SOURCE: Bagby, Lewis. “Bestuzhev's Byron: Cross-Cultural Transformation.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 29, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1995): 271-84.

[In the following essay, Bagby examines some of Bestuzhev's correspondence which reveal the writer's affinity for Byron's life and work, particularly the poem “Darkness.”]

It is the text, with its universal power of world disclosure, which gives a self to the ego.

Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory

This article is an investigation of a reference by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii to Lord Byron's uncharacteristic poem, “Darkness.”¹ Bestuzhev uses the citation to create an illusion of solidity and coherence in his experience.² It appears in a letter of 1831 to his publishers, Ksenofont and Nikolai Polevoi, of The Moscow Telegraph (1825-34). Bestuzhev's letters of exile are peopled with figures from Western literature, but the greatest affinity he felt was for the person and work of Byron. In his letters to the Polevoi brothers Bestuzhev was wont to discuss literary matters more, say; than with his mother and sisters, and even, for that matter, with his brothers Nikolai and Mikhail. The Polevoi letters are for this reason particularly valuable in understanding Bestuzhev's rendering of a self he conceived in literary terms.

At the time Bestuzhev wrote the letter in question, he was on the verge of becoming the most popular writer of prose fiction in the 1830s (a popularity which extended into the twentieth century for many readers, but ended among literati in the 1840s). I say this with no trepidation even though the 1830s introduced the fiction of Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol', two giants whose work dwarfs Bestuzhev's. In terms of the modest but growing popular culture of early nineteenth-century Russia, Bestuzhev successfully claimed primacy among bourgeois readers who, like the Polevoi brothers, were immersed in the literature of European Romantics. Bestuzhev must be counted among this group for two reasons. First, his family mixed aristocratic and merchant origins (the latter of which instilled a great sense of pride in him). Second, he and his audience were of one aesthetic temperament, not least because he helped create bourgeois taste in the early 1820s.

Bestuzhev had been a publisher in the early 1820s with Kondratii Ryleev, issuing the literary almanac Polar Star for the three years prior to the revolt of 14 December 1825, in which they both participated and for which they suffered the consequences. Ryleev was hanged; Bestuzhev exiled to Siberia and the Caucasus. Although permitted after 1830 to publish under the pseudonym Marlinskii, Bestuzhev's real identity remained a fairly well kept secret until his death in 1837 when it became known that the famous writer Marlinskii was the Decembrist Bestuzhev. The richest period in Bestuzhev's fictional output was from 1830 to 1834. At that time he was stationed in Derbent where he had been transferred from Iakutsk, at his own request, to fight Turkish hegemony in the region. Bestuzhev's arrival in the Caucasus had direct parallels in his mind with Byron's Oriental poems, Childe Harold, and the British poet's self-imposed exile to the Northern Mediterranean (an area proximate to the Caucasus and for Bestuzhev its topographical equivalent). In this point of similarity emerge the contours of Bestuzhev's transformation of the Byronic canon (the one which combines his life and letters),³ for in seeing the parallels as they pertained to his own life, he worked them into a configuration that suited his own subjective experience. This subjective move is recapitulated textually in his appropriation of Byron's “Darkness” in a manner which “removes” the very real distance between them.⁴

The chasm separating Byron and Bestuzhev is apparent when we consider facts which escaped Bestuzhev. For instance, Byron traveled to Greece to support the cause of freedom and national integrity. Bestuzhev was on a converse mission—the subjugation of the peoples of the Caucasus to the Russian empire. He was not a liberator, but an oppressor, or at least a player in the imperialist game. Thus, anything Bestuzhev has to say to the Polevoi brothers about his experience must be understood as his attempt to fashion an image of himself on the basis of literary patterns rather than as a valid discovery of consonance with Byron. In terms of personal substance, aesthetic accomplishment, and rational facility, Byron and Bestuzhev are far apart. But Bestuzhev's insistence on the opposite indicates something about the man and his desires.

Bestuzhev corresponded regularly with the Polevoi brothers from 29 January 1831 to 12 May 1837, that is, up to one month before he died at the hands of Cherkes natives during a military skirmish on Adler Promontory on the Black Sea. In Bestuzhev's eighth extant letter one senses an energy behind every word as he revels in his regained contact with the literary world. He is anxious to learn about the contemporary literary scene, expressing himself in a figure not unusual for him: “At one time even I lived in the world of print; now I am entirely alienated from it. Like Irving's awakened Rip Van Winkle I see the same tavern sign, but new guests with dram in hand.”⁵ … This casual remark is filled with gestures we can associate with Bestuzhev's writing, at once multivalenced and subtle, then clumsy and rather too direct, but most always culturally dense (at least in the sense we say so in the late twentieth century). These qualities inhere in Bestuzhev's fiction as well, where the infelicitous too often vitiates the more refined and consequently points to the inferiority of the imitation in comparison with the original. Be that as it may, Bestuzhev's reference to Rip Van Winkle stands out rather clearly, perhaps too much so, for it overshadows more interesting allusions to Bestuzhev's life prior to the Decembrist Revolt. “At one time even I lived [i ia zhil] in the world of print” contains information that summarizes how Bestuzhev perceives himself and his world. First, the particle “i” allows him to suggest a humility that is at once genuine (he has indeed departed the literary scene) and at the same time false (for he was a significant figure, with Ryleev, in the world of print). Furthermore, he had already had several poems published from 1829 to 1831 in Syn otechestva, Moskovskii telegraf, and Literaturnaia gazeta, and had seen his prose tale “The Test” (“Ispytanie”) appear in Syn otechestva i Severnyi arkhiv in 1830).⁶ Second, when Bestuzhev says that he lived formerly “in the world of print,” metaphoric allusion is made to a cultural dominant of the early nineteenth century, to wit, that lives were lived in accordance with models established in literature.⁷ From this perspective, Bestuzhev's “at one time” can be viewed as ironic; in 1831 he had not ceased to conceive of his life in terms of literary models.⁸ The point here is that Bestuzhev peoples his letters with self-referents that are literary. Although brief, not the least of these is the reference to Byron's “Darkness.”

By 1831 the idea of Byron had grown large in Russian culture.⁹ There were already five separate Russian translations of “Darkness” by then.¹⁰ If only intuitively, Bestuzhev appreciated the degree to which the Russian public's apprehension of the poet came, like his, with a set of suppositions, a mythology connected with Prometheus, Napoleon, revolution and war,¹¹ all of which Bestuzhev could utilize to project an idea of himself upon his sundry audiences. In the letter of December 1831 to the Polevoi brothers Bestuzhev presents a passage that interweaves physical, social, and emotional contexts as well as his subjective experience of them, and he rises to an emotional pitch that culminates in the line: “My inner world has become miraculous: read The Darkness [sic] by Byron and you will understand something of what it is like; it is an ocean, ‘beset by a heavy gloom, immobile, dark and silent … over which glimmer some unclear forms.”¹² To appreciate what significance the reference to “Darkness” might have for Bestuzhev, it is necessary to briefly examine the poem itself.

“Darkness” was penned in the period July-August 1816 during a time of personal crisis and concomitant literary activity in Byron's life. He was in some financial difficulties associated with his marriage obligations and his rather profligate way of life. Byron and his wife had recently separated (after only one year of residency together), and, after signing papers formalizing their legal affairs, he left for Switzerland where he spent the summer before moving on to Italy.¹³ In Geneva he met the Shelleys who were also traveling under a cloud of scandal. This was Byron's first meeting with Shelley, which came about thanks to the efforts of the latter's sister-in-law, Claire Clairmont, step-sister of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.¹⁴ The apocalyptic genre, in which “Darkness” is cast, was rarely used by Byron, but on several occasions this small group of literati engaged in Gothic speculations that might have stimulated the verse's imagery. McGann suggests that the brief presence among them of M. G. “Monk” Lewis, with his preference for dark musings, may have impelled Byron in this direction.¹⁵ The poem is bleak, as one would expect, in its vision of “man's last days in a dying universe.”¹⁶ If it is a poem rather uncharacteristic of Byron's creativity, it nevertheless shares a dramatic sense of isolation, death, and longing with other poems of the four months in Switzerland, particularly “The Dream,” “Prometheus,” and [“A Fragment”].¹⁷

