I have built a huge, miraculous monument,
Singing your praises: it will not see death!
Like your sweet image, charming, benevolent
(Witness Napoleon, our faithful friend)
I shan’t see death. All I have done in letters,
Dodging oblivion will live in print.
Not Phoebus, I alone have forged these fetters
Where I can keep the universe shut in.
I was the first who dared to speak in Russian
Amusingly about Elise’s virtue,
To chat with true simplicity of God
And thunder truth to tsars for their own good.
Be stars for us, my empress, my tsaritsas!
Tsars are not stars: Mount Pindus is my state,
Venus my sister, you my little sister,
My Caesar—scissors in the hands of Fate.
(CP, 323)
In the summer of 1827, Batyushkov was declared incurable and the following year he was sent back to St. Petersburg. He was accompanied by his faithful sister, Aleksandra, who not long afterward herself succumbed to mental illness and lived out her days alone in Khantonovo, much less well cared for than Konstantin. Another member of the party was the German Dr. Dietrich, who chose to stay with Batyushkov for all of two years, not really hoping for a cure, but wanting to make life easier for his patient. He was interested in poetry and translated poems by Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, and Batyushkov himself, but above all he was a conscientious observer who left precious notes on the sick man’s behavior. These are fascinating, though they make sorry reading; for instance in September 1828: “He would not allow them to light the stove in his room; they didn’t obey him, and he opened the window, constantly repeating that Stackelberg, Nesselrode, and many others who would start tormenting him were all hiding in the stove.” Or the following February: “This morning he begged Schultz to bring him a dagger for him to kill himself, since he’s fed up of living; he had visions of Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Tsar Aleksandr and others, all were writing down what he said and immediately sending it off somewhere” (WP, 329–30). In March 1830, he fell ill with pneumonia and was given up by his doctors. Friends came to see him before he died, including Pushkin, who tried in vain to talk to him; he had greatly admired Batyushkov since before their first meeting many years earlier, and this final meeting left a trace in his poem “God, let me not go mad…”, where he also alludes to the poem “The Last Spring” (see chapter 5).1 Against all expectations, Batyushkov recovered; he was to live another twenty-five years, for much of the time in better physical health than he had known in his more active days. But soon after his recovery, Dietrich gave up hope and returned to Germany, leaving his patient to friends and family.
There is tragically little to say about the last twenty-five years of the poet’s life. In 1825, his brother-in-law P. A. Shipilov was given power of attorney to administer his estates, which he did very effectively, paying off many debts. In 1833, Batyushkov was finally allowed to retire from government service and was given a small pension; that same year his nephew Grigory Grevents took over the role of guardian and moved with him to his home town of Vologda. Thereafter, his life was quiet and outwardly uneventful. He lived on the upper floor of a town house, making some contact with neighbors and visitors and continuing to read and to draw a great deal. He loved seeing children. In the summer, he was often in a nearby village, where he spent many hours walking in the countryside, so that he remained strong and healthy in body. The artist N. V. Berg, who visited him in 1847, left a vivid description:
His dark-gray eyes were mobile and expressive, with a quiet, gentle look. His thick eyebrows, black with a touch of grey, were neither lowered nor contracted. However hard I looked, I could see no sign of madness in his modest, noble face…. His whole face was thin, somewhat wrinkled and remarkable for its extraordinary mobility. It moved like lightning, with rapid transitions from quietness to uneasiness, from smiles to severity. In general he is very lively and even restless. Everything he does, he does quickly. He walks quickly too, taking big strides.
(WP, 338)
As the years passed, he seems to have become less agitated, though still unpredictable and strange in his opinions. Witnesses noted his quietness, his politeness, particularly to women, his love of children and flowers, his desire to dress well, his taste for the theatre. He even began to be interested in the newspapers, especially at the time of the Crimean War (just before his death), so much so that his old bugbear and admirer Pletnyov wrote to Vyazemsky in January 1855: “Batyushkov has suddenly come to himself again, and hearing about the siege of Sebastopol, asked people to collect as many maps as possible of the place; since then he has been much engaged in European politics. That’s what can be called rising up from the grave, having lain there for thirty years” (WP, 339).
Talk of resurrection was premature; in July of that year, Batyushkov died of typhus, a quiet death followed by a well-attended funeral and burial in a monastery not far from Vologda. He had written almost nothing for many years—or if he did, it has not survived, with one small exception, a poem dated May 14, 1853, entitled “Inscription for a Portrait of Count Bukshoevden of Sweden and Finland. And Also for an Image of Khvostov-Suvorov.” Bukshoevden commanded the Russian forces during the Swedish campaign of 1808–1809, in which Batyushkov had taken part; Dmitry Khvostov was a much-mocked poet of the Shishkov camp and married to a daughter of General Suvorov. Why Batyushkov linked them to this poem is anyone’s guess:
I’m very strangely made—as you’ll agree:
I can both yawn and sneeze,
I wake only to sleep
And sleep to wake eternally.
