Russia posed a problem for Byron when writing Don Juan, for although he had never been there, the geographical, historical, and sexual themes of his comic epic dictated that his hero should go there. As a result of his study of Scott’s Waverley Novels, he was determined that no episode should pass without a firm backing either in his own experience, or in authentic prose sources. Don Juan should have a reality which his Turkish Tales, at least one of which, Lara, was, as he confessed to his publisher, set on ‘the Moon’,1 manifestly lacked.
There were a number of reasons why Don Juan should visit Russia.
Firstly, he was enslaved in Constantinople, and had to escape—and Russia was the nearest stopping-off point on his anti-clockwise trip around Europe. Secondly, Byron knew that no epic in the tradition in which he wrote—the tradition of Pulci, Ariosto and Tasso—was complete without a Christian army besieging a Moslem city, and Suvorov’s siege of Ismail, in which Juan takes part, both fitted into his poem’s time-scheme, and was a perfect demonstration of that very idea.
A very important subtext for Don Juan is a novel by Thomas Hope called Anastasius, or the Memoirs of a Greek,2 which Byron’s publisher John Murray had brought out late in 1819, when Byron was writing the third and fourth cantos of his comic epic (the two cantos were originally one). Anastasius is a picaresque novel set in the eastern Mediterranean,
Quotations from Don Juan are from the edition on the website of the International Byron Society www.internationalbyronsociety.org.
1 Byron to Murray, 24 July 1814: text from National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS) Ms.43488; Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L.A. Marchand (BLJ), IV (1975), pp. 145-6.
2 See Peter Cochran, ‘Why Did Byron Envy Thomas Hope’s Anastasius?’, in P. Cochran, Byron’s Romantic Politics (Newcastle, 2011), pp. 221-62.
whose protagonist claims to be either a Turk or a Greek, a Christian or a Moslem, depending on which label seems to give him the best advantage in whatever situation he finds himself. It casts the gravest doubt on the probity of the Greek nation, and upon the philhellenic concept in whose interest Byron was, in the myth, to ‘sacrifice his life’ five years later. At one point Anastasius finds himself in Bulgaria, near the town of Widin, in the company of General Suvorov. In another, he contemplates travelling to St Petersburg to become the toy-boy of Catherine the Great—but does not do so.
Byron’s written reaction to Anastasius was muted—a sure sign, in one so secretive, that he was studying it assiduously; and indeed we have the word of Lady Blessington that he admired it past reckoning, and envied Hope for having written it.3 He seems to have taken it with him to Greece in 1823,4 as if to test out its theories relating to the instability of ethnic barriers there, and the depth of Greek unscrupulousness. If he did, he found ample evidence of both. His own hero, Don Juan, also travels north from Constantinople, passes Widin,5 fights with Suvorov at Ismail, and (as a reward for his heroism) is sent to Petersburg, where he realises what for Anastasius is a mere ambition, and becomes, indeed, one of the many gigolos of ‘Great Catherine, whom glory still adores, / As greatest of all sovereigns and whores’.6 (Freudian analysts will be delighted when it is pointed out that Catherine was also the name of Byron’s mother.)
People have tried to ascribe a political motive to Byron for the writing of the Russian Cantos of Don Juan. To his London agent, Douglas Kinnaird, he writes:
With regard to the D. J.s – in addition to what I have stated within – I would add that as much rolls (in them) upon the White Bears of Muscovy – who do not at present dance to English Music – it is an appropriate moment to introduce them to the discerning public – in all their native intractability.
– – Besides – they and the Turks form at the present the farce [after] the Congress melodrame upon Spain. – Their names & qualities are become more familiar household words – than when the D. J.s were written. – I am aware of no inferiority in the four.7
3 Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell jr. (Princeton, 1969), p. 51.
4 See W.N.C. Carlton, Poems and Letters of Lord Byron Edited from the Original Manuscripts in the Possession of W.K. Bixby, of St. Louis (Society of the Dofobs, Chicago, 1912).
5 Byron, Don Juan, VII, 61, 1.
6 Ibid., VI, 92, 7-8.
7 Byron to Douglas Kinnaird, 29 January 1823: text from NLS Ms.43454; BLJ, X (1980), pp.
92-3.
