Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

by Konstantin Batyushkov

  In 1811–1812, Batyushkov composed a poem celebrating the type of classic male friendship to which he aspired:

  FRIENDSHIP

  Happy the man who has found a bosom friend,

  The man who loves and is loved by a sensitive soul!

  Even on Cocytus’ banks Theseus does not suffer,

  For he has with him his soul-mate Pirithous.

  Orestes lies in chains—but we only envy him:

  Pylades his friend is with him…under the blade.

  And you, youthful Achilles, greathearted warrior,

  Immortal paragon of heroes and friends,

  Your greatness lies in friendship; this was your life,

  And having avenged your friend with a fearless hand,

  Happy! you fell dead on the funeral pyre.

  (Essays, 221)

  In literature, if not in war, he found a friendship of this kind with Gnedich. It finds expression in a fascinating and moving series of letters between the two men; writing to Gnedich, Batyushkov is at his most mercurial, a free spirit, witty and irreverent. Something of this comes across in the verse epistles that he wrote to his friend, sometimes enclosing them in prose letters. One of the earliest of these, written in 1806, echoes the Epicurean sentiments of “Advice to Friends,” and is written in the short lines that were Batyushkov’s favorite form for his epistles to friends. The particular question raised here is that of literary fame, which was a constant preoccupation, as he admitted in the double self-portrait quoted in the introduction. The author of these disenchanted lines was a mere eighteen years old:

  TO GNEDICH

  Only friendship offers me

  Immortality’s proud wreath,

  But it is wilting visibly

  Like a daisy in the heat.

  Can fame tempt me from the road

  Of pleasure, a road so modest?

  Pleasure’s pathway is well-trodden;

  The road to fame is steep and hard.

  Should I chase an empty specter

  And gather laurels wearily?

  I who know the arts of pleasure

  Like a child who loves to play

  And am happy…Thus far flowers

  Strewed the path to happiness;

  Singing, dreaming, or consoling

  My sad heart by weaving verse,

  I would sing in idle leisure

  And the muse was my dear friend,

  Not my sovereign. But at present

  My spring is coming to an end,

  Fading like a light-winged vision,

  Dragging with it as it goes

  Charms of dreaming and of singing!

  Tender myrtles, tender flowers,

  Which the lovely girls once plaited

  For the poet’s head, are faded!

  Ah! can fame be compensation

  For the loss of happiness?

  Can its coming bring salvation

  As my sun begins to set?

  (CP, 76–77)

  Unlike Gnedich, who persevered with his task, Batyushkov was nagged by self-doubt and shifted from one thing to another, while still clinging to the desire to be a great poet.

  The early years of the nineteenth century saw a flourishing of literary societies in the Russian cities, groupings of mainly young male writers united by the idealistic love of poetry, ideas, and civilized values and the ambition of creating a new Russian literature. One of the earliest of these was the Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Science and the Arts, founded in St. Petersburg in 1801. This gathered together a variety of young men, including several of Batyushkov’s colleagues at the ministry of education. With official permission the Society published journals and other collective works. Batyushkov, barely eighteen, was admitted as a member in 1805, his earliest offering being an adaptation to contemporary Russian society of ­Boileau’s first satire. He was to return to satire frequently, sometimes a general mockery of pride, philistinism, and other social vices, but more often a contribution to the literary polemics of the age, the Russian quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, where Batyushkov and his allies did battle with the archaizing conservatism of the group centered on Admiral Shishkov. As we shall see in later chapters, his sharp pen did good service—not for nothing was he given the nickname “Achilles.”

  Batyushkov didn’t remain deeply involved with the Free Society for long. Indeed, soon after he joined it, its charismatic president, the poet Ivan Pnin, died of consumption, and the Society declined. This loss provided the impetus for Batyushkov’s first poem in a genre that he later illustrated on several occasions, the elegy of mourning. It is a poem of friendship, “sentimentalist” in its advocacy of humanitarian values (notice the epigraph from Voltaire’s poem on the death of the actress Adrienne Lecouvreur). The tone combines the conventional loftiness of a memorial with the quietness of simple feeling; as in many of his later poems of this kind, Batyushkov weaves interesting patterns, using lines of varying length and irregular groupings of rhymes, with an alternation of masculine and feminine endings:

  ON THE DEATH OF PNIN

  Que vois-je, c’en est fait, je t’embrasse et tu meurs7

  Voltaire

  Where is our friend, our singer? Where are the charms of youth?

  Alas, it is all gone, mowed down by death’s sharp scythe.

  The lyre of the sweet muses’ favorite lies abandoned,

  He sings no more, like us he was a passing shadow.

  Our friend is gone, we seek for him in vain.

  He graced the world for one brief morning.

  He faded like a flower in May

  And parted from his friends at life’s first dawning.

  Pnin lived only for friendship, full of ardent feeling.

  Not gold alone he lavished on unhappy men…

  For what is gold alone? Better shed tears with them.

  Pnin strove to help the people of his nation,

  His pen defended innocence from destiny.

  Courteous in friendly conversation,

  He made his friends his family.

  And now, my friends, as round his grave we gather,

  His frigid dust alone is ours.

