Pyotr Vyazemsky and Vasily Zhukovsky in 1807-1829: The History of Personal and Creative Relationships (Based on Correspondence)

The article evaluates the role of correspondence in the epistolary heritage of two poets, Vyazemsky and Zhukovsky, and offers a complete overview of the archival and editing fate of their surviving letters. The overview allows concluding that less than half of Zhukovsky's letters and about a third of Vyazemsky's letters have been introduced into scholarly discourse so far. The fragmentary publication of the correspondence also determined the insufficient study of the history of mutual relations between the two poets, which has never become the object of an independent analysis. Friendship between Vyazemsky and Zhukovsky was deeply conditioned by the peculiarities of their personalities: Zhukovsky completely inherited the sentimentalist cult of close friendship as a deep emotional contact, reaching the level of genuine intimacy, and he allowed very few such relationships. Vyazemsky, who entered high society at an early age, had little experience of such close communication, his type of friendship was not an interpenetration of souls, but an intensive exchange of emotions, thoughts, statements, gestures. The article highlights and characterizes the main stages of the poets' communication. Their friendship was formed in 1807-1809. In Zhukovsky, young Vyazemsky found a benevolent connoisseur, a strict editor, and a literary mentor. The following eight years (1810-1817) for Zhukovsky became the time of a wide literary and public recognition, culminating with active organizational activities as the actual head of Arzamas and entry into the court circle. For Vyazemsky, it was a period of shaping his poetic manner and determining his own place in modern literature. Literary mentoring obviously turned into an equal cooperation, in which the diverse Arzamas communications helped to maintain unity and show individual positions. In 1818-1821, the difference in the poets' life strategies and artistic and ideological attitudes determined a new nature of communication - an intensive dialogue on social and literary topics, fueled by Zhukovsky's cultural activities in the court environment and Vyazemsky's experiences of independent civic activities in Warsaw. Cooperation, assistance, and joint participation in literary projects determined the mode of the predominantly epistolary communication between Vyazemsky and Zhukovsky in 1822-1827. This period was marked by a number of converging crises: caring for the sick K.N. Batyushkov, the Decembrist Uprising and its consequences for the Turgenev brothers, the death of N.M. Karamzin, changes in the position of A.S. Pushkin. Vyazemsky perceived the courtier poet Zhukovsky, with his numerous Arzamas friends going up the career ladder, as an intercessor to the Petersburg literary high life and a defender from censorship; Zhukovsky perceived the young literary journalist as both the Moscow charge d'affaires, a news deliverer, and a kind of a voice of the Arzamas of the past. The breakthrough was in 1828-1829, when, on false denunciations, a case on Vyazemsky's “depraved behavior” was initiated, which demanded Zhukovsky's active help in removing the disgrace.

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