Writings from the Golden Age of Russian poetry

In July 1814, Batyushkov finally arrived back in St. Petersburg, where he was to stay for the next few months. Some time that autumn he wrote a short poem, in fact a free translation of a poem by Schiller:

THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS

The suffering, god-fearing Odysseus,

Seeking his Ithaca, was doomed to wander

Among the terrors of the earth and seas;

With a bold tread he trespassed Hell’s dark border;

Vicious Scylla, Charybdis beneath the waters

Did not cast down his noble soul.

It seemed harsh fate was vanquished by his patience

And he had drained the bitter-tasting bowl;

It seemed that Heaven had wearied of its vengeance

And deep in slumber brought this man

Back to the wished-for cliffs from his wild ventures.

He woke—and did not know his fatherland.

(Essays, 233–34)

In fact, the city that Batyushkov returned to was hardly changed from the place he had known before the war. He took up residence with his beloved aunt Ekaterina Fyodorovna Muravyova in her house on the Fontanka River in the center of the city, and he spent much time with the Olenins on their estate at Priutino just outside the capital. But he didn’t feel at home. Soon after arriving, he wrote to his older sister Anna:

I don’t know yet what my fate is to be; I haven’t yet been transferred to the Guards, on which the possibility of my retirement depends. I won’t weary you with complaints about my success in military service. Can you believe that I can serve as an example [of bad luck] in the army? But let’s leave that, and put it right if we can. They are promising me a government place as a civilian: my old job in the library, which I will be glad to take, or anything else that turns up.

(SP, 376)

But if fate was not looking after Batyushkov as he would have wished, he in turn found it hard to settle to anything. His old torment of depression dogged his steps. At about this time, he wrote a long verse tale (the longest of all his poems) called “The Traveler and the Stay-at-Home,” a largely satirical story that expresses something of his own predicament. First conceived during his stay in London, it was completed after his return to Russia. The subject is not unlike that of La Fontaine’s fable “The Two Pigeons,” juxtaposing a footloose and foolish wanderer with a contented stay-at-home. It opens with a personal statement:

I’ve seen the world, and now,

A quiet stay-at-home, I sit and ponder

By my own fireside how

Hard it can be to keep your life in order;

How hard to spend your days on your own patch

When you have roamed about on land and water,

Seeing and knowing everything, then coming back

No wiser and no better

To your ancestral plot:

A slave to empty fancies,

You live condemned to seek…but seek for what?

So let me tell the tale of one such traveler.

(Essays, 308)

The story, set in classical Greece, follows the fortunes of Filaletos, who leaves his brother Cliton at home on their modest estate on the outskirts of Athens. Spurred on by ambition and curiosity, he travels the ancient world, talks with religious leaders and philosophers, fails to find any real truth, returns to Greece, suffers all kinds of hardship, and eventually makes his way back to Athens. Here Batyushkov, who has been telling his story in a detached satirical voice, suddenly brings himself into the picture, likening this homecoming to his own return to St. Petersburg:

He was a Greek, of course, and loved his country;

He knelt and kissed the earth with joy and tears;

Beside himself with happiness, he accosted

The houses and the trees!…

I too, my friends, I felt my heart rejoice

When tossed by fate’s upheavals

From foreign shores, I reached my native place

And saw again the Admiralty Needle,

The house on the Fontanka…and the faces

Dearer to me than anything on earth!…

I too…But we must speak of Filaletos…

(Essays, 316)

And Filaletos has a rough time of it, even in Athens. He gets involved in a violent debate about war and peace, setting the citizens against him, and only just manages to escape into the welcoming arms of his brother. Now at last all seems to be set for a properly moralized ending, where the overambitious Filaletos will learn to appreciate the superior wisdom of the stay-at-home Cliton. But no, for Batyushkov, with his knowledge of skuka and his itchy feet, this happy ending cannot work. Like the hero of the Odyssey, Filaletos is destined to keep traveling:

And just five days went by

Before our Greek, tired of the same old meadow

And the same faces every day—

Can you believe it!—pined for his lost freedom.

He started to explore the nearby woods

And climbed the local mountains,

All through the night and day wandered the roads

Then secretly made his way to Athens

To yawn

Again in that sweet town

And chat with Sophists about this and that;

And then, on hearing from some scholars

That in the world there is a land

Where spring is never-ending,

Went to find roses—among the Hyperboreans.

