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Voice of the age, voice of the ages: evolution of the Russian poet-prophet complex through three models
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Voice of the age, voice of the ages: evolution of the Russian poet-prophet complex through three models
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1
Voice of the Age, Voice of the Ages: The Russian Poet-Prophet Complex Through Three Models
Jessica Leigh Sanders
A Dissertation Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
(Slavic Languages and Literatures)
May 2013
2
3
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Chapter One: “What shall I cry out?”-- Lomonosov, Derzhavin, 44
Zhukovskii, and the Isaiah Model of Poet-prophet
Chapter Two: Songs of December-- Glinka, Küchelbecker, Ryleev, 121
and David the Psalmist as the Poet-Prophet in rebellion
Chapter Three: Elegy of Elegies-- Baratynskii, Pushkin, and 177
Solomonic mourning for the Poet-Prophet
Conclusion: Our Everything: Russia's National Literary Myth and 263
the Legacy of the Poet-Prophet
Bibliography 272
4
Introduction
In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian poetry entered its Golden Age. This notion of a
poetic Golden Age is embedded with certain widely accepted concepts and developments-- concepts
and developments often hinted at by the writings and biographies of the actual Golden Age writers, but
ultimately crystallized by the way in which later cultural generations interpreted and idealized their
Golden Age forerunners. One of the best known of these embedded concepts is the Romantic conceit
of poet as prophet. The conceit is overtly expressed in some of the best known and most often quoted
poems of the age, from Pushkin's “Prophet” (Prorok) to Baratynskii's “The Last Poet” (Poslednii poet)
and Lermontov's “Death of a Poet” (Smert' poeta) Dostoevsky's 1880 speech during the celebration of
the anniversary of Pushkin's death cemented the identification between poet and prophet in the public
imagination to such an extent that, for subsequent generations, the motif of poet as prophet moved
beyond mere poetic conceit into an essential element in understanding the place of great poets in
Russian culture. By the Silver Age, the new vanguard of Russian poets, from Symbolists like Dmitri
Merezhkovskii and Vladimir Solov'ev to Futurists like Velimir Khlebnikov, were frantically and
genuinely attempting to prophesy and declaring themselves and each other prophets of the new age.
The greater social and philosophical burden placed on Russian authors in general, and poets in
particular, was at least in part born of this moment in which Golden Age poets took up the mantle of
Old Testament prophets.
While a great deal of critical attention has been paid to the growth and influence of this
poet/prophet complex, and to the way in which individual poems written during the Golden Age
portrayed the poet as a prophet, I argue that certain threads of this tapestry of poetry and prophecy have
yet to be fully unraveled. Poems, such as Baratynskii's “The Last Poet,” in which the lyric persona
describes a poet as a prophet, and poems, such as Pushkin's “Prophet,” in which the lyric persona
5
describes himself being called as a prophet, offer only so much insight into the phenomenon of
prophetic poetry. In place of these much studied poems, this dissertation will examine those poems in
which the poet, in a certain sense, actually engages in the act of prophesying-- that is to say, poems in
which the lyric persona speaks as a prophet either by basing his words on a marked biblical prophetic
subtext or by utilizing the signature rhetorical gestures and dynamics of the biblical prophetic texts. By
examining these poems, we are able to discern not only that the poet is aligning his own work with
prophecy, but also how and why a poet might choose to do so. Beyond revealing the poet's perception
of himself and his work, these poems show the poet engaging with, negotiating with, and coercing the
poet's audience and his socio-political context.
The origins of Russian poetic interest in prophetically modeled verse are, to a significant
degree, dependent on a precise understanding of the nature of Hebrew prophecy as exemplified in the
literary prophets. This Hebrew model of prophecy is markedly different from a more colloquial
understanding of the nature of prophecy generalized from different prophetic cultures, especially in
terms of rhetoric, social function, and thematic concerns. As a literary figure, Ezekiel, for instance,
cuts a very different figure from Tiresias, the Oracle at Delphi, or the literary figure of Cassandra.
These Mediterranean prophetic models were powerful sources of poetic inspiration for many of
Western European poets in their development of poetry as prophecy in conjunction with Hebrew
models. Because both Hebrew and Mediterranean prophetic figures have had equal resonance in
Western Culture, it is very easy to consider these two models of prophecy as a unified phenomenon
rather than a blending of two different cultural phenomena that differed greatly from one another. In
the Russian context, the model of the Hebrew prophets has had greater resonance and deeper impact on
the development of poetic tradition. It is therefore necessary to take a serious analytical look into the
specific model of Hebrew prophecy as such before examining how this model is adapted in secular
Russia poetry.
6
The Prophetic Triangle
Throughout this dissertation, reference will be made to the prophetic triangle. This
model, visually represented below, seeks to elucidate the Hebrew prophet's relationship to the other
major parties that figure into his world view and social context. It presents a composite of ideas drawn
from three particular scholarly explorations of Hebrew prophecy as a phenomenon in and of itself, from
sociological, theological, and literary angles. These three works are Albert Cook's The Burden of
Prophecy, which seeks to understand the Hebrew prophet as a particular type of sacred poet by
examining his relationship to his context; Ronald H. Isaacs' Messengers of God, a theological
monograph on the prophets and the phenomenon of Hebrew prophecy as social phenomenon; and
Michael Lieb's The Visionary Mode, which seeks to establish a theory of prophetic interaction with God
as a particular psychological and literary mode and to delineate that mode's development through
Hebraic experience into early and medieval Christianity.
7
It is not uncommon in a colloquial sense to associate the terms “prophesy” and
“prophet” principally if not exclusively with prediction of the future. There is more to a prophet than
just this one aspect, however, and there is an ocean of difference between the significance and status
claimed by the prophet and the self-proclaimed psychic on the corner beneath a gaudy neon-sign.
Isaacs, in Messengers of God, lists and discusses seventeen distinct characteristics of a prophet, only
one of which concerns accurate predictions of the future.
12
While foretelling the future accurately is
one of the features of a prophet, generation of accurate predictions is not so much the defining function
of a Hebrew prophet so much as a litmus test of prophetic authenticity.
3
The issue of authenticity is
paramount for a prophet and his audience. The prophet is claiming a particularly powerful relationship
with both God and his audience, after all, and the consequences to the audience for listening to a false
prophet are dire. But defining a prophet as someone who predicts the future is not unlike defining a
lawyer as someone who can pass the bar exam. In fact, part of the established rhetoric of prophecy
requires predicting catastrophes that will only occur if the audience fails to listen to and obey the
prophet. If the audience does listen and the catastrophe fails to occur, that unfulfilled prediction asserts
the prophet's authenticity just as much as predictions that do come to pass.
The primary function of the prophet actually lies in his occupation of a particular place
in society in relationship to God, the people, and the king. This particular position and the need for it
are first expressed by Moses, one of the early but non-literary prophets, “I stood between God and you
at that time to convey God's word to you, for you were afraid of the fire and did not go up the
mountain.” (Deuteronomy 5:5) While the lineage of prophets extends far back into biblical history, the
time of the literary prophets-- by which, we mean those prophets whose words were recorded as sacred
1
Ronald H. Isaacs, Messengers of God (Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1998), 18-21.
2
It's worth noting that another characteristic Isaacs identifies is poetic beauty and emotive force-- the prophecy must have
aesthetic merit and be able to elicit strong emotional reaction. While this project examines poets who seek in some way
to occupy the space of the prophet, prophets were always required to be poets.
3
Predictions that come true are mentioned in Deuteronomy as one of the guidelines for identifying a true prophet.
8
text-- spanned a period of especially turbulent moments in the development of Hebrew culture and
governance in which the prophet's direct connection to God was vitally important in maintaining
Israelite social unity and identity.
Hebrew society was a theocratic society. It is based around the idea that the Israelites
were the chosen people of the one true God and had a special and exclusive relationship with Him.
When that society moved from its early system of governance by wandering judges into a monarchical
system, the king of this sacred people was likewise a sacred figure-- chosen by God and having a
special relationship with him. This grouping is represented by the three outer axes of the prophetic
triangle-- the interrelation of people and king with God. Both king and people are defined by God and
dependent on communication with God to provide continued clarity and maintenance of their
relationships to Him and to each other. The problem, though, is that while the king and the people may
be able to communicate directly, direct communication with God is perceived as extremely perilous
and existing at a remove, beyond the veil of clear perception. Direct interaction with God required one
to present oneself before the Almighty in complete openness, running the risk of obliteration if one is
found even the least little bit unworthy. Even something like the ark of the covenant, which contained
and concealed written communication from God-- and is therefore removed from direct communication
both through physical recording and physical concealment-- was too dangerous for anyone but special
priests to see, much less open or touch. According to Exodus 34: 29-35, Moses, one of the earliest non-
literary prophets, became so radiant after communicating with God that he had to veil his face to avoid
hurting people. The social structure presumes that direct communication must exist in order to
negotiate the proper roles of all involved, but it must exist at a remove, beyond the veil of clear
perception, in order to insure the people's safety. The space of that perilous remove is occupied by the
prophet. As Cook explains:
9
“. . . The prophet remains open directly to God and gets continually
renewed verbal authority and power from that flow. Since the prophet is
commenting on the constantly changing flow between God and people,
every utterance, while formed in reference to the basic values of
righteousness and the law and in measured analogy to such defining tribal
experiences as the Exodus, takes on the nature of a progress report rather
than a finally poised formulation. In radical distinction to other religious
poetry, Hebrew prophecy rises from and refers to a complex and specific
occasion. The prophet is always testing the status of the conventional
relationship between the Hebrew kingdom and God that serves as the
fundamental integrating force and definition of the prophet's society.”
4
Much like Hebrew society in general, the prophets who occupied this space changed and evolved over
time. The literary prophets represent the culmination of this process. While discussion of this evolution
in detail is not necessary for discussion of the prophetic model in Russian poetry, understanding the
dynamics of the prophetic triangle requires a short digression into the development of the sort of
prophet whose words would later be recorded in sacred text.
The prophet's key defining role and characteristic is his relationship with God. Unlike
all the others in Hebrew society, the prophet exists as an open and constantly available channel of
communication with God. But this direct relationship with God exists for the benefit not of the prophet
himself-- indeed, reluctance to accept the prophetic calling is one of the key characteristics-- but for the
benefit of the people. Prophets are usually of the people,
5
and their main function is to address the
people. However, their calling forever divides them from the people. As Isaacs puts it, “the prophets
4
Albert Cook, The Burden of Prophecy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 2-3.
5
There are, however, the so-called “gentile prophets” to consider, so it's not apparently mandatory for God to choose a
prophet from the chosen people.
10
were persons chosen by God and dedicated to God's service. They were called to their mission during
a time of political and social crisis in the community, and their task was to warn and counsel the
Israelite people, having foreseen the outcome of various national crises as well as the evil practices of
the people.
6
To frame this in terms of the prophetic triangle, during those moments when the line of
communication with God needs to be opened, the prophet emerges as a sort of surrogate for the people
who undergoes the peril of direct communication with God on their behalf. This not only separates
him from the people, but also creates a peculiar sort of relationship between them:
The prophet in Israel drew not just on personal charisma – to use the
terms Max Weber has applied to this society – but on the expectation of
having a charismatic function to fulfill by virtue of personal exposure as
a channel of a divine message. That exposure carried with it the dangers
of stress . . . among others. And it also carried the danger of
invalidation: there were such things as false prophets, and at any time
the charisma of a true prophet could be threatened and the prophet be
maltreated by being accounted a false one. In neither Homeric nor Vedic
society was the poet exposed to the danger faced by the Hebrew
prophet.”
7
The identity of the people is dependent on God's recognition and favor. As the primary and surest
means of discerning God's recognition and favor, the prophet's message and admonitions must be
accepted without question. On the other hand, if he is a false prophet, he must be rejected, usually with
violence, or the connection to God will be put in jeopardy. The position of prophet in relationship to
the people is both extremely powerful and extremely fragile.
6
Isaacs, Messengers of God, 14.
7
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy,30
11
Likewise, the prophet finds himself in an odd and somewhat perilous relationship with
the king. Cook explains some of the complexities of this relationship: “The prophet is unequal to the
king as his subject, but the prophet's access to God also makes the king unequal to the prophet. God, as
always in this context, is the deciding term of the equation.”
8
While in spiritual terms, the prophet is
removed from the people, in the king’s political terms the prophet is just another political subject. In
political terms, the king may be set apart from the people, but in the prophet's spiritual terms he is just
another of God's subjects. The earliest literary prophets lived during the era in which the judges ruled
Israel. The later prophetic texts trace through the history of kingship in Israel and end with the second
Babylonian exile. Thus they span the key period of cultural negotiation in which the ancient Hebrews
attempted to establish their political and spiritual culture, a period that later generations would
constantly look back to.
While the chief function of the prophets was to convey God's communications to the
people, the gradual emergence of kingship during this period necessarily enmeshes issues of kingship
and governance with the prophets' communications. While the issue of kingship remains on the
periphery for some prophets, others do directly deal with the king. Indeed, prophets can either grant or
withdraw God's approval of a king's right to rule-- as in the case of Samuel, who calls David to
overthrow Saul and become king himself-- or shape public judgment of the ruler with extreme political
consequences --as in the case of Elisha, who incited the people to overthrow King Ahab and Jezebel.
It would be going too far, however, to suggest that the prophet and the king are, of
necessity, in conflict with one another. Rather, they are both integral parts of a sophisticated
sociopolitical system. George Mendenhall, in discussing the evolution of Israelite political culture
argues that:
8
Ibid., 6
12
The lateness of kingship in Israel is not due to the primitive nature of
Israelite culture, but the opposite – it had succeeded well enough during
those years to make any alternative seem foolish . . . The related
prophetic condemnation of the king is not then simply a foolhardy
venture of a malcontent, but rather the verdict of a Supreme Court (or
rather his representative) for violation of the constitution.”
9
While the prophet's initial function was to undergo the ordeal of communication with
God on behalf of the people, the very process of his complicated interaction with the king becomes just
as important a part of Hebrew culture. The king is best situated to act or encourage action based on the
prophet's words. The prophet is best situated to support the king's authority to rule. Each is just as able
to undermine the other. Both gain their authority through God for the purpose of performing a specific
function with regards to the people. While the texts of the various prophets dwell far less on this axis
of the prophetic triangle than on the relationships between God, the people, and the prophet, the
relationship between the king and the prophet is an equally important part of the model in general and
comprises a key part of the prophetic model's appeal for poets.
Scholars of the Hebrew bible have long observed that the prophetic texts negotiate their
tense relationships with both king and people, in large part, through a rhetorical pivot between the two
basic modes of prophecy-- lamentation and consolation. The lamentational mode acts as a sort of
social and spiritual diagnosis, followed by grim prognosis. In lamentation, the prophet identifies and
calls out some sort of morally incorrect behavior being committed by the people or by the king which
the people are tacitly permitting. After shaming his audience with the gruesome details of this moral
inventory, the prophet then begins to predict a series of horrific events that will befall the people for
9
George E. Mendenhall, “Ancient and Oriental Biblical Law,” in The Biblical Archeological Reader 3, ed. Edward F.
Campbell and David Noel Freedman. (New York; Anchor, 1970), 16.
13
their actions. Having berated his audience with the worst that can happen, the prophet then, typically
shifts to the consolational mode. Consolation often— although not always-- begins with a hymn to
God's power, justice, and/or mercy. The prophet then proscribes a course of action which the people
must take to mend their ways, followed by fulsome descriptions the divine favor and blessings that the
people shall receive if they change their wicked ways as instructed by the prophet. This stick-then-
carrot rhetoric allows the prophets to build up their audience's fears of God's disfavor to the utmost,
then offer the catharsis of God's mercy-- bludgeoning down any will to resist the prophet's instructions
to reform-- before actually attempting to tell the people what to do. These two modes are alternated
with one another in different degrees. Some prophets offer one mode-- either consolation or
lamentation-- almost exclusively. Some vacillate from one back to the other. Still others-- most
especially Isaiah, the quintessential prophet-- build up as much lamentation as possible before pivoting
to long verse of consolation. The actual predictions of the future in the prophetic texts primarily serve
to further the emotive force of these two rhetorical modes and the pivot between them.
A further aspect of Hebrew prophecy that must be addressed concerns issues of time,
context, and intertextuality. The prophets and their texts are readily and directly linked to a particular
historical moment of crisis. Cook argues that part of the distinction between the prophets and the
writings of later rabbinic sages is derived from their situation in concrete sociopolitical situations,
however obscured those details may be in the text. This situation might be threats faced by either the
Northern or Southern kingdoms, the collapse of independent Israel during the Babylonian conquest
with its desperation for ultimate political restoration, or Israel's reemergence as a vassal state of Persia.
The prophet's exact words may or may not overtly engage with his sociopolitical context, but they can
still be traced back to that context.
10
In this sense, the words of the prophets could be seen as purely
historical, their usefulness limited to the moment in which they were uttered.
10
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 8-10.
14
On the other hand, the books of the literary prophets, especially those of Jeremiah,
Isaiah, and Ezekiel, who are generally considered the major prophets, are recorded and canonized in
both Jewish and Christian tradition as something other than historical records. They are read not only
to illuminate the past, but also the present. Among the 17 key elements of prophecy as defined by
Isaacs are the nature of the people's offenses, which arouse the prophet's anger in terms of both their
timeliness and timelessness: “Many of the things which horrify the prophet . . . continue to manifest
themselves in life's daily occurrences.”
11
By linking concrete historical circumstances to eternal human
concerns and behaviors, prophetic texts telescope the past into the present. By making predictions of
future doom based on current sins, the text extends still further into the future. The prophetic moment
has already happened and is always happening.
12
Its context is both specific to the circumstances of its
utterance and extended into all possible future contexts.
As a consequence of this interpenetration of the past and present, the prophetic literary
texts become canonized in a specific way:
. . . Prophecy is locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary, all at
once. It states, and in its verse form it repeats, a series of capital
propositions. These capital propositions are stated to 'open the eyes and
ears' of the hearers, and so are perlocutionary. And they are meant to
induce a reactive change; they are illocutionary. In the rhetorical
frameworks we take for granted, the political speech, the sermon, and the
poem are fused; and fused with the performance that soon canonized
these utterances as parts of the Bible, putting the books of the prophets
on par with the Law and the Writings.
13
11
Isaacs, Messengers of God, 20.
12
For extensive commentary on the mechanisms and effects of this conflation of all times into one, see Lieb, The
Visionary Mode. Of especial interest are his chapters on the influence of prophetic time on medieval sacred poetry.
13
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 30.
15
The blending of rhetorical genres that Cook identifies in the prophets is key to understanding their use
and potential as literary models. The prophetic books become fodder for all these things-- political
speeches, sermons, and poems-- in later works, both in scripture and later texts. Many of the prophetic
texts build on quotation of and engagement with other earlier prophetic books. This is especially true
of the minor prophets Micah and Zechariah.
14
Many non-prophetic scriptural texts quote from or
engage with prophetic texts as part of their rhetorical frameworks. This is further emphasized in
Christian scriptures, especially Paul's epistles, which frequently harken back to the texts of the prophets
while altering or refiguring the text's original meaning. While some scriptural texts are structured and
canonized in such a way as to keep the texts and their original meaning inviolate, the canonization of
the prophetic books-- developing out of their complex collapsing of context and rhetorical application--
actually invite quotation and refiguration. Because this invitation to intertextual engagement is already
written into these texts in their scriptural context, they provide a particularly tempting target for secular
poets wishing to engage with sacred texts and models in ways that are neither blasphemous nor limited
to the sphere of religious thought and devotional writing.
The Isaiah Model
This Hebrew prophetic triangle is the model of prophecy that I will argue has been
imported into Russian poetry, along with the dynamics that model establishes of intense and ambivalent
power and authority along spiritual, social, and political axes. The prophetic poetry with which this
project is concerned goes beyond simply quoting the words of the prophets as poetic tool. Prophetic
poetry seeks to adopt not only the words or aesthetics of the prophets, but more importantly, to adopt
and adapt this model of power over audience and context. Russian poetry that quotes the prophetic
books begins with the earliest Russian poetry that we have. But this quotation mainly emerges from
the dominance of Russian Orthodoxy over all of Russian life and the lack of alternative aesthetic
14
Marvin A. Sweeney, Form and Intertextuality in Prophetic and Apocalyptic Literature, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005)
16
models. These poems meditate on the themes of the original prophetic text or engage with the text on a
stylistic level rather than attempting any alteration or establishment of the poet's position in his
sociopolitical context. When thinking of Russian poetry in which the poet not only quotes the
prophets, but takes on the role of prophet, we most readily think of the Romantic Era and the Golden
Age. However, it is my contention that the earliest and more successful convergence of the role of
Russian poet and the model of Hebrew prophet begins much earlier in the eighteenth century.
Throughout this work, the complete, unmodified expression of the prophetic triangle
model will be referred to as the Isaiah model. The reasons for the choice are many. First and foremost,
of all the prophetic texts adopted by the poets in question either for direct quotation or as exact subtext,
after psalms, the Book of Isaiah is the most popular choice.
15
Isaiah is lurking even behind adaptations
of other biblical texts. While all of the literary prophets are occasionally referenced in later scriptural
texts, Isaiah seems to stand as the authoritative prophetic subtext. Many psalms, for example, draw on
the phrasing and rhetoric of Isaiah, as do numerous passages of Christian scripture.
16
Additionally,
sometimes the overt subtext of a poem may be another scripture but the model of prophetic interaction
will still follow the standard patterns of the prophetic triangle.
17
Secondly, in both Christian and Jewish tradition, Isaiah is considered the most
exemplary of all the prophets. The works of the minor prophets, such as Malachi, Hosea, or Joel, are
often somehow incomplete. They might fail to record all characteristics of the prophetic experience or
fail to give a full sense of the prophet's context and experience. The three major prophets Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, on the other hand, express the full range of prophetic characteristics through the
medium of lengthy, complex texts that provide a complete story of the prophet's situation and tasks.
18
Of the three, Isaiah is considered the most balanced expression of the full rhetorical pivot expected of
15
The book of Ezekiel also makes the occasional appearance, but far less often.
16
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 53
17
See the discussion of Derzhavin's “To Rulers and Judges” in Chapter One.
18
Isaacs, Messengers of God, 28
17
the prophet-- the turn from lamentation, chastisement, and woe to consolation, promises of redemption,
and joy.
19
Furthermore, Isaiah presents a model of prophecy that encompasses all of past biblical
history. The past in this text has essential moral bearing on the present.
20
Isaiah folds all of Hebrew
history into making his present context and concerns the penultimate crisis of that history. This
leverage not only increases the intensity of Isaiah's control over his audience, but also allows writers
adopting this model to use interpretation of the past rather than prediction of the future as part of their
prophetic scaffolding, a sound advantage for poets who lack genuine psychic ability but are interested
in prophecy as a pose.
Especially given that the Russian poets would be viewing the prophets at least to some
extent through the lens of Orthodoxy, the interest in Psalms, Isaiah, and, to a lesser extent, Ezekiel,
makes a great deal of sense. These are, after all, the main prophetic books that are woven into the
liturgy. While the bulk of the Hebrew scriptures and almost all of the prophetic texts make up a large
part of the minor Orthodox services, Psalms, parts of Isaiah, and bits of Ezekiel play a major role in the
Divine Liturgy-- the main Orthodox Sunday service. A regular Orthodox churchgoer, attending only
Sunday services-- hears the full cycle of Psalms each year. From the Christian perspective, among all
the Hebrew prophets, the dreamy, heavily symbolic visions of Ezekiel offer some of the strongest
arguments for Jesus as the Messiah. Similarly, the second half of Isaiah offers consolation to the
chastised people of Israel through poetic allegories and parables. Some of these passages, most notably
the four songs of the suffering servant, are thought in Christian tradition to predict or refer to Christ.
These passages from Ezekiel and Isaiah are also woven into the framework of Orthodox liturgy, and
both prophets often appear in icons. All of the Psalms and bits and pieces of Isaiah and Ezekiel would
have been familiar and significant to both author and audience to a degree that most of the other
19
The Book of Jeremiah, by contrast, focuses mainly on chastisement, while Ezekiel minimizes chastisement in favor of
consolation.
20
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 32-33
18
prophets would not. Although Ezekiel is just as important and familiar a figure in Orthodox culture,
from a poetic perspective Isaiah's thematic range and coherent stylistic structure provide a readier
model for poetry.
21
For all these reasons and for simplicity's sake, the model of prophecy expressed by
the full prophetic triangle will be referred to as the Isaiah model.
Chapter one deals with the rise and development of the Isaiah model in late eighteenth
to early nineteenth century Russian poetry. The first really vital figure who begins using the prophetic
texts as a model for how to be a poet and how to structure his lyric personae is Gavrila Derzhavin
(1743-1816). Earlier poets freely paraphrased the prophets and other scriptures for devotional writings,
and freely pulled a line or an image here and there from the prophetic texts to add an elevated, biblical
color to their poems. In 1664, when Simeon Polotskii (1629-1680), a Jesuit-educated, Greek-Catholic
monk from Poland, opened the first school in Russia to formally teach poetics as a formal subject, he
translated the Psalms into the new style of syllabic verse that his school attempted to promote. But
Polotskii's Psaltir (Psalter) was intended as a sort of teaching manual for his poetic school. Polotskii's
interest in the Psalms was stylistic. The internal rhetorical dynamics between the psalmist and the
audience were of no importance, and Polotskii's conception of the role of poet was limited to court
panegyrist. Until Derzhavin's era, eighteenth century adaptations of biblical texts and models were
likewise concerned in stylistic issues. The use of biblical language-- Old Church Slavonic-- played a
key role in Mikhail Lomonosov's (1711-1765) development of a Russian Neoclassical hierarchy of
genres and the corresponding styles of language for those genres. Like Polotskii, Lomonosov also
translated Psalms into his new style of verse, but mainly as a pedagogical exercise or as devotional
writing. Unlike Polotskii, Lomonosov boasted scientific and intellectual accomplishments beyond
merely glorifying the Imperial court, a fact reflected in some of his more personal poems. However,
21
This is true, at least, for the poets of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, the period with which this dissertation
is concerned. Ezekiel's dream-like, symbol-laden visions had tremendous appeal for the Symbolist and Decadent poets
at the end of the nineteenth century.
19
Lomonosov's principle understanding of the social function of poetry and poets was-- as it had been for
Polotskii a century earlier-- limited to glorifying the ruler and the nation in order to gain court
patronage.
Derzhavin was a different personality working with a very different court-- that of
Catherine II-- which allowed him to claim a much more ambitious role-- a role analogous to the
Hebrew prophets-- for himself as a poet. I will argue that Derzhavin's choice to adopt this role was a
fortuitous convergence of historical circumstance and exceptional personalities. Catherine II was
unlike any other ruler in previous Russian history. Although she was intensely devoted to Russian
culture, religion, and political interests, Catherine was an upstart German princess who had no real
claim to the throne beyond the fact that she was better suited to rule that her Romanov husband.
Shortly before Catherine took the throne, the political restrictions Peter I had placed on the nobility
were somewhat loosened. Catherine, determined to modernize and Europeanize Russian culture and
laws just as Peter had modernized its military and government, was counting on the nobility to
exercising their greater freedom in order to further her modernizing goals. Derzhavin was one of many
noblemen who wanted to help Catherine achieve her goals. He was a statesman first and foremost, and
saw his poetry through the lens of his civic service. Catherine II, a longtime correspondent of Voltaire
and Diderot, attempted to cultivate the pose of an “Enlightened despot,” a pose which made her take
the verses of her courtiers a great deal more seriously than her predecessors had. The dynamic tensions
in their relationship led Derzhavin to liken himself more and more overtly to a Russian Isaiah, as the
poet doggedly tried to pull the empress back towards the Enlightenment ideals that they ostensibly
shared. By aligning the Russian Empire with ancient Israel, the empress with the sacred kings, and
himself as a poet with the prophets, Derzhavin created a powerful role within imperial society and
politics for educated, literary noblemen like himself. And it is back to Derzhavin, more than to any
other poet, that the later, more famous developers of the poet-prophet complex would turn again and
20
again, seeking ways to occupy this powerful position. Chapter One will analyze Derzhavin's
developing model of himself as a modern, Russian Isaiah, how that model grew out of the groundwork
laid by Lomonsov's odes, and then disintegrated into the Sentimental, solipsistic embrace between
Vasily Zhukovskii (1783-1852), the poet Derzhavin proclaimed as his successor, and Catherine II's
grandson, Alexander I.
While all of the conventional prophetic texts conform to the relationships and dynamics
of the Isaiah model of the prophetic triangle, the Hebrew scriptures also include texts of two
unconventional prophets-- King David's Psalms and the writings attributed to King Solomon-- whose
texts radically alter the basic relationships in the prophetic triangle. As the literary climate grew out of
Sentimentalism and into Romanticism, undercutting the civic thrust of Derzhavin's prophetic poetry,
and the political tensions between the Tsars and the educated gentry edged closer and closer to
conflagration, the generation of young poets who had once been fostered by Zhukovskii would turn
first to David and then to Solomon for new ways to expand and then salvage the power and position of
the poet as prophet. Thus it is necessary to take a moment to explain and introduce these other two
types of prophetic text.
The David Model
Already in Derzhavin's era, the relationship between Russia's autocratic rulers and the
increasingly well-educated, but essentially powerless gentry was fraught with tension. Following the
Napoleonic Wars, as the young educated gentry gleaned more and more experience of European society
and politics, the tensions between the Emperor and the educated gentry began simmering closer and
closer to the boiling point. Things finally did boil over in December, 1825, when a conspiracy of
young gentry made an ill-fated, but ambitious attempt to overthrow-- or at least, radically reform-- the
tsarist government. These failed revolutionaries-- later called the Decembrists-- included a sizable
21
number of poets in their ranks and were loosely associated with different literary societies in which the
best poets of the era gathered. While many of the Decembrist poets looked up to Derzhavin's example,
their poetic ambitions mirrored their politics. In place of the tense negotiation between the king and the
prophet in Derzhavin's Isaiah model, the Decembrists would create a model of poet as prophet in which
the roles of king and prophet are inexorably fused. They would find this model in David the Psalmist.
Chapter two delves into the ways in which three different Decembrist poets-- Fedor Glinka (1786-
1880), Wilhelm Küchelbecker (1797-1846), and Kondratii Ryleev (1795-1826) used the David and the
Psalms to create a model of prophetic poetry with radically expanded political reach.
Chapter two will present the case that both the story of David and the internal structure
of the Psalms provided a model of prophetic poetry that allowed the Decembrist poets to graft their
democratic principles and revolutionary goals onto Derzhavin's politically charged Isaiah model.
While the other prophets existed in a tense relationship of negotiation with the king, and some, like
22
Elijah, actually moved the people to overthrow the king, David overthrows the king in order to become
king himself, combining the power of both king and prophet in one person. He proves that he, not
Saul, is God's true anointed through his poetic gifts as a singer of Psalms and through his military
prowess, both virtues which had tremendous appeal for the Decembrists. But beyond their link with
the story of David, the Psalms offer a model for the relationship between God, the king/prophet, and
the people which readily lent itself to Decembrist values.
Beyond the fusions of king and prophet through the figure of David, the text of Psalms
differs from that of the more typical prophetic texts in several ways. First and foremost, the psalmist
emphasizes his role as the point of connection between God and the people through a particular lyric
voice. The other prophets speak either as the embodied voice of God or as themselves speaking either
to God or to the people. The psalmist's voice instead creates a sort of collectivizing first person.
According to Cook, the first person voice in Psalms acts as the singular voice of the whole collective
“. . . under an associative conception of the psalms taken together in their literary form-- as well as in
the immemorial use of the Psalter for communal recitation of worship.”
22
The individual voice of the
psalmist becomes the voice of the whole community, both by speaking the people's concerns, sorrows
and joys in the texts themselves and by literally becoming the words of the whole community during
worship. While the typical prophet spoke on behalf of the people, the psalmist speaks for and as the
people. In doing so, the psalmist continually embodies the key axis of the prophetic triangle-- that
between God and the people. The typical prophet connects with God, receives revelation, disconnects
with God, speaks to the people, observes and communicates with the people, and then breaks away to
reconnect with God. Through the collectivizing first person voice, the psalmist acts as a filter for the
channel between the people and God which is always open. For the Decembrists, this collectivizing
22
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 88.
23
voice allowed them to marry notions of populism and democracy to their attempts to usurp the tsar's
power.
Through the model of Psalms, the Decembrist poets were able to create a model of poet
as prophet in which the poet is not only the vox populi but also the only authentic voice of true political
authority. Fedor Glinka, one of the older Decembrists who had been the unofficial propagandist of the
conspiracy, but who dropped out before the actual uprising, wrote a collection of systematic adaptations
of the Psalms which I will argue covertly ascribed Divine sanction for Decembrist goals and values
under the guise of playful stylistic games and experiments. Wilhelm Küchelbecker, one of the most
erudite and philosophical of the Decembrist poets, methodically studied the structure and rhetoric of
the Psalms until he was able to write poems which can be considered psalms of his own construction
which emphasized the Decembrist struggle. In exile after the failure of the revolt, Küchelbecker
would write a melancholy epic poem, based on David's life until he became king, infused with
confusion over the revolt's failure and mourning for his executed and imprisoned comrades. Kondratii
Ryleev, one of the most active and radical members of the conspiracy, would model both his political
and poetic persona on the model of young David, presenting himself as the psalmist of Russian
freedom until his arrest and execution.
The Solomon Model
The failure of the Decembrist uprising not only decimated the ranks of the young
Golden Age poets, but also placed the poets who were not implicated in the conspiracy in an
atmosphere of heightened censorship and governmental pressure to stay out of politics. Most of the
poets who remained had been close friends with the Decembrists, but had not entirely shared their
radical political values. Thus the David model held little appeal. And, while many of these poets
would refer back to Derzhavin's model of prophetic poetry with bitter nostalgia, the dangerous political
climate after December, 1825, made a return to the Isaiah model impossible. The new tsar, Nicholas I,
24
had no intention of letting the educated gentry gain so much as a toehold in real or literary political
power. These poets were also facing a rising threat to their class's dominance of Russian cultural life as
the raznochintzy-- people of indeterminate rank from Russia's emerging middle class-- began
coalescing more and more into a unified intelligentsia in the 1830's and 1840's. This growing
intellectual force brought with it entirely different ideas about art and literature, turning more and more
towards journalism and Naturalism and away altogether from poetry. Those few remaining poets, who
had begun writing in the 1820s, each began feeling more and more like the last voice of their class and
generation. A new model from prophetic poetry had to be found that could reassert the social force of
the Isaiah model without incurring the tsar's wrath. The biblical texts associated with Solomon-- most
especially Ecclesiastes and Proverbs-- would provide just such a model.
While Solomon is ranked among the prophets in both Judaism and Christianity, the
biblical texts attributed to Solomon do not seem, at first glance, to have much of anything prophetic
25
about them. The texts in question-- Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Song of
Songs— lack many of the signature qualities of prophetic texts. The typical prophetic call to action is
replaced by an emphasis on passivity and acceptance. Grand, community-wide threats and problems
are forgone in favor of the petty, unchanging sins, sufferings, and pleasures of everyday, individual
existence. As in Psalms, the voice of the prophet and the voice of the king are one, but in the
Solomonic texts, this fusion of king and prophet “. . . evens out all the political turbulence of the
prophets.”
23
God does not appear in a blaze of thunderous glory to enact direct and immediate
vengeance. Instead, God in the Solomonic texts is rather distant, his will manifest in the details of
everyday life. Even the way in which the prophet presents himself seems subsumed and diminished.
Instead of asserting his status as a prophetic, Solomon presents himself as a father lecturing his son or a
teacher giving a lesson to a student. Instead of cataclysmic visions sent by God, Solomon asserts his
prophetic authority through age, experience, and wisdom.
Yet even in this diminished form, Solomon still fulfills the central goal of the prophet--
he acts as the conduit of God's revealed will to the people. For the typical prophets, God's will was
manifest in visions or supernatural signs which the prophet would then interpret and proscribe a course
of action. In the Solomonic texts, God is manifest in mundane, everyday phenomena. The Solomonic
teacher/father figure's lessons consist of interpreting these phenomena for their audience and
proscribing the proper course of action based upon those interpretations. While the medium of
connection with God has changed in the Solomonic texts has changed, the task of the prophet has not.
Furthermore, in spite of the prophet's seemingly diminished status in the Solomonic
texts, the prophet's authority over his audience becomes virtually unassailable. The traditional
prophet's status could be challenged on two fronts-- either by the king or by the people. In spite of
Solomon's lack of political engagement, he is still both prophet and king, so he cannot be challenged by
23
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 106.
26
the king. The people, now put into the position of Solomon's children and students, are likewise unable
to challenge his authority. The traditional prophet based his status on a connection to God which
implicitly is a matter of faith, and the potential for false prophets built into the rhetoric of the prophetic
system itself. Solomon bases his authority on age and experience, which can be proven and verified.
Additionally, by positioning the people as children or students, Solomon puts his audience in a position
where his experience is manifestly greater than theirs, leaving no ground from which the people can
challenge his status.
The biblical texts ascribed to Solomon were written and incorporated into scripture in
the period after the decline of the literary prophets. None of the texts were actually written by
Solomon; many were written down a millennium after Solomon was supposed to have lived.
Ecclesiastes is likely a Hebrew translation of a non-Hebrew philosophical text of unknown origin.
Proverbs and Wisdom are a hodgepodge of short devotional songs on the subject of wisdom and folly
mixed with dozens of common ancient Hebrew sayings. The Song of Songs is probably a collection of
ancient Hebrew wedding songs inspired by or translated from Egyptian love poems. But the fact that
Solomon is considered a prophet and these texts have been traditionally ascribed to his authorship
causes the audience of these texts to endow them with the same authority as prophetic texts. These
texts are written down and incorporated into Hebrew scripture in the period after the destruction of the
first temple, a period when Babylonian invasion almost destroyed Israel and Hebrew culture.
According to Issacs, during this period, the prophetic connection to God passes on to children, the
foolish, and, especially, to wise people, who rabbinic lore argues are superior to the prophets of old.
24
The texts of Solomon-- sometimes also called the “wisdom texts”-- offer a sort of broken and
diminished remnant of the prophetic tradition, which, even in its diminished state, claims superiority
over the older tradition.
24
Issacs, Messengers of God, 32.
27
By disengaging completely from the political while increasing the prophet's authority
over the audience, the Solomonic texts offered an ideal model of prophetic poetry for surmounting the
obstacles facing the poets who survived Decembrism, in which prophetic poems begin melding elegiac
mourning for the political power of the Isaiah model with increased claims of poetic authority over
audience and history. In Chapter Three, I examine the poetry of two of the greatest poets of this era--
Evgenii Baratynskii (1800-1844) and Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)-- in order to show the different
ways in which I claim that each poet adopted the pose of a Solomon style prophet. I also analyze the
work of one of the lesser poetic lights of this era, the Decembrist Alexander Bezstuzhev-Marlinskii
(1797-1837), in order to show evidence of an evolutionary link between the work of the Decembrists
and these latter poets. In part because of the social and political conditions in which these poets were
writing and in part because of the subsumed rhetoric of the Solomonic texts themselves, these poets
would be far more subtle in their adoption of the prophetic pose. However, these three poets, so
different from each other, all turned with greater or lesser coherence towards the social force and
political disengagement of the Solomon model while still gesturing back towards the Isaiah model,
suggesting that all three saw the Solomon model as an evolution of prophetic poetry, albeit as a
diminished, elegiac evolution. Chapter Three will also present a changing engagement with history in
the work of Pushkin and Baratynskii based on the Solomonic texts, in which the prophetic telescoping
of all times into one moment becomes oriented not on the present but on the future. These two poets
begin writing for and shaping their future audience while taking the contempt of their current moment
for granted.
The Bible and literature: Theory and methodology
Much of my argument is founded on theoretical models for addressing the prophetic
texts themselves and the models to be derived from those texts. As seen in the earlier sections of this
introduction, much of the theoretical framework for this approach has been culled from the work of
28
different theologians and scholars of religion as such. This dissertation is structured around these
theological models of prophecy because the different generations of poets which I examine tend to shift
through these models in discernible groups. However, within those groups, the strategies used by
different poets in order to establish themselves within any of the prophetic models can vary a great
deal. In order to deal with these varying strategies of biblical rewriting, a range of theoretical tools are
needed from different sources.
Often, discussion of scripture as a religious subtext can be found as a minor sub-point in
works focused on other issues. Anna Lisa Crone's influential monograph on Derzhavin, for example,
devotes some time to an analysis of the biblical influences on Derzhavin's language as he developed his
“aesthetics of power,” arguing that Derzhavin's poetry eventually took on the roles of both voice of the
people and the voice of God. While she does not go so far as to compare Derzhavin directly to Isaiah
or any other prophet, my arguments about Derzhavin build in large part off of this work. Post-
colonialist critics in particular seem draw to discussion of religious subtexts, an interest likely
motivated by the connection between the Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church. Harsha Ram, in
The Imperial Sublime, identifies the Old Testament prophets, David in particular, as models of dissent
and resistance within the aesthetics of the empire, particularly in connection to Küchelbecker and the
Decembrists. Stephen Baehr, in The Paradise Myth, claims that the imperial state gradually co-opted
the symbols and imagery of the Orthodox church in order to usurp the role of “heaven on earth,” an
argument which further suggests the connections between the Russian poet-prophet and the context of
empire. Tatiana Malchukova's article on psalm paraphrases of the 1820's in Cultural Discontinuity and
Reconstruction: The Byzanto-Slav Heritage and the Creation of a Russian National Literature in the
Nineteenth Century, argues that these works are a distinctly different phenomenon from the biblical
paraphrases of the Eighteenth Century, although they grow out of that tradition, and that these
paraphrases became a space in which the poet could attain greater personal and political freedom. In
29
general, however, the raw theory needed to examine the relationship between a secular text and a
biblical subtext has come from outside the field of Russian literary scholarship.
A substantial body of scholarship exists in English on the role of prophetic biblical
passages in the formation and development of Western, particularly Anglophone, literary traditions.
These scholars have explored a variety of different ways that writers have approached adaptation of
biblical text, from straight-forward and sincere exegesis to mean-spirited parody, not only of the source
biblical text, but of other adaptations. According to these scholars, traditions of biblical influence and
adaptation have had an immense impact on English literature at every level, from the development of
metrics and language to the development of genre and aesthetic categories. The reasons identified for
this powerful influence of the Bible as literary subtext range from obvious spiritual levels (a spiritually
inclined writer such as John Donne, can of course be expected to use relevant biblical subtext in
exploring religiously inspired themes) to simple pragmatism (more populist writers would of course
rely on a subtext all their readers could be expected to know, and the Psalms were almost always the
early English reader's first experience with poetry).
