Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

by Konstantin Batyushkov

  In the meantime, Russia was plunged in war. On June 12, Napoleon took the fateful step of advancing into Russian territory, and a month later the Russian army was driven back from Smolensk to Moscow. Vyazemsky, like many others, immediately went off to fight and took part in the battle of Borodino. But the frustrated Batyushkov was unable to join the army, being kept in bed for a month by a dangerous fever. It was from his sickroom that he wrote one more epistle to Zhukovsky, in the style and meter of “My Penates”—an apology for not visiting Moscow or the older poet’s estate at Belyovo, a last Epicurean vision of happy country life, and a rueful self-portrait of the poet as sick man, finishing with unrepentant mockery of the hapless Khvostov (here called Svistov)—who may well have had the pleasure of reading it a couple of years later:

  TO ZHUKOVSKY

  Sorry, old balladeer,

  Quiet hermit of Belyovo,

  Phoebus be with you there,

  He who was our protector!

  In your humble country place

  Deep in the fields, you’re happy.

  Like the young nightingale

  In the dark wood’s cool shadow,

  Who gives his days to love,

  From his nest never straying,

  And all invisible sings,

  Invisibly enthralling

  The merry shepherd boys

  And all the country people—

  So you, with your sweet voice,

  Among the humble pleasures

  Of your enchanted home,

  Sing your entrancing hymns.

  O sing, good fortune’s darling,

  While Venus from above

  Pours days of merrymaking

  And the delights of love,

  While golden luxury

  And generosity

  From their abundant treasure,

  Serve you the choicest wines

  And tumblers of fine porter

  And juicy oranges

  And truffle-scented pies—

  All the old horn of plenty

  That never will run dry—

  To swell your succulent feast.

  But look at me—the contrast!

  Just see how the relentless

  Small-town Hippocrates

  In league with the pale fates

  And hand in glove with the priests,

  Brother of death and plague,

  Boasting his skill in Latin

  And his long years of practice,

  Treats me with wormwood potions

  And soups made out of bone,

  And with these clever notions

  He’ll see me dead and gone

  And send me to write epistles

  On the banks of the Cocytus.

  Everything has betrayed me

  That filled my heart with pleasure,

  All vanished like a dream:

  The joys of love, Apollo

  And health’s ethereal gleam!

  Now I am like a shadow

  That fills all hearts with fear,

  Dry, pale as a dead body,

  With feeble, shaking knees,

  My back a bow bent double,

  My eyes all dim and shrunken,

  And all my face is furrowed

  With lines of misery.

  My strength has turned to jelly,

  My valor is brought low.

  Alas! old friend, even Lila

  Can’t recognize me now.

  With a malicious expression

  Just yesterday she said

  (As once cunning old Satan

  Said to your noble hero):

  Peace to the dear departed!

  Peace to the dear departed!

  Is that the only penance

  Fate has decreed for me

  For all my past transgressions?

  No, there are newfound torments

  In Satan’s armory:

  Here comes the dreaded Svistov

  To read his compositions,

  Bringing an idle singer,

  A poor devil in tow,

  Like him a tireless rhymer,

  An oral killer too!

  They keep on singing, chanting

  All night, not drawing breath,

  They keep on reading, reading—

  Exterminating angels,

  They’ll read me to my death!

  (Essays, 275–77)

  Before long, however, Batyushkov had recovered and was once again involved in war and the consequences of war. From now on, the playful familiar epistle would give way to more direct and serious expressions of personal feeling that fall into the capacious genre of elegy.

  In March 1813, nine months after his sickbed poem to Zhukovsky, Batyushkov wrote a quite different epistle. Addressed to his young literary friend Dmitry Dashkov, it marks a turning point in his work. It deals with a subject—war—which in the traditional poetics would have been treated in a high formal ode; Batyushkov’s treatment shows his innovative genius, breaking down the barriers between genres, mixing different styles, solemn, lyrical, and familiar, to express an individual take on life. It is written in the short lines he favored for epistles, but in this poem we have the iambic tetrameters characteristic of eighteenth-century odes, as against the lighter trimeters of “My Penates”:

  TO DASHKOV

  My friend, I’ve seen a sea of evil,

  The punishments of vengeful heaven,

  The fury of our enemies,

  War and its devastating fires.

  And I have seen the rich, the crowds

  Of fugitives in tattered clothes,

  And poor mothers pale as shrouds

  Driven from their cherished homes.

  At the crossroads I have seen them

  Clutching their babies to the breast;

  Bitterly I saw them weeping

  And staring at the flaming red

  Of the dark sky with a new shudder.

  Three times since, aghast with horror,

  I’ve walked through devastated Moscow

  Among the ruins and the graves;

  Three times since, my tears of sorrow

  Have watered the city’s sacred ash.

