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Russian heroides, 1759-1843: translatons and transformations
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Russian heroides, 1759-1843: translatons and transformations
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RUSSIAN HEROIDES, 1759-1843: TRANSLATONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS
by Yuliya Volkhonovych
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES)
August 2014
Copyright 2014 Yuliya Volkhonovych
ii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my advisor, Marcus Levitt for introducing me to Russian
heroides and encouraging me over the years to pursue my research, for sharing his expertise
and providing thoughtful support through the final stages of writing. My special thanks to
Sarah Pratt for advising and supporting me during my studies at USC, for reading the
manuscript and offering valuable suggestions. I am grateful to Alik Zholkovsky who taught
me how to read and analyze poetry.
I am very thankful to my family and especially to my husband, Jay, for his unwavering
support, patience and being a great listener, first reader and diligent editor.
iii
Abstract
In the decades leading up to the Golden Age of Russian poetry, poems called
“heroides” [geroidy] frequently appeared in journals and pamphlets. These works had a
pronounced influence on the development of Russian poetry and prose, including the lode star
of Russian literature, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Yet heroides have been largely overlooked in
Russian literary studies, and until the dissertation was written, the full corpus of Russian
heroides had not been identified. This study identifies the entire corpus of Russian heroides,
more than 60 works in verse and some in prose, written between 1759 and 1843, which are
analyzed here for the first time. This corpus includes translations of Ovid’s famous Heroides,
the main prototype of the genre, as well as Russian versions of French héroïdes and original
works by Russian poets. The dissertation identifies several poems as heroides for the first
time, and also reveals several wrongly attributed poems to be translations, establishing
previously unacknowledged sources for several texts. It offers the first monographic overview
of this genre and its place in Russian literature.
Described by one scholar “as emotional cocktails, as swift in their effect and as
evanescent,” heroides told compelling stories of loss and desire in the form of epistolary
monologues by literary characters, mostly females (“heroines”), writing to their absent
spouses or lovers. They featured plots from both classical and modern tragedy, bourgeois
drama, and novels, offering readers a glimpse into a private world, luring them to “abandon”
themselves in tempestuous and dramatic literary fiction. Early Russian translations of Ovid’s
Heroides, especially Kheraskov’s “Ariadne to Theseus,” legitimized the appearance of a
woman at the center of a Russian poetic work and provided a model for describing a woman’s
physical appearance and emotions. French re-inventors of heroides such as Claude Joseph
Dorat and Charles-Pierre Colardeau offered “updatings of Ovid’s woeful outpourings,”
iv
presenting pleas, feelings and struggles not just by mythological characters, but by more
recent figures of abandonment, Alexander Pope’s Eloisa being the most influential. Along
with women, more and more men lamented their fates in heroides which became an effective
format to explore the voices, emotions, and thoughts of a particular individual. Translations
of these works marked a crucial stage in Russian literary development. Built around a highly
confidential and compelling narrator’s voice and driven by the desire to convey a story as
vividly and expressively as possible, the heroide engaged or “colonized” the reader by
reconstructing a chain of emotions and exposing the depths of the human soul. For many
Russian readers only recently introduced to the world of fiction it was a new experience that
played an important role in forming their literary tastes and cultural expectations.
Several Russian poets including Sumarokov contributed to the growth of the genre
making use of both French and Russian sources. However, the genre, often presented in
Russian periodicals to “entertain” a female audience, was raised to a new level when it was
employed by a Russian female writer, Ekaterina Urusova. Urusova’s collection of nine
heroides, Heroides Dedicated to the Muses (1777), revised the image of the woman narrator,
giving her the power to tell her own story, and encouraged other women writers to tell theirs.
While Urusova takes her heroines mostly from Russian neoclassical tragedy, she challenges
the generic conventions of the heroide: some of her heroides have original plots and reject the
necessity of a tragic ending as framed by Ovid and European poets.
Studying heroides in their many shapes and forms reveals the variety of ways in which
these works engaged with the European and Russian literary tradition. Given their emotional
subject matter as well as their wide spectrum of intermediaries and sources, heroides provided
eighteenth-century Russian writers with a way to explore the narrative potential of lyric verse.
Russian heroides also drew on the plots of European epistolary novels, and early Russian
v
epistolary novels used heroides to express characters’ feelings and emotions. During the early
stages in the development of the Russian novel when poetry was still the preferred mode, the
heroide provided a useful bridge between poetry and prose. Pushkin’s masterpiece Eugene
Onegin provides evidence of heroides’ influence on at least two occasions: in Lensky’s elegy
before his duel and in Tatiana’s famous letter. These references indicate that the tradition of
heroides – whose very existence has often been overlooked – still played a living role in
Russian literary consciousness and served as a link between the eighteenth and nineteenth-
centuries.
Heroides reveal the central role of translated literature in eighteenth-century Russia.
Almost always based on well-known plots and characters, Russian heroides were created not
to demonstrate originality, but to capitalize on the popularity of other works. While the terms
“translation” and “original” help categorize the texts of Russian heroides, they can’t fully
communicate the complexity of heroides’ essential intertextuality. At the same time,
translating Ovid’s and European heroides into Russian, poets mastered the poetic craft of
expressing passions, exploring the human psyche, and telling a compelling story. In
particular, translations from French shaped the emerging literary scene and helped to develop
the Russian literary language. While the Russian nobility could speak, write and read in
French, the translation of a literary work into Russian, according to Lotman, was “an act of
certain recognition, a proof of the text’s value for Russian society.” Thus, heroides as a group
provide a vivid picture of the cultural appetites of the time. The dissertation puts forward new
materials and interpretations, and thus brings back into critical discourse a neglected genre,
warranting further study in several directions.
vi
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ii
Abstract iii
Introduction 1
Chapter One. Russian Translations of Ovid’s Heroides
Introduction 25
Translations of Ovid’s Second Heroide “Phyllis to Demophon” 43
Translations of Ovid’s Tenth Heroide “Ariadne to Theseus” 54
Other Translations of Ovid’s Heroides 67
Chapter Two. European Heroides in Russia
Introduction 81
Translations of European Heroides 87
Heroides with Unclear Sources 112
Original Russian Heroides with European Sources 120
Chapter Three. Original Russian Heroides
Introduction 131
Heroides by Alexander Sumarokov 133
Karabanov and His Heroide 137
Heroides Dedicated to the Muses by Ekaterina Urusova 141
Conclusion 175
Appendix 1: Russian Translations of Ovid’s Heroides in the 18-19th centuries 194
Appendix 2: Russian Translations of European Heroides and Original Heroides
Based on European Sources 200
Appendix 3: Original Russian Heroides 205
Appendix 4: The List of All Russian Heroides (Translations and Originals) Published
in Russia in 1748-1843. 207
Bibliography 215
1
Introduction
In 1795, by decree of Catherine the Great, the city Ovideopol was established to honor
the celebrated place of Ovid’s exile and death.
1
Two minor Russian poets, Vasilii Ruban and
Grigorii Gorodchaninov, responded to the occasion with epistles to Ovid.
2
While
Gorodchaninov wrote that Ovid’s works are still read with admiration by old and young,
Ruban’s poem calls Ovid from the grave to witness the great “metamorphosis” that has taken
place in the land of his exile, now conquered by Russians. Ruban describes the surprises and
wonders that Ovid would see: instead of barren land, fertile fields abundant with wheat;
instead of dark forests, magnificent buildings; and in place of dens of wild beasts, repositories
of laws. Ruban reports that rays of enlightenment are shining everywhere, sciences and trades
are flourishing, and the town will resurrect the memory of Ovid and his immortal spirit and
intellect. Ruban writes that if Ovid could see the land as it is today, he would prefer Russia to
his homeland and wouldn’t ever want to leave. In the final section of the poem, Ruban
addresses Ovid asking him to use his sweet voice to compose a song of praise for Catherine
whom he calls the Russian Augustus, and who, in the poet’s opinion, must be credited with
Russia’s metamorphosis.
Alluding to the title of Ovid’s most well known and influential work, the word
“metamorphosis” seems to capture the enthusiasm of eighteenth century Russia with its rapid
development of science and literature, drastic reforms in government and cultural resurgence.
The poem also celebrates the bond between the Russian people and the famous Latin poet,
whom they often called “sweet” and “tender.” Russians’ closeness to Ovid was spawned by
1
See Aleksei Liubzhin, Rimskaia literatura v Rossii v XVII--nachale XX veka (Moscow: Greko-latinskii kabinet Iu.A.
Shichalina, 2007), 133.
2
Nikolai Mizko, “Ovidii v russkoi literature,” Moskvitianin 14, vol.4, (1854): 83.
2
the legend that while in exile, Ovid had written some of his poetry in the Sarmatian language,
which is thought to be Slavonic, and that Ovid’s grave had been discovered in a small town on
the Black Sea. These legends fed the imagination of Russians and received a great deal of
attention in the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
3
By the end of the
eighteenth century the level of familiarity with Ovid’s poetry was reflected not only in
numerous translations of his poetic works, but even in parodies of them.
4
Dedicating his
parody of Ovid’s Amores to women and young girls, Nikolai Osipov advised them to always
carry a work by Ovid as a pocket book or keepsake, and to read a few lines from time to time,
as they provide “entertainment and instruction.”
5
Ovid’s Heroides
Among the works of Ovid introduced to Russian readers in the eighteenth century
were selected poems from Heroides, a collection of letters in verse created by Ovid around 15
AD written from the perspectives of female characters from mythology, like Phyllis, Ariadne,
Dido, and Penelope, to their absent husbands or lovers.
6
The word “heroides” means
“heroines,” but Classic scholars disagree whether the title is Ovidian or not.
7
Over the
3
S. I. Nikolaev, “Ovidii v russkoi literature XVII veka,” Russkaia literature, (1985): 206.
4
For discussion of Ovid in Russian culture, see P. N. Berkov, “Ovidii v russkoi literature XVII - XVIII vv,” Vestnik
Leningradskogo Universiteta (Istoriia, yazyk, literatura) no.14, (1973): 88 - 92. On the Russian reception to
Metamorphoses, see Marcus Levitt, “‘Metamorfozy’ Ovidii v russkoi literature XVIII veka - Pro et Contra,” in
Literarum Fructus: Sbornik statei (St. Petersburg: Al’ians-Arkheo, 2012): 142-153.
5
Nikolai Osipov, Ovidievy luibovnyia tvoreniia, pererabotannyia v Eneevskom dukhe (Ovid's Amores Reworked
in the Spirit of Aeneas) (St. Petersburg: Izhdiveniem I. K. Shnora, 1803), n.p.
6
Apart from the letters of heroines, Ovid’s collection includes so called double letters (which feature a man
addressing his lover, and her response), but their authenticity along with the order of the letters has been
disputed.
7
Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, & Chaucer (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2004), 16.
3
centuries the heroides sparked various literary imitations and adaptations and left an important
mark on the development of eighteenth century Russian poetry. The first translated heroides,
“Phyllis to Demophon” and “Ariadne to Theseus,” present a woman-narrator at the center of
the poetic work, a new poetic phenomenon in Russia. In the first of Ovid’s heroides, Phyllis,
queen of Thrace, explains to her lover, Demophon, that her hopes for his return are waning
while she is tormented by shame and guilt, and contemplating suicide. In the second heroide,
Ariadne, the daughter of the King of Crete, addresses her plea to Theseus, whom she rescued,
but who left her so abruptly that she describes herself as engulfed by fear, grief and suffering.
There are several elements that make Ovid’s Heroides unique and have led scholars to
credit the Latin poet with inventing a new genre.
8
Heroides occupies a unique place at the
intersection of several literary genres: elegy, epistle, and novel. Smith describes the
phenomenon of Heroides in terms of a series of dualities: “conflict and synthesis exist at
several levels in the work: epistle and elegy, Romanized fantasy and ancient myth, reader and
recipient, heroine and Ovid.”
9
The particular textual richness of Heroides comes from its
intriguing intertextuality. While Smith doesn’t find this unique to Ovid or to his collection, he
nevertheless notes that it is more apparent here than elsewhere in his works.
Both through its meter, elegiac couplets - the second most common meter in Latin
poetry - and its subject matter, the separation of lovers, Heroides belongs to the world of
elegy. Scholars who focus on the elegy in their readings of Heroides discover various elegiac
tropes that saturate its poems. Lindheim points out that an elegiac framework underlines “the
heroines’ reoccurring laments, recriminations, accusations, professions of weakness and
8
R. Alden Smith, "Fantasy, Myth, and Love-Letters: Text and Tale in Ovid's Heroides," in Oxford Readings in
Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 217–37.
9
Smith, "Fantasy, Myth, and Love-Letters: Text and Tale in Ovid's Heroides," 237.
4
enslavement, as well as the language of faith, piety, and sacred bonds.”
10
Conte, another
scholar, claims that the collection helps to reveal how well suited the elegy is for the female
voice.
11
But Lindheim also argues that the “epistolary nature of the text exerts an equally
strong generic influence on the collection.” She asserts that the subjectivity of letter-writing
grants the heroines of Ovid the ability to “mold their own characters.” Epistolarity also works
to engage readers with the text in a unique way. Discussing the epistolarity in Heroides,
Fulkerson points out that the reader who gains access to letters addressed to someone else
acquires the unusual and privileged position of an eavesdropper.
12
The direct address in the
first person present has been described as “speech conveyed in writing” and “talking on
paper.”
13
The letter-form creates an intensified experience for the reader, a powerful illusion
of being granted an unmediated account of the experience of separation and abandonment.
Ovid borrowed his subjects from Homer, ancient tragedies, and classical mythology,
and elaborately wove into his text numerous references to Greek lyric, and Greek and Latin
epic. As Kennedy points out, “the heroes and heroines who write these letters are not simply
‘mythological’ or ‘legendary’ but ‘literary’: many of the letters have an obvious specific
canonical text or texts with which they correspond in both dramatic and verbal detail.”
14
In
many cases the intertextual references become the source for a particular kind of irony and wit
10
Sara H. Lindheim, Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid's Heroides. (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2003), 17.
11
Gian Biagio Conte, Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love Elegy and Pliny’s Encyclopedia, trans. Glenn W. Most
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994) 122.
12
Laurel Fulkerson, “The Heroides: Female Elegy?,” in A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), 86.
13
Cited in Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.
14
Duncan Kennedy, “Epistolarity: the Heroides,” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 225.
5
that may be read as parody.
15
Another reading is that Ovid’s Heroides questions generic
conventions, especially of the epic, asking whether “straightforward” poetic genres can
“include the whole range of human experience.”
16
Scholars have disputed the extent Ovid’s heroides have influenced the development of
the modern novel. Ellen Moers grants Ovid’s Heroides a major role in shaping the modern
novel, “tracing all narratives of passion told from women’s point of view” back to Ovid’s
collection. In a more recent study, DeJean refutes the claim, legitimately redefining the impact
of the collection in the way it “dictated the plot of female passion,” and therefore limiting their
influence to stories of abandonment and betrayal centered on unhappy heroines.
17
Abandoned Women
As with Ovid’s collection as a whole, the abandoned characters of Heroides are
viewed by scholars in different ways. For mythological women addressing their lovers,
writing is the last resort as they prepare to end their lives and in doing so they go beyond the
ordinary uses of language resulting in a “poetic of abandonment” that can be found across
genres, cultures, and epochs.
18
Kathryn L. McKinley points out that Ovid’s accomplishment
“within the limitations of poetic and narrative fiction was to construct a feminine subject with
15
See Florence Verducci, Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Heroidum (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985).
16
I refer to Marina Brownlee’s application of Bakhtin’s theory of novel to Ovid’s collection discussed in
Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 26.
17
Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 45-46.
18
Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 129.
6
a substantially increased capacity for reflection and self-interrogation – in ways never before
charted in the history of western literary narrative.”
19
Scholars debate whether Ovid intended to represent all of his heroines in a similar way
or unique from one another. In the opinion of Linda Kaufman, for example, Ovid’s portrait of
Dido is a critique of the previous representation of Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid.
20
Knox takes
Kaufman’s argument to the next stage, seeing that in representing his heroine, Ovid shifts
from the elegiac voice to more of a narrative verse. He writes that “Ovid’s innovative
reformulation of heroines’ voices in the Heroides provides a taste of what is possible in
narrative verse, when the elegiac perspective is employed in service of critical commentary on
the traditions of the past.”
21
On the other hand, Lindheim, who views Ovid’s heroides through the lens of Lacan,
highlights the resemblance of at least three characters from the collection, – Dido, Ariadne
and Phyllis – to one another. Her reading of the poems demonstrates that they adjust their
“self-portraits” to appear simultaneously powerful and powerless when struggling to bring
their lovers back.
22
Using feminist and postmodern theories, Spentzou attempts to extract
“feminine voices” from the male-authored text, discussing the abandoned women as writers.
23
Following Spentzou, Fulkerson grants further creative autonomy to Ovid’s women, examining
19
Kathryn L. McKinley, introduction to Reading the Ovidian Heroine: "Metamorphoses" Commentaries 1100-
1618 (Boston: Brill, 2001), xix.
20
Linda S. Kaufman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1988), 20.
21
Peter E. Knox, ed., Ovid Heroides: Select Epistles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24-25.
22
Sara H. Lindheim, Mail and Female, 91.
23
Efrossini Spentzou, Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
7
them not only as a community of writers, but also as readers of each other works.
24
The
recent scholarship thus seeks to reconcile Ovid’s representation of gender in Heroides with the
views of a modern readership, which could find the portraits of women problematic, to say the
least. The interpretations above revise the notion, exploited in European literature particularly
in the eighteenth century, of the heroines as helpless victims equipped only with rhetorical
pyrotechnics and uninhibited emotionality.
Ovid’s Heroides and European Literature
In Europe Ovid’s Heroides had been well-known since medieval times, translated into
the vernacular, commented on, and used as an educational tool. The heroides inspired
imitations, the most famous of which, Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717), originated in
England where it was called a heroic epistle. In 1758 Charles-Pierre Colardeau published his
free translation of Pope’s epistle and introduced the new genre, héroïdes, which quickly
became popular in France. Poets of the new genre claimed to be independent from Ovid’s
tradition, but they relied heavily on the Ovidian format. The new authors of héroïdes,
Colardeau, Dorat, La Harpe, and Blin de Sainmore, were also dramatists, and the genre
borrowed from the style and tone of tragedy to the extent that one critic labeled them “mini-
tragedies.”
25
In Russia, interest in classical mythology developed rather slowly, and took off only
after the Petrine reforms of the early eighteenth century required its study in educational
24
Laurel Fulkerson, The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
25
For full discussion on French héroïdes , see Renata Carocci, Les héroïdes dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe
siècle, 1758 -1788 (Fasano, Br., Italia: Schena, 1988).
8
institutions.
26
The first translations of Ovid’s Heroides first began to appear in the middle of
the eighteenth century. Along with Phyllis and Ariadne, the pages of Russian periodicals
featured poems about Eloisa and Gabriella, personages whose laments were translated from
French heroides. Both Ovid’s Heroides and French héroïdes were of interest to Russians, who
according to Kahn, showed “enthusiasm for self-expression and poetry of feeling.”
27
As Sobol
argues in her book, Russians didn’t have a native tradition of expressing secular, romantic
love; therefore as a cultural construct had to be imported from the West.
28
Translations of
Ovid’s and European heroides helped Russian writers and readers acquire the conceptual
language to describe passion. This is also worth noting that heroides provided not just tragic
and exotic love tales, but featured predominantly women narrators, freely exposing emotions
and intimate thoughts. This was a new development for Russian poetry where women
commonly functioned as addressees, not speakers. Consequently, women’s voices in poetry
were often indistinct, rarely heard, and their representation by men was rather formulaic.
The heroides were also agents of the feminization of Russian literature. Their
appearance coincided with the notion that women’s speech and sensibility should be a shaping
force of literary tastes. Poems with the subtitle heroides [geroidy] filled the newly-emerging
literary journals that were hoping to attract the attention of an emerging female readership. In
the early 1760s, heroides were featured in the first Russian weekly literary journal Poleznoe
uveselnie [Useful Entertainment], “virtually the only venue for noteworthy developments in
26
Berkov, “Ovidii v russkoi literature,” 90.
27
Andrew Kahn, “Russian Elegists as Latin Lovers,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin Love Elegy, ed.
Thea Selliias Thorsen (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 337.
28
Valeria Sobol, Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2009), 12.
9
Russian literature.”
29
In the late 1770s, another publication, Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie
[Fashion Monthly], hoped with the help of heroides among other genres to occupy the idle
moments of women readers during their toilettes.
30
The tales of desire and suffering narrated
by or featuring tormented women were considered light entertainment by male editors who
encouraged more translations and publications.
Authorship and Translation
Publication of translated literature dominated Russia in the eighteenth century. While
Ovid was always credited as the author of his heroides, translations of European heroides were
usually published anonymously and rarely credited the source. It was common practice for
Russian periodicals to publish translations without the title and author of the original foreign
text or the name of the translator. Gukovskii explains, “a work of art was a thing, an object of
art, and as such, it had nothing to do with the idea of its source and existed outside the
category of time.”
31
The rendering of foreign poetry into the Russian language was taken seriously, and
issues surrounding proper translation techniques sparked several theoretical debates among
Russian poets.
32
One of the main problems for mid-eighteenth century Russian poetry was to
find the best way of rendering classical meters. Poets often launched unofficial competitions
29
“Alexander Levitsky, “Aleksei Andreevich Rzhevskii,”in Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, ed. M. C. Levitt. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 150 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995),
345.
30
“Predyvedomlenie,” Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie no.1 (1779): n.p.
31
G. A. Gukovskii, “Toward the Problem of Russian Classicism: Competitions and Translations," Soviet Studies in
Literature Journal of Translations XXI, no. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 1984-85): 67.
32
See for details: A. A. Derigiun, Trediakovskii – perevodchik. Stanovlenie klassitsisticheskogo perevoda v Rossii
(Saratov: Izd-vo Saratovskogo universiteta, 1985),
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/15505304.html; M. H. Berman, “Trediakovskij, Sumarokov and
Lomonosov as Translators of Western European Literature” (Ph.D diss., Harvard University, 1971).
10
by translating the same text in an attempt to showcase various approaches to translating
foreign texts into Russian.
33
Fraanje states, “eighteenth-century Russian men of letters saw
themselves as specialists in European culture, as the guardians of aesthetic norms and as
supervisors of the efforts by other Russians to acquire these norms.”
34
When translations were
made from a foreign text other than French, a French intermediary was (most) often used. For
example, Kheraskov translated Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” with the help of a literal French
translation. On the other hand, the poet Rzhevskii used a highly accurate Russian prose
translation of Ovid’s “Phillys to Demophon” to compose his poetic version of the heroide.
The process of translation is impossible without reinterpretation, and Russian
translators often attempted to improve the original, according to their own understanding of
aesthetic principles or to make it more accessible or familiar to Russian readers.
35
Russian
translations of Ovid’s heroides, in particular, reveal the process of cultural adaptation and the
reconstruction of meaning to make the works relevant for “the here and now.”
36
When
Russians went to create their own works, following the principles of classicism they emulated
foreign models, but direct borrowing from foreign texts was noticed and criticized.
Translations played an important role not only in introducing readers to European
literature and cultural norms, but also helped to shape the poetic personaе of the poet-
translators. Taking up the theme of abandoned women was an important step for many young
poets. In his book, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, Lipking notes that the poetry of
33
Gukovskii, “Toward the Problem of Russian Classicism,” 53.
34
Maarten Fraanje, “The Epistolary Novel in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Some General Observations,” in
Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Johaim Klein, Simon Dixon and Maarten Fraanje (Cologne,
Weimar, Vienna, 2001), 203.
35
See Gukovskii, and Nikolaev, Levin.
36
I borrow the phrase from White’s discussion on translation theories. See Paul White, Renaissance Postscripts.
Responding to Ovid's Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009),
16.
11
abandoned women can not only be effectively rendered from one language to another, but also
helps emerging poets to release their poetic power.
37
Lipking provides insightful evidence
that over the centuries writers such as Pope, Byron, and Rilke, among others, explored the
subject of abandoned women by borrowing a woman’s unique voice, and that these works led
to defining moments in their poetic careers. Russian translators of heroides who became
successful poets and used their engagement with European heroides to establish their poetic
personae can be used to illustrate Lipking’s point.
Among these authors is Mikhail Kheraskov, who contributed more than anyone to the
introduction and popularization of European heroides in Russia. He was the first to translate
“Ariadne to Theseus” and provide a poetic model of a woman speaker. He was also one of the
first editors to publish heroides, including translations of Ovid’s originals, in both of his
journals Poleznoe uveselnie [Useful Entertainment] and Svobodnye chasy [Free Hours] in the
early 1760s. On par with his French counterparts he translated Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard”
and adapted Tasso’s epic for his heroide “Armida.” Gorokhova observes that the abandoned
sorcerer, Armida, reoccurs in the poet’s work throughout his career, especially in one of his
last poems, “The Poet” (1805). In it, the narrator addresses a young man and tells him that to
be a poet he must be able to hear Armida and respond to her “wretched voice.”
38
The first published work of Gavrila Derzhavin, one of the major Russian poets of the
late eighteenth century, was a translation of the French heroide “Byblis to Caunus.” While this
translation was published without his consent, Makogonenko detects in Derzhavin’s early
translation the themes and language – “freedom of feelings” and “language of the heart” –
37
Lipking, Abandoned Women, 128.
38
R. M. Gorokhova, “Torkvatto Tasso v Rossii XVIII veka. (Materialy k istorii vospriiatiia),” in Rossiia i Zapad: Iz
istorii iiteraturnykh otnoshenii, ed. by M. P. Alekseev (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), 157.
12
that became defining features of his mature work.
39
Another renowned Russian poet, Vladislav Ozerov, debuted on the literary stage with
his translation of Colardeau’s heroide “Eloisa to Abelard” which he held in high esteem. The
young poet explained that “nature itself” forced him to undertake such a challenging
enterprise: “Reading Colardeau, I was delighted; the Parnassian path opened up to me, and I
felt the inspiration of Apollo, which I had never thought about before.”
40
The nineteenth-
century poet and critic Petr Viazemskii writes that while it is impossible to place the
translation on the same level with the original, it would be unjustifiable not to recognize in
Colardeau’s translator an emerging poet.
41
Original Russian Heroides
Along with translated heroides, original Russian heroides also appeared. Among the
authors who made independent attempts to indigenize the genre were the famous eighteenth
and nineteenth century poets Aleksandr Sumarokov and Nikolai Gnedich along with relatively
unknown poet-translators like Andrei Bukharskii and Aleksandr Pisarev. But the most
interesting and independent work in the genre of heroide belongs to the female Russian poet
Ekaterina Urusova, who in 1777 published a collection of heroides, Iroidy Muzam
Posviaschennye [Heroides Dedicated to the Muses].
While Bukharskii and Pisarev use French novels as the sources for their heroides, the
other three Russian poets adapt Russian material, mostly dramatic texts, for their heroides.
39
G. P. Makogonenko, “Derzhavin,” in Istoriia russkoi literatury XI-XVII vekov, ed. D. S. Likhachev (Leningrad:
“Nauka”, 1980—1983), 1: 630.
40
V. A. Ozerov, “Eloiza k Abeliaru” in Sochineniia Ozerova, (St. Petersburg: I. Glazunov, 1828), 64.
41
P. A. Viazemskii, “O zhizni i sochineniiakh V.A. Ozerova,” in Sochineniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1982), 2:20.
13
Following in the footsteps of Sumarokov, the first Russian author of original heroides, who
composed his two poems drawing from his tragedy Khorev, Urusova employs contemporary
Russian tragedies, historic materials and her own stories to launch independent poetic works.
While Urusova’s women-storytellers appeal to Ovid’s notion of abandonment, they depart
from conventions established by both Ovid’s and European heroides, and most importantly,
encourage other women to take up the pen and write. Urusova’s heroides, the first collection
of poetry published by a female poet in Russia, coincide with similar publications in England
and the Netherlands where female poets also used heroides to create original poetry.
42
Considering Russia’s comparatively late exposure to heroides, it is worth noting that
Urusova’s collection of original heroides reflected current European trends.
The Decline
By the first decades of the nineteenth century heroides ceased to be written as the
entire eighteenth-century Russian poetic tradition suffered a sharp devaluation with the rise of
Romanticism. A satirical piece making fun of fashionable literary salons, however, serves as
evidence that the heroide was not completely forgotten. The “report” describes a poetic dinner
thrown by one of the greatest poets of Russia in celebration of his birthday. The report lists the
items on the menu: for example, during the hot course guests read a solemn ode and during
the cold course – an excerpt from a didactic poem, while a heroide was served for the main
course. The mention of heroide, and its place on the menu, suggests that the genre was still a
part of early nineteenth-century literary discussions.
43
The heroide also became an object of
42
See Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006); Olga Van Marion, “Poet for the Love of Her Country: Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken,”
in Women's Writing from the Low Countries 1200-1875: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. by Lia van Gemert, 356-73
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
43
V.P. Gaevskii, “Del’vig,” Sovremennik 1, no.III (1854): 24.
14
ridicule in the poem of the famous Russian satirist, Ivan Krylov, who contemplates what an
absence of ambition would mean to a person or to a poet.
44
In his poem, “Pis’mo o pol’ze
zhelanii” [A Letter on the Benefits of Ambition], he writes that if a poet were to reject
ambition it would make no difference to him whether he was the creator of The Aeneid that
would outlive princes, kings and kingdoms, or the writer of a pitiful heroide. It is ironic that
Krylov doesn’t recognize the classical heritage of heroides while holding Virgil’s epic in such
high esteem.
In the nineteenth century, the genre is discussed in the major Russian textbooks on
literature, and despite the fact that critics refer to the heroide as to the “fruit of a bygone era”
(plod davno minuvshikh vremen),
45
they recall it in an effort to define the genre of works by
nineteenth-century poets that mix elegiac, epic and historic elements. When in 1820, the poet
Pletnev sparked a debate by his poem “Batiushkov iz Rima” [Batiushkov from Rome] in
which he ventriloquizes the voice of another poet, Batiushkov, Pushkin refers to the poem as
both elegy and heroide.
46
Pushkin was familiar with the genre not only through his studies in
the Lyceum.
47
In 1815 he composed the poem “Napoleon na Elbe” [Napoleon on Elba], in
which, according to Vatsuro, the young poet pays tribute to the form of the heroide.
48
The
poem is centered on Napoleon’s inner monologue which “takes us into the heart and mind of
the conquered emperor, who, confident of eventual escape, plans future triumphs and reviews
44
I. A. Krylov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi
literatury, 1945-1946), 3:303.
45
“Uchebnaia kniga Russkoi slovesnosti N. Grecha,” Otechestvennye zapiski 40 (1845): 12.
46
A.S. Pushkin to P.A. Pletnev, Kishinev, 1821, in A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii in 10 tomakh
(Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk, 1949), 10: 50-51.
47
“Litseiskie lektsii po zapisiam A. M. Gorchakova,” Krasnyi akrhiv 80, no.1 (1937): 161.
48
Vadim E. Vatsuro, Lirika pushkinskoi pory: Elegicheskaia shkola (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), 170.
15
earlier fateful reversals.”
49
The heroide also makes an unheralded appearance in Pushkin’s
masterpiece, Evgenii Onegin [Eugene Onegin], discussed in the Conclusion.
Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Scholarship
In nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian scholarship, heroides have been examined
in bibliographical and genre studies, and on a few occasions briefly discussed in the context of
the oeuvre of particular poets.
50
The nineteenth-century Russian bibliographer Neustroev was
the first to assemble a list of heroides published in Russian periodicals.
51
The Russian scholar
Sviasov compiled a list of translations of Ovid’s Heroides in his bibliographical work on
Russian translations of ancient poetry in the eighteenth-twentieth centuries.
52
A recent survey
of translated literature edited by Levin also lists and briefly discusses selected translations of
Ovid’s heroides and European imitations.
53
However, both works erroneously list several
translations of European heroides as translations of Ovid.
54
In terms of genre study, Russian and Soviet scholars have tended to look at heroides
either as a genre closely aligned with the elegy (Merzliakov, Gukovskii, Kozlov) or as
inseparable from the epistolary tradition (Toporov). In his seminal article on the eighteenth-
49
Andrew Kahn, Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 230.
50
Works about Derzhavin, Kheraskov, and Khvostov -- all acknowledge that the poets wrote or translate
heroides.
51
A. N. Neustroev, Ukazatel’ k russkim povremennym izdaniiam i sbornikam za 1703-1802 i k istoricheskomu
rozyskaniiu o nikh (St. Petersburg: 1898; repr., Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1963), 4:138.
52
E.V. Sviiasov, Antichnaia poeziia v russkikh perevodakh XVIII-XX vv.: bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ (St.
Petersburg: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 1998), 340-341.
53
Iu. D. Levin, ed., Istoriia russkoi perevodnoi khudozhestvennoi literatury, 2 vol. (St. Petersburg and Köln:
Dmitrii Bulanin and Böhlau Verlag, 1995 ) 2: 131-132; 180-181.
54
Sviiasov lists “Ariadne to Theseus” (1783, anonymous) as a translation of Ovid’s heroide. Both Sviiasov and
Levin’s work erroneously list “Didona to Aeneus” (1793, by I. Iankovich-de Mirievo) as a translation of Ovid’s
heroide. While the source still has not been identified, it is likely a French imitation of Ovid.
16
century Russian elegy, Gukovskii connects the appearance of the heroide in Russia with a
crisis of the elegiac genre. The scholar suggests that the heroide “was called on to fill a
lacuna, to offer literature something that other genres were unable to give.”
55
Gukovskii
examines several early heroides but doesn’t discuss their impact. Another scholar, Vadim
Vatsuro, attempts to trace the evolution of the heroide in the works of the nineteenth-century
poet, Petr Pletnev. Describing the genre, Vatsuro stresses only its least attractive qualities: the
heroide is not “self-sufficient” because of its reliance on other literary sources; it is
“structurally close to the elegy;” and it is a product of the classical tradition.
56
Following both
Gukovskii and Vatsuro, Vladimir Kozlov recently introduced the term “heroide-elegy”
(geroida-elegiia) to describe selected historical elegies by Pushkin and Ryleev.
57
None of the
above Russian scholars mention a connection between the heroide and the novel, or discuss
the most original Russian heroides, Urusova’s collection, Heroides Dedicated to the Muses.
While Urusova has only recently drawn the attention of Russian scholars,
58
her oeuvre
is known to specialists in the West. Her collection of heroides is referred to in the major
studies on the history of women’s literature in Russia, and has recently been translated into
English.
59
Kahn calls Urusova “the first major [Russian] imitator of Ovid,” crediting her
collection of heroides with expressing “the first feminine perspective on love before the
55
G. K. Gukovskii, “Elegiia v XVIII veke,” in Rannie raboty po istorii russkoi poezii XVIII veka (Moscow: Iazyki
russkoi kul’tury, 2001), 106.
56
Vatsuro, Lirika pushkinskoi pory, 170.
57
Vladimir Kozlov, Russkaia elegiia nekanonicheskogo perioda (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2013), 138-
143.
58
E.g., N. D. Kochetkova, “Kniazhna Urusova i ee literaturnye sobesedniki,” in N. A. L'vov i ego sovremenniki:
literatory, liudi iskusstva, ed. N. D. Kochetkova (St. Petersburg: IRLI-Pushkinskii dom, 2002), 94-103.
59
Amanda Ewington, trans. and ed., Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A
Bilingual Edition (Toronto: ITER-Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).
17
Romantic elegists.”
60
On the other hand, Amanda Ewington focuses on examining the
connection of Urusova’s heroides to neoclassical tragedy. Ewington only briefly
acknowledges Urusova’s collection as a response to other Russian heroides written in the
1760s.
61
None of the discussions above have taken into serious consideration the whole scope
of Russian heroides as translations, imitations and originals, and some scholarly work on the
subject has suffered especially from inaccuracies. In his authoritative survey of eighteenth-
century Russian genres, Charles Drage comments briefly on original Russian heroides by
Sumarokov and Urusova as well as one translation of a European heroide and rates the
“attempts to naturalize the subgenre in Russian literature” as hardly successful because the
Russian heroides deviate so much from the Ovidian model.
62
In his pioneering study of
European heroides, Heinrich Dörrie includes a small section discussing the Russian
translations of heroides by Ovid and Ovid’s European imitators, but the bibliographical list he
compiles is plagued by inaccuracies, and Urusova’s heroides are completely omitted.
63
Recently, three early Russian translations of Ovid’s heroide “Phyllis to Demophon” became
the subject of a comparative analysis in an article by the Italian scholar, Michela Venditti.
64
In the conclusion to her otherwise thorough study, Venditti erroneously traces Ovidian
influences to two nineteenth-century poems. She claims a connection between Rzhevskii’s
60
Kahn, “Russian Elegists as Latin Lovers,” 340.
61
Amanda Ewington, “Urusova’s Sly Stagecraft: The Heroides as Tragedy,” (ASEEES Annual Convention, Boston,
MA, November 24, 2013).
62
Charles Drage, Russian Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1994), 94.
63
Heinrich Dörrie, Der heroische Brief. Bestandsaufnahme, Geschichte, Kritik einer humanistisch-barocken
Literaturgattung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968).
64
M. Venditti, “Russkie perevody XVIII veka vtoroi geroidy Ovidia: Kozitskii, Ruban, Rzhevskii,” in Chteniia otdela
russkoi literatury XVIII veka, vypusk 7 (St. Petersburg: 2013), 168-181.
18
adaptation of Ovid’s heroide, “Phyllis to Demophon,” and poems by Karamzin and
Viazemskii. Phyllis in Ovid is the naïve queen of Thrace, but another Phyllis, a lovely
shepherdess, is a popular figure in French poetry of the eighteenth century, having first
appeared in a number of pastoral poems by Virgil and Horace.
65
Venditti acknowledges these
two Phyllises but nevertheless mistakenly identifies the Phyllis in the two poems by Karamzin
and Viazemskii as the one featured in Rzhevskii’s adaptation of Ovid. The absence of any
reference to the tragic fate of the queen in either of the two nineteenth-century poems and the
fact that Viazemskii identifies his poem as a translation from French points to Phyllis the
shepherdess as the prototype for the heroine of the two poems. Further, nineteenth-century
eclogues by Pletnev and Pushkin make allusions to the same pastoral heroine.
66
While
Venditti legitimately seeks to trace the influence of eighteenth-century heroides on nineteenth-
century poetry, establishing a link between Russian heroides and subsequent literary
developments requires more thorough study.
Vendetti also makes the claim that Rzevskii’s translation of “Phyllis to Demophon”
(1763) was “one of the stages in the development of a woman’s image as the main heroine in
a work of literature.”
67
I support the assertion that Russian translations of heroides offered a
model for presenting a woman and expressing her voice. I would add that Kheraskov’s
“Armida” (1760), a heroide adapted from Tasso’s epic, featured a woman at the center of a
literary work three years earlier than Rzhevskii’s adaptation. When heroides became popular
in Russia, writers were rendering European heroides at the same time as they were translating
65
I. G. Dobrodomov and I. A. Pil’shchikov, Leksika i frazeologiia “Evgeniia Onegina”: Germenevticheskie ocherki
(Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2008), 89.
66
In Eugene Onegin, Pushkin also uses the name Phyllis to describe Olga. See Nabokov’s comments in Vladimir
Nabokov, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin, Translated from the Russian with a
Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 2: 322.
67
Venditti, “Russkie perevody XVIII veka vtoroi geroidy Ovidia,” 181.
19
those of Ovid. Before assessing the impact of a single heroide it is useful to study the corpus
from which it comes but until this dissertation was written, the full corpus of Russian heroides
had not been identified. This dissertation offers scholars the materials to more precisely judge
the unique place heroides have had in the history of Russian literature.
The Corpus
While lists of Russian heroides have been compiled a number of times, the actual
poems have never been collected into a single volume or examined as a corpus. With the
exception of Urusova’s heroides, which were republished and even translated into English,
many poems have never been examined as they have been buried in libraries’ rare books
collections. This dissertation presents a study of over 60 poems written in the genre of heroide
that were published in literary journals, in collections, or separately, between 1748 and 1843.
68
Along with the poems, I’ve traced, whenever possible, existing variants of the same poem to
explore the instances of rewriting and editing. My aim was to include all of the heroides
produced in Russia during this period.
In collecting the Russian heroides, I began with the three existing lists by Neustroev,
Dörrie, and Sviiasov. Researching the poems, I discovered other heroides in journals that
were not on any lists. I have used the following criteria for the selection of poems to be
included in the corpus of Russian heroides. I’ve included all translations of Ovid’s heroides
(sometimes identified as letters) as well as texts in both poetry and prose that carry the subtitle
68
While collecting the material I was unable access several collections and almanacs which to my knowledge
feature translations of French heroides. Among them, Sobranie noveishikh pesen i raznykh liubovnykh
stikhotvorenii (Moscow, 1791) could potentially enlarge the list of the translations of European heroides.
20
“geroida” or “iroida.”
69
I have further included poems without the subtitle “heroide” that I
was able to identify as translations of French heroides. Russian translations of French
heroides were often published anonymously, without any reference to the source, or any
indication that they were translations and I have tried to identify them where possible. Other
poems without the subtitle “heroide” were included in the corpus based on their formal
characteristics and, in some cases, following the lead of other scholars or critics who have
defined them as heroides. All the works included in the corpus, unless otherwise noted,
correspond to the basic parameters of heroides: a first-person narrator (female or male,
mythological, historical or contemporary) writes with intense emotion to a close confidant
describing tragic or complex circumstances. The definition of heroide accommodates a range
of variations as it developed from Ovid’s form to one that became more novelistic in content.
Three Main Categories
Russian heroides logically fall into three main categories: translations from Ovid’s
Heroides, translations and adaptations of European heroides, and original Russian heroides
based on Russian and European themes. Nearly one third of the collected works were
published anonymously and without proper identification. Defining poems as translations,
adaptations, imitations, or originals is so problematic that several studies prefer not to
distinguish between them. In my study, I use the term “translation” when the Russian heroide
represents a rendering of a heroide written in another language. The term “adaptation” is used
to describe a heroide created from literary material that was already used as a source for
69
According to Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, 5:107, the Russian term “geroida” ( or “iroida”) was also used
to identify the heroic poem. For example, the aspiring poet, Irinarkh Zavalishin titled his 1793 poema Geroida ili
Dukh i uvenchannye podvigi Rossiiskhikh besprimernykh geroev [Heroide or Spirit and Crowned Feats of Arms of
Russian Outstanding Heroes]. Poems such as the one above are not included in the corpus because the word
“heroide” doesn’t refer to the genre or form, but is used to indicate that the work glorifies heroic deeds in
military battles.
21
heroides by European authors. Following the example of Colardeau, Kheraskov translated and
transformed into a heroide a canto of Tasso’s epic that features a story about Armida, although
their approaches to Tasso differs. Kheraskov’s “Armida” is the only case of such an
adaptation in my study. I use the term “original Russian heroides” to describe the works
created by Russian poets based on translated European novels and Russian dramas or historic
materials which were not used in heroides before. For example, Sumarokov composed two
heroides drawn from his tragedy Khorev. Bukharskii wrote a heroide drawing on the popular
French novel Incas by Marmontel, altering the novel’s happy end in order to supply the tragic
overtones necessary for a heroide. Almost always based on well-known plots and characters,
Russian heroides were created not to demonstrate originality, but to capitalize on the
popularity of other works. While the terms “translation” and “original” help categorize the
texts of Russian heroides, they can’t fully communicate the complexity of heroides’ essential
intertextuality.
Contributions
Publications of Russian heroides with erroneous attributions or reprints of the same
work under different titles were common. This makes identifying whether a poem is a
translation or not especially challenging. Within the corpus of Russian heroides I have placed
several poems in a special category, because while they clearly demonstrate a reliance on
French literature, their sources have not yet been identified.
22
I have updated existing bibliographical data with several new poems, and in some
cases, established sources and authors for the translations.
70
For example, Derzhavin’s first
published work “Byblis to Caunus” (“Vivlida k Kavnu”) was a translation of an unspecified
heroide. It was published anonymously and accompanied by the note “translated from
German.”
71
For over a century, scholars have treated it as a translation of an unknown German
adaptation of the famous plot from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
72
In fact, I have determined that
Derzhavin’s source was a French heroide, “Lettre de Biblis à Caunus son frère” (1765) by
Adrien Blin de Sainmore, which to my knowledge doesn’t exist in a German translation. I
have also made a clarification in the case of Iakov Kniazhnin’s translation, “The Letter of
Count Comminge to his mother” (“Pis’mo Grafa Kommenzha k materi ego”), published
anonymously in 1779 by Fashion Monthly. Even though the nineteenth-century
bibliographers Novikov and Galakhov correctly state that it is a translation of a heroide by
Dorat,
73
contemporary scholars have referred to it as an original work.
74
Such clarifications
are necessary because in the cases of both Derzhavin and Kniazhnin the translations follow
the original very closely. I have also established that Andrei Bukharskii’s “Montezum k
70
More detailed information about the heroides including their meters is located in the appendicies following
the dissertation.
71
“Iroida, ili Pis’mo Vivlidy k Kavnu,” Starina i Novizna 2 (1773): 31-50.
72
See Mark Simpson, The Russian Gothic Novel and its British antecedents (Slavica Publishers, 1986); G. P
Makogonenko, introduction to G.R. Derzhavin, Sochineniia (Leningrad, 1987); Gitta Hammarberg, “The Idyll as
Prototype for Sentimentalist Fiction,” in Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century: Proceedings of the
Third International of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Indiana University at Bloomington, 1984,
ed. R. Bartlett, A.G. Cross, Karen Rasmussen (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1988), 316-323.
73
Aleksei Galakhov, Istoriia russkoi slovesnosti, drevnei i novoi (St.Petersburg, 1863), 1:453; Nikolai Novikov,
Opyt istoricheskogo slovaria o rossiiskikh pisateliakh (St. Petersburg, 1772), 1: 114.