The context and concerns of both literature and the Bible are quite different in Imperial
Russia. Secular high-brow literature develops much later-- in the eighteenth century-- and was utterly
dependent on the whims of absolutist monarchs whose power over their subjects exceeded even that of
the French Kings. The reading public was a much smaller segment of the population comprised mainly
of nobility and gentry who had far less political and social autonomy and power than the English
aristocracy. While studying the Bible was quite popular in Russia during much of the time period
discussed in this dissertation, Russian Orthodox religion puts greater emphasis on the liturgy than on
the scriptures. While various English translation of the Bible-- most especially the King James
version-- created a common literary language in England, the Orthodox liturgy and the Bible were
written in an archaic language-- Old Church Slavonic-- that had yet to be translated into modern
30
Russian. Most of the poets I discuss studied the liturgy during their formal schooling, but as adults,
most focused on studying the Bible in different foreign languages, so there is no one common Biblical
text to use as a point of reference. In spite of all these contextual differences, much of the major theory
drawn from English literature scholars is quite useful.
The first great giant who must be addressed is Northrup Frye. Frye's interest in the cross
roads of religion and literature, particularly the literature of those Romantics and Pre-Romantics Frye
seemed most inclined to study remained a steady theme in his critical works from his first monograph
on Blake to his final lectures in the years before his death. Put in the simplest possible terms, Frye
sought to recover the legacy of these authors as religious as well as literary thinkers. At a more
complicated level, a level most clearly laid out in Words with Power: Being a second study of the Bible
and literature, Frye seeks to investigate the relationships between society, myth, ideology, and
literature, creating a critical theory that requires sacred text to be both scripture and literature, scripture
to be both a mythological framework in which society functions and a tool for the perpetuation of
ideology, and literature to be both spiritually motivated exegesis and fictionalization of myth that
invites examination and questioning of ideology through interpretation. While Frye's theories are not
without their critics, the distinctions he draws between sacred text and literature which engages with
sacred text are invaluable for distinguishing devotional writing from literature which adapts biblical or
religious texts for purposes that extend beyond the spiritual.
Another group of scholars who follow a similar tract to Frye focus less on the place of
religion and scripture in the life and work of individual poets and more on the place of religion and
scripture in the cultural, political, and social life of specific eras. Edgar Marsch has argued that
Daniel's vision of the four beasts and its Catholic interpretation impacted European rhetoric of empire
from the fall of Rome up through the Eighteenth century. Sharon Achinstein's fascinating, if somewhat
uneven, work Literature and Dissent in Milton's England attempts to trace ties between the religious
31
poetry of Milton and others of his era to specific religious and political phenomena and thinkers of the
time. While her arguments for Milton specifically as a religious Dissenter are a bit problematic, her
claim that the Dissenters found a model for themselves and their cause in the Old Testament prophets,
especially Daniel, is particularly insightful. These scholars tend to base their approach in the social
sciences, treating the Bible as an aspect of religion and literature as an aspect of culture, both of which
fall under the rubric of social phenomena which interact equal with each other and with other social
phenomena such as language and politics. This dissertation only begins to skim the surface of these
issues in the poets I examine. While they turn to different models and deal with vastly different social
and political concerns, the Russian poets of the Golden Age who adopt and develop the pose of poet-
prophet do so in the context of negotiating the position of a particular social class within the Russian
Empire. This dissertation offers a starting point for similar sociological arguments to be made in the
context of Russian poetry.
The other controversial giant of criticism to approach the issue of the Bible and
literature is, of course, Harold Bloom. Ruin the Sacred Truths is, in a sense, a continuation of the
argument Bloom makes in Anxiety of Influence within the very specific context of the influence of
scripture on literature. Whereas Frye and others have sought to recover the religious aspects within
literature, Bloom traces out the influence of the Bible on literature only to establish that truly great
literature subsumes its religious subtexts. He is especially interested in the traces of the Old Testament
which are completely overwritten and transformed by “strong” poets. While Bloom's tendency towards
canonization of specific poets, and all the scholarly objections it can and has provoked, somewhat
hamper his argument, the means by which he distinguishes imitation and paraphrase from rewriting are
useful tools for any scholar approaching the problem of interplay between scripture and literary text. In
Bloom's treatment of the topic, scripture is a literary subtext more or less like any other. Bloom is
interested in literature qua literature, unlike Frye whose literary analysis of the Bible claims that
32
scripture is both literature and something more. For Bloom, scripture is a literary subtext like any
other. His strategies for identifying biblical subtexts that have been almost entirely subsumed in the
literary text are especially helpful for dealing with the post-Decembrist poets, like Baratynskii and
Pushkin, who had the poetic skill to almost completely cover their tracks in their adoption of the
prophetic pose, coupled with strong socio-political pressures encouraging them to do so.
A final critic worth mentioning must be left to stand on his own. Piero Boitani, in The
Bible and its Rewritings, limits himself to the very specific topic of biblical imitations and adaptations,
opening up interesting avenues of inquiry rather than sweeping statements about the nature of the
connection between scripture and literature. While his study begins with a straight-forward
examination of transference of biblical themes and plot lines, he also asks stunning questions about the
convergence between scripture, liturgy, literature, and art. Through these questions, he suggests a
potential for conflict between different interpretive levels of a text that might inspire rewritings, and
makes the tentative assertion that, although plot lines and motifs can be transmitted any which way, the
target context of the rewriting ultimately decides how to value and interpret the poet's text.
By tracing a whole series of biblical rewriting from the Yawhistic document of Genesis
(which he calls text “J”) to Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers (which he refers to as text “M”),
Boitani also provides a somewhat unsystematic, but none-the-less useful list of terms that can be used
to distinguish different types of biblical rewritings based on relationships between the text, subtext, and
the target context of the text.
25
Boitani first addresses the relationship between religious texts, such as
midrashim and sermons, which expand upon the original biblical text. A text which adds explanation to
otherwise mysterious elements of scripture without altering the meaning of the original is an exegesis.
A text which adds explanation to an original scripture but which changes the meaning of the original
25
Piero Boitani, “From J to M” in The Bible and its Rewritings, trans. Anita Weston. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999.
33
scripture in order to address the context of the new text is a prefiguration. Boitani also proposes a third
type of explanatory text which conjoins exegesis and prefiguration-- anagnosis, in which the text first
seems to simply explain a mysterious element of the scripture but then leads to an entirely new reading
of the text oriented on both the scripture's original context and on the context of the new text.
26
Boitani
turns this third term-- anagnosis-- out to literary, rather than religious texts, in his discussion of Milton's
Paradise Lost, emphasizing that this text, while expanding upon biblical subtext, also forces the reader
back to the original scriptures.
27
In his discussion of Thomas Mann, Boitani proposes an additional and
especially useful term for a text that expands upon an original scripture-- amplification. An
amplification seeks to add to and magnify elements of the original scripture, rather than explaining or
interpreting. An amplification does this in part by integrating elements of the new text's context which
can be made to harmonize with the original scripture, connecting the meaning of the original scripture--
complete with all its lacunae and mysteries-- with the radically different context of its new, secular
rewriting. Boitani distinguishes amplification from parody, explaining that an amplification retains a
sincere attitude towards its biblical subtext, while a parody might use many of the same techniques as
amplification in order to emphasize the ridiculousness or falseness of connection between the scriptural
text and the context of the parody. Exegesis and prefiguration are limited to the sphere of devotional or
religious writing. Exegesis adds to, but in no way seeks to “rewrite” or “overwrite” its scriptural
subtext. A prefiguration does rewrite its scriptural subtext, but only for the purposes of replacing that
text with another scriptural subtext. For example,Christian interpretations of Isaiah's songs of the
suffering servant overlays the Hebrew text with Christian scriptural depictions of the crucifixion.
Anagnosis can be either religious or literary, but a literary anagnosis relies on detailed audience
familiarity with its scriptural subtext. Amplification and parody are both literary, rather than
26
While this is not an example put forward by Boitani, Slavacists might recognize Ilarion's Sermon on Law and Grace as
an anagnosis.
27
Boitani, “From J to M” in The Bible and its Rewritings, 13-16.
34
devotional, in that they both rely on pulling scripture into contact with a non-scriptural context for the
purposes of making a point about that non-scriptural context. While I do not make a point of dividing
all of the poems in this dissertation into Boitani's categories, amplification and anagnosis both provide
useful theoretical categories for teasing out biblical connections from some of the more complicated
prophetic poems.
Mourning Isaiah-- Pushkin's “Prophet”
The second the subject of the poet as prophet in Russian literature is raised, almost all
thoughts turn instantly to Pushkin and, in particular, to one poem he wrote in 1826 and published in
1828 called “Prophet.” This poem, one of the chestnuts of Russian poetry memorized by every
schoolchild, serves as one of the most revered and studied texts not only in all of Pushkin's oeuvre, but
also a central text in conventional theories about the development of Russia's cult of the poet. To many,
it will seem exceptionally odd that I do not analyze this poem in the body of my dissertation. Instead, I
use this poem to frame my argument. In my conclusion, I turn to Dostoevsky's famous speech about
“Prophet” given at the 1880 Pushkin Celebration in Moscow, in which the famous author turned to the
audience and proclaimed that Pushkin was not only a great artistic spirit, but actually a prophet. Much
of the poem's critical legacy begins with this speech and the 1880 celebration's enshrinement of
Pushkin as a national poet and hero. Here, in the introduction, I would like to say a few words about
the poem itself, both to explain why I do not include “Prophet” in my study of poem in which poets
speak or function as prophets, and to discuss what significant insight the poem gives us into the
development of prophetic poetry through the three proposed models.
Пророк
Духовной жаждою томим,
В пустыне мрачной я влачился,
И шестикрылый серафим
35
На перепутье мне явился;
Перстами легкими как сон
Моих зениц коснулся он:
Отверзлись вещие зеницы,
Как у испуганной орлицы.
Моих ушей коснулся он,
И их наполнил шум и звон:
И внял я неба содроганье,
И горний ангелов полет,
И гад морских подводный ход,
И дольней лозы прозябанье.
И он к устам моим приник,
И вырвал грешный мой язык,
И празднословный и лукавый,
И жало мудрыя змеи
В уста замершие мои
Вложил десницею кровавой.
И он мне грудь рассек мечом,
И сердце трепетное вынул,
И угль, пылающий огнем,
Во грудь отверстую водвинул.
Как труп в пустыне я лежал,
И бога глас ко мне воззвал:
«Восстань, пророк, и виждь, и внемли,
36
Исполнись волею моей,
И, обходя моря и земли,
Глаголом жги сердца людей».
28
Prophet
Parched with spiritual thirst,
I tarried in a dark desert,--
And a six-winged seraph
At a crossing of ways appeared to me.
With fingers light as sleep
He touched the pupils of my eyes.
My prophetic pupils opened,
Like those of a startled eagle.
He touched my ear,--
And filled them with noise and sound:
And I heard the heaven's shudder,
And the angels' supernal flight,
And the moving of sea-serpents under the waters,
And the growth of the valley vine.
And he bent to my lips,
And plucked out my tongue, sinfulness
And idle-talking and cunning,
And the fork of a wise serpent
28
A. C. Pushkin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 2, 304.
37
Between my palsied lips
Set with his bloody right hand.
And he clove my breast with a sword,
And took out my trembling heart
And a coal, burning with fire,
Placed within my open breast.
Like a corpse in the desert I lay,
And the voice of God called unto me;
'Arise, prophet, and see, and hear,
Be filled with my will,
And, going about the seas and lands,
Burn with my word the hearts of men.
29
Considerable critical ink has been spilled by almost every major Pushkinist on the
subject of this poem, the circumstances of its composition, its interaction with the texts of both other
Russian and non-Russian poets, and its significance in Pushkin's development of his conception of
poetic inspiration. I do not intend to add much to these ongoing debates. Instead, I would like to focus
for a moment on two of the few unquestionable aspects of “Prophet”-- that the poem is a paraphrase of
Isaiah 6:1-10, and that it was written in the year after the failed Decembrist uprising.
Pushkin's personal connections to the Decembrists will be discussed at greater length in
Chapter three. Here it is only important to note that, even though Nicholas I and many of his
reactionary advisers suspected that Pushkin was involved in subversive activity until long after the
poet's death, and many of the Decembrists were Pushkin's close personal friends, he himself was not a
part of the conspiracy. Pushkin's actual politics are infamously hard to pin down. Especially as a
29
Translation by T.J. Binyon. Pushkin: a biography, London: Harper Collins, 2002, 245.
38
young man, he was fond of making shocking, radical statements simply for their shock value.
30
He
held a bitter grudge against Alexander I throughout his life. His relationship with Alexander's
successor, Nicholas I, was initially much more hopeful, but eventually devolved into a torturous
antagonism that contributed in no small part to the poet's early death. Yet his close intimacy with
Nicolas I's court and his patriotic verses of the 1830's often suggest that Pushkin was far more of an
enthusiast for monarchy and empire than most liberals would care to admit. One could perhaps even
argue that Pushkin's relationship with Nicholas I was a darker, bleaker twin of Derzhavin's relationship
with Catherine II. In this sense, it is no surprise that Pushkin's first attempt to align poet with prophet
eschewed the Decembrist's David in favor of Derzhavin's Isaiah.
“Prophet” was written during a crucial moment in the Pushkin's poetic development.
Pushkin's poetic gifts had been recognized at an early age by none other than Derzhavin himself. The
aging poet/statesman had attended the examinations at Pushkin's school, the Imperial Lycée, in 1815,
and heard the young poet recite. Soon, the old poet was telling acquaintances that a new Derzhavin--
Alexander Pushkin-- would soon emerge onto the cultural scene.
31
Pushkin would later make much of
this incident while developing his own myth of himself. However, during Pushkin's early career as a
poet in Petersburg following his graduation from school, his life consisted of elaborate dandy-ism and
hedonistic dissipation. Even as a schoolboy Pushkin had been known for his licentiousness and foul
language. This obscenity bled into his perception of himself and his poetry. During his early
Petersburg period, his diaries and letters frequently used defecation and ejaculation as metaphors for
his poetic process.
32
This is hardly the sort of elevated view of poetry held by Derzhavin or that would
lead to adoption of the prophet as a poetic pose. However, as his career progressed into the mid 1820's,
more and more leading lights of the Petersburg literary scene-- who were also the poet's close friends
30
At the time of the actual Decembrist uprising, Pushkin had, in fact, been exiled to his family estate by Alexander I on
account of such scandalous behavior.
31
T.J. Binyon. Pushkin: a biography, London: Harper Collins, 2002, 33-34.
32
Binyon. Pushkin: a biography, 204.
39
and associates-- were calling on Pushkin in their critical writings as the only potential savior of Russian
letters.
33
After the failure of the Decembrist Uprising, Nicholas I's reactionary cultural policies would
prevent Pushkin or any other poet from attempting to occupy such a role. But in the mid to late 1820's,
Pushkin could not possibly have known that such a path was no longer open to him. “Prophet” is but
one of several poems written during this period in which Pushkin begins to endow himself and his
poetic gifts with ever greater significance.
34
“Prophet” has the clearest biblical subtext of any of the poems discussed in this
dissertation. The poem follows Isaiah 6:1-10 very closely, putting the biblical text into elegant modern
Russian verse peppered with the occasional archaic slavonocism. In the poem, the poet speaks directly
as Isaiah. However, “Prophet” only shows the poet experiencing one aspect of the prophetic triangle--
the connection between God and the prophet. In the greater text of the Book of Isaiah, this episode acts
as a sort of prelude to the act of prophecy itself. By relating the moment in which he was called as a
prophet, Isaiah is able to add authority to his actual prophetic pronouncements. In the very next
chapter of the text, Isaiah begins to enact his prophetic duties by speaking and interpreting God's will
to the people.
Pushkin's poem, however, is not a fragment of a much larger prophetic work but a stand-
alone text. The poem asserts in detail that the poet is a prophet who has experienced all the sublime
terror of connection with God. In the last lines of the poem, the poet receives God's charge to act as a
prophet-- that is to say, to take the divine revelations he has received and convey them to the people.
But the poem ends with God's command. We never find out how the poet responds or what he is meant
to convey to the people. In “Prophet,” in other words, Pushkin asserts the poet's right to act as a
prophet, but then does not enact this status. The poet speaks the words of a prophet-- Isaiah-- but he
33
Marcus C. Levitt. Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1989, 6.
34
Brett Cooke. Pushkin and the Creative Process, Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1998, 94-98.
40
does not prophesy. Instead, he merely asserts his calling and ability to do so, offering limited insight
into Pushkin's understanding of how the poet-prophet actually functions.
The poems examined in the body of this dissertation consist of poems in which the poet
actually enacts the role of prophet within the text. The poet-prophet engages not only with God but
with the other actors of the prophetic triangle, most especially the people. However, “Prophet” still
offers a certain insight into the development of prophetic poetry. It shows the connection between
Derzhavin's Isaiah model and those last poets of the Golden Age who were unable to taken on the
social and political role he adopted. Many of Pushkin's late prophetic poems
35
would gesture back at
Isaiah and Derzhavin with a note of mourning and nostalgia. Even among the Decembrists, Glinka and
Küchelbecker would write poems that mourned the Isaiah model even while developing their own
model of poet-prophet based on David. While the Decembrists rejected Derzhavin's Isaiah model
because it was insufficient for the conveyance of their greater political ambitions, in 1826, Pushkin still
thought he could take on the role of a Russian Isaiah. By the 1830s, when he and other poets would
develop the Solomon model, it had been made painfully clear that poets could no longer attempt the
same tense negotiation with the ruler that Derzhavin had managed in both life and verse. Indeed, it had
become dangerous to even try. The existence of poems like “Prophet” argue that Pushkin's later
engagement with the Solomonic texts is an evolution of his earlier thinking about prophetic poetry
which Isaiah formed the ideal. “Prophet,” with its pointedly clear prophetic subtext, marks a point of
connection in the shift from one prophetic model to another. This poem must not be the starting point
for a discussion of the poet-prophet in the Golden Age. Rather, this poem marks the beginning of the
final phase of the poet-prophet's development. In order to fully examine the poet-prophet and his
development, we must go back to the man who influenced both the Decembrists and those poets who
survived Decembrism. We must go back to Derzhavin.
35
Chapter Three examines six poems written in the last year of his life.
41
A Few Notes on the Issue of the Bible in Russia
One of the major hurdles to presenting my argument has been the issue of which bible to
look at when comparing various poems to their possible scriptural subtexts. The answer to this
question varies from poet to poet, and has not been addressed in any great depth in any of the preceding
chapters. Russian Orthodox religion and spiritual practice tends to focus almost exclusively on the
liturgy rather than the bible, but Slavonic translations of the bible existed and were widely available.
From 1751 to 1876, the officially sanctioned version of the bible was a text known as the Elizabeth
bible, a revised and edited version of older Slavonic bibles commissioned by Peter I, but published
during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth. It attempted to resolve discrepancies between Slavonic and
Greek versions of the bible and to create one uniform bible to be used by the whole Russian Empire.
All of the poets discussed in this dissertation were, at least in theory, familiarized with this version of
the Slavonic bible during their formal schooling. But the degree to which different schools adhered to
official curriculum often varied wildly, as did the degree to which different poets applied themselves to
their education. Derzhavin and Ryleev both received infamously inadequate educations. Pushkin and
Küchelbecker went to the finest school possible, but Pushkin was a notoriously poor student.
Starting in 1816, the Russian Bible Society, commissioned by Alexander I, began
translating various biblical texts from the Greek into modern Russian. Before the group was dissolved
after Alexander's death, they produced Russian translations of the Psalms, the Pentatuch, the Book of
Ruth, and much of the New Testament. Some of the poets discussed in chapters two and three
definitely had connections to the RBS. Certainly their translations of the Psalms had some influence
on Glinka, and perhaps on Pushkin. Other poets, like Baratynskii and Ryleev, were aware of the RBS,
but either lacked access to or interest in their work.
Beyond the official Slavonic bible and the few Russian translations, it was fashionable
in Russia in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries to study the bible in translation. Derzhavin
42
was almost certainly reading the bible mainly in German, perhaps later in French. Pushkin begged his
brother to acquire a decent French translation for him. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii could read in English,
French, and German, and thus could at some point have studied the bible in any, all, or none of those
languages. His father's library was somewhat famous, and he and his siblings were welcome to explore
all of it. Küchelbecker was an incredible polyglot who was very likely studying the Old Testament in
Greek as an adult, but his German parents probably exposed him to some German version as a child.
And many of these poets were incredibly close friends, who certainly would have been discussing their
readings with each other.
As this project continues to grow, I hope to unravel the riddle of who was looking at
which bibles. For the purposes of this dissertation, however, I have sidestepped the question
somewhat. The grand rhetorical gestures and dynamics that form the bed rock of my argument are
present in any biblical translation. The version of the bible quoted throughout this dissertation is the
New International Version-- not because it's an especially good or relevant version, but because it is a
solid and respectable English translation of the Hebrew texts. As much as possible, I have checked this
version against the Russian Synodal Bible, the Elizabeth Bible, and standard French and German
translations. A handful of significant differences have been noted in footnotes, but for the most part the
rhetorical issues pertinent to my argument are fully visible in the NIV texts quoted.
One other biblical issue pertains especially to the Psalms. Whereas most Protestant and
modern Catholic churches and bibles use the Masoretic, or Hebrew, system for numbering the Psalms,
the Orthodox church uses the Septuagint, or Greek, numbering. Because this is a dissertation on
Russian poetry, all Psalms mentioned are given their Septuagint number, which is occasionally
different from the Masoretic number. For example, Psalm 82, the basis of Derzhavin's poem “To
Rulers and Judges,” is given as Psalm 82, rather than Psalm 81, as it appears under the Masoretic
system.
43
A Brief note on translations
All the English translations are mine unless otherwise credited.
44
Chapter One: “What shall I cry out?”-- Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Zhukovskii, and the Isaiah
Model of Poet-prophet
For the development of the poet-prophet by later generations of poet presented in this
dissertation, Derzhavin stands alone as the single most influential figure, both for his importance in
developing the model and for the extent to which later generation can be seen looking back to
Derzhavin. However, in order to trace the development of the poet-prophet through the tradition that
begins with Derzhavin, we need to take a step back and look at how and why Derzhavin was able to
develop into a poet-prophet modeled on Isaiah. This chapter traces the development of the Isaiah
model in its embryonic form in the mid-eighteenth century, with particular attention to the odes and
devotional poetry of Lomonosov. The chapter then traces the Isaiah model's full emergence and
development in Derzhavin's life and work. After Derzhavin passes his role of Russia's national poet
onto Zhukovskii, one of the best and most influential of the Russian Sentimentalists and Pre-
Romantics, I argue that the Isaiah model begins to flounder in the changing political and cultural
climate of the early nineteenth century.
The Imperial Sublime and the Emerging prophet
For a poet to adopt the role of prophet, a certain set of circumstances had to arise.
Quoting or paraphrasing the words of a prophet does not by itself amount to adoption of the role of a
prophet. Given the permeation of the sacred into every sphere of Russian culture up to the eighteenth
century, virtually all early poetry is littered with liturgical references and quotation. Certainly some
prophetic texts appear as part of that mix. But the line between sacred and secular writing has yet to be
drawn. Quotation or adaptation of a scriptural text can happen in both sacred and secular poetry.
However, when a poet poses as a prophet in his poetry, he is deliberately creating a parallel between his
cultural, social, and political position as a poet-- which is secular-- and the prophet's spiritual, social,
and political position as a prophet, which is sacred. This process necessitates a sense of separation
45
between the secular sphere of literature and the sacred sphere of religion in order for the two to
converge. In Russia, this sense of sacred and secular as separate (or at least differentiated from one
another) begins to occur in the eighteenth century with Peter's reforms, which sought to remake the
Russian court, still enclosed within and shaped by a xenophobic medieval culture, in the image of
modern, Western European nations. Because Pre-Petrine Russian culture was so rooted in Orthodox
faith and the sense that all other religions, nations, and customs were heretical, perhaps even demonic,
Peter's reforms required Russian cultural life to break, at least to some extent, with Orthodox culture.
As ecclesiastic control over symbolic language and literary reforms erodes during this
period, the ode emerges as the dominate genre.
36
Lomonosov's introduction and development of the
ode lent a political tinge to poetry, entangling poetry with the concerns and demands of the imperial
court. As stated by Harsha Ram, “Lomonosov's poetic practice would conflate the specific artistic and
thematic parameters of the celebratory ode with the concerns of literature and a whole. His ode
establishes a tradition of political poetry with the Imperial state as its central theme.”
37
While this may
seem like walking up the down slide in relation to the Hebrew development of prophecy, I would argue
that the axes of the prophetic triangle are established by the political demands of the ode. While the
roles of God, the prophet, and the people remain outside the scope of Lomonosov's odes, the
orientation of the ode on the Empire and the ruler develops the point of connection between the
king/Emperor and the people, the divine, and, to a lesser extent, the poet. It should be noted, however,
that for Lomonosov and most of those who wrote odes following his model, the figure of the ruler
remains somewhat vague, generalized, and impersonal.
For there to be any notion of a prophet, the key point of connection between the earthly
elements of the triangle and the divine has to develop. That point of connection between the prophet
36
Harsha Ram. The Imperial Sublime (Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 40.
37
Ibid., 48.
46
and a difficult to access higher power is, after all, what separates the prophet from the people. Lotman
posits an Enlightenment alternative to a literal notion of God filling this space, tracing this development
back even before Lomonosov:
Trediakovsky, in his translation of Horace, had already rendered divinis
vatibus (by which Horace had meant 'poets inspired from above') as
bozhestvennye proritasteli [divine prophets] . . . precisely because poetry
had taken the place of sacred texts in secular culture, truthfulness
(istinnost’) was perceived not as an optional trait of artistic language, but
as an inalienable quality of poetry: anything untrue was not poetry. In
replacing sacred texts, literature inherited their cultural function.
38
This sense of truthfulness offers truth as an optional stand in for the role of God in the emerging poetic
version of the prophetic triangle. From the first, truth is marked both thematically and linguistically as
an aspect of the divine, one that could play a role in secular literature without blurring the distinction
between the old ecclesiastical literature and the emerging, distinctly secular literature.
Secular literature in this sense should not be understood as literature devoid of all religious
elements. The ode and many other genres of eighteenth century poetry make heavy use of biblical
subtexts, motifs and stylistics. These poems are, however, distinct from religion. They are not written
as part of religious practice but as part of a greater cultural sphere in which religion is one of several
elements of life. By presenting the more general cultural value of truth in place of or as a screen for the
divine, the court poet is able to present himself in a position of extraordinary connection to that semi-
divine higher value. Lomonosov's odes align thus far but no further with the prophetic triangle. That
Trediakovskii
39
and others locate the Psalms under the aesthetic dynamics of the ode reveals that a
38
Lotman, Yurii. “Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul'tury XVIII- nachala XIX veka,” Iz istorii russkoi kul'tury ( XVIII-
nachala XIX veka) (Tallinn: Eesti raamat, 1990), 93.
39
V .K. Trediakovskii. “Rassuzhdenie ob ode voobshche,” Sochineniia Tred'iakovskogo, ed. Aleksandr Smirdin (St.
47
sense of parallelism between biblical models and the emerging secular poetry was already becoming
clear very early on in the ode's development. But we cannot say that the full expression of the Isaiah
model is not present at this point.
To begin with, of the four parties necessary for the full prophetic transaction, the
Lomonosovian ode contains only the divine, the ruler, and the poet. Of these elements, the presence of
the poet is so minimal as to be disregarded completely.
40.
In Lomonosov's odes, the poet may be present
as an individual who goes through a particular experience of revelation in relation to the ruler and the
empire, the lyric poet is not individuated. We are given a sense of the lyric persona's experiences but
not his identity. The role of the prophet, by contrast, is highly individuated. His personality, context,
and background function as key elements in his authenticity as a prophet. On the other hand, it can be
argued that even the limited emotional experience of the lyric persona in Lomonosov's odes has some
connection to prophetic models. The reluctance, terror, and peril of the prophet's calling precede his
ecstatic union with God. This aspect of the prophetic experience parallels the perils and ecstasy of the
prophet's connection to God and the perilous vertical and ecstatic horizontal axis experienced by the
odic poet in the Russian Imperial sublime as describe by Harsha Ram.
41
The experience of vertical
uplift described by Ram is made possible through the device of poetic inspiration. The idea of poetic
inspiration becomes the poetic analog to prophetic calling, comprising one major difference between
the poetry of Lomonosov's era and earlier Russian verse. Zhivov situates the development of a Russian
notion of poetic inspiration in the development and generation of poets, citing Lomonosov in particular
as one of the concept's developers.
42
Petersburg; Tipographia V oenno-Uchebnykh Zavednii, 1849) vol. I, 280-281.
40
Ilya Serman,. “Ot liricheskogo ja k poeticheskoj biograffi,” Russkii Klassitsizm (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), 80-96.
41
Instead, this experience takes on a significant role in the more famous Romantic poems that portray poets as prophets
rather than acting as moments when the poet speaks as a prophet. As will be discussed in chapter 3, these poems evince
a strong nostalgia for the failed and surpassed Isaiah model in many respects, even when these poets had moved on to
other models for their own prophetic poems.
42
V .M. Zhivov, “Koshchunstvennaia poeziia v sisteme russkoi kul'tury kontsa XVIII- nachala XIX veka,” Iz istorii russkoi
kul'tury ( XVIII- nachala XIX veka) (Moscow; shkola, 1996), 727.
48
The role of the divine and of the ruler in Lomonosovian odes is also somewhat
problematic. Lomonosov wrote both court odes and spiritual odes. In the former, the presence of the
divine is minimized. Lomonosov's court odes suggest a sort of usurpation of divine authority by
secular rulers. God is merged with-- perhaps even replaced by-- the images of Peter and the various
empresses,
43
even while the poet abstracts the image of the ruler into the realm of the ideal rather than
the real – or perhaps precisely because the poet abstracts the image of the ruler into the ideal.
44
In
Lomonosov's spiritual odes, the ruler is not usually present and the focus is on the divine. The problem
in these odes is that the utter submission of the poet to the divine in the spiritual odes almost exactly
echoes the submission of the poet to the ruler as it occurs in the court odes. The prophet cannot fulfill
his role as negotiator of social and political roles if the ruler is raised to virtually the same level as God.
This utter submission to an earthly ruler drastically undercuts the tense equality between prophet and
king inherent to the prophetic triangle.
I would also claim that the final essential actor in the prophetic triangle-- the people--
has very little presence at all in the Lomonosovian ode. The prophetic system developed first and
foremost for the people, and the prophet's main function is to stand as a surrogate interlocutor for the
people in relation to the divine. Furthermore, the full adoption of the model of poet as prophet in
Russian literature would have its greatest impact on the relationship between the poet and his popular
audience. To this day, Russian audiences have an almost religious reverence for certain poets while the
relationship of the state to poets has long been contentious. If anything, the actors of the Russian
Imperial (and later Soviet) state would fight tooth and nail against the poet-prophet model.
45
Lomonosov, however, is mainly concerned with either addressing the ruler with minimal occasional
43
Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 70.
44
Anna Lisa Crone. The Daring of Derzhavin: The Moral and Aesthetic independence of the Poet in Russia
(Bloomington; Slavica, 2001), 4.
45
See any of the many excellent works on official response to Pushkin by various regimes, some of which will be
discussed in the conclusion.
49
reference to the relationship between ruler and people, or, as in his spiritual odes, with trying to clarify
and negotiate his own relationship with God. The sheer amount of Enlightenment and scientific
imagery in these odes suggests that Lomonosov, who was better known in his own time as a scientist
for whom poetry was just one of several diverse hobbies, attempts this clarification on his own behalf
as an individual or on behalf of a very limited educated class rather than on behalf of the Russian
people or humanity as a whole. Without a sense of the people and a connection between the poet and
the people, the prophetic model does not hold together.
The relationship of Lomonosov's poetry to his biblical subtexts provides further
evidence that, while elements of the prophetic model are decidedly present in his work and he provides
an essential precursor to the full adoption of the Isaiah model in poetry, those elements have not yet
fused into the greater whole of truly prophetic poetry. Lomonosov's spiritual odes tend towards
philosophical meditations on the content of various biblical subtexts. While they do diverge from and
expand on biblical material, Lomonosov's poems generally don't refigure this material as a response to
a new context. The relationship between text A (the original biblical text) and text B (the later literary
text) is direct and adaptive rather than transformative. Further claims are made by both Zhivov and
Ram that Lomonosov's use of biblical material even in the overtly spiritual odes was defined and
motivated by stylistic concerns. Lomonosov's use of Slavonicism and church language amounts to a
negotiation for power over symbolic speech, which was, in a sense, an extension into language and
poetic of Peter I's policies of secularization.
46
Ram argues that Lomonosov's odes do use biblical subtexts, especially the Psalms and
the image of David, as something of a means of tempering the empress and imperial policy.
47
But the
relationship of text B to text A in these instances is still that of paraphrase and allusion. Lomonosov
46
Ram. The Imperial Sublime, 60.
47
Ibid., 79-80
50
references David or Isaiah, for example, in the following lines from an ode of 1757on the birthday of
Empress Elizabeth, «Божественный певец Давид/ Священными шумит струнами,/ И бога
полными устами/ Исайя восхищен гремит.»
*
This allusion occurs in a poem that suggests mild
direction of the Empress (he asks her to keep her oath faithfully). But these lines refer to David and
Isaiah by calling on their authority as past speakers. Lomonosov does not create new pronouncements
on his own context either by assuming a prophet's voice or by modeling his poetic voice on either of
these prophets. His relationship as a lyric voice to these prophets is emphatically different from that
which will be shown to emerge later in Derzhavin's adoption of the Isaiah model, and his use of David
the psalmist as a reference is almost completely ornamental in comparison to the political
sledgehammer the Decembrist poets would seek to create out of the same material.
48
The beginnings of a true prophetic voice do begin to emerge in Lomonosov's first ode to
Catherine II on the occasion of her coronation. While nowhere near as daring as Derzhavin's later take
on the same biblical subtext, in this poem, the argument can be made that Lomonosov begins using
prophetic voice to speak to his own historical period of crisis. The following lines show Lomonosov
taking on the voice of the prophet for himself in a way that speaks to his own historical moment rather
than calling on past voices to lend ethical and stylistic authority to the poet's later words:
Услышьте, Судии земные
И все державные главы:
Законы нарушать святые
От буйности блюдитесь вы
И подданных не презирайте,
Но их пороки исправляйте
*
“The divine singer David / Strums on his holy strings / And with the full voice of God / The enraptured Isaiah thunders.”
48
As discussed in depth in Chapter two.
51
Ученьем, милостью, трудом.
Вместите с правдою щедроту,
Народну наблюдайте льготу,
То Бог благословит ваш дом.
49*
Lomonosov's relationship to the ruler is different in this ode. Catherine was a German woman with
little clear right to the imperial throne, unclear political potential, and unknown values, who had
suddenly risen in rebellion against her own husband. Lomonosov would have had plenty of reason to
be concerned about the direction this new empress might take the empire, concerns which change his
approach in his address to the ruler. As Ram points out, a new poetic voice is speaking here, using
psalmic language in an attempt to hold the new empress to “sacred laws” that are defined in this ode as
key principles of the Enlightenment.
50
The overt subtext of this poem is a psalm, but the prophetic
voice taken on by the poet follows the model of Isaiah. In Psalms, a radically altered model of
prophecy, which will be discussed at length in the next chapter, emerges based on the image of David.
But the prophetic voice in Lomonosov's poem presents a complete representation of the Isaiah model
with no alteration of the key elements. All the elements of the triangle are present-- God, via the notion
of sacred law, the prophet through Lomonosov's adoption of direct address to the ruler both on behalf
of the people and as motivated by sacred expression of God's words/laws, the ruler as the addressee of
the poet's speech and corrective statements, and the people as the subject of the address. It's fitting that
such a voice should emerge at the beginning of Catherine's reign, given that her reign and patronage
would see the rise of Derzhavin and his full scale adoption of the Isaiah model both in poetry and in
life. It is also fairly telling about the limits of both Catherine as a ruler and the Isaiah model within the
49
M.V . Lomonosov. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1959), vol. 8, 772-781.
*
“Hear, ye judges of the world / And all the sovereign heads of state: / Keep from violating the sacred laws / Out of
boisterous excess, / and do not despise your subjects / But correct their vices / with teaching, kindness, and hard work. /
Combine justice with generosity; / Then God will bless your house.”
50
Ram. The Imperial Sublime, 80-81
52
context of the Russian Imperial state that Catherine was greatly displeased with Lomonosov over this
poem. His second ode to Catherine, and the final ode he would ever write, backs away from this new
prophetic poetic voice and retreats to the more comfortable relationship between poet and empress seen
in his earlier, more typical odes. Lomonosov's poet in “Ode on the Taking of Khotin” and “Ode in
Blessed Memory of her Majesty the Empress Anna Ivanovna”-- that de-individuated figure swept up
and overpowered by the force of empire as embodied by semi-divine rulers-- remains his lasting
contribution to the development of the poet's role in Russian culture.
“I wrote this poem about myself:”
51
Derzhavin becomes Russia's Isaiah
One possible key to Lomonosov's failure to adopt the role of poet-prophet lies in his
attitude towards his poetry. In his own time, Lomonosov was best known as a scientist, but he was
truly a living encyclopedia of knowledge and talent who took an interest in nearly every aspect of
science and culture at some point. His poetry, stylistic reforms, and Classicist program, influential as
they may have been for the further development of Russian literature, were but one facet of his identity,
an identity whose guiding light seems to have rested solely in the principles of Enlightenment. His
successor as premier poet of the Russian Empire, Gavirila Derzhavin, likewise did not see himself as
primarily a poet . . . at least not until later in life when he was well into his poetic career. However,
Derzhavin's identity was deeply tied to his notion of himself as a statesman and servant of the Russian
Empire and its people.
52
It must be said that poetry was just one especially powerful tool in
Derzhavin's belt of statesmanship, but in spite of this-- or perhaps because of it-- it is in Derzhavin's
work that the fullest expression of the Isaiah model can be discerned.
Part of the reason the poet became a prophet in Derzhavin's work while the work of
earlier poets merely contained the various elements of the prophetic model had to do with Derzhavin's
51
Derzhavin's response to questions about his prophetic poem, “Lyrik,” Grot.
52
Crone. The Daring of Derzhavin.
53
perception of himself and the degree to which that self was inserted into his poetic work. Before
Derzhavin, the poetic persona of the ode was amorphous, generalized. But the poetic persona in
Derzhavin's mature work is not only a fully-realized self but a self that is intimately connected to
Derzhavin the man.
53
Derzhavin the man carried himself through life like a prophet; his poetic persona
would do likewise in his verses.
The particular concerns and constraints of the court ode forced the same political
concerns on Derzhavin that Lomonosov had been obliged to deal with. The ode forces poetry into a
political sphere, and that sphere is principally concerned with the figure of the ruler. Derzhavin held a
lifelong loyalty and admiration for the ruler he had to contend with from the moment Catherine usurped
her husband's throne. While he was somewhat disillusioned with Catherine's choices and her court as
the years went by and he began interacting with her personally, Derzhavin's loyalty to Catherine
specifically and to the idea of monarchy in general never faltered.
54
But Derzhavin did not see himself
as a passive subject tasked with praising the empress, making use of vague, gentle attempts to guide
imperial policy as Lomonosov had. Derzhavin came to see his relationship to Catherine as a sort of
partnership, albeit an unequal one.
55
In Lomonosov's odes, the figure of the ruler occupies a space of
power that is just a very small step beneath God and a very long reach above the poet and all the other
people of the empire. The ruler exists as an abstract ideal towering over his or her dominion. In
Derzhavin's first successful ode-- and most successful in terms of the court for which such odes were
written-- the empress, through the figure of Felitsa, may still be an ideal, but she is concrete rather than
abstract, and her relationships with her courtiers, however mocked within the poem, are relationships of
influence, negotiation, partnership, and service. The lyric persona in “Felitsa,”speaking in the guise of
a mirza or Tatar nobleman, bows before his empress. He does not utterly submit before her
53
Serman. “Ot liricheskogo k poeticheskoi biografii,” Russkii Klassitsizm, 80-96.
54
Crone. The Daring of Derzhavin, 6.
55
He was, after all, very aware that he was her subject and her court was not a democracy.
54
overwhelming sublimity, as did the poet figure of Lomonosov’s odes. It is my contention that this shift
in the relationship between the odic poet and the ruler puts both parties into positions of the tense,
dynamic inequality parallel to that between the Hebrew prophet and the king, in which the king may
have superior earthly power and authority, but the prophet's connection to God gives him spiritual
insight that allows him to advise-- and, if needs be, to chastise-- the king.
Derzhavin also manages to bring his relationships to the other agents of the prophetic
triangle into better alignment with the Isaiah model. The critical element of the whole system that
Lomonosov's odes never really incorporated-- the people-- play a critical role in Derzhavin's
conception of both poetry and the Russian state. The Lomonosovian ode positioned the poet as a
mouthpiece of the court and of official policy. While Lomonosov and a few other poets wore this role
with dignity and aplomb, in part by virtue of their poetic talent, in lesser hands, the ode became mere
flattery-- one more way for sycophantic courtiers to curry favor with the ruler. Derzhavin, on the other
hand, “. . . wanted from the outset to separate himself from any notion of sycophancy. He therefore
began denying that he was a spokesperson of the court or of governmental officialdom in his earliest
extant panegyric to Catherine II and proclaimed himself, in a very fresh tone, as the voice of the
Russian folk.”
56
Furthermore, he also seems to have understood his obligations as a statesman in terms
of obligation to the greater good of the Russian people.
57
Through the adoption of both of these
attitudes, we can see that Derzhavin develops a relationship to the Russian people that aligns with the
Hebrew prophet's relationship to the people of Israel. He is one of the people who has been singled out
in order to perform a service for the people. He speaks to them on behalf of the greater power he
serves,
but he also speaks and advocates for their interests with the ruler and the state.
56
Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin, 17.
57
Vladislav Khodaseivich. Derzhavin: A Biography, trans. Angela Brintlinger, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2007)
55
This was more than a mere pose in his poetry. Readers of Derzhavin as early as Gogol
noted the poet's powerful blend of very low colloquial language with elevated Church Slavonic.
58
Crone attributes this linguistic mix to Derzhavin's search for a “language of truth.”
59
His position as a
speaker of truth required that he speak the people's truth, thus necessitating the use of language as the
people actually were using it. But, as for Lomonosov, Derzhavin's truth is an analogue of divinity.
Speaking of the divine requires the sublime linguistic effects of Slavonicisms as developed by
Lomonosov's hierarchies of style. Even as Derzhavin the man is embodying the roles of speaker for
and servant of the people, Derzhavin the poet is consciously grafting these issues into the search for a
new and more satisfactory poetic language than that which Lomonosov's Classicism had bequeathed to
Derzhavin's era.
Perhaps in part due to this greater sense of social obligation in his work, Derzhavin's
poetry also embodies a significantly different relationship to God than the one seen in Lomonosov.
Derzhavin, like his predecessor, wrote a great many spiritual odes as well as his court odes. The best
known of these is the sublime meditation “Bog,” which will be discussed at some length later in this
chapter. But many of his odes on the death of various individuals, from the historically unimportant
Prince Meshchersky to the towering figure of Potemkin, also focus in one sense or another on God. It
is somewhat tempting to see in these poems the same sort of religious meditation seen in Lomonosov--
texts in which the relationship to God is contemplated on an individual or cosmic level but not on the
level of humanity as a whole. But Derzhavin actually uses the deaths of these individuals as a jumping
off point for considering different aspects of the general human condition. In “On the Death of Prince
Meshchersky,” for example, this effect is achieved by shifting from one stanza to the next between
58
Nikolai V . Gogol. Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 163.
59
Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin, 33-34.
56
passages of deeply personal emotional experience and grief and passages that universalize that
experience. In the first stanza, the poet is personally threatened by death:
Глагол времен! металла звон!
Твой страшный глас меня смущает,
Зовет меня, зовет твой стон,
Зовет - и к гробу приближает.
Едва увидел я сей свет,
Уже зубами смерть скрежещет.
*
The very next stanza expands this experience-- the threat of mortality-- out in to universal terms.
Nothing will escape.
Ничто от роковых кохтей,
Никая тварь не убегает:
Монарх и узник - снедь червей,
Гробницы злость стихий снедает;
Зияет время славу стерть:
Как в море льются быстры воды,
Так в вечность льются дни и годы;
Глотает царства алчна смерть.
Как молнией, косою блещет
И дни мои, как злак, сечет.
*
*
“O, V oice of time! O, metal's clang! / Your dreadful call distresses me, / Your groan doth beckon, beckon me / It
beckons, brings me closer to my grave. / This world I'd just begun to see / When death began to gnash her teeth, / Like
lightening her scythe aglint, / She cuts my days like summer hay.”
*
“No creature thinks to run away, / From under her rapacious claws: / Prisoners, kings alike are worm meat, / Cruel
elements the tomb devour, / Time gapes to swallow glory whole. / As rushing waters pour into the sea, / So days and
ages pour into eternity / And death carnivorous all eats.”
57
The next two stanzas continue on the theme of death as universal. Then the fifth stanza shifts back to
the individual by calling to the deceased Prince, and the sixth describes the funeral and the grief of
Meshchersky's friends. In the seventh stanza, death takes on a god-like quality of omnipotence:
Глядит на всех - и на царей,
Кому в державу тесны миры;
Глядит на пышных богачей,
Что в злате и сребре кумиры;
Глядит на прелесть и красы,
Глядит на разум возвышенный,
Глядит на силы дерзновенны
И точит лезвие косы.
**
The next three stanzas dwell on the personal before the poem resolves in the final stanza with a nod
towards the dead prince but advice for how the living should conduct themselves in the face of death.
In his discussion of Derzhavin's alteration on the Lomonosovian model of the sublime in the solemn
ode, Harsha Ram argues that, “the interweaving of national history and personal destiny was
Derzhavin's great conundrum: metaphysically, it was manifested as the enigma of time or death;
ethically, it became the quest for an equilibrium that would permit the individual to endure and survive
the impact of force, be it the sovereign or the blows of fate.”
60
In “On the Death of Prince
Meshchersky,” Derzhavin uses the death of his friend as a means to contemplate the impermanence of
all the pleasures of the mortal world as well as to begin exploring the sheer equalizing and diminishing
forces of death, which brings everyone and everything low regardless of earthly status, wealth or
power. Derzhavin then uses his investigation of personal grief as a means of commenting on “the
* *
“It watches over all-the kings / Who hold worlds under guiding hands, / It watches opulent, rich men / Idols of
silver and gold. / It watches charm and beauty, / It watches lofty intellect, / It watches strength undaunted, / And sharpens
keen its scythe.”
60
Ram, The Imperial Sublime. 83.
58
omnipotence of death, the equality of all men before death, and the transitoriness of the pleasures and
vanities of this earth,”
61
not only for himself but for all of humanity. In achieving all of this, Derzhavin
also engages a specific biblical chapter as subtext. This subtext is revealed in the last lines of the first
stanza.
Уже зубами смерть скрежещет,
Как молнией, косою блещет
И дни мои, как злак, сечет.
*
Human mortality is metaphorically compared to vegetation, mowed down by an external divine force.
As the poem continues, this external divine force cuts down and equalizes kings and prisoners,
eradicates the wonders of the world, and negates all human accomplishment.
While the quotation never becomes direct, Derzhavin closely follows the structure and
mimics the figurative language and rhetorical devices of Chapter Forty of the Book of Isaiah. In this
text, the focus is not on personal grief, but on the unknowable nature of God and his omnipotence.
Isaiah follows a similar pattern of alternation between human experience and divine obliteration of
mortal existence and construction. The depiction of death in “On the Death of Prince Meshchersky”
and of God in Isaiah 40 provides the most striking point of connection. Consider stanza 7 (quoted
above) against Isaiah 40:22-24:
22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
61
Harold B.Segel, The Literature of Eighteenth Century Russia (New York: Dutton, 1967). 254
*
“When death began to gnash her teeth, / Like lightening her scythe aglint, / She cuts my days like summer hay.”
59
23 He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
24 No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.
Through this poem, occasioned by a personal experience of grief, Derzhavin positions himself as a poet
in a relationship to humanity that parallels the prophet's relationship to the people. He also presents
himself in a relationship with death-- which has taken on explicitly god-like features-- that shares
features in common with the prophet's relationship to God. In a sense, Derzhavin uses this poem to
express the two most important axes in the prophetic triangle-- between the divine and the people and
between the prophet and the people-- under the cover of a simple poem of mourning.
In “Waterfall,” Derzhavin responds to Potemkin's unexpected death, to which he
personally reacted with a great deal of grief and sadness, not so much by mourning the passage of one
of Russia's most powerful and storied political figures as by contemplating the nature of statesmanship,
greatness, and earthly glory. In a stunning blend of gestures from the general and abstract to the
personal and specific and back again, Derzhavin's poem both offers a genuine funeral ode to Potemkin
and a dissertation on the relationship of all men to their historical moment. Even the metaphor of the
title, as explicated in the poem, is turned outward to a universalizing theme:
Не жизнь ли человеков нам
Сей водопад изображает? -
Он также блеском струй своих
60
Поит надменных, кротких, злых.
*
These poems may not address God directly, but they are deeply concerned with the place of humanity
within the cosmic order. In his discussion of these sorts of poems in Derzhavin's work, Ram goes so
far as to suggest that Derzhavin hijacks the rhetoric of the imperial sublime away from themes of
empire, locating the sublime instead in themes of time and mortality.
62
The great chain of being that
Derzhavin describes in “God” loops these poems back up to the divine, suggesting that Derzhavin is
undoing Lomonosov's substitution of the ruler for the divine as the locus of the sublime by shifting all
of the concerns of the mortal world back into a subordinate relationship with the truly immortal and
ineffable divinity. Furthermore, while God is not always present in name, the force of all-consuming
time and mortality that pervades these poems signals divine presence lurking behind Derzhavin's
thinking in much the same way that truth and law existed as analogues for the divine in Lomonosov.
According to legend, Derzhavin's first word, uttered while witnessing a comet streak
across the sky, was, “God!”
63
While this legend is likely just that, the fact that this legend developed
and lingers gives us some indication of the role of the divine in Derzhavin's life and work. His 1783
ode “God” is certainly the most systematic expression of his spiritual inclinations, but connecting to
and understanding God were arguably key concerns of much of Derzhavin's life and poetic output.
Anna Lisa Crone and Harsha Ram have both argued for an idea of higher truth as the key value of
Derzhavin's poetic universe. Much as with Lomonosov, this idea of a greater, innate truth to the
universe becomes one of the Enlightenment abstractions of God. Khodasevich identifies fate or
fortuna as understood in the Eighteenth-Century as another key concept in Derzhavin's life and work,
arguing that Derzhavin saw connections between unrelated events as manifestations of divine order in
his life, such as the sudden surge of success Derzhavin had at gambling after he was not given the
*
“Is not the life of humans / Depicted for us by this waterfall? / With its benign water it too / Provides drink for the
haughty, the meek, and the evil.”
62
Ram, Imperial Sublime, 88-91.
63
Khodasevich, Derzhavin, 6.
61
rewards he thought he deserved for his service during the Pugachev Uprising. Fate, for Derzhavin,
becomes a sort of manifestation of divine order in the universe in spite of the failings of mortal
institutions. Law also was a “god term” in the Weaverian sense identified by Khodasevich for
Derzhavin and his era:
In the Russian air of the time, the simple word 'law (zakon)' sounded like
an innovation. For Derzhavin it became the source of his highest and most
pure feelings, a subject of ardent tenderness. The Law became like a new
religion. In his poetry, the word Law, like God, came to be surrounded by
love and awe.
64
The comparison between Derzhavin's veneration of law and religion is a valid one. But it should not be
seen as a competing notion with Derzhavin's own religious faith. Law, in the context of Derzhavin's
Enlightenment values, can be understood as an idealized vision of divine order and will manifested in
the actions of the state towards the people, a situation in which fate and truth as manifestations of the
divinely orchestrated order of the universe all line up perfectly with civil action. Thus all of these key
concepts in Derzhavin's world view and work can be understood as abstractions of God. Even in the
poems where Derzhavin does not engage with God directly, the prophet's efforts to connect with God
are manifest through the masks of truth, law, and fate. Nor should Derzhavin's veneration of law be
seen as a politically charged attack on the Russian monarchy-- as it could have been in the context of
English literature, for example-- because so much of Catherine's own rhetoric about her reign was
based on the notion of law and order. While this rhetoric never resulted in the sweeping legal reforms
that Catherine had pushed for early in her reign, and the events of the Pugachev rebellion of 1774-75
and the French Revolution eventually led Catherine to abandon her pose of Enlightened despotism for
64
Ibid., 22.
62
reactionary autocracy, Derzhavin's poems continuously attempt to call Catherine back to the values she
held early in her reign. Neither Derzhavin nor the Empress seemed to have thought of his veneration of
law as an attack on the monarchy.
Derzhavin's ode “God,” as the title would suggest, is his definitive statement about the
relationships along the axis of the prophetic triangle that links God, prophet, and people. Because of
this, it is worth taking a moment to explore this poem is some depth.
Бог
О ты, пространством бесконечный,
Живый в движеньи вещества,
Теченьем времени превечный,
Без лиц, в трех лицах божества!
Дух всюду сущий и единый,
Кому нет места и причины,
Кого никто постичь не мог.
Кто все собою наполняет,
Объемлет, зиждет, сохраняет,
Кого мы нааываем - бог!
Измерить океан глубокий,
Сочесть пески, лучи планет
Хотя и мог бы ум высокий, -
Тебе числа и меры нет!
Не могут духи просвещенны,
От света твоего рожденны,
63
Исследовать судеб твоих:
Лишь мысль к тебе взнестись дерзает, -
В твоем величьи исчезает,
Как в вечности прошедший миг.
Хаоса бытность довременну
Из бездн ты вечности воззвал,
А вечность, прежде век рожденну,
В себе самом ты основал:
Себя собою составляя,
Собою из себя сияя,
Ты свет, откуда свет истек.
Создавши всё единым словом,
В твореньи простираясь новом,
Ты был, ты есть, ты будешь ввек!
Ты цепь существ в себе вмещаешь,
Ее содержишь и живишь;
Конец с началом сопрягаешь
И смертию живот даришь.
Как искры сыплются, стремятся,
Так солнцы от тебя родятся;
Как в мразный, ясный день зимой
Пылинки инея сверкают,
64
Вратятся, зыблются, сияют, -
Так звезды в безднах под тобой.
Светил возжженных миллионы
В неизмеримости текут,
Твои они творят законы,
Лучи животворящи льют.
Но огненны сии лампады,
Иль рдяных кристален громады,
Иль волн златых кипящий сонм,
Или горящие эфиры,
Иль вкупе все светящи миры -
Перед тобой - как нощь пред днем.
Как капля в море опущенна,
Вся твердь перед тобой сия.
Но что мной зримая вселенна?
И что перед тобою я?
В воздушном океане оном,
Миры умножа миллионом
Стократ других миров, - и то,
Когда дерзну сравнить с тобою,
Лишь будет точкою одною:
65
А я перед тобой - ничто.
Ничто! - Но ты во мне сияешь
Величеством твоих доброт;
Во мне себя изображаешь,
Как солнце в малой капле вод.
Ничто! - Но жизнь я ощущаю.
Несытым некаким летаю
Всегда пареньем в высоты;
Тебя душа моя быть чает,
Вникает, мыслит, рассуждает:
Я есмь - конечно есть и ты!
Ты есть! - Природы чин вещает,
Гласит мое мне сердце то,
Меня мой разум уверяет,
Ты есть - и я уж не ничто!
Частица целой я вселенной,
Поставлен, мнится мне, в почтенной
Средине естества я той,
Где кончил тварей ты телесных,
Где начал ты духов небесных
И цепь существ связал всех мной.
66
Я связь миров повсюду сущих,
Я крайня степень вещества;
Я средоточие живущих,
Черта начальна божества;
Я телом в прахе истлеваю,
Умом громам повелеваю,
Я царь - я раб - я червь - я бог!
Но, будучи я столь чудесен,
Отколе происшел? - безвестен;
А сам собой я быть не мог.
Твое созданье я, создатель!
Твоей премудрости я тварь,
Источник жизни, благ податель,
Душа души моей, и царь!
Твоей то правде нужно было,
Чтоб смертну бездну преходило
Мое бессмертно бытие;
Чтоб дух мой в смертность облачился
И чтоб чрез смерть я возвратился,
Отец! в бессмертие твое.
Неизъяснимый, непостижный!
67
Я знаю, что души моей
Воображении бессильны
И тени начертать твоей;
Но если славословить должно,
То слабым смертным невозможно
Тебя ничем иным почтить,
Как им к тебе лишь возвышаться,
В безмерной разности теряться
И благодарны слезы лить.
65
God
O Thou, who's infinite in space,
Alive in ever-moving matter,
Eternal in the flow of time,
God faceless, with a trinity of faces!
Soul unified and omnipresent,
Who needs no place or reason,
Whom none can ever comprehend,
Whose being permeates all things,
Encompassing, creating, guarding,
Thou, called by us God.
Although a great mind might contrive
65
G.R. Derzhavin. Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1982), 251.
68
To fix the ocean's depths,
To count the sands, the rays of stars,
Thou can't be summed or fixed!
Enlightened souls who have emerged
From your creative light
Cannot begin to grasp your ways:
Our thought alone aspires to thee,
But in your magnitude is lost,
A moment in eternity.
From depths eternal thou invoked
Primordial substances of chaos
Within thine very self thou birthed
Eternity before all time.
And before time from thine self alone
Thou shinest forth within thyself.
All light originates in thee.
Creating all with but a single word
And reaching forth in new creation,
Thou wast, thou art, and thou will ever be!
Thou incarnate the chain of life,
Thou nourish and sustain it.
Thou joinest starts with ends.
69
Thou bringest life to all through death.
New suns are born from thee
In flowing streams of sparks.
As on a clear and freezing day,
A hoarfrost dusting shines,
And floats, and churns and sparkles,
As do the stars beneath thy vault.
A multitude of shining spheres
Floats off into infinity.
They all fulfill thy laws,
And cast their vivifying rays.
But all these brilliant lanterns-
This mass of glowing crystal-
This roiling crowd of golden waves-
These burning elements-
Or all these gleaming worlds as one-
Compare to thee like night to day.
Compared to thee the earthly realm
Is like a droplet in the sea.
What is this universe I see?
And what am I, compared to thee?
If, in this airy sea, I wish
70
To multiply a million worlds
By other worlds a hundred times-
Then venture to compare the sum to thee,
All this would be a tiny speck;
So I, compared to thee, am naught.
I'm Naught! But thou shinest through me
With all the splendor of your virtue;
Thou showest yourself through me
Like sun inside a tiny water drop.
I'm Naught! But still I can feel life,
Like something hungering I fly,
I'm always soaring high above.
To be with you is my soul's wish,
It contemplates, reflects and thinks:
If I exist-thou art as well.
Thou art! As nature's order shows,
My heart affirms the same to me,
My reason's sure of it:
Tho art-And I'm no longer naught!
A fraction of the universe's whole,
It seems that I repose in nature's
Critical center where you started
71
With the creation of corporeal beasts,
And ended with the heav'nly spirits:
Through me, you fused the chain of life.
I am the link of all existing worlds,
I am the outer brink of matter,
I am the focal point of living things,
I am the starting place of the divine;
Although my flesh rots into ash,
My mind commands the thunderbolts,
I'm king-I'm slave - I'm worm-I'm God!
But though I am miraculous,
Whence did I come?-that no one knows.
I could not by myself have risen.
Creator, I am your invention!
I am a creature of your wisdom.
O, source of life, bestower of blessings,
My soul and king!
According to your iron laws
My self eternal must needs pass
Across the borne of death;
My spirit's clothed in mortal garb
And I return through death alone,-
72
To your eternity - O, father!-
Thou art inscrutable, transcendent!
I understand that all my soul's
Imaginings are powerless
Your shadow to describe;
But when thou must be glorified
To pay such tribute we frail men
One course alone can follow.
We venture upwards to thy realm,
To lose ourselves in thy vast otherness
And shed our tears of gratitude.
66
Crone suggests that-- as opposed to the Imperial sublime as discussed in Lomonosov, which Derzhavin
radically undermines-- “God” embodies the “'so-to-speak' purer sublime in Derzhavin, not one
associated with territorial expansion of the Empire or governmental Macht.”
67
In the discussion of the
Imperial sublime in Lomonosov presented earlier in this chapter, I noted that the vertical and horizontal
axes that Ram identifies, in which the force of imperial power thrusts the terrified poet upwards where
he obtains an ecstatic eagle-eye view of the action and expansion of the empire, bear a more than
passing resemblance to the peril and ecstasy of the prophet's moment of connection to God. While
“God” expresses neither the vertical uplift nor horizontal expansion of the Imperial sublime, the poem
is structured around a perilous, self-annihilating encounter with the divine that resolves in ecstatic
union with and comprehension of the divine. This poem does not resemble the dynamics of the
66
From the Ends to the Beginning; A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, (Northwestern University, 2001) accessed
January 15, 2013, http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/god.htm
67
Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin, 86.
73
prophetic transaction as applied to some other context or masked by poetic abstraction: it expresses the
experience of the prophet's connection to God in the exact original terms of the biblical prophetic
experience.
The poem begins in a similar vein to Lomonosov's spiritual odes by contemplating the
ineffability of God. But the rhetoric through which he approaches the issue and the role played by such
contemplation in the poem are markedly different. In Lomonosov's spiritual odes, this contemplation
of God's infinity and ineffability often comprises the entire goal. Different poems on the subject arise
from the different occasions which they seek to address. Consider, for example, Lomonosov's “An
Evening Meditation on the Divine Majesty on the Occasion of the Great Northern Lights.” Lomonosov
is present in the poem as an individual, and the poem is inspired and occasioned by an issue personal to
him-- he, as a man of Enlightenment, is baffled and overwhelmed by a phenomenon (the northern
lights) that seems to fall outside the known laws of nature. Although the whole is clothed in pleasantly
poetic language, Lomonosov actually turns to God in stanza six and asks what amounts to a series of
dry scientific hypotheses about the nature of the northern lights. Are they rays of light or fire or
lightening or frozen steam? The final stanza of the poem turns the questions out beyond the original
phenomenon of inquiry towards more universal questions about the size and limits of the cosmos
before turning to a final question that emphasizes God's ineffability: “Скажите ж, коль велик
Творец?”
*
The poem is about a scientist finding God in the liminal spaces between natural mysteries
and scientific knowledge. The contemplation of that ineffability is the whole point of the poem.
Where God's ineffability was the end point for Lomonosov, in Derzhavin's poem, it is
the starting point, stated simply in the first line. God is infinite. The next five stanzas do not question
or interrogate God's ineffability but rather expand upon its range and significance. This process,
although not directly drawn from any particular biblical passage, suggests one of the constant themes of
*
“Tell us, how great is the Creator?”
74
the Book of Isaiah-- the omnipotence and ineffability of God. Furthermore, Derzhavin achieves this
using one of the key strategies that the prophetic texts use to this same end. Consider stanzas 3 and 4
of the poem:
Хаоса бытность довременну
Из бездн ты вечности воззвал,
А вечность, прежде век рожденну,
В себе самом ты основал:
Себя собою составляя,
Собою из себя сияя,
Ты свет, откуда свет истек.
Создавши всё единым словом,
В твореньи простираясь новом,
Ты был, ты есть, ты будешь ввек!
*
Ты цепь существ в себе вмещаешь,
Ее содержишь и живишь;
Конец с началом сопрягаешь
И смертию живот даришь.
Как искры сыплются, стремятся,
Так солнцы от тебя родятся;
Как в мразный, ясный день зимой
Пылинки инея сверкают,
*
From depths eternal thou invoked / Primordial substances of chaos / Within thine very self thou birthed / Eternity before
all time. / And before time from thine self alone / Thou shinest forth within thyself. / All light originates in thee. /
Creating all with but a single word / And reaching forth in new creation, / Thou wast, thou art, and thou will ever be!
75
Вратятся, зыблются, сияют, -
Так звезды в безднах под тобой.
**
And compare them in relation to the following lines of Isaiah 43:
16 This is what the LORD says—he who made a way through the sea, a path
through the mighty waters, 17 who drew out the chariots and horses, the
army and reinforcements together, and they lay there, never to rise again,
extinguished, snuffed out like a wick: 18 “Forget the former things; do not
dwell on the past. 19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do
you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in
the wasteland. 20 The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls,
because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland,to
give drink to my people, my chosen, 21 the people I formed for myself that
they may proclaim my praise.
While the wonderful things described by Derzhavin in “God” are different, the basic demands of the
text are similar. God is praised through the simultaneous miracles of creation and destruction that he
generates which are unified thematically but expand outward in a mounting onslaught of examples until
the narrative voice forces his conclusion on to the audience.
This is made even more clear if we compare the text to Isaiah 40, which begins the
second half of Isaiah known as the book of consolation,
68
and the two chapters which follow. The point
of these three chapters is to restate the glory and mystery of God as a way of restarting the prophetic
conversation after Isaiah's predictions of doom and the social and spiritual criticisms out of which they
* *
Thou incarnate the chain of life, / Thou nourish and sustain it. / Thou joinest starts with ends. / Thou bringest life to
all through death. / New suns are born from thee / In flowing streams of sparks. / As on a clear and freezing day, / A
hoarfrost dusting shines, / And floats, and churns and sparkles, / As do the stars beneath thy vault.
68
The first 39 chapters are the book of lamentations, in which the prophet chastises Israel and predicts doom and
destruction if the people do not mend their ways. Beginning in chapter 40, Isaiah begins to offer consolation for Israel if
the people mend their ways and repair their relationship with God.
76
arise have reached their nadir. This is done by emphasizing that the limited and mortal cannot
comprehend God, who is immortal and infinite. In particular, verses 12-14 of Isaiah 40 resemble
Derzhavin's first two stanzas:
“12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the
breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the
earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a
balance? 13 Who can fathom the Spirit of the LORD, or instruct the LORD as
his counselor? 14 Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him, and who
taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge, or
showed him the path of understanding?
Isaiah poses the question of how to measure the infinite or how to understand God's knowledge while
implying that such attempts are futile.
69
Derzhavin suggests the possibility of someone making such
attempts, then rejects such attempts as futile. The key conclusion of Isaiah's message of consolation--
that God is infinite and we are unable to understand him-- becomes the starting point of Derzhavin's
meditations in “God.”
The third, fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem also draw several gestures drawn from
Isaiah's rhetoric in the beginnings chapters of the book of consolation. In particular, God's majesty is
aligned with and proven by images of light, birth, eternity or transcendence of time, seemingly chaotic
nature ordered by God's will, and life continuing at God's sufferance. The relevant chapters of Isaiah
typically use two or more of these elements to elevate and praise God before offering up some sort of
promise of consolation such as a promise that God will strike down the enemies of Israel, the blind will
see and the poor be made rich, or that the deserts will become fruitful fields and barren fields fruitful
69
An approach echoed in Lomonosov.
77
again. In Derzhavin's poem, these stanzas both build up to the central crisis of the poem-- the negation
of the self in the presence of God that concludes stanza six-- and anticipate the successful resolution of
that crisis. The poem's chiastic structure reveals within the poem a structure of build up in the first five
stanzas, crisis in the sixth stanza, and consolation in the last five stanzas which each respond directly to
the building crisis in each of the first five stanzas.
70
This not only mimics the structure of the book of
Isaiah as a whole but also the defining rhetorical turn of Hebrew literary prophecy in general-- the
dialectic of lamentation and consolation.
71
Many of the passages of Isaiah that fall within the book of consolation, including the
four songs of the Suffering Servant, comprise the Christian argument that Isaiah prophesied the coming
of Christ. In that sense, this section of Isaiah is the best known and most important in the Orthodox
context. That Derzhavin should be calling on so many defining elements of this section of the greater
book shows an awareness of both the rhetoric of prophecy as it exists in the Old Testament, but also an
appreciation of which elements of Isaiah would be most familiar to his audience.
However, the crisis which Derzhavin confronts and resolves beginning in stanza six is
very different from those discussed in Isaiah.
72
While Isaiah, especially in the book of lamentation,
deals at great length with God's destructive capacities, the destruction is intentional in that the
destroyed object has been marked for destruction by sinful action taken by the people or the king. In
“Bog,” we see instead that the lyric persona is obliterated by the sublime confrontation with God. This
is not an intentional act of destruction meant to punish wickedness. It is a danger inherent in
contemplating/connecting with God too closely. This is exactly the perilous direct contact with God
that the prophet is required to undergo on behalf of the people. The whole reason for the prophet's
existence is that the risk of obliteration inherent in connection with God is too great for the people to
70
This structure is discussed at length by Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin, 86-88.
71
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy. Also listed as one of the characteristics of prophecy in Isaacs, Messengers of God.
72
For those keeping track of Boltani's methodology, this turn in the relationship of text A to text B shifts the poem out of
sincere adaptation into the sphere of sincere anagnosis.
78
commune with God directly. Because the prophet is chosen by God before the prophetic transaction
takes place, the prophet is able to survive, although his life is radically altered by the experience such
that he is unable to live a normal life. The assumption is that God has pre-screened the prophet for
worthiness so that he will be able to survive connection with God. It is at this point that the chiastic
structure of the poem is utilized to create a stunning shift in the relationship of the poet to God.
Through the reversal of this structure, the lyric persona is able to internalize and comprehend the
externally incomprehensible mystery of God.
73
While Derzhavin could not have been familiar with
Kant's work at the time he wrote “God” since Critique of Judgment had not yet been written, the terms
of Kant's dynamical sublime help to clarify the interaction between the poet and God. The experience
of God presents such an overabundance of significance—which Derzhavin builds up using the same
sort of expansion of phenomena within a theme that is common in Hebrew prophetic texts-- that the
mind is unable to comprehend the sublime object and approaches obliteration. But through the
experience, the poet is able to conceive of the ineffable, thus resolving the crisis. However, this
philosophical approach falls short when we consider that Derzhavin's poetic person does not just
approach obliteration but does in fact become nothing. To understand this, we need to turn to the
framework of Hebrew prophecy.
74
To rephrase things in terms of the prophetic transaction, the
poet/prophet submits utterly to the perilous contact with God, becoming nothing.
75
In doing so, in stanza 7, he finds that God is able to express Himself through the
prophet. The prophet thus attains ecstatic union with God and God is able to speak through the poet to
the audience in stanzas 8 and 9, before falling back from the ecstatic union into praise of and thanks to
73
Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin, 88.
74
These two approaches-- philosophical and literary-religious are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Some time after
Kant, Hegel claimed in his Aesthetics that sublimity, with its power to destroy and subjugate the individual, was a quality
of the Hebrew scriptures whereas beauty, which uplifts the individual, was a quality of Christian scriptures
75
The case could be made that Derzhavin has chosen to interpret the often unspecified peril the prophets feared in
connecting with God through the lens of the Orthodox concept of kenosis. The case could also be made that kenosis as a
Judeo-Christian religious trend goes all the way back to the prophets.
79
God in stanza 10. Prophetic texts frequently shift between the voice of the prophet himself and the
voice of God speaking through the prophet. It's worth noting that, while most modern English bibles
mark this shift with quotation marks around the words of God spoken through the prophet, Russian
bibles make no such distinction. This heightens the sense of unity between God and the prophet
significantly. But even without quotation marks to indicate who is speaking with the prophet's mouth
in any given line, certain wording and rhetorical gestures are used periodically to indicate when God is
speaking to the people and when the prophet is speaking for himself. One typical pattern in which this
occurs presents the same pattern seen in the last few stanzas of Derzhavin's poem. First, God very
clearly makes a statement which can only be God speaking. In Derzhavin, this occurs in stanza 9, in
which the poetic voice declares that he is everything and also God. Compare Derzhavin's gestures of
union with the divine in that stanza with God's words spoken through the prophet in Isaiah 61: 8-9:
For I, the LORD, love justice; I hate robbery and wrongdoing. In my
faithfulness I will reward my people and make an everlasting covenant
with them. 9 Their descendants will be known among the nations and
their offspring among the peoples. All who see them will acknowledge
that they are a people the LORD has blessed.
The voice clearly identifies itself as God and begins using expansion to make statements (in this case,
promises) that only God can make. In Derzhavin, the identification as God is buried within the line “I
am king, I am slave, I am worm, I am God,” but it is present. The statement is enfolded in statements
that are only true of God (and the poet while united with God) which expand on the theme that God is
everything. This moment in which God's voice is clearly and directly heard is followed by a return to
speech that clearly belongs to the prophet, which using expansion once again, begins offering direct
thanks and praise to God. Isaiah 61: 10-11:
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10 I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has
clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of his
righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a
bride adorns herself with her jewels. 11 For as the soil makes the sprout
come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the Sovereign LORD will
make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations.
The terms of thanksgiving and praise echo the statement God just made. In Isaiah 61, God promises
great rewards for the people. The prophet praises God and thanks him for these rewards. In
Derzhavin's poem, this half of the rhetorical gesture occurs in stanzas 10 and 11. God has just spoken
through the poet about being infinite, omnipresent and ineffable. The poet praises God and thanks him
for exactly those qualities.
While this moment of union is expressed as part of the “great chain of being” concept
that appears often in Derzhavin's cosmology, Pierre Hart has identified how oddly central man--
expressed in the poem as the lyric persona-- seems to be in this poem:
“Derzhavin's positive evaluation of human importance far exceeds that
assumed advocates of the great chain of being theory . . . For Derzhavin . .
. man emerges as the key to the total manifestation of the Divine Will.
This singular assertion is made so forcibly that it almost effects a
reorientation of the entire poem. What began as a celebration of Deity
threatens for a moment to become a panegyric to man.”
76
While Hart's observation that man is somehow central to this poem is undoubtedly correct, I would
argue that the poem only threatens to become a celebration of man rather than God if we assume the
76
Pierre R. Hart. Derzhavin: A poet's progress (Columbia, Ohio: Slavica, 1978), 64.
81
lyric persona exists in the middle of the poem as a representative of all humanity. This is not the case.
In contrast to other poems in which Derzhavin deals with humanity's relationship to the divine, such as
“Waterfall” and “On the Death of Prince Meshchersky,” the language of “God” turns outward. The
rhetorical thrust of the poems are directed in terms of universal experience, using second person plural
pronouns or claiming that an individual experience is or will be shared by all of humanity. In “God,”
the experience of the lyric persona is isolated and individual. We as readers witness the lyric persona's
destruction and ecstatic union with God. We are not invited to join with the poet, nor is it suggested
that any and every one can have the experience that the lyric persona has just undergone. Derzhavin
gestures out to humanity only at the very end of the eleventh stanza when he refers to “we frail men”
and begins to speak in terms of “we” rather than “I.” At this point, Derzhavin suggests a course of
action for everyone to follow, providing the example of the lyric persona's experience as a model of
how to truly praise God. The experience of Derzhavin's lyric persona in “God” is conveyed as an
individual experience that is, by the end of the poem, utilized to the universal good by turning over the
wisdom of the experience to the audience, first through describing his experience, then suggesting what
good might come from imitating it.
In stanza 11, Derzhavin emphasizes the prophetic nature of this perilous and ecstatic
confrontation by turning back to his audience, the people, and generalizing what had been a deeply
individual experience into a plural, shared message in the last five lines beginning with “То слабым
смертным невозможно . . .” in which the task of praising God is no longer the task of just the lyric
persona but of all weak mortals. By taking this turn towards plurality at the end of the poem,
Derzhavin's poetic persona in “God” manages to condense the primary functions of the poet into one
poem. The lyric persona connects with God, facing peril that others cannot face, before resolving that
peril by letting God speak through him in ecstatic union with the divine. This achieved, he uses his
experience in order to tell the people what God wills them to do. In this sense the poem is more than a
82
meditation on God's ineffability. It is a prophetically modeled communication between God and the
audience using the poet as medium.
77
Derzhavin manages to place himself as a prophet in relationship to God largely as part
of his own spiritual perceptions and inclinations. He positions himself as a nobleman, statesman, and
poet at the center of the relationships between all the prophetic actors-- the people, the Empress, God in
the form of fortune or truth-- in Russian society because, unlike his predecessors, he entered state
service and poetry at a uniquely opportune moment. From the time of Peter I through the many twists
and turns of the succession to his grandson, Peter III, Russian social and political structure was strictly
ordered. While the position of a nobleman within the Petrine system was a great deal more pleasant
than that of a peasant, a nobleman's relationship to the ruler was no less strictly defined or structured.
State service under Peter and his immediate successors was not so different from state slavery and just
as lacking in flexibility. “However, the self-image of the nobleman had undergone a remarkable
change for the better in the brief reign of Catherine's deposed husband, Peter III, when, in the manifesto
of February 1762, the nobility was freed from compulsory service.”
78
After this era, the nobility was
not bound up in the structure of the Imperial state as expressly as other social classes were, but neither
did they have the sort of corporate structure that lent the aristocracy such a powerful role in other
European nations. The Legislative Commission somewhat opened space for the clarification of the
nobility's role in state service, but its prorogation in 1768 left the question open, while Catherine began
minor reforms to civil administration without benefit of legal codification.
79
77
The case for this interpretation of the lyric persona's relationship to God in the poem is further strengthened by
Derzhavin's portrayal of himself as “God's singer” whose internal patterns of thought and expression are continuously
ordered by God in other poems. See in particular Anna Lisa Crone's discussion of this issue in her comments on
“Evgenii: A life at Zvanka” in The Daring of Derzhavin, pg. 107-111 or the mini-ode “Lyrik” which Derzhavin wrote in
response to his critics, which portrays the poet in the sort of grandiose, elevated metaphors that characterize Ezekiel's
moments of communication with God.
78
Isabel de Madariaga. “Catherine II and enlightened absolutism,” Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia
(New York: Longman, 1988), 196.
79
Ibid., 199.
83
Furthermore, as Catherine's position on the throne became more stable, she began to
prefer to promulgate her image as an Enlightened autocrat who condescended to a collegial relationship
with the nobles in her service. This further clouded the waters regarding the proper relationship of a
nobleman to his sovereign by suggesting that he was not only allowed but expected to contribute his
opinions to those of the Empress rather than simply enacting her will. In terms of poetry we can
witness this development in Catherine's very different responses to Lomonosov's first ode dedicated to
her, which was met with coldness because it presumed to advise rather than merely praise her, and to
Derzhavin's ode “Felitsa,” which so moved Catherine emotionally that it became the basis for her
ongoing support for Derzhavin both as a statesman and a poet, long after he'd begun to start trouble for
her in both spheres. In Lomonosov's era, the poet-nobleman barely dared to dream of criticizing the
ruler, let alone developing the sort of tense mutual inequality and negotiation existing between the ruler
and prophet in the prophetic triangle. In Derzhavin's work, a very different view of his relationship to
the ruler is evident as early as his Chitalagai odes. As Harsha Ram puts it, “These odes evince a strong
ethico-political and metaphysical orientation that would become a consistent feature of Derzhavin's
work. Critical of power without ceasing to be monarchist, they provided an alternative model to
Lomonosov's gingerly made attempts at political didacticism.”
80
Ronald Vroon has argued that these
odes, ostensibly occasioned by specific military or diplomatic occasions, offer up an image of ideal
imperial behavior rather than commenting on Catherine's actual actions.
81
This is a very different
approach to the ruler than the impersonalized flattery of earlier odes.
Consider the changing relationship between Derzhavin and Catherine in the Felitsa
odes.
82
Harsha Ram suggests that these odes present the Empress both allegorically and as a specific
80
Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 87.
81
Vroon, Ronald. “'Chitalagaiskie ody.' (K istorii liricheskogo tsikla v russkoi literature XVIII veka).” A Symposium
dedicated to Gaviril Derzhavin: Norwich Symposia on Russian Literature and Culture, 185-201.
82
By which I mean “Felitsa”(1782), “Gratitude to Felitsa” (1783), “The mirza's Vision”(1783-84, published 1791), “A
Portrayal of Felitsa” (1789), and “Epistle of an Indian Brahmin to the Crown Prince Khlor” (1802).
84
individual by including elements of Catherine's own writings, creating a sort of “co-authorship” or
collaboration between the lyric persona and the textualized body of the sovereign.
83
Ilya Serman
claims that the significance of these poems lies in Derzhavin's choice to write himself as the mirza into
the court, creating the poet as an individual actor within the ode's political context. In any evaluation
of this cycle of poems, the complex and evolving relationship between Catherine in the figure of Felitsa
and Derzhavin in the figure of the mirza is paramount. In the first poem, Felitsa is ideal, although her
courtiers are flawed, and the mirza submits to her instruction. While the relationship between the ruler
and the poet is still one of submission, it is not the same sort of submission found in Lomonsov's odes.
Felitsa is ideal but in Derzhavin's portrayal of her as an individual, she is no longer the god-like figure
of the ruler seen in earlier odes, and the mirza's submission to her is given willingly, even somewhat
playfully, without the force of overwhelming sublimity seen in Lomonosov's expressions of the
imperial sublime. While this is still a long step from the tense mutual inequality of the ruler and the
prophet in the prophetic triangle, it is a step in that direction. In “The Mirza's Vision,” Derzhavin still
situates his poetic voice in submission to Felitsa, but he has begun putting his words into her mouth.
84
In this sense, Derzhavin is no longer submitting to Catherine herself but rather to an idealized monarch
that bears some resemblance to her. This idealized version of Catherine notably appears to the mirza in
a dream. It is not clear what the source of this dream might be, but clearly the ideal model of a
monarch is coming from somewhere other than the Empress's earthly example. A hint of the source of
this vision might be found in the elevated language that Derzhavin uses in the moment Felitsa appears,
suggesting an element of sublimity.
85
It is also worth noting that part of the instruction imparted by the
vision of Felitsa is that poetry is a gift from God which is not intended for the flattery of mere mortals.
The dream Felitsa also takes the mirza to task for the earlier poem, implying that it was not sufficiently
83
Ram,The Imperial Sublime,103-106.
84
Hart, Derzhavin: A Poet's Progress, 57.
85
Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin,137.
85
honest or critical. While the Felitsa of the first poem obviously represents Catherine, the dream Felitsa
of this second poem is actually demanding the poet do the exact opposite of what Catherine actually
wanted of Derzhavin, a fact of which most of the poem’s readers would have been well aware.
86
In “A
Portrayal of Felitsa,” a poem written with naked intent to flatter Catherine and regain her good will,
Felitsa has been divided into the external, concrete individual Felitsa and a sort of ideal “Felitsa
within.”
87
In this poem, the poet, however gently, has begun suggesting that he is aware of and able to
see an ideal of how the monarch should behave and what she should value that the monarch herself
cannot see. Anna Lisa Crone suggests that this split has already begun in “Felitsa,” in which Derzhavin
“. . . praises her (Catherine) at the expense of her milieu.”
88
Even the enhanced perception of the mirza
is present in the very first poem of the cycle because, in “Felitsa,” the mirza “. . . has a saving grace
that (the other courtiers) lack: he recognizes his own depravity and the Tsarina's moral superiority to
her courtiers.”
89
While Derzhavin's mirza never rises above political submission to Felitsa and continues
to praise her, I suggest that his insistence on his true perception of ideals and his choice to praise a
Felitsa shaped by those ideals moves the relationship of ruler and poet in the ode into a similar form to
that of the prophet and king. The poet/prophet submits to the king/empress as his/her subject, but
through the poet/prophet's superior knowledge of the ideal/God's will, the poet/prophet implicitly
demands that the king/empress be shaped by his visions.
The new ambiguity in the role of noblemen as state servants also gives Derzhavin the
space to begin seeing himself as separate from yet somehow beholden to the people. The previous
system had suggested that all people were equally servants of the greater glory of Russian as embodied
in the ruler. They were simply, so to speak, somewhat more specialized and glamorous cogs in the
86
Ibid., 139-140.
87
Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 111-115.
88
Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin,131.
89
Ibid., 131.
86
machinery of the state, a special subset of the people, not a separate group. The focus of their political
identity was oriented on the ruler, not the people. But in freeing the nobility from state service, Peter
III allowed noblemen to think of state service as a choice, not an inevitable obligation. That, in turn,
enables state servants to consider why they should choose to serve the state.
Catherine, perhaps somewhat inadvertently, provided an answer to the question
inadvertently posed by her late husband's decree when she published the Nakaz. In that document,
Catherine claims in Chapter II, article 13 of the Nakaz, that the true end of monarchy is, “Not to
deprive People of their natural Liberty; but to correct their Actions, in order to attain the supreme
Good.” By claiming that the state exists to serve the people, Catherine could also be said to argue that
the purpose of state service is also linked to the good of the people. Through the lens of these changes,
the nobleman in state service not only exists as separate from the people but also has an obligation to
serve them. It has been noted by Khodasevich and others that Derzhavin's idealization of Catherine II
was first and foremost an image of Catherine as the author of the Nakaz, even long after all others had
realized that Catherine had no intention of actually implementing the reforms she espouses in it. While
Catherine and others enjoyed his idealism in poetry, Derzhavin's military and political career was
continuously undercut by his earnest adherence to his principles without any understanding of less
idealized political concerns or any willingness to compromise.
90
Through this new flexibility in state
service and the Nakaz's alternative justification for the state itself, Derzhavin was able to view himself
in relation to the Russian people in a way that his predecessors were not, a way that also happens to
line up nicely with the relationship between the people and the prophet in the works of the literary
prophets.
In “God,” Derzhavin presented a programmatic understanding of the poet-prophet's
relationship to God and hinted at his connection to the people. In “On the Death of Prince
90
Khodasevich, Derzhavin.
87
Meshchersky” and “Waterfall,” we get an expanded sense of the poet-prophet's relationship to the
people. The Felitsa poems developed the relationship between the poet and the ruler. All the elements
of the Isaiah model had emerged to some degree in these poems. Derzhavin's most complete
expression of his entire model of poet as prophet appears in his 1780 adaptation of Psalm 81, “To
Rulers and Judges” stands as the poem that most completely expresses Derzhavin's understanding of
himself as poet and prophet. This rather aggressive poem, which earned him the censure of the
magnates of his era but the esteem of his revolutionarily minded successors, is worth taking the time to
explore in full.
Властителям и судиям
Восстал всевышний бог, да судит
Земных богов во сонме их;
Доколе, рек, доколь вам будет
Щадить неправедных и злых?
Ваш долг есть: сохранять законы,
На лица сильных не взирать,
Без помощи, без обороны
Сирот и вдов не оставлять.
Ваш долг: спасать от бед невинные,
Несчастливым подать покров;
От сильных защищать бессильных,
Исторгнуть бедных из оков.
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Не внемлют! - видят и не знают!
Покрыты мздою очеса:
Злодействы землю потрясают,
Неправда зыблет небеса.
Цари! - Я мнил, вы боги властны,
Никто над вами не судья, -
Но вы, как я, подобно страстны
И так же смертны, как и я.
И вы подобно так падете,
Как с древ увядший лист падет!
И вы подобно так умрете,
Как ваш последний раб умрет!
Воскресни, боже! боже правых!
И их молению внемли:
Приди, суди, карай лукавых
И будь един царем земли!
91
To Rulers and Judges
The Most High God has risen
To judge the earthly gods in their congregation;
91
G.R. Derzhavin. Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1982), 238.
89
How long-- He said-- how long will you
Spare the unjust and the wicked?
Your duty is: to maintain the laws,
To look not on the faces of the strong,
To leave neither widows nor orphans
Without help, without protection.
Your duty: to save the innocent from harm,
To give shelter to the unfortunate;
To protect the weak from the strong,
To release the poor from their shackles.
They do not hear! They see-- and know not!
By bribes, their eyes are veiled:
Wicked deeds shake the earth,
Injustice convulses heaven.
O kings! I thought that you were powerful gods,
And that no one was judge over you;
Yet you are subject, just as I am, to passions,
And you are just as mortal as I.
And you shall fall,
90
As the withered leaf will fall from the tree!
And you will surely die,
Just as the last of your slaves will die!
Arise, O God! God of the Just!
And hearken to their supplication;
Come, judge, punish the wicked,
And be Thou alone King of the earth!
92
Let us begin by discussing the poem's stated subtext: Psalm 81. As Hart points out, this
Psalm in particular is a significant choice for a poet with Derzhavin's political concerns and
obligations:
The 81
st
Psalm is one of the so-called 'royal psalms' which treat the vital
role of the monarch in Israelite society. As Messiah of Yahweh, the king
had to embody righteousness and, through his just rule, ensure the well-
being of his subjects . . . with very little modification, such notions were
adopted by those men of the Enlightenment who sought improvement in
the monarchic system . . . Although he rewrote 'To Rulers and Judges'
several times in an apparent attempt to soften the harshness of its criticism,
it emerged very much like the original in its sternly admonitory tone. The
poet, standing apart from society, assumes a moral stance which enables
him to pass judgment upon those rulers who have failed to fulfill his
obligations and must therefore suffer God's wrath.
93
92
The Heritage Book of Russian Verse, ed. Dimitri Obolenskii, (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1976), 57-58.
93
Hart, Derzhavin: A Poet's Progress, 35-36.
91
The position that Hart is describing should be very familiar from the earlier discussion of the prophetic
triangle. Derzhavin himself seems to have been quite conscious that he was dressing in prophetic garb
when he responded to criticism of “To Rulers and Judges:” when a courtier suggested that the poem
was evidence of Jacobin sympathies, Derzhavin responded that King David was not a Jacobin and thus
his songs could not cause offense.
94
As a biblical and cultural figure, David plays many roles from sacred king to prophet to
psalmist. A model of prophetic poetry derived from David and psalms will be discussed at length in the
next chapter, but it is worth noting the key paradox of David as a political cipher. While David is the
exemplary sacred king in the Old Testament,
95
he is also a young man who rises from the people to
overthrow a king. The biblical texts gloss over this problem by claiming that even though Saul was
king by hereditary law and his son Jonathan would, by that standard, have been his heir, God had
turned against Saul and instead chosen David. The evidence of God's choice is made explicit when he
is anointed by the prophet Samuel,
96
but implicitly suggested by David's physical, artistic, military, and
prophetic gifts. Certainly the image of David as king was long used as justification of the divine right
of kings.
97
At the same time, the image of young David facing Goliath has an equally long history as
an icon of political dissent and rebellion.
98
The David who is associated with Psalms is the young
David, not the king.
99
Indeed, most of the attributes of David that would appeal to Derzhavin-- civic,
military, and poetic prowess-- belong to young David, the son of a shepherd who would overthrow a
king. To put it succinctly, King David was certainly not a Jacobin, but young David just might have
94
Khodasevich, Derzhavin, 159.
95
Second, perhaps, only to his son Solomon.
96
Some readings allege that Samuel anointed David as both king and prophet. Certainly the fact that David is anointed
king a second time after Saul's death suggests there was an additional meaning to the first anointment.
97
Consider, for example, the ultimate absolute monarch, Louis XIV's fascination with images of and sermons about David.
98
Such as Michelangelo's David, commissioned by the city of Florence as a gesture of defiance against the Medici.
99
It should perhaps be noted that Aseph, not David, is considered the author of Psalm 81 (82) in Judaic tradition, so much
of this discussion of David has limited application. But the general image of the Psalms in Orthodox culture attributes
authorship of the entire body of Psalms to David. Derzhavin's response to his critic certainly suggests that he saw it that
way.
92
been. Later generations of Russian poets will make full use of David's potential as a model of dissent.
Derzhavin uses David's text to a different end which avoids the pitfalls of either side of David's story.
Psalm 81 is the clearest subtext for “To Rulers and Judges.” Psalm 81 was the name of
the poem in its earliest draft, which Derzhavin sought to publish but was rejected on account of the
poem's radical content.
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The structure of the poem clearly follows that of the psalm, but the poem
diverges from its overt subtext in significant ways, too. The psalm has to be considered as a subtext,
but it is worth considering both the biblical subtexts of the Psalm. As I will show below, all of
Derzhavin's alterations harken back either directly to Isaiah or to the Isaiah prophetic model. The text
of Psalm 81 (82) is as follows:
1 God presides in the great assembly;
he renders judgment among the “gods”:
2 “How long will you defend the unjust
and show partiality to the wicked?
3 Defend the weak and the fatherless;
uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.
4 Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
5 “The ‘gods’ know nothing, they understand nothing.
They walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
6 “I said, ‘You are “gods”;
you are all sons of the Most High.’
100
Khodasevich, Derzhavin, 158.
93
7 But you will die like mere mortals;
you will fall like every other ruler.”
8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
for all the nations are your inheritance.
In general, Derzhavin's poem is a faithful translation of the original. But there are a few
very important differences. The first key difference is a slight shift of emphasis in theme. While the
Psalm does mention that the “gods” being criticized are mortal and will die in verse 7, Derzhavin
devotes all of stanzas 5 and 6 to the theme of the tsars' mortality. As Hart states, “Without altering the
original sequence (of the Psalm), Derzhavin expands upon the sensations of life to such a degree that
they threaten to eclipse the final stanza's appeal for divine judgment.”
101
While Hart sees this turn as a
general part of Derzhavin's focus on time and mortality as the major themes of his work, I suggest an
alternative explanation. This alternative becomes clearer when we consider the second major
difference between Derzhavin's poem and Psalm 81.
The title of this poem in its first draft, as has been mentioned, was Psalm 81. Derzhavin
changed the title to “To Rulers and Judges.” Given the popular theory that Derzhavin spoke through
the medium of a psalm as a screen for the harsh political criticism manifest in the poem, why would he
change the name from a title that made it clear that the poem was a translation of a psalm to a title that
puts the poem's political implications front and center? I would argue that he does so specifically
because the political message of the poem is the point Derzhavin wished to make. Psalm 81 makes no
reference at all to rulers or judges except when referring to God as the supreme judge and ruler. The
point of the Psalm is, rather, aimed against pagan gods and idolatry. A straight adaptation of the Psalm
would have retained the same message while perhaps allowing a careful reader to infer that Derzhavin's
poetic missile was aimed at the pantheon of the Empress's court. Derzhavin, both by changing the title
101
Hart, Derzhavin: A Poet's Progress, 36.
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and by directly addressing tsars rather than gods in stanza 5, refigures the meaning of his subtext. This
re-figuration brings the poem back into line with Isaiah and the more traditional Hebrew prophets in
that the background of the book of Isaiah concerns, as do many of the works of the prophets, a critical
period in the history of Israel in which the actions and failures of various kings play a key role. This
historical background manifests in Isaiah as an ongoing concern with the behavior of kings both
regarding their people and regarding God. This latter concern manifests in a particular interest in
reminding the rulers (and the people) of their mortality as a means of reminding them to submit to God.
One of these passages of Isaiah that seems especially relevant to “To Rulers and Judges”
occurs in Isaiah 10:1-4:
1 Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
2 to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.
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3 What will you do on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your riches?
4 Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives
or fall among the slain.
Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.
102
In Russian, as in Derzhavin's poem, the term used is “sirot,” (orphan) rather than fatherless.
95
Unlike Psalm 81, this text is directly focused on rulers and judges, and also follows the themes of “To
Rulers and Judges” quite closely. Both texts begin with the issue of unjust decisions before moving on
to discussion of failures regarding the poor and the weak. It is particularly worth noting that both
Derzhavin's poem and Isaiah 10 mention widows and orphans specifically, whereas Psalm 81 mentions
orphans and the powerless. Derzhavin's poem, after following Psalm 81 for a bit, returns to theme of
Isaiah 10 by emphasizing the plight of unjust or failed rulers. Whereas Derzhavin summarizes that the
tsars are subject to the same passions as all mortals and are themselves mortal, Isaiah 10, which opens
with a promise of God's doom on unjust rulers, frames that doom in verse 3 through rhetorical
questions that place the rulers in the same situations that all mortals face. Then in verse 4, Isaiah states
that the rulers will either die or become slaves. Derzhavin, by contrast, claims that both the rulers and
their slaves shall die. In Psalm 81, the gods are warned that they shall die. Slavery is not mentioned.
In an additional gesture towards Isaiah, Derzhavin opens stanza 6 by symbolizing human mortality
through vegetative mortality, which harkens back to Isaiah 40:7-8. We can see that Derzhavin is not
only bending Psalm 81 to fit themes more typical of Isaiah but does so by integrating figurative
elements from Isaiah.
With all that in mind, the poem should be reconsidered as an expression of the full
prophetic triangle. The poetic voice in both the psalmic and Isaiahian subtexts of Derzhavin's poem is
the voice of God, but spoken through the prophet. Hart suggests that the “I” that emerges in the third
and fourth lines of stanza 5, when the lyric persona compares the mortality of the tsars/gods to his own,
is not the same godlike “I” that speaks through most of the poem.
103
But if we consider the poem as a
prophetic text, the emergence of this “I” is neither surprising nor contradictory. The prophet speaks
both for God and for himself. Much of what we know about the prophet's biographies is only known
103
Hart, Derzhavin: A Poet's Progress, 37.
96
through these moments when the voice of the prophet as a man emerges from under the voice of God.
104
This shows that the union of God and prophet has occurred. This shift in voice is similar, if less
explicit, than the shift discussed earlier in “God” in which the poet begins speaking as God then returns
to speaking as himself.
The title of the poem as well as the direct apostrophe to the tsars in stanza 5 make clear
that the prophet is conveying God's message to the king, with the exception of stanzas 4, in which the
poet/prophet describes the evilness of the tsars and calls for divine justice, and 7, in which the
poet/prophet calls on God directly to chastise the wicked. The concerns with which the poem opens--
justice, law, protection of the weak and powerless-- make clear that the message concerns the
relationship of the ruler to the people. The prophet speaks on their behalf. In stanzas 4 and 7, the
poetic voice is no longer speaker to the rulers and judges but rather about them. In stanza 4, the
addressee is not named, but the poetic voice is describing the manifestly doomed condition of the rulers
to God, to the people, or perhaps both. The gesture is common in the literary prophets, including the
ambiguity of address, while operating in lamentation mode. Isaiah 1:4, the opening passage of the
book of lamentation, provides an example of just such a passage:
Woe to the sinful nation, a people whose guilt is great, a brood of
evildoers, children given to corruption! They have forsaken the LORD; they
have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him.
In stanza 7, the poet calls on God to punish the unjust rulers, speaking in this moment to God on behalf
of the people, a rhetorical gesture which often ends prophetic passages of lamentation. Through this
poem, we see the poet speaking to and for God in order to negotiate with the earthly rulers on behalf of
the people, for whom the poet is advocating. The full prophetic triangle is manifest, along with much
of the rhetoric of prophetic lamentation as it appears in Isaiah.
104
Isaacs. Messengers of God.
97
Although “To Rulers and Judges” is undoubtedly one of the most fierce and critical of
Derzhavin's prophetic poems, it should be remembered that even a poem like this functions as
corrective medicine for the ruler, not as a missile aimed at the heart of monarchy. As a prophetic text,
the poem falls into the rhetoric of lamentation. While these texts do often include predictions of doom
which come to pass, thus confirming the prophet's authenticity, the point of prophetic songs of
lamentation is to correct the rulers or peoples who have gone astray from God's plan. Doom is
predicted for those who do not change their ways. I argue that Derzhavin's poem follows this pattern.
Although the title is addressed to all rulers and judges, the text of the poem makes clear that the
addressees are those rulers who are unjust and failing in their obligations to the people. A ruler that
reforms and returns to a position of justice and obligation to the people will escape the prophesied
wrath of God. Derzhavin's lifelong faith in the monarchy, his response to criticism of “To Rulers and
Judges,” and his continuous
105
quest to get Catherine to act on the principles she'd laid out in the Nakaz
in the everyday business of government
106
suggest that he did not see this poem as a revolutionary or
anti-imperial gesture. Instead, the poem represents a poet's drastic attempt to get the Empress to come
to her senses and remember her higher obligations. Derzhavin does this by turning to the same
methods that served the Hebrew prophets in similar situations. The poem is a plea for justice and
reform rather than a call for or prediction of revolution.
107
Through poems like “To Rulers and Judges” and “On Fortune,”
108
Derzhavin took the
politically charged position in which poetry had been placed by the ode, and turned poetry into a space
for criticism of and negotiation with the ruler rather than submission to monarchy. Especially as his
105
And, from her perspective, apparently quite irritating.
106
See Khodasevich's description of Derzhavin, acting as her secretary, haranguing Catherine for hours while she would
knit.
107
Many readers, of course, missed this nuance. Notably, the Decembrist Kondraty Ryleev includes Derzhavin as one of
the historical figures in his Dumy precisely because he saw a proto-democratic, revolutionary side to poems like “To
Rulers and Judges.”
108
The poem “On Fortune” provides another excellent example, which is thoroughly discussed by both Crone and Ram.
98
career wore on and he was actually put face to face with the Empress he had initially idolized,
Derzhavin managed to turn the poet into the vessel of truth and justice for a ruler that he felt had lost
the ability to perceive those values. Under Derzhavin, poetry also becomes the vehicle through which
the voice of the people could be heard and the poet a figure to which the people could turn for
guidance. The historical moment in which Derzhavin found himself conspired with his own
personality and inclinations to create the Russian model of poet as prophet. In Derzhavin, the Isaiah
model found both a poet that could fill the role of prophet and a ruler who wanted a prophet, although
she didn't always like what he had to say. Catherine's successors, by contrast, would have no use for
Derzhavin and little if any use for the model of poetry as a key element of politics that he created.
When we consider later poets' (such as Pushkin) nostalgia for the Isaiah model and their endeavors to
link themselves to Derzhavin's poetic legacy even when they thought little of his poetry, I would argue
that they are yearning for this moment when the time and the ruler were right for a poet to be a prophet
in relation to all the actors of the prophetic triangle.
“It is not ours to harbor the spirit of pure beauty:” Zhukovskii, Sentimentalism, and the collapse
of the prophetic transaction into the cult of individual sentiment
Although Derzhavin's encounter with the young Alexander Pushkin at the Lycée has
long been enshrined in Russian cultural legend as a sort of passing of the torch from one poetic
generation to another, there are two problems with this view of literary history. First, although Pushkin
did more than anyone to use his school boy encounter with the by then ancient poet as a means of
cementing his poetic reputation, Pushkin thought little of Derzhavin's poetry. The aging statesman-
poet's influence on Russia's great national poet was minimal and indirect. Secondly, while Derzhavin
was indeed very impressed by young Pushkin, he had already “left his lyre”
109
to another poet, who
109
«тебе в наследие, Жуковский, / Я ветху лиру отдаю.» (I hand my ancient lyre, Zhukovskii, / to you as your
inheritance.) From Derzhavin's 1807 poem to Zhukovskii. Derzhavin would make this gesture again in his “Hymn on
the expulsion of the French from the Fatherland,” which he wrote, in part, as a response to Zhukovksy's “Bard in the
Camp of the Russian Warriors”
99
would both mark the end of the literary landscape in which Derzhavin wrote and lay the groundwork
for the Golden Age of Pushkin and his contemporaries. That poet was Vasilii Zhukovskii.
Zhukovskii is often correctly identified as the last of the Russian court poets. A
somewhat curious figure straddling the worlds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nurtured as
an emerging talent by the aging Derzhavin, Zhukovskii was one of the best of the innovators who
followed Karamzin's lead in demolishing the stylistic system developed by Lomonosov to which
Derzhavin's work was still indebted. Later in his life, he became a mentor and friend to the first
generation of Russian poets to seek complete independence from court patronage, while his own career
was gradually subsumed into court service that had less and less to do with poetry. He was so locked
into past models of political thought that he was unable to understand the actions of the younger
generation he nurtured. At the same time, he was fated to outlive nearly all of his young proteges. His
rise to poetic prominence would be achieved on the wings of patriotic fervor, but he would die a bitter
old man away from his country, dismissed and reviled by the poets back home. Zhukovskii truly did
inherit Derzhavin's ancient lyre and was, at least during the reign of Alexander I, able to occupy the
space of poet-prophet that Derzhavin had occupied in Catherine II's day. But the forces of both
Zhukovskii's artistic and historical moment would expose a tragic flaw in this model of prophetic
poetry, leading the next generation of poets to seek new ways of integrating poetry into politics.
While Derzhavin and others had noticed Zhukovskii as a great poetic talent years earlier,
the young poet would not find a political role or voice until the Napoleonic Wars. On the eve of the
Battle of Borodino, Zhukovskii would more or less extemporize a poem that would bring him instant
popular acclaim and the attention of the Tsar. “Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors” is an
exceptionally long poem, which need not be quoted here in full. The poem is structured as a sort of call
and response between the Bard and the Warriors. The Bard encourages the patriotic fervor of the
warriors, which fills a symbolic cup from which the warriors both fill and drink from, but which is
100
eventually given to the Russian tsar. On the one hand, the cup, which is early on referred to as
containing the blood of the slain, suggests a sort of patriotic analogue for Holy Communion. But the
cup also becomes the source of the Russians' ability to visit biblical levels of woe on the invading
French. In this sense, the cup also suggests the cup of God's wrath which appears throughout both
testaments of the Bible.
110
The Bard calls upon great heroes as victories of the past as though they are
currently present on the battlefield as a way of projecting future victory, a collapsing of all times into
one that suggests prophetic rhetoric. In particular, the call and response structure, the integration of
past heroes, the collapsing of time, and the catastrophic doom predicted for Russia's enemies reflects
much of the language of Isaiah's discourse on Israel's eventual victories over Egypt, Assyria, and other
enemies which are offered as consolation once the people and kings return to the will of God.
111
The
Bard repeatedly calls upon the warriors to praise various larger than life figures, some of which are
historical,
112
while other references are to military leaders who are actually present as the battle and
others clearly to the current Tsar or to God. If we consider the warriors as representatives of the
people, the full prophetic triangle is present, however incoherently, in conjunction with the semi-
prophetic telescoping of time. “Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors” is not an especially well-
written or complex poem. Zhukovskii apparently more or less extemporized it for a group of soldiers
who liked it, memorized it, and taught it to other soldiers. This in turn led the tsar to take an interest in
the poem and the poet. Whatever the poem's failings, the clear presence of all the elements of the
Isaiah model and the civic context of the poem show that Zhukovskii had in fact, inherited something
from Derzhavin-- his vision of the poet's socio-political role.
110
The biblical passage describing the cup that seems most relevant to Zhukovskii's poem is Jeremiah 25:27-38.
111
These passages include, but are not limited to, Isaiah 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, and 59.
112
In particular, the reference to Peter in stanza four recalls Lomonosov's “Ode on the Taking of Khotin.”
101
The enthusiasm generated by “Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors” quickly
offered the young poet something Derzhavin had always aspired to-- it established Zhukovskii as the
voice of the Russian people:
From 1812 to 1817, until the beginning of extensive activity on the part
of the oppositional secret societies in Russia, Zhukovskii was regarded
as a poet of civic sentiment and thoughts. The patriotic ideas of Russian
society, still associated with the struggle against Napoleon, had not yet
been transformed into ideas of political freethinking . . . the voice of
'Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors” was accepted as the voice of
Russia itself.
113
Through the poem, Zhukovskii was actually popularly acknowledged as the voice of the people.
Derzhavin had sought to fill such a role and posed himself in poetry and in life as though he actually
was the voice of the people, but it's doubtful that the people saw him that way. Given that the
relationship between the prophet and the people acts as the linchpin of the whole prophetic model, the
popular response to Zhukovskii's poem meant that he was in a position to fill the role of poet/prophet
even more successfully than Derzhavin.
The poem also garnered an immediate response from the tsar. Just as “Felitsa” had
opened the doors of politics for Derzhavin, “Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors” nudged open
the palace doors for Zhukovskii. He would attempt to secure the tsar's favor and interest through a
second, much more carefully rendered poem, his epistle “To Emperor Alexander.” In this poem,
Zhukovskii did and legitimately still could claim to be the voice of the people. This direct address to
the Tsar both praised the monarch as “the Blessed,” a sobriquet that Alexander humbly refused but in
113
Irina M. Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 24
102
which he secretly delighted, but also offers bold advice to set aside the majestic trappings of royalty in
order to mingle with and listen to the people. The poem managed to delight poets, young Pushkin in
particular, who knew the poem by heart.
114
Zhukovskii uses this poem to establish a poetic voice that
has moral weight beyond flattery, suggesting the relationship between the king and prophet as dictated
by God, but also clearly speaking on behalf of the people in his advice to the tsar in the easy, elegant
poetic language developed by Karamzin. This is an updated version of the prophetic voice Derzhavin
develops in the Felitsa cycle. But that voice is beginning to turn towards a poetic interaction with tsar
in which the people are becoming mere window dressing.
Zhukovskii presented this carefully constructed poem to Alexander indirectly by first
presenting it to the Emperor's mother through friends at court. Unlike Derzhavin's “Felitsa,” which
unexpectedly earned the patronage of the Empress, Zhukovskii was intentionally seeking the Emperor's
approval and support. While the decision not to present the poem to the Emperor directly is quite
understandable, especially from the relatively timid Zhukovskii, his decision to access the Emperor
through a female relative would have been a curious one in an earlier era. In the Eighteenth-century, a
poet might have presented such a poem through a secretary or government official. But Zhukovskii
was a poet of the Sentimental era in which feminine association and friendship were idealized. While
“To Emperor Alexander” and “Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors” eloquently demonstrate that
Sentimental poetry could fit patriotism and a certain sort of idealized politics into its framework, it was
not, perhaps, a movement that would lend itself well to situation within government bureaucracy.
Zhukovskii's poems did, however, earn him great favor in the intimate circle of the Imperial family,
especially its female members. After Maria Fedorovna responded favorable to Zhukovskii's poem, she
invited him to share more of his poetry with her. Then, in 1815, the poet received an appointment as
one of her official readers.
114
Solomon V olkov. Romanov Riches (New York; Knopf, 2011), 66.
103
Zhukovskii’s gamble-- approaching the tsar through his mother rather than directly--
paid off. Alexander was impressed and granted Zhukovskii a pension of four thousand rubles a year in
order to encourage his poetic endeavors.
115
In 1817, he was appointed as teacher to Alexandra
Fedorovna, the wife of Grand Prince Nikolai Pavlovich, the future Tsar Nicholas I, a position which
drew him further into the domestic sphere of the Imperial family. Even Derzhavin had not enjoyed the
sort of prolonged closeness with the ruler that Zhukovskii began to enjoy. However, the older poet's
relationship with the ruler had been framed by a very different context. Zhukovskii's various roles at
court were oriented on the domestic lives of the Imperial wives and children, which meant that his
connection to political influence was drastically less significant. “Zhukovskii gradually became more
and more accustomed to his new circle, particularly to its female constituent. Official 'male' court life,
that is, the political aspects of life at court, remained, for the time being, a closed book to him.”
116
Zhukovskii's final and most significant appointment in the domestic sphere of the
Emperor would occur in 1826, when he was invited to supervise the education of Nicholas I's eldest
son, the future Tsar Alexander II. “At court, Zhukovskii became more and more engrossed in his
duties; on the whole, this preoccupation exerted an adverse effect upon his poetic development. In the
first place, he was gradually transferring his energies, normally devoted to creative work, to teaching.”
117
Sentimentalism and the growing sentimentalization of the child further encouraged Zhukovskii to
subsume himself in the little world of the Imperial family in his role as educator.
118
While he did have a
profound influence on the heir to the throne, he had little time to write or keep up with the poetic
climate and fell out of touch with the world beyond the palace. Zhukovskii would eventually write the
lyrics to the Imperial national anthem, “God save the Tsar,” even the title of which suggests his
religious outlook on the issue of monarchy. The Tsar for Zhukovskii was the sacred king, anointed by
115
V olkov, Romanov Riches, 68.
116
Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky, 27
117
Ibid.
118
V olkov, Romanov Riches, 68-69
104
God, and unassailable. In his role as tutor and in his ongoing political activism at court, he would
continue to fill the role of Isaiah style poet-prophet that Derzhavin had left to him. But he was left
dealing with a very different Tsar and a Russian people who had very different political values.
One of the key values of Sentimentalism was intense, sympathetic friendship.
Zhukovskii happened to be a poet who grew out of Sentimentalism during the reign of a Tsar with
whom he was uniquely suited to share just this sort of friendship.
119
During the conflict with Napoleon
in the immediate afterglow of victory, the Tsar and Zhukovskii both enjoyed a popularity born of
patriotic fervor that lead many to hope for great things from the Emperor and his poets. After the
victory over Napoleon, Alexander's personality and reign took a sharp religious and mystical turn.
Zhukovskii, inclined since childhood towards religious mysticism, followed. “The Bible was now
always on Alexander's bedside table, and he saw himself as the weapon of Providence. The goal of his
state policy became the affirmation of Christian morality in international relations.”
120
During the
conflict with Napoleon, Alexander's mystical tendencies had been bent to service of the Russian
people. Afterward, the tsar began to lose himself in religiously motivated foreign and domestic
policies that seemed confusing, retrograde, and even damaging to the growing body of young noblemen
and former military officers who had defeated Napoleon, seen Paris, and found Russia wretched and
lacking by comparison. The once popular tsar began to face sharp criticism, to which he responded
with melancholy withdrawal even further into his self-contained mysticism.
At the same time, Zhukovskii's interest in German idealistic philosophy was growing.
His poetry dropped away from all pretense of representing the popular voice. Instead, Zhukovskii's
poems would explore the deeply personal melancholy found by the German Romantics in the
disconnect between mundane reality and a higher spiritual truth that remains just outside the reach of
119
V olkov, Romanov Riches, 52-59.
120
Ibid., 69.
105
perception. Derzhavin's odes mourning significant deaths were able to turn personal mourning and
tragedy into communal spiritual experience. Zhukovskii abandoned the ode for the elegies like “Song”
which made the experience of grief so inaccessibly personal that the song only reveals itself as a cry of
mourning in the last line when the cause of the lyric persona's anguish is exposed as the occupant of a
grave. Zhukovskii's poetry focuses on the unique emotional experiences of individuals and the
relationships of one individual to another. This is not necessarily an obstacle to establishing most of
the connections in the prophetic triangle. The prophet, the ruler, and God are, after all, individuals.
But the relationship between the prophet and the people remains the single most important aspect of the
whole system. This axis of the triangle relies on the individual's relationship to community and on
clear communication. This key connection between the poet and the people, which Zhukovskii had
established so well with “Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors,” atrophied completely in the
context of Zhukovskii's shift towards the individual and experiential.
This loss of connection to the greater community becomes painfully clear in
Zhukovskii's spiritual poems, of which the 1812 poem “The Boatman” provides an excellent example:
Пловец
Вихрем бедствия гонимый,
Без кормила и весла,
В океан неисходимый
Буря челн мой занесла.
В тучах звездочка светилась;
"Не скрывайся!" - я взывал;
Непреклонная сокрылась;
Якорь был - и тот пропал.
106
Все оделось черной мглою:
Всколыхалися валы;
Бездны в мраке предо мною;
Вкруг ужасные скалы.
"Нет надежды на спасенье!" -
Я роптал, уныв душой...
О безумец! Провиденье
Было тайный кормщик твой.
Невидимою рукою,
Сквозь ревущие валы,
Сквозь одеты бездны мглою
И грозящие скалы,
Мощный вел меня хранитель.
Вдруг - все тихо! мрак исчез;
Вижу райскую обитель...
В ней трех ангелов небес.
О спаситель - провиденье!
Скорбный ропот мой утих;
На коленах, в восхищенье,
Я смотрю на образ их.
107
О! кто прелесть их опишет?
Кто их силу над душой?
Все окрест их небом дышит
И невинностью святой.
Неиспытанная радость -
Ими жить, для них дышать;
Их речей, их взоров сладость
В душу, в сердце принимать.
О судьба! одно желанье:
Дай все блага им вкусить;
Пусть им радость - мне страданье;
Но... не дай их пережить.
121
The Boatman
Driven by misfortune's whirlwind,
Having neither oar nor rudder,
By a storm my bark was driven
Out upon the boundless sea.
"midst black clouds a small star sparkled;
"Don't conceal yourself!" I cried;
But it disappeared, unheeding;
And my anchor was lost, too.
121
V .A. Zhukovskii. Sobranie sochinenii v 4 t (Moscow: Khudozhectvennaia literatura, 1959-1960), vol. I, 143-144.
108
All was clothed in gloomy darkness;
Great swells heaved all round;
In the darkness yawned the depths
I was hemmed in by cliffs.
"There's no hope for my salvation!"
I bemoaned, with heavy spirit...
Madman! Providence
Was your secret helmsman.
With a hand invisible,
'midst the roaring waves,
Through the gloomy, veiled depths
Past the terrifying cliffs,
My all-powerful savior guided me.
Then-all's quiet ! gloom has vanished;
I behold a paradisical realm...
Three celestial angels.
Providence - O, my protector!
My dejected groaning ceases;
On my knees, in exaltation,
On their image I did gaze.
109
Who could sing their charm?
Or their power o'er the soul?
All around them holy innocence
And an aura divine.
A delight as yet untasted -
Live and breathe for them;
Take into my soul and heart
All their words and glances sweet.
O fate! I've but one desire:
Let them sample every blessing;
Vouchsafe them delight - me suffering;
Only let me die before they do.
122
While Zhukovskii's poem takes a slightly more roundabout approach to the topic than Derzhavin, “The
Boatman” revolves around one of Derzhavin's favorite themes in his spiritually inclined poems—
human mortality. Zhukovskii disguises this theme within the story of a boatman lost at sea in a storm
whereas Derzhavin would probably have addressed the issue more openly. The choice to obscure the
theme of the text through a heavily symbolic story by itself is not anti-prophetic. Speaking in parables
served as a favorite device for many of the prophets, most notably Ezekiel. Further evidence of a
prophetic angle in this poem emerges in the last few lines of stanza 2. The lyric voice cries out in
despair, but then a second lyric voice chastise the first voice, lamenting the first voice's failure to see
God's (in this case masked as providence) presence and protection. The third stanza offers consolation,
122
From the Ends to the Beginning; A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, (Northwestern University, 2001) accessed
January 15, 2013, http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/boatman_zhukovsky.html
110
first by describing providence's invisible hand, then proclaiming the Savior's guidance, and finally by
ending the storm and revealing the three angels. This is followed by a stanza of praise and
thanksgiving. These stanzas show a similar structure of prophetic influence to that see in “God.”
In “God,” Derzhavin took the highly personal experience of communion with God,
communicated that experience by speaking as God and then turned that experience outward towards the
audience in the final stanza. The final stanza of “Boatman,” in contrast, takes a personal experience
and makes it even more personal and inaccessible. Already in stanza four, the poet refuses to
communicate the substance of his vision of the three angels, implying instead that such communication
is impossible. In the final stanza, rather than conveying the divine's will for the audience, the poet
provides his own emotional and individual wishes for the angels. The audience—and, by extension,
the people-- exist only outside the frame of this poem.
Zhukovskii was not only falling into a relationship with the divine that precluded the
greater community, he was falling into a similar relationship with the tsar and his family. While
Alexander's withdrawal into his own mystical world has a very different source, he was pleased to find
a world view that harmonized with his own in Zhukovskii's poetry. “Zhukovskii's melancholy and
mystical ballads were balm for Alexander's soul. And the emperor may have appeared as the ideal
personage of his poetry and certainly the constant object of Zhukovskii's thoughts. Never before or
since had a tsar and poet been so close.”
123
While this relationship may have been everything that a
poet and a ruler could have hoped for under a system of patronage, this closeness gradually erased
Zhukovskii's connection with the Russian people. To put things in terms of the prophetic triangle, the
prophet and king came to align so closely that the position of prophet became subsumed into the
position of the king, leaving that vital space of connection between God, the people, and the prophet
more or less vacant. The tense mutual inequality between the prophet and the ruler, unpleasant as it had
123
V olkov, Romanov Riches, 70
111
been for Derzhavin and Catherine personally, had kept the relationship between the two focused on
service to God and the people. The intense sentimental friendship between Zhukovskii and Alexander
undercut that tension, locking the tsar and poet into a circle of mutual affirmation that may have
included God, but certainly did not include the people. Furthermore, the mystical turn that religion
takes in Zhukovskii's poetry limits his usefulness as a poet-prophet. However mystical the experience
of the prophetic transaction might be, the goal of that transaction is to convey God's will to the people.
Zhukovskii's pre-Romantic mysticism, equally grounded in German idealistic philosophy and in the
traditional Orthodox view of spiritual experience, emphasized the emotional and experiential elements
of his poetic encounters with the divine to the detriment if not exclusion of the communicable. The key
point of connection in the prophetic triangle, the axis between prophet and people that motivates the
whole system, begins to weaken on all fronts.
A particularly interesting demonstration of this collapse of the prophetic triangle occurs
in Zhukovskii poem “Lalla Ruk.”
ЛАЛЛА РУК
Милый сон, души пленитель,
Гость прекрасный с вышины,
Благодарный посетитель
Поднебесной стороны,
Я тобою насладился
На минуту, но вполне:
Добрым вестником явился
Здесь небесного ты мне.
Мнил я быть в обетованной
112
Toй земле, где вечный мир;
Мнил я зреть благоуханный
Безмятежный Кашемир;
Видел я: торжествовали
Праздник розы и весны
И пришелицу встречали
Из далекой стороны.
И блистая, и пленяя -
Словно ангел неземной -
Непорочность молодая
Появилась предо мной;
Светлый завес покрывала
Оттенял её черты,
И застенчево склоняла
Взор умильный с высоты.
Всё - и робкая стыдливость
Под сиянием венца,
И младенческая живость,
И величие лица,
И в чертах глубокость чувства
С безмятежной тишиной -
Всё в ней было без искусства
113
Неописанной красой.
Я смотрел - а призрак мимо
(Увлекая душу в след)
Пролетал невозвратимо;
Я за ним - его уж нет!
Посетил, как упованье;
Жизнь минуту озарил;
И оставил лишь преданье,
Что когда-то в жизни был.
Ах! не с вами обитает
Гений чистый красоты;
Лишь порой он навещает
Нас с небесной высоты;
Он поспешен, как мечтанье,
Как воздушный утра сон;
Но в святом воспоминанье
Неразлучен с сердцем он.
Он лишь в чистые мгновенья
Бытия бывает к нам,
И приносит откровенья,
Благотворные сердцам;
114
Чтоб о небе сердце знало
В темной области земной,
Нам туда сквозь покрывало
Он дает взглянуть порой;
И во всем, что здесь прекрасно,
Что наш мир животворит,
Убедительно и ясно
Он с душою говорит;
А когда нас покидает,
В дар любви у нас в виду
В нашем небе зажигает
Он прощальную звезду.
124
Lalla Ruk
Dearest dream, my soul's enchantment
Lovely guest from heav'n above,
Most benevolent attender
To the earthly realm below,
You gave me blissful satisfaction
Momentary but complete:
Bringing with you happy tidings -
Like a herald from the skies.
124
V .A. Zhukovskii. Sobranie sochinenii v 4 t (Moscow: Khudozhectvennaia literatura, 1959-1960), vol. I, 359-360.
115
I dreamed dreams of life eternal
In that Promised Land of peace;
I dreamed dreams of fragrant regions,
Of a tranquil, sweet Kashmir;
I could witness celebrations,
Festivals of roses vernal
Honoring that lovely maiden
From lands strange and far away.
And, with glistening enchantment
Like an angel from above, -
This untainted, youthful vision
Came before my dreaming eyes;
Like a veil, a shining shroud
Screened her lovely face from view,
Tenderly she did incline
Her shy gazes toward the earth.
All her traits - her timid shyness
Underneath her shining crown,
Childlike her animation,
And her face's noble beauty -
Glowing with a depth of feeling,
116
Sweet serenity and peace -
All of these completely artless
Indescribably sublime!
As I watched, the apparition
(Captivating me in passing)
Never to return, flew by;
I pursued - but it had gone!
T'was a vision merely fleeting,
Transient illumination
Leaving nothing but a legend
Of its passing through my life!
T'is not ours to harbor
Beauty's spirit - Ah, so pure!
It comes nigh but for a moment
From its heavenly abode;
Like a dream, it slips away,
Like an airy dream of morning:
But in sacred reminiscence
It is married with the heart!
Only in the purest instants
Of our life does it appear
117
Bringing with it revelations
Beneficial to our hearts;
That our hearts may know of heaven
In this earthly shadow realm,
It allows us momentary
Glimpses through the earthly veil.
And through all that here is lovely,
All that animates our lives,
To our souls it speaks a language
Reassuring and distinct;
When it quits our earthly region
It bestows a gift of love
Glowing in our evening heaven:
"Tis a farewell star for all to see.
125
The title refers to an oriental romance by the Irish poet, Thomas Moore, but the poem should not be
understood as one of many of Zhukovskii's free translations. It is actually a veiled reference to
Alexandra Fedorovna, the wife of the future Nicholas I, who played the title role in an amateur court
theatrical production based on Moore's text during a visit to Germany, which Zhukovskii also took part
in. “Lalla Ruk” thus became one the poet's nicknames for his pupil.
126
Beginning with the title,
Zhukovskii's intense connection to the Imperial family emerges at the expense of his greater audience.
Only those with in the charmed circle of the Imperial women would understand the referent of the
125
From the Ends to the Beginning; A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, (Northwestern University, 2001) accessed
January 15, 2013, http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/lalla_ruk.html
126
Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky, 27
118
poem's title. Without this point of reference, the female figure with whom the lyric persona interacts in
the text of the poem blurs into complete incomprehensibility. But knowing that Lalla Ruk is the future
Empress and Zhukovskii's student frames the interaction between the lyric persona and the beautiful
young woman clearly.
The actual appearance of this beautiful female figure occurs in a dream. This idealized
feminine vision, once we know that it ties back to Alexandra Fedorovna, somewhat suggests
Derzhavin's “The Mirza's Vision,” in which the idealized version of Felitsa appears in a dream. The
second stanza suggests a different point of reference. The lyric persona dreams of the promised land,
and fragrant, paradisiacal surroundings in which a maiden appears, representing foreign lands.
Situating this paradisiacal space in relation to Kashmir harkens back to Moore's poem, which takes
place in India, but the language with which the land in the dream is described and the use of a symbolic
maiden to represent that land invokes rhetorical devices typical of the literary prophets, particularly as
the end point of songs of consolation
127
and Ezekiel's representation of his visions as dreams that take
place in some other plane of reality.
However, for the prophets, these visions always turned outward to the people and
included a message, however obscure and heavily coded, meant for transmission between the people
and God. The dream of the lyric persona in “Lalla Ruk” is deeply personal. It does not turn outward
until the final three stanzas. When the lyric persona does make the prophetic turn towards the
audience as though to convey God's message to the people, he does so only to shut down any notion
of communicating the message. The emphasis is instead placed on the emotional and experiential
aspect of his encounter with the spirit of pure beauty, a frequent substitute or mask for the divine in
Zhukovskii's poems,
128
by stanzas six and seven. In the prophetic transaction, only the prophet is
127
See, for example, Isaiah 60, 62, and the image of Jerusalem in Isaiah 66:10-13
128
Later adopted by Pushkin for less elevated concerns-- seducing a young woman-- in the poem “To K____”
119
given the experience of direct connection with God and the emotions provoked by that experience.
By the seventh stanza of the poem, the lyric persona is claiming that we all can experience this spirit
of pure beauty in momentary bursts, and the poem closes with a discourse on the benefits of those
experiences. This shift reflects Zhukovskii's interest in German Romanticism in that “. . . the
conception of 'two worlds' is developed, and the poet hymns 'the herald' of the higher world of true
reality: 'the spirit of pure beauty.'”
129
The experience of connection to this spirit of pure beauty may be
claimed as necessary and beneficial for the entire audience, but the experiential and emotional aspects
of this connection are both individual and inexpressible. The lyric persona and the beautiful young
woman connected to the vision have their moment of connection to the spirit of pure beauty, but none
of the content of that experience is passed on to the audience. In terms of the prophetic triangle, the
prophet and the king (by proxy through his female relative) have a moment of connection with God.
The prophet then tells the people that the experience was amazing, but if they want any of the benefit
of that connection with God, they'll have to undergo the prophetic transaction themselves. The deeply
individual mysticism of Zhukovskii's poem shows a prophet who has abdicated his responsibility to
the people.
While it may seems as though this argument makes far reaching claims about the poem,
the abdication of the poet-prophet's role in relation to the people also happens in Zhukovskii's life.
Zhukovskii becomes out of touch politically, as seen in his shocked and confused reaction to the
Decembrist Uprising and his failure to understand the poisonous tension between Pushkin and Nicholas
I until after the former's tragic death. He also loses touch poetically, first publishing less and less to
focus on teaching, then later focusing on odd genres such as the epic when all of Russian literature was
moving towards the novel. The former “voice of the Russian people” would ultimately move abroad
and never return. As Irina Semenko describes it:
129
Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky, 56.
120
To be sure, he was not indifferent to politics, as it would sometimes seem.
He was a convinced monarchist; he could not conceive of any other form
of government for Russia and never tired of repeating that the people's
fate depended on the degree of cultivation of the mind and spirit of the
reigning monarch . . . He did not share the political enthusiasms of the
revolutionary youth of the nobility during the first half of the 1820's, years
so pregnant with stormy events. He behaved as if they did not exist. This
was the weakness of his position.
130
Zhukovskii was so bound up personally and poetically in a dangerous combination of a too close
relationship to the tsar and the Sentimentalist cult of individual emotional experience. Especially after
the death of Alexander I, the Tsar towards whom he was able to feel a sort of perfect Sentimental
intense friendship, Zhukovskii found himself in a political and poetic landscape which he no longer
understood. The Decembrist conspiracy filled him with horror and confusion, but so did Nicholas I's
response to his pleas when he tried to intercede on behalf of the exiled Decembrists Zhukovskii had
mentored as young men. He was utterly committed to Russian monarchy during the decades of the mid
nineteenth century when faith in the tsarist government would begin to evaporate completely for large
segments of the educated populace. The politics of the empire had changed, along with the place and
potential of literature. The Isaiah model outlived its usefulness for the time being. It would be left to
those young poets whose talents Zhukovskii had once fostered to reconfigure the prophetic model and
maintain a role for poetry in the political landscape of Russia.
130
Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky, 29
121
Chapter Two: Songs of December-- Glinka, Küchelbecker, Ryleev, and David the Psalmist as the
Poet-Prophet in Rebellion
As discussed in the previous chapter, during the brief reign of Peter III, the sharply
defined position of the nobility and gentry in the Russian Empire that had existed since Peter I began to
disintegrate into something less constrained but much more ambiguous. In the late eighteenth century,
this ambiguity allowed the gentry-- particularly the educated, culturally active gentry-- to begin
fashioning their own idea about their class and its role in relation to the ruler and the rest of the empire.
A great many of the aristocracy simply continued the Petrine pattern of dutiful state service and
obedience to the tsar. But after the great crisis of the Napoleonic wars, growing numbers of young
gentry, who had the benefit of excellent Western-style educations but little opportunity to use or profit
from that education, began to contemplate radical reconfigurations of Russian society and politics.
Cultural life began to distance itself from the court and reliance on patronage, becoming instead an
impetus for aristocratic social gatherings beyond and beneath the purview of the court and the tsar.
The changing relationship between the tsar and the educated gentry resulted in the
flowering of Russian poetry's golden age. It also resulted in one of the great political traumas of
Russia's nineteenth century. A key group of young poets would play a role in both of these literary and
social upheavals. I will present the argument that one group of these young men, more inclined to
culture and literature than politics, would find a model of the poet-prophet almost completely divorced
from politics in Chapter Three. This chapter will instead focus on poets of this era for whom poetry
was a means to political end, and who would eventually make the first attempt at genuine revolution in
Russia. These poets-- known now as the Decembrists-- would create a model of the poet-prophet that
would try to overthrow, rather than negotiate with, the tsar.
The successful adoption of the Hebrew prophet as a poetic model by Derzhavin and
other poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century relied on the alignment of several factors
122
beyond the poet's control. Just as the Hebrew prophet's authority and power depended on open
connections to God, the people, and the ruler, the power of the Isaiah-style poet-prophet relied on an
understood poetic focus on higher truth, a perception that poetry served a direct civic purpose, and a
ruler whose estimation of the value of poets as civic actors was powerful enough to force negotiation
more often than coercion or censorship. Derzhavin managed to position himself as Catherine's Isaiah
so successfully in large part because Catherine and Derzhavin perceived the civic utility of poetry in
similar ways, attitudes reinforced by the Enlightenment values of their era. Poets of the Karamzin
school were far less interested in poetry as an aspect of civic service. The prophetic requirement of
speaking to and for the people was replaced by a Sentimentalist focus on a feminized, francophile
gentry. By the time Russian poets again took a vigorous interest in the people and poetry as a political
act, Russian rulers no longer had any use for poets who wished to negotiate the political sphere. At the
same time, one particular group of educated gentry was no longer interested in negotiating with the
tsars. The requisite elements of the Derzhavin's model of prophetic poetry had fallen apart at multiple
levels. The new poets, the Decembrists, would take David, rather than Isaiah, as their prophetic model
because, like young David, these poet-prophets meant to overthrow the ruler and take his place.
What is Decembrism?
The phenomenon that came to be known as Decembrism is tied to the odd and
unexpected happenings of a specific date. On December 14
th
, 1825 (Old style), a force of
approximately 3000 gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg to protest Nicholas I's assumption to
the throne after the death of his brother, Alexander I, and the unexpected abdication of his older
brother, Constantine. Neither side of the conflict seemed to have had a clear plan, to know what the
protest aimed to do, or to appreciate how violent the situation could or should become. Finally, as the
day wore on, Nicholas I ordered artillery to open fire on the rebels, who fled. This event is called the
Decembrist Uprising.
123
The subsequent arrest and interrogation of many of those involved, however, revealed
that the revolt, however badly planned, was the culmination of decades of work by several secret
societies amongst the Russian gentry and educated classes who had been plotting to overthrow (or at
least radically reform) the Russian imperial state. Many of those connected to these societies were
arrested and exiled, either to Siberia or enlisted service in the Caucasus. Five ringleaders were
executed. All were, one way or another, neutralized and silenced.
Unlike many social movements, Decembrism as a social force is named for the moment
of its death. The secret societies that eventually fomented the revolt began coalescing in 1815. The
motivations for forming these secret societies emerged from a gradually growing rift between
progressive Russian nobility and the tsars that began in the eighteenth-century if not sooner, but that
grew exponentially after the “anticlimax of 1812.”
131
It's important to remember that the events of
December 1825 were the culmination of this trend, but the phenomenon we've come to call
Decembrism constitutes a counter cultural subculture spanning two decades. Formal secret societies
formed, reformed, disbanded, split and reunited. Groups with clear political aims grew out of,
overlapped, and mingled with groups like Masonic lodges, officers dinning clubs, and—later, for the
most part-- literary groups whose overt goals were not political. This subcultural trend extended far
beyond those who were directly involved with the revolt itself. Not every participant in this subculture
participated in the Decembrist Revolt any more than every radically liberal American youth of the
1960s was present at the protest of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Pushkin's famed
response to Nicholas I when questioned about the revolt-- that he had not known about the revolt or the
would-be revolutionaries' plans, but, had he known, he would have participated-- underlines this point.
Pushkin and many of his generation were not Decembrists as such, but they certainly were involved in
131
Patrick O'Meara, K.F . Ryleev: a Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984), 16.
124
the culture of Decembrism. While this chapter will focus on poets who were actually part of the revolt,
it remains important to keep in mind that the phenomenon of Decembrism extended far beyond the 121
or so members of the cultural elite who actually instigated the revolt itself.
Decembrist Activity
The first Decembrist secret society was the Union of Salvation (Sojuz spaseniia),
formed in February of 1816 by members of two officers dining clubs. At least nine of these members
had connections to masonic lodges. The Union of Salvation's ranks swelled to around 30 members
recruited from the military elite and aristocratic circles of St. Petersburg. The Union of Salvation's
primary aims were the establishment of a constitutional government and the abolition of serfdom.
These two goals, couched in general terms, remained the only two issues that the Decembrists were
able to agree on conclusively for the next two decades. The Union of Salvation disbanded in 1818 over
the issue of regicide. Some factions within the group considered regicide to be an unequivocally
unacceptable step. Others felt certain that not only was regicide necessary, but much of the royal
family would likely also have to die as well. This was an issue about which the Decembrists would
never quite come to an agreement.
132
From the ashes of the Union of Salvation, the more moderate Union of Welfare (Soiuz
blagodenstviia) was formed. This group's charter, known as the Green Book, was, in part, inspired by a
similar liberal German group, the Union of Virtue (Tugendbund). The Union of Welfare glossed over
the conflicts that tore apart its predecessor by emphasizing reform in social affairs rooted in liberal
moral vitality rather than political agitation and reform. Cultivation of culture and philanthropy joined
social justice among the group’s key aims, a shift which drew literary groups and debates into a
phenomenon that had previously been tightly linked to the military. In particular, the poet Fedor
132
The ongoing disagreement about this issue contributed in no small part to the aura of confusion that doomed the revolt
itself.
125
Glinka became a sort of semi-official propagandist for the group and the literary circle, “The Free
Society of Lovers of Russian Literature” (Vol'noe obshchestvo liubitelej rossiiskoi slovestvenosti),
became something of a literary think tank for the group, developing a program for literature that was
both aesthetically and ethically in keeping with the cultural and civic goals espoused by the Union of
Welfare.
While the Union of Welfare's move to broaden the Decembrist program beyond
straightforward political issues allowed it, for a time, to sidestep the issues that tore apart its
predecessor, the core identity conflict of Decembrism was never resolved. The goals of constitutional
government and abolition of serfdom remained constant -- but were those reforms to be accomplished
by reform or revolution? How much violence would be considered an acceptable cost of victory?
Towards whom was it morally acceptable to direct that violence? The Union of Welfare, like all the
Decembrist groups, included members absolutely committed to ideals of peaceful reform and members
equally committed to the ideals of violent revolution, as well as members arguing for a full spectrum of
options in between.
Membership in the group swelled then dwindled, finally falling apart at its January,
1821 meeting in Moscow. Its most committed former members then created the Northern and Southern
Societies, the two groups responsible for the 1825 revolt. The general perception that Alexander I was
turning away from the progressive goals he had once seemed to espouse, shifting instead towards a sort
of messianic, pseudo mystical nationalism, had increased the general feelings of cynicism and
disillusionment among the progressive nobility. While many of the early Union of Welfare members
had held out hope for gradual, peaceful reform instigated by social pressure and advocacy from within
the tsarist system, the progressives who joined the Northern and Southern Societies took as a given
that revolution would be needed to precipitate any meaningful change. While all the previous groups
126
had been more or less secret and, more or less, illegal, the Northern and Southern Societies were active
conspiracies against the imperial Russian state.
The Southern Society, based in Tulchin, coalesced around Pavel Pestel. His 1823
manifesto, “Russian Justice” (Russkaya Pravda), laid out a radical program that called for the
immediate and complete abolition of serfdom, the overthrow of the tsarist state, and the establishment
of a Russian Republic. Pestel's approach, looking to recent uprisings in Spain and Naples, took violent
revolt and regicide for granted as inevitable necessities on the way to enacting the society's goals. His
plan went further in envisioning a radical redistribution of Russian landownership and an aggressively
centralized new government based in Nizhnii Novgorod. Pestel's influence lent the Southern Society a
slightly more radical feel, although many of its members were outright hostile to some of Pestel's more
extreme ideas.
The Northern Society in St. Petersburg found its strongest programmatic voice in Nikita
Muraviev. Muraviev's plan, in contrast to Pestel's European models, was influenced by the American
Revolution and constitution. He basically re-imagined Russia as a constitutional monarchy based on
the US constitution in which the tsar would have authority and power more or less equivalent to the US
president. Serfdom would, of course, be abolished and the people would be given a much greater
franchise in the government, but his plan would not make significant changes to class structure and
land distribution. While this plan also took violent uprising as a necessity, social upheaval was to be
kept to a minimum, and Muraviev wished to avoid regicide if at all possible. His plan would have kept
much of the existing order in place, avoiding such touchy issues as land and class reform. Even though
Muraviev's ideas set the general tone of the Northern Society, many of its members felt that his
approach was too modest in terms of the changes the group sought to affect, and that his belief that the
tsar and elements of the existing government could be cowed into a more limited role was too
idealistic. These doubts were especially common in the younger, newer recruits of the Northern
127
Society, such as Kondratii Ryleev and Alexander Bestuzhev, who became key players in the eventual
uprising.
The societies were united by a yearning for a more progressive Russia and greater social
justice. Neither society had a strong sense of unity as far as actual plans and objectives. Nor could
they agree with each other on much beyond the most basic goals. Ideologically, all the society
members were motivated by a desire for greater social justice to be provided by a more progressive
Russian state. Both groups saw an end to serfdom and the establishment of a constitution as key goals
in achieving those ideals and believed that an armed military uprising would be the best way to achieve
these goals. Both groups wanted to accomplish this while limiting civilian casualties and diminishing
the potential for a Russian repeat of the Terror that followed the French Revolution. As matters stood
in 1825, the two groups had agreed to disagree on any number of points and made a pact that neither
group would initiate revolutionary action without the participation of the other. A meeting was set for
1826, during which the two groups planned to hash out their differences and agree on a unified plan.
Alexander I's unexpected death on November 19
th
, 1825 (old style), caused the two
groups to leap into half formed and indecisive action, which ended in complete disaster. The decision
to take action after Alexander I's death is a curious, but telling choice. The tsar's death, occurring as it
did without warning while he was away from the capital, created a great deal of chaos and confusion.
This confusion was further compounded by Constantine's abdication, which had been kept secret even
from Nicholas for three years. Nicholas famously ordered the military to swear allegiance to
Constantine just days before learning of his brother’s abdication, a fact which the Decembrists used to
recruit the common soldiers to their cause, leading to the famous slogan, “Constantine and
constitution!”
But the advantages conveyed by the confusion of the interregnum were offset by some
very serious disadvantages. The plan that would have been agreed upon in 1826, had the tsar not
128
unexpectedly died, would have been designed to overthrown Alexander I or his presumed successor,
his brother Constantine. Since Nicholas was not expected to succeed to the throne, and because he was
a more or less unknown quantity in any case, it seems very unlikely that the Decembrists sprang into
action solely out of dislike for Nicholas and preference for Constantine, regardless of how dis-likable
Nicholas proved to be after he ascended the throne. Therefore, even though the confusion over the oath
of allegiance proved a successful recruiting tactic, the participants in the actual uprising were trying to
launch a coup they were not prepared for against an heir to throne they knew little about. To make
matters worse, dragging Constantine into the rhetoric of the uprising undercut the ideals of democratic
reform the group had hoped to spread to the common people, making the rebellion look monarchist in
spite of itself. Furthermore, the Northern Society had been betrayed to the authorities on December
12
th
. On the same day, the Southern Society's charismatic principle leader and agitator, Pestel, was
arrested. Surely it would have made more sense to abandon the planned revolt and regroup.
Yet even with all of these factors against them, the Decembrists still leapt into action. In
his monograph on Konstantine Ryleev, Patrick O'Meara suggests that the death of the previous tsar
presented an opportunity for the conspirators beyond the advantage of the social and political chaos
caused by Constantine's abdication. O'Meara points out that, prior to 1855, when Nicholas I was
succeed by his son, Alexander II, the transfer of power from one tsar to another “was invariably a
critical event in Russian history since it tended to proceed somewhat haphazardly . . .”
133
One need
only consider such incongruous Russian events as the Time of Troubles, the establishment of Peter I
and his half-brother as dual tsars, and the accessions of all of the female rulers of the Eighteenth
Century to see O'Meara's point. Upon the death of a Russian tsar prior to 1855, anything could happen.
Given the Orthodox understanding of the tsar's role as God's anointed ruler on earth, these upheavals
would certainly have taken on a certain fatalistic quality, the lack of programmatic succession caused
133
O'Meara, Ryleev, 15.
129
not so much by political caprice but by manifestation of divine will. It's perhaps not too far a leap to
say that, in Russia in 1825, the overthrow of the tsar and his replacement by either a republic or
constitutional monarchy could have been seen as an expression of divine intervention, a sign that God
himself was on the side of the progressives. At the very least, it seems likely that the would-be
revolutionaries would have recognized an opportunity in the death of the tsar and the tumult that had
always followed such a death as a moment when their actions could be spun as heroic rather than
treasonous. This fatalistic quality would manifest itself in significant ways in the culture of
Decembrism.
Decembrist Subculture
In general, those that we call Decembrists were those directly involved in the Northern
and Southern societies and their actions, along with those who perhaps were not present at the actual
revolt, but who we know were listed as members of at least one of the secret societies. However, this is
an issue that rapidly loses clarity when regarding a secret society in which even most of the members
didn't know the full roster of membership. The issue of recruitment and how the societies went about
screening new members is worth discussing. Kondratii Ryleev, for example, was recruited to the
Northern Society rather late-- in 1823-- by Ivan Pushchin, Pushchin, while acquainted with Ryleev
and certainly friendly with him, had not known the other man very long or particularly well. In his
later memoirs, Pushchin, recalling Ryleev's recruitment, suggested that he had wanted to confide in and
recruit his close childhood friend, A.S. Pushkin, but he did not feel that young Pushkin had a
sufficiently reliable character. He goes further in saying, “Ryleev was the only person I recruited to the
union, even though I was always surrounded by many people who shared my way of thinking.”
134
This
episode suggests that names listed as members of the conspiracy represent a specific subset-- those that
other members felt could be trusted-- of the larger group of young gentry who espoused Decembrist
134
I. I. Pushchin, Zapiski o Pushkine (Moscow: Pravda, 1989), 69.
130
ideals. The memoirs of other Decembrists have even suggested that some of the more radical younger
members, Ryleev and the middle two Bezstuzhev brothers for instance, were recruiting like-minded
radicals into their own secret cell within the greater structure of the Northern Society without telling the
older, less radical members. These fears suggest that perhaps no one member knew the extent of the
conspiracy. But even if there were not in fact society members that escaped exposure in the
investigation that followed the uprising, the fears of these more moderate members suggest that they
were aware that this younger, more radical subset was regularly associating with like-minded young
men that were not officially members of the group. If we speak of Decembrism as a cultural
phenomenon rather than a historical event, we need to consider that we are dealing with a social trend
that extends beyond the ranks of the known conspirators.
Furthermore, an initiated member of the Decembrist societies not only had to display the
sort of character the other members could trust but would also have to have moved in the same social
circles as those who were already members. Not only did they have to have opportunity to become
acquainted with members, but they had to have spent time with them in situations where the potential
member's political leanings and opinions could be sounded out. This was not such an easy situation to
come by in Imperial Russia where government informers and secret police lurked almost everywhere.
In the end, those recruited to the Decembrist societies were drawn from three main spheres of social
activity.
131
Among these three social spheres, the role of the military clubs is perhaps the best
known and most straightforward. During the Napoleonic wars, officers of the victorious Russian
military got to see Europe-- especially Paris-- firsthand and spent considerable time socializing with
officers of other nations. This experience created something of a crisis. The military victory proved
Russia's worth as an international power, but Russia seemed culturally and politically backward
compared to late Enlightenment Europe. Many of these officers returned home yearning for their
homeland to change, to prove itself the West's equal culturally as well as militarily. Many of these
officers had experienced the officers clubs that were popular in the West and sought to create
something similar in the Russian army. While some of these clubs remained merely a platform for like-
minded officers to drink and socialize with one another, in other clubs, social discussion turned again
and again to issues of social and political reform. Eventually, members of these more politically
charged officers clubs formed the first Decembrist secret societies. Some of these officers remained
part of the conspiracy to the very end, but many did not. However, one need only look to key
132
Decembrist gestures, such as refusing to take off their swords at balls, and the martial tone of much
Decembrist poetry, to see that Decembrist culture never lost touch completely with its military origins.
Freemasonry and Decembrism
While the origins of the Decembrist societies lie in the military groups, so did the
origins of Russian freemasonry. Many Russians in the army had joined Masonic lodges abroad and had
hoped to create the same atmosphere of mysticism, progressive education, and open political discourse
in Russian lodges. The lodges were equally as appealing to young men with literary and cultural
ambitions who had been forced by the deplorable state of most formal education in Russia to take
charge of their own informal self-education. May of the literary circles of the time were formed to
create a sort of framework for this informal self-education. The Masonic lodges were perceived as
another potential locus for creating a sense of structure and community for those looking to right the
inadequacies of their formal educational and cultural background.
135
Given Freemasonry's notorious,
although potentially unearned, international reputation as a breeding ground of revolutionary
conspiracies, certainly the culture of Freemasonry is a good place to begin discussing the broader
subcultural current that culminates in Decembrism.
Alexander I's growing political paranoia led to full suppression of freemasonry in Russia
in 1822. This political gesture, along with the widespread popular belief that the masons were
responsible for fomenting revolution across Europe, has led many scholars to place a great deal of
emphasis on the first wave of Freemasonry in Russia in the eighteenth century. But, at the end of the
day, Freemasonry in Russia has always been something like an imported house plant bought again and
again that always arrives blooming and vibrant from the hot house but which never again reaches full
flower, even with the most gentle coddling, and that withers outright under the weight of the slightest
neglect.
135
O'Meara, Ryleev, 73
133
The wave of Freemasonry most relevant to Decembrism begins in 1803, when
Alexander I was finally persuaded to ease his earlier prohibitions against Masonic lodges. Masonry
was a popular hobby across Western Europe for many military officers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. During the Napoleonic wars, it was not uncommon for Russian officers to join the lodges of
their non-Russian counterparts. Much like the officer's dinning clubs, another Western European
military hobby of which the Russians partook while fighting Napoleon, whatever these Russian officers
experienced in these foreign lodges was sufficiently inspiring that they attempted to transplant
freemasonry to Russia. In 1820, there were approximately 1,300 initiated masons in Russia.
136
But
most of those initiates were far from active. Rather than internationally united hotbeds of conspiracy
and liberalism, the lodges were places of stagnation and endless conflict over the details of empty
ritual. Freemasonry internationally was going through a turbulent period of reform and upheaval that
bled into the Russian lodges, each of which adhered to a complicated hodgepodge of elements taken
from various different national versions of masonry.
137
Furthermore, the strongest and most active
lodges, while they had some members drawn from the educated gentry, were mostly comprised of
members of the merchant class or sizable numbers of Russian-Germans.
138
These groups had very
different interests and concerns drawing them towards Masonry, none of which included conspiracy or
revolution.
While many of the educated, liberally-minded gentry did join lodges, they often did not
remain active Masons for long. Among the Decembrists proper, Pavel Pestel's five years of active
Masonic membership seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.
139
Furthermore, although Pestel
remained active so long after joining his lodge, by the time of his arrest and interrogation, he afforded
136
Lauren G. Leighton. “Freemasonry in Russian: The Grand Lodge of Astrea (1815-1822),” The Slavonic and East
European Review, V ol. 60, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), 244-261.
137
Ibid.
138
Ibid.
139
O'Meara, Ryleev, 72.
134
the Masons little importance in connection with his Decembrist activities.
140
Kondratii Ryleev's
experience of Masonry seems to be more typical. He joined his lodge with great enthusiasm, even
learning German in order to join, but lost interest and ceased active status after only a year or two.
141
The veil of mysticism that lured would-be masons in the first place often failed to provide even the
vaguest illusion of feel speech without government interference. The language of the Grand Lodge of
Astrea's charter placed an emphasis on patriotism, Orthodoxy, and obedience to the Tsar which would
not have seemed so very out of place next to Nicholas I's reactionary policy of Official Nationality.
While many liberal members of the gentry did join, including some of the most radical would-be
revolutionaries, just as many of the conservatives and reactionaries decided to join.
142
The Freemasonry in Russia during this period was mainly significant for providing a
point of contact for those liberals who had come to the lodges with the same goals and left in
frustration for the same reasons. The Masonic lodges were especially useful in connecting the
liberally-minded members of the military groups, whose dissatisfaction with the Tsarist government
was rooted in firsthand experience of Paris and the West, with similarly liberal and politically
discontented members of various literary groups and factions. Furthermore, even though so many
found the reality of Freemasonry to be disappointing, the fact that so many members of the Decembrist
subculture were drawn to Masonry in the first place exposes a yearning for mysticism and education by
revelation that also might be behind the turn of some Decembrists towards prophecy as a model for
poetry.
Literary Societies and Decembrism
Just as this turn towards secrecy and mysticism is significant, the interest in poetry and
literature in general among the Decembrists is also significant. In his critical survey of the Russian
140
Patrick O'Meara. The Decembrist Pavel Pestel: Russia's First Republican (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),41.
141
O'Meara, K.F . Ryleev, 73.
142
Leighton, “Freemasonry in Russia: The Grand Lodge of Astrea (1815-1822)”
135
Romantic movement, William Edward Brown raises the point that the whole notion of “Decembrist
poetry” is an anachronistic, politically motivated construction developed by Soviet critics. “Soviet
Critics . . . accorded a place in their literary histories to 'Decembrist' poetry, 'Decembrist' thought, and
the like. There is no such thing; each of the poets who participated in the uprising has an individual
style and voice.”
143
Nothing I attempt to put forward here is really meant to contradict this observation.
There were a number of poets among the members of the Northern and Southern Societies, and even
more among the subset of gentry culture who espoused Decembrist values, even if they never actually
joined the conspiracy. But just as the Decembrists held wildly divergent political views on any number
of questions, in formal and thematic aspects the work of these Decembrists poets differ almost as vastly
as poetic convention of the period would allow. And yet we cannot discount the notion of Decembrist
poetry altogether. After all, there must be some significance to the sheer number of conspirators who
were engaged in literary pursuits. A two volume collection of Decembrist writing published by
Khudozhectvennaya Literaura in 1975 includes some 20 authors as well as several agitational songs
assumed to have been written collectively by Decembrist groups. Admittedly, only a few of these
writers contributed poetry of any significant volume or merit. Even so, in a group of young men so
focused on such an intense and dangerous goal, it speaks volumes that so many were willing to take
time off from conspiring to write poetry and compose songs. The Soviet approach to Decembrist
poetry had generally been to show how Decembrist politics were reflected in Decembrist poetry.
Perhaps a more fruitful approach would instead attempt to fit poetry into politics. The question is not
one of how politics manifest in poetry, but rather a question of why and how the participants in this
cultural trend thought poetry had any use in politics.
And poetry very clearly did have some importance in Decembrist culture. Lotman's
influential article on the Decembrist in everyday life points out repeatedly that Decembrist behavior
143
William Edward Brown. History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986), vol. 2, 13.
136
and gestures were frequently patterned on the example of literary texts, sometimes drawn from sources
external to Decembrism, others developed by the literary pursuits of the Decembrists themselves.
144
Lotman goes further in connecting this interest in adhering to literary behavioral models to a key
contradiction in Decembrism as a political movement. In theory, the secret societies were meant to be
just that – secret. The very idea of openly engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow an autocrat seems not
only ill-advised but painfully counter-intuitive. And yet, in a sense, this is exactly what the
Decembrists were doing. Lotman's entire analysis is based on the point that the Decembrist was
identifiable from the non-Decembrist not only on the day of the revolt but in mundane moments of
everyday life. Decembrism was not just a political conspiracy but also a subculture with the attendant
needs of a subculture to define itself both to its constituents and against others. This need was
heightened, as Lotman points out, by the value Romanticism placed on sincerity in self-presentation. A
Romantic could not be an austere, devoted revolutionary conspirator at one of Ryleev's Russian lunches
and then act as just one more dashing, flirtatious officer whirling through the opulence of a mazurka at
a ball later that night without inviting one's compatriots to doubt one's sincerity.
145
Using encoded
literary models to express one's sincerity and consistence to the in-group had the advantage of, to some
degree at least, confounding those outside the groups. The rest of aristocratic society certainly noticed,
for example, the large number of young men who suddenly insisted on wearing their swords to balls
and refusing to dance. Only that group of young men necessarily knew why they should behave in
such a way and what values were suggested by this pattern of behavior. Lotman suggests the reasons
for this complicated pattern of behavior. Decembrism was an uneasy mix of political dissent, the
concealment of which was a matter of life and death, and Romantic heroism, which demanded
144
Iurii Lotman. “The Decembrist in Everyday Life,” The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. A. D. Nakhimovsky
and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, trans. Andrea Beesing, (Ithaca; Cornell University Press, 1985), 95-150.
145
As will be seen in Chapter Three, Ryleev's close friend, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, certainly did try to pose as
both the acetic revolutionary and the hedonistic military officer. While Ryleev seems never to have doubted his friend's
sincerity, plenty of others, including Bestuzhev's own brothers, certainly did.
137
authenticity and sincerity in one's self-presentation. Members of this subcultural therefore were
burdened with a need to reveal their identities as members of a particular group while, at the same time,
concealing what membership in that group actually meant in political terms. These coded patterns of
behavior readily achieved that, especially when they were based in a specific interpretation of a literary
subtext. When we consider the importance of these literary models, the interest of the Decembrist in
verse play and poesy, even among those members who had neither the talent nor the inclination to
become published poets, begins to make a great deal more sense. Taking Lotman's example, for
instance, of the Decembrist wives and their decision to share their husbands' exile, we can see that the
origins of this pattern of behavior begin with Ryleev's historical poems.
146
But those poems alone
would not suffice to create such a powerful pattern in the absence of further extemporization on the
subject by other members of the subculture, both in shared interpretations-- such as letters and
conversations-- and in verse imitation. Verse play becomes a means for the group to communicate
amongst themselves about what literary models to adopt and what the resulting encoded gestures would
mean.
The literary circles gain further importance for Decembrism in that this subculture
needed not only behavioral models to define itself against the mainstream culture but also aesthetic
models. The emergence of Romanticism dictated a need for nationally specific and “sincere”
aesthetics, but in the Russian context, so much of the poetic tradition was intimately tied to the
aesthetics of empire. While poets like Derzhavin had found a way to leverage imperial aesthetics in
order to alter the relationship of poet to empire, and Karamzin's whole school had leveraged the
hierarchies of imperial style in order to remove the poet from engagement with empire, the Decembrist
subculture needed a system of aesthetics that both engaged with empire and subverted it. With this in
mind, it is not surprising that the literary societies of the time contained many members with no interest
146
Lotman, “The Decembrist in Daily Life,”119-124.
138
in Decembrism, but the Decembrist societies contained a great many members interested in the doings
of the literary societies. That the work of the Decembrist poets never settled into a substantially unified
aesthetics does not undermine the fact that they were actively interested in pursuing the creation of
such an aesthetics.
Decembrist subculture and mythic history
As was previously discussed, membership in the Decembrist societies filtered through
the spheres of officers clubs, masonic lodges, and literary societies. The subculture that emerged
placed value on the roles exemplified by these three social groups. The ideal Decembrist was not only
a citizen and warrior, but also a poet with a mystical edge-- albeit a mystical edge filtered through
Enlightenment principles. Given the prohibited nature of this subculture's goals and aspirations, the
pattern of behavior dictated by those ideals had to be debated and discussed through indirect models.
Literature was a key means of developing these models.
The primary source for these literary models seems to have been found in an oddly
selective sort of history. That is, a view of historical events distorted by filtration through Decembrist
experience and values. While Decembrist political models came by and large from relatively
contemporary western sources, Decembrist literary models tended to draw on elements of the Russian
and Orthodox historical past. In place of the autocracy of Ivan IV's Moscow or Peter I's St. Petersburg,
Decembrist culture suggested the psuedo-democracy of Novgorod. Little is actually known about how
the governance of medieval Novogord worked, but in Decembrist thinking it became a repository of an
idealized, democratic Russian spirit. The fight against the Mongols from the east and Teutonic
invasion from the east was recast in terms of rebellion of the people against oppressive governments
usurping the people's rights. Although we see this sort of historical adaptation in the works of various
other liberally minded poets of this generation, Kondratii Ryleev's Dumy, a series of historical lyric
meditations, provides the clearest example of this thinking. In the Dumy numerous historical figures,
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both major and minor, model proper patterns of civic martyrdom, all with a democratic emphasis.
Civic duty is oriented on the people in a way that would have been incomprehensible in medieval
Russia. Ivan Susanin gives his life for Russia, not the Tsar. Sviatapolk, brother and murderer of saints
Boris and Gleb, acts out of undue desire to inflict his tyrannical will on the people. His brothers
become martyrs to civic duty rather than religiously motivated yearning to avoid civil war. Kurbskii's
exile becomes a model of civic mourning, an exile brought on and made more painful by devotion to
the Russian people-- a sharp contrast to the historical Kurbskii, whose break with Ivan IV was
precipitated by concern for the rights of the hereditary nobility, not patriotism or proto-democratic
sensibilities. Historical rulers become unambiguously blood thirsty and evil tyrants. Oleg the Wise
invades Constantinople, but his victims in this invasion are described as the descendants of Brutus,
which in historical terms is a bit of a stretch, but adds a patina of Decembrist values over the whole
episode. Oleg is not just a pagan tyrant. He's an anti-democratic autocrat. Boris Godunov is riddled
with insomnia. Having killed the rightful tsar, he's usurped the throne with the best intentions to do
right by the people, but he's becoming corrupted by the power of his position, haunted by the ghost of
the rightful heir to the throne. The magnificent ambitions of Peter I are contrasted, and perhaps found
wanting, against the unpretentious freedom of the Cossacks. This is not literal history. These are tales
of the past reoriented to address the concerns of the present. In a short, Ryleev's Dumy are a catalog of
Decembrist myths.
This creation of historical and literary myths as a means of generating behavioral
models was not limited to medieval Russian history. Even in the Dumy, Ryleev turns to religious
models in the form of saints' lives, and more recent poetic models. The last of the published Dumy
concerns Derzhavin. The poem follows the popular form of graveside elegy. The lyric persona is a
young poet mourning at Derzhavin's grave who, through confronting the end of the poet's mortal body,
comes to realize the immortality of the poet's words and the model he provided for future poets. The
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last few stanzas of the poem in particular express the model that Ryleev sees in Derzhavin in terms that
should seem very familiar to those familiar with the conflation of poet and prophet. In lines 49-52, the
poet's duty is holy truth: “О, так! нет выше ничего / Предназначения поэта: / Святая правда - долг
его.”
*
Derzhavin is discussed in relation to the prophets, passing on their message of the ruler's
obligation to the people, specifically society's weakest members, widows and orphans, in lines 68-72:
“Он так гремел с святым пророком: / 'Ваш долг на сильных не взирать, / Без помощи, без
обороны / Сирот и вдов не оставлять / И свято сохранять законы.'”
*147
The poem references two of
Derzhavin's specific poems, connecting him with the classical past through reference to Derzhavin's
“Monument” (Pamiatnik), but also to Derzhavin's conflation of poet and prophet by referencing “To
Rulers and Judges,” (Vlastiteliam i sudiiam). Clearly the myth of Derzhavin that Ryleev wishes to hold
up for emulation is Derzhavin as the poet-prophet. However, Ryleev's poem suggests less interest in
this model of poet-prophet as a means of negotiating with the tsar on behalf of the people, which
comprised the bulk of Derzhavin's interest in developing this pose, and more in the potential of this
position as a means of advocating for and mobilizing the people. This is further suggested by Ryleev's
choice of poetic reference. While “To Rulers and Judges” is far from the only re-figuration of
prophetic text in Derzhavin's oeuvre, as seen in the previous chapter, it is somewhat different from the
poet's usual work. It was, in fact, seen as such a radical attack on autocratic rule that the first version of
the poem could not be published. For Catherine II's official panegyricist, this was a rare gesture of
discontent and rebellion that took on powerful meaning for later poets. Furthermore, the subtext of the
poem is not Isaiah or Ezekiel or the writings of one of the more typical Hebrew prophets. “To Rulers
and Judges” is modeled very overtly on Psalm 82.
*
O, yes! There is nothing higher / than to be the poet of destiny: / holy truth is his duty.
*
He thundered like the holy prophet / “Your duty is not to gaze upon the strong. / Those without help, without defense /
the widows and orphans, do not forsake them / and keep the sacred laws.”
147
K.F. Ryleev, “Derzhavin,” Sochineniia (Leningrad: Khudozhectvennaia literatura, 19870, 144.
141
While Ryleev's poem is not in itself a re-figuration of prophetic text, it does begin to
present an argument for a continuance and adaptation of the poet-prophet model developed by earlier
poets that could answer the needs of Decembrist subculture. Not only does “Derzhavin” directly quote
one of Derzhavin's most potent prophetic poems, the use of history throughout the Dumy as a means of
elucidating current crises and as a predictor of future victory recalls the telescoping of time seen in the
book of Isaiah and other prophetic texts. As discussed at length in Chapter One, the words of the
Hebrew prophets can almost always be traced back to a concrete socio-political situation contemporary
to the prophet himself while at the same time espousing principles which are just as relevant to the
future as to the present. The past is used both to reinforce the prophet's visions of the future and to
establish the eternal quality of the values in which the prophet grounds his call to action. The
Decembrist poets-- warriors, poets, would-be mystics and revolutionaries-- would find their prophetic
model in the Hebrew prophet who most closely resembled their own image of themselves, the mythic
author of the Psalms-- the young David.
Glinka-- Experiments in Sacred poetry
If any one poet among the Decembrists could be expected to look to biblical prophesy as
a behavioral and aesthetic model, it would be Fedor Glinka. Glinka's background-- second son of an
older gentry family of limited means-- was typical of most of the men attracted to the secret societies.
But unlike many (Ryleev, for instance), whose formal education had been crippled by Alexander I's
increasingly odd and reactionary educational reforms,
148
Glinka had the good fortune to have an older
brother, Sergei, who had been educated in the infantry cadet corps in St. Petersburg during the
administration of Count Agnal't, “during whose benevolent administration instructors aimed more at
'virtue' than at the acquisition of facts. One studied ancient history to find role-models from the stories
148
Franklin A. Walker. “Enlightenment and Religion in Russian Education Under the Reign of Tsar Alexander I,” History
of Education Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3 (Autumn, 1992), 343-360.
142
of heroes. Bookish boys devoured Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau outside of class with the
encouragement of their teacher.”
149
While Fedor Glinka spent far less time in the infantry corps than
his brother and, by the time of his enrollment, the standard of education had fallen drastically, his older
brother took great pains to pass his own sentimental Enlightenment education on to all his siblings.
Fedor and Sergei would eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the politically divide as
Alexander I's reign drew to a close, but both were passionately invested in progressive, Enlightenment
ideals and social justice. Sergei, like many 18
th
century thinkers, looked to find these values in
autocratic paternalism while Fedor began, with much of his generation, to turn towards revolution.
None the less, their values remained similar and Sergei's influence on his brother's intellectual
development cannot be discounted.
Fedor was one of the earliest officers and poets to join the secret societies. He was a
member of both the Union of Salvation and the Union of Welfare. He acted as a sort of semi-official
propagandist for the latter. He was not, however, a coherent political theorist, like Muraviev or Pestel,
and, although his writings evince ongoing interest in the Decembrist cause and its values, he ceased
involvement in the conspiracy after the dissolution of the Union of Welfare. The impact of his poetry
on the later Decembrist poets is debatable. He had neither Küchelbecker's carefully cultivated poetic
skill nor Ryleev's raw and forceful poetic talent. His poetry was probably known to his younger
contemporaries, but likely less influential than the early explorations of progressive values by more
promising poets such as Viazemskii, Pushkin, and Griboedov. But his poetry was infused with both a
religious sensibility and a quest for edifying historical and literary models for behavior – two elements
that would make him an ideal candidate for systematizing a particularly Decembrist model of the
Russian poet-prophet.
149
Franklin A. Walker. “Reaction and Radicalism in the Russia of Tsar Alexander I: the Case of the Brothers Glinka,”
Canadian Slavonic Paper, vol. 21, No. 4.
143
Experiments in Sacred Poetry (Opyty sviashchennoi poezii) represented a systematized
collection of free translations of Psalms that Glinka had been working on throughout the 1820s. The
collection as a whole was first published in 1826, but most of the poems had been published or publicly
recited much earlier, often in markedly Decembrist outlets such as Ryleev and Bezstuzhev's journal,
The Polar Star (Poliarnaya zvezda). Glinka apparently showed Ryleev the proofs for the full
collection just days before the uprising. Harsha Ram, discussing the general Decembrist turn towards
psalms, describes this collection of poems as “only the most systematic attempt at promoting a
spiritually charged form of civic opposition, couched in the eighteenth-century tradition of 'sacred
ode'.”
150
To a certain extent, this is fair evaluation and dismissal of Experiments in Scared Poetry. The
poems it contains follow a long Russia tradition, going back at least as far as Polotsky's Psaltyr’, of
free translations of the Psalms, save that Glinka clearly integrates the values and concerns of his
particular moment. Some of the poems in the collection adapt an entire psalm, but most take up only
parts of a psalm or, in the case of one poem, “Call to Isaiah” (Prizvanie Isaji), take another biblical
passage and shape it into psalmic rhetoric. Glinka's major alterations to his source material are
stylistic, rather than thematic in nature. While some of the poems maintain the ponderous quality of
the Slavonic bible and the eighteenth-century adaptations that precede Glinka's work, many take on a
lighter, elegiac tone that more closely resembles the aesthetic goals of what Lydia Ginzberg called the
school of harmonious precision. This can be seen particularly well in the poem “Happiness of the
Righteous,” (Blazhenstvo pravednogo). This poem takes Psalm 1 as its subtext, a fairly typical psalm,
which contrasts celebration of life lived in accordance with God's will with the suffering felt by those
who have rejected God. Glinka expands on his subtext, which is a mere 6 verses long, as a means of
suggesting different harmonious, non-Slavonic sounding alternatives for the basic lines of the psalm,
dragging Romantic, but not particularly psalmic motifs into the mix. Similarly, the poem, “Moment of
150
Ram, The Imperial Sublime,144.
144
Happiness” (Minuta schastia), seems to be a very straightforward early romantic elegy with occasional
gestures towards psalmic language. Some of these adaptations even struck contemporaries as jocular
or funny. Pushkin, in his diary, suggested that, in one of the more militant sounding poems, Glinka had
put Davydov's words into God's mouth.
151
While it's not entirely clear to which poem Pushkin was
referring, “Victory” (Pobeda), a second adaptation of Psalm 1 which takes a much more martial and
exuberant tone, would be a likely candidate.
While Glinka's goals in Experiments in Sacred Poetry seem to have had more to do with
aesthetics than with thematic issues, in some cases, Glinka's choice of biblical material and the
thematic alterations he makes to that material offer a great deal of insight into the evolution of
prophetic poetry from the Isaiah model of Derzhavin to the David model of the Decembrists. The
choice of material is still telling. For instance, in a collection almost entirely modeled on the psalms,
Glinka includes “Call to Isaiah,” a poem that directly engages Derzhavin's prophetic model on its own
terms, but also refigures the Book of Isaiah in to line with the Psalms.
Призвание Исайи
Иди к народу, мой Пророк!
Вещай, труби слова Еговы!
Срывай с лукавых душ покровы
И громко обличай порок!
Иди к народу, мой Пророк!
Вещай: "Не я ль тебя лелеял
И на руках моих носил?
151
A.S. Pushkin, Polnow Sobranie sochinenie (Leningrad: Nauka, 1977-79, vol. 8,64.
145
Тебе в пустынях жизнью веял,
Тебя в безводии поил;
А ты, народ неблагодарный,
Ты ласки все забыл Отца!
Как змеи - души в вас коварны.
Как камни - черствые сердца!
Что сделали с моим законом?
Где лет минувших чудеса?
Мой слух пронзен невинных стоном,
Их вопли движут небеса...
А ваши сильные и князи,
Пируя сладкие пиры,
Вошли с грабителями в связи
И губят правду за дары.
Где правота, где суд народу?
Где вы, творящие добро?
В вино мешаете вы воду,
Поддел и ложь - в свое сребро!
Вы слепы, иудейски грады!
Я поднял реки из брегов,
И насылал к вам трус и глады,
И двигал бури вместо слов.
А вы, как камни, не смягчались,
И бог ваш, стиснув гром, терпел;
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Но лета благости скончались".
О, страх! Егова загремел!
Напал на сердце ужас хладный!
Я зрю мятеж и страх в умах:
Промчался с криком коршун жадный,
Послышав гибель на полях.
Увы, Израиль! Весь ты клятва!
Ты спал под песнями льстецов;
Но се грехов созрела жатва -
И бог пошлет своих жнецов!..
"На что мне созидаешь храмы?
Мне аромат твоих кадил
И многоценны фимиамы -
Как смрад раскопанных могил!
Ты знаешь сам, что мне приятно:
Одну люблю я правоту.
Зачем же судишь ты превратно?
За что ты губишь сироту?
Омой корыстную десницу,
Лукавство вырви из души,
Будь нищим друг, спасай вдовицу!
Тогда, без жертв своих, спеши,
Как добрый сын, ко мне пред очи:
Я все грехи твои стерплю;
147
Будь черен ты, как сумрак ночи,
Тебя, как день, я убелю!"
152
Call to Isaiah
Go to the people, my prophet!
Preach, trumpet the words of Jehovah
Tear the veils from crafty souls
And loudly rebuke vice!
Go to the people, my prophet!
Preach: “Have I not cherished you
and carried you in my hands?
I blew you living through the desert,
gave you drink when their was no water;
And you, ungrateful people,
You forgot all the Father's tenderness!
Like snakes-- the souls in you are insidious.
Like rocks-- you hearts are hard!
What have you done with my law?
Where are the miracles of years past?
My ears are pierced with innocent moans,
Their cries drive to heaven . . .
And your strong ones and princes,
152
F.N. Glinka. Sochinenia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1986), 220.
148
Feasting on sweet feasts
Have entered into compact with thieves
And ruin the truth of blessings:
Where is rectitude, where is the people's justice?
Where are you, doers of good deeds?
You mix wine with water,
It taunts and lies from its silver cup
You are blind, city of Israel!
I have lifted the river from its banks
And visited you with cowardice and famine
And animated storms in place of words.
But you, like stones are not softened,
And your God, clutching thunder, endured;
But the kindness of summer has passed away.”
Oh, terror! Jehovah has thundered!
With horror he has attacked the frozen hear!
I see sedition and fear in your minds:
With a cry, the greedy vulture races,
Hearing of slaughter in the fields.
Alas, Israel! All you are is your vow!
You slept under the songs of flatterers;
But behold the harvest of sin is ripe--
And god will send his reapers! . .
“What is the building of churches to me?
149
To me the scent of your censors
and precious incense--
Is as the stench of unearthed graves!
You yourself know, what I find pleasing;
Rectitude alone I love.
Why to you judge wrongly?
Why to you bring the orphan to ruin?
Wash the selfishness from your right hand,
Gouge out craftiness from your soul,
Be a friend to the poor, save the widow!
Then, without sacrificing them, hurry
Like a good son, to me before my eyes:
I will swallow all your sins;
Were you black, as the gloom of night,
I would make you as white as the day!”
The poem does not adapt any one specific passage of Isaiah. Instead, the rhetorical
shape of the entire book of Isaiah is condensed into this one poem. It should be noted, however, that
the poem strips Isaiah of much of the political orientation on rulers suggested by the earlier adaptations
of this model. In fact, the references to rulers, judges, and concern for widows and orphans harkens
back to Derzhavin's “To Rulers and Judges” and its subtext, Psalm 82 as much as to the book of Isaiah.
While the poem mentions Israel as context and uses an archaic Hebrew name for God, egov, the poem
lacks the clear sense of geographical and political space we see in Isaiah and the other more traditional
prophetic books. In fact this lack of specificity constitutes one of the key differences between the
150
Psalms and the more traditional prophetic books.
153
Rather than adapting Isaiah on the terms set by that
book, Glinka bends the Isaiah model into the prophetic model of Psalms. I would argue that this choice
reveals at least one major reason for Glinka's interest in adapting the Psalms specifically. Psalms offers
a very particular model of prophecy that harmonizes conveniently with several aspects of Decembrist
subculture.
The first issue to consider concerns the Psalms and authorship – or at least, mythically
attributed authorship. The very ideas of Psalms is integrally linked with a particular biblical figure--
specifically King David, and the convention of considering Psalms a prophetic book is based on the
notion of David as a prophet. But David as a mythic figure is much more than just another prophet.
Whereas the role of the other prophets was most often to negotiate with the king, David receives his
prophetic calling and his calling to kingship virtually simultaneously. He occupies many roles, but his
role as prophet is emphasized far less than his roles as king, warrior, and singer. It is exactly this
multiplicity of roles that makes David so appealing to Decembrism. Just as Decembrist identity is
filtered through military, mystical, and poetic dimensions all tied to the notion of the good citizen,
David as a mythic figure also contains military, mystical, poetic, and civic elements.
The paradox of David lies in that, although he is the penultimate Old Testament model
of sacred king, the model on which European absolute monarchy would be modeled, David attains this
power by rebelling against a still living king. Different aspects of his story can be used to prop up
theocratic autocracy just as readily as they can serve as justification for revolutionaries. In the
powerful combination of roles that is David, a great many key elements of Decembrist culture are
united into a model with intense cultural power. While David's call to kingship comes from God
through the prophet Samuel, David's worthiness as a potential king is proved through both his military
and poetic prowess. Furthermore, David's poetic skills-- as illustrated by the prophetic nature of the
153
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 95-96.
151
psalms-- also have a mystical level. This mystical level is further emphasized by his connection to the
prophet Samuel, suggesting his initiation into a mystical tradition of prophets. These three poles of
David-- military, mystical, and poetic-- echo the three social areas-- officers clubs, masonic lodges, and
literary societies-- from which the Decembrists emerged.
Why, then, does Glinka adapt the psalms rather than the narrative biblical passages that
address David's story? For several reasons, all contained within the structure and poetics of the psalms
themselves as literary texts. The psalms offer a generality of both context and of poetic voice that
allow the poet both the audacity of speaking in the psalmist's voice and of concealing himself and his
political goals. Glinka's interest in shifting styles and aesthetics would be wasted if no one could
recognize his subtext. Psalms may be the best known book of the Old Testament in Orthodox practice.
Psalms make up a sizable and regular part of the liturgy, ensuring that even those who were not
particularly devout or interested in religion would have heard the texts recited multiple times over the
course of their lives. This does not mean that David as a mythic figure and model disappear from view.
In fact, Glinka uses one of the few psalms that directly reference David's story as the subtext for one of
the longest poems in the collection, “Grief and Grace” (Gore i blagodat'). This poem, based on Psalm
78, remains fairly faithful to the content of its subtext, although it mixes up the order of different
passages a bit and either condenses or omits some of the psalm's detailed digressions into Hebrew
history. Both Psalm 78
154
and Glinka's poem mention that God chose David,
155
but while both suggest
David as the resolver of the problems discussed earlier in each text, the psalm calls on its favorite
metaphor of shepherding. Glinka, instead, calls David a humble warrior, harking back to the story of
David and Goliath. David remains an important element in both texts, but for Glinka, his potential as
154
“70 He chose David, his servant and took him from the sheep pens; 71 from tending the sheep he brought him to be the
shepherd or his people Jacob, of Israel his inheritance. 72 And David shepherded them with integrity of heart; with
skillful hands he led them.
155
“Бог избрал кроткого Давида, / И дал он юному борцу / Свой дух, свое благословенье, / И повелел престать
беде.” (God chose meek David, / and He gave the young warrior / his spirit, his blessing, / and commanded him to bring an
end to troubles.)
152
an underdog revolutionary warrior matters more than his leadership skills-- whether in leading sheep or
nations. This change shows the importance of David as a literary-behavioral model, but through using
the Psalms as his subtext, Glinka ensures that any audience reasonably familiar with the Psalms would
notice the change and appreciate which aspect of David's story he wishes to hold up as a model.
Another virtue of the psalms-- at least as far as concerns Glinka's project-- lies in that, of
all the prophetic books of the bible other than perhaps Proverbs, Psalms offers the least socio-historical
specificity and the texts require very little if any contextualization. With very little tweaking, the
landscape of a given psalm can shift from Israel to ancient Greece, to the Caucasus, to the steppes of
Ukraine. The workers of inequity, whose historical identity has long been a mystery, can draw in
persons from the poet's own context without metaphoric stretching. Those few specific points of
reference in Psalms (ex. Zion, Babylon, Jerusalem) may seem very specific in their original Hebrew
context, but Christian tradition had long since refigured these points of reference into more generalized
metaphors for the Christian experience. Glinka makes use of this in one of the more politically pointed
poem in the collection, “Cry of the Imprisoned Jews.”
Плач Плененных Иудеев
На реках вавилонских тамо
седохом и плакахом, внегда
помянута нам Сиона.
Псалом 136
Когда, влекомы в плен, мы стали
От стен сионских далеки,
Мы слез ручьи не раз мешали
С волнами чуждыя реки.
153
В печали, молча, мы грустили
Всё по тебе, святой Сион;
Надежды редко нам светили,
И те надежды были - сон!
Замолкли вещие органы,
Затих веселый наш тимпан.
Напрасно нам гласят тираны:
"Воспойте песнь сионских стран!"
Сиона песни - глас свободы!
Те песни слава нам дала!
В них тайны мы поем природы
И бога дивного дела!
Немей, орган наш голосистый,
Как занемел наш в рабстве дух!
Не опозорим песни чистой:
Не ей ласкать злодеев слух!
Увы, неволи дни суровы
Органам жизни не дают:
Рабы, влачащие оковы,
154
Высоких песней не поют!
156
Cry of the Imprisoned Jews
By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
Psalm 137
When, drawn into captivity, we stood
Far from the walls of Zion
More than once, our streams of tears disturbed
The foreign river in waves.
In sadness, silent, we grieved
All for you, holy Zion;
Rarely did hope shine for us,
And those hopes were – but a dream!
Foresighted authorities have fallen silent,
And our cheerful drums sound no more.
In vain, the tyrants order us:
“Sing of the land of Zion!”
Songs of Zion-- the voice of freedom!
Those songs that gave us glory!
In them we sing of mysterious nature
156
F.N. Glinka. Sochinenia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1986), 228.
155
and of the wondrous deeds of God!
Become mute, oh our clamorous organ,
As our spirits went mute in bondage!
Do not desecrate the pure song:
Do not use it to caress the villains ears!
Alas, these harsh days of captivity
Do not give our organs life:
Slaves, dragged in shackles,
Will not sing the elevated songs!
Like many of the poems in Experiments in Sacred Poetry, this poem contains an
epigraph that directly exposes the subtext. In many ways, like many poems in the collection, it is a
very straightforward adaptation of its subtext. In this case the major difference is that the original
psalm goes back and forth between pleas to sing and the inability of the exiled Jews to do so whereas
the poem focuses almost exclusively on the later. There are also some slight stylistic shifts suggestive
of Glinka's stylistic goals. For example, the original song references harps as the instrument that falls
silent. Glinka instead mentions timbrels (timpan). This may seem an odd choice. Harps and lyres seem
to feature more commonly in school of harmonious precision works that minor folk instruments. But
this particular poem isn't about poetry or poets falling silent. This is rather an undercut pastoral,
framed around the countryside and rivers and concerning common people rather than those of elevated
poetic gift. Thus timbrels falling silent harmonizes better with the goals of the poem. These minor
points of interest aside, the major achievement of this poem occurs in its exploitation of psalmic
contextualization to both reveal and obscure its political thrust. Without words like Zion, Babylon, and
156
Jew, this is clearly an attack on serfdom that reveals the joyless injustice of slavery. Certainly those in
sympathy with Decembrist objections to serfdom could easily have read it as such. But because those
words are included and the poem is set as an adaptation of a psalm, that reading is concealed from less
sympathetic eyes behind a veil of traditional religious interpretation. The poem, Glinka could easily
have argued to the censor or his critics, might just as easily be about the misery of human enslavement
to sin before the coming of Christ. How could a profoundly Orthodox autocracy object to that?
Furthermore, the generalized narrative persona of the Psalms lends itself to a poetic
narrative voice in a way that limits the hubris implied in taking on the voice of another prophet, while
simultaneously allowing the poet to lay claim to David's narrative of rebellion and power. The text
itself makes no claim to speak with David's voice, or to be the voice of a prophet with a special insight
into God's will. Yet in hearing a psalmic text, the audience immediately connects the poetic voice to
that of David, allowing the poet to both conceal and elevate the degree of his identification with the
biblical figure.
Additionally, the rhetoric of Psalms has particular appeal from a Decembrist standpoint.
Psalms upend the typical prophetic triangle by uniting the voice of the prophet with the voice of the
people. Psalms of David further this process by uniting the voice of the prophet and the king. This has
the additional effect of uniting the king and people into one voice. In the more typical prophetic
structure, the prophet's function is to stand apart from God, king, and people and negotiate the
relationships between them. In Psalms, we see direct communication with God where one prophet
speaks as proxy for the many. In the Psalms, more so than any other prophetic book, the prophet
speaks not only to but for the people. The first person voice of the psalms may be singular, but both the
use of that lyric voice to embody the experiences of all the people of Israel and the Psalms long history
of use in communal worship create a sense in the audience that the psalmic voice is the many speaking
157
with one voice.
157
Through adopting David the psalmist rather than David the King, a poet is able to
divert the powerful political channel of rule by divine right in to more democratic banks. The goal of
previous poets had been to carve out a place of power for the poet within the structure of tsarist society.
For them, the appeal of adopting prophecy as a poetic model lay exactly in the traditional role of the
prophet as a person apart from but engaged with society and politics. For the Decembrists, the role of
the poet in society was secondary to a desire to radically alter the structure of that society. The political
and social changes they sought echoed the changes wrought by Psalms in the traditional structure of the
prophetic transaction.
At the same time, the Psalms maintain the defining rhetorical dynamic of Hebrew
prophecy-- the dialectic between of doom/chastisement and consolation. As mentioned in the
discussion of the Isaiah model of prophecy in the previous chapter, this “carrot and stick” dynamic
drives the rhetorical power of prophetic works by allowing the audience (whether that audience is
suggested as king or people) either to fall in line with the prophet's demands and receive God's
consolation or to continue on their current path and be damned. This rhetorical dynamic already
suggests the merging of the different elements of the prophetic transaction as we see them manifest in
Psalms. And it also reflects the rhetorical dynamics that existed within Decembrist circles-- the black
and white world view that they applied to all those not in sympathy with their cause of revolution and
change, along with a driving need for unity of purpose and direction that hamstrung the secret societies'
actions to the bitter end.
Glinka's poetry makes a conscious turn toward Psalms and David as aesthetic and
behavioral models. The need for such models, as discussed by Lotman, was manifest across
Decembrist subculture. Glinka in particular came from a background that inclined him towards
seeking out and experimenting with such models. However, Glinka remains a poet of modest
157
Cook, The Burden of Prophecy, 88-89.
158
reputation and influence who had little involvement in the most radical phases of Decembrism. Two
younger, much more influential poets would have to take up Glinka's use of Psalms in order to establish
David as a significant behavioral model.
Wilhelm Küchelbecker
In the case of Wilhelm Küchelbecker, an interest in and identification with David is both
obvious and has been the object of previous scholarly study.
158159
Küchelbecker holds a somewhat
contradictory place in the literary climate of his day. One of the last of the Archaists to defy the legacy
of Karamzin, much of his poetic work draws inspiration from 18
th
century and classical sources. Yet
his oeuvre, especially in later works like David, is defined by audacious, genre bending
experimentation which seeks to blend obscure classical and neoclassical elements with seemingly
incompatible Romantic ideals and stylistic elements. Küchelbecker was introduced to one element of
his poetic experiments during his brief acquaintanceship with his idol, Griboedov, while in Georgia.
Küchelbecker would recall in years later in his diary that Griboedov had encouraged him to read the
works of the Hebrew prophets. While Küchelbecker's diary entries would save his highest praise for
the Book of Isaiah, in his poetry the psalms and story of David would have the greatest influence.
Küchelbecker refigures David in his own image consciously, deliberately, and with full awareness of
the place of such a strategy in Russian literary history.
160
His first attempts to refigure David occur in the lyric poems of his Decembrist period,
such as “Prophecy” (Prorochestvo).
Пророчество
Глагол господень был ко мне
158
Renata Gal’tseva. “Poet i tsar’ David.” Pushkin cherez dvesti let (Moscow: Institut mirovoi literaturi im. A.M. Gor'kogo,
2002).
159
Kolodiazhnaia, Liudmila. “Pervyi psalom Davida v perelozheniiakh russkikh poetov,” Grani: Zhurnal Literaturi
Iskusstva, Nauki i Oshchestvenno-Politicheskoi Musli, no. 163, 1992, 158-171
160
Kolodiazhnaia, Liudmila. “Pervyi psalom Davida v perelozheniiakh russkikh poetov”.
159
За цепью гор на бреге Кира:
"Ты дни влачишь в мертвящем сне;
В объятьях леностного мира:
На то ль тебе я пламень дал
И силу воздвигать народы? -
Восстань, певец, пророк Свободы!
Вспрянь, возвести, что я вещал!
Никто - но я воззвал Элладу;
Железный разломил ярем:
Душа ее не дастся аду;
Она очистится мечем,
И, искушенная в горниле,
Она воскреснет предо мной:
Ее подымет смертный бой;
Она возблещет в новой силе!"
Беснуясь, варвары текут;
Огня и крови льются реки;
На страшный и священный труд
Помчались радостные греки;
Младенец обнажает меч,
С мужами жены ополчились,
И мужи в львов преобразились
Среди пожаров, казней, сеч!
Костьми усеялося море,
160
Судов могущий сонм исчез:
Главу вздымая до небес.
Грядет на Византию горе!
Приспели грозные часы:
Подернет грады запустенье;
Не примет трупов погребенье,
И брань за них подымут псы!
Напрасны будут все крамолы;
Святая сила победит!
Бог зыблет и громит престолы;
Он правых, он свободных щит! -
Меня не он ли наполняет
И проясняет тусклый взор?
Се предо мной мгновенно тает
Утесов ряд твердынь и гор!
Блестит кровавая денница;
В полях волнуется туман:
Лежит в осаде Триполицца
И бодр, не дремлет верный стан!
Священный пастырь к богу брани
Воздел трепещущие длани;
В живых молитвах и слезах
Кругом вся рать простерлась в прах.
С бойниц неверный ям смеется,
161
Злодей подъемлет их на смех:
Но Кара в облаках несется;
Отяжелел Османов грех!
Воспрянул старец вдохновенный,
Булат в деснице, в шуйце крест:
Он вмиг взлетел на вражьи стены;
Огонь и дым и гром окрест!
Кровь отомстилась убиенных
Детей и дев, сирот и вдов!
Нет в страшном граде пощаженных:
Всех, всех глотает смертный ров! -
И се вам знаменье Спасенья,
Народы! - близок, близок час:
Сам Саваоф стоит за вас!
Восходит солнце обновленья!
Но ты, коварный Альбион,
Бессмертным избранный когда-то,
Своим ты богом назвал злато:
Всесильный сокрушит твой трон!
За злобных тайный ты воитель!
Но будет послан ангел-мститель;
Судьбы ты страшной не минешь:
Ты день рожденья проклянешь!
Тебя замучают владыки;
162
И чад твоих наляжет страх;
Во все рассыплешься языки,
Как вихрем восхищенный прах.
Народов чуждых песнью будешь
И притчею твоих врагов,
И имя славное забудешь
Среди бичей, среди оков!
А я - и в ссылке, и в темнице
Глагол господень возвещу:
О боже, я в твоей деснице!
Я слов твоих не умолчу! -
Как буря по полю несется,
Так в мире мой раздастся глас
И в слухе Сильных отзовется:
Тобой сочтен мой каждый влас!
161
Prophecy
The word of God reached me
Beyond the chain of the mountains on the banks of the Kura:
“You eke out your life in deadening slumber,
In the embrace of an indolent world:
Was it for this that I gave you the flame
And the power to make the people rise up?--
161
W.K. Küchelbecker. Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1967), vol. 1, 159-160.
163
Arise, bard, prophet of Freedom!
Leap up, and announce what I have preached!
None-- but I have summoned Hellas;
Broken her iron yoke:
Her soul will not surrender to hell;
But will be purified through the sword,
And, tested in the forge,
She will resurrect before me:
She will be lifted up by mortal struggle;
And glow in her new strength!
Out pour the barbarians, raging,
Out gush rivers of fire and blood;
To their terrible and sacred work
Rushed the joyous Greeks;
The child took up the sword,
And the women, with the men, took up arms,
And the men were transformed into lions
In the midst of fires, executions, clubs!
The sea is littered with bones,
The multitude of able ships vanished:
Heads raised up to the heavens.
Grief unto Byzantium!
The terrible hours have ripened:
Mark the cities for desolation;
164
Do not take the corpses for burial,
The battle will leave them for the dogs!
But in vain shall be all rebellions:
The sacred might shall triumph!
God shakes thrones and smites them with thunder:
He shields the righteous and the free!
Has he not filled me,
And made my dull gaze clear?
In but a moment, he melts away
The array of cliffs, the fortress, the mountain!
Bloody Lucifer glitters;
Fog rolls through the fields:
Siege is laid to Tripoli
And, confident, the camp does not doze!
At the battle, the sacred shepherd of god
Raises his trembling hand;
With living prayers and tears
The whole army has prostrated itself in the dust.
From the arrow slits, the faithless laugh,
The evil one mocks them with laughter:
But Retribution is carried in the clouds;
The Ottomans are weighed down with sin!
The old man, inspired, has sprung up,
In his right hand, steel, in his left, the cross:
165
In a flash, he has flown to the enemy's walls;
Fire and smoke and thunder abound!
He avenges the blood of the slain
Children and virgins, orphans and widows!
Sparring nothing from the terrible hail:
All, all is swallowed by the deathly pit!--
And lo, a sign of salvation come to you,
People!-- the hour is nigh, nigh!
The Almighty Himself stands behind you!
The sun rises renewed!
But you, perfideous Albion,
Once chosen, immortal,
Who once God called his gold:
The Omnipotent will crush your throne!
For secretly you fought for evil!
But to you will be sent an avenging angel;
You won't avoid your terrible fate:
You were cursed from the day of your birth!
The ruler will torment you;
And terror will cover your children;
And all tongues with disintegrate,
Like dust carried away by the whirlwind.
You will be a song of foreign peoples
And a parable to your enemies,
166
And forget the glorious name
Amidst scourges, amidst fetters!
And I-- even in exile, even in prison
Shall proclaim the word of the Lord:
Oh God, I am in your right hand!
I will not keep silent your words!--
As the storm sweeps across the field,
So the world will hear my voice,
And resound in the ears of the Strong:
You have counted each hair on my head!
Unlike Glinka's Experiments in Sacred Poetry, which comprises free adaptations of specific psalms,
“Prophecy” is structured as a sort of new psalm, replicating the structure and dynamics of its biblical
antecedents while replacing Hebrew values and points of reference with Küchelbecker's own. Take, for
instance the opening, many psalms, especially those ascribed to David, open with a cry to God, after
which God's voice descends to the psalmist. Many others open with the psalmist speaking the word of
God with God's voice having already come to the prophet. Küchelbecker follows the later pattern
while using the first line, “The word of God came to me . . .,” to securely suggest that the former step
has been taken. The landscape suggested by the poem, that of rivers and mountains, also recalls the
landscape of the psalms. But the holy mountain featured in many psalms is replaced by a location in
the Caucasus Mountains as indicated by the reference to the Kura river. A second voice emerges which
calls the lyric/psalmic persona to prophecy, suggesting that this second voice is that of God.
Küchelbecker then shifts this psalmic motif to Decembrist purposes by using this
godlike second voice to call the lyric persona prorok svobodi, Prophet of Freedom. He substitutes
Hellas, rather than Israel, for the nation this prophet shall awaken and exhalt. Harsha Ram, in The
167
Imperial Sublime, argues that this passage refers to the Greek war for independence against the
Ottoman Turks.
162
William Edward Brown, by contrast, argues that “Hellas” suggests Küchelbecker's
archaist poetic program, blending slavonicisms with classical references.
163
While the reference to
Hellas may reflect either or both of these issues, its inclusion shows Küchelbecker grafting his own
context and values onto the form of a psalm. The rest of the poem is torn between descriptions of
God's glory, the main point of the entire concept of a psalm, description of the prophet's enemies, both
in terms of the futility of their actions and their vileness, and the ultimate triumph of God's will, in this
case freedom, in spite of any persecution of the poet. All this does not reflect any one psalm, but rather
general patterns for a psalm. The imagery likewise is a mix of typical psalmic motifs and symbols
particular to Küchelbecker's world view.
Küchelbecker's approach suggests a certain deliberateness and study. While most
Russians would have been familiar with many of the psalms simply through their recitation in the
liturgy and perhaps have read them as part of religious study, Küchelbecker had read not only Psalms
but all the Old Testament prophets as source of poetic inspiration rather than as religious study. His
later diary entries about this poem show that he was aware that “Prophecy” was written under the
influence of his reading of the Old Testament, and the careful structure of the poem suggests that he
must have some mental notion of a sort of programmatic psalmic structure, enabling him to write his
own psalm, rather than a free adaptation of an existing psalm.
Later, during the early years of his imprisonment after the uprising, Küchelbecker would
return to the theme in an extended fashion with David, an epic poem in ten cantos which retells the
story of David's early years, ending with his coronation as king of Israel. David, written after the
failure of Decembrism and the deaths of Küchelbecker's friends, Griboedov and Pushkin, can be read
162
Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 153.
163
Brown, A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, vol. 2,17-18.
168
as a sort of summation of Küchelbecker's Decembrist ideals. Unlike many of the Decembrists, who
either recanted their republicanism or were at least disillusioned by the failure of the revolt,
Küchelbecker remained committed to his Decembrist political ideals throughout his long years of
imprisonment and exile. Notably, it is these elements of David's story-- exile and persecution by Saul--
that are the focus of Küchelbecker's epic. These are coupled with other elements of David's story that
suit Küchelbecker's own emotional needs, such as David's lament for Jonathan's death, suggesting
elements of the poet's own mourning for his friends. In his discussion of David, which he considers a
failed but daring literary experiment, Brown points out that the epic elements of the poem are
subsumed by lyric digression.
164
The only really heroic moment in the poem is David's battle with
Goliath, which is heavily downplayed. Instead, the epic is filled with meditations on the passive
periods of David's life-- exile and mourning. The lyric quality of these passages is further promoted by
Kuchebecker's frequent narrative asides to the audience. Brown argues that, in classical epics, these
asides are either absent (as in Homer) or very short and ironic in tone. In David, these asides are utterly
serious and take up a full third of the text, adding an even greater sense of lyricism. All this suggests
that, while Küchelbecker was aware of the parallels between David's life and his own life and political
goals, what he really was interested in was not David as king, a biographical entity worthy of epic, but
David as psalmist-- a prophet and poet worthy of providing lyric influence. David exists in the poem
as a prophet and lyricist with authority to speak to his audience. Küchelbecker's narrative asides
imitate this authority, allowing the poet to claim it for himself. Even after the failure of Decembrism,
which also marked the end of his ability to publish or connect with an audience in any way,
Küchelbecker continued to develop the literary behavioral models of Decembrism. The fact that
Küchelbecker went to far as to devote an epic to David, an epic embedded with so much of
164
Brown, A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, vol. 2, 36
169
Küchelbecker's own emotions and experiences of the uprising and its aftermath, suggests the great
significance of David as a prophetic/poetic model.
Kondratii Ryleev
Decembrism, as discussed earlier, was a multifaceted and complex phenomenon. Its
boundaries and constituent members are somewhat elusive to define. But if there is any one test case
for defining Decembrist poetics and culture, it's Kondratii Ryleev, whose poetry and life were
Decembrist to the core. Ryleev's poetic and biographical existence were almost entirely defined first
by his sympathy with Decembrist values and later by his overwhelming involvement in the conspiracy
itself. If Ryleev does not meet the definition of Decembrist poet, no one does. Ryleev, as was briefly
discussed earlier, engages in an extensive sort of refiguring of previous historical and mythical figures
as a means of furthering his political program in poetry. Lotman even identifies two of his poems as
the behavior model of the Decembrist wives. But he, unlike Glinka and Kuckelbecker, does not overtly
turn to biblical sources. In his Dumy, Ryleev adopts a strategy not dissimilar to Küchelbecker's
approach to David, but his overt interest is in figures of Russian history from sources like the Primary
Chronicles, saints' lives, and Karamzin's historical writings. But the lack of an overt adoption of David
as a model does not mean that Ryleev does not engage with this model of poetic prophecy. In fact, the
covert existence of this model in his poetry makes the importance of the Decembrist shift towards
David as a model of prophetic poetry even more intriguing.
According to O'Meara's excellent political biography of Ryleev, the poet was very
religious as a child. He suggests that his famous “conversion” during imprisonment was not a
conversion so much as a return to this childhood piety. But during his politically and poetically active
period, Ryleev both personally and artistically was not particularly interested in religion (although it
would be going too far to call him an atheist). Additionally, unlike Küchelbecker who had an excellent
education and multiple languages at his disposal, or even Glinka whose lackluster education was
170
supplemented by the vibrant education of his older brother, Ryleev's formal education was infamously
inadequate and his informal self-education was mainly concerned with reading that would further his
political world view. Although he was a gifted poet, Ryleev both implicitly and explicitly saw his role
in life as political rather than poetical. Thus it would have been highly unlikely that Ryleev would take
up reading the Old Testament for the purposes of poetic education and inspiration. With this in mind,
the lack of an overt interest in psalms or Old Testament prophecy in Ryleev's poetry is not at all
surprising.
It's difficult, however, to argue that some sort of conflation of poet and prophet wasn't at
present in Ryleev's presentation of himself as a poet. Ryleev's mature poetry is emphatically united by
a common theme. According to Franklin Walker, “What is striking in his poetry is the recurrent theme
of the hero who sacrifices himself for the freedom of his country . . . Too little is known of the intimate
details of his life to justify sweeping assertions as to unusual psychic propensities, but both his life and
his poetry testify to a single-minded dedication which anticipates that readiness to die for a cause so
characteristic of the terrorists of later generations.”
165
In Ryleev's poetry and biography up to his
arrest-- at which point his desire for martyrdom cools off considerably-- the overriding theme is a
determination to die for his political ideals, a death-wish which Nicholas I was only too ready to grant.
This bent towards self-fulfilling predictions of martyrdom can be seen in Ryleev's Dumy and other
historical poems, which Lauren G. Leighton argues were seen by Ryleev's contemporaries, and perhaps
the poet himself, as prophetic.
166
The memoirs of many of his fellow Decembrists remember Ryleev in
terms easily reminiscent of biblical prophets, suggesting a certain self-fashioning along a prophetic
model, even if that fashioning may not have been deliberate. I argue that Ryleev's poetry displays a
165
Franklin A. Walker. “K.F. Ryleev: A self-sacrifice for the revolution,” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 47,
no. 109 (Jul., 1969), 436-446
166
Lauren G. Leighton. The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994.
171
self-presentation and world view that is not only prophetic-- in the sense of reminiscent of that of the
prophets-- but specifically psalmic.
Furthermore, it is specifically psalmic in both world view and in rhetoric. Both in
poetry and in politics, Ryleev's world view is hopelessly black and white. His poetry inhabits a world
of tyrants, enemies, and oppression paired against patriotism, freedom, heroes, and victims, all of
whom are either completely good or completely evil and need no complexity of characterization or
thought. In “The Citizen,” this world of absolutes is conveyed through presentation and rejection of the
life of his generation in utterly negative terms that, by the end of the poem, preclude the possibility of
heroism.
Я ль буду в роковое время
Позорить гражданина сан
И подражать тебе, изнеженное племя
Переродившихся славян?
Нет, неспособен я в объятьях сладострастья,
В постыдной праздности влачить свой век младой
И изнывать кипящею душой
Под тяжким игом самовластья.
Пусть юноши, своей не разгадав судьбы,
Постигнуть не хотят предназначенье века
И не готовятся для будущей борьбы
За угнетенную свободу человека.
Пусть с хладною душой бросают хладный взор
На бедствия своей отчизны
И не читают в них грядущий свой позор
172
И справедливые потомков укоризны.
Они раскаются, когда народ, восстав,
Застанет их в объятьях праздной неги
И, в бурном мятеже ища свободных прав,
В них не найдет ни Брута, ни Риеги.
167
Shall I at the fateful hour
Bring shame upon the citizen's dignity,
And emulate you, effete tribe
Of degenerate Slavs?
No, I am not capable in the embraces of voluptuousness
Of dragging out my young years in shameful idleness,
Or of languishing with turbulent soul
Beneath despotism's heavy yoke.
Let the young, their fate yet unriddled,
Refuse to comprehend the destiny of the age
And fail to prepare for future struggles
For the oppressed freedom of mankind.
Let them, with a frigid soul, cast their cold gaze
On the misfortunes of their fatherland
And take no account of their shame to come
and the reproaches of their righteous descendants.
They will repent when the people, having arisen,
Find them in idle languor’s embrace,
167
K.F. Ryleev, “Derzhavin,” Sochineniia (Leningrad: Khudozhectvennaia literatura, 19870, 75.
173
And, seeking liberty's rights in the stormy revolt,
Find among them neither a Brutus nor a Reigo.
168
The poem's rhetoric is structured around a detailed description of the morally inadequate world around
the lyric persona. The poet then suggests two logical suppositions. First, a hero like Brutus will not be
found among those who follow this indolent lifestyle. Second, the lyric persona rejects this lifestyle.
Taken together, these two logical suppositions argue that a new Brutus will be found among those, like
the lyric persona, who reject this lifestyle. In decrying the absence of a hero for the people so long as
these conditions continue, Ryleev is suggesting that he himself will be the people's hero.
Much as Küchelbecker's poem, while not evincing a single identifiable psalmic subtext,
seems to be draw over a sort of programmatic meta-psalm, Ryleev's poem follows the pattern of a very
common psalmic structure, one example of which can be found in Psalm 58:
1 Do you rulers indeed speak justly?
Do you judge people with equity?
2 No, in your heart you devise injustice,
and your hands mete out violence on the earth.
3 Even from birth the wicked go astray;
from the womb they are wayward, spreading lies.
4 Their venom is like the venom of a snake,
like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears,
5 that will not heed the tune of the charmer,
however skillful the enchanter may be.
6 Break the teeth in their mouths, O God;
LORD, tear out the fangs of those lions!
168
Translation by O'Meara, Ryleev, 194-195.
174
7 Let them vanish like water that flows away;
when they draw the bow, let their arrows fall short.
8 May they be like a slug that melts away as it moves along,
like a stillborn child that never sees the sun.
9 Before your pots can feel the heat of the thorns—
whether they be green or dry—the wicked will be swept away.
10 The righteous will be glad when they are avenged,
when they dip their feet in the blood of the wicked.
Psalms of this sort open with a rhetorical question suggesting then rejecting the possibility of evil. This
is followed by a description of that evil that ends with detailed description of how the evil will be
punished and God will triumph. This particular structure forces contemplation of evil action into a
hypothetical sphere in such a way that adoption of any position other than full scale rejection of that
evil is precluded. You're either with the psalmist, in other words, or with the workers of inequity.
Ryleev's adoption of a psalmic pattern is less deliberate and complete than
Küchelbecker's, but it follows the same pattern of coercive rhetoric. You're either a potential Brutus or
a completely useless layabout. In contrast to the psalm, however, Ryleev focuses heavily on the first
element of this type of psalmic rhetoric-- the rejection and description of evil. His poem only suggests
the later elements of the psalm, which describe the defeat of this evil and the victory of good. Rather
than adopting the full dynamic of the underlying form of a psalm, which would require a certain
amount of deliberate contemplation of the psalms as such, Ryleev is merely adopting a rhetorical
device typical of the psalms
However, even in this incomplete and limited adoption of a psalmic form, two key
things are revealed about Ryleev's construction of himself as a prophet. First, his self-construction
relies on a presentation of himself as psalmic. While all of the prophets tend to be concerned with good
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and evil in absolute terms which coerce audience agreement, Ryleev's poem follows psalms in
presuming to speak not only to but also for the people. The particular psalmic structure he adopts here
is designed to coerce an audience into uniting with the poet in complete agreement with his
pronouncements but also into the poet/psalmist's idealized version of “the people.” In “the Citizen,”
this forced unity of perspective forms the sole-basis of his argument. Secondly, even while Ryleev's
interest in constructing himself as a prophet in much of his poetry seems generalized, the particular
type of prophetic mantle he attempts to adopt is David's. “The Citizen” suggests a lyric persona that
not only speaks to and for the people, but who will also be the prophesied hero that will rescue the
people from the evil that the lyric persona himself has prophesied. Like David, Ryleev's lyric persona
is both a prophet and the heroic fulfillment of prophecy.
Across these three poets, we see telling and multi-valenced adoption of David the
Psalmist as a model for the poet-prophet, pushing aside for the moment the more typical dynamic of the
Isaiah model. For Glinka, this choice was conscious, rooted in a certain harmony of theme and
interests between Psalms and Decembrist culture. However, his Experiments in Sacred Poetry, as the
name would suggest, are experiments. They comprise just one of several poetic models Glinka would
work with and these experiments rarely go beyond aesthetic play with some minor emphasis on
thematic values. This, in turn, mirrored Glinka's politics as an advocate of social and cultural reform as
a means of initiating political change. Küchelbecker's adoption of David, while less direct, was much
more intense and complete. His work invokes direct and thoughtful engagement with David and
Psalms as both behavioral and aesthetic models, and he does so explicitly as a means of defining and
negotiating the role of revolutionary-- which he sought to play in life-- through the medium of poetry.
While less clear and complete than that of either of his contemporaries, Ryleev's possibly subconscious
adoption of psalmic rhetoric and Davidian behavior patterns perhaps reveals the most about the
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Decembrist development of a Davidian alternative to the Isaiah model of a prophetic poet, if only
because he seems to have fallen into this model in both life and poetry without deliberately choosing to
do so. Through the model of David, the Decembrists were able to bend the power of Derzhavin's Isaiah
model into a poetic model of revolution in which the educated gentry had the right-- and the
obligation-- to speak for the people and overthrow the unjust tsar.
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Chapter Three: Elegy of Elegies-- Baratynskii, Pushkin, and Solomonic mourning for the Poet-
Prophet
The poets who remained after the failure of Decembrism would write the poems most
powerfully associated with the Russian image of poet as prophet-- Pushkin's “The Prophet,”
Baratynskii's “The Last Poet,” Lermontov's “Death of a Poet,” and others. These poems observe the
poet-prophet at some remove, describing him in terms pointedly reminiscent of Derzhavin's Isaiah
model, but showing the poet-prophet occupying, but not utilizing, the role of prophet or as unable to
utilize the role of prophet. Many of the poems are directly occasioned by the death of great poetic
figures such as Goethe and Pushkin, and they are suffused mourning for the loss of the poet-prophet
and a bitter nostalgia for his time. Although many of these poems become touchstones for the nostalgia
of latter generations of Russian poets, these poems are themselves a product of nostalgia for the
political potential for poetry that vanished after the Catherinian era. The mourning and nostalgia of
these poems finds expression in a body of less overtly prophetic poems written by poets of this era--
poems in which the poets speak as a type of prophet, but through a decidedly more elegiac and less
politically engaged model. The failure of both Derzhavin's model of poet as statesman and the
Decembrist attempt to supplant the tzar with the poet forced these later poets to abandon the political
space earlier poets had tried to inhabit. Instead, I will argue that these poets would develop a very
different model of prophetic poetry that eschewed political engagement in favor of greater authority
over their audience and an emphasis on posterity which maintained the prophetic telescoping of time
by projecting the past and present into the future rather than collapsing the future and past into the
present. These poets would present themselves as purveys of eternal wisdom-- wisdom preserved from
the past, unappreciated by the present, and vital to the future-- in an attempt to salvage what they could
of Derzhavin's model of poet as prophet and to mourn the loss of the educated gentry's political voice
and cultural traditions and values that came after Decembrism.
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Solomon as Diminished Prophet
“The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart.” (1
Kings 3:4-9)
It may seem somewhat counter-intuitive to list Solomon as the next model for Russian
prophetic poetry. While both Judaism and Orthodox Christianity rank Solomon as a prophet, the
biblical texts traditionally ascribed to Solomon are not typically prophetic, nor do they fully meet some
of the key characteristics of prophetic texts. The biblical books in question-- Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
The Song of Songs, and Wisdom-- are a diverse body of work which contains some elements of
traditional biblical prophecy. However, these features are often warped in ways that undercut three key
elements of prophecy-- specifically the prophetic call to direct action, the dynamic tension between
prophet and ruler, and the telescoping of past history and present socio-political context into the future.
But even though the Solomonic texts lack some of these key characteristics of prophecy, the single
most important, defining element of prophecy remains. The voice that emerges from the Solomonic
texts is the voice of a human being, elevated by God above the rest of the people, in order to illuminate
God's will to those people.
The historical Solomon-- if there in fact was a historical Solomon-- reigned as much as a
millennium before the Solomonic texts were first recorded. The four biblical books associated with
Solomon are comprised of cultural odds and ends-- wedding songs, common sayings, philosophical
tracts-- which cannot be fit neatly into any one scriptural category. In rabbinic tradition and in
theological studies, the Solomonic texts are typically grouped under the heading “wisdom writings.”
While the songs and sayings that make up the bulk of the wisdom texts were probably part of Hebrew
culture for centuries, these texts are incorporated into scripture in the period after the destruction of
Solomon's temple and the end of the Babylonian exile, a period of great political chaos and trauma for
Israel. It is during this same period that the prophetic tradition breaks down. After the last minor
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prophets-- Zechariah and Malachi, who both died shortly before the end of the exile-- the sort of direct
communion with God that defined prophetic tradition is replaced with the bat kol-- literally “daughter
of a voice”-- a sort of invisible, sometimes internal, voice that seems to come from the Holy Spirit,
offering a sort of personal revelation of divine wisdom. The idea of wisdom-- or wise persons-- takes
on the social and spiritual authority that had previously belonged to the prophets.
169
The Solomonic
texts, or wisdom texts, are recorded in Hebrew scripture as a collection of this new, less direct sort of
interaction with God by creating a body of texts which embody and define wisdom. The traditional
association of the wisdom texts with Solomon highlights the connection between these texts and the
prophetic tradition-- in that Solomon is supposed to have been a prophet-- but also highlights the key
issue of wisdom, given Solomon's mythic status as the wisest of men, bridging the connection between
the wisdom texts and the prophetic texts.
Setting aside the Song of Songs, which represents something of an outlier among the
Solomonic texts, for the moment, the remaining texts associated with Solomon can be characterized by
a series of features that are similar to prophetic texts-- and may in fact have grown out of prophetic
style and rhetoric-- but which also diverge from the defining features of prophecy in significant ways.
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Wisdom are all structured around a central contrast between the righteous
and the wicked in which the righteous will prosper and the wicked will suffer. This contrast and its
implications are markedly similar to the dialectic of lamentation and consolation that characterizes
Hebrew prophecy. Just as those who fail to listen to the prophet will be doomed by the fate described
in the prophet's lamentations, those who fail to listen to the authorial voice of Solomon's texts will
suffer with the wicked. Just as those who listen to the prophet will be consoled, so those who listen to
Solomon's texts will prosper with the righteous. We can even identify similar values which define
righteousness and wickedness in both the prophetic and Solomonic texts, values such as honesty, faith,
169
Issacs, Messengers of God, 32.