Since this was the beginning of a period of great productivity coupled with a hope of eventual release,¹⁸ Bestuzhev's reference to “Darkness” might seem a bit puzzling. But, as the letter makes amply clear, Bestuzhev was frustrated by the conditions in which he lived and attempted to write. The fullness of life and its new promises were matched by a contrary feeling of emptiness and misery in which his potentials as a human being were being thwarted and his talents as a writer wasted on trifles. These elements become matters of signification in Bestuzhev's citation of the Byron poem, which begins: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.”¹⁹ This prefatory line encapsulates several facets of Bestuzhev's relationship to the poem. First, through it he likens poetry to experience, or meaning to sense (to cite a distinction Ricoeur makes),²⁰ and thereby claims the relevance of Byron's verse to his life. Second, Bestuzhev operates within the dialectic embodied in the relationship of dreams and waking advanced by Byron and Romantic aesthetics in general. These factors taken together prompt the reader, the Polevoi brothers and us, to comprehend the text at two levels—as Bestuzhev's experience of life (somehow unreal to him yet concretely experienced) and as our mode of assessing Bestuzhev's discourse (through the metaphor Bestuzhev proffers: “‘Darkness’ is like my life”).

Within this dream world, with equal emphasis on both words, elements pertaining to the end of time take on special signifying value for Bestuzhev:²¹

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light.

These lines possess double referential value—they signify Byronic themes (which implies an interpretation of Byron's texts) and Bestuzhev's status in exile (which requires another, structurally similar act of interpretation of Bestuzhev's text, i.e., the letter to the Polevoi brothers). At yet another level, each of the interpretative centers of Bestuzhev's rhetoric are “validated” by the presupposition that readers like Bestuzhev equated Byron's poetry with Byron's life. The distance separating Byron and Bestuzhev, as tenor and vehicle in metaphoric utterance, is thus nullified, at least if Bestuzhev's readers do their work of equation in a manner isomorphic to Bestuzhev's reading of Byron.

Bestuzhev's reader familiar with either the original or one of the several translations of “Darkness” is asked to equate poem and life text through the intermediacy of Byron's descriptive language:

And they did live by watch fires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face.

The apocalyptic destruction of habitations, cities, and relationships is reminiscent of the war in which Bestuzhev participated. In the letter's post scriptum Bestuzhev's description of his part in the war indicates the degree to which the borrowed poetic text and the self-text Bestuzhev generates for the Polevoi brothers can be viewed by a willing reader as equivalent.²² The impact of ultimate demise on individuals who, like Bestuzhev, experience personally the waste of war/apocalypse, and others who read about it, becomes a point of contact for addressers (Byron and Bestuzhev) and addressees (Bestuzhev and the Polevoi brothers):

The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd.

The distance which separates people within the poem reiterates the theme of Bestuzhev's letter. Yet there is a difference. In the poem death separates people in ultimate terms. That is, within the self-referential world of “Darkness” human beings die each apart from the other; there is no reversal possible when “Darkness … [is] the Universe.” Bestuzhev, however, works two themes at one time, separation and union, distance and communion. In his letter he refers to the inevitability of the soldier's death on the front lines and makes specific reference to himself:

Your brother asks that I guard my life: that's a bit tough for a soldier. Nature has not bestowed upon me an animal daring which is extolled as bravery; but I am less impulsive in my actions than I used to be. Glory cannot shield me from danger with its azure wings and hope does not gild the smokey dust. I throw myself forward [in battle], but this is more out of duty than from inspiration. Labor and fatigue and the ill weather I bear with patience: no one has heard me mumble in complaint, ‘the beard is not bemoaned once the head is severed.’²³

In the parallels Bestuzhev suggests between the specific content of “Darkness” and his life (as he describes it), he draws down the explicit content of “Darkness” onto the surface description of his own experience. At the same time, he works at nullifying the ultimate separation inhering in “Darkness” and draws his reader into close personal proximity with him:

And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;—a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom. No love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

These stark images function as stimuli which are meant to activate parallel structures in the reader's perception of three texts—Bestuzhev's letter with its citation, the full text of the poem itself, and the life texts of the two authors, Byron and Bestuzhev. The separation across cultures, individuals, languages, codes, genres, and messages is vitiated, but, again, only if the addressee is willing to perform the part scripted for him in Bestuzhev's text. The model for proximity, rather than distance, is supplied in “Darkness” with its famous reference to faithfulness:

The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws. Himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.

