Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

by Konstantin Batyushkov

  A good deal of his poetic output at this time, however, belonged more to the category he had labeled “light verse” in his speech of 1816. This includes a number of satirical epigrams, such as this one of 1815, directed against an unknown target:

  Pamphilus is merry at table,

  Though often at reason’s expense:

  He owes his gay moods to his belly,

  To memory his flashes of sense.

  (Essays, 305)

  Or else there were little poems of friendship, including a quatrain that was sent with a bunch of flowers to “our Horace,” the garden-loving poet Ivan Dmitriev:

  Blizzards and frosts have come and gone—

  Your trees and flowers are never blighted.

  I know from Apollo and Aphrodite

  In Horace’s garden the roses live on.

  (Essays, 306)

  Both of these little pieces were included by Batyushkov—though with some hesitation—in the edition of his works that came out in 1817. The same is true of the “Epistle to Turgenev,” a longer piece included in a letter of October 1816 to his close friend, the influential statesman Aleksandr Turgenev.1 The poem is part of his successful attempt to persuade Turgenev to assist the widow of a war veteran and her daughter; after an appeal to his friend’s generosity, Batyushkov goes on to present his two heroines in a familiarly free and varied style that seems to owe something to the masters of French light verse, not least La Fontaine:

  …But who are they? Like it or not,

  I’ll tell you their whole gloomy story.

  They are a widow and her daughter

  A pair that fate forgot;

  There was a husband called Popov,

  The tsar’s devoted soldier,

  A poor man. Then he died. Free of

  All debts, of course, he met his maker.

  But in this world he left a wife

  With a young child, and only

  His knapsack as a legacy…

  But here the poor aren’t lonely!

  Good folk came to their aid and fed

  The two of them, and warmed them,

  And in a word, did what they could

  To shelter the poor orphans.

  That’s splendid! Marvelous!—Well, yes,

  But our sad world is hardly

  A paradise, as grandpa says…

  In marched a foreign army,

  And Moscow burned down to the ground,

  And our poor widow woman, ruined,

  Set off again with staff in hand…

  And all the time her daughter grew,

  And as she grew, her needs grew too;

  Day followed day, they all just vanished,

  The weeks and months, and they were famished.

  The aged dame is sinking, while

  Her daughter blossoms like a flower,

  Like Grace itself, with lovely eyes

  And looks that overpower.

  With Flora’s roses in her cheeks,

  And hair as fine as golden flax

  Falling on alabaster shoulders.

  Her every word is full of grace,

  She lends a beauty to her dress,

  But all her wealth is in her face,

  Her beauty is her dowry.

  Never a crumb of bread or cake…

  Turgenev, friend, for heaven’s sake,

  Help me to rescue loveliness,

  Poverty and unhappiness!

  They’ll light a pure wax candle there

  Before the holy face, of course.

  Who will they pray for? I won’t say,

  But you, my friend, can guess.

  (Essays, 272–73)

  In such epistles, poetic talk seems like a natural continuation of conversation; storytelling, humor, sentimental eloquence, commonsense remarks, and some semi-parodic description of female beauty mingle to create an entertaining discourse. In its ability to deal with such mundane subjects as poor relief, this light verse, as Batyushkov suggests, contributes to polishing the language of ordinary Russian speech. The same is true of a series of rather more jokey epistles of 1817 to an older member of Arzamas, Vassily Pushkin. Remembered now almost entirely as the uncle of his famous nephew, Vassily was in his day a leading society poet. The first piece is a quite trivial evocation of the old familiar boredom felt by Batyushkov in his country retreat:

  I honestly don’t know the date;

  Time stands still, in bands of steel;

  Boredom is happy to repeat:

  “It’s time to drink your tea,

  Time for a meal, a sleep,

  Time to get out the sleigh.”

  “It’s time for you to give up poetry”—

  Reason keeps on at me day after day.

  (CP, 250)

  Another little poem from a letter written at much the same time praises Pushkin for his devotion to the light poetry—wine, women, and song—that Batyushkov had praised in his speech, and in which he had first found fame himself. Pushkin is compared here to the old models of French elegance, from the Renaissance poet Clément Marot to the chevalier de Boufflers, who had died only four years earlier, and with whom Batyushkov had himself been compared. The tone is humorous, but the sentiment seems to be sincere; the escape from “dark oblivion’s greedy jaws” is a recurrent theme in Batyushkov’s work:

  Eternal youth is his whose voice

  Sings Eros, love and wine,

  Who plucks sweet pleasure’s fleeting rose

  In the gay gardens of Boufflers, Marot.

  He may be harassed by vile coughs and gout

  And the creditors’ unholy throng,

  And toil away all the day long

  To keep the booksellers supplied.

  Once dead, forgotten!—Not a bit—

  Posterity will grasp the truth:

  On what, and how and where the poet lived,

  Where he expired, where his poor dust is laid.

  Believe me, fate will rescue him

  From dark oblivion’s greedy jaws

  And bear to immortality

  The man, his life, his works.

  (CP, 212–13)

  A third squib, which bears the grand title “Epistle from a Practical Sage to the Sage of Astafievo and the Pushkinistic Sage,” was written later in the same year, still from Khantonovo. Included in a letter to Vyazemsky (the “sage of Astafievo”), it is addressed jointly to him and Vassily Pushkin and promises to visit Astafievo, in spite of bad weather. Batyushkov writes in prose: “Some feeble souls like yours complain about the weather; the true sage declares…” after which comes the verse passage:

  Happy whose paradise within

  Is not disturbed by passion’s showers

  Bright May will always shine on him

  And Life will never grudge him flowers!

  Remember how Epictetus in a ragged cloak

  Didn’t know that the barometer foretold foul weather

  Or that the universe’s values shook

  And Rome was poised to swallow the world’s freedom.

  His flesh and spirit tough from constant labor,

  Heat did not make him sweat or rainstorms soak him.

  I shall be tougher far than Epictetus.

  Wrapped in a cloak of patience,

  I shall appear before you

  With the first light of day.

  Yes! yes! you’ll see me standing on your threshold

  Wearing a stoical expression.

  I won’t be short of things to say!

  Ideas from Seneca,

  The gift of eloquence from Sokovnín,

  The social graces from Ilyín,2

  And my philosophy…from the pharmacy.

  (CP, 250–51)

  These are all poems of friendship—a supreme value for Batyushkov. In March 1817, he wrote to Gnedich that when he had finished his current poem (“Tasso Dying”) he would write no more—“except letters to friends: that is my real genre, as I have finally realized” (SP, 403). And indeed these letters (more than thre
e hundred have survived) are among his best writing, by turns graphically descriptive, self-mockingly witty, and sincerely felt. It is interesting in particular to look at the letters to his close literary friends—Gnedich, Vyazemsky, and Zhukovsky; all are familiar and full of life, but the tone changes with the recipient, more ebullient and youthfully malicious with his oldest friend Gnedich, affectionately serious with the somewhat older and more prestigious Zhukovsky.

  Much of the correspondence with Gnedich at this time was taken up with a major event in Batyushkov’s life, the publication of his works. The idea seems to have come spontaneously and unexpectedly from Gnedich in the summer of 1816. He offered not only to edit the volumes, but to print them at his own expense, paying the author an advance. His friend at first treated this as a joke, saying that Gnedich would ruin himself, but in the end the offer was too tempting to refuse, and it was agreed to publish two volumes, respectively, of prose and verse. The prose was ready for publication by the beginning of 1817, but both volumes were published several months later. In the end, Gnedich made a reasonable profit on the undertaking, but the impoverished Batyushkov received only a modest sum.

  Gnedich proved to be a conscientious and a highly sympathetic editor. Based in St. Petersburg, he took on all the necessary tasks of publication, consulting his country friend about the choice and the ordering of texts, suggesting corrections, organizing a subscription (rather against Batyushkov’s wishes), and of course writing a preface. He at first proposed an enthusiastic presentation, possibly on the lines of the following draft for a biography of his friend:

  Constantly and everywhere, Batyushkov lived a life at odds with his vocation as a poet; wherever he was, in his short periods of leisure he poured out his feelings and thoughts…None of our poets has distinguished himself with such an amazing plenitude, such beautifully finished pictures as Batyushkov. He had the most complete possession of his poetic inspiration and he was an artist in the full sense of the word. His poems are inimitable in their harmony, their truly Italian melody.

  (WP, 238–39)

  But Batyushkov warned him that this might be over-egging the cake, and in the end the first volume came out with a much more laconic foreword:

  These two little volumes include almost all Mr. Batyushkov’s writings in prose and verse which are scattered through a range of periodicals, together with some new, unpublished works. I think it would be superfluous to discuss them in a preface. I shall simply say that having obtained the means of producing this edition, I consider it the most agreeable undertaking of my life, since I am sure that I shall satisfy the wishes of enlightened lovers of literature.

  (Essays, 6)

  The publication bore the modest title Essays in Verse and Prose (Opyty v stikhakh i proze). The word “essay” refers to Batyushkov’s great French master, Montaigne, whose Essais are intended as attempts or trials, uncertain searchings rather than finished works. And indeed there is an epigraph from Montaigne at the head of the first volume: “Et quand personne ne me lira, ai-je perdu mon temps, de m’être entretenu tant d’heures oisives à pensements utiles ou agréables?” (And even if no one reads me, have I wasted my time in spending so many idle hours on useful or agreeable thoughts?). Like Montaigne, Batyushkov liked to refer to his works as “scribbling” or “trifles,” but also, like Montaigne, he clearly attached more importance to them than he cared to admit.

