ELEGY
I feel my gift for poetry is gone,
The muse has quenched the flame once lit in heaven;
Life’s sad experience has unveiled
A desert that my eyes had never seen,
My orphaned genius drives me out to fields
Where nothing grows, impenetrable shades,
Where I can find no sign of happiness,
Neither the secret joys, nor the dreams beyond meaning
That Phoebus’ favorites know from youth,
No friendship, love, no songs of the sweet muses
Which once assuaged my heart’s deep grief
Like lotus blossom, with enchanting power.
I do not recognize myself
Weighed down by this new sadness.
Like one cast on the rocks by the wild waves,
Who sees with horror the wreckage of his boat,
Interrogates the dark with trembling hands
And slips along the brink of the abyss,
The mad wind scattering his pleading speech,
His groans and cries…just so I stand
On the edge of ruin and call out for help
To you, my last hope, you my consolation!
Last friend of my poor heart!
Among life’s storms and tribulations
My guardian angel, given me by god!…
I hid your image in my soul, a token
Of the world’s beauty, the creator’s grace.
With your name on my lips I flew to arms
Seeking a wreath of glory or an end;
In times of terror, on the field of Mars,
I gave you the pure tribute of my heart;
In peace and war, through the wide earth,
Your loving image followed me,
Inseparable from a grieving wanderer.
How often in the stillness, full of you,
In woods where Juvisy stands proud above the river
And the Seine pours its silver crystal through the flowers,
How often, amid the noisy, carefree crowd
In the capital of luxury, among the stars,
I quite forgot the magic sirens’ song
And with a longing heart dreamed just of you.
I uttered your beloved name
In Albion’s cool groves,
And taught the echo to repeat it
On Richmond’s flowering fields.
Places whose very wildness is your charm,
O stones of Sweden, Scandinavian deserts,
The ancient home of courage and of virtue!
You heard my vows, the accents of my love
And often fed a wanderer’s meditations
When the pink radiance of the dawning day
Reflected in Trolletana’s lonely waters
The distant cliffs of granite shores,
The huts of shepherds and of fishermen
Through the thin mist of morning.
(Essays, 212–13)
The poem breaks off here with a line of suspension points in the first published version. The original version goes on to a much clearer statement of the poet’s unhappy love since his return to St. Petersburg:
How joyfully I came back to my homeland
With you alone filling my heart and mind!
“Here I shall find peace for my soul,” I said,
“An end to troubles and the wandering life.”
O how my lying dreams led me astray!
For happiness once more betrayed me
In love and friendship and in everything
That made life sweet for me,
All that I’d longed for secretly!
There is an end to wandering, not to sorrows!
My heart discovered in your longed-for presence
New sufferings and torments
Worse than the pangs of parting,
And worse than everything. I could detect
In broken conversations, in your silences,
In your unhappy gaze,
And in the secret pain of downcast eyes,
Your smile and even your cheerful words,
Signs of a heart oppressed by sorrow…
No! no! Life is a burden without hope.
If only I could lavish on your soul
The lasting flowers of love and friendship,
Sacrifice everything to you, take pride in you
And in your happiness and loving eyes,
Find gratitude and happiness
In every word or smile or look of yours
And at your feet forget like a bad dream
The world, fame, bygone cares and grief!
What is my life without you, without hope,
Friendship or love, the objects of my worship?…
And lacking them, the muse
Has quenched the flame of inspiration.
(Essays, 536–37)
Reading these desolate lines, it is hard not to see in them an anticipation of the much more total collapse that was to strike down Batyushkov some seven years later.
In another poem written at much the same time, the sad memories of the past give way to a golden dream of a no doubt impossible future. The poem’s title, “Tauris,” was the poetic Russian name for the Crimea. This area had been annexed by Russia some thirty years earlier, and was to become a popular resort, Russia’s equivalent of the Mediterranean, far removed from the “immense Palmyra” of St. Petersburg. Batyushkov’s poem is one of the first of a long line of Russian evocations of this golden land; it was a favorite poem of Pushkin’s (who was soon to be exiled in Southern Russia and would visit the Crimea). According to Pushkin, the lines about Aquarius were particularly dear to Batyushkov himself. It is generally supposed that the poem is addressed to Anna Furman, though it contains nothing relating specifically to her; it could equally be a poem to an imagined woman:
TAURIS
Dear friend, dear angel! let us take refuge there,
Where quiet waters lap the shores of Tauris,
And Phoebus lights for them the holy places
Of ancient Hellas with his loving rays.
There we, by fate rejected,
Equal in both unhappiness and love,
Beneath the sweet skies of that southern land
Shall feel no more the blows of cruel fortune.
And think no more of honors or of wealth.
Under cool maples rustling in the meadows,
Where squadrons of wild horses gallop freely
Seeking cool waters bubbling though the earth,
Where the wayfarer gladly shuns the heat
To the murmur of branches, desert birds and waters,
There we shall find ourselves a simple cabin,
A homely spring, flowers, a rustic plot.
O you, last presents of indulgent fortune,
Our blazing hearts greet you a hundredfold!
Fitter for love than the palaces of marble
In the immense Palmyra of the north!
And whether spring goes shining through the fields,
Or torrid summer scorches up the harvest,
Or old Aquarius, tipping his frigid urn,
Pours rustling rain, gray fog and darkness,
O joy! you are with me to greet the sunlight,
Leaving behind our sweet bed with the day,
Glowing and fresh, like a wild rose,
With me you share the work, the care, the feasting.
With me at dusk, beneath the quiet dark,
With me, always with me—your charming eyes
I see, I hear your voice, in your hand resting,
My hand can lie all day, all night.
I catch with longing the voluptuous breathing
Of your red lips. and if a little
Your hair is ruffled by a fleeting Zephyr,
Unveiling to my gaze a snowy breast,
Your friend hardly dares breathe, he stands
And looks down to the ground, amazed and silent.
(Ess
ays, 232–33)
Batyushkov did not in fact visit the Crimea until 1822, by which time he was seriously ill. In 1815, there was no possibility of a happy escape with Anna to a southern paradise. Meanwhile, the clash between hope of renewal and acceptance of reality is the subject of one more memorable short poem of the same summer. When first published, it had an epigraph from Petrarch, and the Russian poem in fact resembles Petrarch’s sonnet “Not the stars that wander the calm sky” (“Nè per sereno ciel ir vaghe stelle”), where none of the beauties of the world can comfort the lovesick poet:
WAKING
Zephyr scatters the last shreds of sleep
From eyes sealed fast by dreams.
But I am not wakened to happiness
By Zephyr’s quiet wings.
Neither the rosy light’s sweet rays,
Apollo’s morning heralds,
Nor the soft blue of heaven’s face,
Nor scents borne from the fields,
Nor the swift flight of my brave horse
On the sloping velvet lawns,
The hounds’ call and the song of horns
Around the desolate shore—
Nothing can bring cheer to my soul,
My soul alarmed by dreams;
Proud reason cannot still the voice
Of love with its cold speech.
(Essays, 230–31)
Batyushkov had been on leave from the army since his return from Paris, first in St. Petersburg, then in Khantonovo, where he set in train the rebuilding of the house—with some help from Napoleonic prisoners of war. But eventually, in June 1815, he had to return to the service in Kamenets-Podolsk as adjutant to General Bakhmetev, with whom he had embarked on the campaign of 1813–1814. He was not too cheerful about his prospects, writing to Gnedich:
The posting to Kamenets is not particularly flattering. I have no right to happiness of course, but it is painful to spend the best days of my life on the road, with no benefit to myself or to others; better to be fighting, it seems to me. And the most painful thing (and don’t go thinking these are just empty words) is to be cut off from literature, from the life of the mind, from the pleasant habits of life, and from friends.
(SPP, 292)
And indeed this period of nonactive military service did prove wearisome. At times, it is true, Batyushkov paints a romantic picture of his new surroundings. In a short text with a long title, “Memory of Places, Battles and Travels,” he describes the view from the headquarters where he is stationed:
The views of the ruins of the old fortress and of the new fortifications are beautiful. There are lofty towers with sharp pinnacles, half in ruins, covered with moss and with the wormwood which grows very tall in these southern latitudes; fortifications and bastions surrounded, or rather encircled, by a fast-flowing river which occasionally tumbles over waterfalls—the noise and sparkling streams soften the military gloom and monotony of the fortress buildings. In one place there is a mill, in another a ford where a great herd is crossing, and a little further off a spring cascading from the rocks; all around there is a multitude of children and women carrying yokes with buckets and crowds of Jews leaning on white sticks in the most picturesque attitude.
(SP, 179)
All well and good, but alas! The human element in this landscape had little to offer. In the same letter to his aunt in which he writes about his feelings for Anna Furman, Batyushkov gives a rather cheerless, though humorous, picture of his life in the distant provinces:
I have been here six weeks, and I haven’t spoken to a single woman. You can see what Kamenets society is like. Apart from the officials and their wives and children, the civil servants and the cooks, two or three colonels, silent officers and a whole crowd of Jews, there is no one. There is a theatre; imagine what it is like: when it rains the spectators take out their umbrellas, the wind whistles in all directions and with splendid drunken actors and a fiddle the orchestra produces a very special kind of harmony…All my joys and pleasures are in memory. The present is tedious, the future is known only to God, but the past is ours.