  There, in the streets, where mighty buildings,

  The ancient towers of the tsars,

  Were witnesses of former glories

  And of the fame of later years;

  There where the holy monks of old

  Now rest in peace through passing time,

  And as the centuries unfold,

  Nothing disturbs their sacred shrines;

  There where in days of peaceful labor

  The hand of luxury had made

  Among the golden domes of Moscow

  Gardens and parks—now all I met

  Was embers, ashes, piles of stone,

  Bodies heaped high along the river,

  And pallid regiments of soldiers

  Wandering through the ruined town!…

  And you, my friend, you, my dear comrade,

  Want me to sing of love and joy,

  Of carefree happiness and leisure,

  Of wine and youthful revelry!

  And in the city’s dreadful glare

  Among the fearful storms of war,

  To call the nymphs and shepherds here

  With carols to the dancing floor!

  To sing of the sweet blandishments

  Of Armidas and fickle Circes

  Among the graves of my dear friends

  Fallen on the field of glory!

  No, no! let my talent waste away

  And let the lyre, so dear to friendship,

  Perish if ever I forget

  Moscow the golden, my dear homeland!

  No, no! until the day I bring

  My life, the love of my own country

  As a sacrifice fit to avenge

  The honor of my fathers’ city;

  Until with that hero whose wounds

  Led him along the path to glory1

  I have three times taken my stand
<
br />   Against the ranks of hostile warriors;

  My friend, until that blessed time

  I shall not know muses or graces,

  Love and its passionate embraces,

  Or the tumultuous joys of wine!

  (Essays, 237–39)

  This poem quickly became regarded as the most significant poetic reaction to the destruction of Moscow in 1812. We don’t know what suggestion from Dashkov prompted such an outburst of feeling, but the grief and patriotic fervor expressed here were real enough. ­Batyushkov had indeed been three times through the “sacred ashes” of Moscow, and was able to write realistic descriptions of the French invasion and the great fire that destroyed the city in 1812. A letter to Gnedich after his first visit in October 1812 reads like a prose draft for the poem:

  From Tver to Moscow and from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod I saw, I saw whole families of all conditions and all ages in the most pitiful situation; I saw what I had not seen in Prussia or in Sweden: whole provinces forced to move! I saw poverty, despair, fires, hunger and all the horrors of war, and I shuddered as I looked at the earth, the heavens and myself.

  (SP, 335)

  Batyushkov stood out among his contemporaries for his refusal of both frivolous indifference and false heroics. From the beginning of the invasion, he had understood the dangers of the situation, but at the same time, he would always reject the patriotic embellishment of feats of arms.

  For months, though, he was unable to participate in the fight against Napoleon. Illness and shortage of money prevented him from joining his friend Vyazemsky for the battle of Borodino, fought in early September (late August according to the Russian calendar). Just a few days before Borodino he had been called to Moscow to look after Mikhail Muravyov’s widow, Ekaterina Fyodorovna, who was ill, isolated, and living in a dacha outside the city, with the French troops approaching. While he was there, he received a letter from his friend Petin, written just before Borodino. The letter made a deep impression, as he later recalled in his “Memories of Petin”: “We were in a terrible panic in Moscow, and I was amazed at the mental calm emanating from every line of a letter scribbled down on a drum at a fateful moment.” This businesslike tranquility, allied to Petin’s desire to fight for his country, a desire free of all hatred—all this aroused Batyushkov’s envy: “Fortunate friend, you shed your blood on the field of Borodino, the field of honor, within sight of your beloved Moscow, and I could not share this honor with you!” (Essays, 404). Instead, his role was to escort Ekaterina Fyodorovna to Nizhny Novgorod, two hundred miles to the east, where Moscow society had taken refuge.

  In Nizhny, the refugees amused themselves as best they could, re-creating some of the “balls, charades, and masquerades” of Moscow, but Batyushkov found it hard to take part in this. In the letter to Gnedich just quoted, he continues: “The dreadful acts of the Vandals, i.e. the French, in and around Moscow, acts without precedent in history, have utterly upset my little philosophy and turned me against the human race” (SP, 335). And in a letter to Vyazemsky, he described the doings of the French invaders as “the fruits of enlightenment, or rather of vice, in that wittiest of nations which could pride itself on Henri IV and Fénelon” (SPP, 383). Vyazemsky advised him against joining the army, but Batyushkov had made up his mind to do what “duty, reason and the heart” demanded. He persuaded General Bakhmetev to take him on as an adjutant, but he still had to wait more than six months. In this time, he traveled to and fro between Nizhny and Vologda, passing through the ruins of Moscow, then in February 1813 returned to St. Petersburg, where he was reunited with his literary friends. It was these meetings and conversations that sparked the epistle to Dashkov.

  While he awaited the long-delayed call to arms, the Russian troops had crossed the Niemen and were pursuing the French through Poland and Prussia. Batyushkov, meanwhile, was filling his time with literary battles, directing more satire against familiar targets. With a friend, he produced a sequel to the “Vision on the Banks of Lethe,” entitled “A Bard at the Circle of Lovers of the Russian Word.” Parodying Zhukovsky’s patriotic “A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors,” it figures an enthusiastic poet leading the band of Archaists in a ritual of self-glorification. Shishkov, who by this time was serving in the army, reappears in all his glory:

  All honor to you, Slavenophile,

  Indomitable champion!

