But I tremble like a vole,
Or like a wretched mole,
I love the warmth of coal
But I wander through the cold,
Only verse keeps me whole.
(CP, 248)
But if Khantonovo sometimes seemed like a desert, it could also bloom, as when the poet created for himself a poetic summerhouse in the garden, writing to Gnedich in May 1817: “For the first time in my life I have arranged a summerhouse to my taste in the garden. It cheers me up so much that I can’t leave my writing desk” (SPP, 325). And in a poem of the same time, “The Muses’ Arbor,” he writes of the acacia and the bird-cherry, the flowers and the bees that surrounded him here, even among the dark forests of the North.
Batyushkov was ambivalent about his country home, then—as he was to be ambivalent about the cities where he lived, his native Vologda, the capital St. Petersburg where he studied and worked, Moscow where he had good friends, Paris into which he marched with the Allied armies, Naples where he served as a diplomat. He lived a nomadic life, not really belonging anywhere, but the North was where he began and ended, and in poem after poem he speaks warmly and reverently of his “Lares and Penates,” the household gods.
Batyushkov was born into an old gentry family. There are records of his ancestors from the sixteenth century. One of them, Ivan Mikhailovich, is mentioned as an officer in Ivan the Terrible’s campaign against Kazan. By the seventeenth century, the family had acquired a good deal of property in the Vologda region, but this wealth ebbed away so that Batyushkov, although a serf-owning landowner, was always short of money. His paternal grandfather Lev Andreevich was a notable public figure and managed his estate efficiently; he had a great influence on young Konstantin, who spent several years of his childhood in the old-world country house at Danilovskoe. By all accounts, Lev Andreevich was at this time a vigorous, strong-minded old man.
The father, Nikolay L’vovich, cuts a somewhat less impressive figure, though he was a well-read man with a fine library, and was keen for his son to receive the best possible education. In his youth he was almost caught up in the supposedly seditious doings of his mentally disturbed uncle Ilya (who incurred the wrath of Catherine the Great). Nikolay himself, after a brief period of disgrace, served for a time in the army; by the time of his son’s birth he was an officer of the law (prokuror) in Vologda. Some time in the 1780s he had married Aleksandra Grigor’evna Berdyaeva, who bore him five children—Konstantin’s three older sisters (Anna, Elizaveta, and Aleksandra), Konstantin, and his younger sister Varvara. Aleksandra never married and devoted herself to her brother’s welfare when he fell ill. Of the poet’s mother we know very little, except that she died in 1795, when he was only seven. She is largely absent from his writings, and we can only guess at the effect of her early loss. Her death was attributed to the “derangement of her mental faculties”—an ominous anticipation of what would befall her son. Her quite considerable estate (including Khantonovo) passed to Konstantin and his sisters when they came of age, but this was not enough to protect him from a recurrent shortage of funds.
We have little direct evidence of Batyushkov’s early years, and he himself wrote very little about them. In spite of the positive influence of his Danilovskoe grandfather, he probably had a rather disturbed childhood. Unlike most children of the gentry, he seems not to have had any home-based tutors (the “Monsieur” and “Madame” that Pushkin writes of in Eugene Onegin). But in 1797, after his mother’s death, he was sent to a boarding school in St. Petersburg, a pension run by a French teacher. Batyushkov was thus exposed early on to the hegemonic French culture, and it is no surprise that he translated and imitated several French poets. More interesting for his later life and writings is the fact that after three or four years he moved to a school run by an Italian. Here he began to acquire an unusual fluency in Italian; in later years, even before his diplomatic service in Italy between 1818 and 1821, Italian literature was to be particularly important to him.
At various times he translated or imitated Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and the satirist Giovanni Battista Casti. As a young man, he planned to make a complete translation of Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberata); only fragments were completed, but he wrote a long poem on the death of Tasso—with whose tragic fate he identified. And his prose works include essays on Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. The beginning of the essay on Ariosto and Tasso explains something of their charms, especially for a reader in a northern country. He gives pride of place to the sonorous beauty of the language, a feature that he attempted to imitate in Russian poetry:
There is a special charm attached to learning the Italian language. This supple, sonorous, delightful language, nurtured beneath the fortunate skies of Rome, Naples and Sicily, amid political upheavals and then at the brilliant Medici court, a language given shape by great writers, by the best poets, by learned men and profound statesmen—this language has become capable of expressing all sights and all forms. It possesses a character different from other modern idioms and vernacular languages, all of which show signs of harshness, confused and savage sounds, slowness of speech and something characteristic of the North.
