Category: Russian Literature

Evgeniy Baratynsky – “My talent’s poor, my voice has little weight…”

I have been thinking about this poem by the Russian poet, Evgeniy Baratynsky, for a while now. I remember coming across a translation, perhaps the one by Peter France which I link to below, just as I was getting onto a flight back to the UK a few years ago. After finding the original poem online, I spent much of that flight comparing the two. Baratynsky’s language is cold, dry, and rational. Though he was a contemporary of Pushkin, I need to turn to a dictionary far more often when I read him than his fellow poet. Reading the original poem then I was struck both by its tortured syntax and by its lack of beauty. It seemed to say almost nothing, and say it poorly. The translation was much more impressive.

My Russian is far better now than it was at that time. And I have also come to appreciate Baratynsky. Indeed, I’ve translated a few of his poems here already. Today I return to the poem with fresh eyes and a greater willingness to engage with the original. I hope this translation can give a sense of its quiet intensity.

“My talent’s poor, my voice has little weight…”

My talent's poor, my voice has little weight,
But still I live, and on this earth my life
May yet to others give a kind of joy.
Those still to come will find my heart and voice
Within my verse. How can I know? My soul
Will meet with theirs and make a new connection,
And as I found my friends in my own life,
I'll find a reader in posterity.
(1828)

Russian Version here.
An alternative translation by Peter France.

I don’t have altogether much to say about the poem. When I read it now, it gives me a sense of purpose in my own writing. It is a reminder that whatever success or failure we may have in our own lives, there is something magical and redemptive about the thought that one day someone will turn to our writings, discovering us by accident, and consider themselves lucky for it. Baratynsky these days is less well known than other Russian poets of the 19th century – Fet, Tyutchev, Pushkin, et al. He is almost my secret – a poet who is entirely mine, one claimed by no reading list.

Of course, I love the Great writers too, as much as anyone else and probably more than most. Yet it’s hard to imagine that they love me in return – they have too many admirers, and too little time for us all. In a way, the poem reminds me of a story I heard while on the island of Kizhi in Karelia, in the north of Russia. Baratynsky, it’s worth mentioning in passing, had a great love for the region. On this island there are a great many preserved wooden churches (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site), some of them gigantic, being part of the island’s central complex, and some of them tiny. I took part in a tour, and one question the guide asked us was why bother making a tiny church when you can see, perhaps a ten-minute walk away at most, a huge church which is far richer and more beautiful.

A photo of a large church in the distance
Why build a small church when something like this is only a stone’s throw away?

The answer turned out to be simple. Back in those days, the peasants believed that God would be less likely to hear their prayers if they went where everyone else did. They were worried their concerns would be drowned out among those of so many others. And so they built their own smaller churches and chapels. Here, they hoped that God would listen to them.

In the same way, the lesser writers, though they may have less power and talent, may offer us in their own writings a kind of cosy warmth, and a feeling that our reading of them is not in vain. Through us they live again, and the magic of their literature passes on into a new generation. In me, Baratynsky has indeed found “a reader in posterity”.

Osip Mandelshtam on Baratynsky’s Poem

Osip Mandel’shtam is one of the major Russian poets of the 20th century. I have never enjoyed his poems much, perhaps because I had to study them for my exams, rather than read them for pleasure. One day I hope to return to him and try again, but not just yet. Anyway, in one of his essays (“Concerning an Interlocutor”), he has some comments on Baratynsky’s poem. I thought these were worth translating too. Perhaps you’ll find them interesting.

“Every one of us has friends. Why shouldn’t the poet turn to his own friends, to those people who are naturally close to him? A seafarer in a critical moment throws into the ocean waves a sealed bottle with his name and a record of his fate. Many years later, wandering among the dunes, I find it in the sand, read the letter, learn the date of the event and the final moments of the one who has passed away. I had the right to do this. I did not print a private letter. The letter sealed within the bottle was addressed to whoever found it. I did just that. That means I am the secret addressee.

“Reading Baratynsky’s poem I experience the same feeling. It’s as if such a bottle has fallen into my hands. The ocean, with all its massive power, decided to help it in its journey, and the feeling that you get when you find such a bottle is that Providence itself has had a hand in delivering the message to you. In the casting of a bottle into the waves and in Baratynsky’s poem there is the same clearly-expressed idea. The letter and the poem are both addressed to nobody in particular. But nevertheless both of them have an addressee: the letter’s is that person who stumbled upon the bottle in the sand, while the poem’s is “a reader in posterity”. I would like to know who among those who have come across this line of Baratynsky’s has done so without a quiver of joy and a terrible shudder, such as when someone unexpectedly calls out their name.”

I hope you have enjoyed my translation. If you have any questions or thoughts, do leave a comment below.