Byron, Don Juan, and Russia 39 The Anglophobic Byron is not usually concerned when foreign powers refuse to ‘dance to English Music’: his explanation seems designed for Kinnaird’s benefit. However, it is true that throughout 1822, the year in which Byron wrote the Russian cantos, the cavortings of the Holy Alliance, inspired by the mysticism of Madame Krüdener and Alexander I, was very much in European evidence, in its plans to invade Spain and put down the liberal revolt there (in the event, although Russia wanted to invade, it was France who invaded).
In fact, Byron shows little overt interest in any of these issues. His commentary on Russian ambitions was more comical:
But oh thou grand legitimate Alexander!
Her Son’s Son; let not this last phrase offend Thine ear, if it should reach; and now rhymes wander
Almost as far as Petersburgh, and lend A dreadful impulse to each loud meander
Of murmuring Liberty’s wide waves, which blend Their roar even with the Baltic’s; so you be
Your father’s son, ’tis quite enough for me. – To call men love-begotten, or proclaim
Their mothers as the Antipodes of Timon, That Hater of Mankind, would be a shame,
A libel, or whate’er you please to rhyme on, But people’s Ancestors are History’s game,
And if one lady’s slip could leave a crime on All Generations – I should like to know
What pedigree the best would have to show. – Had Catherine and the Sultan understood
Their own true interests, which kings rarely know Until ’tis taught by lessons rather rude,
There was one way to end their strife, although Perhaps precarious, had they but thought good,
Without the aid of Prince or Plenipo:
She to dismiss her Guards, and He his Haram, And for their other matters, meet and share ’em.
Don Juan, VI, sts.93-5 These stanzas bring us to the last and most important reason for Byron making Don Juan travel to Russia. The main theme of Don Juan is not—as in the Molina / Molière / Mozart tradition—the male sexual appetite, but rather the female sexual appetite. Juan is throughout the passive victim of predatory women. And the most famous example in recent history of a
woman with not only a large sexual appetite, but the power to satisfy it too, was Catherine the Great. Byron’s jest—that she and the Sultan would be far better employed in bed than at war—is an amusing meditation on this theme.
Douglas Kinnaird found Byron’s treatment of Catherine unfair:
With regards to the new Cantos I am delighted with them – the political reflections, the address to Wellington & the Preface are admirable – but why call the Katherine a whore? – She hired or whored others – She was never hired or whored herself – why blame her for liking fucking? If she canted as well cunted,8 then call her names as long as you please – But it is hard to blame her for following her natural inclinations – She dared do it – others are afraid – She could do it with impunity; & would have been a fool not to have done it – I should be equally a fool to do it, if I could not do it with impunity – I looked for more liberality from you – You must not turn against rogering – even tho’ you practise it seldomer …9
This paper will chart Byron’s use of what sources he had to hand in making Juan’s Russian visit, and his sexual servitude to Catherine the Great, look authentic.
His primary source was William Tooke’s Life of the Empress Catharine II, (for which I’ve used the fourth edition of 1800), and his View of the Russian Empire (3 vols., 1799). This last is number 184 in the 1827 Sale Catalogue of Byron’s library; the absence of the Life does not mean Byron did not possess it, for only a remnant of his library was auctioned in 1827, most of it having been ‘cherry-picked’ by his friends. William Tooke was chaplain to the British merchants in St Petersburg from 1774 to 1792. A frequenter of Catherine’s court, he was friends with, for example, Falconet, creator of the famous statue of Peter the Great. His books on Russia bear a complex relationship with those of the French writer Jean-Henri Castéra, who published similar volumes between 1797 and 1800.10
However, Byron seems also to have used a different French book, Charles François Philibert Masson’s Secret Memoirs of the Court of St. Petersburg (1800 English translation); this is not in his library sale catalogue, but again, that does not prove that he did not have a copy. I shall mention other books en passant.
8 Kinnaird echoes Byron’s words to him in a letter of 26 October 1819.
9 Kinnaird to Byron, 15 October 1822: text from NLS Ms.43456. Byron had told Kinnaird on 16 November 1819 that he ‘had not now for a year—touched or disbursed a sixpence to any harlotry’.
10 See A.G. Cross, ‘The Reverend William Tooke’s Contribution to English Knowledge of Russia at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Canadian Slavic Studies, III (1969), pp. 113ff.
Byron, Don Juan, and Russia 41 From Masson, Byron would have formed a very poor view of Russian manners and morals. Here is one of his milder passages:
Next to drunkenness, the most prominent and common vice of the Russians is theft. I doubt whether any people on earth be more inclined naturally to appropriate to themselves the property of others—from the first minister to the general officer, from the lackey to the soldier, all are thieves, plunderers and cheats. In Russia theft does not inspire that degrading contempt which stigmatizes a man with infamy, even among the lowest of the populace. What the thief dreads most is the being obliged to return his booty, for he reckons a caning as nothing; and, if detected in the act, he cries with a grin: “Vinavat gospodin! vinavat; I have done wrong, sir”, and returns what he had stolen, as if that were sufficient amends. This shameful vice, pervading all classes, scarcely incurs blame. It sometimes happens that your pocket is picked in apartments at Court, to which none but persons of quality and superior officers are admitted, as if you were in a fair. A stranger, who lodges with a Russian, even a kniaz, will find, to his cost, that he must leave nothing on his dressing-table or his writing-desk; it is even a Russian maxim, that what is not locked up belongs to anyone who will take it. The same quality has been falsely ascribed to the Spartans; but an Englishman, who has published a book on the resemblances between the Russians and the Greeks, after having proved that they eat, sing and sleep like them, has forgotten to add that in stealing they are still more expert.11
At Canto IX stanza 70, Don Juan, having been summoned to court and dressed for his new role, comes face to face with the Empress. Byron is mildly facetious:
And Catherine (we must say thus much for Catherine) Though bold and bloody, was the kind of thing Whose temporary Passion was quite flattering,
Because each lover looked a sort of king, Made up upon an amatory pattern;
A royal husband in all save the ring, Which, being the damn’dest part of Matrimony, Seemed taking out the sting to leave the Honey.
Byron, Don Juan, IX, st.70 Next he uses a detail with which both Tooke and Masson provided him:
the colour of Catherine’s eyes. His uncertainty as to what colour they in fact were is a sign that he has consulted both books, and cannot choose between them:
11 Masson, Secret Memoirs of the Court of St. Petersburg, II (London, 1800), pp. 45-6.
And when you add to this her Womanhood, In its Meridian; her blue eyes – or Grey – (The last, if they have Soul, are quite as good,
Or better, as the best Examples say:
Napoleon’s, Mary’s (Queen of Scotland) should Lend to that Colour a transcendent ray – And Pallas also sanctions the same hue, Too wise to look through Optics black or blue.)
Byron, Don Juan, IX, st.71 And indeed we find that Tooke writes of the Empress, ‘She has fine large
blue eyes’;12 whereas Masson writes of ‘... her grey eyes’.13 Byron now assays a more detailed description:
Her sweet smile, and her then majestic figure;
Her plumpness, her imperial condescension, Her preference of a boy to men much bigger,
Fellows whom Messalina’s Self would pension;
Her – Prime of Life – just now in juicy vigour – With other Extras which we need not mention – All these – or any One of these – explain
Enough to make a stripling very vain.
Byron, Don Juan, IX, st.72 He may still have both Tooke and Masson open on his writing-desk at the same time; but he prefers the greater discretion of the Englishman. Tooke quotes a source from the 1770s, and has:
She [Catherine] is of that stature which is necessarily requisite to perfect elegance of form in a lady. She has fine large blue eyes; her eyebrows and hair are of a brownish colour; her mouth is well-proportioned, the chin round, the nose rather long; the forehead regular and open, her hands and arms round and white, her complection not entirely clear, and her shape rather plump than meagre; her neck and bosom high, and she bears her head with peculiar grace and dignity. She lays on, as is universally the custom with the fair sex in Russia, a pretty strong rouge... Her gait is majestic: in the whole of her form and manner there is something so dignified and noble, that if she were to be seen, without ornament or any outward marks of distinction, among a great number of ladies of rank, she would be immediately esteemed the chief. There is withal in the features of her face and in her looks an uncommon degree of authority and command. In her character
12 William Tooke, Life of the Empress Catharine II, II (4th edn, London, 1799), p. 179.
13 Masson, I, p. 78.
Byron, Don Juan, and Russia 43 there is more of liveliness than gravity. She is courteous, gentle, beneficent;
outwardly devout.14
Whereas Masson, describing Catherine in the 1790s (Juan’s ‘period’) writes:
If, upon the introduction of a stranger, she presented her hand to him to kiss, she demeaned herself with great courtesy, and commonly addressed a few words to him upon the subject of his travels and his visit: but all the harmony of her countenance was instantly discomposed, and you forgot for a moment the great Catharine, to reflect on the infirmities of an old woman; as, on opening her mouth, it was apparent that she had no teeth.
