And on the deck the helmsman’s cry
To the lookout who dreamed above the murmuring waves,
All these were food for my sweet reverie.
As if in an enchantment I stood by the mast,
And through the misty air and the gray night
My eyes were seeking my beloved Northern Star.
My thoughts were all engulfed in memory
Of my dear native land and of my native sky.
But the wind’s music and the rocking sea
Weighed on my eyes with languorous oblivion,
And dream succeeded dream
And suddenly…was I asleep?…I saw the friend
Who perished in the fateful fight
And by the Pleisse’s waters met his noble end.
But the sight brought no fear; his brow
Preserved no trace of his deep wounds,
And like an April morning shone with joy,
Bringing the light of heaven to my mind.
“My dear friend, is it you, comrade of my best days?
Can it be you?—I cried—ever beloved warrior!
Did I not weep at your untimely burial,
Lit by the fearful glare of martial flames,
Did I not with true friends inscribe
Your valor with the sword’s edge on the wood,
Accompanying your soul to its celestial home
With groans and prayers and tears?
Shade of the unforgotten, dear friend, speak!
Or was the past all only a mirage, a dream,
All, the pale corpse, the grave, the solemn rite
Performed by friendship to your memory?
O, say one word to me! Let that familiar sound
Once more caress my eager ear,
And let me, o my unforgotten friend,
Press your hand lovingly in mine!…”
And I flew to him…But the ethereal shade
Vanished in the blue depths of cloudless sky
Like smoke, a meteor, or a nightmare vision,
And sleep fell from my eyes.
Beneath the canopy of silence all was sleeping;
The fearful elements seemed to make no noise.
From a thin veil of cloud the moon shone down,
The waves lay dark, the breeze was barely stirring,
But sweet tranquility had gone from me,
My soul flew where the shade had fled,
Still longing to detain its heavenly guest—
You, my dear brother, my beloved friend!
(Essays, 222–23)
The Latin epigraph is the opening of Propertius’s Elegy IV.7: “The spirits of the dead are something real: death does not end everything, and the pale shade flies from the quenched pyre.” In the Latin poem, the poet dreams of his dead lover Cynthia, who comes to taunt him with his cowardice and other faults; in the end, the shade slips from his grasp and vanishes. Batyushkov’s poem, while also suspended between the appearance and disappearance of a “shade,” is quite different in tone, with none of Propertius’s bitter cynicism; it is closer to the meetings with the spirits of the dead that one finds in Virgil’s Aeneid, especially Aeneas’s vision of his wife Creusa at the end of book 2. But in any case, the poem echoes the world of Latin poetry that Batyushkov had learned to love in the society of Muravyov and Olenin, now given a worthy subject by the experience of war. The style is nobly serious throughout, moving from the dreamlike vision of a sea voyage to the dramatic confrontation with the shade and back again, but always maintaining the harmony that contemporaries so admired in his poetry. Some years later, Pushkin wrote of “Shade of a Friend”: “Beauty, perfection—what harmony!”
The soldier carries with him Homer and Tasso, and quotes from Propertius, but there is one other classical poet who was perhaps even closer to him: Tibullus. Batyushkov was known to some as the “Russian Parny” or the “Russian Tasso,” but he also called himself a “little Tibullus.” He had begun translating extracts from the elegies in 1809, using French translations as well as the original Latin. Some time in 1814, however, he produced a very free translation of the whole of Elegy III.1, a poem addressed to the Roman poet’s patron Messala. With its painful image of war and its longing for Delia, this poem must have struck a chord in Batyushkov, giving rise to a beautiful Russian elegy, which stands well alone. The opening section complains of the poet’s loneliness, far from both his patron and his beloved. This leads into a development on the golden age, where Batyushkov’s familiar household gods come into their own:
Dear Goddess, give me back the fields of home,
The old familiar murmur of the stream,
And give me Delia! I will bring you gifts,
O Lares and Penates, bring rich offerings.
Why do we not live still in the Golden Age?
The tribes of people in those carefree days
Had not yet driven roads through hills and forests,
And not yet torn the earth apart with ploughshares;
No pine or spruce yet flew with light-winged sails,
Chased by the wind, across the azure seas,
No helmsman would have dared to make his way
In a frail vessel over the furious waves;
The sturdy oxen wandered through the meadow
Trampling the sweet grass, sleeping in green shadow,
The swift steed never stained the bit with blood;
No boundary post, no columns marred the land,
The village doors stood open to the wind;
Honey dripped from the oaks in amber streams,
And from the udders of the grazing sheep
Milk poured abundantly into the bowls.
O peaceful shepherds who, with guiltless souls,
Lived without care in the dumb wilderness!
In your time no one brought unhappiness
To friends by hammering sharp-bladed swords,
And in the fields no clash of arms was heard.
O Age of Jupiter! Miserable days!
War everywhere, and hunger and disease,
Death on all sides, on water and on land…
But you, who hold the thunder in your hand,
Look graciously on me, your peaceful poet!
I never broke the faith in word or thought,
Tremblingly I adored the godly band,
And if fate brings me an untimely end,
May a stone tell the passerby of me:
“Tibullus, Messala’s friend, lies here in peace.”
My only god, master of every heart,
Dear son of Venus, here I was your bard.
I have worn your tender fetters all my life,
And you, Amor, will bear me secretly
Into Elysium, and the meadows there
Where an eternal May-time haunts the air,
Heavy with spikenard and cinnamon
And fragrant with sweet musk roses in bloom;
There we shall hear the birds’, the waters’ voice,
There the young maidens in their choral dance
Move through the woods like fleeting apparitions,
And he who is struck down, caught in the passion
Of love’s embraces, he whom fate lays low,
Wears a fresh sprig of myrtle on his brow…
A twenty-line passage on the contrasting fate of the damned then leads into a final section addressed directly to the poet’s beloved; one can imagine that the name Delia here hides a dream of an idealized Anna Furman, the girl he had left behind in St. Petersburg:
May he who broke our peace and parted us
Suffer the torments of deep Tartarus!
But you, so true to me, my precious friend,
Even in a quiet hut where none can find
You and your soul mate, she who knows your passion,
Don’t leave the household altars for a moment.
When winter blizzards howl, in this safe shelter
Your friend in the dark night will light a candle
&nbs
p; And, turning the distaff softly in her palm,
Will tell you stories of your mother’s time,
And you, lending an ear to these old tales,
Will nod, my love, and sleep will close your eyes,
And quietly from your lap the spinning wheel
Will fall…. And at the door I shall appear
Like a good angel suddenly sent from heaven.
Run then to greet me, out from your peaceful haven,
In lovely nakedness appear to me,
Your hair spread on your shoulders carelessly,
Your lily-white breast and your lovely feet…
O when will Aurora with her rosy steeds,
Blazing with light, bring us that blessed day,
And rapt Tibullus embrace his Delia?
(Essays, 206–10)
This rendering of Tibullus was a primary inspiration for Osip Mandelstam’s “Tristia,” one of the great elegies of the twentieth century.
Batyushkov’s journey brought the poet to Gothenburg, from where he moved on to Stockholm and then by way of Finland back home to St. Petersburg. His short stay in Sweden, though it was a disappointment after London, did spark in Batyushkov a romantic vision of the old Scandinavian world, comparable to that seen in the 1808 “Letters of a Russian Officer in Finland.” This time it produced a full-scale poem, partly inspired by a considerably longer German poem by Friedrich von Matthison, “Elegy written in the ruins of an old castle” (Elegie in den Ruinen eines altes Bergschlosses geschrieben). Like the German poem, Batyushkov’s elegy looks back to a vanished heroic past, though here it is not the poet’s national past. Like the somewhat later “Crossing of the Rhine,” it is written in an elevated style, with a formal pattern reminiscent of the solemn Russian odes of the eighteenth century and a distinctly Ossianic atmosphere:3
ON THE RUINS OF A CASTLE IN SWEDEN
The day’s great eye is flaming in the west
And gently sinking in the ocean
The moon peers pensively through a thin mist
On shores and inlets lapped in silence.
The seas all round are plunged in a deep sleep;
Only from time to time fishermen calling
Send long-drawn voices echoing and resounding
In the night’s quiet lap.
Above the waves the lofty cliffs are dark
Where in the sacred shade of oak trees
I wander deep in thought, seeking the marks
Of years gone by and vanished glory:
Ruins, fierce ramparts, a moat full of grass,
Columns, a shaky bridge with chains of iron,
Moss-covered towers with battlements of granite,
And a long row of graves.
Everything is asleep, and silence reigns,
But memories are gently stirring;
The traveler leaning on a mossy grave
Dreams sweetly, as he sees the ivy
That twists and climbs, clinging to the stone steps,
The shriveled wormwood that the wind caresses,
The moon that silvers over the grim fortress
Above the somnolent deep.
Here once a fighting man of Odin’s blood,
Gray-headed after years of warfare,
Sent off his son to fight, with his scarred hand
Giving the youth his feathered arrows,
His ancient armor and his heavy sword,
And loudly cried out, with his arms uplifted
“He is marked out for you, you god of battles,
Always and everywhere!
And you, my son, swear by your father’s sword,
Swear with the solemn oath of Hela,
To be the terror of the western world
Or like our ancients, perish bravely!”
And the bold youth kissed the ancestral blade
And pressed to his breast his father’s gauntlet
Trembling with joy—so at the sound of conflict
Trembles the eager steed.
War to the enemies of the fatherland!