74
See “Ia.Kniazhnin,” in M. C. Levitt, ed., Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 150 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995); V. N. Toporov, Iz istorii
russkoi literatury. Russkaia literatura vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka. Vol. 2, Book 1 (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury,
2001); Evgueni Vilk, Problem of Tragedy and Tragic Consciousness in Russia at the turn of the 19th Century,
(Ph.D. diss., Central European University, 1999), 56-62, http://rss.archives.ceu.hu/archive/00001056/01/56.pdf.
23
Kortetsu” (1787) is a translation of La Harpe’s heroide “Montezuma à Cortez”(1759). My
study refutes the presumed source of the 1793 translation of the heroide, “Didona Eneiu” by I.
Iankovich-de Mirievo, noted by Sviiasov and in Levin to be Ovid’s Heroide VII. It was more
likely a translation of a French heroide. Examination of Mikhail Kheraskov’s poem, “The
Death of Clarissa,” allowed me to identify an anonymous heroide, “The Death of Clarina,” as
Kheraskov’s as well.
75
I also established that Merzliakov’s heroide, “Pis’mo Vertera k
Sharlote” [Letter from Werther to Charlotte], is a translation of Samuel Bridel’s “Lettre de
Verther à Charlotte.” I have also identified, using secondary materials, that Tuman skii’s elegy
“Verter k Sharlotte” [Werther to Charlotte], which has always been treated by Russian
scholars as an original work, is actually a translation of the French heroide, “Werther à
Charlotte, une heure avant de mourir” by André Coupingny. I will discuss these poems further
in the following chapters.
Basic Overview of the Corpus
From 1748-1843, seventy heroides were published in Russia, including ten poems that
were reprinted once or several times. Of the sixty unique heroides, seventeen poems (29%)
are original Russian heroides based on European and Russian sources; twenty-one works
(35%) are confirmed translations of European heroides; thirteen works (21%) are translations
of Ovid’s Heroides done both in prose and poetry; and another nine poems (15%) are likely to
be translations, but their sources are not yet established.
Eight authors of European heroides and nine Russian translators of Ovid’s and
European heroides are currently unknown. Only three women are among the known writers
75
Mikhail Kheraskov [M.Kh.], “Smert’ Klarisy. Podrazhennaia frantsusskomu sochineniiu,” Poleznoe uveselnie 24
(1760): 239-249; [Mikhail Kheraskov], “Smert’Klariny,” Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779): 163-172.
24
and translators: Urusova with her original collection, and Bunina and Bornovolokova listed as
translators.
76
The original Russian heroides were composed in verse. Six translations of Ovid and
four translations of European heroides were rendered in prose. In the corpus, 44 heroides
(over 70%) feature a women’s address to her lover, father, husband, son or brother, and in two
cases they address their laments to other women. The other sixteen heroides feature men
addressing women (lovers, wives, daughters and mothers) as well as male friends or enemies.
Chapter Breakdown
My dissertation consists of three main chapters. Chapter One offers an overview of the
history of Russian translations of Ovid’s Heroides within the context of Russian literary
development. In this chapter I analyze the translations of Ovid by Russian poets to highlight
elements that are new for Russian poetic discourse. I offer commentary as well on the
reception of Heroides in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Russia. Chapter Two reviews
the translations and adaptations of eighteenth-century European heroides focusing not only on
their sources, but also on their narrative techniques and their relevance to Russian literary
development. Chapter Three discusses the original Russian heroides with a particular focus
on Urusova’s collection and the ways in which she departed from the conventions of women’s
representation established by Ovid and his European imitators. In the Conclusion, I trace the
influence of the heroide in the nineteenth-century Russian novel in verse, Eugene Onegin by
Alexander Pushkin as one example of the genre’s legacy.
76
E. Kheraskova has also been mentioned as the author of heroides but her works aren’t known.
25
Chapter One: Russian Translations of Ovid’s Heroides
The poetic persona of a woman who has been deserted by her lover has proven to be an
attractive poetic vehicle utilized by male and female writers for ages. Women-speakers whose
rhetorical addresses to their husbands or lovers eloquently and passionately urge them to come
back, documenting their declining appearance and contemplating their death, probably
originated with Ovid. His collection of letters, known as Heroides, consisted of monologues
in verse from mythological female characters – “heroines” - to husbands or lovers who had
left them. While over the centuries Heroides were commonly viewed as epistles of abandoned
women, only some of them, most notably, “Penelope to Ulysses,” “Phyllis to Demophon,” and
“Ariadne to Theseus,” fit the description. Even so, the “poetics of abandonment” reflected in
the heroides traveled across languages, genres and aesthetics.
77
The pattern was assimilated in
Europe through numerous translations and imitations.
The emerging Russian literary scene in the 1750s, guided by neoclassical principles,
reveals, among other things, the intense creative engagement of poets and men of letters with
classical and French literary traditions. The leading Russian writer of the period Alexander
Sumarokov encouraged emulation of classical models, which occurred through translations
and imitations of exemplary works by both classical and French authors.
78
Among Latin and
Greek authors, Ovid was one of the most popular and Metamorphoses seemed to be a favorite
77
Lipking, Abandoned Women, 129.
78
For more details, see Levin, Istoriia russkoi perevodnoi khudozhestvennoi literatury; Gukovskii, “Towards the
Problem of Russian Classicism.”
26
work in Russia.
79
Ovid’s Heroides were introduced in Russia during a formative period for
Russian poetry in the second half of the eighteenth century and arguably made a lasting
imprint on it.
To evaluate the impact of the first Russian translations of Ovid’s heroides on the
formation of poetic craft in Russia, it is necessary to review the ways in which Russian poetry
and drama of the 1750-60s depicted feelings and the theme of abandonement. In this period,
Russian songs and elegies were the main genres dedicated to love themes, and on the whole,
these were dominated by male personae. Female personae did arise, however, and of the two
genres, songs more often than elegies engendered a female persona.
80
In these rare instances
when a male poet adopted a female voice, the lack of narrative detail made these poems
almost indistinguishable from ones with male voice. As Rosslyn points out, the early Russian
elegy was characterized by the formulaic expression of feelings, repetitiveness, and “a high
degree of abstraction.”
81
Emerging women poets didn’t often choose to speak on behalf of
women. The first published works by the first female poets Ekaterina Sumarokova and
Elizaveta Kheraskova ventriloquized the male voice.
When Phyllis and Ariadne from Ovid’s Heroides narrated their abandonment in
graphic, emotional and intimate detail in Russian, it is likely that Russian readers and writers
aligned the form used by Ovid with the dramatic monologues known to them via neoclassical
tragedies. Indeed, Russian tragedies often feature young women in love with the enemies of
79
P. N. Berkov, “Ovidii v russkoi literature XVII - XVIII vv,” Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta (Istoriia, yazyk,
literatura) no.14, (1973): 88 - 92. See also Levitt on the Russian reception to Metamorphoses; Levitt shows that
the reception was conflicting, not one sided, and played a role in the formation of the image of Russian past
and in the development of the concept of “fiction.” Marcus Levitt, “‘Metamorfozy’ Ovidii v russkoi literature
XVIII veka - Pro et Contra,” in Literarum Fructus: Sbornik statei (St. Petersburg: Al’ians-Arkheo, 2012): 142-153.
80
Wendy Rosslyn, “Making Their Way into Print: Poems by Eighteenth-Century Russian Women,” Slavonic and
East European Review 78, no. 3 (2000): 425.
81
Ibid.
27
their powerful fathers. In their theatrical monologues, the women express their struggles
between passion and duty in a declamatory and elevated style, demonstrating superhuman
qualities and stoicism defending their lovers and their honors. Compared to Ovid’s heroines
they are less concerned with their personal tragedy and rather see themselves as agents of a
higher truth and virtue. The first Russian translation of Ovid’ heroides, “Phyllis to
Demophon” and “Ariadne to Theseus,” on the other hand, present women solely focused on
their own grief, passionately lamenting and eloquently arguing to bring back their unfaithful
lovers, describing their distraught appearances, magnifying their emotions, contemplating
death, and composing epitaphs for their own gravestones.
The corpus of Russian translations of Ovid’s heroides is rather modest. Out of twenty-
one letters that are traditionally included in Ovid’s Heroides, nine translations of seven of
them were published in the eighteenth century and only three more appeared in the
nineteenth.
82
Among them, the heroides “Phyllis to Demophon” and “Ariadne to Theseus,” the
first to be translated by Russian poets, play an important role, as they present a model that
Russian poets successfully absorbed as they mastered the craft of writing poetry, focusing on
expressing emotions, representing women, and, in particular, giving a female speaker a
distinct voice. As I will demonstrate in chapter Three, these model poems were essential for
Russian authors who generated original heroides.
In order to highlight the new model created by the first translations of Ovid’s heroides,
I will start with a discussion of the relevant thematic concerns of Russian poetry and tragedy
prior to the appearance of Ovid’s heroides. I will follow with a discussion of Trediakovskii
and Lomonosov and their early engagement with Ovid’s Heroides. Next I will discuss the
82
The first translation of all Ovid’s heroides was done by D. Shervinskii. The edition was published in 1902.
28
first Russian translations of Ovid’s Heroides focusing on the cultural conditions of their
production and publication, which will lead into a close analysis of the translations “Phyllis to
Demophon” by Rzhevskii and “Ariadne to Theseus” by Kheraskov and Sankovskii. The
analysis will reveal the particular approaches taken by the poets in rendering Ovid’s texts and
highlight elements new to Russian poetic discourse. A brief overview of later translations will
follow. Finally, in the conclusion I will discuss eighteenth-century poems that provide glosses
to Ovid’s Heroides.
An Overview of Early Russian Poetry and Drama
The absence of a secular tradition along with the vocabulary used to describe love
relationships led Russian poets to borrow from the courtly tradition of France. Vasilii
Trediakovskii, who earned a reputation as the “Russian Ovid,”
83
was credited with the
introduction of love as a literary theme in his 1730 translation of Tallemant’s novel Le voyage
de l'Isle d'Amour (1663) which “became the first printed secular work dedicated exclusively to
the subject of love.”
84
Published in the same volume as the translation, Trediakovskii, who
frequently attended literary salons in Paris, wrote a collection of short poems in French, some
of which attempt to present a female voice. One poem presents a woman who is as cold and
quick to switch her love interests, and who rejects her lover, saying: “Leave me alone, your
flame [of passion] doesn’t interest me.”
85
Among the examples of light poetry (dedications to
newlyweds and engaged couples, praise of the beloved), two short poems in the collection are
83
Liubzhin, Rimskaia literatura v Rossii v XVII--nachale XX veka, 127.
84
Sobol, Febris Erotica, 15.
85
V. K. Trediakovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow-Leningrad: “Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), 68-69.
29
about lovers’ separation, a theme which is close to that of Ovid’s Heroides. Both poems are
only seven lines long, and each is composed in the form of an address. While some of the
lines are repeated by both lovers, the approach to gender is distinct. First, a female speaker,
reflecting on the destructive effect of separation (“Eh! destin cruel, arraches donc mon âme”),
expresses hope that fate will keep her lover safe in the harbor.
86
In the second, a male speaker
addressing his beloved tells her that her eyes will continue to light the fire of his love. He
reveals that the name of his beloved is Philis, a French spelling of Phyllis, evoking a
connection with the heroine of the Ovid’s second heroide.
While an authoritative female voice may be traced back to Russian folklore, where
genres such as the lament were traditionally women’s exclusive preserve,
87
Kelly points out
that popular songbooks represented the female voice more directly.
88
Trediakovskii, who
made pioneering attempts in the genre of the love song, was followed by the poet Alexander
Sumarokov. Prior to authoring the first two original Russian heroides, Sumarokov presented
voices of female speakers in songs and tragedies where female characters were prominently
featured.
89
According to Levitt, “the love song, a relatively insignificant genre for European
Classists, became an important vehicle through which Sumarokov developed the language and
86
Ibid., 91-92.
87
Katharine Hodgson, “Women and Gender in Post-Symbolist Poetry and the Stalin Era,” in A History of
Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 208.
88
Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820-1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994),
27.
89
Apart from Sumarokov, Mikhail Popov composed several songs adopting female persona. They are dated
1765 and 1772, and represent women in conventional language. See “Love songs” #6,9,14,16 &17 in Poety
XVIII veka, Biblioteka poeta, Bol'shaia seriia. 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1972), 1: 523-542.
30
rhytm of his new lyric poetry.”
90
While Trediakovskii’s songs presented love as “a drawing-
room flirtation,” Sumarokov’s works introduced love as “a genuine, profound, and
unconquerable passion,”
91
while rendering the theme of an abandoned lover from both the
male and female perspectives.
92
According to Serman, Sumarokov’s songs “go beyond the
limitations of genre” and overshadow his verse tragedies.
93
The 1787 edition of Sumarokov’s
complete works includes over a hundred fifty songs, but our discussion will be limited to the
songs, a rondo the poet published in 1759, and a sonnet published in 1755 that feature
women’s voices. While on the whole, Sumarokov’s representations of female personae are
conventional, two of the poems depart from the established portrayal of women in poetry.
Sumarokov’s Poetry
In 1755 Sumarokov published a sonnet written as a woman’s address to her unborn
child conceived out of wedlock whom she has been forced to abort. Only fourteen lines long,
the poem reads more like an epitaph than a full-fledged utterance. While the situation is
unusual for the genre, and for poetry of the time, the female speaker accepts her lot with the
stoic attitude expected of female heroines. She mourns the child’s death without putting
blame or making accusations, viewing the child as a necessary and unavoidable sacrifice.
90
Marcus Levitt, “Sumarokov: Life and Works,” in Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston:
Academic Studies Press, 2009), 8.
91
Ilya Serman, “The Eighteenth Century: Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment, 1730-90,” in The Cambridge
History of Russian Literature, ed. Charles Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 63.
92
See A.P. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie vsekh sochinenii, 2
nd
ed., vol.8 (Moscow, 1787). The set of “Theatrical
songs” includes songs of Didona and Aeneus.
93
Serman, “The Eighteenth Century,” 63.
31
Любовь, сразивши честь, тебе дать жизнь велела,
А честь, сразив любовь, велела умертвить.
94
(Love vanquished honor and made me give you life.
Honor vanquished love and made me kill you.)
95
Sumarokov’s other poems in which he adopts a female persona explore love
relationships. In 1759, in the November issue of the journal Trudoliubivaia pchela [The
Industrious Bee], which Sumarokov edited, he published eight poems (seven songs and one
rondo), five of them featuring a woman speaker.
96
In the issue, six of the songs were
published together, and two other poems – another song and rondo –were published at the end
of the issue under the rubric “Miscellaneous poems.”
97
The poems had appeared
anonymously in a poetic collection edited by G.N. Teplov earlier in the same year.
98
In the
journal, Sumarokov explained that the poems had been pirated and published “in defective
versions and with strange titles.” By republishing the songs, he offered readers the correct
versions and hoped to prevent the practice of altering and publication without permission.
99
The songs’ authorship has been contested; in 1830, Makarov suggested that they were written
94
A.P. Sumarokov, “Sonet” (“O suschestva sostav…”), in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, Biblioteka poeta (Leningrad:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), 171.
95
Unless otherwise noted, translations of the Russian texts are mine.
96
“Pesni,” Trudoliubivaia pchela no.11 (1759): 679-686.
97
Trudoliubivaia pchela no.11 (1759):702-703.
98
Marcus Levitt, “The Illegal Staging of Sumarokov's Sinav i Truvor in 1770 and the Problem of Authorial Status
in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Academic Studies
Press, 2009), 199.
99
A.P. Sumarokov, introduction to “Pesni,” Trudoliubivaia pchela no.11 (1759): 679.
32
by Sumarokov’s daughter, but this was later disproved.
100
The six songs published together all feature unhappy lovers exploring the sorrows of
romantic relationships. Discussing Sumarokov’s songs, Sobol notes the poet’s apparent lack
of interest in concrete details and use of “extremely abstract, metaphorical language.”
101
For
descriptions of emotions and feelings, Sumarokov relies on recycling sets of binary
oppositions. Love is aligned with joy, pleasure, sweetness and freedom; separation with
sadness, tears, bitterness and captivity. The details of break-ups or betrayal are not disclosed;
lovers are represented by streams of tears, beautiful eyes and confused souls. Of the three
songs that deal directly with the subject of abandonment, one song is written from the male
and two from the female perspective. In the song “Sokrylis’ te chasy kak ty menia iskala”
[Gone are the Hours When You Searched for Me], a man addresses his unfaithful lover. He
regrets meeting her, blaming her for initiating the affair and then leaving him. In the end, he
has lost hope she will ever come back.
When we turn to the poems which are composed in women’s voices, shame and the
suppression of emotion are a dominant theme. In the song “V kakoi mne vrednyi den’ ty v
tom menia uveril” [On What Evil Day Did You Convince Me?], an abandoned female
speaker, tormented by shame, reveals that she is more guilty than her partner, who left her for
another woman, because she “was blinded by passion.”
В какой мне вредный день, ты в том меня уверил,
Что ты передо мной в любви не лицемерил?
100
V.A. Zapadov, “Kniazhnina Ekaterina Aleksandrovna,” in Slovar 'russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vypusk 2 (St.
Petersburg, 1999), http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/. However, Iu. Stennik in his entry on Sumarokov’s daughter
mistakenly attributes the songs to her and suggests that five out of six were written from a female persona. See
Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1994): 299.
101
Sobol, Febris Erotica, 18-19.
33
Что лести я твоей поверила себя,
Ты винен, только я винняй еще тебя. (680)
(On what evil day did you convince me
That you were not disingenuous in your love?
You are guilty, but because I believed in your flattery
I am even more guilty than you.)
Apart from addressing her lover, she attacks her female rival for depriving her of pleasure
(“utekh”). In the song “Uzh proshle moi vek dragoi” [My Good Times Have Passed], an
abandoned woman blames herself for falling in love with someone who deceived her. She
wishes that her lover would see her in his dreams, but concedes that this is impossible since he
doesn’t even want to hear from her. In the last of the six songs, “Tschetno ia skryvaiu serdtsa
skorbi liuty” [In Vain Do I Hide the Cruel Sorrows of My Heart],
102
a female speaker is afraid
to reveal her feelings to the man she loves. She tries to suppress her emotions and control
herself, admitting that she doesn’t know what she wants but that she is unable to forget him.
While the songs discussed above present a conventional image of the powerless and
guilt-ridden abandoned woman, the poems published by Sumarokov at the end of the same
issue of the journal portray women empowered by desire rather than being victimized by it.
The song doesn’t directly engage the subject of abandonment, but offers an expression of a
woman’s desire. In the poem, the female speaker acknowledges her strong affection for her
beloved, probably a shepherd. She dreams of initiating physical closeness with her beloved:
Я цалуяся с тобой ,
Обнимаюся во сне,
Я во сне тебя в шалаш сама зову:
Успокой смятенный дух, будет то на яву! (703)
(I kiss you,
Embrace you in my sleep,
I myself call you into the hut in my dream;
Calm my troubled spirit, make it happen in reality!)
102
I used Sobol’s translation of the song’s title. See, Sobol, Febris Erotica, 18.
34
The speaker concludes with the confidence that her encounter will happen in reality in the
near future. Such explicit expression of a woman’s desire was more characteristic of
Sumarokov’s eclogues which describe the piquant love affairs of shepherdesses.
103
In the
journal, the song is followed by another poem by Sumarokov titled “Rondo,” in which the
female speaker responds to “rude accusations” of unfaithfulness by her male acquaintance.
Her position differs from the guilt-ridden complaints by the women in other Sumarokov
songs. She says that she is not unfaithful to him, but that she is not in love with him or with
anybody. She asserts her right to be in charge of her own heart, a right that was not often
acknowledged in poetry:
Изменою я мыслей не кривила,
Другим любви я сроду не явила, […]
Но, чтоб любить я стала и тебя,
Не думай ты. (703)
(I haven’t distorted my thinking with unfaithfulness,
I have never granted my love to anybody yet, . . .
But that I have begun to love you,
Don’t think it.)
Sumarokov’s songs written from women’s personae echo some of the motifs present in Ovid’s
Heroides but the poems describe a limited range of emotions, and lack nuance and
characterization.
103
Joachim Klein, “Pastoral’naia poeziia russkogo klassitsisma,” in Puti kul'turnogo importa: Trudy po russkoi
literature XVIII veka (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul'tury, 2005), 132-136.
35
Russian Elegies
In elegies, another popular genre among Russian poets in the second half of the
eighteenth century, laments from unhappy men to their absent lovers were expressed more
often than the grieving of women. According to Kelly, in the elegies “women were mute, and
refracted through a man’s perception.”
104
As scholars point out, Russian elegies were modeled
on the works of Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius as well as on French précieux poetry.
105
Sumarokov popularized the genre in Russia by composing his elegies in alexandrines, using
“tropes of anguished exclamation and topoi of seeing, feeling and remembering.”
106
Like the
songs, the elegies published in the late 1750s are characterized by undefined situations and
nameless characters. Circa 1760, however, the elegy dramatically evolved, adopting new
features; it began to “contemplate” and “teach.”
107
The poets Kheraskov, Naryshkin,
Rzhevskii and Popov contributed to this important change. Their elegies began offering a
basic plot – most frequently, the separation of lovers by an arranged marriage – and a larger
cast of characters, often with names. According to Gukovskii, the lyrical persona gradually
turned into the narrator, and at that point, the elegy began sharing common territory with the
epistle and the heroide.
108
The scholar identifies only one elegy by Popov, published in 1769,
in which an abandoned woman-narrator tells her love story, but the motif of abandonment
functions only as a framing device.
109
104
Kelly, A history of Russian women's writing, 27.
105
Kahn, “Russian Elegists as Latin Lovers,” 336; Gukovskii, “Elegiia v XVIII veke,” 72.
106
Kahn, “Russian Elegists as Latin Lovers,” 339.
107
Gukovskii, “Elegiia v XVIII veke,” 89.
108
The connection between elegy and heroide warrants further study.
109
Gukovskii, “Elegiia v XVIII veke,” 95.
36
Women Poets
Interestingly, the first poem by a woman was an elegy written in a man’s voice,
attributed to Ekaterina Sumarokova in 1759. Kelly notes that the poem, possibly written by
the daughter of the well-known poet and playwright, “was more or less indistinguishable”
from the works of her father. Elizaveta Kheraskova first published her poems, focused on
philosophical and moral themes, in 1760-1761. Her six poems were heavily influenced by the
ideology of the Freemasons to which her husband, the poet Kheraskov, adhered. In the poem
“Molitva,” as Gopfert describes, “the I, which here is masculine, turns directly to the Creator,
evidently because the injuries and humiliations heaped upon him leave no other way.”
110
Women in Early Russian Tragedies
According to Levitt, early Russian tragedies made visible and give an eloquent voice
to intense inner human conflict.
111
In contrast to Russian poetry, the tragedies of Sumarokov
and Lomonosov present women on par with male martyrs who sacrifice their lives in order to
assert their right to follow their hearts.
112
Lomonosov’s Tamira i Selm [Tamira and Selim]
(1750), and Demofont [Demophon] (1752), and Sumarokov’s Khorev [Khorev] (1747) and
Sinav i Truvor [Sinav and Truvor] (1750) are intrinsically connected by conflicts between a
father and daughter due to the fact that the daughter’s lover is not accepted by her father. In
110
Frank Göpfert, “Observations on the Life and Work of Elizaveta Kheraskova (1737–1809),” in Women and
Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 169.
111
Marcus Levitt, The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2011), 87.
112
Particular “masculinization” of women characters was also a result of the conventions of Russian theatre,
where women’s roles were performed by men.
37
three of the four tragedies (Demophon is the exception with two female rivals in conflict) the
daughters have to stand up to at least three stubborn men: a father figure, a lover, and a rival
and/or ruler. According to Klein, lines spoken by women outnumber lines spoken by men.
113
Female characters are the central figures of the tragedies and in virtually all cases are the
driving force of the dramas, often taking on conventionally heroic masculine character traits.
The female protagonists of Sumarokov’s dramas embody a stoic ideal that stands in stark
contrast to the heroism that arises from grief and despair in Ovid’s female narrators.
In Lomonosov’s tragedy Tamira and Selim, which takes place in Crimea during the
Mongol invasion, Tamira falls in love with the enemy of her country, the prince Selim, but her
father has already arranged her marriage to the powerful khan Mamai. In one of her first
monologues, Tamira gives utterance to the “inner struggle” burgeoning in her heart, but states
that she is not afraid of anything. Admitting her love for Selim, she says that she is not willing
to surrender to Mamai: “He could win the whole world, but he won’t win me.”
114
References to Ovid’s Heroides in the play highlight an otherwise unapparent
connection between mythological heroines and Lomonosov’s Tamira. While contemplating
running away from her father to be with her lover, Tamira wonders if she will suffer the same
fate as Medea, one of Ovid’s abandoned women (309). Preparing to commit suicide in order
to follow her lover to the “other world,” Tamira, just like Ariadne in Ovid’s heroide, says that
waiting for death is much harder than dying (328). Oddly, Tamira escapes both death and
abandonment, uniting with her beloved in an anomalous happy ending.
113
Joachim Klein, “Lomonosov i tragediia,” in Puti kul'turnogo importa, 269-270.
114
M.V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow-St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2011), 8:290.
38
In his second tragedy, Demophon, Lomonosov combines the story of Phyllis with the
myth of Iliona.
115
While in Ovid’s Heroides, Phyllis laments her abandonment by Demophon,
Lomonosov’s tragedy depicts events that precede his departure, focusing our attention on
Demophon and introducing Iliona as Phyllis’s rival. In contrast to Ovid’s timid and naïve
portrayal, Lomonosov’s Phyllis is willfull and fearless. She expresses readiness to follow her
beloved anywhere: “I would be afraid of neither sharp rocks, nor storms,” sensing that he is
already slipping away from her (377). She is clearly not blinded by passion and sees that
Demophon is attracted to Iliona, not her.
Suspecting Demophon’s unfaithfulness in a fashion typical for neoclassical drama but
unimaginable for the somewhat naïve and guilt-laden Phyllis from Ovid’s Heroides,
Lomonosov’s Phyllis plots revenge to restore her honor. She causes the death of Demophon in
a fire and kills herself afterwards in order to be united with her lover. While Lomonosov’s
interpretation of Phyllis significantly departs from the character presented in Heroides, the
Russian writer still reveals his indebtedness to Ovid’s collection. Like Ariadne from Ovid’s
heroide who reminds Theseus to include her death in his list of victories, Phyllis tells
Demophon (Theseus’s son) that his shameful behavior toward her will follow him to Troy
[sic] (396).
While Lomonosov’s tragedies show at least a partial engagement with Ovid’s Heroides
in their presentation of female characters, Sumarokov’s heroines, despite demonstrating
“heroic and markedly masculine qualities,”
116
also reveal a connection with Ovid’s abandoned
women.
115
Lomonosov also borrowed plot and characters from “Andromaque” by Racine and was severely criticized by
Sumarokov. For complete details, see the commentaries to M.V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8:
907.
116
Levitt, The Visual Dominant, 101.
39
While the titles of the two tragedies by Sumarokov, Khorev and Sinav and Truvor, do not
incorporate women’s names, Sumarokov’s female characters are prominently featured in both
plays, in which they reveal exceptional determination and inner strength. The monologues of
Osnelda who is in love with her father’s enemy are saturated with philosophical remarks about
happiness, life and death. To her Sumarokov assigned slightly paraphrased lines from Cicero’s
first speech Against Catiline: “О нравы грубые! О дни! О времена!” (Oh coarse manners!
Oh, days! Oh, times!).
117
To avert imminent separation from her beloved, Osnelda takes the
initiative to write a letter to her father asking him to cease his opposition and allow them to
marry. For her, as for the characters of Ovid’s Heroides, letter-writing is the last resort to save
her love and ultimately her life. The link is especially important, as Osnelda will later become
the heroine of the first original Russian heroide. In the play, the content of the letter is not
revealed, her plea is rejected by her father, and Osnelda ends her life poisoned by the brother
of her lover. Osnelda’s martyr-like qualities are highlighted by the playwright on number of
occasions: she asks her beloved to stab her with a sword; she attempts suicide which is
interrupted by her servant; and she soliloquizes, boldly looking at her own grave:
Но что сие есть смерть?
Порог из света вон,
Живот-мечтание и преходящий сон.
(But what is this death?
Threshold out of this world,
Life-dreaming, a transient sleep.)
118
Like Lomonosov’s Tamira, the heroine of Sumarokov’s tragedy, Sinav and Truvor,
Ilmena, the victim of an arranged marriage, is portrayed as a strong individual. When her
father tries to hide his own interests and tells her that “people” want her to marry a powerful
117
Sumarokov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 56; also see comments on p. 457.
118
Levitt, The Visual Dominant, 89.
40
Russian lord, she argues that it is he, not the people, who arranged her marriage. Questioning
her status, Ilmena asks: “Do I live in captivity?”
119
She sees herself isolated from other people
who live peacefully in her country, saying that her suffering exceeds that of a person chained
and tortured in an underground cell. Despite the fact that Ilmena is in love, she fulfills her
father’s order, and after her wedding commits suicide in front of him. Ilmena describes her
torments as she tries to suppress her passion for her beloved:
Повсюду страсть моя гоняется за мной,
Повсюду множит жар и рушит мой покой…
Сама с собою брань имею непрестанно,
Разима, рвусь, стеню и стражду несказанно. (107)
(Everywhere my passion pursues me,
Everywhere it increases its ardor and destroys my inner peace …
I am battling with myself constantly,
I am vulnerable, I am torn and wailing, and suffer unspeakably.)
In early Russian poetry and tragedy, tools for the expression of the emotional states of
a speaker, especially female, were rather limited. The absence of a narrative component in
elegies led to the abstract depictions of feelings and emotions as well as to the under-
individualization of the speakers. In tragedies, women’s voices also had a restricted function
which resulted in a more masculinized tradition of “women-knights.”
120
The next section will
demonstrate how the model introduced by the translations of Ovid’s Heroides helped to
expand the creative horizon for Russian poets.
119
Sumarokov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 86.
120
Inna Vishnevskaia, Aplodismenty v proshloe: A.P. Sumarokov i ego tragedii (Moscow: IMLI, 1996), 24.
41
Ovid’s Heroides and the Theoretical Works of Trediakovskii and Lomonosov
In 1735 Vasilii Trediakovskii made reference to Ovid’s Heroides in his Novy i kratky
sposob k slozheniyu rossiyskikh stikhov [New and Brief Method for Composing Russian
Verse] as examples of poetical epistles: “Пиитическая эпистола есть почти то ж, что и
простая. Сие всякому можно видеть у Овидия в эпистолах от героинь.”
121
(The poetical
epistle is almost the same as a regular epistle. This can be seen in Ovid’s epistles from
heroines.)
While Trediakovskii thus only briefly referred to Ovid’s Heroides in his works,
Lomonosov highlighted their rhetorical power, translating several excerpts in his famous
rhetoric textbook, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiiu [Brief Guide to Eloquence](1748).
Divided into two major parts, “On Invention” and “On Ornamentation,” the first Russian
rhetoric was meant to be a guide for making Russian literary works more persuasive and
stylistically effective.
122
Apart from examples from his own works, Lomonosov illustrates his
points using excerpts from a variety of ancient authors. Segments from Ovid’s Heroides, two
from “Penelope to Ulysses” and one from “Ariadne to Theseus,” are used on three occasions.
In the first part, where Lomonosov argues for the use of ornate speech, he presents an excerpt
from “Penelope to Ulysses” (lines 3-4, 25-27) as an example of how an author can use words
to describe the passage of time by describing a succession of events. Penelope evokes the
atmosphere of the Trojan War, which serves as a backdrop to her own drama, emphasizing
that the Greek victory holds very little meaning for her since Ulysses is not with her. In the
section “On Ornamentation,” dedicated to stylistic devices, Lomonosov uses another passage
121
Trediakovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 390.
122
See commentaries to the Kratkoe rukovodstvo in M.V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati
tomakh, 7: 669.
42
from “Penelope to Ulysses” (lines 5-8) to illustrate the expression of negative desire
(zlozhelatel’stvo) (§234).
123
In a rhetorically elaborate move, Penelope blames Paris--wishing
he had been drowned in the sea on his way to capture Helen--for her having to sleep alone. To
illustrate an expression of strong supplication Lomonosov provides a selective translation of
the final lines from the heroide “Ariadne to Theseus” (lines 145-150) (§235).
124
Lomonosov
liberally renders into Russian Ariadne’s last plea to her lover as she describes herself
stretching her arms out to the sea, with beaten breast and almost no hair. To create a stronger
effect, Lomonosov skips the lines in which Ariadne expresses hope for Theseus’ return,
translating only the last line in which Ariadne asks him to collect her bones for burial if he
comes back and finds her dead.
125
As we discussed earlier in the chapter, Lomonosov’s tragedy, Demophon, features
Phyllis, a mythological woman from Ovid’s first epistle in his Heroides. It is likely that
Lomonosov’ tragedy contributed to the fact that the very first heroide by Ovid translated into
Russian was “Phyllis to Demophon.”
123
Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, 7: 220-221.
124
Ibid., 221.
125
Perhaps, because of Lomonosov’s excerpts, the full heroide “Ariadne to Theseus” was translated twice (in
1763 and 1764), and “Penelope to Ulysses” was translated three times (in 1774, 1812, 1843).
43
Kozitskii, Rzhevskii, and Ruban’s Translations of Ovid’s Second Heroide, “Phyllis to
Demophon”
The Industrious Bee
The heroide “Phyllis to Demophon,” the first heroide from Ovid’s collection translated
into Russian, opened the September issue of the journal Trudoliubivaia pchela [The
Industrious Bee] in 1759.
126
The magazine, which targeted Russia’s intellectual elite, was run
by Aleksandr Sumarokov, Russia’s leading poet and playwright. Along with original Russian
poetry, much of it written by Sumarkov himself, the journal published various types of
translated literature. The journal introduced Russian readers, often for the first time, to the
works of Horace, Livy, Sappho, and Aeschchines. Translations from Greek and Latin
appeared side by side with translations of more contemporary authors such as Corneille, Swift,
and articles from “The Spectator.” According to Levitt, English materials were likely
translated through a French or German intermediary.
127
The editorial concerns of the journal
found their expression in Sumarokov’s article-translation from Locke that stressed “education,
schooling, good partners in conversation, and other useful instructions as the way to a virtuous
life.”
128
Special attention to the classics was declared as important from the very start of the
journal, which ran for a year. The first issue of the magazine opened with the article “O pol’ze
mifologii” [On the Use of Mythology] signed by Grigorii Kozitskii, a poet and a translator
126
G. Kozitskii, “Pis’mo, sochinennoe Publiem Ovidiem Nasonom. Fillida Dimofoontu,” Trudoliubivaia pchela
no.9 (1759): 515-524
127
Marcus Levitt, “Was Sumarokov a Lockean Sensualist? On Locke’s reception in Eighteenth-Century Russia,”
in Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 160.
128
Ibid., 165.
44
who regularly contributed to Sumarokov’s journal.
129
Defending mythology against its
numerous critics, the article boldly and famously proclaimed: “There is no history that is
closer to our age than that of ancient Rome.”
130
Apart from elaborating the impact of
mythology on history, physics, astronomy and natural sciences, the article stresses that one of
the didactic functions of mythology is to reveal the corrupting consequences of polytheism on
society:
Увидев какую они честь вымышленным Богам отдавали, большую воздавать
будем истинному Творцу всей вселенной: познав ложные их чудеса, темные к
уловлению душ человеческих проречения, непристойные праздники, нескладные
обряды, ощутим в мыслях наших несказанную радость и принесем Всевышнему
благодарение, что он от всех тех заблуждений нас избавил и светом истины
просветил.
131
(Having found out what honor they rendered to fictitious Gods, we must offer greater
honor to the true Creator of the universe: having learned about their false miracles,
dark prophesies that seek to catch human souls, indecent celebrations, and incoherent
rituals, let us experience unbridled joy in our thoughts and give thanks to the Most
High that he has spared us from all these mistakes and enlightened us with the light of
truth.)
Presenting myths as elaborately disguised cautionary tales, the article compares
mythology to a doctor who “dissolves a sour but life-saving remedy in sugar” (28). Besides
their instructive value, they work as a key to unlocking foreign literature to the emerging
Russian readership. The author explains that “tender speech and majestic words” in the works
of old and new authors are meaningless without a knowledge of mythology and he praises
Ovid for The Metamorphoses that “everyone reads with inner joy” (21). Lastly, explaining
the meaning behind the title of the journal, The Industrious Bee, readers are compared to bees
129
G. Kozitskii, “O pol’ze mifologii,” Trudoliubivaia pchela no.1 (1759): 5-33.
130
Cited in Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early
Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 52.
131
G. Kozitskii, “O pol’ze mifologii,” Trudoliubivaia pchela no.1 (1759): 28.
45
collecting useful things from books, expanding their knowledge and moving toward
prosperity.
Every month the journal opened with some important piece of writing – whether it was
a section from Metamorphoses, an article on Locke’s philosophy, or a translation of prayers
and psalms. When the September issue of the magazine opened with a translation of Ovid’s
heroide “Phyllis to Demophon,” it started a tradition of placing a heroide at the beginning of
each issue. According to Jacobson, the Phyllis myth “was of great popularity in antiquity,”
132
and as noted for Russian readers it was known from Lomonosov’s tragedy Demophon. In
“Phyllis to Demophon,” the Thracian queen, Phyllis, addresses her lover, Demophon, whom
she rescued from a shipwreck and who then departed for Athens, betraying his promise to
return. Phyllis, rather than attempting to persuade Demophon to come back, falls into despair
and prepares to end her life.
Kozitskii’s “Phyllis to Demophon”
According to the era’s “artistic code,” a literary work was viewed as independent from
its author. Eighteenth-century translators often “corrected” the originals according to their
own literary tastes.
133
However, the first translation of Ovid’s heroide by Kozitskii attempts to
convey the ancient text with minimal violation to the original. Educated in the Kyiv-Mohyla
academy, famous for the rigorous study of languages, Kozitskii translated both from Greek
and Latin, and his renderings of stories from Metamorphoses were also published in the
journal. His translation of “Phyllis to Demophon,” entitled “Pis’mo, sochinennoe Publiem
132
Howard Jacobson, Ovid's Heroides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 58.
133
Gukovskii, “Towards the Problem of Russian Classicism,” 67.
46
Ovidiem Nasonom. Fillida Dimofoontu” [A Letter Composed by Publius Ovidius Naso:
Phyllis to Demophoon] demonstrated that Kozitskii was focused on the careful introduction of
readers to classical material. To be as accurate as possible, Kozitskii rendered Ovid’s heroide
into prose. Venditti, who compares Kozitskii’s work to Ovid’s original, concludes that overall
the translation is very precise. But Venditti points out several instances where Kozitskii finds
Christian equivalents to some words related to ancient culture. For example, when Phyllis
addresses Demophon as “sceleratus” (in English “wicked and accursed”), Kozitskii renders
the word as “bezzakonnyi,” “sinner,” rather than “prestupnik” (“criminal.)”
134
He also uses
the verb “pogreshit’,” “to commit sin” referring to the fact that Demophon didn’t come back
to Phyllis on time. Here is an example of a poet who attempts to make a highly accurate
translation and at the same time clarifies and naturalizes cultural references to make them
more understandable to Russian readers, in doing so providing a familiar moral framework for
the poem.
Rzhevskii’s “Phyllis to Demophon”
The first poetic rendering of Ovid’s “Phyllis to Demophon” was done by Aleksei
Rzhevskii in 1763, four years after the publication of the prose translation by Kozitskii.
135
The note following the title indicates that Ovid’s work was “made into Russian verse from a
translation.”
136
While Gukovskii calls Rzhevskii’s poem a translation, Venditti justly suggests
134
Venditti, “Russkie perevody XVIII veka vtoroi geroidy Ovidia,” 174.
135
Aleksei Rzhevskii, “Geroida. Fillida k Dimofontu. Sochinenie Ovidiia, v rosskie stikhi, delana s perevodu,”
Svobodnyia Chasy 11(1763): 636-646.
136
While Rzhevskii was a frequent contributor to Trudolubivaia pchela and other journals, it was his single
known contribution to the genre of heroide.
47
that Rzhevskii used Kozitskii’s prose translation as the basis for a verse adaptation.
137
Rzhevskii’s approach to Ovid’s text differs from Kozitskii’s in many ways. The unique
quality of Rzevskii’s translation as distinct from Kozitskii’s is that he adds many original lines
to the poem, effectively doubling the length of Ovid’s original. Rzevskii manages to
effectively convey Phyllis’s heightened emotionality, her overwhelming guilt and despair. In
one of the earliest examples in Russian literature, a poetic persona rises above vague laments
about “looks” and “tears;” the emotional outpourings of Rzhevskii’s Phyllis are specific to a
particular narrative and at the same time define it. While she waits for her beloved, Phyllis
imagines his boat is approaching, but after some time she thinks he must be shipwrecked. She
begins to fear his promises to her were false. She recalls how she helped him repair the boat
on which he departed. She considers the death she will choose: taking poison, using a sword,
or hanging herself. Rzhevskii’s translation showcases the possibilities of poetry written in the
form of a first-person narrative.
At the time of the heroide’s publication, Aleksei Rzhevskii (1737-1804), Sumarokov’s
friend and disciple, was a young poet, actively contributing his works in a variety of genres to
literary magazines. Rzhevskii included a brief introductory note summarizing the mythical
background of the heroide which became a common practice for other publications of them.
Setting the tone for his poem, the note meticulously lists the circumstances of Phyllis’s
infatuation with Demophon: “случай, время, место, знакомство, свидание, обращение,
сходство наполнили сердце Филлидино склонностью и сильною страстью” (the
occasion, time, place, acquaintance, dating, manners, connection, youth and love filled the
137
Venditti, “Russkie perevody XVIII veka vtoroi geroidy Ovidia,” 178.
48
heart of Phyllis with a kind disposition and strong passion).
138
Rzhevskii immediately departs
from abstract characterization, indicating that the poem will be framed by a unique narrative.
Many of Rzhevskii’s elegies were also infused with dramatic speech, but he never
adopted a female persona prior to writing heroides.
139
The same year Rzhevskii composed
“Phyllis to Demophon,” he also wrote his tragedy Podlozhnyi Smerdii [The False Smerdius]
which would later inspire the poet Ekaterina Urusova to compose two of her own heroides.
Rzhevskii renders Ovid’s heroide in alexandrines, the meter of tragedies.
Rzhevskii effectively exploits the elements of theatricality embedded in the heroide
stressing if not exaggerating the spontaneity and uninhibitedness of Phyllis’s utterance. Even
though in the first line of the poem Phyllis states that she writes to Demophon, the poem reads
like a theatrical monologue. For example, abruptly interrupting her own musings, Phyllis
addresses Demophon: “Stop. Listen to my voice” (643). Rzhevskii chooses the verb
“внимать” (vnimat’) which translates into English as “listen,” which implies that one may
listen and respond to the voice of the person. Rzhevskii fills the poem with exclamations
“Akh” and “Uvy” [Oh, and Alas], a convention of Russian poetry and drama, along with
emphatic addresses such as “О bogi!” [Oh, Gods!] (641) and “O l’stets!” [Oh, flatterer!]
(642).
140
While conveying the heightened emotional state of Phyllis, these exclamations also
sustain the illusion that Phyllis is speaking from the stage.
Rzhevskii employs Ovid’s use of the parenthetical aside, another theatrical device, to
complicate his characterization of Phyllis. In Ovid’s text, Phyllis compares herself to
Ariadne, another abandoned woman. She muses that Ariadne, who lost her honor just as she
138
Rzhevskii, “Fillida k Dimofontu,” 636.
139
Gukovskii, “Elegiia v XVIII veke,” 110.
140
In contrast, Kozitskii translation has only one exclamation “uvy” [alas].
49
did, now enjoys a happy marriage and rides a chariot harnessed by tigers. In Ovid’s heroide
Phyllis makes the parenthetical point that she does not envy Ariadne. Rzhevskii however, has
her make an additional parenthetical aside: “как ей та честь дана” (how did she manage to be
honored like that?)” (641). Her, Phyllis displays not only envy but a calculated thinking
process as even while lamenting her fate she considers whether she might be able to capitalize
on her misfortune.
Rzevskii’s vivid portraiture notwithstanding, his particular emphasis on theatricality
forces him to add to Ovid’s text and this inadvertently obliterates the rhetorical nuances of the
original, making Phyllis’ speech more straightforward and explicit. For example, where
Ovid’s Phyllis uses various words (unfaithful, flatterer) to describe Demofont, she never calls
him, as Rzhevskii’s Phyllis does, a tyrant. The moniker is a classiscist term, frequently
applied in the tragedies of Sumarokov to negative characters.
141
In another instance, as a way
of underlining Phyllis’ need for her lover, Rzhevskii deconstructs the hallowed relationship
between host and guest. In the first lines of Ovid’s text, Phyllis presents herself as hospita
(“hostess”). While Kozitskii renders the word as “угостившая” (literally, someone who treats
a guest with food), Rzevskii adds the line, “Которая тобой питается и дышет” (one who is
nourished and breathes through you), inverting the original idea and positing Phyllis as the
guest whom Demophon feeds. Only in the sixth line does Rzhevskii go back to original,
saying that Phyllis also received him as a guest.
In Ovid’s text, when Phyllis recalls Demophon’s departure she nostalgically describes
how he embraced and kissed her:
ausus es amplecti colloque infufus amantis
Ofcula per longus jungere pressa moras (Her. 2. 93-94)
141
Vishnevskaia, Aplodismenty v proshloe, 229-230.
50
(You dared to embrace me, and, clinging around the neck of your lover, to press long
kisses to my lips)
142
Rzhevskii turns Phyllis’ recollection of the same moment into a bitter memory. Rzhevskii
renders these two lines into four, qualifying Demophon’s passion and tears as “pretended” and
his request to be faithful as “hypocritical”:
Дерзнул еще ты мне притворну страсть казати,
И бросившись обняв меня облобызати!
И поцелуи мне любовные давать!
И слезы из очей притворно проливать! (642)
(You dared to show me your pretended passion,
And throwing yourself around my neck, kissed me!
And gave me amorous kisses!
And shed pretended tears from your eyes!)
