Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

by Konstantin Batyushkov

  Vyazemsky, whom we have already met giving what seemed to Batyushkov excessive praise to the “Vision,” was himself to become (in Joseph Brodsky’s words) “a superb yet underestimated poet,”2 a central figure in the “Pushkin Pléiade.” As such he was the dedicatee of Evgeny Baratynsky’s great collection Half-light, in which he is described as the “star of our scattered constellation.”3 He lived to the age of eighty-six; in his later years, he was close to court circles, holding influential positions in the civil service, including the censor’s office, and his views became more conservative—indeed he seemed to the new radical intelligentsia a reactionary figure from another age. In 1810, however, he was barely eighteen, five years Batyushkov’s junior, the cosmopolitan descendant of a rich and ancient noble family. He was a young man-about-town and a free spirit, witty and combative, publishing rebellious verse in the underground press, a great enthusiast for contemporary French writing—though he was soon to become actively involved in the struggle against Napoleon, fighting at Borodino. Some years later, Batyushkov sent to Vyazemsky a little poem about a new portrait of a friend whom he knew as a carefree lover of pleasure:

  Who is this with the knotted brows,

  Gloomy and tousled like Theodulus?

  Amazing! it is our own Catullus,

  Our Vyazemsky, the bard of love and mirth.

  (Essays, 373)

  Vyazemsky and Batyushkov sympathized immediately. With Vasily Zhukovsky, who was Batyushkov’s senior by four years, there seems to have been a brief testing period, but soon the three poets formed a close-knit group of friends and allies. In 1812, having witnessed the battle of Borodino, Zhukovsky was to shoot to fame with his patriotic hymn “A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors,” but even in 1810 he had a literary reputation in Moscow. He was the editor of the Karamzinian European Herald (Vestnik Evropy), where some of Batyushkov’s early work was published. Whereas Batyushkov was much influenced by French and Italian poetry, Zhukovsky was a voice of northern Romanticism, a devotee of English and German poetry. As early as 1802 he had published what was to become a vastly influential translation of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”—it was above all as a translator that he influenced Russian poetry. Around the time when Batyushkov got to know him, he became famous for his ballads, mainly derived from German sources; Batyushkov addressed him as a “hermit” in an epistle sent in a letter of June 1812, but later changed this to “balladeer.”

  In the summer of 1810, the three poets went off to stay at Vyazemsky’s country residence at Ostafievo, not far outside Moscow. This splendid neoclassical palace later received many writers, including Pushkin; here, too, Karamzin spent many years writing his History of the Russian State. Batyushkov plunged with pleasure into this patrician luxury, but then, after three weeks, he suddenly left for Khantonovo. From here he wrote apologetically to his friends—thus to Zhukovsky:

  I left you en impromptu, went off like Aeneas, like Theseus, like Ulysses from the wh——s (because my presence was needed here in the country, because I got to feel gloomy, very gloomy in Moscow, because I was scared of being bewitched by you, my funny friends)

  (SP, 300–301)

  It was a strange move, perhaps partly financial in origin, but corresponding to Batyushkov’s inability to settle in one place. And if he had been “gloomy” in Moscow, he was soon bored in the country—or rather, he oscillated between enjoyment and boredom. What is more, he was plagued by illness; his health, never very robust, had been affected by his wound at Heilsberg and the hardships of the Finnish campaign. He wrote to Zhukovsky in the letter cited above: “I am so ill, so weak now, that I can neither write nor think,” and the same note would recur constantly in the following years. At the same time, he tried hard to cure himself, and wrote repeatedly of his desire to find some useful and honorable service in the capital. Gnedich was keen to assist him and eventually helped him to a post in the public library of St. Petersburg. But for the moment, Batyushkov appeared to be the slave of illness and idleness. When Gnedich reproached him with this, he replied with a mocking description of his full country days: ten or twelve hours in bed sleeping and dreaming, one hour smoking, one hour getting dressed, three hours of dolce far niente, one hour for dinner, one hour digesting, quarter of an hour watching the sun set, three quarters of an hour for “natural needs,” one hour remembering friends (including half an hour for Gnedich), one hour with his dogs, half an hour reading Tasso, half an hour repenting that he has translated him, three hours yawning and waiting for nightfall. Then, more seriously, he wrote: “I am very bored here, I want to enter the service, I need to change my way of life—but what comes of it? Like a certain oriental sage, I am waiting for some goddess to fly in from some star…” (WP 113–14). In other words, he settled for dreams.

