At one point Anastasius finds himself in Bulgaria, near the town of Widin, in the company of General Suvorov. It casts the gravest doubt on the probity of the Greek nation, and upon the philhellenic concept in whose interest Byron was, in the myth, to ‘sacrifice his life’ five years later. Anastasius is a picaresque novel set in the eastern Mediterranean, whose protagonist claims to be either a Turk or a Greek, a Christian or a Moslem, depending on which label seems to give him the best advantage in whatever situation he finds himself. Cochran, Byron’s Romantic (.)ģA very important subtext for Don Juan is a novel by Thomas Hope called Anastasius, or the Memoirs of a Greek, 2 which Byron’s publisher John Murray had brought out late in 1819, when Byron was writing the third and fourth cantos of his comic epic (the two cantos were originally one).

2 See Peter Cochran, ‘Why Did Byron Envy Thomas Hope’s Anastasius?’, in P.

Secondly, Byron knew that no epic in the tradition in which he wrote-the tradition of Pulci, Ariosto and Tasso-was complete without a Christian army besieging a Moslem city, and Suvorov’s siege of Ismail, in which Juan takes part, both fitted into his poem’s time-scheme, and was a perfect demonstration of that very idea. Firstly, he was enslaved in Constantinople, and had to escape-and Russia was the nearest stopping-off point on his anti-clockwise trip around Europe. Don Juan should have a reality which his Turkish Tales, at least one of which, Lara, was, as he confessed to his publisher, set on ‘the Moon’, 1 manifestly lacked.ĢThere were a number of reasons why Don Juan should visit Russia. As a result of his study of Scott’s Waverley Novels, he was determined that no episode should pass without a firm backing either in his own experience, or in authentic prose sources.

1 Byron to Murray, 24 July 1814: text from National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS) Ms.43488 By (.)ġRussia posed a problem for Byron when writing Don Juan, for although he had never been there, the geographical, historical, and sexual themes of his comic epic dictated that his hero should go there.

* Quotations from Don Juan are from the edition on the website of the International Byron Society ww (.).

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