the early phases of british interest in russian literature

The Early Phases of British Interest in Russian LiteratureAuthor(s): Gilbert PhelpsSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 36, No. 87 (Jun., 1958), pp. 418-433Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204960 .

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The Early

Phases of British Interest

in Russian Literature

GILBERT PHELPS

I

The publication of Constance Garnett's translation of'The Brothers

Karamazov' in 1912 undoubtedly marked the beginning of 'the

Russian fever'. As the Times Literary Supplement wrote in 1930,1 in an

important stocktaking article on 'Dostoyevsky and the English

Novel', awareness of the Russians 'seemed suddenly to communicate

itself in other countries; the infection spread'. The fever it engendered

raged for a few years and then died away as quickly as it had arisen,

leaving many critics breathless and bewildered in face of what

appeared to be a mysterious manifestation, without roots and with?

out traditions.

The concentration on this brief period of high fever has however

led to a distortion of perspectives, for there is a genuine history lying behind it, and fragmentary though this may be, it did in many

respects prepare the way for the later phase and help to mould it.

The infection may have been startling in its suddenness, but it is

possible to learn a good deal about the patient's constitution and in

consequence to isolate certain predisposing factors.

Some of these are of course inherent: prejudice and violence, for

example, enter into the story from the very beginning. The vilifica?

tion of Russia and things Russian began almost from the moment

that commercial and political contact was made. Thus Anthony Jenkinson (The First Voyage by Master Anthony Jenkinson . . . toward the

land of Russia in they eare 1557) described the Russian people as 'great talkers, and lyers, without any faith or truth in their words, flatterers and dissemblers'. 'It may be doubted', wrote Giles Fletcher in his famous book Of the Russe Commonwealth, written in 1558 and, curi?

ously enough, frequently translated into Russian, 'whether is the

greater, the crueltie or intemperance that is used in this country'. And 'money is their best president', Samuel Collins declared {The Present State of Russia, 1671).

It was difficult for observers in this state of mind to find anything good to say. Samuel Collins scoffed at the 'contemptible' music and

poetry of the Russians, and at their 'pitiful paintings', while Milton, in 1682, in his brief History of Muscovia, which drew upon the travel books of Purchas, Hakluyt, Chancellor, Willoughby, and others, asserted that they 'have no learning, nor will suffer to be among

1 5 June 1930, p. 465.



BRITISH INTEREST IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE 419

them'. Russia was depicted as an utterly barbarous country, in

which the graces of civilisation could find no place: 'the Russians', Samuel Collins declared, 'love nothing soft or smooth but their

women's fat sides'.

Nevertheless the rudimentary beginnings of an interest in Russian

culture are apparent even at this early stage. In spite of his con?

temptuous comments Samuel Collins was sufficiently interested in

Russian church music to take down parts of several anthems, and

there were a number of references to church paintings and furnish?

ings both in his book and in those of the other travellers. It is of

course possible that some of the hostility towards these was associated

with religious passions nearer home. Horsey too tells us that he read

some of the Russian 'cronickells', and there is in the British Museum a

Slavonic bible of 1581, inscribed in Horsey's hand, 'This Bibell in the

Slavonian tongue, had out of the Emperor's librarie'.2 Even Tur-

berville, one of the most unfriendly of the early travellers, had to

admit that the Russians could play chess:

'The Common game is chesse, almost the simplest will

Both give a check, and eke a mate, by practice is their skill.'

Paradoxically enough, in view of later ignorance, the language seems to have attracted some attention. Horsey, for example, praised the 'Slavonian tongue' as 'the most copious and elegent language in the world' (cf. 'A Reaction, or Memoriall', published in Purchas His

Pilgrimes, 1626), and Queen Elizabeth herself expressed her interest,

assuring Horsey that she 'could quickly learne it', and urging Essex to do so. It was, incidentally, in 1696, two years before Peter the Great's visit, that the first Russian grammar by H. W. Ludolf was

published in Oxford.

In an age that was excited by the very existence of language, this

curiosity about an unknown tongue was perhaps to be expected, and there are quite a number of garbled Russian words to be found in the works of the Elizabethan poets and playwrights. Thomas Nashe, for example, in Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596), puns on his own name with 'ponuloi nashe (pomiluy nas), which is in the Russian

tongue, Have mercie upon us'. The various Muscovite embassies to Elizabeth's court, of course,

aroused a good deal of popular interest, and there are numerous references to them, including the famous ones in Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's Lost', which probably refer to the 1582 mission, when the Russian envoy came to arrange a treaty and to discuss the

possibility of a match between Elizabeth's kinswoman, Lady Mary

2 There are also some of Ivan IVs letters in the British Museum.



420 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Hastings, and Ivan IV, the earlier proposals to Elizabeth herself

having been rejected. It is perhaps pertinent to close these brief references to the earliest

'cultural' contacts between the two countries with a mention of the

manuscript which Richard James, chaplain to Sir Dudley Digges, one of the commercial envoys to Russia, brought home in 1618. This

contained Russian transcriptions of six folk songs, which according to Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (in the Lowell Lectures, delivered at New

York in 1905, and afterwards published as Ideals and Realities in

Russian Literature), are the only specimens of popular Russian songs

belonging to that turbulent period of Russian history known as 'the

time of troubles' (smutnoye vremya) to have survived. This manuscript is preserved in the Bodleian, together with James's notebook, which

contains a list of Russian words with their English equivalents. One

of the songs was eventually translated into English as 'The Song of

the Princess Kseniya Borisovna' in W. R. Morfill's The Story of Russia (1890). If one wished to be fanciful one might claim Richard

James's manuscript as the historical starting-point of the infiltration

of Russian literature into England. It can, at any rate, be claimed with some justification, that in a

simple and exaggerated form we already have established the broad

outlines of a pattern which was to persist for a long time to come, and which has never been entirely obliterated. It is a pattern in which

genuine interest struggles against a sense of cultural superiority and a whole set of stock emotional reactions and generalised notions3

arrayed against a background of political and commercial hos?

tility or self-interest. Thus when Potugin in Turgenev's novel Dym

('Smoke') says 'the samovar, the woven bast-shoe, the yoke, and the knout?these are our famous products', he is in fact drawing atten? tion to the persistency of these earlier Western reactions. At times, as we shall see, these negative elements kept out the positive; at others

they allowed them only a grudging and limited functioning. But at all times they made for distortion, and the conflict between them has been one of the main causes of the excitable atmosphere that sur? rounds the reception of Russian culture in Britain.

There would be no point, therefore, in examining in any detail the 'travellers' tales' of the next hundred years or so. There are occasional instances of more objective reporting, for example Dr John Bell's Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Divers Parts of Asia (1763), which Dr Samuel Johnson commended to Boswell, while several of the

books, for example W. Coxe's Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark (1784), contained accounts of Russian literature from

3 The travellers, and especially Giles Fletcher, had been lavish in their descriptions of alcohol, sledges, ice, snow, and wolves.




French and German sources. It is worth noting too that distinguished names begin to crop up among the visitors to Russia. It is intriguing, for example, to contemplate Jeremy Bentham's life at Potyomkin's model colony at Kremenchug in the Ukraine, among the Wedgwood ware, silver dish-covers, and dirty iron knives and forks, surrounded

by English, Welsh, and German experts in dairying and gardening. Bentham arrived in January 1785 and was in Russia for nearly two

years. His job was to help in drawing up the famous model con?

stitution, and he was attracted to Russia for the simple reason that

she 'at least . . . had nothing to unlearn; there was no pretence that her constitution and organisation were the best possible'. He was not

the only European of course to believe that Russia under Catherine

the Great 'had shown its willingness to be informed and led by the

philosophic legislator'. But if unlikely names in connection with

Russian travels are looked for, those of Lewis Carroll and Mark

Twain in the succeeding century are just as surprising. On the whole however the books written by travellers of the 18th

and the early 19th century, and the articles about them in the

periodicals, continued the tradition of suspicion and hostility, al?

though Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Alexander I had their respective admirers. American reactions, incidentally were on the whole less unfriendly than the British: units of the Russian fleet even paid friendly visits to New York and San Francisco in 1863-4, in order to bolster the morale of the North during the Civil War,

according to some sources. Russophobia in England however was

particularly strong between 1814 and 1841, engendered by such

political events as the Greek and Polish revolutions, and the various

Near-East, Middle-East, Persian, and Afghan crises which caused the favourable opinion of Catherine and Alexander I to be thoroughly revised, while Nicholas I, kindly regarded at his accession, was

depicted as a monster of depravity. Revelations of Russia; or the

Emperor Nicholas and his Empire in 1844. By one who has seen and describes, and Russia under the Autocrat Nicholas I, by Anthony C. Stirling, were

typical of the anti-Russian books written by visitors to Russia during this period. After the Straits Convention this Russophobia died down somewhat to return with greater virulence during the Cri? mean War. Little more need be said about the travellers' books, except to note that a large number of them were still based on the most superficial acquaintance with the country they purported to describe4 and that former prejudices and generalisations persisted. There is in fact a kind of circular movement to be observed in con? nection with these hostile descriptions: thus it was in 1851 that the

4 A fact frequently commented on by the periodicals, so that particular attention was drawn to the few genuine excursions 'into the interior'.




