Writings from the Golden Age of Russian poetry

When he returned to St. Petersburg in March 1822, Batyushkov was nearly thirty-five years old; he had more than thirty-three years still to live. For all of this time he was disturbed, mentally ill, sometimes to the point of attempted suicide; for much of the time he was shut away, first in a clinic, then in houses belonging to family members, seeing little of his friends, and writing almost nothing—or at least nothing that has survived. What is usually seen as his last poem was composed some time between 1821 and 1824; it expresses the despair felt by Batyushkov at this time:

Reader, have you not heard

Of gray Melchisedec’s last words?

Man is born a slave,

A slave goes to the grave,

And can he hope that death will say

Why he walked through this lovely vale of tears,

Suffered, complained, accepted, disappeared?

(Essays, 353)

Melchisedec is a priest mentioned in the book of Genesis. In the Epistle to the Hebrews (chapters 6 and 7), Christ is said to be “made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec,” and Melchisedec himself is described as a godlike figure, “without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life.” There is nothing obvious to connect him with the bleak vision of Batyushkov’s poem, which reminds one rather of the book of Job or Ecclesiastes (“for all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief”)—but there seems no doubt that this composite prophetic figure speaks for the poet. Notice too that the “vale of tears” remains “lovely” (more literally, “miraculous”). The poem might have been written at about the same time as the “Imitations of the Ancients,” and, dark as it is, it shares with them a formal perfection, a kind of gem-like beauty. A witness claimed to have seen it written in charcoal on the wall of Batyushkov’s room at the end of his life.

When they saw him again in March 1822, his friends were alarmed at his condition; Karamzin wrote to Vyazemsky: “Batyushkov has come home a melancholic and a hypochondriac, gloomy and cold…he sits in his room and doesn’t want to see us often” (WP, 291). But he was not without support. Until 1833, he was still officially in government service, although constantly on leave. This meant that the tsar’s government took some responsibility for him, paying him a small salary, allowing him expenses for travel to a German clinic, overseeing his movements and dealing with arrangements for the management of his estate. His first desire on returning home was to set off again on his travels, this time to seek a cure in the Crimea, where he had once dreamed of settling with Anna Furman. He obtained the necessary passport, and disappeared from view, turning up in August in Simferopol, where he signed on with a celebrated psychiatrist. To no avail: during the winter his paranoiac condition worsened; he burned his books, tried more than once to kill himself, and had to be carefully watched. His old friend Vyazemsky commented (in a letter to Aleksandr Turgenev): “We are all born under some kind of disastrous constellation…Poor Batyushkov, alone in an inn in Simferopol, devoured by the gloomy dreams of a disturbed imagination—that’s a scene worthy of our Russian way of life and our epoch” (WP, 295).

Eventually he was brought back to the capital by force and lived there for the next year, refusing a room in his old home with the Muravyovs and preferring a little flat by himself. During this period he was assiduously cared for by his old Arzamas friends, particularly Turgenev, who often reported on his alarming condition to Vyazemsky in Moscow. There were relatively good days too, for instance May 17, of which Turgenev wrote: “Batyushkov is very depressed again…But yesterday we sat with him until one in the morning, and Bludov’s jokes enlivened him and his wits. He joked with us about literary people and himself quoted some poems” (WP, 297). Overall, however, the prospects looked bleak, as Karamzin noted in a letter to Vyazemsky: “I saw Batyushkov, who was wearing a beard, and was in the most unhappy frame of mind: he talks nonsense about his illness and wants to hear of nothing else. I have no hope” (WP, 297). In April 1824, Batyushkov wrote a letter to the tsar requesting permission to retire to a monastery; the tsar’s response was to have him sent to a specialist clinic at Sonnenstein, near Dresden.

Sonnenstein later became notorious as the site of a “National Socialist Death Institution,” a precursor of the death camps; here the Nazis gassed those deemed unworthy of life, for the most part the mentally ill or the psychologically disabled. The same institution was in the early nineteenth century a very advanced center for the humane treatment of mental illness. Batyushkov spent four years there, from 1824 to 1828, accompanied by his devoted sister Aleksandra. At first he resisted treatment and tried to run away; later he became reconciled to the regime, but it did no good. He continued to be obsessed with the idea of a conspiracy against him. His state of mind can be seen in a letter, written to Zhukovsky in March 1826, referring to Batyushkov’s superior, the foreign minister Nesselrode, who was responsible for having him sent to Sonnenstein:

Slapped on the cheeks, tormented and accursed together with Martin Luther on the Sonnenstein machine by the insane Nesselrode, I have a consolation in God and the friendship of such people as you, Zhukovsky. I hope that Nesselrode will be punished as an assassin. I can never forgive him, neither I nor God nor decent, honest people. Comfort me with a visit; I await you impatiently in this place of penal servitude, where Batyushkov dies daily.

