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The Influence of Schiller in Russia: 1800-1840

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2018

Charles E. Passage*
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Extract

In considering the literary works of Schiller, one is confronted by the unusual phenomenon of having before him what seems at first to be no less than three separate personalities: the writer of the four youthful plays, the lyric poet, and the great dramatist of the years from 1799-1805. Upon closer study, to be sure, a definite unity of purpose and of temperament is revealed. But it is not at all surprising that his contemporaries and the generation which immediately followed him were some times at a loss to know just where to place him. Schiller's untimely death in 1805 interrupted a fertile creative period which the poet himself would in all likelihood have regarded as but the beginning of yet another excursion into new fields, and he could hardly have been happy to know that at the hour of his death the vanguard of Russian literati, almost wholly unaware of his major works, mourned him as the poet of Die Räuber and Don Carlos.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1946

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References

1 Petersen, Otto P., Schiller in Russland, 1785-1805 (New York, 1934), p. 159.Google Scholar

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3 Petersen stretches every possible point to show that the Russian aristocracy and the empress herself were aware that a genius was active in German literature, but is compelled to admit that Catherine II never mentioned Schiller, Goethe, or Lessing.

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6 Ibid., pp. 168-169.

7 Ibid., pp. 195-203 (his infomation is based on E. S. Shumigorski's biography, Die Kaiserin Maria Feodorovna, St. Petersburg, 1892, Vol. I; and on Prince Dolgoruki's Schatzkammer meines Herzens, 1873.

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11 Letters of a Russian Traveller, p. 83.

12 Deva za arfoyu; Sochineniya Derzhavina ed. Alexander Smirdin, Spb., 1851, 2 vols. I, 269.

13 Petersen, p. 310 and p. 322.

14 Podrazhanie or Olryvok (“O, schastie dnei moikh!”); cf. Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniĭ V. A. Zhukovskogo, ed. P. N. Krasnov, p. 626.

15 Zhukovskiĭ, Sochineniya, Archangelskiĭ edition, I, 27.

16 Toska na milom. Pesnya. Podrazhanie Shitteru, Zhukovskiĭ, Sochineniya, Archangelskiĭ ed., I, 48.

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20 Happiness (Schastie); cf. Sochineniya, I, 60-61.

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26 Ibid., I, 81.

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35 Ibid., p. 256.

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38 Ibid.

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40 Ibid.

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42 Ibid., p. 138.

43 The Triumph of the Conquerors (Torzhestvo pobeditelei) Zhukovskiĭ, Sochineniya, I, 312-314.

44 Kubok, Zhukovskiĭ, Sochineniya, I, 324-326; The Glove. A Story (Perchatka. Povest'), ibid., pp. 326-327; Polikratov Persten', ibid., pp. 329-330; Zhaloba Tserery, ibid., pp. 330-332; Srazhenie s zmeem, ibid., pp. 352-355; God's Judgment (Slid Bozhii), ibid., pp. 355-358.

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