Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age: Unstudied Words That Wove and Wavered

By Anatoly Liberman

Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age is the first translation of nearly all the lyrics by Evgeny Boratynsky (1800–1844), one of the greatest poets of the Golden Age of Russian poetry. The translation retains the meter and rhyming of the original. The commentary following each work provides the necessary background information and often includes translations from the works of Boratynsky’s contemporaries and of later poets. Boratynsky is thus presented against the background of contemporary poetry, both Russian and French, and as an influence on later poets. The book opens with a long introduction on Boratynsky’s life and achievements as well as an analysis of the previous translations of his works into English. Two indexes—of names and of subjects—help the reader to navigate through the poet’s world and works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785271380

Book preview

Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age

Figure 1 Evgeny Boratynsky in the 1830s

Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age

Unstudied Words that Wove and Wavered

Translated from the Russian, with an Introduction and Commentary

by

Anatoly Liberman

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Anatoly Liberman 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-136-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-136-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

On the cover:

Mikalojus K Čiorlionis Serenity (1904)

A mortal genius lives in rapt anticipation

Foreseeing the applause of future generations.

CONTENTS

Your anguish smiles at your deluded senses

Acknowledgments and A Few Editorial Remarks

TO THE READER: WHY BORATYNSKY?

INTRODUCTION

1. Boratynsky: An Outline of His Life and Work.

a. The early years. The catastrophe. Military Service. Contacts with Delvig and Pushkin’s circle. Rise to fame, oblivion and partial resurrection in the Silver Age and at present.

b. Finland. Infatuation with Ponomareva. Ponomareva’s salon . Symptoms of a literary rift among her admirers. Her early death.

c. Boratynsky’s marriage. Boratynsky in relation to his poetic persona. His wife’s personality.

d. Boratynsky’s achievement during the last years in Finland. Retirement from the military service. From the erotic genre to eschatological poems. The old rift between the Classicists and the Romantics becomes a war.

e. Boratynsky and the lovers of wisdom. Boratynsky and Schelling. Boratynsky and philosophy. The commonplace of Boratynsky criticism: Boratynsky thinks. The connotations of the Russian verb for think .

f. The eclipse of Boratynsky’s popularity. Boratynsky’s narrative poems. Boratynsky versus Pushkin. His complex relationship with the Romantic school. An alleged rapprochement between Boratynsky and realism.

g. The last years. Twilight. Boratynsky’s unexpected death at the age of 44.

2. The Poetic World of Evgeny Boratynsky.

a. Boratynsky’s view of his Muse and his gift. His desire to lend the harmony of poetry to life. Boratynsky’s elegies. The inseparability of joy and sorrow in his lyrics. The theme of disease as a dominating theme of his lyrics.

b. Death, progress and the eclipse of civilization in Boratynsky’s poetry.

c. Epistles and odes in Boratynsky’s days. Boratynsky as a dark poet. His orientation toward the past and emphasis on rejection. The literary war. Boratynsky’s epigrams.

d. Boratynsky’s hope for a peaceful future. His death.

3. A Summary of Boratynsky’s Poetic Persona. Some Thoughts on His Language and on Translating Him into English.

a. A condensed view of Boratynsky’s poetic persona. His alter ego as the precursor of the superfluous people of Russian literature.

b. The poetic means for expressing estrangement and rejection. Retardation and archaic vocabulary; dense syntax (inversion).

c. Boratynsky’s euphony (alliteration and other phonetic devices).

d. Boratynsky’s meter and rhythm. Lines of varying length.

4. Boratynsky in English.

5. A Note on the Bibliography

POEMS

Part One

Embarrassed to Be Merry

Part Two

My Gift Is Faint

Part Three

Poetry’s Mysterious Grief

Commentary

Indexes

General Index

The Boratynsky Index

Index of Titles and First Lines in English

Index of Titles and First lines in Russian

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND A FEW EDITORIAL REMARKS

It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to several organizations and people whose help made the appearance of this book possible. For years, the Imagine Fund at the University of Minnesota supported my research in the field of Russian philology. The assistance of my old friends Sigrid and David Coats was invaluable at every stage of work on the manuscript. My thanks are also due to Cathy Parlin who helped me process the illustrations.

I am grateful to Anthem Press for accepting the book. Six specialists read the manuscript and quite a few of their remarks left a trace in the final version. In some cases, I preferred to keep my variants and am alone responsible for their drawbacks.

The traditional spelling of the poet’s name is Baratynsky. At the end of his life, he changed it to Boratynsky, and all the recent editions use this spelling, but those who will decide to search for his works and the literature about him in catalogs and databases should begin by using the old, more familiar variant. My own spelling of English follows the American standard, but when I quote British authorities, I reproduce the original in every detail. Finally, it should be remembered that the Russian alphabet lacks diacritics, and the accent marks over vowels, used sporadically in the introduction and commentary and consistently in the name index, have been added for the convenience of those who do not know Russian. Each piece has two dates: the first points to the date of the poem’s composition, the second to the date of the published version used as the basis of my translation.

April 2019

Minneapolis, Minnesota

TO THE READER: WHY BORATYNSKY?

And all your harmony, o lyre!

To life I wanted to impart.

Evgeny Boratynsky […] The name on the cover will say little or, more likely, nothing to an English speaker who has not studied Russian literature. And yet Boratynsky (1800–1844) was one of the greatest and most original lyric poets in nineteenth-century Europe, an author equal in stature to such giants as Keats and Leopardi.

Translated poetry enjoys little prestige in the English-speaking world—in contrast to the situation in Russia, where Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Heine and Rilke, to mention just a few illustrious names, have merged with national tradition and become part of Russian literature. Hundreds of people have memorized passages from Byron’s Don Juan and Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha in Russian.

I have translated and annotated all of Boratynsky’s important lyrics, in the hope that my book will not end up among the non-required materials for a few graduate courses but will open to English lovers of poetry works they will read and reread, as people listen again and again to their favorite music. Some of Boratynsky’s lyrics need more concentration than the others. This is the order of reading I can recommend: Nos. 8, 19, 21, 28, 47, 53, 56b, 57, 69, 78, 87, 90, 103, 109, 127, 157 and 158. After this, start leafing through the book from the end, backward, while paying special attention to Nos. 132, 129, 126, 119, 91, 83 and 80. Now it may be useful to turn to the introductory article and read the volume from beginning to end. Even though my translation is at best a faithful echo of the original, some, I hope, may be singed by the sparks of Boratynsky’s fire.

INTRODUCTION

Many are countries in which I have traveled;

Many are triumphs in which I have reveled—

Triumphs were false, but evils were true.

1. Boratynsky: An Outline of His Life and Work

a. The early years. The catastrophe. Military Service. Contacts with Delvig and Pushkin’s circle. Rise to fame, oblivion and partial resurrection in the Silver Age and at present

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Evgeny Abramovich Boratynsky (February 19, 1800–June 29, 1844) was not killed in a duel and did not die of tuberculosis. The family owned an estate in the steppe region in south-central Russia not far from the town of Tambov, and Boratynsky cherished the memory of his early years until his last day. His parents were well-to-do rather than affluent; however, for some time, they could hire tutors to give their children a good education, with the emphasis laid on the perfect mastery of French.

While reading the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev and Boratynsky, one wonders not at how they managed to learn near-native (practically, native) French, while living so far from France, but where they obtained their splendid Russian, for many of their contemporaries did not. Working on German is mentioned in one of Boratynsky’s letters, but in later life he complained that he did not know that language, and it is unlikely that he knew any English, though Germanophiles and Anglophiles were all around him. His correspondence with his mother, his wife and his wife’s relatives is all in French.