A clamor fills the port till morning,
The seas are foaming as on every hand
The storm-winged ships fly from their mooring.
In Neustria the clash of arms is loud,
The whole of misty Albion is blazing,
And Hela night and day brings to Valhalla
Pale legions of the dead.
Young man, make haste back to your native shores
Carrying with you the spoils of battle!
A gentle breeze is breathing in your sails
O hero, born to grace Valhalla!
High in the hills the scalds prepare a feast,
The oak trees blaze, and mead in goblets sparkles,
The herald of good news sings to the fathers
Of victories overseas.
At golden dawn here in the port of peace
Your bride-to-be awaits your coming;
She has been praying to the gods in tears
To look with favor on your voyage.
And now, a fleet of swans, through misty veils
The ships glide through the waters, shining whitely;
Blow, following wind, and let your quiet stirring
Swell all the vessels’ sails.
The ship has docked, the hero brings with him
The spoils of war, the captive women;
His father greets him, and his youthful bride,
And the scalds glow with inspiration.
The beautiful young woman, silent, weeping,
Hardly dares raise her timid eyes and look
At her young hero, turning pale then blushing,
A moon among the clouds.
And where the gray stones in a mossy row
Mark how the graveyard lies in ruin,
And through the night from time to time an owl
Sends out a cry of desolation—
There joyful cups on festive tables rang,
There warriors met to feast in celebration,
There the scalds sang of warfare and their fingers
Flew over fiery strings.
They sang of the clash of swords, the arrows’ flight,
The clang of shields, the din of battle,
Villages laid waste in the fierce fight,
And cities that the flames have gutted.
The elders listened greedily to their song,
Their brimming goblets shook between their fingers,
And their proud hearts exalted to remember
Their fame when they were young.
But now the place is wrapped in night’s grim mist;
Time has turned everything to ashes!
Where once the scald shook music from the strings,
Only the dismal wind now whistles!
Where chieftains triumphed with their loyal men
And poured out wine to the great god of battle,
A pair of trembling deer sleep in the shelter
Until the new day dawns.
Where are you now, you giants of the north,
You who plunged Gaul in dark commotion,
Companions of Roald, who in your frail boats
Once sailed across the distant ocean?
Where are you, daring warriors of yore,
You, the wild sons of battle and of freedom,
Who grew amid the snows and native wildness
Amid the spears and swords?
The mighty men are gone! But not in vain
The traveler questions the dark boulders
And reads the secret runes, the dumb remains
Of ancient ways that time has crumbled.
The villager, leaning on his staff proclaims:
“Look on this place, you child of foreign peoples;
Here our forefathers’ relics lie and molder:
Respect their resting place!”
(Essays, 202–5)
But as in Finland in 1809, Batyushkov was not the dupe of his own romantic vision of Scandinavia;
if this world ever existed, it was gone forever now. Looking about him, he saw the rather different reality of modern Swedish society and wrote it down in a rueful little satire included in the letter to Severin from Gothenburg:
I’m in the land of mists and rains,
Where Scandinavians of old
Loved honor and their simple ways,
Wine and war and the clashing sword.
Leaving these lofty cliffs, these caves,
Scorning the deep ocean’s waves,
In their frail boats they’d boldly steer
To strike their foes with awe and fear.
Here Odin received a fearful sacrifice.
Here altars were red with the blood of prisoners…
But a mighty transformation greets our eyes:
Now these same northern tsars
Nibble their ginger cake and smoke tobacco,
They read the Gotha Echo
And sit and yawn together at the stars.
(CP, 254–55)
The juxtaposition of these two Nordic poems points to a constant romantic tension in Batyushkov’s writing. He dreamed of an idealized past, the glory of ancient Hellas, the Renaissance of Petrarch and Tasso, or the violent world of the sagas, but he had to live in a far from heroic present. Perhaps the Napoleonic wars gave him the chance to live a nobler, more active life, but once this episode was over, he had to settle to the frustrations of a rather impoverished civilian existence. His return to Russia was nevertheless to be a return to literary life and to poetry.
In July 1814, Batyushkov finally arrived back in St. Petersburg, where he was to stay for the next few months. Some time that autumn he wrote a short poem, in fact a free translation of a poem by Schiller:
THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS
The suffering, god-fearing Odysseus,
Seeking his Ithaca, was doomed to wander
Among the terrors of the earth and seas;
With a bold tread he trespassed Hell’s dark border;
Vicious Scylla, Charybdis beneath the waters
Did not cast down his noble soul.
It seemed harsh fate was vanquished by his patience
And he had drained the bitter-tasting bowl;
It seemed that Heaven had wearied of its vengeance
And deep in slumber brought this man
Back to the wished-for cliffs from his wild ventures.
He woke—and did not know his fatherland.
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Page 11