180
concern for justice, and correct attitudes toward both one's own wealth and the wealthy and the poor in
one's social context.
However, the Solomonic texts use this set of values and coercive, binary rhetoric in
order to elicit a very different response from the people to whom the texts are addressed. In the case of
the more typical prophets, the consolation or condemnation predicted by the prophet is immediate and
community wide and the force of this rhetoric is usually used to demand immediate and united social
action. The people are saved or doomed as a whole, in other words, and there is a definite time frame
in which they must act. Solomon's texts do not address “the people” as a united entity, but rather
convey advice and instruction at an individual level. Proverbs is framed as the advice of an elder to a
young man. Ecclesiastes is framed as the lessons of one man, drawn from his vast personal experience,
which he wishes to pass on. Wisdom represents something of a break in this trend in that the authorial
voice presents himself as a king speaking, for the most part, to other kings, but also to people in
general. However, the lessons presented by the main authorial voice and the personification of divine
Wisdom that periodically speaks are all focused on how to live and think as an individual. We can
perhaps interpret the younger, less experienced individuals who are the object of instruction in these
books as surrogates for the people, much as the Psalmist sometimes speaks as a surrogate for all the
people of Israel. However, the lessons imparted are not about social forces as they are in the typical
prophetic texts but rather about the daily choices of individual lives and thoughts. The path to
righteousness might be the same for all the people, but it is defined as an individual force and
experience rather than a social force defined communally. In this sense, the presence of the key axis of
the prophetic triangle-- that between the prophet and the people-- has been diminished to a relationship
between an experienced teacher and a naive student.
This emphasis on an interaction between two individuals which may or may not be
extended to a greater communal context acts as the defining feature of the least typical Solomonic text,
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the Song of Songs. Much theological ink has been spilled by both Christian and Jewish scholars in
their efforts to create an acceptable exegesis of this text, shaping its intense sensuality into an allegory
for God's relationship to either the Christian church or the Israelite people as a communal whole. But
the surface level of the text, regardless of whatever allegory might exist at a deeper level, remains a
dialogue between two individuals about the deeply personal experience of sexual desire. Indeed, the
interactions between the bride and the voice of the choral “Daughters of Israel” even takes on the
instructive quality of Proverbs through the bride's repeated cry, “I abjure you, O daughters of Israel, by
the gazelles or the wild does: do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!”
The Solomonic texts further diverge from prophetic texts because of a key difference
that may perhaps grow out of this shift from rhetoric of community to rhetoric of individual
relationships. In the prophetic texts, the dialect of lamentation and consolation functions almost
exclusively as a call to action. The argumentative thrust of the prophetic books lies in the notion that if
the people continue as they are and fail to take the direct actions demanded by God as conveyed by the
prophet, then God will condemn them in the manner lamented by the prophet. Consolation is offered
as an incentive to active change-- if the people take the actions demanded, then doom will be averted.
Often the action called for requires the people to take action against the wicked element among them--
to cast out idolaters, to overthrow a wicked king, or to immediately abandon and prohibit some wicked
behavior that displeases God. In the Solomonic texts, this rhetoric gets turned upside down. While
God as portrayed in Proverbs will punish the wicked, often in ways that are just as dramatic and terrible
as those described by Jeremiah or Isaiah, the righteous are not supposed to act but rather wait passively
for God to punish the wicked. The images of God's wrath do not function as a call to action, as they do
in the prophetic texts, but as an incentive against action. In accordance with the Solomonic turn away
from the social to the individual, these texts also embody a turn away from political action. The
righteous (or the wise) focus on living their own lives rightly and on gaining wisdom for themselves
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and are meant to ignore what other people do in full confidence that God will get around to giving the
wicked their just desserts eventually, in effect undercutting or diminishing the function of prophecy as a
call to action. If the people need only worry about the righteousness of individual choices and can
simple wait for God's actions to reveal His pleasure or displeasure with individual, the prophet as a
conduit of God's will and a guide to political decisions becomes significantly less important.
These differences between “wisdom writing” and the Hebrew prophetic tradition
actually mirror the relationship between the politically charged role of Imperial Isaiah as adopted by
Derzhavin and the politically impotent but socially powerful prophetic pose adopted by the post-
Decembrist Golden Age poets. The sorts of direct calls for immediate political action embodied in the
other prophetic models both culminated and failed with Decembrism. The poets who remained had to
survive in an atmosphere of heightened prosecution in which their whole class-- the educated gentry--
which had long existed in a contentious and oppressive relationship to autocracy, now faced the
possibility of full-scale eviction from any position of political or social authority. By shifting to a
model of individual instruction, they could conceal or step away from overt political action while still
maintaining a position of authority over their audience. By turning inward towards individual choices
and advocating a sort of “let go and let God” approach to the government, they could perhaps convince
the autocrat they their class was no longer a threat and need not be silenced., while still maintaining
some sort of social authority within the greater culture.
At the same time, the Solomonic rhetoric-- focusing on wisdom versus foolishness--
along with the texts’ focus on individual, everyday life, allows the poet to exert an even greater force of
authority over his audience. In the typical dynamic between prophet and audience, the prophet is one
of the people who is separated from them by God's calling, acting as their conduit and surrogate. His
authority over the people comes only from his status as the conduit of God's voice. This authority,
while real and important, is not something the people are meant to accept without question. The
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constant scriptural warnings against false prophets demand that the people seriously question and
consider any individual's claim to prophetic status. The authors of the Solomonic texts likewise base
their authority in God's favor, but the evidence of that favor is rooted in social success and experience
rather than mystical signs of divine intervention. This shift from mystical signs of divine calling
towards much more mundane markers may seem like a step down in the prophet's status, but by rooting
authority is such mundane and tangible markers, the Solomonic texts all but deny their audience the
option to question or reject the prophet's status. The audience of the Solomonic texts is not the
collective people of Israel, who need to listen to the prophets while guarding against false prophecy lest
their entire civilization suffer. Rather, the Solomonic audience is made up of individuals who are
positioned from the beginning as less prosperous and less experienced than Solomon. Given that
experience and prosperity are the signs of God's favor in the Solomonic texts, the audience members’
position of naiveté denies them any opening for rejecting the poet-prophet's words. The mere fact of
his greater experience and prosperity is unimpeachable proof of his righteousness and wisdom.
Furthermore, the Solomonic texts, through their passivity, project the divine proof of
their wisdom into the future. If the audience listen and act wisely as directed, God will eventually
reward them. In the prophetic texts, the past and the future are collapsed into present moment, which--
through the prophetic texts' use and interpretation as scripture rather than history-- becomes the eternal
moment. The Solomonic texts use past experience as a way of forcing the actions of the present
moment to orient on future rewards, making all times look to future moments in which the wisdom of
past and present will be proven. As will be discussed further below, the present moment for the post-
Decembrist poets was bleak, both politically and artistically. Turning towards the model of wisdom
writing as diminished prophecy allowed these poets to leapfrog the present moment and an absent or
uncaring present audience in favor of projecting a future audience in posterity onto the present moment,
rebuking their inadequate contemporary audience and critics.
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The two poets-- Alexander Pushkin and Evgenii Baratynskii-- who best utilize this
politically neutered yet socially potent model of prophetic poetry do so in starkly different ways that
would impact every subsequent generation of Russian poets. Pushkin, ever the genius in his
manipulation of audience yet a sphinx in the substance of his thought, so successfully exploited the
Solomonic model's leverage over his audience that his words literally become became proverbial.
Baratynskii, one of the most respected yet perplexing poets Russia ever produced, enmeshed himself
and his poetry so deeply in pursuit of wisdom that his metaphysical meditations sometimes threatened
to overwhelm the coherence of his verses. But in order to most clearly connect these poets back to the
line of politically active poetry that culminated in Decembrism, we are forced to turn to a decidedly
less exalted poet. It is in the work of Alexander Bestuzhev that we can observe the Solomonic model
emerging from the ashes of the politics of Decembrism and the David model,.
Bestuzhev-Marlinskii: Lament of a Repentant Decembrist
During the critical years of the early 1820's, in which the final form of Decembrism
coalesced, Alexander Alexandrovich Bestuzhev (1797-1837) was Kondratii Ryleev's best friend. The
relationship was a marriage of complete opposites. While Ryleev – ascetic, sincere and serious to the
point of humorlessness – might be the Decembrist who best embodied the literary social type described
by Lotman in “The Decembrist in Everyday Life,” Bestuzhev was a walking counter argument to the
Decembrist prototype. His personal life favored the wild debauchery of non-Decembrist military
officers, and his speech and self-presentation eschewed Decembrist seriousness and sincerity for the
easy wit and irreverence favored by young Pushkin and the Arzamasians. And yet the friendship
between the two was incredibly strong and productive. Bestuzhev lived with Ryleev and his wife. The
two men edited a literary almanac, The Polar Star, together which published some of the most
important literary works and criticism of the early 1820's. Under Ryleev's influence, Bestuzhev, along
with his brothers Nikolai and Mikhail, became an active force in the Northern society. Bestuzhev was
185
one of the privileged few who were trusted with knowledge of the regicide plot. Some of the best and
most well-known Decembrist agitational songs were collaborations between Ryleev and Bestuzhev.
These songs also represent the best of Bestuzhev's literary output during this period. Those poetic and
prose works he wrote alone during the early 1820s were slavish and immature imitations of better
writers, both Russian and European. Bestuzhev would only become a mature writer after the trauma of
December 14
th
, 1825.
That trauma was extensive. Unlike many Decembrists, who would wait anxiously for
arrest and refuse to make a full confession until captivity and psychological torture broke them,
Bestuzhev turned himself in and made a full confession the day after the failed uprising.
170
He was the
first to reveal the extent of the Decembrist's plans and to admit to the regicide plot. In his confession,
he attempted to absolve himself from blame, even claiming that he had dissuaded the tsar's would-be
assassins from carrying out the plot. All four of his brothers, even the two youngest who had not
known anything about the conspiracy until the day of the uprising, had been arrested. Bestuzhev
sought to shield them from blame as much as possible, but his testimony utterly condemned Ryleev, his
best friend, as the single most guilty member of the whole conspiracy.
171
Scholars disagree on the
extent to which Bestuzhev's testimony sealed Ryleev's fate. O'Meara absolves Bestuzhev of
responsibility, pointing out that Ryleev's own testimony presented him as the sole guilty party,
providing enough information about the regicide plot to all but guarantee the death sentence.
Bestuzhev's confession merely corroborated Ryleev's own and those of other Decembrists who
confessed in full.
172
Bestuzhev's biographers have been far less kind, suggesting that Bestuzhev blamed
himself to at least some degree for Ryleev's fate.
173
174
In the end, Bestuzhev was sparred the scaffold,
170
Lewis Bagby. Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinksy and Russian Byronism (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1995), 169.
171
Ibid., 178.
172
O'Meara. K.F . Ryleev, 242-249.
173
Lauren G. Leighton . Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii (Boston: Twayne, 1975), 20.
174
Bagby. Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinksy, 178.
186
even though Nicholas I would never forgive Bestuzhev's involvement in the regicide plot. While
Bestuzhev's initial sentence-- exile to Siberia, but without hard labor
175
-- was far less harsh than that of
most other Decembrists, including his own brothers,
176
when Bestuzhev eventually asked to serve out
his sentence as a common soldier instead of in Siberia, the tsar used Bestuzhev's long military service
in the Caucasus to slowly kill him.
177
Still, Bestuzhev fared better than most other Decembrists. Most
importantly, among all the Decembrists, the tsar allowed only Bestuzhev to continue publishing, albeit
only under a pseudonym. Starting in 1830, he began publishing as A. Marlinskii.
The material Bestuzhev published as Marlinskii exhibited far greater artistic skill and
emotional depth than the empty imitations of Romantic heroism on display in his early works. The
failure of the uprising led to the death of Bestuzhev's closest friend and the near complete destruction
of his large and close-knit family. Both the failure of the uprising and Bestuzhev's sense of guilt over
the fate of his friends and family forced a collapse and reformulation of Bestuzhev's earlier heroic
literary persona.
178
Artistically, this reformulation of a literary self is most successful in Marlinskii's
prose works. The poetry Bestuzhev would produce as Marlinskii, on the other hand, would never quite
break free of his early tendency towards direct imitation. His models for imitation ranged from
Caucasian folk songs to Goethe and to his own literary contemporaries, including Pushkin and
Baratynskii. This imitative quality may detract from the artistic merits of Marlinskii's poems, but it
also insures that his poems are an excellent ground for exploring the mechanisms through which a post-
Decembrist model of poetic power begins.
175
Bagby. Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinksy, 169.
176
The two other Decembrist Bestuzhev brothers, Nikolai and Mikhail, were sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. The two
youngest brothers, Peter and Pavel, whose only real crime was their relation to their older brothers, were sentenced to
military service in the Caucasus, where Bestuzhev would eventually join them and Peter would eventually go mad. His
mother and sisters were forced to expend all their energy trying to support their brothers and manage Alexander's literary
career.
177
Leighton . Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, 28-34.
178
Babgy, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, 189-191.
187
To the best of our knowledge,
179
Bestuzhev-Marlinskii never wrote the kind of elegiac
depiction of the poet as prophet that Pushkin would put forward in “Prophet.” These poems grow out
of a nostalgia on the part of the post-Decembrist poets for the kind of social and political authority
sought, and almost attained, by Derzhavin. These poems are based on the Isaiah model, which was no
longer viable after the failure of Decembrism. However, the fact that Bestuzhev-Marlinskii never
wrote a poem in this exact model does not mean his poems don't contribute to the poetic conversation
about poets as prophets. His mature poetry does evince a clear longing for the position of the prophet-
poet that Derzhavin developed and occupied. At least two of his better poems strive consciously to
connect back to Derzhavin and his position of relative power and authority. So long as we accept
Derzhavin as the most successful inhabitant of the poet-prophet's position in both life and poetry,
Bestuzhev-Marlinskii's poems “Shebutuy” (Shebetuy) and “Clock” (Chasi) function as a sort of
evolutionary missing link between poems which speak as the much diminished Solomonic poet-prophet
and those which portray the poet as an Isaiah style prophet out of mourning and nostalgia.
Both poems, written in 1829, harken back to well-known poems of Derzhavin.
“Shebutuy,” a poem about a waterfall in Siberia, harkens back directly to Derzhavin's “Waterfall”
(Vodopad), while “The Clock” harkens back to and expands on the metala zvon (“the metal's clang”)
from the poem “On the Death of Prince Meshchersky.” Both poems focus on Derzhavin's signature
themes of time and mortality. But while Derzhavin's poem uses an individual confrontation with
mortality to turn outwards towards the universal, Marlinskii's poems take universal experiences down
to an individual level. “Shebutuy” may call to mind Derzhavin's “Waterfall,” but, as Brown points out,
the poem follows a typically Byronic formula, offering a detailed description of natural phenomena
before shifting that phenomena into a metaphor for the lyric persona's internal psychological reality.
180
179
Leighton points out that it is like that many of Marlinskii's poems have almost certainly been lost. Alexander Bestuzhev-
Marlinskii, 118.
180
William Edward Brown. A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, vol. II, 124.
188
It is not going too far to suggest that perhaps, beyond merely imitating the conventions of Byronic
Romanticism, Marlinksii's refusal to turn from the individual also represents an awareness that the civic
spirit of Derzhavin's verse-- and of Marlinskii and Ryleev's own Decembrist poetry-- is no longer a
viable option. The melancholy of these poems may not be a mere stylistic pose, but also an elegiac
mourning for the poet's past political engagement from which he has now been shut out forever.
“The Clock” offers a far more interesting response to Derzhavin:
Часы
И дум и дел земных цари,
Часы, ваш лик сияет страшен,
В короне пламенной зари,
На высоте могучих башен,
И взор блюстительный в меди
Горит, неотразимо верный,
И сердце времени в бесчувственной груди
Чуть зыблется приливом силы мерной.
Оживлены чугунного стрелой
На вас таинственные роки,
И оглашает вещий бой
Земле небесные уроки.
Но блеск, но голос ваш для ветреных племен
Звучит и озаряет даром
Подобно молнии неведомых письмен,
Начертанных пред Валтасаром.
"Летучее мгновение лови, -
189
Поет любимцу голос лести, -
В нем золото и ароматы чести,
Последний пир, свидания любви
И наслажденья тайной мести".
И в думе нет, что упований прах
Дыханье времени уносит,
Что каждый маятника взмах
Цветы неверной жизни косит.
Заботно времени шаги считает он
И бой к веселию призывный;
Еще не смолк металла звон,
А где же ты, мечты поклонник дивный?
Окован ли безбрежный океан
Венцом валов - минутной пеной?
Детям ли дней дался победный сан
Над волей века неизменной?
Безумен клик: "хочу - могу".
Вознес Наполеон строптивую десницу,
Сдержать мечтая на бегу
Стремимую веками колесницу...
Она промчалась! Где ж твой меч,
Где прах твой, полубог гордыни?
Твоя молва - оркан пустыни,
Твой след - поля напрасных сеч.
190
Возникли светлые народов поколенья
И внемлют о тебе сомнительную речь
С улыбкой хладного презренья.
Clocks
And to the thoughts and the deeds of earthly kings,
Clocks, your terrible faces shine,
In the crown of fiery dawn,
From the height of mighty towers,
And your vigilant gaze in copper
burns, compellingly faithful
And the heart of time in an insensitive breast
Almost shakes itself with the force of its rhythmic tide.
Animated, the cast iron arrow
Towards you, mysterious fate,
And announces a prophetic battle
To the Earth, celestial lessons.
But your shine, but your voice to the wind-blown tribes
Sounds and illuminates, free
Like lightening, unseen letter,
Inscribed before Balthazar.
“Such a volatile moment of hue and cry,”--
Sings the favorite's flattering voice,--
And in it the gold and perfume of honor,
191
Final feasts, assignations of love
And the delights of secret places.”
And the mind does not grasp that the ashes of hope
Will be blown away by the breath of time,
That each swing of the pendulum
Mows down the faithless flowers of life.
Mindful of the march of time, he considers
And battles with the call of merriment;
Yet the metal clang will not stop,
And where are you, wonderful worshiper of dreams?
Are you encircled by a boundless ocean
Wreathed with waves-- momentary froth?
Have children given you the order of victory
Over the will of an unchanging epoch?
The mad cry: “I want-- I can.”
Napoleon raised up his obstinate right hand,
To keep dreaming about running
In the saddle of the century's chariot . . .
It flashed by! Now where is your sword,
Where are your ashes, demigod of vanity?
Your fame-- surrounded by desert,
Your footsteps-- fields of land cleared in vain.
The bright ones of the people generations asked
and heard dubious talk of you
192
With a smile of cold contempt.
The opening lines of the poem recall Derzhavin's “On the Death of Prince Meshchersky,” but
Marlinskii also uses this poem to make explicit reference to prophets and prophecy in lines 10 and 11.
The first line's final phrase, zemnykh tsari (kings of the earth or tsars of earthly matters), is an
extremely common phrase in the work of all the literary prophets as well as the psalms. The book of
Wisdom opens by addressing the rulers of the earth.
181
Lines 15 and 16 refer to one of the cliché
moments of Hebrew prophecy, the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast. The poem does gesture
outwards towards history by mentioning Napoleon, but merely to show that even the most towering
legend will come to nothing. In many ways, Marlinskii's treatment of this theme mirrors exactly the
sort of meditation on mortality seen in Derzhavin's poem. However, Derzhavin, using Isaiah as his
subtext,
182
uses death and mortality as a springboard for discussing the place of man in the cosmos and
the relationship of the people to God. He also uses it as a means of walking his audience through the
prophet's key rhetorical pivot against the people-- the shift from lamentation to consolation.
Marlinskii's poem focuses on pride and futility rather than universality and the transcendence of
consolation. The rhetoric of the poem, which emphasizes the slow passage of time rather than sudden,
unexpected death, as well as the futility of pride, recalls the rhetoric of Ecclesiastes. The key argument
of this Solomonic text is that time, age, and death strip everyone, righteous and wicked alike, of
everything. Lamentation, while muted compared to the other prophets, never yields to consolation.
The Solomonic spirit of passivity is also underlined in this poem. Derzhavin's poem ends with a call to
enjoy life. Marlinskii's poem follows Solomon in Ecclesiastes by suggesting that death will conquer
and there is nothing to be done beyond acknowledging that fact.
183
181
In the Russian synodal version, the phrase used is “tsari narodov” (kings of the people).
182
As discussed at length in Chapter One.
183
As a side note, Marlinksky's 1828 poem, “Skull” (Cherep), takes a very similar, if less overtly prophetically inspired,
approach to the issue of human mortality. This poem was written in response to Baratynskii's poem of the same name,
which Bestuzhev-Marlinskii called “tinsel” in one of his letters to Pushkin. Although the post-Decembrist poets had less
193
The Solomonic thread in Marlinskii's work comes through most clearly in the 1829
poem, “Satiety” (Presyshchenie).
Пресыщение
Ты пьешь любви коварный мед,
От чаши уст не отнимая,
И в сердце юное течет
Струя восторгов огневая;
И упоен, и утомлен,
Ты ниспадаешь в тихий сон.
Мечтаний рой тебя лелеет,
Кропя росою сладких слез.
Так с жадных крыл прохладу веет
На жертву неги кровосос;
Так в цвете истлевают силы
От пресыщенья в пыль могилы.
Ты скажешь: «Мил заветный плод,
Не дважды молодость цветет
И без желаний волны Леты
Шумят всегда у наших стоп!»
Но ты и сердцу прежде меты
Готовишь гибельный озноб
И поздний плач, и ранний гроб.
space than the Decembrist for collaboration and literary interaction, through reading and letters, many of these poets
were constantly working together to deal with the various themes and issuer which drew their attention.
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Satiety
You drink the perfidious honey of love,
Without taking your lips from the cup,
And into your young heart
Flows a fiery stream of ecstasies;
And drunken, and weary,
You fall into quiet sleep.
A swarm of dreams lulls you,
Sprinkling you with tears of sweet dew.
And so with thirsty wings the vampire
Fans cold upon the victim of bliss;
And just so in a flower strength decays
From satiety into the dust of the grave.
You will say: “Dear is the forbidden fruit;
Youth does not bloom twice
And without desire, the waves of Lethe
Are always sounding at our feet!”
But you are preparing your heart
Before its time for a fatal chill
And later tears, and an early grave.
The entire body of this poem is thick with Solomonic references. The opening line's reference to
drinking the honey of love calls in the recurring references to honey and drinking from the cup of love
in the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon is further suggested as a subtext by lines 7 and 8 in
195
which sleep, dew, and tears suggest Song of Solomon 5:2, in which the groom comes to the bride in her
dream, his head wet with dew and the moisture of the night. When the bride wakes from her
increasingly erotic dream, she searches for her beloved in the city and is beaten by the guard. The
bride's plight in this chapter serves as one of several illustrations of her repeated exhortation to the
Daughters of Israel that they should not “stir up love until it is ready.” In this particular passage of the
Song, the bride is essentially offering the daughters the same warning against erotic overindulgence
that Marlinskii is offering in his poem. Thus Marlinskii is not only utilizing key images from Song of
Solomon 5, but also using those images to assert one of the key themes of the Song.
However, Marlinskii then amalgamates these elements from Song of Solomon with
elements from other Solomonic texts. “Satiety” goes beyond the relatively mild call for moderation in
the Song in order to call in the rhetoric of the other Solomonic texts. By filling the cup of love at the
beginning of the poem with deceitful honey, the raptures of which lead to intoxication and death,
Marlinskii works the poem into an expansion of Proverbs 5:3-6:
3 For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
4 but in the end she is bitter as gall,
sharp as a double-edged sword.
5 Her feet go down to death;
her steps lead straight to the grave.
6 She gives no thought to the way of life;
her paths wander aimlessly, but she does not know it.
It is worth pausing here to note that the Russian Synodal version of verse 6 reads, “Если бы ты
захотел постигнуть стезю жизни ее, то пути ее непостоянны, и ты не узнаешь их.”
*
which locates
*
“If you want to ponder the course of her life, her paths are fickle, and you will not know them”
196
the aimlessness and ignorance of the adulterous woman's path in those who follow her rather than in
her own experience. Marlinskii's poem reflects this in that, while it's implied by lines 1 (Ты пьешь
любви коварный мед,) that the overindulgence the lyric persona warns against is sexual in nature,
there is no clear or active sexual object. The young man to whom the poem is addressed is to blame for
his own fatal situation. The message of the poem seems to be moderation. Youth is something to be
enjoyed but not to the point of overindulgence, one of the recurring messages of Ecclesiastes and
Proverbs. Furthermore, by suggesting the adulterous woman of Proverbs 5, however subliminally,
Marlinskii is able to call in one of the key rhetorical gestures of both Proverbs and Wisdom-- the
dichotomy between Wisdom, the virtuous wife, and the foolish harlot with whom she is usually
contrasted. The krovosos (“bloodsucker”) in line 10 suggests the semi-demonic aspect the foolish
woman often takes on in the Solomonic texts as soon as men fall into her clutches.
184
Wisdom and
righteousness are rooted in personal, individual everyday choices in which one either aligns entirely
with wisdom or with foolishness. The prophetic pivot between lamentation and consolation is no
longer a sublime process of divine intervention, but a passionate plea for the moderation of passion.
The divine and the demonic are only present in failure to heed that plea.
In poems like “Clocks” and “Satiety,” the heroic revolutionary that Marlinskii aspired to
be in his youth has been replaced with the voice of a more experienced elder, wise in the ways of the
world. The hallmarks of prophetic political engagement that dominated the works of Derzhavin and
the Decembrist poets-- addresses to either the rulers or to the collective people-- are utterly absent. The
problems presented in Marlinskii's post-Decembrist poems-- mortality and moral moderation-- are not
social or political. They are universal problems that might affect anyone, but everyone must deal with
them as individuals. The prophet's special, semi-supernatural insight into the life and conditions of his
nation has been replaced with the wisdom of age and experience. And yet, that insight is still insight
184
See, for example, the above quoted passage from Proverbs 5.
197
beyond that which the poet allows his audience. In “Clocks,” Marlinskii claims interpretive insight
into the phenomena of passing time that even Napoleon cannot grasp, let alone the poet's audience.
“Satiety,” even while presenting a rather bland and uninteresting warning against sensual dissipation,
claims the ability to prophecy its addressee's every thought and move as death approaches. Even as
these poems disengage from political struggles, the audience is forced into an even greater position of
submission to the poet's will.
By and large, none of Marlinskii's poetry ever offered anything much that was entirely
new, innovative, or especially well-developed. He was at his most comfortable as a imitator,
embellishing the work and ideas of others. This makes Marlinskii's poetry possibly the best possible
site for excavating the evolutionary layers of prophetic poetry in Russia. The fact that A. Marlinskii--
who had once been Alexander Bezstuzhev, best friend and poetic collaborator of arch-Decembrist
Kondratii Ryleev-- so easily fell into writing poems that fall into the Solomonic model, even while
referring back to Derzhavin, strongly argues that the Solomon model grew out of the ashes of the David
model and on the ruins of the Isaiah model. The psuedo-Byronic melancholy of these poems should be
seen as both an imitation of an English poetic model and as a reflection of Marlinksii genuine
mourning for the lost political potential of the past era. The better, more complicated expressions of
the Solomon model can be found in two poets which Marlinskii often imitated, and with whom he
corresponded throughout his years of exile.
Evgenii Baratynskii: Prophet of Poetry
Unlike most of his generation, Baratynskii survived long enough to see himself and his
world view become irrelevant. His greatest poetic works, the Sumerki poems, remained unappreciated
until later generations of poets rescued and rehabilitated the Golden Age's most perplexing poet from
obscurity. In contrast to most of the poets discussed in this dissertation, Evgenii Baratynskii was not
ever an especially politically conscious or active writer. While he was friends with many of the
198
Decembrists, he never showed much of an interest in or even an awareness of their politics. Nor was
he a conservative, deeply enmeshed in the world of the Imperial court, like Zhukovskii, with whom he
was also quite close. His later friendship with Ivan Kireevskii, one of the key leaders of the Slavophile
movement, ended in part because of Baratynskii's near complete refusal to engage in the literary and
ideological polemics of the 1830's and 40's. As early as 1823 epistle “To Gnedich, Who Advised the
Author to Write Satires” (Gneichu, kotorii sovetoval socheniteliu pisat satiry) and his 1824 epistle “To
Bogdanovich” (Bogdanovichu), Baratynskii showed a strong reluctance towards writing didactic,
polemical, or politically charged poetry.
185
Given Baratynskii's lack of engagement in the political--
and even social-- issues of his day, it would be easy to assume that he would never developed an
interest in the prophet-poet pose.
However, one of the most famous elegiac poems portraying the poet as prophet--after
Pushkin's "Prophet" (Prorok)-- is Baratynskii's "The Last Poet" (Poslednii poet). The poem presents
compelling evidence that Baratynskii was not only aware of prophetic poetry as a trend but deeply
psychologically invested the idea of poet as prophet. Baratynskii's many elegies for dead poets
specifically and on the death of poetry in general, most especially "On the Death of Goethe," provide
further evidence that Baratynksii was certainly committed to the idea that poets ought to have social
value and political impact, even if he was uninterested in politics as such. Especially when examined
through the lens of late poems,
186
when the poet began to see himself more and more as the last
standard bearer of a bygone era, Baratynskii's deep seated commitment to the social, political and
metaphysical importance of poets and poetry becomes apparent. While he may never have sided with
any particular political party, Baratynskii was a devout partisan of poetry itself as an essential, possibly
the most essential, aspect of social and political life. In other words, unlike his Decembrist
185
Benjamin Dees. Evegeny Baratynskii (Boston; Twayne, 1972), 48-50.
186
By this, I principally mean the Sumerki poems and the handful of poems written after Sumerki but unpublished in the
poet's lifetime.
199
contemporaries, Baratynskii was not interested in the ends to which prophetic poetry could be applied,
but he was deeply committed to establishing poetry as a means of exerting quasi-prophetic social
authority. Baratynskii takes on the stance of poet-prophet in order to reserve this space for all poets, but
he leaves the task of leveraging that space to future generations. In part, simply because of the era in
which his later poems were written, and in part because he was perhaps following the lead of the few
poetical colleagues with whom he still had a vigorous relationship, the poet-prophet that emerges from
Baratynskii's later poems overlooks the more aggressive prophetic models in favor of Solomon. It also
certainly didn't hurt that the sense of passive melancholy and generational succession in the Solomonic
texts harmonized so very well with Baratynskii's image of himself,
Baratynskii was one of several poets affiliated in the 1820s with the group known as the
Pushkin Pleiad. This group of young educated gentry provided much of the gilding on Russia poetic
Golden Age, and they were connected to one another not only by similar literary interests, but also a
spirit of intimate friendship. They were mostly of a similar age, class and educational background, and
inclined towards similar literary and social pursuits. At least one scholar, Evelyn Bristol, has argued
that these young poets were just as much a developing political movement as they were a literary
school, even if that politically movement never quite coalesced into a coherent political platform.
187
While scholars tend to name this group for its most famous member, Pushkin was not really the
linchpin or unifying force of this group. Baratynskii and Pushkin, for example, were not particularly
close or well acquainted with one another during the heyday of the Pushkin Pleiad, even though they
developed a strong mutual respect and appreciation for one another in the 1830's.
188
Both men were
viewed as “exiles” by other members of the group beginning in 1820, although either man's “exile”
looks quite mild and comfortable compared to the fate many of the Decembrists would face just five
187
Evelyn Bristol. “The Pushkin 'Party' in Russian Poetry,” Russian Review, vol. 40, no. 1(Jan., 1981), 20-34.
188
Stephanie Sandler,. “Pushkin, Baratynksii, and Hamlet: On Mourning and Poetry,” Russian Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (Jan.,
1983),73-74.
200
years later. Pushkin was shuffling around various semi-exotic locals like the Crimea and the Caucasus
in pseudo-exile for criticizing the government, before finally being restricted to his mother's country
estate. Baratynskii was serving in the army in Finland, trying to rehabilitate his rank and career after a
petty theft resulted in his expulsion from school, although he was still able to visit his friends in
Petersburg quite often. However, even though Pushkin and Baratynskii barely knew each other during
this period, they both enjoyed very close friendships with Baron Anton Delvig. Delvig had been one of
Pushkin's school chums at the Lyceum-- the core of the Pushkin Pleiad was formed from this elite
boarding school's graduates-- and Baratynskii actually lived with Delvig from 1818 until he was posted
to Finland. The two remained fast friends until Delvig's death in 1831.
189
Delvig, in fact, acted as the
linchpin for this group, and his death marked the group’s final dissolution. In this sense, it might be
somewhat more accurate to call these poets the Delvig Pleiad.
Baratynskii was further connected to the vibrant literary circles of early 1820s
Petersburg when he joined the Free Society of Lovers of the Russian Word in 1821. Pushkin was
loosely affiliated with this group, but never became a formal member. Delvig, however, was a member,
and, through this group, Baratynskii also became acquainted with Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinksy,
Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Fedor Glinka, and Kondratii Ryleev, among many others. It is unlikely that
these Decembrists would have put all of their political cards on the table at meetings of this or any
other literary society, but the fact that so many key Decembrists were members lent a certain radical
political flavor to the group. Political content aside, the Decembrist poets were most definitely using
the Free Society to hash out their ideas about poetry as a political tool and the poet as a civic figure.
For example, many of Ryleev's censored dumy that could not be included in the published collection
were read at Free Society meetings.
190
Glinka was presenting his psalmic adaptations in this forum
189
Dees, Evegeny Baratynskii, 17.
190
O'Meera. K.F . Ryleev, 159-162.
201
long before Experiments in Sacred Poetry was a glint in a publisher’s eye.
191
Baratynskii was an active
and enthusiastic participant in this group, using it as a forum to cultivate his image as a slightly Byronic
and melancholy Finnish exile.
192
He may or may not have personally heard Glinka's psalmic
adaptations or Ryleev's civic myth-making exercises, but he would certainly have heard about them.
Since there was certainly no shortage of literary circles to join in Petersburg during the early 1820's,
Baratynskii's ongoing affiliation with group suggests that he sympathized to some considerable extent
with the group’s values and ideas.
193
This period of Baratynskii's literary career was both his least mature and his most
popularly successful. He had begun publishing poems here and there in 1818, but his first collection of
poems appeared in 1827 and consisted mainly of poems from this early period. This would be his only
published collection to receive broad critical notice and acclaim. While Baratynskii enjoyed his
reputation as a poet to watch, he saw himself a niche figure in a much larger pantheon of educated
gentry poets during this time. Certainly his status as a member of Pushkin and Del'vig's circle
contributed to the warmth and respect Baratynskii received from critics, a fact of which the poet was
likely aware.
As he grew and matured as a poet, however, Baratynskii would be dogged more and
more by a sense of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection. The vibrant literary clique which had
shaped his early career was culled severely by the failure of Decembrism. And even those members of
the young Petersburg literary scene who had not been swept away in that political tidal wave almost
entirely disappeared from the literary scene as tragedy hit poet after poet in an almost continuous
191
Ilya Kozlov. Kniga stikhov F .N. Glinki “Opyty sviashchennoj poezii”: problemy arkhitektoniki i zhanrovogo konteksta,
Doctoral disseration, Ekaterinburg, 2006.
192
Dees, Evegeny Baratynskii, 18.
193
Certainly Baratynskii's later literary affiliations with the Society of the Lovers of Wisdom and Kireevsky's slavophile
circle are clearly reflected in the content of his poetry, even though he never fully embraced all the ideals of either the
Liubomudry or the slavophiles.
202
parade. By the time of Baratynskii's late period in the late 1830's and 1840's, almost none of his old
friends and collaborators remained:
Poetry and appreciation of poetry were entering a period of decline. By
the middle 1840's most of the poets associated with the Golden Age had
either disappeared from the scene or had withdrawn into silence. Among
those of the older generation, Batyushkov became mentally unbalanced
in 1821; Katenin wrote little after 1832; Gnedich died in 1833, Davydov,
in 1839, and Kozlov the following year; Zhukovsky settled in Germany
after 1841. Those of the younger generation similarly vanished from
sight. For participation in the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, Ryleev was
hanged, Bestuzhev and Kyukhelbeker suffered exile and imprisonment.
The young Venevitinov died in 1827; Delvig, in 1831. Pushkin was
killed in 1837 and, after prolonged ailments, Yazykov died in 1846.
Alone of this group, Vyazemsky lived on until 1878, forgotten and
embittered.
194
Witnessing this slow procession of loss had a marked effect on Baratynskii's already melancholy
temperament and on his perception of the literary climate around him. This constant parade of loss in
the old Petersburg literary scene represented not only the loss of individual friends and colleagues, but
the loss of the educated gentry's cultural hegemony, and with it, the loss of that class's potential as a
political force. Baratynskii certainly felt the effects of the altered literary climate in 1835, when his
second collection of poems was published. The Moscow Observer, a journal with which Baratynskii
was closely associated at the time, met the collection with total silence and it received nothing but
negative attention elsewhere.
194
Bejamin Dees. Evgeny Baratynskii, 15.
203
While Baratynskii did attempt to connect with other groups like the Lovers of Wisdom
and the Slavophiles, his poetry continued to show an ongoing allegiance to the vision of poetry that had
flourished in Petersburg in his youth-- that is to say, the vision of poetry created by the educated gentry
at their most poetically and politically ambitious. Baratynskii, who had retired from the army in1825
and left Petersburg and Moscow for his wife's country estate in 1836, gradually drifted away from first
the Lovers of Wisdom and then Kireevsky and his circle. More and more, he began to value his limited
contacts with those of his friends who remained from the early days, most especially Pushkin. By the
time Sumerki appeared in 1842, when even Pushkin was gone, Baratynskii no longer saw himself as
one poet-- albeit a poet with a particular gift for melancholy elegies-- among a vibrant throng of many
strong voices. He now began to see himself as a lone voice crying out in a literary and cultural
wilderness. The dominant tone of Sumerki is one of both despair and grim determination that the poet
must attempt to pass his words and his calling on, even if such a quest is very likely doomed to failure.
This sensibility might be best crystallized in “The Last Poet” in stanza seven:
Суровый смех ему ответом; персты
Он на струнах своих остановил,
Сомкнул уста вещать полуотверсты,
Но гордыя главы не преклонил:
Стопы свои он в мыслях направляет
В немую глушь, в безлюдный край, но свет
Уж праздного вертепа не являет,
И на земле уединенья нет!
195*
195
E.A. Boratynskii. Polnoe sobranie stikhotvoepnij, vol. 2, 203.
*
Cruel laughter answers him; his hands/ Lie motionless upon his lyre, / His lips, once parted, now press closed, / Though
his proud head bends not: / In thought he aims his step / Into the wordless, empty wild; but the world's / no more an
empty cave, / No lonely place remains.
204
“The Last Poet” does not exactly constitute prophetic poetry, but it does constitute an
elegiac response to the lost potential for the poet as prophet. This poem consists of a lyric persona
offering a description of a poet-prophet, rather than a poem in which the persona himself speaks as a
prophet. Even so, the poem offers valuable insight into Baratynskii's understanding of who a poet
could or should be. “The Last Poet” references typical motifs of Hebrew prophecy, harkening back to
Derzhavin's Isaiah poems, now given a much darker, more despondent tone. But beyond the few
stanzas that reference biblical motifs, the poet who is the object of the poem, more so than a prophet, is
a figure enmeshed in a lineage of classical poets and culture. Baratynskii evokes Homer in stanza 3
just before the Poet emerges from the Castalian Spring, tying his origins to both Greek culture and
Greek prophecy. Stanzas 4 through 8 wreath the Poet's sufferings with images of Greek gods with
occasional gestures towards the Hebrew prophets. Then, in stanza 9, just as the Poet's birth is tied to
Homer, his death – or the death of his poetic gift – is linked to Sappho's legendary suicide off the cliffs
of Leucadia. Baratynkskii's poet's prophetic status is important enough to mark here and there, but the
main thrust of the poem seems to be the poet's status in classical poetic lineage. This poem gestures at
Baratynskii's understanding of poet as prophet as abstracted away from himself. To investigate
Baratynskii's own expression of poet-prophet models, we must turn to other poems.
Baratynskii was engaging with Derzhavin's model of prophetic poetry even before his
late poetry, most pointedly in his 1828 poem, “Death” (Smert). This poem blends elements from
Derzhavin's meditations on death with Romantic sensibility of the sublime in order to reinvigorate the
older poets no longer viable model of prophetic poetry.
Смерть
Смерть дщерью тьмы не назову я
И, раболепною мечтой
205
Гробовый остов ей даруя,
Не ополчу ее косой.
О дочь верховного Эфира!
О светозарная краса!
В руке твоей олива мира,
А не губящая коса.
Когда возникнул мир цветущий
Из равновесья диких сил,
В твое храненье всемогущий
Его устройство поручил.
И ты летаешь над твореньем,
Согласье прям его лия,
И в нем прохладным дуновеньем
Смиряя буйство бытия.
Ты укрощаешь восстающий
В безумной силе ураган,
Ты, на брега свои бегущий
Вспять возвращаешь океан.
206
Даешь пределы ты растенью,
Чтоб не покрыл гигантский лес
Земли губительною тенью,
Злак не восстал бы до небес.
А человек! святая дева!
Перед тобой с его ланит
Мгновенно сходят пятна гнева,
Жар любострастия бежит.
Дружится праведной тобою
Людей недружная судьба:
Ласкаешь тою же рукою
Ты властелина и раба.
Недоуменье, принужденье —
Условье смутных наших дней,
Ты всех загадок разрешенье,
Ты разрешенье всех цепей.
196
Death
Death I shall not call the daughter of darkness
And, my slavish dream
196
Boratynskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, vol. 2, part 1, 210-211.
207
Granting her the coffin skeleton,
I shall not arm her with a scythe
O daughter of the ethereal heights,
O dawn-bright beauty,
In your hand is an olive branch of peace,
And not a deadly scythe.
When the flowering world arose
From the balance of wild forces,
Into your keeping, the Almighty
Handed its structure.
And you fly over creation,
Pouring harmony along it,
And in it pacifying with cold breath
The struggles of existence.
You tame the rebellious
Hurricane in its mad force,
You, on its rushing shores,
Turn back the ocean.
You set limits to all vegetation,
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So that giant forests do not cover
The earth with deadly shade,
And grass does not rise to heaven.
And man! O Holy Maiden!
Before you, from his cheeks
Anger's stain instantly vanishes,
Sensuality's heat runs away.
Justly befriending you
Is humanity's unfriendly fate:
You caress with your hand
The ruler as well as the slave.
Doubt, compulsion--
These are the conditions of our troubled days,
You are the solution to all enigmas,
You are the breaking of all chains.