Cliton and Cliton’s wife from their front door

Shouted in vain to stop him in his tracks:

“Brother, dear brother, for God’s sake, please come back!

What do you hope to find so far from home?

New miseries? What are you running from?

Do you resent our friendship, cruel man?

Stay here, dear brother, stay, dear Filaletos!”

No good.—The oddball simply shrugged his shoulders

And disappeared without a backward glance.

(Essays, 319)

Batyushkov, however, did not set off again immediately. Encouraged by the Olenin circle, he wrote the first two of a series of literary essays that would be published in the first (prose) volume of his works a couple of years later. The first of these takes the form of a letter to a cousin of Batyushkov’s patron and mentor Mikhail Muravyov. Subsequently printed as the foreword to an edition of Muravyov’s works, it presents and praises his various writings in a tone of gratitude and family piety, insisting on his public-spiritedness, his humane values, and his cult of feeling. It is a personal essay, in which Batyushkov clearly speaks in his own name.

The second and more interesting of these prose works is quite different. “A Walk to the Academy of Fine Art” is presented as a letter too, but it is supposedly written by a somewhat elderly Petersburger to a friend living in the country, and it presents a series of dialogues between the author and other visitors to the academy show, notably an enthusiastic young artist and an old reactionary who professes contempt for new Russian art. Discussing just a few of the works on display, the essay is much concerned with the relation between the new art of Russia and the models provided by antiquity and Western Europe. As such it clearly relates to Batyushkov’s own poetic practice. Just as the poet had found a new voice for himself by imitating and translating Tibullus, Tasso, Parny, and others, so the artists find inspiration by imitating or copying the great works of other cultures; as one of the interlocutors puts it, “these artists are original in their imitation” (Essays, 57).

The text begins and ends with references to the great German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann; the dominant position adopted by Batyushkov is close to Winckelmann’s neoclassicism. But this does not imply that Russian culture is inevitably derivative and therefore inferior. On the contrary, the very city of St. Petersburg, superior in its unified grandeur to decrepit Paris and smoky London, is like a proclamation of the new mission of Russia. Here again we find a hymn of praise to Peter the Great, together with a reflection on the creation of the city that anticipates the opening of Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”: “Here will be a city—he said—the wonder of the world. I shall summon all the arts and crafts here. Here the arts and crafts, civic institutions and laws will vanquish nature herself. He spoke—and St. Petersburg rose from the wild marshland” (Essays, 73–74).1 The essay breathes the patriotism of one who had marched into Paris with Alexander I. The equestrian statue of Peter (Pushkin’s bronze horseman) may be the work of a Frenchman (Falconet), but as a visitor says, “it gallops like Russia!” (Essays, 81).

Meanwhile Batyushkov was continuing to write poems. A few of these continue in an earlier vein, imitating the French verse of Parny or Millevoye in very free translations. These are mostly love poems, often taking the Russian poet into the realms of imagination rather than reflecting his actual existence. “Bacchante,” for instance, condenses a long text by Parny, “Les Déguisements de Vénus,” roughly translating one of Parny’s “tableaux,” to create a Russian poem that enjoyed great success in its day. It is a throwback to his earlier Epicurean mode, though more frankly erotic than any earlier poems, but it comes oddly after the somber notes first sounded in the epistle to Dashkov about the burning of Moscow:

BACCHANTE

All to Erigone’s feast

They run, the devotees of Bacchus;

Noisily the woods repeat

Moans of pleasure, shrieks and clapping.

In a dark wild forest glade,

Left behind, a young nymph lingers;

I give chase—she runs away,

An antelope, light and nimble.

Zephyrs tousle her young hair

Wound about with ivy tendrils;

Boldly the wind sweeps up her skirts,

Knotting them in a dense tangle.

Yellow hops go subtly winding

All around her lovely form,

And her cheeks are fairly glowing

With the crimson of the rose.

Grapes in purple juice all melting

Stain the mouth she opens wide—

Crazy, utterly enchanting,

Poison to the heart on fire.

I give chase—she runs away

An antelope, light and nimble,

I catch her, and she falls to earth!

Her head rests upon her timbrel!

And the devotees of Bacchus

Wildly shrieking, hurry by,

Through the forest raising echoes—

Cries of pleasure, Evoe.

