Arzamas was a writers’ circle that made its appearance in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1815. The immediate stimulus for its creation was a play by A. A. Shakhovskoy, an active member of the Circle of Lovers of the Russian Word that Batyushkov had mocked in a number of writings, notably the “Vision on the Banks of Lethe.” The play satirized Zhukovsky, and through him the innovative writers who followed in the footsteps of Karamzin. The Karamzinians fought back, and this time they went further and set up a society named mockingly after a provincial town in the Nizhny Novgorod district. The activities of the society were both a somewhat frivolous game and a serious literary enterprise. The members parodied the rituals of the Circle in their meetings, wearing red bonnets and composing comic obituaries for their opponents. They had a definite aim, which was “to bury the late Academy and the Circle of Destroyers of the Russian Word” (to quote the schoolboy Pushkin, soon to become a member). But also, as one of their number, S. S. Uvarov, remembered, “the purpose of this society, or rather of these conversations among friends, was essentially critical. The members devoted themselves to a strict analysis of literary works, applying to the national language and literature all the sources of ancient and foreign literature, seeking for the founding principles of a solid and independent theory of language, etc.” (WP, 230). Among the two dozen members were some of the most important Russian writers of the period, including Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, the society poet Vasily Pushkin, his young nephew Aleksandr, and of course Batyushkov.

The members all adopted nicknames. The young Pushkin was “Cricket”; Batyushkov was “Achilles.” This may have been a jokingly ironic reference to his small stature, but it also indicates that he was a champion of Arzamas. Living far from St. Petersburg, for two years he was a corresponding member, whether in Kamenets, Moscow, or Khantonovo; in December 1815, he wrote to Zhukovsky that he was proud of his new name, but that for the time being Achilles would remain inactive “behind the crimson and black ships” (SP, 389). Even from a distance, however, he participated in the society’s activities, submitting in 1816 his newly composed dialogue, “An Evening at Kantemir’s” for his colleagues to discuss. And in March 1817 he sent Vyazemsky a “Question for Arzamas,” a playful epigram juxtaposing three different poets called Pushkin (not including the subsequently famous Aleksandr). Later on, once he had returned to St. Petersburg in the late summer of 1817, he was an active member, since this new grouping corresponded very well with his own literary orientation.

Meanwhile, at the end of 1815, Batyushkov was able at last to shake the dust of Kamenets from his feet. He obtained leave from General Bakhmetev, and made his way to Moscow, where he was lodged by his hospitable relation Ivan Muravyov-Apostol, and greeted by Vyazemsky and other old friends. Soon he found that he had been transferred, as he had long wished, to the Guards, but this appointment did not last long, since in April 1816 he was allowed to take the retirement from military service that he had requested. He was now a collegiate assessor (the equivalent of major in the army), but this did not give him a position or a salary. For the next two years he mentions in letters his desire for some sort of government service that would give him security and allow him to feel that he was doing something useful and honorable. He was often ill, and constantly short of money, too poor to live permanently in either of the capitals. As a result, he would spend much of 1817 on his estate at Khantonovo in order to live more cheaply. And in the country, although oppressed by skuka and cold, he had more time to read and to write poetry.

In spite of illness and shortage of cash, these two years spent largely in Moscow and Khantonovo saw Batyushkov reach the peak of his literary career. In February 1816, he was elected with Zhukovsky to the Society of the Lovers of Literature, which had rejected him five years earlier. He marked the occasion with a speech, which was read at a meeting of the society, on the subject of “the influence of light verse on the language.” This was partly a formal affair, with some rather blatant flattery of the members; Batyushkov wrote in a letter to Gnedich, parodying a line of Derzhavin: “I spoke the truth to donkeys with a smile” (SP, 400). But this “truth” was an important one for him, and he chose to place the speech at the head of the two-volume edition of his works that appeared the following year. The “light verse” of the title is the society verse that Batyushkov and his friends had written in imitation of Parny and other French poets. This is placed in opposition to the grander forms of poetry; where the epic or the ode demand a more formal, archaic style, epistles, elegies, and epigrams offer a more direct reflection of the language of modern polite society.

Citing a whole range of models, ancient and modern, from Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius to Petrarch, Marot, Waller, and Derzhavin, Batyushkov remarks:

In the lighter kind of poetry, the reader demands all possible perfection, purity of expression, elegance of style, supple and flowing verse; he demands truth of feeling and the strictest propriety in every respect…. Beauty of style is essential here and nothing can take its place. It is a secret known only to talent and especially to the constant application of attention to one subject, since poetry of the lighter kind is a difficult art that demands a person’s whole life and mental exertions.

(Essays, 11–12)

He goes on to note that this urbanity was cultivated in the great age of Catherine, “so auspicious to science and literature,” and that those who practice it have profited from “the attentive reading of foreign authors, some of them ancient, others very recent.” One can see how close this ideal was to Batyushkov’s own practice.

