Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

by Konstantin Batyushkov

  (Essays, 233–34)

  In fact, the city that Batyushkov returned to was hardly changed from the place he had known before the war. He took up residence with his beloved aunt Ekaterina Fyodorovna Muravyova in her house on the Fontanka River in the center of the city, and he spent much time with the Olenins on their estate at Priutino just outside the capital. But he didn’t feel at home. Soon after arriving, he wrote to his older sister Anna:

  I don’t know yet what my fate is to be; I haven’t yet been transferred to the Guards, on which the possibility of my retirement depends. I won’t weary you with complaints about my success in military service. Can you believe that I can serve as an example [of bad luck] in the army? But let’s leave that, and put it right if we can. They are promising me a government place as a civilian: my old job in the library, which I will be glad to take, or anything else that turns up.

  (SP, 376)

  But if fate was not looking after Batyushkov as he would have wished, he in turn found it hard to settle to anything. His old torment of depression dogged his steps. At about this time, he wrote a long verse tale (the longest of all his poems) called “The Traveler and the Stay-at-Home,” a largely satirical story that expresses something of his own predicament. First conceived during his stay in London, it was completed after his return to Russia. The subject is not unlike that of La Fontaine’s fable “The Two Pigeons,” juxtaposing a footloose and foolish wanderer with a contented stay-at-home. It opens with a personal statement:

  I’ve seen the world, and now,

  A quiet stay-at-home, I sit and ponder

  By my own fireside how

  Hard it can be to keep your life in order;

  How hard to spend your days on your own patch

  When you have roamed about on land and water,

  Seeing and knowing everything, then coming back

  No wiser and no better

  To your ancestral plot:

  A slave to empty fancies,

  You live condemned to seek…but seek for what?

  So let me tell the tale of one such traveler.

  (Essays, 308)

  The story, set in classical Greece, follows the fortunes of Filaletos, who leaves his brother Cliton at home on their modest estate on the outskirts of Athens. Spurred on by ambition and curiosity, he travels the ancient world, talks with religious leaders and philosophers, fails to find any real truth, returns to Greece, suffers all kinds of hardship, and eventually makes his way back to Athens. Here Batyushkov, who has been telling his story in a detached satirical voice, suddenly brings himself into the picture, likening this homecoming to his own return to St. Petersburg:

  He was a Greek, of course, and loved his country;

  He knelt and kissed the earth with joy and tears;

  Beside himself with happiness, he accosted

  The houses and the trees!…

  I too, my friends, I felt my heart rejoice

  When tossed by fate’s upheavals

  From foreign shores, I reached my native place

  And saw again the Admiralty Needle,

  The house on the Fontanka…and the faces

  Dearer to me than anything on earth!…

  I too…But we must speak of Filaletos…

  (Essays, 316)

  And Filaletos has a rough time of it, even in Athens. He gets involved in a violent debate about war and peace, setting the citizens against him, and only just manages to escape into the welcoming arms of his brother. Now at last all seems to be set for a properly moralized ending, where the overambitious Filaletos will learn to appreciate the superior wisdom of the stay-at-home Cliton. But no, for Batyushkov, with his knowledge of skuka and his itchy feet, this happy ending cannot work. Like the hero of the Odyssey, Filaletos is destined to keep traveling:

  And just five days went by

  Before our Greek, tired of the same old meadow

  And the same faces every day—

  Can you believe it!—pined for his lost freedom.

  He started to explore the nearby woods

  And climbed the local mountains,

  All through the night and day wandered the roads

  Then secretly made his way to Athens

  To yawn

  Again in that sweet town

  And chat with Sophists about this and that;

  And then, on hearing from some scholars

  That in the world there is a land

  Where spring is never-ending,

  Went to find roses—among the Hyperboreans.

  Cliton and Cliton’s wife from their front door

  Shouted in vain to stop him in his tracks:

  “Brother, dear brother, for God’s sake, please come back!

