Legacies of the Stone Guest: The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature

The legend of Don Juan has had a profound impact on Russian literature, according to this rigorous study. Burry (Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky), a Slavic and East European languages professor at Ohio State University, traces how Alexander Pushkin’s 1839 play The Stone Guest—in which Don Juan seduces the widow of the Commander Don Juan had killed in a duel, only for a statue of the Commander to come to life and seek revenge—echoes throughout the Russian canon. Comparing Pushkin’s love triangle to the one in Anna Karenina, Burry contends that Tolstoy’s novel draws parallels between Anna and Don Juan to express skepticism toward women’s liberation and suggest that women who embrace Don Juan’s “rebellious libertinism” find only “boredom, frustration, and eventually, suicide.” Burry argues that Pushkin “Russianized” the Don Juan legend by dramatizing through the protagonist and the Commander the tension between a “free, iconoclastic individual” and a “restrictive, conformist society,” and he posits that such late-Soviet authors as Venedikt Erofeev and Vladimir Kazakov evoked Pushkin’s Don Juan to push back against their era’s “political, social, and sexual repression.” The methodical literary analysis illuminates an overlooked strand in the fiction of the Russian greats, though the prose is a bit dry. Still, this should pique the interest of Russian literature specialists. (June)