An important element in the speech is patriotic pride in Russia, a pride heightened by the Napoleonic wars. The Society’s essential aim, says Batyushkov, is to enrich “a language, so closely bound up with the civic education, the enlightenment and thence the prosperity of the most glorious and most extensive country in the world,” and it pursues this aim “in the most ancient shrine of the national Muses, which is rising again from the ashes together with the capital of Russia and will eventually become worthy of its former greatness” (SP, 8). The cultivation of light verse therefore has its part to play in the creation of a sophisticated literary culture that will establish Russia alongside the prestigious cultures of Western Europe. The same ambition is expressed, as we saw earlier, in the dialogue “An Evening at Kantemir’s,” also written in 1816. This is a conversation between Antiokh Kantemir, a polyglot poet and Russian ambassador in Paris, and two French men of letters, Montesquieu and a character labeled “Abbé B.” The Frenchmen express surprise that Kantemir writes poems in Russian, for them a barbarous tongue. The response is a hymn of praise to Peter the Great and to his literary equivalent Lomonosov. Writing some eighty years after Kantemir, Batyushkov can put into his mouth hopes and prophecies that are already being fulfilled—he even mischievously has the Abbé remark that to imagine the flourishing of civilization in Russia is comparable to imagining Russian troops marching into Paris (SP, 47). Russia’s time, it is implied, has come.

Among other things, Kantemir remarks on the beauties of Russian popular culture: “We Russians have folk songs: they are filled with the tenderness and eloquence of the heart; you can see in them the quiet deep thoughtfulness that imparts an inexplicable charm to even the most unpolished productions of the northern muse” (SP, 46). In this period, Batyushkov, like many of his fellow poets, was showing a new interest in the themes and forms of Russian folk literature. In 1817 he asked Gnedich to send him some examples of traditional Russian poetry, since he was planning a poem called “The Water Sprite” or “Mermaid” (“Rusalka”) set in the legendary days of Russian antiquity. A letter to Vyazemsky outlines the plot of this poem (SP, 413–14), but unfortunately the plan remained unrealized, and it was left to the young Pushkin to illustrate the genre a couple of years later with his pathbreaking Ruslan and Lyudmila. All that Batyushkov managed was a brief unfinished poem in which we see and hear a Russian soldier back from the wars in a part of Russia remote from his own native region—which he calls the “motherland.” His nostalgic lament recalls that of the earlier poem, “The Prisoner.” Here are the central stanzas of this fragmentary song (the original sounds more peasant-like than the translation):

Sails on the water, where do you ply?—

To the holy motherland.

Birds of the air, why does your band

Soar up so high into the sky?—

To the woods of home we fly.

All things living fly to their home,

But I must wander here,

I sing a sad song through my tears,

Along the roads and paths I roam

And sing a song of home.

(CP, 204)

In a similar vein, Batyushkov did homage to the “northern muse” with his free translation of the currently popular ancient poem previously translated into English by William Mason as the “Song of Harald the Valiant.” This piece, taken from one of the sagas, is spoken by the eleventh-century Norwegian King Harald Sigurdson, known to the English as Harald Hardraade, who fell at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. It tells of a heroic adventurer who is disdained (in the last line of every stanza) by a Russian maiden (see Essays, 287–88). The poem echoes the “nordic” sentiments expressed in ‘ “On the Ruins of a Castle in Sweden” and in the central section of his very early poem “Dreaming,” which Batyushkov kept reworking and expanding, evoking the romantic appeal of the old North, and confusing as he did so the very different worlds of Ossian and the sagas.

A good deal of his poetic output at this time, however, belonged more to the category he had labeled “light verse” in his speech of 1816. This includes a number of satirical epigrams, such as this one of 1815, directed against an unknown target:

Pamphilus is merry at table,

Though often at reason’s expense:

He owes his gay moods to his belly,

To memory his flashes of sense.

(Essays, 305)

Or else there were little poems of friendship, including a quatrain that was sent with a bunch of flowers to “our Horace,” the garden-loving poet Ivan Dmitriev:

Blizzards and frosts have come and gone—

Your trees and flowers are never blighted.

I know from Apollo and Aphrodite

In Horace’s garden the roses live on.

(Essays, 306)

Both of these little pieces were included by Batyushkov—though with some hesitation—in the edition of his works that came out in 1817. The same is true of the “Epistle to Turgenev,” a longer piece included in a letter of October 1816 to his close friend, the influential statesman Aleksandr Turgenev.1 The poem is part of his successful attempt to persuade Turgenev to assist the widow of a war veteran and her daughter; after an appeal to his friend’s generosity, Batyushkov goes on to present his two heroines in a familiarly free and varied style that seems to owe something to the masters of French light verse, not least La Fontaine:

…But who are they? Like it or not,

I’ll tell you their whole gloomy story.

They are a widow and her daughter

A pair that fate forgot;

There was a husband called Popov,

The tsar’s devoted soldier,

A poor man. Then he died. Free of

All debts, of course, he met his maker.

But in this world he left a wife

With a young child, and only

His knapsack as a legacy…

But here the poor aren’t lonely!

Good folk came to their aid and fed

The two of them, and warmed them,

And in a word, did what they could

To shelter the poor orphans.

That’s splendid! Marvelous!—Well, yes,

But our sad world is hardly

A paradise, as grandpa says…

In marched a foreign army,

And Moscow burned down to the ground,

And our poor widow woman, ruined,

Set off again with staff in hand…

And all the time her daughter grew,

And as she grew, her needs grew too;

Day followed day, they all just vanished,

The weeks and months, and they were famished.

The aged dame is sinking, while

Her daughter blossoms like a flower,

Like Grace itself, with lovely eyes

And looks that overpower.

With Flora’s roses in her cheeks,

And hair as fine as golden flax

Falling on alabaster shoulders.

Her every word is full of grace,

She lends a beauty to her dress,

But all her wealth is in her face,

Her beauty is her dowry.

Never a crumb of bread or cake…

Turgenev, friend, for heaven’s sake,

Help me to rescue loveliness,

Poverty and unhappiness!

They’ll light a pure wax candle there

Before the holy face, of course.

Who will they pray for? I won’t say,

But you, my friend, can guess.

(Essays, 272–73)

In such epistles, poetic talk seems like a natural continuation of conversation; storytelling, humor, sentimental eloquence, commonsense remarks, and some semi-parodic description of female beauty mingle to create an entertaining discourse. In its ability to deal with such mundane subjects as poor relief, this light verse, as Batyushkov suggests, contributes to polishing the language of ordinary Russian speech. The same is true of a series of rather more jokey epistles of 1817 to an older member of Arzamas, Vassily Pushkin. Remembered now almost entirely as the uncle of his famous nephew, Vassily was in his day a leading society poet. The first piece is a quite trivial evocation of the old familiar boredom felt by Batyushkov in his country retreat:

I honestly don’t know the date;

Time stands still, in bands of steel;

Boredom is happy to repeat:

“It’s time to drink your tea,

Time for a meal, a sleep,

Time to get out the sleigh.”

“It’s time for you to give up poetry”—

Reason keeps on at me day after day.

(CP, 250)

Another little poem from a letter written at much the same time praises Pushkin for his devotion to the light poetry—wine, women, and song—that Batyushkov had praised in his speech, and in which he had first found fame himself. Pushkin is compared here to the old models of French elegance, from the Renaissance poet Clément Marot to the chevalier de Boufflers, who had died only four years earlier, and with whom Batyushkov had himself been compared. The tone is humorous, but the sentiment seems to be sincere; the escape from “dark oblivion’s greedy jaws” is a recurrent theme in Batyushkov’s work:

Eternal youth is his whose voice

     Sings Eros, love and wine,

Who plucks sweet pleasure’s fleeting rose

In the gay gardens of Boufflers, Marot.

He may be harassed by vile coughs and gout

And the creditors’ unholy throng,

And toil away all the day long

To keep the booksellers supplied.

Once dead, forgotten!—Not a bit—

Posterity will grasp the truth:

On what, and how and where the poet lived,

Where he expired, where his poor dust is laid.

Believe me, fate will rescue him

From dark oblivion’s greedy jaws

And bear to immortality

The man, his life, his works.

(CP, 212–13)

A third squib, which bears the grand title “Epistle from a Practical Sage to the Sage of Astafievo and the Pushkinistic Sage,” was written later in the same year, still from Khantonovo. Included in a letter to Vyazemsky (the “sage of Astafievo”), it is addressed jointly to him and Vassily Pushkin and promises to visit Astafievo, in spite of bad weather. Batyushkov writes in prose: “Some feeble souls like yours complain about the weather; the true sage declares…” after which comes the verse passage:

Happy whose paradise within

Is not disturbed by passion’s showers

Bright May will always shine on him

And Life will never grudge him flowers!

Remember how Epictetus in a ragged cloak

Didn’t know that the barometer foretold foul weather

Or that the universe’s values shook

And Rome was poised to swallow the world’s freedom.

His flesh and spirit tough from constant labor,

Heat did not make him sweat or rainstorms soak him.

I shall be tougher far than Epictetus.

Wrapped in a cloak of patience,

I shall appear before you

With the first light of day.

Yes! yes! you’ll see me standing on your threshold

Wearing a stoical expression.

I won’t be short of things to say!

Ideas from Seneca,

The gift of eloquence from Sokovnín,

The social graces from Ilyín,2

And my philosophy…from the pharmacy.

(CP, 250–51)

These are all poems of friendship—a supreme value for Batyushkov. In March 1817, he wrote to Gnedich that when he had finished his current poem (“Tasso Dying”) he would write no more—“except letters to friends: that is my real genre, as I have finally realized” (SP, 403). And indeed these letters (more than three hundred have survived) are among his best writing, by turns graphically descriptive, self-mockingly witty, and sincerely felt. It is interesting in particular to look at the letters to his close literary friends—Gnedich, Vyazemsky, and Zhukovsky; all are familiar and full of life, but the tone changes with the recipient, more ebullient and youthfully malicious with his oldest friend Gnedich, affectionately serious with the somewhat older and more prestigious Zhukovsky.

Much of the correspondence with Gnedich at this time was taken up with a major event in Batyushkov’s life, the publication of his works. The idea seems to have come spontaneously and unexpectedly from Gnedich in the summer of 1816. He offered not only to edit the volumes, but to print them at his own expense, paying the author an advance. His friend at first treated this as a joke, saying that Gnedich would ruin himself, but in the end the offer was too tempting to refuse, and it was agreed to publish two volumes, respectively, of prose and verse. The prose was ready for publication by the beginning of 1817, but both volumes were published several months later. In the end, Gnedich made a reasonable profit on the undertaking, but the impoverished Batyushkov received only a modest sum.

