Writings from the Golden Age of Russian poetry

In March 1813, nine months after his sickbed poem to Zhukovsky, Batyushkov wrote a quite different epistle. Addressed to his young literary friend Dmitry Dashkov, it marks a turning point in his work. It deals with a subject—war—which in the traditional poetics would have been treated in a high formal ode; Batyushkov’s treatment shows his innovative genius, breaking down the barriers between genres, mixing different styles, solemn, lyrical, and familiar, to express an individual take on life. It is written in the short lines he favored for epistles, but in this poem we have the iambic tetrameters characteristic of eighteenth-century odes, as against the lighter trimeters of “My Penates”:

TO DASHKOV

My friend, I’ve seen a sea of evil,

The punishments of vengeful heaven,

The fury of our enemies,

War and its devastating fires.

And I have seen the rich, the crowds

Of fugitives in tattered clothes,

And poor mothers pale as shrouds

Driven from their cherished homes.

At the crossroads I have seen them

Clutching their babies to the breast;

Bitterly I saw them weeping

And staring at the flaming red

Of the dark sky with a new shudder.

Three times since, aghast with horror,

I’ve walked through devastated Moscow

Among the ruins and the graves;

Three times since, my tears of sorrow

Have watered the city’s sacred ash.

There, in the streets, where mighty buildings,

The ancient towers of the tsars,

Were witnesses of former glories

And of the fame of later years;

There where the holy monks of old

Now rest in peace through passing time,

And as the centuries unfold,

Nothing disturbs their sacred shrines;

There where in days of peaceful labor

The hand of luxury had made

Among the golden domes of Moscow

Gardens and parks—now all I met

Was embers, ashes, piles of stone,

Bodies heaped high along the river,

And pallid regiments of soldiers

Wandering through the ruined town!…

And you, my friend, you, my dear comrade,

Want me to sing of love and joy,

Of carefree happiness and leisure,

Of wine and youthful revelry!

And in the city’s dreadful glare

Among the fearful storms of war,

To call the nymphs and shepherds here

With carols to the dancing floor!

To sing of the sweet blandishments

Of Armidas and fickle Circes

Among the graves of my dear friends

Fallen on the field of glory!

No, no! let my talent waste away

And let the lyre, so dear to friendship,

Perish if ever I forget

Moscow the golden, my dear homeland!

No, no! until the day I bring

My life, the love of my own country

As a sacrifice fit to avenge

The honor of my fathers’ city;

Until with that hero whose wounds

Led him along the path to glory1

I have three times taken my stand

Against the ranks of hostile warriors;

My friend, until that blessed time

I shall not know muses or graces,

Love and its passionate embraces,

Or the tumultuous joys of wine!

(Essays, 237–39)

This poem quickly became regarded as the most significant poetic reaction to the destruction of Moscow in 1812. We don’t know what suggestion from Dashkov prompted such an outburst of feeling, but the grief and patriotic fervor expressed here were real enough. Batyushkov had indeed been three times through the “sacred ashes” of Moscow, and was able to write realistic descriptions of the French invasion and the great fire that destroyed the city in 1812. A letter to Gnedich after his first visit in October 1812 reads like a prose draft for the poem:

From Tver to Moscow and from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod I saw, I saw whole families of all conditions and all ages in the most pitiful situation; I saw what I had not seen in Prussia or in Sweden: whole provinces forced to move! I saw poverty, despair, fires, hunger and all the horrors of war, and I shuddered as I looked at the earth, the heavens and myself.

Batyushkov stood out among his contemporaries for his refusal of both frivolous indifference and false heroics. From the beginning of the invasion, he had understood the dangers of the situation, but at the same time, he would always reject the patriotic embellishment of feats of arms.

For months, though, he was unable to participate in the fight against Napoleon. Illness and shortage of money prevented him from joining his friend Vyazemsky for the battle of Borodino, fought in early September (late August according to the Russian calendar). Just a few days before Borodino he had been called to Moscow to look after Mikhail Muravyov’s widow, Ekaterina Fyodorovna, who was ill, isolated, and living in a dacha outside the city, with the French troops approaching. While he was there, he received a letter from his friend Petin, written just before Borodino. The letter made a deep impression, as he later recalled in his “Memories of Petin”: “We were in a terrible panic in Moscow, and I was amazed at the mental calm emanating from every line of a letter scribbled down on a drum at a fateful moment.” This businesslike tranquility, allied to Petin’s desire to fight for his country, a desire free of all hatred—all this aroused Batyushkov’s envy: “Fortunate friend, you shed your blood on the field of Borodino, the field of honor, within sight of your beloved Moscow, and I could not share this honor with you!” (Essays, 404). Instead, his role was to escort Ekaterina Fyodorovna to Nizhny Novgorod, two hundred miles to the east, where Moscow society had taken refuge.