(SP, 386–87)
But this tedium, as one can perhaps guess from the humor of these lines, was a stimulus to writing. In a rather gloomy letter written from Kamenets in December to Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, complaining of his chaotic nomadic life, remarks: “I am ready to part company with the muses altogether, if I didn’t find in them some consolation for my unhappiness” (SP, 388. “Unhappiness” is in Russian the untranslatable toska, a combination of grief and longing.). As we have seen, it was in Kamenets that he composed his most important sequence of love poems. The epistle “To My Friends” (cited in the introduction), written shortly before the Kamenets episode, suggests that he was already gathering his poems together with a view to publication. But these southern months also produced some important prose writings, which would occupy much of the first volume of his Essays in Prose and in Verse, published two years later.
As ever, Batyushkov was self-deprecating about these essays, writing to Zhukovsky: “All of this was scribbled here out of boredom, with no books or other materials” (SP, 390). They include reminiscences, connected above all with Ivan Petin, for whom he had written the elegy “Shade of a Friend.” In the “Memories of Petin,” already quoted several times in the preceding chapters, he recalls with great feeling the times he spent with his friend in the army and in Moscow, trying to sum up the life of a man whose character and fate he admired and envied. Was it not better, he asks, that Petin should die in action while still young? His questions reflect back on his own situation:
What do we lose, dying in the prime of life on the field of honor and glory, in the sight of thousands of people who have faced danger with us? A few brief moments of pleasure, perhaps, but also the agonies of ambition, and the experience of life which awaits us like a fearsome specter in our middle years.
(Essays, 398–99)
Most of the essays, however, are on literary subjects or more general philosophical questions. There are essays on the great Italians, Petrarch, Tasso, and Ariosto, and one on Batyushkov’s Russian hero, the poet and polymath Mikhailo Lomonosov, whose pioneering achievements he set alongside those of Peter the Great. The essay on Lomonosov stresses his passion for learning, his burning desire for literary fame, but also his relatively humble beginnings in the far north of Russia. These two strands—belief in poetry and the influence of the poet’s early years—are taken up at greater length in an essay entitled “Some Thoughts on the Poet and Poetry.” Here Batyushkov writes of the importance of first impressions, including those of climate, and of the ideal poetic way of life (the quiet of the countryside rather than the bustle of cities). The true poet is seen as a rare genius in his sensibility and his ability to communicate his feelings to others. Communication is indeed the essence of poetry:
In the moment of inspiration, in the sweet moment of poetic enchantment, I would never have picked up a pen if I had found a heart capable of feeling what I feel; if I could communicate to it all my secret reflections and the full freshness of my dreams, and make it vibrate with the same strings that have sounded in my own heart. Where can one find a heart able to share with us all our feelings and sensations? We cannot find it, and we have recourse to the art of expressing our thoughts, in the sweet hope that somewhere on earth there are kind hearts and cultivated minds for which a powerful and noble feeling, an apt expression, a beautiful verse and a page of living, eloquent prose are the true treasures of life.
(Essays, 20–21)
Batyushkov’s ideal is still Montaigne, whose essays are a continuing conversation with posterity. One is reminded of his younger contemporary, Evgeny Baratynsky, who wrote in one of his poems:
…one day
A distant fellow-man will read my words
And find my being, and, who knows, my soul
Will raise an echo in his soul, and I,
Who found a friend in my own time,
Will find a reader in posterity. 3
Friendship was the great value for Batyushkov, as for many of his fellow poets. And if poetry was to be a conversation with friends, real or to come, then the great rule was to be genuine: “Write as you live, and live as you write.” This is the burden of “To My Friends,” where Batyushkov writes:
But friends will find my feelings here,
The story of my passions,
Delusions of my mind and heart;
Cares, worries, sorrows of my earlier years,
And light-winged pleasures.
His ambition, no doubt an impossible one, was to have his friends say of him: “He lived just as he wrote” (Essays, 200).
How to live is the topic of Batyushkov’s most important essay of 1815, “Some Thoughts on Morality, Founded on Philosophy and Religion.” The significance he attached to this slightly longer piece is indicated by the fact that he gave it the final position in the volume of his prose writings. It represents a major change in his view of life. In earlier poems and letters, he had written of his “little philosophy” for living, an Epicurean enjoyment of the moment, without too much concern for larger questions. Even there, however, this carpe diem philosophy was in fact accompanied by a degree of anxiety about personal and public destinies. “Some Thoughts on Morality” offers a more tragic vision of things, and gives a hint of his later despair and mental collapse. It reflects in particular the pain Batyushkov had felt on witnessing the French invasion of Russia and the burning of Moscow (already the subject in 1813 of his great epistle to Dashkov).
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Page 13