(WP, 300).

He found some consolation in art, devoting himself to drawing and making wax models. His doctor, Anton Dietrich, left many accounts of this, noting that “he becomes so absorbed in drawing that he barely answers the questions the doctors ask him. Many of his finished drawings show real talent” (WP, 304). This talent is evident in earlier drawings, notably some vivid self-portraits, including one of the wounded Batyushkov on crutches in 1807. He continued to draw to the end of his life, often repeating the same landscape. Few of these drawings have survived, and none of the wax models, so we have to rely on Doctor Dietrich’s notes, which indicate that he liked to draw Tasso in prison, and also to model his brother and sisters, his father, the tsar, Zhukovsky, and others. Nor had he entirely given up reading and writing. He remained faithful to Tasso, Chateaubriand, and Byron, even writing a letter addressed to “Lord Byron in England” two years after Byron’s death.

As for his poetry, only one significant piece has survived from the years of his affliction, an “Imitation of Horace” sent in a letter to his nephew, Grigory Grevents, who looked after him in his final years, and to whose daughter Elizaveta the poem seems to be addressed. In the standard edition of his poems, this piece is relegated to the endnotes, where it is described as “a nonsensical collection of phrases,” but it is worth more than this suggests. It is not so much an imitation of Horace as a parody of Derzhavin’s poem “Monument,” which is itself derived from Horace’s famous “Exegi monumentum” (Odes III, 30)—also translated or imitated by Lomonosov and, later, Pushkin. All of these poets, taking stock of their achievements, proclaim the lasting value of what they have written—in Derzhavin’s case:

I have built myself a monument miraculous, eternal,

Stronger than metal, higher than pyramids;

Whirlwind and thunder will not overthrow it;

It will not be destroyed by fleeting years.

Batyushkov follows the pattern, writing of his immortality as a poet, comparing himself with the tsar. His poem has its own strange logic, fascinatingly teased out by Ilya Kutik in an essay in the journal Cardinal Points (no. 5, 2015). Let me just add here that through all the absurdity Batyushkov’s poetic gift is palpably present; this poem has something of the vigor and brilliance of his “Imitations of the Ancients,” above all in the stunning, if puzzling, last line—here and in the preceding three lines I have felt free to follow the patterning of sound rather than the lexical meaning, which would translate more literally as: “Tsaritsas, rule as tsars, and you, the empress! / Tsars, do not rule as tsars, I myself am a tsar on Pindus! / Venus my sister, and you my little sister. / But my Caesar is the holy reaper (a kesar’ moy—svyatoy kosar’).”

I have built a huge, miraculous monument,

Singing your praises: it will not see death!

Like your sweet image, charming, benevolent

(Witness Napoleon, our faithful friend)

I shan’t see death. All I have done in letters,

Dodging oblivion will live in print.

Not Phoebus, I alone have forged these fetters

Where I can keep the universe shut in.

I was the first who dared to speak in Russian

Amusingly about Elise’s virtue,

To chat with true simplicity of God

And thunder truth to tsars for their own good.

Be stars for us, my empress, my tsaritsas!

Tsars are not stars: Mount Pindus is my state,

Venus my sister, you my little sister,

My Caesar—scissors in the hands of Fate.

(CP, 323)

In the summer of 1827, Batyushkov was declared incurable and the following year he was sent back to St. Petersburg. He was accompanied by his faithful sister, Aleksandra, who not long afterward herself succumbed to mental illness and lived out her days alone in Khantonovo, much less well cared for than Konstantin. Another member of the party was the German Dr. Dietrich, who chose to stay with Batyushkov for all of two years, not really hoping for a cure, but wanting to make life easier for his patient. He was interested in poetry and translated poems by Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, and Batyushkov himself, but above all he was a conscientious observer who left precious notes on the sick man’s behavior. These are fascinating, though they make sorry reading; for instance in September 1828: “He would not allow them to light the stove in his room; they didn’t obey him, and he opened the window, constantly repeating that Stackelberg, Nesselrode, and many others who would start tormenting him were all hiding in the stove.” Or the following February: “This morning he begged Schultz to bring him a dagger for him to kill himself, since he’s fed up of living; he had visions of Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Tsar Aleksandr and others, all were writing down what he said and immediately sending it off somewhere” (WP, 329–30). In March 1830, he fell ill with pneumonia and was given up by his doctors. Friends came to see him before he died, including Pushkin, who tried in vain to talk to him; he had greatly admired Batyushkov since before their first meeting many years earlier, and this final meeting left a trace in his poem “God, let me not go mad…”, where he also alludes to the poem “The Last Spring” (see chapter 5).¹ Against all expectations, Batyushkov recovered; he was to live another twenty-five years, for much of the time in better physical health than he had known in his more active days. But soon after his recovery, Dietrich gave up hope and returned to Germany, leaving his patient to friends and family.

There is tragically little to say about the last twenty-five years of the poet’s life. In 1825, his brother-in-law P. A. Shipilov was given power of attorney to administer his estates, which he did very effectively, paying off many debts. In 1833, Batyushkov was finally allowed to retire from government service and was given a small pension; that same year his nephew Grigory Grevents took over the role of guardian and moved with him to his home town of Vologda. Thereafter, his life was quiet and outwardly uneventful. He lived on the upper floor of a town house, making some contact with neighbors and visitors and continuing to read and to draw a great deal. He loved seeing children. In the summer, he was often in a nearby village, where he spent many hours walking in the countryside, so that he remained strong and healthy in body. The artist N. V. Berg, who visited him in 1847, left a vivid description:

His dark-gray eyes were mobile and expressive, with a quiet, gentle look. His thick eyebrows, black with a touch of grey, were neither lowered nor contracted. However hard I looked, I could see no sign of madness in his modest, noble face…. His whole face was thin, somewhat wrinkled and remarkable for its extraordinary mobility. It moved like lightning, with rapid transitions from quietness to uneasiness, from smiles to severity. In general he is very lively and even restless. Everything he does, he does quickly. He walks quickly too, taking big strides.

(WP, 338)

As the years passed, he seems to have become less agitated, though still unpredictable and strange in his opinions. Witnesses noted his quietness, his politeness, particularly to women, his love of children and flowers, his desire to dress well, his taste for the theatre. He even began to be interested in the newspapers, especially at the time of the Crimean War (just before his death), so much so that his old bugbear and admirer Pletnyov wrote to Vyazemsky in January 1855: “Batyushkov has suddenly come to himself again, and hearing about the siege of Sebastopol, asked people to collect as many maps as possible of the place; since then he has been much engaged in European politics. That’s what can be called rising up from the grave, having lain there for thirty years” (WP, 339).

Talk of resurrection was premature; in July of that year, Batyushkov died of typhus, a quiet death followed by a well-attended funeral and burial in a monastery not far from Vologda. He had written almost nothing for many years—or if he did, it has not survived, with one small exception, a poem dated May 14, 1853, entitled “Inscription for a Portrait of Count Bukshoevden of Sweden and Finland. And Also for an Image of Khvostov-Suvorov.” Bukshoevden commanded the Russian forces during the Swedish campaign of 1808–1809, in which Batyushkov had taken part; Dmitry Khvostov was a much-mocked poet of the Shishkov camp and married to a daughter of General Suvorov. Why Batyushkov linked them to this poem is anyone’s guess:

I’m very strangely made—as you’ll agree:

I can both yawn and sneeze,

I wake only to sleep

And sleep to wake eternally.

(CP, 323)

In 1853, a couple of years before Batyushkov died, his old friend Pyotr Vyazemsky, now transformed from irreverent young wit to serious conservative politician, was on holiday in Germany. Taking a trip on the Elbe near Dresden, he found himself close to the psychiatric clinic where his fellow poet had spent four years nearly thirty years before. Memories of the sick Batyushkov came flooding back. His poem entitled “Sonnenstein” begins with two stanzas about the beauties of the region before calling up the melancholy past and the still more melancholy present of his friend:

Enchanted country, full of light, then somber,

You living keepsake of the lovely world,

It was beyond your power to lift and scatter

The cloud of thought that settled on my soul.

It was a different vision held me captive,

A charming image visited my soul,

That suffering image, like a grieving shadow,

Hid nature’s beauty under a dark pall.

He suffered here, here for a time he languished,

Zhukovsky’s dearest bosom friend and mine,

In song and suffering our own Torquato

Who saw his sun set long before he died.

Not for his eyes did nature bud and flower,

Her sacred voice fell silent where he stood,

And here the clear blue skies could not awaken

The warmth of happy days in his sad blood.

His inner world was one of nightmare visions,

Locked in himself, as in a prison cell,

His mind shuttered against outward impressions,

God’s world for him was like a lightless hell.

But what he saw, what caused his mind to tremble,

Was what disease engendered in that mind,

And here, poor man, he lived out years of suffering

And still he lives, our godforsaken friend.2

Without having died, the sick man was dead to the outside world. Much earlier, some time in 1822, Vyazemsky had written down in his notebooks what Batyushkov had said about his writing: “What can I write, what can I say about my poems?…I am like a man who didn’t reach his goal and was carrying on his head a beautiful vessel full of something. The vessel slipped from his head, fell and was shattered into smithereens. Just try guessing what was in it!” (SP, 448). And indeed his legacy must be seen as incomplete; heaven knows what he might have written if his life had turned out better. But then the same can be said of Lermontov, of Keats, of many others, and like them, in spite of everything, Batyushkov achieved a great deal in relatively few years. Quite apart from the intrinsic value of his prose and verse, he was one of the principal creators of Russian Golden Age poetry, building on his reading and translation of foreign poetry, ancient and modern, to forge a fluent, natural-seeming, yet richly sonorous language for the expression of emotion, experience, and imagination. He also provided some of the first examples for a whole range of literary genres: elegy, poetic epistle, lighthearted literary satire, the short “anthological poem,” the letter to friends, the sketch of daily life, art criticism.

Naturally then, Batyushkov became—and remained—a pivotal figure in Russian literary history, although literary historians have an unfortunate tendency to see him above all as a precursor of Aleksandr Pushkin. Undoubtedly Pushkin did learn a lot from Batyushkov, as well as going beyond him in many ways, but the older poet should be read for his own value rather than as a precious influence. His Essays in Prose and Verse were twice reissued under different titles before the poet’s death, but the essential edition of his works by L. N. Maykov was published in 1885–1887, in three volumes. It may be this recent publication that prompted Chekhov, in his 1889 play The Wood Demon (and later in the closely related Uncle Vanya), to have his tedious professor Serebryakov ask his young wife Elena to fetch a Batyushkov volume that he thinks he has in his library. By this stage Batyushkov was probably not widely read by the general public, so the professor’s request very likely signifies an out-of-touch academic attitude.

There are quite different and entirely positive mentions of Batyushkov some forty years later in the works of a poet who was the opposite of a dry-as-dust professor, Osip Mandelstam. I quoted in the introduction his eloquent poetic greeting to his distant predecessor; there are also two mentions of Batyushkov in his prose writings on poetry. In “Notes on Poetry,” written in 1923, he declares: “Only those who were directly involved in the great secularization of the Russian language, in making it the language of the laity, helped to accomplish the task of primary significance in the development of Russian poetry. These include Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Batyushkov, Yazykov, and most recently Khlebnikov and Pasternak.” And following up on this the same year in “Storm and Stress,” he again sets Batyushkov alongside Pasternak, remarking of the latter’s new collection My Sister Life: “So new and so mature a harmony has not sounded in Russian poetry since the days of Batyushkov.”3

Nearer our own times, Batyushkov lives again in a remarkable verse novel by Maria Rybakova, Gnedich (2011).⁴ Centered on Gnedich and his translation of Homer, this is also much concerned with the friendship that has figured so largely in the present book, citing letters between the friends and evoking themes from Batyushkov’s work. I have been inspired by Gnedich to complete my study of his friend. But I should like to finish this book with another verse tribute to the poet and his tragic fate, an elusive and moving poem that remained with me as I read and translated Batyushkov. It is the work of the Chuvash-Russian poet, Gennady Aygi (1934–2006);⁵ the epigraph is taken from the poem by Vyazemsky just quoted:

House of the Poet in Vologda

(Konstantin Batyushkov)

A charming image visited my soul…(P. Vyazemsky)

but alongside—a surrounding of silk:

torn as if in a mixture

of his shining

and the trembling:

unceasing: of the temple—

altering the face

as in wind—

in shining of silk—as of features

of dust!—