These small but pointed additions to Ovid’s text help Rzhevskii frame the relationship of
Phyllis and Demophon within the familiar and conventional elegiac opposition between
“pretended” and “sincere” love. They also reinforce the image of Phyllis as an utterly bitter
heroine who is quite vocal in her condemnation of her lover.
The epitaph that Ovid’s Phyllis composes for her own grave demonstrates “Ovidian
compactness to the last point of refinement”
143
:
Phyllida Demophon leto dedit hospes amantem;
ille necis causam praebuit, ipsa manum. (Her. 2. 146-47)
(Demophon, a guest, brought death to his lover Phyllis.
He furnished the cause, she the hand by which death came.)
144
142
White, Renaissance Postscripts, 178. For most English translations of Ovid’s Heroides I use translations
provided by scholars in recent works on Ovid’s Heroides; in other cases, I follow the Loeb edition.
143
White, Renaissance Postscripts, 184.
144
Ibid.
51
Rzhevskii utilizes the epitaph to pass final judgment on the characters. He renders two of
Ovid’s lines into six of his own, highlighting Phyllis as the victim of passionate love and
Demophon as a tyrannical lover who took advantage of her. Obviously, Rzhevskii did not find
satisfaction in the simplicity of Ovid as rendered in Kozitskii’s translation; rather, he
dramatized the epitaph, turning it into the moral of the story.
Here is Kozitskii’s translation:
Димофоонт умертвил Филлиду, угощенный любящею,
он подал ей причину смерти. А на смерть употребила
она собственную руку. (522-523)
(Demophon, who was treated as a guest by loving Phyllis, put her to death.
He furnished the cause, she the hand by which death came.)
And here is Rzhevskii’s poetic adaptation:
Филлиду Димофонт ево любящу страстно,
Похитя честь ея во время ей нещастно.
И обольстив ея тирански умертвил:
Он сняв любви плоды неверность ей явил,
И тем соделал он ея причину смерти ж
Она дерзнула жизнь своей рукою стерти. (646)
(Demophon whom Fillida loved passionately,
Stole her honor in an unhappy moment.
And having seduced her, killed her as a tyrant would;
After collecting the fruits of love he revealed his unfaithfulness
And by doing so caused her death;
She dared to erase her life with her own hand.)
In the epitaph Rzhevskii takes pains to emphasize the loss of Phyllis’ virginity, apparently
ignoring the fact that Phyllis’ love for Demophon had indeed led to a wedding. In six lines
Rzhevskii refers to it three times: Demophon “stole her honor,” and “seduced her,” and if that
wasn’t enough, “collected the fruits of love.” The line “обольстив ея тирански умертвил”
52
(and having seduced her, killed as a tyrant would) demonstrates Rzhevskii’s intention to
underline the cause and effect relations between seduction and death, most likely, to warn his
female readers. Like Phyllis who erases her life with her own hand, the end of Rzhevskii’s
adaptation removes any ambiguities or subtleties from Ovid’s original, placing Phyllis in the
spotlight of convention and theatricality.
Despite Rzhevskii’s limiting reading, his poem represents an important stage in the
development of the poetic craft. Rzhevskii introduces a woman’s voice at the center of a
poetic work while he reconstructs her emotional states within the context of defined narrative
elements.
Vasilii Ruban, “Dve Iroidy”
In 1774, fifteen years after Kozitskii published the first prose translation of Ovid’s
heroide “Phyllis to Demophon” in The Industrious Bee, nearly the exact same text with only
minor changes were published by Vasilii Ruban with the title Dve Iroidy, ili Dva pis’ma
drevnikh Iroin [Two Heroides or Two Letters of Ancient Heroines]. Ruban listed himself as a
translator of both heroides included in the pamphlet, “Penelope to Ulysses” and “Phyllis to
Demophon.” The translation, like Kozitskii’s, are in prose. Like Rzhevskii’s, they are
accompanied by short summaries. The translations are also preceded by a biographical sketch
of Ovid, which Ruban concedes is compiled from the works of other authors, but he does not
provide any names or titles. Following the biographical sketch, Ruban lists all twenty-one of
Ovid’s heroides. For the first time, detailed, “most necessary,” footnotes are provided to help
readers navigate the historic, mythological and geographic context.
The diligent and scholarly
approach Ruban takes to the publication of Ovid’s two heroides suggests that he was well
53
aware of the need to familiarize Russian readership with mythology as expressed by Kozitskii
in his article “On the Use of Mythology.”
How can Ruban’s appropriation of Kozitskii’s translation be explained?
145
Ruban, “a
literary entrepreneur of extraordinary energy and versatility,”
was mocked by fellow writers
for writing poetry slavishly praising his patrons.
146
Kozitskii, at the time Ruban’s heroides
were published, had just finished a five-year tenure as secretary to the Empress Catherine. So
far no records have been found that would point to a dispute between the two well-known
persons in the small literary circle of St. Petersburg, both of whom were accomplished
translators and always signed their works. While Gukovskii points to “the absence of any
notion that each poet had a right to his own work” in the Russian literature of the period,
147
a
more recent scholar, Sergei Nikolaev, provides sufficient evidence about authors’ growing
awareness of the inappropriateness of “stealing” words, particularly from foreign works by
other authors.
148
Many eighteenth-century men of letters were driven by a mission to improve
the given text according to their own literary standards, but according to Nikolaev’s
observations, no matter how much editing was done, the author of the text wouldn’t change.
149
Declining to offer another translator credit for his work, Ruban approached Kozitskii’s text as
if it were the work of Ovid.
One of the major alterations made by Ruban is the versification of the last four lines of
the heroide that constitute the epitaph Phyllis composed for her tomb. In order for the lines to
145
In her discussion about Russian translations of Ovid, Venditti links the appropriation to Ruban’s reputation as
a money-grubber.
146
Irwin R. Titunik, “Vasilii Grigor'evich Ruban,” in Early Modern Russian Writers, ed. M. C. Levitt, 340.
147
Gukovskii, “Towards the Problem of Russian Classicism,” 60.
148
S. I. Nikolaev, “Original'nost', podrazhanie i plagiat v predstavleniiakh russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka: Ocherk
problematiki.” XVIII vek, 23 (2004): 12.
149
Ibid., 18.
54
rhyme, Ruban changed the word order and added two parenthetical remarks, one labeling
Demophon as unfaithful, and the other defining the reason for Phyllis’ death as abandonment:
Филлиду Димофоонт (неверный) умертвил,
Которою любим и угощен был.
Он смерти подал ей причину (чрез разлуку),
А собственну она воздела руку.
150
(Demophon (unfaithful) killed Phyllis,
Who loved him and hosted him.
He furnished the cause of her death (because of the separation),
Which she performed with her own hand.)
Venditti shows, however, that Ruban’s version is on the whole less precise than Kozitskii’s
due to copying errors made from the original translation.
151
Overall, Ruban’s changes to the
word order and punctuation in Kozitskii’s text are minor and, as Venditti concludes, largely
unnecessary.
Kheraskov and Sankovskii’s Translations of Ovid’s Tenth Heroide, “Ariadne to Theseus”
“Ariadne to Theseus” was the second of Ovid’s heroides translated into the Russian
language.
152
Kheraskov, who authored the work in 1763, defined himself in this case not as a
translator, but as an imitator. The signature “M. Kh. imitated Ovid’s heroide” not only
granted him more creative freedom to express himself, but also placed him on an equal
footing with Ovid. Kheraskov, who was appointed the head of Moscow University and ran a
literary circle, published “Ariadne to Theseus” in the journal Svobodnye chasy [Free Hours],
150
Vasilii Ruban, “Dve Iroidy, ili Dva pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’,” (St. Petersburg, 1774): 24.
151
Venditti, “Russkie perevody XVIII veka vtoroi geroidy Ovidia,” 176-177.
152
Mikhail Kheraskov [M.Kh.], “Geroida. Ariiadna k Tezeiu,” Svobodnyia Chasy 6 (1763): 372-381.
55
one of several he edited.
153
The title of the poem for the first time specified the genre
“heroide,” then gaining popularity in France, with which Kheraskov, as a translator and
playwright, would have been familiar. In 1760-62, prior to translating Ovid, he published
several poems which he later revised and published with the subtitle “heroide.”
154
The story of Ariadne is known as “one of the most celebrated episodes of seduction
and betrayal in ancient poetry.”
155
Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus while she is sleeping.
Her address to Theseus reveals in stages the conflicting emotions, overwhelming anxieties,
mental turmoil, and irrational fears that finally lead to the realization that she will die alone on
the empty island. While Kheraskov calls his poem an imitation, he nevertheless makes a
concerted effort to stay close to Ovid’s original, rendering 150 lines of the Latin heroide into
174 lines. Kheraskov’s work is preceded by a brief introduction which reveals the poet’s
intention to make the mythological Ariadne “familiar” to Russian readers. Presenting Ariadne
as a disobedient daughter who runs away from her father, Kheraskov makes references to
Russian tragedies saturated with conflicts between fathers and daughters, in which daughters
often contemplate the option of running away from their fathers with their lovers. In the
introduction, Kheraskov also highlights the opposition between Ariadne, “a tender lover,” and
the “unfaithful” Theseus (372).
Effectively rendering in Russian iconic elements of Ovid’s heroide, such as Ariadne’s
self-representation, her fixation on her grieving body, her shifting emotions, and her
contemplation of death, Kheraskov’s poem provides a model, presenting Russian poets with
concrete poetic devices to which they had not been exposed before. He not only utilizes a
153
The magazine published Rzhevskii’s poetic adaptation of “Phyllis to Demophon” the same year.
154
I will discuss them in Chapter Two as they more closely aligned with French imitations of Ovid than with
Ovid’s Heroides.
155
Knox, Ovid Heroides: Select Epistles, 233.
56
character-narrator who depicts her emotional states, he connects these emotional shifts to the
narrative. Kheraskov manages to render Ovidian’s techniques and build on them effectively,
infusing his poem with his own particular understanding of Ariadne, presenting her as a more
positive and assertive character than she appears in Ovid’s text.
Ariadne’s Portrait
The striking feature of Ovid’s “Ariadne to Theseus” is Ariadne’s effort “to establish a
visual image of herself before Theseus’s mind’s eye.”
156
Ariadne draws attention to her
appearance to add power to her emotionally charged narrative, but her main purpose becomes
especially apparent at the end of the heroide when she expresses the hope that her looks will
provoke Theseus’s pity and bring him back. She directly asks Theseus to imagine her,
providing him with a graphic verbal description of how she looks. Along with Theseus,
readers are forced to visualize Ariadne’s torments. Lomonosov was the first among Russian
men of letters who noticed this highly effective device of Ovid, and as we have seen presented
it in his Rhetoric as an example of strong supplication. For Russian poets, who in their works
had avoided references to a woman’s body, conventionally focusing their attentions on eyes
and hearts, Ovid’s heroide offered rich material and Kheraskov may have felt moved to build
on it. For example, he renders the following three lines from Ovid into nine, significantly
amplifying the melodramatic effect by combining descriptions of the heroine’s actions both
actual and desired with key elements of her portraiture and her emotional expression.
Ovid:
Nunc quoque non oculis, sed, qua potes, adspice mente
Haerentem scopulo, quem vaga pulsat aqua.
156
Lindheim, Mail and Female, 111.
57
adspice demissos lugentis more capillos
et tunicas lacrimis sicut ab imbre graves! (Her. 10. 135-38)
(Yet look upon me now […],
clinging to a rock all beaten by the wandering wave.
Look upon my locks, let loose like those of one in grief for the dead,
and on my robes, heavy with tears as if with rain)
Kheraskov:
На камнях вообрази, где страшны волны бьют,
Там стон мой слышится и очи слезы льют:
Представь меня в моря повергнуться хотящу,
И всюды за тобой желанием летящу.
По бледному лицу разтрепаны власы,
Кленущу своего рождения часы,
И погубившую на свете всю надежду;
Представь потоком слез омытую одежду. (380)
(Imagine me on the rocks, where the frightful waves beat,
There my lament can be heard and my eyes shed tears.
Imagine me wanting to throw myself into the sea
And flying everywhere after you with my desire.
With tattered hair over my pale face,
Cursing the hour I was born,
Losing all of my hope in the world;
Imagine my clothes soaked with the streams of my tears.)
The passage above is from the final part of the heroide, where, as Lindheim argues,
Ariadne becomes “a vulnerable object of her own gaze.”
157
In Ovid’s text, Ariadne calls for
Theseus to imagine her on the rocks, then draws his attention to her hair and soaking wet
dress, presenting herself as a “disheveled and soaking wet girl,” which is often viewed by
Ovid’s commentators as pathetic and even comical.
158
Kheraskov goes even further adding a
description of Ariadne’s lament accompanied by tears. She is not only ready to throw herself
into the sea, but also engulfed by desire and ready to fly after him. We are then treated to two
157
Lindheim, Mail and Female, 111.
158
Mary Catherine Bolton, “The Characterization of Medea, Dido, Ariadne and Deianira in Ovid's ‘Heroides’ and
‘Metamorphoses’”(PhD diss., McMaster University, 1989), 195,
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/1858.
58
close-ups of Ariadne’s hair over her pale face and her soaked clothes-- symbols of her grief
separated by descriptions of her spiraling emotional state, regretting she was born and losing
hope. Kheraskov outdoes Ovid. He adds even more details to the passage, and turns it into a
vivid, not just visual, but “audio” presentation.
Throughout the poem, Ariadne refers to her body parts to demonstrate various degrees
of despair. Inspired by Ovid, Kheraskov faithfully incorporates Ariadne’s trembling hands,
breasts, hair, her tears and her tone of voice into the poem. In the Russian adaptation, Ariadne
mentions her trembling hands six times: first, as her trembling hands search the empty bed for
her beloved; then as she gestures with her trembling hands toward disappearing boats,
attempting to draw Theseus’ attention; twice more as she describes writing the letter; and
twice more as she describes herself dramatically reaching her arms out over the sea toward
Theseus. There are four references to her breast. Ariadne says twice that in despair she beats
her breast with her own hands (273; 380). Her breast is used to describe difficulties breathing
(380). Ariadne also mentions her breast recalling how she let Theseus caress her (376).
Ariadne draws attention to her hair numerous times as well: she tears her hair as a way to
punish herself for the shameful position she ended up in (373), and then refers to it once again
at the end of the poem. (381). She states that her hair is tattered when she is weeping (375); in
another episode, it covers her pale face (380).
While a “stream of tears” was a common trope in Russian poetry, Kheraskov’s heroide
provided new ways of employing it. While in Rzhevskii’s poetic adaptation of “Phyllis to
Demophon” tears were mentioned only three times, in Kheraskov’s “Ariadne to Theseus”
tears appear seven times. Apart from more traditional ways of employing tears as “streams”
(375; 380; 381), and “tears day and night” (375), the heroide provides an image of Ariadne
59
making her empty bed wet with her tears; and her clothing is also repeatedly described as
soaking wet with tears (380; 375).
Kheraskov’s poem also showcases a nuanced way of describing Ariadne’s voice. It is
described as loud, screaming, lamenting, and also as a voice that no one could hear on the
desolate island. Emotional states are described in Kheraskov’s poem in a new, unusual way
for Russian poetry because the plot in which Ariadne is caught helps to avoid the static
representation of emotions. Ariadne’s feelings are expressed through her movements, her
interactions with nature (beach, rocks, waves) or objects (bed, clothes). She is presented
running and falling; she sits still as a rock; makes expressive gestures towards boats; and she
repeatedly loses consciousness. Even more important for the development of Russian poetry is
that Ovid’s heroide presents Ariadne’s thinking process, her psyche, her wild fantasies and her
absurd fears, as an integral part of her sorrowful address to Theseus. In particular, Ariadne’s
contemplation of her own death in Kheraskov’s rendition becomes a point of departure for an
ongoing dialogue among Russian poets.
Ariadne, who portrays Theseus as the murderer of her brother, the Minotaur, wishes
that he would have killed her as well. Knox, in his commentaries, proposes the following
reading of Ovid’s original: “You ought to have slaughtered me; (if you had) your obligation
would have been dissolved.”
159
Kheraskov extends the meaning, aligning Ariadne’s death
with freedom for Theseus, choosing the word “freedom” instead of the words “vows” or
“obligations” which would have been more a more literal rendition:
Я Минотавровой завидую судьбе:
Была бы смерть моя свободою тебе. (377)
159
Knox, Ovid Heroides: Select Epistles, 247.
60
(I envy the fate of Minotaur,
My death would be your freedom.)
Compared to Sumarokov’s loose association of the word “freedom” with love that we noted
earlier in his songs (see p. 29 above), Kheraskov uses the word “freedom” to connote a manly
ideal that Ariadne can enable Theseus to achieve through her death. Therefore, while on the
whole, Kheraskov faithfully renders Ariadne’s preoccupation with death, in some instances he
departs from Ovid’s text.
Ariadne’s numerous reflections upon death are all carefully reproduced by Kheraskov.
She fantasizes about the “thousands of deaths that always torment the spirit.” Death appears to
the heroine in the form of visions.
160
But no matter what death awaits her, waiting for death is
the worst thing for Ariadne. Asserting the inevitability of her death, Ariadne also discusses
“the disadvantages of dying in a foreign land.”
161
All these elements are realized in
Kheraskov’s poem. Kheraskov departs sharply from Ovid in the final passage of the poem,
where Ariadne tries to repudiate her death sentence for the last time. In Ovid’s version:
Debita sit facto gratia nulla meo.
Sed ne poena quidem! (Her.10. 142-43)
(Let no favour be due for my service.
Yet neither let me suffer for it!)
Ariadne’s appeal to Theseus’ sense of justice is made with the logic that if she wouldn’t
deserve death for not helping him, she certainly couldn’t deserve it for having helped him.
Kheraskov’s version significantly reshapes the argument, as Ariadne pleads rather
unexpectedly that the value of her life is greater than her love for Theseus:
160
Ibid., 248.
161
Bolton, “The Characterization of Medea, Dido, Ariadne and Deianira,” 191.
61
Коль хочешь, забывай, что я любила страстно:
Но смерти предавать меня за что напрасно!
Любовь свою ко мне и клятвы позабудь,
Лишь сердцу пленному убийцею не будь! (380)
(If you wish, forget that I loved you passionately:
But why should you put me to death?
Forget your love for me and your vows,
Just don’t be the killer of my captive heart!)
Ovid’s Ariadne never in the entire heroide speaks about her love for Theseus, but Kheraskov’s
Ariadne does and moreover, imagines her only living future as being free from that love.
In Ovid’s heroide Ariadne asks Theseus to collect her bones if he comes back and
finds her dead:
Si prius occidero, tu tamen ossa feres! (Her. 10.152)
(If I have died before you come, ’twill yet be you who bear away my bones!
)
Ovid’s Ariadne seems most concerned that she “will not suffer the fate of lying unburied on
the barren shore.”
162
Kheraskov’s Ariadne uses death to reinforce the ideal of love:
А ежели меня ты живу не застанешь;
Над телом ты моим любовь мою вспомянешь. (381)
But if you do not find me alive when you come back,
Over my body recall my love for you.
Unlike Ovid’s heroine, Kheraskov’s Ariadne reveals a degree of determination. If in
Ovid’s text she recognizes that she betrayed her father to be with Theseus, in Kheraskov’s
poem, Ariadne also acknowledges that she “chose love over kingdom and law” (376). While
Ovid’s Theseus promises ambiguously that Ariadne would be “his,” in Kheraskov’s poem
162
Knox, Ovid Heroides: Select Epistles, 257.
62
Theseus says that he would belong to her as long as they lived. Ariadne goes on to state that
while they are both alive, she is ready to follow him. This presents a striking contrast to
Ovid’s text:
Vivimus, et non sum, Theseu, tua - si modo vivit
femina periuri fraude sepulta viri. (Her. 10.75-6)
(I live on, Theseus, and I am not yours –if a woman buried by the deceit of her
husband does live.)
163
In his poem Kheraskov’s also renders this line, but the constant presence of more assertive
and hopeful expressions depict Ariadne in an unusual light, the more so if it is read against
another Russian translation of Ovid’s “Ariadne to Theseus” made by the poet Vasilii
Sankovskii, a close associate of Kheraskov, only a year later.
Ovid’s Tenth Heroide “Ariadne to Theseus” Translated by Sankovskii, Compared to
Translation by Kheraskov
In 1764, a year after Kheraskov published his imitation of Ovid’s heroide, Sankovskii,
a poet and translator close to Kheraskov’s literary circle, published his own translation of
“Ariadne to Theseus” in the journal Dobroe namerenie [Good intention] which he edited.
164
Sankovskii, who started his career as a poet actively contributing to Kheraskov’s journal, also
translated another of Ovid’s heroides, “Helen to Paris,” and several elegies from Ovid’s
163
Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed. Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 68.
164
Vasilii Sankovskii [V.S.], “Publiia Ovidiia Nasona Geroida Ariadna Tezeiu,”Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-
201. Sankovskii’s translation was republished in Novye ezhemesiachnye sochineniia, almost thirty years later, in
1793. The preface was kept, but the last fifty lines were cut off. It was signed by initials S.L. instead of V.S.
(acronym for Vasilii Sankovskii) – evidently a mistake of the editors or typesetters.
63
Tristia. Sankovskii’s work on the elegies from Tristia may have colored his perception of the
heroide “Ariadne to Theseus,” and when compared to Kheraskov’s translation, his work
stands out as filled with gloom and hopelessness.
While Kheraskov’s introduction to his poetic adaptation is very brief, presenting
Ariadne as a disobedient daughter, Sankovskii’s preface to the translation includes more
details about how Ariadne helped Theseus. The Russian poet admits borrowing the
information from Catullus, whose poem 64 served as an important source for Ovid’s
heroide.
165
The introduction also summarizes Ariadne’s letter, in which she “at first exposes
his cruelty and ingratitude, then asks him to come back to her on the boat” (196).
Sankovskii’s translation was twenty lines shorter than Kheraskov’s and only eight
lines longer than Ovid’s original. While it reflects a more accurate rendering of Ovid’s text,
the way Sankovskii approaches the beginning of Ovid’s heroide shows that, like Kheraskov,
he is attempting to present his own vision of Ariadne. Ovid’s heroide “Ariadne to Theseus” is
characterized by a rather abrupt opening in which the heroine compares Theseus’s actions to
the cruelty of wild animals:
Mitius inveni quam te genus omne ferarum; (Her.10. 1)
(Gentler than you I have found every race of wild beasts)
Commentators have speculated that this opening is an indication of Ariadne’s distress and
self-deception.
166
To express his view, Sankovskii adds four lines to the beginning of the
poem, highlighting Ariadne as abandoned and soon to be dead:
Живу нещастная, живу еще и ныне,
Котора в снедь зверям оставил ты в пустыне,
165
Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides, 213-217.
166
Knox, Ovid Heroides: Select Epistles, 235.
64
Пропала вся в тебе как жалость так и честь,
Могу ли я сие великодушно снесть? (196)
(I live unhappy, I am alive still,
I whom you left in the desert as prey for beasts,
Pity and honor have completely disappeared in you.
Can my soul bear it with magnanimity? )
In the four added lines Sankovskii expresses the essence of Ariadne’s emotional state, as she
stresses her destiny as fixed and unchangeable. Throughout the poem, Sankovskii maintains
the same tone, using the verb “abandon” at least four times. Ariadne calls herself an “outcast
for ages” (198) and asserts that her “death is pre-determined” (200).
Sankovskii’s Ariadne is so disillusioned that she pleads with Theseus to come back
only once at the end of the heroide without any apparent hope and very laconically: “Come
back, Theseus, with the turn of the tide…” In Kheraskov’s poem, Ariadne asks her lover to
come back three times. Her first appeal (“Неверный! возвратись, куда бежишь? куда?”
Unfaithful! Come back, where are you going? Where? (374)) reflects urgency and Ariadne’s
perception that Theseus is not far away. In the second appeal,
Корабль свой обрати оставя волны хладны,
Приди в объятия стенящей Ариадны. (374)
(Turn your boat back leaving cold waves behind,
Come back to the embraces of groaning Ariadne.)
Kheraskov’s Ariadne also emphasizes the promise of physical closeness. The third
plea is strikingly optimistic:
Приди ко мне опять, приди ушлец любезный,
И возвратись ко мне окончить век мой слезный;
И ветры понесут назад тебя сюда,
Которые тебе послушны завсегда. (381)
(Come to me again, come, my departed love,
Return to me to end my age of crying,
65
And the winds which always obey you,
Will bring you back to me.)
In contrast to Kheraskov’s Ariadne, the heroine in Sankovskii’s version does not
proclaim her love and passion for Theseus. More closely following Ovid, Sankovskii renders
the passivity and coldness of Ariadne, as she states: “The place is a stone, and I am a stone as
well” (“И место камень был, и камень я сама,” 197). In Kheraskov’s poem, Ariadne wants
to be turned into stone in order to cease the flame of her passion. (“И думая, что мой утухнет
лютой пламень,/Желаю и сама преобратиться в камень,” 375). Sankovskii’s Ariadne
admits with regret that she betrayed her father and her country, and is now destined to live in
exile forever (198), while Kheraskov’s heroine perceives that she “chose love over kingdom
and law.” Further asserting the stigma and lack of options for abandoned women, the Ariadne
of Sankovskii poses a rhetorical question: “But aren’t women betrayed by men dead?” (198).
Kheraskov avoids such a sweeping generalization about the fate of abandoned women. His
Ariadne asks only whether she can be said to be alive (377). In Sankovky’s final passage,
Ariadne simply asks why Theseus wants to take away her life. She doesn’t beg him or use
other rhetorical manipulations, as Kheraskov’s Ariadne does when she pleads with Theseus to
forget about love and just spare her life.
While Sankovskii closely follows Ovid in descriptions of Ariadne’s feeling of growing
isolation on a small island in the middle of the sea and her fear of being attacked by wild
animals, he significantly tones down Ovid’s attention to Ariadne’s self-portrait. While
descriptions involving tattered hair and wailing breast are each used twice, the more
conventional trope of tears, as in Kheraskov’s poem, is employed seven times. Sankovskii
maintains the tragic tone of the poem, but simultaneously avoids the melodramatic effects
66
exploited by Kheraskov, rendering the passage in which Ariadne asks Theseus to imagine her
pitiful appearance in a casual and matter of fact way:
Сижу на камне я, который бьет вода.
С растрепанными я скитаюся власами,
Одежду отягчив горчайшими слезами. (200)
(I sit on the rock which water strikes.
With tattered hair I wander around,
Weighing down my clothes with most bitter tears.)
Sankovskii’s focus on the inevitable death for which all abandoned women are destined
creates a distinctly gloomy mood which differs from Kheraskov’s emphasis on Ariadne’s
unceasing passion and her determination to bring her lover back.
Despite the apparent differences in the treatment of the abandoned woman and the
different stylistic approaches, the early poetic translations of Ovid’s heroides were innovative
works that brought not just a woman-speaker, but a woman-storyteller to the center of a poetic
work, presenting her voice and emotions within a clearly defined narrative frame.
167
167
As we will show in Chapter Three, this undertaking will be further developed in a few works that Russian
poets later composed exploring the form of the heroide.
67
Other Translations of Ovid’s Heroides
In 1764, apart from the translation of “Ariadne to Theseus,” Sankovskii also published
a poetic rendering of Ovid’s “Helen to Paris.”
168
Ovid’s “Helen to Paris” is one of the so-
called double letters (it is her response to a letter from Paris) and is among the heroides where
Ovid’s authorship is disputed, as the meter and style are unlike the other ones.
169
It is a longer
and more complex epistle which doesn’t engage the theme of abandonment, but in
Sankovskii’s rendition describes the hesitations of a beautiful married woman. Helen
contemplates how to react to the advances of a man who is not her husband. Like Kozitskii,
Sankovskii updates the poem to reflect a contemporary moral framework, introducing the
notion of sin into her speech. Helen is tempted to follow her feelings, but strong enough not
to commit a sin. She eloquently expresses her many reservations about, and obstacles
between, her and Paris as lovers. While Helen consciously fights the urge to sin as she tries to
maintain her honor, citing marriage as an obstacle, Sankovskii’s notes in his introduction that
she “does not completely hold the love [of Paris] in contempt”(291).
After Sankovskii’s publication of “Helen to Paris,” another twenty-four years passed
before the next poetic translation of one of Ovid’s heroides was published in Russia. During
this pause in translations, Russian poetry underwent many changes. For one, French heroides
came into fashion, and Russian poets actively translated and imitated them. More importantly,
after 1769 Russian poets embarked on the creation of original heroides. Both trends will be
explored in detail in the next two chapters.
168
Vasilii Sankovskii, trans., “Elena Parisu,” Dobroe namerenie 7 (1764): 291-300.
169
Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics, 17.
68
The next section will provide a general overview of the poetic translations of Ovid’s
heroides by Russian poets picking up again from 1788. A detailed analysis of these
translations compared to Ovid’s originals is beyond the framework of the current project.
Ovid’s Fourth Heroide “Phaedra to Hippolytus” -- Anonymous
In 1788, the magazine Novye ezhemesiachnye sochineniia [New Monthly
Compositions] published an anonymous translation of Ovid’s heroide, “Pis’mo ot Fedry k
Ippolitu” [Phaedra to Hippolytus] signed as “sent from an outsider” (prislano ot postoronnego
cheloveka).
170
In “Phaedra to Hippolytus,” Phaedra declares her love for her stepson,
Hippolytus, demanding quite impatiently that he come to her bed. Phaedra’s shocking
proposition to Hippolytus is emphasized in this translation:
И лучше б я в родах плод мертвым зрела мой,
Чем видеть их на вред растущих Ипполита.
Вот внутренность моей тебе души открыта! (78)
(I would rather see the fruit [of my womb] dead at birth,
Than see them growing to harm Hyppolytus,
Here I opened up the interior of my soul to you!)
Ovid’s Eleventh Heroide “Canace to Macareus” --- Anonymous; Ruban and Sokol’skii
In the same year the journal New Monthly Compositions published an anonymous
translation of Ovid’s eleventh heroide, “Pis’mo ot Kanaki k Makareiu” [Letter from Canace to
Macareus], which like “Phaedra to Hippolytus” was signed as “sent from an outsider”.
171
Both
170
“Pis’mo ot Fedry k Ippolitu,” Novye ezhemesiachnye sochineniia 27 (1788): 70-82.
171
“Pis’mo ot Kanaki k Makareiu,” Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28 (1788): 56-64.
69
translations reflect a shift from interest in Ovid’s collection as morality tales. Instead, these
translations showcase vivid stories of forbidden love. The heroide “Canace to Macareus,”
narrated by a sister who fell in love with her brother and gave birth to their baby, relates how
their father, when he saw the child, ordered her to throw him to the dogs. The sister writes her
letter holding a pen in one hand and a sword to end her life in the other. Apart from telling
about her baby’s tragic death, Canace graphically describes her failed attempt to abort the
pregnancy and her painful labor. If Ariadne’s dominating emotion is fear and despair,
Canace’s is guilt and shame.
In 1791, the same heroide “Canace to Macareus” with minor changes was published in
the same journal under the name of Vasilii Ruban, revealing yet another instance of his
“correcting” an existing translation of one of Ovid’s heroides.
172
Ruban apparently edits the
work of the anonymous translator as he did with Kozitskii’s version, altering some phrases,
adding new lines and deleting others, and then signing the work as “translated from Latin by
the Collegiate Councilor Vasilii Ruban.” Ruban’s changes to the 1788 version of “Canace to
Macareus” reveal his efforts to improve the translation, which again prove gratuitous. He adds
four lines to Ovid’s text at the beginning of the translation to state that Canace is on the verge
of killing herself, even though it had been explicitly indicated in the fourth line of the original
translation. Ruban also deletes four lines from the anonymous translation that are not part of
Ovid’s original, in which Canace describes the cruelty of her father, calling him “a tyrant not a
tsar” and accusing him of the deaths of his grandson and daughter. In the anonymous
ranslation, when Canace presents the baby to her father, he orders his death. In Ruban’s
version, Canace says that her father beat her. Neither of the two lines renders Ovid’s original,
172
Vasilii Ruban, “Ovidieva pervaia na desiat’ Iroida ot Kanaki k Makareiu, nezadolgo do ee smerti,” Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63 (1791): 74-81. It seems unlikely that a person who signed his works as
“Collegiate Councilor (kolezhskii sovetnik) Vasilii Ruban” would name himself on another occasion as “a
stranger.”
70
in which her father with great effort restrains himself from beating her (“scarce restrains his
hand from my wretched face.”)
173
A third translated version of “Canace to Macareus” was published in 1808 by Ivan
Sokol’skii as a separate pamphlet.
174
While it doesn’t present a striking contrast to the
previous ones, it is more careful in rendering Ovid’s text. For Sokol’skii, a former teacher in
the Moscow Slaveno-Greek-Latin Academy (1786-95), “Canace to Macareus” was his single
known attempt to render Ovid. Sokol’skii is also noted as a translator of a French book about
the philosophy of faith, Izbrannyie mneniia o vere i o neverii [Selected Opinions about Faith
and Unbelief] and is listed as an author of the letter manual Kabinetskii i kupecheskii
sekretarʹ, ili Sobranie nailuchshikh i upotrebitelʹnykh pisem [The Office and Merchantile
Secretary, or a Collection of the Best Generally Used Letters] (1795). Sokol’skii’s translation
was accompanied by a verse dedication and short summary of the story in prose. The poet
dedicated the translation to a consular statesman and minor poet, Gavriil Politkovskii. In his
dedication, Sokol’skii asserts his gratitude that after years of working as a clerk he now has a
chance to write creatively. He declares affinity with the Latin writers Virgil and Martial, but
he says that he knows “tender” Ovid the best. Addressing Politkovskii as an expert in Latin,
Sokol’skii admits that his translation is a weak but earnest work.
175
173
Loeb, Heroides 139.
174
Ivan Sokol’skii, Geroida XI: Kanatse Makariiu (St. Petersburg, 1808).
175
Sokol’skii, introduction to Geroida XI: Kanatse Makariiu, V-IV.
71
Ovid’s Third Heroide “Briseis to Achilles” --Ruban
In 1791, apart from “Canace to Macareus,” Ruban published a translation of Ovid’s
“Briseis to Achilles,” both in the journal and as a separate pamphlet.
176
The summary that
precedes the poetic translation does not discuss the love and devotion the slave Briseis
expresses for her conqueror, Achilles, but does include the first two lines from Ovid in Latin.
The publication includes extensive footnotes and a request by Ruban that in future
publications this format be maintained. He extends a similar request to any republications of
his own translations published in 1774, one of which is, as we noted, in fact Kozitskii’s.
177
Ruban considered his annotated renditions to be models of the proper way to translate ancient
texts. He may have also been claiming a kind of copyright protection. It is ironic that among
the heroides he sought to protect was one that he himself had altered from its original form
and republished under his own name. While Ruban praised Ovid’s Heroides for “beauty and
pleasantness,”
178
his own numerous translations, stand out as heavy and filled with archaic
language and Latinized syntax.
179
Ovid’s First Heroide “Penelope to Ulysses” ---Translated by Ruban, Merzliakov and Krasov
In the 1774 publication, Dve iroidy, in which Ruban appropriated Kozitskii’s
translation of “Phyllis to Demophon,” he also included his own prose translation of “Penelope
176
Vasilii Ruban, “Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem Ovidiem sochinennoe,” Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61 (1791): 54-65.
177
Vasilii Ruban, Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem Ovidiem sochinennoe (St. Petersburg,
1791), 8.
178
Ruban, Dve iroidy, 4.
179
Levin, Istoriia, 2: 180.
72
to Ulysses.” Early nineteenth-century critics considered “Penelope to Ulysses” the best among
Ovid’s heroides.
180
Ruban’s prose translation was considered “precise, but not elegant.”
181
The first poetic translation of “Penelope to Ulysses” was composed by the poet and translator
Aleksei Merzliakov in 1812.
182
As an authoritative literary critic, Merzliakov criticized Russian writers for their
imitation of French literature. While his own views were contentious, Merzliakov argued that
Russian literature should stop imitating imitators: “French literature is undoubtedly very close
to the [greatest] possible degree of perfection… [but] why don’t we borrow from the first
treasury that they borrowed from—why shouldn’t we follow the instructions of their teachers,
the Greeks and Romans?”
183
In his textbook, Kratkoe nachertanie teorii iziaschnoi
slovesnosti [A Brief Outline of Literary Theory] (1822), which largely drew on the work of
the German theorist Johann Eschenburg, Merzliakov classifies the heroide as dramatic poetry,
emphasizing its similarity to elegy and monologue. Merzliakov criticized Ovid for both a lack
of precision in the depiction of feelings and for an excess of wit. In the translation of
“Penelope to Ulysses,” Merzliakov strives to “improve” Ovid by amplifying the emotionality
and theatricality of Penelope’s address.
184
He adds numerous exclamations, rhetorical
questions, and emphasizes the tragic fate of Penelope overall as the “victim of tears and
fears.” In 1821, Merzliakov’s translation was republished by Nikolai Ostolopov in his literary
180
Galinkovskii, “Rassmotrenie Ovidiia,” Chtenie v beside luibitelei ruskago slova, 11 (1813): 60; Ostolopov,
Slovar’ drevnei i novoi poezii, (St. Petersburg, 1821), 1: 172.
181
P.N. Cherniaev, “Sledy znakomstva russkogo obschestva s drevne-klassicheskoi literaturoi v veke Ekateriny
II,” Filologicheskie zapiski 45 (1905): 189.
182
Aleksei Merzliakov, “Poslanie ot Penelopy k Ulissu,” Trudy obschestva lubitelei russkoi slovesnosti pri
Imperatorskom moskovskom universitete, part 2 (Moscow: v universitetskoi tipogrpahii, 1812), 80-87.
183
Liubzhin, Rimskaia literatura, 38.
184
Aleksei Merzliakov, Kratkoe nachertanie teorii iziaschnoi slovesnosti (Moscow, 1822), 256-257.
73
encyclopedia, Slovar’ drevnei i novoi poezii [Dictionary of Ancient and New Poetry], as an
example of Ovid’s heroides.
185
After Merzliakov’s translation another version of “Penelope to Ulysses” was made by
Vasilii Krasov (1810 - 1855), a poet associated with Nikolai Stankevich and friend of
Vissarion Belinskii.
186
The translation was published in Otechestvennye zapiski [Notes of the
Fatherland] in 1843. Krasov’s translation, which renders “Penelope to Ulysses” in free verse,
follows Ovid’s text far more closely than Merzliakov’s translation.
Conclusion
The first Russian translations of Ovid’s Heroides appeared during a very crucial period
for Russian poetry when writers were acquiring skills and developing the themes, genres and
language of love poetry. In this period, both the woman-narrator and woman’s voice were
largely overshadowed by the male perspective on love. In terms of poetic craft the
translations made by Rzevskii, Kheraskov and Sankovskii provided useful models for
expressing women’s voices and representing women, helping to steer poetry toward narrative
and away from abstraction. In translations of Ovid’s heroides, women were brought to the
center stage of the poetic work for the first time.
In Ovid’s heroides, a woman is as if under a magnifying glass allowing readers to see
her experiencing various emotional states, to see her body and to know her thoughts about
death. The depiction of a woman’s body in distress had been obscured in Russian poetry and
drama. Following Ovid, Kheraskov renders Ariadne’s call to Theseus to “imagine her in
185
Nikolai Ostolopov, Slovar’ drevnei i novoi poezii, (St. Petersburg, 1821), 1: 178-185.
186
Vasilii Krasov, “Poslanie Penelopy k Ulissu (Geroida Ovidiia),” Otechestvennye zapiski 29 (1843): 169-171.
74
distress” in an attempt to evoke his pity. For the first time in Russian poetry, a woman is
described not merely by the streams of her tears, but by her arms, her breasts, and her hair.
In Russian tragedies women contemplated death, wondering if it was a way to reunite
with their lovers. In Ovid’s heroides women are defined by the men they love and if a woman
is abandoned by her lover there is no sense in living, no purpose in life. Ovid’s heroides
introduce suicide as the only action for an abandoned woman to take after her lover’s flight.
Ovid’s model proposed variations on the theme of suicide. Phyllis composes her own epitaph
and considers various ways to end her own life. Ariadne sees her death as a means to free her
lover from his vows, yet she expresses an overwhelming fear of death. In short, Ovid supplies
Russian writers with substantially new poetic material and original ways for them to write
about abandonment and suicide.
To render Ovid’s Phyllis and Ariadne in Russian in the eighteenth century, poets
refracted his texts through their own vision, both aesthetic and moral. The translations of
heroides provide insights into the cultural formation of Russian poets. Rzhevskii infuses his
adaptation of “Phyllis to Demophon” with theatrical effects, highlighting not only
Demophon’s “pretended” love, but bringing into question the sincerity of Phyllis’s assertion.
Kheraskov responds to Ovid’s Ariadne foregrounding aspects toned down in the original: her
passionate desire to be with Theseus, her resistance to death, and hope for his return.
Sankovskii, on the other hand, stays close to Ovid’s text, saturating his poem with gloom and
despair.
Recent scholarship on Ovid’s collection tends to grant the heroines authorial autonomy
and to shift away from traditional perceptions of Ovid’s female speakers as “simplistic and
readily identifiable masculine constructions.”
187
Lindheim reveals how the characters
187
Lindheim, Mail and Femail, 79.
75
“manipulate their self-representations to appear in two irreconcilable roles: powerful and also
helpless.”
188
Spentzou and Fulkerson using different approaches examine the heroines as a
community of readers and writers of each others’ texts. Such perceptions are quite distant
from the responses of eighteenth century Russian commentators and translators of Ovid’s
heroides.
While the first translators of Heroides praised the works simply for beauty and
pleasantness, discussions of Ovid’s work in the nineteenth century were mostly focused on
Ovid’s skills in depicting of passionate love. Iakov Galinkovskii in his article “Rassmotrenie
Ovidiia” [Examination of Ovid] (1813) complained that Ovid’s heroides reveal “an excess of
brains and shortage of direct passion.”
189
He says that the works lack the sensuality of
amorous discourse. The translator and critic Merzliakov expresses similar concerns. In his
opinion, Heroides “do not possess precision in expressing feelings and passion; he [Ovid] is
removed from the simplicity of nature, and shows [himself] too much of a witty poet who
forces his characters to speak.”
190
On the contrary, the author of a literary encyclopedia,
Ostolopov, appeared to be satisfied by the degree of passion presented in Ovid’s Heroides.
He presents a highly sympathetic view of the works and imagines Ovid’s design for the
heroides:
Я [Овидий] хочу, говорит он, хочу, чтобы страстный и пораженный подобно
мне острейшими стрелами любовник, нашел в сих сочинениях весь огонь,
который снедает его сердце, и чтобы вскричал в исступлении: кто научил сего
стихотворца изображать с такою истиною мои несчастия?
191
188
Ibid., 134.
189
Ia. Galinkovskii, “Rassmotrenie Ovidiia,” Chtenie v beside luibitelei ruskago slova, 11 (1813): 58.
190
Merzliakov, Kratkoe nachertanie, 256-257.
191
Ostolopov, Slovar’, 1: 173.
76
(I want, he [Ovid] says, I want the passionate lover who is, like me, pierced by the
sharpest arrows, to find in these compositions all the fire that consumes his heart, so
that he will exclaim in terror: who taught this poet to depict my misfortunes with such
truthfulness?)
While translations of “Canace to Macareus” and “Phaedra to Hippolytus” published in
the late eighteenth century do not foreground Ovid’s wit, irony, or parodic intent, they stand
out as exotic, perhaps not fully explainable stories of passionate love affairs, outside of the
norms of morality. On the other hand, the early translations of Ovid’s heroides “Phyllis to
Demophon” and “Ariadne to Theseus” reflect the interests of poets in telling moral stories
reflecting current societal expectations. The formula is expressed most prominently in
Rzhevskii’s rendering of Phyllis’s epitaph, which draws a parallel between seduction and
death as warning to female readers. As Sobol explains, the view of passionate love as a
destructive power had haunted the imagination of Russian authors from medieval times.
192
The fact that eighteenth-century writers were still thinking that way is reflected in these two
poems that respond to Heroides, drawing attention to the women featured in Ovid’s collection
by reinforcing the illusion that the characters are “real” women, and discouraging female
readership from replicating their behavior.
In 1762, three years after Sumarokov’s journal published the prose translation of
Ovid’s heroide “Phyllis to Demophon,” Sumarokov composed the poem “Fillida” [Phyllis]
and included it in his first book of Pritchi [Fables]. Sumarokov wrote over 370 fables, many
of which are modeled on works by La Fontaine and Gellert.
193
The French fabulists borrowed
some of their plots from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the characters of Ovid’s Heroides are not
192
Sobol, Febris Erotica, 9.
193
Joachim Klein, Russkaia literatura v XVIII veke (Moscow: Indrik, 2010), 176.
77
usually featured in their works.
194
It’s very likely that the sixteen-line poem written in vers
libre reveals Sumarokov’s reflections on Ovid’s work. Summarizing the story of Phyllis
abandoned by the unfaithful Demophon, the poet explains that love can often strip honor from
a person and lead to misfortune. He concludes with a warning to “beautiful” girls:
Не вверяйте вы прекрасны,
Не подумая сердец:
Берегитесь на конец,
Как Филлида, быть нещастны.
195
(Do not entrust your hearts
Without thinking, beauties,
Guard yourself or like Phyllis
You’ll be unhappy in the end.)
Sumarokov’s use of Ovid’s heroine to instruct women parallels the work of sixteenth-century
French translators of Ovid who stressed the importance of understanding Heroides precisely
as parables from Holy Scripture.
196
In his study, White points out that “the translators’
concerns with moral utility stem from the awareness that vernacular versions of the work were
more likely to reach a female readership.”
197
Similarly, Sumarokov’s rather brief but pointed
take on Ovid’s Phyllis demonstrates the author’s intention to ensure a “proper” interpretation
of Ovid’s story. While it is difficult to estimate the impact of this short poem, Sumarokov
wasn’t alone in using examples from heroides to proffer a didactic message.
194
Both La Fontaine and Gellert feature a woman named Phillis in their fables, but it doesn’t have any
connection to the story of abandoned Phyllis, contrary to Sumarokov’s fable.