  You have put paid to reason’s rule,

  Untiring in your chanting.

  (Essays, 369)

  This was just a squib (later described by its author as “a very silly joke”), but like the “Vision,” it circulated widely in manuscript copies, being printed much later. It foreshadows the satirical games of the Arzamas group that Batyushkov joined a couple of years later.

  At more or less the same time as this poem and the epistle to Dashkov, he was practicing his German by translating some of Schiller’s The Bride of Messina (Die Braut von Messina), but also trying his hand at war poetry. The romance “Parting” sets out to be a worldly-wise soldier’s poem, inspired by the “hussar” verse of Denis Davydov; it soon became a popular song. In this piece it seems as if Batyushkov is deliberately avoiding a serious view of war and of love:

  PARTING

  Propped on his saber, there he stood,

  The hussar, plunged in woe;

  Leaving his girl for years, he sighed

  As he prepared to go:

  “Don’t cry, my pretty one! No tears

  Can ward off evil days.

  By my honor and moustache, I swear

  My love I’ll not betray!

  Love’s an unconquerable force!

  It shields me in the war;

  With a true heart and a good sword

  What danger can I fear?

  Don’t cry, my pretty one! No tears

  Can ward off evil days.

  If I betray our love…I swear

  By my moustache I’ll pay!

  Then let him stumble, my good steed,

  As I ride to the fight,

  And let my soldier’s bridle snap

  And the stirrups at my feet!

  Let my good sword shatter in my hand

  And break like rotten wood,

  And me, all pale and trembling, stand

  Where once before I stood!”

  But his good steed did not stumble there

  Beneath our gallant soldier;

  His sword was still unshattered there—

  And with it his hussar’s honor!

  But he forgot the love and tears

  Of his dear shepherdess,

  On a foreign soil plucked happiness

  With another lovely lass.

  And the shepherdess, what did she do?

  Gave her heart to another.

  For lovely girls love is a toy,

  Their promises—just blather!

  True love, my friends, has flown away,

  And cheating rules the land,

  While laughing Cupid writes our oaths

  With his arrow in the sand.

  (Essays, 292–93)

  The second of these war poems is of a quite different kind. On the first day of 1813, the Russian army had crossed the river Niemen (Neman), driving the French forces back to the west. Batyushkov was not present, but he used eyewitness accounts to paint a picture of the crossing in which realistic images mingle with a more traditional eloquence. Only a fragment remains of what was to have been a much longer poem:

  RUSSIAN TROOPS CROSSING THE NEMAN ON THE FIRST OF JANUARY 1813

  The somber Neman was sleeping wrapped in snow.

  The plain of icy waves, the empty shore,

  The villages abandoned by the river,

  All were lit up by the dim moon.

  All empty…dark upon the snow in places

  Corpses are lying, a campfire smokes and dwindles

  And, cold as a dead man,

  A fugitive sits and thinks

  There in the road, alone,

  His eyes fixed,
dull, unmoving, on his deadened feet.

  On all sides silence…And see, in the empty distance,

  A forest of massed spears has sprung from the earth!

  It moves. The shields and swords and armor resonate

  And menacingly in the somber night

  The banners, horses, warriors all show black:

  The regiments of Slavs carrying death

  Pursue the foe, they reach the river, ground their spears,

  And from the snow unnumbered tents have risen

  And campfires burning on the shore

  Have curtained all the sky in a red glow.

  In the camp the young emperor

  Sits among his generals,

  By him an ancient leader, gleaming gray,

  In the martial beauty of age.

  (Essays, 343)

  The “young emperor” is Tsar Alexander I, whom Batyushkov was to see (and admire) for the first time later in the same year, since eventually, in July, he was allowed to leave St. Petersburg and head west.

  Traveling by way of Vilnius and Warsaw, he joined the Russian army in Prague. Here he was attached as adjutant to the war-hardened General Nikolay Raevsky, who was later to befriend the young Pushkin during his southern exile. Batyushkov admired Raevsky intensely; he helped to care for him when he was seriously wounded, and they spent several months at close quarters. His admiration stopped short of idolatry, however, and his reports of conversations with the general helped to dispel a “noble Roman” legend that had gathered around him (see Essays, 412–16); here again, he anticipates the Tolstoy of War and Peace, who has his hero Nikolay Rostov cast doubt on the same legend.2

  Batyushkov was soon in action, going under fire in the battle of Kulm. Here he was reunited with his old friend Ivan Petin, now a youthful colonel; a sketch of 1815–1816 entitled “Memory of Places, Battles and Travels” gives a vivid, if rather literary, account of their conversations during a pause in the hostilities: