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"PEOPLE'S ANCESTORS ARE HISTORY'S GAME": BYRON'S DON JUAN AND RUSSIAN HISTORY
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2003 by Walker, David
II
In a four-stanza digression within canto 6, Byron manages to convey a considerable amount about Russian politics past and present. Moreover, he does so by shifting considerably the poem's tone. In its movement from the relation of Juan's comic adventures dressed as a woman in the harem of an autocratic Turkish despot, the disquisition on the bloody and arbitrary nature of Russian politics between 1762 and the time of writing injects a darker and more cynical tone. The sophisticated flippancy with which Byron treats Juan's sexual escapades suddenly takes on the air of tragedy. It is as if Byron is suddenly addressing a different audience. The manner in which he engages the reader in an epic poem that overall resembles the structure of a novel in the style of Fielding's The History of Tom Jones leaves open the door to Bakhtin's theory of the relationship of epic to the novel-nor is this to stretch a point, as Bakhtin refers to Byron's masterpiece in terms that are brief yet highly suggestive. In a discussion entitled "Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel," Bakhtin states that, "in an era when the novel reigns supreme"-and here Bakhtin is referring to the second half of the eighteenth century onwards-"all of the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent 'novelised'" (Bakhtin). He then goes on to cite Byron's Childe Harold, "and especially ... Don Juan" (5-6). Bakhtin presents in "Epic and Novel" a list of criteria determining the characteristics of the novel that can be applied to the "novelised" Don Juan: a novel should have a hero who is not "'heroic' in either the epic or the tragic sense of the word: he should combine in himself negative as well as positive features, low as well as lofty, ridiculous as well as serious." And, most importantly: "the hero should not be portrayed as an already completed and unchanging person but as one who is evolving and developing, a person who learns from life" (10).
Juan's picaresque adventures in a wide variety of European contexts see him constantly dealing with disappointment and disillusionment. From his first moment of exile with Donna Inez in canto 1 to his projected death at the hands of the French revolutionary terror and through his interim experiences in Turkey, Russia, and England, Juan becomes increasingly the pawn of forces over which he has no control. The panoramic European dimension of Juan's travels in foreign lands and Byron's shifting dialogic narrative voice, with its trenchant critique of his own times seen through the window of the recent past, make Don Juan a text that is deeply implicated in what Bakhtin refers to as "a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society" (11). In this respect, Bakhtin appears to be developing a line of thought strongly associated with the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs, who also saw the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as being crucial in the development of a particularly modern literary discourse-in his case, the historical novel." The Napoleonic wars widened horizons and made possible what Bakhtin refers to as "international and interlingual contacts and relationships" (11), which for Lukacs is figured in the waging of war and the creation of politicised mass armies (20).
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