Gnedich proved to be a conscientious and a highly sympathetic editor. Based in St. Petersburg, he took on all the necessary tasks of publication, consulting his country friend about the choice and the ordering of texts, suggesting corrections, organizing a subscription (rather against Batyushkov’s wishes), and of course writing a preface. He at first proposed an enthusiastic presentation, possibly on the lines of the following draft for a biography of his friend:

Constantly and everywhere, Batyushkov lived a life at odds with his vocation as a poet; wherever he was, in his short periods of leisure he poured out his feelings and thoughts…None of our poets has distinguished himself with such an amazing plenitude, such beautifully finished pictures as Batyushkov. He had the most complete possession of his poetic inspiration and he was an artist in the full sense of the word. His poems are inimitable in their harmony, their truly Italian melody.

(WP, 238–39)

But Batyushkov warned him that this might be over-egging the cake, and in the end the first volume came out with a much more laconic foreword:

These two little volumes include almost all Mr. Batyushkov’s writings in prose and verse which are scattered through a range of periodicals, together with some new, unpublished works. I think it would be superfluous to discuss them in a preface. I shall simply say that having obtained the means of producing this edition, I consider it the most agreeable undertaking of my life, since I am sure that I shall satisfy the wishes of enlightened lovers of literature.

(Essays, 6)

The publication bore the modest title Essays in Verse and Prose (Opyty v stikhakh i proze). The word “essay” refers to Batyushkov’s great French master, Montaigne, whose Essais are intended as attempts or trials, uncertain searchings rather than finished works. And indeed there is an epigraph from Montaigne at the head of the first volume: “Et quand personne ne me lira, ai-je perdu mon temps, de m’être entretenu tant d’heures oisives à pensements utiles ou agréables?” (And even if no one reads me, have I wasted my time in spending so many idle hours on useful or agreeable thoughts?). Like Montaigne, Batyushkov liked to refer to his works as “scribbling” or “trifles,” but also, like Montaigne, he clearly attached more importance to them than he cared to admit.

For as he noted in the self-portrait quoted in the introduction, which was written in 1817 but not included in the Essays, he was very susceptible to the charms of fame. A good deal of his self-deprecating irony was part of a strategy of modesty designed to win praise. In the months preceding the publication of the Essays, his letters to Gnedich and others show him in a fever of self-doubt, fearing the exposure that awaits the published author. This comes across most clearly in a letter to Zhukovsky written from Khantonovo in June 1817:

Why did I take it into my head to publish all this? I feel, I know, that there’s a lot of rubbish here; even the poems that cost me so much torment me. But could it have been better? What a life I have led for poetry! Three wars, all the time on horseback or on the highways of the world. I ask myself: can you write anything perfect in such a stormy, changeable life? Conscience replies: No. Why publish then? It’s no great disaster, of course; I’ll be criticized and forgotten. But this thought kills me, it kills me, since I love fame and would like to deserve it, to tear it out of the hands of Fortune—not a great fame, no, just the little one that trifles can obtain for us if they are perfectly done…

(SP, 408)

And about his prose he wrote to Gnedich after rereading Montaigne: “There’s a man! There’s prose! And my stuff, I can see it myself, is thin gruel! It will all wither and soon fade. What’s one to do! If the war hadn’t ruined my health, I feel I could have written something better” (SP, 403). Not surprisingly, then, as work on the edition progressed, he was constantly seeking reassurance from his friends and bothering Gnedich with second thoughts, last-minute alterations, requests to leave out pieces that didn’t pass muster. When success came, it must have been a relief.

Volume one, the prose, consists largely of pieces previously published in journals, many of them being the essays composed in Kamenets in 1815. Batyushkov worried that the collection might be a little slight, and suggested making a number of additions, only one of which was eventually included, a translation of “Griselda,” the last story in Boccaccio’s Decameron. He explained that he had translated freely, trying to capture something of the specific charm of the original. “Griselda” takes its place alongside essays on Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch; it is in fact the only survivor of Batyushkov’s grandiose plan for a two-volume edition of translations of classic Italian texts and of important modern essays on Italian literature. He outlined this in a letter to Gnedich of March 1817, evidently hoping to enhance his reputation—and to make some money (SP, 403–5). But as with the translation of Tasso’s epic, nothing came of it.

In volume two, devoted to poetry, there is a considerably greater proportion of new and unpublished writing. Although the opening poem, “To My Friends,” presents the collection as a sort of poet’s diary, a record of changing thoughts and feelings, Batyushkov decided against a chronological arrangement. The first and much the longest section is entitled “Elegies”—and Batyushkov is often seen as a crucial figure in establishing the elegy as the central poetic genre of the Russian Golden Age. The term is a capacious one in Russian literature, but essentially it is distinguished from the more formal ode by its concentration on the expression of personal feeling. Batyushkov’s elegies are of many different kinds; few are as purely elegiac as “Shade of a Friend,” and some (notably “Tasso Dying”) are essentially historical narratives. It is important to note that in this section, translations (from Tibullus, Parny, and others) are intermingled with “original” poems; as we have seen, Batyushkov often worked by assimilating and re-creating poems from other languages, regarding the result as his own poetry.

The second section is devoted to “Epistles,” though there are also epistles in “Elegies,” notably the great poem addressed to Dashkov in 1813. The personal epistle was another field in which Batyushkov left a mark on the Russian poetry of his time, and this second section opens with what was perhaps his most famous poem, “My Penates.” Then, after “Elegies” and “Epistles,” comes the catchall “Miscellany,” for the most part poems that are not spoken in the poet’s name. Some of the pieces here might well have been placed in the earlier sections but arrived too late, when the rest of the volume had already been set up in print. The most important of these is “Tasso Dying,” completed in the summer of 1817. Before it came such writings as “The Traveler and the Stay-at-Home,” but also a variety of epigrams, inscriptions, and other short occasional pieces. What is not included, however, is the as yet unpublished “Vision on the Banks of Lethe.” This had been a succès de scandale in manuscript, and friends urged Batyushkov to make it generally available, but he refused outright, not wishing to hurt poets he had satirized when he was younger. From the outset he made his position clear to Gnedich:

I wouldn’t print “Lethe” for a million rubles; I shall stand firm on this as long as I have a conscience, reason and a heart. Glinka is dying of hunger; Merzlyakov is a friend of mine, or what we call a friend; Shalikov is living in poverty; Yazykov is eating dust, and you want me to make a public laughingstock of them. No, I’d rather die!

(SP, 391–92)

There were other poems, too, which he regretted having included in the Essays; he planned to remove them in a second edition—but this never materialized.

Meanwhile, he was composing new poems to fill out the second volume. In particular, he set himself to write a few more weighty pieces, for which he needed the isolation of Khantonovo. Most of these reached Gnedich too late to fit into the “Elegies” section where they really belong, the exception being a free translation of a poem by the French poet Millevoye, “The Rivalry of Hesiod and Homer.” Like “Tasso Dying,” written soon after, this poem has a strongly personal theme, the conflictual relationship between the poet and society. Homer and Hesiod are shown competing in ceremonial games for the poet’s prize; Homer sings of war and adventure, Hesiod of the beauty of the seasons. The weak king, more used to the pleasures of peacetime, “Scorned the lofty hymn of the immortal Homer / And awarded the palm to his rival.” Hesiod is surrounded by enthusiastic crowds, while Homer flees the scene:

Harassed by destiny right to the end,

But still a king at heart, no slave to fate,

Swallowing his grief in a deep wordlessness,

Homer took flight from all the cares of court.

And now a wretched Samian orphan boy

Leads the blind bard from land to land, a son

To him, but in Hellas they seek in vain—

Talent and poverty never find a home.

(Essays, 248–49)

We may remember that the life’s work of Batyushkov’s closest friend and editor was the translation of Homer’s Iliad.

The second of these substantial poems, written in the winter of 1816–17, was “The Crossing of the Rhine,” discussed in chapter 4. Here Batyushkov, far from the peaceful pleasures of his Epicurean verse, paints a battle scene with all the colorful expansiveness of a Homer. Immediately after this, almost at the end of the “Miscellany” section, and thus offering a grandiose conclusion to the Essays, is another long poem, the historical elegy “Tasso Dying.” In letters to Gnedich and Zhukovsky, Batyushkov anxiously asks their opinion of this poem: “Did you like my ‘Tasso’? I hope you did. I wrote it in the heat of the moment, with my mind full of all I had read about this great man” (SP, 407).

He had previously translated Torquato Tasso, had addressed a poem to him that prefigures this elegy, and was seen by friends as the Russian Tasso. Whether or not he had intimations of his own forthcoming collapse, he could identify with the Italian Renaissance poet who led a nomadic, tumultuous life, spending seven years in confinement with mental illness. At points Batyushkov’s poem echoes the Romantic legend that Tasso’s confinement was due to the jealousy and cruelty of the Duke of Ferrara. He writes in a long note that his “magnanimous protector shut him up in the hospital of Santa Anna—i.e. the madhouse—without trial or fault,” and goes on to mention Montaigne’s famous visit to the mad poet—“strange meeting in such a place of the foremost sage of modern times and the greatest poet!” There is no mistaking his personal involvement as he continues:

To complete his misfortune, Tasso was not completely mad, and in moments of lucidity he felt all the bitterness of his confinement. Imagination, the principal source of his talent and his woes, never deserted him. Even in confinement he wrote unceasingly. At last, on the urgent request of all of Italy, and almost all of enlightened Europe, Tasso was freed (after a confinement of seven years, two months and a few days). But he did not enjoy his freedom for long. Somber memories, poverty, constant dependence on cruel people, the treachery of friends, the injustice of critics—in a word, all the griefs and misfortunes that can afflict a man, destroyed his strong constitution and brought him by a path of thorns to an early grave. Fortune, malicious to the end, reserved one final blow for him, scattering flowers on her victim. Pope Clement VIII, persuaded by the appeals of his nephew, Cardinal Cintio, and by the voice of all Italy, ordered a triumph for him on the Capitoline.

