1. Vasily Zhukovsky was the illegitimate son of a landowner named Afanasi Bunin and his Turkish housekeeper Salkha, who had been captured during the siege of Bender in 1770 and brought to Russia as a slave.
16 Facts About Vasily Zhukovsky
1. 2.
Vasily Zhukovsky met Nikolay Karamzin, the preeminent Russian man of letters and the founding editor of the most important literary journal of the day, Vestnik Yevropy.
3.
In December 1802, the 19-year-old Vasily Zhukovsky published a free translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in Karamzin's journal.
4.
Vasily Zhukovsky was among the first Russian writers to cultivate the mystique of the Romantic poet.
5.
Vasily Zhukovsky came under the influence of Romanticism in the medieval Hansa cities of Dorpat and Revel, now called Tartu and Tallinn, which were then part of the Russian Empire.
6.
Vasily Zhukovsky's rise at court began with Napoleon's invasion of 1812 and with the consequent revilement of French as the favored foreign language of the Russian aristocracy.
7.
Vasily Zhukovsky's work in this period attracted the attention of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, the German-born wife of Grand Duke Nicholas, the future Tsar Nicholas I Alexandra invited Zhukovsky to Saint Petersburg to be her personal Russian tutor.
8.
On Pushkin's early death in 1837, Vasily Zhukovsky stepped in as his literary executor, not only rescuing his work from a hostile censorship, but diligently collecting and preparing it for publication.
9.
Vasily Zhukovsky met and corresponded with world-class cultural figures like Goethe, the poet Ludwig Tieck, and the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.
10.
In 1841, Vasily Zhukovsky retired from court and settled near Dusseldorf, where he married Elisabeth von Reutern, the 18-year-old daughter of Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern, an artist friend.
11.
Vasily Zhukovsky's body was returned to Saint Petersburg and buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
12.
Vasily Zhukovsky wrote some prose, the best-known example of which is the 1809 short story "Marina roshcha", about the ancient past of Moscow; it was inspired by Nikolay Karamzin's famous story "Poor Liza".
13.
Vasily Zhukovsky translated from a staggeringly wide range of sources, often without attribution, given that modern ideas of intellectual property did not exist in his day.
14.
Characteristically, Vasily Zhukovsky later translated "Lenore" yet a third time as part of his lifelong effort to develop a natural-sounding Russian dactylic hexameter.
15.
On retiring from court, Vasily Zhukovsky devoted his remaining years to hexameter translations of Eastern poetry, including long excerpts from the Persian epic Shahnameh.
16.
Vasily Zhukovsky is often considered the founder of a "German school" of Russian poets and as such has influenced figures as far afield as Fyodor Tyutchev and Marina Tsvetaeva.