(Essays, 288–89)

A very different note is struck by another imitation from the French written at about the same time. “The Last Spring” is loosely based on a poem by the contemporary French poet Charles-Hubert Millevoye, “La Chute des feuilles,” but where Millevoye has a lovesick hero fading away in harmony with the dying year, Batyushkov, in a manner reminiscent of Petrarch, contrasts human suffering with the springtime renewal of nature:

THE LAST SPRING

Bright May is playing in the fields,

The stream begins to chatter freely,

And Philomela’s brilliant voice

Has charmed the dark wood’s melancholy:

Now everything drinks in new life!

You only, singer of love, are sad!

And deep in your sad heart you hide

The knowledge of your coming end;

With feeble steps you make your way

This one last time over the fields,

Taking your leave of them today

And of your wasted homeland’s woods.

“Farewell! you groves and valleys dear,

Rivers and fields that I call home!

Spring has returned, and I can see

My fated hour of death has come.

This was the prophecy I heard

At Epidaurus: you will hear

For the last time the cooing birds,

The halcyon’s quiet melody.

The twigs will once again be green,

The fields be garlanded with flowers,

And the first roses will be seen—

And you will share their dying hour.

The time is close…Sweet flowers in bloom,

Why do you haste to fade and die?

Cover the melancholy tomb

Where my decaying dust will lie.

Cover the road that leads us there,

So that no friendly eye can see.

But if a grieving Delia

Should come near to the place, then breathe

Your sweetness through the empty air

That lies all round and charm my sleep,

My sweet sleep, with your melody

Of languorously trembling leaves.”

The flowers did not fade in the fields,

The halcyons with their quiet song

Mingled their voices with the leaves—

But the youth dwindled and was gone!

And friendship never shed a tear

Where his dear dust slept in the shade,

And Delia never came to see

The desolate tomb where he was laid;

Only the shepherd at high noon,

When he had set his flock to graze,

Troubled with his unhappy tune

The deathly silence of the grave.

(Essays, 234–35)

This poem, which left its mark on Pushkin (discussed later in this chapter), is more characteristic than “Bacchante” of the Batyushkov of 1815. Like “Bacchante,” it is set in an antique world, with Delia, halcyons,2 and a musical shepherd, but its melancholy tonality sets the tone for a number of directly personal love poems written later the same year, when Batyushkov was coming to terms with the sad end of his one serious involvement with a woman about which we know anything.

This was his love for Anna Fyodorovna Furman, whom he had met in the house of the Olenins, her protectors, in 1812. He had carried her image with him throughout his Napoleonic campaigns; on returning to St. Petersburg, he met her again, and his love flared up with new force. She was now twenty-two, a beauty without a fortune, and her friends and protectors would have been glad to see her married to Batyushkov. But he could see all too well that she did not feel for him as he did for her, and he did not want to insist, the more so since he was not in a position to offer her a financially stable future. He later explained his situation in a letter to his aunt, Ekaterina Muravyova, written in August 1815, by which time Anna had left St. Petersburg to join her father in Dorpat (now Tartu, in Estonia) and Batyushkov himself had been taken by military service to Kamenets-Podolsk in Bessarabia in the far south of Russia:

The most important obstacle is that I cannot sacrifice what I hold most dear. I do not deserve her and cannot make her happy with my character and my lack of means. That is a truth that neither you, nor anything in the world can overcome, of course. All the circumstances are against me. I must submit without complaining to the holy will of God, which is sent to try me. I cannot stop loving her. Your last lines made me suffer. I do not like this journey of hers, dear aunt. I wish I could see or know that she was in St. Petersburg, with good people, and near to you. Forgive me this worrisome grief. You are the only woman on earth to whom I can be sincere, but even to you I am afraid to open my heart. I am indeed very sad. One can live without hope, but to see only tears all around one, to see the suffering of everything the heart holds dear, that is a torment that you too know: you have loved.

(SP, 385)

It is in the light of this letter that one can read a group of poems written in Kamenets in the summer of 1815. The first of these was attached to the letter just quoted, no doubt to show his aunt what he felt about Anna, though the feeling is much less bitterly expressed here than in the letter. What Batyushkov calls “memory of the heart” is stronger now than loss and grief:

MY GUARDIAN SPIRIT

Memory of the heart! more potent

Than reason’s mournful memory,

Often with your allure of sweetness

You carry me off to a far country.