  The same pattern of existence continued into 1811. Most of the first half of the year was spent in Moscow, enjoying the city’s many distractions and entertainments as well as the rich literary life. Gnedich did not approve, thinking that the frivolities of the city were luring Batyushkov away from his true vocation. And then again, in midsummer, money ran out and the poet settled in Khantonovo, again prey to skuka and melancholy. He wrote to Gnedich in August:

  Me—a dreamer? On the contrary! I am bored and like you I very often say: People are all swine, I am a person, therefore…finish the sentence yourself. Where is happiness? Where is pleasure? Where is peace? Where is that pure heartfelt voluptuousness in which my heart loved to plunge itself? It has all flown away, vanished with the songs of Chaulieu, the voluptuous dreams of Tibullus and the charming Gresset, the airy nymphs of Anacreon.

  (SP, 310)

  But this was perhaps more a passing mood than a permanent state. Batyushkov did not lose touch with the poets who had consoled him; indeed, he spent much of his time in Khantonovo plunged in books. In 1810, in a notebook given to him by Zhukovsky, he jotted down thoughts, many of them reading notes, referring to the Roman poets and historians, Enlightenment French culture, Tasso, the Scandinavian Edda, and much else. There are several pages on Horace, whose epistolary style is echoed in his own verse, and in whom he probably saw a kindred spirit, “afflicted with the incurable disease of those on whom fortune heaps gifts early on—satiety.” He quotes the Roman poet as saying: “When I am at Tivoli I want to be in Rome; when in Rome, I want to be at Tivoli,” and comments: “That’s what the happiest of all poets wrote, a man whom fortune cherished as her special favorite” (SP, 246–48). He did not see himself as fortune’s favorite, it is true, but he must have recognized in himself the desire for constant change. Among modern writers, Batyushkov is especially attached to Montaigne:

  That’s a book I shall keep reading all my life!…You could call it a very learned book, a very entertaining book, a very profound book; it is never tiring, always new, in a word it is the history and the romance of the human heart. Montaigne can be compared with Homer.

  (SP, 244)

  The fruits of his reading figure in letters to Gnedich, Vyazemsky, and Zhukovsky, where he comments critically or enthusiastically on what is appearing in the capitals, as well as on what Goethe would soon be calling “world literature.” These letters to friends are real works of art, frequently prefiguring the new kind of poetry that Batyushkov was writing. They are written from the heart, with frequent complaints about illness, boredom, poverty, and other woes, as we have seen. But they are also performances, full of zest, veering from familiarity to mock pomposity—the sort of letter that needs to be read aloud.

  Take for instance a marathon letter written to Gnedich between November 27 and December 5, 1811. It begins with a long and impassioned reply to his friend’s career advice, a defense of his freedom, and expression of his horror at the boredom of government service, before moving on to flippant inquiries about St. Petersburg literary life and detailed advice about finer points of prosody. Then comes a fresh start, no doubt provoked by rereading Gnedich’s letter:

  All writers, from
Aristotle to Kachenovsky,4 have constantly repeated: “Be precise in your choice of words—precise, precise, precise! Do not write mouse when you mean house, sword when you mean word, etc.” But you, dear Nikolay, write unblushingly that I shall soon be thirty. You’re wrong, wrong, wrong by six years, since there’s no language where twenty-four equals thirty. What price precision? I for my part will not give up these six years, and like Alexander the Great I shall do many marvels in the great field…of our literature. In these six years I shall read all of Ariosto and translate a few pages of him, and in conclusion, reaching the age of thirty, I shall say with my poet:

  Se a perder s’a libertá, non stimo

  Il piu ricco capel, ch’in Roma sia.