In Nizhny, the refugees amused themselves as best they could, re-creating some of the “balls, charades, and masquerades” of Moscow, but Batyushkov found it hard to take part in this. In the letter to Gnedich just quoted, he continues: “The dreadful acts of the Vandals, i.e. the French, in and around Moscow, acts without precedent in history, have utterly upset my little philosophy and turned me against the human race” (SP, 335). And in a letter to Vyazemsky, he described the doings of the French invaders as “the fruits of enlightenment, or rather of vice, in that wittiest of nations which could pride itself on Henri IV and Fénelon” (SPP, 383). Vyazemsky advised him against joining the army, but Batyushkov had made up his mind to do what “duty, reason and the heart” demanded. He persuaded General Bakhmetev to take him on as an adjutant, but he still had to wait more than six months. In this time, he traveled to and fro between Nizhny and Vologda, passing through the ruins of Moscow, then in February 1813 returned to St. Petersburg, where he was reunited with his literary friends. It was these meetings and conversations that sparked the epistle to Dashkov.

While he awaited the long-delayed call to arms, the Russian troops had crossed the Niemen and were pursuing the French through Poland and Prussia. Batyushkov, meanwhile, was filling his time with literary battles, directing more satire against familiar targets. With a friend, he produced a sequel to the “Vision on the Banks of Lethe,” entitled “A Bard at the Circle of Lovers of the Russian Word.” Parodying Zhukovsky’s patriotic “A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors,” it figures an enthusiastic poet leading the band of Archaists in a ritual of self-glorification. Shishkov, who by this time was serving in the army, reappears in all his glory:

All honor to you, Slavenophile,

Indomitable champion!

You have put paid to reason’s rule,

Untiring in your chanting.

(Essays, 369)

This was just a squib (later described by its author as “a very silly joke”), but like the “Vision,” it circulated widely in manuscript copies, being printed much later. It foreshadows the satirical games of the Arzamas group that Batyushkov joined a couple of years later.

At more or less the same time as this poem and the epistle to Dashkov, he was practicing his German by translating some of Schiller’s The Bride of Messina (Die Braut von Messina), but also trying his hand at war poetry. The romance “Parting” sets out to be a worldly-wise soldier’s poem, inspired by the “hussar” verse of Denis Davydov; it soon became a popular song. In this piece it seems as if Batyushkov is deliberately avoiding a serious view of war and of love:

Propped on his saber, there he stood,

The hussar, plunged in woe;

Leaving his girl for years, he sighed

As he prepared to go:

“Don’t cry, my pretty one! No tears

Can ward off evil days.

By my honor and moustache, I swear

My love I’ll not betray!

Love’s an unconquerable force!

It shields me in the war;

With a true heart and a good sword

What danger can I fear?

Don’t cry, my pretty one! No tears

Can ward off evil days.

If I betray our love…I swear

By my moustache I’ll pay!

Then let him stumble, my good steed,

As I ride to the fight,

And let my soldier’s bridle snap

And the stirrups at my feet!

Let my good sword shatter in my hand

And break like rotten wood,

And me, all pale and trembling, stand

Where once before I stood!”

But his good steed did not stumble there

Beneath our gallant soldier;

His sword was still unshattered there—

And with it his hussar’s honor!

But he forgot the love and tears

Of his dear shepherdess,

On a foreign soil plucked happiness

With another lovely lass.

And the shepherdess, what did she do?

Gave her heart to another.

For lovely girls love is a toy,

Their promises—just blather!

True love, my friends, has flown away,

And cheating rules the land,

While laughing Cupid writes our oaths

With his arrow in the sand.

(Essays, 292–93)

The second of these war poems is of a quite different kind. On the first day of 1813, the Russian army had crossed the river Niemen (Neman), driving the French forces back to the west. Batyushkov was not present, but he used eyewitness accounts to paint a picture of the crossing in which realistic images mingle with a more traditional eloquence. Only a fragment remains of what was to have been a much longer poem:

RUSSIAN TROOPS CROSSING THE NEMAN ON THE FIRST OF JANUARY 1813

The somber Neman was sleeping wrapped in snow.

The plain of icy waves, the empty shore,

The villages abandoned by the river,

All were lit up by the dim moon.

All empty…dark upon the snow in places

Corpses are lying, a campfire smokes and dwindles

And, cold as a dead man,

A fugitive sits and thinks

There in the road, alone,

His eyes fixed, dull, unmoving, on his deadened feet.

On all sides silence…And see, in the empty distance,

A forest of massed spears has sprung from the earth!

It moves. The shields and swords and armor resonate

And menacingly in the somber night

The banners, horses, warriors all show black:

The regiments of Slavs carrying death

Pursue the foe, they reach the river, ground their spears,

And from the snow unnumbered tents have risen

And campfires burning on the shore

Have curtained all the sky in a red glow.

In the camp the young emperor

Sits among his generals,

By him an ancient leader, gleaming gray,

In the martial beauty of age.

