[In the essay below, Karlinsky analyzes Ezda v ostrov liubvi, discussing its flaws and infelicities of style as well as its importance to the development of the Russian novel.]

It is seldom possible to date the introduction of a genre in a given literature with such precision as the introduction of the novel in Russia. The first novel (and, indeed, the first secular work of fiction) that was ever published in Russian appeared in 1730. It was titled Ezda v ostrov ljubvi (The Voyage to the Isle of Love), and the title page of the original edition stated that the work had been translated from the French “by the student Vasily Trediakovsky.” The name of the author of the French original was not mentioned. Prior to 1730, translations of foreign works of fiction, and some locally produced tales of love and adventure, were circulated only privately in manuscript.

The work which the remarkable Russian poet and literary theoretician Vasily Trediakovsky (1703-69) had placed at the beginning of the line that would eventually lead to Dead Souls and Anna Karenina was actually a translation of the first two parts of the allegorical novel, Le Voyage de l'Isle d'Amour, by Abbé Paul Tallemant. Abbé Tallemant (1642-1712), who now survives as a footnote in the histories of French literature, was in his day a popular and admired writer. He was the first cousin of the chronicler Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, author of the Historiettes, and his maternal grandfather was Pierre Corneille's patron, the finance administrator Pierre du Puget de Montauron, to whom the poet dedicated his tragedy, Cinna. By the time he was 18, Paul Tallemant had produced the first installment of Le Voyage de l'Isle d'Amour, which was an immediate success in all the ruelles. It was published in 1663 and was followed by two sequels: Le Second Voyage de l'Isle d'Amour (1664) and Le Retour de l'Isle d'Amour (1666). Also in 1666, Paul Tallemant, aged 24, was elected member of the French Academy, one of the youngest writers ever to obtain this distinction. After the election, Tallemant devoted himself to administrative affairs pertaining to the Academy and wrote little that was of interest, but including a long list of panegyrics and eulogies of kings and their ministers, an “Histoire critique des journaux,” a preface for the 1697 edition of the collected poems of one of the more interesting précieux poets, Isaac de Benserade, who was a friend of Tallemant's.¹

Le Voyage de l'Isle d'Amour was not a very original work for its time. A typical example of seventeenth-century préciosité, it was a part of the extraordinary vogue for literary accounts of imaginary voyages in the late 1650s and the early 1660s.² The tradition to which it belonged combined the line of the idealistic adventure novel, introduced in France at the beginning of the century by Honoré d'Urfé's novel, L'Astrée, and the newly revived taste for allegory and other periphrastic modes of expression brought on by the mid-century préciosité. Except for Tallemant's hero, Tircis, and his three lady loves, all other characters in the first two Voyages are allegorical personifications of states of mind, so that the entire work is really a continuous exercise in this one single trope. Some elements of the plot and the names of several characters can be traced directly to L'Astrée. The less usual features of the novel are its epistolary form (this was far less common in the seventeenth-century than it became in the eighteenth) and the fact that a considerable portion of the descriptions and the dialogue is in verse. The success of Tallemant's book, like that of some of the best-sellers of today, was evidently due not to its intrinsic excellence, but to its ability to provide the female reading public with what it wanted to read and what was to a certain extent already familiar. As late as 1788, the first two Voyages were still well enough known to be included in the series of “Imaginary Voyages and Cabbalistic Novels” then being published in Amsterdam.

But the work had meanwhile achieved its unique distinction of being used as the basis of the first attempt to create modern Russian prose. Nothing less than that was the aim of Vasily Trediakovsky when he presented his translation to the Russian public in 1730. The intention is made clear in what today is the best-known portion of the work, Trediakovsky's preface “To the Reader,” a document of considerable historical importance, often quoted in anthologies and histories of Russian literature. It is a clear declaration of independence of the new secular literature written in Russian vernacular from religious literature, written in the Russian version of Old Church Slavonic. To many Russians in Trediakovsky's time religious literature was still the only thinkable literature. Trediakovsky was well aware of the difficulties of his pioneering when he remarked in his preface that for him the translator differs from the original creator in name only. Indeed, the task of the translator in this case was far more creative than that of the original author. Tallemant had at his service a language that was a pliant and perfected tool and he made free use of a set of widely accepted literary conventions and formulae. Trediakovsky had to put the narration into the language of a social and educational level that differed from both the level of Tallemant's audience and the accepted Russian literary norm. In professing his aim to create a literary language based on everyday conversation, Trediakovsky is modest enough to warn the reader that, “… if I have not conveyed the properties of our language, at least I can flatter myself that I had every intention of doing so.”³

Ezda v ostrov ljubvi was a success. The methods of courtship described were accepted by younger Russians as a new and exciting fashion. The book was denounced by prominent churchmen as immoral and brought the young poet to the attention of the reigning monarch, Empress Anna. Yet, while it is undoubtedly a landmark in the development of the Russian literary language, it is artistically (like much of Trediakovsky's later work) an extraordinarily appealing failure. The Russian language of the first half of the eighteenth century was simply not ready for préciosité. It was only beginning to reach full stride in the tremendous and rapid evolution that was to culminate, early in the nineteenth century, in the language of Zhukovsky and Pushkin. The problem of fusing the heterogeneous elements (colloquial Russian of various levels, Old Church Slavonic borrowings, unassimilated barbarisms from the Western European languages, the Ukrainian-Polish influence of the seventeenth century, the prikaznoj jazyk, i.e., the official vocabulary of the Moscow scribes of the preceding two centuries) was not adequately solved until the end of the eighteenth century. In Trediakovsky's prose these elements float about in a free mixture. Try as he would, he could not shake himself free from the age-old Russian ecclesiastic tradition of writing in Old Church Slavonic. And, in his attempt to use everyday speech, he resorted to manners of expression which verge on vulgarity. The stylistic mixture often produces comic effects where none are required. Here for example, is the description of the Cave of Cruelty:

Sija peščera est' prevelikoi kamen' dikoi tak ne prokhodnoi, čto nikakim sposobom nevozmožno na nego vzlest' … Ja khotel uderžat' Amintu v tu samuju minutu, kak ona tudy vkhodila; no nedopustila mne togo učinit' odna prevelikaja babišča očjun' durnaja, i vzgljadu svirepogo, u kotoryja oba glaza vypučilis' izolbu. Sija staraja korzovka ruki imeet dolgija i vyskhlyja, a nogti kak Lvinyja. Ona obykla vsekh ni vo čto stavit', i kto by vy niblyli ni na kogo nesmotrit i vse ljubit ves' narod mučit'.⁴

In this passage, Trediakovsky's language is at its most resolutely colloquial, despite his use of the Old Church Slavonic form of the genitive case (u kotoryja) and the scribal-sounding verb učinit'. The abundance of peasant expressions produces the effect of burlesque and low comedy quite different from the corresponding passage in Tallemant:

Cet antre est un rocher si escarpé, qu'il est très difficile d'y monter … je voulus arrêter Amynte sur le point qu'elle y voulut entrer mais j'en fus empêché par une grande femme fort laide et d'un regard farouche; les yeux, lui sortent de la tête; elle a de grands bras secs et des ongles prodigieux …⁵

One of Trediakovsky's major problems was to devise a vocabulary for gallant forms of courtship. One can discern in the development of Russian literature in the eighteenth century a long apprenticeship in the expression of the finer feelings, culminating in the sentimentalist school of Karamzin in the 1790s. The role of Trediakovsky and of his Ezda v ostrov ljubvi in this development is only beginning to receive the recognition it deserves.⁶ There is a great deal of linguistic imagination in the neologisms Trediakovsky invented to convey the vocabulary of French galanterie: glazoljubnost' (for coquetterie), kupidonglazun (for amour-coquet), malye prislugi (for petits soins), although one must admit that these coinages sound grotesque in the context of modern Russian. The flora of the Isle of Love is a curious mixture of unassimilated Gallicisms (tjulipy, ol'ety from tulipes, œillets, cf. modern Russian tjul'pany, gvozdiki) and such archaic, Greek-Old Church Slavonic, biblical forms as kriny (i.e., lilies, cf. late eighteenth-century lilei, modern lilii). The population of the Isle of Love is considerably Russified by introduction of czars, boyars, and even landowners (pomeščica Bezpokojnost'). The words un and une are frequently rendered by the numerals edin and odna where the French clearly uses them as indefinite articles, in an evident attempt to convey a French stylistic peculiarity where a Russian equivalent could not be achieved because of the absence of articles in the language. With Tallemant's pallid verse, Trediakovsky is most successful in the two frankly erotic pieces (“Je vis mourir entre mes bras / Cette charmante blonde” and “Là cet amant qui sut lui plaire”), both of which he expands and generally treats with great freedom. The delicate eroticism of these pieces had no Russian equivalent until the poetry of Bogdanovich in the late eighteenth century or Batiushkov at the beginning of the nineteenth; in the second Trediakovsky had to resort to outspoken physical descriptions that would have shocked Abbé Tallemant.

Trediakovsky the poet, a confirmed follower of French seventeenth-century neoclassical poetics, had little use for the novel as a literary form and in general considered prose forms inferior to verse and dramatic genres. It is ironic, therefore, that we must begin the history of the novel in Russia with his name. Although he did not produce any original works in this form, he was the first prominent Russian writer to translate novels into Russian. His choice of works to translate is highly significant. Two decades after the success of Ezda v ostrov ljubvi, he translated the didactic Latin novel, Argenis, by John Barclay, explaining in his preface that he considered Barclay's work to be the prose equivalent of the epic poetry of Virgil, Tasso, Camões, and Milton. Here we see the curious attempt, also observable in the novels of Trediakovsky's successor, Kheraskov, to rehabilitate the lowly novel form by disguising it as an epic poem in prose. In the third foreign novel Trediakovsky translated, he drew the logical consequences of this attitude and turned the most popular French novel of his day, Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque (published during the eighteenth century in five different Russian translations and a total of ten Russian editions) into a Homeric epic poem in hexameter.

Of the three novels translated by Trediakovsky, his version of Tallemant was the most influential. It established the fashion for the idealistic novel of gallant adventure, the form in which the majority of original Russian novels of the eighteenth-century were written. The earliest of these original novels were the work of the clever literary hack, Fedor Emin (ca. 1735-70), an international adventurer of uncertain origins who had spent his earlier life in Turkey and England and who was much given to mystification. In a short span of six years (1763-69), Emin published twenty-five books, including seven novels, of which at least five were original works. At the beginning of Emin's career the fashion was still for novels translated from foreign languages, and he accordingly presented his first two novels (The Unfortunate Floridor and The Garden of Love, both published in 1763) to the reading public as translations from Italian and Portuguese, respectively. His third novel, The Inconstant Fortune or the Adventures of Miramond (also published in 1763), was very similar in form and style to the first two but admittedly an original and even a semi-autobiographical work, and was his most successful and popular book. Its success led to a new demand for original Russian works of fiction in prose. Emin, who had palmed off his first two novels as translations, admitted the authorship of his subsequent books, including his last and least original work in this form, Letters of Ernest and Doraura (1766), a free adaptation of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse.

The only other prominent Russian writer of the second half of the eighteenth century to write original novels was Mikhail Kheraskov (1737-1807), much admired in his day as an epic poet. The seriousness of Kheraskov's literary intentions cannot be doubted, but his novels had a succès d'estime in a small circle of literati and were quickly forgotten. The novels of Emin, on the other hand, deplored by all sensible contemporary critics, enjoyed great popularity and were reprinted until the beginning of the nineteenth century.⁷ The novels of both these writers are unmistakably in the tradition of the idealistic adventure novel introduced by Ezda v ostrov ljubvi. Yet there are some new features: allegory is often connected with the ideas of the Enlightenment; there is a certain amount of preaching, both moral and political; above all, there is a type of plot that can be traced directly to the rise of Free Masonry and of Neoplatonist movements in general throughout Europe in the second half of the century. One of the best summaries of this type of plot is to be found in Kheraskov's preface to the third edition of his mystical epic poem, Vladimir:

This should be read as a voyage of an attentive person along the Road of Truth, where he encounters worldly temptation, is subject to many enticements, falls into the darkness of doubt, struggles with his inherent passions, finally gains control over himself, finds the path of Truth, and, having attained enlightenment, is reborn.⁸

If we compare this with Terrasson's Sethos, with the novels Marianne Thalmann discusses and quotes in her study of the German Masonic novel,⁹ and especially with the opera libretto, The Magic Flute, which Emanuel Schikaneder wrote to be set to music by his fellow member of the Salzburg Masonic Lodge “Zur gekrönten Hoffnung,” W. A. Mozart, we clearly see that the novels of Kheraskov and Emin belong to a widespread European trend of their time.

The idealistic adventure novel in its new Masonic garb can be seen as its most typical in the last two of Kheraskov's three novels (Numa, or the Flourishing Rome, 1768; Cadmus and Harmonia, 1786; and Polydor, Son of Cadmus and Harmonia, 1794). The subject matter of these last two books is derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses and developed by Kheraskov in a highly allegorical manner, including topical references such as an angry indictment of the French Revolution in Polydor. Despite Kheraskov's programmatically stated intention to write novels in prose, he follows the example of Trediakovsky in retaining some features of epic poems. Polydor, for example, opens with an invocation to the Muses. Although there are no indications in the known biographical data on Fedor Emin that he was ever a Mason (Kheraskov was one of the most prominent Russian Masons of his time), Masonic influence is clear in at least two of his novels: The Adventures of Themistocles (1763) and The Rewarded Fidelity, or the Adventures of Lisarchus and Sarmanda (1764). The latter work offers a rather superficial version of the Masonic life-as-voyage-of-purification plot, with some episodes strikingly reminiscent of the libretto of The Magic Flute.

The Soviet literary historians on the basis of the biographies of the two writers, have asserted that Kheraskov represents aristocratic ideology, while Emin is an ideologue of the rising merchant class.¹⁰ In fact, the ideology of Kheraskov is primarily Masonic and the doctrine of human progress through trials to enlightenment is central to his thinking. He is enough a man of his time to denounce superstition in all forms, but unlimited liberty and egalitarianism are for him “an ugly monster.” As in most writers of the period, there is a Rousseauist strain in both Kheraskov and Emin. However, as far as ideology is concerned, the writings of Emin are a grab bag of every imaginable philosophical and sociological cliché of his time, and one can deduce a coherent system from these clichés only by fitting them into a preconceived class scheme. Despite his wide travels, the cultural level of Emin is low—far lower than that of either Kheraskov or Trediakovsky. He tries to popularize ideas he himself does not quite understand, like the notion of electricity and animal magnetism in Miramond. One of the heroines falls in love with Miramond because he thinks of love while kissing her hand; it was the age of Mesmer and Volta, and Emin explains the phenomenon as “electromagnetic.” The plot of his Themistocles is a reductio ad absurdum of the old classicist love-versus-duty situation. Themistocles forces his son to give up the love of a princess, although there are no obstacles or opposition to their love, simply because he considers impulsive love irrational and unwise. The lives of the young people end in death and tragedy, but Themistocles is extolled and rewarded for his adherence to his principles.

From the point of view of language and style, neither Kheraskov nor Emin show anything like the inventiveness and the pioneering spirit of their predecessor, Trediakovsky. The style of Kheraskov is ponderous and archaic for its time, and the language of Emin is at times incredibly inept.

Neither Kheraskov, whose novels were respected but not read, nor Emin, who was read as much as he was berated, wrote the only Russian novel of the eighteenth century which can be read today for the sheer pleasure of it. The Fair Cook, or the Adventures of a Depraved Woman by Mikhail Chulkov (ca. 1743-92) has nothing to do with the idealistic tradition introduced by Trediakovsky. It is a picaresque novel in which a cheerfully amoral kept woman tells of her own adventures. The style is genuinely colloquial, with an admixture of burlesqued classical references and popular proverbs. Altogether, it is one of the most pleasant examples of Russian eighteenth-century prose, quite unfairly overlooked by the Russian critics of the nineteenth century.

In the 1790s, the sentimental novella became the dominant form of prose fiction in Russian literature. And, when the genuinely original and permanent Russian novel came in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, its inspiration was romantic. The idealistic and Masonic novel was a dead form by then, and the living active models were to be found in the sentimental novel of Richardson and Rousseau and the newly invented historical romance of Sir Walter Scott.

Notes

1. On Abbé Paul Tallemant, his literary career, and his family connections, see Antoine Adam, Histoire de la littérature francaise au XVII^e siècle (Paris, n.d.) III, 36-37. Also informative are the same author's notes for Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes (Paris, 1961), 2 vols., passim.

2. Daniel Mornet, Histoire de la littérature française classique 1660-1700 (Paris, 1940), p. 31, counts fourteen such works published in 1663, the year of appearance of the first of Tallemant's Voyages.

3. Ezda v ostrov ljubvi, in Sobranie sočinenij (St. Petersburg, 1849), III, 650.

4. Ibid., p. 670.

5. Abbé Paul Tallemant, Le Voyage de l'Isle, d'Amour, in Voyages imaginaires (Amsterdam, 1788), XXVI, 251.

6. See the chapter on Trediakovsky in Gerta Hüttl-Worth, Die Bereicherung des russischen Wortschatzes im XVIII. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1956), pp. 10-24.

7. Zhukovsky alludes to the popularity of Miramond in one of his epigrams of 1806, and Pushkin ironically mentions Emin as the favorite writer of the heroine in A Little House in Kolomna as late as 1830. See V. A. Žukovskij, Sočinenija (Moscow, 1954), p. 14, and A. S. Puškin, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij (Moscow, 1957), IV, 329.

8. Quoted by I. N. Rozanov, “Mikhail Matveevič Kheraskov,” Masonstvo v ego prošlom i nastojagsčem, ed. by S. P. Mel'gunov and N. P. Sidorov (Moscow, 1915), II, 45.

9. Dr. Marianne Thalmann, Der Trivialroman des 18. Jahrhunderts und der romantische Roman: ein Beitrag sur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Geheimbundmystik, Germanische Studien, XXIV (Berlin, 1923). See also Heinrich Schneider, Quest for Mysteries; the Masonic Background for Literature in 18th-century Germany (Ithaca, 1947).

10. E.g., D. D. Blagoj, Istorija russkoj literatury XVIII veka (Moscow, 1960), p. 377.