And I remember words so tender,

Remember eyes as blue as the sky,

Remember too the golden tresses

Of hair that curls so carelessly;

Remember too the simple costume

Of my unparalleled shepherdess,

The tender vision, unforgotten,

That stays with me at every step.

Love gives to me this guardian spirit

To soften separation’s blows

And, when I sleep, to haunt my pillow

And ease my sorrowful repose.

(Essays, 220–21)

A second poem also accompanied the letter to Muravyova. Here Batyushkov goes back over the years of his campaigns and travels, his return to Russia, and even his present situation in the south by the river Tiras (the Greek name for the Dniester, which flows by Kamenets). The juxtaposition of death and resurrection at the end of this poem of longing carries one back to an earlier and happier love poem, “Convalescence” (see chapter 2):

PARTING

In vain I left behind my father’s country,

My bosom friends, the glitter of art,

And in the soldier’s tent, the noise of battle

Sought to find comfort for a suffering heart.

Ah! alien skies cannot make good love’s wounds!

In vain from land to land

I made my way, and heard the fearsome sound

Of seas that crashed against the strand.

In vain, when fate had torn me from the shores

Of my great northern city’s river,

I came again to Moscow’s ruined squares,

Moscow, where once I breathed the air of freedom!

In vain I fled from northern deserts

And the weak comfort of a glacial sun

To where the Tiras glitters as it runs

Between the hills enriched by Ceres

In lands where ancient races feasted.

In vain—one image haunts me still:

The unforgettable dear girl

Whose name will be forever sacred,

She whose blue eyes contain the universe,

Making a heaven on earth in their reflection,

Whose lovely voice, whose sweetly sounding words

Are death to me, and resurrection.

(Essays, 231–32)

A much fuller picture of Batyushkov’s recent years is given in a long poem entitled “Elegy.” When it was first published in the poet’s collected works in 1817, this piece bore the title “Memories: A Fragment,” where the title word (vospominaniia) is the plural form of the title of the much earlier poem that I have translated as “Remembering” (discussed in chapter 2). In the 1817 edition, the two poems appear side by side. “Remembering” looked back to the campaign of 1807–1808 and Batyushkov’s love for the merchant’s daughter in Riga; “Memories” (or “Elegy”) tells of his war service and travels through France, England, and Sweden in 1813–1814, relating all this to his love for Anna. However, to avoid embarrassment, he chose in 1817 to publish only the first part of the poem given below, where the unspecific reference to a “guardian angel” remains relatively discreet. In its full version, “Elegy” speaks more clearly of the poet’s failure to win Anna’s love. This unhappiness is related to his desertion by the Muses—ironically, in view of the fact that the loss of Anna seems to have sparked several of his most memorable poems. But “Elegy” begins with a clear and cheerless statement of the theme of lost inspiration, leading to a suggestion of the irreparable psychological damage done to the unloved poet:

ELEGY

I feel my gift for poetry is gone,

The muse has quenched the flame once lit in heaven;

Life’s sad experience has unveiled

A desert that my eyes had never seen,

My orphaned genius drives me out to fields

Where nothing grows, impenetrable shades,

Where I can find no sign of happiness,

Neither the secret joys, nor the dreams beyond meaning

That Phoebus’ favorites know from youth,

No friendship, love, no songs of the sweet muses

Which once assuaged my heart’s deep grief

Like lotus blossom, with enchanting power.

I do not recognize myself

Weighed down by this new sadness.

Like one cast on the rocks by the wild waves,

Who sees with horror the wreckage of his boat,

Interrogates the dark with trembling hands

And slips along the brink of the abyss,

The mad wind scattering his pleading speech,

His groans and cries…just so I stand

On the edge of ruin and call out for help

To you, my last hope, you my consolation!

Last friend of my poor heart!

Among life’s storms and tribulations

My guardian angel, given me by god!…

I hid your image in my soul, a token

Of the world’s beauty, the creator’s grace.

With your name on my lips I flew to arms

Seeking a wreath of glory or an end;

In times of terror, on the field of Mars,

I gave you the pure tribute of my heart;

In peace and war, through the wide earth,

Your loving image followed me,

Inseparable from a grieving wanderer.