The first blow that determined Boratynsky’s fate was the early death of his father (the boy had just turned 10), whom he remembered dimly, as he confessed in Desolation (No. 127), but, fortunately, he was and stayed to the end very close to his mother. The offspring of some noble families did not attend school and only took exams at the end of every year to qualify for promotion to the next level. The Boratynskys were no exception, but the loss of the father made the expensive home schooling no longer possible, and Boratynsky was sent to the Pages’ Corps, an aristocratic establishment, whose graduates became Guards officers. The place did not fit the boy’s temperament and inclinations (by contrast, his younger brother flourished there). Yet things might have turned out well if he and some of his friends, inspired by Schiller’s Karl Moor and adventure books, had not formed A Society of Avengers. They enjoyed breaking discipline, and Boratynsky’s reputation at the Corps went from bad to worse.

Silly frolics led to a serious crime. One of the boys stole from his father a gold snuffbox containing 500 rubles. Boratynsky was an accomplice to the theft. By Alexander I’s order, both were expelled from the Corps and forbidden to serve in any capacity except as privates. The punishment could have entailed losing both the nobleman’s status and an exemption from flogging, but even in the form in which it occurred, the catastrophe ruined Boratynsky. To this, it should be added that probably from early on, he was prey to depression; in his lyrics, he described the symptoms of his disease with horrifying precision. Later, his friends urged him to cast off his melancholy, to forget his grievances (some of them imaginary) and to be of good cheer. He tried hard, but usually with little success. His mental health deteriorated as the years went by, and he made futile attempts to conquer depression by heavy drinking.

After the expulsion from the Corps, Boratynsky could have returned home and spent the rest of his life as a landowner, but that would have prevented him from engaging in civil service and left an indelible spot on his honor. Despite numerous attempts on the part of the family, the czar refused to pardon Boratynsky, and he went to stay with his relatives. Fortunately, they treated the youth with love and understanding. To rehabilitate himself, he had to follow the only way open to him, and in 1819 enrolled in the army as a private. The disgrace was unspeakable, but the conditions of his service were not too hard. Only a promotion in 1826 to a junior officer’s rank allowed Boratynsky to retire. He found his mother a nervous wreck, burdened with a large family and in dire need of moral support. This made him settle in Moscow (he would have preferred St. Petersburg), and his nearest future looked bleak.

The years of military service (1819–25) were, amazingly, the brightest in Boratynsky’s life as a poet. He could not avoid the routine the soldier’s duties entailed, but he was granted numerous leaves of absence and allowed to stay in a private apartment. His superiors looked upon him as an equal and did everything to alleviate his hardships. Late in 1818, he met Anton Delvig, a poet and Pushkin’s childhood friend. The two became inseparable. At that time, Boratynsky had in his drawer only a few conventional lyrics, but this did not prevent Delvig from having his new companion’s first works published and, more importantly, from introducing him to Pushkin. This is how Boratynsky found himself surrounded with talented and like-minded people. The names to remember, besides Delvig and Pushkin, are Kiukhelbeker (a future prominent literary critic, poet and Decembrist¹) and Prince Vyazemsky; dedications to them show up more than once among Boratynsky’s poems.

At that time, no one could predict that the period in the history of Russian literature from 1819 to 1837 would be remembered as Pushkin’s epoch, though Pushkin easily outshone everybody, a fact of which his friends were fully aware. Yet Boratynsky occupies a place of his own: he was Pushkin’s outstanding contemporary, not a satellite. Unfortunately, after a few years of fame, he fell into oblivion and was resurrected only by the Symbolists several decades later, close to the end of the nineteenth century. The thunder of the First World War and of the years that followed deafened his beautiful voice, and he continued a shadowy existence among the so-called minor poets. However, some intellectuals always admired him. In the Soviet Union, his poetry was first neglected rather than suppressed, and he never made it into school curricula. His name, when mentioned in connection with Glinka’s immensely popular song Don’t tempt me with your tender ruses (No. 19), sounded unfamiliar, almost exotic. Since roughly the 1960s there has been, in Russia, a veritable Boratynsky Renaissance, but it has affected only the upper crust of the intelligentsia. Boratynsky is doomed to remain the joy of those who have the inclination and leisure to read and reread his exquisite lyrics.

