Contents: introduction chapter I family and youth

Chapter I Family and Youth

1. 
   George Gordon Byron is an English Romantic poet.
   

Byron was the son of the handsome and cheerful Captain John ("Mad Jack") Byron and his second wife, the Scottish heiress Catherine Gordon. After her husband squandered most of his fortune, Mrs. Byron took her young son to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in hostels on a meager income; the captain died in France in 1791. George Gordon Byron was born with a congenital foot defect and was very sensitive to his lameness. In 1798, at the age of 10, he unexpectedly inherited the title and property of William, uncle of the 5th Baron Byron. His mother proudly took him to England, where the child fell in love with the sparkling halls and vast ruins of Newstead Abbey, a gift to the Byrons from Henry VIII . After living for some time in Newstead, Byron was sent to school in London, and in 1801 he entered Harrow, one of the most prestigious schools in England. In 1803, he fell in love with his older and already engaged cousin, Mary Chavor, and when he rejected her, he became for Byron a symbol of idealized and unattainable love. In the same year, he may have met his half-sister, Augusta Byron, from his father's first marriage¹.

In 1805, Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he accumulated huge debts and succumbed to the usual vices of bachelors. Signs of his initial sexual indecision were later more pronounced in what he described as "brutal but pure love and passion" than that of the young singer John Edleston. In addition to Byron's strong attachment to boys, often idealized in the example of Edleston, his lifelong attachment to women is a testament to the strength of his heterosexual zeal. In 1806 Byron published his first poems in a volume entitled "Plays about the Fugitives" and in the same year he developed a close and lifelong friendship with John Kem Hobhouse, who had awakened an interest in liberal Whiggism in Trinity .

In 1807, Byron's first collection of poems, Hours of Idleness, was published. In The Edinburgh Commentary, satirical criticism of the book led to revenge in 1809 with a satirical song called "English Bards and Scottish Commentators" in which she attacked the contemporary literary scene. This incident was his first confession.

On coming of age in 1809, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords and then went on a great tour with Hobhouse. They sailed for Lisbon, crossed Spain and sailed to Greece via Gibraltar and Malta where they proceeded to Ioannina and Tepelene, Albania. In Greece, Byron Child began Harold's visit, and it continued in Athens. In March 1810, he sailed with Hobhaus to Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), visited Troy and, imitating Leander, swam across the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles). Byron's visit to Greece made an unforgettable impression on him. The freedom and openness of the Greeks were in sharp contrast to English restraint and hypocrisy, and served to expand his views on people and mores. He enjoyed the sunshine and the spiritual tolerance of the people².

Byron returned to London in July 1811 and died before his mother reached him at Newstead. In February 1812, in his first speech in the House of Lords, he made a humanitarian appeal against the Tory crackdown on a Nottingham weaver. In early March, the first two cantons of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published by John Murray, and Byron "found himself famous". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a young man who became disillusioned with a pleasant and charming life and sought distraction from foreign lands. In addition to the story of Byron's travels in the Mediterranean, the first two songs represent the sadness and desperation of a generation weary of post-revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Byron's poetry reflects the futility of ambition, the transitory nature of pleasure, and the futility of striving for perfection during "visits" to Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece. After the enormous popularity of Childe Harold, Byron became a lion in the Whig community. The handsome poet came into contact with the passionate and eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb, and her friend Hobhouse averted a runaway scandal. She became his mistress, Mrs. Oxford, who supported Byron's radicalism.

In the summer of 1813, Byron entered into a close relationship with his sister Augusta, who is now married to Colonel George League. He then flirted with Lady Frances Webster to avoid this dangerous relationship. The excitement of these two loves, and the mixture of guilt and joy they evoked in Byron, are reflected in a series of oriental sad and remorseful poems written during this period: Giaur (1813); Bride of Abydos (1813); Corsair (1814) sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication; and Lara (1814).

Offering to Anna Isabella (Annabella) Milbank in September 1814. The marriage took place in January 1815, and in December 1815 Mrs. Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada. The marriage failed from the start due to a rift between Byron and his dreamy and humorous wife; and in January 1816, Annabella was rumored to have left Byron for her parents. About her relationship with August Ley and her bisexuality. The couple filed for legal divorce. Wounded by the general spiritual fury directed at him, Byron left the country in April 1816 and never returned to England³.

Byron sailed across the Rhine to Switzerland and settled in Geneva, next to Mary Godwin (soon to become Mary Shelley), who lived with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Godwin's half- sister, Claire Clairmont . (Byron was romantically involved with Clermont in England.) In Geneva he wrote Childe Harold's Third Songs (1816) after Harold, from Belgium to Switzerland along the Rhine. It evokes a historical association with every place Harold visits and represents the most ambitious, giving pictures of the Battle of Waterloo (Byron visited his address), Napoleon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the mountains and lakes of Switzerland. and the saddest moods. A visit to the Bernese Oberland provided the stage for the Faustian poetic drama Manfred (1817), in which Byron's protagonist's guilt and wider frustrations of the Romantic spirit reflect the "half-earth, demigod" of man. unfit to sink or fly."

At the end of the summer, Shelley's detachment left for England, where in January 1817 Clermont Byron's daughter Allegra was born. In October, Byron and Hobhouse left for Italy. They stopped in Venice, where Byron enjoyed the relaxed manners and mores of the Italians and continued his romantic relationship with the owner's wife, Marianna Segati. In May he joined the Hobhouse in Rome and collected the impressions he wrote in Childe Harold's Fourth Canto (1818). He also wrote the poem "Beppo" in Rome's Ottawa, a poem that satirically contrasts Italian with English etiquette in the Venetian "menage-à- trois" story. Returning to Venice, the baker's wife, Margherita Cogni, became Segati's mistress, and his description of the whims of this "soft tiger" is one of the most interesting passages in his letters describing life in Italy. The sale of Newstead Abbey in the autumn of 1818 for £94,500 cleared Byron of his debt, which had risen to £34,000, and brought him a large income⁴.

In the light, humorous-heroic style of Beppo, Byron found the form of writing his greatest poem - the satire "Don Giovanni" in the form of a picaresque poetic tale. The first two cantons of Don Giovanni began in 1818 and were published in July 1819. Byron turned the legendary libertine Don Juan into a flawless, innocent youth who, although he gladly obeys the beauties that pursued him, remains a reasonable norm in relation to him see the absurdity and absurdity of the world.. He fled to the Russian army, bravely participated in the siege of Izmail by the Russians and was sent to Petersburg, where he won the favor of Emperor Catherine the Great and was sent by her on a diplomatic mission to England. Meanwhile, the story of the poem remains a stake on which Byron's humorous and satirical social commentary can hang. Its most consistent aims are, firstly, hypocrisy and dissent based on various social and sexual conventions, and secondly, the vain ambitions and pretensions of poets, lovers, generals, rulers, and mankind in general. Don Giovanni is not yet completed; Byron graduated from 16 cantons and began 17 before his illness and death. In Don Juan he was able to get rid of Child Harold's extreme sadness and explore other sides of his character and personality - not the tragic difference between reality and appearance, but his satirical mind and comedy explained his point of view⁵.

In 1818, Shelley and other visitors discovered that Byron was obese, his hair was long and gray, he looked older and had sex. But a chance meeting with Countess Teresa Gamba gave Guiccioli Byron, who was only 19 years old and almost three times his own age, power and changed his life. Byron accompanied him to Ravenna, and later he returned to Venice for her. In January 1820, Byron returned to Ravenna as his cavalry servant and won the friendship of his father and brother, Count Ruggiero and Pietro Gamba , who enabled him to join the secret society of the Carbonari and its revolutionary goals. Italy from Austrian rule. In Ravenna, Byron wrote "Dante's Prophecy"; Songs III, IV and V of Don Juan; Poetic dramas Marino Faliero , Sardanapal, Two Foscaria and Cain (all published in 1821); and a terrifying parody of the Poet Laureate's eulogy of King George III at the Apparition of Judgment cinema dedicated to the poet Robert South.

Byron arrived in Pisa in November 1821, where Teresa and Count Gamba followed him after they had been expelled from Ravenna for their part in the uprising. He left his daughter Allegrani, who was sent by her mother to study at a convent near Ravenna, and she died the following April. In Pisa, Byron contacted Shelley again, and in the early summer of 1822, Byron moved to Livorno (Livorno), where he rented a villa near the sea. In July, the poet and publicist Leigh Hunt came here from England to help Shelley and Byron edit the radical Liberal magazine. Byron returned to Pisa and placed Hunt and his family in his villa. Despite Shelley's drowning on July 8, the periodical has moved forward and its first issue includes "Justice Appears". At the end of September, Byron Teresa's family moved to Genoa, where they found refuge.

Byron's interest in the periodical gradually waned, but he continued to support Hunt and give manuscripts to liberals. After a quarrel with publisher John Murray, Byron gave all of his later writings, including The Songs of Don Juan (1823–24), to Lee Hunt's brother, John, the publisher of the Liberal.

By this time, Byron was looking for new adventures. In April 1823, he agreed to work as an agent for the London Committee set up to help the Greeks in their struggle for independence from Turkish rule. In July 1823 Byron left Genoa for Kefalonia. He sent £4,000 of his own money to prepare the Greek Navy for naval service and then sailed for Missolon on 29 December in order to join Prince Alexandros. Mavrokordatos , commander of forces in western Greece.

Byron tried to unite the various Greek factions and personally commanded a brigade of Souliot soldiers, the bravest of the Greeks. But in February 1824 a serious illness weakened him, and in April he fell ill with a fever and died on April 19 in Missolunsea. Deeply saddened, he became a symbol of impartial patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was taken to England and refused to be buried in Westminster Abbey, instead being placed in a family warehouse near Newstead. Surprisingly, 145 years after his death, a monument to Byron was finally erected on the floor of the abbey⁶.

2.