How often in the stillness, full of you,

In woods where Juvisy stands proud above the river

And the Seine pours its silver crystal through the flowers,

How often, amid the noisy, carefree crowd

In the capital of luxury, among the stars,

I quite forgot the magic sirens’ song

And with a longing heart dreamed just of you.

I uttered your beloved name

In Albion’s cool groves,

And taught the echo to repeat it

On Richmond’s flowering fields.

Places whose very wildness is your charm,

O stones of Sweden, Scandinavian deserts,

The ancient home of courage and of virtue!

You heard my vows, the accents of my love

And often fed a wanderer’s meditations

When the pink radiance of the dawning day

Reflected in Trolletana’s lonely waters

The distant cliffs of granite shores,

The huts of shepherds and of fishermen

Through the thin mist of morning.

(Essays, 212–13)

The poem breaks off here with a line of suspension points in the first published version. The original version goes on to a much clearer statement of the poet’s unhappy love since his return to St. Petersburg:

How joyfully I came back to my homeland

With you alone filling my heart and mind!

“Here I shall find peace for my soul,” I said,

“An end to troubles and the wandering life.”

O how my lying dreams led me astray!

For happiness once more betrayed me

In love and friendship and in everything

That made life sweet for me,

All that I’d longed for secretly!

There is an end to wandering, not to sorrows!

My heart discovered in your longed-for presence

New sufferings and torments

Worse than the pangs of parting,

And worse than everything. I could detect

In broken conversations, in your silences,

In your unhappy gaze,

And in the secret pain of downcast eyes,

Your smile and even your cheerful words,

Signs of a heart oppressed by sorrow…

No! no! Life is a burden without hope.

If only I could lavish on your soul

The lasting flowers of love and friendship,

Sacrifice everything to you, take pride in you

And in your happiness and loving eyes,

Find gratitude and happiness

In every word or smile or look of yours

And at your feet forget like a bad dream

The world, fame, bygone cares and grief!

What is my life without you, without hope,

Friendship or love, the objects of my worship?…

And lacking them, the muse

Has quenched the flame of inspiration.

(Essays, 536–37)

Reading these desolate lines, it is hard not to see in them an anticipation of the much more total collapse that was to strike down Batyushkov some seven years later.

In another poem written at much the same time, the sad memories of the past give way to a golden dream of a no doubt impossible future. The poem’s title, “Tauris,” was the poetic Russian name for the Crimea. This area had been annexed by Russia some thirty years earlier, and was to become a popular resort, Russia’s equivalent of the Mediterranean, far removed from the “immense Palmyra” of St. Petersburg. Batyushkov’s poem is one of the first of a long line of Russian evocations of this golden land; it was a favorite poem of Pushkin’s (who was soon to be exiled in Southern Russia and would visit the Crimea). According to Pushkin, the lines about Aquarius were particularly dear to Batyushkov himself. It is generally supposed that the poem is addressed to Anna Furman, though it contains nothing relating specifically to her; it could equally be a poem to an imagined woman:

TAURIS

Dear friend, dear angel! let us take refuge there,

Where quiet waters lap the shores of Tauris,

And Phoebus lights for them the holy places

Of ancient Hellas with his loving rays.

There we, by fate rejected,

Equal in both unhappiness and love,

Beneath the sweet skies of that southern land

Shall feel no more the blows of cruel fortune.

And think no more of honors or of wealth.

Under cool maples rustling in the meadows,

Where squadrons of wild horses gallop freely

Seeking cool waters bubbling though the earth,

Where the wayfarer gladly shuns the heat

To the murmur of branches, desert birds and waters,

There we shall find ourselves a simple cabin,

A homely spring, flowers, a rustic plot.

O you, last presents of indulgent fortune,

Our blazing hearts greet you a hundredfold!

Fitter for love than the palaces of marble

In the immense Palmyra of the north!

And whether spring goes shining through the fields,

Or torrid summer scorches up the harvest,

Or old Aquarius, tipping his frigid urn,

Pours rustling rain, gray fog and darkness,

O joy! you are with me to greet the sunlight,

Leaving behind our sweet bed with the day,

Glowing and fresh, like a wild rose,

With me you share the work, the care, the feasting.

With me at dusk, beneath the quiet dark,

With me, always with me—your charming eyes

I see, I hear your voice, in your hand resting,

My hand can lie all day, all night.

