Александр Пушкин
Poems. With Introduction and Notes
"Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.
"Then the mortal coldness of the soul till death itself comes down;
It cannot feel for other's woes, it dare not dream it's own.
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,
And though the eye may sparkle still, 't is where the ice appears,
"Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene,
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me."
One must go to Shakespeare's Sonnets for poetry as false as this. Among writers with the true poetic feeling, such as Byron truly had, I know not the like of this except these. Of these twelve lines only the first two of the last stanza are true, are felt; the rest are made. How are we, not Arabs but English-talking folk, to know the springs which in deserts found seem (do they?) sweet, brackish though they be? And Byron was a poet! But even a Byron cannot make a shivered sail or a coldness of a soul which is mortal, or a chill that freezes over a fountain of tears anything but mere verbiage, and verbiage moreover which instead of the intended sadness is dangerously nigh raising laughter....
26. Again, take Longfellow's "Hymn to Night:"—
"I heard the trailing garments of the night
Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls.
. . . . . . . . . .
From the cool cisterns of the midnight air,
My spirit drank repose."
For the like of this one can no longer go even to Shakespeare's Sonnets. For Shakespeare was still a poet. One must now go to Mrs. Deland, who is not even that. For observe:
Night has halls, and these halls are marble halls; and this marble-hailed Night is unable to stay at home, and must go forth, and accordingly she does go in full dress with her garments trailing with a right gracious sweep. And the bard not only sees the sable skirts which dangle about in fringes made phosphorescent by contact with the celestial walls of such peculiar marble, but he even hears the rustle.... And these halls with accommodating grace are changed into cool, deep cisterns from which accordingly the bard's spirit with due solemnity draws into his spirit's wide-opened mouth a draught of repose.
27. Turn from this "Hymn to Night" of thirty lines to the three lines of Pushkin in his "Reminiscence," which alone he devotes to Night:—
"When noisy day to mortals quiet grows,
And upon the city's silent walls
Night's shadow half-transparent lies."
The marble halls and the trailing garments were ground out from the writer's fingers; the half-transparent shadow of the poet came to the poet....
28. After such examples of wretchedness from real giants such as Byron and Longfellow indisputably are, I do not hesitate to ask the reader for a last example to turn first to Pushkin's "Cloud," and then read Shelley's poem on the same subject:—
"I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams. [Just how are leaves thus laid?]
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about in the sun."
(Oh, good, my Shelley! one dances to and fro; one cannot dance in a uniform, straightforward motion. Thy imagination never saw THAT picture! Spin, whirl, rush,—yes, but dance?)
"That orbèd maiden with white fire laden
Whom mortals call the Moon
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet
Which only the angels hear
May have broken the woof of my tent's roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer."
Who has not been stirred by the sight of the fleece-like, broken clouds on a moonlight night? But who on looking up to that noble arch overhead at such a moment could see it as a floor?…
29. I call this wretched poetry, even though other critics vociferously declare Shelley's "Cloud" to be one of the masterpieces of the English language. De gustibus non disputandum. The Chinese have a liking, it is said, for black teeth, and a bulb of a nose is considered a great beauty in some parts of Africa, and a human leg is considered a great delicacy by some Islanders; but....
30. And the second characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, which, however valuable it may prove in practical life, is reflected disastrously in its poetry, is its incapacity to appreciate true sentiment. An Anglo-Saxon knows sentimentality when he sees it, he knows morbidness when he sees it; but the healthy sentiment of which these are but the diseases he is incapable of appreciating to a depth where it would become part of his life. Hence, though a Malthus might have written his Essay on Population anywhere, since it is a truly cosmopolitan book, a Malthusian doctrine with all that it means and stands for could have grown up only on British soil; and though the warning voice against the dangers of sentimental charity (if there really be such a thing, and if such a thing, supposing it to exist, be really dangerous!) might be lifted in any land, the hard, frigid, almost brutal doctrine of scientific charity could strike root only in London, and blossom out in full array only in a city like Boston. The reader will please observe that I do not here undertake to judge. Malthusian doctrine, scientific charity, brutality of any kind may be necessary, for aught I know. A great many well-meaning and kind-hearted people have in sober thought decided that it often is necessary. I am only stating what seems to me to be a fact. To me this is a most melancholy fact; to others it may be a joyful fact. But whether joyful or melancholy, this fact explains why so little sentiment is found among the Anglo-Saxon poets even when they feel their passions, and do not, as is usually the case with them, reason about them, or what is worse, compose far-fetched similes about them. Glimpses of sentiment are of course found now and then, but only now and then. It is not often that Wordsworth sings in such pure strains as that of the lines,—
"My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky."
It is not often that Byron strikes a chord as deep as that of the lines "In an Album:"—
"As o'er the cold, sepulchral stone,
Some name arrests the passer-by."
It is here, however, that Pushkin is unsurpassed. One must go to Heine, one must go to Uhland, to Goethe, to find the like of him. And what makes him master here is the fact that his sentiment comes out pure, that it comes forth fused. And it comes thus because it comes from the depths; and as such it must find response even in an Anglo-Saxon heart, provided it has not yet been eaten into by Malthusian law and scientific charity. Pushkin's sentiment extorts respect even where it finds no longer any response; and as the sight of nobility stirs a healthy soul to noble deeds, as the sight of beauty refines the eye, so the presence of true sentiment can only awaken whatever sentiment already sleeps within us. It is for supplying this glaring defect in the English poets that a reading of Pushkin becomes invaluable. I almost fear to quote or compare. Sentiment cannot be argued about; like all else of the highest, deepest, like God, like love, it must be felt. Where it is understood, nothing need be said; where it is not understood, nothing can be said....
31. And yet a single example I venture to give. Pushkin's "Inspiring Love" and Wordsworth's "Phantom of Delight" treat of the same theme. Pushkin sees his beloved again, and after years—
"Enraptured beats again my heart,
And risen are for it again
Both reverence and Inspiration
And life, and tears, and love."
Wordsworth also gets now a nearer view of his "Phantom of Delight;" and the sight rouses him to this pitch of enthusiastic sentiment:
"And now I see with eye serene,
The very pulse of the machine."
In the presence of such bungling, I am almost ashamed to call attention, not to the machine that has a pulse, but to that noble woman who, purified, clarified in the imagination by the heat of a melted heart, can only become to the poet, a—machine. And this is the poet (whose very essence should be sensitiveness, delicacy, sentiment) who is ranked by Matthew Arnold as the greatest poet since Shakespeare....
32. I have given only one example, though there is hardly a volume of English poetry, with the possible exception of those of Burns, which does not furnish dozens of examples. If I give only one, it is because I have in mind Æsop's lioness, who gave such smart reply when chided for giving birth to only one young....
33. There is, indeed, one poet in the English language whose pages throb with sentiment, and who is moreover singularly free from that literary vice which I have called insincerity of imagination; in purity of pictures, in simplicity of sentiment, Goldsmith is unsurpassed in any tongue, but Goldsmith was not an Anglo-Saxon. And even Macaulay's great praise of "The Traveller" has not been sufficient to give it a place of authority among readers. The persons that read "The Traveller" once a year, as such a possession for all times should be read by rational readers, are very few.
34. From what I have designated as the first characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race—its rhetorical quality—springs the second, which I have designated as the superficiality of sentiment; since the rhetorician needs no depth, and when he does need it, he needs it only for the moment. And from this same rhetorical quality springs the third characteristic of English writers which appears in literature as a vice. I mean their comparative lack of the sense of form, of measuredness, literary temperance,—the want, in short, of the artistic sense. For architectural proportion, with beginning, middle, and end in proper relation, English poets have but little respect, and it is here that Pushkin is again master. It is the essence of poetry, that which makes it not-prose, that it is intense; but intensity to produce its effect must be short-lived. Prolonged, like a stimulant, it ceases to act. Hence, one of the first laws of poetry is that the presentation of its scenes, emotions, episodes, be brief. Against this law the sins in English literature among its masters are innumerable. Take, for instance, the manner in which Pushkin, on the one hand, and English poets, on the other, treat an object which has ever affected men with poetic emotion.
35. Many are the English poets who have tried their voices in singing of birds; Wordsworth's lines to the Skylark, the Green Linnet, the Cuckoo, Shelley's piece "To a Skylark," Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," Bryant's "Lines to a Waterfowl," attest sufficiently the inspiration which tender birdie hath for the soul of man. Now read these in the light of Pushkin's twenty lines called "The Birdlet." Bryant alone, it seems to me, holds his own by the side of Pushkin. Shelley and Keats are lengthy to weariness; and Wordsworth is almost painfully tame. What thoughtlet or emotionlet these are stirred with at the sight of birdie is like a babe in the swaddling-clothes of fond, but inexperienced parents, suffocated in its wrappage.
36. This measuredness Pushkin displays best in his narrative poems. His story moves. His "Delibash" is the finest example of rapidity of execution combined with fidelity of skill. And the vividness of his stories in "The Drowned," "The Roussalka," and "The Cossak," is due not so much to the dramatic talent Pushkin doubtless possessed as to the sense of proportion which saved him from loading his narrative with needless detail. Gray's "Elegy," for instance, matchless in its beauty, is marred by the needless appendage of the youth himself. This part of the poem seems patched on Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray" seems to justify Goldsmith's bold metaphor,—for it does drag a lengthening chain at each remove. Longfellow's "Prelude" has like "Sartor Resartus" a most unwieldy apparatus for getting ready. The poet there is ever ready to say something, but hardly says it even at the end. And even Tennyson, who at one time did know what it was to keep fine poise in such matters, is frequently guilty of this merely getting ready to say his say.
