Selected Poetry (Penguin)

by Alexander Pushkin

  Written at the age of seventeen during Pushkin’s penultimate year at the Lycée. The original is in French: ‘On peut très bien, mademoiselle, / Vous prendre pour une maquerelle, / Ou pour une vieille guenon, / Mais pour une grâce, oh, mon Dieu, non.’

  This epigram is mock-addressed to a court lady Pushkin bumped into one dark evening running along a palace corridor which connected with the Lycée, mistaking her for her pretty maid and kissing her. Obliged to send a letter of apology to the princess, Pushkin secretly wrote these four lines. According to a school friend’s memoir, Tsar Alexander, discussing the incident with Pushkin’s headmaster, commented sotto voce that the old woman had probably been delighted by the young man’s mistake.

  First published in 1871.

  The Singer (1816)

  One of the ‘melancholy elegies’ Pushkin wrote in 1816 at the Lycée in the spirit of early nineteenth-century French models. It attracted several composers in due course, including Tchaikovsky, who drew upon it for the words of the duet which the Larin sisters practise at the beginning of the opera Eugene Onegin.

  The original is in stanzas of iambic pentameters ending in a two-stress line. The rhyme scheme in the translation (as far as it is recognisable) is Pushkin’s.

  5, 10 and 15 Ah, did you hear him? […] Ah, did you see him? […] Ah, did you sigh for him?: Pushkin’s sound pattern is central in this poem. The pervasive melting palatised l sounds, notably in the opening words (‘Slykhali l’ vy …’), and their repetition in the refrain of each stanza, are produced naturally in Russian by past-tense endings and the interrogative particle.

  The Window (1816)

  Pushkin has fun with the melancholy elegy genre. The original is in iambic tetrameters throughout. First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

  Liberty: An Ode (1817)

  This poem, written at the age of eighteen a few months after finishing school, was widely circulated in manuscript with other poems of the period by Pushkin; its title gave rise to the unexamined belief that it was subversive and opposed autocracy, and it was one of the poems that caused Pushkin to be exiled. Like ‘The Village’, however, a plea for the abolition of serfdom written some eighteen months later, it is actually supportive of the monarchy. Pushkin began to write it in his friends the Turgenev brothers’ apartment overlooking the grim Mikhaylovsky Castle where the unbalanced cruelty of Tsar Alexander I’s father, Paul I, had led to his assassination in a palace revolution in 1801. Someone suggested this gloomy sight as a subject for a poem. Pushkin threw himself on to a table at the window and began to write, completing the poem at home at night on the same day.

  The original is in iambic tetrameter rhyming ababcddc throughout. First published in Herzen, 1856.

  1 Cytherean muse: Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, said to have landed on the island of Cythera after being born in the sea and thus often referred to as ‘the Cytherean’ in Classical texts.

  10 that immortal Gaul: Pushkin may have had in mind Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836), author of the words and music of ‘La Marseillaise’, or André Chénier (1762–94), passionately imitated in the poem titled by his name (1825) – not in this selection – which became wrongly associated with the Decembrist uprising and nearly resulted in serious trouble for Pushkin.

  46–54 O martyr of the Terror […] Watch as the vile axe falls: On the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793.

  55 the evil purple: Pushkin annotated these words ‘Napoleon’ in his manuscript, and the following stanza continues to refer to Napoleon.

  73 Clio: The Greek muse of history.

  76 Caligula’s last hour: The cruel and insane Roman emperor Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula (Latin: ‘little boot’), was assassinated in AD 41.

  77 with their ribboned honours: The assassins of the unbalanced Paul I in the palace revolution of 1801 were senior army officers.

  88 The anointed miscreant dies: After the word ‘dies’ in one of his draft manuscripts, Pushkin sketched the face of Paul I.

  89–96 Learn then […] throne secure: In a manuscript copy of this poem, Pushkin has put a concluding flourish after the last line of the penultimate stanza, and the final stanza is written to one side in the hand of A. I. Turgenev. This might suggest that Pushkin saw some discrepancy between the visceral hatred of a specific autocrat (Napoleon) contained in lines 57–64 and the markedly different tone of liberal constitutionalism in the final stanza, more expressive of the proto-Decembrist sentiments of the Turgenev circle in which Pushkin moved after finishing school.

