SLAVIC STUDIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Slavic studies were slow in making a formal appearance in American
colleges and universities. There were many reasons for this, not the
least being the general submergence of the Slavic countries (except
Russia) in the eighteenth century. At this period, the Slavic languages
were little studied in Germany or France, far less in England and thus
their absence in the United States is readily understandable.
In addition, the early American colleges, especially before the Civil
War, had limited curricula. They were modelled on Oxford and Cambridge
but, restricted in finances, libraries, and personnel, their curricula
were largely adapted to the presumed needs of the day. They were
intended to prepare men for the Protestant ministry or the law.
Enrollments were small and confined to certain groups of the population.
There was relatively little broad intellectual interest in the country
although men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson or even Count
Benjamin T. Rumford had won recognized places in the world of
scholarship and of ideas.
The modern languages, chiefly French, were taught more or less by the
same methods as the accepted classical languages and Hebrew. It was only
in the first quarter of the nineteenth century that George Ticknor
introduced at Harvard detailed work on modern European literatures. This
was followed in the twenties and the thirties by the introduction of
some Spanish and Italian, largely influenced by the revolt of the
Spanish colonies in South and Central America.
We should not then be surprised that the earliest interest in the Slavic
languages was shown by individuals who, by some means or another, had
had contact with the Slavic world and whose concern was more or less
amateurish. Some of these men were college graduates. Others had had no
formal connection with the colleges of the day but had learned to know
and appreciate Slavic culture and had set themselves the task of making
and publishing translations in America. These began to appear shortly
after the War of 1812. The Napoleonic Wars and later the war with
England had interfered with American trade and commerce but had also
stimulated American interest in Europe. This interest was also aroused
by the Greek war for independence and the formation of a group of
Hellenophiles in New England. Even before this, in 1810, the
Congregationalists of Boston had established the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions. It sent missionaries to the Near
East and these, originally working to convert the Mohammedans, soon
transferred their activity to Orthodox Christians and to the foundation
of such American missionary educational institutions as Roberts College
and the American University in Beirut, later to play so prominent a part
in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.
The visit of the Marquis de Lafayette in 1825 also recalled the American
Revolution and the services of the various foreign officers who had
served in the American Army, including Generals Pulaski and Kosciuszko.
Interest in Poland was again stirred by the Polish Uprising of 1831.[17]
Thus the growing American prosperity and the strengthening of the
American national consciousness started a ferment which for a number of
years caused a growing interest in some forms of Slavic culture in the
United States, especially in New England. We must remember that this was
before any mass Slavic immigration to the United States, although there
were a considerable number of Slavs in the country, especially in the
north and in the ocean shipping sections.
The first translator of Russian poetry in the Anglo-Saxon world was, in
all probability, William David Lewis.[18] His career is typical of this
period. Lewis was born in 1792 in Christiana, New Castle County,
Delaware. He received some education in Clarmont Seminary and Lower
Dublin Academy and was then apprenticed to a merchant. However, his
brother, John D. Lewis, who was established in St. Petersburg as a
merchant asked his younger brother to join him in 1813. This was during
the War of 1812 and the young man, in order to get to Europe, secured a
post as private secretary to the peace commissioners. He sailed for
Europe in 1814. Leaving his post at Gothenburg, he went on to St.
Petersburg where he spent most of his time until 1824.
Lewis had excellent connections in St. Petersburg. He met and became
friendly with Count Nesselrode, with the Cossack leader, Platov, and
also with Nikita Ivanovich Grech, the editor of the _Syn Otechestva_. He
also seems to have met the elderly dean of Russian poetry, Gavriil
Romanovich Derzhavin. It was perhaps under the influence of Derzhavin
and Grech that he began to translate Russian poetry. On January 31,
1821, apparently while on a visit home, he published in the _National
Gazette and Literary Register_ of Philadelphia a poem, _Stanzas_, by
Yuri Aleksandrovich Neledinsky-Meletsky.
Lewis was becoming especially interested in the pre-Pushkin period of
Russian poetry. However, in 1849 he also published in Philadelphia,
where he made his home, a volume of translations entitled the
_Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems_, a name taken from one of
Pushkin’s early poems. Grech saw to it that Lewis’ book was
appropriately reviewed and praised in the conservative Russian literary
journals. However, Lewis was not primarily a man of letters and his
contribution ends here. Even before he left St. Petersburg he had
embarked upon a series of disputes with some of the American diplomatic
representatives in the Russian capital and the next decades he spent as
a successful business man and politician. For a time, 1849 to 1853, he
was Collector of Customs in Philadelphia. He died in 1881. Lewis was
slightly ahead of the work of Sir John Bowring who published in 1821–23,
two volumes of _Specimens of the Russian Poets_. He followed these later
with translations from Polish and Serb poetry, inspired by interest in
the Serb folksongs. The translations were widely read in the United
States.
