The Reception of Thomas Moore in Russia During the Romantic Age

At the beginning of the 1820s the Irish poet Thomas Moore was as famous in Russia as Byron and Sir Walter Scott. In 1821 in Berlin the Russian poet Vasilii Zhukovskii saw a spectacle based on the oriental tale Lalla Rookh where the future imperator Nicolas I and his wife played the main roles. The Italian compositor Spontini wrote the music. For Zhukovskii the image of princess Aleksandra in the role of Lalla Rookh was an epiphany of Poetry itself. He translated an excerpt from the poem "Paradise and the Peri", and in the course of several years he wrote a cycle of poems, both translations and original, based on Thomas Moore's Oriental tale. The image of Lalla Rookh acquired an aesthetic and philosophical meaning in the work of Zhukovskii and he used references to it also in his essay on Raphael's Madonna (1847). Pushkin uses references to Lalla Rookh in a stanza of the Evgenii Onegin excluded from the final version of the poem. The poet Ivan Kozlov translated a song from Moore’s Oriental tale along with a series of shorter poems, one in particular “Those evening bells” (Vechernii zvon 1828) was so succefull that the public forgot it was a translation and was considered a real popular Russian song.