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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
Modem historians support Byron's rendering of the savagery of the conflict. Of an approximate total of 66,000 men combined, the casualties at Ismail numbered some 40,000. Barbarity was the order of the day. As one historian has noted, quoting the testimony of participants: "Ismail assumed the incarnadine horror of a Dantean hell ... 'the most horrible carnage followed [the fall of the city] ... the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say the gutters of the town were dyed with blood'" (Montefiore 450). This is echoed throughout canto 8 and also in canto 9, stanza 29, when Byron relates how "Don juan ... shone in the late slaughter ... / Where blood was talked of as we would of water; / And carcasses ... lay as thick as thatch." Given the descriptions rendered by those who were there, it is little wonder that the siege of Ismail been described as the most savage massacre of the eighteenth century (Montefiore 451). As the siege of Ismail reaches its conclusion, Byron makes it all too apparent where the fault for the slaughter lies. In canto 8, stanza 92, Byron has it that the Cossacks' rapacious violence as they gradually take control of the city has been bred by monarchs towards specific ends: "And whom for this at last must we condemn? / Their natures? Or their sovereigns who employ / all arts to teach their subjects to destroy?" (5.8.135). When the fall of the fortress is confirmed, Suvarov
Said "despatch" is immediately given to juan so that he can render the news "For which all Petersburgh is on the watch" (5.8.139).
III
As Byron makes clear in the opening stanzas to canto 9-when he shifts the discussion onto an international platform through an analysis of Wellington's impact on European politics in the wake of Waterloo-war in modern Europe is "Legitimacy's crutch." Wellington is "Europe's liberator-still enslaved." The word legitimacy therefore frames the Russian cantos and the discussion of how it was and is abused during the reigns of Catherine and Alexander. People's ancestors truly are history's (and Byron's) game. The panoramic sweep of Don juan with its multiplicity of references to world literatures and languages is a child of its time, a period when, as Bakhtin has argued, "The world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly" (12). The epic, he continues, is "a genre that has come down to us already well defined and real" (14). In canto 1, stanza 200, Byron tells us that Don Juan is an epic poem, "and is meant to be." He then informs us that he will follow epic convention in the style of Homer and Virgil by completing the poem in twelve books, "So that my name of epic is no misnomer." Yet the poem itself undoes any claims to epic in the classical sense by not beginning in medias res and by following a strictly linear structure. In classical epic, "it is memory, and not knowledge, that serves as the source and power or its creative impulse" (Bakhtin 15). In Don juan it is recent and contemporary history that provide the basis upon which the poem is built. The tradition of the past is not sacred: like the novel in its Bakhtinian formulation, Don Juan is determined by "experience, knowledge and practice" (Bakhtin 15).