  To Chaadayev (1818)

  Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadayev (1794–1856) was a profound and daring liberal thinker who shook Russia with his Lettres philosophiques (1827–31), a radical critique of Russian historical evolution widely read in manuscript. He was a close friend of Pushkin in his immediate post-Lycée period, turning him towards serious thought for the first time. This is one of the anti-autocracy poems by Pushkin that achieved wide unofficial circulation throughout Russia and caused his banishment.

  First published in Russia in truncated form without Pushkin’s permission in 1829 (with the last five lines cut and ‘liberty’ in line 13 changed to ‘hope’). The whole poem first found uncensored publication in Herzen, 1856.

  O. Masson (1819)

  First published in Annenkov, 1857.

  A Good Revel (1819)

  Olga Masson, the subject of the previous poem, comes into a discarded continuation of this poem written in the same year.

  The original metre is trochaic throughout.

  Renaissance (1819)

  The exhibition of Raphael’s newly restored Madonna with Beardless St Joseph (1506) in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, at the beginning of the nineteenth century occasioned a number of copies by worthless painters. Shostakovich used this poem as the first of his four Pushkin settings, opus 46a, written soon after Stalin/Pravda’s annihilating attack on his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936; the song is quoted in the finale of his Fifth Symphony (the whole work being tagged, with self-preservatory irony, ‘A Reply to Just Criticism’).

  You and I (1820)

  Pushkin had become disenchanted with Alexander I for his failure to bring about any of the liberal reforms he had promised. The tsar read one poem he wrote around this time, however, with warm approval, ‘The Village’, a plea for the abolition of serfdom which it was vainly hoped the tsar might bring about by benevolent exercise of his autocratic power (first published in full in Herzen, 1856).

  The present poem was first published in its entirety in émigré anthologies in Berlin and London, both in 1861.

  24 Count Khvostòv: A talentless but amiable poet (1757–1835) whom Pushkin never ceased to make fun of (see, for example, The Bronze Horseman, Part Two, line 322).

  To Yuryev (1820)

  One of two poems addressed to Pushkin’s friend Fyodor Filipovich Yuryev, a fellow member of the Green Lamp (see Introduction under ‘Life’). The poet Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855) is reported to have exclaimed on reading this poem: ‘Oh! how this scoundrel can write!’ (Annenkov, vol. 1, p. 55).

  Exile, 1820–26

  ‘The light of day has faded’ (1820)

  Pushkin wrote this elegy during the crossing of the Kerch Strait into the Crimean peninsula on his way south to begin his exile.

  This translation broadly preserves, on a shortened scale, the variety of line length of the original.

  The Nereid (1820)

  A memory of the southern Crimean coast and of Yekaterina Rayevskaya, with whose family Pushkin had undertaken the latter part of the long journey from St Petersburg to his exile in the South a few months earlier than the time of writing this poem.

  Pushkin’s hexameters (in couplets) are appropriate to his Classical setting.

  1 Tauris: The Classical Greek name for Crimea.

  ‘I have outlived desires’ (1821)

  This neat elegy, a favourite among Pushkin’s early poems for English translators, has its o
rigins in his first serious narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, of which he wrote out the first fair copy on 23 February 1821, the day after writing the lyric poem. Its first two stanzas are based on a draft passage from the Russian prisoner’s hopeless speech rejecting a Circassian girl’s love early in the second part of the narrative poem; the final stanza is entirely new. The whole poem reflects Pushkin’s prevailing mood of loneliness and dejection after the first few months of exile in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev.

  The original is in iambic tetrameters.

  The Prisoner (1822)

  Written after some recent experiences of prison and prisoners in Pushkin’s first place of exile, Kishinev. He had been shocked by the sudden arrest of his close Decembrist friend Major Vladimir Rayevsky for disseminating ideas of constitutional government; the latter would be held in prison for five years while his case was sub judice and then sent to Siberia.

  Pushkin’s metre is anapaestic tetrameter.

  3 and 5 light […] window: The original for both these words is okno, ‘window’. J. Douglas Clayton (personal correspondence) has pointed to the significance of this word here and elsewhere in Pushkin (the beginning of the prologue to The Bronze Horseman, for example – St Petersburg seen as ‘A window on to Europe’, line 16), and maintains that, as with the use of this word by Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) in the poem ‘I have always said that fate is a game’, written in 1971, in Pushkin’s poem the prison may be taken as ‘standing for Russia, teasing ordinary citizens with its windows looking out on a freedom to which they can have no access’.

  A Songbird (1823)

  Sending this poem to his friend the poet Nikolay Gnedich (1784–1833), admired translator of Homer, Pushkin commented on the ‘touching’ Russian peasant custom of releasing a caged bird on Easter Sunday. The editor of the journal Literary Leaves in which the poem was published soon after it had been written deflected the censor’s attention from political interpretation by noting that the poem referred to ‘those benefactors of humanity who donate some of their income towards the charitable release from prison of innocent persons, petty debtors and the like’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 61, note).

  Pushkin’s metre is iambic tetrameter throughout.

  Night (1823)

  The first of the great love poems inspired by Amalia Riznich, the shortest but not least powerful in its concrete concentration. The striking appearance of this young shipping merchant’s wife whom Pushkin met in Odessa was remembered, long after her death, in the monthly Russian Herald:

  Mrs Riznich was young, tall, graceful, and extraordinarily beautiful. Particularly attractive were her fiery eyes, a neck of amazing form and whiteness, and a plait of black hair, nearly five feet long. But her feet were too large; in order to conceal this deficiency, she always wore a long dress, to the ground. She went about wearing a man’s hat and dressed in a semi-riding habit. (Binyon, pp. 163–4)

  This translation, in an attempt to keep up with the steady flow of the original rhymed hexameters, is in pentameters with increased enjambement.

  ‘I went alone before the dawn’ (1823)

  Pushkin sent this poem to his high-placed friend Aleksandr Turgenev with a note: ‘The other day I wrote an imitation of one of the parables of that moderate democrat Jesus Christ.’ The poem expresses Pushkin’s disappointment that the radical sentiments he had voiced in poems and conversations since leaving the Lycée appeared to have fallen on deaf ears. The closing sestet, however, reached an especially wide readership, including the secret police, in manuscript as a separate poem.

  First published in Herzen, 1856; in Russia (Moscow), 1866.

  Epigraph: Matthew 13:3.

  [On Vorontsov] (1824)

  ‘On Vorontsov’ is not Pushkin’s title but is commonly used to identify this poem. Relations between Count M. S. Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia and Bessarabia, and Pushkin, appointed to his chancellery in Odessa in 1823, were soon strained, as this poem reflects, especially when the young poet began an affair with his wife Yelizaveta (Elise).

  The original is in tetrameters. First published in Berlin, 1861; in Russia (Moscow), 1876.

  ‘Zephyrs share / The midnight air’ (1824)

  Pushkin is fond of foreign locales and a master at conjuring up telling atmosphere with minimal brushstrokes; in the four ‘Little Tragedies’ in verse, for example, he convincingly enters in turn the world of medieval France, eighteenth-century Vienna, seventeenth-century Madrid and medieval England. Aleksey Verstovsky (1799–1862), chief rival of the younger Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), Russia’s first recognised great composer, set this poem for voice and piano; he was famous for his setting of Pushkin’s version of the words of a Moldavian song ‘The Black Shawl’ (1820).

  Pushkin’s longer lines are alternately rhymed trochaic tetrameters; the refrain in translation is in the original metre.

  5 Guadalquivir: One of Spain’s principal navigable rivers, passing through Cordoba and Seville and ending on the Gulf of Cadiz.

