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Adding to the "Guest" List: Hugo's Hernani and Pushkin's Don Juan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David Shengold
David Shengold*
Affiliation:
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

Leporello: Milady, this is the list of the beauties that my master has loved: it's a list that I have made; look at it, read it with me. In Italy, six hundred and forty; in Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; but in Spain there are already a thousand and three.

(Madamina, il catalogo e questo delle belle die amb ilpadron mio: un catalogo egli e che hofatt'io; osservate, leggete con me. In Italia seicentoquaranta, in Almagna duecentotrentuna, cento inFrancia, in Turchia novantuna, ma in Ispagna son gid mille e tr

Lorenzo da Ponte, Il dissoluto punito ossia UDon Giovanni: Dramma giocoso in due atti, 1.5

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Aleksandr Pushkin 1799-1999 , Summer 1999 , pp. 329 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

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References

1. Tomashevskii, Boris, Pushkin iFrantsiia (Leningrad, 1960), 285.Google Scholar

2. “Don Guan” and “Dona” (as in Dona Ana) reflect Pushkin's spelling, and as such will be here used specifically when Pushkin's characters are at issue.

3. Robert Karpiak, in his unpublished dissertation “Don Juan in Slavic Drama” (Ph.D. diss., University of Ottawa, 1978), points out how two Russian commentators with diametrically opposed views concerning Pushkin's knowledge of previous versions of the Don Juan story (Nestor Kotliarskii and I. Nusinov) both insist on the essential originality of Kamennyi gost’ (52).

4. Pushkin, A. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (Moscow, 1935–38), 6: 389 Google Scholar (hereafter PSS, 9 vols.). See Zaborov, M. R., “Frantsuzskaia romanticheskaia drama v Rossii 1820–1830kh godov,” in Epokha romantizma; lz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury (Leningrad, 1975), 127.Google Scholar

5. Pushkin, A. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, Drama (Moscow, 1935), 574 Google Scholar (hereafter Pushkin, Drama).

6. Ibid., 574n3.

7. See, for example, Lerner, N. O., “Pushkinologicheskie etiudy IX: K genezisu ‘Vystrela, “’ Zven'ia, 1935, no. 5: 125–33.Google Scholar

8. For two non-Soviet examples, see Nevo, Natan, “Don Gouan: Essai d'intérpretation du ‘Convive de pierre’ de Pouchkine,” in Comparative Literary Studies 9, no. 3 (September 1972)Google Scholar, and the (otherwise) formidably comprehensive Achinger, Gerda, Victor Hugo in der Literatur der Pushkinzeit (1823–1840) (Cologne, 1991), 146.Google Scholar

9. Pushkin, A. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 17 vols. (Moscow, 1937–59), 14: 93 (hereafter PSS, 17 vols).Google Scholar

10. See Malia, Martin, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. See Zaborov, “Frantsuzskaia romanticheskaia drama v Rossii,” 127.

12. Hernani's disguised entrance to his beloved's house, his beloved's being under threat of compelled marriage to an older uncle, and his fundamental social status as a noble-cum-bandit son of a murdered father are parallels to Pushkin's Dubrovskii that Paul Debreczeny points out in The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin's Prose Fiction (Stanford, 1983), 161.

13. Hugo, Victor, Theatre comptet (Paris, 1963), 1: 1307 Google Scholar. Further citations from Hernani are my translations from this edition.

14. PSS, 17 vols., 7: 171. All citations from Kamennyi gost’ are my translations from this volume.

15. Roman Jakobson, “The Statue in Pushkin's Poetic Mythology,” trans. John Burbank, in Selected Writings/Roman Jakobson, vol. 5, Selected Writings (The Hague, 1979), 246.

16. Aycock, Wendell M., “Pushkin and the Don Juan Tradition,” in Barta, Peter I. and Goebel, Ulrich, eds., The Contexts of Aleksandr SergeevichPushkin (Lewiston, N.Y., 1988), 85–95.Google Scholar

17. Akhmatova, Anna, “Kamennyi gost’ Pushkina,” in O Pushkine (Leningrad, 1977), 89–110 Google Scholar; Vickery, Walter N., Alexander Pushkin (New York, 1992), 81–87 Google Scholar; Kucera, Henry, “Pushkin and Don Juan,” in Rancour-Laferrière, Daniel, ed., Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam, 1989), 123–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Hugo, Theatre compiet, 1: 1220.

19. PSS, 17 vols., 7: 309. For more on the Spanish painter (or painters) Perez, see Tomashevskii's commentary in Pushkin, Drama, 555n5.

20. Hugo, Theatre complet, 1: 1291.

21. A letter to his brother Lev dated 25 August 1823 makes clear that Pushkin was aware of the story of Petrarch's romantic fascination with Laura. PSS, 17vols., 13: 67.

22. Tomashevskii, Pushkin i Frantsiia, 289.

23. Hugo, Theatre complet, 1: 1239.

24. PSS, 17 vols., 7: 162. Note the specific sexual insult inherent in the younger man's inviting his older rival to stand at the door while he seduces the older man's widow. D. D. Blagoi pinpoints this act as the moment that seals Don Guan's fate. See his Sotsiobgiia tvorchestva Pushkina (Moscow, 1929), 217.

25. Hugo, Theatre complet, 1: 1230.

26. Ibid., 1: 1231.

27. A. S. Pushkin, “O Mil'tone i Shatobrianovom perevode ‘Poteriannogo Raia, '” in PSS, 17 vols., 12: 22. Originally published in Soxrremennik, 1837, no. 8. Pushkin refers to Hugo as a second-rate (vtorostepennyi) poet.