195
A.P. Sumarokov, “Fillida,” in Russkaia poeziia, Vol. 1, XVIII vek. Epokha klassitsizma, ed. S.A. Vengerov (St.
Petersburg, 1897): 197-198.
196
White, Renaissance Postscripts, 163.
197
Ibid.
78
Sankovskii’s poem “Love” immediately followed his translation of “Ariadne to
Theseus.”
198
Presenting a metaliterary exploration of the theme of passionate love, it also
reflects a concerted effort on behalf of the author to “explain” Ovid’s Heroides to his readers.
The poem has several parts. At the beginning the poet’s lyric “I” admits that while he has felt
love for authorities, friends, and slaves (!), he has never experienced passionate love and is
reluctant to write about it. He reaches out to his friends, but they are unable to speak about
their experiences and resort to crying. The speaker is forced to judge passionate love on his
own. Looking at his friends’ pale faces, he concludes that passionate love leads to unrest, that
sacrifices made for the sake of a beloved turn a man into a dead shadow. A person
experiencing passions turns away from his friends and family, and is unable to enjoy life. The
poem emphasizes that if love is not shared, or if a beloved is insincere or unfaithful, the lover
is destined to suffer.
To support his statement, the speaker turns to literature. First, he refers to the story of
the unfortunate love between Frederic and Sylvia that was supposedly published in the March
issue of an unnamed journal. While the story demonstrates how love can ruin one’s life, the
speaker leaves it up to readers to decide whether it is worth it to love passionately. What
concerns him is that people overwhelmed by passion tend to lose their minds. He offers the
“detrimental love” of Paris for Helen which caused the Trojan War as an example. At this
point he addresses women, warning them that passionate love wilts their beauty. Men are
unreliable, the speaker says. He evokes the names of Ariadne and Medea as women who,
despite their huge help to Theseus and Jason, were cruelly abandoned by them, while their
lovers went on conquering other women.
198
V. Sankovskii, “Liubov’,” Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 201-205.
79
Не Ариадна ли Тезея жизнь спасла?
Но от него, увы! оставленна была,
Постигнута она жестокою судьбою,
Оставил он ее и Федру взял с собою. (204)
(Didn’t Ariadne save the life of Theseus?
But he, alas, abandoned her,
And she was stricken by cruel fate.
He left her and took Phaedra with him.)
Continuing his address to women, the speaker emphasizes that the words of male
lovers are drawn from Tibullus’s poetry and shouldn’t be considered truthful. Here, the poetic
persona echoes Ovid’s poem “Remedia Amoris” [Love's Remedy], in which the advice to the
lovesick is to stop reading Tibullus:
Не можно почитать правдивыми словами,
Которы говорят любовники пред вами.
Они клянутся вам, Тибуллова то речь. (205)
(Words that lovers tell you
Can’t be considered truthful.
They swear to you, but it is Tibullus’s speech.)
He also comments on the condition of abandoned women as exemplified by Dido who are
doomed to suicide. In conclusion, the lyrical persona pledges not to subject himself to the
passions of love.
Both poems by Sumarokov and Sankovskii invoking mythological abandoned women
reveal a recsponse to Ovid’s Heroides framed by the assumption that they are relevant to
contemporary morality and in apparent disregard of the historical and literary distance that
divides readers from the ancient texts. At the same time, the poem “Love” demonstrates the
powerful place that literature occupies in the imagination of eighteenth-century writers and
readers, shaping and reinforcing their notions of “love” and “gender” among other things. As
80
we will see in the following chapter, Russian poetry continued to grapple with the question of
how to talk about love, and about women and passion. For help they turned to French authors.
81
Chapter Two: European Heroides in Russia
In Russia numerous works of poetry and prose written in the form of heroides, but not
always identified as such, appeared in 1760’s, at the same time as the first translations of
Ovid’s Heroides. Published in Russian literary journals and in separate editions, the majority
of these works represented poetic and prose translations of European heroides. Only a few
represented Russian poets’ attempts to compose their own works and even these drew heavily
on popular French sources. The translations of European (predominantly French) heroides not
only outnumbered translations of Ovid, but in the opinion of at least some early nineteenth-
century critics like Iakov Galinkovskii, were far more effective in conveying passions than the
ancient prototypes. Galinkovskii writes that compared to “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Charlotte
to Werther,” Ovid’s “Penelope to Ulysses” lacks the “fervor and outpouring of the heart that
momentarily pierces the soul of the reader.”
199
European heroides present a versatile body of works that engage a wide range of
themes and draw upon a variety of sources: medieval love stories, epics, French epistolary
novels, famous neoclassic tragedies and bourgeois dramas. They reflect a gradual move away
from the classical duality between duty and passion into the realm of individual sentimental
conceits. Testing the boundaries of a genre at first restricted to presenting mythological and
historical figures, European poets let the voices of more contemporary characters describe
their feelings and struggles. Along with women, more and more men lament their fates in
heroides which became an effective format to explore the voices, emotions, and thoughts of
particular individuals. For these reasons, translations of these works marked a crucial stage in
Russian literary development. Saturated with an excess of emotions and violence the
European heroides were certainly a novelty for emerging Russian literature, setting the stage
199
Galinkovskii, Rassmotrenie Ovidiia, 60.
82
for what Rizzi describes as a “search for ways of describing the human psyche” which
preoccupied generations of Russian writers afterward.
200
While Russian translations and adaptations of Heroides almost always acknowledge
Ovid as the author, translations of eighteenth-century European heroides into Russian were
published anonymously, rarely identified as translations, and with only a few exceptions did
not indicate the source. The result is that the sources for the fifty poems in our corpus
published between 1760 and 1825 have often been misattributed by scholars. In this chapter I
attempt to correctly identify, for the first time, some of the sources for the poems. While
some sources have yet to be discovered, their interpretations and themes often clearly echo
French dramatic and poetic texts. Several Russian poet-translators composed heroides on the
basis of popular French novels. The way heroides were created points to their overtly
intertextual nature, and on the whole, these poems were not meant to show originality but
rather to capitalize on the popularity of the work they are based on.
201
It is clear from the
heroides prominently featured in the first pages of literary journals and published in separate
pamphlets that they also became fashionable. Furthermore, between 1760-90, many heroides
were republished in various journals with and without changes. In a few cases, the subtitle
“heroide” was added only when the poem was published for the second time.
200
Daniela Rizzi, “Kheraskov Translator of Pope: A Russian Manuscript in Venice and the Birth of Russian
Sentimentalism,” Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia no.34 (2006): 60.
201
The link between heroides and their source-texts might be thought of in terms of Genette’s notion of
“paratext” or Morson’s idea of a “penumbral text.” On the first, see Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of
Interpretation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); on the second, Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in
Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace" (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press,
1987), 176-182.
83
Narrative Techniques
Unlike Ovid’s Heroides, European heroides translated into Russian featured stories not
only filled with yearning for love, but also abounding in physical and emotional torture and
awash in graphic descriptions of bloody murders. The often explicit storytelling is meant to
provoke a strong emotional response in the reader, who was begged by the first person
narrator to imagine his other shock and share in their emotional turmoil. The narrators’ pleas
are especially significant considering the formative moment for Russian literature when the
function of reading and the roles of writers and readers were still being negotiated and
defined. On a metaliterary level, the plea of a narrator to his/her interlocutor might suggest
the plea of the writer in anticipation of a sympathetic reader.
While most European heroides could be described as lengthy narrative poems and
were rendered in verse in Russian, some translations were done in prose, and represent
condensed versions of novels, a form which was only just beginning to gain sanction in the
Russian literary scene. The prose translations of European heroides present an unusually bold
and strikingly intimate mode of writing in which unrestricted personal reflections and
emotional outbursts of the narrator fuse with intricate storytelling. Narrators engulfed by their
passions openly delve into the nature of their desire, challenging the boundaries of freedom,
testing assumptions about ethics, infidelity, and death. For many Russian readers only
recently introduced to the world of fiction it was a new experience that played an important
role in forming their literary tastes and cultural expectations.
The Representation of Women
While Russian translations of Ovid’s Heroides provided Russian poets with a model
for representing women’s emotions in a poetic work, European heroides offered “updatings of
84
Ovid’s woeful outpourings, tales of women more recently abandoned by famous men.”
202
Among them, Eloisa, who desperately pours out her heart to her castrated lover from a
monastery cell, is the most famous and influential. Through other heroides, Russian readers
were introduced to the charming and powerful sorcerer, Armida, who is nevertheless unable to
punish her absent lover or kill herself. Another poem is told by a medieval dame who
unknowingly eats her lover’s heart, an act of revenge masterminded by her tyrannical
husband. Not strictly fitting the definition of “abandoned” women, Helen, Electra and
Andromache portray themselves in heroides as chained in captivity, defending their own
causes and appealing for justice. While some French authors like Charles-Pierre Colardeau
distinguished themselves in the genre beyond associations with Ovid, many French heroides
were close rewritings of Ovid. Sentimentalist conventions appear in these works, for
example when Ariadne asks Theseus to cry over her tomb rather than collect her bones, or
when Byblis justifies love for her brother as a natural phenomenon also found in the animal
world. Contrary to Ovid’s heroines, female narrators in eighteenth-century heroides are less
preoccupied with self-presentation, rather their emotional outbursts alternate with a desire to
tell their stories in a compelling way.
The Feminization of Russian Literature
The appearance of heroides focused on representing women’s intense emotions and
passionate struggles coincided with important developments on the Russian literary scene.
The vogue for heroides swelled with the rise of women readers and writers and with the rapid
development of literary journals which promised to satisfy the literary needs particularly of
women readers. In the process of the so-called feminization of Russian literature, “ladies’
202
Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 142.
85
tastes were declared the supreme arbiter of literature.”
203
As part of a larger movement
towards sentimentalism, Russian men of letters began an active promotion of feminine notions
of friendship and emotions expressed in appropriate language. Journals demonstrated their
commitment to publish heroides which means that they found the genre suitable for women.
Despite their considerable length and tragic, emotionally draining content, the poems
were framed as light and easy reading. In 1779, the editors of Fashion Monthly (Modnoe
Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie) dedicated the new literary journal to the fair sex and pledged to
publish only such works or translations which were “pleasant and amusing.”
204
While the
content of heroides hardly corresponds to such description, heroides were listed first among
poetic genres that the journal intended to publish.
205
Indeed, the journal published eight
heroides within its first six months. In 1783, the translator Aleksandr Dmitriev ostentatiously
dedicated a translated volume of French adaptations of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” to the fair
sex. Addressing women, he wrote in his introduction: “You lift us up to the pinnacle of bliss
with the power of your charms and fill our hearts with love and tender passion to which no
other pleasure of life can be compared.”
206
The Significance of Translations and French Influence
Apart from representing “literature for a Russian female readership,” heroides reveal
the importance of translated literature in eighteenth-century Russia. Andrew Kahn points out
203
Iu. M. Lotman, “Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke,” in Iu.M. Lotman, Izbrannye statii v trekh
tomakh, 3 vols. (Tallin: Aleksandra, 1992), 2: 360.
204
Aleksandr Neustroev, Istoricheskoe rozyskanie o russkikh povremennykh izdaniiakhi i sbornikakh za 1703-
1802 gg. (St. Petersburg: Tip. tovarishchestva: “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za,” 1874), 273.
205
Ibid, 273.
206
Aleksandr Dmitriev, trans., intro to Sobranie pisem Abel’iarda and Eloizy (Moscow, 1783): n.p.
86
that in the process of the development of Russian literature, translations of European works
“had a lasting impact on a wide range of linguistic, literary, and cultural trends.”
207
Translations from French, in particular, shaped an emerging literary scene and helped to
establish the literary language. While Russian nobility could speak, write and read in French,
translation of a literary work into Russian, according to Lotman, was “an act of certain
recognition, a proof of the text’s value for Russian society” (акт определенного признания,
утверждение ценности текста в глазах русского общества).
208
The Russian elite closely
followed the news coming from Paris regarding politics, fashion, literature, and theatre. The
phenomenon of French heroides, poems described by Green “as emotional cocktails, as swift
in their effect and as evanescent,” provoked an immediate poetic response in Russia.
209
Mikhail Kherskov’s response to the pioneering French adaptations marked the first
appearance of non-Ovidian heroides in Russia. Charles-Pierre Colardeau first introduced the
heroide to French readers in 1758 with his publication of “Lettre d’Héloïse à Abailard,” a free
verse translation of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717), which he followed with “Armide à
Renaud” – a heroide based on the famous epic Jerusalem Delivered (1581) by Torquato
Tasso. Inspired by Colardeau’s works, Kheraskov translated Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” and
adapted Tasso’s epic into the heroide “Armida.” Kheraskov’s manuscript of his “Eloise to
Abelard” is dated 1758, the same year that Colardeau published his first heroides.
210
207
Andrew Kahn, “Russian Rewritings of La Fontaine's Les Amours de Psyché in the Eighteenth Century,” in
Rewritings, ed. D.L. Rubin (Virginia, 2002): 66.
208
Iurii Lotman, “Russo i russkaia kul’tura XVIII veka,” in Epokha Prosvescheniia, ed. M.P. Alekseev (Leningrad,
1967), 215.
209
Frederick Green, Literary Ideas in 18th Century France and England: A Critical Survey (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1966), 228.
210
However, Kheraskov states that he began his work on translation in 1755, even before Colardeau’s work was
published. See his notes to “Iroida, Eloiza k Abelardu,” in Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779): 83-97. Rizzi
(2006) points out that translations of Pope appeared in Russia earlier than in any other Eastern European
country.
87
Kheraskov’s “Armida” was first published in 1760. Revised and published multiple times,
Kheraskov’s translations greatly contributed to the popularity of the genre heroide in Russia.
The heroides surveyed in this chapter are divided into three groups: translations of
European heroides, heroides with unidentified sources, and heroides written by Russian poet-
translators based on popular French novels. Each group is analyzed with a focus on sources,
authorship, publication history and history of revisions. Following this is a discussion of
narrative techniques and issues related to the representation of women.
Translations of European Heroides
The group of translated heroides in our corpus includes 18 works in poetry and prose.
They introduced a Russian readership to the texts of both world famous and virtually
unknown authors from England, France, Germany and Italy. In 1717, imitating Ovid’s
Heroides, Alexander Pope wrote “Eloisa to Abelard” which became especially popular due to
Colardeau’s translation. Beyond the Russian translations of Pope, Tasso, and Colardeau are
the lesser-known French authors: Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Jean-François de La Harpe,
Adrien Blin de Sainmore, Sebastian Gazon-Dourxigné, and Gabriel Mailhol, who were
represented by one heroide each. Other virtually unknown French poets wrote heroides based
on Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther [The Sorrows of Young Werther] (1744)
which also inspired Russian translations. The French poet Claude Joseph Dorat was more
influential; three of his heroides were translated, with one rendered in Russian three times by
different translators. Finally, a Russian translation of a prose letter from the collection of the
German imitator of Ovid and translator of Pope, Jacob Dusch, was also published with the
subtitle “heroide.”
88
Kheraskov’s pioneering translation of Ovid’s heroide “Ariadne to Theseus” has been
discussed in Chapter One. In the eighteenth-century fashion of awarding to Russian poets the
names of European men of letters, he could be justly called “the Russian Colardeau,” as he
initiated translations of European heroides and his works were republished more than any
other translator’s. His interest in the genre led authoritative scholars to assume his authorship
of a few other heroides published anonymously in Russian literary journals in the late
eighteenth century.
211
In the following section we begin with an analysis of “Armida,”
starting with Kheraskov’s translations and then moving to an overview of other ones. In the
next section “Eloisa to Abelard” will be treated in a similar way, beginning with Kheraskov’s
translation and moving to an overview of other translations. The third section will center on
Kheraskov’s “The Death of Clarissa.”
“Armida”
In 1760, two years after the French publication of Colardeau’s “Epistle of Armida to
Rinaldo” that inaugurated the new genre of heroide in France, Kheraskov’s Armida” opened
the issue of the first Russian weekly literary journal, Useful Entertainment, which he
published.
212
Kheraskov retold the story of Armida modeled on Ovid’s heroines from
Heroides and featured in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. In the poem, Armida, a powerful
sorcerer of stunning beauty, addresses her lover, the Crusader Rinaldo, who abandons her
when he is called to his Christian duty. Kheraskov’s poem, written in alexandrines, doesn’t
211
Gukovskii attributes to Kheraskov the poem “Helen Returned” (“Vozvraschennaia Elena”) (1760) and
Gorokhova attributes all of the heroides published in Fashion Monthly in 1779 to him. Without more evidence,
however, the aguments remain unconvincing. See, Gukovskii Elegiia v XVII veke, 106; Gorokhova, “Torkvatto
Tasso v Rossii XVIII veka,” 151.
212
[Mikhail Kheraskov], “Armida,” Poleznoe uveselenie 11 (1760): 113-119.
89
strictly follow the format of the heroide, and his characterization of Armida doesn’t initially
hew to the conventions of Ovid’s heroines. The second revised version, however, reflects the
poet’s attempt to more closely conform to the model of Ovid’s heroines.
While it is not clear whether Kheraskov drew directly from the sixteenth canto of
Jerusalem Delivered or used the French translation by Jean-Batiste de Mirabaud, Tasso’s epic
appears to have been one of Kheraskov’s favorite works, to which he frequently referred in his
oeuvre.
213
Kheraskov’s “Armida” was initially published without reference to Tasso, although
he followed Tasso’s presentation of Armida’s story closely. Whereas heroides are customarily
structured as the uninterrupted speech of the heroine, in Kheraskov’s poem Armida’s address
is framed by a narrator’s remarks, which interrupt her lament to provide back story, additional
details, and explanations of Armida’s behavior. Kheraskov’s Armida also addresses multiple
interlocuters: she speaks to Rinaldo in the first part, then turns her speech to the Furies.
Armida laments her fate as an abandoned woman, relishing memories of her
passionate love, regretting that she is unable to forget her lover, and asking him to come back.
When she imagines her lover laughing at her grief, she is overcome with feelings of anger and
desire for revenge. She calls on evil Furies to punish her lover, but then changes her mind, and
asks them instead to make him recall the pleasures he experienced with her. Torn between
love and despair, Armida decides to kill herself, hoping that her “hair and streams of blood
will haunt him,” but she fails in three attempts to pierce herself with a sword.
Although Kheraskov viewed Tasso’s famous seductress as “the soul of this
unappreciated poem,” he felt that her story lacked a moral lesson.
214
The Russian poet uses the
concluding lines of the poem to furnish Armida’s lament if not with a moral lesson, at least
213
Gorokhova, “Torkvatto Tasso v Rossii XVIII veka,”155.
214
Ibid, 157.
90
with some message which ensures the intended interpretation of the heroide. In Kheraskov’s
opinion, Armida’s inability to execute revenge on her lover proved that “love has more power
than the gods”:
Напрасно бедные любители трудятся,
Прогнать любезный вид от пленных страстью глаз;
Вас Боги, может, ад и грозный Стикс боятся,
Но страсть любовная еще сильнее вас.
215
(In vain poor lovers labor,
To remove the sight of those they love from eyes imprisoned by passion;
Hell and the menacing Styx might fear you, Gods,
But the passion of love is even stronger than you.)
After the first publication in 1760, a revised version of “Armida” appeared in a volume
with Kheraskov’s translation of Pope (1773), and separately in journals with and without the
title “heroide.”
216
As Gorokhova points out, Kheraskov changed the name of Armida’s lover
from the French “Renaud” to Rinaldo, following the spelling in the Italian original.
217
More
substantial changes reflect the poet’s work adapting Ovid’s heroide “Ariadne to Theseus”
(1763). Stripping away much superfluous material, Kheraskov’s revision focuses on
Armida’s self-presentation and her expression of passionate love.
In the revision, a new stanza is added to the introduction that recalls Kheraskov’s
Araidne:
Тоскою мучима, лишенная надежды,
Терзает волосы и рвет свои одежды;
Не сходственна с своей Армида красотой,
Чрез волны вопиет: постой! Ринольд, постой!
218
215
[Mikhail Kheraskov], “Armida,” Poleznoe uveselenie 11 (1760): 119.
216
[Mikhail Kheraskov], “Iroida II. Armida k Rinol’du,” St. Petersburg, n.d.; “Armida k Rinol’du,” Modnoe
Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779): 222-228; “Iroida. Armida k Rinol’du,” Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 7
(1787): 44-55.
217
Gorokhova, “Torkvatto Tasso v Rossii XVIII veka,”150.
218
“Armida k Rinol’du,” Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779): 223.
91
(Tormented by anguish, bereaved of hope,
She pulls her hair and tears her clothes;
She doesn’t look like beautiful Armida,
And cries over the waves: Stop! Rinaldo, stop!)
Compare Kheraskov’s Ariadne:
На камнях вообрази, где страшны волны бьют,
Там стон мой слышится и очи слезы льют:
Представь меня в моря повергнуться хотящу,
И всюды за тобой желанием летящу.
По бледному лицу разтрепаны власы,
Кленущу своего рождения часы,
И погубившую на свете всю надежду;
Представь потоком слез омытую одежду.
219
(Imagine me on the rocks, where the frightful waves beat,
My lament can be heard there and my eyes shedding tears.
Imagine me wanting to throw myself into the sea
And flying everywhere after you in my desire
With my tattered hair across my pale face,
Cursing the hour I was born,
Losing my only hope in the world;
Imagine my clothes soaked with the streams of my tears.)
Another new stanza in “Armida” also evokes the language of Ariadne:
Представь, Ринольд, представь тот лютый день и час,
Когда ты от моих хотел сокрыться глаз,
Стеняща пред тобой я грудь свою терзала,
Являла видом то, чего недосказала:
Я зрела не отъезд, но зрела смерть мою… (224)
(Imagine Rinaldo, imagine that cruel day and hour
When you wanted to escape from my eyes.
Wailing before you, I was tearing my breast,
My appearance represented what I wasn’t able to express in words:
I saw not your departure, but my death.)
219
Kheraskov, “Geroida. Ariiadna k Tezeiu,” 380.
92
Kheraskov may not have meant to draw a parallel between the characters of Ariadne and
Armida, but simply built on the conventions of the form that worked so effectively and
powerfully in Ovid’s originals.
While Kheraskov’s “Armida” was published several times by 1787, Colardeau’s
“Armida” was translated into Russian only once in 1825 by the little known poet and
translator Aleksandr Pisarev. Pisarev published his free translation of Colardeau along with
five short heroides he composed based on the popular French novel, Letters of a Peruvian
Woman by Françoise de Graffigny (1747), in a compendium titled Kaluzhskie vechera
[Evenings in Kaluga].
220
Introducing his translations of Colardeau’s heroide, Pisarev writes
that even though “[he] often departed from the source, [he] tried to preserve the meaning of
the French poem.”
221
“The Death of Clarissa”
In 1760, along with “Armida,” the weekly Useful Entertainment published another
lengthy poem by Kheraskov titled “Smert’ Klarisy” [The Death of Clarissa] and identified it
only as an imitation of a “French work.”
222
In the poem, a man writes to his friend about the
murder of his beloved and goes on at great length describing the scene of her death and his
subsequent suffering. While “Armida” engages in a dialogue with the Ovidian style of
heroide, “The Death of Clarissa” represents a type of “sentimental” heroide which is not
220
A. Pisarev, “Armida k Renal’du. Iroida (Vol’nyi perevod iz sochinenii Kolardo),”in Kaluzhskie vechera, part 1,
(Moskva, V Universitetskoi Tipographii, 1825): 109-119. Pisarev, a division commander and future head of the
ociety of Lovers of Russian Letters (Obshchestvo liubitelei russkoi slovesnosti) compiled of works mainly by
officers of the 2
nd
grenadiers’ division of which he was a head.
221
Aleksandr Pisarev, “Armida k Renal’du,”109.
222
Mikhail Kheraskov [M.Kh], “Smert’ Klarisy,” Poleznoe uveselnie 24 (1760): 239-249.
93
rooted in the classics or mythology, but is rather based on the trappings of new European
novels and middle-class dramas. There are strong allusions to Richardson’s novel Clarissa
(1748), notably in the name of the heroine and the description of her death, although the plot
has nothing at all in common with Richardson’s novel making the source of the heroide a
mystery. As in the case of “Armida,” Kheraskov significantly revised the first version of his
translation. Under the slightly changed title, “Iroida. Smert’ Klariny” [Heroide. Death of
Clarina], the improved version was published in the new literary journal Fashion Monthly in
1779, at the peak of heroides’ popularity.
223
The early version of the poem was quite lengthy, over 300 lines long. The letter
recreates a hero’s emotional journey from his last exchange with his dying beloved to his
coping with the loss. Similar to the abandoned women who plead for their lovers to imagine
them in emotional distress, the young man begs his friend to imagine his suffering over the
tragic death of his beloved right before their marriage. While the early version of the poem
includes: a lengthy rendition of the woman’s last words; descriptions of the hero’s
unsuccessful attempts to avenge the murder and then commit suicide; and details about his
wanderings in a meadow hallucinating about his dead lover; the identity of the murderer and
his motivation for killing the hero’s bride are left entirely unclear.
In the most striking moment, the hero describes his dying beloved in a particularly
graphic manner:
Клариса вся в крови, Клариса помертвела. […]
Разтрепаны власы, в лице сокрылся цвет,
Глава прекрасная на плечи преклонилась,
В отверстых ей устах душа остановилась:
Те руки, снегу что подобны белизной,
Раскинуты лежат, покрыты синевой…
224
223
[Mikhail Kheraskov], “Iroida. Smert’ Klariny,”Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779): 163-172.
224
Kheraskov, “Smert’ Klarisy,” 241.
94
(Clarissa is covered in blood, Clarissa is dying.[…]
Her hair is tattered, her face is losing color,
Her beautiful head bowed on her shoulders,
Her soul stopped in her opened lips
Those arms [or hands] whose whiteness resembled snow
Lie outstretched, covered with blue…)
The name of the bride and description of her hands, in particular, invoke Richardson’s novel.
In the works of both Kheraskov and Richardson, the body of a dead woman is turned into “an
object for visual consumption.”
225
Richardson gives a detailed description of Clarissa’s dead
body via one of his male characters, Belford: “Her hands, white as the lily, with her
meandering veins more transparently blue than ever... hanging lifelessly.”
226
Revisions made by Kheraskov in the second version convey his attempt to streamline
and shorten the poem as well as to focus it more on the narrator’s emotional agony. Kheraskov
eliminates the graphic depiction of the dying Clarissa, and the hero instead explains to his
friend that he wants to spare him such a terrible image. Among other changes evident in the
second version are the following: all but two lines are cut from the lengthy speech of the dying
beloved, and the murderer, who is moved even further into the background, is granted
forgiveness by the narrator.
“Eloisa to Abelard”
Kheraskov’s rendition of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” was probably his best known
contribution to the heroide genre. To render “Eloisa to Abelard” in Russian, Kheraskov used
225
Judith Broome, Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717-1770 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell
University Press, 2007), 47.
226
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa Harlowe, Or the History of a Young Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 529.
95
the literal translation of Pope into French prose by Fiquet du Bocage.
227
Kheraskov dates his
first attempt to translate the heroide as 1755, while his manuscript is dated 1758, the year
when Colardeau published his free translation of Pope’s epistle that began the fashion for
heroides in France.
228
Kheraskov’s translation of Pope’s heroide was first published in 1765,
and according to the note accompanying later publications, it was printed without the poet’s
permission and incorrectly. His revised translation was published four times: in 1773, 1779,
1786, and 1791.
229
Kheraskov’s translation of Pope, rendered in alexandrines, introduced Russian readers
to a woman struggling to reconcile her earthly passions with her love of God. Writing from a
monastery cell, Eloisa laments her loneliness and spiritual frustration. By equating the value
of life to love, the ambiguity of her feelings heightens the dramatic tension of the heroide. As
Rizzi points out, “Eloisa” was “a daring work both stylistically and in its depiction of passion,
a feeling that in Russia had until then been firmly channeled both in formal and ideal terms in
the classicist canon.”
230
The scholar points out that Kheraskov omits some of Eloisa’s
celebrated declarations of love, attributing it to his intention to comply with the “moral and
literary orientations of the time.”
231
While Kheraskov considered his early version of the
translation “a fruit of his youth,” full of imperfections, Rizzi, who conducted a detailed
comparative analysis of the two versions, concludes that the early version reveals a more
emotionally unrestrained and uncensored rendition of Pope.
232
227
Rizzi, “Kheraskov Translator,” 51.
228
Ibid., 48.
229
Ibid.
230
Ibid., 55.
231
Ibid., 60.
232
Ibid., 58.
96
Kochetkova suggests that the multiple publications of Kheraskov’s “Eloisa to Abelard”
popularized Pope’s work in Russia.
233
However, at the end of the eighteenth century, Russian
poets preferred translating numerous French adaptations of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” rather
than the original. In 1783, a prose translation of Colardeau’s poem was made by Aleksandr
Dmitriev and published in a volume titled Sobranie pisem Abel’iarda and Eloizy [A
Collection of the Letters of Abelard and Eloisa]. In 1794, a free poetic translation of
Colardeau marked the literary debut of the prominent Russian poet and dramatist Vladislav
Ozerov.
234
In the early nineteenth century, the journal Ippokrena published a translation of L.-
S.Mercier’s imitation of Pope’s poem.
235
A collection of Russian translations of various
versions of “Eloisa to Abelard” by Pope and by several other French poets was published in
1816.
236
Translations of French Heroides in Fashion Monthly: Dorat and Mailhal
In 1779 three heroides translated by Kheraskov were republished in the new literary
journal, Fashion Monthly. As noted, that year Russian interest in heroides reached its peak: in
the first half of the year, the journal published eight. Heroides were often featured at the
beginning of an issue, and the June number contained three published one after another.
Among the heroides which were published in Fashion Monthly anonymously and without
233
Natalia Kochetkova, “Kheraskov and Zhukovskii – perevodchiki sochineniia Aleksandra Popa ‘Eloiza k
Abeliaru’,” in Zhukovskii i vremia, 21-28 (Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo univresiteta, 2007), 23. Zhukovskii
translated the first seventy two lines directly from Pope. It remained unpublished till 1902. For additional
information see also, Leonid M. Arinstein, “Pope in Russian translations,” Studies in Bibliography 24 (1971):173.
234
V. A Ozerov, Eloiza k Abelardu. Iroida. Vol'nyi perevod s frantsuzskogo g. (geroidy) Kollardo (St. Petersburg,
1794).
235
[Im-n], “Epistola ot Eloizy k Abeliardu,” Ippokrena 5 (1800): 337-357.
236
Abeliar i Eloiza (Moscow, 1816).
97
indicating whether they were translations or original works, two were later identified as
translations of Dorat and Mailhol (see below). Most of these heroides were republished from
other journals, but the translation of Dorat’s “Pis’mo Grafa Kommenzha k materi ego” [A
Letter of the Count of Comminge to his Mother] that heralded the opening of the very first
issue of the journal was published for the first time.
237
The hero of Dorat’s heroide, the Count of Comminge, was known to Russian readers
from the novel Mémoires du Comte de Comminge (1735) by Claudine de Tencin which was
translated by one of the “most distinguished Russian dramatists,” Iakov Kniazhnin, in 1771.
238
The nineteenth-century bibliographers Galakhov and Novikov correctly identified the heroide
as a translation, and stated that it was Kniazhnin who rendered Dorat’s work into Russian.
239
Galakhov and Novikov notwithstanding, during the Soviet era, the poem was mistakenly
attributed to Kniazhnin as an original work.
240
Comparison to Dorat’s text reveals that
Kniazhnin closely follows the French author. The heroide tells the story of young Comminge
who is first forced apart from his beloved by his father and later persuaded that she is dead.
The young count takes refuge in the desert among monks and discovers after many years that
his lover has followed him there and disguised herself as a monk. Only on her deathbed does
Adelaida reveal herself to him. Comminge’s address to his mother includes Adelaida’s
lengthy speech before she dies, but the main focus of the heroide is on Comminge’s grief.
237
[Iakov Kniazhnin], trans., “Pis’mo Grafa Kommenzha k materi ego,” Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1
(1779): 1-17.
238
Elena Kukushkina, “Iakov Borisovich Kniazhnin,” Early Modern Russian Writers, ed. M. C. Levitt, 175.
239
Aleksei Galakhov, Istoriia russkoi slovesnosti, drevnei i novoi (St.Petersburg, 1863), 1:453; Nikolai Novikov,
Opyt istoricheskogo slovaria o rossiiskikh pisateliakh (St. Petersburg, 1772), 1: 114.
240
Ia. Kniazhnin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, Biblioteka poeta, (Leningrad, 1961), 754. This inaccuracy led Evgenii
Vilk in his dissertation on Kniazhnin to analyze the poem as a reflection of Kniazhnin’s philosophical views. See
Evgueni Vilk, Problem of Tragedy and Tragic Consciousness in Russia at the turn of the 19th Century, (Ph.D. diss.,
Central European University, 1999), 56-62, http://rss.archives.ceu.hu/archive/00001056/01/56.pdf.
98
Another translated heroide published in Fashion Monthly introduced Russian readers
to the brutalities of a medieval love story. The tragic tale of Gabrielle de Vergy, the victim of
a tyrannical husband’s cruel revenge, was turned into a heroide by the French poet Gabriel
Mailhol.
241
Prior to being featured in Fashion Monthly, the poem, “Pis’mo Gabrielly-de-
Verzhi k grafine de Raul’, sestre Raulia de Kusi” [The Letter of Gabriella-de-Vergy to the
Countess de Raoul, sister of Raoul de Coucy”] first appeared in Kheraskov’s journal Vechera
[Evenings] in 1772.
242
Writing from jail to the sister of the noble knight Raoul, Gabrielle de
Vergy tells how she fell in love with him in her youth, but was separated from him by her
arranged marriage to the evil Fayel. To prevent the lovers from meeting, Fayel locks her in a
dark cell, where she suffers tortured visions of her husband’s fury, wishing her life would end.
Her faithful servant comes to her one day and tells her that her husband is full of remorse and
wants to reconcile. She awakens to this hope and when her husband comes to the jail to make
peace with her and brings her food, she is amazed that her life seems to be changing for the
better. Her husband then tells her that what she has eaten was her lover’s heart. Gabrielle de
Vergy finishes her letter waiting to die from poison brought by her servant.
Gabrielle’s letter shows her engulfed by pain and suffering and contemplating the
nature of passions while challenging societal assumptions about them. She closely follows the
model that permeates sentimentalist literature of the time. For example, she questions why her
passion is considered wrong and that she is being punished—after all, nature doesn’t consider
tender passion evil. Why does her husband imprison her when she only feels passion for
241
Gabriel Mailhol, “Lettre en vers de Gabrielle de Vergy, à la comtesse de Raoul, soeur de Raoul de Coucy”
(Paris: vve Duchesne, 1766), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5438872h. The Russian translation was
attributed by M. Grishakova. See M. Grishakova, “Literaturnaia pozitsiia zhurnala ‘Vechera,’” in Klassitsizm i
modernizm: sbornik statei, ed. I. V. Abramets, 27–37 (Tartu: Tartuskii universitet, 1994), 32.
242
Anonymous, “Pis’mo Gabrielly-de-Verzhi k Grafine de Raul’, sestre Raulia de Kusi,” Vechera 2 (1772-73): 245-
255.
99
another man but is not unfaithful? In the finale, she calls upon parents to let their children
follow their hearts in their personal affairs.
Mailhal wrote the heroide in 1766, a few years before the famous tragedy, Gabrielle de
Vergy by de Belloy, was first published. It is likely that the popularity of the tragedy, which
was dismissed by Voltaire and which prompted a number of parodies, inspired the translation
of Mailhol’s heroide into Russian. The heroide culminates in the same scene that had caused a
stir in Parisian society; seeing the heroine discover that she ate her lover’s heart made women
in the audience faint in great numbers. Despite demands to remove the scene from the play,
Gabrielle de Vergy was successfully staged 129 times.
243
Translations of Dorat’s Other Heroides: “Lettre de Barnevelt dans sa prison à Truman son
ami”and “Lettres d'une chanoinesse de Lisbonne à Melcour, officier”
Another French heroide was also popular in Russia due to its theatrical connection.
Between 1774 and 1800, Dorat’s heroide based on the drama The London Merchant, “Lettre
de Barnevelt dans sa prison à Truman son ami” (1763) was translated three times, both in
poetry and prose. The play, written by George Lillo about a young merchant named Barnwell
who steals money and murders his uncle to please his courtesan lover, enjoyed a tremendous
vogue in England and France as well as in Russia where the drama’s French adaptations were
translated a number of times.
244
While the Russian stage history of the play remains largely
243
Henry Carrington Lancaster, French Tragedy in the Time of Louis XV and Voltaire, 1715-1774, 2 vols.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1950), 2: 493-494.
244
Svodnyi katalog russkoi knigi grazhdanskoi pechati XVIII veka, 1725-1800, 5 vols., ed. I.P. Kondakov
(Moscow: Izd. Gos. biblioteki SSSR im. V.I. Lenina, 1962-1965), 2: 155. Lillo’s adaptation by Mercier, Jenneval, ou
Le Barnevelt français, (1769) was translated twice in 1778 and 1783. See Levin, Istoriia, 59.
100
unknown, Galakhov credits the popularity of Dorat’s heroide in Russia and its multiple
translations to the play’s success.
245
Failing to adapt the English play for the French stage, Dorat resorted to writing a
heroide, perhaps perceiving the form as a compromise between the neoclassic French tragedy
going out of fashion and the quick rise of the middle-class drama. In the heroide, Barnwell
writes to his friend from jail to explain what put him in such an unfortunate situation.
Barnwell’s detailed description of how he murders his uncle is followed by a tale of the
ghostly visions that torment his guilty conscience.
The first translation of Dorat’s heroide was made in poetry by Ivan Khemnitser in
1774.
246
Mostly known for his fables, Khemnitser dedicated the heroide to his close friend, the
poet and translator Nikolai Lvov, acknowledging that his translation was inferior to the
original. In the 1790’s two prose translations of Dorat’s heroide were published by Ivan
Kudriavtsev and Grigory Iatsenko.
247
While it has been noted that Kudriavtsev’s translation is
characterized by “a very archaic and ponderous style,”
248
Iatsenko’s rendering is a more
polished version.
Epistolary novels that enjoyed popularity in eighteenth-century Europe were another
source of French heroides. Dorat’s collection of sixteen heroides Lettres d'une Chanoinesse de
Lisbonne à Melcour, Officier (1770), letters from a Portuguese nun to a French officer who
abandoned her after a fleeting affair, was inspired by the famous seventeenth-century prose
245
Galakhov, Istoriia russkoi slovesnosti drevnei i novoi, 496-497.
246
Ivan Khemnitser, “Pismo Barnvelia k Trumanu iz temnitsy. Geroida” (St. Petersburg, 1774).
247
Ivan Kudriavtsev, Pis’mo Barnevel’ta v temnitse sidiashtego k drugu ego Triumanu (Moscow: V
universitetskoi tipographii, 1791); [Grigorii Maksimovich Iatsenko], “Barnvel’t k Trumanu,” Priiatnoe i poleznoe
preprovozhdenie vremeni 11 (1796), 369-393. Iu. Levin also noted the existence of a poem “Prestuplenie
Barnevel’ta” written in the form of amonologue which was not consulted. See Levin, Istoriia, 2: 51.
248
Levin, Istoriia, 2: 177.
101
collection Portuguese Letters. Two of Dorat’s heroides from Lettres d'une Chanoinesse de
Lisbonne à Melcour, Officier were translated into Russian. In 1772, an anonymous translation
of Dorat’s fourteenth heroide appeared in the journal Evenings as “Neschastnaia portugalka”
[The Unfortunate Portuguese] accompanied by the subtitle “letter.”
249
Here, the abandoned
nun, Euphrasie, writes for the last time to her lover when she learns that his ship encountered a
storm. Dorat’s heroide utilizes many elements characteristic of Ovid’s heroides: Euphrasie is
depicted sitting on the shore and looking toward the sea, narrating her emotional anguish,
recollecting the passionate past and hoping to bring her lover back by telling him of her
sufferings. But in her assessment of the situation she seems much more realistic than her
ancient predecessors: she concludes her letter understanding that her lover will never return
and she forgives him, wishing him happiness. The second translation, made by the poet Iurii
Neledinskii-Meletskii in 1792, closely renders the first letter from Dorat’s collection. It
presents the early stage of Euphrasie’s affair in which she confesses her boundless love for the
man without perceiving it as threatening to her love for God.
250
The poem conveys the ecstasy
and passion the nun feels for the French cavalier; she is convinced that divine providence has
brought them together.
Russian Translations of Heroides from the Werther Cycle
Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther sparked imitations in poetry, prose and
drama across Europe. Victor Zhirmunskii in his seminal studies on imitations of Goethe in
Russian literature identifies and analyses five heroides, all but one published in Russian
249
“Neschastnaia portugalka. Pis’mo,” Vechera 2 (1772-73): 42-54.
250
Ui. A. Neledinskii-Meletskii, “Evfraziia k Melkuru. Perevod iz Dorata,”Moskovskii zhurnal 6 (1792): 156-166.
102
magazines between 1787-1819.
251
While Zhirmunskii thoroughly discusses each of the five
poems featuring Charlotte or Werther lamenting their fates, he leaves the question of
authorship open, noting that some poems were published anonymously and others were signed
by Russian translators, and/or identified as imitations. Atkins, in his comparative study of
European imitations of Werther, identifies three French heroides as sources for three of the
five Russian translations Zhirmunskii discusses.
252
Atkins also describes a French heroide that
I discovered to be the source of the anonymous Russian translation, “Pis’mo Vertera k
Sharlote” [Letter from Werther to Charlotte] which I was able to identify as composed by
Aleksei Merzliakov. According to Atkins, the theme of Werther didn’t attract any successful
French poets until the 1790’s when the popularity of the novel was reaching its peak,
253
and
the Russian Werther cycle features translations of virtually unknown French authors.
It remains unclear if the earliest heroide from the Werther cycle titled “Sharlotta pri
grobe Vertera” [Charlotte at the Tomb of Werther] and published in Russian in 1787 is an
original or translated work. The poem was signed by Dmitry Baranov (1773-1833), apparently
fourteen years old when he published the poem.
254
While the heroide shares its title with other
European poetic rewritings of Goethe’s novel, in terms of the interpretation of the relations
between Charlotte and Werther it is connected to James’ Letters of Charlotte, during her
Connexion with Werter (1786), an English imitation novel published in Russia in 1795. The
book’s frontispiece is titled like the poem and could be an illustration for it, as it depicts
251
V. M. Zhirmunskii, “Gete v russkoi poezii,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo 4-6 (Leningrad, 1932), 510-520; V. M.
Zhirmunskii, “Stikhi, posviaschennye Verteru,” in Gete v russkoi literature (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), 44-49.
252
Stuart P. Atkins, The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1949), 308-310.
253
Ibid, 128.
254
Zhirmunskii, “Gete v russkoi poezii,” 518.
103
Charlotte “gazing at Werther’s urn, her face tear-streaked, but serene, taking solace from
reading, presumably the Bible.”
255
In Baranov’s poem, Charlotte likewise addresses the ashes
of Werther and criticizes his suicide as contradicting Christian doctrine. As in James’ novel,
the poem condemns Werther’s suicide.
The publication of Baranov’s poem “Charlotte at the Tomb of Werther” was followed
by two poems with similar titles: “Stikhi na grob Vertera” [Verses on the Grave of Werther]
(1789)
256
and “Sharlotta na Verterovoi grobnitse” [Charlotte at Werther’s Tomb]
(1791),
257
which, as Atkins indicates, are two different translations of the heroide “Charlotte au tombeau
de Werther” by Antoine Arnault.
258
Atkins considers Arnault’s heroide an “amateur” work,
which the French poet composed at the age of eighteen, and the Russian translations are
characterized by their sentimental treatment of the theme.
259
Charlotte, haunted by the shadow
of Werther, sees death as the only way to end her suffering and unite with her beloved.
In 1801, Aleksei Merzliakov, the well-known poet and critic, translated one of the
earliest French poetic adaptations of Goethe’s novel, the epistle by Samuel Bridel, “Lettre de
Verther à Charlotte.”
260
The translation exists in two known manuscript versions: one is
anonymous and analysed by Zhirmunskii; the other, which identifies the poem as a translation
255
Susanne Kord, “From sentiment to Sexuality,” in (Re-)Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution and
Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France, ed. Maike Oergel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 31.
256
[D.I Vel’iashev-Volyntsev], “Stikhi na grob Vertera,” Poleznoe uveselenie iunoshestva 1789: 376-377.
Attributed to Vel’iashev-Volyntsev by Zhirmunskii.
257
“Sharlotta na Verterovoi grobnitse. Perevod s frantsuzskogo,” Moskovskii zhurnal VI (1791): 122-124; signed
by S.
258
Atkins, The Testament of Werther, 253.
259
Ibid., 124.
260
Samuel Bridel, “Lettre de Verther à Charlotte” in Les Delassemens poetiques Par M** (Lausanne, 1788), 117-
129.
104
from French, is by Merzliakov.
261
The first, unpublished, anonymous heroide, “Letter from
Werther to Charlotte,” which Zhirmunskii brought to light, was found in the archive of the
well-known Russian poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. Zhirmunskii was evidently unaware of the
second, signed version that identified the poem as an 1801 translation from French by Aleksei
Merzliakov, uncovered by Iurii Lotman.
262
Atkins, discussing Bridel, the French source for
Merzliakov’s translation, comments that “despite his faithfulness in detail to corresponding
passages in Goethe’s novel, [he] captures none of their poetic spirit”
263
due to his use of
seventeenth-century French poetic vocabulary. According to Zhirmunskii, the translation
presented “a version of Goethe’s novel modified into the form of a traditional epistle.”
264
While Merzliakov’s translation remained unpublished until the mid-twentieth century, a
segment of the heroide was integrated into the anonymous epistolary novel Samoubiistvo [The
Suicide] published in the journal Aglaia in August 1810.
265
Verses from Merzliakov’s
translation also appear in Lenskii’s elegy from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Pushkin modeled
his character, Lenskii, on Goethe’s Werther, but it is unknown whether he read the heroide in
manuscript or drew on the published version in the anonymous novel.
Lenskii’s elegy also features verses from another French heroide on Werther translated
by Pushkin’s friend Vasilii Tumanskii.
266
According to Atkins, the elegiac poet Tumanskii
translated André Coupingny’s “Werther à Charlotte, une heure avant de mourir” that had been
261
Zhirmunskii, Gete v russkoi literature, 44.
262
A.F. Mezliakov, “Pis’mo Vertera k Sharlote,” in Stikhotvoreniia (Sovetskii pisatel’, 1958), 219-229. See notes
by Iu. Lotman on pp. 306-307.
263
Atkins, The Testament of Werther, 124.
264
Zhirmunskii, Gete v russkoi literature, 47.
265
Frajaan, The Epistolary Novel in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Munich: Sagner, 2001), 139.
266
Iu. M. Lotman, Roman A.S. Pushkina "Evgenii Onegin": Kommentarii (Leningrad: “Prosveschenie,” 1983),
298-299.
105
published in the Almanach des Muses in 1801.
267
Tumanskii’s translation, titled “Verter k
Sharlotte” [Werther to Charlotte] and published in 1819, was quite popular, and besides
Eugene Onegin, it is famously featured in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls where it is recited by
the drunken Chichikov. While it is written in the form of a heroide, its short length (4 four-line
stanzas) and the meter (iambic pentameter) make it closer to an elegy.
Back to Ovid: Russian Prose Translations of French Rewritings of Ovid
Two anonymous heroides, “Iroida, ili Pis’mo Vivlidy k Kavnu” [The Heroide or Letter
of Byblis to Caunas] (1773) and “Ariana Tezeiu” [Ariadne to Theseus] (1783), invoke Ovid’s
pairs of lovers from Heroides and Metamorphoses.
268
Although at first glance the translations
follow Ovid’s works closely, in fact they are prose translations of French adaptations of Ovid.
The “Letter of Byblis to Caunas” is a translation of the heroide “Lettre de Biblis à Caunus son
frère” (1765) by Adrien Blin de Sainmore and “Ariadne to Theseus” is a translation of
“Ariane à Thésée, héroïde nouvelle,” by the lesser -known French poet Sébastien-Marie-
Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigné (1762).
269
Originally composed in verse, the heroides were
rendered into Russian prose, revealing an unusually modern style of reflective writing
detailing a first person narrator’s tragic struggle with passions and emotions.
267
Atkins, 129.
268
“Iroida, ili Pis’mo Vivlidy k Kavnu,” Starina i Novizna 2 (1773): 31- 50; “Ariana k Tezeiu,” Gorodskaia i
derevnskaia biblioteka 7 (1783): 357-364.
269
The source for “Byblis to Caunas” is identified by me; the source for “Ariadne to Theseus” was identified by
V.D. Rak in his article “Perevodnye anonimnye proizvedeniia v ‘Gorodskoi i derevenskoi biblioteke’” in N.I.
Novikov i obschestvenno-literaturnoe dvizhenie ego vremeni. XVIII vek, 11, ed. G.K. Makogonenko, 125-130
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 128.
106
“Heroide or Letter of Byblis to Caunas” Translated by Derzhavin
Known as his first published work and wrongly identified in the publication as a
translation from German, the “Heroide or Letter of Byblis to Caunas” was attributed to
Gavrila Derzhavin by his friend, the scholar Metropolitan Evgenii.
270
It was published without
the poet’s permission in 1773 by his friends in the journal Starina i novizna [Old Times and
New], a “literary and historical compendium” run by Vasilii Ruban.
271
In the journal, the note
that accompanies the translation correctly identifies the original plot as from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, which tells the story of the unlawful passion between Byblis and her
brother.
272
In various studies, Derzhavin’s work has been identified as a translation of Ovid’s
heroide,
273
a German text based on Ovid's Metamorphoses,
274
and a story by an anonymous
German imitator of Ovid.
275
Makogonenko correctly notes that Derzhavin’s heroide presents a
story “foreign to classicism.”
276
Indeed, Derzhavin’s translation presents a voice markedly
different both from Ovid and from the German literary tradition. Modern research methods
have identified it as a translation of the heroide, “Lettre de Biblis à Caunus son frère” (1765)
270
Metropolitan Evgenii, Slovar’ russkikh svetskikh pisatelei, sootechestvennikov i chuzhestrantsev, pisavshihk v
Rossii, vol.1, (Moscow, 1845), 171.
271
Titunik, “Ruban,” 341.
272
“Pis’mo Vivlidy k Kavnu,” 31.
273
“Derzhavin,” Entsiklopedicheskii leksikon, ed. A. A. Pliushar, 17 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1835[-1841]), 16: 191.
274
Ia. Grot, ed., Sochineniia Derzhavina (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1880), 8: 272.
275
Mark S. Simpson, The Russian Gothic Novel and its British Antecedents (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers,
1986), 26.
276
G.K. Makagonenko, introduction to G.K. Derzhavin, Sochineniia (Leningrad: Khudozhestvenniaia literatura,
1987), 10.
107
by Blin de Sainmore.
277
Derzhavin’s biographer Iakov Grot excluded Derzhavin’s translation of Sainmore from
his Complete Works because he found the language of the translated heroide “rather clean and
correct” in comparison with Derzhavin’s “Chitalagai odes” written in 1774. Grot concluded
that the translation had probably been significantly altered by the editor.
278
However, the
rather elegant and sensual style of the prose in “Letter of Byblis to Caunas” doesn’t match the
style of the editor in question, Vasilii Ruban, whose prose translations of Ovid’s Heroides
were criticized precisely for their lack of elegance.
The prose translation of Blin de Sainmore’s heroide clearly reflects a pre-romantic and
sentimental sensibility presented in the form of a “stream of consciousness” style. Byblis’s
highly subjective account of her incestuous love for her brother is full of contradictions,
depicting a female character with powerful aspirations who is not afraid to contemplate and
even philosophize openly about her desire and the pain associated with it.
279
Byblis challenges
societal norms and taboos that condemn incest for humans but accept it in the animal world.
At the same time, she appeals to the gods to help humanity better control its passions, to
infuse more shame into people or to make crimes such as incest less attractive. Byblis
oscillates between passion and virtue, and while the overwhelming feelings she has for her
277
The attribution is mine. Adrien Blin de Sainmore, “Lettre de Biblis à Caunus son frère : préc. d'une lettre à
l'auteur” (1765). To my knowledge, there was no German translation of Sainmore’s heroide. Derzhavin’s
knowledge of French is well established in Diana Burgin’s “The Deconstruction of Sappho Stolz” in Pamela
Chester and Sibelan Forrester, eds., Engendering Slavic Literatures (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1996), 17.
278
Grot, Sochineniia Derzhavina, 8: 272.
279
Scholars point out that Derzhavin’s “Byblis to Caunus” influenced Karamzin’s story Bornholm Island.
Hammarberg draws clear parallels between the two works while pointing out that “Byblis to Caunus” was not
the only story dealing with incest. See: Hammarberg, “The Idyll as Prototype for Sentimentalist Fiction,” 316-
323; Simpson, The Russian Gothic Novel, 26; Neuhauser, Towards the Romantic Age (The Hague: Mouton,
1974), 180-181.
108
brother make her strong and powerful, she ultimately falls into the category of abandoned
women-victims.
Blin de Sainmore’s heroide follows Ovid’s format in many ways. Preoccupied with
the impossibility of being with Caunus, Byblis writes on the verge of suicide, like so many of
Ovid’s heroines. In the same vein, she pleads for her lover to come back without much hope,
noting, like Penelope, that while her beloved is away she becomes old and her beauty wilts.
She shares her conflicting desires and fears: she wants Caunus to pity her, she wants him to be
near and far, and she suspects that he has a lover, and thus comes to the realization that death
is her only solution.
In keeping with sentimentalist conventions, Byblis follows her brother into the forest,
and the story of her trying to fulfill her desire is intertwined with descriptions of nature: when
Caunus is in the forest, it is described as a temple of love, idyllic and paradisiacal, but after he
leaves, it turns into the gloomy dwelling of the dead, an iconic gothic cemetery with a snake
crawling among the clefts in the tombs. In the end of the heroide, as Byblis bids a last
farewell to her lover, she presents herself as still searching for a glimpse of him:
Сквозь мглу смертную, потемняющую меня, мой потупленный взор, еще твоего
ищет воображения.
280
(Through the deadly darkness falling upon me, my downcast eyes still seek your
image.)
“Ariadne to Theseus, Heroide”
A similar sense of approaching death characterizes the anonymous translation of an
imitation of Ovid, “Ariadne to Theseus” by Gazon-Dourxigné, which was published in the
280
“Iroida, ili Pis’mo Vivlidy k Kavnu,” Starina i Novizna 2 (1773): 49-50.
109
Russian journal Gorodskaia i derevnskaia biblioteka [Town and Country Library] in 1783.
281
Gazon-Dourxigné, a minor French poet, infuses Ovid’s Araidne with Racinian passions in his
attempt to make the ancient heroide more relevant to contemporary readers.
The French poet
alters Ovid’s text in subtle ways that adds sentimentality to Ariadne’s plea. While in Ovid’s
heroide the opening line states that: “Beasts of the most savage nature have proved more mild
and gentle to me than you,” Gazon-Dourxigné’s opening frames Theseus as an unfaithful
lover right away:
Non, il ne fut jamais Amant traître & sans soi, de tigre plus féroce & plus cruel que
toi.
282
Нет и не было никогда любовника предателя и без совести, ни зверя, столь
лютого и столь жестокого, как ты.
283
(There is not and there never was such a lover-traitor and a person without morals, a
beast as ferocious and cruel as you.)
Ariadne’s plea is infused with extreme emotion and rendered in Russian prose reads like the
diary of a contemporary woman rather than that of a mythological character.
Ariadne methodically recounts how she moves from one emotional state to another,
how following her grief she experiences short periods of calmness, only to be thrown again
into a sea of rage. “Rage” is repeated in the text three times to describe the degree of her
despair. Numerous times “alas,” and other exclamations, rhetorical questions and colloquial
281
Sviiasov mistakenly lists the work as a translation of Ovid’s heroide in Antichnaia poezia v russkikh
perevodakh XVIII-XX vv: bibliographicheskii ukazatel’. Ed. E. Sviiasov (S.-Peterburg: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk,
1998), 341.
282
M. Gazon-Dourxigné , “Ariane à Thésée, héroïde nouvelle, par M. Gazon -Dourxigné” (Paris: Vve Valleyre,
1762), http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb304923038
283
“Ariana k Tezeiu,” Gorodskaia i derevnskaia biblioteka 7 (1783): 357.
110
phrases (such as “But what I am saying?”) are employed in the text to give a sense of the
immediacy of raw speech, and convey a high degree of emotional intensity:
…вся пылая страстью, ищу близ себя прелестного образа, и думая тебя лобзать,
о излишнее восхищение! Объемлю только одр, увы! На котором тебя уже более
не вижу. (357)
(…wholly inflamed by my passion I am searching all around for the lovely image, and
wishing to kiss you - oh excessive delight! - I embrace only the bed, alas! The bed on
which I no longer see you.)
Enduring existential pain and suffering, Ariadne projects the image of a lonely
wanderer: “Where to run? Where to hide? What to hope for? … I am a stranger everywhere,
[and] perpetual exile will always be the reward for my blindness.” (359-360)
Ariadne tortures herself in hope that self-inflicted pain will ease her emotional distress.
Gazon-Dourxigné’s depiction of Ariadne brutalizing herself is a bit more graphic than Ovid’s.
She begs Theseus to see her chest that she has scratched bloody and asks him to count the
hairs she has torn from her head in despair (364). As Ariadne senses her approaching death,
her letter attains an elevated tragic tone. She feels that Theseus will be able to rescue her from
her rage and from death. She pleads with growing urgency: “Hurry, Theseus, your help can
save my life from the scythe of death. I sense its arrival; the darkness covers my eyes: only
your return can stop it from striking” (364). While Ovid’s Ariadne concludes her address to
Theseus with the dry request to collect her bones, the French/Russian Ariadne, in keeping
with sentimentalist tradition, wants her lover to shed tears over her tomb as well.
Translation of Dusch’s Prose Heroide
While “heroide” was commonly used to refer to a poetic work, a translation of a
German prose letter by Jacob Dusch was also published with the subtitle heroide. The letter
111
was a part of Dusch’s popular collection modeled on Ovid’s Heroides called Moralische
Briefe zur Bildung des Herzens (1759) and it appeared in Russian translation in the journal
“Novosti russkoi literatury” [New Works of Russian Literature] in 1802.
284
Dusch was one of
the first translators of Pope into German and his works were known in Russia through
translations by Ivan Golenishchev-Kutuzov. His translation of Dusch’s collection of letters,
titled in Russian Nravouchitel’nye pis’ma dlia obrazovaniia serdtsa [Moral Letters for
Education of the Heart], was published in 1788. The 1802 translation of the letter “Dnii to
Dekii” was done by the obscure translator Maria Bornovolokova who signed it with her
pseudonym “M.Brnklva.”
The publication of “Dnii to Dekii” is accompanied by an editor’s note quoting the
translator’s impressions of Dusch’s letter: “The terrors of war have a special impact on one’s
tender and sensitive heart… Is there a heart more tender and more sensitive than a
woman’s?”
285
The translator clearly has women readers in mind, anticipating their strong
emotional response to the piece.
In the prose letter which is identified by the subtitle as “sent
straight from the battlefield” a man tells his friend about the death of their mutual friend,
Eucharis, whose end he witnessed in battle. While the letter departs significantly from the
subjects of love and abandonment common to Ovid and his imitators, the narrator’s personal
account of observing the death of a close friend while surrounded by fighting and bloodshed
connects readers in a similarly intimate way to an extreme emotional experience. As Bebee
points out, by insisting on constructing letters with plots, Dusch “prefers to exploit the letter’s
284
[M. Bornovolokova], trans., “Iroida. Dnii k Dekiiu,”Novosti Russkoi Literatury 2 (1802): 323-350.
285
[M. Bornovolokova], trans.,“Dnii k Dekiiu,” 323.
112
capacity for the indirect, emotional induction of moral sentiment in the reader through the
latter’s reading of letters written to others.”
286
With the Russian prose translations of these heroides, Russian readers were challenged
by a new way of writing that examined unleashed emotions, deeply hidden yearnings and
intimate thoughts of the private self in a way that powerfully tested their engagement with the
text. It invited a deep identification with the storyteller by delving into a troubled
consciousness to the point where readers could potentially lose themselves in this emotionally
charged process.
Heroides with Unclear Sources
Of the other heroides published in Russia there are several for which the search for
corresponding French originals has not yet yielded positive results. The heroides in question
feature supplications of legendary and mythological women -- Helen, Electra, Andromache,
Dido and Veturia (mother of the Roman general Coriolanus). In seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century France these heroines reigned on the stage in numerous adaptations of ancient
tragedies that were enthusiastically received by the public.
287
While depictions of these
women differ from one literary source to another, the heroides share many details with French
tragedies, and are characterized by a similar treatment of the female characters. At this point
in time it is unclear whether they are original or translated from unknown sources.
286
Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 39.
287
Lancaster, French Tragedy, 2:383.
113
“Returned Helen”
While the heroide is traditionally a written address, one of the first poems with an
unidentified source, “Vozvraschennaia Elena” [The Returned Helen], was composed as her
oral speech.
288
Like many Russian translations of Ovid’s heroides, “The Returned Helen” first
appeared with a prose introduction.
289
The title “heroide” was added when the revised poem
was published in 1779, during the peak of heroides’ popularity, under the slightly altered title
“Elena vozvraschennaia Menelaiu” [Helen Returned to Menelaus].
290
In the heroide, written in alexandrines, Helen addresses her husband, Menelaus, upon
her return from Troy and asks him to forgive her infidelity and spare her life. The monologue
alludes to the scene from Euripides’s tragedy Trojan Women in which where Helen is
depicted defending herself in her own voice.
291
Presented in the heroide as simultaneously a
powerless captive and clever manipulator, Helen laments being falsely accused of infidelity.
She portrays herself as a victim of circumstances, who was unfaithful to her husband “not by
her heart but by her fate.” Hoping to touch her husband’s heart strings, she masterfully
oscillates between asking him to kill her and declaring her unwavering love for him.
Addressing Menelaus as a tsar, a judge and husband, she engages in an imaginary dialogue
with him, probing whether he is moved by her tears and apologies. The last three lines of the
poem provide an uncharacteristic denouement pointing to a happy end:
Возможно ль те слова без жалости снести?
288
Anonymous, “Vozvraschennaia Elena,” Poleznoe uveselnie 2 (1761): 153-156. It was the second monologue
published by Useful Entertainment. The first monologue “Pech zheny Koriolana” [The Speech of Coriolanus’
Wife] appeared in Useful Entertainment in 1760 and will be discussed in conjunctions with Khvostov’s heroide.
289
Note: this is not the same heroide as Ovid’s “Helen to Paris.”
290
Anonymous, “Elena vozvraschennaia Menelaiu,” Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779): 68-74. Both
Gorokhova and Gukovskii attribute the poem to Kheraskov. See note 210.
291
Ruby Blondell, Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 187.
114
Стенанья, токи слез, не продолжались доле.
Простил супруг жену, и стал к ней страстен боле. (156)
(Who could bear such words without feeling pity?
Weeping and streams of tears could not continue.
The husband forgave the wife, and became even more passionate.)
After the first publication, the poem underwent significant editing: 80 lines were added
and the prose introduction was cut. The new version further underlined Helen’s love for her
husband and elaborated the rhetoric of her plea. Two segments were added to show the way
Helen manipulated her story to defend herself. In one, Helen tells how she watched the battle
between Paris and Menelaus, and begged Priam let her to join her husband. Her only fault was
that he didn’t let her go. In the second added segment, Helen complains that she was treated
better in captivity than she is now being treated by her husband. The denouement was also
rewritten with focus on the act of forgiveness, concluding with words of sentimentalist
wisdom which only have distant relevance to the story of Helen:
Любовь когда в сердцах пылает и горит,
Не редко ссорит их, но чаще их мирит. (74)
(When love is burning in hearts,
It often causes conflicts, but more often it reconciles them.)
In his discussion of “The Returned Helen,” Gukovskii notes that the poem’s conclusion links
it to Kheraskov’s “Armida” which ends with a similar statement (i.e. “love conquers all”).
292
292
Gukovskii, “Elegiia v XVIII veke,”106.
115
“Electra to Orestes,” Anonymous
Unlike “Helen Returned to Menelaus,” the anonymous “Elektra k Orestu” [Electra to
Orestes] follows the conventional format of the verse heroide. From the first lines, Electra
emphasizes that she writes to Orestes even though she is hardly able to keep a pen in her hand.
As in Voltaire’s Orestes (1750), the Electra of the heroide is chained and held captive by
Aegisthus, her stepfather. Also in common with Voltaire’s tragedy, Electra calls her brother,
Orestes, back from his refuge to avenge their father, Oedipus, whose tragic death haunts her
imagination.
293
Longing for her brother’s return, Electra urges him to kill Aegisthus. Electra
expresses the hope that by executing him, Orestes will be able to restore justice, but says that
if his attempt fails she is ready to end their lives and have their ashes mixed with their father’s.
“Electra to Orestes” was published twice, in 1772 and in 1779, both times with the subtitle
“heroide.”
“Andromache to Pyrrhus” by Khvostov
Like Electra, Andromache, the heroine of “Andromakha k Pirru” [Andromache to
Pyrrhus] (1788), is represented in chains and in captivity. While signed by the well known
Russian poet Khvostov,
it is also likely a translation.
294
The source for the poem – in which
Andromache, engulfed by grief over the death of her husband, Hector, and fearful that Greeks
will kill her son, begs her captor Pyrrhus to protect him, – is yet to be identified. Berdnikov
suggests that Khvostov based his heroide on a story from the third book of Virgil’s Aeneid
employed by Racine in his famous tragedy Andromache (1667).
295
While the link to Virgil is
293
For the plot summary, see Lancaster, French Tragedy, 2: 341.
294
D. Khvostov, “Andromakha k Pirru,”Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 19 (1788): 63-69.
295
Lev Berdnikov, Shuty i ostroslovy geroi bylykh vremen (Moscow: Luch, 2009), 348.
116
unsupported, “Andromache to Pyrrhus” undoubtedly relies on Racine’s tragedy Andromache,
which Khvostov translated within two years after the publication of his heroide.
296
However,
the heroide reveals no direct parallels either to the play or to Edward Jerningham’s heroic
epistle “Andromache to Pyrrhus” (1761) on which Khvostov could also have modeled his
poem.
297
Jerninham’s poem is nearly four times longer than Khvostov’s heroide and depicts
the heroine witnessing the death of her son. In Khvostov’s heroide, overwhelmed by grief
over the death of her husband and in fear for her son’s life Andromache struggles to address
Pyrrhus, and continually makes weeping asides to her husband and her son. The situation
resembles the scene in Racine’s play where Pyrrhus is irritated that Andromache is only able
to speak about her husband and her son. As in the play, Andromache recalls the moment of
her husband’s death and the destruction caused by Pyrrhus in Troy. What distinguishes the
poem from Racine’s tragedy is the treatment of Andromache. In Racine’s tragedy, Pyrrhus lets
Andromache decide her fate, promising to protect her son if she marries him. In the poem, the
heroine is depicted as completely powerless, awaiting Pyrrhus’ decision about her son’s fate
with despair and trepidation.
298
“Veturia to Coriolanus”by Khvostov
A year before he wrote “Andromache to Pyrrhus,” Khvostov published another
heroide, “Veturiia k Koriolanu” [Veturia to Coriolanus] (1787).
299
In the heroide, the mother
296
Iosif Barenbaum, Frantsuzskaia perevodnaia kniga v Rossii v XVIII veke (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), 153.
297
Edward Jerningham, “Andromache to Pyrrhus. An heroick epistle” (Chadwyck-Healey: 1992).
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:ilcs-
us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:ft:e_poetry:Z000404915:0
298
A similar treatment of Andromache is typical of Les Troyennes (1756) by Chateaubrun, another French
neoclassical tragedy well known in Russia.
299
D. Khvostov, “Veturiia k Koriolanu,” Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 15 (1787): 57-62.
117
of the legendary general exiled from Rome writes to her son insisting that he call off an attack
on his native city. This episode from Roman history is featured in the writings of Dionysius,
Livy, Plutarch, and is famously adapted by Shakespeare in the tragedy Coriolanus (1607),
well known in Russia.
“Veturia to Coriolanus” followed the publication of two addresses to Coriolanus
written by Shishkin and Sumarokov. In Shishkin’s poem, published posthumously in 1760,
the wife, not mother of Coriolanus addresses him in the form of a speech.
300
While ancient
writers and Shakespeare emphasize the role of the mother, Shishkin’s poem, written in
alexandrines, is more closely aligned with two seventeenth-century French tragedies about
Coriolanus by Chapton and Chevreau in which it was the wife who “acquires a prominence
almost equal to that of her husband or her mother-in-law.”
301
In her passionate and hostile
monologue, Coriolanus’ wife demands that her husband acknowledge his guilt and surrender
to the Romans. Within two months Shishkin’s poem was followed by Sumarokov’s twenty-
eight line verse translation of Livy’s account in which Coriolanus is addressed by his
mother.
302
While it is not clear whether Sumarokov translated Livy or some French
intermediary text, the monologue includes a stage direction emphasizing its declamatory
nature. Comparing translations of Shishkin and Sumarokov, Gukovskii points to the similarity
of the meter, but suggests that Sumarokov provided a more exemplary verse translation than
that of Shishkin.
303
300
[Ivan Shishkin], “Pech zheny Koriolana” [The Speech of Coriolanus’ Wife], Poleznoe uveselenie 1 (1760): 30.
301
I refer to Chapoton’s Le veritable Coriolan (1638) and in Chevreau’s Coriolan (1638). See introduction to The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Vol. 37, ed. Sir Sidney Lee (Renaissance Press, 1907), xv.
302
A.P. Sumarokov, “Iz Tita Liviia,” Poleznoe uveselenie 1 (1760): 111.
303
Gukovskii, “Towards the Problem of Russian Classicism,” 60.
118
“Veturia to Coriolanus” published by Khvostov in 1787 gestures to a French source.
For example, in the heroide the mother writes that she embraces his knees. This parallels a
similar moment in Chaligny’s tragedy Coriolan staged in France in the 1770’s.
304
In the play,
Veturia warns her son that his attack on Rome will kill her. In the heroide, Veturia warns four
times of a similar fate for herself: “I’ll go to the tomb,” “I will be devoured by fierce hell,”
“my blood will flow in the streets,” and, finally, if Coriolanus enters Rome, he “will be
walking on [her] ashes.”
While Sumarokov’s monologue was focused on Veturia’s personal tragedy, this
heroide, which is over a hundred lines long, describes the emotional turmoil of a proud Roman
mother who simultaneously sees her son as a great hero, an unjustly exiled leader, and a traitor
who attacks his own compatriots. Khvostov’s Veturia is shamed by her fellow Romans as
well as her family, who reproach her for giving birth to Coriolanus. The mother is depicted
begging her son to resolve the situation without compromising his obligations to the Volscians
by making peace between them and the Romans.
305
“Dido to Aeneas” (1793) Translated by Ivan Iankovich-de Mirievo
The heroide “Didona Eneiu” [Dido to Aeneas] was published by the poet and translator
Ivan Iankovich-de Mirievo in 1793. Since Dido is featured both in Ovid’s Heroides and
Virgil’s Aeneid, scholars have suggested the poem is a translation of one of these works.
306
However, a close analysis of the poem points once again to a more recent French source.
304
Lancaster, French Tragedy, 1:107.
305
This is the only instance where the monologue of Coriolanus’s mother from Shakespeare’s play resembles
Khvostov’s heroide.
306
Sviasov and Levin attribute it as a translation of VII Ovid’s Heroides and Kukushkina suggests that he
rendered an excerpt of Virgil Aeneid, but comparing the translations with those texts prove this. See note 52.
119
Dido, a heroine of equal popularity in France and Russia, frequently appeared in tragedies and
in numerous poetic adaptations. In her books on French heroides, Carrocci lists at least five
versions of Dido’s address to Aeneas published between 1768 and 1786.
307
While the source
for the poem has not yet been identified, “Dido to Aeneas,” translated by Iankovich-de
Mirievo, shows strong links to eighteenth-century French tragedy, most notably to the last
monologue of the heroine in the tragedy Dido (1734) by Le Franc de Pompinignan.
308
As in
the tragedy, Dido in the heroide stabs herself with a sword and says farewell to her lover.
309
Also in the heroide, Dido refers to Iarbe’s sword (Iarbe, Aeneas rival, is featured in most of
the French plays about Dido, but not mentioned in Ovid or Virgil). As in Pompinignan’s
tragedy, Iankovich-de Mirievo’s heroine concludes her lament by forgiving Aeneas his
betrayal. Dido is presented as a conventional abandoned heroine: she says that her lover had
enabled her to breathe, and wishes Aeneas had killed her before he left.
“Melandr to Litseda,” Anonymous
The heroide “Melandr k Litsede” [Melandr to Litseda] which appeared in Fashion
Monthly at the peak of heroides’ popularity, differs from the other poems reviewed in this
chapter.
310
It features a male narrator and it lacks a tragic overtone. Like many sentimentalist
novels and dramas, the poem examines issues of friendship, virtue, faithfulness, and love. In
the heroide, Melandr writes to his beloved in his own defense after his brother has spread
rumors that he has been unfaithful with his brother’s fiancé. Melandr expresses confidence
307
Carocci, Les héroïdes , 348-352; See also her discussion on adaptations of Dido, 68-72.
308
For details about the play, see Lancaster, French Tragedy, 1:174. The play was known in Russia.
309
In tragedies by Metastasio and Kniazhnin the abandoned Dido threw herself in a fire.
310
Anonymous, “Iroida. Melandr k Litsede,” Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779): 85-89.
120
and trust that Litseda still loves him, emphasizing that true love goes hand in hand with
honesty.
Original Russian Heroides with European Sources
Tremendously popular in Russia, French novels inspired the poets Andrei Bukharskii,
Nikolai Gnedich and Aleksandr Pisarev not only to translate heroides, but to compose their
own. Following his translation of La Harpe’s heroide featuring the Mexican ruler
Montezuma, discussed earlier, Bukharskii composed his own heroide based on Marmontel’s
novel The Incas: or, The Destruction of the Empire of Peru (1777). Gnedich’s heroide also
reflects on the struggle between Incas and Spaniards, while Pisarev, who translated one of the
earliest French heroides, “Armida to Renod” by Colardeau, wrote several short heroides based
on the French epistolary novel Letters of a Peruvian Woman.
Bukharskii: From Translating La Harpe to Adapting Marmontel
Some French heroides drew their plots and characters from history with a particular
emphasis on incidents of tyranny, war and intolerance. The trend began with La Harpe’s
heroide “Montézume á Cortez” [ Montezuma to Cortez] of 1759 in which the Aztec ruler,
Montezuma, writes defiantly to the Spanish Conquistador, Cortez, from his prison cell on the
day he is to be killed. Along with Montezuma, La Harpe dramatized the struggles of stoic
characters like Cato, Hannibal and Socrates. La Harpe found heroides’ “usual emphasis on
love rather insipid,” and he set out to depict “great characters of history struggling alone but
with dignity with a destiny that would change the fate of mankind.”
311
In the opinion of Todd,
311
Christopher Todd, Voltaire's Disciple: Jean-François de la Harpe (London, 1972), 144.
121
however, La Harpe’s heroes lack personality and reveal the poet’s “inability to vary the
tone.”
312
Indeed La Harpe abandoned the genre after 1767 admitting that “it was difficult to
have only one character speaking for any length of time without falling into ‘les lieux
communs et la declamation’” (commonplaces and declamation).
313
La Harpe’s “Montezuma to Cortez” was probably inspired by Piron’s tragedy,
Fernand Cortez ou Montézume (1744), which depicts the Spanish invasion of the Aztec
Empire and focuses in particular on the day of Montezuma’s execution in captivity.
314
Andrei
Bukharskii translated La Harpe’s heroide in 1787, rendering Montezuma’s rant and rage in
alexandrines nearly thirty years after it was first published.
Bukharskii may have chosen to translate La Harpe in response to the immense
popularity of Marmontel’s historic novel The Incas which engaged Russian readers with the
subject and personages of the Spanish invasions. Translated by poet and writer Maria
Sushkova within a year of its publication in France, the Russian edition of the novel went
through four editions within twenty years.
315
The novel was set in the Inca Empire and
featured Montezuma and Cortez along with the Peruvian priestess Cora and her lover, the
Spaniard Alonzo.
316
For his own original heroide, “Kora k Alonzu” [Cora to Alonzo] (1793),
Bukharskii drew on Marmontel’s novel.
317
312
Todd, Voltaire's Disciple, 144.
313
Ibid.
314
Lancaster, French Tragedy, 1:159.
315
“Sushkova, M.V.,”in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, 629.
316
Montezuma, the Aztec ruler, was apparently conflated with the Incan Empire and Cortez with Pisaro in an
obvious historical inaccuracy.
317
Bukharskii, Andrei, “Kora k Alonzu, iroida” (St. Petersburg: v tipografii I. Krylova s tovarishchi, 1793.
122
Bukharskii’s heroide was published as a separate pamphlet with an introduction in
which the author acknowledged that his heroide didn’t have the happy ending of Marmontel’s
novel, but argued that in his opinion the story needed a pitiful and tragic conclusion.
318
It is
very likely that Bukharsy’s interpretation of the love plot, which in the novel occupies only
few pages, was also influenced by Kotzebue’ popular tragedy Die Sonnenjungfrau [The
Virgin of the Sun] (1791), also adapted from Marmontel’s novel, with its particular focus on
the love between Cora and Alonzo. Frequently staged in theatres across Russia, the play
contributed to the popularity of the romantic couple, Cora and Alonzo. In Bukharskii’s
heroide, Cora writes to Alonzo a few days before her execution. In the introduction
Bukharskii asserts that if the reader notices a commonality with Marmontel, then the author
will be satisfied.
“Peruvian to a Spaniard” by Nikolai Gnedich
Interest in the war between the Incas and the Spanish invaders resurfaced again in
1805 in the poem “Peruanets k Ispantsy” [A Peruvian to a Spaniard] by Nikolai Gnedich.
319
Mostly known as a translator of The Illiad, Gnedich, prior to writing the poem, had authored a
novel on a related theme: Don Corrado de Guerra or the Spirit of Vengeance and the
Barbarity of the Spaniards (1803).
320
Gnedich didn’t call his poem “A Peruvian to a Spaniard”
a heroide; it was Ostolopov who referred to it in this way in the entry on “heroide” and
published it as an example of the genre in his literary encyclopedia.
321
While scholars
318
Bukharskii, Andrei, “Kora k Alonzu, iroida,”n.p.
319
N. Gnedich, “Peruanetz k ispantsu,” “Tsvetnik,” part. IV, no. 11 (1809): 166.
320
David Punter, ed., A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 71.
321
Ostolopov, Slovar’ novoi i staroi poezii, 1:178.
123
acknowledge the influence of Marmontel’s Incas on the poem,
322
it clearly follows the format
and tone of La Harpe’s heroide “Montezuma to Cortez” translated by Bukharskii.
Both Montezumas of La Harpe’s heroide and Gnedich’s poem address their enemies
from captivity.
323
In La Harpe’s poem Montezuma depicts himself as a martyr who hopes
other nations will avenge his death and remove the Spaniards, whereas in Gnedich’s poem, the
Peruvian ruler imagines he will survive and live to see the day when he and other slaves will
rise and overthrow their oppressors. In the early nineteenth century, Russian poets used the
theme of colonial slavery to disguise criticism of serfdom in their own country, and Gnedich’s
“A Peruvian to a Spaniard” stands out as a forerunner to the civic poetry of the
Decembrists.
324
The authoritative critic Vissarion Belinskii praised the energy of the poem’s
feelings and expression while citing “rhetoric and declamation” inherited from the eighteenth
century as its weakness.
325
Belinskii’s opinion reflects the typical nineteenth-century disregard
for the heroide as an archaic form.
Pisarev’s Adaptation of Peruvian Letters
As in all of Europe, epistolary novels were popular in Russia, and Graffigny’s Letters
of a Peruvian Woman was no exception. The novel consists of letters written by a Peruvian
woman named Zilia who is abducted from a Peruvian temple and taken to Spain where she is
then rescued by a French officer and taken to France. Zilia addresses her letters to her Incan
lover Aza, who was also abducted to Spain, and shares with him her critical and discerning
322
A.M. Kukulevich, V.N. Orlov, “Gnedich,” in Istoriia russkoi literatury, (Moscow, 1941), 5: 420.
323
In Gnedich’s poem, the narrator is unnamed, but assumed to be Montezuma.
324
See commentaries to the poem in N.I. Gnedich, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1956).
325
A.M. Kukulevich ,"Gnedich," 420.
124
observations of European life. According to Mallinson, Zilia’s letters offer a clever
exploration of cultural differences while avoiding direct criticism of France or idealizing Peru.
Unlike a traditional sentimental novel which ends in marriage, Graffigny’s novel
unexpectedly asserts the heroine’s emotional independence from both of her suitors, the
French and Peruvian, highlighting Zilia’s ultimate autonomy and critical mind. The
unconventional ending spawned two companion works that sought to provide a more
traditional resolution.
326
The first, an anonymous collection of nine letters, undermines Zilia’s
autonomy and recasts her friendship with the French officer as a presumed romance. The
second, a novel, Lettres d'Aza ou d'un Péruvien [Letters of Aza] by Hugary de Lamarche-
Courmont, rewrites the text from Aza’s point of view, resolving several complications,
including Aza’s conversion to Christianity, that pull the lovers apart in Graffigny’s novel.
Both subsequent works were often published along with Graffigny’s original novel.
327
In Russia, Letters of a Peruvian Woman was translated and published in 1791. In 1825
Aleksandr Pisarev offered his vision of the story in a collection of short heroides called
“Pis’ma dvukh zhitelei Peru” [Letters of Two Peruvians] published in his Evenings in
Kaluga.
328
The five letters in verse are based on two letters of Zilia from Graffigny’s novel
and three letters adapted from Letters of Aza (including two letters to Zilia and one to Aza’s
male friend). Even though Pisarev doesn’t identify his letters as heroides, they follow the
genre very closely, revealing the emotional turmoil of the separated lovers. Like the
companion works to Letters of a Peruvian Woman, Pisarev adheres to the traditional love
326
Jonathan Mallinson, Introduction to Françoise Graffigny, Letters of a Peruvian Woman Letters of a Peruvian
Woman. Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xii-xxii.
327
Mallinson, Introduction, xxii –xxiii.
328
A. Pisarev, “Pis’ma dvukh zhitelei Peru,” in Kaluzhskie vechera (Moscow: V Universitetskoi Tipographii, 1825),
1: 99-108.
125
story, representing Zilia as an object of love, defined by her lover and dependent on his
feelings toward her. While Graffigny’s novel clearly shows that Zilia doesn’t convert to
Christianity, Pisarev concludes his retelling of the novel’s plot, described in his preface to the
poem, with the following: “They [Zilia and Aza], living in Europe, strove to enrich their
hearts with Christian virtues, and their minds with useful knowledge.”
329
The Unconventional Approach to the Heroide in Poems by Khvostov and Bunina
While the Russian heroides drawn from French novels reflect the approach to the form
practiced by French authors, two heroides by Khvostov and Bunina, despite their differences,
demonstrate the poets’ attempts to infuse the form with new content and context. The poem
by Khvostov titled “Geroida na smert’ Marii Antuanetty, korolevy frantsuzskoi 1794 goda” [A
Heroide on the Death of Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France] was his third heroide and
more than likely an original work.
330
In order to fit his poetic reaction to the bloody death of
the French monarch into a heroide, Khvostov takes significant liberties with the form. While
the heroide’s narrator is supposed to be one famous character addressing another, the speaker
here lamenting the death of the queen is unidentified, and directs his plea to several
addressees, including Racine, Louis XVI, his wife, and the French revolutionaries.
Khvostov’s narrator condemns the revolutionaries for their cruel acts, describing the execution
of Louis XVI and presenting his wife’s execution as the King’s second death. The poet
praises Louis’s meek spirit and the beauty and innocence of Marie Antoinette while depicting
the French revolutionaries as cruel and bloodthirsty.
329
Ibid., 99.
330
Dmitrii Khvostov, “Geroida na smert’ Marii Antuanetty, korolevy frantsuzskoi 1794 goda,” in Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii grafa D.I.Khvostova (St. Petersburg, 1834) 111-115.
126
Anna Bunina’s poem “Iunomu Polluksu” [To the Youthful Pollux] published in the
collection Neopytnaia Muza [The Inexperienced Muse] (1809) is more closely aligned with
the themes of a conventional heroide, but like Khvostov’s also features an unknown speaker.
In the poem, which Bunina identified as a translation, an unnamed woman longs for a young
and beautiful man named Pollux. While the source of the poem is not established, Rosslyn
suggests that Bunina may have intentionally disguised an original work to protect herself from
the criticism of venturing onto a new creative path.
331
Nineteenth-century bibliographies
classified the poem as an elegy, and it was Vil’gel’m Kukhelbeker, the Russian poet and
critic, who identified Bunina’s poem as a heroide.
332
Rosslyn justly notes that in Bunina’s
poem “classical references hardly veil the modern world view,”
333
and the poem also reveals
the influence of Pope’s heroide “Eloisa to Abelard.”
Despite the fact that Bunina’s poem is significantly shorter than Pope’s work, it
includes some similar motifs. Like Eloisa, Bunina’s heroine presents herself as a tormented
soul isolated from the world, lamenting as if from the grave or a gloomy prison and calling for
Pollux. In Pope’s epistle, Eloisa’s thinking is confused as she tries to overcome her earthly
desires; likewise, Bunina blurs the line between dream and reality, presenting her heroine as
unsure about her desire to see Pollux. When he appears in front of her (perhaps in a dream?),
she immediately sends him away, suggesting he join his lover Camilla, who “sings about the
reign of love” at a clavichord. In a stylistically unexpected twist, just for an instant, the reader
is taken from the dark Gothic cell into a salon in Paris or St. Petersburg. The ending of
Bunina’s poem also draws a striking parallel to Pope’s poem. Like Eloisa, “invited by the
331
Rosslyn, Anna Bunina, 114.
332
V.K. Kuchelbecker, “Vzgliad na tekushchuiu slovesnost' v Rossii” [Glance at Current Literature in Russia],
Nevskii zritel’, March (1820): 78-89.
333
Rosslyn, Anna Bunina, 103.
127
ghost to embrace death,”
334
the heroine of the Russian poem sees a vision of a dead female
friend as an angel who urges her to abandon her desires and follow her, presumably into non-
existence. Despite the apparent connection between Bunina’s narrator and Pope’s Eloisa, the
Russian poet sets her heroine apart from the traditional “abandoned woman,” depicting her as
completely paralyzed by memories and hallucinations, highlighting her apathy and
unwillingness to argue her cause.
Conclusions
The men and women narrators of European heroides suffer from abandonment as
much as Ovid’s heroines do: they are separated from loved ones by distance or by death; but
reuniting with a lover is no longer the single driving force behind their speeches or writings.
Not limited to representing lovers or spouses, European heroides depict relationships between
narrators and interlocutors which cover a wide range of familial, social, and political
affiliations. Eloisa and the Portuguese nun are negotiators between physical and spiritual love.
Helen tries to persuade her husband, Menelaus, to spare her life. Veturia asks her son, the
general, Coriolanus, not to attack Rome. Electra urges her brother to avenge their father’s
death and Andromache asks Pyrrhus to save her son’s life. The consequence of writing about
such complex relationships is that the narrator must tell a more complicated story and the
European heroides are charged with maintaining a pitch of intense emotion while telling their
stories in a compelling way. While self-representation is a key element in Ovid’s heroides, in
eighteenth-century ones, descriptions of the heroines’ appearance are limited and
overshadowed by their process of thinking.
334
Gillian Beer, “‘Our Unnatural No-Voice’: The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women’s Gothic,” Yearbook of English
Studies 12 (1982): 131.
128
The portrait in Kheraskov’s “Ariadne to Theseus” of a soaking wet woman standing on
a rock scanning the swollen sea, with her hair torn in rage and despair, doesn’t resurface in
these eighteenth-century heroides. In striking contrast to Ovid’s heroines who are not confined
by physical spaces, many write from prison or monastery cells, often in chains. They offer
only glimpses of how they look: occasionally with breast covered in blood, with hands almost
unable to hold a pen. Armida hopes that after her suicide her hair will mix with streams of
blood and flow towards her lover. This image could hardly be called a portrait, but is an
important detail in her storytelling, assisting the reader in visualizing her passion. In the
heroide “Electra to Orest,” Electra’s only self-description is that “I fell half-dead at the tomb
of my father,” however, she vividly describes her dead father’s “pale face” and says that his
shadow approached her so close that she could count his wounds.
In the European heroides, portraiture is replaced by narrators’ contemplative thinking
channeled through their letter-writing. Gabrielle de Vergy, the imprisoned victim of forced
marriage, not only laments her fate, she also questions the severity of her punishment. Her
crime she defines as “feeling passions for my lover, but staying faithful to my husband.” She
believes that passion is natural, and wonders why she is being punished for it. Byblis also
questions the gods’ intentions, defending her passion for her brother and asking why it is that
incest, a natural occurrence in nature, is taboo in society.
The internal monologue which develops in European heroides is offset by chilling
depictions of violence. Eloisa recollects seeing Abelard castrated in a puddle of blood.
Barnevelt describes to a friend in vivid detail how in order to fulfill the vicious demands of his
beloved, he stabbed his benefactor and upon seeing the open wound put his mouth on it letting
the victim’s blood into his body. In the minutes before drinking a deadly poison, Gabrielle de
Vergy reveals that she has just unintentionally eaten her lover’s heart. As a combination of
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emotional storytelling with thrilling narrative and shocking details, these heroides provide an
intense read.
The passionate addresses, contemplative thoughts, and shocking plots of European
heroides combined to create a vision of the human psyche. As Russian literature moved away
from the universality of neoclassical themes readers reached toward material that expressed
“experience specific to an individual.”
335
The heroide provided a rare vehicle for this
development, offering as it did a kind of blueprint for the relationship between readers and
texts, significant if one considers the formative moment Russian literature had entered in the
second half of the eighteenth century. The narrator’s plea in “The Death of Clarissa” “to
imagine his life” mirrored the intention of writers who brought together many elements into a
narrative in the hope of sharing it, making it meaningful and evoking sympathy from readers.
The structure of the heroide helped to solidify the necessary connection between writers and
their readers. The final lines of “The Death of Clarissa” capture this link eloquently:
Войди ты в нашу страсть, воспомни, друг, о нас.
Представь себе, представь прискорбность нестерпиму
Того, кто был любим, и потерял любиму.
Войди в печальные и страстные сердца,
Что разлучилися дождавшися венца.
Представь ты варвара моей любезной мстяща;
Представь любовника отмстить ему хотяща;
Представь мой плачь, мой стон, отчаянны слова,
Какова описал, представь мя такова:
Отчаянна во всем, надежды всей лишенна,
Несчастна, мучима, гонима, сокрушенна. (172)
(Enter into our passion, remember about us, my friend.
Imagine, imagine unbearable sorrow
Of someone who was loved, and lost his beloved.
Enter into sad and passionate hearts,
Separated just before the wedding.
Imagine the barbarian who executed revenge on my lover;
Imagine my cry, my moan, my desperate words,
335
Rosslyn, Anna Bunina, 115.
130
Which I described, imagine me thus:
Desperate, all hopes lost,
Unhappy, tortured, persecuted and grieving.)