b. Finland. Infatuation with Ponomareva. Ponomareva’s salon. Symptoms of a literary rift among her admirers. Her early death

We should now return to 1819. For keeping things in perspective, it is useful to remember that Boratynsky was born in 1800. Though at that time people matured early, at the moment of his expulsion from the Corps, he was still a youth, and the change of status, coupled with the prospect of military service at the lowest rank, could have crushed a much stronger man. His duty first left him in St. Petersburg but later he was stationed in Finland, and he owed his early recognition to the elegy Finland (No. 12). But a look at Nos. 8, 14, 17, 18, 19 and 27, to mention just a few, reveals a poet who, very early, could say things in an entirely new way.

Boratynsky’s first commission in Finland did not last long, because his regiment was transferred to St. Petersburg and stayed there for about 14 months. This is when he became a common visitor in the salon of Sof’ia Dmitrievna Ponomareva, the heroine of his engrossing love cycle. Six years later, Boratynsky married and left the escapades of his youth behind (compare No. 30), but, while a bachelor, he behaved like everybody else. Ponomareva was rich, highly accomplished, witty and beautiful (the only extant miniature gives almost no idea of her charm). She was also married. A bit surprisingly, her complaisant husband did not mind the presence of a swarm of willful Sophie’s admirers, none of whom, as far as we can judge, was allowed to go too far. Yet she reciprocated the feelings of one of her constant guests. This man did not happen to be Boratynsky, even though, discriminating and vain as she was, she treasured his companionship and poetry.

Boratynsky’s earlier infatuations followed the traditional model of the early nineteenth-century battle of love. His amatory lyrics usually show a measure of restraint (there is almost no hint of youthful brashness in them), but, when it came to Ponomareva, he did not conceal that he was hurt—much more so than he said even in No. 56; he (a situation seldom to recur in his relations with women) lost his temper and prophesied that old age would deprive Sophie of her charm and make her regret her cruelty. Boratynsky was fond of moralizing and shedding words of wisdom in addressing even older and more experienced people (as in Nos. 3 and 14). He could let his feeling of superiority and chagrin overpower him (as in Nos. 20 and 94), but never again did he allow himself to gloat over somebody’s prospective misery.

The Lilas and Daphnes were an indispensable part of a young man’s (rake’s, wastrel’s, scapegrace’s) experience, a traditional element of the initiation. One had to win over willing and especially unwilling beauties, retreat if outsmarted by a rival (consoled at once if unsuccessful, as Pushkin’s Onegin put it) or triumph if things turned out well. While reading the Russian love poetry of that period, it is hard to tell how often the lyrics were a tribute to a conventional game, and to what extent they reflected the truth. Pushkin’s list of mistresses (known as his Don Juan’s list) shows that one should not be in a hurry to generalize. That said, more often than once the adventurous youths satisfied their sexual urge with easily available maidens" (like Natasha, the heroine in Pushkin’s early erotic poem, who treated sweetly the entire Lyceum, the school where Pushkin and Delvig studied) or by going to brothels (and paid dearly for it, like Yazykov, who will turn up several times in the pages of this book). The story of Ponomareva’s salon is told in detail by V. E. Vatsúro in his book S. D. P. Iz istorii literaturnogo byta pushkinskoi pory (S. D. P.: Sketches of Literary Life in Pushkin’s Time). It is available only in Russian.

Some of Ponomareva’s admirers (notably, Boratynsky and Delvig) were the poets of the new, that is, Romantic school; the others represented the conservative, Classical wing. The dissent was fueled by both literary and personal jealousies, because the men who flocked around Ponomareva fell in love with her, one after another, while she, in the idiom of that epoch, was a regular Circe, a siren, a sly temptress. Boratynsky left us a short version of a poetic journal documenting his relations with Ponomareva: a promise of reciprocity, hope, the peak (a single kiss) and estrangement. However, the dates of some lyrics are uncertain, and in a few cases even their attribution to her remains problematic; also, he revised several lines in the 1827 edition of his collected works.

