milestone not only in the history of Prussia, but also in the fate of the princess herself. In Landeck she was first introduced to Russian emperor Alexander, who found her very similar to her mother, invited her to waltz, and “selected” her (in secret, at this time) as a wife for his brother Nikolai. “A secret presentiment told us,” wrote Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, who was present at the ball, “that the uniting of the reigning houses of Russia and Prussia would strengthen the ties connecting the two great powers at that time.”14 On August 12, 1813, the armistice with Napoleon ended. On this day, the eve of his departure to the army in the field, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm answered Charlotte’s “heavenly letter” regarding Kunzendorf: O Lord! That heavenly Kunzendorff [das Himmlische Kunzendorff ]! This, Memel, and Sans-Souci, are, for me, on the same plane of divinity. When I think of the former, even if it’s only been scarcely two weeks since I’ve left, it strikes me like a short blessed dream.15

Here the crown prince reported to his sister on the Russian military orchestra’s performance of their favorite “evening song” (Abendlied) and another 201

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piece, die Seeligen, which evoked for him memories of the two happy days spent in Kunzendorf: Yesterday evening, after the bugle call [dem Zapfenstreich] at Neudorff, when our beloved evening song was played, I went into the garden, stood in front of your former door on the small hill, gazed into the brightly shining moon, and thought of you, the past and the future. Can you imagine that quite precisely? It was in that place where we so often were for two happy days, dancing and joking. I could hear your and my beloved tones solemnly from afar, and looked into the sweet face of Lady Lover’s Consolation [Frau Minnetrost]. I play the Evening Song and the Blessed [das Abendlied und die Seeligen] daily; then I think about the days gone by, and frequently weep.16

In a subsequent letter to her “werthester Freund und holder Bruder,” Charlotte mentions this same “evening song” along with a certain Ländler.17 In 1816, the Silesian composer Bogislav von Gloger incorporated die Abendlied into his musical composition dedicated to Princess Charlotte’s eighteenth birthday, “Erinnerung an Kunzendorff.”18 At the end of this Singspiel, the heroes and heroines of the performance surrounded the princess and sang in chorus to the melody of the Evening Song: Du Herr! nimmt wohlgesällig an der treuen Herzen kindlich Flehn; drum lasse gnadig auch geschehn die Bitte die wir heut’ gethan, und gieb der Theuren deinen Seegen, und leite sie auf deinen Wegen.19

In all likelihood, this Evening Song, which left an indelible mark in the princess’s memory, is the lofty “evening prayer” (Gebeth) set to music by the Russian composer Dmitry Bortniansky on Mikhail Kheraskov’s text “Kol’ slaven nash gospod’ v Sione” (“How Glorious Our Lord Is in Zion”). According to legend, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III was deeply moved by the Russian hymn, which he had heard in 1813 in Silesian Breslau, where during the armistice Emperor Alexander’s headquarters were located. The king introduced the music to Prussian military ritual by a special decree of August 10, 1813.20 This harmonious choral music effectively conveyed the deep religious (as well as faithful ally’s) sentiments of the Prussian royal family at the dawn of the Wars of Liberation. As for the tender Ländler, which gave the name to the young Hohenzollerns’ custom, the score for this piece can be found in a collection of the grand duchess’s documents, kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federa202

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tion in Moscow. The tune is written in the hand of the princess on a single sheet of paper along with a list of Russian words and three sketches of Kunzendorf.21 In 1814 Bogislav von Gloger transformed this simple tune into a waltz, which the princess would dance with her future husband Grand Prince Nicholas in 1815, and which would eventually become an integral part of the festive ritual celebrating Alexandra Feodorovna’s birthday and wedding on July 1 (Julian calendar). Thus, the empress’s daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, recalled that on the day of her parents’ silver wedding anniversary in 1842, “maman” woke up to the sounds of the trumpeters of the Cavalier-Guard regiment playing the Kunzendorf Ländler she had loved since her youth.22 In Zhukovsky’s poem, dedicated to the “blade of field grass,” the grand duchess’s memory of the happy Ländler-Waltzer that she had heard in Kunzendorf is alluded to in the sixth stanza: И к нам тогда, как Гений прилетало За песнею веселой старины Прекрасное . . . [And then, like a Genius, Beauty flew in to us, / Following the song of the joyful past . . .]

I suggest that it is in this musical context that the metrical form of Zhukovsky’s “Flower of the Oath” obtains an additional symbolic meaning. The “tripled consonance” (Pushkin’s expression) of the ottava rima (abababcc) might have been associated by the Russian poet with the two musical origins of the Hohenzollerns’ custom— the solemn Abendlied by the Russian composer Bortniansky—“a sweet and elegant, almost waltz-like, three-beat song,”23— and the Silesian Ländler, or slow waltz, which Princess Charlotte had heard in Kunzendorf and which served as the overture to her birthday celebrations since 1816. As has been noted by a number of scholars, one of the major sources for Zhukovsky’s “Flower of the Oath” was Goethe’s “Zueignung” (“Dedication”) to Faust, written in octaves, which the Russian poet had translated in the summer of 1817 and used as a prologue to his tale in two ballads, Twelve Sleeping Maidens.24 To be sure, in 1817–19, that is, the period of his pedagogical enchantment with the grand duchess, Zhukovsky was virtually fascinated by the octave. Besides “The Flower of the Oath” and the “Prologue” to his tale about the sleeping virgins, he employed ottava rima in a solemn elegy dedicated to the death of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna (1819), as well as his translation of Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, and an unfinished translation of another “Zueignung” by Goethe, “Der Morgen kam . . .” (the 203

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one which, as we recall, Andrei Turgenev began to translate in his diary in 1801).25 In his later years, Zhukovsky would return to the octave in the final monologue of the dying poet Camoens, the protagonist of his lyrical “dramatic poem” of 1839.26 It is remarkable that in Zhukovsky’s version of Halm’s drama, the great Portuguese poet pronounces his farewell, mystical monologue in octaves, that is, the very metrical form of his glorious Os Lusíadas!27 Clearly, the origins of Zhukovsky’s interest in this metrical form were German, rather than Italian or Portuguese.28 It was Goethe who established his adaptation of the Italian octave, with the caesura after the fourth syllable and alternation of feminine and masculine rhymes in the sestet— precisely the model Zhukovsky follows in his verses. In Germany ottava rima was mainly used in lyric and elegiac moods (unlike, for example, English poetry where it was associated mainly with a mock epic—Byron’s Don Juan; also consider Pushkin’s Byronic joke, Little House in Kolomna).29 Finally, the stanza was actively used by German poets of the 1810s for “mourning purposes.” A number of solemn elegies, written in octaves, were dedicated to the deaths of Queen Louise and Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, Queen of Württemberg. These poems traditionally included, besides patriotic sentiments, exalted descriptions of ascension and afterlife existence of the most august departed, as well as visions of the Virgin and celestial chorus.30 I contend that octave, the stanza of “The Flower,” was perceived by Zhukovsky not only as an elegiac form, but rather as a kind of royal, visionary stanza (or, using a musical simile, a choral, requiem form), an ideal medium for the mystical themes and allegorical imagery, drawn by the Russian poet from the German literary arsenal, native to his secret addressee. TH E CHA R M I NG T I M E

Let us return to the grand duchess’s letter about the “Ländlergras custom.” “War,” she recalled, “parted us sisters and brothers, and then, from the battlefields soaked with blood, stems flew to my sisters, and they sent their distant brothers the flowers of the country.” This remembrance refers to the period of the Prussian army’s campaign in the summer of 1813. On June 12, 1815, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm sent his sister dried flowers and plants from the bloody battlefields: Dearest Charlotte, I am sending you several blades of grass and the like which I found on the battlefields around Leipzig and Lützen . . . I picked these 3 roses, should you still be able to recognize them as such near Möckern, not far from where Uncle Charles was injured from a wild rose, even there I picked some grass; then I send this little bundle of grass which I also

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yesterday picked where the three monarchs stood on the 18th; I was as happy as a child about this find. The little red one (I believe a clover) blossom I picked even there as well in a furrow, which I had already noticed on the day of the battle which was created either by Alex’s foot or much more likely a cannonball which killed Anstetten’s horse near us and shattered the leg of his Cossack.31

The Ländlergras custom was preserved in the Hohenzollern and Romanov families up until the 1880s. In 1828, during the war with Turkey, the ten-year-old heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, sent his mother in Odessa, closer to the theater of war, the first “field flower.” Nearly sixty years later, Alexandra Feodorovna’s brother, the aged Emperor Wilhelm I (who was very fond of flowers), sent dried “Ländler-Gras” to his sister Alexandrine.32 The longevity of this custom is affirmed even by the fact that, during the second half of the century, the Royal Berlin Porcelain Manufactory (Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur) released a set collection in which I was able to discover (and acquire) a porcelain plate depicting a bouquet of Ländlergras with the text set off around the “Prussian blue” edge: “Es trägt den stillen Liebesgruß von Süd nach Nord und von Nord nach Süd und sagt ohne Wort was Worte nicht sagen könnten.” It was precisely these words that concluded the grand duchess’s letter of June 22, 1819 to Zhukovsky! In “Flower of the Oath,” the enchanted tutor developed them as a symbolic theme of speaking silence, akin to the one presented in another poem of 1819, “The Ineffable”:33 А ты, наш цвет, питомец скромный луга, Симвóл любви и жизни молодой, От севера, от запада, от юга, Летай к друзьям желанною молвой; Будь голосом, приветствующим друга; Посол души, внимаемый душой, О верный цвет, без слов беседуй с нами О том, чего не выразить словами. [And you, our flower, humble ward of the meadow, / Symbol of love and young life, / From the North, West and South, / Fly to friends, a cherished murmur; / Be a voice of greeting to a friend; / Ambassador of one soul, grasped by another, / Oh faithful flower, speak wordlessly to us / About all that cannot be expressed in words.]

But what was the plant that, in family legend, was called by the allegorical name, Ländlergras? To the best of my knowledge, in German tradi205

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tion, there is no specific “flower of the oath” (Blumen der Vermächtnisses; Blume des Gelöbnisses, or Vermächtnis). Veselovsky sidesteps the question. For him, it is simply a “flower, a grass with which the Grand Duchess’s girlhood memories were linked.” Zhukovsky’s friend, and author of his German biography, Carl Seidlitz, suggests that it was “Vergiss mein nicht”: forget- menot. A well-informed Russian literary historian, Galakhov, also believed that “flower of the oath” referred to a “field forget-me-not” which the poet transformed into a symbol of remembrance,34 related to Novalis’s blue flower (die blaue Blume). There are other candidates for “flower of the oath,” including cornflowers which played a special role in in Hohenzollern family myth: they were the favorite flowers of Queen Louise and her daughter Charlotte.35 The cornflower (“das Blumchen ew’ger Liebestreue”) was sung by Theodor Körner in his verses, written in octaves, “Das Wunderblümchen,” which some scholars consider a possible source of “Flower of the Oath.”36 Meanwhile, the grand duchess herself in her note to Zhukovsky speaks of a simple “grass,” a “trembling blade of grass” (das zitternde Gräschen). Zhukovsky, too, calls the secret flower a “blade of field grass” (bylinka) in his poem. As already mentioned, dried stems of Ländlergras were preserved in the poet’s album which drew Veselovsky’s attention; their current pitiful state, however, does not permit us to identify the plant which became the object of Zhukovsky’s praise. Fortunately, the elegant drawing of Ländlergras on the porcelain plate from the Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin set solves the enigma of “flower of the oath.” It is Zittergras (Briza; in English, quaking grass or totter-grass), known in Russia as triasunka or kukushkiny slezki, a simple grass that grows in Prussia, Silesia, and European Russia in meadow shrubs. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, the plant was also known as Liebesgras (the flower of love). The plate, according to an expert, is a so-called Lösungsteller, or a present of an intimate character, “decorated in an individual manner to express a private, quite often also a secret, message.” The expert believes that it was dedicated to a beloved person and that its decoration is typical of the second half of the nineteenth century.37 It is likely that it is one of the numerous souvenirs of the Hohenzollern-Romanov intimate family circle.38 The word below the plant is “Ländergras,” while the text on the bandlet reads “Es trägt den stillen Liebesgruß von Süd nach Nord und von Nord nach Süd und sagt ohne Wort was Worte nicht sagen könnten”— a slightly changed last sentence from the grand duchess’s letter in Zhukovsky’s album, which served, as we know, as the motto for his “Flower of the Oath.” This sacramental line helps us trace an elegant esoteric play of words in the duchess’s German letter to Zhukovsky: “Liebesgras”—“Liebesgruss” (a greeting of

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love)—“Landlesgruss” (greetings from [different] lands or places)— and finally, coupled with the musical theme— the “Ländlergras.”39 It seems that Zhukovsky perceived the pun and was able to convey it in his poem addressed to “the Few”: В твоих листах вся жизнь минувших лет; В них милое цветет воспоминанье; С них веет мне давнишнего привет . . . etc.40 [All life of bygone years is in your leaves; / A dear memory blooms in them; / A greeting from the past wafts to me from them . . .]

The refined cult of simplicity which distinguished the Prussian royal family 41 became one of the most important elements of the Russian poet’s court romanticism. In 1821, after he had made the acquaintance of Princess Charlotte’s family (see next chapter), Zhukovsky wrote in his diary: In this family, the past is like a sanctuary! But what a past! It is kind, domestic, illuminated by quiet pleasures of the heart! Altogether kind! Here a withered flower means more than all rich pearls, although there is neither the slightest effeminacy of feeling nor romanticism. (PSS, XIII, 165; italics added)

As he visited Berlin in the fall of 1820 for the first time, the poet glued a dried leaf of Liebesgras from Sans Souci in the album which the grand duchess had presented him earlier.42 Now he himself was a participant and part of the Hohenzollern family ritual. TH E FA I T HF U L O NE

The “Flower of the Oath” gave poetic language and form to the grand duchess’s romantic memories of the “golden age” of her youth. The thesis that in this poem Zhukovsky relies exclusively on allegories and symbols, and that the “past” (minuvshee) for him is only a “world populated by ‘images without faces,’”43 seems to me completely incorrect. In fact, in his own idealized depiction of the past, the poet ends up being surprisingly specific: he portrays the summer of 1813; the respite from the war and the anticipation of future victory and eternal peace; “heavenly Kunzendorf,” where the young members of the family had gathered to celebrate the princess’s birthday; the evening music, the frolic country dance, and the distant mountains. Only the addressee of his poem, the guardian of the royal family legend, could have sensed and appreciated this attention to detail:

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О сладкий час! о вечер незабвенный! Как божий рай, цвела там сторона; Безоблачен был запад озаренный, И свежая на землю тишина, Как ясное предчувствие, сходила; Природа вся с душою говорила. И к нам тогда, как Гений, прилетало За песнею веселой старины Прекрасное, что некогда бывало Товарищем младенческой весны; Отжившее нам снова оживало; Минувших лет семьей окружены, Все лучшее мы зрели настоящим; И время нам казалось нелетящим. (PSS, II, 134) [Oh, sweet hour! Oh, unforgettable evening!  / Like a divine paradise, that land was in bloom; / The glowing West was cloudless, / And a fresh quiet descended upon the earth, Like a lucid premonition;  / All Nature conversed with the soul.  / And then, like a Genius, Beauty flew in to us,  / Following the song of the joyful past— / Beauty, that had once been / The comrade of youthful spring; / And all that was extinguished came to life once more; / Surrounded by the family of bygone years, / We saw everything most precious to us as if it were present / And Time itself seemed to halt its flight.]

Further on, Zhukovsky begins to freely combine and, most importantly, interpret his pupil’s remembrances, arranging the latter into a mythologized sujet of her life. In the next stanza, he represents the appearance of some kind of phantom, invisibly connected to the princess’s family: И Верная была незримо с нами . . . Сии окрест волшебные места, Сей тихий блеск заката за горами, Сия небес вечерних чистота, Сей мир души, согласный с небесами, Со всем была, как таинство, слита Ея душа присутствием священным, Невидимым, но сердцу откровенным. И нас Ея любовь благословляла; И ободрял на благо тихий глас . . . Друзья, тогда Судьба еще молчала О жребиях, назначенных для нас;

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Неизбранны, на дне ея фиала Они еще таились в оный час; Играли мы на тайном праге света . . . Тогда был дан вам мною цвет завета. (PSS, XIII, 134) [And the Faithful One was with us, invisibly . . . / These magical places around us, / This quiet radiance of the sunset beyond the mountains, / This purity of the evening sky, / This spiritual world, in accord with the heavens— / With all of this, like the holy mystery, her soul / Was merged, by virtue of a divine presence, / Unseen, yet revealed to the heart. / And Her love blessed us; / And her quiet voice urged us to the Good . . . / Friends, Fate was as yet still silent / About the lots assigned to us; / Not yet cast, in the depths of her chalice / They still lay hidden in that hour; / We were playing at the world’s mysterious threshold . . . / It was then I gave Flower of the Oath to you.]

The “Faithful One” (Vernaia— an adnoun) represents a grammatical Germanism that creates an atmosphere of mysteriousness. Scholars consider this word either a pure abstraction, such as fame or virtue in neoclassicist and sentimentalist poetry, or an obscure “image without a face” that is in no way identified, or else a symbol of the Mother of God or the eternal feminine. Meanwhile, the grand duchess, from whose perspective the poetic narration in “Flower of the Oath” proceeds, would have read this image unambiguously. The poet depicts here a vision of her mother and guardian angel, Queen Louise, whose mystical apotheosis was a commonplace of poetic and visual Luisenkult.44 As we have already stated, the motif of Louise’s constant presence in the emotional and religious life of the grand duchess stood at the center of the Russian romantic myth of her daughter that Zhukovsky created. The stanzas cited above represent a variation on the theme of the queen-martyr’s prophecy, who bequeathed to her children “hopes and the fulfillment of their beautiful dreams” (as we recall, throughout the 1800s and 1810s, Zhukovsky himself constantly prophesied in this spirit to his nieces). In the next two octaves, influenced by Goethe’s “Dedication” to Faust,45 the poet refers the “initiated” reader to the events which followed the end of the war and, first and foremost, to the grand duchess’s Russian mission: И где же вы?.. Разрознен круг наш тесный; Разлучена веселая семья; Из области младенчества прелестной Разведены мы в розные края . . . Но розно ль мы? Повсюду в поднебесной, О верные, далекие друзья,

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Прекрасная всех благ земных примета, Для нас цветет наш милый цвет завета. Из северной, любовию избранной И Промыслом указанной страны, К вам ныне шлю мой дар обетованный; Да скажет он друзьям моей весны, Что выпал мне на часть удел желанный: Что младости мечты совершены; Что не вотще доверенность к надежде И что Теперь пленительно, как Прежде. (PSS, XIII, 134–35) [And where are you? . . . Our intimate circle is scattered; / Our cheerful family sundered; / From the enchanting country of childhood / We are cast apart to different lands . . . / But are we truly separated? / Everywhere in this sublunar realm, / Oh faithful, faraway friends, / This beautiful sign of all earthly blessings, / Our dear Flower of the Oath blooms for us. / From a northern land, chosen by love / And revealed by Providence, / I send you now my promised gift; / Let it impart to the friends of my springtime, / That a cherished fate has befallen me / That the dreams of youth are realized; / That my faith in hope was not in vain / And that the Present is as enchanting as the Past.]

As we see, in the poet’s concept, “the ritual of shared remembrance”46 proves to be inseparably linked to the theme of the ideal family, the members of which are united by the invisible bonds of blood and common past. Moreover, the Ländlergras picked by a “kindred hand” is a material sign of spiritual unity, tying together not only brothers and sisters but also historical eras. The “joyful family” is directed from the past toward the future, this theme being introduced in the next three stanzas of the poem: Да скажет он, что в наш союз прекрасный Еще один товарищ приведен . . . На путь земной из люльки безопасной Нам подает младую руку он; Его лицо невинностию ясно, И жизнь над ним как легкий веет сон; Беспечному предав его веселью, Судьба молчит над тихой колыбелью. Но сладостным предчувствием теснится На сердце мне грядущего мечта: Младенчества веселый сон промчится,

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Разоблачат житейское лета, Огнем души сей взор воспламенится И мужески созреет красота; Дойдут к нему возвышенные вести О праотцах, о доблести, о чести . . .47 О! да поймет он их знаменованье, И жизнь его да будет им верна! Да перейдет, как чистое преданье Прекрасных дел, в другие времена! Что б ни было судьбы обетованье, Лишь благом будь она освящена!.. Вы ж, милые, товарища примите И путь его земной благословите. (PSS, XIII, 135) [Let it tell you that into our beautiful union  / A new comrade has been brought . . . / From the cradle of safety onto this earthly path / He proffers his youthful hand; / His face is lucid in innocence; / Life soars above him like a sweet dream; / Devoting him to carefree good cheer. / Destiny is silent over his quiet cot.  / But, with a sweet premonition, / My heart is overwhelmed by a dream of his future: / The joyful dream of childhood will fly past, / The years of maturity will expose life’s essence, / This gaze will be set aflame by the soul’s fire / And manly beauty will ripen; / Sublime tidings will reach him / With tales of his forefathers, of valor, and of honor . . . / Oh, let him comprehend their prophetic meaning, / And let his life be true to them! / Let it pass, like a pure legend / Of beautiful deeds, into a new era! / No matter what fate is granted to him / Let it be sanctified by Virtue! . . / And you, my dear ones, accept this new comrade / And bless his earthly path.]

This prophecy pertaining to the glorious future of the Russian son (the future Emperor Alexander II), which Zhukovsky has the German mother speak in Russian, completes the poem’s emotional historico- cultural sujet. The romantic custom of the Prussian royal family transforms into a new— Russian— historical myth.

A NEW UTOPIA

Zhukovsky gradually acquainted his circle of “initiated” readers with “Ländlergras.” As we know, Alexander Turgenev forwarded the poem to Viazemsky. The eighteen-year-old maid of honor Sofia Samoilova— the object of

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the poet’s brief, platonic infatuation— becomes yet another “chosen” reader. Female relatives in Dorpat received the poem directly from the poet. The autograph of the poem, copied by Maria Protasova-Moier, has been preserved. Although the piece is written for a certain occasion, notes a nineteenthcentury historian of literature, its content closely concerned the author: “He himself, in the far north, felt exactly what he says from the point of view of the person for whom the poem was composed.”48 Indeed, the grand duchess’s “theme” fell on fertile ground: What belonged to another was transformed into his own; what lay opposite produced an echo; the personal element intruded into . . . poems by request, if they gave cause to express similar feelings, expectations, hopes. . . . and his circle is broken, “the joyful family is parted”; for him the flower acquires the meaning of a symbol. (Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 396)

Tatiana Fraiman, accordingly, interprets the poem as the poet’s monologue about his own past, addressed to his family and friends.49 Prince Viazemsky very accurately characterized Zhukovsky’s poetic gift as the ability to lend his own language to the feelings and thoughts of others. But for the prince, who tended toward political opposition, Zhukovsky’s court romanticism was at best a naive idealization of the life of the court, far removed from poetry. The grand duchess’s request, in his interpretation of the poem, was only a pretext or stimulus for composing the marvelous poetic work. Meanwhile, the poet’s own view of the theme, proposed to him by his pupil, was far from dispassionate. With the aid of a poetic reincarnation as a German “soul,” “born to the crown,” Zhukovsky inscribed his poetry into German romantic tradition, and his own biography and the family legend into the ideal family of his august pupil. In his interpretation, the Prussian princess’s memories proved a “lofty standard” even for his personal experience of the past. Zhukovsky’s ruined family utopia, discussed in the second part of this book, is gradually replaced, conceptually, by a new utopia expressing his striving to become— with the aid of poetry— a part of the German-Russian august family, the beautiful princess’s spiritual brother: “And you, my dear ones, accept this new comrade / And bless his earthly path” (PSS, XIII, 135). All in all, elaborating on Charlotte’s sacramental dream of the “heavenly Kunzendorf,” Zhukovsky constructs his vision of beautiful, transcendental, and magic “royal time.” It becomes a kind of sublime duration in which different temporal continuums— from the bygone years of ordeal to the heroic past to the glorious future— different geographical places— from Silesia to Potsdam to Moscow— and different personal memories are en212

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capsulated into and evolve around a single image of the simple and humble blade of trembling grass, plucked by the sisterly hand and installed into the sacred family album. It is in this symbolic context that the date of the poem’s composition (July 1) reveals its esoteric meaning: the “Flower” itself turns into a birthday gift, memento, a poetic manifestation of the author’s oath of fealty to his new feminine ideal.

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Chapter Ten

Under the Constellation of the Crown The princess fancies the poet, and with a feeling of sadness she approaches that place, i.e., Cachemire, where she is supposed to meet her fiancé; but, in actual fact, it turns out that the fiancé and the poet are the same person. —Zhukovsky to Turgenev, on the court staging of Lalla Rookh, 1821

In Berlin, there were moments of happiness. —Zhukovsky’s Diary, 1821 (PSS, XIII, 169)

T O WA R D T H E E N D of the 1810s, the image of the grand duchess—“not of the august one, but of the loving daughter and sister, of the happy wife and mother”— proves to be at the center of Zhukovsky’s poetic worldview. Around this image “his family ideal begins to be constructed again, this time completely separate from personal biography and freely elevated to a high degree of aesthetic and religious abstraction.”1 Each meaningful event, happy or sad, in the grand duchess’s life becomes the pretext for Zhukovsky’s poetic representation. In April 1818 he celebrates the birth of Alexandra’s first son; in August 1819 he describes the first communion of her daughter; 2 in June 1820 he laments the death of another child. In the fall of 1820, doctors advised the grand duchess to go to the spas in southern Germany to recover her health. Along the way, she was supposed to stop in Berlin. This was Alexandra Feodorovna’s first journey home since her marriage. Zhukovsky was part of her suite: this was his first trip abroad. “I am now in Dorpat and am departing for Berlin,” he wrote to Elagina in October and asked her to “bless him with the hand of a friend”: At last, some of my dreams come true. I will see the beautiful countries to which my imagination has sometimes run . . . the whole journey enlivens and expands the soul. I hope that it will also rouse my poetry which has long been asleep.3

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The poet did not expect much from German court life (“there is no poetry here”), but he was glad that he would see famous theaters, both Schiller’s and Goethe’s tragedies, and would hear the best music: “this is poetry!”4 Meanwhile, it was precisely the court life of the Prussian capital more than anything that enchanted the poet. At the beginning of the 1820s, Berlin was the center of German romanticism, and the court of King Friedrich Wilhelm III was a romantic court known for its aestheticizing of medieval chivalry and various court spectacles representing the life of the royal family in the form of a never-ending, magical fairy tale.5 At the center of Berlin cultural life of the 1810s was the theater, the organizer and “soul” of which was the famous stage director, playwright, and actor A. W. Iffland, “supremo of the largest theatrical empire in Germany.”6 In the mid-1810s, he was replaced in this post by Count Carl von Brühl, whom Zhukovsky met soon after his arrival in Berlin. The status of a courtier not only introduced the poet to the higher circle of Berlin society but also opened to him the doors of the best literary and artistic salons of the Prussian capital.7 On January 27, 1821, in honor of the grand duke and the grand duchess in the Berlin Royal Palace, a luxurious Festspiel was organized on the motifs of Thomas Moore’s Oriental romance Lalla Rookh, which told of the journey of the “tulip-cheeked” eponymous princess, daughter of the Mughal Khan Auerengzeb (Aurangzeb), from Delhi to Cachemire, where her fiancé, prince Aliris, son of the king of the Lesser Bucharia Abdalla, awaits her. In this journey, the princess is accompanied by a young bard from Cachemire, Feramorz, who entertains her with poetic histories, and by minister Fadladeen, a pedant who mocks the poet’s unbridled fantasies. Lalla Rookh falls in love with Feramorz and with sadness approaches the place where she is to meet her betrothed. In the end, she discovers that poet and fiancé are the same person. The idea of a theatrical enactment of a series of beautiful images born of Moore’s poetic imagination belonged to the director of the royal theater, Count von Brühl. The plot of the “Eastern tale” was presented as alternating tableaux vivants, accompanied by song and musical numbers composed by court conductor Gaspare Spontini (who subsequently included the march and several arias from the production of Lalla Rookh in the opera Nurmahal, which will be discussed at the end of this book). The famous Prussian painter and architect Carl Friedrich Schinkel created the luxurious decorations and Eastern costumes for the festival. The best singers of the Berlin opera performed the love songs composed to the lyrics of the poet Samuel Heinrich Spiker. Members of the two royal families and the numerous courtiers served as the dramatis personae. The grand duchess played Lalla

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Rookh, and her husband, Grand Duke Nikolai, played Prince Aliris. The king’s brother, Prince Wilhelm, played the role of the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb. The Duke of Cumberland was King Abdulla, and Princess Luise Radzivill was Abdulla’s wife. The action opened with Spontini’s splendid march (“der prächtige Eintrittsmarsch”) which accompanied the exalted wedding procession of the Indian princess. Episodes from the four cantos of Moore’s tale were represented on the tableaux vivants, displayed along the journey of the wedding train: “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan,” “Paradise and the Peri,” “The Fire Worshippers,” and “The Light of the Harem.” At the end of the spectacle, the princess crossed a Cachemire lake on a festively decorated barge and stopped near the beautiful palace. Prince Aliris descended the steps to meet his fiancé, and Lalla Rookh—“with surprise and satisfaction” (“mit Erstaunen und Vergnügen”)— recognized him as the young bard who had entertained her with his poetic histories on the road to Cachemire. The action concluded with a ballet in which the courtiers, dressed in “Eastern” costume, participated.8 The plot of the Festspiel represented an allegorical recollection of Princess Charlotte’s journey to Russia in 1817, while the grand march of the “Mughal” and “Bucharian” courtiers represented a romantic aestheticization of the union of the Prussian and Russian courts. Named in one newspaper “the most brilliant and quaintly beautiful thing of the kind ever seen,”9 the Festspiel was repeated on February 11 for a select audience, and the participants and viewers of the festivity remembered it long afterwards. The Lalla Rookh festivity made an indelible impression on Zhukovsky. In an ecstatic letter to Turgenev, dated January 7 (19), 1821, he describes it not as a spectacle, but as an unforgettable poetic dream, a genuine vision: . . . The scenes created by the artist Sch[inkel] were incomparable; romances were performed during their presentation, the music for which was composed by Spontini and was magnificent. But the great princess provided enchantment for the whole proceeding; she was conveyed in the procession on a palanquin— it was as if she were floating above me, like a Spirit, like a dream; the costume and the crown, which merely added a certain luster, a transformation of the everyday, the familiar; this crowd, which observed the one and only; this brilliance and the splendor intended for that one and only; the triumphant and, at the same time, the melancholy march; then the chorus of superb voices and the scenes which appeared and disappeared like visions, intensely affected, even more intensely with relation to the one and only, the primary figure; and finally that march— to which all else yielded, and that sweet, lovely face appeared above, and then receded into the distance— all of it together possessed something magical! Not feeling, not imagination, but

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the soul rejoiced, and I returned to my senses with some despondency that had its own kind of sweetness.10

In his letter, Zhukovsky enclosed his poem “Lalla Rookh,” dedicated to the beautiful performer of the main role: Милый сон, души пленитель, Гость прекрасный с вышины, Благодатный посетитель Поднебесной стороны, Я тобою насладился На минуту, но вполне: Добрым вестником явился Здесь небесного ты мне. Мнил я быть в обетованной Той земле, где вечный мир; Мнил я зреть благоуханный Безмятежный Кашемир; Видел я: торжествовали Праздник розы и весны И пришелицу встречали Из далекой стороны. И блистая и пленяя— Словно ангел неземной— Непорочность молодая Появилась предо мной; Светлый завес покрывала Отенял ее черты, И застенчиво склоняла Взор умильный с высоты. Все—и робкая стыдливость Под сиянием венца, И младенческая живость, И величие лица, И в чертах глубокость чувства С безмятежной тишиной— Все в ней было без искусства Неописанной красой!

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Я смотрел—а призрак мимо (Увлекая душу вслед) Пролетал невозвратимо; Я за ним—его уж нет! Посетил, как упованье; Жизнь минуту озарил; И оставил лишь преданье, Что когда-то в жизни был! Ах! не с нами обитает Гений чистый красоты; Лишь порой он навещает Нас с небесной высоты; Он поспешен, как мечтанье, Как воздушный утра сон; Но в святом воспоминанье Неразлучен с сердцем он! Он лишь в чистые мгновенья Бытия бывает к нам И приносит откровенья, Благотворные сердцам; Чтоб о небе сердце знало В темной области земной, Нам туда сквозь покрывало Он дает взглянуть порой; И во всем, что здесь прекрасно, Что наш мир животворит, Убедительно и ясно Он с душою говорит; А когда нас покидает, В дар любви у нас в виду В нашем небе зажигает Он прощальную звезду. (PSS, II, 222–23) [Dearest dream, my soul’s enchantment / Lovely guest from heav’n above, / Most benevolent attender / To the earthly realm below, / You gave me blissful satisfaction  / Momentary but complete:  / Bringing with you happy tidings— / Like a herald from the skies. / I dreamed dreams of life eternal / In that Promised Land of peace; / I dreamed dreams of fragrant regions, / Of a tranquil, sweet Cachemire; / I could witness celebrations, / Festivals of roses

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vernal  / Honoring that lovely maiden  / From lands strange and far away.  / And, with glistening enchantment  / Like an angel from above—This untainted, youthful vision / Came before my dreaming eyes; / Like a veil, a shining shroud / Screened her lovely face from view, / Tenderly she did incline / Her shy gazes toward the earth. / All her traits— her timid shyness / Underneath her shining crown, / Childlike her animation, / And her face’s noble beauty— / Glowing with a depth of feeling, / Sweet serenity and peace— / All of these completely artless / Indescribably sublime! / As I watched, the apparition / (Captivating me in passing) / Never to return, flew by; / I pursued— but it had gone!  / ’Twas a vision merely fleeting,  / Transient illumination  / Leaving nothing but a legend / Of its passing through my life! / ’Tis not ours to harbor / Beauty’s spirit— / Ah, so pure! It comes nigh but for a moment / From its heavenly abode; / Like a dream, it slips away, / Like an airy dream of morning: / But in sacred reminiscence / It is married with the heart! / Only in the purest instants / Of our life does it appear / Bringing with it revelations / Beneficial to our hearts; / That our hearts may know of heaven / In this earthly shadow realm, / It allows us momentary / Glimpses through the earthly veil. / And through all that here is lovely, / All that animates our lives, / To our souls it speaks a language / Reassuring and distinct; / When it quits our earthly region / It bestows a gift of love / Glowing in our evening heaven: / ’Tis a farewell star for all to see.]11

In another poem inspired by the Festspiel, “Appearance of Poetry in the Form of Lalla Rookh” (“Iavlenie poezii v vide Lalla Ruk”) (a translation of the German poem by Mlle Stegeman), Zhukovsky transforms the theatrical image of the grand duchess into the embodiment of poetry itself: Сама гармония святая— Ее нам мнилось бытие, И мнилось душу разрешая, Манила в рай она ее. (PSS, II, 225)

In aesthetic enthusiasm, Zhukovsky interprets the Berlin festival as a realization (if only momentary) of his old utopia, Cachemire, animated now by the “captivating image” of his august pupil. Henceforth in his work, “Lalla Rookh” becomes the symbolic name of the Grand Duchess.12 TH E S A CR ED A L BU M

In the Zhukovsky collection of the Manuscript Division of the Russian National Library, there is a luxurious album bound with a bronze fastener 219

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in the form of a half moon with two roses, adorned with ten precious stones. The grand duchess gave this album to the poet in 1821. It opens with the following long excerpt from the prosaic interlude in the first canto of Thomas Moore’s “Eastern tale,” “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan”: As they passed along a sequestered river after sunset, they saw a young Hindoo girl upon the bank whose employment seemed to them so strange, that they stopped their palankeens to observe her. She had lighted a small lamp filled with oil of cocoa, and placing it in an earthen dish, adorned with a wreath of flowers, had committed it with a trembling hand to the stream; and was now anxiously watching its progress down the current, heedless of the gay cavalcade which had drawn up beside her. Lalla Rookh was all curiosity;— when one of her attendants, who had lived upon the banks of the Ganges (where this ceremony is so frequent that often, in the dusk of the evening, the river is seen glittering all over with lights like the Oton-Tala, or Sea of Stars) informed the Princess that it was the usual way in which the friends of those who had gone on dangerous voyages offered up vows for their safe return. If the lamp sunk immediately, the omen was disastrous; but if it went shining down the stream, and continued to burn till entirely out of sight, the return of the beloved object was considered as certain. Lalla Rookh, as they moved on, more than once looked back to observe how the young Hindoo’s lamp proceeded; and while she saw with pleasure that it was still unextinguished, she could not help fearing that all the hopes of this life were no better than that feeble light upon the river.13

The entry is dated April 9, 1821. The poet had begun to read Moore’s “Oriental tale” in January, before the famous spectacle. From February to March, he translated the third part of the “tale,” “Peri and the Angel” (in the original, “Peri and Paradise”).14 We know from Zhukovsky’s diary that he discussed Moore’s “tale” with the grand duchess more than once. Finally, in the spring of 1821, he began to issue a manuscript journal, Lalla Rookh, which, in distinction to the printed Für Wenige, was intended exclusively for his pupil and, by all appearances, at this initial stage, was completed by both of them. Only the second issue of Lalla Rookh, which included the last two acts of Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans (as we recall, Zhukovsky had published the “Prologue” to the tragedy in Für Wenige in 1818), has survived. In the autumn of 1821, the poet promised Alexandra Feodorovna to write a few more numbers of Lalla Rookh and Für Wenige, but for some reason did not fulfill his promise. The excerpt from the first canto of Moore’s “tale” serves as a unique aesthetic prelude to the album which undoubtedly held significance for the

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poet. It is followed by extracts, already mentioned above, from the biography of Queen Louise by Caroline von Berg, aphorisms and reflections of a religious and moral cast written by various people (including the grand duchess) in French and German, and also a summary of Alexandra Voeikova’s letter, which Zhukovsky mentions several times in his diary.15 A question arises: why does Zhukovsky begin the album given him by the grand duchess with this excerpt? Clearly, the passage meant something both to him and to his pupil. The story of the enchanting Indian custom fit in with Zhukovsky’s romantic ideology and phraseology: one of the poet’s favorite images was the symbol of a lantern burning in the night. Meanwhile, the choice of passage could be informed by more personal reasons. Indeed, in Moore, the inserted episode is linked to an important moment in the development of the action: the Mughal princess at first realizes that she is in love with a “simple” bard. Narrated by the latter, the history of Azim and Zelika’s love makes a large impression on Lalla Rookh. She can think of nothing else than the two lovers’ unfortunate fate: Her gayety was gone and she looked pensively even upon Fadladeen. She felt, too, without knowing why, a sort of uneasy pleasure in imagining that Azim must have been just such a youth as Feramorz; just as worthy to enjoy all the blessings without any of the pangs of that illusive passion too often, like the sunny apples of Istkahar, is all sweetness on one side and all bitterness on the other.16

The princess’s love for the poet is spoken of again immediately after the description of the Indian custom: The remainder of the journey was passed in silence. She now, for the first time, felt that shade of melancholy which comes over the youthful maiden’s heart, as sweet and transient as her own breath upon a mirror; nor was it till she heard the lute of Feramorz touched lightly at the door of her pavilion, that she waked from the revery in which she had been wandering. Instantly her eyes were lighted up with pleasure; and after a few unheard remarks from Fadladeen upon the indecorum of a poet seating himself in the presence of a Princess, every thing was arranged as on the preceding evening, and all listened with eagerness while the story was thus continued.17

For understandable reasons, Zhukovsky could not extract into the album these phrases that framed the history of the Indian custom. But in the given case, as we suggest, the preterition “speaks clearly,” and the romantically disposed grand duchess could hardly have failed to sense the allusion.

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In his literary relations with Alexandra Feodorovna, Zhukovsky was not so much “selflessly inclined to platonic participation in another’s happiness” (Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 226) as he was secretly assuming the role of Feramorz, entertaining the princess with his marvelous songs. In 1821 he addresses to her a cycle of poetic works and philosophical- aesthetic fragments which included, along with “Lalla Rookh” and “Appearance of Poetry in the Form of Lalla Rookh,” the poema “Peri and the Angel,” a small prosaic fragment about remembrance which he also sent to Alexandra Voeikova, a lengthy description of his journey to Saxonian Switzerland, and, finally, a letter, published at the end of the year as a separate article, about Raphael’s Madonna.18 Fearing that his lyrical enthusiasm would be misinterpreted, Zhukovsky for a long time did not want to publicize the poems he dedicated to the grand duchess. “It is not love, but a feeling kindred to it, lofty and pure,” he wrote to Turgenev. “I would lose much if it were otherwise. Why bring God down from the altar in order, having embraced, to be deprived of the Divinity by so doing, that is, exactly of that which attracts one to his altar?”19 This feeling, he continues, “has the quality of divine worship, necessary for the soul in order to preserve life and ennoble it.” In his pupil he sees a “kind, heavenly, elevated creation.” He feels an attachment to her “with charming self-disregard”; she seems to him created “to be the beneficent ideal of a pure soul” (“l’ideal bienfaisant d’une ame pure”). He compares the poem dedicated to her, “Lalla Rookh,” to a mysterious prayer: The feeling which produced them is kin [rodnia] to all those live feelings which in life’s various beautiful moments fill the soul. For you, for Sasha it is intelligible; others can express it otherwise and distort it with their explanation.20

In his next letter to Turgenev (dated February 9 [21], 1821), he again asks that his poems remain a secret: I repeat: both my poems and this letter are only for you and Sasha . . . Don’t read my poems or letters to anyone (except Sasha). I do not wish for anyone to read what I write about the G. D. [Grand Duchess]. I ask you to be obedient in this instance without exception. Don’t show them to anyone!21

In other words, Zhukovsky presents his feeling for the grand duchess as a religious cult of pure beauty, himself as the bard of a beautiful lady, and his poems addressed to her as prayers. He finds the “formula” for such poetic service in a small poem written in his diary on April 4, 1821 and published many years after his death: 222

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Теснятся все к тебе во храм, И все с коленопреклоненьем Тебе приносят фимиам, Тебя гремящим славят пеньем; Я одинок в углу стою, Как жизнью, полон я тобою, И жертву тайную мою Я приношу тебе душою.

They press toward you, into the temple, And on bended knee Bear incense unto you, Glorify you with thunderous song; I stand alone in the corner, As I am filled with life, so I am filled with you, And I carry my secret sacrifice To you with my soul.

(PSS, XIII, 224)22

Zhukovsky goes from poems “for a few” ( für Wenige) to poetry “for her alone” and admits to the circle of “initiated” only his dearest souls, Turgenev and Voeikova (let us note that at this time a platonic affair had begun between them, subsequently reaching a dangerous boundary, from Zhukovsky’s perspective). At the end of 1820, Zhukovsky records in his diary a discussion from his friend, the famous doctor and admirer of Fichte, Hufeland (of whose main work on prolonging life the poet made an abstract in 1804): “all human life and its great purpose, its beginning and end” consist in three German “L’s”: Leben, Liebe, Licht (PSS, XIII, 49). After the Berlin festival, Zhukovsky translates this theological sentiment into the language of his poetic religion: these three “L’s” “of themselves” are in the name “Lalla Rookh” (ibid.).23 H E AVE N LY R EM EM BR A NCES

The image of the grand duchess lies at the center of the poet’s diary entries during the first third of 1821. Here he incessantly refers to the many meetings and conversations with her, her relatives’ and friends’ stories about her, and descriptions of places connected to her girlhood. In the entry for April 4 (16), 1821—Holy Week, according to the Orthodox calendar—Zhukovsky delights at the “endearing religiosity” of his pupil. She prays on her knees, and her “simple movements” and clear voice seem to him manifestations of an “openly pious soul.” On this same day, he visits the grand duchess’s favorite room in the San Souci palace where she lived before her marriage. Here, under the princess’s monogram, he notices her drawing of the Kunzendorf castle which, as we know, played an important role in the biographical myth of Queen Louise’s eldest children. He ritualistically plans “to come to reread Sasha’s letter” in this room and “to relive the memory of my past, as well as another past unknown, but familiar, to me” (PSS, XIII, 162). His worship of the grand duchess assumes the form of a genuine ritual. 223

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On April 6, the poet again goes “to the dear place” which moved him with its “remembrances.” On this day, one of the grand duchess’s secrets is revealed to him. During vespers, he sees in her hands a special prayer book, “her mother’s letters.” “What a beautiful, touching thought— to turn the memories of one’s mother into a prayer, into the purification of the soul, into penitence!” he exclaims. “And what is in this little book! Her thoughts, her feelings, which during the most difficult moments of life filled and comforted her soul! That is genuine, pure piety!” (PSS, XIII, 163). Having returned home, he rereads what the grand duchess had written in his Lalla Rookh and records “something of his own”: Elle est ma religion! Il n y a pas de plus grande jouissance que de sentir avec purete la beaute d’une ame pure.24

We find this French sentiment, dated April 6, 1821, in the above-mentioned album gifted by the grand duchess. It is tempting to suggest that this album— which opened with the citation from Moore’s “Oriental tale”— was the very first issue, considered lost, of the manuscript journal Lalla Rookh. With a much greater degree of confidence we can speak of what the grand duchess’s epistolary prayer book— which included, in the poet’s words, a collection of her mother’s “thoughts and feelings”— represented. At the end of the nineteenth century, the American journalist and Germanophile Poultney Bigelow published as part of his History of the German Struggle for Liberty a manuscript of a work Queen Louise wrote when she was dying, “Himmlische Erinnerungen” (“Heavenly Remembrances”). Bigelow had received the manuscript from the Duke of Cumberland, the queen’s grand nephew. According to Bigelow’s description, the manuscript was a small album (forty pages), the leaves of which were decorated with colorful ornaments, primarily lilies.25 The third page of the album contained the queen’s favorite motto: “Recht, Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung.” The text included ten reflections of a religious and moral orientation, dating to 1803–1809 and “drawn obviously from her own precious and painful experiences.”26 In 1896 Louise’s “Heavenly Remembrances” was reprinted by the queen’s biographer, Paul Bailleu, in the eighth volume of Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte.27 As far as we know, this small secret book (“dem verschwiegenen kleinen Buche”) has subsequently not drawn any attention among scholars. What can we say about its provenance? A comparison of the sentiments comprising the “Heavenly Remembrances” with the queen’s published letters shows that they are all taken from her letters to her friend and future biographer, Carolina von Berg, who, as I suggest, created this compilation, too.28 In Zhukovsky’s album of 1821, we find the complete text of Louise’s 224

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“Heavenly Remembrances,” written in the poet’s handwriting.29 Only the grand duchess could have familiarized the poet with this precious relic. In so doing, she initiated him into one of the secrets of her romantic family. One has to suppose that this compilation of Louise’s private thoughts and feelings was the very “prayer book” the poet ecstatically wrote about. Here is the full text of Louise’s reflections as copied by Zhukovsky in their historical (the years of ordeals in Prussia) progression:30 In happy days, too, I fortify myself with Religion against the evil days which may come, and in this bronze age must be expected.—Potsdam, 1803. Man lives upon memories. He who has none but pleasant ones regarding his life can never be wholly unhappy.—Potsdam, 1803. The man of upright purpose has one comfort at least, that God cannot wholly abandon him. Help may be long in coming, but it will surely come.—Memel, 1807. It may be said with truth that we deserve happiness only by doing what is right and living according to our sense of duty. But whether we shall attain happiness rests with God.—Memel, 1807. Whoever said this spoke true: that there is nothing on earth more dreadful than to be forced to withdraw the good opinion once held of a fellow man. It is frightful pain! But in spite of it all I believe more firmly than ever that there is such a thing as virtue, and that it alone can make us happy, even while yet on earth.—Königsberg, May, 1809. And so I close my eyes and fold my hands, and keep repeating over and over again: We all are in thy hands. Forsake us not, O God!— 1809. This morning I read a passage which pleased me because it is the truth: “Suffering and misery are blessings from God when we have endured them.” And I, too, in the midst of my wretchedness already say: How much nearer am I to God; how much more dear to me have become my feelings regarding the immortality of the soul.—Königsberg, März, 1809. No man can guarantee the result of his enterprise; but when a decision is taken with a good purpose in view, then may we leave the result in the hand of God.—Königsberg, 1809. Ah me! In the midst of many confusions, only stop for a moment and reflect; and everything in the world will be found in the place prepared for it by God’s foresight. With our gaze fixed on things above, a sigh sent to Heaven, and a prayer for new strength, we shall thus be able to endure, for God does not abandon those who love him and trust in him.—Königsberg, August, 1809.

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Ah, if man had only a place where he could find peace for his worried soul, where so many a yearning could be quieted, so many a tear be dried with certainty! Often did I sigh like this. But I found no such place of rest on earth. At last, however, my sighs go up to God as sacred memories, and I become strong through faith.— 1809.

Following these ten sentiments, which seem to transmit the queen’s voice (and wisdom) from the grave, we find in Zhukovsky’s album his reflection on misfortune, dated April 6 (18), 1821 (that is, on the same day as the entry in the Grand Duchess’s “prayer book”) and, most likely, inspired by the queen’s thoughts: Misfortune makes everything vivid! Misfortune is a magnet which attracts heavenly spirits to our soul! . . . Gold is purified by misfortune’s fire. Potsdam, April 6/18, 1821 (PSS, I, 14 ob.)

The theme of Louise is continued in subsequent extracts in the album, this time from the queen’s biography written by Carolina von Berg. As we already know, these extracts became the source of the poet’s own discussions of memory addressed to the grand duchess (the fragment about the letter to her mother she did not finish reading). In general, the theme of Queen Louise occupies a visible place in the poet’s diaries of 1820– 21. At the very beginning of his stay in Berlin, he visits Louise’s mausoleum in Charlottenburg, the place where the “beloved mother sleeps, the queen unforgotten by her people, the woman, the adornment of her time, the victim of misfortune; and she is buried where everything is infused with her memory, where she was the soul of her family and she delighted in pure family happiness” (PSS, XIII, 143). In the diary entry, he gives a detailed description of the famous monument-sarcophagus erected by Christian Daniel Rauch: “Death here seems like a dream, and the thought of awakening unwittingly blends with it.” This monument awakens in him a sad memory mixed with a vague hope. Over her head are seven faded wreaths woven by Louise’s children on the first birthday after her death. Twice per year, the king and his family come to honor Louise’s memory at her grave. Zhukovsky observes the palace church where all the queen’s children were baptized. Here he turns his attention to the monument to the little prince whose death inaugurated all the misfortunes of the royal house (he died in 1806). In one of the rooms, his attention is caught by the “queen’s eyes, painted in a frame,” in which he recognizes the eyes of the Grand Duchess (PSS, XIII, 144). His conversation with the grand duchess about “March 10th” (the queen’s birthday) dates to the beginning of March and grows into a spiritual discussion about communion. In all likelihood, even the translation of The Maid of Orleans, com226

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pleted in the spring of 1821, can be referred to Zhukovsky’s unique “Louisiada.” In Prussian cultural myth, Louise was seen as a symbol of national rebirth during the Wars of Liberation, the German Jeanne d’Arc. In his solemn hymn in octaves, the patriotic poet Theodor Körner, one of Princess Charlotte’s favorite authors, represented Louise as the savior of the fatherland: Und wie einst, alle Kräfte zu beleben, Ein Heil’genbild für den gerechten Krieg Dem Heeresbanner schützend zugegeben Als Oriflamme in die Lüfte stieg: So soll Dein Bild auf unsern Fahnen schweben Und soll uns führen durch die Nacht zum Sieg! Luise! sei der Schutzgeist deutscher Sache! Luise sei das Losungswort zur Rache!31 [And as to nerve each breast, of old, full oft / Before the host, some pictured saint so fair / Was borne, and as their banner high aloft / Floated, a conquering oriflamme in air, / E’en thus shall guide us still thine image bright; / And light us mid the gloom of dark despair. / Louise! the guardian angel of our right! Louise! the watchword of the avenging fight!]32

The allusion here to Johanna’s monologue in the “Prologue” of Schiller’s tragedy is beyond doubt. Compare the following ottava rima from Zhukovsky’s translation of the “Prologue,” which was first published in Für Wenige: Когда начнет бледнеть и смелый в брани, И роковой пробьет отчизне час— Возьмешь мою ты орифламму в длани И мощь врагов сорвешь, как жница клас. Поставишь их надменной власти грани, Преобратишь во плач победный глас, Дашь ратным честь, дашь блеск и силу трону И Карла в Реймс введешь принять корону. (PSS, VII, 238) [When even the most daring warrior begins to pale in battle / And the homeland’s fatal hour strikes, / Take this royal banner [Oriflamme] in your hand / And you will break the enemy’s strength just as a farmer cuts wheat with a scythe. / You will set limits to their haughty power / You will turn their triumphant voice into a lament / You will give honor to the army and glory and strength to the throne, And you will lead Charles to be crowned in Rheims]33

Remarkably, God speaks to Zhukovsky’s Maiden in prophetic octaves! As we can see, the Prussian national myth of Queen Louise becomes the historical- poetic backdrop for Zhukovsky’s aesthetic “philosophie de Lalla Rookh.” 227

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On the night of April 11/12, Zhukovsky records in his diary an emotionally and philosophically rich description of the previous day. In distinction to other landscape revelations going back to Rousseau and Goethe, the Berlin entry is organized as a philosophical fragment with its own sujet and “secret” subject. Below we will trace the development of this lyrico-philosophical sujet. On the morning of April 11, the poet goes out to see the sunrise. At first, the weightless clouds in front lit up; then the edges of those clouds behind which the sun was hidden; then the sun itself rose. The description of the sunrise soon results in a discussion of the impressions which dawn and dusk have made on his soul: they are “the same— but a difference in the vividness of the feeling is perceptible.” In the evening, you sense nature falling asleep, relaxation; in the morning, awakening, yet at both times, “you sense freshness, but again, this freshness is different.” You feel the sunset when you are weary from the day, but you feel the sunrise once “you have regained your strength from rest.” From these observations there follows a philosophical conclusion which asserts the identity of soul and nature: You really only feel yourself in physical and moral nature! It [nature] is only what we ourselves are! Even in the sound of evening there is not much that we find in the sound of morning. The former is a sound fading away, the latter a sound just beginning. In the former, many voices grow silent, in the latter new ones are constantly added so that, just like the objects themselves, they receive new form with the addition of light. (PSS, XIII, 164)

Zhukovsky compares such a “universal, mixed murmur (which is so vivid and captivating in spring)” to a “universal prayer.” He ascends a mountain which opens up to him a “beautiful view” of Potsdam. Illumination gradually reveals the vista: shores, ducks “like black and white spots on the water,” boats and barks with sails, finally the New Palace, the Belvedere, and many homes between greenery, churches. Over the whole world rises the bright sun, under which the eastern shore disappears and which shines brightly in the water. With each step, the picture of the visible world changes and becomes animated. Having descended from the mountain, the poet meets a bailiff who greets the rising sun with his pipe. Before us is not so much a landscape sketch expressing the dynamism of the poet’s mood as a test of specific philosophical ideas, or rather, a test of his own readiness to accept those ideas. The poet provides the philosophical key immediately after the description of the morning landscape. Upon returning, he opens a book by Fichte which makes him fall asleep, “but not out of boredom.” The book is Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation 228

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of Man, 1800), the most popular and lucid summary of the philosopher’s complex system. It comprises three parts, titled appropriately “Doubt,” “Knowledge,” and “Faith.” In the author’s words, the book is addressed not to professional philosophers, but to simple readers whom the philosopher tries, in his discussions, to lead “from the world of sense into a region of transcendental thought.” As Fichte explains his philosophical-narrative strategy, the treatise is written from the first-person perspective, but this “I” does not signify the author: But it is his earnest wish that the reader should himself assume this character, and that he should not rest contented with a mere historical apprehension of what is here said, but that during reading he should really and truly hold converse with himself, deliberate, draw conclusions and form resolutions, like his imaginary representative, and thus, by his own labor and reflection, develop and build up within himself that mode of thought the mere picture of which is presented to him in the book.34

It is precisely to this principle of reading that Zhukovsky adheres, applying the German philosopher’s doctrine to his own experience. The description of awakened nature and the soul in the poet’s diary represents a variation on the theme of religious revelation in Fichte’s book: An eternal stream of life and power and action which issues from the original Source of all life— from Thy Life, O Infinite One! for all life is Thy Life, and only the religious eye penetrates to the realm of True Beauty [das Reich der wahren Schönheit]. I am related to Thee, and what I behold around me is related to me; all is life and blessedness, and regards me with bright spiriteyes, and speaks with spirit-voices to my heart. In all the forms that surround me, I behold the reflection of my own being, broken up into countless diversified shapes, as the morning sun, broken in a thousand dew-drops, sparkles towards itself.35

Zhukovsky mentions his reading of The Vocation of Man for the first time in his diary entry from April 4, but, as I suggest, his interest in Fichte’s philosophy arose earlier. An entry from January 1821 testifies to his attempt at mastering the philosophy: here he describes a morning walk in Berlin’s park, Tiergarten, which I briefly discussed in the introduction to this book. The poet writes that the beautiful morning had a “marvelous effect on the soul.” But “is it really possible to be so dependent on the sun’s ray?” Is not the “return of the good without your knowledge” proof of the fact “that it is within you and that it requires from you only the force of your will in order to awaken and to remain always awake?” If the bright morning gives the soul 229

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its moral worth, as if against the soul’s will, then why cannot free will do the same? It is necessary to find that “which can still be yours,” but for this pure action, in which one sees the “sacred” fulfillment of duty, is required. Man’s worth, the poet posits, is in the sincere wish for good and in constant striving towards it; attainment does not depend on it. “The world exists only for the soul of man,” he concludes his discussion. “God and the soul are the two beings” (PSS, XIII, 154–55). Naturally, one discerns Karamzin’s successor behind these statements (“everything for the soul”—vse dlia dushi), but the nature and intent of these reflections go far beyond Karamzin’s sensualism. At the beginning of the 1820s, Zhukovsky is occupied by metaphysical questions which Fichte attempted to answer in his philosophy: What am I? What is my vocation? Why did nature, from its infinite variety of states (modifications), assume at this moment specifically that which it in fact assumed? Why should my heart grieve and be torn asunder from that which calms my mind so well? Where does the voice of my inner being, which wants to lead me beyond the bounds of representation, come from? One can say that at this stage of his “emotional biography,” the poet tried to express his feelings and thoughts to the accompaniment of Fichte’s philosophy: the relationship between the “I” and the “not-I” (nature), moral worth, free will, action, striving towards good, the essence of man in his formation, the sense of duty, and finally, the aspired unity of the soul and the world. Let us return to the events of April 11, 1821, as the poet describes them in his diary. After his Fichte-inspired daydream, Zhukovsky goes to lunch with the royal family in Sans Souci. He and Count Brandenburg raise a toast to the grand duchess’s health. The subject of Alexandra Feodorovna is quickly combined in the diary entry with Fichte’s philosophy, which he now applies to his definition of the essence of beauty. The passage is cited in full: Wahrheit: Grund-Ich. We spoke of her. What comprises her charm? Truthfulness! And what in general is the essence of beauty? Truth! That is, the close relationship with that which comprises the essence of the human soul! Not with the one that we happen to be in at any moment of our life, but with the one that is the foundation of our existence, that is present at any moment of life, that serves as the measurement of all possible modifications of our existence! Grund-Ich— das Göttliche in dem Menschen. And with the purely Divine, that feeling, which she awakens in the soul, has a large kinship. It is impossible to be attracted to her without having been attracted to the purely beautiful! And it is impossible to withdraw from this purity without feeling oneself guilty before it! (PSS, XIII, 165)

Obviously, in the treatise on the vocation of man, Zhukovsky finds a philosophical basis for his own cult of the grand duchess as an embodiment of “pure beauty” that attracts the poet’s soul.36 230

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It is noteworthy that in the cited diary fragment, Zhukovsky describes the elated feeling provoked by his ideal as a feeling of close kinship with the Divine. Here the poet apparently takes up Fichte’s thought on universal kinship of the world’s phenomena, all growing from a single root. Of course, Zhukovsky’s interpretation of Fichte is very subjective. The poet even introduces the term “Grund-Ich,” which is absent from the German original. Meanwhile, it is precisely this subjective interpretation that indicates the main direction of his search (the path traversed by the German romantics in their own time): from metaphysics to aesthetics and aesthetic religion. In May 1821 Zhukovsky receives a gift from Doctor Hufeland: Fichte’s Die Anweisung zum seiligen Leben (The Way Towards the Blessed Life, 1806). The poet’s notes in the margins of a preserved copy of this book indicate that the philosopher’s discussion of striving (Streben)— one of the central concepts of his teaching— held special interest for him. According to Fichte, the possibility of pleasure, bliss, or universal prosperity is founded exclusively on the striving for love. Yearning for the absolute, the striving to unify and merge with the eternal “is the supreme root of all finite existence and is ineradicable from any branch of this existence.” This striving for the eternal, lying at the foundation of any finite existence, leads man to the true life: “Where it enters life and permeates it, this mysterious striving is indicated and understood as love for the eternal.”37 The philosophical interpretation of striving proposed by Fichte was taken up by the German romantics (Novalis, Jean Paul, Tieck), from whom Zhukovsky inherited it. In his diary “essay” on the essence of beauty, addressed to the grand duchess (February 4, 1821), the poet wrote: Only that which does not exist is beautiful!38 In these moments of vivid feeling you strive not towards that which has produced it and what is before you, but towards something better, mysterious, distant, which is united with it and which is not with it and which exists somewhere for you! And this striving is one of the ineffable proofs of immortality: otherwise why, in a moment of pleasure, would we not have the fullness and clarity of pleasure?! (PSS, XIII, 156)

Let us continue our reading of the entry from April 11. After lunch, Zhukovsky, accompanied by the grand duchess’s brother, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, walks through the palace’s rooms. In the Kavalierhaus, he again visits Charlotte’s “sacred” room in which, as we recall, under the princess’s monogram, hung her drawing of Kunzendorf: “Blessed is the site where the beautiful soul used to live” (PSS, XIII, 162).39 On April 16 and 18, he listens to the music of “Ländler-Walzer” and “God Save the King” performed by a military orchestra (PSS, XIII, 167). With rapture, the poet describes the religious cult of the past in the royal family, in which there is not the slightest effeminacy of feeling or exuberant romanticism. 231

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Finally, in the concluding part of the entry, Zhukovsky describes the sunset, which he observes “with sad eyes,” and the “evening, surprisingly quiet, fragrant, full of the life of spring.” The entry ends with a description of his walk with the crown prince and a picture of the starry sky. “La couronne [that is, the constellation Corona Borealis],” the poet says, “is my dearest constellation” (PSS, XIII, 165). The last words sound like the motto of his courtly cult of the grand duchess and her family. Thus, in the commentary to the final stanza of “Lalla Rookh,” Zhukovsky develops his “sidereal philosophy”: The star in the dark sky— doesn’t descend to earth, but shines reassuringly on us from a distance and in some manner connects us to the sky from which it silently illumines us. Our life is like a night beneath the starry sky. Our soul in the finest moments of existence reveals new stars that don’t radiate all their light, and don’t need to; adorning our sky and acquainting us with it, they serve at the same time as our guides to the earth.40

It is tempting to interpret these lines as a formative text for the symbolism of the starry night in Russian literature, from Pechorin’s skeptical contemplations in “The Fatalist” to Pierre’s (War and Peace) and Alyosha’s (Brothers Karamazov) mystical experience. TH E (P )R U S S I A N M A D O NNA

The result of the poet’s reflections on the ideal of beauty in 1821 is the essay “On Raphael’s Madonna”— a fragment from a letter to the grand duchess. The legend of Raphael’s vision, once narrated by Wackenroder, is developed in this essay into one of the first aesthetic manifestos of romanticism in the history of Russian literature. Of course, Zhukovsky’s interest in Raphael’s most famous painting was not accidental. By the beginning of the 1820s, the aesthetic cult of the Italian artist and his Sistine Madonna (the Ur-Bild of German romanticism) was at its zenith. In 1820 the Berlin Academy of Arts celebrated the 300-year anniversary of the death of Raphael. The composer Carl Friedrich Zelter wrote a requiem for the occasion and discussed the Berlin festivities in a letter to Goethe: Three large pictures, the Madonna del Sisto, the Madonna del Pesce and a picture of St. Cecilia, were erected near one another, high up the end of a 110-foot-long hall. Among these Raphael’s catafalque stood on a 7-foot-high dais. On both sides of the platform were statues of the hero’s four favourite muses. . . . A burning candelabra was placed between every two muses rising up over the figures, which crowned them really well. Over the catafalque was

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the bust of Raphael. . . . All spaces were well festooned with coloured cloth as well as the entire front area which was 40-foot deep. A choir of 100 selected singers was [positioned] in the area: women clothed in white and the men behind them in black, arranged in a semi-circle.41

Friedrich Bury’s copy of the Sistine Madonna, presented at this festival, was the subject of special reverence in the royal family in which it was connected with memory of the queen. In 1804 Louise gave her husband this copy which since then had occupied a place in the Orangerie of the Potsdam palace. Two cherubs from Raphael’s Madonna were illustrated on the cover of one of Princess Charlotte’s albums. In German romantic poetry, the queen-martyr was constantly juxtaposed to (and occasionally even identified with) the image of the Madonna. Zacharias Werner likens her to the Holy Queen of Heaven: Luisa, Du, die Reine, Wie mehr wie Du wohl Keine, Der Himmelsköniginnen An Huld und Qualen gleich.42 [Louise, you, the pure, than you no one nearer the Queen of Heaven, no one more her equal in grace and suffering.]

German artists and sculptors traditionally depicted Louise in the image of the Virgin Mary, elevated to the heavens. For example, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna became the prototype of Johann Gottfried Schadow’s “Apotheose der Königin Luise” (1811/12).43 In the article on Raphael’s Madonna, Zhukovsky describes his experience of the painting as being in a prayerful state: The soul grows diffuse . . . the unrepresentable was represented for it, and it was where only in the best moments of life it can be.44

In his interpretation, Raphael’s masterwork is not a painting subject to the rules of art, but itself a vision (it is tempting to see in this interpretation a reflection of Fichte’s aesthetic concepts of true beauty as a “form without form”).45 The description of this vision flows naturally into a citation from his own poem dedicated to the grand duchess, “Lalla Rookh” (“The genius of pure beauty was with her” [Genii chistoi krasoty byl s neiu], that is, with the soul): Он лишь в чистые мгновенья Бытия бывает к нам,

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И приносит откровенья, Благодатные сердцам. Чтоб о небе сердце знало В темной области земной, Нам туда сквозь покрывало Он дает взглянуть порой; А когда нас покидает, В дар любви, у нас в виду, В нашем небе зажигает Он прощальную звезду. [Only in the purest instants / Of our life does it appear / Bringing with it revelations / Beneficial to our hearts; / That our hearts may know of heaven / In this earthly shadow realm, / It allows us momentary / Glimpses through the earthly veil. / And through all that here is lovely, / All that animates our lives, / To our souls it speaks a language / Reassuring and distinct; / When it quits our earthly region / It bestows a gift of love / Glowing in our evening heaven: / ’Tis a farewell star for all to see.]

In the semantic context, pertinent to his august addressee, the poem not only served as a poetic commentary on the impression that the painting made on the poet, but also recalled the festival in which the grand duchess appeared as the “genii chistyi (or ‘chistoi’) krasoty” (“a pure spirit of beauty”).46 In addition, it referred back to the iconic representations of her mother. Following German models, Zhukovsky invariably represents the queenmartyr as the Holy Mother. As we recall, in “Flower of the Oath,” Louise appears under the name of the Faithful One. The fragment of the remembrance addressed to the grand duchess ends with a translation of Jean-Paul Richter’s poem on the ascension of Louise. In turn, the death and transfiguration of Catherine, the Queen of Württemberg, in Zhukovsky’s funeral elegy in octaves of 1819 is described under the obvious influence of the German poetic myth of Louise’s ascension: Незрима нам, но видя нас оттоле, Безмолвствует при жертвенном престоле.47 [Not being seen by us, but seeing us from there, / She is keeping silence by the sacrificial throne.]

As already mentioned, even Zhukovsky’s 1821 translation of Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans was linked to the image of the Prussian queen. In the denouement of Schiller’s tragedy, which Zhukovsky included in the only 234

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surviving manuscript copy of Lalla Rookh no. 2, the heroine ascends to the heavens where she is met by Maria: . . . Смотрите, радуга на небесах; Растворены врата их золотые; Средь ангелов—на персях вечный сын— В божественных лучах стоит она И с милостью ко мне простерла руки; О, что со мною?.. Мой тяжелый панцирь Стал легкою крылатою одеждой . . . Я в облаках . . . я мчуся быстротечно . . . Туда . . . туда . . . земля ушла из глаз; Минута скорбь, блаженство бесконечно. (PSS, VII, 372–73) [Look, there is a rainbow in the heavens; / Their golden gates are wide open; / Among the angels, eternal son on her breast, / She stands illuminated by divine rays / And with mercy [or: kindness] extends her hands to me; / Oh, what is happening to me? . . . My heavy armor / Has become a light, winged garment . . . / I am among the clouds . . . I rush forward on currents of air . . . / Further . . . further . . . the earth has disappeared from my sight; / Grief is but a moment, bliss is eternal.]

Zhukovsky describes Raphael’s painting as a marvelous vision of the Mother of God, once revealed to the artist and accessible, in a moment of aesthetic revelation, to the one who contemplates his picture— to the poet himself: The curtain is drawn, and heaven’s mystery is revealed to the eyes of man. Everything takes place in heaven: it appears empty and as if it were hazy, but this is neither emptiness nor haze, but some kind of quiet, unnatural light full of angels whose presence you sense more than you notice: one could say that everything— even the air— turns into a pure angel in the presence of this heavenly maid walking past. And Raphael beautifully signed his name on the painting: below her, from the edge of the earth, one of the angels directs its eyes to the heights; a deep, significant thought reigns on the infant’s face— was not Raphael like this at the moment when he was thinking of his Madonna? Be an infant, be an angel on earth in order to have access to heaven’s mystery.48

The last words, sounding like a summa summarum of “heavenly remembrances” which the grand duchess utters at the hour of prayer, are a testament to the letter’s addressee and to himself. In Zhukovsky’s poetic myth at 235

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the beginning of the 1820s, the queen-martyr becomes a mediator between earthly and heavenly life, between the Russian poet and the Prussian royal family and its romantic legend. C ON CL U S I O N

At the beginning of the 1820s, Zhukovsky’s emotional worldview, under the direct influence of the version of romanticism cultivated by the court of Prussia, crystallizes into an aesthetic system centered on the symbol of the Madonna, which he interprets as the embodiment of love, virtue, beauty, and truth.49 Other female images in his poetry and biographical myth of the period shine in the reflected light of this central symbolic image. In this context, Zhukovsky presents his own mysterious feeling for the grand duchess (the Lalla Rookh of his poetry) as a religious—Fichtean— love for a moral ideal. But how does his lofty image of the grand duchess correlate in his poetic mythology with the images of his former “angels,” Maria and Alexandra? In German romantic tradition (Novalis, Tieck), the hero falls in love with different women, in each of whom he discerns a reincarnation of the ideal. The idea of mystical identification is alien to Zhukovsky: he prefers to name his angels in terms of kinship. Sasha is the grand duchess’s “sister.” His feeling for the latter is “kin” to all the best experiences of his life. Literature— both Russian and German—“is family” (PSS, XIII, 147).50 One of his most famous ballads, “Vadim,” ends with a symbolic heavenly vision of twelve awakened sisters. Earthly hope in his writings is called the “sister of faith.” Poetry in his later dramatic poem Camoens51 is named the “sister of  heavenly religion” (PSS, VII, 450). This is more than the rhetoric, traditional for the era of sensitivity, of brotherly love and kindred souls. The principle of kinship stands at the center of Zhukovsky’s poetic system. By analogy with the allegorical “fiancée of her fiancés,” formulated by Nikolai Chernyshevsky in Vera Pavlovna’s utopian dream, one may call Zhukovsky the brother of his sisters. The beautiful for him is the family whose divine origin and guardian stand beyond the boundaries of earthly existence.

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PART IV

The German Wife

Chapter Eleven

Sunset Love I continued to wait for Providence to somehow intercede for me and send me a wife. I had no time to do this myself. But Providence has done nothing. Truly it is not for me to have my own family. Meanwhile the years pass and have made me extremely indecisive. Solitude is burdensome and sad in old age, but with family life there are so many cares and dependencies! —Zhukovsky to A. P. Zontag (1831)

For a quarter of an hour before my fate was decided . . . I did not even consider that what now comprises my happiness was possible; thus I did not desire it. It came to me without my knowledge, sent from above, and I gave it my hand in full faith without the least hesitation. —Zhukovsky to E. I. Moyer and V. A. Elagin (1845)

О, молю тебя, Создатель, Дай вблизи ее небесной, Пред ея небесным взором, И гореть и умереть мне, Как горит в немом блаженстве, Тихо, ясно угасая, Огнь смиренныя лампады Перед образом Мадонны.

Oh, I pray to you, Creator, Let me, in her lofty presence And before her eyes, celestial, Be consumed with fire and perish, As there burns with silent rapture Gently fading in translucence, Sacred candle’s flame, so feeble, At Madonna’s holy image.1

T H I S E L E G A N T P O E M , dedicated to Zhukovsky’s future wife Elizabeth von Reutern (1821– 1856), was first published in the memoirs of Count Alexander Vladimirovich Sollogub (1845–189?), the son of the renowned prose writer and Zhukovsky’s friend, in the third issue of the little-known journal Theatrical and Musical Messenger in 1883.2 Alexander 239

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Sollogub was only tangentially acquainted with the poet— by his own admission he had several times been seated on Zhukovsky’s knee as a child— but he nonetheless found it necessary to add to his publication a rather clumsily composed biographical note: When Vasily Andreevich was married, it surprised all of his acquaintances and friends, as his choice was a German woman, Miss Reutern (a distant relation of the Finance Minister). Zhukovsky was quite friendly with her father, and this was, probably, the cause of his late, yet passionate, attachment to the well-known beauty, his wife, for whom he wrote the following blank verses, which had never before been printed.3

In the commentary to the publication, Sollogub claimed that the original of this poem as well as a musical accompaniment composed by Mikhail Yurievich Vielgorsky (1788–1856), Sollogub’s grandfather, would soon appear in an appendix to the Messenger, but this promise was never realized.4 In the next note Sollogub added that Vielgorsky’s “prayer” had been written “at the request” of Zhukovsky himself and belonged among the best of the composer’s religious works. Sollogub’s publication has remained unnoticed, passed over even by such conscientious scholars as Veselovsky, who dedicated an entire chapter of his study to Zhukovsky’s “final love” and married life (Veselovsky, V.A. Zhukovskii, 333–70). Or perhaps Veselovsky simply did not trust the source: in 1894 Count Sollogub, a theater critic, singer, spiritualist, and well-known playboy, appeared as a central figure in a highly publicized scandal connected to the forged will of a millionaire by the name of Gribanov.5 In 1912 Ivan Bychkov published a letter from Zhukovsky to Avdotia Elagina in Russian Bibliophile dated December 4, 1840. In the letter, the very same poem appeared, containing only a minor deviation from the text published by Sollogub: Pred nebesnoiu Madonnoi. [Before the heavenly Madonna.]

Zhukovsky specifically requested that these verses were not intended for publication,6 and indicated their source, a poem by the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau, “Stumme Liebe” (“Mute Love”). In his commentary to Zhukovsky’s letter to Elagina, Bychkov included the text of the original: Ließe doch ein hold Geschick Mich in deinen Zaubernähen, Mich in deinem Wonneblick Still verglühen und vergehen;

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Wie das fromme Lampenlicht Sterbend glüht in stummer Wonne Vor dem schönen Angesicht Dieser himmlischen Madone!7

However, this new publication also passed unnoticed. By a strange twist of fate, the poem was only included in the second volume of Zhukovsky’s collected works (edited by Tsezar Volpe) nearly 100 years after its composition and nearly 57 years after it was first published. Volpe included it along with Elagina’s letter, giving it the title “[To] E. A. Reutern,” under which it continues to be found in all consequent editions of Zhukovsky’s works as well as anthologies of Russian love poetry. In his commentary, Volpe indicated that the version of the poem was taken from the original stored at the Public Library in Leningrad;8 however contemporary scholars have not been able to locate it (PSS, II, 726) under the record indicated (similarly, the original of the letter to Elagina is also nowhere to be found).9 Nowhere else— not in Zhukovsky’s diaries, nor in his correspondence, nor even in the letters and memoirs of his contemporaries— is this poem mentioned or reproduced. MUT E L O V E

Such is the editorial history of a work which occupied a special place in Zhukovsky’s life. In this chapter I would like to reconstruct the history of its creation, which reflects the dynamic nature of Zhukovsky’s relationship with his young fiancée. I will also examine this poem in the context of the poet’s theology of love and marriage, as it appears in Zhukovsky’s works, diaries, and correspondence from the final period of his life, one that was well known to an extremely narrow circle of “initiates.” Such a study is all the more interesting as “the question of matrimony” was, as we know, of central importance to the poet’s biography as well as his art.10 Moreover, it was a fundamental question for sentimental and romantic culture.11 As Novalis wrote, “Die Ehe ist das höchste Geheimnis” (“Matrimony is the highest mystery”).12 Given this, it is vital to define the place and meaning of the poem, addressed by Zhukovsky to his future wife, within the “secret” canon of his work, the study of which is one of the central concerns of this book, which focuses on a group of texts of particular emotional importance for Zhukovsky himself. This “collection” of texts, which were understood only by those closest to the poet, comprises, to use the expression of Clemens Brentano, the sacred history of his inner life (“die heilige Geschichte meines Innern”).13 As the creator of the poetics “Für Wenige” (see chapter 7 of this study), Zhukovsky 241

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is undoubtedly one of the most suitable authors for such a methodological approach, and his translation of Lenau’s poem on “mute love” is one of the most eloquent examples of this phenomenon. Lenau published “Stumme Liebe” in Gedichte of 1834 in the section “Sehnsucht” (“Yearning”). As the commentators to his collected works have shown, the poem, apparently, was inspired by the poet’s secret love for the Countess Maria von Wurttemberg, whose acquaintance he had made shortly before his departure from Wurttemberg in 1833 (hence the allusion to the Virgin Mary in the poem).14 Zhukovsky’s library contains a volume of Lenau printed in Stuttgart in 1837, in which “Stumme Liebe” can be found on page 36,15 but apparently Zhukovsky knew this poem by heart (see his letter to Elagina later in this chapter). Zhukovsky’s poem, “Oh I Pray to You, Creator” is the subject of a remarkable study by Vladimir Toporov, in which the poem is examined as a part of a “secret” cycle of texts that includes, among others, the poem relating Zhukovsky’s final meeting with Maria Protasova-Moier.16 In a recent article, Tatiana Stepanishcheva broadens the interpretative context of Zhukovsky’s miniature, perceptively pointing out the symbolic resonance between this poem and Pushkin’s works (first and foremost “There live in the world a poor knight” (“Zhil na svete rytsar’ bednyi,” 1829) and “Madonna” (1830).17 Scholars have noted a series of important changes that are introduced by Zhukovsky in his translation: he eschews the use of rhyme, changes the metric pattern, and replaces “fate” with “Creator”; direct address is employed to the latter, and not to the beloved, transforming the poem into a verse prayer. There is a more distinct juxtaposition between the earthly and heavenly spheres, as well as a direct correspondence between the beloved and the Virgin, which culminates in a final point: “the sky, future life.”18 Zhukovsky himself includes no title (the notion of “mute love,” characteristic of romantic poetry, is implicit in the text), and the “enchanting closeness” of the beloved, in which the passionate lyrical protagonist in the German original dreams of perishing, is replaced by an idiosyncratic oxymoron “in her heavenly closeness,” which emphasizes the exalted and uplifting purity of the object of his emotions. In addition, “in the languor of your gaze” (“deinem Wonneblick”) in Zhukovsky’s version is rendered as “before your heavenly gaze,” which results in the establishment of a virtuous and constant distance between the lyrical hero and his beloved; this then corresponds to the heavenly realm. It could be said that Zhukovsky consequently softens the emotional outburst of the original and simultaneously neutralizes its Catholic orientation. Love, in Novalis’s famous aphorism, is mute, and only poetry can give it language.19 But what is Zhukovsky’s poem trying to say or . . . conceal?

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Let us first turn to the immediate biographical context of the work. Towards the end of 1839, Zhukovsky completed his most important civil task— the education of the Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, the future Emperor Alexander II, whose sublime destiny he had predicted in the “Flower of the Oath.” The latter’s upcoming marriage to the Princess of Hesse Maria (as the duke’s mentor, Zhukovsky was an active participant in the search for a bride for the young heir) was to become, according to the poet, the symbolic conclusion of his more than twenty years of service to the court. However, the imperial family was reluctant to let Zhukovsky leave his post. In March 1840, the poet was appointed tutor of Princess Maria and set out with the grand duke’s suite to Darmstadt. Upon returning to Petersburg he was tasked with supervising the education of the grand duchess. Zhukovsky nevertheless viewed these new responsibilities as temporary, and in his letters to the emperor and empress he repeatedly touched upon his departure under conditions worthy of such a long and faithful period of service. Zhukovsky’s central plan for the future was to arrange the estate at Meiershof (Meeri) in Estonia, where he intended to move for the remainder of his life “happily together” with his relatives. Before his departure to Germany he requested that the empress and the heir to the throne, in the case of his death, take under their patronage the household of Alexandra Voeikova (his “Svetlana”) and carry out to their benefit that which was indicated in his will of 1837.20 In April of the same year Zhukovsky went to Darmstadt, and from there he occasionally visited his friends in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. In May he wrote a letter to the empress, in which he described himself as a lonely individual, cast out into a foreign “new world,” a kind of “old knight” for whom the future only consists of sorrowful recollections of the happy past (PSS, XIV, 205).21 In the middle of May Zhukovsky thinks of taking a summer voyage along the Rhine in the company of his friend and constant companion, the Prussian political figure and religious thinker Joseph von Radowitz. In his diary Zhukovsky writes of the grand duke’s engagement, reflects on the “philosophical history of book printing,” describes his Russian grammar lessons with the young princess, meetings with friends (especially Radowitz, who read to him his philosophical fragments), and records his impressions on the paintings created by artists of the Düsseldorf school (he has been considering writing a book on contemporary German art). Suddenly, in June, Zhukovsky decides to marry the daughter of his friend, a Düsseldorf artist in Russian employ, Gerhardt von Reutern. Zhukovsky had only met her a handful of times, and was nearly three times her age.22 On June 14, 15 minutes

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before his departure from Düsseldorf, Zhukovsky suddenly learns from the young woman’s father that his desire might be granted: she had long harbored tender feelings for the older poet. Within a week, Zhukovsky writes a letter to the empress containing a request to provide for the existence of his future family (he reads this letter aloud to his future father-in-law). In the beginning of August, he asks for Elizabeth’s hand and quickly receives her consent. In the end of September he rewrites his will in favor of his future wife (PSS, XIV, 223), and the wedding is scheduled for May of the following year, allowing Zhukovsky to return to Russia to settle his affairs and attend the April 16, 1841, festivities marking the marriage of Grand Duke Alexander and Princess Maria. Although all ages are obedient to love (or, as it is sung in the young Zhukovsky’s comic opera “it is never too late to love”),23 the news of the 57year-old’s sudden decision to marry caused no small amount of disbelief and concern in a number of circles whose opinion he valued greatly. It was an unequal marriage, and Zhukovsky’s decision contradicted his well- established image of a solitary poet whose life was sustained by the dream of an unattainable beloved. In this sense Zhukovsky’s desire to marry could be seen as a betrayal of the previous romantic ideal, the memory of Maria Protasova-Moier.24 Leonid Maikov, a historian of nineteenth-century literature, described the elderly poet’s decision to marry as “an event that was not only unexpected by his friends, but completely incomprehensible from a psychological point of view” (admittedly, Maikov then goes on to list several psychological motivations, but it would seem he was not entirely convinced by them).25 Of course, the notion of a late (“twilight”) love is not a rare subject in the biographies of prominent poets of the romantic period. But Zhukovsky was not the “titanic elder” Goethe,26 and his romantic enthusiasm struck a clearly dissonant chord in relation to the melancholic story of his life that the Russian poet himself had created. AN APOLOGY FOR MARRIAGE

Zhukovsky spends the late summer and fall of 1840 writing letters in which he gives his religious and mystical justifications for his sudden decision, building them into his own biographical and poetic legend whose central theme was the long and obedient anticipation of a wife and family happiness. These letters are sent to a number of correspondents, and are specifically directed at the individual expectations of their recipients. In general, his explanations can be distilled to the following. It was not he, but rather Providence, that had decided the matter: a miraculous confluence of circumstances over the course of nearly fifteen years— from the ar244

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rival of the young and handsome one-armed Reutern to Dorpat in 1826 (i.e., three years after the death of Maria Protasova-Moier) up until Zhukovsky’s own explanation with Reutern’s daughter, who the poet had first met seven years prior in a small cottage on the shores of Lake Geneva and later in the ancient Cassel castle of Willingshausen where her family then lived. The castle, with its famous artistic colony (Willingshäuser Malerkolonie) founded by Reutern and an aristocratic literary salon run by Reutern’s aunt-in-law, Wilhelmine Schwertzell, and visited by the Grimm Brothers, was one of the cultural centers of Germany in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.27 Zhukovsky claimed that he felt no romantic passion for his chosen (a glance back to Goethe, or—God forbid—Pushkin’s Mazepa?), but rather a quiet clear emotion bordering on a heavenly religion. Elizabeth’s immediate consent to marry him was not only entirely voluntary (her mother and father did not interfere in her decision), but was also the consequence of her inexplicable love for him which, as she told her mother, occurred almost at first sight. His upcoming marriage to her was Providence’s reward for the life he had led, a reward which, moreover, had come to pass when he had already given up any hope for the future, and had reconciled himself to a solitary old age (which he had recently described in Camoens’s lyrical monologue in an eponymous poem of 1839).28 This marriage was to be his return to himself after long years of serving others, the final chapter of the “sunset” of his life, a preparation for eternal life, in which all that was beautiful and “familiar” that was lost by him in his past earthly existence would flow together into a united whole. The earthly archetype of this mystical meeting is seen by him as that “happy togetherness” that was to take place within the next two years: a quiet life with one’s family “under a common roof” in a kind of spiritual commune which would include the new and old members of his family, living and dead. Here Zhukovsky appears to draw the central themes and “eras” of his “dear past” into the present, representing the current moment as a kind of biographical coda which promises a happy conclusion. This providential optimism, it should be said, differentiates Zhukovsky’s concept of “late love” from both Goethe’s tragic individualism which challenges death (Trilogie der Leidenschaft, 1823–24), and Tiutchev’s “blessed hopelessness” in “Final Love” (“Poslednaia liubov’,” 1852). With almost prophetic enthusiasm, Zhukovsky interprets the spring and summer of 1840 as a watershed moment, in which the will of Providence has not only marked a change in his own life, but in European history and the life of the imperial family as well. This period saw the death of the empress’s father, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, and the start of his son’s reign (Zhukovsky’s friend), as well as the grand duke’s upcoming marriage. In an article recounting the meeting of the imperial family and Princess Maria in Darmstadt that had been requested by Count Benkendorf, 245

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Zhukovsky— purposefully in my view— uses the same symbolic image of the veil and the same rhetoric of Providence that can be found in his letters to his relations.29 In addition, in a letter to the new Prussian king Zhukovsky speaks of the mystical significance of “the year 40” in Prussian chronicles from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.30 In this way, Zhukovsky constructs the sudden change in his fate in his writings within the context of a more general plan of renewal on the part of Providence.31 The most canonical version of this mystical apology for his marriage can be found in a letter written by Zhukovsky over the course of an entire month, from August 10 (22) to September 6 (17).32 This letter with multiple addressees (“to the Bunin household”) was devised by the poet as a lyrical confessional manifesto, one that was not intended for publication, but rather to be read aloud in a circle of friends and those close to him. The letter actually was read aloud in Petersburg and Moscow, as contemporary sources attest. Zhukovsky also read the same letter to his betrothed (in translation, of course). In other words, Zhukovsky turned his final love into a cultural fact, and would soon poetically (and symbolically) expand upon it in the “Dedication” to the epic poem Nal and Damaianti (1842), and in his lyrical reflections on marriage in the poem itself and other works, up to and including The Odyssey (1842–49). In the end, Zhukovsky was able to convince his contemporaries that he had made the right decision. The bachelor Alexander Turgenev welcomed the upcoming marriage of his old friend as his liberation from “the Court’s yoke” and the realization of a dream of domestic heaven that was several decades in the making.33 The story of Zhukovsky’s final love was seen by his pious “sister” Elagina as a “miraculous confluence of circumstances” which had led the poet to “a long desired but unsought sanctuary of domestic happiness.”34 Prince Viazemsky would give the following summary of Zhukovsky’s biographical legend several years later. “Zhukovsky,” he writes, “was a purified Rousseau. Like Rousseau, in the sixth decade of his life he experienced the full force of romantic passion,35 but [for Zhukovsky] it was not actually passion, and was certainly not romantic, but rather a radiant compassion, which illuminated the mystery of marriage.”36 L ON G I NG F O R HO M E

The literary nature of Zhukovsky’s letters on his marriage to Elizabeth von Reutern is evident and worthy of note. Here we will merely mention that in re-creating the timeline of events in his diaries with precision (PSS, XIII, 214), Zhukovsky subtly stylizes his romantic history along the lines of a German romantic mystical novel (or poem), in which the protagonist’s quest 246

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for an ideal wife is subordinated to the will of mysterious Providence. One source of this conscious stylization of events, as I will argue, is Zhukovsky’s own work, which in turn is connected with the story of his relationship with the Reutern family. I am referring to the providential meeting between the knight Hulbrand and the young Undine from Zhukovsky’s enchanting fairytale poema of 1832–37. The depiction of the family idyll on the coast of an “azure sea” in the fifth chapter of the poem was, by all indications, inspired by Zhukovsky’s memories of his arrival at the shore of Lake Geneva “in Vernay, in my family circle then” (i.e., the Reutern household) in 1832–33 (see the “Postscriptum” to part 2), and his stay in the castle Willingshausen in August 1833: Может быть, добрый читатель, тебе случалося в жизни, Долго скитавшись туда и сюда, попадать на такое Место, где было тебе хорошо, где живущая в каждом Сердце любовь к домашнему быту, к семейному миру С новою силой в тебе пробуждалась; и снова ты видел Край родимый; и все обаяния младости, блага Первой, чистой любви на могилах минувшего снова В прежней красе расцветали, и ты говорил, отдыхая: Здесь живется сладко, здесь сердцу будет приютно. (PSS, IV, 130; italics added)37 [Mayhap, good reader, it has happened to you in life,  / That having wandered here and there you happen upon / A place that feels right to you, where the love / For hearth, home, and family life that lives in every heart / Awoke within you with a new strength; and once more you saw / Your native land; and upon the graves of the past / All of the charms of youth, the goodness of your first, pure love once more / Began to flower in their former beauty, and you said, coming to rest: / Here life is sweet, here shall the heart find refuge.]

In the “Dedication” to Undine, written for the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna in July 1836, Zhukovsky indicates that he began his fairy tale in Switzerland, living in complete solitude on the shores of Lake Geneva (PSS, IV, 482). In a letter to the Bunins (Ekaterina Protasova’s family) on his recent engagement, he recalls his trip to Vernay to visit the Reutern family, and writes that it was one of those times in life which, when it came to an end, left in his soul an inexplicable longing for his homeland. Zhukovsky writes that it had seemed to him that Providence had wanted to brighten his soul with this “momentary vision of what is desired, dreamt about, that which we see in dreams but which never comes to be, but beyond this ethereal apparition there was hidden the essential” (SS, 755). Leaving the Willingshausen 247

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castle, Zhukovsky took with him the sad memory of his “departed angel,” with whom, it had seemed, he had “bid farewell to forever” (SS, 761). In her letter to Zhukovsky on his recent engagement, Elagina confided that she had grown so joyful, as if she herself were with the poet “in this dear family”: “I now know through you, and where you have been well spiritually.”38 The italicized words are, in fact, a hidden citation from the passage from Undine cited above. Let us return to Zhukovsky’s letter to the Bunins. Zhukovsky recalls that the three days that he spent in that ancient castle passed like a pleasant dream, and when they bid their farewells, the elder daughter of Reutern, then a thirteen-year-old child, threw her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him “with such unusual tenderness” that he was shocked, “though of course it left no trace on [his] soul” (SS, 756). It would seem that this tender impulsiveness can also be found in Zhukovsky’s Undine as well.39 In the fifth chapter of the fairy tale, Zhukovsky includes a story about an old fisherman that is conspicuously absent in the original.40 In the poet’s version, the fisherman is a former warrior, one who had experienced much in his days, and who serves as the wise and interesting interlocutor of Undine’s husband-to-be, the knight Hulbrand: Рыбак был мудрец простодушный; Зная людей, изведав тревоги житейские, бывши Ратником сам в молодых летах, на досуге он много Мог рассказать про войну и про счастье, несчастье земное; Словом, он был живая летопись . . . (PSS, IV, 130) [Knowing people, having witnessed life’s worries, having / Been a soldier himself in his early years, he could at leisure / Go on about war and about earthly happiness and unhappiness; / In a word, he was a living chronicle . . .]

