Vasily Zhukovsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Vasily Zhukovsky composed the words that Russians sang as their national anthem for decades, yet he spent much of his career translating other people's poems. Born in 1783 in the village of Mishenskoe in the Tula Governorate, he was the illegitimate son of a landowner and a Turkish woman who had been taken as a slave after the siege of Bender in 1770. That double inheritance, one foot in Russian soil and one in the wider world, defined everything he would become. How did a man of uncertain social standing rise to tutor the future tsar? How did a poet best known for borrowing from other languages come to be credited with igniting an entire literary movement? And why did Vladimir Nabokov call him one of the greatest minor poets who ever lived, in the same breath praising him above the very writers he translated?

• 2. Unlikely Origins

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  The Bunin family, into which Zhukovsky was born, had a notable literary tendency; roughly ninety years after his birth, the same family produced the Nobel Prize-winning writer Ivan Bunin. For reasons of social propriety, the infant Zhukovsky was formally adopted by a family friend and kept that adopted surname and patronymic for the rest of his life, even though he was raised within the Bunin household. At fourteen, he was sent to Moscow to study at the university's boarding school for noblemen. There he encountered Freemasonry alongside the fashionable currents of English Sentimentalism and German Sturm und Drang. He also met Nikolay Karamzin, the founding editor of the leading literary journal of the day, Vestnik Yevropy, known in English as The Herald of Europe. That encounter planted the seed of a relationship that would shape Russian letters for a generation. Karamzin's European orientation and his suspicion of rigid classicism became the aesthetic north star by which Zhukovsky would navigate his entire career.

• 3. The Translation That Started a Movement

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  In December 1802, the nineteen-year-old Zhukovsky published a free translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in Karamzin's journal. Scholars still cite that single text as the conventional starting point for the Russian Romantic movement. The translation introduced a sentimental, melancholy tone that was strikingly new in Russian at the time, and it made Zhukovsky famous enough that Karamzin asked him to take over the editorship of Vestnik Yevropy in 1808. He used the post to explore Romantic themes, largely through translation. His ballad "Ludmila," published that same year, and its companion piece "Svetlana" from 1813, became landmarks in the Russian poetic tradition. Both are free adaptations of Gottfried August Burger's German ballad "Lenore," yet each renders the original in a completely different way. So committed was Zhukovsky to the challenge of that source poem that he later translated "Lenore" a third time, as part of a lifelong effort to develop a natural-sounding Russian dactylic hexameter.

• 4. War, Court, and the Dolbino Autumn

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  Napoleon's invasion of 1812 changed the social climate of Russia in ways that happened to suit Zhukovsky's position perfectly. French, the favored foreign language of the Russian aristocracy, fell into disrepute, and Zhukovsky, like thousands of others, volunteered to defend Moscow. He was present at the Battle of Borodino and joined the general staff under Field Marshal Kutuzov, who put him to work on propaganda and morale. During that service he wrote "A Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors," a patriotic ode intended to strengthen the resolve of Russian troops. After the war he settled in the village of Dolbino, near Moscow, where in 1815 he experienced what became known as the Dolbino Autumn, a burst of concentrated poetic creativity that drew the attention of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, the German-born wife of the future Tsar Nicholas I. Alexandra invited him to Saint Petersburg to serve as her personal Russian tutor. Many of his best translations from German, including nearly all of his Goethe translations, were produced as practical language exercises for her sessions.

• 5. Mentor, Protector, Impresario

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  Shortly after moving to Saint Petersburg, Zhukovsky helped found the jocular Arzamas literary society to promote Karamzin's European-oriented aesthetics against the classicists. The teenage Alexander Pushkin was among its members, and he rapidly emerged as Zhukovsky's poetic heir apparent. By the early 1820s, Pushkin had surpassed Zhukovsky in originality and brilliance, a verdict Zhukovsky himself accepted. The two remained lifelong friends, with the elder poet acting as mentor and court protector. That protective instinct extended far beyond Pushkin. Zhukovsky's good personal relations with Tsar Nicholas I shielded him from the reprisals that followed the failed Decembrist Revolt of 1825. He used his standing to intercede for Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen, and Taras Shevchenko; in Shevchenko's case, Zhukovsky was instrumental in purchasing him out of serfdom. When Pushkin died in 1837, Zhukovsky stepped in as his literary executor, rescuing unpublished masterpieces from hostile censorship and preparing the full body of work for publication. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s he also championed the career of Nikolay Gogol. Nicholas later appointed him tutor to the young tsarevich Alexander, the future Tsar Alexander II, and many historians attribute the liberal reforms of the 1860s at least partly to the progressive educational methods Zhukovsky used with him.

• 6. The Craft of Borrowing

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  Dostoevsky famously referred to Zhukovsky's Schiller translations as "nash Schiller" - "our Schiller" - a phrase that captures how thoroughly those versions had become Russian property. Zhukovsky translated from an exceptionally wide range of sources: ancient epics by Ferdowsi and Homer, Classical and Romantic works by Schiller and Goethe, ballads by Byron and others. He often translated without attribution, which was standard practice in an era when modern concepts of intellectual property did not yet exist. What drove his choices was not opportunism but formal principle, above all an interest in genre. His translations of Schiller, which included the verse drama Die Jungfrau von Orleans about Joan of Arc, were praised for their psychological depth and were considered by many to equal or surpass the originals. In the late 1830s he produced a celebrated version of Friedrich de la Motte Fouque's prose novella Undine, rendered in a waltzing hexameter that later inspired the libretto for an opera by Tchaikovsky. After retiring from court in 1841, he devoted himself to Eastern poetry, including long excerpts from the Persian epic Shahnameh, and finally to his translation of Homer's Odyssey, published in 1849. Though scholars have criticized it for distortions of the original, it became a classic of Russian verse in its own right.

• 7. The Man Behind the Work

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  Much of Zhukovsky's original verse drew on a passionate but Platonic affair with his half-niece Maria Protasova, whom he called Masha, the daughter of one of his half-sisters. Poems such as "Moi drug, khranitel'-angel moi" ("My friend, my guardian angel...") are considered minor classics of Russian love lyric. His private life also unfolded across Europe; he traveled widely in the German-speaking world, where connections to the Prussian court gave him entry to fashionable spa towns like Baden-Baden and Bad Ems. He met Goethe in person and corresponded with the poet Ludwig Tieck and the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. In 1841 he settled near Dusseldorf and married Elisabeth von Reutern, who was eighteen years old and the daughter of his artist friend Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern. They had two children, a daughter named Alexandra and a son named Pavel. Alexandra later became the subject of considerable public attention because of her affair with Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich. Zhukovsky died in Baden-Baden in 1852, aged sixty-nine. His body was returned to Saint Petersburg and buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra; his crypt stands directly behind the monument to Dostoevsky, the writer who had called his Schiller translations uniquely, indelibly Russian.