Borrow travelled by way of Hamburg and Lübeck to Travemünde, whence he went by sea to St. Petersburg, now called Petrograd, where he arrived on the twentieth of August, 1833.  He was back in London in September, 1835, and thus it will be seen that he spent two years in Russia.  After the hard life he had led, everything was now rose-coloured.  “Petersburg is the finest city in the world,” he wrote to Mr. Jowett; “neither London nor Paris nor any other European capital which I have visited has sufficient pretensions¹ to enter into comparison with it in respect to beauty and grandeur².”  But the striking thing about Borrow in these early years was his capacity for making friends.  He had not been a week in St. Petersburg before he had gained the regard of one William Glen, who, in 1825, had been engaged by the Bible Society to translate the Old Testament³ into Persian.  The clever Scot, of whom Borrow was informed by a competent judge that he was “a Persian scholar of the first water,” was probably too heretical for the Society, which recalled him, much to his chagrin⁴.  “He is a very learned man, but of very simple and unassuming manners,” wrote Borrow to Jowett.  His version of the Psalms⁵ appeared in 1830, and of Proverbs in 1831.  Thus he was going home in despair, but seems to have had “good talk” on the way with Borrow in St. Petersburg.  In 1845 his complete Old Testament in Persian appeared in Edinburgh.  This William Glen has been confused with another William Glen, a law student, who taught Carlyle Greek, but they had nothing in common.  Borrow and Carlyle could not possibly have had friends in common.  Borrow was drawn⁶ towards this William Glen by his enthusiasm for the Persian language.  But Glen departed out of his life very quickly.  Hasfeld, who entered it about the same time, was to stay longer.  Hasfeld was a Dane, now thirty-three years of age, p. 98who, after a period in the Foreign Office at Copenhagen, had come to St. Petersburg as an interpreter to the Danish Legation, but made quite a good income as a professor of European languages in cadet schools and elsewhere.  The English language and literature would seem to have been his favourite topic.  His friendship for Borrow was a great factor in Borrow’s life in Russia and elsewhere.  If Borrow’s letters to Hasfeld should ever come to light, they will prove the best that he wrote.  Hasfeld’s letters to Borrow were preserved by him.  Three of them are in my possession.  Others were secured by Dr. Knapp, who made far too little use of them.  They are all written in Danish on foreign notepaper: flowery,

分享到：