I catch with longing the voluptuous breathing

Of your red lips. and if a little

Your hair is ruffled by a fleeting Zephyr,

Unveiling to my gaze a snowy breast,

Your friend hardly dares breathe, he stands

And looks down to the ground, amazed and silent.

(Essays, 232–33)

Batyushkov did not in fact visit the Crimea until 1822, by which time he was seriously ill. In 1815, there was no possibility of a happy escape with Anna to a southern paradise. Meanwhile, the clash between hope of renewal and acceptance of reality is the subject of one more memorable short poem of the same summer. When first published, it had an epigraph from Petrarch, and the Russian poem in fact resembles Petrarch’s sonnet “Not the stars that wander the calm sky” (“Nè per sereno ciel ir vaghe stelle”), where none of the beauties of the world can comfort the lovesick poet:

WAKING

Zephyr scatters the last shreds of sleep

From eyes sealed fast by dreams.

But I am not wakened to happiness

By Zephyr’s quiet wings.

Neither the rosy light’s sweet rays,

Apollo’s morning heralds,

Nor the soft blue of heaven’s face,

Nor scents borne from the fields,

Nor the swift flight of my brave horse

On the sloping velvet lawns,

The hounds’ call and the song of horns

Around the desolate shore—

Nothing can bring cheer to my soul,

My soul alarmed by dreams;

Proud reason cannot still the voice

Of love with its cold speech.

(Essays, 230–31)

Batyushkov had been on leave from the army since his return from Paris, first in St. Petersburg, then in Khantonovo, where he set in train the rebuilding of the house—with some help from Napoleonic prisoners of war. But eventually, in June 1815, he had to return to the service in Kamenets-Podolsk as adjutant to General Bakhmetev, with whom he had embarked on the campaign of 1813–1814. He was not too cheerful about his prospects, writing to Gnedich:

The posting to Kamenets is not particularly flattering. I have no right to happiness of course, but it is painful to spend the best days of my life on the road, with no benefit to myself or to others; better to be fighting, it seems to me. And the most painful thing (and don’t go thinking these are just empty words) is to be cut off from literature, from the life of the mind, from the pleasant habits of life, and from friends.

(SPP, 292)

And indeed this period of nonactive military service did prove wearisome. At times, it is true, Batyushkov paints a romantic picture of his new surroundings. In a short text with a long title, “Memory of Places, Battles and Travels,” he describes the view from the headquarters where he is stationed:

The views of the ruins of the old fortress and of the new fortifications are beautiful. There are lofty towers with sharp pinnacles, half in ruins, covered with moss and with the wormwood which grows very tall in these southern latitudes; fortifications and bastions surrounded, or rather encircled, by a fast-flowing river which occasionally tumbles over waterfalls—the noise and sparkling streams soften the military gloom and monotony of the fortress buildings. In one place there is a mill, in another a ford where a great herd is crossing, and a little further off a spring cascading from the rocks; all around there is a multitude of children and women carrying yokes with buckets and crowds of Jews leaning on white sticks in the most picturesque attitude.

(SP, 179)

All well and good, but alas! The human element in this landscape had little to offer. In the same letter to his aunt in which he writes about his feelings for Anna Furman, Batyushkov gives a rather cheerless, though humorous, picture of his life in the distant provinces:

I have been here six weeks, and I haven’t spoken to a single woman. You can see what Kamenets society is like. Apart from the officials and their wives and children, the civil servants and the cooks, two or three colonels, silent officers and a whole crowd of Jews, there is no one. There is a theatre; imagine what it is like: when it rains the spectators take out their umbrellas, the wind whistles in all directions and with splendid drunken actors and a fiddle the orchestra produces a very special kind of harmony…All my joys and pleasures are in memory. The present is tedious, the future is known only to God, but the past is ours.

(SP, 386–87)

But this tedium, as one can perhaps guess from the humor of these lines, was a stimulus to writing. In a rather gloomy letter written from Kamenets in December to Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, complaining of his chaotic nomadic life, remarks: “I am ready to part company with the muses altogether, if I didn’t find in them some consolation for my unhappiness” (SP, 388. “Unhappiness” is in Russian the untranslatable toska, a combination of grief and longing.). As we have seen, it was in Kamenets that he composed his most important sequence of love poems. The epistle “To My Friends” (cited in the introduction), written shortly before the Kamenets episode, suggests that he was already gathering his poems together with a view to publication. But these southern months also produced some important prose writings, which would occupy much of the first volume of his Essays in Prose and in Verse, published two years later.

