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

Byron's recourse to sexual politics in the poem is indicative of the extent to which they were important in understanding Russian affairs in the later reign of Catherine II and onwards into the post-Napoleonic period under Alexander. Bastardy and illegitimacy are crucial aspects of dynastic despotism in the poem and in Byron's reading of Russian politics, which justifies attacks upon the right to rule by those who claim their wills to be divine and above reproach. In several instances, Byron makes reference to Catherine's promiscuity, and does so in a fashion that links political office to sexual transgression. Catherine is "greatest of all sovereigns and whores" (5.6.92) and also a "modern Amazon and Queen of queans" (5.6.96). As both Jerome McGann and Katherine Kernberger have noted, sex and oppression in the poem are virtually inseparable. McGann argues that "Catherine uses sex and therefore makes it an equivocal value" (Fiery Dust 297); whilst in Kernberger's view, Juan's "giving in to greed for roubles and influence" serves to corrupt him, turning the hero of the poem into an "imperial gigolo [who] betrays himself" (49). Kernberger is perhaps only partially correct, however, in her further assertion that "Catherine's desire for sexual dominance derives from the same source as her despotic political practices" and that "sexual relations" in Don Juan "are exposed as merely political" (49). Such an assertion denies the knowledge of Russian history Byron demonstrates in the poem.

Russia exercised a profound and sometimes contrary influence on the Enlightenment and Romantic literary imaginations. In British literature this was marked by disparate views of Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From Defoe's depiction of Russia as the savage other in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Byron's portrayal of the sexually rapacious imperial court of Catherine the Great, there is a continuity of negative depiction. This is indicative in extreme terms of how Russia was perceived by the English reading public in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nor was the negative representation of Russia and the Russians confined to fiction. Prominent English diplomats looked upon the Russians as little more than barbaric. In An Account of Russia (1768), Lord Macartney, "our man in St Petersburg," could write that "Russia is but little known" and that the Russians themselves were essentially an ignorant people with no literature of their own that was worth the name (iv, cited in Dukes 176). As modern historians of Russia in the eighteenth century have pointed out, such a view is in many ways surprising, as the British had first-hand knowledge of Russia and its politics through a significant trading presence in St. Petersburg and Moscow throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, as such commentators have been at pains to document, many Russian aristocrats and intellectuals took all things English to heart, something that was looked on by one contemporary as at best a mixed blessing: