Byron’s engagement with Eastern European writers: Mickiewicz and Pushkin

Mazepa, a painting by Vernet (‘Mazepa and the Wolves’, 1826), and another study, by a British painter John Frederick Herring, ‘Mazeppa Surrounded by Horses’ (1833), reminds us of Byron’s cosmopolitanism. Tchaikovsky’s opera, Mazeppa (1884), and Pushkin’s poem on the subject, Poltava (1828–1829), shed light on recent tensions in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, demonstrating how porous these boundaries have been. Voltaire wrote The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia (1759) as well as Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731), central figures in Pushkin’s Poltava. As a poet connected to nationalist causes, Byron encourages us to consider the role of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire in the Crimean War and the Byronic poetry produced as a result: Mickiewicz’s ‘Crimean Sonnets’, for example, or Madame Szymanowska’s ‘Le Murmure’, the talented pianist who introduced both Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod to a St. Petersburg audience and Chopin to a Polish one. Byron’s ‘Mazeppa’ is not simply a poem, then, but a work of art that fired the imagination of French painters and Ukrainian nationalists, while earning a response from Pushkin, whose own friendship with Mickiewicz influenced Russian and Polish politics. One pleasure of writing this book was visiting Vilnius, the city once known as the Jerusalem of the North. Mickiewicz was imprisoned there for having joined the Philomath society, a central event of Forefathers’ Eve, which George Sand considered to be as great, if not greater, than Byron’s Manfred and Goethe’s Faust. The innovative work of Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin is a testimony to Byron’s inspiring genius. To read Pan Tadeusz and Eugene Onegin against Byron’s Don Juan is to uncover points of influence between Eastern and Western Europe, which the work of Larry Wolff has helped us understand. When I visited Adam Mickiewicz’s tomb in Istanbul, affixed with a white neon crucifix, I realized how important Byron’s death in Greece had been. Here was another poet who died fighting in a political cause, raising a Jewish Battalion to fight the Russians in the Crimean War and thereby unite the Polish people, as Byron had tried to unite the Greeks.