Bati︠u︡shkov Konstantin Nikolaevich - Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

WRITINGS FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN POETRY

RUSSIAN LIBRARY

The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

Editorial Board:

Vsevolod Bagno

Dmitry Bak

Rosamund Bartlett

Caryl Emerson

Peter B. Kaufman

Mark Lipovetsky

Oliver Ready

Stephanie Sandler

Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

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Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

Copyright 2018 Peter France

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54614-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Batyushkov, K. N. (Konstantin Nikolaevich), 17871855, author. | France, Peter, 1935 translator.

Title: Writings from the Golden Age of Russian poetry / Konstantin Batyushkov; presented and translated by Peter France.

Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Russian library | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015324 (print) | LCCN 2017019738 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231546140 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231185400 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231185417 (pbk.)

Classification: LCC PG3321.B4 (ebook) | LCC PG3321.B4 A2 2017 (print) | DDC 891.78/309dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015324

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Book design: Lisa Hamm

CONTENTS

S urprisingly little pre-twentieth-century Russian poetry is readily available and well known in the English-speaking worldPushkin, Lermontov, perhaps Tyutchev, but hardly any other poets. Yet there is a rich poetic world here, particularly from the early decades of the nineteenth century, the time of the so-called Pushkin Pliade. The great names include Evgeny Baratynsky, Vasily Zhukovsky, Pyotr Vyazemsky, and the poet to whom this volume is devoted, Konstantin Batyushkov.

I have been living with Batyushkov, one way or another, for some time now. It was decades ago that I first read himthe moving elegy entitled Shade of a Friend, which figures with two other poems by him in Dmitry Obolenskys pathbreaking Penguin Book of Russian Verse. The poems are accompanied by good prose translations, but I felt the urge to attempt a verse translation. Not long afterward I first read (and then translated) the poem by Gennady Aygi, House of the Poet in Vologda (1966), which concludes the present volumein this I found a haunting image of a vulnerable poet who succumbed to madness. Later I discovered a poem written some thirty-five years earlier, the poem by Osip Mandelstam that opens this book, and realized how important Batyushkov was for the greatest of twentieth-century Russian poets. Continuing to translate him, I came to feel that this was a poet who should be more widely known in the English-speaking world, the more so because his writing echoed his involvement in some of the great events of modern European history. My aim in writing this book has been to situate his work in relation to his life experience at a crucial time in the development of modern Russian culture. The translations of his poetry are central to this book (and are discussed in a translators note at the end of the volume); in what follows they are interwoven with his prose writings and letters to create a narrative of his fascinating and troubled life.

I am particularly indebted to Vyacheslav Koshelevs Konstantin Batyushkov: Stranstviya i strasti (Konstantin Batyushkov: Wandering and Passions), a sympathetic and richly documented biography of the poet, and have also read with much profit what seems to be the only book-length study of Batyushkov in English, the literary-historical essay Konstantin Batyushkov by the Russian scholar Ilya Z. Serman (New York: Twayne, 1974). See also a detailed biographical sketch by Igor A. Pilshchikov and T. Henry Fitt, Konstantin Batiushkov: Life and Work, www.rvb.ru/batyushkov/bio/bio_eng.htm.

All translations from Russian, both the prose and the verse, are my own. Earlier versions of some of the verse appeared in the following publications: European Romantic Poetry, edited by Michael Ferber; The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski; and Cardinal Points: International Literary Quarterly (online).

I have been helped and encouraged in the writing of this book by many friends and colleagues. My special thanks go to Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, Ilya Kutik, Robyn Marsack, Sin Reynolds, Maria Rybakova, Antony Wood; to Masha Karp and the Pushkin Club, London; and to the staff of Columbia University Press, in particular Christine Dunbar and the anonymous peer reviewer who made many generous and helpful comments.

W here possible, references are to K. N. Batyushkov, Essays in Verse and Prose (Opyty v stikhakh i proze), ed. I. M. Semenko. Moscow: Nauka, 1977abbreviated as Essays. Other references are as follows:

K onstantin Batyushkov (17871855) was one of Russias greatest poets. As such he was celebrated by an even greater poet, Osip Mandelstam, a century later. In 1932, Mandelstam was a literary outcast living in poverty in Moscow, where he wrote a poem addressed to his hero. It was one of the last poems to be published in his lifetime (in the journal