(Essays, 343)

The “young emperor” is Tsar Alexander I, whom Batyushkov was to see (and admire) for the first time later in the same year, since eventually, in July, he was allowed to leave St. Petersburg and head west.

Traveling by way of Vilnius and Warsaw, he joined the Russian army in Prague. Here he was attached as adjutant to the war-hardened General Nikolay Raevsky, who was later to befriend the young Pushkin during his southern exile. Batyushkov admired Raevsky intensely; he helped to care for him when he was seriously wounded, and they spent several months at close quarters. His admiration stopped short of idolatry, however, and his reports of conversations with the general helped to dispel a “noble Roman” legend that had gathered around him (see Essays, 412–16); here again, he anticipates the Tolstoy of War and Peace, who has his hero Nikolay Rostov cast doubt on the same legend.2

Batyushkov was soon in action, going under fire in the battle of Kulm. Here he was reunited with his old friend Ivan Petin, now a youthful colonel; a sketch of 1815–1816 entitled “Memory of Places, Battles and Travels” gives a vivid, if rather literary, account of their conversations during a pause in the hostilities:

The whole camp rises up in my imagination, and thousands of trivial details enliven this imagination. My heart drowns in pleasure: I am sitting in my friend Petin’s hut at the foot of a high mountain crowned with the ruins of a feudal castle. We are alone. We talk openly, from the heart; we cannot see enough of one another after our long separation. The danger from which we had emerged unscathed, the noise, movement and activity of army life, the sight of the troops and their ammunition, the simple military hospitality of a friend, a comrade of my youth, a bottle of Bohemian wine resting on a drum, a handful of fruit and a piece of stale bread, parca mensa, a simple meal, but lovingly prepared—all this combined to make us happy as children.

(Essays, 396–97)

Before long the two friends were involved in an even more bloody conflict, the battle of Leipzig, which made a deep impression on Batyushkov. On the first day of the battle Raevsky was badly wounded and had to be helped from the field. Then Petin was killed in action and buried in a makeshift grave. In his “Memories of Petin,” Batyushkov writes:

I saw this grave, covered with fresh earth; I stood over it in deep sorrow and gave relief to my heart with tears. It contained the most precious treasure of my life—friendship. I asked, begged the respectable and very ancient priest of the village to preserve the fragile memorial, a simple wooden cross, with the brave young man’s name inscribed on it.

(Essays, 408)

The scene recurs in one of Batyushkov’s greatest poems, the elegy “Shade of a Friend.” Batyushkov himself came very near to being taken prisoner; as an adjutant, he was sent by the general to carry messages, and described what he experienced in a letter to Gnedich:

On the 7th [of September, Russian style], the general sent me early in the morning to Bernadotte’s army to inquire about his son. I rode all round Leipzig and saw all the horrors of war. The battlefield was still fresh—and what a field it was! For most of ten miles, there were piles of human bodies at every step, together with dead horses and shattered shell-cases and gun-carriages. Heaps of shells and the moans of the dying.

He concludes with a French tag from La Fontaine: ce sont là jeux de princes (such is the sport of princes).

Leipzig was Batyushkov’s cruelest exposure to the horrors of war. Thereafter he accompanied Raevsky to convalesce in Weimar, finding it dull and disagreeable, even if it was Goethe’s city. His soldier’s view of the place is spelled out in another letter to Gnedich:

We’ve been in Weimar ten days or so now; we lead a quiet, boring life. There is no society. The Germans are fond of the Russians, all except my landlord, who poisons me daily with filthy soup and baked apples. There’s nothing to be done about this; neither I nor my comrades have a pfennig until we get our pay. I wander around like a Scythian in the land of Goethe, Wieland and other learned folk. Occasionally I go to the theatre. The auditorium is not bad, but poorly lit. They play comedies, dramas, operas and tragedies—the last of these rather well, to my surprise. I liked Don Carlos greatly and am reconciled to Schiller.

Two months later the army moved through a series of German cities toward France, crossing the frontier into Alsace on the last day of 1813. This frontier was the Rhine, and Batyushkov later made this crossing the subject of one of the monumental “historical elegies” he wrote in 1816–1817, comparable in its ambition to “Tasso Dying.” There are realistic elements here, as in all of Batyushkov’s war writings, but the picture is heightened and idealized, with a courtier-like reference in the tenth stanza to “Russia’s benediction” (Tsar Alexander’s wife, who was born on the banks of the Rhine). Aiming at a kind of epic grandeur that he had not previously attempted in poetry, Batyushkov sets the current moment and his individual experience in a vast historical context, from the Roman legions to the invasion of Napoleon, culminating in the arrival of the Russian liberators:

THE CROSSING OF THE RHINE—1814

The troops come riding through the fields. My horse

Rejoices when he sees your waters gleaming

Far off, O Rhine, and whinnies,

Breaks from the ranks and gallops to the shore

Borne up on wings of thirst;

Then gulps your icy flood,

Bathing his weary chest

In your life-giving cold.