(Essays, 138)
Batyushkov was thus unusually well endowed with foreign languages for a young man of his generation, and was correspondingly well read in literature, philosophy, and history. In addition to French and Italian, he knew some German (he translated scenes of Schiller’s The Bride of Messina [Die Braut von Messina]) and possibly a little English—and as we have seen he was open to the winds blowing from the North, whether it be Byron, Ossian, or the scalds of old Scandinavia. But as has so often been the case, Italy, the Mediterranean, and the ancient world of Greece and Rome were particularly appealing to a man from Northern Europe. The lost world of the classics haunted him, as it haunted such different figures as Goethe, Hölderlin, Shelley, and Batyushkov’s younger compatriot Evgeny Baratynsky. He did not know the ancient languages as well as the modern ones. When he translated poems from the Greek Anthology, he worked from French versions provided by a Russian friend. As for Latin, although he used epigraphs from the Roman poets and translated enough of Tibullus to be called “the Russian Tibullus,” he still needed to eke out his own Latin by using French translations. But whatever his linguistic competence, the poets of Greece and Rome, from Anacreon and Sappho to Horace and Propertius, were close to his heart, as was the culture they spoke for. One of Batyushkov’s most affecting poems is a beautifully composed short piece written in 1819 after visiting the ruins of a famous Roman resort, the baths of Baiae in the Bay of Naples.
Such mastery came later in Batyushkov’s life. Already at school, though, he was writing poetry. Almost all of it has vanished, but it is interesting to look at the first of his poems to have survived, “Dreaming.” Written in 1802–1803, when the poet was fifteen, it was sufficiently important in his eyes to be rewritten several times; the original 89 lines were expanded to 211 by the time it was published in the 1817 edition of his works. Pushkin—who admired Batyushkov greatly—did not think much of it, even in its revised form, annotating it with remarks such as “childish verse,” “crude,” and “the weakest of all his poems.”3 In its original form it is certainly derivative, owing a lot to Batyushkov’s uncle, the poet Mikhail Muravyov, but also to Western Romanticism and notably to the Poems of Ossian. At the same time, it announces a constant theme, the dissatisfaction with reality and the need for “dreaming,” by which we should understand imagination. These are the first ten lines:
O sweetest dreaming, daughter of quiet night,
Come down in misty clouds from heaven to me,
Or in the dear face of my fearful love,
Whose burning eyes are glittering with tears!
You who like a ray of light
Pierce the tender poet’s night,
You burn like dawn fire and exalt his verses,
Your favorite, a favorite of the muses,
And hi
s grief to him is sweet,
For in his grief he dreams.
(CP, 55)
From early on, then, young Konstantin was hooked on poetry. At the age of sixteen or seventeen, he wrote an “Epistle to My Poems,” which ends:
Long, long ago it became clear to me
That I’d have lived my life out quietly
If wretched Phoebus hadn’t made me crazy;
I would disdain the thrills of being famous,
And happy as a pasha in Kashmir
I’d never dream of muses, poems or lyre.
But no…my poems, I can’t live without you;
Your rhymes and meters are my second nature!
It’s my misfortune, my infirmity—
Poems, like women, are a necessity;
If they don’t love us, we should really scorn them,
But they are beautiful, and we adore them.
(CP, 58–59)
The young author of these lines had left school a couple of years earlier. His formal schooling was short, but the gaps in his education were to be amply filled by his time in St. Petersburg society, where his good fortune allowed him to spend the years from 1802 to 1806 under the care, and in the house, of his kinsman Mikhail Muravyov.
Muravyov, born in 1757, belonged to the same generation as Batyushkov’s father and had served as tutor to the future tsar, Alexander I; he then became a senator and an important figure in the ministry of education, where he found a not too demanding job for his young nephew, who was never to feel at home in the tedium of government service. Muravyov was a man of great learning, and it was to him that the young poet owed his knowledge and love of the Latin and Greek classics. More generally, he seems to have been an influential father figure, passing on to Batyushkov some of his values, his moral sense, his taste for domestic and family life, his cult of friendship, his love of studious retirement (the Lares and Penates that figure so much in the younger man’s poems). Muravyov was also a significant poet, a member of the “sentimentalist” school grouped around Karamzin.4 In his verse, the expression and exploration of private feelings tends to replace the more public concerns of the eighteenth-century ode. At the same time, the formal language and structure of the ode give way to the more conversational form of the epistle, the verse letter to friends, and also to various forms of light verse—on the model of French poésies légères. In all these matters, Batyushkov followed closely in the footsteps of his uncle and later wrote an essay in homage to him.
If St. Petersburg life meant earnest conversations with the uncle, it also meant the “salon” of the aunt—one of the first Russian salons. Here the young man encountered the charms of women—married women and young girls—and here he learned to love and flirt and play. As he later put it in a letter, “…I loved, crowned with lily of the valley, in a pink tunic with a staff and green ribbons—green, the color of hope—innocent at heart, with eyes full of feeling, and singing little ditties: ‘Who could with such passion love’ or ‘I am content, yet malcontent’ or ‘Nowhere I can find a place’ ” (WP, 39). All very innocent then, or so it seems, it allowed Batyushkov to make a name for himself as a poet of love and pleasure, an Epicurean poet. This is the figure he cuts in one of his earliest poems, originally entitled “Advice to Friends” in 1805 and later extensively rewritten to be called “The Joyful Hour.” Here is the first version, in which the poetry of love, wine, and roses slides naturally into the theme of death—as in Poussin’s painting, Et in Arcadia ego, where classical shepherds cluster around a tomb. With his “oaten flute,” or reed pipe, Batyushkov plays the shepherd of pastoral poetry:
ADVICE TO FRIENDS
Faut-il être tant volage,
Ai-je dit au doux plaisir…
(Henriette de Murat)5
Give me a simple oaten flute,
My friends, and all sit down around me,
Where coolness lingers through the heat
In the thick shadows of the elm tree;
Come close, sit down and lend an ear
To the wise guidance of my muses:
In the short days of the young year
If happiness is what you’re seeking,
Dear friends, abandon fame, that specter,
Play pleasure’s games while you’re still young,
And as you dance through life’s path, scatter
Roses; and flourish, lovely youth!
