XI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia
10th-14th July 2023
Tatiana Smoliarova (University of Toronto), “I saw, and clearly saw, the living Light…”: on one of the possible sources of Gavriil Derzhavin’s ode “On the Return of Count Zubov from Persia” (1797)
My paper will focus on a possible source of Gavriil Derzhavin’s ode “On the Return of Count Zubov from Persia” (1797), one of the finest poems he has ever written. The poem’s four central stanzas (5-8) present Valerian Zubov’s adventurous life as a series of incredible “tableaux”, stringed on the alternating verbs of vision “видел” and “зрел” [“…You have gazed upon the horrors, the beauties of nature <…>, You have seen during fair weather / The sun’s rays there, among the ice…, <…> You have seen a light rain glowing there, <…> / You have seen a block of amber gray [ice] there, <…> You have seen the Caspian lying / Stretched out among the reeds and in the sand, <…> You have seen the thunder in the darkness, <…> You have seen the torrid steppe / Teeming with hordes of enormous snakes…]). I would suggest that this sequence of visions dates back to the fifth canto of Luis de Camões epic poem The Lusiads (1572). Three extensive quotes from Camões have first appeared in Mikhail Lomonosov’s “Brief Guide to Eloquence”, also known as “Rhetoric” (1748). In his “Rhetoric”, Lomonosov mostly provides quotes from ancient authors and from himself: Camões is a rare exception. Two of three quotes come from canto V, probably the most widely cited part of The Lusiads. It is in the same canto that we find stanzas 16 – 19, containing the description of various Nature’s “horrors and beauties”, observed by Vasco da Gama and his fellow travelers. These four stanzas are also stringed on similar syntactic construction (although in the first person) “I saw”, “We saw”, etc. Juxtaposing Camões’ and Derzhavin’s verses, we find several word-for-word, striking coincidences. If Lomonosov had to work with L.-A. Duperron De Castera’s French translation (and then started learning Portuguese to be able to read Camões’ in original), by 1797, when Derzhavin wrote his ode, a full prose Russian translation of The Lusiads was available. It was published nine years earlier, in 1788, by Alexander Dmitriev, an eminent translator and Ivan Dmitriev’s brother (hence, belonging to Derzhavin’s circle). It is well known that Derzhavin’s owed his acquaintance with Ossian’s poetry to Dmitriev’s Russian translation: it seems more than plausible that he would have read The Lusiads. And even if he did not read the entire thing, he might have payed attention to canto V, which, as mentioned above, was quoted by Lomonosov and many others.
The paper will discuss possible reasons of Derzhavin’s interest in this text (first and foremost, the “Asian context”: Camões’ poem was an account of Vasco da Gama’s travels to India; Valerian Zubov was returning from Persia). Derzhavin’s interest in The Lusiads might have been also kindled by Mikhail Kheraskov’s 1796 preface to the third edition of his Rossiada – the first full-fledged Russian epic: discussing the history of world epic poetry, Kheraskov spoke very highly of Camões, considering The Lusiads one of the best examples of epic poetry ever written. I will close my talk by allusions to Joseph Brodsky’s “The Big Elegy of John Donne” (1963), several stanzas of which were famously influenced by Derzhavin’s ode. It’s curious to trace this “baroque circle”: how an eighteenth-century Russian ode, inspired, if only in part, by a sixteenth century baroque epic, later on influenced an elegy written in the twentieth century and addressed to a seventeenth-century baroque poet.
