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

The battle for Ismail was a bloody affair that in many ways was ill advised. The Russian forces numbered 31,000 and were attacking the fortress at the wrong time of the year; sickness and hunger decimated the Russian army led by Ivan Gudevich, Grigory Potemkin, and Nikolai Samoilov. Before them stood what seemed to be an impregnable fortress "built into a natural amphitheatre which was defended by 265 cannons and a garrison of 35,000 men" (Montefiore 448). In overall command of the war against the Turkish was Prince Potemkin, a man, Byron suggests, who derived his greatness from his love of "homicide and harlotry" (5.7.36-37) and gained his position from his relationship with Catherine the Great (Chandler 38O).14 Despite their initial failure to take Ismail, the Russians persisted. Potemkin appointed as general Count Suvarov, a man he was confident could get the job done. This proved to be the case, though the cost in human life was horrendous in what proved to be an extremely close-fought battle:

Byron looks upon the siege of Ismail with a cynical eye, one attuned to man's glorification of war ratified by cant. Byron relates Potemkin's appointment of Suvarov with reference to the letter exhorting the general to carry the siege to a successful conclusion. This letter, says Byron, would be "worthy of a Spartan, had the cause / Been one to which a good heart could be partial" (5.7.40). In Byron's view, the cause for which the war was being fought was a bad one: neither Potemkin nor Suvarov is motivated by "Defence of freedom, country, or of laws; / But as it was mere lust of power to o'erarch all / With its proud brow." The letter, therefore, "merits slight applause, / Save for its style, which said all in a trice, / 'You will take Ismail at whatever price.'" (5.7.40). The use of the word price is an appropriate one both in terms of human cost and motivation. These are warriors, says Byron, who fight for "cash and conquest" (5.7.64); he pursues the fiscal metaphor further at the beginning of canto 8:

On the contrary, blood may be spilt only in the pursuit of liberty from one's oppressors, in the vein of Leonidas and Washington, "Whose every battlefield is holy ground, / Which breathes of nations saved, not worlds undone" (5.8.3-5).

Byron appears to anticipate much of what both Bakhtin and Lukacs are saying about war and modernity. In canto 7, stanza 41, we read "war cuts up not only branch but root" and is not a short and glorious affair governed by archaic rules of conduct more suited to romance and story than to reality. The scale of the conflict and the manner in which it was fought are factors that separate the siege of Ismail from that quintessential literary siege that also took place on Turkish soil. In a nod to Homer towards the end of canto 7, Byron admits that, although modern epic cannot equal the relation of the siege of Troy, yet "still we moderns equal you in blood" (5.7.80). In canto 8, as the siege gathers pace, Byron refers to the pointlessness of the conflict in terms that would not look out of place in the verse of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon: