But up from the abyss there glides
A hideous Beast.
Which, spouting, pipes forth rushing streams
And gapes his horrid, toothy jaws …
No more! No more.
Appear!
And there came forth …
Serene and verdant lie the dales
O’er which at noon a white Swan soars.
Beneath the clouds
He lets resound his cheering song.
The far-off vale, the glade, the hill,
The rushing stream
Give back a hundred-fold reply.
But then, as swift as thunderbolt,
Upon his silvery pinions gliding,
The Eagle with his grasping claws
Stoops for his prey.
He rends and tears and beats his wings,
And snow-white swans-down falls to Earth …
No more! No more.
Appear!
And there came forth …
The sun has set, the evening dark
Reveals a host of burning stars
In heaven’s arc.
And fiery, fleeting meteors
Hurl downwards, in a glistening clew,
From realms
On high: they cheer the watcher’s gaze
Like warm and welcome firelight:
One falls upon a darkened house,
Borne thither by the wind: it catches—
The town’s ablaze!
A smoky, soot-black column rears,
And flames, like scarlet waves, pour forth …
No more! No more.
Appear!
And there came forth …
Beset by cares and lust for gold,
The merchant at his tally beads
Makes up his sums:
He grudges all his partners’ gain
As he apportions out the wares,
And sleepless sits,
As hour by hour the voyage charts
He cons: surveys with greedy gaze
The ocean and its billowing waves,
Descrying there his distant ship.
Through tears of joy he spies
Her sails and flags, her cannon’s flare:
But near the wharf—a hidden shoal …
No more! No more.
Appear!
And there came forth …
The worthy ploughman in his fields
Fears God and waits on Nature’s will,
Spares not his sweat;
In summer’s heat the plough he follows,
Then supples well and stores the traces,
And bides the season,
Awaiting increase from the seeds
That he with his own hand has sown.
The golden ears of wheat are full,
They bend and sway like ocean waves,
And heaven’s shade
Gives blessing to his honest toil;
A cloud then spills both hail and ruin …
No more! No more.
Appear!
And there came forth …
Young man and maiden, newly wed,
All golden, shining, shadowless,
Their nuptial chains—
In Love’s pure blessedness they drown;
A conqueror and suer both,
The worthy groom
Now melts in ecstasy of love,
And to her charms surrenders all,
Forgetting there his former cares,
Salutes his lover’s lips, her hands,
And, through the veil,
His hand, outstretched, has grasped the prize;
Dame Death rears up with gleaming scythe …
No more! No more.
Appear!
And there came forth …
The Son of Fortune, proud and bold
In spirit fully arrogant
And adamant,
Has scattered all opposing banners
And round his brow has gathered,
Encircled,
Green laurels culled from many lands,
And, kingly rights annihilating,
Now drunk with heady fumes of power,
In every tribe the people’s sway
Usurps;
He harks not to good subjects’ groans,
But reaches out to claim the crown …
No more! No more.
Is not this world a magic play,
Wherein the lantern shadows change,
Enchanting and deceiving men?
Does not some lord or sorcerer
Or mighty mage divert himself
Thereby, his prowess vaunting,
As he with idle finger sets
The planets’ course? Does he not call
All earthly creatures to behold
His dreams—and they but dreams themselves?
Why, Man, so arrogant though mortal,
So ignorant for all your lore,
Now soaring in your reason’s pride,
Now crawling, bug-like, in the dust,
Why chase thus after fortune’s phantoms
Which flicker into sight and, passing,
Entice us to the fatal feast?
Were it not best to scorn their gleam,
And laud instead the Master’s hand
That made this world so fair of sight?
We may be—nay, we shall be—then,
Unmoved observers of His works
Whose will directs obedient Fate.
Let other eyes admire our course,
And let His hand direct our way
Who sets the suns and stars aspin:
He knows their end as He knows ours!
He orders it—and I ascend;
He speaks—and I descend once more.
This world’s but dreams: the Dreamer—God.
(1803) Translated by A.L. & M. K.
Zlogór, Volkhv of Novgorod
Chorus
Boyán’s disciple, grey-haired skald!
Arise o’er Vólkhov’s sombrous river,
And let your harpstrings newly quiver
With ancient lays and lore recalled—
Freed from the dust of past resplendence—
Bemuse with wonders your descendants;
Bring on your harp old deeds to sight,
From darkness strike them with new light!
Skald
Hearken! From his dwelling in the southlands came Odin to the land of midnight sun. With him came Véles, and Zlogór the shaman, whose funeral libations flowed so free they formed a river, ever since hight Vólkhov; this river’s currents lap his funeral mound, they writhe and twist like snake with scales of silver, they circle, like the raven or the owl.
Thus he, once spewed from out the bowels of Tophet, a creature fashioned of demonic guile, yet scion of the Slavic tribe, and mage within its fortress, by his arts did blind the people’s eyes with conjurings and visions; from time to time would he transform himself, appear as thunder, lightning, wind or rainstorm. A crocodile—their volkhv, their prince, their priest.
By force and fear of him did he inspirit the ignorant to bow to black-horned god—to vile Perún—instead of unto Heaven, and with their prayers bring sacrifice in blood; but such as would refuse to make their off’rings he and his offspring, lurking ‘neath the streams of swift Nevá, Ilmén’ and deepest Mshága, Shelón or Ládoga, would drown, and thus destroy.
To shrive Zlogór’s black soul came hell-born demons, but still so fearsome was his powers’ fame, that when he died, good people of the northlands made sure to lay him face-down on his bier, and hide him there as well as they were able. So that the tyrant might not harm them more, they drove down through his heart a stake of aspen, then piled atop his grave a ponderous mound.
Yet even when his earthly life was ended, Zlogor did not cease making mischief here—as to this day you may hear tales related by goodwives and by aged crones alike. Deceits he wove, cabals he brewed and discord, and was the pet of many a worthy dame; full well he kne
w their cellars and their turrets, as birdlike he went flitting through the house.
Kikímora herself could never spy him; he took his ease curled up upon the stove, and oft would he the meal set by for evening devour, with great gnashing of his teeth. Or in the night, much to the master’s wonder, he’d force a nag to gallop league on league; he’d weave and plait his favorite horse’s forelock and bind its waving tail into a club.
Vadim and all the people were incited ‘gainst Gostomysel by Zlogor himself, and thus between the Slav and the Varangian was strife ignited, in despite of sense; he also was it that forbade Dobrynia to baptize all the folk of Novgorod, to raise up holy altars on the hilltops, and then to drown their idols in the streams.
Next would he Yaroslav the Wise have hindered from setting forth the Code of Russian Law, then bade the folk to draw in heavy oxcart unto the veche, in good Marfa’s stead, that spiteful crone Yagá, the crafty Bába—that evil witch—with iron pestle swift. And at Khutinsky Abbey he attempted to burn Iván the Dread with flames from hell.
So to this day he plays his pranks at Zvanka, weaves fantasies of shadows in the night: he creeps down to the Volkhov with the moonrise, in golden moonbeams paints there hills and trees; his visage, bending down, is limned in brightness with trailing dreadlocks, and with snow-white beard, he flickers in the current—or, reposing in darkness ‘neath his mound, like thunder snores.