37. These, then, are the three great virtues of Pushkin's poems: They have sincere imagination, which means pure taste; they have true sentiment, which means pure depth; they have true measure, which means pure art. Pushkin has many more virtues which are common to all great poets; but of these three I thought necessary to speak in detail.
Poems: Autobiographical
MON PORTRAIT
X. 35.3
Vous me demandez mon portrait,
Mais peint d'après nature:
Mon cher, il sera bientôt fait,
Quoique en miniature.
Je sais un jeune polisson
Encore dans les classes:
Point sot, je le dis sans façon
Et sans fades grimaces.
One, il ne fut de babillard,
Ni docteur de Sorbonne
Plus ennuyeux et plus braillard
Que moi-même en personne.
Ma taille à celle des plus longs
Elle n'est point égalée;
J'ai le teint frais, les cheveux blonds,
Et la tête bouclée.
J'aime et le monde, et son fracas,
Je hais la solitude;
J'abhorre et noises et débats,
Et tant soit peu l'étude.
Spectacles, bals me plaisent fort,
Et d'après ma pensée
Je dirais ce que j'aime encore,
Si je n'étais au lycée.
Après cela, mon cher ami,
L'on peut me reconnaître:
Oui! tel que le bon Dieu me fit,
Je veux toujours paraître.
Vrai demon pour l'espièglerie,
Vrai singe par sa mine,
Beaucoup et trop d'étourderie,—
Ma foi—voilà Poushkine.
MY PEDIGREE
IV. 66
With scorning laughter at a fellow writer,
In a chorus the Russian scribes
With name of aristocrat me chide:
Just look, if please you … nonsense what!
Court Coachman not I, nor assessor,
Nor am I nobleman by cross;
No academician, nor professor,
I'm simply of Russia a citizen.
Well I know the times' corruption,
And, surely, not gainsay it shall I:
Our nobility but recent is:
The more recent it, the more noble 't is.
But of humbled races a chip,
And, God be thanked, not alone
Of ancient Lords am scion I;
Citizen I am, a citizen!
Not in cakes my grandsire traded,
Not a prince was newly-baked he;
Nor at church sang he in choir,
Nor polished he the boots of Tsar;
Was not escaped a soldier he
From the German powdered ranks;
How then aristocrat am I to be?
God be thanked, I am but a citizen.
My grandsire Radsha in warlike service
To Alexander Nefsky was attached.
The Crowned Wrathful, Fourth Ivan,
His descendants in his ire had spared.
About the Tsars the Pushkins moved;
And more than one acquired renown,
When against the Poles battling was
Of Nizhny Novgorod the citizen plain.
When treason conquered was and falsehood,
And the rage of storm of war,
When the Romanoffs upon the throne
The nation called by its Chart—
We upon it laid our hands;
The martyr's son then favored us;
Time was, our race was prized,
But I … am but a citizen obscure.
Our stubborn spirit us tricks has played;
Most irrepressible of his race,
With Peter my sire could not get on;
And for this was hung by him.
Let his example a lesson be:
Not contradiction loves a ruler,
Not all can be Prince Dolgorukys,
Happy only is the simple citizen.
My grandfather, when the rebels rose
In the palace of Peterhof,
Like Munich, faithful he remained
To the fallen Peter Third;
To honor came then the Orloffs,
But my sire into fortress, prison—
Quiet now was our stern race,
And I was born merely—citizen.
Beneath my crested seal
The roll of family charts I've kept;
Not running after magnates new,
My pride of blood I have subdued;
I'm but an unknown singer
Simply Pushkin, not Moussin,
My strength is mine, not from court:
I am a writer, a citizen.
MY MONUMENT
IV. 23
A monument not hand-made I have for me erected;
The path to it well-trodden will not overgrow;
Risen higher has it with unbending head
Than the monument of Alexander.
No! not all of me shall die! my soul in hallowed lyre
Shall my dust survive, and escape destruction—
And famous be I shall, as long as on earth sublunar
One bard at least living shall remain.
My name will travel over the whole of Russia great,
And there pronounce my name shall every living tongue:
The Slav's proud scion, and the Finn, and the savage yet
Tungus, and the Calmuck, lover of the steppe.
And long to the nation I shall be dear:
For rousing with my lyre its noble feelings.
For extolling freedom in a cruel age,
For calling mercy upon the fallen.
The bidding of God, O Muse, obey.
Fear not insult, ask not crown:
Praise and blame take with indifference
And dispute not with the fool!