The narrator of this passage from “The Death of Clarissa” captures the essence of the
heroide form, and his desire to tell the story as vividly as possible to his friend and to stir his
emotions mirrors the broader effort by writers to engage their readers with greater plot detail
and nuance of feeling. The urgent repetition of the imperitive “imagine” is likewise reflective
of the increased demand that writers made for a greater part of their reader’s imagination, a
deeper level of involvement in the story, as the national Russian literature was gaining
momentum. The Russian translations and imitations of European heroides provide insight into
this formative period of Russian poetry and prose when the emotional and passionate
individual-self,
336
both of woman and man, began to emerge and express itself within more
elaborate stories.
The main goal of this chapter has been to provide an overview of the translated and
adapted heroides published in Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which
have been brought together as a corpus and analyzed for the first time. The next chapter will
focus on: two original heroides by Alexander Sumarokov; one by Petr Karabanov; and most,
importantly, on the collection of nine heroides by the pioneering Russian woman-poet,
Ekaterina Urusova. Urusova not only created heroides employing Russian literary sources, but
attempted to depart from the conventions, particularly in the area of the women’s
representation, that were established by Ovid and his European imitators.
336
I borrow the expression “individual-self” from Amanda Ewington, introduction to A Bilingual Edition, 25.
131
Chapter Three: Original Russian Heroides
“Представь меня в моря повергнуться хотящую” (Imagine me who wants to throw
myself in the sea), wrote Kheraskov, adapting Ovid’s heroide “Ariadne to Theseus.”
337
The
characteristic feature of Ovid’s heroides was the call of an abandoned heroine to her absent
lover to imagine her, distraught by grief, with tangled hair and eyes red from crying. This
formulaic rhetorical device, usually including a description of hair, breast, and eyes,
highlighting the unattractive appearance of a formerly beautiful woman, was used by the
heroine as a last attempt to bring her lover back by evoking his pity. The small corpus of
original Russian heroides also includes this device, although male and female authors employ
it differently. For Alexander Sumarokov and Petr Karabanov, a heroide offered a convenient
framework for reinforcing conventional gender roles. For the female author of heroides,
Ekaterina Urusova, it was an opportunity to reclaim woman’s voice and to challenge
traditional assumptions about women.
One of the main characteristics of the original Russian heroides is their strong reliance
on theatre. “Osnelda k Zavlokhu” [Osnelda to Zavlokh] and “Zavlokh k Osnelde” [Zavlokh to
Osnelda] (1769), the first original Russian heroides, were composed by Sumarokov, using as a
source his own first tragedy, Khorev. Karabanov’s heroide “Aniuta k Viktoru” [Aniuta to
Victor] (1787) came as a follow-up to the popular comic opera Aniuta (1772) by Mikhail
Popov. In between, in 1777, Ekaterina Urusova published a collection entitled Iroidy muzam
posviashtennye [Heroides Dedicated to the Muses] (1777). It was the very first volume of
poetry published by a Russian woman poet. It included nine heroides, the largest number of
337
Mikhail Kheraskov, “Ariadna k Teseiu,” Svobodnyia Chasy 6 (1763): 380.
132
heroides ever written by a Russian author, as well as a programmatic invocation providing a
framework for this collection. Three of Urusova’s heroides were drawn from popular Russian
tragedies by Rzhevskii and Khrapovitskii.
A strong connection to the theatre is not uncommon to the genre of heroide. While
some of Ovid’s heroides were based on classical tragedies, eighteenth-century French
practitioners of heroides often drew their subjects from modern plays. As we have seen,
Claude Joseph Dorat based one of his most popular heroides, “Lettre de Barnevelt, dans sa
prison, à Truman, son ami” (1763), on George Lillo’s The London Merchant; and Dorat’s
collection of heroides, Les Victimes de l'amour, ou lettres de quelques amantes célébres
[Victims of Love, or Letters From Some Famous Lovers] (1776), also drew on contemporary
tragedies.
Original Russian heroides when compared to their sources not only shed light on the
cultural significance of the genre, but reveal various strategies their authors use to represent
gender roles, and most interestingly, to portray female characters. Portrayals of women in
Urusova’s collection of heroides represent a significant departure from the conventions
established by Ovid’s and European heroides. The Russian poetess not only widened the
heroide’s thematic range, but built on and subverted entrenched ideas about women, virtue,
and gender roles. While all Russian heroides demonstrate strong reliance on Ovid’s model of
the abandoned woman, in striking contrast to the heroides of Sumarokov and Karabanov,
Urusova’s works reflect a sophisticated play on traditional versus non-traditional depictions,
revealing a concerted effort to change, at least to some degree, the established image of
women.
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Heroides by Alexander Sumarokov
Sumarokov’s Biography
The first Russian heroides were composed by Aleksandr Sumarokov, one of the first
professional writers and among the most important literary figures in eighteenth-century
Russia. The renowned poet, playwright, and director of the Russian Theatre, Sumarokov was
also the editor of the first private Russian literary journal, The Industrious Bee, which in 1759
published the first Russian translation of a heroide by Ovid, “Phyllis to Demophon,”
composed by Grigorii Kozitzkii. By 1768 when he published his own heroides, Sumarokov
was well established in his literary career; he had “provided models of virtually every current
European poetic and dramatic genre,” including librettos for the first Russian operas and other
valuable contributions to Russian letters.
338
He had by that time authored seven out of his
nine Russian tragedies, and already influenced a younger generation of poets commonly
referred to as the “Sumarokov school.”
339
Sources for Sumarokov’s Khorev
Sumarokov’s two heroides, “Geroida: Osnelda k Zavlokhu” and “Geroida: Zavlokh k
Osnelde,” which were first published in his 1768 collection Raznye stikhotvoreniia
[Miscellaneous Poems] along with works in other genres, such as odes, traditional elegies, and
eclogues, were based on his play, Khorev. Written in 1747, the play purports to draw on
ancient Russian history. According to Berkov, there is no such story in any chronicles that
Sumarokov had access to. Stennik argues that “for Russian eighteenth-century drama the
338
Marcus Levitt, “Sumarokov: Life and Works,” in Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston:
Academic Studies Press, 2009), 13.
339
A term coined by G. A Gukovskii. On this see G. A Gukovskii, “Lomonosov, Sumarokov, shkola Sumarokova,”
in Rannie raboty po istorii russkoi poezii XVIII veka (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001), 40-71.
134
national past took the place of classical mythology.”
340
From the moment the play was
published it was criticized by Trediakovskii, Sumarokov’s rival, for lack of authenticity and
for open borrowing from Racine and Corneille.
341
Sumarokov didn’t deny the accusations. In
fact, he was a proud borrower of such great models.
342
Khorev enjoyed huge success, and
became a staple of the Russian stage.
Tragedy vs. Heroides
In Khorev, the struggle over the throne leads the lovers, Osnelda and Khorev, to a
tragic death. The deposed king, Zavlokh, Osnelda’s father, forbids his daughter to marry
Khorev, his conqueror’s brother. Both heroides represent letters which play a key role in the
plot, raising suspicion and precipitating Osnelda’s death, but they are not quoted in the text of
the play. Closely related to and consistent with the play, Sumarokov’s heroides don’t offer any
digressions from the plot or variation on the treatment of the characters.
In her plea to her father, Osnelda reveals shame and guilt for loving his enemy. She
demonstrates awareness that she is a victim of the (conventional neoclassical) conflict
between love and duty. Even though she is overwhelmed with guilt, Osnelda addresses a
concrete request to her father. She begs him to end his enmity and allow her union with
Khorev. In Sumarokov’s second heroide, Zavlokh responds to his daughter with the
ultimatum:
Когда ты дочь моя – так будь великодушна!
340
Cited in Marcus Levitt, Visual Dominant, 84. For other aspects of Russian tragedy, see Levitt’s discussion on
pp. 84-85.
341
M.S. Grinberg and B.A. Uspenskii, “Literaturnaia voina Trediakovskogo i Sumarokova v 1740-kh-nachale
1750-kh godov,” Russian Literature 31, no.2 (1992): 135-271.
342
Amanda Ewington, A Voltaire for Russia: A. P. Sumarokov’s Journey from Poet-Critic to Russian Philosophe
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 222.
135
А если ты мне враг – Хореву будь послушна!”(169)
(If you are my daughter – then be a magnanimous soul!
And if you are my enemy – obey Khorev!)
While it is customary for lovers in tragedies to be victims of parental hostility, Sumarokov’s
choice to compose the heroides as an exchange between father and daughter, rather than
between lovers, is an unusual one. Marsh, in her article “An Image of Their Own,” claims
that the portrayal of the “father-daughter relationship is relatively uncommon for the Russian
literary canon.”
343
However, at least four of Sumarokov’s tragedies depict tension between
fathers and daughters. Vishnevskaia suggests that Sumarokov was a pioneer in representing
women in his plays insofar as there were virtually no indigenous literary models available to
him; she notes that the medieval epic, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, with its famous depiction
of Iaroslvana, who later became a model for the representation of the unhappy Russian
woman-lover, had not yet been discovered.
344
Nevertheless, Osnelda’s address to her father reveals Sumarokov’s awareness of
conventions used by Ovid in representing his female narrators, among them the one with
which we opened this chapter. When Osnelda tries to evoke her father’s pity, she uses
rhetoric borrowed from Ovid, asking him to “imagine” her overcome by grief and suffering.
Osnelda describes herself as tortured by guilt and regret:
Вообрази меня ты падшу на колени
И пораженную ужасною судьбой,
В отчаяньи своем стенящу пред тобой,
Рожденья час и день клянущу злом тревоги
И омывающу твои слезами ноги!
Во образе моем представь ты тени мрак,
343
Rosalind Marsh, “An Image of their Own?: Feminism, Revisionism and Russian Culture,” in Women and
Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York: Bergahn Books, 1998), 20.
344
Vishnevskaia, Aplodismenty v proshloe, 208.
136
Ланиты бледные и возмущенный зрак! (167)
(Imagine me fallen on my knee
And stricken by terrible Fate,
Wailing in despair in front of you,
Cursing the evil time and day of my birth
And washing your feet with my tears!
Imagine me as a dark shadow,
My pale cheeks and exasperated gaze!)
Osnelda paints herself “as a dark shadow” with “pale cheeks and an exasperated gaze,” while
washing her father’s feet with tears. These motifs were first presented by Ovid in “Ariadne to
Theseus,” and expanded by Kheraskov in his 1763 translation of Ovid’s heroide examined
earlier. Osnelda concludes with a plea to her father which foreshadows the play’s ending:
А если пред отцом Оснельда тщетно стонет,
Так смерть моя твое удобней сердце тронет. (167)
(If Osnelda moans in front of her father in vain,
Then my death will more likely touch your heart.)
Both in tragedy and in Ovid’s heroides, suicide is the ultimate resort for female characters
unable to reunite with their lovers. Osnelda’s plea follows the same pattern: if her father won’t
let her be with the man she loves, she will end her life. Sumarokov’s heroides reveal strong
connection to his tragedies, as they share a common meter (alexandrines), poetics and terms of
the conflict. As he adapts the exchanges between father and daughter into the form of
heroides, he also employed devices from Ovid’s heroides in the representation of his heroine.
137
Karabanov and His Heroide
The next original Russian heroide, “Aniuta to Victor,” relies heavily on Ovid’s devices
in the representation of an abandoned women. The poem was published anonymously in
Zerkalo sveta [Mirror of the World] in 1787 and later attributed to the poet Petr Karabanov
(1764-1829), a member of the Russian Academy.
345
Petr Karabanov was a much lesser known
figure than Sumarokov. However, he was nevertheless an active poet who was published in
almost every literary magazine of the time, albeit anonymously, with some of his poems
turned into songs, and Karabanov also translated from French. His version of Voltaire’s Alzire
was published twice, but was frequently criticized for its use of archaic language.
346
The
heroide “Aniuta to Victor” represents his only known attempt in the genre.
347
Aniuta and Victor were the main characters of the popular comic opera Aniuta, staged
in 1772, which is considered to be the first Russian comic opera. Mikhail Popov, its author,
was a successful translator of French comedies. Not surprisingly, his original work draws on
the plot of Charles Simon Favart’s Annete et Lubin (1762), a French comic opera that had
already been translated in Russian by Prince Kozlovskii.
348
Popov made significant efforts to
Russianize Aniuta: among the main characters he showcased peasants who spoke as in real
life and he also incorporated folk songs into the opera. Contemporary social injustices and
class tensions were also brought to the Russian stage for the first time. Aniuta is a story about
345
Here and throughout I will refer to the publication: [Petr Karabanov], “Iroida: Anuita k Viktoru,” Zerkalo
Sveta, 4 (1787): 209-217. The authorship was established by N. M. Petrovskii by comparing the poem to the one
published in Karabanov’s Collection of Poems in 1801 under the title “Poslanie Aniuty k Viktoru” [An Epistle of
Aniuta to Victor]. N. M. Petrovskii, “Bibliographicheskie zametki o russkikh zhurnalakh XVIII v.,” Izvestiia
Otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, v.12, book 2 (1907): 320-321.
346
Barenbaum, Frantsuzskaia perevodnaia kniga, 114.
348
Iurii Vladimirovich Stennik, “M. I. Popov,” in Marcus C. Levitt, ed., Early Modern Russian Writers: Late
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 310-311.
138
love between a nobleman, Victor, and Aniuta, a noble woman raised among peasants, who
escapes an unfavorable marriage to a fellow peasant when Victor discovers her noble origins.
Aniuta is one of the first empowered female characters, a Russian Cinderella, who not only
wins the faithful love of the charming Victor but in the end becomes more or less of an equal
to him by discovering her noble origins.
Although a comic opera was an unusual choice for a heroide, it is likely that
Karabanov wanted to capitalize on its popularity and exploit a well-recognizable pair of
characters. In order to fit Aniuta into the genre of heroide, Karabanov needed to rework the
story. The choices that he made in adapting the comic opera for a heroide reinforce the form
as a convenient framework for constructing conventional gender roles. In order to turn a
comedy into a tragedy and conform to the genre of heroide, Karabanov made basic changes to
the plot which allowed him to turn Aniuta into an abandoned woman. While the opera
concludes with the happy marriage of Aniuta and Victor, in Karabanov’s heroide, Aniuta is
abandoned. The heroide reveals a conflict between Aniuta and Victor from the very start, as
she declares:
Хоть я раба твоя; но ты меня любил,
Я все тебе верна; но ты мне изменил.
349
(Although I am your slave, you loved me;
I am still faithful to you; but you betrayed me.)
Karabanov further infuses the conflict with social tension, but his Aniuta never discovers her
noble origins. Victor leaves her without providing any explanation and Aniuta believes that he
has left her for a noble girl because of her low social status. During her affair with Victor,
Aniuta enjoys the means to “be a mother” to the peasants, but once she is abandoned this
pleasure is taken from her. Filled with regret, Aniuta decides she will give all of Victor’s
349
[Karabanov], “Iroida: Anuita k Viktoru,” 209.
139
expensive presents (jewelry) to the poor and seek her own peace in poverty. In Karabanov’s
heroide, class tensions thus serve to add to the heroine’s suffering not only as a victim of
unhappy love, but of social inequality.
Karabanov also makes strategic changes in the structure of the heroide that reveal his
approach to the representation of gender roles. The Ovidian heroide is focused solely on a
woman’s emotional response to abandonment, with the minimal textual presence of her lover
or husband. This helps readers to align their sympathies with the abandoned woman. It is
uncommon for a female character in a heroide to quote an absent companion extensively.
However, in Karabanov’s heroide, Aniuta recites long passages from Victor’s speeches on
two occasions within her monologue. Victor’s presence via his speeches in a text owned and
controlled by a female narrator helps cast him in a positive light rhetorically. In the first
speech that Aniuta quotes, Victor criticizes “unnatural” noble girls who dare to use “cheek
powder” among other clever tricks to inspire love. The second quote is his genuine profession
of love for Aniuta in which he eloquently declares that he can’t live without her. These
speeches are not found in the comic opera and are purposefully inserted by Karabanov to
advocate for Viktor. They also provide sufficient grounds for Aniuta to wholeheartedly
forgive him for his infidelity. She rationalizes his behavior, blaming it all on the “vetrennost’”
(fickleness or carelessness) that is part of the nature of a young man.
Victor’s speeches also serve to undermine the reliability and trustworthiness of Aniuta
as a narrator. Placed in the Ovidian discourse of abandonment and stripped of her noble
origin, Aniuta is presented as a typical heroine of a heroide who “tears her hair, has torn her
clothing and sheds many tears” (216). Contrasted to the polish and perfection of Victor’s
quotes, Aniuta’s speech is chaotic and unclear. Typically, a heroide provides a developed
narrative, something which is also lacking in Karabanov’s piece. Aniuta doesn’t provide us
140
with the details of Victor’s departure or the circumstances of his infidelity. At one point she
states that he has been unfaithful to her a single time, at another point, she suggests multiple
cases of infidelity: “I love him, but I hate his infidelity” (люблю, хотя его измены
ненавижу) (212). In a fashion typical of heroides, Aniuta goes through various emotional
states trying to find a solution for her situation. She says that she will despise him, forget him,
she contemplates bloody revenge, only to shamefully admit that she feels pity for him and still
loves him. With the exception of one segment where Aniuta is filled with pride for her free
and innocent peasant love and addresses noblemen on behalf of all peasant girls, Karabanov’s
heroide provides an example of a conventional gender representation where a male’s infidelity
is excused and blamed on nature while women are expected to forgive them and end their
lives when their lover leaves them.
Aniuta warns Victor that it won’t do any good for him to be unfaithful. She predicts an
unfortunate future in which the noble girl will do the same to him as he did to her, and she
proclaims that virtue is on her side. She also considers alternatives to prescribed suicide,
proposing that living in poverty will bring back a harmonious and peaceful state of mind. But
once again, Karabanov is faithful to the Ovid’s model of an abandoned heroine. Aniuta’s
virtue neither provides consolation for her nor creates a sense of moral superiority. Thus, she
proclaims her imminent death, inviting Victor to make an epitaph for her grave which says: “I
paid for her love with my betrayal” (217). The ending of Karabanov’s heroide thus echoes
Ovid’s “Phyllis to Demophon” in which Phyllis promises her lover that a similar inscription
will be placed over her grave.
“Aniuta to Victor” shows the author’s awareness of conventions in the representation
of abandoned woman as well as of the format of the genre. Yet Karabanov’s innovations – his
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engagement with a non-tragic source and use of inserted speech - only further reinforce
conventional generic gender representations.
Heroides Dedicated to the Muses by Ekaterina Urusova
Urusova’s Biography
Following the publication of Urusova’s heroides, the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie
Vedomosti [St. Petersburg Gazette] published a review which said the following: “The author
of these heroides didn’t reveal her name, and our own modesty forces us in this case not to
reveal it. Therefore, we can only say that these heroides came from the author of ‘Polion.’”
350
As Marcus Levitt suggests, while most of Urusova’s works were published anonymously,
Princess Ekaterina Urusova was a well-known author.
351
Both Polion, ili prosvetivshiisia
Neliudim, poema [Polion or the Misanthrope Enlightened] (1774) and Iroidy muzam
posviashtennye [Heroides Dedicated to the Muses](1777), the first individually published
poema and collection by a Russian woman writer, demonstrate not only her ability to work in
a longer format, but her preoccupation with gender roles and women’s writing.
352
Despite the relative scarcity of information about her life, it is known that Urusova was
of noble birth, and in Derzhavin’s memoirs she is described as “not particularly attractive, but
350
“Iroidy muzam posveshchennyia,” in Sanktpeterburgskiia uchenyia vedomosti na 1777 god N. I. Novikova 6:
22 (1777): 175.
351
Marcus Levitt, “The Polemic with Rousseau over Gender and Sociability in E. S. Urusova's Polion (1774),”
Russian Review 66.4 (2007): 586.
352
In my analysis of Urusova’s collection, I will refer to the bilingual edition: Ekaterina Urusova, Iroidy muzam
posviashtennye, in Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Bilingual Edition,
trans. and ed. Ewington Amanda (Toronto: ITER-Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014), 152-
271. In some instances, I alter Ewington's translations for precision.
142
a passionate lover of literature.”
353
By and large, the first generation of Russian women
writers came from families of writers or were married to writers, and Urusova was no
exception.
354
Her cousin and mentor was Mikhail Kheraskov, the well-known poet and editor
of literary journals, himself married to a poet, Elizaveta Kheraskova. Kheraskov, who had
introduced heroides of Ovid and European authors to the Russian reader, offered Urusova
advice on how to write poetry. An exchange of poems between the two was published in
Starina and Noivizna in 1773. In his poetic address to Urusova, Kheraskov suggested themes
and genres for her poems, and in response Urusova said that she modeled her authorial
persona on Kheraskov. Urusova dedicated her poema, Polion, to Kheraskov, acknowledging
his influence and help.
355
Her longer works reveal her knowledge of ancient classics and the
European literary tradition, and like many Russian authors, she expressed an interest in
translating French poetry.
356
Urusova belonged to the one of the first “circles” of Russian
writers and her works were well received and noticed by critics and readers, including
Catherine the Great.
357
Even though little is known about her personal life, one story circulates concerning the
precarious social status of Russian women-writers. Around 1777, the time when Urusova
composed her Heroides, the famous poet Derzhavin jokingly rejected Urusova as a candidate
to be his wife because (as he put it in his memoirs) she was a poet and between the two of
353
Ia. Grot, “Zhizn' Derzhavina,” 8: 241.
354
Rosslyn, “Making Their Way,” 416.
355
N. D. Kochetkova, “Kniazhna Urusova i ee literaturnye sobesedniki,” in N. A. L’vov i ego sovremenniki:
Literatory, liudi iskusstva, ed. N. D. Kochetkova (St. Petersburg: IRLI-Pushkinskii dom, 2002), 95.
356
V.N. Toporov, Iz istorii russkoi literatury. Russkaia literatura vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka, Vol. 2, book 1
(Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury, 2001), 361. In a letter dated August 15, 1777, the poet Mikhail Muraviev
writes to his father that Urusova wants to translate to his journal excerpts from French translations of poems
written in Gallic. Unfortunately, this is the only evidence we have regarding her translations.
357
Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, 683.
143
them no one would be able to make borsch.
358
This is especially telling because marriages
between writers were not uncommon at the time. While Rosslyn strongly discourages us from
seeking connections between works of women writers and their life experiences due to the
lack of information,
359
Urusova’s choice to address the theme of abandoned women could be
viewed as a response to her break with Derzhavin. In fact, Urusova never married. Yet as
Kochetkova notes, despite this incident Urusova kept in touch with Derzhavin and was friends
with his wife, and Derzhavin’s archive contains many of her works. It is also possible that the
break with Derzhavin could have caused her “to break with Muses,”
360
because Urusova
abandoned her writing between 1780 and the 1790’s.
Urusova’s particular attention to gender roles is introduced in her first long work
named after the male character Polion, whose name Judith Vowles interprets as (pol + i + on
– “sex and he”).
361
In the nineteenth century, Polion was viewed as “praising the triumph of
love and beauty over rough manners and the vanity of false teachings.”
362
It tells the story of a
young man, Polion, who is saved from misanthropy by the demi-goddess Naiada. Polion
exemplifies “man’s need for woman and love to achieve genuine enlightenment.”
363
The
influence of Naiada is limited in the sense that it is Eros who shoots the arrow into Polion
forcing him to experience the love of Naiada, not the goddess herself. According to Levitt, the
358
Ia. Grot, “Zhizn' Derzhavina,” 8:241.
359
Rosslyn, “Making Their Way into Print,” 409.
360
Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, 683.
361
Judith Vowles, “The “Feminization” of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-
Century Russia,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Green (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1994), 45–47.
362
N. V. Guberti, Materialy dlia russkoi bibliografii (Moscow: M. Kat- kov, 1878), 352.
363
Levitt, “The Polemic with Rousseau,” 592.
144
heroine “emerges more as a figure of male fantasy than a female role model.”
364
Levitt
convincingly argues that “Urusova does not engage in any direct way with the issues facing
women writers and intellectuals, nor is any social or institutional basis for women’s
participation suggested other than the (mostly pastoral) games, dances, and interactions of
country life.” In his view, Urusova “frames her argument, as well as her identity as a writer,
fully within an almost entirely male-defined tradition, but one in which the very fact of its
being male-defined is not raised as a problem.” Levitt calls the genre of Urusova’s Polion
“pastoral-didactic,” and even though in Heroides Dedicated to the Muses she switches to the
mode of tragic monologue and heroide, some of the devices and imagery from Polion find
their way into the heroides in the form of various digressions.
If in Polion Urusova suggests that experiencing love is the ultimate path to a man’s
genuine enlightenment, then in Heroides Dedicated to the Muses, her next large work,
Urusova examines women’s experience of love, demonstrating that even though love causes a
lot of grief, virtue can help overcome it. Rosslyn points out that “women’s passion had
initially been expressed in the first person only by male poets.”
365
Urusova thus makes a
pioneering attempt to penetrate a taboo subject matter for women writers. While her female
characters fit the description of abandoned women, Urusova departs in many ways from
Ovid’s conventions of representation, revealing her intention to build on and subvert
entrenched ideas about women, virtue, and gender roles.
364
Ibid., 601.
365
Rosslyn, Anna Bunina, 102.
145
The Invocation
Heroides Dedicated to the Muses consists of nine heroides and a programmatic
invocation that sets a framework for the poems. The fact that Urusova’s collection is an
ambitious and serious undertaking and not to be treated lightly is reflected in the invocation.
Written in alexandrines, the meter of neoclassical tragedies, Urusova’s invocation offers her
readers a sweeping overview of the Russian enlightenment project that features the rapid
development of Russian literature as its main achievement. To describe Russia’s
transformation in the eighteenth century, Urusova conflates iconic images that were widely
used to define Russian culture and literature of that period, simultaneously inscribing women-
poets into this “encapsulated literary history.”
366
В кратчайши времена Россия процвела,
Расинов, Пиндаров, она произвела.
ЕКАТЕРИНИН век те ныне воспевают,
Премудрыя дела в безсмертие включают.
На Росскую страну вселенна мещет взор,
Прославь ея, прославь, прекрасных Муз собор! (152)
367
(In thre shortest time Russia has blossomed—
She has produced Racines and Pindars.
They now sing the age of CATHERINE.
They enter her wise deeds into immortality.
The universe casts its glance at the Russian land.
O host of beautiful Muses, glorify her! Glorify her!) (153)
Like many of her Russian contemporaries, Urusova states that it was the development
of literature which brought Russia out of darkness and ignorance. She sees her country
366
Catriona Kelly, “Sappho, Corinna, and Niobe: Genres and Personae in Russian Women’s Writing, 1760–
1820,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, eds. Adele M. Barker and Jehanne Gheith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 38.
367
See note 350 above.
146
moving from mrak (darkness) to zaria (sunrise), in other words, from darkness into the light:
“from out of this darkness Russia has been made bright” (в мрачности такой Россия
озарилась). Levitt finds that this narrative of “the triumphant entrance into the world/light”
shapes the Russian cultural self-image in the eighteenth century, reflecting “jubilant
optimism” based on the “radical cultural reorientation” that Russia experienced beginning in
Petrine times.
368
Urusova applies the narrative to glorify the epoch of Enlightenment in
Russia, connecting it with the deeds of Catherine. She associates the moment that the
Universe is finally discovering Russia with Catherine’s reign, not with Peter’s, and calls on
the muses to praise her country. While it was a widespread convention to pay tribute to
Catherine II in this way, Rosslyn points out that for a woman-poet, the Empress as “a writing
woman” was an important role-model.
369
Urusova calls writers to celebrate the Golden Age of
Catherine and her great deeds.
While the Empress could serve as an example of “a writing woman” (if not a woman
writer), Sumarokov undoubtedly shaped Urusova’s vision of Russian literary history.
Urusova’s description of the rapid development of literary talent in Russia mirrors
Sumarokov’s vision of his own creative path which he often described in his poetry. As
Aleksandr Feldberg demonstrates, Sumarokov viewed his own path to becoming a writer as
“an author who is alone making his way to Parnassus through a primeval forest.”
370
In her
invocation, Urusova writes that the path to Parnassus prior to the Enlightenment had been
overgrown with thorns and when the “Parnassian fire” finally ignited the hearts of Russians,
368
See chapter 1 in Levitt, Visual Dominant, 15-27.
369
It is also supported by Andrew Kahn. However, in the recent paper, Ewington suggests that Catherine didn’t
encourage women-writers.
370
Aleksandr Feldberg, “Neskol’ko motivov ‘poeticheskoi avtobiographii’ A.P. Sumarokova,” Toronto Slavic
Quarterly 13 (Summer 2005), http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/13/feldberg13.shtml.
147
the country began to produce its own “Racines, [and] Pindars.”
371
Here Urusova is referring
to Sumarokov and Lomonosov, Sumarokov’s friend and rival, possibly giving preference to
Sumarokov by naming him first.
Urusova’s description of the growth of Russian literature, which she frames within the
neoclassic tradition, referring to the Muses, Parnassus, and evoking names of European
classical and neoclassical writers, explicitly echoes Sumarokov’s “Epistola o stikhotvorstve”
[Epistle on Poetry]. Composed in 1747, it is known as the first Russian verse treatise on
poetics. In it Sumarokov instructs writers on styles and genres according to the classicist
model of Boileau’s L’Art poetique.
372
Urusova follows Sumarokov and his epistle when she
enthusiastically proclaims the rise of women’s writing as part of the rapid development of
literary talent. She points out that Russia has not only produced her own Racines and Pindars,
but has also begun to see Russian Sapphos and de la Suzes.
373
Trediakovskii had refered to
both Sappho and de la Suze in his “Epistola ot Rossiiskoi poeziia k Apollinu” [Epistle from
Russian Poetry to Apollo] of 1735, and, as Rosslyn notes, Sumarokov also includes the names
of both model poetesses on his “list of writers ‘worthy of glory’.”
374
Urusova’s equation of the appearance of male and female writers was likely made with
the hope of encouraging other writers and would-be writers among women. Since a lot of
poetry was published anonymously or circulated in manuscript, it is hard to access the volume
of women’s writing in the late 1770’s. In Rosslyn’s opinion, the most significant work was
371
This metaphor of the “path to Parnassus” appears in Urusova’s Polion and other works.
372
Levitt, “Sumarokov: Life and Work,” 10.
373
Both names were applied to Elisaveta Kheraskova by Nikolai Novikov in his Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei. See,
Gopfert, “Observations on the Life and Work of Elizaveta Kheraskova (1737-1809),” 180. Also Anna Bunina was
called Russian Sapho. (See, Diana Burgin, “The Deconstruction of Sappho Stolz,” in Engendering Slavic
Literatures Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 15.)
374
Rosslyn, “Making Their Way,” 417.
148
Urusova’s Polion and a handful of other poems.
375
However, Urusova stresses that female
writers are on par with male writers. By synchronizing Russian literature with European
names, Urusova re-emphasizes one of the most important principal of neoclassical poetics –
emulation of classical models-- which Sumarokov stressed in his “Epistle.” In such a way,
Urusova contextualizes her own undertaking to compose Heroides. She legitimizes her own
activities as a poet by inscribing herself and her fellow female writers within Sumarokov’s
literary system and hierarchy. While trying to blur hierarchical distinctions between male and
female writers, Urusova also demonstrates awareness that the duties of women writers are
specifically defined and predetermined, once again, taking her cue from Sumarokov.
376
Urusova defines the tasks of female writers “in terms of pastoral poetry”
377
: to create tender
and pleasant songs, praise the virtues and make readers feel passions. Urusova writes:
И чтобы окружать священных Муз престол,
То начал воспевать у нас и женский пол,
Они ко нежностям во песнях прибегают,
И добродетелям венцы приготовляют.
С приятностью они веселости поют,
И действие страстей почувствовать дают. (152)
(The female sex here has also begun to sing,
So that women might surround the sacred Muses’ throne.
Their songs turn to tenderness
And prepare crowns for virtue.
They sing pleasantly of merriment
And make us feel the power of passions.) (153)
375
Rosslyn, Anna Bunina, 97-98. See also Rosslyn’s study of women translators, Feats of Agreeable Usefulness:
Translations by Russian Women 1763-1825 (Fichtenwalde [Germany]: Verlag F.K. Göpfert, 2000).
376
Rosslyn, “Making Their Way,” 422.
377
Levitt, “The Polemic with Rousseau,” 600.
149
Urusova asks the muses to inspire her with inspiration and to heed the female poetic voice, all
the while asserting herself as heir to the classical tradition:
О Музы! Вы мой дух ко песням вспламените,
И пола вашего вы голосу внемлите! (152)
(O Muses! Enflame my spirit toward song
And harken to the voice of your sex!) (153)
While Vincent notes that the reference to the muses as women demonstrates Urusova's
heightened awareness of her gender and “her primacy as a woman-poet,”
378
this argument
was first suggested by Sumarokov, who wrote in one of his poems that “Minerva is a woman,
and not a single Muse on Helicon is of the male sex.”
379
Kelly points out that in her oeuvre Urusova quite often represents herself as a friend of
the muses.
380
For Urusova, as for male writers, the muses are distant goddesses who have
power to send inspiration, rather than the symbol of women who are creative artists, a notion
that entered Russian poetry later.
381
In a manner typical of Sumarokov’s works, she dedicates
her poetry to the muses: “О Музы! Я для вас на лире воспою” (O Muses! For you I will sing
out on my lyre) (154-155). This reliance on the authority of the muses is directly linked with
the image of herself that Urusova wants to project. Her view of the grand development of the
Russian literary scene during the reign of Catherine presents a sharp contrast to the way
Urusova describes herself. First of all, discussing the Russian Sapphos and de la Suzes, she
378
Patrick Vincent, The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics, and Gender, 1820-1840 (Durham:
University of New Hampshire Press, 2004), 47.
379
A.P. Sumarokov, “Lisitsa I statuia,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 213.
380
Kelly, “Sappho, Corinna, and Niobe,” 44.
381
For example, Rosslyn notes that the title of Anna Bunina’s poetry collection Inexperienced Muse (1809)
conflates these two notions about the muse. (Rosslyn, Anna Bunina, 100).
150
doesn’t see herself as one of them, but modestly points out that she is only a follower. She
asks the muses to encourage her “timid voice” and look down upon her from the mountain
tops.
As Rosslyn demonstrates, such modesty and statements about inexperience “routinely
figured in prefaces to works by women writers, as a plea for indulgence or an expression of
apprehension.”
382
Like many of her fellow eighteenth-century Russian writers, Urusova
published her collection anonymously, although the reviewers of her work were well aware of
her identity. In her ambitious collection she proves that she is capable of going far beyond the
assigned task of making readers “feel the passions,” as she challenges both the neoclassical
tradition and the heroides’ conventional portrayal of women characters.
An Overview of Urusova’s Collection
What follows the invocation is somewhat at odds with the picture of pleasant
merriment Urusova so enthusiastically describes in it. While they do allow readers to feel
passions, her nine heroides are not happy and tender songs; on the contrary, and with only one
exception, they are grief-stricken tales, not the “sentimental, pastoral manifestations” expected
from women writers.
383
The treatment of female characters and their attitude toward death
also differs significantly from what one finds in the heroides of Ovid or of his imitators,
European or Russian.
Urusova’s nine heroides feature dramatic storytelling by seven women: mothers,
daughters, and wives, dealing with infidelities, forced marriages, and attempts to rescue their
children and fathers while guarding their moral principles. Only Zeida, from the heroide that
382
Rosslyn, Anna Bunina, 101.
383
Ibid., 102.
151
opens the collection, is a woman whose lover has abandoned her in the tradition of Ovid.
Along with women, Urusova’s collection also features three heroides with male-speakers.
Like Sumarokov and Karabanov, Urusova draws subject matter for three of her heroides from
popular Russian tragedies. Another one of Urusova’s heroides is based on a legend from
Lomonosov’s Drevniaia rossiiskaia istoriia [Ancient Russian History] (1766). The others are
her own creations, unusual for the genre of heroides where a well-known speaker/narrator is a
must. In sharp contrast to Ovid, who used generic settings for his heroides, Urusova provides
colorful details about the environment of her poems, especially those set in Persia, Crete, and
ancient Russia.
Actively employing devices she used in Polion, Urusova significantly expands the
range of her poems’ thematic motifs with various sentimentalist digressions that anticipate the
novel: descriptions of idyllic landscapes, fantastic imagery, characters’ nightmares, as well as
reflections, inner monologues, and excerpts from other letters written to the characters. The
female narrators of Urusova are not confined by the “claustrophobic intensity” typical of
Ovid’s heroides.
384
Urusova’s fantastic changes of scenery go beyond what can technically be
recreated in the theatre; they are novelistic in scale and scope coming alive only in readers’
imaginations. For instance, a typical pastoral landscape which she describes as a “природных
прелестей собор” (cathedral of natural delights) is suddenly overshadowed by a huge
building surrounded by a gloomy forest with tree branches covering the view of the sky:
Огромно здание очам моим предстало,
Во мрачности оно густых лесов стояло.
Растущи ветвия клонилися к стенам,
И заслоняли путь прозрачным небесам. (244).
(An enormous building appeared before my eyes.
384
I borrow the phrase “claustrophobic intensity” from Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain,
180.
152
It stood amidst the darkness of a dense forest.
Branches grew toward its walls
And blocked the path to the clear heavens.) (245)
In another heroide, the narrator recounts events that take place during a global catastrophe
involving a hurricane, earthquake, lightning, and a terrifying fire.
Urusova’s narrators do not just reveal their overwhelming emotions and lament their
losses, they are good storytellers. For example, one wife’s story, that of the Russian princess
Rogneda from Lomonosov’s Ancient Russian History, vividly describes the terrible bloodbath
caused by her husband, Vladimir, in which he killed her brothers and father. Tormented like
Hamlet by the shadow of her murdered father, she narrates her failed attempt to kill her
husband. Her emotional account draws readers into moment by moment descriptions so that
they feel as if they have “participated imaginatively,” as Rosslyn puts it.
385
Another wife,
Ofira, has a vivid dream in which she opens her arms to embrace her husband and he throws a
snake at her which sucks blood from her breast. She wakes up to the reality that he has left
her. In the next heroide, Ofira’s husband tells his story. When he flees from his wife, he
enjoys the beauty of nature which is suddenly overshadowed by a huge gloomy building that
looms in the middle of a primeval forest. (The passage cited above.) There he is confronted by
a vision of a beautiful woman tormented by unspeakable grief. He learns from her that her
husband has betrayed her and she wants to commit suicide. This vision which mirrors his
actions toward his own wife makes him realize his mistake and leads to a moral conversion
prompting him to beg her forgiveness. The unfaithful husband addresses his wife with a
confession of guilt, not sure whether she will take him back. Urusova creates the possibility
for reconciliation between man and woman, and thus challenges the generic status of the
385
Rosslyn, “Making their way,” 426.
153
“abandoned woman.” In this heroide, Urusova offers a resolution unimaginable in the
heroides of Ovid or of his European imitators. While the implied “happy ending” challenges
the literary models for the heroide it aligns significantly with didactic writing.
Rosslyn notes that in Polion, Urusova exploits the role of woman writer-as-educator
for the family and nation, which was one traditional way for women to legitimize their
writing.
386
In her Heroides, she continues doing so, as this exchange between a virtuous wife
and unfaithful husband can be viewed as a vivid instruction for couples on resolving conflicts
sparked by male infidelity. Other overt and implied didactic messages of Urusova’s Heroides
that echo ones found in Kheraskov’s poetry and in Urusova’s Polion are directed towards
parents, encouraging them to give freedom to their children to follow their hearts when
choosing a partner. Thus in the last heroide of the collection, “Kliiada,” a daughter being
forced to marry a man she doesn’t love, tells her story. She writes on the verge of suicide
about her love for a man that transformed them both, a man whom she now must forsake to
fulfill her father’s wish. Urusova expands not only the thematic range of the genre, but
revises its functions. Narrative elements coupled with a didactic undertone transform the
heroide into a mini-novel in verse. The portrayal of women also departs from the Ovidian
notion of an abandoned woman in remarkable ways demonstrating Urusova’s shifting notion
of what a woman’s story can be.
In the next section, I will focus on the particulars of Urusova’s treatment of women
and their deaths to identify other major deviations from Ovid’s tradition as represented in
Russian translations of Heroides published prior to 1777. Then I will examine Urusova’s
heroides which are based on tragedies, highlighting how her female characters differ from
386
Rosslyn, “Making their way,” 413.
154
those in the plays. Throughout, I will compare the representations of these women to the
characters appearing in the original heroides by Sumarokov and Karabanov.
“Zeida to Leandr” and Ovid
Urusova was an innovator. She took a genre in which she had never worked before, in
which no other female Russian poet had ever worked, and she used it as an opportunity to
reclaim the female voice and attempt to bring changes to the conventional portrayal of
women. Her heroides demonstrate knowledge of Ovidian conventions, and it seems as if she
makes a conscious effort to alter them and to represent more empowered, independent, and
strong women.
The first heroide in the collection, “Zeida k Leandru” [Zeida to Leandr], serves as the
best example to explore where Urusova follows and where she departs from Ovid. Urusova’s
first heroide is the only one in the collection that relies heavily on plot elements and details
typical of Ovid’s Heroides, representing a woman outside of familial relations, only as an
abandoned lover. In the heroide, Zeida addresses her partner who has left her. Unlike Ovid’s
famous mythological heroines, Zeida is an unknown woman, but like them, Zeida appeals to
the gods for help and praises Pontus, the ancient Greek god of the sea. Zeida’s narrative
combines elements from three of Ovid’s heroides, “Phyllis to Demophon,” “Ariadne to
Theseus,” and “Penelope to Ulysses.” All of them had been translated by Russian poets and
published in literary journals or as pamphlets.
387
387
For my comparisons, I use Russian translations of selected Ovid’s heroides, because it was likely through
them that Urusova got to know the genre and drew from it. These were, in particular: “Ariadna k Tezeiu”
(1763) by Kheraskov ([Mikhail Kheraskov], “Armida,” Poleznoe uveselenie 11 (1760): 113-119); “Fillida k
Dimofontu” (1763) by Rzhevskii (Aleksei Rzhevskii, “Geroida. Fillida k Dimofontu. Sochinenie Ovidiia, v rosskie
stikhi, delana s perevodu,” Svobodnyia Chasy 11(1763): 636-646); and “Penelopa k Ulissu” (1774) by Ruban
(Vasilii Ruban, “Penelopa k Ulissu” Dve Iroidy, ili Dva pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’ (St. Petersburg, 1774), 3-12.)
155
Zeida’s story is left rather vague: her lover vows to the gods to love her unto death and
then he abandons her, taking to the sea. As with Ovid’s abandoned women, Zeida begins her
narrative by recalling the past. Like Phyllis, Zeida defines herself by her love for her partner,
Leandr. Both Phyllis and Zeida recall that their partners had pledged to be faithful until death:
Phyllis: Филлида, жди супруга своего и верным почитай к себе по смерть его.
(643)
(Phyllis, wait for your husband and consider him faithful to you until his
death.)
Zeida: Мне верным быть по смерть, клялся пред небесами. (154)
(You vowed to the heavens to be faithful to me unto death.) (155)
In similar fashion, both heroines recall their lover’s departure which involve embraces,
tears and promises:
Phyllis: Слезы из очей притворно проливать,
И купно смешивать с моими их слезами. (462)
(And [you] shed tears disingenuously,
And mixed them with my tears.)
Zeida: Подобный моему ток слезный проливал. (156)
(You shed a stream of tears just like mine. (157)
As the narrative progresses, Zeida becomes increasingly upset and her tone turns angry
and bitter. All three of Ovid’s mythical heroines experience a similar shift of emotions. Like
Phyllis, Zeida calls her lover a “tyrant” and admits that she is easily deceived (162). Like
Ariadne, she calls her partner “cruel,” and writes that “if you would kill me you would do less
156
wrong” (165). Like Penelope, when her lover doesn’t come back when he promised, Zeida is
overwhelmed by fear for his fate:
Penelope: Ныне трепещу воображая в мыслях опасности, тебе случиться
могущие. (4)
(Now I am trembling, imagining the dangers that you could face.)
Zeida: Способна я была изобретать напасти,
И ужасалася твоей суровой части.
(I was susceptible to imagining misfortune
And was terrified at your harsh lot.) (159)
As with Ovid’s abandoned women, Zeida comes to the seashore to watch for her
lover’s return. Early one morning after a sleepless night tormented by thoughts of her lover,
Zeida runs onto the “yellow sand” hoping that the approaching boat will bring her lover. This
scene bears a striking resemblance to the story of Ariadne from Ovid’s heroide in the prose
adaptation-translation by Rzhevskii. There Ariadne discovers that Theseus has left her in the
middle of the night, and at sunrise she comes to the beach [“yellow sand”] to see his boat
vanishing over the horizon. In Zeida’s story, the arriving boat brings her lover’s brother with
the news that Leander is planning to marry another woman.
Zeida’s sweeping changes through various emotional states closely follow the Ovidian
model. In her narrative, framed more as a passionate utterance than a written letter, Zeida
reveals her pain, anger and inability to execute revenge. Her address to her lover is interrupted
by her inner speech, as she shows an awareness that her writing itself reveals her weakness
and vulnerability. She asks, “Am I no longer in control of myself?,” then questions her own
thoughts and feelings: “Why am I judging myself so severely?” Urusova perceptively
demonstrates Zeida’s self-consciousness. Such introspection is not characteristic of Ovid’s
heroines.
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Zeida declares that the law of love doesn’t allow her to punish Leander. Like Ovid’s
heroines, she decides to be faithful to the partner who betrayed her, sadly admitting her
inability to break free from the chains of her passion. However, there are some important
differences. In contrast to Ovid’s characters who are destroyed by love and mostly
contemplate how to end their lives, Zeida does not talk about suicide, and does not even beg
her lover to come back. Unlike Ovid’s characters, Zeida doesn’t appeal to her lover by
describing her appearance compromised by days of crying and anguish. Instead, she invites
Leandr to look into her heart. Zeida is empowered by her love:
Отраду в горести едину ту имею,
Что больше нежель ты, любити я умею. (169)
(I have but one joy in my grief,
That I know how to love better than you do.) (170)
While Ovid’s heroines typically lament about their despair and hopelessness, Zeida appears to
find strength in her faithful love. By declaring faithfulness as a virtue she attempts to find
consolation, a way to feel superior to Leander: it is better to love an unfaithful partner than be
unfaithful to a faithful partner.