Her voice too was hoarse and broken, and her speech inarticulate. The lower part of her face was rather large and coarse; her grey eyes, though clear and penetrating, evinced something of hypocrisy, and a certain wrinkle at the base of the nose indicated a character somewhat sinister.15
Byron doesn’t want Juan’s ordeal in Catherine’s bed to be too onerous, so he leaves these details out. But he has borrowed from Masson in an earlier passage:
Though somewhat large, exuberant, and truculent When wroth, while pleased, she was as fine a figure As those who like things rosy, ripe and succulent
Would wish to look on – while they are in vigour;
She could repay each amatory look you lent With interest – and in turn was wont with rigour To exact of Cupid’s bills the full amount
At sight, nor would permit you to discount.
Byron, Don Juan, IX, st.62 Masson (or rather, his translator) gives the rhyme-word which the gentlemanly Byron implies without using:
She [Catherine] was of the middle stature, and corpulent; few women, however, with her corpulence, would have attained the graceful and dignified carriage for which she was remarked.16
Another source, still to be mentioned, is not a history book, but a poem: Il Poema Tartaro, by Giambattista Casti—a writer Byron admired and imitated, while hardly mentioning him, so risqué was he (few Italians these days have even heard of him). Il Poema Tartaro (which as usual is not in Byron’s library sale catalogues) was inspired by Casti’s time as a diplomat in Russia during the 1770s. He had conceived a great detestation of the place:
14 Tooke, II, pp. 179-80 (quoting a source of 1772-3).
15 Masson, I, pp. 77-8.
16 Ibid., p. I 76.
Utile insomma sarebbe all’Europa tutta di togliersi dai confini e slontanar più che sia possibile una Potenza rapace, infida, ingannevole, prepotente, inquieta, soverchiatrice, impertinente, pericolosa, insaziabile, che così sarebbe costretta a riconcentrarsi a Mosca e rinunciare a ogni influenza e ingerenza Europea, e ritornare come le altre volte a divenire Potenza asiatica.
E così sia amen.
[To sum up, it would be useful if all Europe could combine to confine and keep at a distance more than has hitherto been possible a Power so rapacious, faithless, deceitful, arrogant, turbulent, overwhelming, impertinent, dangerous, and insatiable, so that it would be forced to centre itself again on Moscow, renounce all European influence and interest, and return as in past times to being an Asiatic Power. Let all say Amen.]17
Il Poema Tartaro travesties Catherine’s Russia by moving it a couple of thousand miles north-east, rechristening it ‘Mogollia’, Catherine ‘Cattuna’, Peter the Great ‘Djenghis-Khan’, Potemkin ‘Toto’, and so on. The joke makes Russia into an Asiatic power. The hero is a young Irishman with a big nose called Tomasso Scardassale, who does what Juan does, and serves
‘Cattuna’ sexually.
There are numerous echoes of Casti’s poem in Byron’s:18 but Byron is much less offensive than the Italian. Byron’s joke about Catherine’s appetite, just quoted (‘She could repay each amatory look you lent / With interest—
and in turn was wont with rigour / To exact of Cupid’s bills the full amount / At sight, nor would permit you to discount’) is a more discreet version of a passage from Casti:
Me di fibra sensibile [says Cattuna to Tomasso], e di vive Tempe, come ben sai formò natura
E diemmi ancor molle, e al piacer proclive, Cor, che in van di resistere procura, Alle dolci invincibili attrative
Di bella qual tu sei, maschil figura;
E o fanciulla foss’io, vedova, o moglie, Invan m’opposi all’amorose voglie.
Or perchè sol regnando amar poss’io Liberamente, e premiar chi degno Parmi de’premii miei, dell’amor mio;
Perciò sol di regnar formai disegno;
17 Casti, dispatch in Bibliothèque Nationale, MS.1629 ff 152-61; quoted by Antonino Fallico,
‘Notizie e appunti sulla vita e l’operosità di G.B. Casti negli anni 1776-1790’, Italianistica, III (September-December 1972), p. 530.
18 See Cochran, ‘Casti’s Il Poema Tartaro and Byron’s Don Juan Cantos V-X’, Keats-Shelley Review, XVII (2003), pp. 61-85.