Sources of Shevchenko’s acquaintance with Japanese culture

(a comment on several diary entries)

Abstract

The research subject of the offered article is Shevchenko’s scope of reading in the aspect of his awareness of Japan. The main problem is to clarify the content of Shevchenko’s diary entries, in which the Japanese, “something Japanese”, and “Japanese comedy” are mentioned. Thus the goal was set to find out the range of printed sources of the poet’s knowledge about Japan. In the course of the research, traditional means and methods of literary source studies as well as the method of philological reading were used. The works of his predecessors, in particular of Leonid Bolshakov and Mykola Sulyma, are taken into account, and several corrections are proposed to their reasoning. The author of the article considers a thorough review of proven poetic lectures, in particular periodicals, as a promising way of searching. The novelty of the article lies in the fact that as a result of such an approach, for the first time it is justified that Shevchenko’s scope of reading included Yevgeniy Korsh’s article from the series Japan and the Japanese (1852), which undoubtedly became one of the principal sources of information about this Far East country, its political system and culture, for the exile. A large passage in Korsh’s article is devoted to the description of theatre and, in particular, the loud declamation of the actors, which was probably remembered by Shevchenko.

            The results of the research are as follows. The article confirms Mykola Sulyma’s reasoning, that the Ukrainian poet was familiar with Russians in Japan at the end of 1853 and at the beginning of 1854, and the series of articles by Ivan Goncharov published in Morskoi Sbornik (1855), which were later included in the book of essays Frigate ‘Pallada’. At the same time, the stylistic influence of the Russian writer should be interpreted more carefully. Shevchenko, like Goncharov and many of their contemporaries, used the word “comedy” in the mentioned contexts in a purely everyday sense, and not in a terminological one. It is clear that Shevchenko did not mean Japanese puppet comedy: he lexically combined a puppet show with a comedy, occasionally noticing “something Japanese” in the bishop’s service in Nizhny Novgorod. Meanwhile, the expression “Japanese comedy” seems to have really been inspired by descriptions of the Japanese theatre with its noisy actors, which, according to the poet, apparently lacked harmony and grace, which became the basis for the comparison with the religious procession in the Kremlin in Moscow. In the use of words in his diary, particularly in the comparisons, Shevchenko remained quite original, and sometimes, as is the case with the mentions of “Japanese”, he was subjective, which prevents one from interpreting these entries unambiguously.