O precious day! I am standing by the Rhine!

I gaze with greedy eyes down from the hills

And greet the mountains, fields

And feudal castles wrapped in cloud and rain,

And the land rich in fame

And ancient memory

Where from the Alps eternally

You pour your mighty waves.

Witness of ancient days, of centuries,

O Rhine, those countless legions drank from you

Who with their swords wrote laws

For the proud wandering tribes of Germany.

Fate’s darling, freedom’s scourge,

Here Caesar fought and won,

And his steed swam across

Your sacred waters, Rhine!

Centuries passed; the cross now ruled your waves,

And love and honor filled men’s souls and thoughts;

Knights took up arms and fought

To save fair ladies’ honor, orphans’ lives.

Here in their tournaments

The champions’ sharp swords rang;

Here even today we sense

The troubadours’ sweet song.

And here, beneath the shade of oak and fig,

In the sweet murmur of the mountain streams,

In happy villages and towns

Passion still lives among the chosen few.

Here inspiration flows

From old simplicities,

The sacred love of home

And scorn for luxuries.

Everything here, the fields, the sacred waters,

Which knew time’s mysteries, the voice of bards,

Everything gives new power

To lofty feelings and high-flying thoughts.

Free, proud, half-savage, once

True priests of nature sang

The old Germanic songs…

But their spellbinding choirs are gone.

And you, great river, witness of all time,

You, still today so calm, so regal,

With your proud nation’s fall

You too have bowed your head in captive shame.

How long now have you flowed

In sorrow past the hordes

Of hostile troops who bear

The new Attila’s eagles?

How long is it since those who till your banks

Among their ancient vineyards first encountered

The alien regiments

And met the hostile gaze of foreign soldiers?

How long have they been drinking

Your wine in crystal cups,

And sending horses trampling

Your fields and your ripe crops?

The hour has struck! We sons of the north have come

Under our Moscow flag with fire and freedom;

We come from icy seas,

From the warm breakers of the Caspian,

From far-away Baikal,

From Dnieper, Don and Volga,

From Peter’s granite walls,

From Caucasus and Ural.

We have come in thunder to defend your name,

The honor of your arms, your wasted fields,

Your villages, the sacred place

Where Russia’s benediction bloomed in peace;

The land of the bright angel

Born for the midnight lands

And given by Providence

To tsar and grateful Russia.

We are here, O Rhine, you see our biting swords!

You hear the noise of troops, the neighing horses,

Hurrahs of victory and shouts

Of heroes galloping down to your wide waters.

Sending dust flying,

Trampling the enemy dead,

The horses soon are drinking,

Crowded on the soft earth.

What a rich feast for eyes and ears! We see

The horses, then the gleam of the bronze cannons,

The muskets ranged in battle,

And ancient flags among the shields and spears;

The plumes of soldiers’ helmets,

The ranks of heavy horses,

And the light cavalry—

Reflected in the water!

We hear the axes ring, the forest felled!

The campfires smoke and flare above the Rhine;

The festive goblets clink,

The soldiers’ joyful shouts rise to the skies;

A warrior hugs his friend,

Another whets his bayonet,

A horseman with a threatening hand

Brandishes a winged dart.

And there a rider, leaning on his spear,

Alone and pensive, stands on the high bank

And with an eager eye

Follows the river’s winding course. Perhaps

His memory is recalling

The river of his homeland,

And to his breast, unthinking,

He presses his bronze cross.

But over here a bloodless sacrifice

Is ordered by the generals among the heaps

Of trophies, and the priest

Kneels here before the God of the Maccabees.

Above him rustles and waves

The forest of our banners;

The young sun in the heavens

Makes our high altar blaze.

The cries of war fall silent; in the ranks

Devotion suddenly seals the soldiers lips;

The weapons are all dipped

Leaders and warriors bow their heads in thanks.

Then to our God they sing,

To you, the Lord of Hosts,

You never-failing sun,

The peaceful offerings smoke.

Now they all move away, line after line;

Like a great sea the army moves and flows,

And a heroic cry

Never yet heard by you, O Rhine, resounds;

Your welcoming shores give voice,

The bridge trembles at our shouts;

The enemy, seeing us, flees

And vanishes from sight.

