Three and a half centuries of incessant struggle to resurrect its independence from the power which had come from the East had exhausted the Riurik line. A new dynasty, the Romanov, was elected to face Poland—a western foe which nearly subjected Muscovy to its rule at the outset of the seventeenth century. Russia was able to secure its political independence from Poland under the Romanovs, but the first century of their reign was marked by religious strife, undermining Russia’s unity and also inspiring such works as The Life of Avvakum. As that century was coming to a close, a new Romanov, Peter I, charted a fresh course for Russia, envisioning a social order based on modern science and technology. He was the first czar to leave his realm and to travel (incognito) to the West—or to Hell, for believers like Avvakum. The immediate post-Petrine period of Russian literature largely glorified Peter’s course, and many of those who were on the side of his reforms also provided entirely new readings of the cosmos surrounding Man. Much of this new awareness was directly tied to the efforts of M. V. Lomonosov (1711-65)—the Russian Newton and a member of several western academies. Equally and uniquely famous for his literary craft and his science, Lomonosov was among the first to express in a newly devised syllabotonic system of prosody (akin to that of English and German) far grander visions of space than had been previously offered in Russia’s oral tradition. His seminal work in this regard was the following sacred ode (1743), which he later appended to his treatise on the nature of electricity:
EVENING MEDITATION ON THE MAJESTY OF GOD ON THE OCCASION OF THE GREAT NORTHERN LIGHTS
Its face concealed, now hides the Day;
As meads are cloaked in gloomy Night;
Tall hills are scaled by blackest shade;
That bends the beams from out our sight;
The depthless star-vault gapes ajar:
Unending vault, unnumbered stars!
A grain of sand caught in the wave,
A spark within an icy maze,
A speck of dust borne on the gale,
A feather in a raging blaze,
Thus I now drown in this dark vault
Adrift and lost in weary thought!
The mouths of wise men teach us thus:
One finds there countless worldly spheres;
Unnumbered there are burning suns,
There nations mark the circling years:
For Godhead’s greater glory there
Does Nature reign as it reigns here.
Yet Nature, where is now thy Law?
The northlands see the dawn arise!
May Sol establish there his throne?
May frozen seas breed storms of fire?
Lo, we are rapt in icy flame!
Lo, night now ushers in the Day!
O you whose swift all-seeing minds
Descry the Book of ageless law,
To whom the smallest atom’s signs
Show Nature’s rule without a flaw,
To you the planets’ course is known,
What is it then perturbs us so?
What strength the midnight’s rays can jolt?
How may thin flame the welkin cleave?
How, absent clouds, may lightning bolt
Its rising path to Zenith weave?
Can steam pent in an icy frame
Mid Winter’s snow engender flame?
There viscous fogs and seas contend;
Or Sol its darting rays does turn,
Through thickened air to us they bend;
Or peaks of pregnant mountains burn;
Or Ocean’s zephyrs cease to blow,
And tranquil waves ‘gainst ether flow.
Replete with doubt is your retort
About the near—much less the far.
Canst tell the measure of the world?
What lies beyond the smallest star?
How endless is Creation’s chord?
Tell then: how great our Author-Lord?
The questions with which Lomonosov ends here embody the poet’s wish to express the greatness of God. This will be picked up in the works of other poets, such as Derzhavin, as we shall see, but Evening Meditation exemplifies a curious hybrid: one might expect the scientist Lomonosov to frown on the reverent acceptance of such a natural event as the aurora borealis, yet Lomonosov the poet celebrates its paradox via the oxymoron—a favorite trope of the Baroque which negates rational resolution. By imagining his rhethorical persona to be immersed, adrift in space earlier in the poem, Lomonosov can be still seen as the first scientist who seeded the ideas from which the Russian space program ultimately sprang. Having no spaceships at his disposal, Lomonosov’s poetic “eye” could transcend the necessity of their use and offer accurate visions of the physical processes occurring in space—concretely on the Sun—in the companion piece to his Evening Meditation, the Morning Meditation on the Majesty of God:
If we—the mortals—had the fortune
To soar beyond the Earth in flight,
And train our eye on Sol’s orb scorching,
Enhancing thus our fleeting sight,
We would behold then from all sides
A burning Sea of timeless tides.
There fiery billows swell up, seeking
Repose on shores not to be found,
There flaming whirlwinds churn by, streaking,
Contend through ages’ ceaseless round;
There rocks like water come to boil,
And rains blast down—in flames embroiled.
Two centuries later these grand visions would inspire sci-fi writers, like Ivan Efremov (author of our last selection) to imagine and advocate a space program which could actually impel Russia’s first space-faring vessel to leap from the decks of Avvakum’s dream-ships into the Cosmos itself.
A2. From Myth & Poetry to the Shifted Realities in Prose
Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816)
O Thou, in universe so boundless,
Alive in planets as they swarm
Within eternal flow, yet timeless
Unseen, you reign in triune form!
