Writings from the Golden Age of Russian poetry

2. For a list of the sources used for the present volume see the abbreviations list (p. xi) in the front matter.

1. Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816), born near Kazan in modern Tatarstan, was the outstanding Russian poet of the late eighteenth century and an influential figure at the court of Catherine the Great. He is best known for his grand odes and his powerfully original style.

2. In the poem “At Tsarskoe Selo” (1911) in her first collection, Evening.

3. Cited in a note to the poem in CP, 314.

4. “Sentimentalist,” a standard term in Russian literary history, has no pejorative overtones, referring to a new proto-Romantic sensibility that owed something to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

5. “Must one [you] be so fickle, / I said to sweet pleasure.” Madame de Murat was a now largely forgotten French poet of the seventeenth century.

6. See Peter France, “Fingal in Russia,” in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. Howard Gaskill (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 259–73.

7. “ What do I see, it is over, I embrace you, and you die.”

1. Bread and salt are the traditional Russian expression of hospitality.

2. Don Quixote’s worn-out steed; a literal translation of the original is “magnificent nag.”

3. François-René de Chateaubriand, Historical Essay on Revolutions (Essai historique sur les révolutions), book 1, part 1, chap. 22.

4. Nikolay Gavrilovich Kurganov (1725–1796), a mathematician and academician, was the author of an influential Russian grammar that included an anthology of poetry.

5. See The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, ed. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski (London: Penguin, 2015), 17.

1. Crates of Thebes, a Cynical philosopher of the fourth century BCE.

2. See his biographical note in An Age Ago: A Selection of Nineteenth-Century Russian Poetry, selected and translated by Alan Myers with a foreword and biographical notes by Joseph Brodsky (London: Penguin, 1989). This volume contains four translations of poems by Batyushkov.

3. Yevgeny Baratynsky, Half-light and Other Poems, trans. Peter France (Todmorden: Arc, 2015), 18–21.

4. Mikhail Kachenovsky (1775–1842), conservative critic, associated with the journal Moscow Herald (Vestnik moskvy).

5. Ermil Kostrov (1755–1796), translator of Homer and Ossian.

6. Aleksey Kruchonykh (1886–1967) declared that his “transrational” text “Dyr bul shchyl” was more Russian than all of Pushkin.

7. “My health is fleeing; this unfaithful one / Makes no promise to return, / And Nature who is tottering / Has already warned me / Not to count too much on her. / So the play will suddenly end / With the second act: / Quickly I reach the denouement, / The curtain falls and I am forgotten.”

8. “In her age of beauty, the flower of youth…/…Gone up to heaven, alive and beautiful”

1. General A. N. Bakhmetev, a wounded war hero who was soon to become Batyushkov’s commanding officer.

2. War and Peace, vol. 3, part 1, chap. 12.

3. The form and imagery of this poem inspired Pushkin’s first major composition, “Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,” which the young student famously read aloud before Derzhavin on January 8, 1815.

1. Compare the lines from “The Bronze Horseman”:

We’ll build a city here, a port,

To challenge our disdainful neighbors…

A hundred years have passed since then;

a northern city, young, a wonder,

has, from the forest and the fen,

risen in majesty and splendor

(Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, 88)

2. The halcyon, also referred to in “Shade of a Friend,” is a bird from Greek mythology, reputed to build its nest on quiet waters—whence the expression “halcyon days.”

3. Baratynsky, Half-light, 100–101.

4. Aleksandr Pushkin, “To Batyushkov” (1815). The quotation is taken from the first of two similar poems with the same title.

1. Not related to the novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was more than thirty years his junior.

2. Sergey Sokovnin (1785–1868) was an amateur poet who had distinguished himself by declaring publicly on the street his love for Vyazemsky’s wife. Nikolay Ilyin (1777–1823), a dramatist and translator, was a member of the Society of Lovers of Literature.

3. “…And like a swift Alpine torrent, / Like a flash of lightning / In the clear night sky, / Like a breeze or smoke, / Or like a sudden arrow, / Our fame flies past: and every honor / Is like a fragile flower. /

What do you hope for, or what do you now expect? / After the triumph and the palms / All that remains for the soul/Is grief and lamentations and tearful complaints. / What help can come from love or from friendship henceforth! / O tears! O sorrow! (Torquato Tasso, Torrismondo).

4. See After Lermontov: Translations for the Bicentenary, ed. Peter France and Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014), 128–41.

1. “Your value increases when people listen to you.”

2. “And that’s how they write history.”

3. “Do you know the land where the lemon trees flower?”—the first line of Mignon’s song in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

4. Ilya Serman notes: “Later, critics came to consider these ‘anthological’ verses of Batyushkov’s his highest achievement. Belinsky [the major Russian critic of the nineteenth century] thought them ‘the best product of his muse.’ ” According to Belinsky, these poems are distinguished by “simplicity, unity of thought capable of expression in a small space, directness and loftiness of tone, plasticity and grace of form.” See Ilya Sermain, Konstantin Batyushkov (New York: Twayne, 1974), 142.

5. For instance, D. S. Mirsky writes: “For strange beauty and haunting emotional intensity they are unique in Russian poetry. They are a rare instance of the creative influence of mental illness on poetry.” A History of Russian Literature, ed. and abr. Francis J. Whitfield (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 78.

1. On this allusion see Nabokov’s comments in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated from the Russian with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, revised edition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), vol. 3, 74.

2. P. A. Vyazemsky, Selected Works (Izbrannye sochineniya), ed. V. S. Nechaeva (Moscow/Leningrad: Academia, 1935), 267–68.

3. Osip Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 166, 179.

4. Translated into English under the same title by Elena Dimov (Tilburg, Netherlands: Glagoslav, 2015).

5. See Gennady Aygi, Selected Poems, 1954–1994, bilingual edition, trans. Peter France (London: Angel Books, 1997), 64–65. A slightly earlier poem, “Ever more often—Batyushkov,” is included in Aygi’s Winter Revels, trans. Peter France (San Francisco: Rumor Books, 2009), 28.