(Essays, 320–24)

Battles, marches, and countermarches brought the Russian army to the gates of Paris. On the way, however, Batyushkov had taken time out to visit Cirey, the country mansion where Voltaire had lived with his lover, the physicist and mathematician Madame du Châtelet. He subsequently wrote about this visit in an open letter to Dashkov, published in 1816 under the title “A Journey to the Château de Cirey”; this is partly a tourist’s report, partly an homage to two remarkable people—though it is interesting to see that the fulsome praise of Voltaire is largely attributed to the writer’s companion. It is a romantically nostalgic visit: as the travelers approach Cirey, they meet an old man in a worn-out revolutionary cap, who tells them: “Time and revolution have destroyed everything…. They planted a tree of liberty…. They destroyed God’s churches…. And how did it all finish? The tree has been chopped down and the inscription on the church porch, Liberty, fraternity, or death, has been whitewashed over” (Essays, 105–6). A long note points up the contrast between the Germans, who love and preserve the past, and the French, for whom nothing is sacred. France, once so much admired, no longer offers a model of civilization. In Voltaire’s study the Russians declaim the odes of Derzhavin and Lomonosov, and Batyushkov cites Voltaire’s own words: “C’est du Nord à présent que nous vient la lumière” (It is from the North that the light shines today). Russia is the victorious power (Essays, 111–12).

Then on March 16–18 came the triumphal entry into Paris. A few days later, Batyushkov wrote again to Gnedich: “From the heights of Montreuil I saw Paris, wrapped in thick mist, an endless row of houses dominated by the lofty towers of Notre Dame. I confess my heart began to beat with joy!” (SP, 354). There was no fighting, and the Russian troops marched into the city to the hurrahs of the Parisians. In a letter to Zhukovsky some months later, Batyushkov described this as a “marvelous moment, worth a whole life” (SP, 379). He spent two months in Paris, looking at all the sights, visiting the opera, drinking in celebrated coffee houses and restaurants, and even attending a session of the French Academy. He was not greatly impressed by this sanctuary of French literature, and commented: “In the usual way of things, I think the age of glory for French literature has gone and is unlikely ever to return” (SP, 365). This remark comes from a rather literary letter addressed to Dashkov, one of the very few accounts he left of his time in Paris. He says little of the riches of the art galleries for fear of boring his correspondent, but he does allow himself some admiring words for Parisian women and their feet:

For them love pours out

All his golden arrows.

All is enchanting,

Their walk, their light figure,

Their arms, half-bared,

Their eyes full of pleasure,

Magic sounds on their lips

And passionate words.

Everything charms you—

And, dear friends…their feet!

The Graces’ creation,

Companions of Venus;

For such feet gods eternal

Spread the way with roses

Or smooth it with swan’s down.

Phidias before them

Would drown in emotion;

The poet is in heaven,

And the penitent, weeping,

Abandons his prayers.

The stay in Paris was pleasant enough, but after the initial rapture, Batyushkov was not bowled over. He has severe things to say on the old topics of French frivolity and the fickle affections of the Paris crowd. By the middle of May, having fallen ill, he is writing to Vyazemsky of his pleasure in imagining his return to Moscow and his friends: “I entered Paris full of enthusiasm and I am leaving it with joy” (SPP, 277). In “The Prisoner,” possibly written in France, but more likely after his return to Russia, he gives a sympathetic depiction of the very Russian nostalgia of Lev Davydov, brother of the poet, who was a prisoner of war in France. Here is a stanza “sung” by the captive:

Sound sweetly, sound, waves of the Rhone,

Water the golden fields,

But let the voice of my own Don

Sound through your song to me!

O winds, sweep down through the dark night

From the land I call my own,

And you, stars of the North, burn bright

On one so far from home!

(Essays, 244)

Not being a prisoner, Batyshkov no doubt felt less longing for home than his lyrical hero, but he neglected the opportunity to see more of France, and on May 17 set off on his return journey. He did not go by the direct overland route, but took advantage of an invitation from a friend, Dmitry Severin, who was on a diplomatic mission to London, and returned to St. Petersburg by sea, with brief stays in England and Sweden. It seems to have been his first experience of sea travel.

Unfortunately, we know little about his time in England. He arrived in London at a propitious moment, shortly after the tumultuous reception given to the tsar and the Don Cossack leader Platov, and he seems to have been surrounded by good friends from the Russian embassy. In a letter written to Severin in mid-June, after he had reached Sweden, he is lyrical in his praise of British life and society:

So, my friend, the land in which everything flourishes, a land piled high, so to speak, with the riches of the whole world, can only sustain itself by its unfailing respect for social and divine manners and laws.

These are the foundations for the freedom and prosperity of the new Carthage, that wonderful island where luxury and simplicity, the power of the king and of the citizen are constantly set against one another in a perfect equilibrium. This mixture of luxury and simplicity is what impressed me most in the homeland of Elizabeth and Addison.

