Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Read online

  WRITINGS FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN POETRY

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

  Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

  Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

  Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

  City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Copyright © 2018 Peter France

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54614-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Batyushkov, K. N. (Konstantin Nikolaevich), 1787–1855, author. | France, Peter, 1935– translator.

  Title: Writings from the Golden Age of Russian poetry / Konstantin Batyushkov; presented and translated by Peter France.

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Russian library | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017015324 (print) | LCCN 2017019738 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231546140 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231185400 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231185417 (pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PG3321.B4 (ebook) | LCC PG3321.B4 A2 2017 (print) | DDC 891.78/309—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015324

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Introduction

  1. Vologda to St. Petersburg

  2. War and Peace

  3. The City and the Country

  4. Back to War

  5. The Return of Odysseus

  6. Arzamas and the Essays

  7. To Italy

  8. Into the Dark

  Notes

  Translator’s Note

  Index of Texts by Batyushkov Cited or Discussed

  PREFACE

  Surprisingly little pre-twentieth-century Russian poetry is readily available and well known in the English-speaking world—Pushkin, Lermontov, perhaps Tyutchev, but hardly any other poets. Yet there is a rich poetic world here, particularly from the early decades of the nineteenth century, the time of the so-called Pushkin Pléiade. The great names include Evgeny Baratynsky, Vasily Zhukovsky, Pyotr Vyazemsky, and the poet to whom this volume is devoted, Konstantin Batyushkov.

  I have been living with Batyushkov, one way or another, for some time now. It was decades ago that I first read him—the moving elegy entitled “Shade of a Friend,” which figures with two other poems by him in Dmitry Obolensky’s pathbreaking Penguin Book of Russian Verse. The poems are accompanied by good prose translations, but I felt the urge to attempt a verse translation. Not long afterward I first read (and then translated) the poem by Gennady Aygi, “House of the Poet in Vologda” (1966), which concludes the present volume—in this I found a haunting image of a vulnerable poet who succumbed to madness. Later I discovered a poem written some thirty-five years earlier, the poem by Osip Mandelstam that opens this book, and realized how important Batyushkov was for the greatest of twentieth-century Russian poets. Continuing to translate him, I came to feel that this was a poet who should be more widely known in the English-speaking world, the more so because his writing echoed his involvement in some of the great events of modern European history. My aim in writing this book has been to situate his work in relation to his life experience at a crucial time in the development of modern Russian culture. The translations of his poetry are central to this book (and are discussed in a translator’s note at the end of the volume); in what follows they are interwoven with his prose writings and letters to create a narrative of his fascinating and troubled life.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am particularly indebted to Vyacheslav Koshelev’s Konstantin Batyushkov: Stranstviya i strasti (Konstantin ­Batyushkov: Wandering and Passions), a sympathetic and richly documented biography of the poet, and have also read with much profit what seems to be the only book-length study of Batyushkov in English, the literary-historical essay Konstantin Batyushkov by the Russian scholar Ilya Z. Serman (New York: Twayne, 1974). See also a detailed biographical sketch by Igor A. Pilshchikov and T. Henry Fitt, “Konstantin Batiushkov: Life and Work,” www.rvb.ru/batyushkov/bio/bio_eng.htm.

  All translations from Russian, both the prose and the verse, are my own. Earlier versions of some of the verse appeared in the following publications: European Romantic Poetry, edited by Michael Ferber; The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski; and Cardinal Points: International Literary Quarterly (online).

  I have been helped and encouraged in the writing of this book by many friends and colleagues. My special thanks go to Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, Ilya Kutik, Robyn Marsack, Siân Reynolds, Maria Rybakova, Antony Wood; to Masha Karp and the Pushkin Club, London; and to the staff of Columbia University Press, in particular Christine Dunbar and the anonymous peer reviewer who made many generous and helpful comments.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Where possible, references are to K. N. Batyushkov, Essays in Verse and Prose (Opyty v stikhakh i proze), ed. I. M. Semenko. Moscow: Nauka, 1977—abbreviated as Essays. Other references are as follows:

  SP Konstantin Batyushkov, Selected Prose (Izbrannaya proza), ed. P. G. Palamarchuk. Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1987.

  SPP Konstantin Batyushkov, Something About the Poet and Poetry (Nechto o poete i poezii), ed. V. A. Koshelev. Moscow: Sovremennik, 1985.

  CP Konstantin Batyushkov, Complete Poems (Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii), ed. N. V. Freedman. Moscow/Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1964.

  Works Konstantin Batyushkov, Works (Sochineniya), ed. D. D. Blagoy. Moscow/Leningrad: Academia, 1934.

  WP Vyacheslav Koshelev, Konstantin Batyushkov: Wanderings and Passions (Konstantin Batyushkov: stranstviya i strasti). Moscow: Sovremennik, 1987.

  Introduction

  Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855) was one of Russia’s greatest poets. As such he was celebrated by an even greater poet, Osip Mandelstam, a century later. In 1932, Mandelstam was a literary outcast living in poverty in Moscow, where he wrote a poem addressed to his hero. It was one of the last poems to be published in his lifetime (in
the journal Novy Mir):

  BATYUSHKOV

  Like a flâneur with a magic cane,

  tender Batyushkov lives at my place—

  wanders down Zamostie lanes,

  sniffs a rose, sings Zafna’s praise.

  Not for a moment believing that we

  could be separated, I bowed to him:

  I shake his brightly gloved cold hand

  in an envious delirium.

  He smiled at me. “Thank you,” I said,

  so shy I could not find the words:

  No one commands such curves of sound,

  never was there such speech of waves.

  With oblique words he made us feel

  the wealth and torments that we share—

  the buzz of verse-making, brotherhood’s bell

  and the harmonies of pouring tears.

  And the mourner of Tasso answered me:

  “I am not yet used to eulogy;

  I only cooled my tongue by chance

  on the grape-flesh of poetry.”

  All right, raise your eyebrows in surprise,

  city dweller and city dweller’s friend—

  like blood samples, from glass to glass

  keep pouring your eternal dreams.1

  “Tender Batyushkov lives at my place”—Mandelstam had in his room a portrait of the poet, perhaps a very well-known one, where the eyebrows do indeed seem to be raised in surprise. And Batyushkov certainly lived with him—as early as 1910 he had alluded in a poem to an anecdote in which the mentally ill poet, being asked the time, answered, “Eternity.” The poem of 1932 shows a great closeness to the subject: “Zafna” is the addressee of Batyushkov’s poem “The Torrent”; the marvelous evocation of his “curves of sound” and “speech of waves” recalls the enthusiasm of his contemporaries for the music of Batyushkov’s verse; “the mourner of Tasso” refers primarily to the great elegy “Tasso Dying”; and the modesty of the final two stanzas is attested by many descriptions of the poet and by the deprecating way he often wrote of his poetry.

  The last two lines present Batyushkov as a predecessor, spilling out poems and dreams like blood and wine (a kind of Eucharist) to keep alive the brotherhood of poets with their “harmonies of pouring tears.” In 1932, in the face of exclusion and persecution, the need for such forefathers was pressing; Mandelstam found them not only in Batyushkov, but in the Italian poets that his predecessor had loved, imitated, and translated: Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch. They offered an example of living lightness—just as Batyushkov is seen as an elegant “flâneur,” almost a dandy with his “magic cane,” a poet of roses and love, poles apart from the grim literary functionaries who dominated the recently founded Union of Writers of the USSR.

  So who was this “tender Batyushkov” whose image radiated light for the beleaguered Mandelstam? To most non-Russian readers his name is hardly known, but for Russians he is a classic. After the first flowering of Russian poetry in the eighteenth century, characterized above all by the great odes of Lomonosov and Derzhavin, the new poetry of the nineteenth century was largely created by two figures, Batyushkov and the translator and romantic ballad-writer Vasily Zhukovsky. Both were born in the 1780s and lived through the Napoleonic wars; both belonged to Arzamas, the literary grouping out of which emerged in the 1820s the magnificently varied poetry of what was later to be called the Golden Age or the “Pushkin Pléiade.” Aleksandr Pushkin regarded Batyushkov as a master.

  He did not leave a large volume of poetry, but contemporaries saw in it a practical demonstration of the new heights that the Russian literary language could reach. When in 1821–1823, John Bowring presented Russian poetry to the English-speaking world in his groundbreaking Specimens of the Russian Poets, Batyushkov was given a prominent place with a rather good translation of his long-verse epistle, “My Penates.” What is more, some lines from the same poem are picked out as an epigraph to the volume, printed daringly in Russian; they celebrate his fellow poets, the priests of the muses.

  Many contemporaries gave descriptions of Batyushkov. A close female friend, E. G. Pushkina, left this beautiful, perhaps idealized, portrait:

  Batyushkov was short of stature; he had high shoulders, a hollow chest, red and naturally curly hair, blue eyes and a languid look. A touch of melancholy in all his features combined with his paleness and the softness of his voice to give his whole physiognomy an elusive expression. He had a poetic imagination; there was even more poetry in his soul. He was an enthusiast for everything beautiful. Every virtue seemed accessible to him. Friendship was his idol, selflessness and honesty his essential traits of character. When he was speaking, his features became more animated with movement, and inspiration shone in his eyes. His free, elegant, pure speech gave great charm to his conversation. Carried away by his imagination, he often elaborated sophisms, and if he did not always convince his interlocutors, at least he did not irritate them, since a deeply felt enthusiasm is always excusable in itself and wins the listener’s indulgence. I loved his conversation, and even more so his silence. How often I took pleasure in guessing even his fleeting thoughts and the feelings that filled his soul at a time when he seemed plunged in reverie!

  (WP, 194–95)

  Batyushkov, too, tried to describe himself, insisting rather more on the negative side, his nervous, troubled nature, his tendency to what Baudelaire would soon be calling “spleen.” He was a great reader of Montaigne, and like him he attempted to fathom and sum up his own variable and contradictory nature. The result is found in many letters to friends, above all those to his bosom friend, Nikolay Gnedich, translator of Homer, but also, most strikingly, in a self-portrait of 1817, a Romantic Jekyll-and-Hyde image that I should like to quote in full as an introduction to his story. Batyushkov pretends to be writing of a “strange person” he has recently met:

  He is about thirty. He is sometimes healthy, very healthy, sometimes ill, at death’s door. Today he is as carefree and fickle as a child, but tomorrow you’ll find him deep in thought and religion, gloomier than a monk. His face is as good-natured as his heart, but also as changeable. He is thin and dry, and as pale as a sheet. He has lived through three wars; in camp he was full of health, but on leave—a dying man! On the march he was never downcast, always willing to sacrifice his life in a miraculously carefree way which even he was surprised by; in society he finds everything wearisome and the smallest obligation of any kind is a lead weight to him. When duty calls, he does what he has to do selflessly, just as he doses himself with rhubarb when he is ill without batting an eyelid. But what good is there in this? Where does it lead? There are few obligations which he considers a duty, because his little head likes philosophizing—but in such a twisted way that he is constantly suffering from it. He served in the army and in the civil service; very assiduously and very unsuccessfully in the former, in the latter successfully and not at all assiduously. Both types of service he found wearisome, because in reality he is no lover of ranks and medals. Yet he wept when he was passed over and not given a medal. He is as irritable as a dog, and as docile as a sheep.

  There are two men in him: one is good-hearted, simple, cheerful, obliging, god-fearing, excessively sincere, generous, sober, agreeable; the other is malevolent, sly, envious, greedy, sometimes (but not often) mercenary, gloomy, grumpy, capricious, discontented, vindictive, crafty, excessively given to pleasure, inconstant in love, and ambitious in every way. This man, the dark one, is a real monster. Both men live in one body. How does this happen? I don’t know; I only know that this strange fellow has the profile of a villain, but if you look into his eyes you see a good man: you just have to look carefully and for a long time. This is why I love him! Woe to the person who knows him in profile!

  There is more to come. He possesses some talents, yet he has no talent. He has succeeded in nothing, but is always writing. His mind is very capacious, and very narrow. His patience is very limited, whether because of illness or some other cause; his attention is easily distracted, his memory fe
eble, weakened by reading; just judge for yourself whether he will succeed in anything. In society he is sometimes very agreeable, and sometimes attractive in a special way when people consider his good heart, his carefree mind and his easygoing behavior to others; but when they think of his egoism, self-satisfaction, stubbornness and weariness of soul, everyone sees in him my man in profile. He can be amazingly eloquent; he can make a good entrance and speak well; but he can also be obtuse, tongue-tied and shy. He has lived in hell; he has been on Olympus, as you can see by looking at him. He is blessed and cursed by some spirit. For three days he will think about good deeds and want to perform them—then suddenly his patience will snap and on the fourth day he will be ill-tempered and ungrateful; don’t look at his profile then! He is capable of speaking very sharply, and often writes caustically about his neighbor. But the other man, the good one, loves people and weeps bitterly at the epigrams of the dark man. The light man saves the dark one with his tears to the creator, tears of real repentance and good deeds toward humanity. The bad man spoils everything, hinders everything; he is haughtier than Satan, whereas the light man is as good-hearted as a guardian angel. In what strange way can two make one here, how can evil be so mixed up with good and yet so clearly different from it? Where does he come from, this man—or these men, the dark and the light, who make up my acquaintance? But let us continue our description.

  He—but which one, the dark or the light?—he or they both love fame. The dark man can love anything, he is even willing to kneel to Christ if people will praise him, such is his vanity; the light one, by contrast, loves fame as Lomonosov loved it, and is amazed at the impudence of the other. The light man has a tender conscience, the other one a forehead of copper. The light one adores his friends and would go to the stake for them; the dark one wouldn’t sacrifice a fingernail to friendship, so ardently does he love himself. But when it is a question of friendship, the dark man is excluded; the light one is on guard! In love…but let us not complete the description, it would be both repellent and delightful! Everything good you could say about the light man will be taken for himself by the other. To conclude: these two men, or this one man, is currently living in the country and writing his portrait with pen and ink. Let’s wish him a hearty appetite, he is going to dinner.