The Princess (Maykov poem)

The Princess (Russian: Княжна, Knyazhna) is a poem by Apollon Maykov first published in January 1878 issue of The Russian Messenger. It told the story of a young Russian girl of a noble family joining a group of radical youth to fight against the repressive state. The poem, condemned by the Russian literary left of the time, in retrospect is seen as a strong political statement attacking both the corrupt political system of mid-19th-century Russia, based on serfdom and the violent methods of undermining it, professed by "nihilistic" youth.^[1]

Background

The initial target of Maykov's satire was serfdom, and in the poem's early versions, the heroine was a young retrograde, a holder of conservative views. Soon, though, Princess Zhenya turned into a rebel abhorred by the environment she'd been brought up in, but still in certain ways corrupted by it. Finally, the author has made his heroine a symbol of the Russian cultural elite's infatuation with the Socialist ideas, which had no bearing upon the country's history and cultural traditions, as the author saw it.^[1] In his unpublished "Notes on the insinuations, concerning the Princess" Maykov wrote:

[The heroine] is the symbol of our old life, or rather the life of our high society which had lost spiritual unity with its people but is still bound to the lower classes by common history [part of which is] serfdom. [This high society] is still the holder of Russia's historical legacy and – even if by inertia - it moves along the way of fulfilling its historical mission. That is why [the Russia's ruling class] whatever its flaws are, has to be given credit for creating the Great Russia, even if this greatness is now a thing of the past.

"Zhenya is planning to start a new life. Our liberals, my critics, suppose that Zhenya symbolizes the start of a new era. I cannot deny - I even agree - that principles professed by this girl and her generation with their longing for justice, mark the end of the old times. But I refuse to greet them as heralds of the dawn of some kind of new era," Maykov wrote later in the same essay.^[1]

Originally, in the poem's finale Zhenya was becoming a sister of mercy in the Russo-Turkish War. A later version of it was posing the question: "And what about Zhenya, poor Zhenya? What happened to her? Disappeared in the dark? Or found herself in a Siberian prison, victim of heinous doctrines? Or - any transformation might have happened - with some old granny went to a monastery to 'pray her sins down', to some holy sites? All this is possible, and every road's a thorny one."^[1]

Critical response

The Russian democratic press of the time was outraged with Maykov's "Princess". "Mr. Maykov as a Judge of the New Generation of Women", was called the article by M.Artemyeva, written for Vospitaniye i Obrazovaniye magazine but banned by censors. Even O.F.Miller in his later 1888 article (Russkaya Mysl, No.8, 1888) suggested that the "hypertrophied fear of nihilism" did the author a lot of harm. ^[2]

References