The Influence of International Relations between England and Russia on the Image of Russia in Selected English Literary Works

• Thesis title in Czech: Vliv mezinárodních vztahů mezi Anglií a Ruskem na obraz Ruska ve vybraných dílech anglické literatury
• Thesis title in English: The Influence of International Relations between England and Russia on the Image of Russia in Selected English Literary Works
• Key words: Rusko|obraz Ruska|anglická literatura|mezinárodní vztahy|ruští vládci|mezinárodní ohlas|Velká Británie
• English key words: Russia|image of Russia|English literature|international relations|Russian monarchs|transnational reception|Great Britain
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2019/2020
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Miroslava Horová, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 23.04.2020
• Date of assignment: 23.04.2020
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 21.05.2020
• Date and time of defence: 10.09.2020 09:00
• Date of electronic submission: 19.08.2020
• Date of proceeded defence: 10.09.2020
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student
• Opponents: PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Russia, or Muscovy, as it used to be called, started to be mentioned in English literature in the 12^th-13^th centuries. These first mentions included references to the climate, folk traditions (usually referred to as ‘barbarian’) and the czars. In the 15^th-17^th centuries more extensive information on Russia appeared in the form of travel literature, as trade between Russia and Great Britain started developing, and R. Chancellor, J. Horsey, G. Fletcher wrote their first impressions after visiting Russia. These three Englishmen contributed to the image of Russia as eyewitnesses of the situation at the court. In the 18^th century fiction starts to dominate over travelogue. The reign of Peter I became a turning point in the representation of Russia. His progressive politics provided the basis for a more positive attitude to Russian monarchs and the establishment of the Russian Empire made the country more respected internationally, prompting several English poets to write enthusiastic works glorifying Peter and his achievements. Catherine II, the second and last Russian monarch donning the title ‘the Great’, known for her enlightenment project, received an adverse reception among English authors, however, perhaps due to her aggressive wars of conquest or rumours of her sexual profligacy, influencing satirical portraits in works such as Don Juan by Lord Byron and the play Great Catherine by Bernard Shaw (inspired by Don Juan). The gender correlations of this discrepancy will be discussed.
This thesis will argue that political climate and changes in international relations between England and Russia played a key role in establishing the image of Russia in English literature. The theoretical approach employed here is that of imagology. Developed in France, this methodology became more widespread in Germany and Belgium than in the English-speaking countries; however, the imagological approach is particularly useful for this thesis, because it is a branch of Comparative Literature which studies intercultural relations in terms of transnational perceptions, images and self-images. A theoretical overview of the conceptual framework of imagology will be followed by close-reading of selected primary material, with comparative analyses where appropriate, in order to trace the development of the reception of Russia across the selected works, and define possible developments as well as lingering stereotypes. The material for close reading will include the mock-epic poem Don Juan by Lord Byron, Russia: An Ode by A. C. Swinburne, the play Great Catherine by Bernard Shaw, and selected poems by W. Wordsworth, A. Hill and M. Stringer.

References

Primary sources:
1. Byron, George Gordon. Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973.
2. Shaw, Bernard. ‘Great Catherine,’ in Heartbreak House; Great Catherine; and Playlets of the War. London: Constable and Company, 1919.
3. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. ‘Russia: An Ode’, in Swinburne’s Collected Poetical Works. London: Heinemann, 1927.
4. Hill, Aaron. The Northern-Star: A Poem. London: E. Berington, and J. Morphew, 1718. Repr. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership, 2011. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004776294.0001.000/1:3?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
5. Wordsworth, William. ‘The French Army in Russia,’ in Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes. Russia: Vol. XX. Ed. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1876–9.
6. Stringer, Moses. ‘A Congratulatory Poem to the High and Czar of Moscovy, On his Arrival in England,’ in Loewenson, Leo, ‘People Peter the Great Met in England. Moses Stringer, Chymist and Physician.’ The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 37, no. 89, 1959, pp. 459–68. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/4205070

Secondary sources:
1. Berry, Lloyd E. ‘Giles Fletcher, the Elder, and Milton's A Brief History of Moscovia.’ The Review of English Studies, vol. 11, no. 42, 1960, pp. 150–56. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/511502.
2. Cochran, Peter. ‘Byron, Don Juan, and Russia.’ A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, ed. by Anthony Cross, Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 37–52. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjsk8.6.
3. Cross, Anthony. ‘By Way of Introduction: British Perception, Reception and Recognition of Russian Culture.’ A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, ed.by Anthony Cross. Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 1–36. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjsk8.5.
4. Janowicz, Stanislaw. ‘Living History: Myth, Representation and Dramatising Catherine The Great’/ University of Southern Queensland thesis: 2017.https://eprints.usq.edu.au/34464/1/Janowicz_2017_whole.pdf
5. Kohn, Hans. ‘Russia.’ Naval War College Information Service for Officers, vol. 4, no. 7, 1952, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44794491.
6. Kohn, Hans. ‘Russia.’ Naval War College Information Service for Officers, vol. 1, no. 3, 1948, pp. 19–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44794455.
7. Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey (eds). Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers. University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.
8. Meehan-Waters, Brenda. ‘Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule.’ The Russian Review, vol. 34, no. 3, 1975, pp. 293–307. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/127976.
9. Naarden, Bruno and Joep Leerssen. ‘Russians’, in Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: a Critical Survey, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007, pp. 226-30; online version at www.imagologica.eu posted 26 April 2019.
10. Prince De Linge. His Memoirs, Letters, and Miscellaneous Papers. Volume II. C.-A. Sainte. Translated by Katharine Prescott. New York: Bretano’s Publishers, 1899.
11. Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich. Criticism and Journalism. Moscow: Direct-Media, 2015.
12. Raeff, Marc. ‘Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration’. The Journal of Modern History, vol. 54, no. 3, 1982, pp. 635–38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1906272.
13. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 'Russia. The Ode'. https://internetpoem.com/algernon-charles-swinburne/russia-an-ode-poem/
14. Walicki, Andrzej. 'Russian Social Thought: An Introduction to the Intellectual History of Nineteenth-Century Russia.' The Russian Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1–45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/128768.
15. Zorin, Andrei, et al. By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Russia. Academic Studies Press, 2014. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxsj45.