I would argue that this interpolation was motivated by Zhukovsky’s desire to endow Undine’s adopted father with the personal qualities of Gerhardt von Reutern, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and friend of the author.41 Zhukovsky’s recollections of his time at Willingshausen might have been caused by the poet’s close relationship with Reutern in August and September of 1835; the fifth chapter of Undine was complete in October of the same year. “Reutern’s older daughter, then 19 years old,” recalled Zhukovsky of their second meeting in 1839, “appeared before me like a heavenly vision, which I admired to my soul’s fulfillment simply as a heavenly vision, not even allowing myself the thought that this bright spirit could descend from the heavens and merge with my life” (SS, 760). A similar description can be found in Zhukovsky’s Undine: “kakim-to  // Raiskim viden’em siiala 248

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ona”; “prizrakom svetlym sidela Undina” (the italicized words are absent in Fouqué’s original). These linguistic and situational resonances not only serve as evidence of the prehistory of Zhukovsky’s “sudden marriage,” known only to those closest to the poet; they also demonstrate how diligently Zhukovsky worked his own romantic history into his artistic creations, as well as into the chivalric model that serves as the basis of Fouqué’s fairy tale. It should be noted that similar attempts at “life-creation” (zhiznetvorchestvo) could be found in other romantically inclined biographies of the period (for example, in her youth the Prussian princess Charlotte modeled her life after Fouqué’s Der Zauberring).42 TH E IC O N O F T H E S O U L

In the context of Zhukovsky’s quickly composed myth of a miraculous love for a heavenly creature43 that suddenly appeared to him at the end of his life (in itself a variation on the theme of momentary visitation of the poet by a genius of pure beauty that, at least in this case, remains), a special place is occupied by the “visible image” (vidimyi obraz) of the beloved. In general, Zhukovsky’s beloved is mysteriously silent in his letters, only looking upon others or allowing herself to be seen. In his letter to the Bunins, Zhukovsky recalls her magical gaze directed at him: “when she lifted her eyes from her work (which she held in her hands) and they fell upon me, in these eyes there was an inexpressible gaze, which directly poured into my depths” (SS, 760); “she looked at me from the deck with such a gaze, that it once again agitated my soul, and it could have made it once more produce that, from which it had long ago denied, if I were to give it my will” (SS, 765). Finally, the angelic image of the “immaculate” Elizabeth reminds Zhukovsky of the impression made upon him by the Raphael Madonna: I admired her, like the image of Raphael’s Madonna, which I spent several happy minutes contemplating in quite recollection . . . [However] in that feeling, the one with which I looked upon that angelic face, there was no perfected peace, which you experience when you look at the quiet Madonna. It was combined with sorrow, I pitied myself, looking at her and feeling that the youth of my heart was still entirely with me, I bemoaned the fact that the youth of life had passed and that I had to indifferently pass by that to which my soul could surrender itself to with all of its inexorable ardor, but to which my soul must remain a stranger. (SS, 760)44

The material incarnation of this “angelic visage” was a portrait of Elizabeth von Reutern created by a professor of the Düsseldorf school of art, Carl 249

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Ferdinand Sohn (1805–1867), which Zhukovsky had ordered in August 1840 and brought to Russia instead of his fiancee. He shows this portrait to his friends, informing the closest of them beforehand of the magical effect even this pale copy was to have on the initiated. “Imagine the ideal German woman,” writes the recently “initiated” Pletnev to his friend Yakov Grot, “fair-skinned, a most correct face, lowered eyes, wearing a golden cross; a shirt can be seen under her dress, the edge of the dress’s body rests on the shoulders and is sewn with a narrow band of lace; inexpressible calm, thought, reason, innocence, feeling— everything is reflected in this portrait, which I myself would not call a portrait but rather an icon. One could easily pray to it. The very form of the portrait, surrounded from above with a light-blue fond, all of this produces an inexpressible impression. We admired this image all evening.”45 “Bring her portrait,” writes Elagina to Zhukovsky in Moscow, “it will make both you and me happy. Different features of the same ideal, which we have loved in life. The seen image of that which had always been hidden in the soul.”46 Another “material” vessel that was capable of bringing Zhukovsky’s beloved’s soul to Russia were her letters, which the poet promised to bring to Elagina: they “were the same as her face. How pleasant it will be to give you these letters to read and to show you the portrait” (Zhukovsky also showed these letters to the empress). Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s letters to Zhukovsky from this time period have not been discovered, rendering any judgment of their “heavenly” contents difficult.47 In general, there is remarkably little that is known about Zhukovsky’s young bride- to-be: she was devoutly religious, sang well, drew, was interested in poetry, and composed poems herself. The religious atmosphere in her household is described by Carl Seidlitz (who never met her and who clearly was ill-disposed towards her) in broad brushstrokes: strict piety, unconditional faith in Providence, a constant focus on the struggle against sins both real and imagined. Veselovsky’s study includes a fragment from Elizabeth’s recounting of her acquaintance with Zhukovsky (which was written at the poet’s request), which speaks of the young woman’s romantic exaltation. The Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library contains a confession signed by Elizabeth. It was written around August 1839, and entitled “Mein Glaubensbekenntnis” (“Auf dem Grund der heiligen Schrift, und nach der Anleitung des apostolischen Glaubensbekenntnisses . . .”). This document presents Elizabeth’s own exposition of the canonical formulas of faith practiced in pious Lutheran families: praise of “allmächtigen Schöpfer aller Dinge,” gratitude for God’s infinite love for creation, virtue, and inexpressible good (“seine Gnade und unaussprechliche Güte”); prayers for strength and patience in the struggle against one’s own sins and vices (“meine Sünden

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und Mängel mit großem Langmuth”), hopes for an inexpressible (“unaus”) love, similar to that of the Virgin Mary, and so on.48 According to the Rev. Dr. Carl Kreger, whom we consulted with in studying this work, the text was in all likelihood written at her father’s insistence, probably in connection to some serious series of events. It should be recalled that in June 1839 Zhukovsky visited the Willingshausen castle, from whence he sets off to Berlin with Elizabeth’s father before heading on to Petersburg. In July of the same year Zhukovsky confesses his love for Elizabeth to her father, and receives a noncommittal response: “Look: if she herself is willing to give herself to you, then I will agree to everything beforehand” (SS, 761). Although Reutern says that he will speak to his daughter about Zhukovsky’s declaration, it is extremely likely that her own confession was initiated by her father as a kind of spiritual trial. Clearly, in Zhukovsky’s consciousness Elizabeth embodied not only the ideal German wife, as his friends wrote repeatedly in their letters, but also a kind of sublime religiosity that was so valued by the German romantics and whose models the Russian poet had once found in the Protasova sisters and Princess Charlotte, the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna. It is precisely in this sense that the word “always” from Zhukovsky’s letter to Elagina— that Elizabeth was “the seen image of that, which was always hidden in the soul”— should be understood. A N “UN F R EE” T R A NS L AT I O N

Immediately following the passage quoted above in Zhukovsky’s letter to Elagina there is a fragment which contains the translation from Lenau. It serves as a poetic commentary to Sohn’s “religious” portrait and the “heavenly” letters of Elizabeth herself: On the very same day of my first departure from Düsseldorf, the thought that in a few hours my fate would be decided had not even appeared possible. We were playing a game in which you had to guess various lines of poetry written backwards, while still maintaining the word order, but rearranging the letters of the words. I unintentionally wrote eight lines from Lenau and gave them to her, and she began to work on them. By evening they had become the inscription to my life; I translated them, or, I should say, made them my own. Here they are . . .49

It is worth noting that Zhukovsky’s letter to his relatives, a kind of official report of his experiences in Düsseldorf which relates, in great detail,

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that “decisive” day in his life (June 14, 1840), contains no mention of Lenau’s poem. Clearly, this work was only intended for the very few. In general, the fragment from the letter to Elagina is not so much the story of the poem’s composition, but rather the tale of its miraculous birth, which was supposed to indicate that Zhukovsky’s personal life was being secretly directed to a happy end by Providence itself. Each and every stage of this unfree translation (i.e., which was directed by Providence itself) is significant. Our departure point is a simple parlor game. Quiet evenings spent with family, during which there would be music, readings, telling fairy tales, innocent games, and religious discussion, epitomized the moral and aesthetic values of the Reutern-Schwertzell household.50 An old family friend, Joseph Maria von Radowitz, would write in his memoirs of the particular influence this ideal family would have on his own aesthetic and moral development.51 It should be noted that in the household there was a particular cult surrounding the young Elizabeth, a fact which undoubtedly influenced Zhukovsky. The poet’s journal from the 1840s contains a drawing (dated June 14, 1840) of the Düsseldorf home where the Reuterns lived: a house in a garden, with arched gates seen to the left. The next day’s entry contains a drawing from the deck of the “providential” steamship that Zhukovsky had traveled on.52 Although Zhukovsky claimed that his choice of Lenau had been unintentional (thus emphasizing the lack of his own individual will in the process guided by Providence), this is extremely unlikely. The Austrian melancholic’s poem too readily portrays Zhukovsky’s state before his conversation with Elizabeth’s father, namely that of someone hopelessly in love.53 In addition, this “mute” declaration of love through another’s poetry is a traditional device of romantic culture. In the rearranged letters the beloved is to guess at the original (a similar guessing game is interpreted in the romantic canon as evidence that there is a kinship between souls; see, for example, Werther and Lotte, who “recognize” Klopstock’s ode in the thunderstorm). I would argue that in this case for both Zhukovsky and his addressee the very first word of the original poem, “Ließe,” if read in a certain way, contains a meaning above and beyond the conditional mood of the verb “to keep,” namely an archaic diminutive form of the name “Elisabeth.”54 Finally, late in the evening after his conversation with Elizabeth’s father, when family happiness suddenly seems possible, Zhukovsky translates Lenau’s poem into Russian, not only “making it his own” by changing, in a fundamental fashion, the somber mood of the original, but also by turning it into the “inscription” (or motto) of his future life: his hopes for marriage. The only problem is that the text which, according to Zhukovsky, was completed the evening of July 14, was not the same as the one produced in his December letter to Elagina. 252

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I was fortunate enough to find the following original copy of this poem, which included a reverse translation back into German, in the collection of the Martin Bodmer Foundation in Cologny (Geneva): О, когда бы мой Создатель Дал в близи твоей небесной, Пред твоим небесным взором И гореть и умереть мне, Как горит в немом блаженстве, Тихо, ясно умирая, Огнь волшебныя лампады Пред небесною Мадоной. Ließe mein Schöpfer Mich in deinen himmlischen Nähen, Vor deinem himmlischen Blick Brennen und vergehen, Wie brennt in stummer Wonne, Still und hell vergehend, Das Licht der frommen Lampe Vor der himmlischen Madonne.

July 26, 1840 Judging from the inventory, this version came to the Bodmer Foundation from the remarkable collection of autographs of Stefan Zweig. In Zweig’s catalogue Zhukovsky’s poem is mistakenly listed as a translation of Theodor Körner’s “Die letzte Gedanke.”55 Zweig acquired it in 1923 from the wellknown Parisian bibliophile Charavay. How it ended up in Charavay’s possession is unknown, although there is one possible explanation. According to Zhukovsky’s diary entry from July 26, 1840 (new style), the poet had spent this Sunday meeting with Radowitz and speaking to him of his love: A beautiful evening with Radowitz. Conversation about me. The signed copy. A reading on law and love . . . What a wealth of thoughts . . . This is much better than whit, eloquence, or subtlety. (PSS, XIII, 214; italics added)

Radowitz was a passionate hunter of autographs and had gathered an incredibly rich collection. It is known that Zhukovsky assisted him in the acquisition of entire series of them belonging to Russian historical figures.56 It would be reasonable to surmise that on July 26 Zhukovsky had given his 253

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friend his recently composed poem with a translation into German (the reason for their conversation proves a most suitable motivation: Zhukovsky’s love for the daughter of their mutual friend).57 In 1864, following Radowitz’s death, his collection was put up for auction in Leipzig. Although the published catalogue does not contain Zhukovsky’s text,58 I would hazard that the poem’s home is this collection, as the date of the poem corresponds with the time of the diary entry, and not the written work. There are significant differences in this version of the text and the one from the December letter to Elagina. It is closer to the original (although “fate” here is also replaced by “Creator”). There is no direct address to the Creator, but there is a direct address to the beloved (informal you: ty, tebia), which is more characteristic for a declaration of love. The most striking difference in this version is the dominance of the conjunctive mood, both in ideology and grammar. It is undoubtedly closer to the moment of the poem’s creation (July 14, if the letter to Elagina is to be believed) and reflects Zhukovsky’s state before his engagement (August 2): a timid sense of hope and an undefined future. In addition, the German translation not only assists the addressee’s comprehension, it also emphasizes the distance between Zhukovsky’s poem and its German original. Vladimir Toporov has convincingly argued that this short poem is a kind of cento of Zhukovsky’s beloved literary themes, which can be seen in numerous examples of his poetry, prose, and correspondence: silence, a fading light, the light of a lamp, a heavenly gaze, and so on.59 However, the poem’s particular value is not to be found in this reworking of previous themes in a new context, but rather a new quality, which reflects a special moment in Zhukovsky’s emotional and artistic biography. It seems to me that the lines “quietly, clearly dying” in the “Geneva” variant are not a simple repetition of favored literary motifs, but a direct reference to Camoens’s somber monologue, a fitting expression of Zhukovsky’s own fears at the end of the 1830s: Счастлив стократно Простой поселянин! Трудом прилежным Довольный, скромный, замыслов высоких Не ведая, своей тропинкой он Идет; когда же смертный час его Наступит, он, в кругу своих, близ доброй Жены, участницы всего, что было И горького и радостного в жизни, Среди детей, воспитанных с любовью, Смиренно, тихо, ясно умирает; И всеми он любим, и, с ним прощаясь, Все плачут, и глаза ему родная Рука при смерти зажимает. Я же? (PSS, VII, 444; italics added)60 254

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[Happy a hundredfold / Is the simple villager! Satisfied with his / Diligent labor, modest, knowing no / Lofty designs, he goes along his / Path; when the hour of his death / Strikes, he is surrounded by kith and kin, near his good / Wife, his partner in everything that was / Bitter and joyful in life, / Among his children, raised with love, / He dies meekly, quietly, lucidly; / He is loved by all and, parting with him, / They all weep, and a kindred hand / Closes his eyes upon his death. And me?]

The epithet “pious” in relationship to a fading life also leads the reader to one of Zhukovsky’s favorite recollections of the period. Elizabeth once recalled how she had been particularly influenced by Zhukovsky’s “wondrous” thoughts on piety, which he had expressed during a conversation with F. B. Schadow, a Düsseldorf- based religious artist. The words “mute bliss” (the precise kind of bliss lovers experience in Zhukovsky’s ballads and elegies) in the 1830s and early 1840s take on the connotation of the feeling of spiritual unity of those betrothed to one another. In general the word “blessed” (blazhennyi) can be seen as a kind of refrain throughout Zhukovsky’s diaries in the month following his engagement: “a blessed conversation with my angel,” “a blessed evening,” “a blessed morning with my angel,” “a blessed quarter hour on the porch,” “a blessed day,” “a blessed hour in Klotz Winkel” (so Zhukovsky called the journal of his correspondence diary with his bride, after the protagonist of a humorous story he had created). “A month has passed for me in the blessed clarity of calmness of the soul,” he summarized in his letter to his relative, “then nothing had yet been decided, but a kind of encouraging voice was heard by me, and it was a surprising pleasure to sit by myself in my room, thinking of her and even not thinking, but, as if in a dream, feeling that she is close by, and that it will be like this for the rest of my future” (SS, 772). The poetic model of the mute bliss of the betrothed can be found in the description of a wedding from the second canto of Zhukovsky’s “Indian poem,” Nal and Damaianti (1837– 41).61 The happy protagonist, “full of the bliss of love,” vows to his “timidly blushing bride” that he will be faithful to her unto the grave. Having given this promise, Светлый жених перед всеми своей лучезарной невесте Дал целомудренно первый любви поцелуй; и друг другом Долго в блаженстве немом любовались они; напоследок, Вспомнив, что боги близко, и царь и царевна пред ними Пали с молитвой; и боги скрепили своей благодатью Брак их . . . (PSS, V, 109; italics added)

Once again, the italicized words show Zhukovsky’s interpolation.62 Remarkably, the very same mystical romantic terminology (an inner 255

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voice, piety, the heavens, sacrifices, mute bliss) is used in Elizabeth von Zhukovsky’s memoirs: His presence was everything to me, it gave me everything; I felt an inexplicable joy, the source of which I did not understand, and that dream which I had long ago discovered in the depths of my heart, became more and more real with each day. Zhukovsky’s presence was happiness, seeing him was bliss.63 One feeling filled me now, the feeling that my soul belonged to him for eternity, although that “forever” was still unknown to him. There settled in me the conviction that I was destined to either live with him, or to die . . . From then on I started to live with the hope that my soul might be joined to his in eternity. Often, gazing at the sky, I said to myself: my soul already lives with him there!64

If the Russian text of the poem was a declaration of the poet’s love, then his German translation “Ließe mein Schöpfer . . .” could easily have been signed by his pious beloved. Zhukovsky’s poem expressed her sentiment as well. L IE B E U ND T O D

I date the “Elagina” (or final) version of the poem to August or early fall of 1840, a time of constantly increasing religious enthusiasm for Zhukovsky. In this version, we are not faced with a madrigal confession of love, but rather a prayer in verse addressed to the Creator, in which Zhukovsky entreats the Lord that his life be preserved so that he might love her, and that the remainder of his days be illuminated by her radiance. In diary entries from this period Zhukovsky repeatedly turns to God and requests that his life be extended. We will include but one example, from a September letter addressed to the empress: “I ask for but one thing from the Lord: that my life be preserved, as through His Goodness I now place upon it a very high value.”65 As in the beginning of the 1810s (when he hoped to marry Maria Protasova), Zhukovsky’s religious Welt-Empfindung is now centered around the Lord’s Prayer: June 26, 1840—Translated Our Father (for a lesson with Princess Maria); July 6—My soul is full, and Our Father is on my lips and in my heart; August 23—Grant God your life; also: let Thy will be done; August 29—What happiness it is to know that she is an angel of quiet family; happiness, which is silent to the world, which is my own, shared with no one; it will remain so. Bless me, God Almighty. But let Thy will be done;

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August–September—In this moment I feel so completely happy, that it cannot continue and must change. But why rest upon such thoughts. It is not for nothing that we say: Let Thy will be done! On earth there is no true happiness, nor [true] misfortune, there is only the will of God in different aspects.66

The theme of the Lord’s Prayer in relation to Zhukovsky’s personal life circumstances reaches its culmination in a letter to Anna Zontag from September 9, 1840: From that clear peaceful light that surrounds me there often appears the stern face of death and an involuntary sadness winds itself around my heart. Liebe is stark wie Tod [sic!] . . . so wrote to me a friend of the Gospel before my departure for Düsseldorf. How close are these two words Liebe and Tod. On this earth there is no happiness without love, but there is also no happiness without death. To one the soul alone says: do not abandon me! To another it says: do not take me away! The first gives happiness its beauty; the second gives it its worth. But the thought that all things on earth must come to an end, this leads to anxiety. However, there is a medicine for such concerns and it is a most simple one. It is contained in the Lord’s Prayer. He who can read “Our Father” as it has been given to us from above fears nothing and finds all that is good to be true.67

“Do not take me away!” and “Do not abandon me” can be seen as deep emotional subtexts for the Lenau translation in particular and for Zhukovsky’s religious experience in general. Zhukovsky’s friend, the Weimar chancellor Friedrich von Müller, records the following words of Zhukovsky in an entry dated October 29, 1840: “turning the conversation to the fact that he [Zhukovsky] did not want to die as a groom, [he] said: ‘Love and death are the two great forces of life’ [Die Liebe und der Tod sind die beiden großen Mächte des Lebens]. Without love there is no life, without death there is no desire to ascend to the heavens” (PSS, XIX, 517).68 The significance of this period of searching for a Christian justification of love for Zhukovsky can be seen in the fact that the words from the “Song of Songs,” which had been written in his copy of the New Testament, are included (in German) in his farewell letter to his wife, which was written (or dictated) in French (April 1852): I enjoyed life with you in the full meaning of the word. I understood its worth better and became more and more confirmed in my striving toward its goal, which consists of nothing else but in learning to submit to the will of God. I am indebted to you for this, accept my gratitude and along with it my assurance that I loved you as the very best treasure of my soul. You will weep,

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because you have lost me, but do not despair: love is as strong as death [die Liebe is stark als der Tod]. There is no separation in the kingdom of God. I believe that I will be bound to you even more closely than before death. In this certainty, in order not to disturb the peace of my soul, do not worry, preserve peace in your soul and its joy and sorrow will belong to me even more, than in this earthly life (italics added).69

I think I would not be mistaken in claiming that the friend who had written words on the strength of love and death on Zhukovsky’s copy of the New Testament was none other than Joseph von Radowitz, who had been chosen by the poet to be his “guide and judge of my life” (as the mystic Ivan Vladimirovich Lopukhin had done at an earlier point in Zhukovsky’s life). It was Radowitz, then, who was to become one of, if not the first reader of Zhukovsky’s poem. H US B A ND A ND WI F E

Zhukovsky’s diary entries from the summer and autumn of 1840 clearly show that the poet was in a constant search for Christian foundations for his love and upcoming marriage. Frequent conversations with Radowitz not only strengthened his resolve to marry; they also became an important (though hardly the only) source of encouragement for his religious searching. On July 18, soon after his conversation with Elizabeth’s father, Zhukovsky turns to Radowitz for advice.70 “If [her] father’s words could suddenly lend me resolve,” he would later write to his relatives, “then Radowitz’s words added to this resolve a joyful vivacity as far as myself was concerned, for until then it had still seemed that in my year I had not the right to ask for the love of a 19-year-old girl and that such a love was an impossible matter.” However, Radowitz, who knew both Elizabeth and Zhukovsky’s characters well, dispersed his doubts and vouched for his happiness, as long as she will give him her hand freely from the heart, without any external influence (SS, 770). On June 16 (28), Zhukovsky visits his friend once more, and Radowitz reads to him from his “clear and concise” philosophical fragments on Protestantism, matrimony, omniscience, and space and time (PSS, XIV, 211–12).71 Most pertinent for Zhukovsky, of course, was the fragment on marriage (“Die Ehe”). Somewhat later, already after his engagement, Zhukovsky mentions a conversation with his fiancée on the androgynous nature of the first man and, by extension, the mystical essence of marriage: A wonderful conversation this morning. It is true: husband and wife were one at the world’s creation: love is the meeting of two souls, intended to comprise

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a single soul. Their perfect union into one without the loss of distinctiveness is their meeting in life here. It is also love, but already without separation. Here, [they] are united with desire, a perfectly quiet melancholy, and the incessant feeling of satisfaction. (PSS, XIX, 218)

Of course, these thoughts stem from passages from scripture which Zhukovsky knew quite well, but their immediate source— in the sentimental and mystical variant presented above— derives from Radowitz’s article mentioned earlier, in which the hypothesis of the dual nature of the first person is used to explain marital love as a path leading to the restoration of a higher unity.72 It also draws upon Radowitz’s reflections in “die leibliche Seite der Ehe” (“the physical side of marriage”) as well as his “die Gemeinschaft der Interessen, der Gewohnheiten, der Freuden und Leiden” (“the community of interests, the habits, the joys, and sorrows”).73 It is possible that it is around this time that Zhukovsky arrives at the idea of translation of a book by the German theologian Julius Martin on original sin, salvation, and eternal life, in which the very opening pages address the first married pair: “In the beginning God created one person— husband and wife” and so on.74 Another important source for Zhukovsky’s thoughts on Christian love from this time period were the lessons of Princess Maria’s confessor, the pastor Carl Zimmerman, a well-known participant of the German religious revival of the 1830s. On August 27 (the day after his meeting with Radowitz, when Zhukovsky composed the draft of the poem currently located in Geneva), the poet writes in his diary: Pastor Zimmerman visited me after dinner. One must love in order to gain the ability to sacrifice that which you love to that which is greater than you. It is not a true sacrifice, but merely a submissive giving to the eternal power of our beloved. For love there is no solitude. Nor does [this] loss create solitude. God is so clear to the loving heart. Wherever the beloved was, it will always be with Him. One needs only to be capable of forgetting oneself, or even better, to be able to submit oneself. Do not refuse the beloved, but sanctify your love to something higher and more important. (PSS, XIV, 214; italics added)

These words could serve as a lyrical theological commentary to the poem in its final version: the idea of a submissive sacrificial Christian love, which is, according to Zhukovsky in his letters to his family, nothing more then the “complete and serene faith of the heart,” in which suddenly, as if by some kind of revelation, all had become familiar. Such a faith is not founded upon convictions or experience: “it is an inner voice, it is an undeceiving anticipation, it is the second vue of the future” (SS, 778). It should be noted that at this time Zhukovsky’s German friends were calling his attention to the 259

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mystical sermons of Johann Tauler (1300–1361), whose thought centered on the idea of the soul’s ascension through love by progressing through a series of stages— through self-denial— along the path to the Creator. Naturally, all of these theological and mystical ideas had fallen on well- tilled soil, and it would be easy to find similar notions and images in Zhukovsky’s verse, correspondence, and diaries from earlier periods: the representation of family life as a union in the name of a higher moral goal, the telling silence of the knight Togenburg, the quiet faith in Providence, invisibly leading the poet to his betrothed, the belief in a “sacred submissive love” and the understanding of the latter as selfless sacrifice.75 But there is still a vital difference: in the 1840s the aging Zhukovsky is seeking a positive Christian philosophy of love and marriage, which was to define from there on out his feelings, actions, and creations. The “poet as moralist” surrenders its place to the “poet as theologian” (here, as I argue, the influence of Radowitz can also be discerned: his Christian romantic fragments serve as a pattern for Zhukovsky’s religious articles and fragments from the latter half of the 1840s). Instead of the idea of spiritual marriage that had attracted to Zhukovsky in the 1810s,76 there now appears an entire doctrine of earthly marriage, understood in a religious and mystical sense. Such a representation of marital love leads to the justification and sanctification of a personal, private, earthly life, removed from the cares of society. This notion of marriage, Zhukovsky believed, would lead to a deeper understanding of one’s self through another. Consequently, “bliss” is now to be found not in a remote dream or in life beyond the grave, but rather becomes embodied in the constant mixture of joy with sadness— which endows the former with worth— which exists in the “earthly” relationship between the spouses. From here there naturally follows a mystical and religious idealization of family existence in Zhukovsky’s later poetry. Compare, for example, in his translation of The Odyssey: О, да исполнят бессмертные боги твои все желанья, Давши супруга по сердцу тебе с изобилием в доме, С миром в семье! Несказанное там водворяется счастье, Где однодушно живут, сохраняя домашний порядок, Муж и жена, благомысленным людям на радость, недобрым Людям на зависть и горе, себе на великую славу. (PSS, VI, 104)77 [Oh, let the immortal gods fulfill all of your wishes / Having given you a husband according to your heart, along with plentitude in your house / And peace in your family! An unspeakable happiness reigns there, / Where husband and wife live as one soul, guarding their household in order, / Gladdening all well-

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intentioned people, / Bringing envy and grief to those with ill-will, and bringing great glory on themselves.]

Romantic poets from Novalis to Rossetti often weep over their beloveds, who quietly fade away, leaving only memory as the source for the melancholic (or, on occasion, impassioned) imagination. The 57-year-old Zhukovsky felt that he would pass away before his wife, and this feeling left a trace of “finitude” on his Christian theology of love, which found its “quiet and clear” expression in the religious poem that had been inspired by Elizabeth von Reutern. This poem was built into the “secret” emotional canon of his life’s work and was known to only the dearest circle of his friends. In this context, I would like to return to Alexander Sollogub’s claim that it was Zhukovsky himself who asked Vielgorsky to compose music to his poem “Oh, I pray to you, Creator.” Although we have no documentation to support this version of events, it seems to me to be extremely close to the truth. Already in the summer of 1839, Elizabeth’s performances of Müller, Beethoven, Rode, and Mendelssohn remind Zhukovsky of Vielgorsky. By the beginning of the 1840s, Vielgorsky, a deeply religious person, was one of Zhukovsky’s closest spiritual friends. In his diaries from the end of 1840 and the beginning of 1841 Zhukovsky repeatedly recalls his meetings and conversations with Vielgorsky and the musical performances at his home. Zhukovsky attends the wedding of Vielgorsky’s daughter to Vladimir Sollogub, and the occasion was marked by a concert given by the famous Italian singer Giuditta Pasta. On the day of Zhukovsky’s wedding (May 21, 1841), Vielgorsky writes him a letter in which he says that he is praying to the Almighty that his life be extended and that he grant Zhukovsky patience: Trust in the advice of a friend: I will not say that you should not give yourself over to the sensual pleasures of the marital bed— you are quite distant from such petty matters— but rather resist a certain kind of materialism, a lazy sense of habit which unnoticeably sneaks into the life of a married man and which, though being the complete opposite of the unreflected life of the bachelor, is different, yet no less dangerous to the soul. (PSS, XIV, 178–79)78

The original of Vielgorsky’s musical “prayer” composed to Zhukovsky’s words is kept in the Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library. It is contained in the upper half of one page of sheet music, and includes the musical text (“Adagio. Sotto voci”) for the poem’s first stanza. Instead of a title there is the word “Basso,” that is, it is possible that before us there is not a “separate” romance, as is said in the records of the Imperial Public Library, but rather a part of a greater choral work, intended

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to be sung in four parts.79 Unfortunately, the work is lost to us, but we do know that in the 1840s Vielgorsky created a number of choral quartets, cantatas, and religious suites the vast majority of which remain unpublished to this day.80 Clearly, Zhukovsky’s poem was well understood by the composer, who was familiar with his friend’s family history and spiritual yearnings, as an example of religious poetry which required an appropriate form of musical expression.81 As the result, the “mute” twilight love of the Russian romantic obtained its musical voice.

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Chapter Twelve

The Last Supper And when at length it came, with joy They hail’d the bridal day, And onward to the house of God They went their willing way. And as they at the altar stood And heard the sacred rite, The hallowed tapers dimly stream’d A pale sulphureous light. And as the Youth with holy warmth Her hand in his did hold, Sudden he felt Donica’s hand Grow deadly damp and cold. —Robert Southey, “Donica”

I N N O V E M B E R 1 8 4 0 Zhukovsky arrives in Russia, stopping first in Petersburg before moving to Moscow in January 1841. On the occasion of the marriage of the tsar’s heir, Zhukovsky is awarded the title of privy councillor, a rank that was also held by Goethe.1 His Petersburg and Moscow friends, who had already been informed of his marriage to Reutern, congratulate the poet and ask him to recount the story of his miraculous love. On the New Year’s eve, Zhukovsky’s Petersburg friends, led by the former Arzamasian Dmitry Bludov, arranged a number of tableaux vivants inspired by the poet’s lyrics:2 И ты поэт, и для тебя виденье И у тебя от сердца отлегло, Тебе его Святое Провиденье Наградой дивной сберегло.— За жизнь твою, за сладостные звуки, Которым свет рукоплескал, Вадима сон тебе дается в руки Ты совершенство отыскал. (“Vadim”)3

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[And so you are the poet, and there is a vision for you / And your heart eased [as] / Sacred Providence preserved this wondrous reward for you.— / This is the reward for your life, for your sweet sounds, / Which the world applauded you for; / The dream of Vadim was given into your hands— / You found the perfection.]

In turn, the more patriotically inclined Moscow friends present Zhukovsky with an entire volume of congratulatory poetry.4 Fyodor Glinka asks that the groom bring his “Rhineland maiden” to Moscow, where a warm welcome awaits her: . . . Увидишь, какова Москва. Москва—святой Руси и сердце и глава!— И не покинешь ты ее из доброй воли; Там и в мороз тебя пригреют, угостят; И ты полюбишь наш старинный русский град, Откушав русской хлеба-соли! (l. 22)5 [You will see what Moscow is—  / Moscow— the heart and glory of holy Russia!—  / And you won’t leave it out of good will;  / They will give you warmth in winter and will feed you generously; / And you will fall in love with our ancient Russian city, / Having tasted Russian bread and salt.]

Mikhail Dmitriev, meanwhile, urges Zhukovsky to return to poetry for the glory of Russia: Там, на Рейне, благодатный Ангел—дева есть одна: Цвет любови ароматный В твой венок сплетет она! И где он к тебе приветный Пышен тек между холмов И лелеял дар заветный Для тебя, краса певцов! Ты, отдавший долг отчизне, Возвратися к струнам вновь: Возрожденный к новой жизни, Пой нам славу и любовь!6 [There, on the Rhine river, lives a blissful Angel— the only maiden. / She will twine the fragrant flower of love into your wreath! / And there where the welcoming Rhine / Luxuriously flew amidst the hills / And cherished the sacramental gift / For you, the beauty of bards, / You, having paid the debt to the

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fatherland, / Come back to your lyre: / Having been born to a new life, / Sing us glory and love!]

The more ironic members of the Petersburg circle could not resist poking fun at their friend. In April the vaudeville “Le bon papa, ou La proposition de mariage” by Eugène Scribe and A.-H.-J. Mélesville was staged at Bludov’s home. The play had been well known in Russia through Dmitry Lensky’s Russian adaptation, “The Grandfather Groom” (“Dedushka-zhenikh,” 1830).7 Zhukovsky, of course, was invited. “These stones cast at me are little more than pebbles,” writes Zhukovsky in his diary, “but still, one should not allow a French vaudeville into my sanctuary” (PSS, XIV, 253; italics mine). Such “pebbles,” for instance, could be found in the lines of the vaudeville’s aged protagonist: DE VERBOIS: . . . A mesure que je la regarde, je ne trouve plus qu’il soit si ridicule de se marier; c’est à mon âge surtout qu’on a besoin d’une compagne,d’un guide, d’un appui: autant me laisser conduire par elle que par Babet, qui me grondait toujours!8 [As much as I look at her, I do not find marriage ridiculous anymore; it is especially at my age that one is need of a companion, a guide, support: better to let myself be steered by her than by Babet!]

Judging from his diary, Zhukovsky himself experienced moments of doubt. Two days after the staging of the offensive vaudeville, he records his own impressions from Giuditta Pasta’s singing in Norma: Pasta, who used to be the queen of the stage, was pathetic at times, as she wanted to sing not in accordance with her years. Should this be applicable to me as well? No. The answer to everything is the heavenly, pure, faithful, and lofty soul of my dear Elizabeth. I shall have to come to terms with my current situation and not ask for that which I cannot. Rather, I should accept with faith and love, and with hope (in both senses of the word) that it was given to me as sincere and pure. (PSS, XIV, 254)

Zhukovsky’s attitude to the ironic comments of his friends and his own personal doubts about leaving the cares and concerns of society behind (represented here by the vaudeville) can be understood via the concept of “the sanctuary of the soul.” Indeed, the poet’s love for “the heavenly Elizabeth” was presented as a kind of secret domestic religion, and their future home together as a temple (similar to the Reutern-Schwertzell house). Access to such a sacred space can only be granted to noble individuals, such as Radowitz, Elagina, or Vielgorsky. 265

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In this context, Zhukovsky’s attitude towards the Moscow festivities is symptomatic. The historian Pogodin, who informed readers of his journal of a number of dinners given in honor of the “patriarch” of Russian poetry,9 described these occasions as a series of symposia, in which “five generations” of the Russian intelligentsia discussed not only artistic concerns, but religious and philosophical questions as well, such as Saint Augustine’s interpretation of Pilate’s question: “What is truth?” These luxurious feasts, widely reported in the press (to Zhukovsky’s chagrin)10 seemed to him to be a profanation of the ideal of a quiet family meal with its dignified discussion of serious (and first and foremost, spiritual) issues. For Zhukovsky’s circle, steeped in the German Pietist tradition, such a repast should be modeled after the Last Supper of the New Testament, and should, of necessity, be kept away from the eyes and ears of the uninitiated, and above all from the representatives of the press! Zhukovsky’s wedding took place on May 21 (June 2), 1841. The poet’s biographers usually remark upon the first blissful year of the new couple’s life together, but recently published diaries written by Zhukovsky paint a remarkably different picture. Zhukovsky’s wife’s condition was difficult: miscarriages, constant bleeding, trembling hands, chest pains, despondency, irregular heartbeat, headaches, upset nerves, convulsions, a complete lack of appetite, malnutrition, “hysterics,” nausea, and a host of other symptoms and conditions were constantly present. This situation was to remain unchanged up until the end of Zhukovsky’s life; the happier moments, judging from his diaries, were few and far between (e.g., the birth of his daughter and son).11 Wedding wishes in verse and prose are rarely prophetic. This can also be said of Miatlev’s recastings of Zhukovsky’s works, and of the patriotically infused wedding missives of Zhukovsky’s Moscow friends. However, if one were truly looking for a work that foretold Zhukovsky’s fate, the best example could be found in the poet’s ingenious translation of Robert Southey’s ballad “Donika” (1831), in which a beautiful bride-to-be (“her face like day, her eyes like night”) is suddenly transformed into a soulless spirit on the eve of her wedding: И мутными глядит кругом очами, И к другу на руку легла, И, слабая, неверными шагами Обратно в замок с ним пошла.

And on his arm reclin’d she moved With feeble pace and slow, And soon with strength recover’d reach’d The towers of Arlinkow.

И были с той поры ее ланиты Не свежей розы красотой, Но бледностью могильною покрыты; Уста пугали синевой.

Yet never to Donica’s cheek Return’d the lively hue, Her cheeks were deathy, white, and wan, Her lips a livid blue.

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В ее глазах, столь сладостно сиявших, Какой-то острый луч сверкал, И с бледностью ланит, глубоко впавших, Он что-то страшное сливал. (PSS, III, 173–74)

Her eyes so bright and black of yore Were now more black and bright, And beam’d strange lustre in her face So deadly wan and white.12

TH E S CHO O L O F PAT I ENT S U F F E RI NG

As a result of his wife’s illness, Zhukovsky continues to put off his return to Russia, harming his relationship with both the tsar and his heir. Searching for relief from “that monster of a nervous disease” he turns to well-known doctors, and as did his frequent guest, the “hypochondriac” Gogol, to the writings of “spirit- knowers” (dushevedtsy). Zhukovsky’s unfortunate experience demanded a corrective to his religious interpretation of marital life as a “quiet evening” in the “familial sanctuary,” removed from the cares of society. This corrective is directly related to the evangelical renaissance then transpiring in pre-revolution Germany, a religious movement for which the issue of preserving the role of the Christian family in the “age of disbelief” was of central importance. It is entirely clear that Zhukovsky’s Christian theology of love and marriage was polemically directed against the liberal theories which had become widespread during the 1840s.13 Carl Seidlitz wrote about the “growth of Pietistic tendencies” in Zhukovsky’s thought, highlighting the role of Friedrich Krummacher’s impassioned sermons on the religious life of his family.14 However, there were many additional religious sources that helped shape Zhukovsky’s worldview in the latter period of his life, including a number of mystical works (Tauler, Rudolf Ewald Stier),15 as well as Catholic, and to a lesser extent, Orthodox authors (Sturdza, Bazarov). Conversations on religious topics with Radowitz, Reutern, and, at the very end of his life, his confessor, the Russian priest Ioann Bazarov, also played a vital role. The radical religious reorientation of Zhukovsky’s thought comes to replace the Karamzinian ideal of family happiness (see chapter 3 of this study). In a move typical for Zhukovsky, this change is justified through recourse to Karamzin’s own thought. “Earthly happiness,” reasons Zhukovsky, “does not only live in the family, this is true. But I often recall Karamzin; he, a happy father and husband, advised no one to take on the cross of family life.” “In moments of anxiety, more so than in any other state, I find myself ready to agree with him,” he continues, “but I calm myself with the thought that these anxieties are needed by the soul, and all the more needed, perhaps, 267

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than joy. It is [from such anxieties] with all of their torments of the home that faith is born, which gives peace to the soul.”16 The image of a happy family breakfast in the lap of nature, far removed from corrupt civilization, which had served as Zhukovsky’s ideal at the beginning of his life (see chapter 1), is now replaced in this later period with the image of a sublime Last Supper, an Abendmahl, in which the members of the family share communion with God. For the final three weeks of his life Zhukovsky discussed with his friends the bliss of uniting with God through Jesus Christ, which awaits the Christian beyond the grave. Not long before his death Zhukovsky gave a touching rendition of “the Last Supper of the Lord, his prayers in Gethsemane” (PSS, XIV, 452) to his children. Finally, on the eve of his death, he told his confessor of a previously unexperienced spiritual lightness, brought forth by a readiness to “accept God into myself, to make myself a member of the Divine Family.”17 To conclude, in the mid- 1840s, Zhukovsky’s formulates a Christian doctrine of marriage as a school of patient suffering, a burdensome cross to bear, yet one capable of endowing salvation. In the center of this doctrine, which his wife shared, there was no place for the Karamzinian spiritual ideal of peace and sentimentalist self-admiration and love. It was founded on the idea of self-sacrifice, of a complete and total giving of one’s self to God’s power in good faith, and of the most strict inner discipline.18 “I am convinced, completely convinced, that the main treasure of the soul is to be found in suffering,” he writes to Ekaterina Protasova at the outset of his married life.19 On the day after his daughter’s birth, Zhukovsky writes in his diary, In the sanctuary of family life there is a vessel of Communion [that gives] eternal life. My children and wife shall give it to me, and it will allow me to arrange their lives according to His will. (PSS, XIV, 269)

“Family life,” he writes to his young relatives (Elagina’s son Vasily and Protasova-Moyer’s daughter Ekaterina) on the occasion of their marriage, is constant self-denial and in this self-denial there is contained its secret treasure, if only the soul can know its value and has the strength to dedicate itself to it (this strength is most needed in petty daily circumstances, then in the lofty rarer [occasions]).20

Finally, in a confessional entry from the mid-1840s, Zhukovsky admits that God had willed that he “awaken” in a “striking fashion”: He gave me family life. Here all deceptive veils fall from us. With false faith in myself I received God’s gift without fear. This gift was the mirror of truth:

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I stand before it and see myself as I am according to my nature and as the person that my life has made me. This knowledge is punishment for the lack of care with which I lived earlier; my entire previous life was almost lacking my soul. It is also punishment for the impudence with which I received from God’s hands this gift, not doubting that I was worthy to accept it and capable of fulfilling those responsibilities that had been placed upon me by His gift.21

In this passage, marriage appears not as the earned entitlement of an old romantic, nor is it the inner church, instituted by God to contain the devil22 and open only to the initiated. Rather, it is an awakening to the horrors of real life and the consciousness of one’s own sinfulness. Naturally Zhukovsky, in accordance with his own mystical theodicy, interprets his painful awakening to the secret workings of Providence and calls the bitter wedding cup the cup of salvation,23 but he already no longer prays that the Creator might allow him to live and perish in the lofty presence of his ideal. Instead, he prays that he might be given the strength to withstand the ordeal. Elizabeth Zhukovsky was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Petersburg next to her husband. Pletnev, who, as we know, was initiated by the poet into the “secret canon” of his biographical myth, provides the following description of their tombstones: The graves of two people, sanctified by the bonds of marriage, enjoined in life, are now sheltered by one stone, cut into the form of an old Russian sarcophagus. On the poet’s side of the grave the following words have been cut out: “In eternal memory of the famous bard in the camp of Russian warriors, Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky.” On the other side the following inscription: “Here buried near the body of her husband Elisaveta Alekseevna Zhukovskaya, born in Liefland May 19, 1821, passed away in Moscow November 26, 1856.”

These are followed by three biblical texts: (1) “Believe in the light to become the sons of light”; (2) “Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer,” and (3) “O Woman, great is thy faith.” In the middle of the monument, where the cross is depicted, lies the inscription: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.” The last, as we know, was the poet’s favorite verse: it was also inscribed at his insistence on the “familial” graves of Maria Moier and Alexandra Voeikova, and was to be on his own grave in accordance with his will. The friends of the poet and his wife tried to choose texts from the scriptures that reflected the main qualities of the departed. Such a text, according to Pletnev, was the verse from Matthew 269

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on the faithful woman, which all who witnessed the “anguishing, yet simultaneously peaceful,” passing of Elizabeth Zhukovsky and her parting with her children in that fateful moment, “undoubtedly repeated to themselves in their hearts.”24 On the sides of the sarcophagus, one can see two cherubs from Raphael’s Madonna which, as we recall, were depicted on the front page of Alexandra Feodorovna’s album.

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The Heavenly Sisters Who has not heard of the vale of Cashmere, With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave, Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave? —Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh

Wahre, ächte Poesie verschwistert die Seelen, von allen Climates. Es ist die Umarmung der Gemüter, die dort oben statt finden wird und von der wir hier, uns unbewusst, eine Ahnung haben, die in Wirklichkeit . . . übergehen wird, bis dahin müssen Wir uns hienieden treu sein. —Maria von Kleist

T H E E V E O F the New Year 1844 saw the publication of Zhukovsky’s “Indian tale” Nal and Damaianti (a translation of Friedrich Rückert’s epic poem of the same name). The poema opened with a verse “Dedication to her Imperial Highness, Her Majesty the Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna,” the youngest daughter of Emperor Nikolai I and the Empress Alexandra, known in her family as Adini. The “Dedication” had a clear confessional character and was addressed not only to the young princess, but “the few” relatives and sympathetic readers who were well acquainted with the poet’s biographical myth. This history of his life was related by Zhukovsky through the use of three allegorical dreams (similar to “tableau vivants”).1 The first dream (a vision of the “Bride of the North” in the verdant vale of Cachemire) is a recollection of his first meeting with his future pupil, the grand duchess Alexandra, in Dorpat in 1817, as well as the Festspiel of 1821, in which she played the role of the Indian princess Lalla Rookh. The second dream (the encounter with “the vision of my soul” in the “royal home”) is comprised of recollections of Zhukovsky’s lessons with his royal pupil and life at court since 1817. 271

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The third dream (a vision of quiet life in a bright home, on whose threshold there stands his wife with her “small daughter”) is a picture of Zhukovsky’s current state as a happy spouse and father— the poet’s “blessed reality.” Now the wanderings of life have come to their conclusion, and for the final time he calls upon the dear shades of the beautiful past to find resonance in the present, his beloved Maria Protasova-Moier, buried in Dorpat, and her sister Alexandra, buried in Italy.2 In the conclusion of the “Dedication,” Zhukovsky returns to the miraculous vision that illuminated his life and which continues to shine out to him, as if it were from “another world”: Часто на краю Небес, когда уж солнце село, видим Мы облака; из-за пурпурных ярко Выглядывают золотые, светлым Вершинам гор подобные; и видит Воображенье там как будто область Иного мира. Так теперь созданьем Мечты, какой-то областью воздушной Лежит вдали минувшее мое; И мнится мне, что благодатный образ, Мной встреченный на жизненном пути, По-прежнему оттуда мне сияет. Но он уж не один, их два; и прежний В короне, а другой в венке живом Из белых роз, и с прежним сходен он, Как расцветающий с расцветшим цветом; И на меня он светлый взор склоняет С такою же приветною улыбкой,

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Often on the edge Of the heavens, when the sun has already set, we see Clouds; From behind the purple ones brightly Peek out golden ones, similar To the radiant peaks of mountains; and it is as if The imagination sees there the realm Of another world. So now, like the creation Of a dream, like some sort of ethereal realm Lies my past in the distance. And it seems to me that the image of grace That I encountered along life’s path Is once more shining upon me from that place. But it is no longer one image, but two; and the earlier one Wears a crown, while the other wears a living wreath Of white roses, and it is similar to the first, Like a blooming flower to one in full bloom; And its bright gaze inclines over me With the same welcoming smile

The Heavenly Sisters

Как тот, когда его во сне я встретил. И имя им одно. И ныне я Тем милым именем последний цвет, Поэзией мне данный, знаменую В воспоминание всего, что было Сокровищем тех светлых жизни лет И что теперь так сладостно чарует Покой моей обвечеревшей жизни.

As the other when I encountered it in a dream. And they have one name. And on this day With this dear name I dedicate the final flower Given to me by poetry In the memory of all that was The treasure of those bright years of life And which now so sweetly enchants The peace of my twilight years.

(PSS, V, 98–99; italics added) This heavenly vision has attracted the special attention of Zhukovsky scholars and biographers. Whose images come to the poet? Which name, announcing the “final flower” of his poetry (i.e., Nal and Damaianti), do they carry? What does this splitting of a previously united “virtuous image” signify? In his comments on the conclusion to the “Dedication,” Zhukovsky’s friend and first biographer, Pyotr Pletnev, suggests that the poet hinted either at the Empress Alexandra and her daughter, or the departed Maria Protasova-Moier and the poet’s wife Elizabeth Zhukovsky-Reutern.3 Another person close to the poet, Carl Seidlitz, observes that “by poeticizing his real life and desiring happiness, Zhukovsky attempts to compare the image of his wife with the ideal of his youth and mature years—Masha.”4 However, Alexander Veselovsky is unwilling to accept such a reading: It would truly remind us of Novalis’s mysticism, but here something else had taken place, a more superficial comparison: Zhukovsky’s daughter Alexandra had been born (October 30, 1842), a “flower in bloom.” The poem is dedicated to the Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna, she is “encrowned,” and their “name is one.” (Veselovsky, V.A. Zhukovskii, 293–94)

In his review of Veselovsky’s book on Zhukovsky, the symbolist poet Alexander Blok offers his mystical reinterpretation of the last vision from the “Dedication.” “Death is a great good,” Blok formulates “the motto of Zhukovsky’s life,” and it “came to him as the spirit of ‘the eternal feminine’ in which Zhukovsky had once combined the images of Masha and his wife.” Curiously, this interpretation, which completely contradicts the one offered by Veselovsky, represents Zhukovsky as a poet close to symbolism: “He is 273

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ours, our own, close . . . ‘Lively joy’ along with our ‘swan-like progenitor’5 meditated on the Ewige Weiblichkeit” (Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 576). Such a mystical interpretation was countered by another of Zhukovsky’s biographers, the writer Boris Zaitsev: Repetition occurred to the Romantics, and they believed in it like Novalis: the beloved dies, and another appears, but the secret image is the same, the first one . . . There exists, perhaps, a certain temptation to depict Zhukovsky’s marriage in the spirit of Novalis, but it is only a temptation. Masha is Masha, and she can not be repeated. Elisabeth was never capable of becoming her, and these morbid tricks [an attack against Blok’s mystical symbolism?—I.V.] were completely alien to Zhukovsky (as they are to any Christian).6

Yet Iosif Eiges argues that the two images with one name that Zhukovsky mentions at the end of the poem are the images of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna.7 This explanation was confirmed by Tsezar Volpe in his exemplary edition of Zhukovsky’s poetry: the poet intended to depict Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (Lalla Rookh in the Berlin festivities of 1821) and her daughter Alexandra Nikolaevna “who looked like her.”8 Two tendencies can be discerned in the interpretation of this “vague moment” in Zhukovsky’s writing: an allegorical one (the two images are the empress and her daughter, or the empress and Zhukovsky’s daughter) and a symbolic one (Maria Protasova and Elizabeth Zhukovsky-Reutern). From a formal perspective, the Eiges-Volpe hypothesis is most convincing (Zhukovsky mentions one name, not two; the poem is dedicated to the Grand Duchess Alexandra). However, Seidlitz and Blok’s interpretation, in which they sensed a symbolic subtext, would seem to be more correct in essence. So who did Zhukovsky envision? Once more it is necessary to emphasize that here we are faced with a poem intended for a small circle of individuals who knew the poet’s life and personal symbolism on an intimate level. An explication of the symbolic subtext of this mysterious vision will allow us to better understand and bring together the threads of the lyrical myth that Zhukovsky created over the course of the four decades of his emotional life, the history of which we have attempted to reconstruct in this study. H IS TO RY O F T H E T EX T

Let us pause briefly to consider the history of the “Dedication’s” creation. On May 16 (28), 1840, Zhukovsky completes his translation of Nal and Damaianti (PSS, V, 379–98). In a letter to his pupil, Grand Duke Alexander 274

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Nikolaevich, from August 8 of the same year the poet writes that the poema is almost complete, and that he plans on devoting it to Alexander’s youngest sister. On September 5 (17), 1841, Zhukovsky apologizes for delays in the poema’s transcription, and says that he will soon bring it to be presented to the grand duchess. On December 28, 1842, Zhukovsky admits that he has yet to complete the “Dedication,” which is already formulated in his head, but which is proving difficult to put on paper. On October 30 (November 11) 1842, Zhukovsky’s daughter is born. She receives the name Alexandra. Scholars trace the first attempts at the “Dedication” to this time period (PSS, V, 386–89). On February 11 (23), 1843, another draft of the “Dedication” can be found. Zhukovsky claims to have completed the poem on February 16 (28). On May 12 of the same year the censor Nikitenko gives permission for the poema’s publication, which occurs on New Year’s Eve. Finally in 1844, Zhukovsky receives a letter of thanks from the Grand Duchess.9 According to Vladimir Toporov, the “Dedication” to Nal and Damaianti should be counted among those of Zhukovsky’s works that had been prepared not only biographically, but “textually,” in his letters, diaries, original and translated poems, artistic prose, conversations, and so on.10 As we will see, three events had a decisive influence on the poem’s creation: the staging of Spontini’s opera Nurmahal, oder das Rosenfest von Caschmir in Darmstadt on May 1, 1840, which directed Zhukovsky to recollections of the Lalla Rookh festivities in Berlin; Zhukovsky’s own marriage to Elizabeth von Reutern in May 1841, which drew a symbolic line between his present and his past, which was connected with the Protasov household; and, finally, the birth of his daughter Alexandra, which symbolized for Zhukovsky a new era in his life. In a letter to the empress from November 7 (19), 1842, the poet explains his choice of name for his daughter: Having given her this name, I expressed my best wishes for her earthly happiness, as I understand it. Let the guardian angel of She, who bears this name, and of whom I thought while giving this name to my daughter, [she] who had such a fortuitous influence on my own life, and finally [she] whose veneration my heart shall preserve until its last beat,— let Her good angel speak to the angel of my child and open to her the secret of the soul of She, to whom God has entrusted it, so that in time the soul of my beloved daughter should be filled with that which makes [the soul] of Her so ideal and beautiful. There is something inexplicable in the word my daughter when I call my daughter Alexandra.11

It would not be incorrect to propose that the christening of Zhukovsky’s daughter would mark the final point in the formulation of the “Dedica275

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tion’s” meaning. In sum, the “Dedication” symbolically connects three eras from Zhukovsky’s life: the past, the present, and the future. Remarkably, the immediate source and thread that runs through all three of these eras is music— the “triumphant march” from Spontini’s opera Nurmahal, which Zhukovsky had heard in Darmstadt. H E AV ENLY M U S I C

April 4 (16), 1840 marked the engagement between the Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich and the young Princess Maria of Gessen-Darmstadt. By April 24 (May 6), Zhukovsky begins to tutor the princess in the Russian language. On the first day of their lessons the young pupil reminds the poet of Alexandra Feodorovna, whose first lesson had taken place some twenty-two years prior. On this day Zhukovsky attends Spontini’s opera Nurmahal at the Darmstadt theater. This opera (which the composer had defined as a series of “lyrical scenes”) had been written in 1822, after the Lalla Rookh festivities dedicated to the grand duchess, for which Spontini had written a number of musical compositions. Some of these were used in his opera, first and foremost the opening march and the “Romanze der Nurmahal” based on Spiker’s poem (“In die Wüste flieh mit mir!”). The libretto was written by Carl Herklots on the basis of the German translation of the fourth part of Moore’s “Oriental tale,” The Light of the Haram, which told the story of an argument and eventual reconciliation between the Sultan Selim (Dschehangir) and his wife Nurmahal.12 The opera’s premier, which took place in Berlin in 1822, coincided with the engagement of the Prussian princess Alexandrine and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The staging of Nurmahal in Darmstadt in the spring of 1840 was also understood as a wedding present, on this occasion to the new heir to the Russian throne and the Hessian princess Maria. The opera begins with a march accompanying the movement of a royal procession which places a throne on stage, on which the royal couple sits. The words of the chorus are addressed both to the opera’s protagonists and to the audience sitting in the theater: Triumph dem Monarchen dem Hohen! Preis ihm dem Herrscher der Macht!13

The Lalla Rookh march and “Nurmahal’s aria” are but two of the musical numbers which were also performed at the Festspiel in Berlin in 1821. This coincidence gave Zhukovsky the sensation of déjà vu, akin to the one portrayed by Goethe in his classical dedication to Faust. “I recalled so many people,” writes Zhukovsky in his diary, “the Radziwill family. Brühl.  .  .  . 276

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Hufeland. Sasha. Masha. Youth. There is now before me a new world” (PSS, XIV, 430). A quote from Goethe’s “Zueignung” is contained in a letter to the empress, which describes the stream of Zhukovsky’s emotions: .