(CP, 323)
In 1853, a couple of years before Batyushkov died, his old friend Pyotr Vyazemsky, now transformed from irreverent young wit to serious conservative politician, was on holiday in Germany. Taking a trip on the Elbe near Dresden, he found himself close to the psychiatric clinic where his fellow poet had spent four years nearly thirty years before. Memories of the sick Batyushkov came flooding back. His poem entitled “Sonnenstein” begins with two stanzas about the beauties of the region before calling up the melancholy past and the still more melancholy present of his friend:
Enchanted country, full of light, then somber,
You living keepsake of the lovely world,
It was beyond your power to lift and scatter
The cloud of thought that settled on my soul.
It was a different vision held me captive,
A charming image visited my soul,
That suffering image, like a grieving shadow,
Hid nature’s beauty under a dark pall.
He suffered here, here for a time he languished,
Zhukovsky’s dearest bosom friend and mine,
In song and suffering our own Torquato
Who saw his sun set long before he died.
Not for his eyes did nature bud and flower,
Her sacred voice fell silent where he stood,
And here the clear blue skies could not awaken
The warmth of happy days in his sad blood.
His inner world was one of nightmare visions,
Locked in himself, as in a prison cell,
His mind shuttered against outward impressions,
God’s world for him was like a lightless hell.
But what he saw, what caused his mind to tremble,
Was what disease engendered in that mind,
And here, poor man, he lived out years of suffering
And still he lives, our godforsaken friend.2
Without having died, the sick man was dead to the outside world. Much earlier, some time in 1822, Vyazemsky had written down in his notebooks what Batyushkov had said about his writing: “What can I write, what can I say about my poems?…I am like a man who didn’t reach his goal and was carrying on his head a beautiful vessel full of something. The vessel slipped from his head, fell and was shattered into smithereens. Just t
ry guessing what was in it!” (SP, 448). And indeed his legacy must be seen as incomplete; heaven knows what he might have written if his life had turned out better. But then the same can be said of Lermontov, of Keats, of many others, and like them, in spite of everything, Batyushkov achieved a great deal in relatively few years. Quite apart from the intrinsic value of his prose and verse, he was one of the principal creators of Russian Golden Age poetry, building on his reading and translation of foreign poetry, ancient and modern, to forge a fluent, natural-seeming, yet richly sonorous language for the expression of emotion, experience, and imagination. He also provided some of the first examples for a whole range of literary genres: elegy, poetic epistle, lighthearted literary satire, the short “anthological poem,” the letter to friends, the sketch of daily life, art criticism.
Naturally then, Batyushkov became—and remained—a pivotal figure in Russian literary history, although literary historians have an unfortunate tendency to see him above all as a precursor of Aleksandr Pushkin. Undoubtedly Pushkin did learn a lot from Batyushkov, as well as going beyond him in many ways, but the older poet should be read for his own value rather than as a precious influence. His Essays in Prose and Verse were twice reissued under different titles before the poet’s death, but the essential edition of his works by L. N. Maykov was published in 1885–1887, in three volumes. It may be this recent publication that prompted Chekhov, in his 1889 play The Wood Demon (and later in the closely related Uncle Vanya), to have his tedious professor Serebryakov ask his young wife Elena to fetch a Batyushkov volume that he thinks he has in his library. By this stage Batyushkov was probably not widely read by the general public, so the professor’s request very likely signifies an out-of-touch academic attitude.
There are quite different and entirely positive mentions of Batyushkov some forty years later in the works of a poet who was the opposite of a dry-as-dust professor, Osip Mandelstam. I quoted in the introduction his eloquent poetic greeting to his distant predecessor; there are also two mentions of Batyushkov in his prose writings on poetry. In “Notes on Poetry,” written in 1923, he declares: “Only those who were directly involved in the great secularization of the Russian language, in making it the language of the laity, helped to accomplish the task of primary significance in the development of Russian poetry. These include Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Batyushkov, Yazykov, and most recently Khlebnikov and Pasternak.” And following up on this the same year in “Storm and Stress,” he again sets Batyushkov alongside Pasternak, remarking of the latter’s new collection My Sister Life: “So new and so mature a harmony has not sounded in Russian poetry since the days of Batyushkov.”3
Nearer our own times, Batyushkov lives again in a remarkable verse novel by Maria Rybakova, Gnedich (2011).4 Centered on Gnedich and his translation of Homer, this is also much concerned with the friendship that has figured so largely in the present book, citing letters between the friends and evoking themes from Batyushkov’s work. I have been inspired by Gnedich to complete my study of his friend. But I should like to finish this book with another verse tribute to the poet and his tragic fate, an elusive and moving poem that remained with me as I read and translated Batyushkov. It is the work of the Chuvash-Russian poet, Gennady Aygi (1934–2006);5 the epigraph is taken from the poem by Vyazemsky just quoted:
House of the Poet in Vologda
(Konstantin Batyushkov)
A charming image visited my soul…(P. Vyazemsky)
but alongside—a surrounding of silk:
torn as if in a mixture
of his shining
and the trembling:
unceasing: of the temple—
altering the face
as in wind—
in shining of silk—as of features
of dust!—
of everything:
that is—
corroded by wind from the windows:
and by light: to the living face—
concealing itself
like a treasure:
amidst the silk:
the wind:
and the rays
1966
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Peter France (New York: New Directions, 2014), 51.
2. For a list of the sources used for the present volume see the abbreviations list (p. xi) in the front matter.
1. VOLOGDA TO ST. PETERSBURG
1. Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816), born near Kazan in modern Tatarstan, was the outstanding Russian poet of the late eighteenth century and an influential figure at the court of Catherine the Great. He is best known for his grand odes and his powerfully original style.
2. In the poem “At Tsarskoe Selo” (1911) in her first collection, Evening.
3. Cited in a note to the poem in CP, 314.
4. “Sentimentalist,” a standard term in Russian literary history, has no pejorative overtones, referring to a new proto-Romantic sensibility that owed something to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.
5. “Must one [you] be so fickle, / I said to sweet pleasure.” Madame de Murat was a now largely forgotten French poet of the seventeenth century.
6. See Peter France, “Fingal in Russia,” in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. Howard Gaskill (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 259–73.
7. “ What do I see, it is over, I embrace you, and you die.”
2. WAR AND PEACE
1. Bread and salt are the traditional Russian expression of hospitality.
2. Don Quixote’s worn-out steed; a literal translation of the original is “magnificent nag.”
3. François-René de Chateaubriand, Historical Essay on Revolutions (Essai historique sur les révolutions), book 1, part 1, chap. 22.
4. Nikolay Gavrilovich Kurganov (1725–1796), a mathematician and academician, was the author of an influential Russian grammar that included an anthology of poetry.
5. See The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, ed. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski (London: Penguin, 2015), 17.
3. THE CITY AND THE COUNTRY
1. Crates of Thebes, a Cynical philosopher of the fourth century BCE.
2. See his biographical note in An Age Ago: A Selection of Nineteenth-Century Russian Poetry, selected and translated by Alan Myers with a foreword and biographical notes by Joseph Brodsky (London: Penguin, 1989). This volume contains four translations of poems by Batyushkov.
3. Yevgeny Baratynsky, Half-light and Other Poems, trans. Peter France (Todmorden: Arc, 2015), 18–21.
4. Mikhail Kachenovsky (1775–1842), conservative critic, associated with the journal Moscow Herald (Vestnik moskvy).
5. Ermil Kostrov (1755–1796), translator of Homer and Ossian.
6. Aleksey Kruchonykh (1886–1967) declared that his “transrational” text “Dyr bul shchyl” was more Russian than all of Pushkin.
7. “My health is fleeing; this unfaithful one / Makes no promise to return, / And Nature who is tottering / Has already warned me / Not to count too much on her. / So the play will suddenly end / With the second act: / Quickly I reach the denouement, / The curtain falls and I am forgotten.”
8. “In her age of beauty, the flower of youth…/…Gone up to heaven, alive and beautiful”
4. BACK TO WAR
1. General A. N. Bakhmetev, a wounded war hero who was soon to become Batyushkov’s commanding officer.
2. War and Peace, vol. 3, part 1, chap. 12.
3. The form and imagery of this poem inspired Pushkin’s first major composition, “Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,” which the young student famously read aloud before Derzhavin on January 8, 1815.
5. THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS
1. Compare the lines from “The Bronze Horseman”:
We’ll build a city here, a port,
To challenge our disdainful neighbors…
A hundred years have passed since then;
a northern city, young, a wonder,
has, from the forest and the fen,
<
br /> risen in majesty and splendor
(Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, 88)
2. The halcyon, also referred to in “Shade of a Friend,” is a bird from Greek mythology, reputed to build its nest on quiet waters—whence the expression “halcyon days.”
3. Baratynsky, Half-light, 100–101.
4. Aleksandr Pushkin, “To Batyushkov” (1815). The quotation is taken from the first of two similar poems with the same title.
6. ARZAMAS AND THE ESSAYS
1. Not related to the novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was more than thirty years his junior.
2. Sergey Sokovnin (1785–1868) was an amateur poet who had distinguished himself by declaring publicly on the street his love for Vyazemsky’s wife. Nikolay Ilyin (1777–1823), a dramatist and translator, was a member of the Society of Lovers of Literature.
3. “…And like a swift Alpine torrent, / Like a flash of lightning / In the clear night sky, / Like a breeze or smoke, / Or like a sudden arrow, / Our fame flies past: and every honor / Is like a fragile flower. /
What do you hope for, or what do you now expect? / After the triumph and the palms / All that remains for the soul/Is grief and lamentations and tearful complaints. / What help can come from love or from friendship henceforth! / O tears! O sorrow! (Torquato Tasso, Torrismondo).
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Page 20