Vasily Zhukovsky - Life

Life

Zhukovsky was born in the village of Mishenskoe, in Tula Oblast, Russia, the illegitimate son of a landowner named Afanasi Bunin and his Turkish housekeeper Salkha. The Bunin family had a literary bent and some 90 years later produced the Nobel Prize-winning modernist writer Ivan Bunin. Although raised in the Bunin family circle, the infant poet was formally adopted by a family friend for reasons of social propriety and kept his adopted surname and patronymic for the rest of his life. At the age of fourteen, he was sent to Moscow to be educated at the Moscow University Noblemen's Pension. There he was heavily influenced by Freemasonry, as well as by the fashionable literary trends of English Sentimentalism and German Sturm und Drang. He also met Nikolay Karamzin, the preeminent Russian man of letters and the founding editor of the most important literary journal of the day, The Herald of Europe (Вестник Европы).

In December 1802, the 19-year-old Zhukovsky published a free translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in Karamzin's journal. The translation was the first sustained example of his trademark sentimental-melancholy style, which at the time was strikingly original in Russian. It made him so well known among Russian readers that in 1808 Karamzin asked him to take over the editorship of The Herald of Europe. The young poet used this position to explore Romantic themes, motifs, and genres—largely by way of translation.

Zhukovsky was among the first Russian writers to cultivate the mystique of the Romantic poet. Much of his original work was inspired by his half-niece Maria "Masha" Protasova, the daughter of one of his several half-sisters, with whom he had a passionate but ultimately Platonic affair. He also came under the influence of Romanticism in the medieval Hansa cities of Dorpat and Revel, now called Tartu and Tallinn, which had recently been brought into the Russian Empire. The university at Dorpat (now Tartu University) had been reopened as the only German-speaking university in Imperial Russia.

Zhukovsky's rise at court began with Napoleon's invasion of 1812 and with the consequent revilement of French as the favored foreign language of the Russian aristocracy. Like thousands of others, Zhukovsky volunteered for the defense of Moscow and was present at the Battle of Borodino. There he joined the Russian general staff under Field Marshal Kutuzov, who drafted him to work on propaganda and morale. After the war, he settled down temporarily in the village of Dolbino, near Moscow, where in 1815 he experienced a burst of poetic creativity known as the Dolbino Autumn. His work in this period attracted the attention of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, the German-born wife of Grand Duke Nicholas, the future Tsar Nicholas I. Alexandra invited Zhukovsky to St. Petersburg to be her personal Russian tutor. Many of Zhukovsky's best translations from German, including almost all of his translations of Goethe, were made as practical language exercises for Alexandra.

Zhukovsky's pedagogical career removed him in some respects from the forefront of Russian literary life, while at the same time positioning him to become one of the most powerful intellectuals in Russia. Among his first acts on moving to St. Petersburg was to establish the jocular Arzamas literary society in order to promote Karamzin's European-oriented, anti-classicist aesthetics. Members of the Arzamas included the teenage Alexander Pushkin, who rapidly emerged as his poetic heir apparent. Indeed, by the early 1820s, Pushkin had upstaged Zhukovsky in terms of the originality and brilliance of his work—and even in Zhukovsky's own estimation. Yet the two remained lifelong friends, with the older poet acting as a literary mentor and protector at court.

Much of Zhukovsky's subsequent influence can be attributed to this gift for friendship. His good personal relations with Nicholas spared him the fate of other liberal-intellectuals following the ill-starred 1825 Decembrist Revolt. Shortly after Nicholas ascended the throne, he appointed Zhukovsky tutor to the tsarevich Alexander, later to become the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II. Zhukovsky's progressive educational methods influenced the young Alexander so deeply that many historians attribute the liberal reforms of the 1860s at least partially to them. The poet also used his high station at court to take up the cudgels for such free-thinking writers as Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen, and Taras Shevchenko (Zhukovsky was instrumental in buying him out of serfdom), as well as many of the persecuted Decembrists. On Pushkin's early death in 1837, Zhukovsky stepped in as his literary executor, not only rescuing his work from a hostile censorship (including several unpublished masterpieces), but also diligently collecting and preparing it for publication. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Zhukovsky also promoted the career of Nikolay Gogol, another close personal friend. In this way, he acted as an impresario for the developing Russian Romantic Movement.

Like his mentor Karamzin, Zhukovsky travelled widely in Europe, above all in the German-speaking world, where his connections with the Prussian court in Berlin gave him access to high society in spa-towns like Baden-Baden and Bad Ems. He also met and corresponded with world-class cultural figures like Goethe, the poet Ludwig Tieck, and the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. In 1841, Zhukovsky retired from court and settled near Düsseldorf, where he married Elisabeth von Reitern, the 18-year-old daughter of a Baltic German artist friend. The couple had two children, a girl named Alexandra and a boy named Pavel. Alexandra later had a much talked-about affair with Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich.

Zhukovsky died in Baden-Baden in 1852, aged 69. His body was returned to St. Petersburg and buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. His crypt can be found directly behind the monument to Dostoevsky.