Byron's ironic reference to friendship is not matched by Bestuzhev's rhetoric. Bestuzhev would not have dogs, but humans (the Polevoi brothers, his Decembrist confreres) be friends of the type idealized in the literary and Masonic circles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reference to his brothers, Nikolai and Mikhail (exiled to Siberia), and to Kondratii Ryleev occur elsewhere in the letter and set up cross-references which reinforce the theme of personal relations (e.g., Byron's man/dog, Bestuzhev's man/man) as distinct from the failed relations catalogued in “Darkness” in its metaphoric depiction of society. From this perspective Bestuzhev utilizes Byron's poem as a negative example, one which his readers were asked covertly to supersede in an act of understanding and sympathy (but not pity).

My claim here is not that there is any ontologically necessary tie between Byron's imagery and Bestuzhev's or, for that matter, between Bestuzhev's argument and its reception. Rather, emphasis is placed on Bestuzhev's utilization of the poem to activate reader associations available to him/her in the symmetry of the texts (poem and letter). To this end Bestuzhev presents the Polevoi brothers with some guidance. Overt parallels, however, are to be drawn by them. It is in this form that Bestuzhev's rhetoric is most effective, for it involves suggestion, not declaration, persuasion, not command. By supplying the reader the opportunity to invest meaning in his reading experience, making connections explicit where merely suggested, Bestuzhev signifies the condition in which the normal and necessary distance which separates authors and readers can be surmounted and emotional proximity established. This was the goal of the word for Bestuzhev in exile.

Within the nexus of associations available to Bestuzhev as a reader of Byron, to Bestuzhev as writer of self-texts, and to the Polevoi brothers as readers of Byron and Bestuzhev, perhaps most compelling is Byron's use of images of water and ships. For the Russian reader they came to symbolize the plight of the Decembrist and of post-Decembrist society:

                                                                                The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; and tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

This imagery of the boat at the conclusion of the poem signals a relationship between the cosmic and the earthly domains, both in ruins, static, and lifeless. As elsewhere in the poem, Byron reinforces the emptiness of the universe in the repetition of the suffix -less. It is this absence which apparently prompts Bestuzhev's interest in referencing the poem, replacing the emptiness to which the poem refers with the substance of verbal encounter. Again distance is overcome as separation yields to proximity through the shared word.

Bestuzhev feels no need to cite the entire poem in his letter to the Polevoi brothers. They would have known the poem in any one of its variants available to the reading public. Bestuzhev chooses to highlight only one part of the poem (interestingly, not its dense third and fourth stanzas²⁴). On the basis of the line Bestuzhev recites, it is difficult to ascertain with any precision its relationship to the original. Of the myriad images available to him, Bestuzhev refers only to part of the sixth “stanza”: “[an ocean] beset by heavy gloom, motionless, dark and silent.” This seems to refer inexactly, but conceptually and imagistically, to Byron's lines: “The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still [nedvizhnyi] / And nothing stirr'd within their silent [nemoi] depths”.

Whether Bestuzhev, at the time of his writing, was recalling from memory the lines he cites, referring to a Russian or French translation of the poem, or simply engaging in poetic license,²⁵ the changes he makes in comparison to the original are suggestive. First, Bestuzhev excludes the rivers and lakes. Whether conscious or not, the elimination of these images may be the result of a desire to have the poem correspond to his actual circumstances: he was living at the time in Derbent, which is located on the Caspian Sea. The sea, of course, is a romantic convention used to suggest a dualism inherent in personality, a dualism, moreover, which Bestuzhev keenly felt if we can, in some measure, believe his remarks to the Polevoi brothers.²⁶ Second, Bestuzhev includes the qualifiers “dark/gloomy” (mrachnyi) and the epithet “heavy gloom” (tiazhelaia mgla), evaluative addenda which suggest Bestuzhev's reading and/or memory of the original, not its specific content. In effect, he offers an interpretation of the poem's mood (which is not too difficult to do)²⁷ and encapsulates it in his rhythmic rendering of the lines. In sum, Bestuzhev's reference to “Darkness” and his translation of two of its lines indicate both biographical and aesthetic information usually associated with him. He is a remaker of myths in order to create his own.