(Essays, 331)

This is the point at which Batyushkov’s poem begins, though the long speeches given to the dying poet carry the reader back over his whole life with references to his Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberata). The poem is one of his most formal, written in a high poetic style, with a sprinkling of archaic forms and expressions to create a solemn tone far removed from the playfulness of “My Penates.” The meter is a Russian equivalent of the Greek elegiac couplet, with alternating masculine and feminine line endings. The epigraph from Tasso bewails the brevity of fame:

TASSO DYING

…E come alpestre e rapido torrente,

Come acceso baleno

In notturno sereno,

Come aura o fumo, o come stral repente,

Volan le nostre fame; ed ogni orore

Sembra languido fiore!

Che più spera, o che s’attende omai?

Dopo trionfo e palma

Sol qui restano all’alma

Lutto e lamenti, e lagrimosi lai.

Che più giova amicizia o giova amore!

Ahi lagrime! ahi dolore!

(Torquato Tasso, Torrismondo)3

What festival is being made ready in old Rome?

Where are they bound, these floods of people?

Why this sweet-smelling smoke of spices and of myrrh,

These baskets full of aromatic grasses?

From Tiber’s waters to the towering Capitol,

Above the thronging universal city

Why have they hung these priceless rugs among

The laurels, the flowers, the imperial purple?

And why this din, the thunder and the roar of drums,

Is this a day of revelry or conquest?

Why does the vicar of Christ make his slow way

Into the house of prayer with sacred banners?

And who will wear the garland in his trembling hands,

The priceless present of a grateful city?

Whose triumph?—It is yours, who with your heavenly voice

Sang of Jerusalem and liberation!

The noise of celebration carries to the cell

Where Tasso is struggling with his final sickness

And where the spirit of death has stretched his wings

Over the godlike forehead of the victim.

Neither the tears of friendship, nor the prayers of monks,

Nor the honors heaped too late upon him,

Nothing can shield him from the iron hand of fate

That knows no pity for our human greatness.

Already, half destroyed, he feels the lethal hour

And welcomes it and calls it blessed,

With a sweet swan song once again, for the last time,

He says farewell to life, exclaiming:

“O friends! let me once more look upon Rome the great

Where an untimely grave awaits the poet.

Let my eyes rest upon your hills and on the smoke

That rises from an ancient city’s ashes.

O sacred land of heroes and of miracles!

Eloquent dust of noble ruins!

Azure and purple richness of the cloudless skies

And poplar trees and venerable olives,

And you, eternal Tiber, where the peoples drank,

Where bones of the world’s citizens are scattered,

I greet you all, a captive of these cheerless walls,

Condemned to die before my days are reckoned!

All is fulfilled! I stand above the dark abyss,

And shall not hear the Capitol applauding;

Nor will fame’s laurels sweeten the bitter taste

That fills the air above my weary deathbed.

From my first days I was the people’s laughingstock;

When I was still a boy I lived in exile,

And like a poor vagabond all through Italy,

Beneath its blessed skies I wandered.

What twists and turns of fate did I not suffer then?

Where was my little boat not driven?

Where could I find a resting place? Where did my bread

Not crumble in the tears of bitter sorrow?

Sorrento! Cradle of my unhappy days,

Where in the depths of night, like sad Ascanius,

Destiny tore me from my mother’s side,

Her sweet embraces and her kisses,

As a boy you know how many tears I shed!

Alas! since then, fate’s constant victim,

I have known life’s miseries, her bitterness,

The fortune-furrowed waves lay open

Beneath me, and the thunder’s voice was never hushed!

Still driven from house to house, country to country,

I sought in vain the shelter of a port:

Everywhere finding—her unrelenting finger!

Everywhere—thunderbolts to discipline the poet!

And nowhere, not in the poor peasant’s cottage,

Or safe from harm in Alonso’s palace walls,

Or in the quiet of some hidden dwelling,

In thickets or in hills, was there a place to lay

My head, oppressed by fame or by its absence,

The head of a fugitive who from his earliest days

Was the marked victim of the cruel goddess.

My friends! what is this weight that presses on my heart?

Why does it shudder so? Why is it aching?

Where have I come from? What is the infernal road

That I have traveled, what glimmers through the darkness?

Ferrara…Furies…and the envious hiss of snakes!

Where shall I fly to, murderers of talent?

Rome is a place of refuge—place of brothers, friends,

Their tears, the sweetness of their kisses…

And Virgil’s laurel wreath, here in the Capitol!

I have done everything that Phoebus ordered.

I was his zealous acolyte from my first youth,

Harried by lightning and the wrath of heaven,

I sang the greatness and the fame of bygone days,

And even in chains my soul did not betray him.

The Muses’ heavenly fire was never quenched in me,

In suffering my genius grew stronger.

It lived among the miracles, beneath the walls

Of Zion, on the flowering banks of Jordan,

Haunting the peaceful havens of Lebanon,

And questioning the Cedron’s troubled waters.

Before my gaze you rose again, heroes of old,

Exalted in your warlike stature.

I saw you, Godfrey, leader, overlord of kings,

Calm, majestic in the hiss of arrows;

And you, Rinaldo, like Achilles in the fight,

Heaven-favored conqueror in love and battle,

I saw you flying over bodies, once your foes,

Like fire, like death, exterminating angel…

And Tartarus was laid low beneath the shining cross.

O paragons of valor without equal!

O holy triumph of our distant ancestors

Now gone to endless sleep! Pure faith triumphant!

Torquato rescued you from the deep chasm of time:

He sang—and you will never be forgotten—

He sang and won the crown of immortality

Woven by fame and by the seven Muses.

It is too late. I stand above the dark abyss,

And shall not see the applauding Capitol;

Nor will fame’s laurels sweeten the bitter taste

That fills the air above my weary deathbed.”

He said no more. His eyes burned with a dusky flame,

The last gleam of a dying poet’s spirit,

As if he hoped to snatch out of the hand of Fate

A day of triumph in his final moments.

His gaze still searching for the Capitol,

He tried in vain to rouse his dying body;

But, worn out by the fearful agony of death,

Could only lie stretched on his bed, unmoving.

The sun was gliding westward to its resting place

And sinking in a glow of crimson;

The hour of death drew closer…now for the last time

A light shone from his somber features.

With a tranquil smile he looked out to the west

And animated by the cool of evening,

He raised his right hand to the watchful heavens

Like a righteous man who speaks of hope and comfort,

And said to his grieving friends: “Look there, how in the west

The sun, greatest of all the lights, is blazing!

He calls on me to follow him to cloudless lands,

Where the eternal Light will rise upon me…

Already an angel stands before me as my guide

And overshadows me with wings of azure…

Bring me the sign of love, the sacramental cross,

And pray with hope and tears of supplication…

All earthly things can only die—fame, laurel wreaths…

The mighty works of art and of the muses:

But there all is eternal, like the eternal God

Who gives the crown of never-failing glory!

There, there is all the greatness that inspired my soul,

All I have lived for since the cradle.

O brothers, friends, you must not shed your tears for me,

Your friend has won the treasure that he longed for.

He will go from this world, and given strength by faith,

He will not feel the terror of his passing:

There, there…o joy! among the uncorrupted souls

Among the angels Eleonora will meet him!”

Speaking of love, the heavenly poet breathed his last;

His friends stood weeping over him in silence.

The day burned slowly out, a bell’s transparent voice

Carried the sorry tidings to the city.

“Torquato our poet is dead!” a weeping Rome exclaimed,

“The bard is dead, he deserved a kinder fortune!…”

The next day they beheld the torches’ somber smoke,

And the Capitoline was draped in mourning.

(Essays, 325–30)

Batyushkov concluded his note on the poem with the words: “May the shade of the great poet not be offended that a son of the gloomy north, who owes to the Gerusalemme liberata the best and sweetest moments of his life, has ventured to bring this meager handful of flowers to his memory!” In fact, he thought the poem the best he had written, and originally wanted it to begin the volume, in place of an author’s portrait. Contemporaries saw in it a reflection of the poet’s own tribulations, especially after his mental collapse, and most thought highly of it. It does not actually conclude the Essays, being followed by a happier and less grandiloquent poem written in the summer of 1817; this celebration of the construction of a summerhouse strikes once more some of the chords of Batyushkov’s earlier epistles to friends, the praise of country solitude, the pleasure in poetry:

THE MUSES’ ARBOR

Here, under the bird-cherry’s creamy shade,

Beneath the acacias’ golden beauty,

I build an altar to the blessed muses,

Companions of my younger days.

I bring them flowers, the amber of the bees,

And the first fruits of the meadow,

And may my humble presents bring them pleasure,

My grateful song beneath the trees!

The poet does not pray to them for gold;

They have no time for riches;

They are the allies of the poor and needy,

In huts, not palaces, at home.

He does not pray for fame’s resplendent gifts;

Alas! his voice is feeble.

A bee can never, like the mighty eagle,

Soar boldly to the heights.

He prays the muses that they will return

To his tired soul the love of beauty,

And the bright cheerfulness that used to burn,

And freshness to his flagging feelings.

And may care with its heavy load

Drown in the river of oblivion,

And greedy time not touch the muses’ favorite

In this, his calm abode.

May he, no longer young, but young in heart,

The carefree child of the carefree graces,

Sometimes come here to rest in the deep shade

Of the bird-cherries and acacias.

(Essays, 333–34)

Two more poems were completed just before the publication of the Essays. The first is another verse epistle; it is addressed to Batyushkov’s cousin Nikita, a close friend and the son of his former protector Mikhail Muravyov. Nikita was more than ten years his junior, but the two had both fought in the Napoleonic wars. In 1812, at the age of fifteen, Nikita had run away from home to join the army; to his regret, however, he had not had the thrill of riding into Paris with the Russian army. In his earlier writings and letters, Batyushkov often spoke of the tonic effect of military life on his lethargic and depressive nature; here, finding common ground with his young cousin, he recalls one last time the glory days of wartime and contrasts them with the dull and forgotten existence he lives in Khantonovo. Vivid passages in his realistic description of military life anticipate much later writing by Lermontov, in particular his long poem “Valerik.”4

TO NIKITA

Comrade in arms, I love to see

Spring bursting out in gay abundance,

And then for the first time to hear

The lark’s bright song above the meadow.

But it’s sweeter far to see the fields

Coming alive with tents and banners

And to lie carefree by the fires

Waiting for daybreak and the battle.

What happiness, my gallant knight,

To gaze down from a hillside lookout

At the green valleys stretching bright

Beneath the endless ranks of soldiers!

How sweet to hear outside the tent

The far-off roar of cannon at evening

And sink ourselves deep into sleep

Beneath our greatcoats till the morning,

When we shall hear in the dewy sun

The early horses’ trot and clatter

And the long-drawn-out growl of guns

Stirring the echoes on the mountains.

What joy it is to race along

The ranks of soldiers on your charger,

And plunge the first into the throng,

Shouting and slashing with your saber!

What joy to hear the order: “Charge!

Infantry, cossacks!—Charge, hussars!

After the enemy, chasseurs!—

Highlanders, Bashkirs, Tatars!”

Whistle and buzz, bullets of lead!

Grapeshot and shells, come flying over!

What do they care for you, our men

Made for the battlefield by nature?

Like a forest the columns move…

O what a glorious sight!—none better!

They march—their silence speaks of war;

They march—their muskets at the ready;

They march…Hurrah! It’s all knocked out,

Everything scattered in the rout.

Hurrah! Where are the enemy?

They’ve run away. We’re in their quarters.

O happy warriors!—and now we

Drink captured wine from shining helmets

And as victorious cannons roar,

Sing a Te Deum to the Lord…

But you are trembling eagerly,

Clutching your saber, my young warrior.

Your soul is troubled, and I see

You long to go and pluck the laurel.

On the bloody battlefield

You with the spirit of Suvorov

Go wandering, but cannot find

In this weak world a worthy fortune.

But never fear—when the thunder roars,

You’ll hasten to the flags of honor,

But there, alas! you’ll see no more

Your friend among the eager soldiers.

Forgotten by vociferous fame,

That sweet tormentor of the spirit,

I sleep here, like a weary peasant

Who never hears the voice of praise.

(Essays, 303–4)

The poem was meant as a surprise to the twenty-year-old Nikita; Batyushkov specifically asked Gnedich not to show it to him until the book came out, adding ruefully: “That’s the sort of trifles that I busy myself with, thirty-year-old child that I am” (WP, 243). He gave his Essays to Nikita with a heartfelt dedication, but the young man, whatever he may have thought of the epistle, was not impressed by the conservative aspect of the prose pieces, and wrote unflattering notes in the margins of his copy (see Works, 26–29). For although the cousins were very close at this time and both members of Arzamas, their political views were some way apart. Nikita Muravyov was one of the early members of what became the insurrectionary Decembrist movement. Though he did not actually take part in the uprising of December 1825, he was found guilty of conspiracy and condemned to death, this being commuted to twenty years of hard labor. Batyushkov, on the other hand, while he was close to several of the future Decembrists, had little sympathy with their aims; he had satirized the literary conservatives around Admiral Shishkov, but turned away from what he came to regard as the destructive ideas of the French Enlightenment, preferring the more accepting wisdom of Montaigne.

Finally, let us return to the poem Batyushkov first wrote at the age of fifteen, “Dreaming,” already briefly discussed in chapter 1. Though this poem is hardly on a level with his best writing, it clearly mattered a great deal to him, and he placed the final, rewritten and much expanded version at the end of the “Elegies” section of the Essays; easily the longest of the elegies, this hymn to imagination seems thus to proclaim the poet’s enduring artistic credo. Much of the expansion consists of lengthy developments of the Nordic/Ossianic and the Anacreontic/erotic motifs; the poem then concludes very much like the first version—echoing in 1817 the sentiments with which Batyushkov began it in 1802:

You, Dream, be true to me, and live with me!

Society, the empty gleam of fame

Can never take the place of what you give!

Let fools prize glittering vanity,

Kissing the golden dust of marble halls—

But I am rich and happy when I have

Found for myself repose and freedom,

Leaving society’s worries to oblivion!

And may I never forget

The poet’s happy lot: to know

In poetry the happiness of Dream!

The smallest thing delights him; as a bee

Weighed down with golden pollen

Buzzes from grass to flowers

And thinks a stream the sea,

The poet sees a palace in his retreat—

Happy because he dreams.

(Essays, 259)

In spite of Batyushkov’s fears, the publication of the Essays was a great success. Like many writers of the time, he had published widely in journals, and together with his manuscript writings (notably the “Vision on the Banks of Lethe”) these had already given him a considerable reputation. But the appearance of two volumes of prose and verse, including many new works, made it clear that here was one of the outstanding poets of the age. Batyushkov was no doubt reassured, at least for the time being. Even four years later, when he was convinced that the world was against him, he remembered the high point of his career: “Then all the journalists, without a single exception, showered me with praise, undeserved no doubt, but praise” (SP, 441). However badly things were to go subsequently, the Essays of 1817 had established him as a major Russian writer.