And as victorious cannons roar,
Sing a Te Deum to the Lord…
But you are trembling eagerly,
Clutching your saber, my young warrior.
Your soul is troubled, and I see
You long to go and pluck the laurel.
On the bloody battlefield
You with the spirit of Suvorov
Go wandering, but cannot find
In this weak world a worthy fortune.
But never fear—when the thunder roars,
You’ll hasten to the flags of honor,
But there, alas! you’ll see no more
Your friend among the eager soldiers.
Forgotten by vociferous fame,
That sweet tormentor of the spirit,
I sleep here, like a weary peasant
Who never hears the voice of praise.
(Essays, 303–4)
The poem was meant as a surprise to the twenty-year-old Nikita; Batyushkov specifically asked Gnedich not to show it to him until the book came out, adding ruefully: “That’s the sort of trifles that I busy myself with, thirty-year-old child that I am” (WP, 243). He gave his Essays to Nikita with a heartfelt dedication, but the young man, whatever he may have thought of the epistle, was not impressed by the conservative aspect of the prose pieces, and wrote unflattering notes in the margins of his copy (see Works, 26–29). For although the cousins were very close at this time and both members of Arzamas, their political views were some way apart. Nikita Muravyov was one of the early members of what became the insurrectionary Decembrist movement. Though he did not actually take part in the uprising of December 1825, he was found guilty of conspiracy and condemned to death, this being commuted to twenty years of hard labor. Batyushkov, on the other hand, while he was close to several of the future Decembrists, had little sympathy with their aims; he had satirized the literary conservatives around Admiral Shishkov, but turned away from what he came to regard as the destructive ideas of the French Enlightenment, preferring the more accepting wisdom of Montaigne.
Finally, let us return to the poem Batyushkov first wrote at the age of fifteen, “Dreaming,” already briefly discussed in chapter 1. Though this poem is hardly on a level with his best writing, it clearly mattered a great deal to him, and he placed the final, rewritten and much expanded version at the end of the “Elegies” section of the Essays; easily the longest of the elegies, this hymn to imagination seems thus to proclaim the poet’s enduring artistic credo. Much of the expansion consists of lengthy developments of the Nordic/Ossianic and the Anacreontic/erotic motifs; the poem then concludes very much like the first version—echoing in 1817 the sentiments with which Batyushkov began it in 1802:
You, Dream, be true to me, and live with me!
Society, the empty gleam of fame
Can never take the place of what you give!
Let fools prize glittering vanity,
Kissing the golden dust of marble halls—
But I am rich and happy when I have
Found for myself repose and freedom,
Leaving society’s worries to oblivion!
And may I never forget
The poet’s happy lot: to know
In poetry the happiness of Dream!
The smallest thing delights him; as a bee
Weighed down with golden pollen
Buzzes from grass to flowers
And thinks a stream the sea,
The poet sees a palace in his retreat—
Happy because he dreams.
(Essays, 259)
In spite of Batyushkov’s fears, the publication of the Essays was a great success. Like many writers of the time, he had published widely in journals, and together with his manuscript writings (notably the “Vision on the Banks of Lethe”) these had already given him a considerable reputation. But the appearance of two volumes of prose and verse, including many new works, made it clear that here was one of the outstanding poets of the age. Batyushkov was no doubt reassured, at least for the time being. Even four years later, when he was convinced that the world was against him, he remembered the high point of his career: “Then all the journalists, without a single exception, showered me with praise, undeserved no doubt, but praise” (SP, 441). However badly things were to go subsequently, the Essays of 1817 had established him as a major Russian writer.
After the publication of the Essays, Batyushkov wrote very little else, or at least very little that has survived. Later on, he described his subsequent “silence” as deliberate, but this seems unlikely, the more so in that it was not complete. Indeed he had many ideas for writing, and did in fact produce some of his most memorable work in these years, notably the brief and brilliant poems translated from or inspired by the lyrics of the Greek Anthology.
Once he had more or less finished work on the Essays, at Khantonovo in May 1817, he wrote down some thoughts in a notebook. He kept notebooks at other times, but apart from this one, the only comparable texts to have survived are some reading notes of 1810 (discussed in chapter 3). Many of the jottings of 1817 are also reactions to books read; indeed, they are given the title “Other People’s Stuff is My Treasure”—a form of words that points up the close links of reading and writing for Batyushkov and his contemporaries. But there are also notes that give a more direct insight into his inner world. The first of these reads:
I must never lose the beautiful passion for the beautiful, which so attracts one to the arts and literature, but I must not become surfeited with it. Moderation in all things. The works of Racine, Tasso, Virgil and Ariosto can captivate a fresh soul: happy the man who at thirty can weep, can shed tears of emotion. Horace asked that Zeus should end his life when he became impervious to the sounds of the lyre. I very much understand this prayer…
(Essays, 410)
This sounds a note that we often hear in his letters to friends: the weariness that makes it difficult for him to maintain old enthusiasms, to settle anywhere, or indeed to write. He continues, a little later, with a fascinating account of his attempts to deal with this:
My illness hasn’t gone away, but it has calmed down a bit. All around me is a gloomy silence, the house is empty, it’s drizzling, the garden is muddy. What can I do? I’ve read all there was, even the European Herald. Let me recall the old days. Let me write spontaneously, impromptu, without narcissism, and see what comes pouring out—write as fast as you speak, with no ulterior motive, the way few people write, since narcissism is always plucking at your sleeve and getting you to put a different word in place of the one you first thought of. But Montaigne wrote whatever came into his mind. True. But Montaigne is a quite exceptional man. I compare his mind to a spring that has been dammed up—open the sluice and the water comes rushing out, endlessly flowing, foaming and boiling, always clear and healthy—and why? Because there was a great reservoir of water. With a small mind, a weak or sluggish one, like mine, it’s very hard to write spontaneously, but today I’m in the mood, I want to perform a tour de force. My pen will dispel my melancholy a little. So then…But I’m stuck already. How to begin? What to write about? Recall the past, describe the present, plan for the future. But you have to admit that’s all very tedious. Speaking of the past is all right when you’re old and very important or rich, talking to your heirs, who listen out of kindness: “On en vaut mieux quand on est écouté.”1 What can you say about the present? It hardly exists. And the future?…ah, the future’s been very burdensome to me recently! So then, write about something: discuss something! I’ve tried discussing things, but it never seems to work; when I discuss something—as kind people tell me—it’s like when other people show off. That’s a painful thought. Why can’t I discuss things?
And he goes into a comic routine, listing eleven reasons (such as his short stature) for his inability to think, then carries on:
But I must write. I’m bored without a pen in hand. I’ve tried drawing, but it’s no good; what shall I do? help me, good people—but I’ve no one to talk t
o. I don’t know how to cope with my misery. Let’s see. As it happens, I recall someone’s words—Voltaire’s, I remember now: “Et voilà comme on écrit l’histoire!”2 These words came back automatically, I don’t know why, and they set me off remembering events I have witnessed in my life and what I have subsequently read in descriptions of these events. What a difference, my God, what a difference! “Et voilà comme on écrit l’histoire.”
And he is off, telling stories of his wartime commander Raevsky and the gap between what actually happened and the legends that grew up around it, then moving on to a brief portrait of the general, “a great warrior and sometimes a good man, sometimes a very strange one.” And he concludes: “I’ve written all that without flagging. God be praised! An hour has flown past without my noticing it” (Essays, 410–16). Getting through the days could be a burden.
Batyushkov did have ideas for further writing. We have seen in the previous chapter his plans for a long poem on a theme from Russian folklore (“Rusalka”) and for a collection of translations from the Italian. The notebook of 1817 adds an unexpectedly ambitious outline for an “agreeable and useful book,” a very full history of Russian literature designed for a society readership who knew their own literature less well than those of Western Europe. Batyushkov had written earlier to Gnedich of his problems with the Russian language, but now, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, he is pursuing the patriotic agenda he had suggested in “An Evening at Kantemir’s.” It is not clear whether he had any intention of embarking on this venture himself, but he develops his scheme in some detail, starting with the old Slavonic language and the literature of the Middle Ages, but devoting the vast majority of the volume to post-Petrine writing. He lists a huge range of writers, including his contemporaries, under twenty-eight different headings, and suggests a number of topical themes and questions:
The influence of the newborn German literature—and in part that of English literature. What have we achieved? Why has the lyrical genre [i.e. the ode] flourished and why must it decline? What is most characteristically Russian? The richness and poverty of the language. Can a language thrive without a philosophy, and why can it thrive, but not for long? The influence of church language on that of civil society, and the influence of civil eloquence on spiritual eloquence…
(Essays, 422)
It could have been a fascinating and timely book, but none of it was ever written.
Another aspect of this notebook is the new concern for morality that we saw also in the essays of 1815. It is here that we find the remarkable double self-portrait that is cited at length in the introduction. Batyushkov’s key value in these notes seems to be sniskhozhdenie, which can be translated as tolerance or indulgence. He sees this—somewhat contrary to his earlier satirical practice—as an essential value in literary life:
From whatever angle you look at man in himself and in society, you find that tolerance must be the first of virtues. Tolerance in speech, in deed, and in thought—that is what gives an attractiveness to goodness, which is almost more appealing than anything in the world. To frown and pick up Juvenal’s big stick is not very difficult, but to jest with life, like Horace, that’s the true philosopher’s stone…
Simplicity and tolerance are the signs of a mind made for art…The Savior’s words on the poor in spirit who inherit the kingdom of heaven can be applied to the literary world too.
(Essays, 418, 428)
This expresses the thirty-year-old poet’s new outlook, more Christian, more quietist, more conservative. It tended to separate him from his younger, more radical, more combative friends, those who would go on to form the Decembrist conspiracy against the autocracy that the poet was content to serve.