  Now we repeat in grief and tears:

  Rest here in peace, dear friend and brother,

  Live in our hearts, beloved follower of the muse.

  When for the last time we embraced his body,

  It seemed the world shared in our grief

  Amor himself in sorrow

  Put out the light of life.

  He did not lay upon his tomb

  Sad cypress branches, but a rose in bloom.

  (CP, 73–74)

  With his farewell to Pnin at the end of 1805, it is as if Batyushkov is anticipating his farewell to the peaceful, protected life he had enjoyed with the Muravyovs. From the end of the following year, he would be caught up in a life of war and travel.

  What a life I have led for poetry! Three wars, all the time on horseback and on the highways of the world.

  ► Letter from Batyushkov to Zhukovsky, June 1817

  While young Batyushkov was finding his way in the polite society of St. Petersburg, flirting with women, and taking his first steps as a poet of Epicurean enjoyment, storms were gathering in the west. The First Consul Bonaparte had crowned himself as the Emperor Napoleon in 1804, and after the short-lived peace of Amiens, hostilities between France and the rest of Europe began again. In 1805, as we learn from the first sentence of War and Peace, Napoleon annexed Genoa and Lucca; he then turned his attention to the Central Powers, defeating Austria and Prussia in a series of major battles. Russia, under Alexander I, occupied an ambiguous position. Russian forces were on the losing side at Austerlitz and Friedland, but in 1807 Alexander and Napoleon met at Tilsit and signed peace treaties, which among other things opened the way for Russian forces to conquer Finland in the campaign of 1808–1809. Relations between France and Russia soon deteriorated, and Napoleon made the enormous mistake of marching east. He reached Moscow after the blo
ody but inconclusive battle of Borodino, only to be forced to retreat from the burning city and make his disastrous return to France, harassed by Russian forces. Alexander and his army entered Paris as conquerors in March 1814.

  But at the end of 1806, after a series of defeats, Russia’s western frontiers were under threat. Indeed, the danger was sufficiently great for the government to call for volunteers. The nineteen-year-old Batyushkov was one of those who responded; in January 1807, he was transferred at his own request from his uninspiring civilian post to a position in the militia, and soon he was marching to meet the enemy in Prussia. His father had not consented to this, and Konstantin had to make his excuses: “I beg your forgiveness for taking this honorable step without your permission or your blessing…. I have done this of my own volition and I hope (if I am worthy of it) that our sovereign will reward you generously for your sadness and grief” (SP, 279–80).

  So why did he take this “honorable step”? Partly, as this letter suggests, in the unrealistic hope of improved career prospects. But as with Tolstoy’s young heroes, there were more idealistic motives. The excitement of a military life had glamour for a man who later spoke repeatedly of the boredom he felt in day-to-day life; as we saw above, he wrote of himself: “On the march he was never downcast, always willing to sacrifice his life in a miraculously carefree way;…in society he finds everything wearisome.” He wanted glory, and no doubt shared with many Russians a genuine upsurge of patriotism.

  Batyushkov’s attitude to this Russian patriotism is interesting, the more so since he owed so much to French culture. We remember how at the beginning of War and Peace the Francophile and largely Francophone members of the St. Petersburg elite unite in condemnation of the French emperor (the exception being Pierre, for whom Napoleon is still the embodiment of revolutionary values). In 1810, Batyushkov was to skewer this contradiction (which he himself shared) in a neat little epigram:

  THE TRUE PATRIOT

  “O Russian bread and salt!1 O ancestors!

  You heirlooms, sweet and simple,

  Grandfather’s granite will and granny’s wimple!

  You are our sole recourse!

  And yet, and yet, you are forgotten!”

  So, at a table spread with bottles,

  Firs, sitting with my guests, was holding forth

  In words of fire, a Russian champion,

  Eating ragoût, truffles and champignons,

  Then he knocked back a magnum of champagne

  And then—sat down to play boston again.

  (Essays, 364–65)

  The same sort of fiercely ironic observation is made by Count Rostopchin in book 8 of War and Peace.

  Whatever his motivations, the poet marched off to war. He remembered this departure ten years later, in an essay in memory of his soldier friend, the even younger Ivan Petin, who died a heroic death at the battle of Leipzig in 1813:

  In 1807 we both left the capital and set off on the campaign. I believe in sympathy, because experience has taught me to believe in the inexplicable mysteries of the heart. Our souls were alike. The same passions, the same predilections, the same impetuous and carefree nature that was characteristic of me in my early youth captivated me in my comrade. The habit of being together, enduring together the labors and cares of war, sharing dangers and pleasures, all this bound us more closely.

  (Essays, 399)

  Batyushkov was full of enthusiasm, and felt happy riding through the fields reading Tasso. Unlike Petin, though, he was not a born soldier. In the self-portrait quoted above we read: “He served in the army and in the civil service, very assiduously and very unsuccessfully in the former.” A snatch of verse in a letter sent to Gnedich at the beginning of March sounds a comic note of nostalgia:

  Am I condemned to hear just drums of war?