This ideal view of Britain owes something to Voltaire’s English Letters and might not have survived a longer residence. But Batyushkov was in London for only a couple of weeks before setting off for home. He sailed from Harwich, where he was kept waiting by contrary winds. This gave him time to visit a church, where the “simplicity of the service,” the music, the angelic faces of the women, the numerous children, and the sailors’ weather-beaten faces left a “deep and delightful impression” on him. Once he was on board, he had to put up with seasickness and with some tedious fellow travelers, but he enjoyed the poetry of sea travel. He wrote to Severin:

I spent my free hours on deck in a sweet enchantment, reading Homer and Tasso, the soldier’s true companions. Often, setting my book aside, I gazed with admiration on the open sea. How marvelous are those boundless, endless waves! What an inexpressible feeling was born in the depths of my soul! How freely I breathed! How my eyes and my imagination flew from one side of the horizon to the other!

A nocturnal version of this enchantment is the setting for one of Batyushkov’s most moving poems, an elegy for his lost friend Ivan Petin, the noble victim of the Napoleonic wars:

SHADE OF A FRIEND

Sunt aliquid manes: letum non omnia finit

Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos

I sailed from the misty shores of Albion;

Beneath the leaden waves I seemed to see them sink.

In the ship’s wake fluttered the halcyon

And with its quiet singing cheered the sailors’ work.

The evening breeze, the billows’ buffeting,

The same unchanging noise, the beating of the sails,

And on the deck the helmsman’s cry

To the lookout who dreamed above the murmuring waves,

All these were food for my sweet reverie.

As if in an enchantment I stood by the mast,

And through the misty air and the gray night

My eyes were seeking my beloved Northern Star.

My thoughts were all engulfed in memory

Of my dear native land and of my native sky.

But the wind’s music and the rocking sea

Weighed on my eyes with languorous oblivion,

And dream succeeded dream

And suddenly…was I asleep?…I saw the friend

Who perished in the fateful fight

And by the Pleisse’s waters met his noble end.

But the sight brought no fear; his brow

Preserved no trace of his deep wounds,

And like an April morning shone with joy,

Bringing the light of heaven to my mind.

“My dear friend, is it you, comrade of my best days?

Can it be you?—I cried—ever beloved warrior!

Did I not weep at your untimely burial,

Lit by the fearful glare of martial flames,

Did I not with true friends inscribe

Your valor with the sword’s edge on the wood,

Accompanying your soul to its celestial home

With groans and prayers and tears?

Shade of the unforgotten, dear friend, speak!

Or was the past all only a mirage, a dream,

All, the pale corpse, the grave, the solemn rite

Performed by friendship to your memory?

O, say one word to me! Let that familiar sound

Once more caress my eager ear,

And let me, o my unforgotten friend,

Press your hand lovingly in mine!…”

And I flew to him…But the ethereal shade

Vanished in the blue depths of cloudless sky

Like smoke, a meteor, or a nightmare vision,

And sleep fell from my eyes.

Beneath the canopy of silence all was sleeping;

The fearful elements seemed to make no noise.

From a thin veil of cloud the moon shone down,

The waves lay dark, the breeze was barely stirring,

But sweet tranquility had gone from me,

My soul flew where the shade had fled,

Still longing to detain its heavenly guest—

You, my dear brother, my beloved friend!

(Essays, 222–23)

The Latin epigraph is the opening of Propertius’s Elegy IV.7: “The spirits of the dead are something real: death does not end everything, and the pale shade flies from the quenched pyre.” In the Latin poem, the poet dreams of his dead lover Cynthia, who comes to taunt him with his cowardice and other faults; in the end, the shade slips from his grasp and vanishes. Batyushkov’s poem, while also suspended between the appearance and disappearance of a “shade,” is quite different in tone, with none of Propertius’s bitter cynicism; it is closer to the meetings with the spirits of the dead that one finds in Virgil’s Aeneid, especially Aeneas’s vision of his wife Creusa at the end of book 2. But in any case, the poem echoes the world of Latin poetry that Batyushkov had learned to love in the society of Muravyov and Olenin, now given a worthy subject by the experience of war. The style is nobly serious throughout, moving from the dreamlike vision of a sea voyage to the dramatic confrontation with the shade and back again, but always maintaining the harmony that contemporaries so admired in his poetry. Some years later, Pushkin wrote of “Shade of a Friend”: “Beauty, perfection—what harmony!”

The soldier carries with him Homer and Tasso, and quotes from Propertius, but there is one other classical poet who was perhaps even closer to him: Tibullus. Batyushkov was known to some as the “Russian Parny” or the “Russian Tasso,” but he also called himself a “little Tibullus.” He had begun translating extracts from the elegies in 1809, using French translations as well as the original Latin. Some time in 1814, however, he produced a very free translation of the whole of Elegy III.1, a poem addressed to the Roman poet’s patron Messala. With its painful image of war and its longing for Delia, this poem must have struck a chord in Batyushkov, giving rise to a beautiful Russian elegy, which stands well alone. The opening section complains of the poet’s loneliness, far from both his patron and his beloved. This leads into a development on the golden age, where Batyushkov’s familiar household gods come into their own:

Dear Goddess, give me back the fields of home,

The old familiar murmur of the stream,

And give me Delia! I will bring you gifts,

O Lares and Penates, bring rich offerings.

Why do we not live still in the Golden Age?

The tribes of people in those carefree days

Had not yet driven roads through hills and forests,

And not yet torn the earth apart with ploughshares;

No pine or spruce yet flew with light-winged sails,

Chased by the wind, across the azure seas,

No helmsman would have dared to make his way

In a frail vessel over the furious waves;

The sturdy oxen wandered through the meadow

Trampling the sweet grass, sleeping in green shadow,

The swift steed never stained the bit with blood;

No boundary post, no columns marred the land,

The village doors stood open to the wind;

Honey dripped from the oaks in amber streams,

And from the udders of the grazing sheep

Milk poured abundantly into the bowls.

O peaceful shepherds who, with guiltless souls,

Lived without care in the dumb wilderness!

In your time no one brought unhappiness

To friends by hammering sharp-bladed swords,

And in the fields no clash of arms was heard.

O Age of Jupiter! Miserable days!

War everywhere, and hunger and disease,

Death on all sides, on water and on land…

But you, who hold the thunder in your hand,

Look graciously on me, your peaceful poet!

I never broke the faith in word or thought,

Tremblingly I adored the godly band,

And if fate brings me an untimely end,

May a stone tell the passerby of me:

“Tibullus, Messala’s friend, lies here in peace.”

My only god, master of every heart,

Dear son of Venus, here I was your bard.

I have worn your tender fetters all my life,

And you, Amor, will bear me secretly

Into Elysium, and the meadows there

Where an eternal May-time haunts the air,

Heavy with spikenard and cinnamon

And fragrant with sweet musk roses in bloom;

There we shall hear the birds’, the waters’ voice,

There the young maidens in their choral dance

Move through the woods like fleeting apparitions,

And he who is struck down, caught in the passion

Of love’s embraces, he whom fate lays low,

Wears a fresh sprig of myrtle on his brow…

A twenty-line passage on the contrasting fate of the damned then leads into a final section addressed directly to the poet’s beloved; one can imagine that the name Delia here hides a dream of an idealized Anna Furman, the girl he had left behind in St. Petersburg:

May he who broke our peace and parted us

Suffer the torments of deep Tartarus!

But you, so true to me, my precious friend,

Even in a quiet hut where none can find

You and your soul mate, she who knows your passion,

Don’t leave the household altars for a moment.

When winter blizzards howl, in this safe shelter

Your friend in the dark night will light a candle

And, turning the distaff softly in her palm,

Will tell you stories of your mother’s time,

And you, lending an ear to these old tales,

Will nod, my love, and sleep will close your eyes,

And quietly from your lap the spinning wheel

Will fall…. And at the door I shall appear

Like a good angel suddenly sent from heaven.

Run then to greet me, out from your peaceful haven,

In lovely nakedness appear to me,

Your hair spread on your shoulders carelessly,

Your lily-white breast and your lovely feet…

O when will Aurora with her rosy steeds,

Blazing with light, bring us that blessed day,

And rapt Tibullus embrace his Delia?

(Essays, 206–10)

This rendering of Tibullus was a primary inspiration for Osip Mandelstam’s “Tristia,” one of the great elegies of the twentieth century.

Batyushkov’s journey brought the poet to Gothenburg, from where he moved on to Stockholm and then by way of Finland back home to St. Petersburg. His short stay in Sweden, though it was a disappointment after London, did spark in Batyushkov a romantic vision of the old Scandinavian world, comparable to that seen in the 1808 “Letters of a Russian Officer in Finland.” This time it produced a full-scale poem, partly inspired by a considerably longer German poem by Friedrich von Matthison, “Elegy written in the ruins of an old castle” (Elegie in den Ruinen eines altes Bergschlosses geschrieben). Like the German poem, Batyushkov’s elegy looks back to a vanished heroic past, though here it is not the poet’s national past. Like the somewhat later “Crossing of the Rhine,” it is written in an elevated style, with a formal pattern reminiscent of the solemn Russian odes of the eighteenth century and a distinctly Ossianic atmosphere:3

ON THE RUINS OF A CASTLE IN SWEDEN

The day’s great eye is flaming in the west

And gently sinking in the ocean

The moon peers pensively through a thin mist

On shores and inlets lapped in silence.

The seas all round are plunged in a deep sleep;

Only from time to time fishermen calling

Send long-drawn voices echoing and resounding

In the night’s quiet lap.

Above the waves the lofty cliffs are dark

Where in the sacred shade of oak trees

I wander deep in thought, seeking the marks

Of years gone by and vanished glory:

Ruins, fierce ramparts, a moat full of grass,

Columns, a shaky bridge with chains of iron,

Moss-covered towers with battlements of granite,

And a long row of graves.

