The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

Review
Author(s): Alexandra K. Harrington
Review by: Alexandra K. Harrington
Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), p. 438
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3664139
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438 The Russian Review

Ketchian, Sonia I. Keats and the Russian Poets. Birmingham Slavonic Monographs
ham: Department of Russian, University of Birmingham, 2001. viii + 308 pp.
07044-2293-X.

Ketchian's impressive study makes a significant contribution to the relatively small body of critic
works on the reception of English literature and culture in the Russian context. It focuses on the
allusive use of John Keats's poetry by a number of the foremost poets in the Russian traditio
Ketchian's emphasis is on the texts of original Russian poems, and the book's strength lies in
detailed readings of a variety of well-known narrative and lyric works (including Pushkin's Ruslan
Liudmila, Blok's "Solov'inyi sad," and Akhmatova's "Pobeg"), illuminating their hitherto unreco
nized Keatsian contexts.

Chapters 1 and 2 offer a compact but thorough history of Keats's reception in Russia by critics
and translators. Ketchian demonstrates that Keats's reputation in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury was overshadowed-almost obscured, in fact-by the esteem in which his contemporary Lord
Byron was held. Keats therefore had very little discernible impact on Russian poetry until the onset of
the so-called Silver Age.
In chapter 3, Ketchian succeeds in the difficult task of establishing that, despite the paucity of
interest in Keats in Russia in his lifetime, Pushkin is likely to have known something of the English
poet through acquaintances connected with England. She then proceeds to make a convincing cas
for there being a polemical response in Pushkin's Ruslan i Liudmila to Keats's de facto rape scene in
The Eve of St. Agnes.
The fourth chapter is devoted to a discussion of the diluted and almost subliminal echoes in
Russian poetry of a key Keatsian image (the "brain-flies" which feature in Endymion). Ketchian
traces borrowings and permutations of this striking image through several Russian poets (including
Fet, Annenskii, Gumilev, and Briusov), highlighting how it takes on a Russian character of its own a
it passes from poet to poet.
Chapter 5 centers on Aleksandr Blok, but also discusses the consonance in sensibility between
Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad" and the culture of the Silver Age more generally. Here
Ketchian shows that Blok's "Solov'inyi sad" is one of a series of Symbolist ballads inspired by an
based on Keats's lyric.
Chapters 6 and 7 deal in depth with the intertextual use of Keats by Gumilev, and the remainder
of the book concentrates on other Acmeists. The Acmeist view of poetry as a craft and consequent
concern with the revitalization of the literature of the past led to a particularly intensive contextual use
of Keats. One of the most effective chapters in the book examines Mandel'shtam's use of Keats'
celebrated "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in the creation of his "Kuvshin" and other related lyrical poems
The last four chapters focus primarily on Akhmatova, of whom Ketchian has previously proved
herself to be a sensitive reader. Ketchian establishes that Akhmatova alone among major Russian
poets makes overt references to Keats (in her Poema bez geroia and Shipovnik tsvetet). Moreover
Ketchian's discovery of other, more hidden allusions to Keats sheds light upon some of Akhmatova's
less characteristic lyrics, in particular "Pobeg."
The amount of space devoted to Akhmatova (albeit interspersed with observations relating her
lyrics to those by other Russians) makes the study seem somewhat disproportionate. However, the
heavy emphasis on her is largely justified by Ketchian's claim that Akhmatova is "unique among the
Russian poets for the quantity of Keatsian reflections in her original verse" (p. 175).
The quality of the book is not matched, unfortunately, by that of the binding. The most recent in
the excellent series of Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, Ketchian's study is considerably longe
than other titles in the series and the binding is not sufficiently robust to withstand many readings.

Alexandra K. Harrington, University of Durham

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