  What do you hope to find so far from home?

  New miseries? What are you running from?

  Do you resent our friendship, cruel man?

  Stay here, dear brother, stay, dear Filaletos!”

  No good.—The oddball simply shrugged his shoulders

  And disappeared without a backward glance.

  (Essays, 319)

  Batyushkov, however, did not set off again immediately. Encouraged by the Olenin circle, he wrote the first two of a series of literary essays that would be published in the first (prose) volume of his works a couple of years later. The first of these takes the form of a letter to a cousin of Batyushkov’s patron and mentor Mikhail Muravyov. Subsequently printed as the foreword to an edition of Muravyov’s works, it presents and praises his various writings in a tone of gratitude and family piety, insisting on his public-spiritedness, his humane values, and his cult of feeling. It is a personal essay, in which Batyushkov clearly speaks in his own name.

  The second and more interesting of these prose works is quite different. “A Walk to the Academy of Fine Art” is presented as a letter too, but it is supposedly written by a somewhat elderly Petersburger to a friend living in the country, and it presents a series of dialogues between the author and other visitors to the academy show, notably an enthusiastic young artist and an old reactionary who professes contempt for new Russian art. Discussing just a few of the works on display, the essay is much concerned with the relation between the new art of Russia and the models provided by antiquity and Western Europe. As such it clearly relates to Batyushkov’s own poetic practice. Just as the poet had found a new voice for himself by imitating and translating Tibullus, Tasso, Parny, and others, so the artists find inspiration by imitating or copying the great works of other cultures; as one of the interlocutors puts it, “these artists are original in their imitation” (Essays, 57).

  The text begins and ends with references to the great German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann; the dominant position adopted by Batyushkov is close to Winckelmann’s neoclassicism. But this does not imply that Russian culture is inevitably derivative and therefore inferior. On the contrary, the very city of St. Petersburg, superior in its unified grandeur to decrepit Paris and smoky London, is like a proclamation of the new mission of Russia. Here again we find a hymn of praise to Peter the Great, together with a reflection on the creation of the city that anticipates the opening of Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”: “Here will be a city—he said—the wonder of the world. I shall summon all the arts and crafts here. Here the arts and crafts, civic institutions and laws will vanquish nature herself. He spoke—and St. Petersburg rose from the wild marshland” (Essays, 73–74).1 The essay breathes the patriotism of one who had marched into Paris with Alexander I. The equestrian statue of Peter (Pushkin’s bronze horseman) may be the work of a Frenchman (Falconet), but as a visitor says, “it gallops like Russia!” (Essays, 81).

  Meanwhile Batyushkov was continuing to write poems. A few of these continue in an earlier vein, imitating the French verse of Parny or Millevoye in very free translations. These are mostly love poems, often taking the Russian poet into the realms of imagination rather than reflecting his actual existence. “Bacchante,” for instance, condenses a long text by Parny, “Les
Déguisements de Vénus,” roughly translating one of Parny’s “tableaux,” to create a Russian poem that enjoyed great success in its day. It is a throwback to his earlier Epicurean mode, though more frankly erotic than any earlier poems, but it comes oddly after the somber notes first sounded in the epistle to Dashkov about the burning of Moscow:

  BACCHANTE

  All to Erigone’s feast

  They run, the devotees of Bacchus;

  Noisily the woods repeat

  Moans of pleasure, shrieks and clapping.

  In a dark wild forest glade,

  Left behind, a young nymph lingers;

  I give chase—she runs away,

  An antelope, light and nimble.

  Zephyrs tousle her young hair

  Wound about with ivy tendrils;

  Boldly the wind sweeps up her skirts,

  Knotting them in a dense tangle.

  Yellow hops go subtly winding

  All around her lovely form,

  And her cheeks are fairly glowing

  With the crimson of the rose.

  Grapes in purple juice all melting

  Stain the mouth she opens wide—

  Crazy, utterly enchanting,

  Poison to the heart on fire.

  I give chase—she runs away

  An antelope, light and nimble,

  I catch her, and she falls to earth!

  Her head rests upon her timbrel!

  And the devotees of Bacchus

  Wildly shrieking, hurry by,

  Through the forest raising echoes—

  Cries of pleasure, Evoe.

  (Essays, 288–89)

  A very different note is struck by another imitation from the French written at about the same time. “The Last Spring” is loosely based on a poem by the contemporary French poet Charles-Hubert Millevoye, “La Chute des feuilles,” but where Millevoye has a lovesick hero fading away in harmony with the dying year, Batyushkov, in a manner reminiscent of Petrarch, contrasts human suffering with the springtime renewal of nature:

  THE LAST SPRING

  Bright May is playing in the fields,

  The stream begins to chatter freely,

  And Philomela’s brilliant voice

  Has charmed the dark wood’s melancholy:

  Now everything drinks in new life!

  You only, singer of love, are sad!

  And deep in your sad heart you hide

  The knowledge of your coming end;

  With feeble steps you make your way

  This one last time over the fields,

  Taking your leave of them today

  And of your wasted homeland’s woods.

  “Farewell! you groves and valleys dear,

  Rivers and fields that I call home!

  Spring has returned, and I can see

  My fated hour of death has come.

  This was the prophecy I heard

  At Epidaurus: you will hear

  For the last time the cooing birds,

  The halcyon’s quiet melody.

  The twigs will once again be green,

  The fields be garlanded with flowers,

  And the first roses will be seen—

  And you will share their dying hour.

  The time is close…Sweet flowers in bloom,

  Why do you haste to fade and die?

  Cover the melancholy tomb

  Where my decaying dust will lie.

  Cover the road that leads us there,

  So that no friendly eye can see.

  But if a grieving Delia

  Should come near to the place, then breathe

  Your sweetness through the empty air

  That lies all round and charm my sleep,

  My sweet sleep, with your melody

  Of languorously trembling leaves.”

  The flowers did not fade in the fields,

  The halcyons with their quiet song

  Mingled their voices with the leaves—

  But the youth dwindled and was gone!

  And friendship never shed a tear

  Where his dear dust slept in the shade,

  And Delia never came to see

  The desolate tomb where he was laid;

  Only the shepherd at high noon,

  When he had set his flock to graze,

  Troubled with his unhappy tune

  The deathly silence of the grave.

  (Essays, 234–35)

  This poem, which left its mark on Pushkin (discussed later in this chapter), is more characteristic than “Bacchante” of the Batyushkov of 1815. Like “Bacchante,” it is set in an antique world, with Delia, halcyons,2 and a musical shepherd, but its melancholy tonality sets the tone for a number of directly personal love poems written later the same year, when Batyushkov was coming to terms with the sad end of his one serious involvement with a woman about which we know anything.

  This was his love for Anna Fyodorovna Furman, whom he had met in the house of the Olenins, her protectors, in 1812. He had carried her image with him throughout his Napoleonic campaigns; on returning to St. Petersburg, he met her again, and his love flared up with new force. She was now twenty-two, a beauty without a fortune, and her friends and protectors would have been glad to see her married to Batyushkov. But he could see all too well that she did not feel for him as he did for her, and he did not want to insist, the more so since he was not in a position to offer her a financially stable future. He later explained his situation in a letter to his aunt, Ekaterina Muravyova, written in August 1815, by which time Anna had left St. Petersburg to join her father in Dorpat (now Tartu, in Estonia) and Batyushkov himself had been taken by military service to Kamenets-Podolsk in Bessarabia in the far south of Russia:

  The most important obstacle is that I cannot sacrifice what I hold most dear. I do not deserve her and cannot make her happy with my character and my lack of means. That is a truth that neither you, nor anything in the world can overcome, of course. All the circumstances are against me. I must submit without complaining to the holy will of God, which is sent to try me. I cannot stop loving her. Your last lines made me suffer. I do not like this journey of hers, dear aunt. I wish I could see or know that she was in St. Petersburg, with good people, and near to you. Forgive me this worrisome grief. You are the only woman on earth to whom I can be sincere, but even to you I am afraid to open my heart. I am indeed very sad. One can live without hope, but to see only tears all around one, to see the suffering of everything the heart holds dear, that is a torment that you too know: you have loved.

  (SP, 385)

  It is in the light of this letter that one can read a group of poems written in Kamenets in the summer of 1815. The first of these was attached to the letter just quoted, no doubt to show his aunt what he felt about Anna, though the feeling is much less bitterly expressed here than in the letter. What Batyushkov calls “memory of the heart” is stronger now than loss and grief:

  MY GUARDIAN SPIRIT

  Memory of the heart! more potent

  Than reason’s mournful memory,

  Often with your allure of sweetness

  You carry me off to a far country.

  And I remember words so tender,

  Remember eyes as blue as the sky,

  Remember too the golden tresses

  Of hair that curls so carelessly;

  Remember too the simple costume

  Of my unparalleled shepherdess,

  The tender vision, unforgotten,

  That stays with me at every step.

  Love gives to me this guardian spirit

  To soften separation’s blows

  And, when I sleep, to haunt my pillow

  And ease my sorrowful repose.

  (Essays, 220–21)

  A second poem also accompanied the letter to Muravyova. Here Batyushkov goes back over the years of his campaigns and travels, his return to Russia, and even his present situation in the south by the river Tiras (the Greek name for the Dniester, which flows by Kamenets). The juxtaposi
tion of death and resurrection at the end of this poem of longing carries one back to an earlier and happier love poem, “Convalescence” (see chapter 2):

  PARTING

  In vain I left behind my father’s country,

  My bosom friends, the glitter of art,

  And in the soldier’s tent, the noise of battle

  Sought to find comfort for a suffering heart.

  Ah! alien skies cannot make good love’s wounds!

  In vain from land to land

  I made my way, and heard the fearsome sound

  Of seas that crashed against the strand.

  In vain, when fate had torn me from the shores

  Of my great northern city’s river,

  I came again to Moscow’s ruined squares,

  Moscow, where once I breathed the air of freedom!

  In vain I fled from northern deserts

  And the weak comfort of a glacial sun

  To where the Tiras glitters as it runs

  Between the hills enriched by Ceres

  In lands where ancient races feasted.

  In vain—one image haunts me still:

  The unforgettable dear girl

  Whose name will be forever sacred,

  She whose blue eyes contain the universe,

  Making a heaven on earth in their reflection,

  Whose lovely voice, whose sweetly sounding words

  Are death to me, and resurrection.

  (Essays, 231–32)

  A much fuller picture of Batyushkov’s recent years is given in a long poem entitled “Elegy.” When it was first published in the poet’s collected works in 1817, this piece bore the title “Memories: A Fragment,” where the title word (vospominaniia) is the plural form of the title of the much earlier poem that I have translated as “Remembering” (discussed in chapter 2). In the 1817 edition, the two poems appear side by side. “Remembering” looked back to the campaign of 1807–1808 and Batyushkov’s love for the merchant’s daughter in Riga; “Memories” (or “Elegy”) tells of his war service and travels through France, England, and Sweden in 1813–1814, relating all this to his love for Anna. However, to avoid embarrassment, he chose in 1817 to publish only the first part of the poem given below, where the unspecific reference to a “guardian angel” remains relatively discreet. In its full version, “Elegy” speaks more clearly of the poet’s failure to win Anna’s love. This unhappiness is related to his desertion by the Muses—ironically, in view of the fact that the loss of Anna seems to have sparked several of his most memorable poems. But “Elegy” begins with a clear and cheerless statement of the theme of lost inspiration, leading to a suggestion of the irreparable psychological damage done to the unloved poet: