Russian Reception by James Hogg (Soviet period)

The article continues a series of works devoted to the Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770–1835), a famous interpreter of folk ballads and author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Facts and materials related to the perception of J. Hogg in Russia in Soviet times are collected and summarized. It is indicated that during the period under review, in the studies of Russian literary scholars, separate judgments were made on the traditions of R. Burns in the works of J. Hogg, the role of W. Scott in his fate, etc. The Russian translations of the works of the English and American classics (in particular, J. G. Byron, E. A. Poe, J. F. Cooper) that appeared in the Soviet era, which contained references to the Scottish poet, are noted. The publications, which included information about J. Hogg, are comprehended, with special attention paid to S. Ya. Marshak’s epigram “Inscription on the Stone” mentioning J. Hogg’s name, the research of M. P. Alekseev, B. G. Reizov, R. M. Samarin and etc. The scientific works of A. D. Ivanova, first of all her Ph.D. thesis “The originality of the artistic work of James Hogg” (1990), which contributed, along with the changes in social life that occurred at the turn of the J. Hogg, the emergence of new translations of his works are analyzed.

Russian Reception by James Hogg (Mid-19th — Early 20th Centuries)

The article continues a series of works devoted to the Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), a famous interpreter of folk ballads and author of “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (1824). The facts and materials related to the perception of J. Hogg in Russia in the middle of the XIX — early XX century are collected and summarized. It is noted that during the period under review, no new translations of J. Hogg's poetry and prose into Russian were created, however, in the articles of leading literary critics (N. G. Chernyshevsky, M. L. Mikhailov, A. V. Druzhinin) when analyzing the works of N. V. Gogol, T. Goode, the translation activity of I. S. Turgenev expressed opinions on certain aspects of the biography and work of the Scottish author. It has been established that the main source of information about J. Hogge and his work was for the Russian reader of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries translated publications on the history of English literature and culture, other books by Western European researchers published in Russia. The manifestations of interest of Russian researchers and popularizers of English literature in the work of J. Hogg are comprehended, with special attention paid to the article by N. A. Solovyov-Nesmelov “James Hogg”, which was a literary sketch about the childhood of the writer, and the essay by K. F. Tiander the novel of the first quarter of the 19th century, which offers a different assessment from the predecessors of the Scottish author’s activities as a continuer of the traditions of M. Edgeworth.

James Hogg (1770-1835)

Portrait of James Hogg, writer and shepherd

Early Russian Reception of James Hogg (1830s)

The early Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), known in his homeland as an interpreter of folk ballads and the author of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” (1824) — a complex work, which laid the foundation for the theme of multiple personality disorder in English literature is comprehended in the article for the first time. It has been suggested that the first Russian to hear about Hogg and his works was A. I. Turgenev, who visited W. Scott in Abbotsford in August 1828. The materials of the Russian periodicals of the 1830s (“Library for reading”, “Northern Bee”, “Telescope”, “Moscow Observer”), which reported facts about the life and work of Hogg, were comprehended. It is noted that the authors of a number of articles (most of them published without a signature and under kryptonyms) were significant critics and publicists of the era — O. I. Senkovsky, N. A. Polevoy, N. I. Nadezhdin. It was established that in the 1830s, fragments from Hogg’s memoir about the life of W. Scott in Abbotsford “The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott” (1834), as well as a fragment from the book “Noctes Ambrosianae” (1802—1835), attributed to Hogg, but in reality a collective work of J. Wilson, J. G. Lockhart, Hogg and W. Maginn were translated into Russian. The analysis of publications about Hogg in periodicals and in the fourteenth volume of the Encyclopedic Lexicon (1838) revealed inaccuracies in the presentation of biographical facts, the tendency of Russian publicists to uncritically perceive the subjective assessments of the Hogg-memoirist, largely due to his desire to emphasize his own literary significance. It is noted that, introducing Hogg as a follower of Burns and a friend of Scott, the authors of articles in Russian periodicals did not pay due attention to Hogg’s creative individuality, the originality of his creative heritage, as a result of which the late period of his literary biography (late 1810s — mid-1830s), associated with the creation of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” and a number of other significant works, remained unnoticed against the background of early works associated with reliance on folk songs.

Short Fictions of Improvement by James Hogg and Walter Scott

This chapter reads James Hogg and Walter Scott within a new, revisionist history of short fiction that is particularly interested in the genre of the ‘tale’. Focusing on the half-decade between 1827 and 1831, the chapter highlights a selection of Hogg’s mature contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate (first series). These years were marked by literary experimentation, when a confident improving persuasion in Scottish culture was threatening to unravel. The formal logic of these short fictions, defined by a curiously focused spontaneity, exacerbates a pluralistic handling of the collision between improvement and tradition. Different models of time (progress, renewal, disruption) and belief (suspension, scepticism, credulity) serve to interrogate improvement in a wide range of contexts around commercial modernisation. The chapter unpacks two specific literary innovations in this context. The first looks to acts of transmission in the literary marketplace which by turns sustain, contain and defer the dialectics of improvement. The second sees the emergence of a fully fledged aesthetic vocabulary of culture in Scott’s writing.

Dialectics of Improvement

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, it shows, was not a unified ideal in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland but rather a contested body of different ideas, some of which were mutually contradictory. The book untangles the complexity of this term that was applied variously to field drainage, elocution lessons, a taste for landscape scenery and the macrohistory of Western civilisation. As it explores, improvement provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history. The book makes a significant contribution to debates around the relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, stressing a series of aesthetic innovations across the turn of the nineteenth century in a culture that was saturated by the dialectical workings of improvement.

From a Gothic Text to a Neobaroque Cinema: Wojciech Jerzy Has’s Adaptation of James Hogg’s ”The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner”

<p>The article discusses the journey of the gothic novel <em>The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner </em>(1824)<em> </em>by James Hogg (1770-1835) from the repertoire of Scottish Romanticism to the neobaroque film adaptation <em>Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany </em>(1986)<em> </em>by the Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000). The film demonstrates Has’s anamorphic position and emphasizes the crucial role of the gothic text’s neobaroque aesthetics in illuminating Polish cultural and political conflicts in 1986. Has rearticulates contradictions structuring the puritan-provincial mind depicted by Hogg and launches a critique of factional fanaticism.</p>