Byron and Pushkin by V. M. Zhirmunsky

In 1917–1921, being the first Professor of World Literature at the recently (1914) opened Saratov University, young Victor M. Zhirmunsky taught general courses in World literature – and seminar “Byron’s Contemporaries in Literature”, which concentrated on literary sources for Byron’s poems and their influence on Russian poetry. Zhirmunsky’s letter to B. Eichenbaum of July 29, 1918 contains an outline of his idea for a doctoral thesis on Byron’s poetics with “a long excursion” based on the seminar’s work – a research into “Byronic” Pushkin’s poems. Presented upon his return to Leningrad as his doctoral thesis, Byron and Pushkin (1924) proved to set the golden standard in comparative literary studies and to this day is in print. The book is analyzed as a methodological breakthrough, a combination of the approach of academic literary history with the emerging ideas of Russian formalism. Zhirmunsky’s arguments are backed up by his exhaustive reading of Russian Byronic poems, by his following his texts. His bold for the period exclusion of biographical and psychological aspects from his analysis allows him to demonstrate what exactly is transferred from the source to recipient text: the motive structure, narrative construction, ways of manifestation of the author’s position – in short, the genre model. Specifically, Zhirmunsky is shown to be an early forerunner of the concepts of the death of author and intertextuality.