Hakluyt Society published George Turberville's Certain Letters in Verse . . . Out of Muscovia, and in I856, while anti-Russian feeling aroused by the Crimean War was still at its height, the Society also published E. A. Bond's Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, which included Giles Fletcher's Qf the Russe Commonwealth, while the Marquis de Custine's La Russie en I839 was retranslated into English and published in America in 195I .

As a source of bizarre themes and 'background material' however Russia attracted at the same time that she repelled. Some evidence of this is apparent even in the i8th century. Aaron Hill, for example, a friend of Pope and Richardson, published his long poem, 'The Northern Star', a eulogy of Peter the Great, in I7I8, and it had run into five editions by I 739, while a Latin translation, included in the I 724 edition, was dispatched to Peter himself, earning for its author a gold medal. There are passages about Russia too in Goldsmith's Letters of a Citizen of the World. Fum Hoam, echoing the contemporary political distrust, writes to Lien Chi Altangi: 'I cannot avoid beholding the Russian Empire as the natural enemy of the more western parts of Europe; as an enemy already possessed of great strength, and from the nature of the government every day threatening to become more powerful', and in this and other letters there are descriptions of dress, customs, and scenery. The attraction was even stronger however for the poets of the romantic revival: the enthusiasm for the East, and the popularity of Oriental themes in such poems as 'Lalla Rookh', 'The Loves of the Angels', 'The Epicurean', and 'The Revolt of Islam', no doubt prepared the way for interest in yet another strange and semi-oriental country. Thomas Moore, for example, describes 'The Russian Lover'-the title of one of the ballads-as speeding 'fleetly o'er the moonlit snows'. Walter Savage Landor devoted some of his Imaginary Conversations to Russian historical personages: there are, for example, the dialogues between Peter the Great and the Tsarevich Alexis, and we may note a particularly bloodthirsty one, between Catherine the Great and Princess Dashkova, outside the bedroom door behind which Catherine's husband, Peter III, is being murdered. There was Wordsworth's 'The Russian Fugitive' (I830); Catherine the Great figured in Byron's 'Don Juan'; and there was the Voltaire-inspired 'Mazeppa'.

It is interesting too to observe that it was in I833 that Robert Browning visited Russia and heard from 'my friend the Russ' the tale, with its stage-property-wolves, sledges, and snow-which eventually issued as 'Ivan Ivanovitch' in I879. There is also a reference in his letters to a play of which no trace has been found, entitled 'Oxlya, Player-Girl', 'about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkies, and fish-pies and so forth, with palaces in the background'.




This kind of interest, it is true, amounts to very little in terms of Russian 'influence'. At the same time a playing with background themes and material is a common preparatory phase in the process of cultural infiltration.

Of greater importance are the first translations. Many of these, it is true, are of more interest to the bibliographer than to the literary historian. But it is worth while examining them in some detail, up to say I869, when W. R. Ralston's Liza (a version of Turgenev's Dvoryanskoye gnezdo) was published. They are in some ways as plausible a starting-point for the Russian infiltration as I912, if for no other reason than that they are the first stepping-stones.

It is not, perhaps, generally realised how early these translations began. The first, it would seem, was in I 723, when the Russian Cate- chism of Feofan Prokopovich was published in a translation, apparently from the Russian, by J. T. Philips. A second edition followed two years later, and it is relevant to note that an interest in the Russian Orthodox Church, the tentative beginnings of which we noticed in the early travel books, was maintained throughout this early period. It may be said to have assumed some importance with the advent of the theologian Platon (Pyotr Levshin).

The first of Platon's works to be translated into English in 1770 was A Sermon Preached by Order of her Imperial Majesty on the Tomb of Peter the Great, in the Cathedral Church of St Petersburg. But more important was the Brief Theology, published in Russia in I755, and subsequently translated into many European languages. There were three English editions. The first, entitled The Present State of the Greek Church in Russia, or A Summary of Christian Divinity was 'translated from the Sclavonic' by Robert Pinkerton and published in Edinburgh in I814, and in New York the following year. There was another version in I857, with the 'Treatise on Melchisedec' added, and a third, The Great Catechism of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Orthodox Church, translatedfrom the Greek, in I867.

Platon's Brief Theology was, according to Russian sources, at one time in use as a text-book for divinity students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, while Platon himself received many Euro- pean visitors in Russia, including some Englishmen. It is tempting, if somewhat fanciful, to see in this appearance of Platon in English translation the genesis of later interest in 'Holy Russia', or even to detect a link between the visits of Europeans to Platon and the later pilgrimages to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. These are speculations only, but there can be no doubt of a continuing British interest in the Russian Church. Dean Stanley's Lectures on the Eastern Church (i 86i), for example, was widely read: the eleventh edition of the Engcclo- paedia Britannica (i 9II) speaks of 'the struggles of Nikon with the




Tsar, and his emendations of the sacred books, which led to the great schism in Russia', as being 'well known', because they have been made familiar to our people 'by the eloquent pages of the late Dean Stanley', and this interest, in an age when theology mattered, cannot have been without some effect.

It was religious feeling too that lay behind the popularity of Derzhavin's 'Ode to God', which has been translated into many European languages (there are no less than fifteen French versions) and into several Oriental ones. It made its first English appearance in Sir John Bowring's Specimens of the Russian Poets ( 82 I) and turned up again in I 849, in America, in a collection of Russian poems made by W. D. Lewis. In i86i -a curious apotheosis-it was published as a broadside by W. Stokes, 'Teacher of Memory at the Royal Poly- technic Institute of London', with a preface which informs us that this 'exalted poem' was 'translated into the Tartar and Chinese languages, written in silk, and suspended in the Imperial Palace at Pekin', while the emperor of Japan 'had it translated into Japanese, embroidered in gold, and hung up in the temple ofJeddo'.

There were other appearances of Derzhavin's poem, both in England and America, and in the history of the slow and very gradual penetration of Russian literature, what can be justly described as that 'popularity' of Russian poetry during these early years cannot be overlooked; at the least it must have familiarised English readers with Russian names, scenes, and themes.

The important landmark, if this is not too extravagant a term, is Sir John Bowring's Specimens of the Russian Poets. Bowring, linguist, economist, and Member of Parliament, was a friend of Jeremy Bentham, who was perhaps originally responsible for interesting him in the subject. He had at first planned to write a history of Russian literature, but decided to publish first 'a few translations of the poetry of a people, the political influence of whose government on the rest of Europe has been long moving with gigantic strides, and will soon be more sensibly felt'. The history was never written, but the conception at least shows that some people were by now aware that there was a literature to write about. The Specimens, as we have seen, appeared in I82I, and quickly went into a second edition, because, Bowring tells us, it was 'received with singular, nay with flattering encouragement'. A second part was issued in I823.

The claim that Bowring's were the first English translations of Russian poetry was, incidentally, challenged in 1902 by Professor Leo Wiener, who discovered that some translations made by W. D. Lewis from Neledinsky-Meletsky had appeared in The National Gazette and Literary Register of Philadelphia a few months before Bowring's collection was published; but these minor pieces do not




in any way detract from the historical importance of Bowring's work.

The two parts of The Specimens include poems by Derzhavin, singled out for special praise by Bowring, Kantemir, whose satires, translated into French by Abbe Guasco, were published in London (I749-50), Batyushkov, who visited England in I823, Lomonosov, Dmitriyev, Bogdanovich, Izmaylov, Kozlov, Zhukovsky, and Krylov. Of these, Krylov was perhaps the most popular: W. D. Lewis translated three of his fables in I 825; there were long articles about him, together with specimens, in Fraser's Magazine in I839, and again in I842, and in I869 Ralston published his book Krilov and his Fables. Greatest of them all, Pushkin, was on the whole rather poorly represented during this early period. There were some extracts from his verse in L. H. Saunders's Poetical Translationsfrom the Russian Language (I826), and in I827 specimens of Pushkin's verse were published in The Foreign Review. A long extract from 'Poltava' was included in an article in the Foreign Quarterly Review in I832, and comparison was invited with Byron's 'Mazeppa'; there was also an extract from 'The Fountain in Bakhchisaray'.

It is true that in I835 Pushkin achieved the dignity of a volume, viz. The Talisman: from the Russian of Alexander Pushkin. With other Pieces, but this book is a bibliographical curiosity more than anything else. It is an interesting one however, for the translator was George Borrow, who had been sent to St Petersburg by the Bible Society in August I833 to supervise the preparation of a Manchu translation of the New Testament, and it was in St Petersburg that his small volume was published. Besides 'The Talisman' it contained 'The Mermaid', also by Pushkin, three 'Ancient Russian Songs', an 'Ancient Ballad from the Malo-Russian', and 'The Renegade', from the Polish of Mickiewicz.

The three articles on Pushkin's 'Life and Works', which were written by Thomas Budge Shaw for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (August I845) and which contained translations of 'The Feast of Peter the First', 'The Lay of the Wise Oleg', 'Andre Chenier', 'The Mob', 'The Black Shawl', 'Napoleon', and 'The General', represented the only really important contribution to Pushkin's English reputation during this period, and it was not until i88i that revgeny Onegin was translated by Lieutenant-Colonel Spalding, the translator of Melchior de Voguie's Le roman russe (i886).

In order to obtain a fair picture of what Russian culture, as viewed through the publishers' lists, looked like at this stage, leaving fiction aside for the moment, we should note one or two further examples of early translation.

History, for instance, was early represented by Lomonosov's




Chronological Abridgement of Russian History, 'printed for T. Snelling ... next the Horn Tavern in Fleet Street', in I 767, and in I 792 by Pleschief's [S. I. Pleshcheyev's] Survey of The Russian Empire, 'translated from the Russian, with additions' by 'J. Smirnove', who was apparently a Russian living in London.

These were not of course the only sources of historical information available in the i8th century. There were, in addition to such well- known books as Captain John Perry's State of Russia Under the Present Tsar (I7I6) and W. Richardson's Anecdotes of the Russian Empire (I783), which contained a certain amount of reliable historical information, more serious works such as John Williams's Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Northern Governments (I777), in the preparation of which the author had consulted original manuscripts in the Mos- cow archives, and W. Took's View of the Russian Empire during the Reign of Catherine the II, published in three volumes in 1799. It is interesting moreover to note here that a book published in I 723 and entitled An Imperial History of the Life and Actions of Peter Alexowitz, Czar of Muscovy, has been ascribed to Daniel Defoe. There were also many translations from German and French histories and memoirs: David Hume, for example, translated the 'Russian Memoirs' of Christof Hermann von Manstein into English in 1770. The most important historical works of the period however were in French, notably Pierre Levesque's Histoire de la Russie, in five volumes, published in Paris in I782. This work and also Voltaire's Histoire de l'empire de la Russie sous Pierre-le-Grand were certainly well known to English historians of the period, and the i 8th-century French philosophers played a vital part in spreading knowledge about Russia in this country. It is important too at this point to draw attention to a history of Russian literature, with a lexicon of Russian authors, by Friedrich Otto, translated in I839 by George Cox, a Fellow of New College, Oxford.

Germans were the first to 'discover' Russian literature and to dis- seminate it: a bibliography of Russian literature was published in Germany as early as I769, and Otto's history was an important source of information. It was not an entirely fortunate one however, for it was German as well as French influence which was responsible for confusion in the transliteration of Russian names. Thus we find Henry James using the form 'Ivan Turgenew' if he is reviewing a German translation, and 'Tourguenieff' if it is a French one. Another important book, An Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic Nations, with a sketch of their popular poetry by Talvj (Therese von Jacob), was published under her married name, Mrs Robinson, in New York in I 850.

The field of autobiography in Russian literature was represented




among these early translations by The journal of Peter the Great (from the French, I773), The Memoirs of Princess Dashkow [Ye. R. Dash- kova], written by Herself and edited by Mrs W. Bradford (I 840) (from the French manuscript, but first published in English), The Memoirs of the Empress Catherine II, written by herself, translated from the French in 1858, with a preface by Herzen, and by V. N. Tatishchev's Testament, published in an English translation in Paris in i86o, and by other books extant in French versions.

The mention of Herzen is a reminder that from I848 onwards London was the home of numerous political refugees. Herzen established his Free Russian Press in the spring of I853. Apart however from a few public appearances, a few speeches, an occasional dinner party with the literary celebrities of the day, a few pamphlets in English, and some meetings and correspondence with Carlyle, he had few real contacts with English life which, like an earlier romantic exile, Jean Jacques Rousseau, he found, according to a letter of I855, 'about as boring as that of worms in a cheese'.

Finally, even Russian drama was introduced to English readers in these early years; for in i 8o6 appeared Demetrius, the Impostor: A Tragedy in Four Acts by A. P. Sumarokov, described in the preface as 'the Father of the Russian Theatre and its first Dramatic Poet'. But more important, from the point of view of literary quality, was Gore ot Ouma: A Comedy from the Russian of Griboiedof [Griboyedov]. Trans- lated by Nicholas Benardaky in I857, and the extracts from the plays of A. N. Ostrovsky, which were published in The Edinburgh Review in the text of an article entitled 'The Modern Russian Drama' in I868. In other words a considerable body of information about Russian culture and history, together with a fairly wide range of translations, had accumulated before i869.

II

If we are looking for a starting-point for the history of Russian fiction in England it should, from the point of view of chronological accuracy, be I793, when Ivan Czarowitz: or the Rose Without Prickles that Stings Not: A Tale Written by her Imperial Majesty. Translatedfrom the Russian Language, was published in book-form with several foot- notes explaining Russian phrases. The 'Advertisement' informs us that 'the original' was given to Dr James Anderson, editor of The Bee (Edinburgh), where, 'translated with an elegant simplicity ... it first appeared in an English dress. It is now printed separately for the satisfaction of the curious.'

This is one of the 'moral tales' written by Catherine the Great during her 'French phase'. It is difficult to say whether it attracted




attention, although Catherine as a personality certainly fascinated; she was in correspondence with Bentham and other English thinkers, and even more so of course with the French Encyclopaedists, and in I 768 she personally authorised an English translation of the 'Nakaz' or code of laws, about which she had sought their advice.

A few years later however a genuine Russian author may be said, at any rate, to have 'made an impression'. In I803 N. M. Karam- zin's Travels from Moscow through Germany, Switzerland, France, and England, which, as the translator A. A. Feldborg pointed out in his preface, was strongly influenced by Laurence Sterne's Sentimental journey, appeared in a translation from the German. In the same year a translation of one of Karamzin's 'sentimental tales', 'Julia' (from the French this time) was published in St Petersburg. And only a few months later Russian Tales (which included 'Julia') was brought out in London, with an engraving of Karamzin for frontispiece and a preface by the translator, John Battersby Elrington. This was addressed 'To My Friends' and declared that 'this translation is not offered to your perusal by Genius aiming at Fame; but by a Gentleman in Prison labouring for Bread'. Another preface, addressed 'To the World' explains: 'I have attempted to dress a Foreign Beauty in an English Costume'.

In the following year the Tales appeared again. In the preface to this version A. A. Feldborg refers to the success of his translation of the Travels and expresses the hope of 'a similar indulgence towards this second attempt, should my endeavour be found in some degree corresponding with the Just Expectations of the Public'. There is some mystery here however, for Feldborg's translations are almost identical with those of the unfortunate John Battersby Elrington.

The next phase might be described as one of rebound from Sir Walter Scott. To it belongs a group of translations from Russian novelists who had been directly inspired by his example. The first of these was F. V. Bulgarin's Ivan Vejeyghen [Vyzhigin], translated by G. Ross in I83I and published in the United States in the following year. This was the first Russian novel to be published there. Three years later appeared M. N. Zagoskin's The roung Muscovite: or the Poles in Russia. Edited by Captain Frederic Chamier, R.JN. The substitu- tion of 'edited' for 'translated' covers a curious set of circumstances. According to the preface the manuscript was in the first instance translated by 'a Russian Lady of high rank and her two amiable daughters' and dedicated 'by the author's desire as well as their own' to Sir Walter Scott. The information that 'his Novels had been the means of forming a new school of writings in Russia' apparently pleased Scott, who, the editors inform us, 'accepted




the... Dedication in a manner which did honour to M. Zagoskin and the fair Translators as well as to himself.'

This interesting evidence of direct contact between Sir Walter Scott and his apprentices in Russia gives added point to Turgenev's speech at the Scott Centenary Celebrations in Edinburgh in I87I, in which he declared that 'all our best writers have been sincere admirers, some of them have been imitators of your great master of romance'.

It was the desire perhaps to make their offering more acceptable to Scott that led the editors to make 'improvements' and even to add 'new incidents where M. Zagoskin's narrative appeared to be defective'. Captain Chamier5 hastens to assure us that 'in effecting these improvements, nothing has been done to deteriorate the sen- timents, or characters or incidents of the Original-on the contrary, great pains have been taken to give all these their due-and if possible an increased effect'. In some cases however even the names of the characters are 'changed to something more harmonious', while quotations from the English poets are used as chapter epigraphs. We are assured however that 'there is nothing British-everything is Russian'. The 'editing' in this case did perform some useful service: there is an interesting account of Zagoskin and his work, together with a number of notes containing pertinent historical information, but it is, of course, only too typical of the kind of liberties taken with texts in this early phase.

Rather more important, in terms of its impact on the English public, is Thomas Budge Shaw's translation of 'Ammalat Bek' by Marlinsky (A. A. Bestuzhev) in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in I843. Shaw, who contributed many articles on Russian literature to the periodicals, including two on Pushkin in Blackwood's Maga- zine in I845, went to Russia in I840, settled in St Petersburg, was for some years Adjunct Professor of English at the Imperial Lyceum of Tsarskoye Selo, where he wrote his Outlines of English Literature by request of the Russian authorities, and subsequently tutor in English to Russian royalty until his death in I862. He is one of the important links between English and Russian culture in the i gth century, the first of a succession of scholars, who by reason of a special interest in Russia and the Russian language were to play a major role in the introduction of Russian literature to Britain.