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya – “The Boarding School Girl”

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya is the second woman writer of Russia’s 19th century who I’ve read, the first being Karolina Pavlova. (I wrote about Pavlova’s novel, A Double Life, here). Where Pavlova produced a flawed but original novel about the life of a young aristocratic girl who falls prey to the schemes of the men and older women surrounding her, using satire and mixing poetry and prose in a way that has more in common with the German novellas of the early 19th century than Russian literature, Khvoshchinskaya is not particularly stylistically original at all. Her stories make use of the 19th century’s staple: drab and workhorse realism.

In spite of her uninspiring prose, what Khvoshchinskaya brings to the table is a commitment to shining a light on the struggles that the average woman in Imperial Russia faced. In her task she is rather more subtle than Pavlova, whose anger often undermines the effectiveness of her arguments, and in many ways she anticipates Chekhov. The difference between them is that Khvoshchinskaya focuses on women’s suffering specifically, at least in “The Boarding School Girl”.

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya herself. Like the Brontës, there were multiple Khvoshchinskaya sisters, all of them writers.

The Boarding School Girl

The first thing to have in mind when reading Khvoshchinskaya is that like the Brontë sisters, she too used a male pseudonym – V Krestovsky. What that meant in practice is probably that there was some pressure on her to self-censor to appear more “manly”. “The Boarding School Girl” begins with what might be such an attempt. The story’s first scene, in spite of its title, is occupied by two young men – Veretitsyn, and Ibraev. They are in a small administrative centre, somewhere deep inside Russia. Veretitsyn has been there for over a year – they are walking in his garden – while Ibraev has just arrived, to take up an important administrative position at the head of some department. Veretitsyn, we soon learn, is almost the opposite. He is watched by the police, a certified “dangerous influence”, and in exile. But they are old friends and want to catch up.

Towards the end of the meeting they notice a girl through the bars of Veretitsyn’s garden fence, walking in her own garden with a book and studying hard. In spite of Veretisyn’s assertion that “I don’t want her to be happy”, he decides to go and speak to her. And thus begins the acquaintance that sets in motion the events of “The Boarding School Girl”.

Our Heroine: Lelenka

Our heroine is Lelenka, a girl of about sixteen. She is introduced to us not by her physical characteristics, but by her mental ones – she has a good memory, and is a hard worker. Her eyes are not beautiful, but “clear and direct”. And indeed, Khvoshchinskaya predominantly uses a kind of anti-description of her, opposing her to typical women and, indirectly, to men’s typical definition of them. Lelenka’s look “was not coquetry: her calm gaze did not challenge, didn’t seek out a conversation; she did not even close her book”. She speaks a little with Veretitsyn through the bars of the garden wall – a prominent symbol for her lack of emancipation, and then she goes home.

They meet again later. We are perhaps expecting a romance to come of this. After all, Veretitsyn, the exiled revolutionary, fits neatly into a class of characters known as “superfluous men” who populated Imperial Russian literature since either Eugene Onegin (Eugene Onegin) or Pechorin (A Hero of Our Time), depending on who you ask. The most recent prominent example for Khvoshchinskaya would probably have been Rudin, in Turgenev’s novel of the same name, published in 1855. Superfluous men are intelligent, but ineffectual. They speak well but they are unable to commit to any of the radical ideas they espouse. As a result they either die bleakly, live bleakly, or are redeemed by a poorly-written angelic woman.

Veretitsyn acts as a kind of alternative teacher for Lelenka to those at school. He reveals to her the artificiality of her life, and puts into her head the idea of freedom by making her aware of how little of it she has: “You are a wonderful, obedient, kind daughter: you are only acting according to your duty” (emphasis mine). She should instead live for herself. Veretitsyn is just playing around – he’s terribly bored, and Lelenka is a pleasant distraction. When he gives her Romeo and Juliet to read the tone of his thoughts is derisive: “well, let her educate herself!” he thinks. It is a “violent joke”.

But for Lelenka herself, his words are not such a joke. She realises that she has indeed never been doing anything for herself. The usual translation of the title of the story, “The Boarding School Girl”, is not perfect because Lelenka does not actually board at school, but goes there every morning, accompanied by a servant from her household. “The School Girl” is probably better. Either way, the emphasis is on education. Lelenka is constantly learning in the story, but not only at school. After speaking with Veretitsyn she realises her education has consisted simply of memorising things, never of thinking for herself.  

An Unhappy Family

We see her lack of choice in her domestic life. “Raised in fear”, the children of her family know only the route to their school and back. At home she is told by her mother “sew, sew, or read a book”. But she starts to recognise her parents’ hypocrisy, the way that they are constantly “puffing themselves up” (the Russian word “важничать” comes directly from the word for “importance”) in spite of their lowly position and poverty. Lelenka, however, only recognises her unfreedom – she has little power to remedy it. She flunks her school exams, completely pointlessly, as an act of rebellion. But that’s all she can do. Khvoshchinskaya makes use of passive constructions in Russian to show her lack of agency, for example “All of these clothes were placed upon Lyolya”.

