“Don Juan” Byron in brief
“Epic poem” – according to the author’s review, and in fact – a novel in verse, “Don Giovanni” – the most important and most ambitious work of the late stage of Byron’s creativity, the subject of constant reflection of the poet and fierce polemic of criticism.
Like “Eugene Onegin,” the masterpiece of the late Byron breaks off in mid-sentence. Judging by the correspondence and reviews of contemporaries, who worked on “Don Juan” during the last seven years of his life, the poet managed to realize no more than two thirds of his vast intention.
In the first song, with juicy satirical strokes, the poet sketches out a sketch of the existence of a fairly ordinary noble family in Seville in the second half of the 18th century, recreating the class and family environment in which the future indomitable conqueror of women’s hearts could be born. The experience of the “Childe Harold” creator
The ship sailing to Livorno, crashes, and most of the passengers die in the waves during a severe storm. In this case, Juan loses his servant and mentor, and himself, emaciated, unconscious,
A captivatingly beautiful girl, living with her pirate father in isolation from the outside world, finds a fabulously beautiful young man on the coast and gives him her love. Gide is unknown calculation and duplicity: “Gide – as a daughter of a naive nature / And genuine passion – was born / Under the hot sun of the south, where the peoples / Live, love obedience to laws. / Chosen beautiful for years / She surrendered with heart and soul, / Without thinking, not worrying, not shy: / He was with her – and happiness was with her! “
However, like any utopia, this cloudless band in the life of the heroes is soon interrupted: Father Gide, who was deceased in one of his smuggling “expeditions”, returns to the island and, not listening to his daughter’s pleas, binds João and sends him with other captives to the market slaves to Constantinople. A shocked surviving girl falls into unconsciousness and after a while dies.
João, in turn, along with fellow sufferer – British John Johnson, who served in the army of Suvorov and captured janissaries, is sold to the harem of the Turkish sultan. He liked the beloved wife of the sultan, the beautiful Gulbee, he is hidden in a woman’s dress among charming odalasks and, not knowing about the danger, “attracts” the favor of one of them – the beautiful Georgian Dudu. The jealous sultanza is furious, but, subject to considerations of sober calculation, is compelled to help Joao and his friend Johnson, along with two unlucky concubines, to flee the harem.
The atmosphere of spicy erotic resignation changes dramatically when the fugitives find themselves in the location of Russian troops under the command of Field Marshal Suvorov storming the Turkish fortress Izmail on the Danube.
These pages of the novel truly capture – not only because, striving to give the maximum historical and documentary authenticity to his narrative, Byron quite in detail and colorfully characterizes the fearless Russian commander, but above all because they fully expressed Byron’s passionate rejection of the inhuman practice of bloody and senseless wars, which constituted a significant – often leading – part of the foreign policy of all European powers. Byron-antimilitarist, as usual, far outstrips his own time: idolizing freedom and independence and paying tribute to Suvorov’s courage and talent, his simplicity and democracy, he says resolute “no” to the conquering monarchs, for the sake of ephemeral glory throwing thousands of human lives into the maw of the monstrous massacre. “But, in essence,
To match the author and the hero: by ignorance, showing miracles of heroism in the siege of the fortress of João, without a second hesitating, rescues from the hands of the enraged Cossacks a five-year-old Turkish girl and later refuses to part with it, although this interferes with his secular “career”.
Whatever it was, he was awarded the Russian Order for courage and was sent to St. Petersburg with a message from Suvorov to Empress Catherine about the capture of the impregnable Turkish stronghold.
“The Russian episode” in the life of the Spanish hero is not too long, but Bayron’s account of the customs and customs of the Russian court in sufficient detail and eloquently testifies to the enormous work done by a poet who has never been to Russia, but sincerely and unbiasedly tried to understand the nature of the Russian autocracy. Interesting and ambiguous characteristics given by Byron Catherine, and unambiguously hostile assessment of the poet favoritism, prospering, however, not only with the imperial court alone.
The brilliant career of a favorite of the Russian empress, “lighted up” by Juan, soon turns out to be interrupted: he falls ill, and all-powerful Catherine, having provided the handsome youth with the credentials of the envoy, sends him to England.
Having passed Poland, Prussia, Holland, this darling of fate finds itself in the homeland of the poet, who bluntly expresses his very far from official attitude to the role played by the supposed “freedom-loving” Britain in European politics.
And again the genre of the story changes. Actually the “picaresque” element triumphs here only in a short episode of the attack on Juan street robbers on the London street. The hero, however, easily out of the situation, sending one of the attackers to the next world. Further – closely anticipating Pushkin’s “Onegin” pictures of the high life of the capital and rural Albion, showing both the increasing depth of Byron’s psychologism, and the inherent poet’s incomparable skill of a sarcastic-satirical portrait.
It is difficult to get away from the idea that it was this part of the narrative that the author considered central to his grandiose design. It’s hardly accidental at the beginning of this strip in the existence of the character that the poet “utters”: “Twelve songs I wrote, but / All this is just a prelude for now.”
By this time, Joao is twenty-one years old. Young, erudite, charming, he not without reason attracts the attention of young and not so young women. However, the early worries and disappointments were borne by the virus of fatigue and satiety. Byron Don Juan, perhaps, is so strikingly different from folklore that there is nothing “superhuman” in him.
Becoming an object of purely secular interest from the brilliant aristocrat Lady Adeline Amondeville, Joao is awarded an invitation to stay in the luxurious country estate of Lord Amondeville – a beautiful but superficial representative of his estate, a hundred percent gentleman and a passionate hunter.
His wife, however, also flesh from the flesh of his environment with her mores and prejudices. Experiencing a sincere disposition towards Joao, she finds nothing better than… to find her proper foreigner for a proper bride. He, for his part, after a long break, seems to really fall in love with the young girl Aurora Rabi: “She was like the innocent grace of her / Shakespeare heroines.”
But the latter does not enter into the calculations of the lady Adeline, who had time to look after one of her high-society friends for a young man. With her, in the night silence of an old rural mansion, the hero encounters in the last pages of the novel.
Alas, fate prevented the poet from continuing the narrative…
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