Vasily Zhukovsky
Foremost Russian poet who introduced Romanticism through masterful translations.
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Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky was Russia's top poet in the 1810s and a major literary figure in the early 1800s. He served the Romanov court as tutor to Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna and later to her son, the future Tsar Alexander II. Zhukovsky is recognized for bringing the Romantic movement to Russia.
Life
Zhukovsky was born on 9 February 1783 in the village of Mishenskoe in the Tula Governorate of the Russian Empire. He was the illegitimate son of landowner Afanasi Bunin and his Turkish housekeeper Salkha, who had been captured during the siege of Bender in 1770 and brought to Russia as a slave. The Bunin family later produced the Nobel Prize-winning writer Ivan Bunin. For social propriety, the infant poet was formally adopted by a family friend and kept his adopted surname and patronymic for life.
At fourteen he was sent to Moscow to be educated at the Moscow University's boarding school for noblemen, where Freemasonry and the literary trends of English Sentimentalism and German Sturm und Drang influenced him. There he met Nikolay Karamzin, the preeminent Russian man of letters and founding editor of Vestnik Yevropy. In December 1802, Zhukovsky published a free translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in Karamzin's journal, which made him well known among Russian readers.
In 1808 Karamzin asked him to take over the editorship of Vestnik Yevropy, a position he used to explore Romantic themes through translation. Much of his original work was inspired by his half-niece Maria "Masha" Protasova, with whom he had a passionate but Platonic affair. He also came under the influence of Romanticism in the medieval Hansa cities of Dorpat and Revel, now Tartu and Tallinn.
Work
Zhukovsky's main contribution was as a stylistic and formal innovator who borrowed from European literature to provide high-quality models for original works in Russian. His translation of Gray's "Elegy" is cited by scholars as the conventional starting point for the Russian Romantic Movement. He also wrote prose, including the 1809 short story "Marina roshcha" about the ancient past of Moscow, inspired by Karamzin's "Poor Liza". Zhukovsky translated from a wide range of sources, often without attribution, motivated by formal principles.
He was especially admired for his melodious translations of German and English ballads. The ballad "Ludmila" (1808) and its companion piece "Svetlana" (1813) are landmarks in the Russian poetic tradition; both are free translations of Gottfried August Burger's "Lenore", each rendering the original differently. He later translated "Lenore" a third time as part of his effort to develop a natural-sounding Russian dactylic hexameter. His translations of Schiller, including ballads, lyrics, and the verse drama Die Jungfrau von Orléans, became classic works in Russian, remarkable for psychological depth and influencing younger realists such as Dostoevsky.
Zhukovsky also wrote original verse, including love lyrics to Masha Protasova and the patriotic ode "A Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors", written to boost morale during his service on Kutuzov's general staff. He composed the lyrics for the imperial national anthem "God Save the Tsar!".
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Vasily Zhukovsky (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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