Her parents decide without consulting her that, as she’s now sixteen, she must get married. In addition to parents, social constraints are another layer of restraints placed upon women in the 19th century in Russia. At one point her mother is bartering concerning the price of the dowry for Lelenka – a kind of concrete reduction of Lelenka from human being into an object with a price attached. At another, a friend of her mother’s asks her if she speaks French and asks to listen, even though the friend doesn’t even understand it. Lelenka is told “you just need to submit, submission is what’s needed”, and that “you need to thank god for sending you someone to take care of you”. God is the final tool for keeping Lelenka in her place.

The Revolutionary and his Protégée

Veretitsyn was just having fun with Lelenka. He had no idea that his words could have had an effect on her. But she discovers freedom: “Let them make of me a woman in the kitchen, a worker… but I’ll not be a slave”. When Veretitsyn hears that she has failed her exams he is shocked and changes tack. He now starts defending the system he had earlier criticised. “You understand that people need to live with each other; that’s why we have laws, and rules, and convention”. But it is too late. Lelenka knows that Veretitsyn has “spoiled [her] character”, but she can do nothing but continue down that path. She thinks for herself – “Will I really have children one day? Will I really live just as they do?”

The answer is no. Veretitsyn, giving her Shakespeare, opened her mind to a new way of existence, one dominated by passion and personal interest. The description of reading (in French) is filled with joy – words were now “understandable without the slightest effort, everything just translated itself in her mind, in her heart, not from the words but from some kind of feeling clearer and more rich than words themselves”. Veretitsyn, unable to liberate himself from cynicism, successfully liberates Lelenka from her own circumstances.

In Petersburg

The second-to-last chapter ends with Lelenka being told that she has to marry. She refuses, but we don’t expect her to manage to hold our forever. The final chapter, taking place eight years after the events of the rest of the story, seems at first to confirm this. We are taken to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Khvoshchinskaya gives us a panoramic view of the people here – ladies and serious men. The descriptions focus on tight, restricted clothing. But instead we are taken not to a “lady” but to a “female artist”: it is, of course, Lelenka. There she meets among the visitors Veretitsyn, and she invites him home to chat.

A lot has changed. She is no longer Lelenka (a diminutive, showing her immaturity), but Elena. When Veretitsyn offers to carry her artist’s things she refuses, and when they stand by the banks of the Neva there is no longer a fence separating them. They are now, at last, equals. We learn that after hearing about the marriage Lelenka fled to her aunt’s, in Petersburg, and there she started going to a new educational establishment. The teachers there noticed her talent for painting, and helped her to develop it. She now has complete independence, financially as well as in every other sense – she knows three foreign languages, does translations and paintings. “I am free”.

Veretitsyn has declined where Lelenka has grown: “with the years one gets quieter”. He disagrees with her, calls her and her generation egotists. For him, it is enough that things get slowly better. She has permanently rejected love as a “yoke” and now lives for herself. When the story ends, we hear the “rustle of a pen upon paper” as she works. The sound “rustle” in Russian is normally associated with dresses, but Lelenka is not like those others. With that simple word choice, we see how far she’s come.

Conclusion

“The Boarding School Girl” is at its most interesting in this final chapter. The earlier portions catalogued Lelenka’s unfreedom, but here Khvoshchinskaya is really going against the patriarchal grain by ultimately showing that freedom is not only possible for women, but actually enjoyable. However, I’m not convinced by it. I guess it’s just the stodgy reactionary in me, but Lelenka’s freedom is marked by an unacknowledged loneliness that will only get worse as time goes on. She may be young and free and happy now, but I can’t see it lasting forever.

Freedom is as much a yoke as love is, and I find some merit in Veretitsyn’s view too, that Lelenka’s work is “just another source of opium”. In the end, Khvoshchinskaya herself doesn’t really take a side. Lelenka certainly has grown up – and that this is a good thing nobody can reasonably deny – but the endpoint she thinks she’s reached may only be the first step on a more challenging journey to full maturity. But that continuation of her story, unfortunately, was not written.

A good short article with extra information on the story is here.

Evgeniy Baratynsky – Four Translations of his Poetry

Evgeny Baratynsky is one of the great poets of the Golden Age of Russian poetry, but he is generally overshadowed by A.S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, both of whom are more accessible, in part because of their prose works, and in part because of their easily-digestible content. Baratynsky is a solitary figure compared to those others because of his pessimism, comparable to that of Leopardi in Italy. Where Lermontov might look sadly upon his generation, he nonetheless lived a life of action, of active revolt. Baratynsky often gives the impression he doesn’t think it’s worth even trying. He is bitter, but what makes him interesting is that he is also intellectual in vision, where other poets are more emotional. He is not always easy to read in Russian, but teasing out his meanings is a pleasant exercise. Each reading leaves you feeling you’re a little closer to understanding him.  

