Dragon is a poem by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy , was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist...

, written in the spring and summer of 1875

1875 in literature

The year 1875 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*October 1 - American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe is reburied in Westminster Hall and Burying Ground with a larger memorial marker. Some controversy arose years later as to whether the correct body was exhumed.*...

 and first published in Vestnik Evropy

Vestnik Evropy

Vestnik Evropy was the major liberal magazine of late-nineteenth-century Russia; it lasted from 1866 to 1918....

October (#10) 1875 issue (pp. 581-605). The poem (consisting of 193 three-liners) was subtitled "A XII century tale. From the Italian" and dedicated to Yakov Polonsky

Yakov Polonsky

Yakov Petrovich Polonsky was a leading Pushkinist poet who tried to uphold the waning traditions of Russian Romantic poetry during the heyday of realistic prose....

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In July 1875 Tolstoy met Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

 and Mikhail Stasyulevich

Mikhail Stasyulevich

Mikhail Matveevich Stasyulevich was a Russian writer and scholar, author of books on ancient history, journalist, editor and publisher, best known as the founder and editor-in-chief of Vestnik Evropy, one of Russia's leading literary magazines...

 in Karlsbad

Karlovy Vary

Karlovy Vary is a spa city situated in western Bohemia, Czech Republic, on the confluence of the rivers Ohře and Teplá, approximately west of Prague . It is named after King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, who founded the city in 1370...

 and read them the poem. According to the latter, all three discussed whether it was advisable to refer to as "translated from Italian" something that was in fact the original Russian text. "Let Angelo de Gubernatis

Angelo de Gubernatis

Count Angelo de Gubernatis , Italian man of letters, was born at Turin and educated there and at Berlin, where he studied philology....

 scratch his head, digging in old archives, searching for the original", Tolstoy exclaimed, laughing. Still he made a compromise: in the "translated from Italian" phrase the first word was dropped.

The Dragon, as Tolstoy saw it, had one serious merit. "The best thing about this story is that it presents as rather plausible a kind of occurrence that would be quite impossible", he wrote in a letter to Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein

Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein

Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was a Polish noblewoman who pursued a 40-year liaison/relationship with Franz Liszt. She was also an amateur journalist and essayist and it is conjectured that she did much of the actual writing of several of Liszt's publications, especially his Life of Chopin...

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