The theme of the poem is commonly taken to be the poet’s calling; but four lines of political content thought to be by Pushkin and written at the same time as the poem have been taken by some to be possibly an alternative ending. They read: ‘Arise, arise, prophet of Russia, clothe yourself in a shameful garment, go with a halter about the neck, and appear before the abhorrent murderer’ (literal translation by Bayley, p. 146). Pushkin dated the poem not by the date of composition or completion but with the more significant date of 8 September 1826, the day of his reconciliatory meeting with the newly crowned Tsar Nicholas I.
One of Pushkin’s editors, Mikhail Pogodin, wrote to Pushkin’s friend Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky two months after his death: ‘[Pushkin] wrote “The Prophet” on his journey to Moscow in 1826 [for his interview with the tsar]. There were supposed to be four poems in all, but only the first (“I wandered in a lonely place”) was printed’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, pp. 689–90, note). The other three poems were destroyed. The above four-line political fragment seems unlikely to be Pushkin’s, but if it is, these lines surely have no place in this poem, although it might be conjectured that they once belonged to one of the poems destroyed.
Bayley (p. 145) compares ‘The Prophet’ to ‘The Upas Tree’ (1828): ‘Where [the latter] condenses its apprehension of power in a few heavy drops, “The Prophet” pours it out like a stream of molten lava. It is a poem of inner power, the inspiration of an Old Testament prophet compressed into a few lines of visionary fervour.’
2 My soul’s great thirst tormented me: A variant line in Pushkin’s hand, which would seem to relate to the first printing of the poem in the Moscow Herald (1828), reads: ‘My soul’s great shame tormented me’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 690, note). Pushkin’s feelings about not being with his friends in the Decembrist uprising of 1825 might be read in this alternative wording.
Moscow and St Petersburg, 1826–30
[To my Nanny] (1826)
This poem, untitled by Pushkin and not quite finished, was written shortly after Pushkin’s return from his last two years of exile spent at Mikhaylovskoye in close and warm companionship with his old nanny, Arina Rodionovna (very much a presence in ‘Winter Evening’, 1825, and an affectionate memory in the late poem about Mikhaylovskoye ‘… I see again’, 1835). The original sprinkles folkloric-sounding words into a basically formal style. The title given here is commonly used to identify the poem.
Winter Road (1826)
Written after a journey from Pskov to Moscow, rather more than four hundred miles, in December 1826; Pushkin had made a brief visit to Mikhaylovskoye to bring back some belongings left there after the end of his exile.
The original is in quatrains of alternately rhyming lines. Ellipses are put to particularly expressive use in this poem.
13 verst-posts: A verst was an old Russian measure of length, the equivalent to two-thirds of a mile.
14 Nina: The name may be fictional.
To I. I. Pushchin (1826)
Written on the eve of the first anniversary (13 December 1826) of the Decembrist uprising, addressing Pushkin’s closest school friend, Ivan Pushchin, a Decembrist, who had courageously paid an officially prohibited personal visit to him the previous winter during his last period of exile at Mikhaylovskoye. The two had got through three bottles of Veuve Clicquot during an extended but curtailed evening; Pushchin had left at three in the morning after less than twenty-four hours, and the two never met again. Pushchin received a death sentence that was commuted to twenty years’ hard labour in Siberia, where on the day after his arrival at the town of his exile he was given a copy of this poem, in handwriting unknown to him, by the wife of another Decembrist. Writing of his last meeting with Pushkin thirty-three years later in a valuable memoir was to bring him to tears.
The original is in iambic tetrameters, with each stanza rhyming abaab. First published in The Contemporary, 1841.
‘Deep in the Siberian mines’ (1827)
Addressed to the Decembrists sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia, many of whom Pushkin knew, two of them close school friends. As with the previous poem, it was not long before this one reached its audience. Pushkin sent it off as soon as he had written it, via the wife of one of them who was embarking on a visit to her husband. The first stanza holds an echo of words in a song written for Pushkin’s class’s graduation from the Lycée. Too fervently taking the poem as a call to armed rebellion, one of the recipients composed a spirited poem in reply, containing the line ‘From a spark a flame shall flare up’, which Lenin was to take as the motto for his peripatetic newspaper Spark (1900–1905).