When I heard it, Darmstadt disappeared from my eyes and I found myself at the Lalla Rookh festivities. The beautiful vision of those times flew before my memory so clearly it was as if youth herself had come to pay me a visit en personne. Und manche liebe Schalten standen auf.14 A strange, unclear enchantment in the sounds. They have nothing in essence of themselves, but in them the past lives and is resurrected. I did not think of thinking about anyone, but following this image of the holiday it was precisely those who had then been [alive] and who are now absent [appeared], as if they themselves flew from all directions past me like spirits to a funeral feast.15

On August 8, 1840, Zhukovsky expands in his letter to the empress on a special emotional state, “similar to heavenly music, for which it is impossible to find words.”16 Such an experience, he confesses, was brought upon him by rereading the lines written during the Lalla Rookh festivities by the empress’s brother and the poet’s friend, the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm: Then in the distance, high above the crowd, a vision appeared to me. It came before my eyes like a good spirit, and from that time this spirit has always remained mine, it is the same, time has changed nothing in it. And every time I see it anew, it brings with it the beauty of life.17

Three years later, in a letter to the empress written from Düsseldorf, Zhukovsky once more recalls Spontini’s music, to which much of the past is resurrected: “there is something immortal in the sounds, although they have no being of their own. With them that which has already taken place appears just as clearly as it first did, in all of its previous freshness and youth.” Zhukovsky once more turns to Goethe’s dedication to Faust: “And many dear shades arise.” A Russian scholar justly notes that these “dear shades” would consistently stand before Zhukovsky when in Düsseldorf in February 1843, he would write the “Dedication” to his Indian tale Nal and Damaianti.18 On the symbolic plane of the poem, the triumphant, yet tender, sounds of the march by Spontini are associated (or merge) with not only memories of the past, but also with quiet light, a mysterious sleep, and, finally, with the dreams of poetry.19 Moreover, the theme of “heavenly music” in Zhukovsky’s “Dedication” is tied to Spontini’s opera (and through it to the Berlin festiv277

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ity of 1821 as well as Moore’s oriental romance) not only on a biographical level, but on the thematic level as well. The core episode of the opera was Nurmahal’s dream, cast upon her by the sorceress Namuna and the geniuses (i.e., spirits) under the latter’s control. In her dream, Nurmahal hears a wondrous melody, the aria “From Chindara’s warbling fount I come,” which the sorceress sings, weaving shining flowers and leaves into the magical “Wreath of Dreams”: Hither I come From my fairy home, And if there’s a magic in Music’s strain, I swear by the breath Of that moonlight wreath, Thy lover shall sigh at thy feet again.20

Upon awakening, Nurmahal finds a lute next to her. Changing into the clothes of a Bedouin, the queen sets off for a rose festival, where she performs her magic song.21 The harmonious sounds touch her husband’s heart; he recognizes the singer as his wife and becomes reconciled to her. In the opera’s conclusion the chorus sings praises to eternal love and the beautiful festival of flowers in Cachemire. Nurmahal’s final words in Moore’s poem, which might have inspired Zhukovsky as the creator of the Russian Alexandra cult, are: “Remember, love, the Feast of Roses!” Indeed, the reminiscent nature of the poema was reinforced by the drawings made for its first edition by the noted Estonian painter FriedrichLudwig von Maydell in accordance with Zhukovsky’s requests.22 Symbolically, the very first lithographed portrait, preceding the dedication of the poema to the grand duchess, refers the initiated reader to Wilhelm Henzel’s portrait of her mother, Alexandra Feodorovna, in the costume of Lalla Rookh.23 F ROM A NO T H ER WO R L D

Let us now return to the final vision of Zhukovsky’s “Dedication” to Nal and Damaianti. It takes place in the heavens, in that “airy land” where the past is hidden. The feminine face gazing over the poet, which illuminates the latter with a “smile of greeting,” is a typical symbolic image in Zhukovsky’s poetry, one that is associated with Mary, the Mother of God, and the Prussian Queen Louise— the Faithful One in his “Flower of the Oath.” Sergei Averintsev, commenting on a similar vision in Zhukovsky’s 1818 ballad “The Knight Togenburg,” observes that from the space of linear perspective we

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are transported to the space of the soul: “the face peering down into the dale— exceeds earthly dimensions.”24 However, in the conclusion of the “Dedication” we are faced with two images (one wearing a crown, the other in “a living wreath of white roses”) merged into one. This combination is a departure from previous images of the feminine in Zhukovsky’s poetry. This final vision from Zhukovsky’s “Dedication” is, in fact, a kind of doubling of an image that is well established in his poetry, that of Lalla Rookh, the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (the “Bride of the North” in the Dedication), who from her youth had been given the family nickname “White Rose” (Blanche Fleur). As we recall, the first encounter with the spirit of Lalla Rookh adorned with a crown occurs to Zhukovsky at “the festival of the rose and spring” in 1821: “All her traits— her timid shyness / Underneath her shining crown, / Childlike her animation, / And her face’s noble beauty—  / Glowing with a depth of feeling, / Sweet serenity and peace—All of these completely artless / Indescribably sublime! (“Lalla Rookh,” PSS, II, 222).25 The new “appearance” of Lalla Rookh (here as the benefactor Empress) is described in Zhukovsky’s poem “The Vision” of 1828: Блеском утра озаренный, Светоносный, окрыленный, Ангел встретился со мной: Взор его был грустно-ясен, Лик задумчиво-прекрасен; Над главою молодой Кудри легкие летали, И короною сияли Розы белые на ней. (PSS, II, 258) [By the lustre of morn illumined, / Luminiferous, bewinged, / An angel met with me: His gaze was forelorn, serene, / His visage was pensive, beautiful, / Over his youthful head  / Light ringlets hovered,  / And as a crown shone  / Roses white upon it.]

In the poem “July 1, 1842,” written for the celebration of the silver anniversary of the Russian tsar’s marriage, Zhukovsky describes a painting given to the imperial couple by the poet’s father-in-law, the artist Reutern: an image of Saint George with two wreaths in his hands, one of white roses, and the other of laurels. Once more, the empress is depicted here in a crown made of white roses.26 In the “Dedication” to Nal and Damaianti this allegorical portrait is

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doubled: the crown is kept by the mother, while the wreath of white roses is bequeathed to the daughter. Such an allegorical reading, however, is insufficient in explaining the profound significance of the vision of these two images from “another world.” In this vision, I would argue, there is an additional source to be found in Zhukovsky’s poetry, one that would have been readily apparent to the poet’s “few” friends, who intimately knew his emotional myth. Indeed, the image of beautiful roses (blooming and in full bloom) would have reminded the initiated readers of Zhukovsky 1815 poem “Song”: Розы расцветают, Сердце, отдохни; Скоро засияют Благодатны дни. Все с зимой ненастной Грустное пройдет; Сердце будет ясно; Розою прекрасной Счастье расцветет. Розы расцветают— Сердце, уповай; Есть, нам обещают, Где-то лучший край. Вечно молодая Там весна живет; Там, в долине рая, Жизнь для нас иная Розой расцветет. (PSS, II, 220) [Roses are blooming, / Rest, my heart; / Soon will shine / Blessed days. / With the stormy winter / All which is sad will pass; / My heart will be lucid; / Like a wonderful rose / Happiness will bloom. / Roses are blooming, / Take hope, my heart; / There is, we are promised, / A better land somewhere. / Eternally youthful / Spring lives there; / There, in the valley of heaven, / Another, different life for us / Will bloom like a rose.]

Here the beautiful rose in full bloom symbolizes the “other life,” the abode of heaven, for which the blooming rose (the human soul) strives. It is from this “other world” that the two images from the “Dedication” of Nal and Damaianti shine upon the Poet. This poem from 1815 occupies a special place in Zhukovsky’s poetic myth of the family: it was the Protasov sisters’ favorite romance. It was this 280

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poem that his goddaughter Alexandra (Svetlana) recited in a whisper before her death in February 1829. In Zhukovsky’s diaries and letters Alexandra is repeatedly connected with the image of a flower (a growing child, and young woman in bloom).27 In his “Dedication,” Zhukovsky recalls the biblical inscription on Voeikova’s grave in Livorno. This inscription, shared by the Protasov sisters, is requested by Zhukovsky for his own “welcoming gravestone.” In this way, the inscription completes the symbolic triangle connecting all three of their souls, and will become a sign of their deep kinship, a monument to their earthly existence. In the already cited letter to Alexandra Feodorovna from May 1, 1840, the poet mentions to the empress both the Berlin celebration and Alexandra Protasova-Voeikova, “to whom I then described the celebration.” Sasha was then “in the full flower of life,” and now, in a distant grave under the skies of Italy which are “just as bright as she herself was.” Moreover, as we recall, for Zhukovsky there was always some kind of invisible connection between the empress and his relative of the same name. In 1821 Zhukovsky had written to Alexander Turgenev that the image of a “genius of pure beauty” referred to both Alexandra Feodorovna and Sasha Voeikova. “Those who know you are familiar with the genius of pure beauty!” he writes to Voeikova herself in 1821, explaining the meaning of the concluding lines of his programmatic poem. “Everyone who has been with you experienced the lighting of a beautiful consoling star forever, and that star will never lose its dear brilliance.”28 In Zhukovsky’s biographical myth, Sasha Voeikova, who had once personified for him earthly joy (Allegro), is transported to the heavens: she is the same star whose joyful and tender light illuminates the sorrowful life on earth. “‘Roses bloom on her grave,” Zhukovsky writes to Seidlitz in 1829, and the thought of her awakens in the heart everything that is beautiful in life; some kind of music can be heard when you give yourself over to imagination in this moment. Now, for me all that is beautiful will be synonymous with death. Recently, listening to the singing in church, it was as if I was standing by her deathbed.29

One can argue that this pure music is the same as that which is implied in the “Dedication” to Nal and Damaianti and in the poem “The Appearance of Poetry in the form of Lalla Rookh,” and in Moore’s original work. In Zhukovsky’s terms, these are the sounds of a heavenly homeland which allude to the notion that “that which is past, will come true again” (byloe sbudetsia opiat’). According to Zhukovsky’s poetic theology, “Svetlana’s” soul returned to its natural bright and joyful world, while memory of her served as a reminder that the beautiful had been in his life and remained in his soul, promising a future meeting there: “That which remains of her sleeps! That 281

Epilogue

which is alive of her lives and we know how it lives, as she told us of it in her final moment.”30 From this point forward, Sasha becomes a “heavenly sister” for Zhukovsky, illuminating with her quiet mystical light his own melancholic existence. In all likelihood, it is Alexandra Voeikova (or, to use Zhukovsky’s terms, her angel) whom the poet “sees” in the symbolic conclusion to the “Dedication” to Nal and Damaianti. It is not an accident that, when published, the poem was dated February 16 (28), 1843, that is, the day of the “beautiful death” of his goddaughter. The “Dedication,” directly addressed to the Grand Duchess Alexandra and indirectly addressed to her mother, includes a third, hidden addressee that is connected to the other two by their shared name: Zhukovsky’s “guiding star” which continues to shine upon him from the “other world.” By dedicating the poem to the young grand duchess, who resembled in her look and character both her mother and grandmother, Queen Louise,31 Zhukovsky initiates her into the secret order of the “sisters” of the poet. In his view, she definitely belonged to these few: a cheerful and deeply religious nature, gifted singer and artist, “a lark” that “emanates with joy,” as her sister Olga recalled her.32 It could be said that in this vision, as in a cinematic dissolve, one picture shines through another. The “other world” is both various places from the poet’s past (Muratovo, Dorpat, Berlin, Pavlovsk, and Düsseldorf) and the mystical “valley of heaven” (the kingdom of Cachemire from the “Indian Hut” he had dreamt of with Masha and which was aesthetically “embodied” during the Lalla Rookh celebration). On different levels of reading this vision, the feminine image adorned with a crown is the mythic Lalla Rookh, and the empress, and Alexandra Voeikova, which also alludes to the poet’s other “guiding star,” who found her resting place in Dorpat, Maria, as well as to his God-given wife Elizabeth. The angel in “the living wreath” is both the Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna and Zhukovsky’s infant daughter. In other words, the name “Alexandra” unites the poet’s dear companions, both living and dead, “into a single merged” feminine image, which “does not exist by itself, but which is clearly visible to our soul.”33 However, in this image there is no sense of the notion of mystical equivalency that one finds in Novalis. Zaitsev is quite correct in his insistence that such an idea was unacceptable for Zhukovsky’s worldview. Instead, to use Zhukovsky’s own words, the women mentioned are all “kin,” “sisters,” or “synonyms” of Beauty, which the poet defines in the 1840s as “the sensation and hearing of God in creation,” symbolically enciphered by him in the “dear name” Alexandra. It is by this royal name34 that Zhukovsky, in the conclusion of the “Dedication” of 1843, “crowns” his two “final flowers”: his newborn daughter and series of recollections inspired by Spontini’s melancholy music,

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which freely flows into an “Indian poem” on marital love and fidelity— one more poetic “flower of the oath” to the imperial family. C ON C L U S I O N

Zhukovsky’s Nal and Damaianti was published in the beginning of 1844. By a tragic irony of fate (familiar to Zhukovsky since the publication of his churchyard elegy devoted to Andrei Turgenev in 1802), the “Dedication” to the grand duchess appeared as her requiem. The young princess died from childbirth complications caused by consumption in August of 1844. She was nineteen—“the sunshine which warmed us all dissipated,” as her brother Konstantin wrote. The grief of the imperial family was profound, especially of the empress, who fell into a deep depression which lasted for many months.35 Since the moment of her death, the cult of Adini— the “momentous guest on earth”— became an integral part of the Romanov family myth.36 Her last room was turned into a sanctuary. Her paintings and memorabilia were kept as holy objects by the members of her family. The favorite artist of the imperial family, Karl Briullov, was commissioned to paint an icon of the ascension of Tsarina Alexandra of Rome, the saintly patron of the Russian empress.37 The artist gave the saint the features of the departed princess, effectively placing the Orthodox icon within the context of the “Prussian” artistic tradition (depiction of Queen Louise’s “Verklärung”)38 and Zhukovsky’s poetic portrayals of “royal” ascensions.39 In turn, an unknown artist, presumably Fyodor Bruni, depicted Alexandra in the image of the Virgin, based on Raphael’s famous painting lauded by Zhukovsky in his programmatic essay of 1821.40 Unsurprisingly, Zhukovsky eagerly contributed to the creation of this new cult (or, to be sure, to its incorporation into his “old” Liusen- and Alexandra cult). The poet responded to Adini’s demise with a solemn letter of consolation addressed to her mother, Empress Alexandra, which was published in December 1844 and, again, in early 1845.41 In the spring of 1845 he started writing a poem, entitled “The Chalice of Tears” (“Chasha slioz”)— a free translation of a German fairy tale, “Das Thränenkrüglein,” once recorded by Ludwig Buchstein.42 It is very likely that this unfinished poem, written on the topic of Mater Dolorosa, should have served as a poetic companion to his letter to the grand duchess’s mother as well as the secret remembrance of the young angel in the wreath of white roses who shined out to the poet “from the other world”— in the same way as his uncompleted translation of Milton’s “Allegro” commemorated another Alexandra, Adini’s “celestial sister,” in the poet’s personal mythology.

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“True genuine poesie unites [verschwistert, lit.: ‘makes sisters of’] souls of all climates,” wrote Zhukovsky’s Prussian confidant, Maria von Kleist. The cousin of the poet Heinrich von Kleist, and a close friend of Queen Louise— she served as the latter’s maid of honor—Maria wrote these words on the title page of a copy of Rückert’s poema, which she presented to Zhukovsky in 1829. In this study I have tried to show that this principle of sisterhood lies at the foundation of Zhukovsky’s romantic religion of love— his major contribution to Russian literature. For Zhukovsky, Poetry—“the sister of the heavenly religion” as well as the “synonym of death”— truly was both a magical medium and the site for the embodiment of that “feminine paradise” capable of transcending national borders and social class. Present at the very outset of Zhukovsky’s emotional biography, the ideal of “feminine paradise” would remain elusive, failing to take shape in the Protasov household, the tsar’s family, and, in the end, his late, “sunset” marriage.

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IN TROD U CT I O N

The epigraph is translated by Kevin M. F. Platt. In original: “Мне рок судил: брести неведомой стезей, / Быть другом мирных сел, любить красы природы, / Дышать под сумраком дубравной тишиной  / И, взор склонив на пенны воды, / Творца, друзей, любовь и счастье воспевать. / О песни, чистый плод невинности сердечной! / Блажен, кому дано цевницей оживлять / Часы сей жизни скоротечной.” V. A. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 20 tomakh, 20 vols. (Moscow: “Iazyki russkoi kul’tury,” 1999–2014), vol. 1. Stikhotvoreniiaa 1797–1814 godov, 77. Unless otherwise noted, henceforward all references to Zhukovsky’s poetic and dramatic works will be to the 20-volume Polnoe sobranie sochinenii edition parenthetically in the body of the text by volume and page number. The title Polnoe sobranie sochinenii will be abbreviated PSS. 1. Georgii Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris: YMCA, 1988), 129. 2. From Zhukovskii’s letter to P. A. Pletnev of March 6, 1850. Quoted in V.A. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), 16. On the “modes of biographical discourse” in Russian literature of the first third of the nineteenth century, see Andrew Kahn, “Life-Writing in the 1830s: Viazemsky’s ‘Fon-Vizin’ and Pushkin’s ‘Table Talk,’ ” Ulbandus Review 12 (2009/2010): 83–104. 3. On various aspects of Zhukovskii’s work, see Tikhonravov 1898; Veselovskii 1904; Rezanov 1906–16; Sakulin 1902; Gukovskii 1965; Eikhenbaum 1922; Semenko 1975 (English translation, 1976); Egunov 1964; Mann 1995; Toporov 1981; Ianushkevich 1985 and 2006; Nemzer 1987; Proskurin 1999; Liamina and Samover 2004 and 2009; Kiseleva and Stepanishscheva 2005 and 2007; Fraiman (Stepanishcheva); Lebedeva 1992; and Aizikova. This list is by no means full. 4. Irina Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky (Boston: Twayne, 1976). 5. Annette Pein, Schiller and Zhukovsky: Aesthetic Theory in Poetic Translation (Mainz: Liber-Verlag, 1991); Michael R. Katz, The Literary Ballad in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Sarah Pratt, Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev

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and Boratynskii (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984); William Edward Brown, A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1986); Lauren Leighton, The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature: Decembrism and Freemasonry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Michael Wachtel, The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and Its Meanings (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Stephanie Sandler, Rereading Russian Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); C. Ciepiela, “Rereading Russian Pastoral: Zhukovsky’s Translation of Gray’s Elegy,” in Rereading Russian Poetry, ed. S. Sandler (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 31–57; Olga Glagoleva, Dream and Reality of Russian Provincial Young Ladies, 1700–1850 (2000); David Cooper, “Vasilii Zhukovskii as a Translator and the Protean Russian Nation,” The Russian Review 66, no. 2 (April 2007): 185–203. A small number of dissertations related to different aspects of Zhukovsky’s poetry have been defended in England and the United States since the 1970s; among them Dorothea D. Galer, “Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovskii: His Theory of Translation” (Northwestern University, 1975); Leon Paul Burnett, “Dimensions of Truth: A Comparative Study of the Relationship between Language and Reality in the Works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Keats” (University of Essex, 1976); Andrew Swensen, “Russian Romanticism and Theologically Founded Aesthetics: Zhukovskij, Odoevskij, and Gogol and the Appropriation of Post-Kantian Aesthetic Principles” (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995); George Randolph Rueckert, “Zhukovsky and the Germans: A Study in Romantic Hermeneutics” (University of Washington, 2003); Justin Radtke, “Vasily Zhukovsky’s Ballads: Themes and Their Christian-Spiritual Meanings” (Reed College, 2013). On the history of the British and American reception of Zhukovsky, see E. K. Belonogova, Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo v retseptsii angloiazychnoi kul’tury, dissertation (Tomsk, 2009). 6. To be sure, British literary journals of the 1820s referred to Zhukovsky as the founder of Russian romanticism. Lord Byron, in one of his letters to Thomas Moore (December 27, 1823), called him “the Russian nightingale” with a reference to John Bowring’s introduction to his Specimens of Russian Poets (London, 1821). The Works of Byron, vol. 13 (1904), 294 (Byron misspells the name of the poet as “Kutoffski”). Curiously, in his anthology J. Bowring applies this poetic formula to Karamzin, rather than Zhukovsky, referring to Gavriil Derzhavin’s lines. See Bowring, Specimens of the Russian Poets (London, 1821), 15. 7. On the genre of intellectual biography, see Gerald N. Izenberg, “Text, Context, and Psychology in Intellectual History,” in Developments in Modern Historiography, ed. Henry Kozicki (London: Macmillan, 1993), 40–62; Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Philosophy of History, ed. Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 49–76. On the formation of character or self-image in Russian

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literature, see Lidiia Ginzburg’s O lirike (Leningrad: Sovetsii pisatel’, 1964) and O psikhologicheskoi proze (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971). On the semiotic conception of authorial biography, developed by the Russian culturologist Iurii Lotman and employed in his biographies of Pushkin and Karamzin, see David Bethea, “Lotman: The Code and Its Relation to Literary Biography,” in Realizing Metaphors (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 118–33. 8. See James William Anderson, “The Methodology of Psychological Biography,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (Winter 1981): 455– 75. A brief bibliographical digest of the works on “psychobiography” is provided in Carl Edmund Rollyson, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography (Pasadena, Calif.: Salem, 1992), 148–73. 9. On the “philosophy of feeling” in the Age of Sensibility, see V. A. Kozhevnikov, Filosofiia chuvsta i very v ee otnosheniiakh k literature i ratzionalizmu XVIII veka i k kriticheskoi filosofii (Moscow: Tipografiia G. Lissner i A. Gashil, 1897); A. N. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii: Poeziia chuvstva i serdechnogo voobrazheniia (St. Petersburg, 1904); Ferdinand de La Barthe, Shatobrian i poetika mirovoi skorbi vo Frantsii (Kiev, 1905). 10. From the phenomenological point of view the problem of “emotional biography” is considered in the book of Norman K. Denzin, On Understanding Emotion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984). Denzin distinguishes two types of emotional consciousness: “reflective” and “unreflective.” In the first case “the person is completely contained within emotional experience,” while at the same time in the second case he “situates himself biographically in the emotional experience and reflects the emotion onto himself . . . He attempts to guide, direct, and interpret the emotion as he is experiencing it.” Denzin calls this process of experience and interpretation of experience the “emotional situation,” which enters into the person’s “emotional biography” (104). 11. The creation of the “emotional biography” of Zhukovsky is possible thanks to the voluminous studies of his work by earlier scholars. The biographical and cultural-historical context of his oeuvre has been thoroughly researched in the works of Viazemskii, Pletnev, Shevyrev, Seidlitz, Tikhonravov, Gruzinskii, Veselovskii, Sakulin, Lotman, Toporov, Kiseleva, Stepanishcheva (Fraiman), and Glagoleva. Zhukovskii’s “psychological” poetics have been treated by Eikhenbaum, Gukovskii, Semenko, and Ianushkevich. Zhukovskii’s poetic ideology and its reflection in the work of his contemporaries have been studied in articles by Nemzer, Zorin, and Proskurin. Of great significance for the study of Zhukovskii’s emotional biography are the studies of a group of scholars from Tomsk University devoted to the analysis of the many marginal writings in the books in Zhukovskii’s library (in 1879 the Siberian merchant A. M. Sibiriakov bought the poet’s book collection from his son and donated it to the only just-opened University of Siberia). At this point, a significant part of the poet’s correspondence with his “co-sentimentalists” (sochuvstvenniki) has been published and anno-

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tated. Slowly but surely the “complete” collection of his works is appearing in print under the editorship of A. S. Ianushkevich, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 20 tomakh, vols. 1–8, 13–14 (Moscow: 1999–2014). 12. “The history of a man’s soul, even the pettiest soul— proclaims the protagonist of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time— is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau’s Confessions has precisely this defect— he read it to his friends.” Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. J. H. Wisdom and Marr Murray (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1916), 112. 13. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii: Poeziia chuvstva i serdechnogo voobrazheniia (Moscow: Intrada, 1999), 16. All references to this book are from this edition and are incorporated within the text. The page numbers are given in parentheses. 14. V. N. Toporov, “‘Sel’skoe kladbishche’ Zhukovsogo: k istokam russkoi poezii,” Russian Literature 10, no. 3 (1981): 246. 15. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 81–82. 16. Andrei Zorin, “Leaving Your Family in 1797: Two Identities of Mikhail Murav’ev,” in Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 46. 17. A. L. Zorin, “Poniatie ‘literaturnogo perezhivaniia,’” in Istoriia i povestvovanie (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie [NLO], 2006), 25. 18. Ibid. 19. Zorin, “Leaving Your Family in 1797,” 46. 20. On the late eighteenth-century classifications of emotional attitudes to the world, see Ilya Vinitsky, “‘The Queen of Lofty Thoughts’: The Cult of Melancholy in Russian Sentimentalism,” in Steinberg and Sobol, Interpreting Emotions, 30–37. 21. For the superb discussion of the literary models for Sushkov’s suicide, see Martin Fraanje, The Epistolary Novel in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Munich: Otto Sagner, 2001). 22. Kozhevnikov, Filosofiia chuvstva i very; Vinitsky, “The Queen of Lofty Thoughts.” 23. N. M. Karamzin, Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), 66. Kutuzov, I believe, describes one of the alleys emerging from the labyrinth that repeatedly attracted the sensitive author’s attention in the eighteenth century. The image of the labyrinth occupies a special place in Kutuzov’s mystical writings (see Ya. L. Barskov, Perepiska moskovskikh masonov XVIII v. [St. Petersburg, 1915]), as well as in “Tiergartenmythologie” from Christoph Friedrich Nicolai to Walter Benjamin. See Susanna Brogi, Der Tiergarten in Berlin— ein Ort der Geschichte (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 86–87.

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24. N. M. Karamzin, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1964), 121–22. 25. Edvard Iung, Plach’, ili noshchnye razmyshleniia o zhizni, smerti i bezsmertii, 2nd ed., trans. [from German] Aleksei Kutuzov (Moscow, 1785). See G. Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris: YMCA, 1988), 117. On the history of the Russian reception of the English sentimental and early romantic literature, see Iurii D. Levin, Angliiskaia poeziia i literatura russkogo sentimentalizma (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990). 26. P. A. Orlov, Russkii sentimentalizm (Moscow, 1977), 129. 27. Kutuzov criticized his young friend for his “attachment to the external side of life.” On his critique of Karamzin, see Iurii Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina (Moscow: Kniga, 1987), 74–76. 28. On Nicolai’s critique of Pietism, see “Friedrich Nicolai: Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker,” in Choose Not These Vices: Social Reality in the German Novel, 1618–1848, ed. Albert D. White (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 107–22. 29. Friedrich Nicolai, Sebaldus Nothanker (Philipp Reclam, 1938), 126. 30. “Sebaldus’s brow was cheered by the sight of so many happy people. The Pietist’s brow, however, became more furrowed by it. Filled with spiritual irritation, he called out, “Behold the children of Belial, how they pursue pleasures of the flesh! How they walk, ride, and travel the path of sins! Always straight into the sulphurous pit of Hell!” Friedrich Nicolai, Wilhelmine: The Life and Opinions of Master Sebaldus Nothanker: Masterworks of the German Rococo and Enlightenment, trans. John Raymod Russell (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 1998), 88. 31. Friedrich Nicolai, Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1938), 128. 32. Karamzin mentions that he read “Nicolai’s description of Berlin” before he went to the Tiergarten. The description of the royal park is given in the third volume of this book “Der Koenigl[icher] Thiergarten oder Park,” in Beschreibung der königlichen Residenzstädte Berlin und Potsdam, vol. 3 (1786), 943–47. On Karamzin and Nicolai, see Gerda S. Panofsky, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin in Germany: Fiction as Facts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 22–29. 33. The “denigration of the jolly fellows” occupies an important place in Kutuzov’s footnotes to his translation of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. For the translator, the joyful attitude toward the world was absolutely wrong and wicked, while the melancholic mood was sublime and pious. Plach’ Eduarda Iunga: Ili noshchnye razmyshleniia o zhizni, smerti i bezsmertii, trans. A. Kutuzov (Moscow, 1785), 31. See Ilya Vinitsky, “A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics,” in Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 40–42. 34. Compare the similarity in the very method of thinking between Zhu-

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kovskii and Kutuzov: “is it not proof that . . .” and “is not this darkness the representation . . .” (“. . . ne est’ li dokazatel’stvo togo, chto . . .” and “ne est’ li t’ma siia izobrazhenie . . .”). 35. These fragments illustrate the various types of emotional personality, characteristic for the romantic age at different stages of its development. Kutuzov’s “I” is universal, it includes within itself the experience of any person seeking wisdom, while at the same time Karamzin’s “I” expresses the private feelings of a man of the age of Rousseau. Finally, Zhukovskii’s “I” is the synthesis of earlier interpretations: personal feeling, becoming the object of the poet’s interpretation, leads him to religious insight and the realization of moral duty. 36. “In all the forms that surround me, I behold the reflection of my own being, broken up into countless diversified shapes, as the morning sun broken in a thousand dewdrops sparkles towards itself.” J. G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. from the German by W. Smith (London: J. Chapman, 1848), 193–94. 37. For more details, see Vinitsky, “The Queen of Lofty Thoughts,” 18–43. 38. This remarkable omission might be explained by Veselovskii’s programmatic intention to reconstruct the social-psychological type of the Age of Sensibility rather than to write a “traditional” biography of the poet. Thus, instead of focusing on Zhukovskii’s formative years, he presents an insightful discussion of the cultural environment in which the poet was formed (“Epokha chuvstvitel’nosti”). However, this broad picture has a limited hermeneutic value for us, since it cannot explain the peculiarities of Zhukovskii’s personality and poetic worldview. 39. On the symbolic role of women in Novalis, see James R. Hodkinson, Women and Writing in the Works of Novalis: Transformation beyond Measure? (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2007), 168–244. 40. P. A. Pletnev, Stat’i, stikhotvoreniia, pis’ma (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1988), 172. 41. See E. N. Shchepkina, Iz istorii zhenskoi lichnosti v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1914); P. N. Sakulin, “M.A. Protasova-Moier po ee pis’mam,” in Izvestiia otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 12, book 1 (1907): 1–39; Iurii Lotman, “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (1995); Gitta Hammarberg, “The Feminine Chronotope and Sentimentalist Canon Formation,” in Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia (1994); Judith Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature: Women, Language and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature (1994); Glagoleva, Dream and Reality of Russian Provincial Young Ladies, 1700–1850; as well as Wendy Rosslyn’s highly informative collection Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003). 42. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 2. On the ethos of the Russian provincial household in the end of the eighteenth century, see Lotman, Sot-

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vorenie Karamzina; John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), 19–47; Tom Newlin, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738–1833 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 43. On the role of literary works in the “emotional navigation” of readers in the sentimental age, see William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling—A Framework for the History of Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and a series of articles by Andrei Zorin (2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). 44. Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). “The realistic Bastard  .  .  . backs the world while fighting it head on,” while the Foundling, “lacking both the experience and the means to fight, avoids confrontation by flight or rejection.” Quoted in M. McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 171. The Foundling’s tale “is one of escape from reality, of quixotic quest for this lost paradise.” Jennifer Hixon, “The Fall of Novgorod,” in Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf, Stephen Moeller-Sally, et al. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 196. 45. Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia, 129. 46. See Oleg Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, ili Podvizhnyi palimpsest (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 165– 67; Andrei Nemzer, “ ‘Sii chudesnye viden’ia . . .’: Vremia i ballady V.A. Zhukovskogo,” in Zorin, Nemzer, Zubkov, Svoi podvig svershiv (Moscow: Kniga, 1987); Andrei Nemzer, “Kanon Zhukovskogo v poezii Nekrasova,” in Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu 2, no. 5 (Tartu, 2011), 443– 63; Leibov, “Tiutchev i Zhukovskii: Poeziia utraty,” Tiutchevskii sbornik 2 (Tartu, 1999), 31–47. PROL OG U E

The first epigraph is from P. A. Pletnev, “O zhizni i sochineniakh Zhukovskogo,” Sochineniia i perepiska 3, no. 1 (1885): 65. The second epigraph is from Zhukovsky, “The Vision” (PSS, II, 258). Translated by Zachary King. 1. On the history of the Pension, see M. A. Sushkov, Moskovskii universitetskii blagorodnyi pansion i vospitanniki Moskovskogo universiteta, gimnazii ego, universitetskogo blagorodnogo pansiona i druzheskogo obshchestva (Moscow, 1858); N. S. Tikhonravov, “O prebyvanii V.A. Zhukovskogo v universitetskom Blagorodnom pansione i pervykh godakh ego zhizni v Moskve,” in Tikhonravov, Sochineniia 3, pt. 2 (Moscow, 1898); M. Iu. Liubzhin, Ocherki po istorii rossiiskogo obrazovaniia imperatorskoi epokhi (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Moskovskogo Kulturologicheskogo litseiia, 2000).

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2. V. N. Toporov, “Sel’skoe kladbishche Zhukovskogo: K istokam russkoi poezii,” Russian Literature 10, no. 3 (1981): 207–304. 3. Zhukovsky’s poems were set to music by various composers, including A. N. Pleshcheev, A. G. Weyrauch, D. S. Bortnianskii, A. N. Verstovskii, A. A. Aliab’ev, M. I. Glinka, and, later on, P. I. Tchaikovsky. 4. G. A. Gukovskii, Pushkin i russkie romantiki (Moscow: Intrada, 1995), 59. 5. In 1813 Bortnianskii set to music eight stanzas from Zhukovsky’s famous poem, which immediately became “the emblematic anthem of the war.” The score of Bortnianskii’s cantata, published in 1813, “spread in handwritten copies as well.” Marina Ritzarev, Eighteenth-Century Russian Music (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2006), 329–30. 6. K. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 1783–1852 (St. Petersburg, 1883), 114. 7. His conversations with Goethe in Weimar in September 1827 had a certain impact on Zhukovskii’s vision of contemporary history and the value of the present moment. 8. On the apocalyptic theme in Zhukovskii’s works, see Ilya Vinitsky, “The Invisible Scaffold: Execution and Imagination in Vasilii Zhukovskii’s Works,” in Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture, ed. Marcus C. Levitt and Tatyana Novikov (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 57–69. 9. In 1881, in accordance with his will, Dostoevsky was buried next to him. Zhukovskii’s gravestone bears an inscription taken from his programmatic poem Camoens (1839): “Poetry is God in the holy dreams of the earth” (PSS, VII, 454). C H A P T ER O NE

The first epigraph is from The Story of Daphnis and Chloe: A Greek Pastoral by Longus, edited with text, introduction, translation, and notes by W. D. Lowe (Cambridge, Eng.: Deighton, Bell, 1908), 111. The second epigraph is from Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Etudes de la nature, vol. 4 (Paris, 1804), 235. “Your goats are now become wild, your orchards are destroyed, your birds are fled, and nothing is heard but the cries of the sparrow-hawks that hover around these rocks.” Paul and Virginia, from the French of Bernardin Saint-Pierre, trans. Helen Maria Williams (Halifax: Scott, Webster, and Geary, 1840), 115. 1. The basis for this publication is the letter that Zontag wrote to Prince P. A. Viazemskii in 1854. 2. In a letter dated March 6, 1849, Zhukovskii encouraged Zontag to become “our family biographer”: “What an occupation it would be, full, life-giving, reviving the past, vivid for the present, and preparatory for our earthly and heavenly future!” Utkinskii sbornik (pis’ma V.A. Zhukovskogo, M.A. Moier i E.A. Protasovoi) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo M.V. Beer, 1904), 124, 127. However, the poet

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was unhappy that the memoirs were published: he considered them to be a text addressed only to the “initiated,” the members of the family. Utkinskii sbornik, 80. On the life and work of A.  P. Zontag, see O. B. Lebedeva, “Zontag Anna Petrovna,” in Russkie Pisateli: 1800–1917: Biobibliograficheskii slovar’, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1992), 351–53; O. E. Glagoleva, Russkaia provintsial’naia starina: Ocherki kul’tury i byta Tul’skoi gubernii XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Tula: Ritm, 1993), 98–100. 3. Zontag’s sister, A. P. Kireevskaia (née Iushkova; since 1817, Elagina), wrote to Zhukovskii in the summer of 1836: “In Mishenskoe vile desolation reigns in abundance, nothing remains of the past. The grove by the house is being cut up. And in place of a stroll I must traverse logs and brush . . . There is not a trace of the flowerbed. In the basements and cellars I could not find a single engraving.” Perepiska V.A. Zhukovskogo s A.P. Elaginoi, 1813–1852 (Moscow: Znak, 1999), 433. 4. It must be said that at the time such requests were quite common. For example, in December 1770, Count Ivan Orlov made inquiries about the fate of two “beautiful Turkish girls” that had been promised to him by Field Marshal P. A. Rumiantsev, who lived “in recompense for his labors” like “a Sultan among the beauties.” “I regret that the designated Turkish girls have died,” wrote Orlov, having learned of the sad fate of his “gift.” “I hope that Your Highness will be able to find the replacements [for the girls], since I hope that you have many of them in abundance.” Cited in L. P. Polushkin, Brat’ia Orlovy, 1762–1820 (Moscow, 2007), 142. Another field marshal, Aleksandr Suvorov, had his own “pocket” (karmannaia) Turkish girl. Admiral Kreig sent a captive Turkish woman to his brother from Ochakov. She “raised several small girls being held captive together with her.” In the house of Field Marshal Kamenskii there lived “Turkish girls given as gifts upon return from the Army to our military acquaintances, women, baptized by them in the Russian Orthodox faith and somehow or other raised.” M. I. Pyliaev, Staraia Moskva (Moscow, 1995), 363. There was no lack of “trophy” women in the years of the successful wars against the Porte. Thus, upon the taking of Izmail in 1790, the “soldiers were permitted to rob as promised for three days straight” and “they received as booty more than a million rubles and many beautiful Turkish women.” D. N. Bantysh-Kamenskii, Biografii rossiiskich generalissimusov i general-fel’dmarshalov, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1840), 128. The fate of the Turkish female captives in Russia in the eighteenth century certainly deserves a separate study. 5. There remains little historical evidence regarding Bunin’s only son, Ivan, who studied, according to family legend, at the University of Leipzig and passed away in 1781 at the age of twenty. Carl Seidlitz called him “the pride and joy of his mother” (“der Stolz und die Freude der Mutter”). Karl Johann von Seidlitz, Wasily Andrejewitsch Joukoffsky: Ein russisches Dichterleben (Mitau: E. Behre, 1870), 6. A. I. Bunin’s great-granddaughter, E. I. Elagina, wrote that the young

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man was “very educated, loved painting and possessed expert knowledge of it,” ordered icons for the stone church in Mishenskoe, and “traveled into distant lands.” According to one legend, Ivan died in Leipzig from an illness; according to another, he died upon his return to Russia from Germany of an unhappy love for a certain lady Lutovinova, whom he was unable to marry since his father had at some time in the past given his word to his friend, Count Grigorii Orlov, that their children would be married. “On the day of their betrothal,” tells E. I. Elagina, “when they began to drink to the health of the bride and groom, he burst a vein and died a sudden death” E. I. Elagina, “Semeinaia khronika,” Rossiiskii arkhiv (2005): 290–91. On Ivan Bunin’s study at the elite Pedagogium in Halle (rather than Leipzig), along with the illegitimate children of Catherine the Great’s favorites, Aleksei Bobrinskii (the son of the empress and Grigorii Orlov) and Aleksandr Chesmenskii (Aleksei Orlov’s son), see Il’ia Vinitskii, “Semeinye sviazi: Zametki o real’noi osnove biograficheskogo mifa Zhukovskogo,” in Zhukovskii: Issledovaniia i materialy, no. 2 (Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo TGU, 2013), 9–20. 6. A. S. Ianushkevich and O. B. Lebedeva, eds., V.A. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), 41. 7. According to the traditional version, the girls were both taken from the pasha’s harem. In the age of Catherine, imprisoned Turkish girls were often “relocated among the inhabitants” (“razmeshchalis’ po obyvateliam”). Apparently, Sal’kha lived with Bunin for several years without any legal documents. She was granted a free residence permit for Russia only after the birth of their son. I. I. Nekrasov, “Taina dvorianstva Zhukovskogo,” Belevskie chteniia, no. 3 (2004): 79– 90. There is confusion regarding the year of Zhukovskii’s mother’s birth. From the “confessional records” (“ispovedal’nye rospisi”) it follows that she was born in 1736; but according to family legends, she was born in 1748. P. Viskovatyi, “Stoletnii iubilei V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 226 (1883): 12. 8. The poet’s biographer P. Bartenev noted that in the Bunin family everyone treated the little Zhukovskii “with familial warmth,” which explains why he did not develop those unhealthy qualities “which are seen with some frequency in illegitimate children”—“either arrogance, or exaggerated self-deprecation, and almost always a mercurial character.” To Zhukovskii, claims Bartenev, “it was almost imperceptible that he was not a full member of the family into which he had been included along with his mother, the meek and universally loved Elizaveta Dementievna.” Russkii arkhiv, nos. 7–12 (1877): 485–86. However, this is a significant “almost”: the lack of belonging to the family of his benefactors was painfully perceived by the sensitive boy. Thus, in his journal entry of August 26, 1805, written in a moment of sadness, Zhukovskii recalled: “Not having my own family, in which I would have meant something, I saw around me people only briefly acquainted, because I had been raised in front of them, but I did not see relatives who belonged to me by right; I was used to separating myself from everyone,

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because no one took any particular interest in me and because every interest taken in me seemed to me to be charity. I was not left, abandoned, and had my corner, but was loved by no one, I did not feel anyone’s love” (PSS, XIII, 26). 9. O. E. Glagoleva, “Nezakonnorozhdennye deti v XVIII veke,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, nos. 4–6 (2002): 220. 10. As the scholar writes, “the basis for the issuance of a certificate of nobility to Zhukovskii was a falsified paper drawn up by the civil servants of the Tula local noble deputy body with the participation of Tula and Kaluga governorgeneral, General- in-Chief M. N. Krechetnikov,” the lover of the half- sister of the future poet, Natalia Vel’iaminova.” Glagoleva, “Nezakonnorozhdenyye deti,” 163. 11. “Sweet sisters! Lovely friends!” said he, when come up to us, taking a hand of each, and joining them, bowing on both: “let me mark this blessed with my eye; looking round him; then on me.—A tear on my Harriet’s cheek!—He dried it off with my own handkerchief—Friendship, dearest creatures, will make at pleasure a safe bridge over the narrow seas; it will cut an easy passage through rocks and mountains, and make England and Italy one country. Kindred souls are always near,” and so on. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, letter 315, in The Novels of Samuel Richardson, vol. 3 (London, 1824), 783. 12. “Oh how much I love . . . my tormentor!” says the beautiful Kseminda in this long novel. “My heart, weak for him, prefers him to everyone on Earth . . . I am prepared to bear all persecution from you, expect only your toleration, do not pile up my henceforth growing love for you, and do not deny me your gaze” (182). A faithful Turkish woman, selflessly in love with a Russian officer, is portrayed in the musical drama of Ivan Kozlovskii with a text by P. Potemkin Zel’mira and Smelon, or The Capture of Izmail (1795). 13. See Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in EighteenthCentury England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 14. From the psychoanalytic point of view, Zhukovskii’s family utopia is a dreamer’s naive (pre-Oedipal) fantasy, a dreamer who relies completely on his relatives and benefactors (the type of the foundling novel in the classification of the family novel offered by the French scholar Marthe Robert [Roman des origines et origines du roman]). 15. For an excellent historical-cultural discussion of this period see Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 39–50. 16. The family patriarch, Afanasii Ivanovich Bunin, died in 1791. 17. For her description of Zhukovskii, Zontag uses lines from his poem of 1809, “Happiness: From Schiller” (his free translation of Schiller’s “Das Glück”). 18. Andrei Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia, vol. 3 (1872), 1179. 19. Glagoleva, Russkaia provintsial’naia starina, 63. 20. Utkinskii sbornik, 130–31. 21. The tragedy is based on Plutarch’s biography of Camillus. Rezanov also

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indicates as a possible source Messner’s drama about Scipio, published in the journal Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni in the spring of 1795. V. I. Rezanov, Iz razyskanii o sochineniiakh V.A. Zhukovskogo, vol. 1 (1906): 101. Also, according to the recollections of Zontag, Zhukovskii’s play was performed in the winter of 1794–95 and we have no basis for shifting the chronology. An immediate historical impulse, leading the boy to create such a heroic drama, could have been the recent victory of Field Marshal Rumiantsev and Suvorov in the Polish campaign of 1794. G. R. Derzhavin called Rumiantsev the “Glorious Camillus” in the poem “Vel’mozha” (“Courtier”) (November 1794; publ. 1798). 22. On the exceptional popularity of the novel of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in Russia, especially in the provinces, see A. Belova, “Domashnee vospitanie russkoi provintsial’noi dvorianki kontsa XVIII— pervoi poloviny XIX vekov,” in Zhenskie i gendernye issledovaniia v Tverskom gosudarstvennom universitete (Tver, 2000), 32–44. 23. Ianushkevish and Lebedeva, eds., Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 106. 24. Rezanov, Iz razyskanii o sochineniiakh V. A. Zhukovskogo, vol. 1, 101. It is likely that Favières’s play Paul et Virginie, tremendously successful in France in the early 1790s, served as a model for the young playwright. Zhukovskii, apparently, was familiar with Karamzin’s review of this play, published in the 1791 volume of his Moscow Journal (Moskovskii zhurnal), to which the Bunin family subscribed. Karamzin noted a number of flaws in the dramatic version of the novel, but in general he considered it to be fine and touching. He especially liked the third act of the play, in which Virginia’s lover “magnanimously decides to offer up his life for her salvation.” Quoted in XVIII vek, vol. 3 (1958): 273. Favières abandoned the tragic end of the Bernardin version of the novel: in the finale, Paul carried out his beloved in his arms and the final chorus (to music by Kreutzer) sang that the grief and tears of the heroes remained in the past and their tender hearts would now be forever united in the bounds of love. 25. Viktor Afanas’ev, Zhukovskii (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1986), 15. 26. Ibid., 16. 27. V. V. Afanas’ev, “Rodnogo neba milyi tsvet” (Moscow: Detgiz, 1981), 9. 28. “Virginia had prepared, according to the custom of the country, rice and coffee, boiled with spring water; to which were added hot yams and young fresh cocoas. They had no table linen, but its place was supplied by leaves of the plaintain tree, and the utensils they made use of were calbassia shells split.” Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (1840), 52. 29. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (1840), 54. 30. The visit of the Governor to the hut of Madame de la Tour symbolizes the fragility of the sentimental utopia of the novel: “The continuation of the idyllic life of the valley depends on the tolerance— or protection— of an external power aligned with the authority of history, not nature.” Renata Ruth Maut-