And indeed government service of some kind was becoming a pressing need for Batyushkov in 1817. His finances, already shaky, were dealt a further blow when his father died in November, leaving Konstantin as head of the family, responsible for paying his father’s debts and looking after his siblings, including two children of his father’s second marriage. He didn’t attempt to duck these responsibilities, taking out new loans and selling off some of his own property to prevent the sale of his father’s house. In particular his letters show his extreme concern for the welfare and education of his little half brother Pompey, born in 1811, who was to help with the edition of his works seventy years later. His income was barely adequate for all this. The success of the Essays brought in little money. In the light of his newfound fame, he was made an honorary librarian of the Imperial Public Library where he had served as a younger man—this gave him honor, but not cash. Consequently, he kept coming back to his old plan of obtaining a diplomatic post in his poetic homeland, Italy. As well as cultural riches, this would have the advantage of a warmer climate, which he found himself needing more and more as his various ailments continued to harass him. In June 1817, he had written to Zhukovsky: “Winter is the death of me. Even when I was quite healthy, I froze like a cabbage-stalk in France…imagine what it’s like for me here in Russia, with our killing frosts! Let’s go to the Crimea, ‘wo die Zitronen blühn’ ” (SP, 409).3
In fact, the following summer he went nearly as far as the Crimea, bathing assiduously in the sea at Odessa, while fulfilling his role as honorary librarian by studying the antiquities of southern Russia. But Italy was the real dream. In June 1818, on the persuasion—and with the help—of Zhukovsky and other friends, he plucked up his courage and submitted his case in a letter to the tsar. Describing his life, his campaigns, and his illnesses, he wrote of his desire to use his modest knowledge and abilities for the good of the Fatherland, while profiting from a climate “necessary for the restoration of my health which was shattered by my wound and the hardships of the Finnish campaign” (WP, 260–61). The following month he received an appointment to the Russian mission in Naples, with a modest salary.
Meanwhile he had continued to play his part in the literary life of the capital. As already noted, his Essays in Verse and in Prose were received with great acclaim, and no dissenting voices, in the autumn of 1817—Batyushkov must have felt at least partly reassured by this success. Arriving in St. Petersburg not long before publication, he was at long last able to attend meetings of Arzamas. In fact, by this time the society was beginning to change—but also to decline and disperse. Since Derzhavin’s death in 1816, Arzamas’s old adversary, the Circle of Lovers of the Russian Word, was no longer active, so there was no obvious literary fight to be fought. Some members were departing from St. Petersburg—Zhukovsky to Moscow, Vyazemsky to Warsaw, others on foreign missions. At the same time, new members were seeking to inflect it more toward radical politics. In order to breathe new life into Arzamas, there was a proposal to found a new literary-political journal. In the end nothing came of this, but Batyushkov did produce one outstanding contribution, which was later published separately (and semi-anonymously). This is a group of translations of poems from the Greek Anthology, the famous collection of several thousand short Greek poems by a great variety of authors from the seventh-century BCE to the tenth-century CE.
Batyushkov knew no Greek, and the translations were done from French versions of the Greek produced by his Arzamas colleague Sergey Uvarov, a classical scholar who later played an important educational role in the reactionary government of Nicholas I. Indeed, Batyushkov’s poems were intended originally to provide illustrations for Uvarov’s article on the Anthology. They are for the most part love poems, a lot of them in the erotic mode that Batyushkov had earlier found in Parny. In many of them, love is threatened, and one or two, including the first one (taken from Meleager), are poems of loss and mourning. The very short final piece strikes a different note, celebrating courage in the face of death. In all cases, though, there is a memorable concision, a striking richness of imagery, a beauty of orchestration and a fluidity of construction characteristic of their author. As usual with his translations, they show a freedom that allows the poet to express his own vision and his own feelings, in his o
wn voice. The meter is a characteristically Russian iambic, with lines of varying length, and there are irregular rhyme schemes mixing masculine and feminine endings (though my translations are largely unrhymed). Here is the full collection of thirteen poems:
FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
I
In nothingness’s gloomy mansion
O woman unforgettable! accept from me
Tears and despairing cries on your cold tombstone,
Roses ephemeral as you!
All is in vain. Eternal darkness
Will not give up your ever-grieving shadow;
We cannot call you back from envious Hades.
Here all is dumb and cold; here nothing speaks.
My funeral torch only reveals the blackness…
What have you done, you governors of heaven?
Say, why does beauty have so short a life?
But mother earth, take these my bitter tears,
Take her who sleeps, the faded flower of spring,
And may she rest in hospitable shade.
II
Witnesses of my love and sorrow,
Youthful roses, damp with tears!
Deck with your wreaths the modest cottage
Where my beloved shuns our eyes.
Remain, sweet wreaths, and do not wither!
But if she comes, pour out on her
All your sweet odor, and once more
Water with tears her lovely tresses.
May she stand wondering, and sigh;
And you, flowers, with your fragrant breath,
Water with tears my dear one’s tresses.
III
At last! Nikagor and fire-breathing Eros
With Bacchus’ cups have vanquished Aglaya…
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Page 17