V.A. Zhukovsky, a reader of the German poetry of the 1840s: Gedichte Eines Lebendigen by Georg Herwegh (1841)

The summer of 1841 was marked by a real literary sensation for the German world. The first part of the collection of poems by the twenty-four-year-old Georg Herwegh (Georg Herwegh, 1817-1875) Gedichte eines Lebendigen ("Poems of a Living Man") was published in Zurich. The effect of the book was intoxicating, it had a powerful impact both on conservatives and reactionaries. It was a new kind of political poetry based almost exclusively on rhetoric. Herwegh proved to be very demanded in the pious Germany of the Biedermeier which was massively reading and writing at that time. He was close to and understood by the opposing parties, having adopted a safe strategy: the "Stuermer" and radical pathos of his verses was based on the immutable plot and composition structure of spiritual and edifying literature, as well as on romantic natural philosophy and mythopoet-ics. The unpretentious language which he used to express the eternal motives of tyrant-fighting together with the call for unity, protest and liberation, relevant to the country, made his poems clear to the general reader. The life-affirming pathos of disagreement could be noticed already in the title, with which the author hinted at Letters of the Dead by Hermann von Ptickler-Muskau, a German prince, a traveling writer, a subtle and ironic narrator, a major in the Russian service, and the founder of Europe's largest English-style park. His works were familiar to Zhukovsky, who read the Prince's four-volume edition Briefe eines verstorbenen. Ein fragmentarisches Tagebuch aus England, Wales, Irland, Frankreich, Deutschland und Holland, geschrieben in den Jahren 1826-1829 (Lobanov, 1981, 259), this book causing Herwegh's polemics. The paper addresses the problem of attributing and analyzing the facts of the Russian reception of the poems by Georg Herwegh, one of the most famous German poets, a representative of the new revolutionary and democratic direction. The notes and autographs V. A. Zhukovsky made in the editions of Herwegh are introduced in the scientific discourse (Herwegh G., Gedichte eines Lebendigen (1841)). For the first time the paper shows the overview and the comparative analysis of the Russian and German reception of Herwegh's personality and his creative heritage of the 1840s-2010s. In this context, Zhukovsky's remarks have a special significance. In Russia, Herwegh's personality and legacy were conceived stage-by-stage. This way, the peculiarities of the reception were determined by the historical and cultural situation in the recipient culture. The first period of the comprehension may be essentially dated back to the 1870s-1900s. The second period is connected in Russia with the appearance of the ideological pathos that was typical of the poems, which brought a scandalous popularity to the German poet. The burst of attention was marked in 2009-2013 when a cycle of new articles on the relationship between the Herzens and Herwegh was published.

Keywords

Authors

References