Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

by Konstantin Batyushkov

  There is delight too in the forests’ wildness,

  And gladness on the ocean’s shore,

  Harmony in the sound of breakers

  Exploding in their rush and roar.

  I love my neighbor, but you, nature,

  Are dearer than all things to the heart!

  With you, my sovereign, I no more remember

  The man I was, and I forget

  What I am now in my decrepitude.

  In you my feelings live again:

  I cannot put them into shapely words,

  Yet how can I not speak of them?

  Roar then, o roar, tremendous ocean!

  Man, the ephemeral tyrant, he

  Busily in the dust builds future ruins,

  But how should he command the sea?…

  (Essays, 349)

  The final poem written in Naples was composed in January 1820 as an inscription for the tomb of a little girl. It was written at the mother’s request, and takes up a theme that haunted Batyushkov:

  INSCRIPTION FOR THE TOMB OF MALISHEVA’S DAUGHTER

  Dear friend who come here from my distant home,

  I pray you: look upon this humble stone.

  Two parents here have laid to rest their hope,

  And I lie here in peace, their little one.

  Report my words to them: “Dear ones, don’t cry!

  Envy my ephemerality;

  I did not know this life,

  And know eternity.”

  (Essays, 350)

  This little poem had an unexpected destiny. It was shown by Batyushkov’s friend Bludov to the editor of the journal Son of the Fatherland, who took the liberty of publishing it without the author’s consent or of course the consent of the woman who had asked for it. The poet’s displeasure at this indiscreet behavior was one element in his rejection of the Russian literary establishment as he descended into mental illness.

  For health reasons, Batyushkov had himself transferred at the end of 1820 to Rome, where he had a more sympathetic superior. Soon, however, he was putting in official requests for retirement, and in May 1821, without waiting for an answer, he left Rome for Teplice, a spa town now in the Czech Republic, on the German border and close to the places where he and Petin had fought in 1807. He went there in search of a cure, bathing and taking the waters assiduously and cutting himself off from most Russian contacts. Even so, he was still interested in his literary work; in June he made marginal corrections on a copy of the Essays of 1817 with a view to a new edition—which never appeared. In this he proposed to omit some weaker pieces, replacing them with a new sequence consisting of six very short pieces in a similar vein to his translations from the Greek Anthology, but this time entirely original. They were virtually the last thing he wrote, and were not published until long after his death, in 1883, but they have been seen by many critics as his masterpiece.5 With hindsight one can see them as marked by the crisis that Batyushkov was undergoing; they seem to be written less for conventional readers than for the poet himself. The third piece pursues the love theme that had dominated the Greek Anthology poems, but the rest are all concerned with life and death, courage and resignation. From a formal point of view, they are on a par with “You wake, o Baiae,” but the melancholy beauty of the earlier poem is replaced in some of these with an excitingly unexpected choice of words and images, from the sun as “tsar of the azure desert” to the “crocodile waters” of life:

  IMITATIONS OF THE ANCIENTS

  I

  Life without death’s not life. What is it then? A bowl

  With a drop of honey in a sea of wormwood.

  Magnificent the ocean! Azure king of the desert,

  O sun, you are a wonder amid heaven’s wonders!

  And there is so much beauty on the earth!

  Yet silver is all counterfeit and pointless.

  Weep, mortal, weep! Your earthly fortune

  Is in the hands of ruthless Nemesis.

  II

  Mountains can feel the pull of music;

  The camel is attentive to love’s tune,

  Groaning beneath his load; you see the rose

  Blush deeper red than blood at songs

  Of nightingales in valleys of the Yemen…

  But you, my beauty…I don’t understand.

  III

  Look how the cypress, like our steppe, is barren—

  But always fresh and green.

  Citizen, you can’t bear fruit like the palm tree?

  Then imitate the cypress;

  Like it, alone and dignified and free.

  IV

  When a girl in agony is fading

  And her body is blue and chilled,

  It is in vain love pours out flowers

  And amber; she must lie still,

  Pale as a lily of the fields,

  Like a waxen form; and now

  Flowers cannot warm her cooling hands

  And perfume has no power.

  V

  O mortal! Do you wish to go unharmed

  Through the sea of life’s commotion?

  Do not be haughty; let the following wind

  Spread your sail aloof and happy.

  Don’t quit the wheel when the fierce tempest roars!

  Scipio when happy, Peter in life’s storms.

  VI

  Do you want honey, son?—Never fear stings;

  The crown of victory?—Fight bravely!

  Or is it pearls you long for?—Dive down deep

  Into the crocodile waters.

  Fear not! God loves the brave; they are his own,

  He keeps for them honey, pearls, death…a crown.

  (Essays, 351–52)

  At about this time, Batyushkov became aware of the unauthorized publication of his epitaph for a little girl in Son of the Fatherland. This was swiftly followed in the same journal by a poem that gave even greater offense. The culprit this time was the poet Pyotr Pletnyov, a great admirer of Batyushkov, who without any malicious intent wrote an epistle entitled ‘‘B…ov from Rome,” where he takes the liberty of speaking in the poet’s name. It was published in the journal anonymously, so that even some of his friends thought it was by Batyushkov. It was not in itself particularly hurtful, but Batyushkov, by this time feeling vulnerable and persecuted, took it very badly—and Pletnyov, attempting to put things right, made the situation even worse by publishing in the same journal a brief and laudatory poem, “On a Portrait of Batyushkov.” The poet, convinced that Pletnyov was a stalking horse and complicit in a plot hatched by unnamed enemies, dispatched an open letter to the editor of Son of the Fatherland, declaring that he had given up writing and that he was not a contributor to the journal. In fact this announcement, which was sent by way of Gnedich, never appeared.

  Batyushkov wrote again to Gnedich—for the last time—a few days later to explain his position as he saw it. Recognizing the value of his friend’s work on the Essays, he declares, not quite accurately, that since its publication he has written nothing: “I promised myself that I would give up literature, at least with a view to publication, and I have kept this promise.” Then came the business with Son of the Fatherland and “some person called Pletaev [sic]”—all of which filled him with indignation. He concludes:

  How can a person you don’t know be so malevolent? I don’t know, but it’s plain to see. What did I do to deserve it? If Mr. Pletaev wrote verse under my name, why did the editors of Son of the Fatherland have to print it? No, I can’t find words for my indignation: it will only die when I die. But the blow has been struck, and this is the consequence: I shall write no more, and I’ll keep my word. Maybe I had a spark of talent; maybe with time I might have written something worthy of the public—I say it with pardonable pride—and worthy of myself, since I am 33 years old and six years of silence have made me not more foolish, but more mature. Things have turned out differently. I shall be a man without honor if ever I publish something in my name. What’s more, insulted by praise, I have decided not
to go back to Russia, since I fear people who, in spite of the fact that I shed my blood on the field of honor and am now in the service of my beloved monarch, use such an unworthy and base method of hurting me behind my back.

  (SP, 442–43)

  This was Batyushkov’s last surviving letter to any of his friends, and it marks the beginning of a steep decline. In the autumn of 1821 he moved to nearby Dresden and spent the winter there. His friends in Russia began to be seriously worried, having received alarming reports from his friend Bludov who had visited him in the summer; Aleksandr Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky at the beginning of October: “Batyushkov is very depressed, he has fallen out with everybody, and according to Bludov he is on brink of the worst kind of melancholia” (WP, 287). Then, the following month, Zhukovsky, who had been traveling in the West, called to see him in a village near Dresden. His notebooks suggest that Batyushkov read aloud some poems, then tore them up, but one short but affecting poem does survive, a little piece written in Zhukovsky’s album. The opening lines refer to Derzhavin’s famous final lines about the river of life and death, then there is an allusion to loving sentiments expressed in Zhukovsky’s own work, before the final obsessive return to poor Pletnyov, yet again transformed into Pletaev:

  Zhukovsky, time swallows everything,

  Both you and me, and fame and art,

  But what we cherish in our hearts

  Will not be drowned by oblivion.

  It cannot die, the heart, o no!

  Goodness outlasts the funeral bell…

  And what lives in your heart, I know,

  Not even Pletaev can tell.

  (CP, 239)

  After this, Batyushkov disappeared into silence during the Dresden winter, except that in December he wrote to the head of the diplomatic service, describing his situation in Naples and asking again to be allowed to retire from the service. Eventually he was given indefinite leave, and finally, contrary to what he had said to Gnedich, he reappeared in St. Petersburg. The story of his remaining tragic years can be quickly told.

  When he returned to St. Petersburg in March 1822, Batyushkov was nearly thirty-five years old; he had more than thirty-three years still to live. For all of this time he was disturbed, mentally ill, sometimes to the point of attempted suicide; for much of the time he was shut away, first in a clinic, then in houses belonging to family members, seeing little of his friends, and writing almost nothing—or at least nothing that has survived. What is usually seen as his last poem was composed some time between 1821 and 1824; it expresses the despair felt by Batyushkov at this time:

  Reader, have you not heard

  Of gray Melchisedec’s last words?

  Man is born a slave,

  A slave goes to the grave,

  And can he hope that death will say

  Why he walked through this lovely vale of tears,

  Suffered, complained, accepted, disappeared?

  (Essays, 353)

  Melchisedec is a priest mentioned in the book of Genesis. In the Epistle to the Hebrews (chapters 6 and 7), Christ is said to be “made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec,” and Melchisedec himself is described as a godlike figure, “without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life.” There is nothing obvious to connect him with the bleak vision of Batyushkov’s poem, which reminds one rather of the book of Job or Ecclesiastes (“for all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief”)—but there seems no doubt that this composite prophetic figure speaks for the poet. Notice too that the “vale of tears” remains “lovely” (more literally, “miraculous”). The poem might have been written at about the same time as the “Imitations of the Ancients,” and, dark as it is, it shares with them a formal perfection, a kind of gem-like beauty. A witness claimed to have seen it written in charcoal on the wall of Batyushkov’s room at the end of his life.

  When they saw him again in March 1822, his friends were alarmed at his condition; Karamzin wrote to Vyazemsky: “Batyushkov has come home a melancholic and a hypochondriac, gloomy and cold…he sits in his room and doesn’t want to see us often” (WP, 291). But he was not without support. Until 1833, he was still officially in government service, although constantly on leave. This meant that the tsar’s government took some responsibility for him, paying him a small salary, allowing him expenses for travel to a German clinic, overseeing his movements and dealing with arrangements for the management of his estate. His first desire on returning home was to set off again on his travels, this time to seek a cure in the Crimea, where he had once dreamed of settling with Anna Furman. He obtained the necessary passport, and disappeared from view, turning up in August in Simferopol, where he signed on with a celebrated psychiatrist. To no avail: during the winter his paranoiac condition worsened; he burned his books, tried more than once to kill himself, and had to be carefully watched. His old friend Vyazemsky commented (in a letter to Aleksandr Turgenev): “We are all born under some kind of disastrous constellation…Poor Batyushkov, alone in an inn in Simferopol, devoured by the gloomy dreams of a disturbed imagination—that’s a scene worthy of our Russian way of life and our epoch” (WP, 295).

  Eventually he was brought back to the capital by force and lived there for the next year, refusing a room in his old home with the Muravyovs and preferring a little flat by himself. During this period he was assiduously cared for by his old Arzamas friends, particularly Turgenev, who often reported on his alarming condition to Vyazemsky in Moscow. There were relatively good days too, for instance May 17, of which Turgenev wrote: “Batyushkov is very depressed again…But yesterday we sat with him until one in the morning, and Bludov’s jokes enlivened him and his wits. He joked with us about literary people and himself quoted some poems” (WP, 297). Overall, however, the prospects looked bleak, as Karamzin noted in a letter to Vyazemsky: “I saw Batyushkov, who was wearing a beard, and was in the most unhappy frame of mind: he talks nonsense about his illness and wants to hear of nothing else. I have no hope” (WP, 297). In April 1824, Batyushkov wrote a letter to the tsar requesting permission to retire to a monastery; the tsar’s response was to have him sent to a specialist clinic at Sonnenstein, near Dresden.

  Sonnenstein later became notorious as the site of a “National Socialist Death Institution,” a precursor of the death camps; here the Nazis gassed those deemed unworthy of life, for the most part the mentally ill or the psychologically disabled. The same institution was in the early nineteenth century a very advanced center for the humane treatment of mental illness. Batyushkov spent four years there, from 1824 to 1828, accompanied by his devoted sister Aleksandra. At first he resisted treatment and tried to run away; later he became reconciled to the regime, but it did no good. He continued to be obsessed with the idea of a conspiracy against him. His state of mind can be seen in a letter, written to Zhukovsky in March 1826, referring to Batyushkov’s superior, the foreign minister Nesselrode, who was responsible for having him sent to Sonnenstein:

  Slapped on the cheeks, tormented and accursed together with Martin Luther on the Sonnenstein machine by the insane Nesselrode, I have a consolation in God and the friendship of such people as you, Zhukovsky. I hope that Nesselrode will be punished as an assassin. I can never forgive him, neither I nor God nor decent, honest people. Comfort me with a visit; I await you impatiently in this place of penal servitude, where Batyushkov dies daily.

  (WP, 300).

  He found some consolation in art, devoting himself to drawing and making wax models. His doctor, Anton Dietrich, left many accounts of this, noting that “he becomes so absorbed in drawing that he barely answers the questions the doctors ask him. Many of his finished drawings show real talent” (WP, 304). This talent is evident in earlier drawings, notably some vivid self-portraits, including one of the wounded Batyushkov on crutches in 1807. He continued to draw to the end of his life, often repeating the same landscape. Few of these drawings have survived, and none of the wax models, so we have to rely on Doctor
Dietrich’s notes, which indicate that he liked to draw Tasso in prison, and also to model his brother and sisters, his father, the tsar, Zhukovsky, and others. Nor had he entirely given up reading and writing. He remained faithful to Tasso, Chateaubriand, and Byron, even writing a letter addressed to “Lord Byron in England” two years after Byron’s death.

  As for his poetry, only one significant piece has survived from the years of his affliction, an “Imitation of Horace” sent in a letter to his nephew, Grigory Grevents, who looked after him in his final years, and to whose daughter Elizaveta the poem seems to be addressed. In the standard edition of his poems, this piece is relegated to the endnotes, where it is described as “a nonsensical collection of phrases,” but it is worth more than this suggests. It is not so much an imitation of Horace as a parody of Derzhavin’s poem “Monument,” which is itself derived from Horace’s famous “Exegi monumentum” (Odes III, 30)—also translated or imitated by Lomonosov and, later, Pushkin. All of these poets, taking stock of their achievements, proclaim the lasting value of what they have written—in Derzhavin’s case:

  I have built myself a monument miraculous, eternal,

  Stronger than metal, higher than pyramids;

  Whirlwind and thunder will not overthrow it;

  It will not be destroyed by fleeting years.

  Batyushkov follows the pattern, writing of his immortality as a poet, comparing himself with the tsar. His poem has its own strange logic, fascinatingly teased out by Ilya Kutik in an essay in the journal Cardinal Points (no. 5, 2015). Let me just add here that through all the absurdity Batyushkov’s poetic gift is palpably present; this poem has something of the vigor and brilliance of his “Imitations of the Ancients,” above all in the stunning, if puzzling, last line—here and in the preceding three lines I have felt free to follow the patterning of sound rather than the lexical meaning, which would translate more literally as: “Tsaritsas, rule as tsars, and you, the empress! / Tsars, do not rule as tsars, I myself am a tsar on Pindus! / Venus my sister, and you my little sister. / But my Caesar is the holy reaper (a kesar’ moy—svyatoy kosar’).”