  Let friendship’s lovely voice amid the clashes

  For one short hour restore me to Parnassus

  When I have strayed into the ranks of Mars

  And on a doughty Rosinante2

  Set off for glory at a canter.

  (CP, 241)

  A few days later, from Riga, again in a letter to Gnedich, Batyushkov gives a fuller, but by no means heroic, picture of poet as soldier:

  Believe me, it’s not easy from a sleigh or saddle

  With people shouting “Quick March!” or “Eyes right!”

  To write, dear friend, a verse epistle…

  No—shunning me, the Muses have taken flight

  And in St. Petersburg or God knows where

  Hidden their lovely features.

  Without them I am speechless!

  If you become a wolf you can’t so soon unlearn

  The wolfish way of walking and the howl.

  So, when a sacred thought arises in my soul

  Not hearing drums that beat,

  Or the sharp shouts of stately musketeers,

  I urge my poor winged horse to take its flight

  Up to Parnassus—or, put otherwise,

  Eschewing eloquence,

  A dismal sight rises before my eyes.

  The wind from all sides blows through the smashed panes;

  A gloomy tomcat woos his feline lover

  And the poor Finn’s knapsack

  Falls from his weary back;

  The wretch squats in the fireside corner

  And with a torn sleeve wipes the tears that linger…

  Poor children of a climate cold and raw,

  Acquainted with hunger, Russian soldiers, war!

  (CP, 77–78)

  Before long, though, the game turned serious. The Russian army crossed the Prussian frontier and on May 28 and 29 engaged the enemy in the battle of Heilsberg. Batyushkov fought bravely here, and had to be carried off the field half-dead. He gave his version of events in a poem of 1809:

  REMEMBERING

  Dreams! You have been beside me everywhere,

  Strewing the dark road of my life with flowers!

  How sweetly in the Heilsberg fields I dreamed

  While the whole camp lay deep in sleep,

  And leaning on his spear of steel, the warrior

  Gazed into misty distance! In the sky

  The full moon shone, shedding its light

  Between the branches on my little hut;

  The Alle gently rolled its glowing stream,

  Reflecting in its waves the camp and trees.

  In the dim hours of night the fires burned low

  Beside the sleeping soldier’s huts. O fields

  Of Heilsberg! O you lofty hills,

  Where I so often in the moonlit night

  Sat deep in thought, dreamed of my motherland.

  O fields of Heilsberg! Then I did not know

  That soldiers’ bodies soon would strew your grass,

  That from these hills the metal jaws would thunder,

  And I, your happy dreamer, flying

  To meet my death against the foe,

  Would press my hand on a deep wound,

  Nearly succumbing at my dawn of life…—

  The storms of life passed over like a dream! —

  Only dark memory survives…

  A frontier lies between the past and us;

  Only in dream can we come near it.

  And in my memory I now bring back

  To life the terrifying moment

  When in a paroxysm of pain,

  Seeing a hundred deaths before me,

  I feared to die far from my native place.

  But heaven heard my heartfelt prayers and looked

  With pity on me in my need;

  I crossed the Neman, saw the promised land

  And wept and kissed the earth and said:

  “Thrice blessed is the man who lives at home

  Among his household gods, enjoying the peace,

  And never takes a step outside his hut

  And does not with his prayers

  Trouble winged Victory!

  He is not blinded by the love of fame
/>   To sacrifice his peace, his blood:

  He sees his grave and quietly waits for death.”

  (Essays, 210–11)

  The poem, written in the flowing manner characteristic of Batyushkov’s elegies, moves with little warning from the soldier’s dreams to the horrors of action; above all, it dramatizes the pull between the glamour of war and the joys of home life (the “household gods”) that will recur in his writing.

  Batyushkov’s injury was indeed serious and was to plague him in later life. In 1808, his bravery at Heilsberg would be rewarded with the Order of St. Anne (third class). Meanwhile he was transferred to Riga to convalesce; another letter to Gnedich tells the tale:

  Dear friend! I am alive. How—God only knows. I was shot right through the leg by a bullet that hit the upper part of my thigh and my behind. The wound is quite deep, but not dangerous, since the bone has apparently not been hit—how this happened I don’t know. I am in Riga. I can’t convey to you what I had to suffer lying in the cart that brought me here. Our battalion had heavy losses. All the officers are wounded, one dead. The infantry were very brave, crazily so. Who could have imagined all this?

  (SP, 281)

  Riga turned out to be a place of happiness for the wounded poet. In the two months he spent there, he convalesced in the welcoming house of a local merchant. The poem I have translated as “Remembering” was originally called “Memories of 1807” and had a long concluding section (omitted from the publication of his works in 1817) expressing the poet’s gratitude to the “peaceable family” and the “hospitable roof” of his Riga hosts. Above all, Batyushkov remembered the daughter of the house, whom he called Emilia—whether this was her real name or a poetic label remains unclear. Here are some nostalgic lines from what seems to be one of Batyushkov’s first genuine love poems:

  Alas, it all has vanished like a sweet dream!

  Where have they gone, the raptures and the kisses,

  And where are you, clandestine nighttime meetings,

  When I would hold her tight in my embrace