Bunin’s poems are the best the Russian muse has created for several decades. Once, in Petersburg’s loud years, the radiant rattle of modish lyres drowned them out, but that poetic brouhaha passed without a trace and those “blasphemous creators of words”1 have been dethroned or forgotten. We are left cold by the dead slabs of Bryusov’s poetry; Balmont’s poetry, which deceived us with its new melody, now seems out of tune; and only the throb of one lyre, the special throb that belongs to immortal poetry, stirs us as before, stirs us more than before, and it seems strange that in those Petersburg years not everyone could distinguish, not every soul was amazed by the voice of a poet whose equal we have not had since Tyutchev’s time. Nonetheless, I suppose that even today, among the so-called reading public, especially that part of it inclined to see new accomplishment in the illiterate mutterings of a Soviet poetaster, the poetry of Bunin is not in high regard or, at best, is looked on as the not entirely lawful pastime of a man fated to write prose. It’s not worth disputing such a view.
Among Bunin’s “selected poems,” many one would like to reread are not there. They are printed alongside the writer’s stories, in the shadow of his prose, and they exist only in old journals, in supplements to Niva,2 and in a separate little book poorly and sloppily published also by Niva. It would be good to see them all collected; every line of Bunin’s is worth being preserved. But we must be thankful even for this collection (very elegantly presented, by the way), for these two hundred Bunin poems.
It’s easy to pounce on a poet, it is easy to fish laughable mistakes, monstrous stresses, bad rhymes out of his doggerel. But how does one speak of the works of a great poet, where everything is beautiful, everything smooth, how does one express the charm and depth of his poetry, the novelty and strength of his imagery? How can one extract citations when behind a citation the poem stretches whole onto the page? And there are other difficulties: the music and the thought in Bunin’s poetry are so merged into one that it’s impossible to talk separately about theme and rhythm. You get drunk on these poems, and it’s a pity to disrupt their enchantment with empty cries of rapture.
So I have read this book and set it aside, and am beginning to listen to the blissful, throbbing echo it has left behind. And, gradually, I make out the special Buninesque leitmotif, whose simplest expression is repetition, the languid repetition of a single word: “sing, sing, crickets, my night-time friends…”;3 “and the ballroom floats, floats in drawn-out / songs of happiness and yearning…”;4 “the tumbler pigeons amble, amble, as they coo…”;5 “the ringing of little bells […] / flows, flows….”6 And, finding this rhythmic key, catching this sound, I already feel its further development, the musical enumeration of actions or objects, an almost incantatory exclamation, two lines beginning identically: “Only your morning bells, Sofia, / Only the voice of Kiev…”7
The key mood in Bunin, corresponding to this key rhythm, is perhaps the very essence of the poetic feeling of his work overall, the purest, most divine feeling a person can experience, looking at the painted world, listening to its sounds, breathing in its scents, being imbued with its fierce heat, its dampness, its cold. It is that desire, sharp to the point of torment, languid to the point of fainting, to express in words the inexplicable, mysterious, and harmonious that make up the broad conception of beauty, the beautiful. “O, torment of torments,” the poet himself says, “what do I need, what does it need” (the bare maple “against the pure and azure emptiness”), / “the goldfinches, the leaves? And will I ever understand / why I must encompass the joy of this torment— / this sky here, and this chime, / and the dark meaning it’s full of / —into consonances and sounds?”8 Bunin’s greatness as a poet lies precisely in the fact that he finds these sounds, and his poems not only breathe with that special poetic thirst—to encompass everything, express everything, preserve everything—but also quench that thirst.