Everything is asleep, and silence reigns,

But memories are gently stirring;

The traveler leaning on a mossy grave

Dreams sweetly, as he sees the ivy

That twists and climbs, clinging to the stone steps,

The shriveled wormwood that the wind caresses,

The moon that silvers over the grim fortress

Above the somnolent deep.

Here once a fighting man of Odin’s blood,

Gray-headed after years of warfare,

Sent off his son to fight, with his scarred hand

Giving the youth his feathered arrows,

His ancient armor and his heavy sword,

And loudly cried out, with his arms uplifted

“He is marked out for you, you god of battles,

Always and everywhere!

And you, my son, swear by your father’s sword,

Swear with the solemn oath of Hela,

To be the terror of the western world

Or like our ancients, perish bravely!”

And the bold youth kissed the ancestral blade

And pressed to his breast his father’s gauntlet

Trembling with joy—so at the sound of conflict

Trembles the eager steed.

War to the enemies of the fatherland!

A clamor fills the port till morning,

The seas are foaming as on every hand

The storm-winged ships fly from their mooring.

In Neustria the clash of arms is loud,

The whole of misty Albion is blazing,

And Hela night and day brings to Valhalla

Pale legions of the dead.

Young man, make haste back to your native shores

Carrying with you the spoils of battle!

A gentle breeze is breathing in your sails

O hero, born to grace Valhalla!

High in the hills the scalds prepare a feast,

The oak trees blaze, and mead in goblets sparkles,

The herald of good news sings to the fathers

Of victories overseas.

At golden dawn here in the port of peace

Your bride-to-be awaits your coming;

She has been praying to the gods in tears

To look with favor on your voyage.

And now, a fleet of swans, through misty veils

The ships glide through the waters, shining whitely;

Blow, following wind, and let your quiet stirring

Swell all the vessels’ sails.

The ship has docked, the hero brings with him

The spoils of war, the captive women;

His father greets him, and his youthful bride,

And the scalds glow with inspiration.

The beautiful young woman, silent, weeping,

Hardly dares raise her timid eyes and look

At her young hero, turning pale then blushing,

A moon among the clouds.

And where the gray stones in a mossy row

Mark how the graveyard lies in ruin,

And through the night from time to time an owl

Sends out a cry of desolation—

There joyful cups on festive tables rang,

There warriors met to feast in celebration,

There the scalds sang of warfare and their fingers

Flew over fiery strings.

They sang of the clash of swords, the arrows’ flight,

The clang of shields, the din of battle,

Villages laid waste in the fierce fight,

And cities that the flames have gutted.

The elders listened greedily to their song,

Their brimming goblets shook between their fingers,

And their proud hearts exalted to remember

Their fame when they were young.

But now the place is wrapped in night’s grim mist;

Time has turned everything to ashes!

Where once the scald shook music from the strings,

Only the dismal wind now whistles!

Where chieftains triumphed with their loyal men

And poured out wine to the great god of battle,

A pair of trembling deer sleep in the shelter

Until the new day dawns.

Where are you now, you giants of the north,

You who plunged Gaul in dark commotion,

Companions of Roald, who in your frail boats

Once sailed across the distant ocean?

Where are you, daring warriors of yore,

You, the wild sons of battle and of freedom,

Who grew amid the snows and native wildness

Amid the spears and swords?

The mighty men are gone! But not in vain

The traveler questions the dark boulders

And reads the secret runes, the dumb remains

Of ancient ways that time has crumbled.

The villager, leaning on his staff proclaims:

“Look on this place, you child of foreign peoples;

Here our forefathers’ relics lie and molder:

Respect their resting place!”

(Essays, 202–5)

But as in Finland in 1809, Batyushkov was not the dupe of his own romantic vision of Scandinavia; if this world ever existed, it was gone forever now. Looking about him, he saw the rather different reality of modern Swedish society and wrote it down in a rueful little satire included in the letter to Severin from Gothenburg:

I’m in the land of mists and rains,

Where Scandinavians of old

Loved honor and their simple ways,

Wine and war and the clashing sword.

Leaving these lofty cliffs, these caves,

Scorning the deep ocean’s waves,

In their frail boats they’d boldly steer

To strike their foes with awe and fear.

Here Odin received a fearful sacrifice.

Here altars were red with the blood of prisoners…

But a mighty transformation greets our eyes:

Now these same northern tsars

Nibble their ginger cake and smoke tobacco,

They read the Gotha Echo

And sit and yawn together at the stars.

The juxtaposition of these two Nordic poems points to a constant romantic tension in Batyushkov’s writing. He dreamed of an idealized past, the glory of ancient Hellas, the Renaissance of Petrarch and Tasso, or the violent world of the sagas, but he had to live in a far from heroic present. Perhaps the Napoleonic wars gave him the chance to live a nobler, more active life, but once this episode was over, he had to settle to the frustrations of a rather impoverished civilian existence. His return to Russia was nevertheless to be a return to literary life and to poetry.