These translations are only my first attempts at trying to pin down the poet’s soul. I like Baratynsky enough that I can see myself returning to him later, but for now I’ve only prepared these four pieces. After each poem I’ll leave a few words, describing the poem and anything I found interesting about it.

A sketch of Evgeniy Baratynsky
Young and unhappy, as most of us these days are, Evgeniy Baratynsky spent some time in Finland as a soldier, married, then died in Italy at the age of 44, which is pretty old for a Russian poet.

The Poems

Prayer

Lord of Heaven, grant your peace
To a soul ill at ease.
For the errors I've seen
Send oblivion's dark screen;
And to rise to your height,
Give me strength to do right.

This is short and sweet, the kind of prayer that you really can mumble to yourself going to bed. Baratynsky doesn’t seem particularly interested in God – He’s rarely mentioned elsewhere – but I still like this poem. It seems a prayer for our own times, with its sense of anxiety and unease. The divided hopes of the poet – both for strength and for forgetting – reflect his ultimate lack of confidence. An alternative translation for comparison is here .

The unusual anapaestic “- – / – – /”meter and rhyme are the same as are used in the original.

“O thought…”

O thought, your fate’s that of the flower
Which calls the moth with every hour;
Draws in the golden bumblebee;
To whom the loving midge does cling
and whom the dragonfly does sing;
When you have seen your wonders flee
And in your turn have faded grey -
Where then those wings that blessed your day?
Forgotten by the host of flies -
Not one of them has need of you -
Just as your failing body dies
Your seeds bring forth another you.

Baratynsky here shows an interest in the nature of thought. However much an idea may hold interest, that interest often turns out only to be temporary. Ideas come in and out of fashion. But what those who look beneath the surface see is that even a brief contact with an idea can be enough to lead to the creation of a new one from out of the old, so that even apparently forgotten thoughts are never truly in vain.

To a Wise Man

Carefully between our lives’ storms and the cold of the grave, o philosopher,
Hope you to find a safe port - "Calm" is the name that you give it.
We, who are called from the void by the tremulous word of creation
- Our lives are worries alone: life and our worries are one.
He who’s escaped common turmoil will think up a care
For himself: palette or lyre or the words of a pen.
Infants, the world’s newest entrants, its laws as if sensing,
Cry in their cradle the instant they’re born.

This is probably my favourite of Baratynsky’s poems, but of course that doesn’t mean I’ve successfully translated it. The theme is the suffering of existence. We may try to find calm, but ultimately all of us will struggle, whether from our own minds or from the external world. That’s all there is to it, probably. The meter is weird and Classical though, which is cool.

Baratynsky spent a formative period in his youth up in Finland. The picture shows part of Karelia, now Russian but once partially Finnish. The landscape is the same on both sides of the border. I was there last week.

“What use to those enchained…”

What use to those enchained are dreams of being free?
Just look – the river flows, and uncomplainingly,
Within its given banks, according to its course;
The mighty fir is powerless before the force
That binds it where it stands. The stars above are caught
Within the paths an unknown hand believes they ought
To go. The roaming wind’s not free – for it a law
Dictates the lands in which its breath has right to soar.
And to the lot which is our own shall we submit –
Rebellious dreams accept as dreams or else forget.
We, reason’s slaves, must learn obediently to bind
Our deep desires to all those things fate has in mind –
Then happiness and peace shall demarcate our time.
What fools we are! Is it not boundless freedom’s sign
That gives us all our passions? Is it not freedom’s voice
We hear within their torrents? O how hard’s for us the choice
To live while feeling in our beating hearts the fire
That rages in the bounds set by our fate's desire!

Another particular favourite of mine. Baratynsky here does not argue for freedom, as do those rebellious Romantics. Instead, he sees us as failing to follow the subservient example of nature, which happily obeys the limits it has been assigned at birth. But are doomed to suffering precisely because this is something we cannot do. We have passion, which fights against our fate, leading us to our downfalls. This poem is fun because of its form and punctuation and whatnot.  Baratynsky shows how enchained nature is by controlling when he begins and ends the sentences, relative to the line.

Conclusion

Anyway, I like Baratynsky, just as I like Leopardi. Both of them went against the grain with their pessimism, but I like it as an antidote to the baseless optimism we sometimes encounter in our own days. There is a kind of glamour in despair that both capture, and though it is dangerous to wallow, there can certainly be some pleasure in spending time in the poets’ company.

Here are two articles providing more information about Baratynsky. This one includes a translation of Baratynsky’s awesome long poem, “Autumn”, which I could not possibly attempt to translate myself. The other, meanwhile, compares two recent book translations and gives some information about Baratynsky’s life.