Boratynsky obviously found it offensive to keep elbowing his way through a crowd of lovesick wooers and assailing a moving target. I have deliberately chosen one poem of the Ponomareva cycle for the introduction, so that it should not get lost among the other similar confessions made at approximately the same time (?1822). It is a perfect example of Boratynsky’s nonaggressive attitude and self-restraint.

(Kogda by menee prekrasnoi)

If your good looks ’mid friend and stranger

Created less effusive fuss,

And if your charm, so fraught with danger,

Did not endanger all of us;

And if your voice and eyes of Venus,

Their tenderness and languid flame

Did not conceal the frightful menace

That makes me circumspect and tame;

If Cupid with his bow and arrows

Had given me a better start,

Then love for you (perhaps) might harrow

My otherwise receptive heart.

It’s true: love did not send me reeling,

And, happily, I am not dazed.

Some secret voice suppressed this feeling;

Enamored? No, I am amazed.

Later, Boratynsky divided his admiration between a demon (Zakrevskaia) and an angel (Voeikova), but he fell in love only once, and the object was Ponomareva. Hence his evil prophecy: he wanted to be avenged. If he had as much as a premonition of her fate, he would never have written such unkind lines. In March 1824, Ponomareva suddenly fell ill. Nothing is said in the memoirs about the nature of her disease, which is described as a fever, a meaningless word. She died in severe pain and left behind several broken-hearted votaries, an avalanche of epitaphs and a durable legend.

c. Boratynsky’s marriage. Boratynsky in relation to his poetic persona. His wife’s personality

In the 1820s, Boratynsky was remembered for the elegies in which he advised the women he once loved to forget him (because he had already forgotten them). So when in 1826 he announced that he was going to marry Nastas’ia L’vovna Engelgardt, his friends’ reaction was one of shocked surprise and even resentment.

Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky (born in 1792; he was the oldest man in that group) expressed the kindest opinion about the event (the passages that follow are from private letters): "You know your Evgeny expressed the desire to continue himself and is about to marry my neighbor Engelgardt, a pleasant, clever and kind maiden, but not endowed with an elegiac appearance. I love Baratynsky with all my heart, and I respect him. The more you grind him, the better and more strongly he smells. His base, his foundation, in addition to his gift, is solid and beautiful." The addressee was Lev Pushkin, the poet’s younger brother (see No. 74).

Lev’s response was quite different: All this time I keep cursing you, Moscow, the Muscovites, fate and Baratynsky. You, blockheads and matchmakers, had to marry him! Why are you so happy? In order to keep busy while arranging marriages (admittedly, a laudable pastime), you ruined for less than a broken farthing a thoroughly decent man. In the course of the last three years, Baratynsky has thirty times been on the point of marrying and thirty times the affair went flop. Did it make him unhappy? He could not for a moment, ever, live without love, but, once the infatuation passed, he would abhor the woman.

I am saying all this to demonstrate Baratynsky’s fickleness; in his young age he should not have put on a yoke of family life. You will say that he is happy. Probably, but let us wait for the end, as the fable puts it, and it is hard to pay with a long life of boredom and disgust for a year (if indeed a year) of well-being. The necessity to marry was a constantly buzzing bee in his bonnet, but who in his right mind believed him? […] . For poetry he is dead. His field is erotic poetry, but it no longer becomes a husband, and now for precisely this reason he is expunging his best lyrics from the collection of his poems. To expel Baratynsky from poetry is a joke worthy of Herostratus […] What will now be his lot? A landowner? But in this case he should have waited very long before marrying.