The original is in tetrameters throughout. Widely read along with the Decembrist’s lines in response and other political poems by Pushkin, it first saw publication in London (Herzen, 1856).
Arion (1827)
Pushkin clothes his real subject, his own survival after the suppression of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, in a story originally from Herodotus. The famous Greek poet and singer Arion, returning home by ship after winning a competition, is set upon by the crew, eager to steal his riches. Offered the choice between being thrown into the sea alive or killing himself on board (carrying the right to a funeral on land), he persuades the crew to let him sing one last song, after which he leaps overboard and is borne to the shore by dolphins that have gathered to hear his singing.
The poem was written on the anniversary of the execution of five of the Decembrists, but Pushkin showed it to no one for three years and then published it anonymously in the Literary Gazette, edited by Anton Delvig with Pushkin (five issues weekly, 1830–31).
The Angel (1827)
The positive power of Pushkin’s angel firmly sets off this poem and its author from the Romanticism so powerfully exemplified in Mikhail Lermontov’s famous poem with the same title, written at the age of seventeen, four years after Pushkin’s was published. Lermontov’s angel carries a new soul to be born on earth, where it will always be homesick for its heavenly fatherland.
The original is in tetrameters throughout, with a single rhyme through the even-numbered lines that is reflected, as far as found possible, in this translation (though the triple repetition of ‘eyes’ is not Pushkin’s).
The Poet (1827)
One of a number of poems by Pushkin about poetry and the poet; six or seven of them, counting ‘The Prophet’ (1826), with which this poem shares some images, are included in the present selection: ‘Prose Writer and Poet’ (1825), ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828), ‘To the Poet’ (1830), ‘Rhyme’ (1830) and possibly ‘Autumn (A fragment)’ (1833).
1 Apollo: The ancient Greek sun god, patron of music, poetry, etc.
19 October 1827 (1827)
Written for the 1827 anniversary celebration of Pushkin’s Lycée class, which he attended after an absence of seven years. The third and fourth lines of the second stanza seem to refer to five identifiable classmates, two of them being the Decembrists (unnoticed by the censor) Ivan Pushchin (see note to ‘To I. I. Pushchin’, 1826) and the Russian-(Baltic) German poet Wilhelm Kyukhel’beker. By an extraordinary coincidence, Pushkin’s path had crossed with the latter’s five days before the celebration, at a coaching station as he was returning to St Petersburg after a visit to Mikhaylovskoye. Kyukhel’beker was with a gang of prisoners on the way to Siberia; the two had embraced before being separated by gendarmes (Binyon, p. 269).
This unrhymed translation focuses on content, comprehensively recasting the original metrical form of two four-line stanzas of tetrameters and separating the opening refrain of each into two parts spread over the first and additional fifth line of each translated stanza.
The Talisman (1827)
Remembering Yelizaveta Vorontsova (see note to ‘[On Vorontsov]’, 1824). In Odessa, Pushkin had fallen deeply in love with the vivacious Yelizaveta, who had given him, on his departure for Mikhaylovskoye, a ring with a Cabalistic inscription, which he was to wear during his fatal duel. Another well-known poem, ‘Guard me, my talisman
’ (not in the present selection), written two years earlier (1825) in iambic tetrameters, treats the same affair more personally. In this later poem, Pushkin stylises his personal experience by turning to the more formal, less personal trochaic metre to create an atmosphere of Eastern exoticism.
Recollection (1828)
Drafts of this poem, entitled ‘Insomnia’ and also ‘All-night Vigil’, include a continuation longer than the final version of the poem, spelling out feelings of slights endured, remorse towards others and regret over wasted years.
The original metre alternates hexameters and tetrameters.
Thou and You (1828)
The addressee of this poem wrote in her copy of it: ‘Anna Alekseyevna Olenina mistakenly said ty [informal ‘you’] when she was talking to Pushkin, and on the next Sunday he brought this poem’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 702, note). What most attracted Pushkin about Anna, in accordance with his best-known female predilection, were her famously small feet. He proposed to her but was turned down flat by her father, a high-placed government official.
The original metre is iambic tetrameter throughout, with the last four lines expressively set off from the first four by a change in rhyme scheme – from alternate rhyming to ring rhyme (rhyming abba), as both quatrains in this translation.
‘My beauty, sing to me no more’ (1828)
Like the previous poem, addressed to Anna Olenina, who was a singing student of Glinka, the leading Russian composer of the time. The ‘face’ and ‘dear but fated spectre’ (lines 8 and 9) are taken to refer to Mariya Rayevskaya, a daughter of General Nikolay Rayevsky, with whose family Pushkin had spent an idyllic few days on the Black Sea coast on his way to his first place of exile eight years earlier; she had since followed her Decembrist husband to Siberia. (See note to ‘The mists of night enfold the Georgian hills’, 1829, for more on Pushkin’s relations with the Rayevsky family on the Black Sea coast in 1820.)
The original is in consistent alternately rhyming iambic tetrameters with the same first and third line rhyme throughout except in the third stanza, bringing a sharp change of mood there, dramatically rendered in Balakirev’s setting for voice and piano (1863).
Another effect of rhyme in the original that has proved unobtainable in translation is feminine following masculine rhyme, an unusual way round for Pushkin, so that the unstressed final syllable concluding each couplet and each stanza and concluding the poem dies away like an echo.
Glinka and Rakhmaninov also composed settings of this poem.
Portrait (1828)
Agrafena Zakrevskaya was already notorious well before Pushkin wrote this poem about her. She was married to a dull but successful civil servant, in whom she took little interest. She fascinated Pushkin, who had a brief affair with her in 1828, the year in which this poem was published. The poet Yevgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844) was scarred by her, thus portraying her in his narrative poem The Ball of the same year: ‘Her heat is the heat of a drunken maenad, / The heat of fever – not the heat of love’ (translated in Binyon, p. 275).
The original is in iambic metre; the present trochaic translation might be taken as echoing Pushkin’s usual metrical tendency in dealing with the legendary and exotic (see note to ‘The Talisman’, 1827).
The Drowned Man (1828)
One of the most powerful of Pushkin’s winter poems. In the year following composition, 1829, this ballad appeared in two separate publications, subtitled ‘Folk Song’ and ‘Folk Tale’ respectively. It demonstrates Pushkin’s use of simple folk language in poetry (brought out by the trochaic metre) in emulation of Wordsworth and other English Romantics whose work he read largely in French translations. His style and diction here have a down-to-earth directness, avoiding the embellishments that he had come to see as a mark of general outmodedness in Russian poetry of the late 1820s. At the same time he employs his own sophisticated touches, such as not only repeating the final line of the last two stanzas but also keeping the same emphatic rhyme running through the last dozen lines (both rendered in this translation).
51 you wandering Cain: An image of violence and evil verbally etched on the popular mind from Genesis 4:12: ‘a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth’.
The Upas Tree (1828)
Pushkin’s title, ‘Anchar’, is the name of a highly poisonous tropical tree, and this would seem to be its first use in Russian (Wachtel, p. 107). References to the ‘poison tree’, the tree of death, run through English Romantic poetry, but Pushkin’s source seems to have been a French translation of a long poem, The Loves of the Plants (published in 1789), by the English botanist-poet Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) – grandfather of Charles Darwin – who gave lurid details of the supposed death-dealing properties of this tree’s poison. In Eastern lands, the tree was regarded as ‘a holy instrument of the great Prophet to punish the sins of mankind’ (Wachtel, p. 110). In this poem as in ‘The Prophet’ (1826), Pushkin employs exalted, biblical language for his deeply felt humanitarian theme, and Genesis 2:17 is relevant in this later poem: ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’
Pushkin exploits the menacing sound of the word anchar; the explosive ch in combination with harsh n and r dominate the poem, especially the first stanza:
V pustyne chakhloy i skupoy,
Na pochve, znoyem raskalyonnoy,
Anchar, kak groznyy chasovoy,
Stoit – odin vo vsey vselennoy.
It was four years before this poem was published in Anton Delvig’s almanac Northern Flowers (on this publication, see Introduction under ‘Life’).
‘Raven flies to raven’ (1828)
A free translation of a French prose translation (1826) of the Scottish ballad ‘The Twa Corbies’. Pushkin simplifies and prunes his French original, leaving the raw savagery, such as ‘Je lui arracherai avec mon bec ses beaux yeux bleus’ (‘I’ll pike out his bonny blue een’), unstated. He uses the Russian folk-style metre of trochaic tetrameter.
The Poet and the Crowd (1828)
At the time when this poem was written Pushkin was losing his readership (see Introduction under ‘Life’) and wrote several poems upholding his position as a poet vis-à-vis his public, sometimes, as here, distinctly aggressively (see also ‘To the Poet’, 1830). A ready assumption that Pushkin’s sympathy lies firmly with the poet is put in its place by one present-day critic, who notes the moral high ground of the crowd in the poem, well aware of its limitations as it seeks moral instruction from the poet, who is consumed by callous egotism (Kahn, pp. 210–13). Although the poet is not to be equated with Pushkin, something like a telling self-image may be read here. A contemporary reviewer of Pushkin’s third collection of lyric poems (1832) interpreted Pushkin’s falling sales as the public’s ‘revenge over disappointment that the formerly “thoughtful and awesome, strong and fiery speaker of ideas and dreams” has gone cold’ (quoted in Kahn, p. 213).
Epigraph: Latin: ‘Away, profane ones.’ From Virgil’s Aeneid (6.258): words spoken by the Cumaean Sibyl before she begins her prophecy.
6 throng: Pushkin’s first published title was ‘The Mob’, the Russian word for which, chern’, is used here (translated ‘throng’) and as the designation for the speakers of the fourth stanza; it sounds very like the word cherv’ (‘worm(s)’, line 18).
20 Apollo Belvedere: A Roman statue depicting the Greek god Apollo, an image of aesthetic perfection for the Western world. It has long stood on display in the courtyard of the Belvedere in the Vatican.
A Flower (1828)
The original is in consistent tetrameters.
‘City of splendour, city of poor’ (1828)
Addressed to Anna Olenina (see notes to ‘Thou and You’, 1828, and ‘I loved you’, 1829), whom Pushkin had seen in St Petersburg on the eve of a journey to Mikhaylovskoye in autumn 1828. In her diary entry on the meeting, Olenina noted: ‘When he left, Pushkin told me he had to go off to his estate –
if he could pluck up the courage, he added with feeling’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 704, note). See ‘Winter Road’ (1826) on the ‘dismal’ nature of this journey.
Signs (1829)
On which side of you the new moon shone was significant in Russian folklore, as set out in this poem in reiterative folkloric style. The addressee, if any actual person, is unknown. The prosodic shape of this translation broadly echoes that of the original.
‘Once there lived a humble knight’ (1829)
In this ballad-like poem Pushkin uses the stock figure of the crusading knight for an almost dramatic exploration of mystic devotion, rather in the direction of the four dramatic psychological studies he wrote the following year and called ‘Little Tragedies’ (Mozart and Salieri, etc.). He included a shortened version of the poem as a song in the unfinished drama ‘Scenes from the Days of Chivalry’ that he worked on in 1835. The completed version, published in Pushkin’s journal The Contemporary in 1837 not long after his death, plays a significant role in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot (1868–9).
11 the Virgin Mary: Pushkin’s term is a literal translation, strikingly not the standard Russian Bogomater’ (Mother of God).
31 Ave, Mater Dei: Latin: ‘Hail, Mother of God’.
Selected Poetry (Penguin) Page 25