Watered by a pure spring, flourish,
If only for a few short days,
Like a rose, shaded by myrtle,
Among the laughing fields of May!
Let us taste the joys of living,
Find flowers growing on the thorns!
Time flies; there isn’t long for playing,
Not long for glorying in life’s charms.
Not long—but time to forget sadness,
To drown in a sweet dream of gladness:
Dreams are the source of happiness!
Ah! must we always mope and sigh
Without a smile for lovely May?
Better far to take our ease
And with a beautiful young girl
Go dancing beneath the shady trees,
Then, winding an arm around her waist
And breathing love, nothing but love,
Quietly, quietly, we shall sigh
And press a heart against a heart.
What bliss! And here is cheerful Bacchus
Pouring his thick, heady wine,
Here in a fine white dress Erata
Sings in our ears a tender tune.
You hasty hours, stay still, give us
Just one more glimpse of happiness!
But no, the happy days race by,
Race by, or like an arrow fly;
No lingering, no heart’s delight
Can halt the days’ impetuous flight,
And time’s strong hand will still destroy
Our calm, our comfort, and our joy!
You cheerful, greenly gleaming meadows,
Clear-watered streams, beloved gardens!
You willows, oaks and aspen glades,
Shall I no more beneath your boughs
Enjoy the freshness of the shade?
Shall I too in a quiet field soon
Lie down to sleep beneath a stone,
My lyre and simple oaten flute
Lying above me on the tomb?
Grass will grow thickly over them,
Grow thickly, and no friendly tears
Will ever water my cold dust!
And should I feel despair at this?
When I die, everything is dead!
But in their somber hands the fates
Keep spinning, spinning my life’s thread…
Corinna and my friends are here—
Why should I now give way to grief?
If our life runs quickly from us,
If joy itself is not eternal,
Better to live by play and pleasure,
Mingling merriment with wisdom,
Than to pursue fame’s empty lure
And yawn with boredom and dull care.
(CP, 74–76)
In the first few years of his poetic career, Batyushkov was to return to these themes again and again. It was as an Epicurean poet that he influenced younger contemporaries.
The young poet flourished in the Muravyov household and met a number of important people there, including the father figure among poets, Gavrila Derzhavin. Even more significant as a meeting place for writers was the circle that gathered in the open house of Muravyov’s distant relative Aleksey Nikolaevich Olenin (1763–1843). A little younger than Muravyov, Olenin was still old enough to be Batyushkov’s father; he was for Konstantin both a protector and a friend. He was not himself a poet, but a rich nobleman, a powerful public figure interested in all the arts. His salon was active in promoting the fusion of neoclassicism and sentimentalism that lies behind much of Batyushkov’s writing. Olenin’s principal interests were the plastic arts and archaeology, and i
t was in this area that he influenced theatrical practice, advising the star playwright of the period, Vladislav Ozerov, on the designs for his historical plays such as Oedipus at Athens and Fingal. The second of these tragedies was based on the poems of Ossian, whom we have already come across among Batyushkov’s enthusiasms.6
Batyushkov admired Ozerov’s work and sympathized with him. Indeed, he went so far as to write a fable, “The Shepherd and the Nightingale” (much appreciated by the playwright), in an attempt to console and encourage Ozerov after critics of the opposing camp (conservative defenders of traditional classicism) had attacked and satirized his patriotic tragedy Dmitry Donskoy. Later he was to compare Ozerov with his hero Torquato Tasso, seeing both of them as driven to despair and madness by hostile criticism.
Batyushkov rubbed shoulders with many other significant writers in Olenin’s circle. There was Derzhavin, of course, but also the fable writer Ivan Krylov, for whom Batyushkov expressed unwavering admiration, the great historian Nikolay Karamzin, and established poetic luminaries such as Vasily Kapnist and Ippolit Bogdanovich. But his great friend was Nikolay Gnedich, three years his senior, a young poet from what is now Ukraine. He had grown up in a poor family, but unlike Batyushkov, he studied at Moscow University before moving to St. Petersburg, where he became Batyushkov’s colleague in the ministry of education. The two friends were very different in appearance and character: Batyushkov small, mobile, and impressionable; Gnedich tall, one-eyed (as a result of a childhood bout of smallpox), serious, and self-reliant. They complemented one another, with Gnedich taking on the role of tutor and protector to his younger friend and eventually seeing to the publication of his works. Some time around 1806, they agreed each to translate a major epic poem, the Iliad for Gnedich, Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberata) for Batyushkov. Gnedich carried his task through to the end, creating the standard Russian Homer, whereas Batyushkov managed to complete only a small fragment of Tasso’s poem.
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Page 3