Embracing all, Thy single Spirit
Knows no abode, no cause to stir it,
Nor paths that Reason ever trod,
Who fills, incarnate, all that’s living,
Embracing, keeping and fulfilling,
To Whom we give the name of GOD!1
AFTER ITS PUBLICATION in 1784, Derzhavin’s God (Bog), initial stanza of which is quoted here in lieu of a proem to his works below, became the first Russian poem to gain worldwide acclaim. This ode has been recognized over the last two centuries as one of the greatest works of Russian literature. Even major literary protagonists (for instance, Dmitrii in Brothers Karamazov) are fond of quoting from it, and—just to feel the expanse of the poem’s universal reach—let us quote four additional stanzas:
To put the ocean depths to measure,
To sum the sands, the planet’s rays,
A lofty mind might want at leisure—
But knows no rule for Thee, nor scales!
Nor can the spirits brought to seeing,
Born from Thy light into their being,
Trace the enigmas of Thy ways:
Our thought, with daring, space traverses,
Approaching Thee, in Thee disperses,—
A blink in the Abyss—no trace.
Thou didst call forth great Chaos’ presence
From out the timeless, formless deep,
And then didst found Eternal essence,
Before the Ages born in Thee:
Within Thyself didst Thou engender
Thy selfsame radiance’s splendor,
Thou art that Light whence flows light’s beam.
Thine ageless Word from the beginning
Unfolded all, for aye conceiving,
Thou wast, Thou art, and Thou shalt be!
The chain of Being Thou comprisest,
And dost sustain it, give it breath;
End and Beginning Thou combinest,
Dost Life bestow in Th
ee through death.
As sparks disperse, surge upward, flying,
So suns are born from Thee, undying;
As on those cold, clear winter’s days
When specks of hoarfrost glisten, shimmer
Gyrate and whirl—from chasms’ glimmer
So Stars cast at Thy feet bright rays.
Those billions of lumens flaming
Flow through the measureless expanse,
They govern laws, enforce Thy bidding,
They pour forth life in gleaming dance.
Yet all those lampions thus blazing,
Those scarlet heaps with crystal glazing,
Or rolling mounds of golden waves,
All ethers in their conflagration,
Each world aflame in its own station—
To Thee—they are as night to day.
What has not been recognized so widely is that the poem is not only a magnificent celebratory ode, clearly displaying the poet’s penchant for the fantastic in his resplendent visions and images, but the presentation of an entire philosophical system. Going well beyond mere praise of the Deity, the poet imbues man’s relationship to God with a multidimensional, spherical character, as exemplified in the words, “Thou formest in me Thine own likeness, as in a drop Sol finds its trace…” (7th stanza). It must be said that Derzhavin was the last poet in Russia in whose fantasy worlds God’s omnipotence is not questioned. Yet, however successful in representing a seamless progress from the crevices of the poet’s inner persona to the outer reaches of Universe, touching the very fabric of “God,” when probing further about the meaning of the Maker’s creation Derzhavin wisely refused to provide banal answers as to the purpose of either the divine plan or our own afterlife. His vast contemplative poetry shows instead that the paradoxes with which Life endlessly confronts us are manifested not so much in the decoding of their meaning, as in seizing those rare flashes of time when we feel whole and attuned to its pulse. If “this world’s but dreams” and “the Dreamer—God,” as he ends his Magic Lantern (1803), presented as our first full selection below, then it is surely futile for a man to do the dreaming himself. For this reason, the famous question “to be or not to be,” posed by Hamlet and repeated ad nauseum in the cultural histories of mankind to this day, would have been a priori devoid of meaning to Derzhavin, since man cannot create his own being. A better question from his viewpoint would have been how to be? Holistic images of a well-lived life encoded in the vast canvas of his poetry vibrantly pierce the fabric of time and provide the modern reader with hope that there is eternal value to what God giveth to be appreciated not only at the time when He taketh away.
Derzhavin overcomes death’s seeming omnipotence by capturing life as it fantastically manifests itself in varied colors, smells, sounds and moods. He covets life and easily assures us of its continuance in his art. Such is, for instance, the transformative tally of Nature’s wealth as he experienced on his country estate, Zvanka:
I see there, from the barns and hives, the cotes and ponds,
Rich gold in butter and in honeycombs on tree limbs,
In berries—royal purple, on mushrooms—velvet down,
And silver, in the bream atremble;
All phenomena of life were possible subjects for transformation in his poetry. He was one of the first Russian poets to sing of feasts, and the objects of his mature poetic vision are as richly vibrant as the most accomplished 17th-century Dutch still-lifes: their specificity is attained not only by descriptions of their visual and tactile texture, but by their origin as well. Hence his fish is from the river Sheksna or from Astrakhan, his beer Russian or English, his ham Westphalian, his seltzer water drunk from Viennese crystal glasses, his coffee sipped from Chinese faience. In depicting such native foods as borscht or pirogi, as tastier to his persona than the foods of French origin, Derzhavin raises Russian cuisine to the status of a self-sustained, rich tradition worthy of respect in world culture:
The crimson ham, green sorrel soup with yolks of gold,
The rose-gold pie, the cheese that’s white, the crayfish scarlet,
The caviar, deep amber, black, the pike’s stripes bold,
Its feather blue—delight the eyesight.
Delight the eye, and joy to every sense impart;
Though not with glut, or spices brought from foreign harbors,
But with their pure and wholesome Russian heart:
Provisions native, fresh and healthful.
When downing good Crimean or Don-region wine,
Or linden mead, blond beer from hops, or black beer spuming,
Our crimson brows a little fuddlement avow,
The talk is merry through the pudding.
Derzhavin’s poetic celebrations of life on his estate anticipated the views that Tolstoy was to voice in prose much later, and his art—just as Tolstoy’s—found true admirers in Europe. For instance, John Bowring, contemplating Russia’s advances in his anthology of Russian poetry of 1821, and certain that in this land “the foundation is now laid, on which the proud edifice of civilization will be raised,” found the following words to characterize the poet:
But of all the poets of Russia, Derzhavin is in my opinion entitled to the very first place. His compositions breathe a high and sublime spirit; they are full of inspiration. His versification is sonorous, original, characteristic; his subjects generally such as allowed him to give full scope to his ardent imagination and lofty conceptions.2
In order to continue echoes of Shakespeare’s voice in Dezhavin’s fantasy space we quote—in lieu of an epigraph to The Magic Lantern—some celebrated lines from The Tempest. Across the space of a further two centuries both works speak to us as well, embodying one of the dominant threads uniting the writings chosen for this volume. There are other threads to be sure, yet rarely so eloquently expressed and so visually endowed. For this reason, it would be futile to interweave here the remaining threads in any kind of expository prose. In The Magic Lantern, with the cinematic richness of its visual montage, Derzhavin anticipates modernity in a way that very few poets of the period can rival. The poem briefly describes a traveling magic-lantern show as preface to eight tableaux—to continue the prescient cinematic metaphor, eight clips—each of which depicts a scene of earthly vitality or happiness, and each of which ends abruptly as disaster is about to strike. The poem concludes with a meditation on the absurd unreality of the “insubstantial pageant” of existence. Derzhavin makes no reference to immortality in the Christian sense, and the all-powerful Mage who orchestrates the universe appears to be a capricious and indifferent deity, a fact, which the poet accepts stoically. The abrupt alternation of longer and shorter iambic lines admirably conveys the changing of the lantern’s slides and the sudden darkness that follows each tableau, demonstrating that the ultimate mage in the text is the poet himself.
The second work chosen to represent Derzhavin’s reach into the fantastic realm is Zlogor, Volkhv of Novgorod (1813). In the late 18th and early 19th centuries a vogue for literary works in the folkloric style and on folkloric subjects swept Europe, Russia included. The Romantics turned to the native cultures somehow forgotten by Neo-classicim as a powerful source of creative inspiration. In Russia as elsewhere men of letters trolled dusty archives for gems of their people’s earliest literature and, following the example of Germany’s Grimm brothers, traveled about recording remnants of oral tradition as dictated to them by a bemused peasantry. Derzhavin had no need to travel far afield in search of such material. Indeed, his own estate, his beloved Zvanka, provided a rich source of such ancient lore, as is evidenced by Zlogor. According to legend, Zlogor was a vokhv—a sorcerer or pagan shaman—who held sway in the Novgorod region in the early Middle Ages, and a kurgan said to be his tomb was in fact located at Zvanka. For economy’s sake, we have adapted this entry in such a way that it omits the repeated chorus lines and presents individual stanzas in paragraphs of rhythmic prose which can be scanned as an iambic pentameter.
; [In lieu of an epigraph, A.L.]
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on …
The Magic Lantern
The thunder of an organ’s pipes
Cuts through the peace of darkened field:
A luminous, enchanting lamp
Paints on the wall a brilliant orb,
And motley shadows move therein.
The wise and wonder-working mage,
With gestures of his staff, his eyes,
Creates—and then destroys them all.
Apace the townsmen gather round
To see these marvels at his hands.
Appear!
And there came forth …
The wild cave’s monstrous denizen,
Emerging from its horrid shade
A Lion comes.
He stands and with his paw he grooms
His gleaming mane. His tail he lashes
And his roar,
His gaze, like gales from murky depths,
Or like a livid lightning bolt
That flashes through the forest, rumbles.
He roots and pounces, seeking prey,
And, through the trees,
He spies a peaceful grazing Lamb:
His leap is made—his jaws agape …
No more! No more.
Appear!
And there came forth …
Along the smooth and glassy main,
The hour when dawn flings over all
Her rosy light,
Bewhiskered monarch of the seas,
The silver Sturgeon, eyes aglow,
Comes forth,
Emerging from the water’s depths.
His wing-like fins around him ripple,
He sports about the ocean’s portals.
Worlds Apart Page 8