The publication of 'Ammalat Bek' in an important periodical certainly assured it a considerable public, and Shaw was presumably referring to its success when he wrote of 'the indulgent-nay flattering reception met with by the Translator in his first attempt' in the

5 This preface may possibly be by a Colin Mackenzie. The words 'written by Colin Mackenzie, Esq., author of The Clubs of London, etc.' appear in ink on the fly-leaf of the British Museum copy.




preface to another book in the following year. This was a translation of The Heretic (Basurman) of I. I. Lazhechnikov, and it was at least sufficiently successful to encourage Shaw to produce a second version in I849 under the more romantic title of The Heretic and the Maid of Moscow, while another of Bestuzhev's novels, under the bizarre title of The Tartar Chief, or a Russian Colonel's Head for a Dowry, was published in I 846. Shaw's 'editing' of The Heretic, incidentally, was confined to placing Russian mottoes at the chapter headings and the sensible addition of several pages of Russian names with appropriate English pronunciations.

III

We now come to the stage at which curiosity was sharply stimu- lated, and in many cases distorted, by the series of political crises which culminated in the Crimean War, and at which the English public was for the first time introduced to Russian fiction of un- mistakable literary calibre.

Perhaps the most important of this group of translations was that of Pushkin's Pikovaya dama (Queen of Spades), made almost certainly from the French and probably from Prosper Merim6e's version in La Revue des Deux Mondes a few years earlier. The form which it took implies a considerable audience and at a more popular level; for it was published in October I850 as No. 38 of Chambers's Papers for the People, although without the names of author or translator. It was reprinted towards the end of the same year in the American Living Age and appeared again in I854 in one of the English annuals, The Gift of Friendship, which again suggests a wide appeal, and indeed the story maintained its popularity all through the igth century. There were new versions by Mrs Suther- land Edwards in I892, by Thomas Keane in I894, and by C. E. Turner in I899, and it crops up frequently in English and American periodicals and collections. There have been at least two translations in our own century, and it has been made into both a radio play and a film.

Pushkin's 'Scottesque' romance Kapitanskaya dochka (The Captain's Daughter)-the spell of Scott had by no means exhausted itself- was first translated, very unsatisfactorily, by T. K. Hanstein in I859. Its real popularity however came later: it appeared in I875 in an interesting little volume by Mrs Telfer entitled Russian Romance, in I877 in America in a translation by M. de Zielinska, under the title of Marie, and it was included in Thomas Kean's Prose Tales of A. Pushkin in I 894. Like 'The Queen of Spades', it also found its way into many English and American periodicals.




Most of Pushkin's tales in fact appeared in one form or another during the igth century. 'The Pistol Shot', for example, was published in Albion in i86i, and even the unfinished 'Dubrovsky' was translated, along with Grigorovich's 'New Year's Eve' and Ler- montov's 'Taman", in Tales from the Russian, issued by The Railway and General Automatic Library in i892.

As for Lermontov, he suffered rather more than Pushkin from the hostile atmosphere in which he first appeared. For in I853 there was published another of the 'piracies' of the period. It was entitled Sketches of Russian Life in the Caucasus, and the authorship was mys- teriously assigned to 'A Russe, Many Years Resident Among the Mountain Tribes'. It was included in the Illustrated Family Novelist series and contained some interesting engravings of Russian scenes which had already become traditional, including a fine frontispiece showing a troyka, drawn by horses with flying manes and driven by a bearded and fur-capped driver with a Byronic scowl on his face. This volume was in fact the first English version of Lermontov's Geroy nashego vremeni (Hero of Our Time). It was a rather elaborate forgery, even the names of the characters were crudely disguised: Bela, for example, became Khabila; the title of the last chapter 'A Fatalist' was changed to 'Predestination'; and 'Taman", perhaps the best of the episodes, was omitted altogether.

In I854 however David Bogue produced a complete and reason- ably sound version with due acknowledgement of authorship, and in the same year Therese Pulszky published her translation in New York in The Parlour Library. Fresh translations followed at regular intervals throughout the i gth century, for example in I 886, which has been described as 'the vintage year' of Russian translations and would seem to be another rival to I 9 1 2 as a 'starting-point'. R. I. Lipmann's version was published and reissued the following year in Vizetelly's Celebrated Russian Novelists series, and the episode 'Taman" was published separately in various periodicals and collections. Lermontov's poems 'The Demon' and 'The Circassian Boy' [sic] both appeared in i875, and 'The Demon' has been translated at least four times since then.

An even more interesting 'piracy' appeared in i 854 under the title Home Life in Russia, ascribed to 'A Russian Noble' and 'Revised by the Editor of Revelations of Siberia', apparently a Polish colonel named Szyrma, who had studied at Edinburgh University, and who was responsible for several bogus translations. The anonymous 'Russian Noble', according to a skilful and plausible preface had Coffered the manuscript in English to the publishers, and the Editor's task' had been confined to 'altering such verbal errors as might be expected'. But, it continues, 'we are not at liberty to mention the author's name-not', the editor hastens to assure us, 'that the work




itself requires any further vindication, for its genuineness is avouched by almost every line', but because 'the writer is still anxious to return to his native country and is perfectly aware that the avowal of his handiwork . . . will not serve as a special recommendation, except possibly as a passport for the innermost regions of the Siberian wilds'. And this was written twelve years after the publication of Myortvyye dushi (Dead Souls) and two years after Gogol"s death.

