Zhukovsky

Literary historians love to explore questions about how writers depend on one another and how earlier figures influence later ones. Personally, I find this scholarly tradition rather unproductive—even from a purely scientific point of view. The fact that one writer’s work reminds you of another is very often explained not by influence or impact, but by the kinship of their souls and therefore their styles. Style and soul are inseparably linked. Establishing these harmonies is far more important than establishing influences. About which Russian writers Zaytsev is most in tune with, and why they are beloved to him—he himself told us in his three monographs on Zhukovsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov.

All three monographs were written in Zaytsev’s manner. Not from the outside, but from within. With intuitive penetration into the life destinies of the authors he loved, and with heightened attention to the religious themes in their work; in relation to Chekhov, this emphasis on the religious theme seems, at first glance, not entirely justified—but with deeper penetration into Zaytsev’s understanding of Chekhov, it nonetheless convinces. Another very important and valuable thing in these monographic works is that the lives of the writers and the development of their creativity are given against a carefully studied and beautifully written background of Russian cultural and public life. This applies above all to Turgenev and to Zhukovsky. To a lesser degree—to Chekhov. But even behind Chekhov there stands the background of our time.

Considering Zhukovsky to be the source of Russian poetry, Zaytsev does not exaggerate either his artistic gifts or the number of his indisputable creative successes. He only notes features of his poetic gift: the “lightly resonant songfulness” of his voice, the “flying, passing structure” of his verse, and the “spiritualistic lightness” of his poetry. He praises him only by pointing out that in Zhukovsky, for the first time, those sounds rang out that would create the glory of the great Pushkin. “Zhukovsky,” Zaytsev writes, “is the Russian Perugino through whom—overtaking and then outshining him—there will enter the Russian Raphael.”

In his “History of Russian Literature,” Thorzhevsky reproaches Zaytsev for the fact that in his “master’s book” on Zhukovsky he styles the poet as a saint. I think this reproach is already wrong, because Zaytsev repeatedly calls Zhukovsky a romantic. Romanticism, however—inseparable from one or another form of religiosity—cannot be connected with sanctity in any way. To verify this, it is enough to try calling Seraphim of Sarov a romantic. And besides that, Zaytsev emphasizes that Zhukovsky “rather lived life near a church than inside a church.” “He feared the church somewhat, as if he were embarrassed by it; he knew little of the clergy… His religiosity always had a very personal character.”