The translations of Bowring, and a special interest in the works of
Mickiewicz, determined the career of James Gates Percival.[19] He was
born near Hartford, Connecticut, in 1795 and was graduated from Yale in
1815. A student of languages, a poet of stature, an excellent geologist,
Percival was eccentric and somewhat of a recluse. His works attracted
little more than local interest and were soon forgotten. He finally
became the state geologist of Connecticut and later of Wisconsin, where
he died in 1856. For more than twenty years, though, he had done Polish
translations and contributed articles on Polish literature and history
to various periodicals. Some of these were little more than a rewriting
of articles published in European journals, for Percival knew ten
languages and was abreast of European developments. His knowledge of
Polish was not too thorough, but at the period he influenced a group
known as the “Connecticut Wits” and is a good example of the American
interests of the time.
A more substantial contributor was the better known Talvj,[20] the
author of the _Historical View of the Languages and Literatures of the
Slavonic Nations_. This was the first survey of the Slavic literatures
after the works of Safarik. Talvj had a remarkable career. Her real name
was Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob. She was born in Halle, Germany
in 1797, where her father, Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob, was a professor at
the University of Halle. In 1807 he was invited to give a series of
lectures at the University of Kharkov. Therese soon became a competent
linguist, began to translate the novels of Sir Walter Scott into German,
and in 1825 published in German a collection of the _Volkslieder der
Serben_, again in response to an interest in the Serb folksongs.
In 1828 she married Edward Robinson, an American Congregational minister
and scholar who was then a professor in the Union Theological Seminary
in New York. Robinson was much interested in Biblical archaeology,
edited a popular religious journal, the _Biblical Repository_, and spent
considerable time in the Biblical lands. He published his wife’s work on
Slavic literature in this journal. In 1850 it was issued in book form.
When Robinson died in 1863, Talvj (her pen name was taken from the first
letters of her name) returned to Germany. She died in 1870 in Hamburg.
Talvj’s book was probably the outstanding work on the Slavs done by a
non-Slav in the first half of the century. Unfortunately it attracted
little attention even though it was much sounder than were many of the
studies written as much as a half century later. It received due
recognition only after Slavic studies in the Anglo-Saxon world had begun
to find themselves and had shown a certain independence of thought.
The approach of the American Civil War and American preoccupation with
western expansion turned interest away from Slavic themes. It was only
near the end of the Civil War that we begin to find truly interested
spokesmen for Slavic culture and even then the leaders were men who had
personal connections with the Slavic World, often through service in the
American diplomatic corps.
One of these was Jeremiah Curtin.[21] Born near Milwaukee, Wisconsin in
1840, after a common school education and some study at Carroll College,
Waukesha, Wisconsin, he went to Harvard where he received his degree in
1863. A few months later, he met Admiral Lisovsky and the other Russian
naval officers in the fleet that visited New York. They induced him to
go to Russia and for a while, he was secretary of the American Legation
there. On his return to the United States, he did some work on the
folklore of the American Indian but later returned to Russia and
traveled extensively in the Caucasus. He wrote a great deal about his
experiences but achieved most of his fame by his translations of the
novels of the Polish writer, Henryk Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz’s _Quo
Vadis_, in Curtin’s translation, has kept its place as the most popular
piece of Slavic literature in English. It has been produced several
times in the movies and while Curtin’s name is largely forgotten, his
translations are still read and Sienkiewicz is still the best known
figure in Polish literature among Americans.
Another American born in the same year, 1840, was Eugene Schuyler.[22] A
member of the celebrated Schuyler family, he was born in Ithaca and
educated at Yale, where he graduated in 1859. He then went to the
Columbia Law School and on leaving it in 1863, entered the American
diplomatic service. He was American Consul in Moscow and Revel (Tallinn)
and Secretary of the American Legations in St. Petersburg and
Constantinople. While he held the latter post he made a full report on
the Turkish atrocities against the Bulgarians in 1876. For a while he
acted as Minister Resident in Greece, Romania and Serbia. He was
regarded as somewhat too pro-Russian, though, and in 1889 the Senate
refused to confirm him as Assistant Secretary of State. Schuyler died in
1890. His chief work was a two volume biography of Peter the Great which
appeared in 1884 and was the chief American historical work dealing with
a Russian subject. While it has been outmoded by later historical
research, the biography still stands as a monument to his scholarship
and understanding of the Russian scene.
George Kennan was slightly younger.[23] He was born in 1845 in Norwalk,
Ohio. He received little formal education but became an expert
telegrapher and was used on important assignments by the Western Union
Telegraph Company, including service in the telegraph office of the
White House during the Civil War. As the Civil War drew to its close,
the American and Russian governments became interested in a plan for
linking San Francisco and St. Petersburg by telegraph. Parties of
trained men were sent to various points in the northwest and to Siberia
to make the preliminary surveys and to build the line. Kennan was placed
in charge of the section that was working in the northern part of
Siberia. He spent some years in the wilderness there and became familiar
with the life of the native population as well as the Russians. When
construction was stopped after the completion of the Atlantic cable,
Kennan traveled extensively in the Caucasus and spent some time in St.
Petersburg. He recounted his experiences in a volume, _Tent Life in
Siberia_, published in 1870. His familiarity with the natives of Siberia
and the wilder tribes of the Caucasus led him to feel that Russia, with
its multi-national population, was in a way similar to the United States
of his day with its still unintegrated masses of immigrants and its
still hostile Indian population.
After working as a reporter and war correspondent, he was sent in 1885,
by the Century Company to visit and report on the Siberian prison camps.
He was able to do this because of the many friends in high position that
he had made during his previous visit. He was profoundly shocked by the
conditions and his attitude, previously friendly to the imperial regime,
turned into utter disgust. He secured priceless material from the
Russian revolutionists whom he met on his travels and when he published
it in the Century Magazine and later in book form, in 1891 (_Siberia and
the Exile System_), it speedily became one of the outstanding
denunciations of the imperial regime. It had much to do with opening the
eyes of the Western World to the cruelty and barbarity of the imperial
administration of justice. George Kennan continued his work as a
reporter and war correspondent in both the Spanish-American and
Russo-Japanese Wars. He died in 1924.
The last of this group of nineteenth century amateurs was Isabel
Florence Hapgood.[24] She was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1850
and passed most of her early life in Worcester. She early became
interested in translating and after working in the chief European
languages, began to teach herself Russian. She started work on
translating Tolstoy and also published a book on the byliny, _Epic Songs
of Russia_. In 1887 she made her first visit to Russia and met many
important officials and writers. For the next twenty years, she
dominated the Russian translation field in the United States with many
translations from Tolstoy, Turgenev and other authors. In 1906 she
brought out her greatest piece of work, a translation and adaptation of
the Service Books of the Russian Orthodox Church, for which she received
a gold watch from Tsar Nicholas II. The work was reprinted several times
then, and again after World War I by the Young Men’s Christian
Association in Paris. For years she was a well known figure at the
services of the Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York. She rarely
missed a service and she carefully explained the ritual and its
significance to the Americans who attended. Miss Hapgood paid another
visit to Russia during the winter of 1916–1917 and on that occasion she
was received by the Tsarina. She was in St. Petersburg when the Russian
Revolution broke out. Her friends succeeded in getting her out of the
capital and in enabling her to return to the United States through
Vladivostok. Before her death in 1928, she saw her work replaced in
large part by newer translations and she keenly felt the destruction of
the old regime with which she had been connected for almost half a
century. Yet her importance as one of the first serious translators from
Russian into English must not be forgotten. She still remains an
interesting figure in American-Russian relations.
This brief review of the leading figures makes it clear that they worked
outside the educational system of the United States. They were persons
who had developed, for one reason or another, a personal interest in
Slavic affairs. Many of them had lived in one capacity or another,
largely as members of the American diplomatic service, in some Slavic
country. They were strict individualists and did not try to develop
students or assistants. They worked as they pleased and on what they
pleased and if their work was later recognized, they often paid no
attention to it except for the pride any person feels in recognition and
honor.
During this entire period, the colleges and universities had taken no
part in the development. The educational system ignored both the Slavic
culture and the steadily increasing number of Slavic immigrants. They
continued the usual curricula and developed their courses and work in
the traditional languages of Western Europe.
Yet the results which these individuals had achieved cannot be
overestimated. By the end of the century the leading works of Russian
literature, especially the novel, were generally known to American
readers, though all too often from English versions of French and German
translations. The appreciation of Polish culture had decreased during
the century as the memory of Pulaski and Kosciuszko faded, not without
the active cooperation of the representatives of Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Russia, which had succeeded in removing Poland from
the European map and in presenting Polish artists and writers as members
of their own states. The culture of the other Slavic peoples was even
less known and studied.
Yet when we say this, we must never forget that the situation was little
better in England. Even in France and Germany, Slavic studies had not
really found themselves. It is true that professors like Jagic, August
Leskien, E. Berneker and A. Brueckner had already started on their
brilliant careers. Morfill and later Nevill Forbes in England were
trying to hold up a standard. Even there, though, a study of the Slavic
languages and culture, as well as the presentation of the great Russian
novelists, was done in an highly out of context manner. So it also was
in the United States where interest had been concentrated in the hands
of a few select individuals who had worked on their own and for their
own pleasure.