  For as he noted in the self-portrait quoted in the introduction, which was written in 1817 but not included in the Essays, he was very susceptible to the charms of fame. A good deal of his self-deprecating irony was part of a strategy of modesty designed to win praise. In the months preceding the publication of the Essays, his letters to Gnedich and others show him in a fever of self-doubt, fearing the exposure that awaits the published author. This comes across most clearly in a letter to Zhukovsky written from Khantonovo in June 1817:

  Why did I take it into my head to publish all this? I feel, I know, that there’s a lot of rubbish here; even the poems that cost me so much torment me. But could it have been better? What a life I have led for poetry! Three wars, all the time on horseback or on the highways of the world. I ask myself: can you write anything perfect in such a stormy, changeable life? Conscience replies: No. Why publish then? It’s no great disaster, of course; I’ll be criticized and forgotten. But this thought kills me, it kills me, since I love fame and would like to deserve it, to tear it out of the hands of Fortune—not a great fame, no, just the little one that trifles can obtain for us if they are perfectly done…

  (SP, 408)

  And about his prose he wrote to Gnedich after rereading Montaigne: “There’s a man! There’s prose! And my stuff, I can see it myself, is thin gruel! It will all wither and soon fade. What’s one to do! If the war hadn’t ruined my health, I feel I could have written something better” (SP, 403). Not surprisingly, then, as work on the edition progressed, he was constantly seeking reassurance from his friends and bothering Gnedich with second thoughts, last-minute alterations, requests to leave out pieces that didn’t pass muster. When success came, it must have been a relief.

  Volume one, the prose, consists largely of pieces previously published in journals, many of them being the essays composed in Kamenets in 1815. Batyushkov worried that the collection might be a little slight, and suggested making a number of additions, only one of which was eventually included, a translation of “Griselda,” the last story in Boccaccio’s Decameron. He explained that he had translated freely, trying to capture something of the specific charm of the original. “Griselda” takes its place alongside essays on Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch; it is in fact the only survivor of Batyushkov’s grandiose plan for a two-volume edition of translations of classic Italian texts and of important modern essays on Italian literature. He outlined this in a letter to Gnedich of March 1817, evidently hoping to enhance his reputation—and to make some money (SP, 403–5). But as with the translation of Tasso’s epic, nothing came of it.

  In volume two, devoted to poetry, there is a considerably greater proportion of new and unpublished writing. Although the opening poem, “To My Friends,” presents the collection as a sort of poet’s diary, a record of changing thoughts and feelings, Batyushkov decided against a chronological arrangement. The first and much the longest section is entitled “Elegies”—and Batyushkov is often seen as a crucial figure in establishing the elegy as the central poetic genre of the Russian Golden Age. The term is a capacious one in Russian literature, but essentially it is distinguished from the more formal ode by its concentration on the expression of personal feeling. Batyushkov’s elegies are of many different kinds; few are as purely elegiac as “Shade of a Friend,” and some (notably “Tasso Dying”) are essentially historical narratives. It is important to note that in this section, translations (from Tibullus, Parny, and others) are intermingled with “original” poems; as we have seen, Batyushkov often worked by assimilating and re-creating poems from other languages, regarding the result as his own poetry.

  The second section is devoted to “Epistles,” though there are also epistles in “Elegies,” notably the great poem addressed to Dashkov in 1813. The personal epistle was another field in which Batyushkov left a mark on the Russian poetry of his time, and this second section opens with what was perhaps his most famous poem, “My Penates.” Then, after “Elegies” and “Epistles,” comes the catchall “Miscellany,” for the most part poems that are not spoken in the poet’s name. Some of the pieces here might well have been placed in the earlier sections but arrived too late, when the rest of the volume had already been set up in print. The most important of these is “Tasso Dying,” completed in the summer of 1817. Before it came such writings as “The Traveler and the Stay-at-Home,” but also a variety of epigrams, inscriptions, and other short occasional pieces. What is not included, however, is the as yet unpublished “Vision on the Banks of Lethe.” This had been a succès de scandale in manuscript, and friends urged Batyushkov to make it generally ava
ilable, but he refused outright, not wishing to hurt poets he had satirized when he was younger. From the outset he made his position clear to Gnedich:

  I wouldn’t print “Lethe” for a million rubles; I shall stand firm on this as long as I have a conscience, reason and a heart. Glinka is dying of hunger; Merzlyakov is a friend of mine, or what we call a friend; Shalikov is living in poverty; Yazykov is eating dust, and you want me to make a public laughingstock of them. No, I’d rather die!

  (SP, 391–92)

  There were other poems, too, which he regretted having included in the Essays; he planned to remove them in a second edition—but this never materialized.

  Meanwhile, he was composing new poems to fill out the second volume. In particular, he set himself to write a few more weighty pieces, for which he needed the isolation of Khantonovo. Most of these reached Gnedich too late to fit into the “Elegies” section where they really belong, the exception being a free translation of a poem by the French poet Millevoye, “The Rivalry of Hesiod and Homer.” Like “Tasso Dying,” written soon after, this poem has a strongly personal theme, the conflictual relationship between the poet and society. Homer and Hesiod are shown competing in ceremonial games for the poet’s prize; Homer sings of war and adventure, Hesiod of the beauty of the seasons. The weak king, more used to the pleasures of peacetime, “Scorned the lofty hymn of the immortal Homer / And awarded the palm to his rival.” Hesiod is surrounded by enthusiastic crowds, while Homer flees the scene:

  Harassed by destiny right to the end,

  But still a king at heart, no slave to fate,