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ner Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brasil, 1830–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 108. 31. In his 1789 introduction, Bernardin himself suggested the possibility of a theatrical adaptation of the novel (Paul et Virginie [1789], 30). On the role of pantomime and theatricality in the novel by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, see N. A. Litvinenko, “Poetika teatral’nosti,” Vestnik universiteta Rossiiskoi akademii obrazovaniia, no. 3 (2006): 53– 60; Mark Darlow, “‘Apprendre aux hommes à mourir’: The Theatrical Adaptations of Paul et Virginie,” European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics, vol. 17; also in Edward Batley and David Bradby, eds., Morality and Justice: The Challenge of European Theatre (Rodopi, 2001), 129–42. For a bibliographical index of the plays and opera librettos derived from the novel, see Paul Toinet, Paul et Virginie: Répertoire bibliographique et iconographique (Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1963). 32. The generic model for the breakfast in the hut of Madame de la Tour is the description of a morning repast in “Daphne and Chloe.” See Richard F. Hardin, Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient to Modern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 36, 89–93. On the role of the communal meal in the chronotope of the idyll, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Voprosy estetiki i literatury (Moscow: Khudozhetsvennaia literatura, 1975), 374–76. 33. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Studies of Nature, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 3 (London, 1801), 451. 34. Compare: “His eyes, which were black, would have been too piercing, if the long eye-lashes with which they were rayed around, as by the finest touches of the pencil, had not tempered them with the most expressive softness.” Paul and Virginia: Translated from the French of J.H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre (Glasgow, 1818), 15. 35. On the doom facing the idyllic world of the heroes of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel, see the excellent article by Clifton Cherpack, “Paul et Virginie and the Myths of Death,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 90 (1975): 247–55. 36. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia (1840), 55. 37. Ibid., 58. 38. Ibid., 58. 39. Ibid., 61. 40. Ibid. 41. Apparently, until the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century, Zhukovskii perceived the French writer as a superior master of the literary style. In his unpublished work of 1804 entitled “Examples of Style, Chosen from the Best French Prose Writers and Translated into Russian by Vasily Zhukovskii” (“Primery sloga, vybrannye iz luchshikh franzuzskikh prozaicheskikh pisatelei i perevedennye na russkii iazyk Vasiliem Zhukovskim”), the poet introduces several fragments from the works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, among

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which was also “Paul et Virginie.” V. I. Rezanov, Iz razyskanii o sochineniiakh V.A. Zhukovskogo, vol. 1 (1906): 513–61. 42. Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance: Women Writers, Kinship Structures, and the Early French Novel (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 136. 43. These are the words of Charles Nodier on the archetype of Virginia. See further: “Innocent simplicity and pure- heartedness made their faces appear to be of the people, although, by elevated origin, angelic charms, it could sooner be related to the inspiration of the divine rather than the fabrication of the poet,” “On the Types in Literature.” Cited in V. Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkogo romana i povesti, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1910), 307. 44. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 86–87. 45. See Cherpack, “Paul et Virginie and the Myths of Death,” 247–55; Kurt Wiedemeier, La religion de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (Fribourg, Switz.: Editions universitaires, 1986). 46. Zhukovskii’s family, of course, understood the boy’s situation well. The issue of his registration in the gentry books became a “family affair of the Bunin family” (I. I. Nekrasov, “Taina dvorianstva Zhukovskogo,” Belevskie chteniia, no. 3 [2004]: 79–90). Already in June 1795, the future poet, before thanking the Yushkovs for their efforts, receives his certificate of nobility. In 1797 he receives his first property (a house, given to him by his other half-sister) and a pair of serf servants. C H A P T ER T WO

The first epigraph, which translates as “Brothers, beyond the star-canopy / Must a loving Father dwell,” is from Schiller’s Sämmtliche Werke in einem Bande (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1834), 19. The second epigraph is from the same source, page 129, and translates as, “My innocence! My innocence!” 1. Lynne Avery Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 25. 2. Ibid., 28. 3. The fate of this small ideal society, which is unprotected by paternal authority, is an unhappy one. See Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance, 136. 4. On the aspects of sentimental feminization (the term had been originally applied to sentimentalism by V. Vinogradov in Iazyk Pushkina [Moscow: Nauka, 2000], 236), see Judith Vowles, “The “Feminisation” of Russian Literature,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby Clyman and Diana Greene (London: Praeger, 1994), 35– 60; Gitta Hammerberg, “The Feminine Chronotope and Sentimentalist Canon Formation,” in Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia, ed. A. G. Cross and G. S. Smith (Nottingham, Eng.: 298

Notes to Pages 37–41

Astra, 1994); Carolin Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, “Feminisation as Functionalisation: The Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man,” in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), 51–72. 5. Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 110–35. 6. A. T. Pierson, Traditions of Freemasonry and Its Coincidences with the Ancient Mysteries (New York: Macoy and Sickels and Pierson, 1865), 210. 7. The paternal image of Ivan Turgenev was much in common with the sentimental model of the “good father.” See Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 17–52. 8. There were two more sons in the family besides Aleksandr and Andrei. 9. Ivan Turgenev was a recognized leader of the Masonic Learned Society of Friends, which included the brothers Lopukhin (Ivan and Pavel), Doctor Matvei Mudrov, and other influential members of Russian Masonry from the end of the eighteenth century. 10. V. E. Vatsuro, Lirika pushkinskoi pory: Elegicheskaia shkola (Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), 29. 11. For more on the activities of the society, see Veselovskii 1904, Istrin 1911, and Lotman 1958. 12. Quoted in Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura, ed. R. V. Iezuitova (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 374. 13. J. W. von Goethe, Goethe’s sämmtliche Werke in vierzig Bänden, vol. 1 (1840), 5. 14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poetical Works, vol. 1 (1902), 5. 15. Goethe, Goethe’s sämmtliche Werke, 4. 16. Goethe, Poetical Works, 4. 17. For more see Vinitsky, “Posviashchenie v poeziiu: ‘Zueignung’ Gete v russkikh perevodakh,” Russian Studies 2, no. 2 (1996): 53–77. 18. On the activity of Novikov’s “Translators’ Seminary,” see G. V. Vernadskii, Russkoe masonstvo v tsarsvovanie Ekateriny (Petrograd, 1917). 19. See “Mladshii turgenevskii kruzhok i Aleksandr Ivanovich Turgenev,” in Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1911), 3–114. 20. Ivan Turgenev dedicated his translation of Johann Mason’s Know Thyself to his sons. Ioann Mason, Poznanie samogo sebia (Moscow, 1783). 21. The work of Fénelon was of particular importance among the Masons. The true believer, according to the French theologian, saw the heavenly father in his earthly one and in his brothers, kin, and friends he saw the tight bonds provided for by Providence. 22. Friedrich Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke in zwei Bänden, vol. 1 (1857), 19. In Andrei Turgenev’s translation: “Братья, там над небесным сводом, должен жить любимый Отец.” V. M. Zhirmunskii, Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 355. 299

Notes to Pages 41–44

23. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Akademiia nauk), 49–50. 24. “This name is the Father, God the Father, Abba. Compassion, mercy, forgiveness, humility, and love are the properties of the Father . . . [and] in granting mercy, forgiveness, compassion and undeserved love to us, the wretched, he is truly the Father, the Father of all who believe in Him and from whom was sent his son, Jesus Christ.” Platon, Pouchitel’nye slova, vol. 19 (Moscow, 1848), 273–75. 25. Ibid. 26. Quoted in Rannie romanticheskie veianiia (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), 63. 27. Poety nachala XIX veka, ed. Yu. M. Lotman and M. G. Al’tshuller (Leningrad: Nauka, 1961), 259. 28. A. F. Merzliakov, “Pis’mo Vertera k Sharlotte,” in Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1958), 227. At the end of his short life, Werther poses the question: “Can it be, ever-benevolent heavenly Father, that you turned away your own son?” “Werther’s ‘father’— as one contemporary critic has noted— is a withdrawn figure, one who, so it seems, decrees suffering for the son.” Martin Swales, Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 44. 29. V. A. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia, vol. 5 (1885), 215. 30. Having lost his virginity several days earlier (i.e., in the beginning of 1800), he prayed to God that he be relieved of just punishment, and swore “not to stray from the path of chastity.” Zorin, “Pokhod v bordel’ v Moskve v ianvare 1800 goda (Schiller, gonoreia i pervorodnyi grekh v emotsional’nom mire russkogo dvorianina”), Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 92 (2008): 142–57. 31. “Der Mann behielt das Feuer zum Hauptagenten seines Wesens, und das Weib bekam das Wasserprincipium.—Wenn wir Feuer und Wasser zusammenbringen, so ueberwaeltigt die eine Kraft die andere.” Alfred Payrleitner, Österreicher und Tschechen: Alter Streit und neue Hoffnung (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003), 111. 32. That is Piotr Strakhov, professor of physics at Moscow University and the translator of Saint-Martin’s “Of Errors and Truth,” one of the most influential texts for the elder Turgenev’s circle. Strakhov achieved academic renown with his lecture “On the Properties and Chemical Structures of the Atmosphere, Air, and Similar Other Substances.” 33. Pis’ma i dnevnik Aleksandra Ivanovicha Turgeneva (1911), 89. 34. In 1797, Andrei Turgenev composed a humorous epigram on the theme of the creation of woman: “Адам еще в раю с женой был жить обязан; / Так до падения он был уже наказан” (“Adam was still forced to live in heaven with his wife; / So he was already punished before his fall”). Poety 1790–1810-kh godov, ed. I. M. Lotman and M. G. Al’tshuller, 234. 35. Pis’ma i dnevnik, 89.

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36. Jakob Böhme, “Mysterium Magnum,” in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1843). See chapters 18 and 19. 37. N. A. Berdiaev, Smysl tvorchestva (Moscow, 2002), 102. 38. Zorin writes, “Turgenev would read his own personal sin as being analogous to original sin, and his own fall as a reflection of the fall of humanity.” Turgenev would interpret his own “unsuccessful sexual experience” as both “a loss of innocence” and “a break with commonly accepted moral values,” an act that was much in keeping with the “robber” Karl Moor. Zorin, “Pokhod v bordel’,” http:// www.polit.ru/article/2008/11/07/zorin/. 39. IRLI, f. 309, no. 272, l. 12 ob. -13. 40. Goethe’s allegorical “Dedication” was resonant with the Masonic teaching of the inner transfiguration of a man who had become lost in darkness. Note, for example, the similarities in the description of the shining heavens which suddenly open upon the protagonist in Turgenev’s translation and the “divine Sun” which illuminates the heart of the “spiritual knight” in the theosophical work of Ivan Lopukhin, a friend of Turgenev père. Perhaps tellingly, the main impulse behind Andrei Turgenev’s translation was a conversation on spirituality he had overheard between Lopukhin and Platon. See Il’ia Vinitskii, “Posviashchenie v poeziiu,” 53–77. 41. In 1803 Turgenev reads Böhme’s Aurora: Die Morgenröte im Aufgang and plans on discussing the work with his father’s friend, Maksim Nevzorov. 42. Zorin, “Progulka verkhom: (Iz istorii emotsional’noi kultury),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 65 (2004): 170–84, or http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo /2004/65/zorin11.html. Sandunova’s exoneration (not guilty!) was arrived at with the assistance of an artistic mold (see Louisa’s monologue at the conclusion of Kabale und Liebe). 43. It is worth recalling that Böhme’s mystical anthropology played an important role in the worldview of Goethe and the romantics. See Ronald Douglas Gray, Goethe the Alchemist: A Study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe’s Literary and Scientific Works (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 221–22; Paola Mayer, Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). 44. As Lotman once aptly noted, Turgenev “saw himself completely in him” (i.e., Karl Moor). Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i v 3 tomakh, vol. 2 (Tallinn, 1992), 238. 45. Zorin, “Soblaznenie à la Rousseau,” in Evropa v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 75. 46. V. N. Toporov, “Dva dnevnika (Andrei Turgenev i Isikaro Takuboku,” Vostok-Zapad: Issledovaniia, perevody, publikatsii 4 (1989): 125. 47. According to Varvara Sokovnina’s vita, her decision to leave the mundane world for a monastery was influenced by Karamzin’s essay on solitude: “she fell into sorrow and with a penitent cry turned towards God, so that He, knowing

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her fate, would take her away from this treacherous world and show her the path to her longed-for refuge.” Zhizn’ igumen’i Serafimy (Moscow, 1861), 11–12. 48. Seraphima’s vita tells a story where neither the admonitions of her own mother (who described monastaries as “shelters for the blind and malformed”) nor the “tearful entreaties of brothers” were of any use in dissuading the girl from leaving behind worldly life. Zhizn’ igumen’i Serafimy, 11; G. Piasetskii, Zhizneopisanie blazhennoi pamiati igumenii i skhimonakhini Serafimy (Orel, 1886). 49. Poety 1790–1810-kh godov, ed. Lotman and Al’tshuller, 243. 50. Iurii Lotman, Andrei Sergeevich Kaisarov i literaturno-obshchestvennaia bor’ba ego vremeni (Tartu, 1958), 65. 51. “There is freedom and possibility in choosing love and marriage over the nunnery. But there is a parallel danger  .  .  . in excessive sexuality and desire.” Marjorie B. Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 229. 52. Quoted in M. A. Gordin, Liubovnye eresi (St. Petersburg, 2002), 34. 53. Ibid. 54. Poety 1790–1810, 239. One might think that the poison of love had been linked for him with a certain medical problem, rather than those lofty Schillerean sufferings. 55. Poety 1790–1810, 240. 56. See V. Istrin, “Smert’ Andreia Ivanovicha Turgeneva,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 26, no. 3 (1910): 1–36. On the “mystery” of Turgenev’s death, see Zorin, “Smert’ v Peterburge v iiule 1803 goda,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 120 (2013): 157–92. 57. Poety 1790–1810, 244. 58. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, vol. 2 (1911), 287–88. Italics added. 59. Pis’ma Zhukovskogo k Turgenevu, 9. See the section “Immensité” in Fénelon’s De l’existence de Dieu (part 2, chap. 5): “Qui met l’étendue sans bornes change l’étendue en Immensité; qui met l’étendue avec une borne fait la nature corporelle.” Fénelon, Oeuvres spirituelles de Fénélon, vol. 1 (Paris: Dufour, 1842), 156. On Zhukovskii’s interest in Fénelon, see I. A. Aizikova, “V.A. Zhukovskii i Fénelon,” in Biblioteka Zhukovskogo v Tomske, vol. 3 (1988), 220–49. 60. Karamzin taught not to trust one’s dreams, but rather rely on Providence and strive for virtue in this world. 61. V. A. Zhukovskii, “Neiz’asnimoe proisshestvie (Razgovor mezhdu Villibal’dom i Blandinoiu),” Vestnik Evropy, no. 6 (1808). 62. Pushkin “inherited” this spiritualist hypothesis from Zhukovskii; see his fragment “Tavrida” (1822), structured as a dispute between two theories regarding the afterlife— personal and impersonal. 63. In the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century, the poet and his friends created a cult of the young man (a son, brother, lover, and poet). On formation of the Russian myth of a dying poet, see V. N. Toporov, “Mladoi pevets 302

Notes to Pages 52–60

i bystrotekushchee vremia (К istorii odngo obraza v russkoi poezii pervoi treti XIX veka),” in Russian Poetics (Columbus: Slavica, 1983), 425–27. 64. On the ideological sources of Zhukovskii’s religious beliefs, see Tikhonravov 1898. 65. Pis’ma i dnevnik A.I. Turgeneva, 111–12. C H A PTER T HR EE

The epigraph can be found in Sochineniia V.A. Zhukovskogo, vol. 5 (1885), 226. 1. Russkii arkhiv, nos. 7–12 (1877): 486. 2. These are Pletnev’s words. Quoted in Zhukovskii, v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 380. 3. Ibid. 4. Stepan Shevyrev, O znachenii Zhukovskogo v russkoi zhizni i poezii (Moscow, 1853), 58. 5. V. N. Rogozhin, “Dela ‘Moskovskoi tsenzury’ v tsarstvovanie Pavla I,” Sbornik otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, vol. 99 (1923): 27, 55. 6. Ibid., 88, 104. 7. Given the latter’s young age at the time, she probably had little more than a nominal role to play in the translation. 8. E. I. Elagina, “Semeinaia khronika,” in Rossiiskii Arkhiv: Istoriia Otechestva v svidetel’stvakh i dokumentakh XVIII–XX vv., vol. 14 (Moscow: Studiia TRITE, 2005), 291. 9. Many years later she recalled that “the habit of being an outsider in my own home pained my heart.” OR RGB, f. 104, k. 8, ed. khr.–, l. 3 ob. 10. Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 67. 11. On male guidance in the reading process in the Age of Sensibility, see O. Glagoleva, “Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provinical Noblewomen (1750–1825),” in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (2003), 140. According to Turgenev’s and Zhukovskii’s beliefs, “lofty feelings toward the pupil may be instrumental in educating young ladies: if one reads Rousseau to one’s beloved, she responds rightly, hypnotized by the ‘right’ ideas.” Ibid., 140. 12. The book was authored by F. Daniel Pernay, who was known as a translator of Wieland. In 1800 it was reprinted under a new title, F. Daniel Pernay, Mémoires anecdotiques pour servir à l’histoire de la revolution françoise (Paris: Chez J.-J. Fuchs, 1801). 13. V. Somov, “La libraire francaise en Russie au XVIII siecle,” in Est-Ouest: Transferts et réceptions dans le monde du livre en Europe (XVIIe–XXe siècles), ed. Frédéric Barbier (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005), 106. 14. P. Bartenev, “Avdot’ia Petrovna Elagina,” Russkii arkhiv, book 2, no. 8 303

Notes to Pages 60–64

(1877): 485. The woman recalled here is later remembered by Zhukovskii in his “outline” of his “past life” in 1804. Also, see Pis’ma V.A. Zhukovskogo k A.I. Turgenevu (1895), 276. 15. E. Tarle, “Teruan’ de Merikur,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 33 (1901), 93–94. 16. On false Mercurini, see Istoricheskii zhurnal 9, no. 2 (1939): 68; Émile Haumant, La culture française en Russie (1700–1900) (Cambridge, Eng.: Oriental Research Partners, 1971), 355. 17. Pernay’s book was published in a new edition in 1801, in Napoleonic France. According to a contemporary scholar, in the context of the time “The History of Adrian P***” expressed the views of the part of French society that called for the historical reconciliation of Republicans with moderate Royalists. Michel Delon, “Mémoires anecdotiques pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution française,” in Europaische Memoiren / Memoires Europeens: Festschrift für Dolf Oehler, ed. Frauke Bolln, Susanne Elpers, and Sabine Scheid (Göttingen: V & R Unipress; [Bonn]: Bonn University Press, 2008), 163–72. 18. Ostatok chelovekoliubiia vo Frantsii ili Anekdoty Respubliki (Moscow, 1798), 5. 19. Ostatok chelovekoliubiia vo Frantsii, 27. 20. The romantic biography of Ivan Bunin is no less muddled than the story of his civil service. Grigorii Orlov had no legitimate daughters, and his illegitimate daughter Natalia married Count F. F. Buksgevden in 1777. It is possible that the family legend is referring to another charge (and, according to rumors, also an illegitimate child) of Orlov’s: Elizaveta Aleksandrovna Alekseeva (b. 1760, she would later marry the German poet Klinger). According to the chronicles of the Lutovinov family (the Bunins’ neighbors), there is no evidence of Ivan Bunin’s son being involved with either of them. Going by the chronological constraints of this romantic story, it is possible that Ivan’s beloved may have been one of two Lutovinov daughters: Daria (b. 1760) or Elizaveta (1762). The tragic fate of the former (which is unconnected to the Bunin family story) was depicted by her maternal relative, the writer Ivan Turgenev, in “Three Portraits” (1846). See N. M. Chernov, Provintsial’nyi Turgenev (Moscow, 2003), 22–25. 21. Elagina, “Semeinaia khronika,” 291. 22. Ibid., 292. 23. Ibid. 24. The second month of the new reign—“the beautiful beginning” of Alexander’s age. 25. N. M. Karamzin, Sochineniia Karamzina, vol. 7 (1803), 266. 26. Ibid., 248, 269. 27. Quoted in Iurii Lotman, Karamzin (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1997), 688. 28. Poety 1790–1810-kh godov, 240. 29. Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura, 367.

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Notes to Pages 64–67

30. Sochineniia Karamzina, vol. 7 (1803), 265. 31. Andrei Turgenev wrote a prosaic translation of the beginning of the ode: “Кто может назваться другом верного друга, кто нашел себе милую супругу, тот сплетай с нами восторг свой.” Quoted in Rannie romanticheskie veianiia, 63. 32. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, vol. 4 (2001): 33. As Zorin has pointed out, the object of this erotic fantasy was the actress Sandunova. Zorin, “Progulka verkhom  .  .  .  ,” http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2004/65/zorin11.html. Zhukovskii, ever pious, would have a different understanding of an ideal wife. Here is a generalized portrait from Zhukovskii’s translation of William Tell: “The breeze before the dawn which blows through the leaves and the trees, a stream, pouring over a cliff, whose every drop glistens from the morning sun, none of these were as pure as the heart of dear Edma. Calm, humility, and mindfulness had chosen it as their sanctuary. The virtues she possessed had not even names, so mixed were they with her essence that she could not understand, how it would be possible that she was virtuous, without ceasing to live herself.” Zhukovskii, Vil’gel’m Tell’ (1802). Quoted in Rezanov, Iz razyskanii, vol. 1 (1906), 323. 33. Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich von Schillers sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1 (1818), 12. In English translation by Sir E. B. Lytton: “When o’er the chords thy fingers steal, / A soul-less statue now I feel, / And now a soul set free! / Thou rulest over life and death, / Mighty as over souls the breath / Of some great Sorcery.” Friedrich von Schiller, The Poems and Ballads of Schiller (1852), 329. 34. Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, vol. 357 (1905): 387. 35. This letter, dated January 8, 1806, will be discussed below. 36. As recorded in the repertoire digest included in the second volume of the history of the Russian drama theater, the play was performed on December 15 and 20, 1801, and February 7, 1802. Istoriia russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra, vol. 2 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977), 487. See the recent commentary to the play, in Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, vol. 7 (2011), 559–69. 37. Teatr Kotzebue v 4-kh chastiakh (Moscow, 1802). 38. It should be noted that the aesthetically astute Andrei Turgenev was the first in the group to speak of the limitations of Kotzebue’s dramatic system. 39. On the Russian reception of Kotzebue, see Rezanov, Iz razyskanii, vol. 1, 285– 310. On Zhukovskii’s comedy, see Gerhard Giesemann, Kotzebue in Russland: Materialien zu einer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt, 1968), 144–49; L. Ya. Voronova, “Perevod i publikatsiia komedii ‘Lozhnyi styd,’ ” in Poeticheskoe pereshagivanie granits (Kazan, 2002), 52–59; Lebedeva (PSS, VII, 559–69). 40. “The revolt against marriage conventions, separation of married couples, divorce and generally irregular relations between the sexes that were so characteristic of the romantic period do not play an important part in his comedies.” Albert William Holzmann, Family Relationships in the Dramas of August von Kotzebue (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1935), 160. 41. Kotzebue’s arch-foe, August von Schlegel, mocked this play in one of his

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epigrams: “Falsche Scham, wie bist du beschämt da selber der Autor / Sich nicht schämet, von dir fälschlich den Titel tu leihn.” August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1846), 276. 42. See in Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, part 2, 2: “One man who would overcome temptations succumbs to bad examples; another blushes at being modest and becomes impudent out of shame, and this false shame corrupts more honest hearts than do false inclinations.” Another example: “Do you not see that the crimes which shame and a sense of honour have not prevented, are screened and multiplied by a false shame and the fear of reproach? It is this fear which makes men hypocrites and liars.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or, The New Heloise (1997), 246, 111. In his copy of the novel, Zhukovskii underlined the passage about the dangers of “la fausse honte.” Z. Kanunova, “Tvorchestvo Russo v vospriiatii Zhukovskogo,” in Biblioteka Zhukovskogo v Tomske, vol. 2, 290. 43. L. Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 191. 44. Kotzebue’s hero addresses his beloved “Minchen! edles Minchen!” 45. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (1902), 33. 46. These lines of Schiller are performed in the finale of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805). As a contemporary scholar writes, “die Parallele zum Finale von Beethovens ‘Fidelio’ (1805) das wiederum auf den letzten Satz der neunten Sinfonie vorausdeutet, ist nicht zu ubersehen. In Kotzebues Kontext wirken die Verse banal; und die Frage ist durchaus zu erwägen, ob es vielleicht der Geschmack am trivialen Pathos war, der Beethoven bewog, dieses Gedicht Schillers zu vertonen.” Frithjof Stock, Kotzebue im literarischen Leben der Goethezeit: Polemik, Kritik, Publikum ([Düsseldorf]: Bertelsmann Universitats-Verlag, 1971), 70. 47. “Кто нашел под солнцем друга,  / С кем любезная супруга  / Делит бремя жизни сей–Тот приди к нам, в круг друзей! / Радость кроткая, благая, / Радость, дщерь небес святая!  / С чистой, пламенной душой  / Мы в чертог вступаем твой!” 48. Katharine A. Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 14. 49. Quoted in Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 73. 50. Turgenev refers to the ode “The Man” (“Chelovek”), in which Zhukovskii adopts the gloomy imagery of Edward Young. 51. V. E. Vatsuro and M. N. Virolainen, “Pis’ma Andreia Turgeneva k Zhukovskomu,” in Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura, 387. 52. Ibid., 403. 53. Ibid., 380. 54. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (1988). 55. Compare in Pope’s original: “Heav’n first taught letters for some wretch’s

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aid, / Some banish’d lover, or some captive maid; / They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires, / Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires, / The virgin’s wish without her fears impart, / Excuse the blush, and pour out all the heart, / Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul, / And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.” Alexander Pope, The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (London: John Bell, 1787), 171. 56. Zhukovskii i russkaia ku’ltura, 391–92. 57. Donamar addresses her as: “Das Idol meiner Kindheit!” 58. Katharine Ann Jensen aptly called this ideal type the Epistolary Woman: “Seduced, betrayed, and suffering, this woman writes letter after letter of anguished and masochistic lament to the man who has left her behind,” Jensen, Writing Love, 1. 59. Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura, 392. 60. Quoted in Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 74. 61. I. M. Dolgorukii, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg: Imperatorksaia akademiia nauk, 1849), 440. 62. Friedrich Bouterwek, Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit seit dem Ende des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (Göttingen: J.F. Röwer, 1801), 151–52. 63. See V. T. Danchenko, Franchesko Petrarka: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ russkikh perevodov i kriticheskoi literatury na russkom iazyke (Moscow: Kniga, 1986), 14, 107–8. 64. “The world did not know her while it had her; I knew her who remain here to weep.” 65. In 1796 V. L. Pushkin published a poem, “Na smert’ Laury.” Danchenko, “Franchesko Petrarka,” 108. 66. According to Zorin and Nemzer, “A. Turgenev visited this pond and wrote down the inscriptions from the trees. Zorin and Nemzer, “Paradoksy chuvstvitel’nosti,” in “Stolet’ia ne sotrut . . .”: Russkie klassiki i ikh chitateli (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), 24. Andrei Zorin correctly highlights the connection between Elizaveta Sandunova and Schiller’s Louisa and Karamzin’s Liza. See his “Poniatie literaturnogo perezhivaniia i konstruktsiia psikhologicheskogo protonarrativa,” in Istoriia i povestvovanie (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 20–21. However, this connection is not associative, but rather typological, sanctioned, as it were, by the epigraph to Rousseau’s novel: Heloise-Louisa-Liza-Elizaveta. 67. This line from Petrarch’s Sonnet 338 was used as an epigraph to a speech given at an Arzamas meeting on November 25, 1825 by Uvarov (whose Arzamasian nickname was “Starushka,” or “old woman”). The speech “mourned” the Russian Sappho, the poet Anna Bunina. Arzamas, vol. 1, 307. 68. The young Zhukovskii’s experiences bear a surprising resemblance to those of Mandel’shtam’s Oliver Twist, who also despaired “over heaps of office books.” Both texts are founded on the notion of the suffering of a poetic soul in the soulless world of bureaucracy or business.

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69. V. E. Vatsuro and M. N. Virolainen, “Pis’ma Andreia Turgeneva k Zhukovskomu,” in Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura, 406. 70. P. A. Bartenev, “K biografii V.A. Zhukovskogo: Pis’ma ego materi i rodnykh k nemu,” Russkii arkhiv 1 (1883): 209. 71. J. W. von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (United States: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007), 83. 72. Turgenev’s journal contains a translation of a fragment of this letter. Apparently, Zhukovskii translated one of Werther’s letters, telling of his service in the city. Zorin, “Soblaznenie a la Rousseau,” in Evropa v Rossii: sbornik statei (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 75. 73. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 83–84. Italics added. 74. “I returned from a distant world with a heavy burden of unfulfilled hopes and destroyed desires.” 75. P. M. Martynov, “Selo Mishenskoe, rodina V.A. Zhukovkogo,” Istoricheskii vestnik 27 (1887): 121. 76. Compare in Gray: “Here rests his head upon the lap of earth / A youth to fortune and to fame unknown. / Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, / And Melancholy marked him for her own. / Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, / Heaven did a recompense as largely send: / He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, / He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend. / No farther seek his merits to disclose, / Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, / (There they alike in trembling hope repose) / The bosom of his Father and his God.” Thomas Gray, The Works of Thomas Gray: Containing His Poems and Correspondence, vol. 1 (1825), 128. 77. Quoted in Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 56. 78. Pis’ma i dnevnik A.I. Turgeneva, 235–36. 79. Quoted in Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 78. 80. OR RGB, f. 104, k. 8, ed. khr. 19, l. 1. 81. OR RGB, f. 104, k. 8, ed. khr. 19, l. 3 ob. 82. Elagina, “Semeinaia khronika,” 297. Interestingly, in 1817 Zhukovskii decides to pay his first love a visit in St. Petersburg: “I was almost happy to pass by several streets with my former hope of seeing a familiar person!” However, her home turns out to be empty, “with only my godson stuttering away in it!” N. V. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni: A.A. Voeikova–“Svetlana,” vol. 2 (Petrograd: Sirius, 1916), 65. Maria Svechina had no children, so we will not hazard to identify the child mentioned by the poet. C H A P T ER F O U R

The first epigraph: “Что ждет меня в дали на жизненном пути? / Что мне назначено таинственной судьбою?” Pis’ma V.A. Zhukovskogo k A.I. Turgenevu (Moscow, 1895), 11.

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Notes to Pages 85–90

The second epigraph is from Zhukovskii, Estetika i kritika (Moscow, 1985), 324. 1. As Zhukovsky puts it, “A calm, innocent life, occupations that are beneficial or pleasant both for me and others, friendship, sincere affection towards my close friends and, finally, should it be possible, the pleasure of certain moderate blessings— these are all that I demand from Providence!” (PSS, XIII, 14). 2. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, 83. 3. Veselovskii called Zhukovskii’s poetry “the poetry of feeling and of the heart’s imagination.” It is perhaps better to call it “the heart’s religion.” 4. In the romantic tradition, falling in love with a teenaged girl was a common plot. For instance, Novalis fell in love with Sophie when she turned twelve. 5. Zhukovskii discussed with the Protasov sisters the works by Derzhavin, Schiller, Bürger, Goethe, Wieland, Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, Boileau, Horace, and Juvenal. Of course, the Protasov sisters were the first to hear Zhukovskii’s own works. Masha discusses the volume and content of the reading in a letter to her cousin from the summer of 1806. She mentions that with her mother she is reading Roman history and Barthélemy’s Anacharsis, with her sister Greek history, and with her aunts Adèle et Théodore by Madame de Genlis, and the Bible. In addition, she was also reading Maria Edgeworth in French translation, and the memoirs of William Coxe in German. “I am also writing geography in German, verses in French, Roman history in Russian, and various anecdotes in Italian.” Utkinskii sbornik, IV. 6. Mme. De Genlis, Adeliia i Teodor, ili Pis’my o vospitanii, soderzhashchiia v sebe pravila, kasaiushchiesia do trekh razlichnykh sposobov vospitaniia, kak to printsov i oboego pola iunoshestva, trans. Pavel Sumarokov (Tambov, 1791). In 1792, Genlis’s novel appeared in Russian translation in St. Petersburg and two years later in Moscow. 7. Théodore’s education is discussed to a lesser extent in the novel. 8. Moral and psychological experiments occupy an important place in the Baroness’s pedagogical system: “The basic plot runs as follows: Adèle commits an initial error of judgment but, thanks to her mother’s stage-managing, soon understands her mistake, repents, and thereby repairs her fault.” Lesley H. Walker, A Mother’s Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 154. 9. “Genlis’s vision of society in microcosm— the family— revolves around a panoptic maternal authority who exercises complete control over the individual ad infinitum.” Julia Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 150. 10. Commenting on Aleksandra Protasova’s album entry on her mother’s voice, which could “pierce the heart,” Zhukovskii writes, “The mother’s voice is both eloquent and powerful” (PSS, XIII, 13). 11. From 1805 to 1810 Zhukovskii closely read and studied Rousseau’s

309

Notes to Pages 90–94

Emile. Judging by his numerous notes in the margins of the copy of the text from his library, his attention was particularly drawn to the fifth part of the treatise, which was dedicated to Sophie’s education, and how she was to be an ideal wife for the main character. F. Z. Kanunova, “Zhukovskii— chitatel’ pedagogicheskogo romana-traktata Russo ‘Emil,’ ili o vospitanii,” in Biblioteka V.A. Zhukovskogo v Tomske, vol. 3 (Tomsk, 1988), 74–90. 12. Zhukovskii drew his theoretical views on education from the French Encyclopédie (PSS, XIII, 463). In his “Catalogue of the Best Books of Every Kind” (“Rospis’ vo vsiakom rode luchshikh knig”) compiled in 1805, Zhukovskii included the following pedagogical works: Adèle et Théodore; Education practique (by Maria Edgeworth); Allgemeine Revision (by Joachim Heinrich Campe); Lettres sur l’éducation des filles (by Madame de Maintenon); Méthode de Pestalozzi (by Marc Antoine Jullien); Emile; Belinde, conte moral (by Maria Edgeworth); Ami des parents (by Maria Edgeworth); Leçons d’une gouvernante and Methode d’enseignement (by Genlis); Oeuvres morales de la Mise de Lambert; Der Kinderfreund (by Christian Felix Weisse); Kleine Seelenlehre für Kinder (by Campe); [Le] magasin des enfante (by Jeanne Marie, le Prince de Beaumont), and so on; Choix de nouveaux contes moraux (by Maria Edgeworth); Oeuvres de Mme Genlis; Oeuvres de m-r le prince de Beaumont; Niemoyers Erziehungsschriften; Die Kunst, ein gutes Mädchen; Die gute Jüngling, gute Gatte und Vater (Johann Ludwig Ewald); De l’éducation et du bonheur des femmes (by Félicité G[enlis]); Le guide des mères (by Hugh Smith); La gymnastique de la jeunesse (by J. A. Amar Durivier and L. F. Jauffret); Briefe über Pestalozzi und seine Elementar-bildungsmethode (. . .); Praktisches Lehrbuch zur Bildung eines richtigen mündlichen und schriftlichen Ausdrucks der Gedanken (by [Johann Christoph] Vollbeding); Handbuch der praktischen Erziehung (Niemeyers); and so on. Rezanov, Iz razyskanii, vol. 1, 245. 13. L. K. Khitrovo, “Teksty stikhotvorenii V.A. Zhukovskogo: (Po arkhivnym materialam Pushkinskogo doma),” in Pushkin i ego sovremenniki, vol. 5, no. 44 (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2009), 78–79. 14. Published in Khitrovo, “Teksty stikhotvorenii V.A. Zhukovskogo,” 78–79. 15. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky. 16. Franklin’s list of “13 virtues” included Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility. On Zhukovskii’s circle’s interest in “Franklin’s system” of self-analysis, see Rezanov, Iz razyskanii, vol. 1, 217. 17. Quoted in Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 97. 18. In the original: “Geist der Liebe! bleib bey uns, / Seye uns gewogen— / Laß als Friedenszeichen uns / Diesen Regenbogen. / Wo du thronst, da blühen schön / Deine reinre Triebe— / Laß uns froh durchs Leben gehn / An dem Arm der Liebe.” Leopold Huber and Carl-Friedrich Hensler, Die Teufelsmühle am Wienerberg (1801), 97. As one can see, in his version, Zhukovskii departs from the last two lines of the original. 310

Notes to Pages 95–102

19. I. I. Dmitriev, Sochineniia i perevody, part 3 (Moscow: Tipografiia Beketova, 1805), 67–68. 20. Zapadnoevropeiskii sonet XIII–XVII vekov (Leningrad: Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1988), 424. 21. Danchenko, Petrarka v russkoi literature, vol. 1 (Moscow: Rudomino, 2006), 71. 22. Novosti russkoi literatury (1802), 50. 23. Vestnik Evropy 10, no. 13 (1803): 37. 24. Zhukovskii’s unfinished translation of Rousseau’s “Letters to Sara,” begun in the summer of 1805 and by all indications connected with his new feeling for his young niece, offers an excellent example of the extent to which Zhukovskii had assimilated the pre-romantic rhetoric of love (PSS, VIII, 405–9). On Rousseau’s doctrine of love, expressed in this work, see Robert Osmont and E. R. Porter, “J. J. Rousseau and the Idea of Love,” Yale French Studies, no. 28 (1961): 43–47. 25. I. M. Semenko, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo (Leningrad, 1975), 123. 26. V. A. Zhukovskii, “Lionel’ k El’mine,” OR RNB, f. 286, oo. 1, ed. khr. 21, l. 1 ob. 27. Vestnik Evropy 41, no. 19 (1808): 167–68. 28. Ibid. 29. In his book on the history of love in Western culture, Simon May argues that “the tone of ecstatic melancholy,” characteristic of romanticism, is grounded in the duel sense of loss and gain. “On the one hand, mourning and terror are natural reactions to the irretrievable loss of a divine world order and the firm moorings it afforded . . . On the other hand, the construction by human beings of a new order, founded on their own autonomy and its vast creative possibilities, evokes the rapture of a new dawn.” May, Love: A History (Yale University Press, 2011), 153. 30. V. A. Zhukovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols., vol. 4 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1960), 455. 31. Quoted in Zhukovskii i vremia (Tomsk, 2007), 56. 32. In 1789 Fonvizin had announced the publication of “a periodical publication dedicated to truth,” The Friend of Honorable People, or Oldthoughts, but the police prevented it from being printed. 33. Vestnik Evropy 1, no. 1 (1808): 6–7. 34. Ibid., 16. 35. Ibid., 17. 36. Ibid., 16–17. 37. Ibid., 21. Italics added. 38. Ibid., 91. 39. Quoted in Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 107. 40. Ibid. 41. “И так с тобою я в деревню полечу, / Забывши светския печальныя за311

Notes to Pages 102–104

бавы, / И общежитие, и модные уставы!— / О сколько радостей нас ожидает там!” Denis Davydov, “Agreement,” Vestnik Evropy 39, no. 6 (1808): 211–19. 42. “О друг мой! так и ты, оставя град мятежной, / В уединении, в безмолвной тишине, / Вкушаешь всякий день лишь радости одне! / То бродишь по лугам, то по лесу гуляешь; / То лирою своей Климену восхищаешь.” Viazemskii, “Epistle to Zh[ukovskii],” Vestnik Evropy 39, no. 19 (1808): 179. Another work, a prosaic dialogue between Ulysses and Circe, translated from the English by M. T. Kachenovsky, lauds the ideal of a faithful and virtuous wife who inspires her husband to achieve great feats. Vestnik Evropy 41, no. 17 (1808). 43. This individualized lyricism distinguishes Zhukovskii’s experiment from the conventional lyricism of sentimental almanacs and journals of his time, from Karamzin’s Aglaia (1794–95) to Makarov’s Zhurnal dlia Milykh (1804). 44. “My friend, we are all mad for your Messenger. Not only do we read it, we also learn from it,” writes “grandmother” Maria Bunina from Mishenskoe. Ekaterina Protasova writes, “We are all enraptured by The Messenger! It is beautiful! Basil, we have already read it three times through. Vasilii Ivanovich Kireevskii also praises it without end.” Quoted in Victor Afanas’ev, Zhukovskii, 23. 45. S. V. Kiselev, “Intimno-dnevnikovye formy tsiklizatsii v ‘Vestnike Evropy’ V.A. Zhukovskogo 1808–1809 gg,” in Zhukovskii i vremia (Tomsk, 2007), 54. 46. It should be noted, however, that there were fundamental differences between the old, patriarchal model of relationships and the new, romantic conflict presented in Zhukovskii’s biography. In Fonvizin’s neoclassical comedy, the uncle takes the place of a wise and caring father. Zhukovskii’s relationship to his niece is that of a mentor in love with his charge. This new model can be seen in late eighteenth-century literature. In Friedrich Klinger’s Geschichte Giafers des Barmeciden, which was published in Petersburg in 1794, the virtuous Giafer falls in love with his pupil (and twelve-year-old niece) Fatime, seeing in her his most dear and faithful friend, prepared to share both happiness and misfortune with him. Giafer dreams of marrying the girl, but the Caliph does not give him permission, citing their blood relation. 47. Vestnik Evropy 1, no. 1 (1808): 25–29. 48. In 1798 Andrei Turgenev translated, upon his father’s advice, C. Meister’s Answeisung fur Junglinge zu eigenem Arbeiten (1789). In Russian translation, it was entitled “Sposob chitat’, zamechat’ i sochiniat’, v pol’zu molodykh liudei.” Rezanov, Iz razyskanii, vol. 2, 211. 49. “Ich nahm von der Toilette eines jungen Frauenzimmers ein Buch auf, und begriff nicht warum sie es so eilfertig wegriss. Sie erröthete über den Verdacht, den sie zu erwecken schien, und las mir, zu ihrer Rechtfertigung, die ersten Seiten vor, die von der Hand ihres Vaters waren.” J. J. Engel, Schriften: Der Philosoph für die Welt (Berlin: Mylius, 1801), 259–65. 50. For example: “Keine Liebe ist so rührend, als die verhehlte, die sich selber ihre Klostermauern zum Entsagen baut”; “Heilig ist dem liebenden Herzen 312

Notes to Pages 104–111

die Gestalt die zu ihm sagt: ich bin dein!”; “In der Wirklichkeit nimmt man leichter an unglücklicher Liebe Theil, als an glücklicher.” “Nichts ist gesährlicher, als sich verliebt zu stellen: man wird’s sogleich darauf .” See Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1807 (1806), 3–38. 51. “Nur in den Minuten des Wiedersehens und der Trennung wissen es die Menschen, welche Fülle der Liebe ihr Busen verberge, und nur darin wagen sie es, der Liebe eine zitternde Zunge und ein über- fließendes Auge zu geben— wie Memnons Statue nur tönte und bebte, wenn die Sonne kam und wenn sie unterging, am Tage aber bloß warm von ihren Strahlen wurde.” (“It is only at the moments of separation and reunion that man is sensible of the fulness of affection of which his heart is susceptible. And then only does Love call for a trembling tongue and a moist eye;— as Memnon’s statue vibrated and resounded only when the sun arose and descended. During the day, it was warm only from the sun’s rays”). Jean Paul, Sentenzen aus Jean Pauls und Hippels Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Berens, 1801), 173. 52. Also see Tat’iana Fraiman, Tvorcheskaia strategiia i poetika Zhukovskogo (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli kirjastus, 2002). 53. E. M. Zhiliakova, “Mariia Edzhvort v kontekste tvorchestva V.A. Zhukovskogo,” in Zhukovskii i vremia (Tomsk, 2007), 63–64. 54. OR RNB, f. 286, op. 1, ed. khr. 21, l. 1 ob. 55. Vestnik Evropy 1, no. 1 (1808): 272. 56. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky. 57. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 12 tomakh, vol. 9 (St. Petersburg, 1902), 28. 58. Ibid., 30. 59. Vestnik Evropy 45, no. 9 (1809). This is a translation of Fabre d’Églantine’s “Le délire de l’amour.” 60. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky. 61. Simon May in his Love: A History (Yale 2011) argues that such interpretation of love is characteristic of “the third transformation” in the cultural history of this feeling, “of which Rousseau is the guiding spirit” (164). C H A PTER F I V E

1. At the same time, Zhukovskii begins to translate the recently discovered epic poem The Lay of Igor’s Campaign. His other project of this period is the literary anthology Collection of Russian Verses (parts 1–5, 1810–11). 2. Quoted in Biblioteka Zhukovskogo v Tomske (Tomsk, 1988), vol. 2, 151–52. 3. The name of Cicero’s villa where he composed his famous Disputations. 4. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 44. 5. On Pleshcheev, see Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina, 249. Pleshcheev composed music to many of Zhukovskii’s poems and romances. 6. In the mid-1790s, Karamzin limited himself to the company of “dear 313

Notes to Pages 112–122

people, books, and nature” while at the Pleshcheevs’ estate Znamenskoe. For more on Karamzin’s Znamenskoe experiment see Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina, 245–49. 7. Seidlitz apparently refers to the theatrical idyll described in the first part of the novel rather than the aristocratic “Tower Society” (Turmgesellschaft), which was comprised exclusively of men, unlike Zhukovskii’s domestic utopia. The biographer draws a compelling cultural parallel between the Russian poet’s Muratovo and Goethe’s “Athens on the Ilm.” 8. In the end of 1811 Pleshcheev and Zhukovskii undertook a poetic “correspondence of two neighbors in two languages”: the former would write in French, while the latter would respond in Russian. 9. Karamzin, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 2 (1964), 142. 10. Dementich was the magistrate of the village (starosta). 11. In the humorous handwritten journal “Muratovo Louse” (which was dedicated to “sentimental souls”), Sasha is called “the Royal Princess Aleksandrina.” 12. See Tat’iana Fraiman, “O nekotorykh tvorcheskikh modeliakh v poezii Zhukovskogo,” in Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii: Literaturovedenie IV (Novaia seriia) (Tartu, 2001), 169–84. 13. Ekaterina Protasova’s objections and the reasons for them will be discussed in the next chapter. 14. After Zhukovskii’s departure, Ekaterina Protasova told the Iushkov nieces about the poet’s proposal and her refusal. The result of this announcement was a deep split within the “happy family”: the nieces completely supported their idol. 15. The poem was published in December 1812. 16. As we recall, the theme of God’s “best name” in Zhukovskii’s writings emerged in the early 1800s, under the impression of Metropolitan Platon’s sermon. 17. On Lopukhin’s influence on Zhukovskii, see A. L. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 282–84. 18. See Larionova, “Istoriia o doktore Fore v russkom plenu,” Pushkin i ego sovremenniki 5, no. 44 (2009): 5–41. 19. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 1, 37. 20. Russkii arkhiv, vol. 3, no. 9 (1900): 26. 21. Kiseleva and Stepanishcheva observe that Zhukovskii portrays the Protasov family circle using the vocabulary that had been employed in Turgenev’s circle. Liubov’ Kiseleva and Tat’iana Stepanishcheva, “Problema kommentirovaniia epistoliariia (na primere perepiski Zhukovsogo i ego plemiannits),” in Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu 4 (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2007), 256–69. 22. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, 285–86. 23. Bogdanovich, “Druzheskoe poslanie 1810-kh godov,” Vestnik Permskogo universiteta: Seriia filologii, vol. 2, no. 14 (2011): 135–36.

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Notes to Pages 122–128

24. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo oral, 284–85. 25. Pokhozhdeniia Oronoka kniazia afrikanskogo, S gravirovannymi kartinkami, parts 1–2 (St. Petersburg, 1796). 26. Hans Turley, “Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism, and Crusonian Identity,” in A New Imperial History Culture: Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 186. 27. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. 28. It is also worth noting along the way that a similar utopia of a common life shared under one roof by two individuals related to each other both spiritually and by blood can be found in the second epilogue of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Tolstoy’s ideological utopia thus also derives from Rousseau’s model. 29. “Где вера не нужна, где места нет надежде,  / Где царство вечное одной любви святой!” Here Zhukovskii cites the final lines of Andrei Turgenev’s “Elegy” (1802), a poetic expression of the afterlife in Zhukovskii’s inner circle. 30. “Нам лишь чудо путь укажет / В сей волшебный край чудес.” Zhukovskii cites two last lines from his translation of Schiller’s “Sehnsucht.” In original: “Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen / In das schöne Wunderland.” 31. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 18. 32. Zhukovskii had sold his small estate and presented the money to his niece Aleksandra as a dowry. 33. Utkinskii sbornik, 24–25. 34. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 19. 35. Ibid., 34. 36. Ibid., 44. 37. Utkinskii sbornik, 174. 38. Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma (Leningrad, 1984), 89. Italics added. 39. Ibid. 40. As we recall, Paul, in a despondent monologue, reproaches Virginia’s “hard-hearted” mother: “[Y]ou will say, ‘She is not your sister, and you have no control over her.’ She is all to me: my fortune— my family, my birth, all unite to render her my sole good. I know none but her. We have had but one habitation, one cradle, and we shall have but one grave,” Paul and Virginie (1840), 61–62. 41. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 36. 42. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 16. 43. Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 31. 44. A. N. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu: Vol’nost (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1992), 64.

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Notes to Pages 128–131

45. Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 221. 46. T. O. Sokolovskaia, Russkoe masonstvo i ego znachenie v istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia (Moscow, 1999), 164. 47. Quoted from N. Bludilina and E. Lebedev, Rossiia i Zapad: Literaturnye istochniki poslednei treti XVIII veka (Moscow, 2000), 645. 48. Quoted in Ivan Pechinskii, Rossiiskaia khristomatiia, ili otbornye sochineniia otechestvennykh pisatelei v proze i stikhakh (St. Petersburg, 1833), 380. According to Rousseau (Emile), educator’s control over a young man’s imagination was of paramount importance, since “natural love” should become “the crown of human maturity.” Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility, 227. 49. Zorin, “Pokhod v bordel,” magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2008/92/zo14-pr.html. 50. Jakob Friedrich Feddersen, Christliches Sittenbuch für den Bürger und Landmann (Hamburg: Carl Ernst Bohn, 1783). 51. Zhukovskii graduated from the Pension as the best in his class “in learning and conduct.” 52. V. I. Pokrovskii, Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovskii, ego zhizn’ i sochineniia (Moscow: Spiridov, 1908), 303. 53. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, “Enthaltsamkeit von dein Genuß der physischen Liebe in der Jugend und außer der Ehe,” in Makrobiotik; oder, Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (Berlin: Wittich, 1805), 130–34. 54. See Hufeland’s Art of Prolonging Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1870), 225. In original: “Wer nie in schnöder Wollust Schoss / Die Fülle der Gesundheit goss, / Den ziemt’s, dass er sich brüsten kann; / Ihn das Wort: Ich bin ein Mann! . . .” Hufeland, Makrobiotik, s. 130. Bürger’s poem, praised, among others, by Wieland, has been incorporated “in most of the collections of hymns for the use of the Lutheran church.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 5 (1854), 771. 55. Hufeland’s Art of Prolonging Life, 226–27. 56. Ibid., 227. 57. “We in general find, in the old world, that all those from whom any thing great or glorious was expected, were obliged to restrain physical love. So much were people then convinced that Venus absorbs the whole powers of man, and that those given up to dissipation could never attain an exalted position.” Ibid., 227. 58. “Блажен Духовный Юноша, который возрастая во внутренней жизни Премудрости, от младенчества жизни сея сохранил любовь к Божественному Источнику рождения своего и Елей Духовнаго помазания на девственный брак с Софиею.” Ivan Lopukhin, Ο ζηλοςοφς: iskatel’ premudrosti, ili, Dukhovnyi rytsar’ (Moscow, 1989), 14. 59. As Hufeland writes in his chapter on happy marriages (which immediately follows his chapter on sexual abstention), the marital bond ennobles the human drive to physical love. This most basic animal instinct is transformed in

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marriage into “one of the highest moral motives of action,” while “violent passions, ill-humor, and bad customs” disappear. Hufeland’s Art of Prolonging Life, 248. 60. On the ballad’s mystical roots, see Il’ia Vinitskii, Dom tolkovatelia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 73–98. 61. Zhukovsky clearly refers to the vision of the Lord’s Temple, depicted in Isaiah and Saint John— the realm of pure light and fire, known as the Empyrean in Dante and Milton. 62. In sentimental ideology, “‘feminine’ qualities such as emotionality, tenderness and spontaneity acquired a universal value, becoming the essential ingredients of both female and male characters.” Alessandra Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801–1825) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 211. 63. On the famous “war on Parnassus” in the second half of the 1810s, see V. E. Vatsuro, “V preddverii pushkinskoi epokhi,” in Arzamas: Sbornik v dvukh knigakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1994), vol. 1, 5–27. 64. On “meekness” and “virginity” as Christlike attributes of Zhukovskii’s image in the “Arzamas” society, see Boris Gasparov, Poeticheskii iazyk Pushkina kak fakt istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 140. 65. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Stasiulevich, 1899), 305. 66. Ibid., 371. 67. A. F. Voeikov, in his review of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liudmila, condemned the ambiguous scenes and authorial hints as aspects of the poem that prevented it from reaching a moral goal. This review was met with a scathing response by A. A. Perovskii, who caustically remarked that the reprobate Voeikov was ill-suited for the role of the guardian of social mores, openly mocking the “virgin ears” and “timid conscience” of Pushkin’s critic. In a letter to her cousin, Masha Protasova relished the image of Voeikov’s anger upon reading these “horrible jests at his virginity.” Utkinskii sbornik, 247. 68. “И Пушкин, школьник неприлежный / Парнасских девственниц-богинь, / К тебе, Жуковский, заезжали,  / Но к неописанной печали  / Поэта дома не нашли . . . / Какой святой, какая сводня / Сведет Жуковского со мной?” Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 20 tomakh, vol. 2, part 1 (Moscow: Voskresen’e, 1999), 98. 69. Compare “бес предстал, / Одеян адским блеском . . . / Но старца грозного узрел— / Утихнул и смирился; / . . . И, смутен, вопрошает: / “Что, мощный враг, тебе в сей час / К сим падшим призывает?” [“Gromoboi”] and “Пред ним восстав, смутился мрачный бес / И говорит: ‘Счастливец горделивый, / Кто звал тебя? Зачем оставил ты / Небесный двор, эфира высоты?’ ” (Gavriiliada). Commentators find the source of this description in Évariste de Parny’s La paradis perdu. A. S. Pushkin, Gavriiliada, ed. B. Tomashevskii (Petrograd,

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1922); M. P. Alekseev, “Zametki o ‘Gavriiliade’”; Alekseev, Pushkin: Sravnitel’noistoricheskie issledovaniia (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), 281–325. 70. In “Svetlana,” a dove covers with its wings the young maiden’s bosom; in Pushkin’s Gavriiliada the same dove is playfully placed somewhat lower on the body. This is a device that was already employed by Pushkin in “Rusalka” in 1819, in which the “damp head” of the mermaid in Zhukovskii’s “The Fisherman” is replaced by a more explicit image. Tomashevskii argues that the “dove scene” in Gavriiliada derives from La paradis perdu. Alekseev observes that some details might have been adopted by Pushkin from Parny’s “Léda.” Alekseev, Pushkin, 322. Boris Gasparov indicates other possible sources. Gasparov, Poeticheskii iazyk Pushkina, 115. 71. Compare, for example, the description of the hell’s “raptures”: “Вот слава! Мне восплещет ад // И с гордым cатаною”; “О страх! Свершилось . . . плещет ад / И с гордым сатаною” (“Gromoboi”) and “Уж ломит бес, уж ад в восторге плещет” (Gavriiliada). In turn, Satan’s mockery of the boring church in which “the smoke of the censer and an icon with diamonds / written by some iconscribbler,” is a reworking of “Gromoboi” in which a house of God built by a repentant sinner contains an icon of a saint painted by a “famous master”: “And day and night the candle flame burned  / Before the icon-lamp,  / In a golden crown the diamond shone // Along with the pearls of the frame” (“И день и ночь огонь пылал / Пред образом в лампаде / В златом венце алмаз сиял, / И перлы на окладе”). Also compare Mary’s vision of the hosts of the angels who fly around in radiance and glory (“Тьмы ангелов волнуются, кипят, / В сиянии и славе нестерпимой”), which alludes to the mystical conclusion of Vadim, with its “And hosts of seraphim teem / Inside the flaming vortex.” Notably, Zhukovsky’s ingenious portrayal of the Empyrean was revived by Voeikov in his epistle to his wife and friends, published in 1821 (“дерзает подлететь Создателя к чертогу, / Где Серафимов тьмы кипят, / И в хоре их поет “Три свят” / И “Слава в вышних Богу!”). Syn Otechestva (1821), part 67, no. IV. In turn, Semen Osetrov in his polemical essay, published in the April 1821 issue of Vestnik Evropy, mocked this mystical scene as completely incomprehensible. Vestnik Evropy, part 116, no. 4 (1821): 308. April and May of 1821 is the commonly accepted date of composition of Pushkin’s Gavriiliada. 72. Jean Philippe Jaccard perceptively notes that by “playing with the erotic element” in Ruslan and Liudmila, Pushkin exposes “those devices of narrative technique, which only in our days have become customary elements of literary prose.” Jaccard, “Mezhdu ‘do’ i ‘posle’: Eroticheskii element v poeme Pushkina ‘Ruslan i Liudmila,’” Russian Studies, no. 1 (1994): 180. C H A P T ER S I X

The first epigraph is from Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans: Eine romantische Tragödie (Berlin, 1802), 70. “Obedience is woman’s lot on earth, / And 318

Notes to Pages 137–142

stern forbearance is her grievous duty. / She must be purified through strictly serving. / Who here hath served, is great in the hereafter.” Schiller, The Maiden of Orleans: A Romantic Tragedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 37. The second epigraph is from Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloíse, ou, Lettres de deux amants, vol. 3 (Paris, 1808), 344–45. 1. In original: “il faut monter la plus  montagne pour voir le royaume de Cachemire.” Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, we follow the French spelling of “Cachemire” for “Kashmir” or “Cashmere,” as was used by Zhukovsky. 2. Perepiska Zhukovsogo i Elaginoi, 146. 3. “Le malheur ressemble à la montagne noire de Bember, aux extrémités du royaume brûlant de Lahore: tant que vous la montez, vous ne voyez devant vous que de stériles rochers; mais quand vous êtes au sommet, vous apercevez le ciel sur votre tête, et à vos pieds le royaume de Cachemire.” Bernardin de SaintPierre, Études de la nature, vol. 1, 412. 4. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, “The Indian Cottage,” in Paul and Virginia, from the French of Bernardin Saint-Pierre (1840), 254. 5. St. Pierre’s harsh critique of hypocritical morality of the official church also corresponded with the Russian poet’s own beliefs on the subject. 6. From 1821 onwards the image of this beautiful Indian kingdom becomes firmly connected with Moore’s Oriental romance Lalla Rookh, as well as the “living pictures” presented in Berlin in honor of the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna. In the next part of this book this performance, which is of enormous import for Zhukovskii’s work, will be further discussed. For the moment, we must note that the image of the difficult- to-attain Cachemire represents the final stage in the evolution of the theme of the “heavenly abode” in Zhukovskii’s creative consciousness in the 1810s. 7. Germaine de Staël, An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 22. 8. Utkinskii sbornik, III. 9. Maria Protasova’s letters from 1815 and 1816 were published in Russkaia Starina in 1883. In 1897 Pastukhov published an article about Zhukovskii’s life in Dorpat. Utkinskii sbornik of 1904 included letters of Maria Protasova-Moier to Zhukovskii and Kireevskaia. 10. P. N. Sakulin, “M.A. Protasova-Moier po ee pis’mam,” in Izvestiia otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk (1907), 2. 11. See Malle Salupere, “A ta, s kotoroi obrazovan,” Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu, no. 2 (2000): 65–78. 12. Maria’s favorite authors were Fénelon, Mendelsohn, and Jean Paul Richter. 13. Sakulin, “M.A. Protasova-Moier po ee pis’mam,” IV. 14. F. F. Vigel’, Vospominaniia, part 5 (Moscow, 1865), 78–79. 15. Collaborative reading was one of the few means of uncensored commu319

Notes to Pages 143–150

nication available to the lovers. See Kiseleva and Stepanishcheva, “Problemy avtotsenzury v perepiske M.A. Protasovoi and V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii. Literaturovedenie V (Novaia seriia) (2005): 65–79. 16. N. E. Nikonova, “Kniga kak mnogomernoe prostranstvo kommunikatsii,” Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 3, no. 15 (2011): 113–25. 17. Ibid., 119. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 120. 20. Sakulin, “M.A. Protasova-Moier po ee pis’mam,” 23. 21. Ibid., 139. 22. Ibid., 143. 23. Ibid., 181. 24. Ibid., 143. 25. Ibid., 144. 26. Ibid. 27. “Voeikov and me,” “Voeikov and Ekaterina Afanasievna,” “Ekaterina Afanasievna and me,” “Masha and Ekaterina Afanasievna,” “Masha and me,” “Voeikov and Sasha.” Interestingly, in his distribution of household responsibility, Zhukovskii nominates himself to “supervise the cleanliness of the house” (PSS, XIII, 64). 28. Jean Starobinski offers an aphoristic definition of Rousseau’s utopia of Clarens: “Everyone watches everyone else: together these separate individuals constitute a social body” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 85). 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 104. 31. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 1, 46. Also, see Utkinskii sbornik, 104. 32. See Kiseleva and Stepanishcheva, “Problema avtotsenzury v perepiske V.A. Zhukovskogo i M.A. Protasovoi,” 65–79. 33. Voeikov did everything to prevent this marriage, including mocking the low social status of the groom (“a priest’s son”), starting rumors that Masha was Zhukovskii’s lover, and finally, in a drunken episode, threatening to kill Moier, Zhukovskii, and himself. Masha’s resolve and Zhukovskii’s intercession were what made this sad marriage possible. According to a family legend, at her wedding ceremony in church, Voeikov bit Masha’s shoulder so hard that he drew blood. 34. Utkinskii sbornik, 179–80. Already in her first letter to Kireevskaia following her wedding (dated January 20, 1817), Masha admits that the moment when she told herself she was ready to give up everything that comprised her happiness, and that she would continue to live only for Zhukovskii’s sake and would marry “the first man she came across,” “that moment was more terrible than all of hell’s torments. And all of this [only] two months after Zhukovskii was still asking for my hand!” (French original). Utkinskii sbornik, 187.

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Notes to Pages 151–155

35. Utkinskii sbornik, 263. 36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or, The New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, 1997), 407. 37. Ibid. 38. Utkinskii sbornik, 285–86. 39. Ibid. 40. The epigraph to these notes was her favorite line from Zhukovskii’s “Voice from the other world,” a free translation from Schiller: “My friend! I have completed all that is of this earth.” 41. “Будь счастлив!—думай обо мне с совершенным спокойствием . . . Будь отец второй моего малютки и сын моей матери.” Utkinskii sbornik, 285–86. C H A PTER S EV EN

The sources of the three epigraphs for this chapter, respectively: Pis’ma Zhukovskogo i A.I. Turgenevu, 111; Utkinskii sbornik, 293; and “Гибель близко . . . но не спит / Голубочек белый” (PSS, III, 36). 1. Ekaterina Protasova was an ardent admirer of Madame de Genlis’s oeuvre. She believed that everything written by the French author “est admirable,” OR RGB, f. 104, k. VI, no. 41, l. 5 ob. 2. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 1, 13. 3. Utkinskii sbornik, 294. 4. Liubov’ Kiseleva, “Okruzhenie Zhukovskogo: Domashniaia literatura,” in Memento vivere: Sbornik pamiati L.N. Ivanovoi, ed. K. A. Kumpan and E. R. Obatnina (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2009), 64. 5. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 339–40. 6. Apparently in order to make her explanation more convincing, Ekaterina Protasova deducted a year from her daughter’s age! 7. Utkinskii sbornik, 294. 8. Ibid., 295. 9. A. I. Pleshcheeva (“Nina”) was a confidant in the Zhukovskii-Masha relationship and “unconditionally sympathized with their plans” (PSS, XIII, 714). 10. Utkinskii sbornik, 295. 11. Protasova looked at the relationship between Zhukovskii and her daughter through the prism of Rousseau’s novel, which “explains her relentless spying on them, which offended the poet so much.” Kiseleva and Stepanishcheva, “Problema kommentirovaniia epistoliariia,” 258. 12. Utkinskii sbornik, 296. 13. Not to be confused with his patron, Archbishop Filaret (the future metropolitan), who supported Zhukovskii. On hieromonk Filaret, see Grigorii (Voinov), Ocherk zhizni startsa Filareta (v skhime Feodora), ieromonakha mosk-

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voskogo stavropigial’nogo Novospasskogo monastyria (Moscow: Novospasskii monastyr’, 1997). 14. Pis’ma Zhukovskogo k A.I. Turgenevu, 111. Characteristically, Voeikov portrays the opponent of his friend’s marriage in the image of a fanatical, gothic monk who ruthlessly chases innocent sufferers. This picture goes back to Zhukovskii’s own interpretation of his situation. In one of his letters, the poet personified the religion, professed by the ascetic hieromonk in the likeness of Callousness of the Heart (Zhestokoserdie), with shining eyes and a bloody inscription on its forehead, “the Duty”— an awkward reworking of the word “Prejudice.” This, according to Zhukovskii, is a false and hypocritical religion. It serves Moloch, the god of egoism, and it has no idea what compassion is. It is as cold as stone and it is guided by the principle, destructive to anyone’s soul: “Cut in the name of God and be happy!” The true religion is its opposite. It is founded on love, meekness, and empathy revealed to the world by Christ. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 19–21. The supreme duty of a Christian, according to Zhukovskii, is to help one’s fellow creature, and any assistance in the happiness of “two fellow creatures” is a sacred duty for a true believer. 15. Utkinskii sbornik, 293. 16. In what follows, I do not discuss the gothic elements in Zhukovskii’s poetry and prose. However, I would like to stress here that a peculiar mechanism of undoing the gothic fears is present in most of the poet’s ballads on the theme of crime and punishment. In the course of action, these horrors dissipate as soon as the dreamer awakes. See Gukovskii, Pushkin i russkie romantiki, 59. This is the principle of one of Zhukovskii’s most famous poems, “Svetlana” (1811; a “national” version of Bürger’s gothic ballad “Lenore”). Here the dark forces fail to harm a pure Russian soul, protected by wise Providence. 17. David Warren Sabean, “Kinship and Issues of the Self in Europe around 1800,” in Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300– 1900 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 222. “The marriage system that developed after 1750 involved alliances with the familiar, with ‘same’ rather with ‘other.’ . . . Kinship was reconfigured away from the vertical to horizontal, from a structure characterized by inheritance to one characterized by alliance, from clan-like structures to more fluid, open- ended networks of kindred.” Sabean, “Kinship and Issues of the Self in Europe around 1800,” 222. 18. Utkinskii sbornik, 293. 19. M. I. Gorchakov, O taine supruzhestva: Proiskhozhdenie, istorikoiuridicheskoe znachenie i kanonicheskoe dostoinstvo 50 glavy pechamoi Kormchei knigi (St. Petersburg, 1880), 49. 20. Ibid., 49. 21. Ibid., 24. 22. The French physician Dr. Raymond Fauvre, who used to treat the Protasov family in the early 1810s, wrote about the consequences of the ban

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Notes to Pages 158–160

in his recollections: “Dans l’intérêt des moeurs, la religion défend les mariages entre parens, même les plus éloignés; mais que les passions s’en vengent quelquefois d’une manière scandaleuse!” Raymond Fauvre, Souvenirs du Nord ou la guerre, la Russie et les Russes ou l’esclavage (Paris: Pelicier et Mongie, 1821), 237. 23. On their relationships, see chapter 3 of the present book. 24. Utkinskii sbornik, 112. 25. Ibid., 294. 26. Elagina, “Semeinaia khronika,” 271–323. 27. L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 34, p. 382. In Wilson’s translation: “She was a pitiable, meek, down-trodden creature. They let her have a little room, and a girl to look after her. When I knew her, she was not only pitiable but disgusting. I do not know what her illness was, but her face was swollen as if it had been stung by bees. Her eyes were just narrow slits between swollen shiny cushions without eyebrows. Similarly swollen, shiny, and yellow were her cheeks, nose, lips, and mouth. She spoke with difficulty (having probably a similar swelling in her mouth). In summer, flies used to settle on her face and she did not feel them, which was particularly unpleasant to witness. Her hair was still black but scanty and did not hide her scalp. A bad smell always came from her, and in her little room, the windows of which were never opened, the odour was stifling. And this Lyobov Sergeyevna became Dmitry’s friend.” A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 34–35. 28. Christopher H. Johnson, “The Siblings Archipelago,” in Remapping the Humanities, vol. 1 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 95. 29. Sabean, “Kinship and Issues of the Self in Europe around 1800,” 228. 30. “The incredible outpouring of correspondence among pairs of siblings during the period offers us insight into the practices of the new intimacy. So too do the scads of novels, epic poems, plays, and theological treatises concerned with sorting out the legitimate and illegitimate feelings that brothers and sisters shared.” Sabean, “Kinship,” 223. 31. The theme of sibling incest in the Western literary tradition from Goethe to Ibsen has been examined by Otto Rank in the second part of his seminal study “Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage.” According to Rank, incest fantasies, which take on a remarkable variety of forms and variations in the works of “the most important authors of all times and places,” represent one of the driving forces of literary creation. Otto Rank, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 381, 573. 32. “Go, children— said the enlightened master to the incestuous lovers— your innocence and love are equally respectable. If you were rich, you obtain the permission of loving one another, of being united. It is not just that your misfortune should be deemed a crime.” Jean François Marmontel, Moral Tales, vol. 2 (T. Cadell, etc., 1781), 53.

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Notes to Pages 160–162

33. Augustine delivers a passionate monologue in defense of his feeling for his sister in which he juxtaposes the laws of society to the laws of nature and the human heart: “Do not ask the echo of your cloisters, not your molding parchment, not your crossed ideas and decrees: ask nature and your heart” ( fragt die Natur und eurer Herz). Quoted in Christine Lehleiter, Inheriting the Future, Generating the Past (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2007), 69. 34. R. L. Thorslev, “Incest as Romantic Symbol,” Comparative Literature Studies 2, no. 1 (1965): 55. According to Otto Rank, interest in incest is a defining characteristic of the romantic consciousness (Incest Theme in Literature and Legend, 514). 35. “This was an essentially romantic theme that seems to have appeared in Russian literature first in the early work of Derzhavin.” Rudolf Neuhäuser, Towards the Romantic Age: Essays on Sentimental and Preromantic Literature (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 181. 36. In this context, it might be interesting to juxtapose “The Island of Bornholm,” with its paralyzing fear of incest, and another proto-romantic story, set on an isolated island, Paul et Virginie by Saint-Pierre. In the latter, natural love is presented as an antidote to social ills. Yet both love stories end tragically. 37. On the possible influence of this story on Ekaterina Protasova’s vision of love between her brother and daughter see Kiseleva and Stepanishcheva, “Problema kommentirovaniia epistoliariia.” 38. Walker, A Mother’s Love, 151. 39. Translated into Russian by Karamzin in 1788. Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma, part 14 (1788). On the impact of this translation on Karamzin’s tale “The Isle of Bornholm,” see Vatsuro, “Literaturno-filosofskaia problematika povesti Karamzina ‘Ostrov Borngol’m,’” XVIII vek, Derzhavin i Karamzin, vol. 8 (1969): 201. 40. Walker, A Mother’s Love, 158. 41. Townsend writes that “Radcliffe narrowly avoids the forms of uncleniece incest detailed in texts such as Eliza Parson’s Castle of Wolfenbach (1793), Joseph Fox’s Santa-Maria, or, The Mysterious Pregnancy (1797), and Mrs. R.  M.  P. Yorke’s The Romance of Smyrna.” Dale Townsend, The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing, 1764–1820 (New York: AMS, 2007), 188. 42. “It is the first proof of a superior mind to liberate itself from prejudices of country, or of education. . . . Self-preservation is the great law of nature. . . . When my life, or what may be essential to my life, requires the sacrifice of another, or even if some passion, wholly unconquerable, requires it, I should be a madman to hesitate.” Ann Radcliffe, The Novels of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1824), 164. 43. Zhukovskii believed that “God would bless our life” and “laws” would

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Notes to Pages 162–163

not condemn this union. According to Kiseleva, in the poet’s usage, the words “brother, sister, friend, family” denote spiritual, rather than familial (кровную / родственную) bonds, as is characteristic of the literature of the age. Kiseleva and Stepanishcheva, “Problema kommentirovaniia,” 260. This is not entirely accurate. Zhukovskii does not ignore blood ties, but rather perceives them as the precondition for their spiritual union. One can say that the Bunins’ family— in its numerous branches— has an ontological status for Zhukovskii. This is the basis for his universe. 44. “Приди ты, мой отец, брат, муж, друг! // Молит тебя супруга, дочь и твоя любовница” (PSS, I, 456); Kochetkova, “Kheraskov i Zhukovskii— perevodchiki sochineniia Aleksandra Popa ‘Eloiza k Abeliaru,’ ” in Zhukovskii i vremia (Tomsk, 2007), 25. Pope’s original lines are the following: “Come thou, my father, brother, husband, friend / Ah let thy handmaid, sister, daughter, move.” Pope, The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, 174. 45. On Zhukovskii’s vision of chastity, see chapter 4. 46. On the role of the novel in the formation of Zhukovskii’s biographical myth, see chapter 1 of this book. 47. In his copy of the novel, Zhukovskii underlined the following lines: “Sie schwiegen eine lange Zeit. Dasjenige, was sie empfanden, war über allen Ausdruck. Und wozu hätten Sie auch der Worte bedurft? Der Gebrauch der Sprache hört auf, wenn sich die Seelen einander unmittelbar mittheilen, sieh unmittelbar anschauen und berühren, und in Einem Augenblick mehr empfinden, als die Zunge der Musen selbst in ganzen Jahren auszusprechen vermöchte.” N. B. Remorova, Zhukovskii i nemetskie prosvetiteli (Tomsk, 1989), 28. Translation: “A long time they continued silent, nor is it in the power of language to express what they then felt: And what use had they for words? Language becomes unnecessary, when souls immediately communicate, perceive and affect each other, and experience more, in one moment than the tongue of the muses themselves would be able to describe in several years.” Christoph Martin Wieland, The History of Agathon in Four Volumes, vol. 1 (London, 1773), 17–18. 48. Wieland, The History of Agathon in Four Volumes, vol. 2, 192. 49. “Their acquaintance derives the period of his primary (and parentless) socialization into the Delphic religion.” David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginning of Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 89. 50. Ibid. Agathon says: “So far as I know of the nature of our souls, it appears to me, that when her powers are unfolded to a certain degree, she gradually acquires an idea of something beautiful, which insensibly regulates our taste and judgment, and becomes the model after which our imagination seems to paint the several images of what we call great, excellent, and sublime.” Wieland, The History of Agathon, vol. 2, 136–37.

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Notes to Pages 163–167

51. Ibid. “Having lost all sexual desire for Danae, Agathon has finally found in her a true sister— a resolution that suggests that a pure moral attachment can only be a sibling one.” Sabean, “Kinship,” 229. 52. Simon May observes that, for the romantic mind, “to love is to discover and obey one’s own law— or, for some Romantics, the law of nature as it speaks through one. It is to express an inner voice” (Love: A History, 153). Zhukovskii’s religion of love adds a mystical dimension to this idea. 53. Ronald D. Gray, Goethe the Alchemist: A Study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe’s Literary and Scientific Works (2010), 20–22. 54. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, [1971]), 113–14, 179–87. 55. Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 171; Jennifer Hixon, “The Fall of Novgorod,” in Russian Subjects, 196. 56. In fact, Zhukovskii’s exalted profession of love and family as a path to God’s kingdom signifies the “decline in the authority of religion” and “traditional hierarchies” of which Simon May writes. See May, Love: A History, 153. The poet’s pious half-sister was quite right when she suspected a dangerously heretical way of thinking in her brother’s profession of love. 57. Pletnev, Stat’i, stikhotvoreniia, pis’ma, 201. POS TS CR I P T U M

The translation of the first epigraph is: “The world did not know her while it had her; I knew her who remain here to weep.” The second epigraph in the original reads “Утешится безмолвная печаль / И резвая задумается радость.”A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2, part 1, 57. 1. Pis’ma Zhukovskogo k A.I. Turgenevu (1895), 266. 2. Russkii arkhiv 1 (1900): 364. 3. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 152. 4. See E. Zhiliakova, “Zhukovskii— chitatel’ Bairona,” in Biblioteka Zhukovskogo v Tomske, vol. 1 (Tomsk, 1978), 448. 5. The poet used the second volume of the 1803 collection of Milton’s works, which he had in his library (The Poetical Works of John Milton. From the text of Dr. Newton. To which are prefixed the Life of the author; a criticism on his works by Dr. Johnson, and a critique on Paradise Lost by Joseph Addison., C.Cook’s Eddition. London. Text of “L’Allegro” located on pp. 139–42). 6. John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton, with the Life of the Author by S. Johnson, vol. 3 (London, 1807), 180. 7. Utkinskii sbornik, 120.

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8. Ibid., 109. 9. In 1817 A. P. Kireevskaia married A. A. Elagin. 10. Original in German. Utkinskii sbornik, 51. 11. Pis’ma Zhukovskogo k A.I. Turgenevu (1895), 273. 12. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Philadelphia: J.W. Moore; New York: J. Wiley, 1850), 147. 13. Pis’ma Zhukovskogo k A.I. Turgenevu (1895), 274. 14. Utkinskii sbornik, 108–9. 15. Ibid., 109. 16. Russkii arkhiv, book 13, no. 1 (1883): 13. 17. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 18. 18. Kiseleva and Stepanishscheva, “Problema kommentirovaniia,” http:// www.ruthenia.ru/document/542893.html. 19. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 1, 137. 20. Ibid., 142. 21. The fate of Dr. Seidlitz, the keeper of family lore and future biographer of the poet, was connected in the most intimate way with that of the Protasov sisters. He was platonically in love with the eldest, Masha, and carried this love through his whole life. See Malle Salupere, “A ta, s kotoroi obrazovan,” 65– 78; Kiseleva and Stepanishcheva, “K istokam knigi Veselovskogo o Zhukovskom” (K.  Zeidlits), Voprosy literatury, no. 6 (2007): 62– 71. Seidlitz, who knew the joiner’s craft, made a cradle (“a first dwelling”) for Masha’s daughter, and . . . a coffin (“a final dwelling”) for Masha’s sister Aleksandra. 22. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 149. 23. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 1, 219–20. 24. Zhukovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, vol. 4, 599–600. 25. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 1, 220. 26. “Sasha’s contemporaries always recall her cheerfulness,” her biographer writes. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 1, 11. 27. Ibid., vol. 1, IX. 28. Ibid., vol. 1, XIII. 29. Utkinskii sbornik, 109. 30. Pis’ma k A.I. Turgenevu, 272. 31. The Poetical Works of John Milton, vol. 3, 184. 32. It is worth noting that it was Rousseau who canonized such momentary memories of the happy past in The New Heloise and Confessions. In the latter he stated that the shores of Lake Geneva were connected in his consciousness to some complicated feeling, born of a memory of two women, Mme De Warens and Mlle de Vulson, to whom he gave the first surges of his heart. Rousseau paints a picture of “imagined happiness,” of which he dreamed all his life: a fruit garden on the banks of that very lake, “a firm friend, an amiable woman, a cow,

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Notes to Pages 174–181

and a little boat”; The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau (Teddington, Eng.: Echo Library, 2007), 105. 33. Pis’ma k A.I. Turgenevu, 272. 34. Viazemskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (St. Petersburg, 1878–96), 415. 35. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 317. 36. Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 216. 37. Russkii arkhiv, no. 6 (1866): 373. 38. Ibid. 39. Characteristically, Zhukovskii’s “unfaithful student,” Pushkin, offers a different interpretation of the Miltonic pair. In Evgenii Onegin, pensive Tatiana (Penseroso) is preferred to cheerful Olga (Allegro). C H A P T ER EI G HT

In the original, the chapter epigraph reads: “Что с тобой вдруг, сердце, стало? / Что ты ноешь? Что опять / Закипело, запылало? / Как тебя растолковать?” (PSS, II, 74). 1. Pis’ma k A.I. Turgenevu, 177. 2. Glinka was sick; he would die in February 1818. 3. Pis’ma k A.I. Turgenevu, 177. 4. Ibid., 178. 5. Princess Charlotte left Berlin for Petersburg on May 31, 1817 in the company of her brother, Prince Wilhelm (the future emperor of Germany) and their retinues. The princess’s journey to the Russian border “was an uninterrupted series of ovations and expressions of sympathy for her on the part of her countrymen.” N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi: Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1903), 73. On June 9, the princess crossed the Russian border, where her future husband awaited her. Her journey through Russia was an exhausting one due to the summer heat, but on June 20 it came to its conclusion with a majestic arrival into Petersburg: “All looked at her with a most tender manner, recalling the kindness and misfortune of her mother, the beauty Queen Louise, who had passed away not long ago” (76). On June 24 Charlotte received Chrismation, and was given the name Grand Duchess Aleksandra Feodorovna. On the June 25 (Nikolai’s birthday) the betrothal takes place, and on July 1 (Charlotte’s birthday), the sacrament of marriage is performed (during the reign of Nikolai I, July 1 becomes one of the central state holidays). On September 1, 1817, the newlyweds depart for Moscow, a journey which took twelve days due to the pregnancy of the grand duchess. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai, 76–86. 6. Pis’ma k A. I. Turgenevu, 184. 7. As we have seen, all of these qualities can be found in Zhukovsky’s description of Voeikova herself, the Allegro of his poetic myth of the beautiful sis-

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ters. Almost from their very first meeting, Zhukovsky creates a symbolic parallel between the two Aleksandras, whose fates had become entwined with his own. 8. Viazemskii, “Pis’ma N.M. Karamzina k Zhukoskomu,” Russkii arkhiv, nos. 7–8 (1868): 1832–33. 9. “Я неволен, очарован! / Я к неволе золотой, / Обессиленный, прикован / Шелковинкою одной! / И бежать очарованья / Нет ни силы, ни желанья! / Рад тоске! хочу любить!.. / Видно, сердце, так и быть!” (PSS, XIII, 75). The first line of this fragment would reappear in a modified version in Aleksandr Pushkin’s madrigal to Natalia Goncharova (“Ia vliublen, ia ocharovan . . .”). 10. See Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 113; Liamina and Samover, “Zhukovskii i velikaia kniaginia Aleksandra Fedorovna: K voprosu konstruirovaniia obraza,” in Permiakovskii sbornik, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2009), 148. 11. August Theodor von Grimm, Alexandra Feodorowna, Empress of Russia, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1870), 227. 12. Philipp Demandt, Luisenkult: Die Unsterblichkeit der Königin von Preussen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003); Wulf Wülfing, Karin Bruns, and Rolf Parr, Historische Mythologie der Deutschen (Munich: W. Fink, 1991), 59–111. 13. L. E. Misailidi, “Stat’ia V.A. Zhukovskogo ‘Vospominanie’ (K istorii sozdaniia),” in Memento Vivere: Sbornik pamiati L.N. Ivanovoi (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2009), 96. 14. Karl Hahn, Die letzten Lebensstunden Luisens: Als Manuscript gedruckt (1810), 44. Carl Heinrich August Hahn (1778–1854) was the rector of the “königlichen Garnisonsschule” in Berlin. 15. Johann George Scheffner, Mein Leben, wie ich, Johann George Scheffner, es selbst beschrieben (Leipzig: J.G. Neubert, 1816), 409. 16. “Einen andern Brief, den ihr ihre älteste Tochter, die Prinzessin Charlotte, deren Geburtstag gerade während ihrer Krankheit am 13. Juli fiel, am nämlichen Tage aus Charlottenburg schrieb, und der ein reiner Ausdruck kindlicher Liebe und Verehrung war, ließ sich die Königin vorlesen; er bewegte sie aber so, daß ihre Schwester, die Prinzessin von Solms, mit dem Lesen inne halten mußte. Auch hat sie diesen Brief vor allzu großer Rührung nie ganz hören können. Von dem Kronprinzen und ihren andern Kindern sprach sie viel, und bei jeder Nachricht, die aus Charlottenburg ankam, erkundigte sie sich mütterlich nach ihnen.” Caroline von Häseler Berg, Luise, Königin von Preussen: Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1814), 100. 17. RNF, f. 286, op. no. 2, ed. khr. no. 229, l. 4 ob.; Berg, Luise, Königin von Preussen, 110. 18. RNF, f. 286, op. no. 2, ed. khr. no. 229, l. 4 ob. 19. Herman Schoenfeld, Women of the Teutonic Nations (Philadelphia: Rittenhouse, 1908), 309. 20. At the time of Zhukovsky’s acquaintance with Princess Charlotte, the latter had already been at the center of a small romantic cult of admiration in

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Notes to Pages 183–185

Germany. Famous poets and composers dedicated their works to her, and her favorite brother Friedrich (the future Friedrich Wilhelm IV) wrote for her a short allegorical fairy tale, in which he places her in the role of the beautiful queen of Borneo, with her departure for Russia serving as a “voyage into the mysterious world of an island to the East.” See V. Pakhomova-Geres, “Korol’ i poet: Fridrikh Vil’gel’m IV i V.A. Zhukovskii: Zabytaia istoriia odnoi druzhby,” in Nemtsy v Rossii: Russko-nemetskie nauchnye i kul’turnye sviazi (St. Petersburg, 2001), 247. 21. I refer to Zhukovsky’s collection, “Thoughts and Observations” (Мысли и замечания), which was banned by the Russian censors in 1850. 22. “В ту минуту, когда ты в белой брачной одежде . . .” (PSS, II, 76). In its form (hexameter) and imagery, this translation prefigures Zhukovsky’s future poem dedicated to Pushkin’s death, “Он лежал без движенья, как будто по тяжкой работе . . .” (1837). 23. The newborn’s godparents were Emperor Alexander, the Dowager Empress Maria and the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III, who, in the summer of 1818, traveled to Moscow. 24. In Zhukovsky’s consciousness the theme of labor and childbirth were given a clearly religious and mystical meaning, and were often associated with the idea of the afterlife. “Eternity may be compared to the tortures of childbirth,” he writes in an album given to him as a gift by the grand duchess in 1820. “They say there are no moments more blissful than the first moment of maternal happiness. Perhaps in the moment of the separation of body and soul there is this bliss as well. Death is nothing but the words said on the cross: It is finished!” (PSS, XIII, 318). For the symbolic significance of pregnancy and childbirth in the German romantic tradition, see Gail Newman, “Guter Hoffnung? Pregnancy and Narrative in Two German Romantic Märchen,” Women in German Yearbook 26, no. 1 (2010): 30–53. 25. GARF, f. 672, op. 1, ed. khr. 408, l. 10. 26. Characteristically, Zhukovsky’s friend A. I. Turgenev remained dissatisfied with the vague political allusion in the final line of this poem. He believed that being a dutiful wife and mother were the only qualities required of the spouse of a grand duke. 27. Grimm, Alexandra Feodorowna, vol. 1, 110. 28. M. P. Alekseev has advanced the notion that Zhukovskii was secretly in love with the grand duchess, a fact which “he, apparently, could not admit even to himself.” Alekseev, “Tomas Mur i russkie romantiki XIX veka,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo: Russko-angliiskie literaturnye sviazi: XVIII vek–pervaia polovina XIX veka, vol. 91 (Moscow, 1988), 664. 29. Grimm, Alexandra Feodorowna, vol. 1, 110. 30. N. P. Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Rasskazy o knigakh (Moscow: Kniga, 1977), 295. 31. The journal Für Wenige excluded the sort of dedication typical for offer-

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Notes to Pages 185–188

ings to such high personages, thus further emphasizing its “domestic,” intimate character. 32. In the history of Russian printmaking, Zhukovskii’s journal was one of the first to employ wood engravings. E. L. Nemirovskii, Bol’shaia kniga o knige (Moscow, 2010), 588. 33. Pis’ma k A.I. Turgenevu, 219. 34. N. P. Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Russkie literaturnye al’manakhi i sborniki XVIII–XIX vv. (Moscow: Kniga, 1965), 80–81. 35. See Mariia Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope: Literaturnoe obshchestvo “Arzamas” i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 622. 36. T. S. Vol’pe, “Zhukovskii,” Istoriia russkoi literatury, vol. 5, part 1 (1941): 373. 37. Liamina and Samover, “Zhukovskii i velikaia kniaginia Aleksandra Fedorovna,” 146. The journal was part of Zhukovsky’s general pedagogical project, which included the creating of additional learning materials, lists of exemplary literary works in Russian, and the publishing of special guides to Russian grammar. Liubov’ Kiseleva, “Zhukovskii— prepodavatel’ russkogo iazyka (nachalo ‘tsarskoi pedagogiki’),” in Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu, vol. 3 (Tartu, 2004), 198– 228. Also in http://www.ruthenia.ru/document/535213.html. 38. Pis’ma k A.I. Turgenevu, 187–89. 39. Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope, 622. 40. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 392. 41. Our research has shown that the following people received copies of Zhukovsky’s work (the list is, of course, incomplete): the grand duchess, her husband, members of her circle, Nikolai Karamzin, Ivan Dmitriev, Rumiantsev, members of “Arzamas,” the poets Delvig, A. S. Pushkin, V. K. Kiuchel’beker; A. P. Elagina, the Protasova household (including the Voeikovs), lady-in-waiting Elizaveta Pliuskova, the Dorpat poet T. von Bock, Antonskii, the director of the Noble Pension (Zhukovsky lived with him after his arrival until mid-October 1817), and E. M. Olenina. 42. Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope, 624. 43. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 201. 44. Compare: “Ты блеснул  .  .  . и просветлел  / Тихо темный луг:  / Так улыбкой наш удел / Озаряет друг. / . . . Лейся, мой ручей, стремись! / Жизнь уж отцвела! / Так надежды пронеслись! / Так любовь ушла! / . . . Что в полночный тихий час, / Слышимо душой, / Очаровывает нас / Тайною мечтой” (PSS, II, 29–33); “Я знаю край! там негой дышит лес, / Златой лимон горит во мгле древес, / И ветерок жар неба холодит, / И тихо мирт и гордо лавр стоит . . . / Там счастье, друг! туда! Туда / Мечта зовет! Там сердцем я всегда! / . . . О друг, пойдем! туда! Туда / Мечта зовет!.. Но быть ли там когда?” (PSS, II, 71).

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Notes to Pages 188–194

45. Syn Otechestva, no. 1 (1818), 113. 46. This comparison will become commonplace in critical attacks directed at Zhukovskii’s circle by Grech, Bulgarin, and their supporters in the 1820s and 1830s. 47. Pis’ma Zhukovskogo k Turgenevu, 188. 48. Syn Otechestva, no. 9 (1818): 109–10, 116. 49. Ibid., 190. 50. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv, vol. 2 (1899): 61. 51. “Pis’ma N.M. Karamzina k Zhukoskomu (1803– 1818),” Russkii arkhiv (1868), 1835. 52. Ibid., 1386. 53. Andrei Zorin, “Poslanie ‘Imperatoru Aleksandru’ V.A. Zhukovskogo i ideologiia Sviashchennogo Soiuza,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 32 (1998): 112–13. 54. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh (St. Petersburg: Stasiulevich, 1899–1913), vol. 1, 133. 55. Ibid., 136. Translation: “Honour should be counted for something, since it causes a certain pleasurable titillation which might well be called the onanism of virtue.” See Ferdinando Galiani, Correspondance avec Mme d’Épinay, le baron d’Holbach, le baron de Grimm, Diderot, et autres personnages célèbres de ce temps (Paris: J.G. Dentu, 1818), 5–6. 56. In general and in particular the strategy of Zhukovskii’s friends can be defined as an attempt to “liberate” him from his “captivity” at court and return him to the camp of the “geniuses of Arzamas.” 57. P. A. Orlov, ed., Dekabristy: Poeziia, dramaturgiia, proza, publitsistika, literaturnaia kritika (Moscow, 1951), 552. 58. B. S. Meilakh, Talisman: Kniga o Pushkine (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1984), 75. 59. On Zhukovskii’s, Batiushkov’s, and Pushkin’s interest in Marmontel in the 1810s, see N. E. Razumova, “Proizvedeniia Marmontelia v chtenii i perevodakh Zhukovskogo,” in Biblioteka V.A. Zhukovskogo v Tomske, vol. 3 (Tomsk, 1988), 183– 219; D. M. Sharypkin, “Pushkin i ‘nravouchitel’nye rasskazy’ Marmontelia,” in Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materially, vol. 8 (Leningrad, 1978), 109. 60. Jean-François Marmontel, Oeuvres, vol. 4 (1819), 102–3. 61. Vestnik Evropy 1, no. 1 (1808): 26. 62. Ibid. 63. Quoted in “Arzamas,” book 1 (Moscow, 1994), 220–21. 64. Pis’ma k A.I. Turgenevu, 163. 65. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 20 tomakh, vol. 2, part 1, p. 56. 66. Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Selected Lyric Poetry, trans. and annotated by James E. Falen (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestwern University Press, 2009), 24. 67. “Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus, neque te

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Notes to Pages 194–197

ut miretur turba labores, Contentus paucis lectoribus.” Horace, The Works of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (London: John Murray, 1849), 330. 68. See in Wieland: “Du der schreiben will was uns zum Wiederlesen reizen soll,  / ausstreichen must du lernen, und, mit wenig Lesern  / zufrieden, nicht der Menge zu Gefallen schreiben!” Horace, Horazens Satiren: Aus dem Lateinischen übersetzt von C.M. Wieland (Leipzig: Weidmannischen Buchhandlung, 1819), 292. See Voss: “Oftmals wende den Griffel, wenn würdiges häufiger Lesung / Schreiben du willst. Nicht, daß dich die Meng’ anstaune, bewirb dich, / Wohl vergnügt, zu gefallen den wenigen. Wünschtest du albern, / Daß man in dumpfiger Schul’ einpredigte deine Gedichte? / Ich nie! Mir ist genug, daß der Ritter mir klatsche! wie herzhaft.” Horace, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Werke: In zwei Bänden [übersetzt] von Johann Heinrich Voss, vol. 2, Satyren und Episteln (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1822), 78. Italics added. 69. Compare in Ivan Barkov’s translation: “К томуж не тщись, чтоб им простой дивился люд, / Но небольшим числом чтецов доволен будь.” http:// www.horatius.ru/index.xps?3.710. 70. “Populär war Thucydides weder im Leben, noch suchte er als Schriftsteller diesen Ruhm; er wollte lieber durchgedacht, als schnell allgemein beklatscht werden, und schrieb mehr für Wenige als für die Menge: daher deutet an, was andere ausgelegt haben würden, er ist manch mahl rauh und schwer, aber das Eindringen in seien Geist belohnt sich.” Johannes von Müller, Vierundzwanzig Buecher allgemeiner Geschichten, vol. 1 (1852), 80; Johannes von Müller, Universal History, vol. 1 (Boston: Stimpson and Clapp, 1837), 79. 71. K. N. Batiushkov, “K Tvortsu Istorii Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo,” in Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow, 1964), 233–34. 72. Translated by Julia Dasbach. 73. Quoted in Sabine Meine and Nina Noeske, Musik und Popularität: Aspekte zu einer Kulturgeschichte zwischen 1500 und heute (Hanover, 2011), 83. 74. Freidrich von Schiller, Werke: Gedichte I (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943), 150. 75. “Wenn man mit Wenigen in einer großen gemischten Gesellschaft etwas heimliches reden will und man sitzt nicht einander so muß man in einer besondern Sprache Diese besondre Sprache kann entweder eine dem nach oder den Bildern nach fremde Sprache sein letztere wird eine Tropen und Rätselsprache sein.” Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, vol. 1 (Munich: C. Hanser, Cop., 1978), 290; Novalis, Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose of Novalis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Phanes, 1989), 41. 76. In Thomas Carlyle’s translation: “Aloft on their white summits glancing,  / Bedecked in their garments of golden dew,  / The clouds of the sky are dancing;  / There threading alone their lightsome maze,  / Uplifted apart from all mortals’ gaze. / And high on her ever-enduring throne / The queen of the mountains reposes; / Her head serene and azure and lone / A diamond crown en-

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Notes to Pages 197–201

closes; / The sun with his darts shoots round it keen and hot, / He gilds it always, he warms it not.” Thomas Carlyle, Schiller (Boston, 1877), 70. 77. The famous bibliophile Smirnov-Sokolskii had noted that Zhukovskii’s journal stands at the source of the Russian tradition of “private” publications of extremely limited circulation. Smirnov-Sokolskii, Rasskazy o knigakh, 323. We should add that after Zhukovskii, there were a number of books that were published with the subtitle “For the Few.” 78. Hahn, Die letzten Lebensstunden Luisens, 3. 79. Utkinskii sbornik, 232. 80. I. Luppol, ed., Pis’ma Aleksandra Turgeneva Bulgakovym (Moscow, 1939), 9. C H A P T ER NI NE

The first epigraph is from Mikhail Kheraskov, “Prelozhenie psalma 64,” in Russkaia dukhovnaia poeziia (2011), 1752. The second epigraph is from Anna Akhmatova, Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow, 2005), 260. 1. GARF, f. 672, op. 1, 408, l. d. 17–20. 2. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv, vol. 1, 285. 3. Ibid., 292. 4. P. A. Pletnev, Perepiska Ia. K. Grota s P.A. Pletnevym (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva putei soobshcheniia, 1895), vol. 2, 192. 5. V. A. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia (1885), 8th ed., vol. 2, 556. 6. “. . . und so trägt es noch jetzt den stillen Liebesgruss von Norden nach Süden, von Süden nach Norden und sagt ohne Worte, was Worte nicht sagen können.” 7. Veselovskii, “Tsvet zaveta,” Literaturnyi vestnik 5, no. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1903): 299. 8. Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm was then seventeen-and-a-half years old, Prince Wilhelm sixteen, Prince Carl about twelve, Prince Albrecht three and a half, Princesses Alexandrine and Luise— ten and five, respectively. 9. See a description of the festival on the occasion of Charlotte of Prussia’s birthday, which took place on July 13, 1816 in Charlottenburg in Erinnerung an Kunzendorff: Am Geburtstag Ihrer Königlichen Hoheit der Prinzessin Charlotte von Preußen den 13ten Juli 1816. GARF f. 1321, op. 1, no. 1027b. This celebration, writes Anna Sidorova, “was accompanied by dramatizations from the life of the royal family in Kunzendorf, verses on it and music which the princess had heard there.” All the princess’s brothers and sisters, her closest relatives, and the courtiers took part in the costumed festivity. Carl, Grand Duke of MecklenburgStrelitz, played the role of the spirit of the Giant Mountains of Rübezahl, a personage from the tale by Charlotte’s favorite author, Friedrich de la Motte

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Notes to Pages 201–203

Fouqué, “Die Geschichten vom Rübezahl.” Many years later, at the festivity “Der Zauber der weissen Rose” (“Magic of the White Rose”), which took place in Potsdam in 1829 in honor of Charlotte’s arrival, at that time already Russian empress, pictures of the time the royal family spent in Silesia appeared in the theatrical performance more than once. Anna Sidorova and Marina Sidorova, Risunki prusskikh korolevskikh rezidentsii v al’bomakh imperatritsy Aleksandry Fedorovny. An English version: Marina and Anna Sidorova, “The Drawings of Prussian Royal Palaces and Gardens in the Albums of the Prussian Princess Charlotte (Russian Empress Alexandra Feodorovna,” in Prussian Gardens in Europe: 300 Years of Garden History (Leipzig, 2007), 294–97. 10. Sidorova, Risunki prusskikh korolevskikh rezidentsii v al’bomakh imperatritsy Aleksandry Fedorovny, http://www.gardenhistory.ru/page?pageid=246. 11. Ibid. 12. In the notes to the thirteenth volume of Zhukovsky’s Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Kunzendorf is mistakenly identified as the name of an artist (PSS, XIII, 646). 13. GARF, f. 672, 1, 426, l. 159. Italics added. 14. Quoted in Otechestvennaia voina 1812 g. v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Nauka, 2008), 166. 15. Herman Granier, Hohenzollernbriefe aus den Freiheitskriegen (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1913), 80. 16. Ibid., 80. Frau Minnetrost is a heroine of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Zauberring, the novel Queen Louise’s children enthusiastically read— and enacted— in 1813. They called Princess Marianne, their beloved aunt, “Minnetrost.” 17. “Lasse Dir ja das Abendlied und den Ländler spielen und gedenke alsdann” (November 13, 1813). 18. The waltz is included in Gloger’s Sechs deutsche Lieder, mit Begleitung des Pianoforte oder der Guitarre. 19. Erinnerung an Kunzendorff: Am Geburtstag Ihrer Königlichen Hoheit der Prinzessin Charlotte von Preußen den 13ten Juli 1816, 5. GARF f. 1321, op. 1, no. 1027b. 20. The German tattoo used the lyrics of Gerhard Tersteegen: “Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe / Die sich in Jesu offenbart; / Ich geb’ mich hin dem freien Triebe, / Wodurch ich Wurm geliebet ward; / Ich will, anstatt an mich zu denken, / Ins Meer der Liebe mich versenken. . . .” For more details, see Bernhard Höfele, Die deutsche Militärmusik: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte (Cologne: Luthe, 1999), 152. On the history and composition of the Prussian Zapfenstreich, see Heinz Busch, Vom Armeemarsch zum Grossen Zapfenstreich, ein Lexikon zur Geschichte (2005), 212–17. 21. GARF, f. 672, op. 1, d. 434, l. 9. Mentioned by A. N. Sidorova and M. V. Sidorova in “ ‘Prelestnaia strana Sileziia’ v al’bomakh imperatritsy,” in RosssiaPol’sha: Dva aspekta evropeiskoioi kul’tury (St. Petersburg, 2012), 530.

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22. GARF, f. 728, op. 1, d. 3123, no. 2330. Ol’ga Nikolaevna, “Son iunosti: Vospominaniia: 1823– 1846,” in Nikolai I. Muzh, otets, imperator: Russkie memuary (Moscow, 2000), 288. It is likely that this tradition went back to the Erinnerung an Kunzendorff, dedicated to Charlotte’s eighteenth anniversary. The 1816 performance began with the morning serenade based on the music of this Ländler. 23. Ritzarev, Eighteenth-Century Russian Music, 253. 24. On Goethe’s octaves as the source for Zhukovskii’s inspiration, see PSS, III, 331–32. Jane Brown, a Faust scholar, suggests that ottava rima, a highly formal stanza, associated with allegorical Renaissance epics, immediately located Goethe’s tragedy in the “nonillusionist tradition.” Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Faust: The German Tragedy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 40. 25. On the polemics concerning Zhukovsky’s ottava rima between Katenin, Somov, Bestuzhev, and Grech, see N. V. Izmailov, “Iz istorii russkoi oktavy,” in Poetika i stilistika russkoi literatury: Pamiati akademika Viktora Vladimirovicha Vinogradova, ed. M. P. Alekseev (Leningrad, 1971), 105. 26. A free translation of Friedrich Halm’s Camoens: Dramatisches Gedicht in einem Aufzuge (1838). 27. There are no octaves in Halm’s original. 28. Namely, Wieland’s Oberon and, more importantly, two of Goethe’s “Zueinungen” (“Dedications”)— to his lyrical works and to Faust, as well as Theodor Körner’s farewell “Zueignung. Am 24. April 1813.” See V. M. Zhirmunskii, Gete v russkoi literature (Leningrad, 1981), 85; Ianushkevich in PSS, III, 331–32. 29. Henry Gibson Atkins, A History of German Versification: Ten Centuries of Metrical Evolution (London: Methuen, 1923), 197. 30. See, for example, Carl Christian Wolfart’s “Trauergesang auf den Tod Ihro Majestät der in Gott ruhenden höchstseligen Königin Luise” (1810) or Gustav Schwank’s elegy in octaves, “Todten-Feyer: Dem Andenken der erhabensten Frau Katharina Königin von Würtemberg” (1819), which may be conceived as an eerie doppelganger of Zhukovskii’s elegy dedicated to the death of Catherine, Queen of Württemberg. 31. Granier, Hohenzollernbriefe aus den Freiheitskriegen, 292. 32. Kaiser Wilhelm I, Briefe an seine Schwester Alexandrine und deren sohn Grossherzog Friedrich Franz II (Berlin: K.F. Koehler, 1927), 243. 33. G. Obatnin, “Kupido wor proklaty, ili chelovekom nado byt’,” in Kirillitsa: Ili nebo v almazakh: Sbornik k 40-letiiu Kirilla Rogova (Moscow, 2006), www.ruthenia.ru/document/539852.html. 34. A. Galakhov, Istoriia russkoi slovesnosti, drevnei i novoi, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1880), 239. 35. Aleksandra Feodorovna’s maid of honor, Baroness Fredericks, recalled that on the empress’s birthday, the royal family, by established tradition, “drank tea on a balcony decorated with cornflower wreaths, surrounded by a crowd.”

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The cornflower was one of the empress’s favorite flowers, and “they tried to decorate everything with cornflowers in time for her birthday.” Baronessa M. P. Frederiks, “Iz vospominanii,” Istoricheskii vestnik, vol. 71 (1898): 78. 36. I. P. Galiun, K voprosu o literaturnykh vliianiiakh v poezii Zhukovskogo (Kiev: Tipografia Panteleeva, 1916), 15–16. 37. Frau Eva Wollschläger, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten BerlinBrandenburg KPM-Archiv (Land Berlin), e-mail from November 31, 2012. 38. According to Natalia Kazakevich’s data, within the period from 1818 to 1845 the Prussian Royal Porcelain Factory (KPM) received almost 500 orders from the Prussian royal family for various products to be sent to the Romanovs as souvenirs, commemorating the major events of their family and court life. Natalia Kazakevich, “ ‘Dostopamiatnye veshchi’ rossiiskih monarkhov,” Nashe nasledie, nos. 54–55 (2000), 148. Among those souvenirs, for example, was a cup with a view of the castle of Kunzendorf, which belonged to the Empress Alexandra. Liudmila Rokhlina in “Farforovaia kollektsiia” observes that “подобная ‘посудная’ символика, хотя и с долей немецкой сентиментальности, приобретала государственное значение. Эта своеобразная ‘фарфоровая летопись,’ ставшая исторической, практически выполняла ту же функцию, какую позднее будет выполнять фотография,” http://www.partner-inform.de/public_ druck.php?ids=1382. 39. This amalgam of words explains a strange misspelling of the word (“Ländlergrass”) in Zhukovskii’s autograph from the grand duchess’s album in GARF. 40. The grand duchess’s lines were reincarnated in another poem of Zhukovskii’s, written in 1819, “The Ineffable.” Compare “Сей миновавшего привет // (Как прилетевшее незапно дуновенье  // От луга родины, где был когда-то цвет, // Святая молодость, где жило упованье).” 41. Elizabeth Harriot Hudson, The Life and Times of Louisa, Queen of Prussia, vol. 1 (London: Hatchards, Piccadilly, 1878), 433–34. 42. This sacramental album contains autographs of Zhukovsky’s royal friends, including “charming lines” from Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and a Silesian landscape by Princess Alexandrine. On January 12, 1827, Zhukovsky’s kindred soul, the Prussian poet Countess Elisabeth von der Recke, copied the grand duchess’s letter from Zhukovsky’s album and wrote a brief but lofty commentary regarding the romantic ritual: “In Beziehung auf das Grashalm, welches unsere erhabene Kaiserin Alexandra zur schönen Aufgabe eines Liedes für sie machte, wage ich es auf dem nähmlichen Blatte die Gefühle meines Herzens hinzuschreiben” (Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 276). 43. V. A. Grekhnev, Mir pushkinskoi liriki (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1994), 147. 44. See, for example, the typical description of the queen’s postmortem being in a poem of 1810: “Dass hohere Bestimmung Sie erfuelle / Schwebt dort die Lichtgestalt im Engelchor, / Denkt ihres Volks auch mit der Himmelskrone / Und steht, sein Engel, nun an Gottes Throne.” Carl Christian Wolfart, “Trauer-

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Notes to Pages 209–215

gesang auf den Tod Ihro Majestät der in Gott ruhenden höchstseligen Königin Luise.” Louise’s Verklärung theme is discussed in Wulf Wülfing, Karin Bruns, and Rolf Parr, “Königin Luise von Preussen,” in Historische Mythologie der Deutschen 1798–1918, 76–86. On the role of Louise, “der preussischen Jeanne d’Arc,” in the patriotic mythology of the Wars of Liberation, see ibid., 94– 95. The cult of Louise reached its apogee on August 3, 1814 with the inauguration of the “Stiftung des Luisenordens” by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. The Order of Louise “was enameled in Prussian blue and mounted in the centre with a medallion bearing the initial ‘L.’” This order not only canonized the public image of the queen but rather elevated the public image of Prussian women in general, “the mothers and daughters of this land” who “feared for their loved ones fighting with the enemy and . . . grieved for the fallen.” Cristopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 376–77. 45. Zhukovskii translated the “Zueignung” in 1817 as a prologue to his tale in two ballads, The Twelve Sleeping Maidens. Following Goethe’s example, in “Flower of the Oath,” Zhukovskii effectively casts “the act of memory into a form of a professional masque,” a procession of “wavering apparitions” passing before the eyes of the meditative narrator. Brown, Goethe’s Faust, 40–41. 46. Liamina and Samover, “Zhukovskii i velikaia kniaginia Aleksandra Fedorovna,” 144–58. 47. These lines are reflected in Aleksandr Blok’s famous poem “O doblestiakh, o podvigakh, o slave” (1908). 48. Galakhov, Istoriia russkoi slovesnosti, vol. 2, 239. 49. Fraiman, Tvorcheskaia strategiia i poetika Zhukovskogo, 125–30. C H A P T ER T EN

The first epigraph is from Modeste Gofman, Le Musée Pouchkine d’Alexandre Oneguine a Paris: Notice, catalogue et extraits de quelques manuscrits (Paris: Champion, 1926), 154–55. 1. Liamina and Samover, “Zhukovskii i velikaia kniaginia Aleksandra Fedorovna,” 148. 2. “Today the Grand Duchess was relieved of her burden with the birth of her daughter Maria,” Turgenev wrote to Viazemskii on August 6, 1819. “It is likely even Svetlana will be relieved of his burden by writing verses on this occasion.” Indeed, on August 6, 1819, the poet writes his long poem “Pramater’ vnuke,” dedicated to this event. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh (St. Petersburg: Stasiulevich, 1899–1913), vol. 1, 283. 3. Pis’ma Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 232. 4. Ibid. 5. The role of the Prussian court and administration in the cultural zenith

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Notes to Pages 215–222

was philosophically grounded by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the future rector of the University of Berlin, during the years of French occupation. The mission of the German nation, the philosopher asserted, lay in bringing to the world the ideals of “moral regeneration and self-sacrifice to the achievements of national ideals,” and that precisely through its cultural achievements, Germany was supposed to become a powerful nation state. Ronald Taylor, Berlin and Its Culture: A Historical Portrait (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 92. The task of Prussia’s state power, according to Fichte, lay in supporting the cultural and scientific development of the country. 6. Ronald Taylor, Berlin and Its Culture, 103. 7. On the Berlin period of Zhukovsky’s life, see A. S. Ianushkevich, V mire Zhukovskogo (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), 319–25. 8. Gasparo Spontini and S. H. Spiker, Lalla Rûkh: Ein Festspiel, mit Gesang und Tanz (Berlin, 1821), 7. 9. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 654. 10. Translated by Michael R. Katz. Gofman, Le Musée Pouchkine, 153–56. 11. Translated by Ilya Kutik. 12. Pushkin employed the theme of Lalla Rookh in one of his stanzas in the draft version of the last canto of Eugene Onegin: “И в зале яркой и богатой / Когда в умолкший, тесный круг / Подобна лилии крылатой, / Колеблясь входит Лалла-Рук  / И над поникшею толпою  / Сияет царственной главою  / И тихо вьется и скользит / Звезда-Харита меж Харит / И взор смущённых поколений / Стремится ревностью горя / То на нее, то на царя.” Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 637. 13. RNB, f. 286, op. no. 2, ed. khr. no. 229, l. 1. 14. Regarding the translation “Peri and the Angel,” the grand prince said: “Worthy of its subject” (PSS, IV, 407). In 1831 Zhukovskii translated Spiker’s love songs, written for the “Lalla Rookh” festival. 15. The album was written in up through the end of the 1830s. In his last will and testament dated June 25, 1831 (Nikolai I’s birthday), Zhukovskii bequeathed this album to Alexandra’s daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna. L. E. Misailidi, “Zaveshchanie V.A. Zhukovskogo 1831 goda,” Pushkin i ego sovremenniki 5, no. 44 (2009): 109. 16. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), 83. Italics added. 17. Ibid., 84. 18. The image of the “genie of pure beauty,” according to one commentator, was “linked to ‘earthly’ amorous experiences, specifically the poet’s infatuation with Alexandra Feodorovna.” Quoted in V. V. Vinogradov, Stil’ Pushkina (Moscow, 1941), 398. 19. Gofman, Le Musée Pouchkine, 153.

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Notes to Pages 222–230

20. Ibid., 155. 21. Ibid. 22. See the superb interpretation of this poem in E. E. Liamina and N. V. Samover, “Religioznoe v epokhu poeticheskikh manifestov: ‘Tesniatsia vse k tebe vo khram  .  .  .’ V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Pushkinskie chteniia v Tarty, no. 3 (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2004), 99–111. Sarah Pratt’s translation: “They all crowd into the church towards you and, genuflecting, they all bring you incense, and praise you with resounding hymns. I stand alone in the corner; I am filled with you as with life, and I bring my secret sacrifice to you with my soul.” 23. These three “L’s,” as we recall, are contained in the title of Milton’s poem “L’Allegro,” which Zhukovskii used as a literary name for Alexandra (Sasha) Voeikova. In Prussian symbolic language, the “German L” was also associated with the Luisenorden, inaugurated by Friedrich Wilhelm III to commemorate the faithfulness of German women during the Wars of Liberty. The medallion of the order, enameled in royal blue, had the initial “L” mounted in the center. In this context one might suggest that the initial letter of the word “Ländlergras” (the German title of Zhukovsky’s poem) served as the hidden reference to the Lousian tradition. 24. “She is my religion! There is no greater pleasure than to feel with a pure heart the beauty of a pure soul” (PSS, XIII, 163). 25. Poultney Bigelow, History of the German Struggle for Liberty, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896), 209. 26. Ibid., 208. 27. Paul Bailleu, “Aus einem Stammbuch der Königin Luise,” Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte, vol. 8 (1895): 251–53. 28. Königin Luise von Preussen, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, 1786– 1810 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1985). 29. “Auch in guten Tagen kräftige ich mich durch die Religion gegen die Bösen die da kommen können . . . ich werde gestärkt durch den Glauben.— 1809.” RNB, f. 286, op. no. 2, ed. khr. 229, l. 12–13. 30. Here and below I use Bigelow’s English translation of Louise’s “Remembrances.” Bigelow, History, 209–11. 31. Theodor Körner, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: A.F. Maklot, 1830), 299–300. 32. Theodor Körner, A Selection from the Poems and Dramatic Works of Theodor Körner, by the translator of the “Niebelungen-Treasure” [Madame L . Davesiès de Pontès] (London: Williams and Norgate, 1850), 361. 33. Translated by Michael Wachtel. 34. Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1910), XI–XII. 35. Ibid., 172. 36. Compare: “Все—и робкая стыдливость / Под сиянием венца, / И мла-

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Notes to Pages 231–234

денческая живость, / И величие лица, / . . . Все в ней было без искусства / Неописанной красой!”; “Она пленяла красотою, / Своей не зная красоты”; “При ней все мысли наши—пенье!” 37. Biblioteka Zhukovskogo v Tomske, vol. 2, 198. 38. Zhukovskii proposes his own interpretation of his favorite aphorism from Rousseau: “il n’ya de beau que ce qui n’est pas!” (“La nouvelle Héloïse,” “Emile”). Oeuvres complètes de J.J. Rousseau, vol. 2 (Paris, 1823), 404. 39. This aphorism was borrowed by Zhukovskii from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso: “Die Stätte, die ein guter Mensch betrat, / Ist eingeweiht; nach hundert Jahren klingt / Sein Wort und seine That dem Enkel wieder” (act 1, scene 1). In Goethe’s drama, these lines are pronounced by Countess Leonore and related to Ferrara. In 1827, Chancellor von Müller paraphrases Leonore’s aphorism in his poem, written down in Zhukovskii’s album: “Wohl ist sie heilig, wie der Dichter lehret, / Die Statte, die ein edler Mensch betrat!” N. Nikonova, “Veimarskii sled V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, vol. 113 (2012): 158–83. In 1829 Zhukovskii translates these lines for his courtly almanach “Sobiratel’”: “То место, где был добрый, свято! / Для самых поздних внуков там звучит / Его благое слово, и живет / Его благое дело” (PSS, II, 263). 40. Zhukovskii, Estetika i kritika, 331. Translated by Michael R. Katz. 41. Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Goethe and Zelter: Musical Dialogues (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2009), 265. 42. Friedrich Ludwig Zacharias Werner, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Grimma: Verlags-Comptoir, 1810), 28. 43. Demandt, Luisenkult, 293, 295. 44. Zhukovskii, Estetika i kritika, 309. 45. “What one feels by encountering a beautiful object is not a completely positive pleasure Kant describes in the third Critique as ‘feeling at home in the world.’ We cannot stay [weilen] in the contemplation of beauty that does not reassure us in our capacity to comprehend the given world. On the contrary, we are immediately bewildered with respect to the ordinary consciousness and we are driven to contrast the opposition of the not-I and to search more and more for the unity and the disintegration of determination and limitation.” Cited in Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 77. 46. In his writings, Zhukovskii uses both forms: “chistyi,” attributed to the genius, and “chistoi” as the characteristic of beauty. The aesthetic concept of the “genius of beauty” has a clear Schillerian origin. See, for example, in Schiller’s lyrical play Die Huldigung der Künste (Homage of the Arts, 1804), dedicated to Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna: “Ich bin der schaffende Genius des Schönen, / Und die mir folget, ist der Künste Schaar. / Wir sind’s, die alle Menschenwerke krönen, / Wir schmücken den Palast und den Altar.” Friedrich Schiller, Schillers

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Notes to Pages 234–240

Sämmtliche Werke in einem Bande (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1840), 554. As is well known, Zhukovsky’s formula “genii chistoi krasoty” was then borrowed by Pushkin (II, pp. 601–2). 47. After Luise’s death, ottava rima was employed by German poets as a solemn form for funeral elegies. See, for example, Carl Christian Wolfart’s “Trauergesang auf den Tod Ihro Majestät der in Gott ruhenden höchstseligen Königin Luise” (1810). As we noted above, Zhukovskii’s elegy dedicated to the memory of Catherine of Württemberg finds its counterpart in Gustav Schwank’s elegy in octaves, “Todten-Feyer: dem Andenken der erhabensten Frau Katharina Königin von Würtemberg” (1819). 48. Zhukovskii, Estetika i kritika, 309. 49. Zhukovskii’s most astute contemporaries had already spoken of the extraordinary role of the “feminine” image in his poetic worldview. “Zhukovskii,” wrote Nikolai Polevoi in 1832, “was one of the most beautiful visions of the divine virgin.” N. A. Polevoi and K. Polevoi, Literaturnaia kritika: Stat’i i retsenzii, 1825–1842 (Moscow, 1990), 196. In his review of Veselovskii’s book, Aleksandr Blok noted the significance of this image in Zhukovskii’s life and poetry: “Playful joy . . . fell deep into thought over the Ewige Weiblichkeit.” Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. 5 (Moscow: 1962), 576. Iosif Eiges wrote of the “charm of the feminine” which Zhukovskii experienced. I. Eiges, “V.A. Zhukovskii,” Sofiia, no. 4 (1914), 85. Vladimir Toporov suggested that the “image of the Beautiful Lady as a ‘romantic metaphor of harmony or otherwise myth of the organic, living connection of all existence in the world’ . . . is incomparably more closely connected to similar images in Zhukovsky (Lalla Rookh, for instance) than is usually thought.” Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg, 2003), 602. 50. Entry from November 27, 1820. 51. A free translation of Friedrich Halm’s Camoens: Dramatisches Gedicht in einem Aufzuge (1838). C H A P T ER EL EV EN

The source of the first epigraph is Utkinskii sbornik, 106. The second epigraph is quoted in Zhukovskii v vosponinaiiakh sovremennikov, 79. 1. Translated by Kevin M. F. Platt. 2. The publication was dedicated to the poet’s hundredth anniversary. 3. Gr[af] Sollogub, “Byl’,” Teatral’nyi i muzykal’nyi vestnik, no. 3 (January  16, 1883), 6. Sollogub refers to the nephew of Zhukovskii’s father- in- law, Mikhail Reutern, who was the Russian minister of finance from 1862 to 1878. 4. Instead, in the “Appendix” to the journal, Sollogub published two more

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Notes to Pages 240–242

works by Viel’gorskii— the romances “Je t’aimas” and “Ne iavliaisia, prizrak milyi” (no. 14). 5. At the time, this legal process drew an enormous amount of attention from society, and was followed by a wave of publications, which were wittily called “The Sollogubiana” by a journalist from Russkoe Bogatsvo. In particular, it was claimed that Sollogub lied in his testimony and created versions that contradicted each other. S. Krivenko, “Bez rulia: Zametka po povodu protsessa gr. Solloguba i Ko,” Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 6 (1894): 187–200. According to A. N. Leskov, the trial of Sollogub and his associates inspired his father’s story “Winter Day” (1894). Andrei Leskov, Zhizn’ Nikolaia Leskova (Moscow, 1954), 562. 6. Elagina passed on to him a request from Pogodin that he support “the Muscovite” with his poetry. 7. Russkii bibliofil (1912), 115–16. See Saint Dunstan’s translation into English: “In thy magic presence, fate / Holds me mute enchanted ever; / ’Neath thy glance, with joy elate, / Dying fast away—I quiver. / As the lamp before the shrine,  / Of the heavenly Madonna,  / Gleaming on her face divine,  / Fainter ever grows, and waner.” Saint Dunstan, Poems: Original & Translated (London: W. Slatter, 1884), 4. 8. Zhukovskii, Stikhotvoreniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1939– 40), 540. 9. Otchet Imperatorskoi Publishnoi biblioteki za 1907 god (St. Petersburg, 1908), 218. 10. Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 12–13. 11. V. M. Zhirmunskii, Nemetskii romantizm i sovremennaia mistika (St. Petersburg, 1996), 84–90. 12. Novalis, Werke und Briefe, vol. 2 (Winkler, 1962), 43. 13. Clemens Brentano, Ein Lebensbild nach gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen von Johannes Baptista Diel, vol. 1 (Freiburg, 1877), 151. 14. Nikolaus Lenau, Werke und Briefe, vol. 1 (Wien: Deuticke Klett-Cotta, 1993–1995), 575; Band 7, 477. 15. Nicolaus Lenau, Gedichte, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1837), 36. 16. V. N. Toporov, “Iz issledovanii v oblasti poetiki Zhukovskogo,” Slavica Hierosolymitana, vol. 1 (1977): 51–77. 17. T. Stepanishcheva, “Pushkin v poeticheskoi sisteme Zhukovskogo (O perevode iz Lenau),” in Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii: Literaturovedenie: VI (Novaia seriia) (Tartu, 2008), 76–85. 18. Toporov,  “Iz issledovanii v oblasti poetiki Zhukovskogo,” 71; Stefan Simonek, “Zur Rezeption von Nikolaus Lenau in Rußland bis zur Jahrhundertwende,” Lenau-Forum, vol. 21 (1995): 94. 19. “Die Liebe ist stumm, nur Poesie kann für sie sprechen.” Novalis, Werke (1978), 335.

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Notes to Pages 243–246

20. M. L. Gofman, “Zhukovskii v sem’e Protasovykh i Voeikovykh,” Na chuzhoi storone, vol. 9 (Berlin, 1925), 251. 21. Pamiati Zhukovskogo i Gogolia, no. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1907), 50–51. 22. His fiancée was only a year older than the bride of his royal charge, Princess Maria of Hessen. 23. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 12 tomakh, vol. 4 (St. Petersburg, 1902), 105. 24. Rumors of Zhukovskii’s wedding, “adorned in colorful commentary,” quickly reached Russia and worried the poet’s friends and relatives. Elagina wrote to Zhukovskii that she had heard that he was intending to marry “some Saxon Countess”: “there are many that would happily ensnare you with a net of deceit and calculation” (September 1, 1840). When she later discovered the name of Zhukovskii’s bride-to-be, she relaxed somewhat; Zhukovskii had written to her earlier about the “dear Reutern family.” Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 468. 25. L. N. Maikov, Istoriko-literaturnye ocherki (St. Petersburg, 1895), 66. 26. The story of 73-year-old Goethe’s passionate love for 19-year-old Baroness Ulrike von Levetzow, partially reflected in his “Trilogie der Leidenschaft,” must have been known to Zhukovskii. In September 1827 the Russian poet and his new friend (and future father-in-law) Gerhardt von Reutern visited Goethe in Weimar. Zhukovskii presented to the great writer an allegorical painting by Carl Gustav Carus with his own inscription in verse and, in return, received from Goethe a calligraphically written copy of the latter’s “sacred” “Marienbader Elegie” (published only after Goethe’s death), the second poem of the Trilogy (Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 282). I contend that Zhukovskii’s poem “To Goethe” (“Tvorets velikikh vdokhnovenii . . .”), written and translated into German immediately after this meeting, was a veiled response to this desperate elegy: “Твое вечернее сиянье / Не о закате говорит! / Ты юноша среди созданья! / Твой гений, как творил, творит” (PSS, II, 252). It is more than likely that for Zhukovskii the memory of the elegy and the visit to Goethe with Reutern served as an additional literary-biographical “defense” of his late love for Elizabeth. 27. Konrad Kaiser, Die Künstlerkolonie Willingshausen (Kassel, 1980); Hermann Rebel, When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 106, 116. 28. V. A. Zhukovskii, Kamoens: Dramaticheskaia poema (1839; translated from F. Halm). 29. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1878), 40–41. 30. Letter from June 14, 1840, Russkii bibliofil, 148. 31. Fully entrusting himself to the will of Providence, Zhukovskii does not forget to devote as much energy as possible in order to materially provide for his future family: in a letter to the emperor, written more than a month after his proposal and agreement with his future father-in-law, he writes that he places his

344

Notes to Pages 246–248

lot in the hands of the emperor “as unto the hand of Providence.” Pamiati Zhukovskogo i Gogolia, 52. 32. V. A. Zhukovskii, “Pis’mo k E.A. Protasovoi i k prochim rodnym o brake ego s devitseiu Fon-Reitern, pisannoe v Diussel’dorfe, 10 Avgusta po 5 Sentiabria 1840 goda,” in Zhukovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1869), 751–83. All references to this letter are taken from this edition and are incorporated within the text. Sobranie sochinenii is abbreviated as SS. The page numbers are given in parentheses. 33. Quoted in Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 337. 34. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 469. 35. By all indications Viazemskii meant Rousseau’s “autobiographical” “Letters to Sara,” in which the fifty-year-old lover confesses his passions for his young addressee. In 1805 Zhukovskii, as we recall, translated these letters into Russian. 36. In 1854 Viazemskii visits the locales where, in 1833, Zhukovskii had first met his future wife (Vernay and Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva). “In this house,” writes Viazemskii of his friend’s house in Vernay, “Zhukovskii, probably, often held on his knee a little girl, who then, unbeknownst to him, was to be his betrothed and who would later illuminate the final years of the sunset of his life with her bright and warm radiance.” V.A. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 213. On Viazemskii’s reflections on “sunset love,” see Il’ia Vinitskii, “Poeticheskii mif Tiutcheva (O stikhotvorenii ‘Grustnyi vid i grustnyi chas . . .’),” Izvestiia RAN: Seriia literatury i iazyka 57, no. 3 (1998): 25. 37. See Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 157. 38. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 468. Zhukovskii showed Elagina a drawing that depicted the Reutern family’s home: “I have now seen you in that room where we were so happy in the drawing, the sounds of the piano were ringing out, near you on one side was the noble figure of Reutern on the other, an angelic face which captivated you while you sat at your easel, you are well, calm, behaglich, your heart was full at ease.” Elizabeth herself also enjoyed drawing indoor family scenes. Kaiser, Die Künstlerkolonie Willingshausen, 127. 39. Compare: “.  .  . она ж, приподнявшись,  // Руки вкруг шеи его обвила . . .”; “. . . Ундина прижалась к рыцарю”; “Около вечера с нежностью робкой Ундина, взявши Гульбранда // За руку, тихо его повлекла за собою”; “Вскрикнула, вспрыгнула, кинулась к милому в руки Ундина, // Грудью прильнула ко груди его и на ней онемела.” Zhukovskii’s conflation of the “18 year-old Undine” and the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth is quite typical: in every romantic Hulbrand, there is always a little Humbert. 40. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 157; E. V. Landa et al., “V.A. Zhukovskii: Undina [Primechaniia],” in Fridrich de lia Mott Fuke, Undina (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 542. 41. Reutern had lost his right arm at the Battle of Leipzig and taught himself to paint left-handed.

345

Notes to Pages 249–252

42. T. A. Ilovatskaia and V. A. Pakhomova-Gerres, Volshebstvo Beloi Rozy: Istoriia odnogo prazdnika (St. Petersburg, 2000), 8–9. 43. It is characteristic that Zhukovskii calls his fair-skinned blue-eyed Undine (a water spirit) “heavenly” (such an epithet is lacking in the original). In the poet’s diaries and correspondences the word “heavenly” is constantly used to describe the blue- eyed Elizabeth (compare, in this context, the line “before her heavenly gaze” in his translation from Lenau). 44. Stepanishcheva points out the “Pushkinian subtext” in Zhukovskii’s comparison of his bride with the Madonna. Stepanishcheva, “Pushkin v poeticheskoi sisteme Zhukovskogo,” http://www.ruthenia.ru/document/543653.html. 45. Pletnev, Perepiska Ia. K. Grota s P.A. Pletnevym, vol. 1, 128. Sohn created two portraits of Elizabeth in 1840: one en face at full height with a Bible in her hands, while the second was smaller and en profil. Zhukovskii took the latter with him to Russia (see his letter to Smirnova-Rosset from September 9, 1840). The rather unusual form of the small portrait, more characteristic of religious painting, can be explained by the fact that it was part of a series of three portraits of the von Reutern sisters that had been commissioned. 46. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 472. It should be noted that the direct artistic inspiration of Zhukovskii’s poem “Oh, I pray to you, Creator” (prayer before the Madonna’s image) was the Düsseldorf school of painting, especially its religiously informed wing, with its pensive Madonnas and solemn Saint Elizabeths, as well as its cult of mystical love and sublime sorrow. See in particular the chapter “The Dusseldorfers” in Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, vol. 1 (London: Henry, 1895), 255–67. 47. Zhukovskii attributed great significance to his correspondence with his fiancée, numbering each letter (perhaps in anticipation of a “secret” epistolary book). 48. OR RGB, f. 104, k. 2, no. 20. 49. Perepiska Zhukovskogo i Elaginoi, 472–73. 50. On “an oral tradition that took place in the drawing room among good company” in Willingshausen, see Rebel, When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue, 106. 51. Paul Hassel, Joseph Maria v. Radowitz, vol. 1 (Berlin: Mittler und Sohn, 1905), 152. 52. IRLI 27.803, CXCVIII б.74, l. 8. 53. In the cultural consciousness of the late 1830s, Lenau was seen as a melancholic poet-martyr, who lived without joy and who loved without hope of happiness. I. Neverov, “Germanskaia literature v poslednee desiatiletie: 1830– 1840,” Otechestvennye zapiski, vol. 10 (1840): 57. 54. The spelling “Ließchen” is used in Carl Arnold Kortum’s poem Die Jobsiade, a copy of which can be found in Zhukovskii’s library. More importantly, see “heilige Elißabeth”—Saint Elizabeth of Hungary— a favorite subject mat-

346

Notes to Pages 253–258

ter of the Düsseldorf school, to whom Zhukovskii and Aleksandr Turgenev often compared the young Elizabeth. 55. “Schoukowskij Wassilij Andrejewitsch (1783– 1852): Übersetzung von Der Letzte Gedanke von Theodor Körner: Eigenhändiges Manuskript,” in Ich kenne den Zauber der Schrift, by Oliver Matuschek (Vienna: Inlibris, 2003), 324. Theodor Körner has no poem under this title. It is possible that Zweig had in mind “Stille Liebe” (1834), which was written by Justinus Kerner, a friend of Zhukovskii’s who did dedicate a number of poems to “die liebe, edle Frau von Joukowsky,” kept in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. Zweig’s mistaken attribution was corrected twelve years ago during the preparation of the Bodmer catalogue, by Jean Philippe Jaccard. The Lenau poem is best known for having been set to music by Robert Schuman (1840). 56. Several days before this meeting Zhukovskii had given Radowitz the autographs of Emperor Alexander and Empress Elisabeth, which he had received from Countess Edeling. 57. Zhukovskii’s self-translations into German have been examined by Dietrich Gerhardt in “Eigene und Übersetzte deutsche Gedichte Zukovskijs,” in Gorski Vijenac: A Garland of Essays Offered to Professor Elizabeth Mary Hill (Cambridge, Eng.: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970), 118–54. 58. Verzeichniss der Joseph vd. Radowitz hinterlassenen Autografensammlung (Berlin, 1864). The collection was bought by the Royal Library in Berlin. It includes other autographs by Zhukovskii. 59. Toporov, “Iz issledovanii v oblasti poetiki Zhukovskogo,” 74–77. 60. The italicized lines show Zhukovskii’s interpolation. 61. Translation of Friedrich Rückert’s Indian tale, Nal und Damajanti (1828). 62. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovsogo, 192. 63. Quoted in Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, 335. 64. Original in French. Quoted in E. A. Zhukovskaia, “Iz ‘Vospominanii,’ ” Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 325–26. 65. V. A. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 12 tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1902), vol. X, 77. 66. Pamiati V.A. Zhukovskogo i N.V. Gogolia, 77. 67. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 414. Compare this with a later interpretation of this prayer as “complete self-denial” in Zhukovskii’s letter to Gogol from 1847. V. A. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 12 tomakh, vol. 10 (St. Petersburg, 1902), 79–80. 68. Dietrich Gerhardt, “Aus deutschen Erinnerungen an V. A. Zukovskij,” in: Orbis Scriptus, Dmitrij Tschizevskij: Zum 70. Geburtstag (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), 305. 69. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 90. See the original in OR RNB, f. 286, op. 2, no. 101, l. 1. 70. “Dined at Radowitz’s. An important conversation” (PSS, XIV, 393).

347

Notes to Pages 258–263

71. These fragments can easily be identified as belonging to the fifth volume of Radovitz’s works (unfortunately, this was not noted in the commentary of the most recent edition of Zhukovskii’s works): “Recht und Liebe,” “Die Ehe,” “Ueber Canitz Betrachtungen eines Laien über Strauß Leben Jesu,” “Allwissenheit,” “Die Offenbarung,” “Zeit.” J. von Radowitz, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 2 (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1853). 72. J. von Radowitz, “Die Ehe,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, 56. 73. “Die leibliche Seite der Ehe tritt bei richtigem Verständniß des Obigen sofort in ihr wahres Licht. Es sind nicht mehr zwei getrennte Körper, sondern beide Eheleute bilden einen gemeinschaftlichen Leib.” Radowitz, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, 57. By all indications, Zhukovskii was familiar with this small excerpt from Radovitz on the covenant of marriage as well (“Die Gelübde der Ehe”). 74. Julius Martin, Erinnerung an die Lehren von der Sünde, von der Erlösung und von dem Schicksal des Menschen nach dem Tode (Marburg, 1840). In the copy kept in the Russian National Library, white pages have been glued in for translation— a typical practice for Zhukovskii. OR RNB, f. 286, op. 1, no. 59, l. 6. 75. See Liamina and Samover, “Religioznoe v epokhu poeticheskikh manifestov,” 106–8. 76. Zorin, Кormia dvuglavogo orla, 283–84; Vinitskii, Dom tolkovatelia, 73–98. 77. It is no coincidence that these same words from his translation of the Odyssey are cited by Zhukovskii in a letter to Ekaterina Moier before her wedding on January 11 (23), 1845. His wife added the following verse from the first Book of Kings (8:66): “. . . and they went unto their tents joyful and glad of heart for all the goodness that the LORD had done for . . . his people.” See Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 214. The ideological resonance between The Odyssey and the Bible was characteristic of Zhukovskii’s thought during the 1840s. 78. IRLI, 27958/CC 1 b. 31, l. 19. Zhukovskii received this letter on June 2 (14) (PSS, XIV, 261). 79. Interestingly, Zhukovskii was known by his friends as an able amateur singer with a rich bass voice. 80. For more detail, see T. Trofimova, “Muzykal’noe nasledstvo kompozitora Mikhaila Iur’evicha Viel’gorskogo,” Vsesoiuznaia bibliotika imeni Lenina. Zapiski otdela rukopisei, no. 2 (1939): 75–76; T. Shcherbakova, Mikhail i Matvei Viel’gorskie (Moscow: Muzyka, 1990), 110. 81. Viel’gorskii’s religious music was performed quite rarely, almost exclusively to small audiences in his home. Shcherbakova, Mikhail i Matvei Viel’gorskie, 48. By right of birth, the first publisher of this poem, A. V. Sollogub, belonged to this “small society.” C H A P T ER T WELV E

The epigraph is from The Poetical Works of Robert Southey: Complete in One Volume (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1829), 637. 348

Notes to Pages 263–266

1. V. V. Ogarkov, V.A. Zhukovskii: Ego zhizn’ i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’: Biograficheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1894), 52. 2. The author of this cycle of short congratulatory poems was the witty poetdilettante Miatlev. OR RNB, f. 52, “Batisuhkovy,” no. 244, l. 118–19. 3. OR RGB, f. 52, no. 244, l. 118 ob. 4. The album “To the memory of Zhukovskii’s arrival in Moscow in 1841 and the evening spent with him on February 23,” is kept in the Zhukovskii collection in the Russian National Library (f. 286, op. 2, ed. khr. 231). It includes poems by F. N. Glinka, M. A. Dmitriev, A. S. Khomiakov, N. M. Shatrov, A. P. Glinka (according to Dmitriev, Zhukovskii visited the latter with gratitude), and finally, Dmitriev’s eleven-year-old son, Fedya. 5. OR RNB, f. 286, op. no. 2, ed. khr. 231, l. 12. E. A. Zhukovskaia came to Moscow with her children following her husband’s death, and she passed away herself on November 27, 1856, alone and unneeded by anyone. According to P. I. Bartenev, whom she had hired as a tutor for the children, Zhukovskii’s family was looked after by Elagina. But between her and the young widow there was not a full understanding, as Zhukovskaia could not speak Russian and was unused to Russian life. In any case, Zhukovskii was always the topic of their soliloquies. P. Bartenev, “Vospominaniia,” Rossiiskii arkhiv, vol. 1 (1994): 87. On Zhukovskaia’s last years, see Father Ioann Bazarov’s sympathetic memorial essay, published in Istoricheskii vestnik, vol. 70 (1897): 581–92. For more on her life in Moscow, consult Dmitrii Dolgushin’s book V.A. Zhukovskii i I.V. Kireevskii: Iz istorii religioznykh iskanii russkogo romantizma (2009), 161–67. Zhukovskaia’s letters are kept in the RNL f. 104, RGALI, f. 236, and IRLI, f. 265. The RNB also contains “Introduction to reflected memories” by Zhukovskaia (in Russian), which begins with the words “My spiritual sufferings, from which I neither die nor live, flow from a ruined life and deceived hopes” (f. 104, op. 2, no. 22, l. 1). 6. Ibid., ll. 5–9. 7. The vaudeville’s plot is simple: Adolf, fearing refusal, proposes to Henrietta in his grandfather’s name, planning on his grandfather giving up his bride to him at a later point. The young woman knows nothing of her fiancée’s intentions and is disturbed by his act. For the sake of revenge, she agrees to marry the old man. At the last moment, everything is resolved in a happy ending. A. Gozenpud, Muzykalnyi teatr v Rossii: Ot istokov do Glinki (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1959), 599. 8. Eugène Scribe, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Furne, 1841), 501. 9. Khomiakov prepared a “majestic feast” for Zhukovskii, “with a never before seen sturgeon,” asparagus, “game in feathers,” and the best wines. For the occasion, both Westernizers and Slavophiles, both idealists and “realists” gathered at a single table. N. P. Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M.P. Pogodina, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1892), 19–22. 10. Ibid., 21. 11. The poet’s family album, kept in the New York Public Library, itself rep349

Notes to Pages 267–271

resents a Biedermeier idyll that was never achieved in real life: the angelic faces of the children, an infant in a carriage raising a cross in one hand, the wife sitting with her sewing. It suffices, however, to juxtapose these dated drawings with Zhukovskii’s diary entries to see just how distant this visual idyll was from reality. 12. Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 637. 13. Zhukovskii’s interest in contemporary debates on marriage is shown by how he had marked his library copy of Valerie Gasparin’s Le marriage au pointe de vue chretien (Paris, 1843). See V. V. Lobanov, Biblioteka V.A. Zhukovskogo v Tomske: Opisanie (Tomsk: Tomskii gosudarstvennii universitet, 1981), 361. 14. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 181. 15. At the end of the 1840s Zhukovskii studied Rudolf Ewald Stier’s multivolume commentary to the New Testament, “Die Reden des Herrn Jesu,” in which the relationship between spouses is given particular attention. Biblioteka V.A. Zhukovskogo v Tomske, 298. 16. PZhIT, p. 307, November 8(20), 1844. Italics added. 17. I. Bazarov, “Elizaveta Alekseevna Zhukovskaia (1821– 1856),” Istoricheskii vestnik, book 11 (1897), 452, 455. 18. On Zhukovskii’s vision of family life as a quest for self-knowledge, see Dolgushin, “Novyi Zavet v perevode Zhukovskogo,” in Novyi Zavet Gospoda nashego Iisusa Khrista: Perevod V.A. Zhukovskogo (2008), 413–14. 19. Quoted in Semenko, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 68. 20. Quoted in Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 213. Zhukovskii’s emphases. 21. Quoted in I. A. Aizikova, “Zapisnye knizhki V.A. Zhukovskogo 1840-kh godov: K voprosu ob evoliutsii prozy pisatelia,” Vestnik TGPU, no. 3 (2004): 40. 22. The idea of family as an institution ordained by God was the cornerstone of Luther’s theology of marriage. See, for instance, Scott Hendrix, “Luther on Marriage,” in Timothy J. Wengert, Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 2004), 169–84. 23. The theme and image of “the cup of suffering” occupies a significant place in Zhukovskii’s work and religious consciousness. See in particular his unfinished translation of Ludwig Bechstein’s fairy tale “Das Thränenkrüglein,” in Deutsches Märchenbuch (G. Wigand, 1847)—“The Cup of Tears” (1845). See Susanne Schmidt-Knaebel, Ludwig Bechstein: Prosasagen ausserhalb der grossen Anthologien (1826–1859) (Frankfurt: Lang, 2008), 104–7. 24. P. A. Pletnev, “O upotreblenii denezhnoi summy, sobrannoi na sooruzhenie nadgrobnogo pamiatnika V.A. Zhukovskomu,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, part C (1858): 144–45. E PIL O G U E

The first epigraph is from Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817), 295. 350

Notes to Pages 271–277

The second epigraph: “True genuine poetry unites the souls, from all climates. It is the embrace of the minds which will take place up there and about which we have, unbeknownst to us, an inkling that will become; until then we will have to be faithful to each other here below.” Maria von Kleist’s “Zueignung” written on a copy of Rückert’s Nal und Damajanti (1819) which she presented to Zhukovskii in 1829. Cited in PSS, V, 381. Italics added. 1. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 185. 2. He bequeaths a similar inscription for his “welcoming gravestone”: “in the relief of sorrow  / in memory of earthly happiness,  / in reward for earthly love / and eternal life and repose” (PSS, V, 98). 3. “Even more touching at the end of the Dedication is the conflation of two beings, of which one illuminated the morning of the poet’s life, while the other, actively listening to its sounds in the present, illuminates the evening of his life.” P. A. Pletnev, Sochineniia i perepiska, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1885), 524. 4. Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo, 187. 5. Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. 5, 576. This is an allusion to one of the last poems by Zhukovskii, “Tsarskosel’skii lebed’” (1851). 6. Boris Zaitsev, Zhukovskii; Zhizn’ Turgeneva; Chekhov (Moscow, 1994), 169. 7. V. A. Zhukovskii, Stikhi i proza (Moscow, 1916), 290. 8. Zhukovskii, Stikhotvoreniia v 2-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1940), 545. 9. Ibid., 544. 10. Toporov, “Iz issledovanii v oblasti poetiki Zhukovskogo,” 68. 11. Pamiati V.A. Zhukovskogo i N.V. Gogolia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1907), 84–85. 12. Moore indicates in his notes that the name Nurmahal means “light of the harem.” 13. C. H. Bitter, Gesammelte Schriften von C.H. Bitter (Leipzig: W. Friedrich, 1885), 125. 14. Zhukovsky’s favorite line from Goethe’s “Zueignung” to Faust: “И много милых теней восстает” (“and many dear shades arise”). 15. Alekseev, “Tomas Mur i russkie pisateli XIX veka,” 674. 16. A. A. Fomin, “Pis’ma V.A. Zhukovskogo k Imperatoru Nikolaiu I i k Imperatritse Aleksandre Feodorovne 1821–1852 gg.,” in Pamiati V.A. Zhukovskogo i N.V. Gogolia, 72. 17. Pamiati V.A. Zhukovskogo i N.V. Gogolia, 72. 18. Alekseev, “Tomas Mur i russkie pisateli XIX veka,” 674. 19. “Вдруг вдалеке послышались мне клики; / И вижу я: от запада идет/ Блестящий ход; змеею бесконечной / В долину вьется он; и вдруг я слышу: / Играют марш торжественный; и сладкой / Моя душа наполнилася грустью. / Пока задумчиво я слушал, мимо / Прошел весь ход, и я лишь мог приметить / Там, в высоте, над радостно шумящим / Народом, паланкин; как привиденье, / Он мне блеснул в глаза; и в паланкине / Увидел я царевну молодую, / Невесту Севера; и на меня / Она глаза склонила мимоходом” (PSS, V, 96). 351

Notes to Pages 278–283

20. Moore, Lalla Rookh, 319. 21. Zhukovskii knew the Nurmahal’s romance quite well. It was sung in the 1821 Lalla Rookh Festspiel by the prominent Berlin singer Seidler. In 1831 Zhukovskii translated it into Russian (“Pesn’ beduinki”). 22. V. A. Zhukovskii, Nal’ i Damaianti: Indiiskaia povest’. Risunki po rasporiazheniiu Avtora vypolneny g. Maidelem ([St. Petersburg]: Izdatel’stvo Fishera, 1844). 23. W. Henzel, Portrait of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna in Costume of Lalla Rookh (1821), Preussische Schlösser und Gaerten BerlinBrandenburg, Berlin. Alexandra Nikolaevna responded to Zhukovsky in a letter published by P. Bartenev in 1869: “Хотя я далека от идеала, поразившаго ваши взоры на паланкине, но я постараюсь идти в след ему и постараюсь достигнуть его чистоты сердца, смирения и получить вместе с тем удивительный его дар распространять счастие вокруг себя. Ничто не могло быть мне приятнее, как увидеть образ этого небеснаго существа во главе мне посвященной поэмы.” The last sentence certainly refers to the portrait of her mother in the role of Lalla Rookh which opens Zhukovskii’s work. Aleksandra Nikolaevna, “Pis’mo k V.A. Zhukovskomu. 1843 g.,” Russkii arkhiv, nos. 1– 6 (1869): 107–8. Italics added. 24. S. S. Averintsev, “Razmyshleniia nad perevodami Zhukovskogo,” in Zhukovskii i literature kontsa XVIII–nachala XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), 274. 25. Also, see “Так пролетела здесь, блистая / Востока пламенным венцом, / Богиня песней молодая / На паланкине золотом” (“Appearance of Poetry in the Form of Lalla Rookh,” PSS, II, 224). 26. “Царице в дар венец другой / Из белых роз—их блеск живой / С ее душою сходен ясной / . . . светла, чиста, как небеса” (PSS, II, 332). 27. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 2, 81. 28. Ibid., vol. 1, 112. 29. Utkinskii sbornik, 144. 30. Solov’ev, Istoriia odnoi zhizni, vol. 2, 81. 31. Her sister Olga wrote that Alexandra inherited the “Prussian look”: deep blue eyes and dark hair. Ol’ga Nikolaevna, “Son iunosti,” 305. 32. Ol’ga Nikolaevna, “Son iunosti,” 257. 33. Zhukovskii, Estetika i kritika, 331. It is quite possible that in his “Dedication” Zhukovskii refers to a concrete group painting depicting the empress and her young daughter, but I was unable to identify it. 34. The heavenly patron of the Russian empress and her daughter was Saint Tsarina Alexandra of Rome, the Byzantine empress. 35. “After a whole year of tears and mourning, the health of the Empress was utterly exhausted, and the physicians urged the Emperor to send her to some foreign waters— but to which, was a question difficult to answer. Her depression of spirits required to be as much considered as the disorder of her

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nerves.” August Theodor von Grimm, Alexandra Feodorowna, Empress of Russia, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1870), 251. 36. The description of this cult can be found in her sister Ol’ga’s recollections: “Ранняя смерть—это привилегия избранных натур. Я вижу Адини не иначе, как всю окутанную солнцем.” Ol’ga Nikolaevna, “Son iunosti,” 258. 37. K. Briullov, Ascension of St. Alexandra (1844). GMZ “Tsarskoe selo.” http://nasledie-rus.ru/podshivka/pics/5505-pictures.php?picture=550519. 38. See, for example, Friedrich Jügel’s Verklärung Der Königin Luise (1810). 39. I refer to Anna Pavlovna’s mausoleum described in “Slavianka,” the vision of Ekaterina Pavlovna’s death in his elegy on the death of the Queen of Wurttemberg, the transfiguration of Queen Louise in his translation from Jean Paul, and the heavenly visions of the Faithful One in the “Flower of the Oath” and Raphael’s Madonna in his essay of 1821. 40. See http://www.rusmuseum.ru/exhib/lenta/exhibition2012/neizvestnyj _hudozhnik/photos21/. In the context of Zhukovskii’s myth of the heavenly sisters, this painting may serve as an illustration to the poet’s vision of two saintly figures shining out to him from another world. 41. In this letter, Zhukovskii calls Adini “the angel of beauty for one’s eyes, the angel of kindness for the heart, and the angel of purity for the skies.” Zhukovskii, “O konchine velikoi kniazhny Aleksandry Nikolaevny,” in Sochineniia, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg: Glazunov, 1885), 53. The letter was published in Sovremennik, vol. 36 (1844) and Moskvitianin (1845). 42. On the employment of the “christlichen Motiv von der ‘Schmerzensmutter’ ” in this fairy tale, see Schmidt-Knaebel, Ludwig Bechstein, 105.

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Index

Abrams, M. H., 164, 326n54 Addison, Joseph, 101, 326n5 Afanasiev, Viktor, 31, 296nn25–28 age of sensibility, 6–7, 13–15, 128, 145, 287n9, 290n38, 303n11. See also melancholy Albrecht (Prussian prince), 334n8 Alekseev, M. P., 318n69, 330n28, 336n25, 351n15 Alekseeva, Elizaveta Aleksandrovna, 304n20 Alexander I (Emperor of Russia), 4, 20, 155, 181, 184, 186, 197, 317n62 Alexander Nikolaevich (Grand Duke, future Emperor of Russia Alexander II), 4, 22, 24, 211, 214, 243. See also under Zhukovsky Alexandra (Tsarina of Rome), 283, 352n34. See also Alexandra Nikolaevna Alexandra Feodorovna, Grand Duchess (Princess Charlotte, Empress of Russia from 1825), 14, 171, 185, 188, 194, 196, 199–207, 226, 227, 230, 231, 249, 251, 270, 271, 273, 281, 319n6, 328n5, 329n11, 330n27, 334–37, 339n15, 352n23, 353n37; cult of, 179–85; Kunzendorf, 200–203, 208; as Lalla Rookh, 21–22, 214–24, 227, 232–36, 271, 272, 274–79, 281, 282; Ländlergras custom, 199–200, 205, 207, 210. See also Louise (Queen of Prussia); Zhukovsky Alexandra Nikolaevna (Grand Duchess; Adini), 271, 273, 274, 282, 352n23, 353n41; her death myth, 283–84. See also Briullov, Karl; Zhukovsky Alexandrine (Prussian princess), 205, 279, 334n8, 336n32, 337n42

375

Aliab’ev, A. A., 292n3 Al’tshuller, Mark Grigor’evich, 300n27, 302n49 Amar Durivier, J. A., 310n12 Anna Pavlovna (Grand Duchess), 353n39 Arbeneva, Avdotia Nikolaevna, 158 Ariosto, Ludovico, 110 Arkhangelsky, Alexander, 65 Averintsev, Sergei, 278, 352n24 “Arzamas” (literary society), 134, 173–75, 186–87, 190, 191, 193, 263, 307n67, 317n63. See also Zhukovsky: humor Bailleu, Paul, 224, 340n27 Bantysh-Kamenskii, D. N., 293n4 Baratynsky, Evgeny, 15, 171 Barkov, Ivan, 135, 333n69 Bartenev, Pyotr, 56, 57, 294n8, 303n14, 308n70, 349n5, 352n23 Barthe, Ferdinand de La, 287n9 Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques, 309n5 Batiushkov, Konstantin, 7, 15, 52, 121, 190, 192, 194, 197, 332n59, 333n71 Bazarov, Ioann, 349n5 Beaumont, Jeanne Marie, 310n12 Bechstein, Ludwig, 350n23 Behn, Aphra, 122, 315n27 Belevsky, Count Alexis, 24 Belinsky, Vissarion, 19, 140 Benkendorf, Count Alexander, 245 Berg, Carolina von, 181–83, 196, 221, 224, 226, 329n16. See also Louise (Queen of Prussia) Berlin, Isaiah, 75 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri, 13, 37, 122, 126, 154, 162, 292, 296n22, 297n41, 298n45; Études de

Index la nature, 7, 59, 292, 319n3; La chaumiert Indienne, 138–39; Paul et Virginie, 27, 30–35. See also idyll; Zhukovsky; Zontag, Anna Bestuzhev, Alexander, 336n25 Bezobrazova, Alexandra Grogorievna, 159. See also incest Bigelow, Poultney, 224, 340n25 Blok, Alexander, 3, 22, 45, 52, 273, 274, 338n47, 342n49, 351n5. See also Veselovsky, Alexander; Zhukovsky Bludov, Dmitry, 193, 263, 265 Bobrinskii, Aleksei, 294n5 Bock, T. von, 331n41 Böhme, Jakob, 131, 301n36; theosophy of, 44. See also Turgenev, Andrei Boileau, Nicolas, 309n5 Bolotov, Andrei, 291n42, 295n18 Bortniansky, Dmitry, 202, 203, 292n2 Boucillion, 120 Bouterwek, Friedrich, 46, 74, 75, 307n62; Donamar, 46, 73–75, 307n57. See also Turgenev, Andrei Bowring, John, 286 Brentano, Clemens, 241, 343n13 Brown, Jane, 336n24, 338n45 Brown, William Edward, 4, 286n5 Briullov, Karl, 283n37, 353n37 Brühl, Carl von, 215, 276 Brunswick, Duke of, 59 Buksgevden, F. F., 304n20 Bulgarin, F. V., 332n46 Bunin, Afanasy, 13, 14, 17, 27, 28, 62, 293n5, 294n7, 295n16 Bunin, Ivan, 293n5, 294n5, 304n20 Bunina, Anna, 307n67 Bunina, Maria Grigorievna, 38, 56, 58, 77, 111, 312n44 Bunina, Natalia Afanasievna, 58, 62 Bunin family, 14, 15, 18, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 57, 60, 62, 79, 91, 125, 156, 159, 164, 246–49, 294n8, 296n24, 298, 304n20, 325n43 Bürger, Gottfried, 309n5, 316n50; “Lenore,” 19, 322n16; “Männerkeuschheit” (Chastity), 130 Burton, Robert: Anatomy of Melancholy, 169, 327n12 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 134, 160,

376

165, 166, 172, 204, 286n6. See also Zhukovsky: Vernay Camoens, Luís Vaz de, 236, 245, 292n9, 336n26, 342n51, 344n28 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 310n12 Carl, Prussian prince, 334n8 Carlyle, Thomas, 333n76 Catherine (Queen of Württemberg), 234, 336n30, 342n47 Catherine the Great (Empress of Russia), 3, 37, 157, 290n41, 294n7, 298n4 Charavay, Noel, 253 Charlemagne, 110 Charlotte (Prussian Princess). See Alexandra Feodorovna Chateaubriand, François-René, 111, 160 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 47, 72 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich, 15, 236 Chesmenskii, Aleksandr, 294 Cicero, 313n3 Ciepiela, Catherine, 286n5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 286n5 Corneille, Pierre, 309n5 Coxe, William, 309n5 Dashkov, Dmitry, 18, 121, 186 Decembrists, 18, 22 Delvig, Anton, 187, 331n41 Dementich, Magistrate, 113, 314n10 D’Epinay, Madame, 190 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 95, 286, 296n21, 309n4, 324n35; “Heroida, or the Epistle of Vivleda to Kavn,” 160–61. See also incest; melancholy: love melancholy Dmitriev, Ivan, 18, 66, 94, 120, 121, 189, 311n19, 331n41. See also melancholy: love melancholy Dmitriev, Mikhail, 264, 349 Dolgoruky, Ivan, 74 Dolgushin, Dmitrii, 349n5, 350n18 Domenichino: St. John the Evangelist, 183 Dostoevsky, Feodor, 22, 47, 232; Brothers Karamazov, 292 Dräseke, J. H. B., 142–44 Dubois de Masonfort, Louis, 59 Dunstan, Saint, 343n7

Index Edeling, Countess, 347n56 Edgeworth, Maria, 309n5, 310n12 Eiges, Iosif, 274, 342n49 Ekaterina Pavlovna (Grand Duchess), 203, 204, 353n39 Elagin, Vasily, 239, 268 Elagina, Avdot’ia Petrovna (née Yushkova; from 1816, Kireevskaia), 50, 56–60, 62, 105, 112, 120, 123, 125, 126, 137, 140, 144, 145, 150, 159, 167, 188, 199, 214, 240–42, 246, 248, 250–52, 254–56, 268, 293n3, 294n5, 303n14, 319n2, 320n34, 327n9, 331n41, 343n6, 344n24, 345n38, 349n5 Elagina, Ekaterina Ivanovna (née Moier), 159, 268, 293n5, 303n8, 304n21, 308n52, 323n26 Elizabeth, Saint, 346n46, 346n54 Elizabeth I (Empress of Russia), 157, 347n56 emotional biography, 5, 8, 287n11 emotional history, 4 emotional modes, 8–11 emotional polyphony, 10 Engelsbach, 59 Ermolov, Aleksei, 18 Ewald, Johann Ludwig, 267, 310n12 Example of Firm and True Love, or the Adventures of the Beautiful Turkish Kseminda, Christened Elizaveta, 29 father figure, 37, 41–43 Fatima, 28 Fauvre, Raymond, 120, 314n18, 322n22 Feddersen, Jakob Friedrich, 129, 316n50 feminization, 37, 133, 290, 298n4 Fet, Afanasy Ivanovich, 15, 22 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 186, 223, 230– 33, 236, 339n5, 340n34, 341n45; Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 11, 228– 30, 290n36 Filaret (Archbishop), 121, 321n13 Filaret (Hieromonk), 155, 158, 321n13 Florovsky, George, 4, 14, 285n1, 289n25, 291n45 Fonvizin, Denis, 99, 103, 311n32, 312n46; The Friend of Honorable People, or Oldthoughts, 311n32; The Minor, 99– 100, 103

377

Fonvizin, Pavel, 160 Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, 185, 186, 196 Fox, Joseph, 324n41 Fraanje, Martin, 288n21 Fraiman, Tatiana, 212, 285n3, 287n11, 313n52, 314n12, 338n49 Francisca (Bouterwek’s heroine; Andrei Turgenev’s female ideal), 46, 73, 74, 82. See also Bouterwek, Friedrich; Turgenev, Andrei Franklin, Benjamin, 93, 129, 310n16 Fredericks, Baroness, 336n35 freemasonry, 8, 10, 12, 18, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 118, 119, 128, 129, 143, 286n5, 288n23, 299n9, 301n40, 316n46 Friedrich Wilhelm III, 21, 195, 202, 245, 330n20, 330n23, 334n8, 337n42, 338n44, 340n23 Friedrich Wilhelm IV (Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm), 4, 201, 204, 215, 231, 277, 330n20, 334n8, 337n42 Friendly Literary Society, 18, 38, 63 Galakhov, A. D., 206, 336n34, 338n48 Galiani, Ferdinando, 190, 322n55 Garve, Christian, 101, 103, 105 Gasparin, Valerie, 350n13 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité de, 13, 89, 96, 309n6, 321n1; Adèle et Théodore, 89, 90, 154, 161, 309n5, 309n8, 310n12 Ginzburg, Lidia, 67, 287n7, 306n43 Glagoleva, Olga, 4, 286n5, 287n11, 290n41, 293n2, 295n9, 303n11 Glinka, Feodor, 189, 264, 349n4 Glinka, Grigory Andreevich, 179, 328n2 Glinka, Mikhail, 292n3 Gloger, Bogislav von, 202, 203, 335n18 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 45, 66, 87, 142, 181, 186, 188, 195, 196, 204, 215, 228, 232, 244, 245, 263, 292n7, 299n13, 306n46, 309n5, 314n7, 323n31, 325n49, 326n53, 338n45, 341n39, 344n26 works: “Dedication“ (Zueignung) to Faust, 203, 209, 276, 277, 301n40, 336n24, 351n14; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 7, 8, 40, 77, 300n28, 308n75; Wilhelm Meisters

Index Lehrjahre, 112, 160; “Zueignung” (“Der Morgen kam; es scheuchten seine Tritte”), 39, 40, 41, 55, 203, 301n43 Gofman, Modeste, 338, 339n10, 344n19 Gogol, Nikolai Vasil’evich, 3, 23, 267, 286n5 Goldsmith, Oliver, 146 Golitsyn, Nikolai, 153, 156, 201 Goncharova, Natalia, 329n9 Gray, Thomas, 7, 18, 56, 79, 173, 286n5, 308n78 Grech, Nikolai, 188, 189, 332n46, 336n25 Griboedov, Alexander, 18 Grimm, August-Theodor, 185, 329n11, 330n27, 353n35 Grimm, Brothers, 245 Grot, Yakov, 199, 250, 334n4, 346n45 Gruzinskii, A. E., 287n11 Hahn, Carl: Die letzten Lebensstunden Luisens, 182, 197, 329n14, 334n78 Hebel, Johann Peter, 186 Henri IV (King of France), 51 Hensler, Carl Friedrich, 310n18 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 166, 186, 291n43 Herklots, Carl, 276 Herzen, Alexander, 15 history of emotions, 5–7 Hohenzollerns (Prussian dynasty), 186, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 335n15 Hole, Richard, 110 Homer, 23, 110, 246, 260, 348n77 Horace, 194, 195, 309n5, 333n67 Hufeland, Christoph-Wilhelm, 130, 131, 223, 231, 277, 316n54, 317n59 Hume, David, 101 Hunt, Lynn Avery, 37, 298, 299n7 idyll, 23, 28, 32–36, 57, 100, 113–22, 163, 247. See also Bernardin de Saint Pierre; Zhukovsky: Muratovo Iffland, A. W., 215 incest, 156–64, 323n31, 324n34 Jaccard, Jean Philippe, 318, 347n55. See also Pushkin, Alexander Jauffret, L. F., 310n12 Jean Paul (Richter), 10, 97, 104, 105, 145,

378

184, 186, 196, 231, 234, 313n51, 319n12, 353n39 Jügel, Friedrich, 353n38 Julie (heroine of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse): female model, 48, 76, 82, 91, 150–51. See also age of sensibility; Turgenev, Andrei; Rousseau; Zhukovsky Juvenal, 309n5 Kachenovsky, Mikhail Trofimovich, 98, 312n42 Kaisarov, Andrei, 38, 41, 302n50 Kaisarov, Mikhail, 95 Kamenskii, M. F., 293n4 Kant, Immanuel, 286n5, 341n45 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich, 8–13, 18, 24, 29, 41, 48, 62–64, 66, 76, 96–101, 110–13, 121, 128, 161, 180, 181, 187, 189, 190–95, 230, 268, 286n6, 287n7, 288n23, 289n27, 289n32, 290n35, 296n24, 301n47, 302n60, 324n39, 307n66, 312n43, 313n6, 324n39, 331n41; emotional mode, 9–11; ideal of happiness, 46, 86, 267 works: “Conversation on Happiness,” 64; History of the Russian State, 110, 190, 194–95; Letters of a Russian Traveler, 8–9, 11, 96; “On the Sciences, Arts, and Enlightenment,” 112 Karamzina, Elizaveta Ivanovna, 48 Katenin, Pavel Aleksandrovich, 336n25 Katz, Michael, 4 Kazakevich, Natalia, 337n38 Keats, John, 286n5 Kheraskov, Mikhail, 128, 325n44, 334; Cadmus and Harmony, 129; “How Glorious Our Lord Is in Zion,” 198, 202; Vladimir Reborn, 129 Khomiakov, Aleksei Stepanovich, 349n4 King, Zachary, 291n1 Kireevskaia, Anna Petrovna (née Yushkova). See Elagina, Avdot’ia Petrovna Kiseleva, Liubov’, 285n3, 287n11, 314n21, 320n15, 321n4, 324n37, 325n43, 327n18, 331n37 Kleist, Heinrich von, 284 Kleist, Maria von, 271, 284, 351 Klinger, Friedrich, 304n20, 312n46

Index Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 124, 195, 252 Konstantin Nikolaevich (Grand Duke), 283 Konstantin Pavlovich (Grand Duke), 184 Körner, Christian Gottfried, 195 Körner, Theodor, 336n28, 340n31, 347n55 Kortum, Carl Arnold, 346n54 Kotzebue, August von, “German Shakespeare, ” 66–67; False Shame (False Scham), 65–70, 105, 305n38, 305n39, 306n46 Kozhevnikov, V. A., 287n9 Kozlov, Ivan, 171, 172 Kozlovskii, Ivan, 295n12 Krechetnikov, Mikhail Nikitich, 58, 62, 295n10 Kreger, Carl, 251 Kreig, Admiral, 293n4 Krivenko, S., 343n5 Krummacher, Friedrich, 267 Kuprin, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 47 Kutuzov, Aleksei Mikhailovich: emotional mode, 8–12; 288n23, 289n27, 289n33, 290n34, 290n35. See also freemasonry; Young, Edward Lay of Igor’s Campaign, 110 Leighton, Lauren, 4 Lenau, Nikolaus: “Stumme Liebe” (“Mute Love”), 240–44, 251, 252, 257, 346n43, 347n55 Lensky, Dmitry: Grandfather Groom, 265, 349n7 Lermontov, Mikhail Yurievich, 5, 15, 232, 288n12 Leskov, A. N., 343n5 Leskov, Nikolai Semenovich, 343n5 Levetzow, Ulrike von, 344n26 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 110 Liubov’ Sergeevna (Protasova?), 159 Longus, 27. See also Bernardin de SaintPierre Lopukhin, Ivan, 18, 119, 131, 258, 299n9, 301n40, 314n17, 316n58 Lopukhin, Pavel, 299n9 Lotman, Yury, 7, 29, 287n11, 289n27, 290n41, 290n42, 299n11, 300n27, 301n44, 302n50, 304n27, 313n5, 314n6 Louise (Queen of Prussia), 14, 21, 180–84,

379

195–97, 206, 209, 221, 223–27, 233, 234, 278, 282–84, 328n5, 335n16, 338n44, 340n30, 353n39; “Heavenly Remembrances,” 224–26, 235–36; Luisenkult, 183, 209, 329n12, 338n44, 340n30 Luise (Prussian Princess), 334n8 Luther, Martin, 197 Lutovinova, 294n5 Lutovinova, Daria, 304n20 Lutovinova, Elizaveta, 304n20 Lvov, Pavel, 160 Maiden of Orleans (Jeanne d’Arc), 134, 135, 141, 142, 186, 197, 203, 220; as prototype for Louisa of Prussia, 226, 227–28, 234, 338n44. See also Schiller; Zhukovsky Maikov, Leonid, 244, 344n25 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de, 310n12 Maiofis, Maria, 331n35 Makarov, Mikhail Nikolaevich, 312n43 Malinovsky, Akeksei, 66 Mandelstam, Osip, 307n68 Maria Alexandrovna (Empress, wife of Alexander II), 259, 276, 344n22 Maria Feodorovna (Dowager Empress), 20, 180, 330n23 Maria Nikolaevna (Grand Duchess), 46, 74, 247, 338n2 Maria Pavlovna (Grand Duchess), 341n46 Marmontel, Jean-François: “Annete et Lubin,” 160; pour le petit nombre, 191, 323n32, 332n59. See also incest Martin, Julius, 348n74 Mary (Queen of Scots), 105 Mason, Johann, 299n20 May, Simon, 311n29, 313n61, 326n52 Mazepa (Hetman of Ukraine), 245 Mecklenburg-Schwerin (Prince), 276 Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Georg Friedrich Carl Joseph (Prince), 334n9 melancholy, 9, 11, 18, 19, 35, 71, 78–80; love melancholy, 94–98, 105, 106, 135, 166–69, 174, 175, 201, 216, 221, 259, 282, 288n20, 308n76, 311n29, 327n12 Mélesville, A. H. J., 265 Mendelsohn, Moses: “On the Immortality of the Soul,” 59

Index Méricourt, Théroigne de, 60 Merzliakov, Aleksei Fedorovich, 38, 39, 42, 63–65, 77, 300n28 Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy; journal), 18, 96, 98–107, 109, 110, 191, 312n44 Messner, A. G., 296n21 Milton, John: “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”, 96, 166, 169, 170, 172–74, 176, 283, 317n61, 326n5, 327n31, 328n39, 340n23. See also melancholy; Zhukovsky: emotional self-portrait Moier, Ekaterina. See Elagina, E. I. Moier, Johann, 150, 164, 179, 320n33 Moor, Karl (Schiller’s hero and Andrei Turgenev’s model). See Schiller; Turgenev, Andrei Moore, Thomas: Lalla Rookh, 21, 138, 215, 216, 220, 221, 224, 271, 276, 278, 281, 286n6, 319n6, 350, 351n12, 352n20. See also Alexandra Feodorovna; Zhukovsky Moravian Brethren, 122 Moritz, Carl Phillipp, 145 Moscovite (Moskvitianin; journal), 27, 353n41 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 119, 316n45 Mudrov, Matvei, 299n9 Mufel, Johann Carl, 28 Müller, Friedrich von (Chancellor), 341n39 Müller, Johannes von, 194, 195, 333n70 Müller (composer), 261 Napoleon I, 3, 20, 23, 116, 168, 183, 200, 201, 248, 304n17 Nicolai, Christoph Friedrich: Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, 10, 11, 288n23, 289n28, 289n32 Nikolai Pavlovich (Grand Duke, Emperor of Russia Nicholas I from 1825), 4, 14, 21–23, 179, 203, 328n5, 336n22, 339n15 Nodier, Charles, 43 Novalis, 10, 12, 21, 45, 97, 186, 195, 196, 206, 231, 241, 242, 261, 273, 274, 282, 290n39, 309n4, 333n75, 343n12 Odoevsky, Vladimir Fedorvich, 18 Olga Nikolaevna (Grand Duchess), 203, 282, 339n15, 352n31

380

Orlov, Aleksei, 294n4 Orlov, Grigorii, 62, 294n5, 304n20 Orlov, Ivan, 293n4 Parny, Évariste, 317n69, 318n70 Parson, Eliza, 324n41 Pasta, Giuditta, 261, 265 Paul I (Emperor of Russia), 3 Pein, Annette, 4 Pernay, F. D., 303n12, 304n17 Perovskii, A. A., 197, 317n67 Perovsky, Vasily, 171 Petrarch, Francesco, 6, 19, 70, 75, 76, 95, 125, 165, 307n67, 311n21. See also Bouterwek, Friedrich; Derzhavin, Gavriil; Dmitriev, Ivan; Zhukovsky pietism, 11, 289n28 Pindar, 114 Plato, 14, 47, 48, 109 Platon, Metropolitan of Moscow, 41–43 Platt, Kevin M. F., 285, 342n1 Pleshcheev, Alexander, 111, 112, 115, 120, 121, 192, 313n5, 314n8 Pleshcheeva, Anastasiia Ivanovna (Karamzin’s friend), 12, 314n6 Pleshcheeva, Anna (Nina), 155, 321n9 Pletnev, Pyotr, 12, 17, 187, 199, 250, 269, 273, 287, 290, 291, 303, 326, 334, 346, 350, 357 Plutarch, 295n21 Podshivalova, Alexandra, 30 Polevoi, Ksenofont, 342n49 Polevoi, Nikolai, 342n49 Polonsky, Yakov Petrovich, 52 Pope, Alexander: “Epistle from Eloise to Abelard,” 73, 150, 162, 306n55, 325n44 Potemkin, P., 295n12 Pratt, Sarah, 340n22 Prokopovich-Antonsky, Anton Antonovich, 85, 129, 331n41 Protasov, Andrei, 154 Protasova, Alexandra Andreevna (also Sasha, “Svetlana,” “Allegro,” from 1814 Alexandra Voeikov), 14, 19, 21, 57, 88, 89, 107, 112, 114, 116, 120– 23, 146, 164, 168, 171–76, 180, 221– 23, 236, 269, 272, 273, 275, 277, 281–83, 314n14, 320n27, 327n26, 340n23. See also Milton, John; Protasova, Ekaterina; Protasova, Maria; and

Index under Zhukovsky, including Muratovo (“colony of merriment”) Protasova, Ekaterina Afanasievna, 56, 58, 88, 89, 90, 99, 103, 104, 107, 111, 112, 114–20, 122–24, 127, 140, 147, 149, 164, 203, 247, 268, 312n44, 314n14, 320n27, 321n1, 324n37; fear of incest, 153–56, 158, 159, 161. See also Protasova, Alexandra; Protasova, Maria; Zhukovsky Protasova, Maria Andreevna (from 1817, Moier), 13, 14, 57, 69, 76, 82, 85, 88– 91, 93, 95, 102, 103, 105, 107, 112, 114, 116, 118–20, 120, 124, 129, 139– 42, 144, 146, 150, 151, 155, 159, 164, 165, 167, 171, 174–76, 179, 180, 197, 212, 236, 242–46, 269, 272–74, 277, 282, 290n41, 309n5, 314n14, 317n67, 319n9, 320n27, 320n33, 321n9, 327n21; death and grave of, 151–52, 171–72, 175; education of, 88–90; lot, 137–52. See also Protasova, Alexandra; Protasova, Ekaterina; Rousseau; Zhukovsky Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich, 3, 15, 20, 22, 23, 52, 60, 133, 134–36, 140, 165, 187, 190 works: Barkov’s Shade, 135; Captain’s Daughter, 60; Eugene Onegin, 20, 133, 140, 195, 328n39, 339n12; Gavriiliad, 135–36, 317n69, 318n70–71; Little House in Kolomna, 204; Poltava, 245; “Rusalka,” 135; Ruslan and Liudmila, 135, 318n72; “To Zhukovsky,” 193 Pushkin, Vasily Lvovich, 76, 191, 307n65 Racine, Jean-Baptiste, 309n5 Radcliffe, Ann, 161, 324n41 Radishchev, Aleksandr, 128, 315n44 Radowitz, Joseph Maria von, 243, 252–54, 258–60, 265, 267, 346n51, 347n56, 347n70, 348n71 Radzivill, Princess Luise, 226 Rank, Otto, 323n31, 324n34 Raphael, Sanzio da Urbino: “Sistine Madonna,” 22, 87, 222, 232, 233, 235, 249, 270, 283, 353n39 Rauch, Christian Daniel, 226 Ravaillac, François, 51

381

Recke, Elisabeth von der, 337n42 Reutern, Elizabeth von (after 1841, Zhukovskaya), 23, 239–41, 244–46, 248, 249, 255, 256, 258, 261, 265, 269, 270, 273–75, 282, 344n24, 345n36, 347n55, 349n11; as the icon, 249–51; “Mein Glaubensbekenntnis,” 250–51. See also Reutern, Gerhardt; Zhukovsky Reutern, Gerhardt von, 23, 252, 258, 165, 243, 245, 247, 248, 251, 265, 267, 279, 344n31, 345n41 Reutern, Mikhail, 240, 342n3 Rezanov, Vladimir, 31, 285, 295n21, 296n24, 298n41, 305n32, 310n12, 312n48 Richardson, Samuel, 13; The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 295n11 Richter, Jean Paul. See Jean Paul. Ridiger, 59 Robert, Marthe, 13, 164, 291n44, 295n14 Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de, 60, 61 Rodzianko, Semion, 38 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 261 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 10, 12, 48, 59, 62, 63, 67–69, 72, 74, 80, 89, 106, 129, 154, 166, 173, 228, 246, 290n35, 298n44, 303n11, 311n24, 313n61, 345n35; religion of, 13; utopia, 35, 57, 148–51, 320n28. See also Protasova, Maria; transparency; Zhukovsky works: Confessions, 288n12, 327n32, 328n33; Emile, 7, 90, 93, 128, 129, 309n11, 316n48, 341n38; Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, 7, 35, 38, 40, 47, 48, 57, 68, 71, 86, 87, 91, 137, 142, 150–52, 155, 165, 306n42, 307n66, 315n28, 319, 321n11, 327n32, 341n38; Letters to Sara, 106, 311n24, 345n35 Rückert, Friedrich, 271, 284, 347n61, 351 Rumiantsev, P. A., 293n4, 296n21 Rumiantsev, S. P., 331n41 Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl; journal), 27 Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, 17, 32, 27–28 Sabean, David Warren; “sibling archipelago,” 159–60, 322n17, 323n29, 326n51

Index Sakulin, Nikolai, 140, 285n3, 287n11, 290n41, 319n10, 320n20 Salkha. See Turchaninova, Elizaveta Samoilova, Sofia, 211 Sandler, Stephanie, 4, 286n5 Sandunova, Elizaveta, 45, 76, 301n42, 305n32, 307n66 Schadow, Johann Gottfried, 233, 235 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 10 Schiller, Friedrich, 7, 18, 44, 45, 48, 57, 63, 65, 66, 121, 129, 133, 163, 166, 188, 195, 196, 215, 285n5, 295n17, 298, 299n22, 300n30, 302n54, 305n33, 309n5, 315n30, 321n40, 333n74, 341n46 works: Aesthetic Letters, 48; “An die Freude,” 37, 38, 41, 42, 64, 65, 93, 306n46; Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 135, 137, 141, 186, 197, 203, 220, 227, 234, 318, 319; Kabale und Liebe, 45, 76, 307n66; “Laura am Klavier,” 65; Räuber, 75 Schinkel, Carl Friedrich, 215 Schlegel, August von, 186, 305n41 Schuman, Robert, 347n55 Schwank, Gustav, 336n30, 342n47 Schwertzell, Wilhelmina, 245 Scribe, Eugène, 265, 349n8 Seidlitz, Carl Johann von, 21, 31, 112, 128, 166, 171, 173, 200, 206, 250, 267, 273, 274, 281, 287n11, 292n6, 293n, 313n4, 314n7, 315n42, 326n3, 327n21, 329n10, 345n37, 347n62, 348n77, 350n14, 351n1 Semenko, Irina, 4, 97, 194, 285n3, 287n11, 311n25, 350n19 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 62, 101 Shakespeare, William, 46, 48, 66, 309n5; Macbeth, 46; Midsummer Night’s Dream, 46 Shakhovskoi, Alexander, 134 Shevyrev, Stepan, 18, 57, 287n11, 303n4 Sibiriakov, A. M., 287n11 siblings, 159–60 sin. See Protasova, Ekaterina; Turgenev, Andrei; Zhukovsky Smirnova-Rosset, A. O., 346n45 Smirnov-Sokol’skii, N. P., 186, 330n30, 331n34, 334n77

382

Smith, Hugh, 310n12 Sobol, Valeria, 288n16 Sohn, Ferdinand, 250, 251, 346n45 Sokovnina, Anna Fedorovna, 47 Sokovnina, Anna Mikhailovna, 53 Sokovnina, Ekaterina Mikhailovna, 47, 48, 50, 53, 55, 71–73, 142 Sokovnina, Varvara Mikhailovna (Mother Serafima), 47, 50, 72, 301n47, 302n48 Sollogub, Alexander Vladimirovich, 239, 240, 262, 342n3, 343n5, 348n81 Solloguv, Vladimir Fedorovich, 239, 261 Solov’ev, Nikolai, 173, 308n82, 314n19, 320n31, 321n2, 327n19, 352n27 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 3, 18, 22, 45, 52, 79 Somov, Orest, 303n13, 336n25 Son of the Fatherland (Syn Otechestva; journal), 188. 189, 193 Southey, Robert, 110, 263, 266, 348, 350n12 Spiess, Hans Christian, 131, 132 Spiker, Heinrich, 215, 276, 339n8 Spontini, Gaspare, 215, 216, 275–77, 282, 339n8 Staël, Germaine de: De la literature, 139, 319n7 Starobinski, Jean, 86, 298n44, 306n54, 309n2, 320n28. See also Rousseau Strakhov, Piotr, 300n32 Sturm und Drang period, 8, 19, 38, 42, 45, 163 Sumarokov, Pavel, 309n6 Sushkov, M. A., 291n1 Sushkov, Mikhail, 8, 288n21 Suvorov, Aleksandr Vasil’evich, 293n4, 296n21 Stier, Rudolf Ewald, 267, 350n15 Svechin, Nikolai Petrovich, 70, 72 Svechina, Maria Nikolaevna (née Veliaminova), 46–48, 58, 59, 61, 62, 68, 70– 72, 74, 76, 77, 80, 82, 142, 158, 179, 308n82; The Remainder of Philanhropy in France (translation), 58–62. See also Zhukovsky “Svetlana.” See Protasova, Alexandra Tasso, Torquato, 110, 341n39 Tauler, Johann, 260, 267 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il’ich, 292n3 Teleman, Georg-Philipp, 195

Index Tersteegen, Gerhard, 335n20 Thomspon, James, 7 Tieck, Ludwig, 12, 145, 185, 186, 231, 236 Tiergarten (Thiergarten), 8–11, 229, 288n23, 289n32 Tiutchev, Fyodor, 15, 52, 245, 285, 291n45, 345n36 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich, 15, 47, 68, 315n28, 323n27 Toporov, Vladimir, 7, 242, 254, 275, 285n3, 287n11, 288n14, 289n2, 292n2, 301n46, 302n63, 342n49, 343n16, 347n51, 351n10 transparency, 72, 86, 132, 148, 149, 298n44. See also Starobinski, Jean Tsitsianov, Prince, 77 Turchaninova, Elizaveta Dementievna (Zhukovsky’s mother), 17, 28, 29, 30, 32, 56. See also Zhukovsky Turgenev, Alexander Ivanovich, 38, 47, 53, 75, 76, 80, 93, 102, 121, 123, 134, 153, 156, 165, 171, 173–75, 179, 180, 186, 189, 190, 193, 199, 211, 214, 216, 222, 223, 246, 281, 283, 299n19, 330n26, 338n2, 347n54 Turgenev, Andrei Ivanovich, 7, 8, 18, 19, 38, 39, 41–44, 47, 53, 55, 57, 63, 66, 69, 70, 76–80, 82, 129, 163, 168, 204, 283, 299n8, 299n22, 300n32, 300n34, 301n40, 301n46, 302n56, 305n38, 306n51, 312n48, 315n29; death, 49– 51; on brotherhood, 54–55; on domestic utopia, 65, 121; original sin, 43– 45, 57; on poetry, 44–45; on women (“female spectrum”), 46–50, 74, 75, 89–93. See also Goethe; Schiller; Zhukovsky works: “Elegy” (“The deadening arm of dismal autumn . . .”), 47–48, 50; “Let us forget to search for bliss here,” 49–50; “You are illuminated by light of mind,” 48–49 Turgenev, Ivan Petrovich, 18, 50, 52, 53, 299n9. See also father figure Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 159, 304n20 Turgenev family, 38, 40–41 Turkish woman, model of, 32 Uhland, Ludwig, 166 University Pension for the Nobles, 18, 38,

383

58, 66, 85, 95, 129, 154, 186, 291n1, 316n51, 331n41 Uvarov, Sergei, 121, 186, 192, 307n67 Veidemeer, Ivan, 46 Veliaminov, Nikolai, 58, 77 Veliaminova, Maria. See Svechina, Maria Veliaminova, Natalia Afanasievna, 56, 58, 62, 295n10 Veliamonova, Avdot’ia Nikolaevna, 58 Venevitinov, Dmitry, 18 Verstovskii, A. N., 292n3 Veselovsky, Alexander Nikolaevich: V. A. Zhukovsky. The Poetry of Feeling and of the Heart’s Imagination, 6, 7, 12, 59, 65, 145, 175, 199, 200, 206, 212, 222, 240, 250, 273, 287n9, 287n11, 288n13, 290n38, 295n15, 299n11, 309n3, 327n21, 337n42, 342n49, 344n26 Vielgorsky, Mikhail Yurievich, 240, 261, 262, 265, 343n4, 348n80 Vigel, Philipp, 140, 319n14 Virgil, 110 Vladimir I, Prince, 110, 111, 128 Voeikov, Alexander, 38, 82, 120–25, 127, 140, 145–47, 149, 150, 153, 156, 164, 172, 187, 189, 192, 317n67, 318n71, 320n27, 320n33, 322n14, 331n41, 344n20 Voeikov, Andrei, 172 Voeikova, Alexandra (Sasha; née Protasova). See Protasova, Alexandra Volpe, Tsezar’, 241, 274, 331n36 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 72, 135, 309n5 Wachtel, Michael, 4, 286n5, 340n33 Wagner, Richard, 24 Weisse, Christian Felix, 310n12 Welt-Empfindung, 8–9, 40, 12. See also Karamzin, Nikolai; Kutuzov, Aleksei; Zhukovsky Weyrauch, A. G., 292n3 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 7, 12, 52, 129, 194, 303n12, 309n5, 316n54, 333n68; Geschichte des Agathon (brotherly love), 7, 162, 163, 325n47; Oberon, 7, 110, 127, 336n28. See also incest

Index Wilhelm, Prince (future German emperor Wilhelm I), 216, 328n5, 334n8, 336n32 Wolfart, Carl Christian, 336n30, 337n44, 342n47 Wordsworth, William, 4, 286 Wurttemberg, Countess Maria von, 242 Yorke, R. M. P., 324n41 Young, Edward: Night Thoughts, 7–9, 289n33, 306n50 Yushkova, Anna. See Zontag, Anna Petrovna Yushkova, Varvara Afanasievna, 30, 56, 62, 79 Zagarin, P., 35 Zaitsev, Boris, 274, 282, 351n6 Zeidlits, Karl. See Seidlitz Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 232, 341n41 Zhukovskaya, Elizaveta Alekseevna. See Reutern, Elizabeth Zhukovsky, Alexandra (Zhukovsky’s daughter), 24, 257, 282 Zhukovsky, Andrei, 17 Zhukovsky, Pavel, 24 Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreevich: and Alexander Nikolaevich (Grand Duke, Emperor Alexander II), 22–23, 210–12; and Alexander Pushkin, 134–36, 193; Alexandra, name and vision, 272–76, 282–83; and Alexandra Feodorovna (Grand Duchess, “Lalla Rookh,” Empress Alexandra Feodorovna), 180–85, 198–213, 215–23, 233–36, 271–74, 278–79; Alexandra-Kult, 183–85; and Alexandra Protasova (Svetlana, Allegro), 19, 21–22, 114–15, 171–76, 280–83; and Andrei Turgenev, 18–19, 38–50, 64–65, 71–76, 78–80; brotherhood, idea of, 40–41; on chastity, 127–36; on chosen few, 102–3, 185– 97; on dear graves, 171–72, 175; on death and afterlife, 51–55; on death and poetry, 185–97; divine music, 276–78; Dolbino, 112, 124, 187, 187; Dorpat, 123, 125, 140, 145–50, 187, 197, 198, 212, 214, 245, 271, 272, 282, 319n9, 331n41; on education, 89–94; and Ekaterina Afanasievna Protasova, 122–25, 153–60; and Elizabeth von

384

Reutern (Zhukovskaia), 23, 243, 247– 51, 256–70; emotional self-portrait, 176; false shame, 67–68; familial romanticism, 11–14, 51–52, 62, 156, 267; family ideal and happiness, 12– 14, 37–38, 62–65, 86, 101–3, 116–22, 150–52; 164, 210–12, 252–62, 266–70 (“school of suffering”); feminine ideal (Weiblichkeit), 12, 20, 62, 139–45, 181, 184, 185, 213, 222, 232, 236, 246– 47, 250–52, 284; feminine paradise (kingdom), 35, 38, 57–58, 128, 284; and Fichte, 228–32; on French Revolution and Terror, 59–62; genius of pure beauty, 22, 222, 223, 230; 233– 34, 249, 281, 339n18; heavenly sisters, 57, 73, 131–35, 141, 142, 164–66, 203, 220, 226–27, 264, 271–74, 282–84; on hope, 123–25; humor, 113–14, 175– 76; as illegitimate son, 13, 29, 30, 43, 164, 294–95; on illicit love, 156–64; on inner Eden, 125–27; on journal as love utopia, 98–101; longing for family, 57; and Lopukhin, Ivan, 118–19; on love and death, 256–58; love as religion, 55, 87, 106–9, 136, 147–52, 156, 223, 224, 231, 236, 245, 265, 284; on love as sacrifice, 105, 147–152; on love melancholy, 94–98; and Maria Protasova (Moier, Minvana), 19, 88–94, 103–09, 116–18, 125–26, 137–52; and Maria Svechina (Veliaminova), 58– 62, 68–82; and Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” 166–76; Mishenskoe (native land), 17, 27, 32, 38, 71, 77, 88, 125, 154, 173, 293n3, 294n5, 308n75, 312n44; Muratovo (“colony of merriment”), 111–26, 134, 170, 172, 174, 175, 200, 282, 314n11; “philosophy of Lalla Rookh,” 224, 232–33; plans for the future, 62–63, 85, 91– 92, 129–30, 243–44; on platonic love, 105–6, 109; on poetry as therapy, 167– 68; on prejudice, 155–56, 158–59; on Queen Louisa and her cult, 182–184, 208–10, 223–27, 233–36, 252–56; as Russian Petrarch, 19, 75–76; as Russian Saint Preux, 149; on sin, 90, 114, 122, 124, 127, 152, 163, 164; scenarios of love, 12–15; on sisterhood, 56–57;

Index 170–71, 284; of stars and starry sky, 40, 54, 114, 115, 133, 172–75, 219, 220, 232–34, 281, 282, 298; symbolism, Cachemire (kingdom), 137–39, 142, 168, 214–16, 219, 271, 278, 282, 319n1, 319n6; “Teutonic direction,” 21, 186–87; twilight love, 244–45; as Tyrtaeus of the Slavs, 20; of roses, 279–81; “unfree translation,” 251–56; “union of kinship,” 57; Vernay (Switzerland), 165–73, 247, 345n36; WeltEmfindung, 12, 35, 51–52, 75, 147. See also emotional biography; emotional modes works: “Abbadona,” 124; “The Aeolian Harp” (Eolova arfa), 19, 131; Alyosha, the Priest’s Son, or the Terrible Ruins (Aliosha Popovich i uzhasnye razvaliny), 93–94; “The Appearance of Poetry in the Image of Lalla Rookh” (Iavlenie poezii v vide Lalla Ruk), 219, 222, 281, 352n25; “Away from here, Melancholy . . .” (Proch’ otsel’, melankholiia; translation of Milton’s “L’Allegro”), 166–76; “Camillus or the Liberation of Rome” (Kamil, ili Osvobozhdennyi Rim), 30, 295n21; “The Chalice of Tears” (Chasha slioz), 283; “Count Hapsburg” (Graf Gapsburgskii), 186; “A Country Cemetery” (Sel’skoe kladbishche), 18–19, 71, 79–80, 99, 175; “Elvina and Edwin” (El’vina i Edvin), 131; “Epistle of Heloise and Abelard” (Poslanie Eloizy k Abeliaru), 19, 73, 150, 162; “Evening” (Vecher), 3, 87, 99; False Shame (Lozhnyi styd), 65–66, 68–70; “The Fisherman” (Rybak), 135, 186; “The Flower of the Oath” (Tsvet zaveta), 198–213; “The Forest King” (Lesnoi tsar’), 186; Für Wenige—For the Few (Dlia Nemnogikh), 181, 185– 97, 223; “The Hermit” (Pustynnik), 146; “Hope” (Nadezhda), 58; “The Hymn” (Gimn), 107–9; “The Ineffable” (Nevyrazimoe), 205– 6, 337n40; Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf (Ivan Tsarevich i seryi volk), 23; Kamoens, 204, 236, 245,

385

254–55, 292n9, 336n26, 342n51; “The Knight Togenburg” (Rytsar’ Togenburg), 19, 131, 186, 188, 260, 278; “Lalla Rookh,” 216–20, 223, 233–34; “Lenora,” 19, 322n16; “Lionel to Elmina” (Lionel’ k El’mine), 105; “Liudmila,” 19; “Madame de la Tour,” 30–32, 35–36; Maid of Orleans (Orleanskaia deva) 135, 141– 42, 186, 197, 203, 226–27, 234–35; “Maria’s Grove,” 105; Muratovo poems, 111–22; “My Secret” (Moia taina), 173; Nal and Damaianti (Nal’ i Damaianti), 271–77, 277–83; “New Love—New Life” (Novaia libov’—novaia zhizn’), 179, 181, 186; “A New Year Gift” (Podarok na novyi god), 103–5; Odyssey (Odisseiia), 23, 246, 260, 348n77; “Oh, I Pray To You, Creator” (O moliu tebia, Sozdatel’), 239–42, 251–53, 255–56, 261–62; “On Friendship” (O druzhbe), 63; “On Happiness” (O shchastii), 63; “On the Death Penalty” (O smertnoi kazni), 23; “On the Passions” (O strastiakh), 63; “Paradise” (Rai), 117–18; Pavlovsk poems, 20; Peri and the Angel (Peri i angel), 222; “The Prussian Vase” (Prusskaia vaza), 105; “Raphael’s Madonna” (Rafaeleva Madonna), 22, 87, 222, 232, 235, 236, 249, 270, 353n39; “The Sailor” (Plovets), 115– 16; “The Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors” (Pevets vo stane russkikh voinov), 20, 116; “The Singer in the Kremlin” (Pevets v Kremle), 20; “Slavianka,” 20, 54, 353n39; “Something on Ghosts” (Nechnto o privideniiakh), 52; “The Song” (“Roses are blooming;” “Pesnia. Rozy rastsvetaiut”), 280, 281; “Svetlana,” 20, 134–35, 153, 171, 173, 174, 176, 318n70, 322n16; “Thoughts at a Sepulcher” (Mysli pri grobnitse), 43; “Three Sisters: Minvana’s Vision” (Tri sestry: Videnie Minvany), 107; “To Nina” (K Nine), 106; “To the Moon” (K mesiatsu), 186–88, 191; “To the Por-

Index trait of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna” (K portretu velikoi kniagini Aleksandry Fedorovny), 184–85; Twelve Sleeping Maidens (Dvenadtsat’ spiashchikh dev), v, 57, 131–33, 135, 203, 236, 264, 318n71, 338n45; Undine (Undina), 166, 247–49, 345n39, 346n43; Vadim of Novgorod (Vadim Novgorodskii), 52; “The Vision” (Videnie), 279; Vladimir, 110–11; “The Writer in Society” (Pisatel’ v obshchestve), 101–2

386

Zimmerman, Carl, 259 Zimmerman, Johann Georg, 7 Zontag, Anna Petrovna (née Yushkova), 27–33, 35, 57, 120, 128, 168, 173, 239, 257, 292n1, 293n2, 293n3, 295n17, 296n21 Zorin, Andrei: emotional matrices, 7, 8, 57; 45, 48, 129, 287n11, 288n16, 291n43, 300n30, 301n38, 302n56, 305n32, 307n66, 308n72, 314n17, 315n24, 316n49, 332n53, 348n76. See also history of emotions Zweig, Stefan, 253, 347n55