The intention underlying this publication is clearly stated: it is to 'throw light upon the domestic life of our ancient allies and present foes' and to give 'an insight into the internal circumstances and rela- tions of Russian society which only a Russian could afford us'. We are told that 'the author affirms that the story is true and that the main facts are well known in Russia'. In other words the book is presented as a piece of straightforward reporting, and there is no attempt to assess its literary merits, its relationship to Russian literature, or the satirical purpose behind it. The text is very much cut about, and the book is made to end as follows:

The Imperial messenger pointed silently to a sinister-looking carriage, called a Siberian Kibitka, into which our hero was assisted without being able to utter a syllable-and the next moment he was a dead man!

It was not, in fact, until i886, the 'vintage year' again, that Tchitchikoff's [Chichikov's] Journeys: or Dead Souls was published and ascribed to Gogol'. This was Isabel Hapgood's translation, and even now Gogol' received scant justice, for a 'Continuation of Dead Souls', vastly inferior in quality, was added without any explanation, and this defect was not remedied until Constance Garnett produced her version of I922.

Gogol"s short story 'The Portrait' however had already appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in I847; in I855 The Dublin University Magazine published 'Old World Landowners', and Cossack Tales, which included 'Taras Bul'ba', appeared in i86o in a translation by George Tolstoy. There was another translation of 'Taras Bul'ba' in i886 by Isabel Hapgood, and St J0hn's Eve and Other Stories, by the same translator, also came out in i886 to a somewhat dubious reception in the periodicals.

In this respect Turgenev was almost as badly served as Gogol', so far as his first appearance was concerned. It was in i 855 that James D. Meiklejohn published Russian Life in the Interior, or the Experiences of A Sportsman, a pirated version of Zapiski okhotnika, taken from a French translation-an incompetent rendering against which Tur- genev himself protested. In I854 however the August number of Fraser's Magazine published 'Photographs from Russian Life' (the imagery of photography is now beginning to enter literature) by




'M. Ivan Tourghenieff' (one of several versions of Turgenev's name), selected from Charriere's Memoirs d'un seigneur russe. During the following year Household Words, under the editorship of Charles Dickens, presented in its usual breezy manner an interesting series of summaries and extracts, also taken from Charrie;re, under the titles 'The Children of the Tsar', 'More Children of the Tsar', 'Nothing like Russian Leather', and 'A Singing Match'. In I862 'The Two Prima Donnas' and 'The Dumb Door Porter' (better known as 'Mumu') were published in a volume by G. A. Sala.

The first version of Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Children), 'translated from the Russian, with the approval of the author', by Eugene Schuyler, was published in New York in I867, and another of the full-length novels, Dym, appeared in the following year in a bad anonymous version, against which Turgenev had once again to protest, under the title Smoke: or Life at Baden. In addition, many of Tur- genev's short stories appeared in British and American periodicals. And so to I869 and W. R. S. Ralston's Liza (Dvoyanskoye Gnezdo), which marks the real 'starting-point' of Turgenev's reputation in England, and thus of a new and infinitely more important phase in the history of the Russian novel in English fiction.

It was Turgenev indeed who dominated the story for a considerable time; Lev Tolstoy's fame was to come later, and Dostoyevsky did not make his appearance in English until i886. But there are two early translations from Tolstoy which deserve mention. Child- hood and routh, which was published in London in I862, was translated from the Russian by Malwida von Meysenbug, a translator of a very different calibre from the usual run, a friend of many famous contemporary writers, musicians, and composers, including Wagner, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen, and in her old age a profound influence on Romain Rolland. The second, The Death of Ivan (Ilyich) was translated in I869 by I. H. Harrison.

And finally this early period saw examples of the work of the minor Russian writers of the 'golden age'. In 1854, for example, Sollogub's 'The Apothecary's Wife' found its way into The Dublin University Magazine, and in i86i Saltykov-Shchedrin's Tchinovicks (Gubernskiye ocherki) was published in London in a translation by F. Aston.

In other words, by I869, in spite of the pressure of that uneasy atmosphere which fills the entire history of the Russian novel in Eng- land, and the establishment of the various emotional 'stereotypes' that attended it, there was a growing interest in Russian themes and back- grounds, however distorted, and a considerable body of Russian literature available in English translation, including not only history, biography, drama, and poetry, but also examples of fiction by both minor Russian writers and the great Russian novelists themselves.



the early phases of british interest in russian literature

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