  To *** (1825)

  One of the best known of Pushkin’s lyric poems. The addressee is Anna Kern, unhappily married to a general much older than herself, who visited a neighbouring estate to the Pushkins’ at Mikhaylovskoye near Pskov in 1825 and there met the exiled Pushkin, who had first seen her six years before in St Petersburg when he was nineteen and she was already married. She describes in a memoir how he presented her with the published first chapter of Eugene Onegin out of which fell this poem – on a folded sheet which Pushkin unsuccessfully tried to snatch back. Glinka set the poem for voice and piano.

  The original is in iambic tetrameter throughout.

  1 that moment: Original: ‘Chudnoye mgnoven’ye’ (‘wondrous moment’). The exact English equivalent of Pushkin’s word chudnoye would seem overdone here to the present translator, who has preferred to avoid exaggeration, archaism or cliché (such as ‘wonderful’) and leave it to the reader to pick up the ineffable effect of the rest of the stanza.

  ‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’ (1825)

  At Mikhaylovskoye, Pushkin enjoyed the regular company of the family of a widow in her forties, Praskovya Osipova, a distant relation of his, and her large family consisting mostly of marriageable daughters living on the neighbouring estate, Trigorskoye. Pushkin and Osipova became close friends and probably no more. A manuscript copy of this poem in Osipova’s hand exists with the undated heading: ‘Lines written on P.’s receipt of flowers from P. O., late autumn.’

  The metre of the original is iambic tetrameter. First published in Pushkin’s journal The Contemporary, 1838.

  Winter Evening (1825)

  Winter is a favourite subject of Pushkin’s, inspiring some of his finest lyric verse. This poem was written during the last two years of his exile, spent alone on his parents’ modest estate, Mikhaylovskoye, with the old nanny of his childhood (the model for Tatyana’s nanny in chapter 3 of Eugene Onegin, written around this time – and see Introduction under ‘Life’ for more about Arina Rodionovna).

  A trochaic metre, kept in this translation, contributes to the poem’s folk idiom and atmosphere, as often in Pushkin; compare the ballad ‘The Drowned Man’ (1828) and Mary’s song from A Feast during the Plague (1830). The original is in tetrameters throughout.

  Prose Writer and Poet (1825)

  Written just before the high point of Pushkin’s lifetime reputation with publication of early chapters of Eugene Onegin and his first lyric collection.

  Mniszek’s ‘sonnet’ from Boris Godunov (1825)

  A quiet moment during a ball scene in Pushkin’s historical drama about the guilt-ridden Tsar Boris, supposed to have murdered the seven-year-old heir to the throne which he himself assumed. This speech by a supporter of the Pretender Dimitry takes the form of a sonnet, rounded off with an extra line at the end.

  2 The stamp of the mazurka: Invented in the sixteenth century, the mazurka became a popular dance throughout Poland in the seventeenth, but Pushkin knew the more rumbust
ious Russian ballroom version of his time. It is this that he describes in the words ‘mazurki grom’ (literally ‘the thunder of the mazurka’), both in this passage from the original version of Boris Godunov and later in Eugene Onegin, chapter 5, XLII.2.

  11 earth-encrusted. In premodern practice, bottles of fine wine were sometimes kept buried in the ground in order to ensure a consistent temperature.

  Confession (1826)

  Addressed to one of the unmarried daughters of Pushkin’s neighbour Praskovya Osipova (see note to ‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’, 1825). The form of this poem, varyingly rhymed and running on undivided into stanzas, makes it look like a spontaneous letter, an effect aimed at in this translation with sacrifice of rhyme.

  First published anonymously in 1837 after Pushkin’s death.

  29 Opochka: The nearest town to the estate of Mikhaylovskoye.

  The Prophet (1826)

  For this great poem Pushkin takes his setting, style and diction from Isaiah 6:1–10; also from the solemn, archaic diction of his school friend V. K. Kyukhel’beker’s lengthy poem ‘Prophecy’, which on a first reading three years earlier he had found ludicrously over the top; now, in late summer 1826, an elevated style chimed with his purpose in writing (Wachtel, p. 25).