Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844

, in the midst of the most revolting atrocities and debaucheries, broke down the power of the aristocracy, prostrated the energies of the nation, and paved the way for successive usurpations—the skilful and crafty policy, and the unscrupulous means by which Boris raised himself to the throne, after he had destroyed the last representatives of the direct line of Rurik, which, in all the vicissitudes of Russian fortune, had hitherto held the chief place in the nation—the taint of guilt which poisoned and polluted a mind otherwise powerful, and not without some virtues, and made him at length a suspicious and cruel tyrant, who, having alienated the good-will of the nation, was unable to oppose the pretensions of an impostor, and swallowed poison to escape the tortures of an upbraiding conscience—the successful imposture of the monk who personated the Prince Dimítri, one of the victims of Boris' ambition, and who was slaughtered on the day of his nuptials at the foot of the throne he had so strangely usurped, by an infuriated mob; not because he was known to be an impostor, but because he was accused of a leaning to the Latin church—the season of anarchy that succeeded and led to fresh impostures, and to the Polish domination—the servile submission of the Russian nobility to Sigismund, king of Poland, to whom they sold their country; the revival of patriotic feelings, almost as soon as the sacrifice had been made—the bold and determined opposition of the Russian church to the usurpation of a Latin prince, the persecutions, the hardships, the martyrdom it endured; the ultimate rising of the Muscovite people at its call—the sanguinary conflict in Moscow; the expulsion of the Poles; the election of Michael Romanoff, the first sovereign of his family and of the reigning dynasty—the whole history of the days of Peter, of Catharine, and of Alexander, and even the less prominent reigns of intermediate sovereigns—are full of the interest and the incidents which are usually considered most available to the writers of historical romance.

But such materials abound in the history of every people. Men of genius for the work find them scattered every where—in the peculiarities of personal character developed in the contests of petty tribes or turbulent burghers, as often as in the revolutions of empires. The value of historical, as well as of other fictions, must be measured by the power and the skill it displays, rather than by the magnitude of the events it describes, or the historical importance of the persons it introduces; and therefore no history can well be exhausted for the higher purposes of fiction. Of what historical importance are the stories on which Shakspeare has founded his Romeo and Juliet —his Othello —his Hamlet , or his Lear ? Does the chief interest or excellence of Waverley , or Ivanhoe , or Peveril of the Peak , or Redgauntlet , or Montrose , depend on the delineation of historical characters, or the description of historical events? What space do Balfour of Burleigh, or Rob Roy, or Helen Macgregor, fill in history? The fact appears to be, that, even in the purest historical prose fictions, neither the interest nor the excellence generally depend upon the characters or the incidents most prominent in history. A man of genius, who calls up princes and heroes from the dust into which they have crumbled, may delight us with a more admirable representation than our own minds could have furnished of some one whose name we have long known, and of whose personal bearing, and habits, and daily thoughts, we had but a vague and misty idea; and acknowledging the fidelity of the portrait we may adopt it; and then this historical person becomes to us what the imagination of genius, not what history, has made him, and yet the portrait is probably one in which no contemporary could have recognized any resemblance to the original. But the characters of which history has preserved the most full and faithful accounts, whose recorded actions reflect most accurately the frame of their minds, are precisely those which each man has pictured to himself with most precision, and therefore those of which he is least likely to appreciate another man's imaginary portraits. The image in our own minds is disturbed, and we feel something of the disappointment we experience when we find some one of whom we have heard much very different from what we had imagined him to be. The more intimately and generally an historical character is known, the more unfit must it be for the purposes of fiction.

Then again, in fiction, as in real life, our sympathies are more readily awakened, and more strongly moved, by the sufferings or the successes of those with whom we have much in common—of whose life we are, or fancy that we might have been, a part. The figures that we see in history elevated above the ordinary attributes of man, are magnified as we see them through the mist of our own vague perceptions, and dwindle if we approach too near them. If they are brought down from the lofty pedestal of rank or fame on which they stood, that they may be within reach of the warmest sympathies of men who live upon a lower level, the familiarity to which we are admitted impairs their greatness, on the same principle, that "no man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre ."

We are inclined to believe that the great attraction of historical prose fiction is not any facility which it affords for the construction of a better story—for we think it affords none—nor any superior interest that attaches to the known and the prominent characters with which it deals, or to the events it describes; but rather the occasion it gives for making us familiar with the everyday life of the age and the country in which the scene is laid. Independent of the merits of the fiction as a work of imagination, we find another source of pleasure; and, if it be written faithfully and with knowledge, of instruction in the vivid light it casts on the characteristics of man's condition, which history does not deign to record. This kind of excellence may give value to a work which is defective in the higher essential qualifications of imaginative writing; as old ballads and tales, which have no other merit, may be valuable illustrations of the manners of their time, so by carefully collecting and concentrating scattered rays, a man possessed of talents for the task may throw a strong light on states of society that were formerly obscure, and thus greatly enhance the pleasure we derive from any higher merits we may find in his story.

M. Lajétchnikoff, in the work before us, appears to have aimed at both these kinds of excellence; and, in the opinion of his countrymen, to have attained to that of which they are the best or the only good judges. Mr Shaw, to whom we are indebted for all we yet know of this department of Russian literature, tells us in his preface that he selected this romance for translation because—

"It is the work of an author to whom all the critics have adjudged the praise of a perfect acquaintance with the epoch which he has chosen for the scene of his drama. Russian critics, some of whom have reproached M. Lajétchnikoff with certain faults of style, and in particular with innovations on orthography, have all united in conceding to him the merit of great historical accuracy—not only as regards the events and characters of his story, but even in the less important matters of costume, language, &c.

"This degree of accuracy was not accidental: he prepared himself for his work by a careful study of all the ancient documents calculated to throw light upon the period which he desired to recall—a conscientious correctness however, which may be pushed too far; for the original work is disfigured by a great number of obsolete words and expressions, as unintelligible to the modern Russian reader (unless he happened to be an antiquarian) as they would be to an Englishman. These the Translator has, as far as possible, got rid of, and has endeavoured to reduce the explanatory foot-notes—those 'blunder-marks,' as they have been well styled—to as small a number as is consistent with clearness in the text."

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