As ever, Batyushkov was self-deprecating about these essays, writing to Zhukovsky: “All of this was scribbled here out of boredom, with no books or other materials” (SP, 390). They include reminiscences, connected above all with Ivan Petin, for whom he had written the elegy “Shade of a Friend.” In the “Memories of Petin,” already quoted several times in the preceding chapters, he recalls with great feeling the times he spent with his friend in the army and in Moscow, trying to sum up the life of a man whose character and fate he admired and envied. Was it not better, he asks, that Petin should die in action while still young? His questions reflect back on his own situation:

What do we lose, dying in the prime of life on the field of honor and glory, in the sight of thousands of people who have faced danger with us? A few brief moments of pleasure, perhaps, but also the agonies of ambition, and the experience of life which awaits us like a fearsome specter in our middle years.

(Essays, 398–99)

Most of the essays, however, are on literary subjects or more general philosophical questions. There are essays on the great Italians, Petrarch, Tasso, and Ariosto, and one on Batyushkov’s Russian hero, the poet and polymath Mikhailo Lomonosov, whose pioneering achievements he set alongside those of Peter the Great. The essay on Lomonosov stresses his passion for learning, his burning desire for literary fame, but also his relatively humble beginnings in the far north of Russia. These two strands—belief in poetry and the influence of the poet’s early years—are taken up at greater length in an essay entitled “Some Thoughts on the Poet and Poetry.” Here Batyushkov writes of the importance of first impressions, including those of climate, and of the ideal poetic way of life (the quiet of the countryside rather than the bustle of cities). The true poet is seen as a rare genius in his sensibility and his ability to communicate his feelings to others. Communication is indeed the essence of poetry:

In the moment of inspiration, in the sweet moment of poetic enchantment, I would never have picked up a pen if I had found a heart capable of feeling what I feel; if I could communicate to it all my secret reflections and the full freshness of my dreams, and make it vibrate with the same strings that have sounded in my own heart. Where can one find a heart able to share with us all our feelings and sensations? We cannot find it, and we have recourse to the art of expressing our thoughts, in the sweet hope that somewhere on earth there are kind hearts and cultivated minds for which a powerful and noble feeling, an apt expression, a beautiful verse and a page of living, eloquent prose are the true treasures of life.

(Essays, 20–21)

Batyushkov’s ideal is still Montaigne, whose essays are a continuing conversation with posterity. One is reminded of his younger contemporary, Evgeny Baratynsky, who wrote in one of his poems:

…one day

A distant fellow-man will read my words

And find my being, and, who knows, my soul

Will raise an echo in his soul, and I,

Who found a friend in my own time,

Will find a reader in posterity. 3

Friendship was the great value for Batyushkov, as for many of his fellow poets. And if poetry was to be a conversation with friends, real or to come, then the great rule was to be genuine: “Write as you live, and live as you write.” This is the burden of “To My Friends,” where Batyushkov writes:

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.

His ambition, no doubt an impossible one, was to have his friends say of him: “He lived just as he wrote” (Essays, 200).

How to live is the topic of Batyushkov’s most important essay of 1815, “Some Thoughts on Morality, Founded on Philosophy and Religion.” The significance he attached to this slightly longer piece is indicated by the fact that he gave it the final position in the volume of his prose writings. It represents a major change in his view of life. In earlier poems and letters, he had written of his “little philosophy” for living, an Epicurean enjoyment of the moment, without too much concern for larger questions. Even there, however, this carpe diem philosophy was in fact accompanied by a degree of anxiety about personal and public destinies. “Some Thoughts on Morality” offers a more tragic vision of things, and gives a hint of his later despair and mental collapse. It reflects in particular the pain Batyushkov had felt on witnessing the French invasion of Russia and the burning of Moscow (already the subject in 1813 of his great epistle to Dashkov).

