"PEOPLE'S ANCESTORS ARE HISTORY'S GAME": BYRON'S DON JUAN AND RUSSIAN HISTORY

Northumbria University, Newcastle

NOTES

1 Byron's reception in many European countries in the nineteenth century is addressed in Paul Graham Trueblood's Boron's Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

2 On Byron and Bakhtin in relation to the theorisation of carnival and laughter, see Philip W. Martin, "Reading Don juan with Bakhtin," in Nigel Wood, ed. Theory into Practice: Don Juan (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), pp. 90-121. see also Charles Donelan, Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's Don juan (London: Macmillan, 2000).

3 see T, S. Eliot's essay on Byron in On Poetry and Poets', see also E R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry.

4 see Jane Stabler's succinct overview of Byron's reputation as a poet (1-26).

5 Much of what follows on Byron and early nineteenth-century Russia is indebted to Diakovna and Vacuro's valuable essay.

6 see Byron's preface to canto 6 in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works (5: 295). All references to Don juan, unless otherwise specified, are to this edition, abbreviated to BCPW, and are numbered by volume, canto, and stanza.

7 see canto 7, stanzas 44-45, for Byron's comments on the condition of England in the immediate wake of Napoleon's defeat.

8 In canto 9.28, Byron makes reference to the legitimacy of rebellion in Spain and Greece. Caught in an imperialist and oppressive web, "None save the Spanish fly and Attic bee, / As yet are strongly stinging to be free."

9 Nikolay Novikov, Satiricheskie zhurnaly, cited in Cross 233. see also Dukes, "The Russian Enlightenment." see also E. J. Simmons, English Literature and Culture in Russia, 1553-1840, and M. S. Anderson, Britain's Discovery of Russia, 1553-1815.

10 On Byron's debt to the poetics of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Andrew Rutherford.

11 see George Lukacs, The Historical Novel, especially chapter one, "The Classical Form of the Historical Novel" (15-100).

12 Byron's relation to Scott and the relation between Don juan and the historical novel is brilliantly discussed in James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the case of Romantic Historicism, 375.

13 see also Jerome Christenson, Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society, and Jerome J. McGann, "The Book of Byron and the Book of the World."

14 According to Montefiore, Potemkin's debauchery was nothing more than a "facade" (449).

WORKS CITED

Anderson, M. S. Britain's Discovery of Russia, 1553-1815. London: Macmillan, 1958.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Epic and NOvel." The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1990. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. 3-40.

Byron, George Gordon. The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron. 7 vols. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.

_____. Byron's Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie Marchand. 13 Vols. London: John Murray, 1973.

Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.