  (If it means losing my freedom, I place no value on the richest position in Rome.)

  Since at thirty I shall be the same as I am now, an idler, a joker, an oddball, a carefree child, a scribbler but not a reader of verse; I shall be the same Batyushkov who loves his friends, falls in love out of boredom, plays cards having nothing better to do, fools around like a devil, thinks deeply like a little Dane, argues with everyone, but fights with no one, hates Slavs and Geoffroy the martyr, Tibullizes in his spare time and learns ancient geography so as not to forget that Rome is on the Tiber, which flows from north to south—and at thirty he’ll be just the same, with just one difference, that now he calls you a friend of ten years’ standing, and then there’ll be five more, but to love you more, to feel greater friendship and affection for you is surely impossible. Farewell!

  Then, after a break, he continues on December 5:

  That’s a long letter, you’ll be saying! Don’t be amazed! Tomorrow is your name day and I must congratulate you—which means adding a whole extra page. So, I congratulate you, dear friend, be happy, cheerful, wise, love me, poetry, and wine—wine, our delight, as your predecessor Kostrov5 has it. But so that you always love poetry, wine, and me, your friend:

  The gray-beard who is always flying,

  Always coming, always going,

  Here and there, and everywhere,

  Dragging years and centuries,

  Eating mountains, draining seas,

  Giving life to the old world,

  That old gray-beard, nature’s pall,

  Both desired and feared by all,

  Winged and flighty—old man Time,

  May he always in their prime

  Keep the friendly ties you value,

  And in spite of the world’s folly

  Bring to friendship’s holy shore

  Love and happiness galore!

  Such is my wish—the same in prose or in verse. I permit you to write just as many verses for my name day and to drink my health with a bottle of…water, just as I shall do tomorrow, ceremoniously, with two noble witnesses, two friends of mine, two…curly-haired dogs.

  Yesterday I received the volume of poetry edited by Zhukovsky. What a mess they have made of my poem “Remembering!” Lines missed out and rhymes left high and dry! Generally, I am happy with this edition, happy with your “Peruvian,” happy with Voeikov’s “Epistle on Nobility,” happy with [Vasily] Pushkin, happy with Kantemir and Petrov, but even so, there’s an ocean of rubbish! Guess what is beginning to annoy me? It’s the Russian language and our authors, who treat it so mercilessly. And the language in itself is not too good, crude, with a whiff of the Tartar. Look at the letters and combinations of letters—Y, SHCH, SH, SHII, SHCHII, PRI, TRY! What barbarians! And the writers? But good luck to them! Forgive me for being cross with the Russian people and their language. I have just been reading Ariosto, breathing the pure air of Florence, reveling in the musical sonorities of the Italian language and conversing with the shades of Dante, Tasso and the mellifluous Petrarch, whose every word is a joy! Farewell!

  (SP, 322–24)

  In spite of country tedium and ill health, this is Batyushkov in top form, full of ideas and witticisms, enthusiasms and passions. It is interesting to see him deploring the harsh sounds of Russian, the very letters that would a century later be celebrated by Kruchonykh and the Futurists as a refuge from overcivilized euphony.6

  Both in Moscow and in the country, he continued to write poems. Several of these sprang from his reading, being either free translations or adaptations of his favorite poets. Indeed, it is striking how many of his poems are derived from foreign models. Often this is openly stated; in his poetic collection of 1817, three poems are described as “from Parny” or “imitation of Parny,” three are attributed to Tibullus, and there are two “imitations” of the Italian poet Casti. In addition to this, however, there are at least ten other free translations (from Parny, Millevoye, Bion, Schiller)—to which one can add a number of free translations and imitations not included in the 1817 volume, notably thirteen poems from the Greek anthology.

  If Batyushkov looked to foreign models, it was to enrich and give direction to a still young poetic culture (the first great poet in modern Russian, Lomonosov, preceded him by only two generations). Tibullus, Petrarch, Tasso, and Parny could offer Russian poets examples of lyrical feeling, elegant wit, and sonorous beauty; at the same time, through translation, Batyushkov could create his own individual voice, something different from existing Russian poetry. In some cases, notably “My Penates,” more than one model provides the starting point. Sometimes, indeed, the impetus may come from a source that is not a poem at all. Take, for instance, this little piece inspired by a painting, Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego:

  INSCRIPTION FOR A SHEPHERDESS’S TOMBSTONE

  Dear friends, dear sisters, carelessly you play,

  Frolicking, dancing, singing all the day.

  I too like you once lived in Arcady

  And in my tender years in groves and fields

  I tasted joy’s too-fleeting gleam.

  Love promised happiness in a golden dream;

  But in that happy place what lay concealed?

  A tomb!

  (Essays, 307)

  In all cases, Batyushkov is what we can call a strong translator, reworking and using the original to make his own poem. In February 1810, sending Gnedich “The Apparition,” a free translation of Parny’s “Le Revenant,” he comments: “I am sending you a little piece that I have taken, or rather conquered, from Parny. The idea is an original one. I don’t think I’ve spoiled it in my translation…” (SP, 294–95). In French the poem begins with a sprightly vision of the poet’s imminent death:

  Ma santé fuit; cette infidèle

  Ne promet pas de revenir,

  Et la nature qui chancelle

  A déjà su me prévenir

  De ne pas trop compter sur elle.

  Au second acte brusquement

  Finira donc la comédie:

  Vite je passe au dénouement;

  La toile tombe, et l’on m’oublie.7

  Batyushkov keeps close to Parny’s form—the octosyllables become trochaic tetrameters, alternating lines of seven syllables with a masculine ending and lines of eight syllables with a feminine ending. This was a form he often used in his own poems—and which probably derives from French practice. The central ideas of the original are rendered too, but completely rephrased; Batyushkov plays down the theatrical metaphor of the last four lines, while building Parny’s simple reference to “nature” into a darker classical scene starring Fate and Zeus. A quite close translation of his translation (though with rather looser rhyming) reads:

  Look at me! I am just turning

  Twenty, and my cheeks are pale;

  Life’s flower withers with the morning,

  Fate has counted out my days,

  Giving not a moment’s grace.

  Why delay? My groans and tears

  Will not touch almighty Zeus,

  And dark death, the final curtain,

  Will fall, and I will be forgotten.

  (Essays, 217)

  A more developed translation is his version of Parny’s “Persian Idyll” entitled “Le Torrent,” the poem to which Mandelstam
is referring when he writes of Zafna. The original is written in a poetic prose reminiscent of Ossian, but Batyushkov makes of this five well-formed stanzas. Even so, it is a relatively close translation, but again he feels free to omit, add, and embroider. The result in Russian reads like an original poem, the central theme being one that recurs throughout his work, the contrast of sensual happiness with the destructive river of time:

  THE TORRENT

  The storm is hushed, the sun makes its appearance

  Far in the west, in the clear azure sky;

  After the raging storm, a muddy torrent

  Goes racing through the meadows noisily.

  Zafna! come closer; for such a pure maiden

  Under the palm trees’ shade a rose bush grows,

  While from the rocks and wilderness the torrent

  Roars through the thickets, foaming as it goes.

  You light these thickets with your presence, Zafna!

  How sweet to be with you in this wilderness!

  You sing to me of love in a soft whisper—

  On quiet wings the wind bears off your voice.

  Your voice, my Zafna, like the breath of morning

  So full of sweetness, floats over flowers to me:

  Torrent, be quieter, break off the seething

  Roar of your waters foaming through the field.

  Your voice, my Zafna, wakes an answering echo