Our Notes & References

First edition of the first Russian translation of Byron’s poem in verse, by a leading poet of the dawn of Russia’s Golden Age of literature and poetry.

A fine, uncut copy in its original printed wrappers. Rare outside Russia: in the West we located only four copies in public institutions, at the Universities of East Anglia and North Carolina, in Harvard (the Diaghilev-Lifar copy) and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Only an electronic copy at the LoC and no copy traced on the market in recent decades.

Byron wrote The Bride of Abydos, the second of his six so-called “Eastern poems”, at the end of 1813, when he was 26. The main character of the poem, Selim, is a typical Byronic hero, ill-fated, yet bold. The story revolves around his tragic love for his half-sister Zuleika, for whose sake he defies his father, a Turkish Pasha, and becomes a pirate. The poem explores the British cultural taboos of the time through the themes and the setting of the Orient.

First translations of Byron’s (other) works into Russian appeared in 1821. Most notable of those early translations was Vasilii Zhukovskii’s version of The Prisoner of Chillon, which came out in 1822. Russian literati often translated Byron from the more common French: Pushkin’s friend, the Decembrist’s wife Elena Raevskaia authored some unpublished translations and helped Pushkin to understand Byron’s original texts.

The first Russian translation of The Bride of Abydos – in prose – was made by Mikhail Kachenovskii; it appeared in the magazine Vestnik Evropy in 1821. It is after Byron’s death in 1824 that Ivan Kozlov (1779-1840) translated the poem in verse; by that time Kozlov, 20 years older than a rising Pushkin, was already recognised as a major Russian poet, especially thanks to his magnum opus, the Byronic poem Chernets, or a Tale of Kiev (1825).

It worth noting that Kozlov dedicated his translation to the newly enthroned Empress Aleksandra Feodorovna, wife of Nicholas I: this would indicate the recognition of Byron as a literary phenomenon by the Russian public, and the importance of this publication has been underlined by major Russian scholars, including Zhirmunskii, who mentioned Kozlov’s translation in his seminal work Byron and Pushkin (p. 332).

Kozlov had a deep emotional connection with Byron: in 1821, he became blind, which made him empathise with Byron’s literary persona as a sufferer and an outcast. Kozlov was fascinated with Byron’s support of the independence movement in Greece and mourned the death of the poet “as if it was the death of his own child” (Trush, p. 20). In 1824 he wrote an epic poem, Byron, presenting the English author as a heroic fighter for freedom; this rather political poem, dedicated to Pushkin, remained excluded from 19^th-century collections of Kozlov’s poems until 1892 for censorship reasons. Kozlov played host to a distinguished literary salon, attended by Zhukovskii and Pushkin. To the latter he sent a copy of Chernets; Pushkin liked it and replied in the form of a poem: “Pevets! Kogda pered toboi…” (Belinskii, p. 5).

“Of course we can read Byron in the original and in German or French … but the translation of a foreign work into our own language interprets it for us in a special way” (review of Kozlov’s translation by the prominent literary critic Nikolai Polevoi in 1826, in Russian Writers on Translation, p. 18).

“Kozlov was one of the first Russians to come under the influence of Byron and to translate him into Russian. … Kozlov’s narrative poems had an important influence on Lermontov and his poetic technique on the poets of the school of “pure art” such as Fet” (Terras, p. 234).

Bibliography

Smirdin 6767; Smirnov-Sok. 767; Belinskii, Vissarion. Collected poems of Ivan Kozlov, St Petersburg, 1840; Trush K.A. Ocherk literaturnoy deyatelnosti I.I. Kozlova (1779—1840), 1899 ; Nikolai Polevoi (1826), in Russian Writers on Translation: An Anthology, ed. Brian James Baer, Natalia Olshanskaya, Routledge, 2013; Zhirmusky, V.M., Byron and Pushkin (1978); Terras, Victor, Handbook of Russian Literature, Yale University Press, 1990; The Reception of Byron in Europe, ed. Richard Cardwell, Bloomsbury, 2005.