Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Read online

  That man is me! Have you guessed as much by now?

  (Essays, 424–27)

  One might see in this divided soul an expression of Batyushkov’s intermediary historical position—between the urbane sociability of Enlightenment Russia and the rebellious Romantic sensibility that is embodied in Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin or in the Pechorin of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Times. Certainly Russian critics have repeatedly described him as one of the first of the so-called superfluous men, the gifted rebels without a cause who fill the pages of nineteenth-century Russian literature. What he could not know in 1817—in spite of forebodings expressed in letters to friends—was that this split self would a few years later succumb to an incurable mental illness. If the poet saw himself as a split personality, we can equally see his life as split into two more or less equal parts: the thirty-five years before he collapsed (1787–1822), years filled with poetry, friendship, love and war; and the thirty-three years of his illness (1822–1855), years in which he withdrew from society, failed to find a cure, and wrote almost nothing.

  The corpus of Batyushkov’s writings is not very extensive, most of the essential pieces apart from the letters being included in the two volumes of his Essays in Verse and Prose (Opyty v stikhakh i proze) of 1817.2 Ever self-critical, he eliminated quite a bit of early or occasional verse from this selection, and would have omitted more from a second edition. He also seems to have destroyed a number of manuscript poems, and of course his illness prevented him from completing many planned works. Even so, he created work in a number of different genres that opened the way for much subsequent Russian literature.

  The first full edition of his writings was published in three volumes in 1885–1887. The third volume contains over three hundred letters, mainly to family and friends, to which over fifty have been added subsequently. They are revealing and often brilliant letters, sometimes mixing prose and verse and echoing the poems; not for nothing did Batyushkov declare in 1817: “letters to friends: that is my real genre.” His other prose writing consists of essays, usually on literary or moral subjects, and accounts of places visited, notably the pioneering “Strolls Through Moscow” of 1810, and the 1815 “Walk to the Academy of Fine Art,” which ushers in Russian art criticism on the model of Diderot’s Salons.

  Turning to his poetry, the first thing to note is that a good deal of it is translation, or at any rate verse inspired by foreign models—French, Italian, German, English, Latin, and Greek. When he was writing, modern Russian poetry was still young; the writers of his generation sought to enrich their culture with themes, forms, and images worked out in prestigious foreign literatures. His great friend Zhukovsky was no doubt the master translator, whose translations overshadow his “original” work, but Batyushkov too was a great reader and borrower. His translations are invariably free, remaking the foreign original in a new form for a different culture. Nor did he distinguish between translated and original poetry; the two belong equally to him and are inextricably mingled in his 1817 volume of verse.

  One of his characteristic genres, however, is not translated, though it had foreign models: the verse epistle to friends. He wrote such epistles throughout his career; they range from short passages embedded in actual letters in prose to such long missives as “My Penates,” which set the standard for such writing among his immediate successors. The epistles are sprightly, written in rapid short lines, and characteristically moving from mock gravity to much more down-to-earth matters, but also to passages of genuine feeling. There are many other kinds of “light verse,” to use Batyushkov’s expression—poems of love, friendship, and social life. For him, such verse, as against the solemn ode of the eighteenth-century lyrical tradition, was essential in modern society.

  Not all his verse was “light,” of course; in particular, the year 1812, with the French invasion and the burning of Moscow, marked a turning point in his view of things. This change figures first in an epistle to his friend Dashkov, which was followed over the years by a number of elegies, serious, sometimes tragic poems of love, friendship, history, poetry, war, and death. The elegy of personal feeling was to be the major genre of Golden Age Russian poetry, and Batyushkov can be seen as its principal creator. Some of his most memorable poems, such as “Shade of a Friend” and “Tasso Dying” are of this kind. But then, toward the end of his creative life, after the publication of the two volumes of 1817, he wrote what many have seen as his masterpieces, the short poems contained in “From the Greek Anthology” and “Imitations of the Ancients.”

  Batyushkov himself stressed the connection between his life and his poetry. “Write as you live, and live as you write” was his motto. In his letters he is often unduly modest about what he calls his “scribblings.” Such is the message of an epistle that he wrote in 1815 and then used as an introduction to the first—and only—selection of his poems published in his lifetime:

  TO MY FRIENDS

  Here is my book of verse,

  Which may perhaps be precious to my friends.

  A kindly spirit tells me

  That in this maze of words and rhymes

  Art is in short supply:

  But friends will find my feelings here,

  The story of my passions,

  Delusions of my mind and heart;

  Cares, worries, sorrows of my earlier years,

  And light-winged pleasures;

  How I would fall, then rise,

  Then vanish from the world,

  Trusting my little boat to fate.

  And, in a word, my friends will find

  The diaries of a carefree poet here,

  And having found them, say:

  “Our friend was often credulous,

  Fickle in love, in poetry eccentric,

  But he was always true to friendship;

  He wearied no one with his poems

  (A wonder on Parnassus!)

  He lived just as he wrote…

  Not well, not badly!”

  (Essays, 200)

  To say that “art is in short supply” is a typically modest disclaimer; in fact, Batyushkov paid great attention to perfecting the language and form of his poetry. Nevertheless, in a letter to Zhukovsky in December 1815, he distinguishes himself from the majority of readers who see poetry as “rhymes, not feelings, words, not images” (SP, 387). For the most part his poems are not openly autobiographical, but even apparently impersonal texts are usually an expression of his feelings. In the present book, I shall follow the thread of Batyushkov’s writings to explore his troubled life, his passions, delusions, cares, worries, sorrows and light-winged pleasures, setting all these against the changing world of Russian society from Catherine the Great to Nicholas I.

  Konstantin Nikolaevich Batyushkov was born in Vologda in northern Russia in May 1787 and died there in July 1855. This makes him a near-contemporary of Byron, Stendhal, and the composer Carl Maria von Weber; younger than the English Lake poets; older than Shelley, Leopardi, or Lamartine. As far as Russian poetry is concerned, he belonged to the generation following that of the great poet Gavrila Derzhavin (whom he praised as the “giant of Parnassus”)1 and the fable writer Ivan Krylov. With his friends Vasily Zhukovsky (four years his senior) and Pyotr Vyazemsky (five years his junior), he can be seen as an immediate forerunner of the great flowering of Russian poetry associated with the names of Aleksandr Pushkin, Evgeny Baratynsky, Anton Delvig, Nikolay Yazykov, and many more.

  The prime of his life was the time when Russia was at war with the armies of Napoleon, and indeed Batyushkov might well have been a character in War and Peace. The first scene in Tolstoy’s novel takes place in July 1805 in a St. Petersburg salon such as the eighteen-year-old Konstantin frequented at that time. The world he knew was very much the world of the novel, a society held between the opposite poles of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and between city and country, but for several years turned topsy-turvy by foreign wars and invasion, a society where social success depended largely on family, patronage, and marria
ge. Like Prince Andrey and Nikolay Rostov, Batyushkov joined the fight against Napoleon, being wounded not at Austerlitz, but at the battle of Heilsberg, just before Friedland and Tilsit. Later he missed the battle of Borodino, but saw the smoking ruins of Moscow (like Pierre Bezukhov), then marched west in pursuit of Napoleon and entered Paris with the Russian army in 1814. In 1820, the date Tolstoy gives to his Epilogue, Batyushkov was coming to the end of his active life and showing signs of mental disturbance, but he lived on until 1855, by which time Tolstoy was approaching the age of thirty and thinking toward his great novel of the Napoleonic wars.

  Batyushkov was born during the reign of Catherine the Great and died just after Tsar Nicholas I, but his most active years coincided with the reign of Nicholas’s elder brother, Alexander I, with whose army he marched into Paris. He encountered Alexander for the first time in 1813 and seems to have had mixed feelings about him. From the early nineteenth century, however, the young poet looked back with admiration to the greatest of the Romanovs, Peter the Great, who had made Russia, permanently if incompletely and controversially, a European nation with a European culture. Batyushkov was proud to belong to this renewed culture, singing Peter’s praises in a number of places. Thus, in a dialogue entitled “An Evening at Kantemir’s,” his protagonist, Prince Kantemir, the Russian poet and ambassador in Paris in the 1730s, explains to his French interlocutors how his once barbarous nation has been transformed:

  You know what Peter did for Russia; he created people—no! he developed all the spiritual potential in them; he cured them of the disease of ignorance; and the Russians, under the guidance of a great man, proved in a short time that talents belong to the whole of humanity.

  (Essays, 43)

  Peter was not particularly interested in literature, but in creating a modern state. To do this, he needed an educated people, and he created institutions of learning that would transform the cultural life of the elite. And not just the elite: the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, founded in 1724, subsequently the Imperial Academy, gave an education to the commoner Mikhailo Lomonosov, who became a prominent academician and the father of modern Russian literature (the University of Moscow bears his name today). In one of his essays, Batyushkov presents Lomonosov as the Peter the Great of Russian language and literature:

  He achieved as much in the difficult sphere of literature as Peter the Great had in the sphere of politics. Peter the Great awakened a nation sleeping in the fetters of ignorance; he gave it laws, military power and fame. Lomonosov awakened the language of this sleeping people; he gave it eloquence and poetry, he tested its strength in every genre and prepared reliable means to success for future talents.

  (Essays, 9)

  Batyushkov and his friends were to be counted among these “future talents.”

  If Russian literature was to take its place in the concert of European literatures, it had to learn from foreign examples, just as Peter had served his apprenticeship in the shipyards of Holland, bringing back to Russia foreign craftsmen and specialists of all kinds. Naturally, therefore, translation played a central role in the creation of Russian literary culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. German writers and scientists were influential, but the dominant model was France. Paris was the cultural capital of Europe, French increasingly became the second language of educated Russians, and the Russian nobility began to travel to France. Kantemir, as we have seen, was at home in Paris in the 1730s; his satires are written in French-style syllabic verse, and were published in London in French translation. He was aiming to be the Russian Boileau, and many of his successors were seen as the Russian Racine, Molière, Voltaire, or La Fontaine.

  By the second half of the eighteenth century, the enlightenment culture of France was epitomized in the figure of Voltaire, with his readable witty critique of existing abuses, superstition, and obscurantism; Voltaire and the philosophes were eagerly read in the new Russia by Batyushkov, among others. But France also offered models of salon poetry; by the end of the century, French poetry tended to mean above all light, galant verse—witty, erotic, and sentimental. Among the young Batyushkov’s models we find representatives of successive generations, Jean-Baptiste Gresset (1709–1777), Évariste de Parny (1753–1814), and Charles-Hubert Millevoye (1782–1816). All of these are largely forgotten today, but Parny in particular had a great reputation among the young Russian poets of the early nineteenth century. In one of her poems, Anna Akhmatova has the schoolboy Pushkin strolling outside his school, in the park of Tsarskoe Selo, with a “dog-eared copy of Parny.”2

  Of course, by the time Pushkin was at school around 1812, France was not primarily the place of enlightenment and light verse. In the first place, it had become the land of revolution, to which the Russians, like other European peoples, reacted variously, ranging from enthusiasm to horror. Revolution was followed by foreign conquests under Napoleon; in Batyushkov’s eyes, as we shall see, the invasion of the Napoleonic armies and the destruction of Moscow meant that French enlightenment had given way to barbarism. In Russian literature more generally, the new century brought a change of models, with French enlightened classicism giving way to the romanticism of Northern Europe, which was made available to Russians by some major translations. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Vasily Zhukovsky helped create a new poetry with his versions of Gray’s “Elegy” and German ballads. Even before this came the vogue for an imagined ancient Celtic culture generated by James Macpherson’s “translations” of Ossian. Kostrov’s complete Russian Ossian was published in 1792, and several of Batyushkov’s poems show him succumbing to the charm of the northern bard.

  Vologda, where Batyushkov was born and died, is an ancient city of northern Russia. Situated some 200 miles to the north of Moscow, and some 250 miles to the east of St. Petersburg, it occupied a strategic position on the trading routes connecting Novgorod, Moscow, and Archangel. As a child, Batyushkov lived for several years on his grandfather’s estate at Danilovskoe, southwest of Vologda, and he later inherited from his mother the estate of Khantonovo, between Vologda and Novgorod. Between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, Batyushkov led a wandering life; his destiny carried him from place to place, both within Russia and abroad, to Germany, Finland, France, England, Sweden, Italy. In these years, Khantonovo was the country base to which straitened circumstances and inclination frequently forced him to return, and where he had the leisure to write.

  In one of his essays, Batyushkov speaks of the formative influence of the places where poets spend their earliest years. Following Montesquieu’s theories about the dependence of culture on climate, he writes:

  The climate, the sight of sky, water and earth, all this works on the poet’s impressionable soul. We see in the songs of the Scandinavian scalds and the Erse bards something severe, dark, wild and invariably meditative, reminding us of the overcast northern sky, the sea mists, and a nature poor in the gifts of life but always majestic and delightful, even in its horror.

  (Essays, 26–27)

  Batyushkov is thinking here of the poems attributed to Ossian, which swept through literary Russia in his youth, but he finds this northern character too in the writing of his hero Lomonosov, who came from Arkhanglesk in the far north:

  I see in my mind’s eye how, full of inspiration,

  A youth stands silently above the raging ocean,

  His mind alive with dreams and sweet new thoughts,

  Hearing the waves’ monotonous uproar.

  (“Epistle to I. M. Muravyov-Apostol,” Essays, 283)

  Derzhavin, Batyushkov’s great predecessor, is imagined similarly, haunted by the sights and sounds of his Volga childhood.

  It is not surprising then if he presents himself as a “Hyperborean,” a child of the North. In “The Traveler and the Stay-at-Home,” a long fable about the dangers and the charms of travel, he has his exhausted traveler returning to Athens only to set off again in search of a land of eternal spring, to find roses in “the snows of the
Hyperboreans” (Essays, 319). Batyushkov himself, responsive as he was to the charms of the Bay of Naples during his diplomatic service there, still found himself longing for home. Home might mean Moscow or St. Petersburg, but also the run-down estate at Khantonovo, a wooden mansion set on a hill looking over the grandiose Sheksna River and the immense forests and marshes of the North. Not that he was always happy there, far from it. Like Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, he found boredom lying in wait for him in the country, where he lived a lonely life. In a letter of November 1809 to his best friend, Nikolay Gnedich, he writes: “Time passes quickly, then slowly, there is more bad than good, more stupidity than intelligence…In my house all is quiet; the dog is dozing at my feet, looking at the fire in the stove, my sister is in another room, reading old letters, I think…I have picked up a book again and again, and it has fallen from my hands” (SP, 286). In the winter it could be fearfully cold too, prompting the poet to a flash of doggerel in a letter to his friend:

  I’m shivering with cold,

  Though I’m sitting by the stove,

  Lying under my coat

  I see the fire’s glow,