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

The intellectual crosscurrents between Russia and Western Europe were strong in the period. Yet despite the admiration with which many things British were held in Catherine's Russia, she herself drew the line emphatically when it came to emulating the allegedly democratic political institutions that were supposedly at the heart of British political life. As mentioned above, Rousseau's writings on the social contract found no Russian translator during Catherine's reign. Moreover, the radical republican politics with which Byron is associated-the ideals in particular of the American and French revolutions and his admiration for the works and beliefs of Milton and the English revolutionaries-colours dramatically his reading of Russia during the age of Catherine the Great, a reading that tends in the main to follow the notion that, at best, Russia is an enlightened despotism. Enlightenment ideas about progress, particularly those associated with the French Revolution, were carefully filtered in Russia. Catherine believed that equality before the law should not be extended to the monarchy. Despite her borrowing freely from the works of Montesquieu and Diderot (Catherine plagiarised from Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws with great selectivity), she did so in order to strengthen her own position as monarch. Thus her recourse to Montesquieu in her work of political theory, the Nakaz, or Instruction (1766), is an adaptation rather than an adoption. "Montesquieu's celebrated admiration of the division of powers in England into the executive, the legislative, and the judicial became an administrative arrangement meant to improve the functioning of Russian autocracy" (Riasanovsky 285). And as Dukes has argued, "for the most part she stole for an explicit purpose, to construct a rationale for her own brand of government, which has since been identified as a variant of enlightened despotism" (183).

It is true, as others have argued, that Byron personifies the imperial and despotic nature of Russia in his portrait of the queen, but this is only a partial rendering of a significant section of the poem as a whole. The added factors that need to be considered are the development of the RussoTurkish war, in which Juan is a participant, and the imperial claims of the Russian state. Although Byron does place a great deal of emphasis on the relationship between sexual and political power, it is history and structure rather than agency that determine Juan's adventures in Catherine's Russia. As Byron succinctly puts it when discussing Alexander, "people's ancestors are history's game" (5.6.94). Personal histories are entwined in political events only insofar as the protagonists are monarchs. The implicit political ideology underpinning the politics of the text is republican, which Byron demonstrates in canto 6.95 when he posits a solution to the political differences between Catherine and the Turkish Sultan:

On the face of it this stanza seems to suggest that Catherine and the Sultan could solve all of their problems were they only to stop thinking with their genitalia. It seems that their insatiable sexual appetites drive their political wills. Yet, in an important context, this is to miss the point. Byron is arguing in this passage from the particular-Catherine and the Sultan-to the general-about "kings" who can rarely distinguish between their individual private wants and their public duties. Catherine and the Sultan both have imperial ambitions with which Byron will have no truck. The imperial dreams and pretensions that are the common lot of kings, the stanza suggests, can only be resolved by the oppression of one people by another in a war of conquest. The human and economic cost is borne by those people in the least advantageous position to pay (6.96).