The remarks of Delvig’s wife were equally harsh, but they need not be taken at face value, for she was capricious and disloyal. Baratynsky has written us that he is going to marry. His bride is a damsel of 23 [actually, 22] years old, plain and sentimental, but, when all is said and done, a very kind person. She is head over heels in love with Evgeny; nothing is easier than to turn his head, and this is what the Misses Engelgardt hastened to do, in order to expedite this marriage. Delvig died of a severe cold in 1831. His widow, after more than five years of questionable marital bliss, remarried a few months later, and her second husband was one of Boratynsky’s brothers.

We have no way of deciding to what extent Lev Pushkin identified Boratynsky with the persona of the universally admired elegies, but he erred on all points. Everybody remembered the cynical lines in No. 47 in which the poet predicted a loveless union between himself and a chaste maiden who would not realize that her husband felt only boredom while bringing her to the altar. Boratynsky did love his wife-to-be despite her lack of an elegiac appearance (which means that she did not resemble a woman about whom poets wrote elegies; indeed, she was not another Ponomareva). He also became a true friend of her sister Sof’a (another Sof’a!) and her father. But the couple’s family life was not radiant: Boratynsky’s wife had to cope with his depression and later with his alcoholism. They had nine children, two of whom (daughters) died young. Boratynsky was fully aware of the hell in which Nastas’ia L’vovna lived most of the time (No. 158), and he all but worshiped her. Life frequently imitates art, but nothing in this marriage resembled the plots of Boratynsky’s early elegies. Lev Pushkin’s taunt about a landowner’s status also went amiss, for Boratynsky took excellent care of his business. However, all that happened later. In 1826 he was jubilant (see No. 82).

In his letter to Vyazemsky, Lev Pushkin mentioned a prospective collection of Boratynsky’s poems. The book appeared in 1827, and indeed, Boratynsky found it immodest, perhaps even prejudicial, to include some of his addresses to Ponomareva, and the same fate befell No. 47, the masterpiece containing a picture of a loveless union. He also tampered with a few dates, to disguise the circumstances that had inspired his confessions. Volume I contained many lyrics and two narrative poems: Eda (it deals with the seduction of a Finnish peasant girl by a Russian hussar) and The Ball (a society drama). The not too numerous reviews were mixed but, on the whole, friendly. Yazykov, later one of Boratynsky’s greatest admirers, in a private letter, dismissed both narrative poems as a complete failure.

d. Boratynsky’s achievement during the last years in Finland. Retirement from the military service. From the erotic genre to eschatological poems. The old rift between the Classicists and the Romantics becomes a war

While Boratynsky was waiting impatiently, almost despairingly, for the promotion that would bring his military service to an end, he kept composing at a feverish speed. So many people pleaded with the czar for Boratynsky’s pardon that he expected an almost immediate release from the chains (see the opening of No. 81) and predicted a farewell to his northern exile (No. 29). But the czar proved to be incomprehensibly stubborn. Not only did he turn down all appeals; in April 1824, he prohibited further requests without special permission. Alexander, in his last years, was in almost every respect different from the open-minded monarch of two decades earlier. The country groaned under the ferule of his favorite Arakcheev (see No. 60). According to an extant story, once, while Boratynsky was standing watch, the czar approached him, patted him tenderly on the shoulder and said: ‘Serve some more time, serve some more time’—an idyllic picture of a benevolent father. Finally, a year later, the promotion was granted. Now an officer, Boratynsky could have stayed in the military, but the routine bored him. After Alexander’s death in November 1825, he applied for retirement, and in February 1826 Nicholas I signed it.

