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Pogorel'skij, The First Russian Hoffmannist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2019

Charles E. Passage
Charles E. Passage*
Affiliation:
German Department, Brooklyn College
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Extract

Between the formative years of the eighteenth century, when Russian literature was at school to Western Europe, and the decade of the 1840's, when the native genius achieved unequivocal expression, there lie three significant decades during which the Russian spirit strove to find itself. The weight of tradition lay with British and French literary models, the displacement of which is effected not by head-on revolt, but by the introduction of German literary models as a counterweight. It has long been recognized that the process was initiated by the poet V. A. Zhukovskij, tentatively and uncertainly at first, and then sustained by him with vigor, especially in the years 1815-18, when his translations from the poetry of Goedie and Schiller appeared in profusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 1956 , pp. 247 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1956

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References

1 See Passage, Dostoevski the Adapter (University of North Carolina Press, 1954).

2 The three dissertations of 1807, published 1808, bear the following titles: 1. Wie sind Thiere und Gewächse von einander unterschieden und welches ist ihr Verhältnis zu den Mineralien? 2. Sur le but et Futility du systeme des plantes de Linné. 3. O rastenijakh kotorija by polezno bylo razmnozhat’ v Rossii (Concerning plants, which it would be useful to propagate in Russia).

3 A distant cousin of Leo Tolstoy. The principal works of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-75) are: Prince Serebrjannij, historical novel, 1862; a trilogy of dramas: The Death of Ivan the Terrible, 1866; Tsar Fëdor Ivanovich, 1868; and Tsar Boris Godunov, 1870; two long narrative poems and some 300 lyrics published throughout his lifetime.

4 Biographical information has been drawn chiefly from the article on Pogorel ‘skij in the Russian Biographical Dictionary (Russkij biograficheskij slovar’) and from André Lirondelle, Le Poète Alexis Tolstoï, thèse pour le doctorat ès lettres, Université de Paris, 1912.

5 Sergei Ignatov, Gofman i Pogorel'skij in Russkij filologicheskij vestnik, LXXII (1914), 249–78.

6 Datura fastuosa, a most unusual, interesting, and relatively little known tale of Hoffmann, was published posthumously in 1822 and republished in the collection known as Die Letzten Erzählungen in 1825. With the title of The Botanist it appeared in Russian translation in The Moscow Telegraph, VIII, 1826. Besides the details it contributed to the story under discussion here, it was to form the basis for the curious tale known as The Lonely Cottage on Vasilevskij Island, conceived by Pushkin but written and published by “Tit Kosmokratov” in 1829, and is further related in all probability to Dostoevsky's A Christmas Tree and a Wedding of 1848.

7 Ignatov, Gofman i Pogorel'skij, op. cit., p. 268, mentions that Venturino's role is unclear and that he is a poor imitation of Coppelius, but offers no explanation of the fact.

8 Ibid., p. 267.

9 Four other works can only be mentioned here owing to the limitations of space: The Black Chicken, a fairy tale for children which the author composed for and about his young nephew (1829); The Hypnotist, a novel-fragment related to Hoffmann's short story of the same name (1830); The Girl from the Convent School, an unexpectedly realistic novel about life among the Ukrainian gentry (1830, 1832); and Letter to Baron Humboldt, composed in 1829 both in Russian and in French translation. It purports to be a defense of the use in Russian orthography of the alphabet letter known as the “hard sign,” written in the first person by the alphabet letter itself. The able little essay presents all of the arguments in favor of retention of the sign, which, after 1917, was finally eliminated, almost entirely, from Russian orthography. All diaries and private papers of Pogorel'skij have been lost. Ignatov explains (p. 257) that: “The former manager of the estate (Pogorel'cy) was a lover of fine foods, particularly of cutlets in paper wrappings, and in his long stay at Pogorel'cy he used up all of the writer's papers for his favorite food.“.

10 Works of Antoni Pogorel'skij (Sochinenija Antonija Pogorel'skago), edited by Alexander Smirdin (St. Petersburg, Imperial Academy of Sciences Press, 1853), two volumes in one. S1.