These two categories—biography and aesthetics—form the center of any rendering of texts by Bestuzhev, whether his own or others': they incline in two directions: (a) beyond the text toward Bestuzhev's life and the persona he develops in society through his writing, and (b) internally toward the dialogical transformation of the text from within (as though from a prior, preutterance code to another that emerges secondarily as a response to the first).²⁸ These two simultaneous events underscore the cross-cultural transformation Bestuzhev makes for his readers—through verbal art as well as in his letters he attempts to render a literary image of self both as author and hero.²⁹ It is a self-making not unlike Byron's, at least structurally, if not in terms of the details or the image's complexity. For the Polevoi brothers, and through the reference to Byron, Bestuzhev demonstrates his affinity to literary texts that equate with his life and at the same time provides proof of his sensitivity to the aesthetic word—not a bad act for a writer to perform in his correspondence with his publishers, particularly those in direct contact with the literary milieu from which Bestuzhev was excluded and through whom he could be reintroduced qua hero.

Bestuzhev's brief mention of “Darkness” is significant for what it indicates more or less overtly. But it is perhaps more dramatic for what it leaves out—80 lines of verse, or 98 percent of the entire poem. Bestuzhev's reference to two lines supplies the Polevoi brothers (and anyone they would grant the privilege of reading Bestuzhev's private correspondence) with a manner of interpreting Bestuzhev's relationship to Byron's poem, not the poem itself. In effect, through Bestuzhev's allusion to Byron's text, he instructs his publishers how to read the image of his life he wishes to project (and in which he sincerely believed). The transformation inherent here is significant not for what it does aesthetically with Byron's poem, but for what it imposes on a reader sensitive to Bestuzhev's life circumstances. It asks the reader (the Polevoi brothers, their circle of intimates, and, by extension, you and me) to place Bestuzhev in a mental landscape adjacent to a vast and powerful body of water, the dualism of which can be inferred by poetic canon, and the political nature of which can be read by reference to other post-Decembrist texts, e.g., Pushkin's “Arion” (1827).³⁰ It asks the reader to understand the qualifiers Bestuzhev uses, particularly those he adds to the original, as they pertain to his life.

Bestuzhev equates his isolation with immobility and stasis (“nedvizhnyi”), and he views himself as silenced (“nemoi”) because of the censorship of his work under the name Bestuzhev. This brings up a crucial issue—Bestuzhev's identity before the public, his self-making, which is the central, albeit unstated (and perhaps even unconscious), concern of his letter to the Polevoi brothers. Its heart is conditioned by the very real distance which separates him from his family, friends, publishers, the literary world, and social scene in the north. It is the source of his desire, the fount of his “dream … not all a dream,” to remove the distance, to overcome the isolation, and feel (if not be) proximate to a world that is alive and responsive to him, not cold and out for his blood.³¹

Bestuzhev would like to be seen in a tragic and romantic guise. To foster the image of self as martyred hero, for which he had no small claim, he emphasizes literary antecedents. He is not only a Rip Van Winkle (an image which reinforces his isolation from contemporary life and literature in the major Russian cities), but the Byronic “I” of “Darkness” which in “a dream, which was not all a dream” views the microcosm (Petersburg and Moscow) from the macrocosmic vantage point of the end of time. This is at one and the same time a witty condemnation of vacuous society and a longing for its ambiguous and varied pleasures. It is grand society, after all, that has driven him, at least indirectly, into exile, but that same society which once held him in high esteem as a writer, publisher, and promising young officer. These are clear Byronic themes. Interestingly enough, there is sufficient truth to them in Bestuzhev's life to make the rendering relatively accurate. Bestuzhev saw to that.

Bestuzhev projects an image of himself that is “of” the world and “above” it, much like the image of Prometheus the Romantics valorized in their lives and texts, and like the image of Christ Bestuzhev also invokes in his letter. With the aid of these man-god images, Bestuzhev places “Darkness” in the self-mythologizing context he seeks before his audience:

In place of harmony I find within myself a desert wind whispering in the ruins. Beneath my cross, my burdensome cross (which is more spiritual than material), I fall for a moment, and not just once. My spirit is strong; but this is more a [physical] numbness than firmness [of character]. Only two jewels have I extracted from the flood: the soul's pride and peace before everything that is beautiful. My inner world has become incredible: read Byron's The Darkness [sic] and you will get a sense of something of which I speak.

In Bestuzhev's use of Byron's stark poem we observe a felicitous collision of cultures in which the extreme Romantic, Bestuzhev, suggests a manner by which he might best be understood as a cultural monument; condemns the society that supports him even as it exiles him; and mythologizes himself on the order of the cosmic “I” of Byron's poem. Bestuzhev insures these readings by topographical allusion (his location on the Caspian Sea); meaningful subtractions from the original poem; biographically significant additions to the original poem; and reference to Lord Byron as a pan-cultural phenomenon (whose biographical and literary texts lionized the poet for Russian and world culture). Bestuzhev's literal absorption of Byron into his life and literary texts indicates dramatically his desire to achieve a specific form of selfhood. Paraphrasing Ricoeur, it is the Byronic text (life text and aesthetic texts). with its power of world disclosure, which gives a self to Bestuzhev's ego.³² It is not inappropriate that he should be called Russia's Byron, not because of the accuracy of the description at the surface level, but because of its conformity to Bestuzhev's deepest wish and his brief success at realizing it.

Notes

1. Virtually all commentators on the poem have noted its uniqueness within Byron's body of work. John Clubbe calls the work “the most pessimistic of Byron's poems.” See “‘The New Prometheus of New Men’: Byron's 1816 Poems and Manfred,” in Nineteenth Century Literary Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Stevenson. Ed. Clyde de L. Ryals (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1974), p. 27. M. Raizis comments, “‘Darkness’ is an ostensibly strange poem.” See “Byron's Promethean Rebellion in 1816: Fictionality and Self-projection,” The Byron Journal, No. 19 (1991), p. 43.

2. It is something of an irony, inherent in cross-cultural transformations of the type described here, that the “jarring co-existence, so often noted in Byron, of skepticism and belief” is glaringly absent in Bestuzhev's reading of Byron. See R. J. Dingley, “‘I had a Dream’: Byron's ‘Darkness,’” The Byron Journal, No. 9 (1981), p. 30.

3. Contemporary critics labor against the propensity to equate the two. Gleckner mentions “the depths to which biographizing has plunged the general state of Byron criticism from his day to ours” and traces an alternative course in his study. See Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1967), p. xii. Bestuzhev's reading, of course, was in keeping with the fashion which drew proximate the poet's life and his letters. But more, he went to school on this reading.

4. Paul Ricoeur discusses the problem of “distanciation” and “appropriation” in his Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 43-44, 91-95. This study's theoretical framework, applied in some measure in this article, illuminates how very much Bestuzhev was trying to accomplish in his letter to the Polevoi brothers.

5. “Pis'ma Aleksandra Aleksandrovicha Bestuzheva k N. A. i K. A. Polevym,” Russkii vestnik, No. 3 (1861), p. 291.

6. See Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudlit, 1958), I, 608; II, 708-13.

7. Iurii Lotman has persistently made this point. See “The Theater and Theatricality as Components of Early Nineteenth-Century Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1984), pp. 141-64.

8. It should be noted, too, that Bestuzhev's work, under the pen name Marlinskii (or, rarely, as A. B.), had already begun to appear in print in the late 1820s.

9. “Beginning with 1818 the anti-Karamzinist journal Vestnik Evropy (published by M. T. Kachenovskii) initiated a continuous publication of papers on Byron's work, derived mainly from French, but also partly from German, magazines.” (Diakonova, Nina and Vadim Vacuro, “Byron in Russia,” in Byron's Cultural and Political Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Ed. Paul Graham Trueblood. [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press] 1981], p. 144.) As early as 1823 Bestuzhev had encouraged Pushkin to take up English so that he might read Byron in the original, for it is only in the language native to the poet, he argued, that Byron might best be appreciated. “Appreciation” in Pushkin's case may be the correct word, but in Bestuzhev's instance something more like “acquired” might better fit, for Bestuzhev used with great consistency his idea of Byron to inform his life and letters.

10. “The eschatological motifs of Byron's “Darkness” became firmly rooted in Russian poetry. In the 1820s alone it was translated at least five times (by O. Somov, F. Glinka, D. Glebov, M. Vronchenko, A. Rotchev); in the years to follow it attracted Lermontov (1830) and Turgenev (1846)” (Diakonova and Vacuro, p. 152). I use the Rotchev translation here; see Dzhordzh Gordon Bairon, Izbrannaia lirika (Moscow: Raduga, 1988), pp. 246-50.

11. Byron's poems, letters, and journal entries of 1816 indicate how closely entwined these figures and events were for him. See George M. Ridenour, “Byron in 1816: Four Poems from Diodati,” in George Gordon, Lord Byron. ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), pp. 65-74, but particularly Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), II, 563-660.

12. “Pis'ma A. A. Bestuzheva,” p. 310. Bestuzhev misnames Byron's poem, which lacks the article.

13. Byron also suffered rumors about incestuous relations with his half-sister Augusta. His 1816 poem “Epistle to Augusta” (Diodati, 1816) could only fuel those rumors.

14. For details concerning Byron's and Shelley's relationship, see John Buxton, Byron and Shelley: The History of a Friendship (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968). Buxton overstates Shelley's influence on “Darkness” and the other poems of 1816 (p. 262). The intellectual and climatological atmosphere which produced “Darkness” may have influenced the creation of Frankenstein as well; see John Clubbe, “The Tempest-toss'd Summer of 1816: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,” The Byron Journal, No. 19 (1991), pp. 26-40. On the basis of her acquaintance with Byron for the three months she and her husband lived adjacent to him on Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley portrayed Byron in the character Raymond in The Last Man (Buxton, p. 267).

15. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetic Works, 4 vols., ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), IV, 459n.

16. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, II, 637.

17. Clubbe emphasizes the Promethean theme. Note that Bestuzhev mentions Prometheus in his letter. Clubbe's description of the mythological figure's importance to Byron might easily apply to Bestuzhev as well: “In [1816] Byron came to understand better the essential character of the myth: that while Prometheus' fate was symbolic of the general human lot, it was still a fate ennobled by suffering and by a tremendous effort to maintain his mind's independence” (p. 17).

18. Bestuzhev apparently hoped that by winning distinction in battle he would be promoted to the rank of officer, a privilege which could technically win him freedom before his twenty years of servitude were to expire in 1846. Unbeknownst to him, Nicholas I had seen to the impossibility of this maneuver already in 1829 when he approved Bestuzhev's transfer to the Caucasus from Iakutsk.

19. I have here used the text in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetic Works, IV, pp. 40-43.

20. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, pp. 19-22.

21. Bestuzhev's argument, in effect, is that his life is a representation of a representation, a blending of verbal discourses which, and this is the key moment in his rhetoric, refer to a substantive reality. The literariness of identity and lived experience is highlighted here (as elsewhere) in Bestuzhev's letter.

22. “Communication has been cut off, our mounts starve … Kazi-Mulla … threatens all the local cities and towns with a new siege. … The battle of Agach-Kale cost us four hundred men. … Eight of our excellent officers went down. …” “Pis'ma A. A. Bestuzheva,” p. 316.

