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

The literary figure most closely associated with Lukacs's analysis of the historical novel is Walter Scott, a writer whom Byron greatly admired. As James Chandler recently has written, there are more than sufficient grounds for viewing Don Juan as Byron's contribution to the newly created (in the Lukacsian sense) historical novel. And it is also apparent that Byron read obsessively Scott's novels during the period that he was composing his epic masterpiece: "And pray send me W. Scott's new novels-what are their names and characters? I read some of his former ones for at least an hour a day" (Byron's Letters and Journals 7: 48-49).12 Arguing against Jerome Christenson's assertion that Don Juan's historical moment is the ascendancy of commercial society, and Jerome McGann's modified view of the poem that it is confined historically to 1789-1824, Chandler posits instead that "Don Juan is haunted by a historicism with which it can neither dispense nor quite come to terms" (38O).13 Rather than see the poem in relation to Scott's fiction, however, as productive as that may be, it is fruitful to read the episodic nature of Don Juan against historically specific events. This is particularly the case when one considers Byron's treatment of warfare and modernity and the manner in which they are ruthlessly pursued to curtail political liberty.

Byron's description of the siege of Ismail and Juan's involvement in it in canto 7 of the poem demonstrates the extent to which warfare in the world of the poem is increasingly internationalised. In stanza 18, Byron informs us of the conflict's polyglot nature:

Of those European nations that Byron mentions, the English and the French are most heavily represented. Between stanzas 18 and 22, the mercurial nature of French and English participants in the siege is highlighted. They are fighting for individual advancement and not the cause of liberty, that clarion call of Enlightenment political action that can do no more than murmur in canto 6, stanza 93, when Byron is referring to the dubious legitimacy of Catherine and her heirs. Moreover, it is the ordinariness of the English participants in the conflict-signified in these stanzas by their surnames, Thomson and Smith, and by their Christian names, Peters and "Jacks and Gills and Wills and Bills" (5.7.19-20)-that testifies to the war's modernity. This is no romantic and idealistic battle for higher principles, fought by a moral and ethical aristocratic elite according to chivalric rules. Indeed, Smith is so common a name "that one would think the first who bore it Adam" (5.7.25). The French fare no better. Referring elliptically in stanza 22 to the history of antipathy between France and Great Britain both in the past and in the present, Byron takes ironic refuge behind his patriotism, saving himself the trouble of naming the French. Indeed, patriotism is seen to be an empty word signifying nothing, especially when the motive for action is no more than greed and self-aggrandisement: