Writings from the Golden Age of Russian poetry

Whatever his motivations, the poet marched off to war. He remembered this departure ten years later, in an essay in memory of his soldier friend, the even younger Ivan Petin, who died a heroic death at the battle of Leipzig in 1813:

In 1807 we both left the capital and set off on the campaign. I believe in sympathy, because experience has taught me to believe in the inexplicable mysteries of the heart. Our souls were alike. The same passions, the same predilections, the same impetuous and carefree nature that was characteristic of me in my early youth captivated me in my comrade. The habit of being together, enduring together the labors and cares of war, sharing dangers and pleasures, all this bound us more closely.

(Essays, 399)

Batyushkov was full of enthusiasm, and felt happy riding through the fields reading Tasso. Unlike Petin, though, he was not a born soldier. In the self-portrait quoted above we read: “He served in the army and in the civil service, very assiduously and very unsuccessfully in the former.” A snatch of verse in a letter sent to Gnedich at the beginning of March sounds a comic note of nostalgia:

Am I condemned to hear just drums of war?

Let friendship’s lovely voice amid the clashes

For one short hour restore me to Parnassus

When I have strayed into the ranks of Mars

And on a doughty Rosinante2

Set off for glory at a canter.

(CP, 241)

A few days later, from Riga, again in a letter to Gnedich, Batyushkov gives a fuller, but by no means heroic, picture of poet as soldier:

Believe me, it’s not easy from a sleigh or saddle

With people shouting “Quick March!” or “Eyes right!”

To write, dear friend, a verse epistle…

No—shunning me, the Muses have taken flight

And in St. Petersburg or God knows where

Hidden their lovely features.

Without them I am speechless!

If you become a wolf you can’t so soon unlearn

The wolfish way of walking and the howl.

So, when a sacred thought arises in my soul

Not hearing drums that beat,

Or the sharp shouts of stately musketeers,

I urge my poor winged horse to take its flight

Up to Parnassus—or, put otherwise,

Eschewing eloquence,

A dismal sight rises before my eyes.

The wind from all sides blows through the smashed panes;

A gloomy tomcat woos his feline lover

And the poor Finn’s knapsack

Falls from his weary back;

The wretch squats in the fireside corner

And with a torn sleeve wipes the tears that linger…

Poor children of a climate cold and raw,

Acquainted with hunger, Russian soldiers, war!

(CP, 77–78)

Before long, though, the game turned serious. The Russian army crossed the Prussian frontier and on May 28 and 29 engaged the enemy in the battle of Heilsberg. Batyushkov fought bravely here, and had to be carried off the field half-dead. He gave his version of events in a poem of 1809:

REMEMBERING

Dreams! You have been beside me everywhere,

Strewing the dark road of my life with flowers!

How sweetly in the Heilsberg fields I dreamed

While the whole camp lay deep in sleep,

And leaning on his spear of steel, the warrior

Gazed into misty distance! In the sky

The full moon shone, shedding its light

Between the branches on my little hut;

The Alle gently rolled its glowing stream,

Reflecting in its waves the camp and trees.

In the dim hours of night the fires burned low

Beside the sleeping soldier’s huts. O fields

Of Heilsberg! O you lofty hills,

Where I so often in the moonlit night

Sat deep in thought, dreamed of my motherland.

O fields of Heilsberg! Then I did not know

That soldiers’ bodies soon would strew your grass,

That from these hills the metal jaws would thunder,

And I, your happy dreamer, flying

To meet my death against the foe,

Would press my hand on a deep wound,

Nearly succumbing at my dawn of life…—

The storms of life passed over like a dream! —

Only dark memory survives…

A frontier lies between the past and us;

Only in dream can we come near it.

And in my memory I now bring back

To life the terrifying moment

When in a paroxysm of pain,

Seeing a hundred deaths before me,

I feared to die far from my native place.

But heaven heard my heartfelt prayers and looked

With pity on me in my need;

I crossed the Neman, saw the promised land

And wept and kissed the earth and said:

“Thrice blessed is the man who lives at home

Among his household gods, enjoying the peace,

And never takes a step outside his hut

And does not with his prayers

Trouble winged Victory!

He is not blinded by the love of fame

To sacrifice his peace, his blood:

He sees his grave and quietly waits for death.”

(Essays, 210–11)

The poem, written in the flowing manner characteristic of Batyushkov’s elegies, moves with little warning from the soldier’s dreams to the horrors of action; above all, it dramatizes the pull between the glamour of war and the joys of home life (the “household gods”) that will recur in his writing.

Batyushkov’s injury was indeed serious and was to plague him in later life. In 1808, his bravery at Heilsberg would be rewarded with the Order of St. Anne (third class). Meanwhile he was transferred to Riga to convalesce; another letter to Gnedich tells the tale:

Dear friend! I am alive. How—God only knows. I was shot right through the leg by a bullet that hit the upper part of my thigh and my behind. The wound is quite deep, but not dangerous, since the bone has apparently not been hit—how this happened I don’t know. I am in Riga. I can’t convey to you what I had to suffer lying in the cart that brought me here. Our battalion had heavy losses. All the officers are wounded, one dead. The infantry were very brave, crazily so. Who could have imagined all this?

(SP, 281)

Riga turned out to be a place of happiness for the wounded poet. In the two months he spent there, he convalesced in the welcoming house of a local merchant. The poem I have translated as “Remembering” was originally called “Memories of 1807” and had a long concluding section (omitted from the publication of his works in 1817) expressing the poet’s gratitude to the “peaceable family” and the “hospitable roof” of his Riga hosts. Above all, Batyushkov remembered the daughter of the house, whom he called Emilia—whether this was her real name or a poetic label remains unclear. Here are some nostalgic lines from what seems to be one of Batyushkov’s first genuine love poems:

Alas, it all has vanished like a sweet dream!

Where have they gone, the raptures and the kisses,

And where are you, clandestine nighttime meetings,

When I would hold her tight in my embrace

And did not envy even the gods their fate!…

Now, separated from her,

I count the weary days, dragging my bitter chain,

And only memories give me the power

To fly to her again

And dimly in the night I feel

Through dreaming’s deep enchantment

A gentle breeze that bears the fragrance

Of flowers, and I breathe

Emilia’s sweet breath.

(Essays, 535–36)

It is hard to know how much reality there is in the various love poems that Batyushkov left. Sometimes it is clear that he is imitating the erotic or sentimental writings of a Tibullus or a Parny, as in his youthful verses addressed to “Malvina,” “Chloe,” and others. He describes himself in an epistle to Petin as “equally unhappy in love and war”—and certainly he seems far removed from such enterprising ladies’ men as Byron or Pushkin. He may have had passing affairs, but the only woman for whom his love was clearly expressed was Anna Furman, and as we shall see, this love was to remain unrequited. Nevertheless, the tender sentiments expressed in various poems of 1809–1810, even when the poems are in part translations from the French or the Italian, suggest a strong attachment to the memory of the Riga merchant’s daughter. Not that it matters greatly to the twenty-first-century reader, any more than it matters whether Ronsard’s sonnet on the death of “Marie” is inspired by a real loss or by a patron’s commission. In Batyushkov’s case, his Riga love, whether real or imaginary, gave us the most moving (and the most shapely) of his early poems:

CONVALESCENCE

As the white lily feels the mower’s murderous scythe

And bows its head, slowly dissolving,

So in my illness I could sense untimely death

And thought the hand of fate was on me.

The black of Erebus already veiled my sight,

My heart was beating time more slowly,

I was dissolving, vanishing, still young, the sun

Of my existence setting.

But you came close to where I lay, life of my soul,

Your rose-red lips, so sweetly breathing,

The tears that sparkled in the brightness of your eyes

And the succession of your kisses,

Your burning sighs, the power of your beloved words,

All called upon me to abandon

The dark domains of grief, the fields of death, the shores

Of Lethe, for the world of passion.

You gave me back my life; this was your blessed gift.

From now on I shall breathe you only,

Even the hour of torment will seem sweet to me,

And love will be my dissolution.

(Essays, 214)

In the autumn of 1807, when the militia was disbanded, Batyushkov joined the Guards, but he very soon fell ill and spent the winter in St. Petersburg on sick leave, being looked after by the Olenin family. Over the next year, moving to and fro between the capital and his northern homeland, he was preoccupied with family affairs and relations with his father and sisters. His decision to join the army had upset his father, who then exacerbated relations by remarrying. Konstantin’s unmarried sisters Aleksandra and Varvara took their brother’s side in the quarrel, and they eventually went with him to live on his mother’s estate at Khantonovo, but only when he was able to inherit it at the age of twenty-one. Meanwhile, he seems to have written very little, though he was continuing to work on the translation of Tasso. He did, however, write one more verse epistle to Gnedich, enclosed with a letter of July 1, 1808, sounding the note of country boredom, isolation, and depression, which will so often be heard in his letters:

Now I can break the chain of silence

And greet my bosom friend again.

It’s a long time since last I sent you

The scratchings of my idle pen.

And how can my flute make tuneful music

Beneath this empty, savage sky?

Is this a place for the young muses

To come and make sweet poetry?

How can I sing oppressed by fate,

Held fast by a cruel destiny,

With neither friends nor family?

Amid a sea of desolation

Only cold hearts can take their ease

And cast their eyes without emotion

On tombs of loved ones and of friends,

On death and malicious calumny

That like a serpent, basely writhing,

Inflicts a cruel wound in hiding

On spotless innocence itself;

But with a soul that feels so deeply

Can I remain a placid victim

In this harsh world of calumny?

On this earth we all will find

An open grave for humankind,

Where, mown down by the fatal scythe,

They all must fall, the sceptered tsar,

The shepherd, monk and warrior!

Can I alone deserve to live

In happiness, eternally?

Alas, we all bow down beneath

The fetters and the yoke of grief,

Which all our lives we’re doomed to bear

With arms too weak to cast them off.

But how, dear friend, can we endure them

And never weep or feel despair?

It’s simpler far to cross the ocean

When Boreas spreads his wings in anger

Unharmed in a frail cockleshell

Bereft of rudder, shroud and sail

And never lift your eyes to heaven.

Now in your company I weep

While, lightning-like, time flashes by.

The bright moon shining over me

Stares peacefully into the lake;

All is asleep in night’s May shadow,

The waterfall is barely heard,

The groves in the quiet valley slumber,

And through their branches overhead

The subtle moonbeams float to earth,

And I, in Morpheus’ mighty hand,

Break off my flute’s sorrowful tune—

Perhaps before this short night ends

In the land of dreams I’ll find you

And once again embrace you, friend.

(CP, 81–82)

Then, in the autumn of 1808, his regiment was sent off on a new campaign. As an indirect result of the treaties signed at Tilsit, Russia went to war with Sweden over the possession of Finland, which was achieved in September 1809. For him the campaign lasted about eight months, during which he spent a hard winter in the northern part of Finland. The wildness of the country had a romantic appeal, and after his return to Russia he exploited this in his first serious prose writing, an “Extract from the Letters of a Russian Officer in Finland,” first published in the journal The European Herald (Vestnik Evropy) in 1810. It opens with the words:

I have seen a country close to the Pole, bordering on the Hyperborean sea, where nature is poor and cheerless, where the sun gives continual warmth for two months only, but where, as in countries more blessed by nature, people can find happiness.

(Essays, 95)

Then come poetic descriptions of northern scenery, the vast and impenetrable forests, the silence and darkness, the granite cliffs and roaring torrents, the interminable snowbound winters, the howling wolves and wheeling birds of prey. And this wild “Hyperborean” land once had wild inhabitants, warriors who drank blood out of the skulls of their enemies. Mingling images from Norse mythology with the poems of Ossian and even Arthurian legend, Batyushkov writes of the dreams of the poet in such a landscape:

Perhaps on this pine-covered cliff, at whose foot a gentle breeze stirs the deep waters of the gulf, perhaps on this cliff stood a temple to Odin. Here the poet loves to dream of bygone days and to plunge in thought into those ages of barbarism, magnanimity and fame. Here he looks with pleasure on the ocean waves once covered with the ships of Odin, Arthur and Harald, on the dark horizon where the shades of vanished warriors passed, on the stones, relics of gray antiquity, on which can be seen mysterious signs, drawn by some unknown hand.

(Essays, 98)

This is followed by a long quotation from Batyushkov’s youthful poem “Dreaming,” and finally by a picturesque evocation of the Russian army encamped in this wilderness.

Such is the romantic aspect of the northern campaign, later echoed in rather derivative poems such as “The Scald” and “Warriors’ Dream.” Batyushkov’s correspondence conveys a less heroic image. The campaign alternated between periods of movement and action (some of it shared with his friend Petin, who was soon wounded in the leg and separated from him), and long weeks spent in camps in the freezing wastes of northern Finland. Plagued by illness and longing to get back to St. Petersburg, Batyushkov wrote to Olenin:

It’s so cold here that time’s wings have frozen. Dreadful monotony. Boredom stretches out on the snow, or to put it more simply, it is so depressing in this savage, barren wilderness without books or society, and often without wine, that we can’t tell a Wednesday from a Sunday. So most humbly I beg you to order for me a Tasso (whom I have had the misfortune to lose) and a Petrarch…

(WP, 77)

The letter speaks again of skuka, a very Russian term, translated here as “boredom,” but really a more all-embracing world weariness; this was a constantly lurking presence in Batyushkov’s life. Against skuka, one remedy was Italian poetry. During the Finnish campaign he was continuing work on his translation of Tasso. In letters to Gnedich, he more than once asks himself why he should devote so much time to a task that would bring few rewards. However, in 1808 he published in a journal some of Canto 1 of Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberata), together with a rather formal epistle “To Tasso.” This piece was inspired by the “Épître au Tasse” of the French poet La Harpe, who also translated Tasso and whose admiration and sympathy for the suffering poet found a ready echo in Batyushkov. His own epistle may be derivative both in form (rhyming alexandrine couplets) and in sentiment, but it announces some of the characteristic directions his later poetry will take. The extracts given below concern Tasso’s many-sided poetic gift, his sufferings at the hand of ill-wishers, and his continuing fame:

…Torquato, he who knows the bitter taste

Of love and sorrow and in his young days,

Following the muse, enters the hall of fame,

He suffers and is great before his time!

You sang, and all Parnassus woke in rapture,

Young Phoebus with the muses in Ferrara

Placed in your hands the lyre of Ovid’s songs,

Sheltering your genius with immortal wings.

You sang the noise of war—the pallid furies

Spread out for you its darkness and its horrors:

Men race over the field, trampling on banners,

Their fury burning with the torch of hatred,

Hair flying in the wind and bloodied tunics,

And I see deaths…with brazen Mars beside me…

But war and horror, the clash of swords and spears,

The voice of Mars, have vanished into air;

I hear far off the oaten pipes of shepherds,

And I can give myself to other passions:

No hatred now, but the young god of love

Sleeps softly in a flowery myrtle grove.

And then he rises—once again swords glitter!

What Proteus so changes you, Torquato,

What wondrous god has filled these holy dreams

With both a grim and tender beauty’s beams?

…….….….….….….….….

And what reward, Torquato, were you given

For your harmonious songs? The critics’ venom,

The courtiers’ flattery and false words of praise,

Enough to poison any poet’s days.

And cruel love, the source of all your troubles,

Appeared before you in those golden chambers,

And from her hands you took the poisoned cup

Entwined with flowers and roses still in bud,

You drank it all, and in a dream of love

Enslaved yourself, enslaved your lyre to beauty.

But joys are false and happiness is fleeting—

The veil is torn. You are a slave, Torquato!

Thrown into darkness, like a criminal,

Deprived of freedom and of Phoebus’ light.

The poet’s soul is broken by deep sadness,

His talent, his creative power have vanished,

His reason’s gone!…O you whose treachery

Plunged Tasso in a hell of cruelty,

Come, feast your eyes on this fine entertainment,

And revel in the ruin of his talent!

Come! He who was above all human praise,

Who gave his heroes eloquence, whose eyes

Pierced through the clouds into the heavenly mansions—

Here groans in chains…. O you great Gods, have mercy!

How long yet must he, guiltless, bear the weight

Of shameful envy and infernal spite?

…….….….….….….…..

Godlike poet, we call to you in vain,

But the whole world still rings with Tasso’s fame!

All that is left of Troy is dust and ashes,

We cannot tell where her great men are buried,

Divine Skamander eddies endlessly,

But in the minds of men, Homer still lives,

And humankind still glory in their singer:

His shrine—the world. And yours too will survive us.

(CP, 83–85)

Eventually Batyushkov’s requests for leave were successful and he was allowed to return to Russia. Much of the second half of 1809 was spent in the country, in the still-neglected estate at Khantonovo, in the company of his two unmarried sisters. Although this was the place of his household gods, he was not happy there, constantly short of money, and often ill and depressed. As he put it in a letter to Gnedich (in words that seem ominous in hindsight), “the charming, beautiful Madame de Sévigné says that if she could only live two hundred years, she would become a perfect woman. If I live another ten years, I shall go mad. Really, life is tedious and there’s no consolation” (SP, 286). But in fact he did find consolation in reading and writing. This period of enforced solitude gave Batyushkov the leisure to extend his already impressive literary culture and to work out his own poetic values and strategies.

His reading was extensive and covered several different literatures: the poets of Rome and of the Italian Renaissance, the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau, some English writers, as well as contemporary Russian writing. As we saw in chapter 1, he was strongly influenced by French love poetry of the late eighteenth century, notably that of Évariste de Parny. Admiration led to translation, which led to original writing. Translation is particularly important for literary cultures that are just finding their own voice, as Russian culture was in the early nineteenth century. The great translators of the time were Gnedich and in particular Vasily Zhukovsky, whom Batyushkov was soon to meet in Moscow, but translation and imitation occupy a central position in Batyushkov’s oeuvre too. Before long, he would be seen as the Russian Parny, and already in Khantonovo he was beginning his free translation of Parny’s Madagascar Songs (Chansons madécasses).

Parny, born on the Île Bourbon (present-day Réunion), was vastly popular in his day—Chateaubriand described him as “the only elegiac poet France has produced.”³ He became famous with his Erotic Poems (Poésies érotiques, 1778), followed a few years later by the Madagascar Songs, prose poems supposedly based on the folk songs of Madagascar (comparable in a way to Macpherson’s recent versions of Gaelic poetry in Biblical English). Since Parny probably never set foot in Madagascar, there is some doubt about the status of his versions, but this didn’t prevent them from attracting, like Ossian, foreign readers and translators. Only one of Batyushkov’s Madagascan songs survives, in which he recasts Parny’s poetic prose into rhyming quatrains. Parny’s poem (Chanson VIII) begins:

Il est doux de se coucher durant la chaleur sous un arbre touffu, et d’attendre que le vent du soir amène la fraîcheur.

(It is sweet to lie during the heat under the dense foliage of a tree and to wait for the evening breeze to bring coolness.)

In Batyushkov’s poem this gives a quatrain that can be translated:

How sweet to sleep in the cool shade

While the great heat consumes the valley

And the wind in this forest glade

Stirs the leaves with its soft breathing.

(CP, 117)

Batyushkov was to translate quite a few more Parny poems in the following year or two; I shall return to these and other translations in the next chapter.

He composed a number of other poems in these Khantonovo months, most of them concerned with the campaign of 1807. These include two we have already looked at, “Memories of 1807” and “Convalescence,” as well as a nostalgic epistle to Count Wielgorski, a Polish composer he had met in Riga. Here too we can probably place an “Answer to Gnedich,” a short verse epistle in his familiar manner replying to a friendly letter, painting a formalized self-portrait of the poet as modest country-dweller, and reflecting on the rival pull of friendship and love.

ANSWER TO GNEDICH

Now and in time to come, dear Gnedich,

Your friend gives you his hand and heart;

He has served his time with the blind goddess,

Mother of cares that bear no fruit.

Alas! my friend, in my young season

I too fell foul of Circe’s charms,

But looking in my empty pockets,

I have forsaken love and arms.

Let those afflicted with ambition

Hurl fire and thunderbolts with Mars

While I, not seeking recognition,

Live happy in my little house.

There let us place our clay Penates

Together in a friendly shade

And then sit down to simple suppers—

Our dreams will give us golden days.

And if by chance love should come calling

On our retreat, friendship’s abode,

Alas! your friend, the same as ever,

Will pay his homage to the god.

As a guest, overcome by feasting,

Gets up and quits the sumptuous board,

So I, lost in a lover’s rapture,

Uncaringly will quit the world!

(Essays, 274)

All the poems and letters sent to Gnedich failed to persuade him to come and stay in Khantonovo. At his friend’s request, however, Batyushkov wrote some verses to a “goddess of beauty,” the great tragic actress and singer Ekaterina Semyonova (who provides yet another link with War and Peace, since she sings in the opera attended by Natasha and so memorably described by Tolstoy). At the same time, soon after his return to Khantonovo, he was beginning to write in a more acid vein on the cultural life of St. Petersburg and Moscow, about which he was well informed, even though living at a distance. In August, he sent Gnedich some newly composed epigrams, including this “Madrigal for a New Sappho:”

You are Sappho, I Phaon, I agree:

But it’s a great sorrow to me

That you don’t know the way to the sea.

(Essays, 306)

Referring to Sappho’s legendary death by drowning, this is directed, no doubt unfairly, against the poet Anna Bunina, possibly referring to her love for the poet Ivan Dmitriev. Batyushkov admired Dmitriev and was later on good terms with Bunina; the main reason for his malice at this time was no doubt her alliance with the traditionalist camp of writers led by Admiral Shishkov. The Shishkovists were the main targets in the long satirical poem, “Vision on the Banks of Lethe” (1809), which was to make Batyushkov a fashionable figure in the metropolitan literary world.

Russian literature at this time was broadly split into two camps. The most prominent figure was Nikolay Karamzin (born 1766), now best known as the author of the great History of the Russian State, but in the years around 1800 seen principally as a reformer of the Russian literary language and the leader of the sentimentalist movement, which found expression in his periodical, the Moscow Journal (Moskovsky zhurnal). He and his numerous disciples (many of them based in Moscow) aimed to reform the language of Russian literature, reducing the number of Slavonicisms (expressions based on the archaic language of the Russian church), inventing new terms often based on French models, so as to create an easy, elegant, modern style, suitable for use in light society verse. This tendency was opposed by the conservative camp whom we now call the Archaists, grouped around the poet, statesman, and admiral Aleksandr Shishkov. In a Discourse on the Old and New Style published in 1803, Shishkov had criticized the modernizing cosmopolitanism of the Karamzinians. A believer in the classical poetics of eighteenth-century Russia, he championed Church Slavonic as the root of Russian, but also advocated the traditional language of the peasants as an additional source for literary Russian. In the “Vision on the Banks of Lethe,” Batyushkov coins the new word “Slavenophile” to describe Shishkov; the conflict between these two camps can be seen as a literary prefiguration of the Slavophile/Westernizer debates that were to be so important in nineteenth-century Russian culture.

Although he was later prominent as a critic of the Archaists, Batyushkov is not the champion of any one cause in the “Vision,” but shoots his arrows in all directions in a long satire that owes a good deal to French models. He avoids mentioning Karamzin, but the Moscow Karamzinians get their share of mockery. The basic notion of the satire is a dream in which all the currently active poets are struck dead by Apollo and have to come before a jury of the great dead poets; they throw their works into the waters of Lethe, the river of oblivion—those that sink will be forgotten. Here come the Karamzinians, sporting a variety of sentimental affectations, most of them easily identified by knowledgeable contemporary readers (the toupee-wearing “prince of fibbers” is the Karamzinian poet Shalikov):

But here appeared some other shadows;

They hailed from Moscow’s white-walled town

And sported wonderful apparel:

Their robes were copiously sewn

With leaves from head to foot; one gloried

In childish verse and childish prose,

One in a mausoleum, a churchyard,

One in the diary of his soul;

Some sang Melania, Ziulmisa,

The Moon or Vesper or a dove,

Glafira, Chloe, Militrisa,

Or rams, or cats and toms in love.

All these in melancholy verse

In every key, for charming ears

(O age of iron!). But the ladies

Had never once in sleep or waking

Noticed these miserable bards.

In all the pallid, doleful crowds,

One sporting a well-combed toupee,

A prince of fibbers, licensed poet,

Presents his new work to the court.

“And who are you?” “Alas, a shepherd,

A sigher, never taken short;

Here is my crook, my wreath of flowers,

Here my taffeta bouquet,

And here the list of stubborn beauties

For whom I lived and breathed all day,

And whom I wearied with my charms.

Here is my Aglaya, my sheep”—

He spoke and, yawning wearily,

Fell into Lethe half-asleep.

(Essays, 358–59)

The next victim is rather different. It is the poet Sergey Glinka, who was later to become a good friend of Batyushkov, in spite of the lines about him in the “Vision.” In his journal Russian Herald (Russky vestnik), he was a champion of all things Russian, which exasperated the more cosmopolitan, though patriotic, Batyushkov:

“Ouf, I’m so tired! A chair, your honor—

I’m very famous, let me sit;

I am immortal when I’m funny.”

“Your name?” “A Russian and a poet.

I chase after celebrity,

Foreign good sense is my enemy.

To Russians my twisted words are straight.

And by my pilgrim’s scrip I swear it.”

“But who are you?” “The Russian Rousseau,

The Russian Young, Locke and Racine.

I have composed three Russian dramas

For Russians: I have no more strength

To write more tearful plays for Russians.

My labors have been all in vain.

These foreign notions are to blame.”

With that, he vanished in the stream.

(Essays, 359)

Eventually it is the turn of Shishkov and his team, the devotees of noble Russian antiquity:

And then, on Hades’ sullen shore,

Appeared a great and wondrous spirit.

In a stupendous coach of yore

He quietly approached the river;

Instead of nags between the shafts

People were harnessed fore and aft,

And with a will they heaved and pulled him,

And in his wake like autumn drones

Thronging the air in light-winged squadrons

Shades of all kinds came floating on

To left and right. At the sound “Whoa!”

The pale shade shook his weary brow

And came out coughing from the carriage.

“And who might you be?” Minos queried,

“And who are these?” to which the shade

Answered: “From Neva’s banks we hail—

All Russian bards.” “But what misfortune

Has changed these people into horses?”

“This is my youthful regiment

Of poets fired by love of plaudits;

They sang Pozharsky and they lauded

The venerable Hermogen.

Their thoughts are aimed at heaven, their words

Are taken from the Holy Scripture,

Their lines may be a little rough,

But genuine Varyago-Russian.”

“And you yourself?” “I too am one

Whom old Kurganov4 taught to write;

I did not deal in trifles, but

In patience, sweat and noble toil,

For I am a Slavenophile.”

(Essays, 360–61)

But though a comic figure, Shishkov is in a different league from his followers, and he and his works will escape drowning: “for his firm mind and his deeds he tasted the reward of immortality.”

The strongest approbation, however, is given to the eccentric figure of the “Russian La Fontaine,” the fable writer Ivan Krylov, a writer set apart from both camps, and always the object of Batyushkov’s affectionate mockery and real admiration:

A shade now came to Minos’ throne,

Unkempt and in the strangest costume,

Wrapped in a tattered dressing gown,

All fluffy, with a shaggy forehead,

Carrying a napkin and a book,

Saying: “Death deliberately took

Me unawares one day at table,

But I am ready, when you like,

To start again with you and sample

Hell’s offering of pies and wine:

Now is the time, good friends, to dine.

You know me, Krylov is my name!”