Ovid’s heroines often allude to the names of other heroines. While Ovid’s Phyllis
compares herself to Ariadne, Zeida similarly compares herself to Armida, the beautiful
sorceress from Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered who falls in love with the crusader, Rinaldo.
Rinaldo had abandoned Armida because he was called to his Christian duty, and Zeida sees
Armida’s situation as preferable to her own, since her lover abandoned her not because of
another woman, but because of his belief. As we have seen, in 1772, Urusova’s mentor,
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Kheraskov, adapted the story from Tasso’s epic in the heroide “Armida,”
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and the character
of Armida had also been featured in operas and paintings. Invoking the heroine, Urusova pays
tribute to both Ovid and Kheraskov, also suggesting her own place within the tradition.
Other Female Characters
Most of Urusova’s heroides demonstrate her reliance on Ovid’s models, but
simultaneously reveal slight deviations from them, offering readers unconventional portraits
of women and their attitudes toward death. Like Zeida, Urusova’s Ofira from the heroide
“Ofira to Medor,” a wife lamenting her unfaithful husband, relies on the narratives Ovid
composed for Ariadne. Like Ariadne, one morning she wakes up alone in her family bed
realizing that she has been abandoned by her beloved:
Со трепетом от сна я очи отворя,
Спешу тебя узреть смятением горя,
Но ах! в одре моем тебя не обретаю;
Зову тебя к себе, но тщетно глас пускаю. (226)
(Fretfully opening my eyes from sleep,
I hasten to see you, burning with anxiety.
But, ah! I do not find you in my bed.
I call you to me, but send utter my words in vain.) (227)
As with Phyllis, Ofira herself had prepared for the departure of her husband, expecting
to leave with him:
Стремяся мысль мою с твоею соглашати,
Спешила все к пути сама приготовляти,
Моим рачением тебе покой дала,
Ах, сколь моя была забота мне мила! (223)
388
The poem was originally published without the subtitle of heroide, and doesn’t strictly follow the format of a
heroide. In subsequent publications, however, the revised version was identified as one. Therefore, I also
consider the first publication of “Armida” in 1760 as a heroide.
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(Striving to accord my thoughts with yours,
I myself hastened to prepare everything for the journey.
My efforts gave you peace of mind,
Ah, how dear I found those tasks!) (224)
Like Phyllis, Ofira is haunted by the image of her husband:
Phyllis: А ты глазам моим мечтаешься всечасно,
Прелестной вижу взор, лице твое прекрасно. (642)
(You constantly appear as a dream before my eyes,
I see a wonderful sight, your beautiful face.)
Ofira: И все тебя, Медор! мне все воображает.
На что ни погляжу, во всем тебя я зрю. (232)
(And Medor, everything makes me think of you.
No matter where I look, I see you in everything.) (233)
While progressing through the emotional states of sorrow, hope, anger, and uncertainty, Ofira
tries to understand if she did something to prompt her husband to leave her. While Ovid’s
Phyllis does the same, and finds herself guilty of provoking Demophon’s departure, Ofira, on
the contrary, concludes with certainty that she did everything right. Urusova departs from
Ovid even further when, in contrast to his typically passive heroines, her Ofira expresses
readiness to follow her husband and overcome cruel misfortunes and dangers. While Ariadne
is fearful, imagining how her body will be torn to pieces by hungry wild animals, Ofira is
ready to face danger for the chance to be near her husband.
Ofira: Ах! Если б знала я, где ныне пребываешь […],
Отважно за тобой пустилася вослед,
И презрила бы я свирепость лютых бед […],
Подвергла бы себя свирепости морей,
Подверглась лютости я хищных бы зверей. (232)
(Ah! If only I knew where you were now, […],
I would courageously set out after you
And scorn the ferocity of cruel misfortunes. […],
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I would subject myself into the savage seas.
I would subject myself to the fierce beasts of prey.) (233)
Ofira acknowledges her unshakeable love for her husband and says that he can always
rely on her as his friend – which implies, at least on some level, that Urusova’s characters
don’t define themselves as “abandoned women” but see various options for their futures,
including the possibility of an equal relationship between man and woman outside marriage:
Любезный мой супруг! хотя меня оставил; […],
Во мне всегда любовь и друга ты увидишь. (236)
(My beloved husband! Although you abandoned me, . . .
You will always find love and a friend in me.) (237)
Princess Rogneda, another narrator in Urusova’s collection, also demonstrates that her
concerns go beyond the rather limited interests of an “abandoned woman.” Exiled by her
unfaithful husband for an attempt to murder him, Rogneda does not have any remorse or
complaint; all she wants is to secure the future of her son, exiled along with her. Rogneda begs
her husband to make him his successor to the throne. While Ovid’s heroines are typically
scared of death, for Rogneda, death is something she anticipates with joy: “И снидет в гроб с
веселием Рогнеда” (And Rogneda will descend happily into the grave) (206-207).
Rogneda’s peaceful acceptance of death presents a sharp contrast to the agony expressed by
the heroines in Ovid’s poems.
In Urusova’s heroide “Promest ko drugu” [Promest to a Friend], a young man shares
his love story with his male friend. Although a female character is not the narrator, Urusova’s
depiction of the man’s love interest represents a compromise between an Ovidian
representation and her own particular way of depicting a woman. The male narrator, Promest,
tells his friend about a young woman, Floriza, whom he encountered while rescuing her father
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during a natural disaster that was followed by a huge fire. It is significant that Promest was
first drawn to Floriza because of the type of heroic actions which are typically ascribed to
male characters. Even though this heroide is deliberately stripped of any references to
concrete mythological or historical context, Promest compares Floriza to the Trojan hero,
Aeneas:
Там был младый Еней, спасающий Анхиза,
А здесь отца спасла от гибели Флориза. (213)
(There it was young Aeneas, saving Anchises;
And here Floriza was saving her father from ruin.) (214)
This comparison is unusual, considering that the overall representation of Floriza is fairly
conventional. When Promest first sees her, Floriza is described like a conventional
“abandoned woman,” weeping with pale face and tattered hair: “младую деву зрел
рыдающу, стенящу” (I saw a young maiden […] she was sobbing and moaning) (212-213).
Yet Urusova subverts the iconic image by depicting Floriza involved in actions unusual for
women. Clearly, Urusova sees in female characters the potential for committing acts of
courage and heroic deeds. In this heroide, Urusova’s tactic in representing women becomes
especially apparent: she doesn’t necessarily break the traditional stereotype, but slightly
expands and builds on it. Right after Promest compares his lover to a powerful mythic hero,
he recounts that she cried for help, and he as a true hero was able to rescue both the woman
and her father by offering them shelter in his home. As the story unfolds further, Floriza is
depicted as a traditional idealized heroine, feminine and modest – simply a perfect creature for
the young man to fall in love with.
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Urusova’s Heroides Based on Tragedies
In Urusova’s three heroides based on tragedies and also in her last heroide, “Kliiada,”
she introduces the most telling changes to the representation of women characters. The two
heroides, “Darii k Fedime” [Darius to Fedima] and “Fedima k Dariiu” [Fedima to Darius]
based on Rzevskii’s tragedy Podlozhnii Smerdii [The False Smerdis] (1769), are focused on
Fedima, who is torn between her lover and her husband, a pretender to the throne whom she
had married to save Darius, her true love. When Darius wants to kill the tyrant, free Fedima,
and liberate his country, she begs Darius not to harm her husband because she believes it is
her duty to be faithful even though he is a tyrant and an impostor. At the same time, she
declares her love for Darius. Changes Urusova makes to the character of Fedima stand out not
only when compared to the Fedima of Rzhevskii’s play, but also point to Urusova’s polemics
with Sumarokov who had also featured a Fedima in his tragedy “Aristona” (1751).
In Rzhevskii’s play, Fedima is presented as being trapped between her lover, Darius,
and her husband, Smerdis. Torn between the two men, she admits that she is confused about
her real duty:
Смертельнее меня отчаянье мятет,
Противны стали мне и жизнь моя, и свет;
Я сохранити долг супружества стараюсь,
Но в чем мой долг, теперь я мыслию теряюсь.
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(Overwhelmed by deadly despair,
I despise my life and the whole world;
I want to fulfill my marriage duty,
But I am confused now what my duty is.)
The marriage vow is sacred for Fedima; she prefers to die rather than break it. She is opposed
to violence of any kind and begs Darius to leave the country rather than kill her husband. In
389
A. Rzhevskii, Podlozhnii Smerdii, in Russkaia literatura. Vek XVIII. Tragediia, ed. Iu.V. Stennik (Moscow, 1991),
246.
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one of the key scenes, Fedima intercedes in a confrontation between her lover and husband,
begging them to kill her rather than one another. Fedima’s moral strength is significantly
undermined and even perceived as weakness to highlight the courage of Darius, the true hero
of the play. In the play, Darius kills Smerdis, saving Fedima’s life, and is proclaimed the new
tsar of Persia. In the finale, he invites Fedima to share the throne, but Fedima can only weep,
mourning the death of her husband, and doesn’t seem to accept his offer.
Since no letters are exchanged between Fedima and Darius in Rzhevskii’s tragedy,
Urusova’s heroides function as extensions of the dialogue between the lovers. Both
monologues carefully retell the events of the play, revealing the tragic circumstances in which
Darius wants to liberate his country from the pretender and tyrant Smerdis, and take back his
lover Fedima whom Smerdis has married by force. Urusova significantly amplifies the
conflict between the lovers and shifts the emphasis, focusing her heroides on a moral dilemma
only touched on in the play. Urusova makes Fedima the heroine for taking a conscious moral
and ethical stand against violence. In the play, Fedima is never asked to kill her husband. The
playwright mostly highlights her distraught state of confusion as she perpetually needs to
make sure that both her lover and her husband are not harmed. Wirtschafter views Fedima’s
character in the play as a passive heroine for whom “no human deed could break the sacred
bond of marriage.”
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In Urusova’s heroide “Darius to Fedima,” however, Darius openly
urges Fedima to kill Smerdis. Fedima demonstrates a much stronger and determined
character than in the play. In response to Darius’s request to help do away with her husband,
Fedima strongly rejects the violent act, proclaiming that the duty of marriage is superior to
both her love of Darius and the future of her country. In contrast to Fedima in the play, she is
390
Elise Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2003),
68.
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clear and articulate that she will never be together with Darius if he commits violence against
her husband. For her, the throne is not worthy if a drop of blood is shed.
О трон! Коль горести тобой не изчезают,
На что к тебе, на что? столь алчно досязают?
На что перед тобой лиют ручьями кровь? (190)
(O throne! If you don’t make griefs disappear,
What are you good for? Why do they all desire you?
Why do rivers of blood flow before you?) (191)
Urusova’s Fedima is not confused; she has no doubts about whether she is right or wrong. She
defends her ideal of peacefulness (spokoistvie) and the law of non-violence (nezlobiia zakon)
as her guiding principles. She wants to stay innocent and is willing to accept her suffering.
Среди мучения, тем буду восхищаться,
Что я злодействию умела противляться,
Что в жизни зверству я причастна не была,
И от раскаянья слез токов не лила; (190)
(Amid my torment I will be glad
That I was able to resist wicked deeds;
That in life I was not party to brutality
And did not shed a stream of tears in remorse;) (194)
Urusova’s Fedima who rejects the directive to kill her dishonest and oppressive
husband presents an especially striking contrast to the Fedima from the tragedy “Aristona” by
Sumarokov.
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In “Aristona,” Fedima suspects that her husband is unfaithful and stops at
nothing in order to destroy her rival. Obsessed with revenge, she orders her servant to kill an
innocent woman, and when she realizes that she has caused more harm than good, she kills
herself. Urusova’s Fedima and other heroines from her collection, on the other hand, are
391
Aleksandr Sumarokov, Dramaticheskie sochineniia (Leningrad: “Iskusstvo, 1990), 134-188.
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connected through their vocal opposition to violence. Urusova’s heroines strongly reject
violent revenge as a way to punish unfaithful husbands or lovers.
The character of Fedima clearly demonstrates to what degree Urusova is invested in
the representation of a new type of woman. Unlike Ovid’s heroines, Urusova’s Fedima
appears very strong and not emotionally tormented. She sees herself as a part of a larger
world, and as someone who is fulfilling her very own small role assigned by the Universe. She
is not concerned with her own fate, but focuses on steering Darius to the path of
righteousness, which makes her a saint-like figure. Unlike Ovid’s heroines, Urusova’s Fedima
doesn’t refer to her own appearance; her focus is on saving her own heart and soul as well as
those of others. Urusova thus rewrites Sumarokov’s myopic heroine, giving her a moral and
philosophical consciousness.
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This very particular move on the part of Urusova as a writer was further developed in
the character of Olphena from the heroide “Olphena k Merionu” [Olphena to Merion], also
based on a popular tragedy. This was Khrapovitskii’s Idamant which was never published and
hasn’t survived in manuscript form so it is impossible to compare Urusova’s heroide to
Krapovitskii’s play.
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However the basic set-up of the play as provided by the heroide is
remarkably similar to Sumarokov’s Khorev, on which he based his two heroides. Because of
this close connection, it is possible to draw some conclusions about Urusova’s effort to once
again subvert the status quo. While both Sumarokov’s “Osnelda to Zavlokh” and Urusova’s
“Olfena to Merion” feature daughters addressing their fathers, they reveal the different
approaches authors took in creating their heroines.
392
On the other hand, Ewington in her anthology explains Urusova’s neglect of Sumarokov’s version by the
decline of his reputation. (See note 84 in Amanda Ewington, trans. and ed., A Bilingual Edition, 476-477).
393
Ewington, A Bilingual Edition, 479.
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Sumarokov’s Osnelda writes to her father from the camp of his enemy where she has
been held captive since childhood, and Urusova’s Olphena writes from a prison cell. In both
heroides, daughters ask their fathers to make peace with their enemies and allow them to
marry their beloveds, arguing for the ideals of love and reconciliation. While Sumarokov’s
heroine wants to evoke pity in her father, in Urusova’s heroide, Olfena represents herself as a
sophisticated woman and appeals not to her father’s emotions, but to his reason and logic.
Olphena dares to teach her father. She explains to him that by preventing him from poisoning
her lover she not only saved the life of her lover, but just as importantly prevented her father
from committing the sin of murder. Olphena offers psychological explanations of her father’s
behavior that led him to make war against his closest friend:
Во щастьи протекал тогда твой сладкий век:
Но щастие сие, дух зависти пресек. […]
Увы! родитель мой, ты славой заразился,
Приобрести ее, на все ты устремился. (256)
(At that time your sweet days flowed happily.
But that happiness was cut short by the spiritr of envy.
Alas! My father, you have been corrupted by glory.
You seek to attain it at any cost.) (257)
Urusova’s treatment of Olfena as an empowered and wise woman thus presents a great
departure from Sumarokov’s treatment of Osnelda with its focus on the heroine’s misery,
“Osnelda’s continual exclamation of grief.”
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Both Osnelda and Olfena plead with their fathers to accept the love of their daughters
and both heroides conclude with similar ultimatums:
394
Drage, Russian Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 94.
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“Osnelda to Zavlokh”:
А если пред отцом Оснельда тщетно стонет,
Так смерть моя твое удобней сердце тронет. (167)
(If Osnelda moans in front of her father in vain,
Then my death will more likely touch your heart.)
“Olfena to Merion”:
Koгда же то тебя, родитель мой, не тронет,
Что Греция в стыде, что дшерь в оковах стонет,
Так в щедрости одной просить дерзаю я,
Чтобы самим собой пресеклась жизнь моя. (262)
(My father, if you are not moved by the spectacle of
Greece standing in shame and your daughter moaning in fetters,
Then I dare beg you for this one act of kindness:
That you yourself cut short my life!) (263)
For Olfena, as for Osnelda, death is the last resort, but in contrast to Osnelda, she is ready for
it:
За Идоманта жизнь окончить мне приятно;
Увы! Я за него умреть хочу стократно. (262)
(’Tis pleasant for me to end my life for Idomant.
Alas! I wish to die for him a hundred times over.) (263)
Once more, Olfena is proactive and explicit. She asks her father to end her life with the poison
he prepared for her lover. She finds it satisfying that her death will save her lover’s life.
Urusova’s heroides based on tragedies, “Darii to Fedima” and “Olphena to Merion,”
provide insights into the ways the author strives to create a fully realized representation of a
woman character-narrator. In fact, Olphena seems to be even more liberated from the
conventions than Fedima. Compared to Fedima, whose saint-like qualities were discussed
above, Olphena is presented as a woman of action. From the first line we learn that she saved
her lover’s life. She also shares with her father a dream in which she intercedes in a battle
between her lover and father, taking swords out of their hands. (Compare this to Fedima in
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Rzhevskii’s play in which she offers her own life.) In contrast to Fedima who accepted her lot
as a misfortunate lover doomed to sufferings, Olfena is empowered because she experiences
the blessings of ideal love. She describes her relationship with Idomant:
Казалось нам, что весь любви подвластен свет,
Что злобы; ни войны во всей вселенной нет.
(It seemed to us that the whole world was ruled by love,
That in the whole Universe there was neither malice nor war.) (260).
The many ways in which Urusova connects and at the same time polemicizes with
Sumarokov reflects Urusova’s intent to revise existing gender conventions. Contrary to Ovid
and Sumarokov, Urusova’s heroines are no longer caught up in their conflicting emotions, but
view themselves as a part of the larger world, and their concern is for the greater good and
about promoting ideals of love and friendship.
Urusova’s Last Heroide
In Urusova’s collection, “Olphena to Merion” is followed by one last heroide,
“Kliiada.” The subject matter is of Urusova’s own invention, and this final heroide is the most
innovative and daring of the collection. It not only challenges the format of the heroide, but
the representation of a woman and a woman’s death. “Kliiada” is a follow-up to the father-
daughter relationships introduced in the previous heroide, “Olphena to Merion.” In this
heroide, Kliiada, the narrator, laments the forced marriage arranged by her father for her with
the goal of financial gain. Kliiada instead declares her love for Giront, describing their
relationship as an “ideal love” that has completely transformed both their lives. Kliiada
concedes that her father doesn’t approve of Giront, but also that it is her duty to obey him.
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Urusova maintains a strong connection to neoclassical tragedies, preserving the conflict
between duty and passion, the difference being that in the end Kliiada chooses duty over
passion and death is her own choice.
Like Osnelda, Kliiada doesn’t see any other alternative than suicide, but her
interpretation of death differs drastically from those expressed by other heroines in both
Ovid’s and European heroides. Kliiada sees in her suicide an expression of her free will:
Клияда в смерти лишь отраду почитает,
Она умреть спешит, но должность исполняет.
О должность! Я воздам приличну дань тебе!
И буду я потом властна сама себе. (272)
(In death Kliada sees only joy.
She hastens to die, but fulfills her duty.
O duty! To you I shall pay proper tribute!
And then I shall be under my own power.) (273)
In Ovid’s heroides, female characters are destined for death simply because they are
abandoned. As a variation, Ariadne expresses a desire to die in order to free her lover from
any obligation. For Osnelda and Olfena, death is the only way to assert their love and fidelity.
Of all these female characters, Kliiada is the only woman who views death as an assertion of
her own freedom.
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Kliiada’s position as a narrator is also very unusual. She addresses her laments not to
her lover or father, but to a group of women whom she calls “соучастницы мучения моего”
(those [women] who share my suffering) (262) and “любовницы несчастны” (misfortunate
[women] lovers) (266), highlighting their equal status:
О вы! Которые со мною в равной части,
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Another female character who sees suicide as independence is “an abandoned women” in the vision of
Medor. When Medor attempts to prevent her, she runs away from him, saying “ne budesh’ vlasti ty imeti nado
mnoi” (you will not have power over me). See: Urusova, “Medor to Ofira,” in A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed.
Amanda Ewington, 222-37.
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Которы терпите любовные напасти,
Я к вам писание и мысли обращу. (262)
(O you! Ladies who share my fate,
Who endure misfortune in love!
I address my thoughts and this writing to you.) (263)
In a culminating moment, Kliiada also addresses the women:
Cтените обо мне! Взрыдайте вы со мною!
И чувствы страстные ко жалости склоня,
Скорбящу, страждущу, представьте вы меня! (270)
Lament about me! Break out sobbing with me!
And inclining your passionate feelings toward pity,
Imagine me suffering and mourning! (271)
In “Kliiada,” Urusova for the first and only time uses the signature rhetorical device “imagine
me.” Recall that in Ovid’s heroides, an abandoned heroine often begs her absent lover to
imagine her distraught by grief, with messy hair and eyes red from constant crying. Both
Sumarokov and Karabanov effectively utilize this formulaic rhetorical device in their
heroides, reinforcing the tragic situation by highlighting the unattractive appearance of a
formerly beautiful woman. When Urusova employs the device, she shifts focus from the
pitiful appearance of the heroine to her emotions, which are exposed not to her lover or father,
but to a group of compassionate women. The word “predstav’te” that Urusova uses has a few
meanings, and apart from “imagine,” can also be translated as “represent” or “present.”
Kliiada laments: “Imagine me in despair, in sorrow, and crying…” This ambiguity of meaning
allows the possibility that Kliiada’s call to “lament about me” and “represent me” could be
meant as encouragement for women to get engaged in creative writing, and furthermore, to
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write about women. Kelly also stresses that in the last epistle, “Urusova re-emphasizes and
reshapes the notion of poetry as communication between women.”
396
Sumarokov’s Osnelda dares to admit that she chose love over duty. Urusova’s Olphena
dares to teach her father how he should behave. Her Kliiada is presented as a woman who is
able to see her own tragedy in a larger context, has no fear of addressing a large circle of
people, and is hopeful that her story will help other women. Through Kliiada, Urusova
demonstrates that a woman’s lot is not just suffering; she can be a bearer of a moral message
which can help society. Thus Urusova as a female writer also acknowledges her awareness of
a moral agenda that was conventionally the property of male writing.
Conclusion
Even though original Russian heroides are not numerous, the fact that they are based
on particular literary materials allows us to see what choices were made by their authors and
how they reflect dynamic gender roles. As we have seen, Urusova’s collection Heroides
Dedicated to the Muses stands out among original Russian heroides. In his heroides
Sumarokov writes in connection with his popular play which had become a staple of the
Russian stage. Karabanov capitalizes on the success of the first Russian comic opera and
inserts the main characters into the “abandoned woman” pattern typical of the heroide. These
heroides by Sumarokov and Karabanov present conventional women victims and their
depictions lie comfortably within the mainstream female image of heroides. While Urusova
also bases some of her heroides on plays, and her strong women characters are connected to
the heroines of tragedies by Sumarokov and Lomonosov, she manages to effectively challenge
some conventional aspects of the way female characters were portrayed.
396
Kelly, A history of Russian women's writing, 30.
172
Like Sumarokov, Urusova composed a heroide where a daughter speaks to her father
acknowledging that she chose love over duty. However, Urusova’s Olphena doesn’t merely
appeal to emotions, she is presented as having higher morals, empowered to instruct her father
how to follow the path of righteousness. Urusova’s other heroine, Kliiada, hopes to obtain
freedom through death, and addressing parents, she advocates that young people have the
freedom to follow their hearts in marriage. Urusova compares one of her characters, Floriza,
to Aeneas for her brave efforts to save her father during a fire. Her other character, Ofira,
swears that she is ready to follow her husband anywhere, and expresses no fear even if her
fate is to be eaten alive by wild animals or drowned in the sea. Urusova brought the stoicism
of tragic heroines and their worldly largess into the the genre of the heroide where women
were typically portrayed as lamenting and self-absorbed. Urusova took greater advantage of
the genre than any other Russian writer, thus inscribing herself and other women poets into
literary history.
Our analysis of Urusova’s heroide “Zeida k Leandru” demonstrates her knowledge of
major motifs and elements of Ovid’s heroides and as well as her dependence, particularly, on
Russian translations of Ovid’s Heroides made by Rzevskii and Kheraskov. However,
Urusova borrows from Ovid selectively, showing particular resistance to devices that depict
women stereotypically, shifting the focus of her poetry from outward to inward, from tattered
hair to a kind and faithful heart.
By composing the collection Heroides Dedicated to the Muses Urusova accomplished
several crucial tasks. She inscribed herself and other women into the canon of Russian
literature envisioned by neoclassists, but preserved her unique voice by enriching, and in some
cases subverting, conventional notions of gender roles. While she writes that women “should
sweetly sing of pleasurable things,” her heroides acutely describe the turmoil brought on by
173
passions and show how women can rise above the stigma of abandonment. Conventionally
positioning herself as a poet rather modestly, somewhere at the bottom of Parnassus and
following in the footsteps of male poets, Urusova nevertheless highlights the “primacy of a
women-poet.” She views the heroide as a genre in which a woman-poet can reclaim a
woman’s voice and use it as a vehicle for communication, instructing and comforting other
women as well as men. In her poems she boldly experiments with the conventions of the
genre to achieve novelistic effects. In her portrayal of female characters based on heroines
from Russian neoclassic tragedies, Urusova resists the static “state of abandonment”
introduced by Ovid and widely imitated thereafter. Her women are empowered by their
adherence to higher morals and seek death only as a means to assert their free will.
It is symbolic that the first collection of poetry published by a Russian woman poet
was modeled on Ovid. Heroides attracted women writers because “these poems represented
women’s speaking and women’s experience.”
397
Even a brief look at the history of women’s
writing in Britain reveals that starting with Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century and
onwards British women-writers often translated, imitated and composed heroides. In the
eighteenth century, both Lady Mary Chudleigh and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu contributed
to the tradition. While Chudleigh adapted selected epistles by Ovid, in two epistles written in
1723-24, she, like Urusova in her heroides, presented contemporary women-speakers.
398
Like
Urusova, Montagu was of noble origin, the daughter of aristocrat, and as one of the most
important women writers of the period, critiqued masculine ideologies. Compared to
Urusova’s work, the feminist stance of Montagu’s epistles is far more evident and advanced;
her speakers manage to survive abandonment. Yet works of both Montagu and Urusova share
397
Staves, A literary history of women’s writing in Britain, 179.
398
As Staves points out, at age twelve, Montagu had already imitated the Heroides in her “Julia to Ovid.” She
also satirized Pope and excelled in “answer”poems.
174
a radical departure from Ovid which is reflected in their heroines’ claims of moral superiority.
Montagu’s works invite more in-depth comparison with those of Urusova than is possible
here, but it is important to acknowledge that Urusova’s collection Heroides Dedicated to the
Muses is a part of the larger European tradition of women’s writing and stands out as a
sophisticated and programmatic attempt to reclaim woman’s voice, let it be heard, and
encourage poetry as a tool for creative communication among women.
175
Conclusion
The Influence of Heroides
During an important transitional moment in eighteenth-nineteenth century Russian
literature, Russian heroides rose to prominence at the juncture of two literary currents:
evolving poetry and emerging prose. Heroides contributed to Russian literature in a variety of
ways. Early Russian translations of Ovid’s Heroides, especially Kheraskov’s “Ariadne to
Theseus,” legitimized the appearance of a woman at the center of a Russian poetic work and
provided a model to describe her appearance and her emotionality. Simultaneously, Russian
poets responded to the new fashion for European imitations of Ovid’s Heroides. Following in
the footsteps of the French re-inventors of heroides, Dorat and Colardeau, Kheraskov
translated Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” providing a contemporary and relevant model for
Russian writers seeking to express passions, explore the human psyche, and tell a compelling
story. Further translations of European heroides introduced narratives from both “high” and
“low” culture, from classical tragedy and bourgeois drama, offering readers a glimpse into a
“private world” of the other, luring them to abandon themselves in frenetic and dramatic
literary fiction. A few prose translations of French verse heroides demonstrated that the genre
was flexible enough to suitably convey a novelistic “stream of consciousness” long before the
term was coined. The genre, introduced in Russian periodicals to “entertain” a female
audience, was raised to a new level when it was employed by a Russian female writer.
Urusova’s collection of nine heroides Heroides Dedicated to the Muses revised the image of
the woman narrator, giving her the power to tell her own story, and encouraging other women
to tell theirs.
176
In terms of the language and craft of their poetic expression, heroides reveal the
intricate process of a developing tradition. Heroides, whether they deal with ancient myths or
stories of average people, granted Russian readers and writers access to a variety of
compelling plots and established a level of intimacy between a poem and its reader by honing
the confidential narrative voice. Given their emotional subject matter as well as their wide
spectrum of intermediaries and sources, heroides provided eighteenth and early nineteenth-
century writers with a more complex form in which to explore the narrative potential of lyric
verse, a potential that was exploited by poets of the Golden Age and beyond. In the early
nineteenth century, this exploration, most notably, culminated in Pushkin’s “novel-in-verse,”
Eugene Onegin. By way of a conclusion, I will discuss two examples in Pushkin’s
masterpiece which reflect the influence of the heroide, Lenskii’s elegy and Tatiana’s letter.
Overview
Pushkin’s masterpiece has attracted numerous studies and examinations since its first
installments appeared in 1825.
399
The multilayered, intertextual, and extra- and metaliterary
components that constitute Pushkin’s work along with its unique generic characteristics have
led scholars to unfold the intricacies of Pushkin’s method in various directions. Critics have
productively examined the references, allusions and direct borrowings from novels and lyrical
genres to bring out the rich connections in Pushkin’s work to both prose and poetry.
400
Over
399
For a succinct overview of Pushkin’s work, see Marcus Levitt, “Evgenii Onegin,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Pushkin, ed. Andrew Kahn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 41-56.
400
Among the many profound qualities of Pushkin’s masterpiece highlighted by scholars is that Pushkin’s
exquisite weaving of an amazing array of literary sources, direct quotations and references doesn’t exclude the
“profound artistic originality” of his work. It may be also telling that the ways in which scholars describe
Pushkin’s playful evocation of sources in Eugene Onegin parallels Ovid’s elaborate patterns of referencing and
modifying myths and ancients texts in his Heroides. Both works have been crowned as highly original despite
their obvious reliance on well-known characters and plots.
177
the years Eugene Onegin has been called a novel, a work of poetry, and a “dialectical blending
of the two.”
401
In one recent study, Oleg Proskurin re-emphasized the crucial role poetic
traditions played in the creation of Eugene Onegin, effectively asserting the primacy of the
verse in Pushkin’s “novel in verse.”
402
According to Proskurin, “the formation of the crucial
structural principles of the ‘novel in verse’ is connected neither with the corruption of the
prosaic novel by the verse nor with the destruction of poetic authoritarianism by the ‘novel,’
but with the development of structural principles that were taking shape in poetical genres.”
403
He sees in the composition of Eugene Onegin the development of a “great form” out of the
structural principles of a small form – the lyric poem.
404
In Eugene Onegin characters are cast as types from different Romantic and
Sentimental literary traditions and at times are also associated with various poetic genres.
405
The three main characters, Onegin, Lenskii and Tatiana stand for English, German, and
French novelistic traditions,
406
and reference characters from well-known literary works.
However, their roles are only partly determined by these types. As Fedorova puts it “the main
heroes are shaped by their choice of literary models, but they are also granted the freedom to
recognize these models, creatively transform them, switch from one to another, and even
judge them from the point of view of other aesthetic systems.”
407
401
Levitt, “Evgenii Onegin,” 46.
402
Oleg Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, ili, Podvizhnyi palimpsest (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999),
148.
403
Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, 148.
404
Ibid., 144.
405
Ibid., 148.
406
Levitt, “Evgenii Onegin,” 46-47.
407
Milla Fedorova, “The Lover of Julie Wolmar: The New Heloise and Tatiana's Dilemma,” Slavic and East
European Journal 53.2 (2009): 177.
178
Several scholars have pointed out that the poet Lenskii, Onegin’s friend, is modeled on
the young artist Werther, from Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
408
Lenskii, like Werther, studied in Gottingen and writes Romantic poetry. According to the
Russian scholar Tarkhov, Lenskii represents “the Russian variation… of the ‘Wertherian type
of the Romantic-idealist.”
409
For Proskurin, who likens characters to poetic genres, Lenskii
embodies the genre of the French elegy.
410
The narrator of Eugene Onegin not only introduces
readers to the characters of the novel, but also to their writing. One example is the elegy
Lenskii writes on the eve of his deadly duel with Onegin, sparked by Onegin’s flirtations with
his beloved, Olga. Scholars have gone to great lengths to identify the verses from various
poems Pushkin used to compose Lenskii’s elegy. Nabokov’s commentary supplies numerous
parallel verses from French, English and Russian poetry, including early poems of Pushkin
himself.
411
Lenskii’s Last Elegy
Among the works cited as sources for Lenskii’s last poem are elegies by Merzliakov
and Tumanskii.
412
My research has helped me identify both of them as translations of two
408
See, for example, Sonia Hoisington, “Parody in Evgenii Onegin: Lenskii’s Lament,” Canadian Slavonic Papers
29: 2–3 (1987): 266–78. Clayton writes about the ironic comparison of Werter and Lenskii in J. Douglas Clayton,
Ice and Flame: Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 181.
409
Cited in N. I. Mikhailova, “Verter,” in Oneginskaia entsiklopediia, (Moscow: Russkii put’, 1999-2004), 1:177.
410
Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, 155.
411
Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, 3: 24-27.
412
The poems of Merzliakov and Tumanskii as the source for Lenskii’s elegy are discussed in Iu. M. Lotman,
Roman A.S. Pushkina "Evgenii Onegin": Kommentarii (Leningrad: “Prosveschenie,” 1983), 298-300; N. I.
Mikhailova, “Verter,” in Oneginskaia entsiklopediia, 176-179. Tumanskii’s poem is also discussed in Nabokov,
Eugene Onegin, 3: 24-27; N.L. Brodskii, Evgenii Onegin. Roman A.S. Pushkina. Posobie dlia uchitelia (Moscow,
1964). Scholars view the works not as translations of French heroides, but as Russian elegies.
179
little-known French heroides by Bridel and Coupingny which the Russian poets translated in
the early nineteenth century.
413
Both poems, which share an identical title, feature Werther’s
last address to his beloved, Charlotte, before he commits suicide. The verses Pushkin chooses
for Lenskii’s elegy convey Werther’s perception of what will happen after his death, and
mirror Lenskii’s anticipation of his own demise on the eve of the duel. Pushkin echoes verses
from Tumanskii’s translation in which Werther envisions his beloved crying over his ashes,
and turns them into a question directly addressed to his beloved Olga:
Придешь ли, дева красоты,
Слезу пролить над ранней урной (Evgene Onegin, Six: XXII: 8-9)
(Wilt thou come, maid of beauty,
To shed a tear over my early urn.)
414
Tumanskii:
Приди мечтать о мне и горести слезами
Ту урну окропи, где друга прах сокрыт.
415
(O come to dream of me and with bitter tears asperge
That urn where your friend’s dust is hidden.)
416
Pushkin also incorporates verses from Tumanskii’s translation to describe the tomb and its
surroundings in the moonlight.
417
413
See Chapter Two for a discussion of the translations by Merzliakov and Tumanskii.
414
Here and throughout I use Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Onegin: A
Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin, Translated from the Russian with a Commentary, vol.1, Bollingen Series
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975): 89-288 with minor changes.
415
Iu. M. Lotman, Roman A.S. Pushkina "Evgenii Onegin": Kommentarii (Leningrad: “Prosveschenie,” 1983), 299.
416
Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, 3:27.
417
Mikhailova, “Verter,” 178.
180
Merzliakov’s translation and Lenskii’s elegy share the phrase “the world will forget
me,” and the rhyme “drug-suprug,” (friend-husband).
418
It is noteworthy that Merzliakov’s
translation existed only in two manuscripts, and only an excerpt was published as a part of the
Russian epistolary novel, Samoubiistvo [The Suicide] printed anonymously in the journal
Aglaia in 1810. The novel incorporated several excerpts from heroides to describe the feelings
of its characters.
419
The appearance of quotations from the heroides in Pushkin’s famous text
is evidence that Pushkin treated heroides as living and relevant material which the poet
absorbed into his work. Lenskii’s character reflects a unique intersection of three cultures: he
is a Russian poet, modeled on the well-known German character, who also embodies the
French elegiac tradition. Heroides that Pushkin employs for Lenskii’s last elegy mirror a
similar cultural confluence: they are Russian translations of French poetic adaptations of the
German novel. Pushkin’s allusion to the heroide genre was not limited to Lenskii’s elegy, and
can be traced to other parts of the novel, in particular, to verses concerning Tatiana and her
letter.
Tatiana and Her Letter
Tatiana’s literary genealogy is commonly traced to the characters in her favorite
novels: Richardson’s Clarissa, Rousseau’s Julie, and de Stael’s Delphine.
420
Based on the plot
of Eugene Onegin alone, Tatiana has little claim to the status of abandoned woman. Tatiana, a
seventeen year-old provincial beauty, realizes her passion for Onegin, a disenchanted St.
418
Iu. M. Lotman, Kommentarii, 298-300; also see Lotman’s comments in A. Merzliakov, Stikhotvoreniia, 307.
419
Frajaan, The Epistolary Novel, 139.
420
Clayton argues that Tatiana in different parts of the novel is also modeled after Shakespeare’s Juliet, and
LaFayette’s Princess Cleve. See J. Douglas Clayton, “Tatiana: Diana’s Disciple,” in Ice and Flame: Aleksandr
Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” 115- 37.
181
Petersburg socialite, after his one meeting with her and her family. But by setting Tatiana and
Eugene’s first meeting as a hostess and a guest, Pushkin creates a parallel with Ovid’s Phyllis,
who hosts the shipwrecked foreigner Demophon before she falls in love and is subsequently
abandoned by him. This one meeting, described in passing, ends in rumors that marriage is
looming for Tatiana. While Tatiana and Onegin do not precisely mirror Phyllis and
Demophon, presenting Tatiana as a hostess who falls for her guest may be seen as preparing
her for the role of an abandoned woman.
Following her meeting with Onegin, Tatiana writes him a letter where she fully
embraces the persona of an abandoned heroine. Pushkin describes Tatiana as she writes her
letter, portraying her “loose hair,” an iconic feature of Ovid’s Ariadne:
И между тем луна сияла
И томным светом озаряла
Татьяны бледные красы,
И распущенные власы. (Three: XX: 5-8)
(And meantime the moon shone
And with dark light irradiated
The pale charms of Tatiana
And her loose hair. )
421
Kheraskov’s translation of Ovid’s “Ariadne to Theseus” uses a slightly different
expression – “растрепаны власы” (unkempt hair). In Ovid’s original, there are four
references to Ariadne’s loose hair.
422
It is also noteworthy that Pushkin’s rhyme (красы-
власы, beauty-hair) is the same one that Kheraskov had used in the heroide “Armida.”
One of several signifiers that her letter pays tribute to the eighteenth-century Russian
tradition of translating French heroides is the fact that Tatiana’s letter to Onegin is a
421
See note 409 above.
422
Lindheim, Mail and Female, 113.
182
translation from French. From the letter’s first famous line Pushkin seems to embrace the
tradition of the abandoned heroine who writes a letter as a last resort to express the extreme
pain of being separated from her lover:
Я к вам пишу — чего же боле?
Что я могу еще сказать? (Three: XXXI, II: 1-2)
(I write to you – what would one more?
What else is there that I could say?)
These lines have been scrutinized many times by scholars. Mikhail Gronas sees in them
Tatiana’s “heightened self-consciousness” and traces them back to the lines in Pushkin’s
private correspondence.
423
Nabokov alludes to a bad eighteenth-century novel which has
similar phrasing.
424
The lines importantly convey the passion that pushes Tatiana beyond the
safety of prescribed behavior into the realm of literary imagination. Tatiana’s account of her
suffering obviously doesn’t “square with the facts”
425
of her situation; in her letter she is
assuming a literary persona. The point is that the literary persona she embraces in the letter
originated in part with the women in heroides. With this letter Tatiana joins the ranks of
abandoned women whose fate as predetermined by literary conventions is painful confession
and death.
Tatiana raises the subject of abandonment early on in the letter:
Но вы, к моей несчастной доле
Хоть каплю жалости храня,
Вы не оставите меня. (Three: XXXI, II: 5-7)
423
Mikhail Gronas, “Pushkin and the Art of the Letter,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, ed. Andrew
Kahn, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141.
424
Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, 3: 389.
425
Richard A. Gregg, “Rhetoric in Tatiana’s Last Speech: The Camouflage That Reveals,” Slavic and East
European Journal 25 (1981):1.
183
(But you, preserving for my hapless lot
At least one drop of pity,
You’ll not abandon me…)
Tatiana emphasizes their separation as the cause for her writing.
Поверьте: моего стыда
Вы не узнали б никогда,
Когда б надежду я имела
Хоть редко, хоть в неделю раз
В деревне нашей видеть вас (Three: XXXI, II: 9-13)
(Believe me: of my shame
You never would have known
If I had had the hope
But seldom, but once a week ,
To see you in our village)
Tatiana’s desire to hear Eugene’s voice again is more modest than that of Ovid’s heroines,
who openly express their need for physical closeness with their beloved. Rather than insisting
explicitly for her loved one to “come back,” as Ovid’s heroines do, Tatiana offers a more
implicit demand, “I’ll wait for you.”
Pushkin turns to the Ovidian trope “imagine me” in Tatiana’s plea to Evgeny for pity:
Вообрази: я здесь одна,
Никто меня не понимает,
Рассудок мой изнемогает,
И молча гибнуть я должна. (Three: XXXI, II: 68-71)
(Imagine: I am here alone,
No one understands me,
My reason is breaking down,
And, silent, I must perish. )
Like Ariadne lamenting her isolation on an uninhabited island, Tatiana, who lives in the
tranquility of a provincial estate surrounded by a loving family and a caring nanny, proclaims
184
her isolation and looming death.
426
Unlike Ariadne, Tatiana doesn’t draw attention to her
appearance, compromised by tears and self-inflicted wounds; instead Tatiana laments that she
is not understood.
Tatiana and Famous “Nuns”
Employing the familiar rhetoric of Ovid’s heroines, Tatiana wishes that Eugene hadn’t
even visited her home in the first place, then later casts her addressee, Eugene, as a powerful
figure, asserting that he was sent to her by God:
То воля неба: я твоя;
Вся жизнь моя была залогом
Свиданья верного с тобой;
Я знаю, ты мне послан богом,
До гроба ты хранитель мой... (Three: XXXI, II: 33-38)
(That is the will of heaven: I am thine;
My entire life has been the gage
Of a sure tryst with you;
I know that you are sent to me by God,
You are my guardian to the tomb…)
The passage above conflates Tatiana’s religious sensibility with her desire to be in
love. As has been established, the first two lines in the passage are Pushkin’s direct borrowing
from Rousseau, a moment in the letter where, as Nabokov notes, Tatiana switches her address
to Onegin “from the formal second person plural to the passionate second person singular.”
427
In my reading of the letter, it is also the moment where the rhetoric of the passage begins to
426
The passage is underscored by a similar irony in Ovid: Ariadne, in complete isolation, creates an absurdly
long list of threatening creatures and people she fears will attack her.
427
Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, 3:392.
185
more explicitly resemble voices from eighteenth-century imitations of Ovid, in particular, the
heroides by Dorat, “Euphrasie to Melcour,” and Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard.”
428
In the early stage of their love affairs, both Dorat’s Euphrasie and Pope’s Eloisa
perceive their passionate love for man as a gift from God. In her first letter to the French
officer Melcour, the naïve and open-hearted nun reveals her passion to her beloved for the
first time. Twice Euphrasie shares her convictions that her affair happened by God’s
providence:
Я вся твоя: владей Эфразией своею!
Любови взор есть свят, все непорочно с нею.
429
(I am yours: take charge of your Euphrasie!
Love’s gaze is holy; everything is innocent in it.)
Любя, покорствую Творца я вышней воле… (160)
(By loving [you], [I] follow the highest will of Creator…)
Tatiana’s declaration “I am yours” literally echoes Euphrasie, and just like the nun, Tatiana
submits herself to the power of her beloved:
Но так и быть! Судьбу мою
Отныне я тебе вручаю (Three: XXXI, II: 64-65)
(But so be it! My fate
Henceforth I place into your hands.)
Euphrasie describes her submission to Melcour as a spiritual experience that also could be
traced to Tatiana’s letter:
428
The Russian translations of both heroides are discussed in Chapter Two.
429
Neledinskii-Meletskii, trans., “Evfraziia k Melkuru,” 166.
186
Euphrasie:
Душа, над коей власть тебе принадлежит,
Mелкуру отдалась: его боготворит.
Средь храма зрю его… Я внемлю,
oн вещает…
Зовет меня… (159)
([My] Soul, over which you [God] have power,
Is given to Melcour: she [soul] idolizes him.
I see him in the cathedral…I listen,
he speaks…
Calls me…)
Tatiana:
Не правда ль? Я тебя слыхала:
Ты говорил со мной в тиши,
Когда я бедным помогала
Или молитвой услаждала
Тоску волнуемой души? (Three: XXXI, II: 47-51)
(Is it not true? It was you I heard:
You in the stillness spoke to me
When I would help the poor
Or assuaged with a prayer
The anguish of my agitated soul?)
Tatiana embraces the nun’s image: she writes about helping the poor and praying. Her first
meeting with Onegin and Euphrasie’s meeting with the French officer are described using the
same trope.
Ты чуть вошел, я вмиг узнала, (Three: XXXI, II: 44)
(Scarce had you entered, instantly I knew you)
Compare to Euphrasie:
Лишь в первый раз узрела я тебя,
Неведому до толь познала радость я. (160-161)
187
(When I saw you for the first time,
I experienced a joy unknown til then.)
On several occasions, the rhetoric of another famous abandoned heroine, Eloisa, particularly
in the rendition of the early translation of Pope’s heroide by Kheraskov, surfaces in Tatiana’s
writing. For both Eloisa and Tatiana, the men they love also directly and indirectly play the
roles of their mentors. In her letter to Abelard, Pope’s Eloisa recalls the beginning of their
passionate affair, highlighting their innocent conversations:
Сладчайшие слова твои уста вещали,
Беседуя с тобой, кто б тронуться не мог?
430
(Your lips pronounced sweetest words,
Talking to you, who wouldn’t have been moved?)