Returning to the concept of “beauty,” one can note that for Bunin “beauty” is “what passes,” but “what passes” he feels as “eternally repeating.” In his world, as in the rhythm of his poems, there are sweet repetitions. And this world is unprecedentedly spacious. In the poem “Dog” (which begins so characteristically: “Dream, dream…”) the poet himself says that he is “like God, fated / to know the yearning of all lands and times.”9 Russia’s estates and Russia’s fairy-tale heartland—“the Russia of the Princes of Kiev, bears, elks and aurochs”;10 the valleys of Jordan and the “dusty road to Nazareth”;11 Italian wisteria and ruins “and the fires and songs of Catania…”;12 “a forgotten portico of Phoebus” on an island in the Aegean sea;13 the Nile and “the living and clear-cut trace of a footprint”14 preserved in a thin blue layer of dust, increasing by five thousand years the allotted life of the poet; the smoke of the Bosporus mixed with the cold water, smelling of honey and vanilla; the Indian Ocean, where “like a great cane, the unsteady foresail / staggers from star to star…”15 and Ceylon, “the end of the world”16—Bunin felt all this, and conveyed all this. “Earth, earth! Innumerable footprints / I have left on you….But I shall not, I shall never quench the torment / of my love for you!”17 And Bunin’s poems about other countries are not merely “descriptive poems,” and not the “Eastern melodies” so soundlessly flaunted by second-rate poets. There is no “exoticism” in them. Bunin feels the dream of a foreign people, a foreign legend, and the detail of a landscape unnoticed by the tourist just as vividly and as keenly as the “creak of a rotting floorboard”18 in his own estate, the damp garden lit up by night lightning, or a simple, somewhat coarse Russian fairy tale, which he knows like no other how to give life to with his creative breath.
To this richness of themes there corresponds a richness of rhythm. Bunin has an amazing mastery of every poetic meter and every kind of poetry. His sonnets—in the brilliance and naturalness of their rhymes, in the lightness and imperceptibility with which he clothes his thought in such complex harmony—Bunin’s sonnets are the best in Russian poetry. His unusual eyesight notices the edge of a black shadow on a moonlit street, the special density of blue sky through leaves, the spots of sun slipping like lace across the backs of horses—and, capturing this harmony of light in nature, the poet transforms it into a harmony of sound, as if keeping the same order, observing the same sequence. “The little Negro boy in a dirty Turkish fez / hangs in a tub overboard, painting the forecastle— / and from the water onto the fresh red varnish / mirrory arabesques rise up….”19
I have already said that beauty for Bunin is “passing” (which is why he has so many poems dedicated to tombs, ruins, deserts…). After exclaiming “O joyous moment!” he adds: “O deceitful moment!”20 The cockerel on the church cross that “floats, flows, runs like a rook” (a wonderfully Buninesque repetition of verbs!) “sings that all is deception, / that only for a moment does fate give us / our father’s home, and a dear friend, / and a circle of children and a circle of grandchildren….”21 On Rachel’s tomb there are “no name, no inscriptions, no marks….”22
One would think that such a profound sensation of transience must breed a feeling of illimitable grief. But the yearning of great poets is a happy yearning. A wind of happiness blows from Bunin’s poems, although he has no shortage of gloomy, threatening, and ominous words. Yes, everything passes, but: “Earth, earth! Sweet call of spring, / is there really happiness even in loss?”23 And Christ tells his Mother (who is mourning that heat will destroy some flowers, others will be scythed down): “Mother! night’s darkness covers only the earth, not the sun: / death does not destroy the seed, but only cuts off / the earthly seed’s flower. / And the earthly seed will not dry up. / Death mows, love sows again. / Rejoice, my love! You’ll be / consoling yourself till the end of the age!”24 Everything repeats itself, everything in the world is a repetition, a change, with which the poet “unchangingly consoles” himself. This blessed quivering, this languorously repeating rhythm, is perhaps the main charm of Bunin’s poetry. Yes, everything on earth is loss and deception, where there were cathedrals there are now stones and poppies, everything living dies away, everything turns into satiny dust upon the flagstones of crypts. But is the loss itself not imaginary, if what’s fleeting in the world can be enclosed in an immortal, and therefore a happy, poem?
* V. Sirin, “Literaturnoe obozrenie: Iv. Bunin. Izbrannye stikhi. Izdatel’stvo ‘Sovremennye zapiski.’ Parizh. 1929,” Rul’, May 22, 1929, 2–3.