The essay speaks of a conversion from the frivolity of carefree youth to the serious concerns of maturity. What Batyushkov calls the “age of reading” (i.e., enthusiastic openness to the various visions of the world) gives way to the “age of doubts,” where the individual realizes the need for solid values that will stand the test of reality. This is particularly urgent because he and his contemporaries live “unfortunately…in an unhappy age when human wisdom is not sufficient to cope with the ordinary concerns of the most simple citizen.” We have seen, he says, “the terrible ruins of the capital, amidst the even more terrible ruins of all order and the sufferings of all humanity throughout the enlightened world” (Essays, 184). This destruction is all the more fearful because it has been inflicted on Europe by a nation that was taken as a model of civilization and enlightenment.

To ease his doubt, then, Batyushkov reviews the currently fashionable philosophies, the writings of the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, of course, but also a series of modern French thinkers: Duclos, La Rochefoucauld, Helvétius, and the whole materialistic school, whose morality is founded on interest and pleasure. None of these can satisfy the seeker of lasting values. Even the Epicureanism of the great Montaigne is found wanting: Batyushkov aligns himself rather with the Christian apologist Pascal’s double refutation of the Epicurean Montaigne and the Stoic Epictetus. Among recent writers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, although “gifted with great genius,” provides an eloquent example of the failure of philosophy to deal with human weakness; his posthumous (and for Batyushkov shocking) Confessions demonstrate the inadequacy of the simple love of virtue: “So a man born for virtue committed a terrible, previously unheard-of, crime, a crime engendered by human wisdom.” There is only one true remedy for human weakness, and that is faith: “Only religion could comfort and calm the suffering man; he knew and felt this truth, but led astray by his own pride, he constantly turned away from this light yoke of salvation” (Essays, 191–92). And Batyushkov is happy to see in his native Russia the power of a Christian country to overcome the rationalist infidels:

The spear and the saber, bloodied by holy water on the banks of the quiet Don, have flashed in the house of dishonor, in sight of the temples of reason, fraternity and liberty, erected by atheism; and the banner of Moscow, of faith and of honor, stands in the place of the greatest crime against God and humanity.

(Essays, 195–96)

Looking back on the war, Batyushkov seems now to be leaning toward a traditional, not to say reactionary, view of society and history, a view that was at odds with those of many of his liberal or radical friends. Certainly, as he himself admitted to Zhukovsky, he was not the person he had been: “My character has changed greatly: I have become thoughtful, silent, quiet to the point of stupidity, and even uncaring” (SP, 391). Put more positively, his experience had brought him a new seriousness, which expressed itself in his advice in the same letter to Zhukovsky not to content himself with ballads, but to seek out a form of poetry more worthy of his gifts. Younger poets, notably Pushkin and Vyazemsky, were dismayed to see Batyushkov abandoning the Epicurean stance of his earlier poetry. In a verse epistle, the fifteen-year-old Pushkin asked: “Why on his gold-stringed harp has the singer of joy fallen silent?” As he saw it, his elder’s particular gift was for beautiful play rather than solemn public verse.4 And the irreverent Vyazemsky lamented the change that had come over his once playful friend in a rather brutal letter:

Zhukovsky scared me; now I can see that he was merely unwell, whereas you are sick. Perhaps Zhukovsky’s unhappiness was the mother of his genius; yours—forgive me—is the mother of stupidity. Imagine a madman who picks a rose, taking away all its freshness and its scent—and then admires the stem. You are just like that madman; you are attempting to ruin the charm of your life…Be the Batyushkov you were, when I gave you a piece of my heart, or else don’t expect me to love you, since I was born to love Batyushkov and not some other person.

(WP, 204)

It may have been in response to reproaches of this kind that Batyushkov in this same crucial year of 1815 wrote a serious long epistle to Vyazemsky. Referring directly to the early death of the prince’s friend Varvara Kokoshkina (“Lila,” the subject of an elegy cited in chapter 3), and to the tragic events of 1812, in which his Moscow house (“the house of joy”) had burned down, Batyushkov takes up the themes of his essay on morality: the inadequacy of worldly philosophy and the hope offered by faith (“Hope” is also the title of a short poem of 1815 on the same subject):

TO A FRIEND

Tell me, young thinker, what in this world will last?

Where can good fortune live forever?

We have played among the phantoms of the dust

And we have drained the cup of pleasure;

But where are they, those feasts, those golden times?

Where are they now, the brimming glasses?

Where the bright wisdom of those worldly minds?

Where your Falernian wine, our roses?

Where is your house, the house of joy? All gone.