Tatiana also emphasizes that she treasures Eugene’s words and their conversations above all.
She longs not for physical closeness, but to hear his speech and respond to it.
Чтоб только слышать ваши речи,
Вам слово молвить…(Three: XXXI, II: 14-15)
(Only to hear you speak,
To say a word to you,)
Referring to the past, Eloisa claims that she was unaware of the sinful side of love, and
perceived her lover as an angel several times.
Как ангела тебя мне ум воображал,
Дух ангельский в тебе в то в то время обитал. (85)
(My mind presented you as an angel,
The spirit of an angel was dwelling in you then)
430
[Mikhail Kheraskov], trans., “Eloiza k Abelardu,” Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779): 85.
188
While Eloisa describes her lover based on an intimate relationship with him, Tatiana describes
encounters with Eugene inspired by her literary imagination. “Незримый, ты мне был уж
мил.” (Unseen you were already dear to me) (Three: XXXI, II: 40). Despite the difference,
both Eloisa and Tatiana hear the voices of their beloved while they pray. Along with Eloisa,
Tatiana identifies her Onegin with an angel who whispers to her at her bedside:
Не ты ли, милое виденье,
В прозрачной темноте мелькнул,
Приникнул тихо к изголовью?
Не ты ль, с отрадой и любовью,
Слова надежды мне шепнул? (Three: XXXI, II: 53-57)
(Was it not you, dear vision,
That slipped through the transparent darkness
And gently bent close to my bed head?
Was it not you that with delight and love
Did whisper words of hope to me?)
In her letter, Eloise realizes her passion is a sin, and therefore casts her dreams about her lover
as temptations, obstacles on her way to repentance and holiness. While Tatiana’s letter reflects
the innocent stage of her love, she already anticipates the possibility that her romance might
end badly by posing the question:
Кто ты, мой ангел ли хранитель,
Или коварный искуситель. (Three: XXXI, II: 58-59)
(Who you are? My guardian angel
Or a perfidious tempter?)
189
Conclusion
The goal of this close textual analysis and comparison has been to demonstrate how
the tradition of both the ancient and eighteenth-century heroide are revealed in Tatiana’s letter
and Lenskii’s elegy. Heroides may provide a more relevant generic frame than some of the
sources and references proposed by other critics. For instance, Proskurin suggests looking
into French poetry rather than novels for sources related to Tatiana’s character.
431
Greenleaf
points out that an elegiac subtext can be found in virtually every line of Tatiana’s letter.
432
Both Greenleaf and Proskurin see the letter’s indebtedness to early nineteenth-century poetry,
making reference to the works of Batushkov and Zhukovskii for example as the source for the
image of a guardian angel in Tatiana’s letter. While the phrases from their suggested sources
do bear resemblance to Tatiana’s writing, there is very little contextual connection between
Tatiana’s letter and the poems cited, all of which were written on behalf of male speakers.
433
Greenleaf uses the apparent disparity of context between Tatiana’s letter and the assumed
sources to highlight the masculine antecedents of Tatiana’s letter and show that words which
in a man’s mouth sound trite and hyperbolic sound more true in Tatiana’s letter.
434
Proskurin
suggests that Zhukovskii’s poem “To Nina” where a male speaker addresses his lover
anticipating his death and their separation is the source for the spiritual meetings Tatiana
imagines between her and Eugene. Such convoluted explanations are not necessary to draw a
parallel between Tatiana and Eloise, both of whom idolize their lovers and associate them
431
Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, 164.
432
Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994), 259.
433
Greenleaf discuss the following poems: Batushkov’s “Moi genii” [My genius] (1815), Zhukovskii “K
mimopreletatevshemu znakomomu geniiu” [To the familiar genius just flown past] (1819). In addition,
Proskurin discusses Zhukovskii’s poem “Nine” [To Nina] (1808).
434
Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 260.
190
with guardian angels. Likewise, Proskurin traces Tatiana’s image of helping “the poor” to an
abstract phrase in the same poem by Zukovskii (“понесешь отраду в обитель недуга и
скорби” [you will bring comfort into the dwelling of illness and grief]), but it seems more
likely that Tatiana is channeling Eloise or the Portuguese nun. Nabokov concurs that the
sources for the passage constitute “a very Gallic situation.”
435
Olga Hasty, the author of a book-length study onTatiana’s character, doesn’t see the
point in looking for sources of her letter outside Tatiana’s own reading list. She links
Tatiana’s writing to the literary tradition of sentimental novels in which “feelings are the
driving force,” citing Rousseau as the principle source of Tatiana’s language and thoughts.
Hasty insists on viewing Tatiana’s writing as a unique, spontaneous, genuine creative gesture,
but she seems to be surprised by the fact that Tatiana departs from her models in sentimental
novels by daring to write before being written to.
436
The expert on early nineteenth-century
cultural norms, Lotman, likewise points out that at the time, for a 17 year-old young,
unmarried woman to write to a single man would be a very bold act, perceived as a violation
of decorum and cultural conventions.
437
Perceived within the context of the heroide, however,
Tatiana’s act of bravery belongs to the long standing tradition of women in desperate
circumstances who wrote “first,” holding tight to the keys of poetic power.
To my knowledge, only a few attempts have been made to establish Tatiana within the
classical tradition of the heroide
438
or its eighteenth-century variant whose most apparent
435
Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, 3: 393.
436
Olga Peters Hasty, Pushkin’s Tatiana (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 77 and 89.
437
Iu. M. Lotman, Komentarii, 230.
438
M. Shapir cites studies of Slonimskii (Voulikh 1967: 34—36) and Costello (Costello 1964: 54) who
independently examined parallels between plot details related to Tatiana’s letter and the story of Byblis to
Caunus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For further discussion, see M. Shapir, “Pushkin i Ovidii: novie materialy (iz
kommentariev k “Evgeniiu Oneginu”) in Statii o Pushkine (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2009): 111.
191
representative is Pope’s Eloisa. In his study of poetics of abandoned women Lipking assumes
Tatiana’s evocation of Ovid.
439
Shapir observes the closeness of Ovid’s Heroides to Tatiana’s
letter and cites their commonalities: bitter complaints and supplications, unjust reproaches,
shame, and the threat of approaching death; but he raises doubts about whether or not Tatiana
can be considered an abandoned woman.
440
The heroide, always transgressing onto the territories of other genres and literary forms
– elegy, epistle, tragedy, and ultimately the novel, -- was perhaps never a fully distinct genre,
uniquely fusing narrative storytelling with the poetic form. Built around the highly
confidential and compelling narrator’s voice, driven by the desire to convey a story as vividly
and expressively as possible, the heroide engaged, or as Said puts it, “colonized,”
441
the reader
by reconstructing a character’s chain of emotions and thoughts and exposing the depths of the
human soul. Its mark on the increasingly sophisticated voices of the Russian novelistic
tradition remains to be explored.
Heroides and the Novelistic Tradition
Studying heroides in their many shapes and forms– as translations, adaptations,
imitations and original Russian works, makes us aware of how these works anticipated the
novelistic tradition and helped to establish it. Heroides drew from the plots of epistolary
novels and in turn heroides were absorbed by them. Further, along with epistolary novels, as
the example of Eugene Onegin shows, heroides also had a part in the development of the
439
Lipking, Abandoned Women, 54.
440
M. Shapir, “Pushkin i Ovidii: novie materialy (iz kommentariev k “Evgeniiu Oneginu”), in Statii o Pushkine
(Moscow: Yazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2009): 112.
441
Edward Said, “The World, the Text, and the Critic,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 7-21.
192
novel. But the role of the heroide in shaping the novel, at least in Russia, is largely
unacknowledged and should be explored further. In his examination of early Russian
eighteenth-century epistolary novels, Maarten Fraanje observes that poetry is manifested in
them in a variety of ways. Among the poems described, referred to or even inserted in these
novels, many belong to the genre of heroide. For example, Fraanje writes that in the
anonymous short novel The Suicide, cited earlier, “poetic fragments serving as the expression
of the characters’ feelings, and having been slightly modified for this purpose, are carefully
woven into the course of the epistolary dialogue.”
442
During the early stages in the
development of the Russian novel when poetry was still the preferred mode for the expression
of feelings, the heroide provided a useful bridge between poetry and prose.
Eighteenth-century Russian heroides have been left scattered in Russian literary
journals and until recently have been off the radar of Slavic scholars, and an assessment of
their place in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Russian literature, until now, has not been
undertaken.
443
Among the contribution of the heroides that warrants further study particularly
in the Russian context is their role in the development of the novel. In Britain, where the
influence of poetry on the formation of the novel has long been acknowledged, heroides were
among the primary models which early novelists used “for constructing [the] shared emotional
442
Fraanje, The Epistolary Novel, 139.
443
However, some productive attempts to research heroides have been made by recent scholars. On Russian
translations of Ovid’s heroides, see M. Venditti, “Russkie perevody XVIII veka vtoroi geroidy Ovidia: Kozitskii,
Ruban, Rzhevskii,” in Chteniia otdela russkoi literatury XVIII veka, 7 (St. Petersburg, 2013), 168-181. On
Urusova’s collection, see Andrew Kahn, “Russian Elegists as Latin Lovers,” The Cambridge Companion to the
Latin Love Elegy, ed. Thea Selliias Thorsen, 336-347 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Amanda Ewington,
trans. and ed., Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Bilingual Edition
(Toronto: ITER-Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).
193
experience between characters and from character to reader.”
444
The appearance of the heroide
at the birth of the classical Russian novel suggests one of the ways its influence was felt.
But this is a whole other story still to be told.
444
Gabrielle G. Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), 8.
194
Appendix 1. Russian Translations of Ovid’s Heroides in the 18-19
th
centuries
* reprint of previously published work
By Order of the Heroides in Ovid’s Collection
Ovid’s first heroide, Penelope to Ulysses
1748 Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Penelope to Ulysses” [Penelope to Ulysses] (lines 3-4, 5-8).
Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiu. St. Petersburg, 1748.
1774 Ruban, Vasilii. “Penelopa k Ulissu” [Penelope to Ulysses]. In Dve Iroidy, ili Dva
pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’. St. Petersburg, 1774.
1812 Merzliakov, Aleksei. “Poslanie ot Penelopy k Ulissu.” [Penelope to Ulysses]. Trudy
obschestva lubitelei russkoi slovesnosti pri Imperatorskom moskovskom universitete. Part 2,
80-87. Moscow: V universitetskoi tipogrpahii, 1812.
1843 Krasov, Vasilii. “Poslanie Penelopy k Ulissu (Geroida Ovidiia)” [Penelope to
Ulysses]. Otechestvennye zapiski 29 (1843): 169-171.
Ovid’s second heroide, Phyllis to Demophon
1759 Kozitskii, Grigorii. “Pis’mo, sochinennoe Publiem Ovidiem Nasonom” [Phyllis to
Demophon]. Trudoliubivaia pchela, 9 (1759): 515-524 (prose). Republished by Ruban in
1774 in the collection Dve iroidy under his own name as a translator with minor edits.
1763 Rzhevskii, Aleksei. “Geroida. Fillida k Dimofontu. Sochinenie Ovidiia, v rosskie
stikhi, delana s perevodu” [Phyllis to Demophon]. Svobodnyia Chasy 11(1763): 636-646.
1774 *Ruban, Vasilii. “Filliada k Demofontu” [Phyllis to Demophon]. In Dve Iroidy, ili Dva
pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’. St. Petersburg, 1774.
Ovid’s third heroide, Breseida to Achilles
1791 Ruban, Vasilii. “Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem Ovidiem
sochinennoe” [Briseis to Achilles]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61 (1791): 54-65.
Also printed as a separate pamphlet same year.
1791 *Ruban, Vasilii. Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem Ovidiem
sochinennoe [Briseis to Achilles]. St. Petersburg, 1791. Also published in Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61 (1791): 54-65.
Ovid’s fourth heroide, Phaedra to Hippolytus
195
1788 Anonymous [prislano ot postoronnego cheloveka]. “Pis’mo ot Fedry k Ippolitu”
[Phaedra to Hippolytus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 27 (1788): 70-82.
Ovid’s tenth heroide, Ariadne to Theseus
1748 Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Ariadne to Theseus” [Ariadne to Theseus] (lines 145-150).
Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiu. St. Petersburg, 1748.
1763 [Kheraskov, Mikhail]. “Geroida. Ariiadna k Tezeiu” [Ariadne to Theseus]. Svobodnyia
Chasy 6 (1763): 372-381.
1764 Sankovskii, Vasilii [Perevel V.S.]. “Publiia Ovidiia Nasona Geroida Ariadna Tezeiu”
[Ariadne to Theseus]. Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-201. Reprinted in NES 1793.
1793 *Sankovskii, Vasilii [Translated from Latin by S.L.]. “Ariiadna k Tezeiu.” [Ariadne to
Theseus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 79 (1793): 94-97. First published in Dobroe
Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-201.
Ovid’s eleventh heroide, Canace to Macareus
1788 Anonymous [prislano ot postoronnego cheloveka]. “Pis’mo ot Kanaki k Makareiu”
[Canace to Macareus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28 (1788): 56-64. Reprinted in
Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63 (1791): 74-81 with minor edits and signed by Vasilii
Ruban.
1791 *Ruban, Vasilii. “Ovidieva pervaia na desiat’ Iroida ot Kanaki k Makareiu, nezadolgo
do ee smerti.” [Canace to Macareus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63 (1791): 74-81.
First published anonymously in Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28 (1788): 56-64. Minor
edits.
1808 Sokol’skii, Ivan. Geroida XI: Kanatse Makariiu [Canace to Macareus]. St. Petersburg,
1808.
Ovid’s seventeenth heroide, Helen to Paris
1764 Sankovskii, Vasilii. “Elena Parisu” [Helen to Paris]. Dobroe Namerenie 7 (1764): 291-
300.
196
Russian Translations of Ovid’s Heroides in Chronological Order
1. 1748 Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Penelope to Ulysses” [Penelope to Ulysses] (lines 3-4, 5-8).
Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiu. St. Petersburg, 1748.
2. 1748 Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Ariadne to Theseus” [Ariadne to Theseus] (lines 145-150).
Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiu. St. Petersburg, 1748.
3. 1759 Kozitskii, Grigorii. “Pis’mo, sochinennoe Publiem Ovidiem Nasonom” [Phyllis to
Demophon]. Trudoliubivaia pchela, 9 (1759): 515-524 (prose). Republished by Ruban in
1774 in the collection Dve iroidy under his own name as a translator with minor edits.
4. 1763 [Kheraskov, Mikhail]. “Geroida. Ariiadna k Tezeiu” [Ariadne to Theseus].
Svobodnyia Chasy 6 (1763): 372-381.
5. 1763 Rzhevskii, Aleksei. “Geroida. Fillida k Dimofontu. Sochinenie Ovidiia, v rosskie
stikhi, delana s perevodu” [Phyllis to Demophon]. Svobodnyia Chasy 11(1763): 636-646.
6. 1764 Sankovskii, Vasilii [Perevel V.S.]. “Publiia Ovidiia Nasona Geroida Ariadna
Tezeiu” [Ariadne to Theseus]. Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-201. Reprinted in NES
1793.
7. 1764 Sankovskii, Vasilii. “Elena Parisu” [Helen to Paris]. Dobroe Namerenie 7
(1764): 291-300.
8. 1774 Ruban, Vasilii. “Filliada k Demofontu” [Phyllis to Demophon]. In Dve Iroidy,
ili Dva pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’. St. Petersburg, 1774.
9. 1774 Ruban, Vasilii. “Penelopa k Ulissu” [Penelope to Ulysses]. In Dve Iroidy, ili
Dva pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’. St. Petersburg, 1774.
10. 1788 Anonymous [prislano ot postoronnego cheloveka]. “Pis’mo ot Fedry k
Ippolitu” [Phaedra to Hippolytus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 27 (1788): 70-82.
11. 1788 Anonymous [prislano ot postoronnego cheloveka]. “Pis’mo ot Kanaki k
Makareiu” [Canace to Macareus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28 (1788): 56-64.
Reprinted in Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63 (1791): 74-81 with minor edits and
signed by Vasilii Ruban.
12. 1791 Ruban, Vasilii. “Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem
Ovidiem sochinennoe” [Briseis to Achilles]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61
(1791): 54-65. Also printed as a separate pamphlet same year.
13. 1791 Ruban, Vasilii. “Ovidieva pervaia na desiat’ Iroida ot Kanaki k Makareiu,
nezadolgo do ee smerti.” [Canace to Macareus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63
(1791): 74-81. First published anonymously in Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28
(1788): 56-64. Minor edits.
14. 1791 Ruban, Vasilii. Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem
Ovidiem sochinennoe [Briseis to Achilles]. St. Petersburg, 1791. Also published in Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61 (1791): 54-65.
197
15. 1793 Sankovskii, Vasilii [Perevel V.S.]. “Ariiadna k Tezeiu” [Ariadne to
Theseus]. “Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 79 (1793): 94-97. First published in
Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-201. (at the beginning of the magazine) under
Sankovskii’s name.
16. 1808 Sokol’skii, Ivan. Geroida XI: Kanatse Makariiu [Canace to Macareus]. St.
Petersburg, 1808.
17. 1812 Merzliakov, Aleksei. “Poslanie ot Penelopy k Ulissu.” [Penelope to Ulysses].
Trudy obschestva lubitelei russkoi slovesnosti pri Imperatorskom moskovskom
universitete. Part 2, 80-87. Moscow: V universitetskoi tipogrpahii, 1812.
18. 1843 Krasov, Vasilii. “Poslanie Penelopy k Ulissu (Geroida Ovidiia)” [Penelope to
Ulysses]. Otechestvennye zapiski 29 (1843): 169-171.
198
Russian Translations of Ovid’s Heroides, Alphabetically by Translator
1. Anonymous [prislano ot postoronnego cheloveka]. “Pis’mo ot Fedry k Ippolitu” [Phaedra
to Hippolytus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 27 (1788): 70-82.
2. _____. “Pis’mo ot Kanaki k Makareiu” [Canace to Macareus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye
Sochineniia 28 (1788): 56-64. Reprinted in Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63 (1791):
74-81 with minor edits and signed by Vasilii Ruban.
3. [Kheraskov, Mikhail]. “Geroida. Ariiadna k Tezeiu” [Ariadne to Theseus]. Svobodnyia
Chasy 6 (1763): 372-381.
4. Kozitskii, Grigorii. “Pis’mo, sochinennoe Publiem Ovidiem Nasonom” [Phyllis to
Demophon]. Trudoliubivaia pchela, 9 (1759): 515-524 (prose). Republished by Ruban in
1774 in the collection Dve iroidy under his own name as a translator with minor edits.
5. Krasov, Vasilii. “Poslanie Penelopy k Ulissu (Geroida Ovidiia)” [Penelope to Ulysses].
Otechestvennye zapiski 29 (1843): 169-171.
6. Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Penelope to Ulysses” [Penelope to Ulysses] (lines 3-4, 5-8).
Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiu. St. Petersburg, 1748.
7. Lomonosov, Mikhail. “Ariadne to Theseus” [Ariadne to Theseus] (lines 145-150). Kratkoe
rukovodstvo k krasnorechiu. St. Petersburg, 1748.
8. Merzliakov, Aleksei. “Poslanie ot Penelopy k Ulissu.” [Penelope to Ulysses]. Trudy
obschestva lubitelei russkoi slovesnosti pri Imperatorskom moskovskom universitete. Part
2, 80-87. Moscow: V universitetskoi tipogrpahii, 1812.
9. Ruban, Vasilii. “Filliada k Demofontu” [Phyllis to Demophon]. In Dve Iroidy, ili Dva
pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’. St. Petersburg, 1774.
10. Ruban, Vasilii. “Penelopa k Ulissu” [Penelope to Ulysses]. In Dve Iroidy, ili Dva pis’ma
drevnikh Iroin’. St. Petersburg, 1774.
11. Ruban, Vasilii. “Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem Ovidiem
sochinennoe” [Briseis to Achilles]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61 (1791): 54-65.
Also printed as a separate pamphlet same year.
12. Ruban, Vasilii. “Ovidieva pervaia na desiat’ Iroida ot Kanaki k Makareiu, nezadolgo do ee
smerti.” [Canace to Macareus]. Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63 (1791): 74-81.
First published anonymously in Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28 (1788): 56-64.
Minor edits.
13. Ruban, Vasilii. Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem Ovidiem
sochinennoe [Briseis to Achilles]. St. Petersburg, 1791. Also published in Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61 (1791): 54-65.
14. Rzhevskii, Aleksei. “Geroida. Fillida k Dimofontu. Sochinenie Ovidiia, v rosskie stikhi,
delana s perevodu” [Phyllis to Demophon]. Svobodnyia Chasy 11(1763): 636-646.
199
15. Sankovskii, Vasilii [Perevel V.S.]. “Publiia Ovidiia Nasona Geroida Ariadna Tezeiu”
[Ariadne to Theseus]. Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-201. Reprinted in NES 1793.
16. Sankovskii, Vasilii. “Elena Parisu” [Helen to Paris]. Dobroe Namerenie 7 (1764): 291-
300.
17. [Sankovskii, Vasilii]. “Ariiadna k Tezeiu” [Ariadne to Theseus]. “Novye Ezhemesiachnye
Sochineniia 79 (1793): 94-97. First published in Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-201.
18. Sokol’skii, Ivan. Geroida XI: Kanatse Makariiu [Canace to Macareus]. St. Petersburg,
1808.
200
Appendix 2. Russian Translations of European Heroides and Original Heroides Based on European Sources, By Date
Date Translator Title Source Publication Information
1760 [Kheraskov,
Mikhail]
“Armida” Tasso Jerusalem Delivered
(1581)
Via French translation by
Jean-Batiste de Mirabaud
Poleznoe uveselenie 11 (1760): 113-
119 - at the beginning of the issue.
(Kheraskov’s magazine). Reprinted
with changes first in 1773 book, and
then in Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe
Izdanie 1 March (1779): 222-228
(w/o title iroida). Also reprinted in
Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 7
(1787): 44-55. + title iroida added
1760 Kheraskov, Mikhail
[M.Kh.]
“Smert’ Klarisy.
Podrazhennaia frantsusskomu
sochineniiu.”
[The Death of Clarissa].
Unknown Poleznoe uveselnie 24 (1760): 239-
249 – at the beginning of the weekly
issue. Reprinted in Modnoe
Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779):
163-172. The title changed to
“Smert’Klariny”; subtitle iroida
added, minor changes.
1761 Anonymous “Vozvraschennaia Elena”
[Returned Helen]
Unknown Poleznoe uveselnie part 2, 1761: 153-
156 – at the beginning of weekly
issue. Reprinted in Modnoe
Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779): 68-
74. The subtitle iroida added, minor
changes.
1765 [Kheraskov,
Mikhail]
“Epistola Eloizy ko Obelardu”
[Epistle from Eloisa to
Abelard]
Alexander Pope Eloisa to
Abelard (1717)
via French prose
translation by Fiquet du
Bocage
Sto novykh novostei sochineniia
gospozhi Gomes, t.1, Spb. 1765, pp.
175-196 (Almost identical to 1758
manuscript). When reprinted in 1773,
1779, 1786 & 1791 an edited version
was used. Title iroida was added.
1772 Anonymous “Neschastnaia portugalka.
Pis’mo” [Misfortunate
Portuguese. A Letter].
Heroide XIV from
“Lettres d'une Chanoinesse
de Lisbonne à Melcour,
Vechera chast’ 2 (1772-73): 42-54.
201
Officier” (1770)
1772 Anonymous “Elektra k Orestu” [Electra to
Orestes]
Unknown, possibly French Vechera chast’ 2 (1772-73): 131-136.
Reprinted in 1779 MES with added
title
1772 Anonymous “Pis’mo Gabrielly-de-Verzhi k
Grafine de Raul’, sestre Raulia
de Kusi. Perevedeno s
frantsuzskogo.”
Gabriel Mailhol, “Lettre
en vers de Gabrielle de
Vergy, à la comtesse de
Raoul, soeur de Raoul de
Coucy” (1766)
Vechera chast’ 2 (1772-73): 245-255.
Reprinted in “Modnoe
Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779):
177-185 (with title iroida added).
1773 Derzhavin,
Gavriil
[Perevedeno s
nemetskogo ]
“Iroida, ili Pis’mo Vivlidy k
Kavnu.”
Adrien Blin de Sainmore
“Lettre de Biblis à Caunus
son frère” (1765)
Starina i Novizna 2 (1773), 31-50.
1774 Khemnitser, Ivan “Pismo Barnvelia k Trumanu
iz temnitsy. Geroida.”
Claude Joseph Dorat
“Lettre de Barnevelt dans
sa prison à Truman son
ami” (1763)
St. Peterburg, 1774.
1779 [Kniazhnin, Iakov] “Pis’mo Grafa Kommenzha k
materi ego”
Claude Joseph Dorat
“Lettre da Comte de
Comminge à sa mère”
(1764)
Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1
jan. (1779): 1-17 (at the beginning of
the first issue of the magazine).
1779 Anonymous “Iroida. Melandr k Litsede.” Unknown Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2
may (1779): 85-89 (at the end of the
may issue).
1783 Dmitriev,
Aleksandr
“Pismo liubovnoe Eloizy k
Abel’iardu” in Sobranie pisem
Abel’iarda and Eloizy (prose)
Charles Pierre Colardeau
“Armida à Renaud” (1758)
Moscow: V Univ.tipografii, 1783, p.
102-135.
1783 Anonymous “Geroida. Ariana k Tezeiu.”
(prose)
Sébastien-Marie-Mathurin
Gazon-Dourxigné “Ariane
à Thésée, héroïde
nouvelle” (1762)
Gorodskaia i derevnskaia biblioteka 7
(1783): 357-364
1787 Baranov, Dmitrii “Sharlotta pri grobe Vertera” Unknown Zerkalo sveta, 2 (1787): 768-773.
1787 Bukharskii, Andrei “Montezum k Kortetsu” Jean-François de La Harpe
“Montézume á Cortez”
Zerkalo Sveta, 4 (1787): 246-251.
202
(1759)
1787 Khvostov, Dmitrii
[D. Kh.]
“Veturiia k Koriolanu” Tit Livy or French
intermediary
Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia
15 (1787): 57-62.
1788 Khvostov, Dmitrii
[D. Kh.]
“Andromakha k Pirru” Unknow, likely French Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia
19 (1788): 63-69.
1789 Anonymous
[Vel’iashev-
Volyntsev]
“Stikhi na grob Vertera” Antoine Arnault
“Charlotte au tombeau de
Werther” (1785)
Poleznoe uveselenie iunoshestva
1789: 376-377.
1791 [S.] “Sharlotta na Verterovoi
grobnitse. Perevod s
frantsuzskogo”
Antoine Arnault
“Charlotte au tombeau de
Werther” (1785)
Moskovskii zhurnal, 6 (1791): 122-
124.
1791 Kudryavtsev, Ivan. “Pis’mo Barnevel’ta v temnitse
sidiashtego k drugu ego
Triumanu.”
Claude-Joseph Dorat
“Lettre de Barnevelt dans
sa prison à Truman son
ami” (1763)
Moscow: v Univ. tip., 1791.
1792 Neledinskii-
Meletskii, Iurii
“Evfraziia k Melkuru. Perevod
iz Dorata”
Heroide I from “Lettres
d'une Chanoinesse de
Lisbonne à Melcour,
Officier” (1770)
Moskovskii zhurnal 6 (1792): 156-
166.
1793 Iankovich-de
Mirievo, I.
“Didona Eneiu.” Unknown, likely French
imitation of Ovid.
Sankt Peterburgskii Merkurii 4
(1793): 213-217.
1793 Bukharski, Andrei
Ivanovich
“Kora k Alonzu, iroida.” Based on
Jean-François de La Harpe
“Montézume á Cortez”
(1759) and Jean François
Marmontel Les Incas, ou
La destruction de l'empire
du Pérou) (1777)
St. Petersburg: v tipografii I. Krylova
s tovarishchi, 1793.
1794 Ozerov, V. A. “Eloiza k Abelardu. Iroida.
Vol'nyi perevod s
frantsuzskogo g. (geroidy)
Kollardo”
Free translation of Charles
Pierre Colardeau “Armida
à Renaud” (1758)
St. Petersburg, 1794.
1794 Khvostov, D. “Geroida na smert’ Marii
Antuanetty, korolevy
Likely original Polnoe sobranie sochinenii grafa
D.I.Khvostova, 3-izd. St. Petersburg,
203
frantsuzskoi 1794 goda” 1834:111-115.
1796 Iatsenko, Grigorii
Maksimovich [Ia.]
“Barnvel’t k Trumanu.”
Claude-Joseph Dorat
“Lettre de Barnevelt dans
sa prison à Truman son
ami” (1763)
Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie
vremeni 11 (1796): 369-383; 385-393.
1800 [Im-n] “Epistola ot Eloizy k
Abeliardu. From Воnnet de
nuit. Dе Мr. Меrcier”
Louis-Sebastien Mercier
“Epitre d'Héloise a
Abélard” (1763)
Ippokrena 5 (1800): 337-357.
1801 Merzliakov,
Aleksei
“Pis’mo Vertera k Sharlote,
perevedeno s frantsuzskogo”
Samuel Bridel “Lettre de
Verther à Charlotte”
(1788)
Manuscript. First published in A.F.
Merzliakov, Stikhotvoreniia,
Biblioteka poeta (Sovetskii pisatel’,
1958), 219-229.
1802 Bornovolokova,
Mariia
[M.Brnvlkva]
“Iroida. Dnii k Dekiiu.” One letter from Jacob
Dusch Moralische Briefe
zur Bildung des Herzens
(1759)
Novosti Russkoi Literatury 2 (1802):
323-350.
1805 Gnedich, N. “Peruanetz k ispantsu” Based on Based on
Jean François Marmontel
Les Incas, ou La
destruction de l'empire du
Pérou) (1777)
Tsvetnik IV no.11(1809):166.
1806 Zhukovskii, Vasilii “Poslanie Eloizy k Abeliaru” Alexander Pope Eloisa to
Abelard (1717)
First published in 1902: Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii V.A. Zhukovskogo
pod redaktsiei Arkhangelskogo, vol.1,
St. Petersburg, 1902.
1809 Bunina, Anna “K iunomu Polluksu.
Perevod.”
Unknown; possibly
original work.
Neopytnaia muza, 1809, p. 46-50
1819 Tumanskii, Vasilii “Verter k Sharlotte.
Podrazhanie frantsuskomu.”
André Coupingny
“Werther à Charlotte, une
heure avant de mourir”
(1801)
Blagonamerennyi VI (1819): 5.
1825 Pisarev, Aleksandr “Pis’ma dvukh zhitelei Peru.” Based on Françoise de
Graffigny Lettres d’une
péruvienne (1747) and
In Kaluzhskie vechera –part 1,
Moskva: V Universitetskoi
Tipographii, 1825: 99-108
204
Lettres d'Aza ou d'un
Péruvien by Hugary de
Lamarche-Courmont
1825 Pisarev, Aleksandr “Armida k Renal’du. Iroida
(Vol’nyi perevod iz sochinenii
Kolardo).”
Free translation of Charles
Pierre Colardeau Armida à
Renaud (1758)
In Kaluzhskie vechera –part 1,
Moskva: V Universitetskoi
Tipographii, 1825: 109-119.
205
Appendix 3. Original Russian Heroides
Date Author Title Source Publication Information
1769 Sumarokov,
Aleksandr.
“Geroida: Osnel’da k Zavlokhu.”
[Osnel’da to Zavlokh]
Sumarokov, A. P. Khorev (1750) Raznye stikhotvoreniia. St.
Petersburg, 1769: 214-217.
1769 Sumarokov,
Aleksandr
“Geroida: Zavlokh k Osnel’de.”
[Zavlokh to Osnel’da]
Sumarokov, A. P. Khorev (1750) Raznye stikhotvoreniia. St.
Petersburg, 1769: 217-221.
1777 [Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Zeida k Leandru,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Urusova’s invention St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Darii k Fedime,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Rzevskii, A.
Podlozhnii Smerdii
[The False Smerdis] (1769)
St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Fedima k Dariiu,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Rzevskii, A.
Podlozhnii Smerdii
[The False Smerdis] (1769)
St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Rogneda ko Vladimiru,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Lomonosov, M. V.
Drevniaia rossiiskaia istoriia
[Ancient Russian History](1766)
St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Promest ko drugu,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Urusova’s invention St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Ofira k Medoru,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Urusova’s invention St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Medor k Ofire,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Urusova’s invention St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Ol’fena k Merionu”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Khrapovitskii, A.
Idamant
St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova,
Ekaterina]
“Kliiada,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
Urusova’s invention St. Petersburg, 1777.
1787 [Karabanov, Petr] “Iroida: Anuita k Viktoru.” Popov, M.
Aniuta (1772)
Zerkalo Sveta 4 (1787): 209-
217.
Reprinted in Sobranie
noveishikh pesen i raznikh
liubovniukh stikhotvorenii,
206
part 1, (Moscow, 1791); Petr
Karabanov, Sobranie
stikhotvorenii, 1801.
207
Appendix 4: List of All Russian Heroides (Translations and Originals) Published in Russia in 1748-1843.
* reprint of previously published work
Date Author Title Meter Publication Information
1748 Lomonosov, Mikhail “Penelope to Ulysses” [Penelope
to Ulysses] (lines 3-4, 5-8);
“Ariadne to Theseus” [Ariadne to
Theseus] (lines 145-150).
alexandrines Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiu. SPb.,
1748: 59, 65, 215, 216.
1759 Kozitskii,
Grigorii
“Pis’mo, sochinennoe Publiem
Ovidiem Nasonom” [Phyllis to
Demophon].
prose Trudoliubivaia pchela, 9 (1759): 515-524.
Republished by Ruban in 1774 in the
collection Dve iroidy under his own name as a
translator with minor edits.
1760 [Kheraskov, Mikhail] “Armida” alexandrines Poleznoe uveselenie 11 (1760): 113-119.
Reprinted with changes first in 1773 book,
and then in Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie
1 march (1779): 222-228 (w/o title iroida).
Also reprinted in Novye Ezhemesiachnye
Sochineniia 7 (1787): 44-55. + title iroida
added
1760 Kheraskov, Mikhail
[M.Kh.]
“Smert’ Klarisy. Podrazhennaia
frantsusskomu sochineniiu.”
[The Death of Clarissa].
alexandrines Poleznoe uveselnie 24 (1760): 239-249.
Reprinted in Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe
Izdanie 2 (1779): 163-172. The title changed
to “Smert’Klariny”; subtitle iroida added,
minor changes.
1761 Anonymous
[Kheraskov, Mikhail?]
“Vozvraschennaia Elena”
[Returned Helen]
alexandrines Poleznoe uveselnie part 2, 1761: 153-156.
Reprinted in Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie
1 (1779): 68-74. The subtitle iroida added,
minor changes.
1763 [Kheraskov, Mikhail] “Geroida. Ariiadna k Tezeiu”
[Ariadne to Theseus].
alexandrines Svobodnyia Chasy 6 (1763): 372-381.
1763 Rzhevskii, “Geroida. Fillida k Dimofontu. alexandrines Svobodnyia Chasy 11(1763): 636-646.
208
Aleksei Sochinenie Ovidiia, v rosskie
stikhi, delana s perevodu” [Phyllis
to Demophon].
(translation according to Gukovskii)
1764 Sankovskii, Vasilii
[Perevel V.S.]
“Ariiadna k Tezeiu”
[Ariadne to Theseus].
alexandrines Dobroe Namerenie 5 (1764): 195-201 (at the
beginning of the magazine). Reprinted in
NES 1793.
1764 Sankovskii,
Vasilii
“Elena Parisu.” [Helen to Paris] alexandines Dobroe Namerenie 7 (1764): 291-300. (at the
beginning of the magazine)
1765 [Kheraskov, Mikhail] *“Epistola Eloizy ko Obelardu”
[Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard]
alexandrines Sto novykh novostei sochineniia gospozhi
Gomes, t.1, Spb. 1765, pp. 175-196 (Almost
identical to 1758 manuscript). When reprinted
in 1773, 1779, 1786 & 1791 an edited version
was used. Title iroida was added.
1769 Sumarokov, Aleksandr.
“Geroida: Osnel’da k Zavlokhu.”
[Osnel’da to Zavlokh]
alexandrines Raznye stikhotvoreniia. S.-Peterburg, 1769:
214-217.
1769 Sumarokov, Aleksandr “Geroida: Zavlokh k Osnel’de.”
[Zavlokh to Osnel’da]
alexandrines Raznye stikhotvoreniia. S.-Peterburg, 1769:
217-221.
1772 Anonymous “Neschastnaia portugalka.
Pis’mo” [Misfortunate
Portuguese. A Letter].
alexandrines Vechera 2 (1772-73): 42-54.
1772 Anonymous “Elektra k Orestu [Electra to
Orestes]
alexandrines Vechera 2 (1772-73): 131-136
Reprinted in 1779 MES with added title.
1772 Anonymous Pis’mo Gabrielly-de-Verzhi k
Grafine de Raul’, sestre Raulia de
Kusi. Perevedeno s
frantsuzskogo.”
alexandrines Vechera 2 (1772-73), 245-255
Reprinted in Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie
2 (1779): 177-185 with title iroida added.
1773 Derzhavin,
Gavriil [Perevedeno s
nemetskogo ]
“Iroida, ili Pis’mo Vivlidy k
Kavnu.”
prose Starina i Novizna 2 (1773): 31-50.
1773
(?)
[Kheraskov, Mikhail] *“Iroida I. Eloiza ko Abelardu” in
one volume with “Iroida II.
Armida k Rinol’du”
alexandrines Spb, s.d. (1773): 5-19. Significantly edited
version of 1765 poem. Includes a note.
Reprinted also in 1779, 1786 & 1791.
209
1773
(?)
[Kheraskov, Mikhail] *“Iroida II. Armida k Rinol’du”
in one volume with “Iroida I.
Eloiza ko Abelardu”
alexandrines Spb, s.d. (1773), pp. 19. Reprint of Poleznoe
uveselenie 11 (1760):113-119 with changes,
title iroida added. Reprinted in Modnoe
Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779): 222-228
w/o title iroida. Reprinted in Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 7 (1787): 44-55
with title iroida.
1774 Khemnitser,
Ivan
“Pismo Barnvelia k Trumanu iz
temnitsy. Geroida”
St. Petersburg, 1774.
1774 Ruban,
Vasilii
“Filliada k Demofontu” [Phyllis
to Demophon]. In Dve Iroidy, ili
Dva pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’.
prose St. Petersburg, 1774.
1774 Ruban,
Vasilii.
“Penelopa k Ulissu” [Penelope to
Ulysses]. In Dve Iroidy, ili Dva
pis’ma drevnikh Iroin’.
prose St. Petersburg, 1774.
1777 [Urusova, Ekaterina] “Zeida k Leandru,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] “Darii k Fedime,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] “Fedima k Dariiu,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] “Rogneda ko Vladimiru,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] “Promest ko drugu,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] “Ofira k Medoru,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] Medor k Ofire,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] “Ol’fena k Merionu”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
[Urusova, Ekaterina] “Kliiada,”
in Iroidy Muzam Posviaschennye
alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1777.
1779 [Kniazhnin, Iakov] “Pis’mo Grafa Kommenzha k alexandrines Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 jan.
210
materi ego” (1779): 1-17 at the beginning of the first issue
of the magazine
1779 Anonymous *“Iroida, Elena vozvraschennaia
Menelaiu” [Returned Helen]
alexandrines Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779):
68-74. Reprint of Vozvraschennaia Elena in
Poleznoe uveselnie 2 (1761): 153-156. (The
subtitle iroida added, minor editing changes.)
1779 [ Kheraskov, Mikhail] *“Iroida, Eloiza k Abelardu”
[Eloisa to Abelard]
alexandrines Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779):
83-97. It is a re-edited version of 1765 poem
and a reprint of 1773 version.
Reprinted in Novye Ezhemesiachnye
Sochineniia 3 (1786): 78-103. Also in 1791.
1779 [ Kheraskov, Mikhail] *“Armida k Rinol’du” alexandrines Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1 (1779):
222-228 (w/o title iroida). Reprint of Poleznoe
uveselenie 11 (1760): 113-119 with some
changes. First published in 1773 in a book.
Also reprinted in Novye Ezhemesiachnye
Sochineniia 7 (1787): 44-55. + title iroida
added
1779 Anonymous “Iroida. Melandr k Litsede.” alexandrines Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779):
85-89.
1779 [ Kheraskov, Mikhail] *“Iroida. Smert’ Klariny.” [The
Death of Clarina]
alexandrines Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779):
163-172. Reprint from Poleznoe uveselnie 24
(1760): 239-249.
Initial title “Smert’ Klarisy. Podrazhennaia
frantsusskomu sochineniiu” changed to
“Iroida. Smert’ Klariny.”
1779 Anonymous *“Iroida. Elektra k Orestu.”
[Electra to Orestes].
alexandrines Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779):
173-177. Reprint from Vechera (1772); title
“iroida” added.
1779 Anonymous *Iroida. Gabriella de Verzhi.” alexandrines “Modnoe Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 2 (1779):
177-185. Reprint from Vechera (1772); title
“iroida” added.
211
1783 Dmitriev, Aleksandr “Pismo liubovnoe Eloizy k
Abel’iardu” in Sobranie pisem
Abel’iarda and Eloizy
prose Moscow: V Univ.tipografii, 1783, p. 102-135.
1783 Anonymous “Geroida. Ariana k Tezeiu.”
[Ariadne to Theseus]
prose Gorodskaia i derevnskaia biblioteka 7 (1783):
357-364
1786 [ Kheraskov, Mikhail] *Iroida. Eloiza k Abelardu alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 3 (1786):
78-103. It is a re-edited version of 1765 poem
and reprint of 1773 version which also
reprinted in 1779 and 1791.
1787 Baranov, Dmitrii “Sharlotta pri grobe Vertera” alexandrines Zerkalo sveta, 2 (1787): 768-773.
1787 Anonymous
[Karabanov, Petr]
“Iroida: Anuita k Viktoru.” alexandrines Reprinted in Sobranie noveishikh pesen i
raznikh liubovniukh stikhotvorenii, part 1,
(Moscow, 1791); Petr Karabanov, Sobranie
stikhotvorenii, 1801.
1787 Bukharskii, Andrei “Montezum k Kortetsu.” alexandrines Zerkalo Sveta, 4 (1787): 246-251
1787 Anonymous
[ Kheraskov, Mikhail]
*Iroida. Armida k Rinol’du alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 7 (1787):
44-55. First published in Modnoe
Ezhemesiachnoe Izdanie 1(1779): 222-228
w/o subtitle iroida.
1787 Khvostov, Dmitrii
[D. Kh.]
“Veturiia k Koriolanu.” alexandrine Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 15
(1787): 57-62.
1788 Khvostov, Dmitrii
[D. Kh.]
“Andromakha k Pirru.” alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 19
(1788): 63-69.
1788 Anonymous
[prislano ot
postoronnego cheloveka]
“Pis’mo ot Fedry k Ippolitu.” alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 27
(1788): 70-82.
1788 Anonymous
[prislano ot
postoronnego cheloveka]
“Pis’mo ot Kanaki k Makareiu”
[Canace to Macareus].
alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28
(1788): 56-64. Reprinted in Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63 (1791): 74-81
with minor edits and signed by Vasilii Ruban.
1789 Anonymous
[Vel’iashev-Volyntsev]
“Stikhi na grob Vertera” alexandrines Poleznoe uveselenie iunoshestva (1789): 376-
377.
1791 [S.] “Sharlotta na Verterovoi
grobnitse. Perevod s
iambic
tetrameter
Moskovskii zhurnal, VI (1791): 122-124.
212
frantsuzskogo”
1791 Ruban, Vasilii. “Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot
Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem
Ovidiem sochinennoe.” [Briseis
to Achilles].
alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61
(1791): 54-65. Also printed as a separate
pamphlet same year.
1791 Ruban, Vasilii *“Ovidieva pervaia na desiat’
Iroida ot Kanaki k Makareiu,
nezadolgo do ee smerti.” [Canace
to Macareus].
alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 63
(1791): 74-81. First published in Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 28 (1788): 56-
64. Minor edits.
1791 Ruban, Vasilii. *“Iroida, ili Pis’mo v stikhakh ot
Vriseidy k Akhillu, Publiem
Ovidiem sochinennoe.” [Briseis
to Achilles].
alexandrines St. Peterburg, 1791. Also published in Novye
Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 61 (1791): 54-
65.
1791 Kudryavtsev, Ivan. “Pis’mo Barnevel’ta v temnitse
sidiashtego k drugu ego
Triumanu.”
prose Moscow: Univ. tip., 1791.
1791 Anonymous
[ Kheraskov, Mikhail]
*“Eloiza ko Abelardu” alexandrines Sobranie noveishikh pesen i raznykh
liubovnykh stikhotvorenii, M. 1791, ch.1, pp.
152-166. It is an edited version of 1765 poem.
First published in 1773 and reprinted in 1779
and 1786.
1792 Neledinskii-Meletskii,
Iurii
“Evfraziia k Melkuru. Perevod iz
Dorata”
alexandrines Moskovskii zhurnal 6 (1792): 156-166
1793 Iankovich-de Mirievo, I. “Didona Eneiu.” alexandrines S.-Peterb. Merkurii 4 (1793): 213-217.
1793 Sankovskii, Vasilii
[Perevel V.S.].
*“Ariiadna k Tezeiu” [Ariadne to
Theseus].
alexandrines Novye Ezhemesiachnye Sochineniia 79
(1793): 94-97
First published in Dobroe Namerenie 5
(1764): 195-201.
1793 Bukharski, Andrei
Ivanovich
“Kora k Alonzu, iroida.” alexandrines St. Peterburg: v tipografii I. Krylova s
tovarishchi, 1793.
1794 Ozerov, V. A. “Eloiza k Abelardu. Iroida. alexandrines St. Petersburg, 1794.
213
Vol'nyi perevod s frantsuzskogo
g. (geroidy) Kollardo”
1794 Khvostov, Dmitrii “Geroida na smert’ Marii
Antuanetty, korolevy frantsuzskoi
1794 goda”
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Russian heroides, 1759-1843: translatons and transformations
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