August, 1836.
MY MUSE
IV. 1
In the days of my youth she was fond of me,
And the seven-stemmed flute she handed me.
To me with smile she listened; and already gently
Along the openings echoing of the woods
Was playing I with fingers tender:
Both hymns solemn, god-inspired
And peaceful song of Phrygian shepherd.
From morn till night in oak's dumb shadow
To the strange maid's teaching intent I listened;
And with sparing reward me gladdening
Tossing back her curls from her forehead dear,
From my hands the flute herself she took.
Now filled the wood was with breath divine
And the heart with holy enchantment filled.
1823.
MY DEMON
IV. 107
In those days when new to me were
Of existence all impressions:—
The maiden's glances, the forests' whisper,
The song of nightingale at night;
When the sentiments elevated
Of Freedom, glory and of love,
And of art the inspiration
Stirred deeply so my blood:—
My hopeful hours and joyful
With melancholy sudden dark'ning
A certain evil spirit then
Began in secret me to visit.
Grievous were our meetings,
His smile, and his wonderful glance,
His speeches, these so stinging
Cold poison poured into my soul.
Providence with slander
Inexhaustible he tempted;
Of Beauty as a dream he spake
And inspiration he despised;
Nor love, nor freedom trusted he,
On life with scorn he looked—
And nought in all nature
To bless he ever wished.
1823.
REGRET
IV. 76
Not ye regret I, of spring my years,
In dreams gone by of hopeless love;
Not ye regret I, O mysteries of nights.
By songstress passionate celebrated;
Not ye, regret I, O my faithless friends
Nor crowns of feasts, nor cups of circle,
Nor ye regret I, O traitresses young—
To pleasures melancholy stranger am I.
But where are ye, O moments tender
Of young my hopes, of heartfelt peace?
The former heat and grace of inspiration?
Come again, O ye, of spring my years!
REMINISCENCE
IV. 96
When noisy day to mortals quiet grows,
And upon the city's silent walls
Night's shadow half-transparent lies,
And Sleep, of daily toils reward,—
Then for me are dragging in the silence
Of wearying wakefulness the hours.
In the sloth of night more scorching burn
My heart's serpents' gnawing fangs;
Boil my thoughts; my soul with grief oppressed
Full of reveries sad is thronged.
Before me memory in silence
Its lengthy roll unfolds.
And with disgust my life I reading
Tremble I and curse it.
Bitterly I moan, and bitterly my tears I shed,
But wash away the lines of grief I cannot.
In laziness, in senseless feasts
In the craziness of ruinous license,
In thraldom, poverty, and homeless deserts
My wasted years there I behold.
Of friends again I hear the treacherous greeting
Games amid of love and wine.
To the heart again insults brings
Irrepressible the cold world.
No joy for me,—and calmly before me
Of visions young two now rise:
Two tender shades, two angels me
Given by fate in the days of yore.
But both have wings and flaming swords,
And they watch—… and both are vengeant,
And both to me speak with death tongue
Of Eternity's mysteries, and of the grave.
1828.
ELEGY
IV. 85
My wishes I have survived,
My ambition I have outgrown!
Left only is my smart,
The fruit of emptiness of heart.
Under the storm of cruel Fate
Faded has my blooming crown!
Sad I live and lonely,
And wait: Is nigh my end?
Thus touched by the belated frost,
When storm's wintry whistle is heard,
On the branch bare and lone
Trembles the belated leaf.
1821.
RESURRECTION
IV. 116
With sleepy brush the barbarian artist
The master's painting blackens;
And thoughtlessly his wicked drawing
Over it he is daubing.
But in years the foreign colors
Peal off, an aged layer:
The work of genius is 'gain before us,
With former beauty out it comes.
Thus my failings vanish too
From my wearied soul,
And again within it visions rise,
Of my early purer days.
1819
THE PROPHET
IV. 19
Tormented by the thirst for the spirit
I was dragging myself in a sombre desert,
And a six-winged seraph appeared
Unto me on the parting of the roads.
With fingers as light as a dream
Mine eyes he touched:
And mine eyes opened wise
Like the eyes of a frightened eagle;
He touched mine ears,
And they filled with din and ringing.
And I heard the trembling of the heavens
And the flight of the angel's wings,
And the creeping of the polyps in the sea,
And the growth of the vine in the valley.
And he took hold of my lips,
And out he tore my sinful tongue
With its empty and false speech.
And the fang of the wise serpent
Between my terrified lips he placed
With bloody hand.
And ope he cut with sword my breast,
And out he took my trembling heart,
And a coal with flaming blaze
Into the opened breast he shoved.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God unto me called:
Arise, O prophet, and listen, and guide.
Be thou filled with my will,
And going over land and sea
Fire with the word the hearts of men!
1826.