(1813) Translated by A.L. & M. K.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin
(1799-1837)
OUT OF SHEER RESPECT for tradition one ought to begin any selection from Pushkin’s oeuvre by offering at least one of his lyrical poems simply because he is considered to this day Russia’s foremost poet. Every Russian schoolchild knows that Pushkin’s favorite season was autumn, hence our first choice—his most famous autumnal poem—Autumn: a Fragment. The trouble with received knowledge is that it often petrifies thinking, and the average Russian schoolchild rarely gets beyond the poem’s first stanza (the only one published in school anthologies) to the entire text which embodies Pushkin’s musings on the Romantics’ notion of the “moment of inspiration,” during which unseen forces guide the poet as he creates a new and fantastic world of verbal brilliance. Writing this work on his beloved estate Boldino in the early 1830’s, Pushkin reveals later on in the poem that he is no longer enslaved by ordinary Romantic themes or satisfied by the tenets of Romantic discovery, which for him had already become cliches. To illustrate this he chooses one of the most characteristic Romantic genres—the fragment—and describes the process that normally induces the inspired state of mind for his persona, and which happens for him most naturally in the autumn months. Yet when he reaches this creative state the poet’s persona is paradoxically left with no path to follow. A ship under way is the work’s culminating metaphor for poetic inspiration, but the unanswered question “Where shall we sail?” ends the poem; these words are followed not by a complete stanza, but by a series of dotted lines which verbally express nothingness rather than a higher or revealed truth. A prescient note of modern absurdity is struck by Pushkin. Reaching this end-point, the reader is forced to reflect upon the beginning—the incomparable description of a Russian October with which the poem opens—and to recognize in this “fragment” an exquisite poetic artifact, grander than any obscure fantastic world.
As epigraph to “Autumn” Pushkin chose the line “What nimble thoughts do not them brim my sleep-drowned mind?” from Derzhavin’s pastoral masterpiece To Eugene. Life at Zvanka: Just as Pushkin a generation later was to celebrate the Russian landscape at Boldino, Derzhavin in this 1807 work unscrolls before the reader an enchanting celebratory catalogue of Zvanka’s virtues, describing the course of one idyllic early summer’s day on the estate. The concluding stanzas of Derzhavin’s poem were long considered “flawed,” given their abrupt shift in tone from the idyllic to the fey as the poet imagines the estate’s eventual decay and an indifferent Nature’s obliteration of his own tomb. In choosing as “Autumn’s” epigraph the very line that begins this final section of Zvanka, Pushkin signals his understanding that this “flaw” was in fact the poem’s essence, just as the “unfinished” stanza of “Autumn” carries that text’s ultimate—absurd and, hence, fantastic—meaning.
A similar level of absurdity is struck in The Bronze Horseman, also set in autumn, but with prodigiously different workings of its agency. Written roughly at the same time and subtitled “A Petersburg Tale” this work is hailed in Russia as Pushkin’s greatest narrative poem. Moreover the story has a dimension—its locale: the city of St. Petersburg—which embodies a theme of considerable wealth. One of the city’s most potent symbols is the famed equestrian statue of Peter by Falconet, which in The Bronze Horseman becomes the incarnation of the monarch’s great achievement, or more precisely of Peter’s implacable will. His presence so charges the atmosphere of the poem’s opening lines that, like the God of the Old Testament, he is not at first named directly, but referred to by the pronoun He. Further on Peter is called “The Idol,” a deity embodying the vastness and colossal power of the Russian Empire to be sure, but also associated with History—and with Eternity itself.
The plot establishes a contrastive parallelism with Falconet’s Horseman on one side and the narrative’s protagonist Eugene on the other. The resulting juxtapposition comes perilously close to parody. Peter the Great’s god-like musings as he plans his city recall the first chapter of Genesis, and in fact Petersburg seems almost to spring into being at his word, created in his image. But Eugene is a man writ small, reduced to virtual non-entity. His family name is not given; he has lost any connection with his forbears and lineage, has no history himself and aspires to create none. He occupies a lowly position on any scale used to measure such things: he is poor, with no great ambitions or talents, his needs are modest and his dream of marital bliss and small comforts fulfills them all.
Eugene does have one quality that the Horseman lacks, and which is essential for our sympathy. He is human: the statue is literally and figuratively inhuman. Larger than life, Peter’s image is a demi-god, the Idol, the master of Destiny who inspires adulation, awe and also terror. And here we must feel the great historical impact on Russia—for good or ill—of Peter’s reforms, and of their steep price. Peter’s dream city on the banks of the Neva is juxtaposed with the real city in which Eugene must live, and which is subject to devastating floods: the great monarch’s conquest of Nature is not without its setbacks. The Horseman remains secure in his saddle, but the powerless Eugene, distractedly mounted backwards on a stone lion, sees all his dreams literally washed away. The particular form of Eugene’s resulting madness with its echoes of Don Juan heightens this contrast to an absurd degree.
There are, however, not two but three personages occupying the narrative space of The Bronze Horseman, the last represented by the poet-narrator himself. Incidentally, the original is fully executed in verse. We have chosen to render only the prologue in its rhymed iambic tetrameter, rendering its narrative section in metered (iambic octameter) prose. The poet’s paean to Peter’s city (beginning with “I love thee, Peter’s own creation …”) comprises some of the most famous lines in all of Russian literature and establishes the poet as mediator between Peter and Eugene. He celebrates the former’s indisputable accomplishment: this expression of St. Petersburg’s uncanny beauty has never been equaled. Yet he also acknowledges the human tragedy that Peter’s unwavering and merciless will made inevitable. The poet holds these two aspects in a delicate balance, with no attempt at resolution. And it is precisely the irreconcilability, the irreducible complexity of life, which is, if anything, the meaning of the poem. To insist on resolving the dilemma in Bronze Horseman is in fact to impoverish the poem—even to misread it, since its meaning in the profoundest sense is the dilemma it constructs.
Our third Pushkin selection, The Queen of Spades, is a fully representative sample of Pushkin’s experimentation with the prose narrative, a form which he felt was
produced by a creative process radically different from poetic inspiration. Elegant to the point of dryness, with a minimum use of descriptive modifiers (especially prevalent in Romantic poetry), the Queen of Spades succeeds in its kaleidoscopic density of narrative information, its unexpected twists of plot and meanings, shifts in the narrative time-line, and in the very meaning of concepts presented. The story, to which Petersburg again functions as an important backdrop, is a splendid victory of Pushkin’s verbal narrative craft, involving a mock story of the supernatural (à la Hoffman), a mock romance, a mock murder with a mock weapon, a mock mystery—all framed by an elegantly symmetrical beginning and ending, both of which involve a depiction of a closed room in which different people play cards with very different outcomes. The Queen of Spades is also Pushkin’s glorious achievement in the portraiture of the exceptional man (exceptional not in the term’s superlative sense, but rather in the sense of an outsider) as the varied permutations of his persona appear to others and to himself. It is also one of the first major Russian prose works dealing with the subject of madness—a state of mind vibrantly explored in the volume by such varied writers as Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, et al—but also a state of mind elevated to the level of exceptionality by the Romantic movement itself. The focus of the plot revolves around the secret of three winning cards, a secret of unique interest to the protagonist of the story, Herman. A descendant of Germans (implicitly of those who helped Peter to found the city) who, instead of following reason and the disciplined work for which his forefathers were famous in Russia, goes insane due to his fixation on the three-card sequence and the idea of enriching himself with it. Petersburg functions as the midpoint as well as the final disposition of the protagonist’s march towards insanity.
We thus have two narratives in which Pushkin’s protagonists are driven to madness within (and perhaps by) this eerie locale. Such are, however, only the explicit degrees of madness Pushkin explores in these narratives. Switching our focus back to the first, we must note that this “Petersburg Tale” speaks to the motif so important in planning for any future, namely the irrational foundation of a utopian city built in the middle of nowhere and the historical consequences of this. Considering the fact that Peter chose the most inhospitable site—a place of swamps, shifting river banks, and floods—we must conclude it was a priori Peter’s madness that forced future inhabitants of his creation to succumb to the same malady. Note that although we have preserved the poem’s standard English title, Pushkin in fact does not use the word bronze. The poem’s true title is The Copper Horseman and Peter’s fame is thus rung not on sonorous bronze—a noble metal and a metaphor for lasting fame—but on tinny copper. Aware of its hollow sound, Pushkin may have intended Falconet’s equestrian figure to morph in readers’ minds into a tin soldier, or as Ecclesiastes would say: vanitas vanitatum. The city as a utopian and dystopian space for human habitation is richly represented in this volume—especially in the section devoted to Russian early modern utopian works, the writings of Gogol’ and Dostoevsky, as well as in the fiction of the Symbolists—but The Bronze Horseman is the first major elaboration of such a theme in Russia.
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