23. Ibid.

24. The third “stanza” (“The brows of men by the despairing light”) is especially marked for unique prosodic elements. It contains a higher frequency of enjambment than the rest of the poem (56 percent versus 44 percent). This gives the verse a particular drive during its initial stark descriptive passages. Furthermore, the third “stanza” contains a fairly regular caesura, which again distinguishes it and reinforces rhythmically the description of man's persistent degradation. The poem's sole truncated foot occurs in the third stanza during a dramatic moment when flame and the heavens are linked in something of an inverted Promethean image. In addition, the same stanza contains a high frequency of trochaic inversion, or spondees, which make highly noticeable and impactful the epithets “dull sky,” “past worlds,” “wild birds shriek'd.” And finally, the stanza contains rhymed elements otherwise missing from the poem and consequently deserving of attention as a coherent lexical series: “brutes/multitude/food.” These prosodic features reinforce the poem's focus on a death that is rendered in individual, group, and cosmic terms. The fourth stanza contains similar features, but not in the density of the third. Bestuzhev is clearly more moved by imagery than prosodic elements, something which distinguished him from the poets of his day and, perhaps, made him a prose writer first, a poet fourth (after literary critic and epistolary writer).

25. This passage also enticed British readers contemporary to Byron, excluding Scott and other literati (Dingley, “I had a Dream,” p. 20). Rotchev translated these lines as follows: “… Ozera, reki / I more—vse zatikhlo. Nichego / Ne shevelilos' v bezdne molchalivoi” (Izbannaia lirika, 249). In Bestuzhev's rendering, “okean” replaces “more,” “nemoi” displaces “zatikhlo,” “nedvizhnyi” supplants “ne shevelilos',” and “mrachnyi” substitutes for “molchalivoi.” This suggests that Bestuzhev was either recomposing the poem from memory or utilizing a different translation (perhaps French). Concordances of Byron, Pushkin, and Shakespeare, with whom Bestuzhev was familiar, do not deliver the images of the ocean he here cites. It seems likely that he recalled the lines and images from memory. Note, too, Bestuzhev incorrectly cites the poem's title: there is no article in Byron's “Darkness,” an interesting translinguistic addition on Bestuzhev's part and perhaps an indication of his finely attuned, if here misguided, understanding of English. If Bestuzhev was referring to a French translation, entitled “Le Tenebres,” this could have supplied the article he inserted in English in his letter. I am indebted to Professor Khama Basilli Tolo for his comments on the use (or lack thereof) of the article in nineteenth-century French translations from English.

26. The dualism is isomorphic to Bestuzhev's use of Byron's poem.

27. Stevenson argues that the “general idea … that people get the sort of apocalypse they deserve,” is offset, even balanced, by the “double exception implied” in lines 47-54, where the good, obedient, and faithful dog's qualities can be inferred for the master (who has not made food of his companion). See Warren Stevenson, “Byron and Coleridge: The Eagle and the Dove,” The Byron Journal, No. 19 (1991), p. 120. His view is contrary to the usual reading of the poem as “immitigable cynicism and despair” (Leslie A. Marchand, Byron's Poetry: A Critical Introduction [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965], p. 128) or as a “fatalistic acceptance of man's evil and man's doom” (Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970], p. 174).

28. This process is most apparent in translations from one language to another, but less so at the surface level within the same language. Bakhtin's descriptions of this process are most enlightening: “An element of response and anticipation penetrates deeply inside intensely dialogic discourse. Such discourse draws in, as it were, sucks in to itself the other's replies, intensely reworking them.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in Dostoevsky,” Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 197.

29. Bestuzhev makes a good model of what Mikhail Bakhtin describes at length in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Art and Answerability. ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, tr. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 4-256.

30. For a discussion of “Arion” and of the relations between Pushkin and Bestuzhev, both concerned with Decembrist fate, see Lauren G. Leighton, “Puskin and Marlinskij: Decembrist Allusions,” Russian Literature, No. 14 (1983), pp. 351-82.

31. Pechorin as an authentic social type is prefigured here, rendering Lermontov's editorial claim, in the introduction to A Hero of Our Time, valid as a socio-literary event of romantic interpretation. Like Bestuzhev's letter, Lermontov's discourse is poised on the threshold where art and life meet in aestheticized belief, that is, in self-fulfilling prophecy.

32. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p. 95.