Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855) was one of Russia’s greatest poets. As such he was celebrated by an even greater poet, Osip Mandelstam, a century later. In 1932, Mandelstam was a literary outcast living in poverty in Moscow, where he wrote a poem addressed to his hero. It was one of the last poems to be published in his lifetime (in the journal Novy Mir):
BATYUSHKOV
Like a flâneur with a magic cane,
tender Batyushkov lives at my place—
wanders down Zamostie lanes,
sniffs a rose, sings Zafna’s praise.
Not for a moment believing that we
could be separated, I bowed to him:
I shake his brightly gloved cold hand
in an envious delirium.
He smiled at me. “Thank you,” I said,
so shy I could not find the words:
No one commands such curves of sound,
never was there such speech of waves.
With oblique words he made us feel
the wealth and torments that we share—
the buzz of verse-making, brotherhood’s bell
and the harmonies of pouring tears.
And the mourner of Tasso answered me:
“I am not yet used to eulogy;
I only cooled my tongue by chance
on the grape-flesh of poetry.”
All right, raise your eyebrows in surprise,
city dweller and city dweller’s friend—
like blood samples, from glass to glass
keep pouring your eternal dreams.1
“Tender Batyushkov lives at my place”—Mandelstam had in his room a portrait of the poet, perhaps a very well-known one, where the eyebrows do indeed seem to be raised in surprise. And Batyushkov certainly lived with him—as early as 1910 he had alluded in a poem to an anecdote in which the mentally ill poet, being asked the time, answered, “Eternity.” The poem of 1932 shows a great closeness to the subject: “Zafna” is the addressee of Batyushkov’s poem “The Torrent”; the marvelous evocation of his “curves of sound” and “speech of waves” recalls the enthusiasm of his contemporaries for the music of Batyushkov’s verse; “the mourner of Tasso” refers primarily to the great elegy “Tasso Dying”; and the modesty of the final two stanzas is attested by many descriptions of the poet and by the deprecating way he often wrote of his poetry.
The last two lines present Batyushkov as a predecessor, spilling out poems and dreams like blood and wine (a kind of Eucharist) to keep alive the brotherhood of poets with their “harmonies of pouring tears.” In 1932, in the face of exclusion and persecution, the need for such forefathers was pressing; Mandelstam found them not only in Batyushkov, but in the Italian poets that his predecessor had loved, imitated, and translated: Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch. They offered an example of living lightness—just as Batyushkov is seen as an elegant “flâneur,” almost a dandy with his “magic cane,” a poet of roses and love, poles apart from the grim literary functionaries who dominated the recently founded Union of Writers of the USSR.
So who was this “tender Batyushkov” whose image radiated light for the beleaguered Mandelstam? To most non-Russian readers his name is hardly known, but for Russians he is a classic. After the first flowering of Russian poetry in the eighteenth century, characterized above all by the great odes of Lomonosov and Derzhavin, the new poetry of the nineteenth century was largely created by two figures, Batyushkov and the translator and romantic ballad-writer Vasily Zhukovsky. Both were born in the 1780s and lived through the Napoleonic wars; both belonged to Arzamas, the literary grouping out of which emerged in the 1820s the magnificently varied poetry of what was later to be called the Golden Age or the “Pushkin Pléiade.” Aleksandr Pushkin regarded Batyushkov as a master.
He did not leave a large volume of poetry, but contemporaries saw in it a practical demonstration of the new heights that the Russian literary language could reach. When in 1821–1823, John Bowring presented Russian poetry to the English-speaking world in his groundbreaking Specimens of the Russian Poets, Batyushkov was given a prominent place with a rather good translation of his long-verse epistle, “My Penates.” What is more, some lines from the same poem are picked out as an epigraph to the volume, printed daringly in Russian; they celebrate his fellow poets, the priests of the muses.
Many contemporaries gave descriptions of Batyushkov. A close female friend, E. G. Pushkina, left this beautiful, perhaps idealized, portrait:
Batyushkov was short of stature; he had high shoulders, a hollow chest, red and naturally curly hair, blue eyes and a languid look. A touch of melancholy in all his features combined with his paleness and the softness of his voice to give his whole physiognomy an elusive expression. He had a poetic imagination; there was even more poetry in his soul. He was an enthusiast for everything beautiful. Every virtue seemed accessible to him. Friendship was his idol, selflessness and honesty his essential traits of character. When he was speaking, his features became more animated with movement, and inspiration shone in his eyes. His free, elegant, pure speech gave great charm to his conversation. Carried away by his imagination, he often elaborated sophisms, and if he did not always convince his interlocutors, at least he did not irritate them, since a deeply felt enthusiasm is always excusable in itself and wins the listener’s indulgence. I loved his conversation, and even more so his silence. How often I took pleasure in guessing even his fleeting thoughts and the feelings that filled his soul at a time when he seemed plunged in reverie!
(WP, 194–95)
Batyushkov, too, tried to describe himself, insisting rather more on the negative side, his nervous, troubled nature, his tendency to what Baudelaire would soon be calling “spleen.” He was a great reader of Montaigne, and like him he attempted to fathom and sum up his own variable and contradictory nature. The result is found in many letters to friends, above all those to his bosom friend, Nikolay Gnedich, translator of Homer, but also, most strikingly, in a self-portrait of 1817, a Romantic Jekyll-and-Hyde image that I should like to quote in full as an introduction to his story. Batyushkov pretends to be writing of a “strange person” he has recently met:
He is about thirty. He is sometimes healthy, very healthy, sometimes ill, at death’s door. Today he is as carefree and fickle as a child, but tomorrow you’ll find him deep in thought and religion, gloomier than a monk. His face is as good-natured as his heart, but also as changeable. He is thin and dry, and as pale as a sheet. He has lived through three wars; in camp he was full of health, but on leave—a dying man! On the march he was never downcast, always willing to sacrifice his life in a miraculously carefree way which even he was surprised by; in society he finds everything wearisome and the smallest obligation of any kind is a lead weight to him. When duty calls, he does what he has to do selflessly, just as he doses himself with rhubarb when he is ill without batting an eyelid. But what good is there in this? Where does it lead? There are few obligations which he considers a duty, because his little head likes philosophizing—but in such a twisted way that he is constantly suffering from it. He served in the army and in the civil service; very assiduously and very unsuccessfully in the former, in the latter successfully and not at all assiduously. Both types of service he found wearisome, because in reality he is no lover of ranks and medals. Yet he wept when he was passed over and not given a medal. He is as irritable as a dog, and as docile as a sheep.
There are two men in him: one is good-hearted, simple, cheerful, obliging, god-fearing, excessively sincere, generous, sober, agreeable; the other is malevolent, sly, envious, greedy, sometimes (but not often) mercenary, gloomy, grumpy, capricious, discontented, vindictive, crafty, excessively given to pleasure, inconstant in love, and ambitious in every way. This man, the dark one, is a real monster. Both men live in one body. How does this happen? I don’t know; I only know that this strange fellow has the profile of a villain, but if you look into his eyes you see a good man: you just have to look carefully and for a long time. This is why I love him! Woe to the person who knows him in profile!
There is more to come. He possesses some talents, yet he has no talent. He has succeeded in nothing, but is always writing. His mind is very capacious, and very narrow. His patience is very limited, whether because of illness or some other cause; his attention is easily distracted, his memory feeble, weakened by reading; just judge for yourself whether he will succeed in anything. In society he is sometimes very agreeable, and sometimes attractive in a special way when people consider his good heart, his carefree mind and his easygoing behavior to others; but when they think of his egoism, self-satisfaction, stubbornness and weariness of soul, everyone sees in him my man in profile. He can be amazingly eloquent; he can make a good entrance and speak well; but he can also be obtuse, tongue-tied and shy. He has lived in hell; he has been on Olympus, as you can see by looking at him. He is blessed and cursed by some spirit. For three days he will think about good deeds and want to perform them—then suddenly his patience will snap and on the fourth day he will be ill-tempered and ungrateful; don’t look at his profile then! He is capable of speaking very sharply, and often writes caustically about his neighbor. But the other man, the good one, loves people and weeps bitterly at the epigrams of the dark man. The light man saves the dark one with his tears to the creator, tears of real repentance and good deeds toward humanity. The bad man spoils everything, hinders everything; he is haughtier than Satan, whereas the light man is as good-hearted as a guardian angel. In what strange way can two make one here, how can evil be so mixed up with good and yet so clearly different from it? Where does he come from, this man—or these men, the dark and the light, who make up my acquaintance? But let us continue our description.
He—but which one, the dark or the light?—he or they both love fame. The dark man can love anything, he is even willing to kneel to Christ if people will praise him, such is his vanity; the light one, by contrast, loves fame as Lomonosov loved it, and is amazed at the impudence of the other. The light man has a tender conscience, the other one a forehead of copper. The light one adores his friends and would go to the stake for them; the dark one wouldn’t sacrifice a fingernail to friendship, so ardently does he love himself. But when it is a question of friendship, the dark man is excluded; the light one is on guard! In love…but let us not complete the description, it would be both repellent and delightful! Everything good you could say about the light man will be taken for himself by the other. To conclude: these two men, or this one man, is currently living in the country and writing his portrait with pen and ink. Let’s wish him a hearty appetite, he is going to dinner.
That man is me! Have you guessed as much by now?
(Essays, 424–27)
One might see in this divided soul an expression of Batyushkov’s intermediary historical position—between the urbane sociability of Enlightenment Russia and the rebellious Romantic sensibility that is embodied in Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin or in the Pechorin of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Times. Certainly Russian critics have repeatedly described him as one of the first of the so-called superfluous men, the gifted rebels without a cause who fill the pages of nineteenth-century Russian literature. What he could not know in 1817—in spite of forebodings expressed in letters to friends—was that this split self would a few years later succumb to an incurable mental illness. If the poet saw himself as a split personality, we can equally see his life as split into two more or less equal parts: the thirty-five years before he collapsed (1787–1822), years filled with poetry, friendship, love and war; and the thirty-three years of his illness (1822–1855), years in which he withdrew from society, failed to find a cure, and wrote almost nothing.
The corpus of Batyushkov’s writings is not very extensive, most of the essential pieces apart from the letters being included in the two volumes of his Essays in Verse and Prose (Opyty v stikhakh i proze) of 1817.2 Ever self-critical, he eliminated quite a bit of early or occasional verse from this selection, and would have omitted more from a second edition. He also seems to have destroyed a number of manuscript poems, and of course his illness prevented him from completing many planned works. Even so, he created work in a number of different genres that opened the way for much subsequent Russian literature.
The first full edition of his writings was published in three volumes in 1885–1887. The third volume contains over three hundred letters, mainly to family and friends, to which over fifty have been added subsequently. They are revealing and often brilliant letters, sometimes mixing prose and verse and echoing the poems; not for nothing did Batyushkov declare in 1817: “letters to friends: that is my real genre.” His other prose writing consists of essays, usually on literary or moral subjects, and accounts of places visited, notably the pioneering “Strolls Through Moscow” of 1810, and the 1815 “Walk to the Academy of Fine Art,” which ushers in Russian art criticism on the model of Diderot’s Salons.
Turning to his poetry, the first thing to note is that a good deal of it is translation, or at any rate verse inspired by foreign models—French, Italian, German, English, Latin, and Greek. When he was writing, modern Russian poetry was still young; the writers of his generation sought to enrich their culture with themes, forms, and images worked out in prestigious foreign literatures. His great friend Zhukovsky was no doubt the master translator, whose translations overshadow his “original” work, but Batyushkov too was a great reader and borrower. His translations are invariably free, remaking the foreign original in a new form for a different culture. Nor did he distinguish between translated and original poetry; the two belong equally to him and are inextricably mingled in his 1817 volume of verse.
One of his characteristic genres, however, is not translated, though it had foreign models: the verse epistle to friends. He wrote such epistles throughout his career; they range from short passages embedded in actual letters in prose to such long missives as “My Penates,” which set the standard for such writing among his immediate successors. The epistles are sprightly, written in rapid short lines, and characteristically moving from mock gravity to much more down-to-earth matters, but also to passages of genuine feeling. There are many other kinds of “light verse,” to use Batyushkov’s expression—poems of love, friendship, and social life. For him, such verse, as against the solemn ode of the eighteenth-century lyrical tradition, was essential in modern society.
Not all his verse was “light,” of course; in particular, the year 1812, with the French invasion and the burning of Moscow, marked a turning point in his view of things. This change figures first in an epistle to his friend Dashkov, which was followed over the years by a number of elegies, serious, sometimes tragic poems of love, friendship, history, poetry, war, and death. The elegy of personal feeling was to be the major genre of Golden Age Russian poetry, and Batyushkov can be seen as its principal creator. Some of his most memorable poems, such as “Shade of a Friend” and “Tasso Dying” are of this kind. But then, toward the end of his creative life, after the publication of the two volumes of 1817, he wrote what many have seen as his masterpieces, the short poems contained in “From the Greek Anthology” and “Imitations of the Ancients.”
Batyushkov himself stressed the connection between his life and his poetry. “Write as you live, and live as you write” was his motto. In his letters he is often unduly modest about what he calls his “scribblings.” Such is the message of an epistle that he wrote in 1815 and then used as an introduction to the first—and only—selection of his poems published in his lifetime:
TO MY FRIENDS
Here is my book of verse,
Which may perhaps be precious to my friends.
A kindly spirit tells me
That in this maze of words and rhymes
Art is in short supply:
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;
How I would fall, then rise,
Then vanish from the world,
Trusting my little boat to fate.
And, in a word, my friends will find
The diaries of a carefree poet here,
And having found them, say:
“Our friend was often credulous,
Fickle in love, in poetry eccentric,
But he was always true to friendship;
He wearied no one with his poems
(A wonder on Parnassus!)
He lived just as he wrote…
Not well, not badly!”
(Essays, 200)
To say that “art is in short supply” is a typically modest disclaimer; in fact, Batyushkov paid great attention to perfecting the language and form of his poetry. Nevertheless, in a letter to Zhukovsky in December 1815, he distinguishes himself from the majority of readers who see poetry as “rhymes, not feelings, words, not images” (SP, 387). For the most part his poems are not openly autobiographical, but even apparently impersonal texts are usually an expression of his feelings. In the present book, I shall follow the thread of Batyushkov’s writings to explore his troubled life, his passions, delusions, cares, worries, sorrows and light-winged pleasures, setting all these against the changing world of Russian society from Catherine the Great to Nicholas I.