The atmosphere in the country, depressing enough under Arakcheev, became much gloomier in 1825 and 1826, after the Decembrists’ revolt was put down. Arrests and reprisals became the order of the day. Yet for Boratynsky, 1826 was a happy year. Eda and The Ball appeared as a separate book; he regained his freedom and married. Lev Pushkin was also mistaken when he characterized Boratynsky as exclusively a poet of the erotic genre. A glance at his early œuvres will easily prove the opposite. Yet the change of his themes is remarkable. Some phantoms of old kept tormenting him (Nos. 91, 115 and especially 99), but they had to recede. From the time of his youth, Boratynsky was torn between hope (the desire to act) and resignation. Now he began to write about the blessings of death (No. 83) and the demise of civilization (No. 80). At the age of 28, he described himself as an old man, ready to welcome his friends in a secluded hut (No. 84; the motif of hosting a party far from the madding crowd was not alien to him even much earlier). He viewed his past as if from a hazy distance, and the old idea of possessing a faint gift and a barely audible voice took hold of him (Nos. 87 and 97). His imagination carried him far away from the soulless dust of our earth (No. 90).

Any unprejudiced observer will notice the heights he reached between roughly 1827 and 1832. However good, even brilliant his love poetry might be, it had to make itself heard in an ocean of other poets’ madrigals, album pieces and elegies, without merging with Pushkin’s popular lyrics. Now he stood alone among his contemporaries. No one had written anything like The Last Death, The Last Poet, and Desolation. No one had said such words about his own Muse. The aphoristic final lines of Nos. 73, 103, 119 and 123, to mention a few, go far beyond the elegant pointes typical of his earlier verses.

Literary criticism is seldom impartial or objective. It has been noted in connection with the atmosphere in Ponomareva’s salon that many of her admirers were at loggerheads. Party lines were drawn and seldom crossed. The conservatives (the foes of the Romantic school) fought the Epicurean, hedonistic mood of the younger poets, with their celebration of wassails, chalices, voluptuous women and the overuse of words like the Russian counterparts of dulcet and joy of lust (sladostnyi, sladostrast’e). They also parodied what they called the young men’s mutual admiration society, but they themselves were people of average ability, and this is what doomed them. In the long run, no parodies could destroy Pushkin and Boratynsky.

With time, disagreement gave way to bitter enmity. Vicious epigrams were bandied back-and-forth; insults replaced critique. It defies belief that someone (this someone was N. I. Nadezhdin, whose name today means nothing to the uninitiated) could write an evil review of Boratynsky’s No. 81, a charming and fairly unpretentious lyric. Indeed, like the tyrant in Pushkin’s anthologized poem The Upas Tree (Anchar), the journalist dipped his arrows in poison. After 1825, Boratynsky’s circle of literary friends was narrow. Ryleev, a leading Decembrist, had been hanged. Kiukhelbeker dragged out a miserable existence in Siberia. Delvig and Vyazemsky did not live in Moscow. The relations with Pushkin had lost the warmth so memorable to those who will recall the admiring lines in Boratynsky’s Banqueting; Pushkin’s poems repaid that admiration in kind.

e. Boratynsky and the lovers of wisdom. Boratynsky and Schelling. Boratynsky and philosophy. The commonplace of Boratynsky criticism: Boratynsky thinks. The connotations of the Russian verb for think

The vacuum was partly filled by the appearance of I. V. Kireevsky, whom Boratynsky met in 1829. Kireevsky was part of the group known in the history of Russian thought as liubomudry ‘lovers of wisdom’; later, they moved close to or even merged with the Slavophiles. Their idol was Friedrich Schelling. Boratynsky never read Schelling in any language, though he seemingly had a superficial exposure to a rehash of his books. Schelling’s views were close to Tyutchev’s, who, unlike Boratynsky, did read Schelling’s works and even had personal contact with him. Boratynsky, Tyutchev and Schelling shared a lifelong interest in the relations between man and nature. However, a great poet is not someone who retells in metrically arranged lines the ideas of an influential thinker.

A member of a group of young enthusiasts, Boratynsky participated in numerous talks about transcendental philosophy. The air around him crackled with intellectual conversation, and he breathed this air avidly, but as a poet he was affected by it in a minimal way. In a letter to Pushkin, dated January 1826, he said that he was glad to get acquainted with the subject but did not quite understand it. By his admission, regarding German aesthetics, he liked the poetry that inspired it, but that its foundations could probably be refuted philosophically. I am not sure I understand the