Looking back at the discussion of the prophet's relationship to God in Chapter One, the
model of power dynamics Baratynskii establishes in “Death” should look familiar. We have an all-
powerful, all-encompassing supernatural force and a lone voice empowered to express what this force
is to the people. This presentation of the poet-prophet as divinely empowered conduit between God
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and the people forms the single most important axis of the prophetic triangle, the one axis of the
prophetic transaction that must function in order for prophecy to have taken place.
While death constitutes a major theme across Baratynskii's career, this poem presents
the clearest connection to Derzhavin and the Isaiah model of prophetic poetry. According to Dees, this
poem “ . . . attempts by a process involving sublimation and justification, to come to terms with
(death).”
197
Dees goes on to characterize Baratynskii's version of death personified in “Death” as
having “all the attributes of a cult.” In a sense, this is a valid accusation when the poem is read against
Isaiah 40, the direct biblical subtext of the poem. Whereas Derzhavin's “On the Death of Prince
Meshcherskii,” which was also structured on the foundation of Isaiah 40, used a personified death/time
figure as the supernatural force in place of God as a means of shifting the focus of the text onto the
nature of mortality, Baratynskii's “Death” glorifies death personified in the same terms which Isaiah
uses to glorify God. In a sense, he is the prophet of Death's cult.
Baratynskii uses the first stanza of the poem, “Смерть дщерью тьмы не назову я / И,
раболепною мечтой / Гробовый остов ей даруя, / Не ополчу ее косой,” to prepare the reader for a
radically different portrayal of Death. She is not a product of darkness, nor does she need to be armed
with her traditional weapon. Instead, she is “О дочь верховного Эфира! / О светозарная краса!” who
holds an olive branch in token of peace in place of her scythe. Eventually, the poet even names her
“Holy Maiden” (святая дева). Even without the Isaiah subtext, Baratynskii is presenting death as a
holy, rather than demonic, figure. Not only is the panegyric approach to death almost a sort of hymn,
but even the language of the poem encourages the reader to connect it with biblical language.
According to Dees, “the archaisms in 'Death,' however, are not merely the conventional archaisms of
the time, but include terminology which would be practically unintelligible to the average reader; the
197
Dees, E.A. Baratynskii. 85.
210
tendency is illustrated by such words as the Church Slavonic 'dshcher',”
198
rather than 'doch'” in the
first line. The poem is designed to call up liturgical language and a religious context.
Dees characterizes the actions of Death in “death” as a quest for limitations and
stability in a boundless world.
199
And Baratynskii's Death does seem to provide the boundaries the poet
craves. She subjugates hurricanes, forces the oceans to adhere to their banks, and keeps the plant life
(and, by metaphorical extension, human life) from overrunning the world, solve all mysteries, and
resolves all bindings. Furthermore, she also functions as the great equalizer: “Дружится праведной
тобою / Людей недружная судьба: / Ласкаешь тою же рукою / Ты властелина и раба.” The general
tone of the poem, one of praise and loftiness, suggests that the reader is meant to take comfort from
Death's all-encompassing, omnipotent presence.
God serves exactly these functions in Isaiah 40. The previous chapters of Isaiah are a
devastating castigation of the people of Israel and a series of terrifying predictions of doom. Chapter
forty opens the second half of Isaiah, called the Book of Comfort. The first verse begins by calling the
people to take comfort from what their prophet is about to tell them on God's behalf. In Christian
tradition, this call to comfort is given particular significance among the Old Testament prophesies
because the promised deliverance can be read as an anticipation of Christ. Beginning in Isaiah 41, the
prophet begins to suggest a savior figure as a source of comfort. But first the prophet spends several
verses on God as destroyer rather than creator or redeemer. In doing so, God is shown placing the
limits on what seems to mortals limitless. For example, in Isaiah 40: 12, the prophet asks a series of
rhetorical questions, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his
hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains
on the scales and the hills in a balance?” The implied answer is that God can and has since he both
198
Ibid.
199
Ibid.. 86.
211
created and can destroy all of these things. Also, in Isaiah 40:22, “He sits enthroned above the circle of
the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads
them out like a tent to live in,” the prophet once again glorifies God while reducing mortals, but then
shows God's greatness by reducing the seeming infinity of the heavens to a tent for grasshoppers. Only
God is allowed to remain sublimely all-encompassing, able to transcend limits by placing them on
everything else either spatially or temporally. The comfort the people are meant to draw from God's
infinity comes by combining his limiting powers with his power to equalize all. By leveling both
individuals and nations to dust and toppling idols, God as destroyer gives hope to Isaiah's Israel, which
in previous chapters has been enslaved by foreign powers for its sinfulness.
Likewise, Baratynskii tries to make the universality and inevitability of death a comfort,
rather than a source of intellectual anxiety and terror. Derzhavin's “On the Death of Prince Meshersky”
tried to prescribe dutiful acceptance of death as a means of overcoming grief. The reader must take it
on faith that approaching death fits somehow into the greater plan of fate, and by extension God. In
“Death,” Baratynskii preaches a similar acceptance of mortality, but goes one step further in explaining
why we should accept, even celebrate death. In this poem, Baratynskii's version of mortality orders
and balances the universe through keeping the forces of life and nature in check and ensuring this one
respect in which all are equal, from leaves to hurricanes.
However, “Death” has one further twist in store for Baratynskii's readers. Baratynskii's
presentation of mortality, a limitless and all-encompassing experience, is as clear an example as any of
Kant's dynamical sublime. The dynamical sublime is an experience of power that exceeds the mind's
ability to conceive of its sensuous form, resulting in an ability to conceive of the idea of the infinite,
turning the experience from terror into pleasure. Thomas Wieskel's Romantic Sublime reformulates this
aesthetic category as an excess of signified, as opposed to the excess of signifier present in the
mathematical sublime. Basically, the sublime can be achieved mathematically through the experience
212
of sheer immensity of the object itself, like a mountain or a hurricane, or dynamically by an excess of
meaning-- the signified-- ascribed to the object. This excess of meaning must then be displaced into
time or space.
200
If this cannot be achieved, the person undergoing the experience is annihilated-- the
experience quite seriously blows their mind, destroying both self and cognition.
201
Baratynskii, of
course, is not annihilated by the overpowering significance of death (at least not in this poem). He
displaces the overabundance of signified by creating a persona of Death which he moves through time
and space, granting death's all-encompassing, all-powerful nature while still controlling what she
encompasses and how that power is expressed.
It may seem as though Baratynskii is using this poem to reassert prophetic poetry along
the lines of the Isaiah model. Clearly, the poem is harkening back to that earlier model. However, in
“Death,” Baratynskii is engaging in prophetic poetry for very different ends, which ultimately result in
a different model. Part of the power of the Isaiah model as used by Derzhavin lay in its power as a
negotiating tool. The poet-prophet acts as a powerful influence on both the ruler and the people, but
space is still allowed for either the ruler or the people to reject the prophet. Even while using his own
poetic prowess to overcome the potentially annihilating power of death by projecting death's over-
abundance of significance into the poems metaphoric portrayal of Death as a persona, Baratynskii
places his readers in a position in which they are not allowed to do the same or able to shift outside of
the poet's designation of who and what death is. Derzhavin's lyric persona minimizes its direct
interaction with death, focusing instead on his own feelings and the consequences of mortality, creating
a bridge between his pseudo-divine confrontation with mortality and his readers' earthly and human
sphere of emotional experience. His poet submits to death along with his readers in the final stanza,
200
Thomas Weiskel. Romantic Sublime:Studies in the Structure and Psychology of transcendence (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976). 2-27.
201
It is perhaps worth noting that Hegel's theory of the sublime tied this aesthetic category to eastern religions, especially
Judaism, and texts like Isaiah 40, which emphasize man's inability to mental conceive of God. Hegel goes so far as to
argue that this experience is meant to cause just such an erasure of the individual, who has no choice but to submit to
the overpowering mystical experience of the Divine.
213
demonstrating a poet-prophet who has insights beyond those of his audience, but in the end is still one
of the people. Baratynskii's use of Kant's dynamical sublime, separates the poet from the general
mortal submission to death. According to Wieskel, the ego only survives the sublime's overabundance
of meaning by projecting that meaning into another form-- poetry, for instance. Through the very act of
writing this hymn to death, Baratynskii shapes the idea of death, allowing him to rise above the burden
of death's overwhelming significance. The poem acts as an illustration of the poet-prophet's ability to
connect with the divine and assert prophetic authority over the audience without ever connecting to the
audience's own experience.
The relationship between the people and the prophet has shifted away from the Isaiah
model. The prophet has begun to act as an unassailable, one-way conduit for divine revelation rather
than a channel for communication between the divine and the people. This shift suggests a key element
of the Solomon model in that the relationship between the prophet and the people in the Solomon texts
is that of wholesale submission of the later to the former. Even though the Solomonic texts seem to
reduce the lofty relationship between prophet and people to that of parent and child or mentor and
protege, this “reduction” insures that the people are no longer given any authority over the prophet,
thus giving the Solomonic prophet heightened authority and control hidden behind less elevated
window dressing. “Death,” however, does not adopt much beyond this one element of the Solomonic
model. Instead, we might consider the poem a sort of hybrid-- utilizing the lofty language and
thematics of Isaiah while asserting the covert audience domination seen in Proverbs and Wisdom.
By the time Baratynskii began developing the Sumerki poems, the somewhat distressing
power dynamics seen in “Death” are but one element of the Solomon model present across the
collection. Almost every poem connects in some way with the themes and rhetoric of the Solomonic
texts. In particular, the key rhetorical framework seen in all of the Solomonic texts (other than the
Song of Solomon)-- that of the prophet “reduced” to a more experienced teacher or parent while “the
214
people” as a collective are reduced to a single naive child or student who stands as an individual
representing all individuals-- becomes one of the key structuring devices for many of the poems.
Contrasts between experience and naivety structure “Filida, with each winter . . .” (Filida s kazhdoyu
zimoyu . . .). “To the Wiseman” (Mudretsu) is based around the contrast between the frantic activity of
youth and the passive calmness of waiting for death. In “The Goblet” (Bokal), Baratynskii creates a
lyric persona has traded the unreflective Bacchanalia of youth (a youth reminiscent of Baratynskii own
wild youth with his young poet friends in Petersburg) for meditative solitude. This poet is gifted by his
mature solitude with revelations that the young do not understand or appreciate. “There were storms,
inclement times,. .” (Byli buri, nepogody . . .) begins with a young man escaping the despondency of
his life through poetry.
While many of the poems in Sumerki suggest elements of Solomonic texts, the fullest
expression of Baratynskii's adoption of the Solomonic pose is presented in the poem “Autumn”
(Osen'). “Autumn” stands as one of the key Sumerki poems in that it presents not only one of the most
ambitious and well-crafted poems of the collection, but also presents the culmination of several strains
of Baratynskii's metaphysical poetic musing. According to Pratt, the complex structure of the poem
splits the lyric persona into an “objective” and “subjective” persona. Both personae seem to be the
kind of melancholic, philosophizing, educated men of intellect that often dominate Bartaynskii's
poems, figures who equally represent Baratynskii himself and all of the social and cultural class to
which he belonged.
202
In “Autumn,” one persona of this type, who can be read as a stand in for
Baratynskii, addresses a second person, who could be seen equally as a younger man of similar
disposition or a younger version of Baratynskii himself. The “subjective” persona uses the arrival of
autumn as a springboard to berate the “objective” persona on the inadequacy, failure, and futility of his
202
Sarah Pratt. Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1984), 87-88.
215
intellectual world view. The churning emptiness experienced by the intellectually engaged lyric
personae is contrasted with the carefree tranquility of peasant life. The “subjective” persona uses his
insight into the contrast between the “objective” persona and the peasants to promote the wisdom of
accepting that death is inevitable and all human endeavors are ultimately futile. Acceptance of this
truth offers the only hope of peace and happiness. The “subjective” persona pushes this wisdom onto
the “objective” persona by using their shared personal experience to anticipate every possible avenue of
intellectual escape that the “objective” persona might seek to use.
This complicated severing and splicing of the lyric persona allows Baratynskii to assert
the basic structure of Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, a teacher figure-- traditionally understood to be
Solomon-- who has experienced all life's luxuries and intellectual pursuits, uses a sort of dis-integrative
logic on his own biography in order to enlighten unnamed protege figures who might make the same
mistakes. Baratynskii adopts this rhetorical structure frequently, building many of his poems as an
address from an older teacher to a younger student. The splitting of the lyric persona in “Autumn” not
only allows him to use the Solomonic rhetorical structure but also allows him to telescope time in the
manner of the other prophetic models. The poet's past self coexists in the poem with his present self
who is projected onto a future younger version of himself. All times are both discrete and coexisting.
As with the prophetic poems of other models, this telescoping of time increases the poet-prophet's
authority over his audience, expanding his rhetorical reach beyond his own sociopolitical context.
In the case of this poem, the fact the Baratynskii goes to such lengths to create prophetic
telescoping of time heightens awareness that the poem is meant to convey more than a sentimental
elegy on a poet's response to nature. Baratynskii is building on the elegiac traditions to which he was
so devoted in his youth, but intends to present much more in his poem than the individual emotional
response of one sensitive individual. The prophetic telescoping of time offers one of several markers
used in the poem to tell the audience that “Autumn” is a very different kind of poem. One of the most
216
famous aspects of the poem-- it's lexical archaism and torturous syntactic complexity-- also serve this
function. By choosing words that evoke the slavonicisms that were considered so passe by innovating
poets of the 1820s, Baratynskii signals that “Autumn” will not be the sort of nature elegy that was
popular early in his career, in which the stylistic dictates of the school of harmonious precision vied
with the last vestiges of eighteenth century elevated style. Baratynskii's style offers neither the elevated
archaic coloring favored by Shishkov and his circle, nor the precise, elegant clarity of Zhukovskii and
his acolytes. Rather, by using an archaic lexicon and complicated sentence structures, Baratynskii is
able to assert his wisdom over the reader's presumed naivety at the most basic linguistic level. Even
while using the rhetorical structure of the “diminshed” Solomon model, Baratynskii's language
suggests knowledge beyond that of his audience. This knowledge, which elevates him above the
audience, builds the poet's prophetic status far beyond what we saw in the work of more overtly
political poets.
Beyond using the discursive structure of the poem to build Solomonic rhetorical
dynamics over his audience, Baratynskii builds and expands on the themes of one key Solomonic text,
Ecclesiastes, in a direct and systematic way. The book of Ecclesiastes consists of a teacher figure going
through all the different aspects of his biography and declaring all the works of man, everything under
the sun, to be meaningless, and suggesting that life lived in harmony with the world and God's
commandments is the only thing that has worth. Baratynskii's poem deviates from this model through
the division of the lyric persona. Rather than going through the futility of his own biography, the
“subjective” persona addresses instead the biography and potential experiences of the “objective”
persona while still maintaining the general theme of “Autumn” mirrors that of Ecclesiastes. Both texts
are concerned with finding the best way of living. Both contrast a specific individual-- the “teacher” of
Ecclesiastes and the “objective” persona of “Autumn”-- whose approach with conscious effort and
introspection and are made unhappy, with archetypal figures who are not introspective and content with
217
their lives. In the case of “Autumn,” these less introspective figures are the woodsman and the
peasants who live in harmony with nature's seasonal rhythms. In Ecclesiastes, these figures are the
wise who are able to live meekly in accordance with God's creation. While Ecclesiastes suggests that
God's will is manifest in the natural world, Baratynskii presents nature itself as the manifestation of the
divine.
Much like “Death,” “Autumn” is derived from a specific subtext-- Ecclesiastes 12: 1-7:
Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of
trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no
pleasure in them”— 2 before the sun and the light and the moon and the
stars grow dark, and the clouds return after the rain; 3 when the keepers of
the house tremble, and the strong men stoop, when the grinders
203
cease
because they are few, and those looking through the windows grow dim; 4
when the doors to the street are closed and the sound of grinding fades;
when people rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint; 5
when people are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the
almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire no
longer is stirred. Then people go to their eternal home and mourners go
about the streets. 6 Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, and
the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well, 7 and the dust returns to the ground it
came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. 8 “Meaningless!
Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!”
203
In Russian, the word used is “жернова” or millstone, rather than the somewhat less specific term “grinder.” This is an
important distinction for the purposes of analyzing “Autumn.”
218
However, the two poems rewrite their subtexts in very different ways. “Death” follows the structure of
Isaiah 40 quite closely, resulting in a poem of very similar length, but significantly shifts the theme
from the ineffability of God to the cognitive human response to mortality. “Autumn,” by contrast, is a
vastly longer poem than its subtext and only makes occasional gestures at the rhetorical structure of
Ecclesiastes 12. But while the length and structure may be quite different, “Autumn” mirrors almost
exactly the themes of Ecclesiastes. This final chapter of Ecclesiastes functions as a summation of the
book itself, recapitulating the argument-- all men will die, whatever they strive to do on the way to
dying is meaningless, and the only worth to be found comes from submission to the divine plan as
manifest in daily life-- in the space of just a few lines. Baratynskii's poem takes this condensation of
the whole book of Ecclesiastes and then uses his own poetic concerns to expand those basic elements
of the subtext out again on his own terms.
This condensation and re-expansion of a subtext on the poet's own terms presents a
relationship between biblical subtext and new, non-sacred text that Piero Boitani terms “amplification.”
204
The new, scripturally inspired but not in itself scriptural text “rewrites” its biblical subtext in that
“. . . the whole of preceding literature . . . is absorbed and amalgamated in a palimpsest . . .” while
maintaining and continually reiterating the theme of the original scriptural text.
205
In essence,
Baratynskii takes a text in which the whole of Ecclesiastes is distilled down to a few verses then mixes
and infuses the basic elements of those few verses with new elements coming from Baratynskii's own
context and concerns in order to create a new, amplified text. This amplified text has a recognizable, if
only just barely, connection to the themes of the original subtext but also stands as an entirely new,
rewritten text to be considered on its own.
206
204
Boitani,. “From J to M,” The Bible and its Rewritings, 34. This term is used apropos of Thomas Mann's Joseph and his
Brothers, which Boitani evaluates in relation not only to its biblical subtexts but also in comparison with Milton's
Paradise Lost and its relationship to biblical subtexts. This is discussed in my introduction.
205
Ibid., 33-34.
206
An “amplified” text differs in this respect from an “adaptation” which cannot be read and understood outside of its
connection to a biblical context. For instance, the Protestant hymn, “A Time to Reap, a Time to Sow, the Bible Told Me
219
In “Autumn,” Baratynskii takes the basic rhetorical structure of Ecclesiastes 12: 2-7--
using the changes of daily life during the approach of winter to comment on the changes in an
individual's life as death approaches-- and makes it his own through extensive amplification. Consider,
to begin with, stanza one of “Autumn:”
И вот сентябрь! Замедля свой восход,
Сияньем хладным солнце блещет,
И луч его в зерцале зыбком вод
Неверным золотом трепещет.
Седая мгла виётся вкруг холмов;
Росой затоплены равнины;
Желтеет сень кудрявая дубов,
И красен круглый лист осины;
Умолкли птиц живые голоса,
Безмолвен лес, беззвучны небеса!
*207
At first glance, there seems to be very little to connect this stanza with Ecclesiastes 12. But if we
reduce both texts down to basic, abstracted elements, clear similarities begin to emerge. Baratynskii is
simply adapting the basic elements of Ecclesiastes 12 to fit his own location and aesthetics.
Ecclesiastes 12 begins to list, in verse 2, the things which mark both the approach of winter and of old
age. This list begins with the sun, moon, and stars growing dark, followed by clouds forming and a
So” is an adaptation of Ecclesiastes 3. While it only uses a few lines of its biblical subtext, the coherence of the song
relies on the recognition that those line are scripture and that the goal of the song is religious expression. The 60's
anthem, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds, directly quotes Ecclesiastes 3 much more extensively, but the song functions
as an expression of 60's countercultural values of harmony and peace. The song is comprehensible as such with or
without recognition of the biblical subtext behind the song, thus making “Turn! Turn! Turn!” an amplification rather
than an adaptation.
*
And here it is, September! Slowing its upward path, the sun shines with a chilly glow and its rays flicker like untrue
gold in the rippling mirror of the waters. Gray mist winds around the hills; the plains are flooded with dew; the curly
leafed canopy of the oaks is turning yellow, and the rounded foliage of the aspen is red; the lively voices of the birds
have fallen silent, the forest is speechless, the heavens soundless!
207
Prose translation of “Autumn” is taken from Pratt, Russian Metaphysical Romanticism.
220
suggestion of precipitation. Stanza one of “Autumn” begins with a sunrise, rather than the darkening of
the sun, but takes great pains to point out that the sun's light has become unsatisfactory-- it's light is
“chilly” and like “false gold.” This is followed by the suggesting of low hanging clouds-- “gray mist”--
and precipitation-- “dew” on the plains, in contrast to the “rain” and “clouds” in Ecclesiastes 12: 2.
Ecclesiastes lists markers of winter relevant to ancient Israel. Baratynskii makes veiled use of the
signifiers of fall from his subtext that are also relevant to his own context-- autumn is a dark and rainy
season for Russia as well-- but then follows those images with images of foliage turning, signifiers of
autumn for Baratynskii's context that do not appear in Ecclesiastes 12 and would not pertain at all to its
context. Then the final lines of the stanza reconnect to the subtext. Ecclesiastes 12: 4 refers to bird
songs growing quieter. Baratynskii refers to the birds, but they are already silent. He then amplifies
his subtext further by extending the silence of the birds to the forest and the heavens, emphasizing a
metaphysical significance to the silent birds that is suggested by Ecclesiastes but never made explicit.
Through this process of somewhat indirect reference to the subtext followed by expansion, Baratynskii
rewrites Ecclesiastes 12 to address his own geographical context and his own metaphysical concerns.
Stanza two of “Autumn” connects back to stanza one by again acknowledging the
arrival of September in exactly the words of stanza one. Creating such a strong connection between the
two stanzas allows this second stanza to act as a site of pure amplification without a need to refer back
to Ecclesiastes. By structuring the stanza as a site of pure amplification, Baratynskii is able to maintain
the argument of his Solomonic subtext while making that argument on his own terms, using his own
language and experience.
И вот сентябрь! И вечер года к нам
Подходит. На поля и горы
Уже мороз бросает по утрам
Свои сребристые узоры.
221
Пробудится ненастливый Эол,
Пред ним помчится прах летучий;
Качаяся, завоет роща, дол
Покроет лист её падучий,
И набегут на небо облака,
И, потемнев, запенится река.
*
The frost on the fields and mountains reemphasizes Baratynskii's geographical context just as the
yellowing foliage did in stanza one. Next, Baratynskii returns to the image of rain, but this time
through the Greek god, Aeolus, harkening back to the kinds of Classical references popular in the
school of harmonious precise style poetry that defined Baratynskii's youth and also to Baratynskii
sense of himself, as seen in “The Last Poet,” as an heir to the Classical poets of Greece. In Aeolus'
wake, Baratynskii presents howling groves, marauding clouds, and a dark, foaming river. These
images again emphasize a certain geographic context, but they also suggest typical Romantic images of
the sublime in nature. Baratynskii's poem uses these two stanzas to expand on the bare bones of a few
verses of Ecclesiastes 12. Through this expansion, the poem grounds the theme of its subtext-- to
which the poem remains faithful-- in a completely new geographical, cultural, and aesthetic context.
Baratynskii may be making the same point as Solomon, but he is making that point in a way that is
entirely his own.
This process is continued in stanza 3 of “Autumn” by bidding farewell to a radiant,
idealized summer, a move which strongly suggests the melancholy elegies for which Baratynskii first
became famous. At the same time, Baratynskii uses this stanza to reconnect with his subtext.
Прощай, прощай, сияние небес!
*
And here it is, September! And the evening of the year approaches us. In the morning frost now casts its silvery
patterns on fields and mountains. Rainy Aeolus will awaken; flying dust will be swept away before him; the swaying
grove will raise a howl and its falling foliage will cover the valley; and clouds will overrun the sky; and the darkened
river will foam.
222
Прощай, прощай, краса природы!
Волшебного шептанья полный лес,
Златочешуйчатые воды!
Весёлый сон минутных летних нег!
Вот эхо в рощах обнажённых
Секирою тревожит дровосек,
И скоро, снегом убелённых,
Своих дубров и холмов зимний вид
Застылый ток туманно отразит.
*
Having thus amplified his biblical subtext with so many elements of his own, Baratynskii begins to
slowly reconnect with Ecclesiastes 12. He does this in stanza three by introducing the figure of the
woodcutter in lines 6-8. On the one hand, the woodcutter can be read as yet another expansion of
autumn imagery that suggests Baratynskii's context and values. The woodcutter presents not only an
image of Russian-- as opposed to ancient Israeli-- winter, but also might suggest just a hint of
Baratynskii's past connection with the Slavophiles and their idealization of the Russian peasants. On
the other hand, the woodcutter also connects the poem back to the Solomon texts. Woodcutters may
not make much of an appearance in the Hebrew scriptures, but harvesting fruit (rather than wood)
from trees is a recurring image across the prophetic books. The success or failure of one's fruit trees
becomes a particular sign of divine favor or displeasure in Proverbs and Wisdom. The woodcutter
with his axe is also reminiscent of prophetic images of God destroying orchards and felling trees,
images that also suggest Death with her scythe in Baratynskii's poem, “Death.”
*
Farewell, farewell, radiance of the heavens! Farewell, farewell, beauty of nature! Forest full of magical whispers,
golden-scaled waters! The happy shelter of summer's momentary bliss! And so the woodcutter with his axe alarms the
echo in the bares groves; and soon the thickening current will dimly reflect the winter scene of its oaks and hills
whitened by snow.
223
The woodcutter in stanza three also anticipates the moment in the next stanza when
“Autumn” reconnects directly with Ecclesiastes 12. Ecclesiastes 12: 3-4 begin presenting images of
human life, rather than the natural world, changing with the arrival of winter. This shift centers
around the repeated image of millstones going silent. In Ecclesiastes 12, harvest is not only over, it's
been processed already. “Autumn” positions itself at a slightly earlier moment in time. Stanzas four
and five focus on peasant life:
А между тем досужий селянин
Плод годовых трудов сбирает;
Сметав в стога скошённый злак долин,
С серпом он в поле поспешает.
Гуляет серп. На сжатых бороздах
Снопы стоят в копнах блестящих
Иль тянутся вдоль жнивы, на возах,
Под тяжкой ношею скрыпящих,
И хлебных скирд золотоверхий град
Подъемлется кругом крестьянских хат.
*
Дни сельского, святого торжества!
Овины весело дымятся,
И цеп стучит, и с шумом жернова
Ожившей мельницы крутятся.
Иди, зима! На строги дни себе
*
And in the meantime, the peasant at his leisure gathers the fruit of his year's labor; having swept away the mown grain of
the valleys into stacks, he will hurry to the field with his sickle. The sickle flails away. Sheaths stand along the
harvested furrows in shining shocks, or are hauled along the mown stubble on carts that squeak under their heavy
burden, and a golden-topped city of grain stacks rises around the peasants' huts.
224
Припас оратай много блага:
Отрадное тепло в его избе,
Хлеб-соль и пенистая брага;
С семьёй своей вкусит он без забот
Своих трудов благословенный плод!
*
In these stanzas, we see the Baratynskii's Russian peasants moving towards the moment that has
already arrived in Ecclesiastes, harvesting grain for the rumbling millstones in anticipation of the
arrival of winter when-- as in Ecclesiastes 12-- the millstones will have finished their work and fallen
silent. Stanza five makes mention of the millstones in line 3, along with other aspects of processing
grain, but the mill is yet busy. The very next line, “Idi, Zima!” (Come, winter!) anticipates the arrival
of winter in which the millstones will fall silent.
Beyond lightly, but clearly, connecting back to Ecclesiastes 12, stanzas 4 and 5 add
further levels of amplification to the text by setting up the contrast between the peasant's rich life and
the futility of the “objective” persona's life. The detailed description of peasant life at harvest time
emphasizes Baratynskii's brief interest in s Slavophilia even more than the woodcutter of stanza three.
Furthermore, these stanzas connect the poem to the greater network of Solomonic texts both in
imagery and in rhetoric. One of the key differences, as discussed earlier in this chapter, between the
Solomon model of prophecy and the Isaiah and David models, concerns the issue of how and why
God's favor or displeasure manifests itself. In the Solomon texts, God does not generally manifest
itself as the supernatural force seen in the typical prophetic books. Rather, God's favor becomes
evident as material comfort which one earns by hard work and humble acquiescence to the status quo
of the world around you. This is frequently expressed in terms of harvest. For example, in Proverbs
*
Days of rustic, holy celebration! Barns smoke gayly and the flail thumps and the millstones of the enlivened mill turn
with a rumble. Come, winter! The plowman has stored up much good for the harsh days ahead: the comforting warmth
in his house, bread and salt, and foamy brew;with his family he will taste the fruit of his blessed labors in carefree
tranquility.
225
6: 6-8. “6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! 7 It has no commander, no
overseer or ruler, 8 yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.” The
successful harvest is proof, according to the Solomonic texts, of wisdom, and failure of harvest is
proof of foolishness
208
and of God's disfavor. The connection between this sort of rhetoric and the
peasants in “Autumn” is strengthened by the stress Baratynskii places on the abundance enjoyed by
the peasants in contrast to the poverty experienced by the “objective” lyric persona. Baratynskii had
been managing his wife's estate and the peasants owned by that estate for quite some time by the time
“Autumn” was written. Whatever sentimental notions he might have once had about happy peasant
life, by the advent of his late poetic period, he would have been well aware that such images of
sufficiency and happy abundance were a very far cry from the reality of serf life for even well-cared
for Russian peasants. These descriptions of peasants are decidedly not a capitulation to the demands
of literature in the age of Russian Realism. The abundance enjoyed by the peasants in the poem acts
as a metaphor for emotional and metaphysical abundance which contrasts with emotional and
metaphysical poverty of the intellectualizing “objective” persona.
The next three stanzas provide further reason to view the abundant harvest of the
peasants as a spiritual abundance rather than a literal one. In stanza six, the “subjective” persona
begins his address to the object persona, comparing his intellectual harvest to the peasant's agricultural
harvest:
А ты, когда вступаешь в осень дней,
Оратай жизненного поля,
И пред тобой во благостыне всей
Является земная доля;
Когда тебе житейские бразды,
208
And not in the good, Holy Fool sort of way
226
Труд бытия вознаграждая,
Готовятся подать свои плоды.
И спеет жатва дорогая,
И в зёрнах дум её сбираешь ты,
Судеб людских достигнув полноты,-
*
While Baratynskii projects this quest to harvest grains of thought onto the “objective” persona, the idea
of laboring to obtain all knowledge suggests the “Teacher” figure of Ecclesiastes 1: 12-18:
12 I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 I applied my
mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the
heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! 14 I have seen
all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a
chasing after the wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be straightened; what
is lacking cannot be counted. 16 I said to myself, “Look, I have
increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem
before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17
Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of
madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.
18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the
more grief.
The parallel between the “subjective” persona-- the voice addressing the audience-- and the “Teacher”
becomes even clearer when stanza six is considered in conjunction with stanzas seven, eight and nine,
where Baratynskii begins to develop the “objective” persona-- the one being addressed-- by projecting
*
But you, when you enter the autumn of your days, the plowman of the field of life, and your earthly lot appears before
you in all its beneficence; when the furrows of life, rewarding the labor of your existence, prepare to yield their fruits to
you, and the treasured harvest ripens, and you gather it in kernels of thought, having achieved fulfillment of the fates of
man--
227
elements of the poet's own life and experience onto the future sorrow towards which the younger
persona is headed:
Ты так же ли, как земледел, богат?
И ты, как он, с надеждой сеял;
И ты, как он, о дальнем дне наград
Сны позлащённые лелеял...
Любуйся же, гордись восставшим им!
Считай свои приобретенья!..
Увы! к мечтам, страстям, трудам мирским
Тобой скоплённые презренья,
Язвительный, неотразимый стыд
Души твоей обманов и обид!
*
Твой день взошёл, и для тебя ясна
Вся дерзость юных легковерии;
Испытана тобою глубина
Людских безумств и лицемерии.
Ты, некогда всех увлечений друг,
Сочувствии пламенный искатель,
Блистательных туманов царь-и вдруг
Бесплодных дебрей созерцатель,
Один с тоской, которой смертный стон
*
Are you as rich as the farmer? You sowed with hope, as he did; you cherished gilded dreams about the distant day of
reward, as he did . . . So admire and be proud of that which has come to pass! Count your accomplishments! . . . Alas!
In addition to dreams, passions, and earthly labors, you have stored up scorn and the biting, irrefutable shame of the
deceptions and insults of your soul!
228
Едва твоей гордыней задушен.
Но если бы негодованья крик,
**
Но если б вопль тоски великой
Из глубины сердечныя возник,
Вполне торжественной и дикой,-
Костями бы среди твоих забав
Содроглась ветреная младость,
Играющий младенец, зарыдав,
Игрушку б выронил, и радость
Покинула б чело его навек,
И заживо б в нём умер человек!
*
Although Baratynskii has divided the lyric persona in two and uses the “subjective” persona to berate
the “objective” persona for the futility of the latter's intellectual pursuits, these stanzas are reminiscent
of the passages of Ecclesiastes where the “Teacher” berates himself for attempting to pursue a life path
that proves to be meaningless.
209
Read against the full text of Ecclesiastes, these passages far more
closely resemble the “Teacher's” descriptions of his own failures, misery, and dissatisfaction regarding
himself rather than the “Teacher's” comments to his audience. But in Ecclesiastes 12, which provides
the underlying structure of “Autumn,” the same turn outwards towards an external second person is
made. While most of the text of Ecclesiastes is a first person narrative account of the “Teacher's” life
* *
Your day has come and all the insolence of your youthful credulity is clear to you. The depth of human madness
and hypocrisy has been experienced by you. You were once the friend of all passions, the ardent seeker of sympathy, the
tsar of the sparkling mists-- and suddenly you are the contemplator of barren wilds, alone with your anguish whose
deathly groan is barely stifled by your pride.
*
But if a cry of indignation, if a wail of intense anguish should rise out from the depths of your heart, all solemn and wild,
frivolous youth would be shaken to his very bones in the midst of his amusement; the playing babe would begin to howl,
drop his toy, and joy would abandon his brow forever, and within him, man would die alive.
209
These passages are many, but a key example is found in Ecclesiastes 2: 17-23, where the Teacher rejects the path of
deliberately trying to cultivate wisdom.
229
and observations about life, in the first verse of Ecclesiastes 12, the “Teacher's” narrative becomes a
lecture that begins to predict the student's behavior. “Remember your Creator in the days of your
youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, 'I find no pleasure in
them.'” In this text, the “Teacher” begins-- for the very first time-- to attribute his own experience to
his student/audience, a rhetorical device which Baratynskii uses to structure his entire poem.
In “Autumn” stanza ten, Baratynskii continues amplifying Ecclesiastes 12 by using the
function of Ecclesiastes 12 as it exists with the book of Ecclesiastes as a whole to draw in more of the
key elements of the Solomonic texts. As stated earlier, Ecclesiastes 12 functions as a sort of summation
or recapitulation of the book of Ecclesiastes as a whole. Stanza ten of “Autumn,” which describes a
feast at which the “subjective” persona orders the “objective” persona to be a good and generous host,
even though every dish tastes of mortality, draws in elements of the Solomonic texts which are omitted
in Solomon's own summation of his argument in Ecclesiates 12:
Зови ж теперь на праздник честный мир!
Спеши, хозяин тороватый!
Проси, сажай гостей своих за пир
Затейливый, замысловатый!
Что лакомству пророчит он утех!
Каким разнообразьем брашен
Блистает он!.. Но вкус один во всех
И, как могила, людям страшен;
Садись один и тризну соверши
По радостям земным своей души!
*
*
So call the fair-minded community now to the holiday celebrations! Hurry, generous host! Invite your guests and seat
them at the ingenious and ornate feast! What joy it foretells for epicurean taste! It shines with such a diversity of
dishes! But there is only one taste in all of them, and it terrifies people like the grave; be seated alone and complete the
funeral feast in accordance with the earthly joys of your soul!
230
Commandments to host or enjoy a feast recur frequently in Proverbs and Wisdom, often uttered by the
personification of wisdom herself. Like harvest, a successful feast functions as one of the key
leitmotifs in daily life that indicates wisdom and divine favor across the Solomon texts. The
Solomonic text to which stanza ten refers most directly, however, is one of the few mentions of feast in
Ecclesiastes-- Ecclesiastes 9: 7-10.
7 Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful
heart, for God has already approved what you do. 8 Always be clothed
in white, and always anoint your head with oil. 9 Enjoy life with your
wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has
given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot
in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand
finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where
you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor
wisdom.
As in Baratynskii, the image in this passage is not of a feast as evidence of divine favor, wisdom, or
righteousness, but rather an image of feasting and celebrating because death is going to render
everything one does meaningless, so one might as well try to enjoy life while it lasts. This is a theme
of Ecclesiastes that is not included in the summation of the argument in Ecclesiastes 12. By pulling
this theme into his rewriting of Ecclesiastes 12 in “Autumn,” Baratynskii is able to amplify the aspects
of his subtext that drive the poet's decision to rewrite this piece of scripture. Baratynskii then modifies
elements of this passage of Ecclesiastes 9 in order to help it fit as a coherent element in the poem and
its response to the theme of Ecclesiastes 12 by framing the feast within the address of the “subjective”
persona to the “objective” persona and amplifying the elements of despair and impending mortality.
231
Stanzas 11-15 all preform more or less the same functions of amplifying and expanding
the same few verses of Ecclesiastes 12, specifically verses 6-7: “6 Remember him—before the silver
cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the
wheel broken at the well, 7 and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to
God who gave it.” The somewhat obscure images of these two verses-- the silver cord, the golden
bowl, the pitcher-- all seem to be symbols of impending death. Baratynskii exchanges these omens for
some of his own. Stanza 11 presents the mind overpowering the heart and stopping it with the chill of
experience. Stanza 12 builds towards the discovery of an afterlife. The last two lines in particular
mentions in particular mention harp music that the “objective” persona was unable to understand before
the discovery of heaven, suggesting that the approach of death acts as the event which enables such
understanding. Stanza 14 brings in a hurricane and other natural disasters, emblems of death
personified in his earlier poem, “Death.” Stanza 15 concerns the fate of a fallen star, on its surface just
another natural omen, but understood by most scholars as a comment on Pushkin's death. These
stanzas combine to expand upon and amplify the omens of death in Ecclesiastes 12, tailoring them to
Baratynskii and his audience.
Just as Ecclesiastes 12 serves as a recapitulation of Ecclesiastes as a whole, the final
stanza of “Autumn” acts as a recapitulation of the whole poem. Many of the earlier stanzas are focused
on pulling the theme of Ecclesiastes 12 out of winter into the early autumn moment before winter
arrives. Stanza 16 pulls back into alignment with Ecclesiastes as autumn turns into the long awaited
winter.
Зима идет, и тощая земля
В широких лысинах бессилья,
И радостно блиставшие поля
Златыми класами обилья,
232
Со смертью жизнь, богатство с нищетой -
Все образы годины бывшей
Сравняются под снежной пеленой,
Однообразно их покрывшей, -
Перед тобой таков отныне свет,
Но в нём тебе грядущей жатвы нет!
*
In this stanza, all the activity and abundance that the peasants were using to stave off and ignore the
arrival of winter are predicted to fade away. Rather than death leveling everything as in Ecclesiastes
12, Baratynskii allows a natural phenomenon-- snow-- to achieve the same end, suggesting once again
the connection between nature and the divine in his work. Furthermore, while Baratynskii adheres to
the general theme of Ecclesiastes-- all is meaningless because everyone will die-- he also picks up on
and develops an idea that Ecclesiastes merely implies. In Ecclesiastes, we see that the “Teacher” is
often made miserable by his quest for wisdom and a meaningful life, there is no suggestion that those
who don't seek wisdom are somehow happier than those who do. Baratynskii, in the last words of his
poem, makes it quite clear that the misery and meaninglessness to which all people are subject are
especially bad and painful for intellectuals like the “objective” persona.
And yet, for all the despair projected onto the “objective” persona, the “subjective”
persona still composes the poem. Even while warning the protege figure implied by the “objective”
persona about all the misery and failure to be found in trying, as in stanza 13, to “transmit your
innermost essence to earthly sound,” Baratynskii does just exactly this not only in “Autumn,” but in
all his other Sumerki poems. Similarly, the “Teacher” of Ecclesiastes claims again and again that there
*
Winter is coming, and the emaciated earth with its wide bald patches of impotence, and the fields that once glittered
joyfully with the golden shocks of abundance, with death-- life, wealth with poverty-- all images of the past year are
leveled under as shroud of snow that covers them all alike-- thus is the world that stands before you from now on, but for
you there is no coming harvest in it!
233
is nothing new under the sun, and everything under the sun is meaningless, that the only thing to do is
to live in accordance with God's will. Yet he writes Ecclesiastes. The very act of writing in a context
in which everything that anyone attempts will end in insignificance and despair suggests that the
author and the act of writing somehow stand above the general rules they write about. In spite of the
close identification between the “Teacher” and his audience, between Baratynskii's “subjective” and
“objective” personae, the existence and authority of the text itself elevates the one who has written
above his audience. This elevation reasserts the key element of prophecy-- the prophet is elevated
above and set apart from his audience, the people. In doing so, the text itself is elevated to a new
level. The “Teacher” of Ecclesiastes may be, in his own terms, something under the sun-- and
therefore meaningless-- but the text he has written is scripture, the implied word of God and thus
something not of this earth-- and therefore it escapes the pervasive meaninglessness he describes. All
things in “Autumn” may be forced to succumb to the arrival of winter and death. All the lyric
persona's intellectual and artistic pursuits may bring him only misery. But the poem, the text itself,
rises above this. The poet may succumb to death and despair, but poetry itself will continue.
Baratynskii lived through many waves of change in both his personal life and the
political and cultural life of his country. Personally, he withdrew from these changes, but his writing
asserted, from the beginning of his career to the end, that no matter what else might change, poetry
itself remained the essential, important thing. He was desperate to assert the cultural and political
importance of the line of poetic tradition he saw himself and his friends as continuing. The great
legacy of classical poetry extending back to ancient Greece seemed to be getting lost in Russian
culture as literature turned more and more towards prose, realism, and overt social and political
commentary. In Sumerki and his last poems, Baratynskii emerges as a poet desperate to preserve that
tradition until a new generation would have a chance to rediscover its importance, even while he is
certain that he will fail in this pursuit.
234
It is tempting to define Baratynskii's poetry-- especially the prophetic poems like
“Autumn” and “Death”-- entirely by their spirit of frustration and deep melancholy. Certainly
optimistic notes are few and far between in Sumerki. However, we must remember that Baratynskii,
like so many of his colleagues, died relatively young and unexpectedly. While Sumerki was his last
published collection of poems, he kept writing until his sudden death while traveling Italy with his
family. These last poems of his life are stylistically consistent with Sumerki, making use of the same
complex language and syntax. However, these last poems begin hinting at a different, more consoling
response to the problems the poet confronted in Sumerki. One of Baratynskii's last poems before his
death, 1843's “On Planting a Forrest” (Na posev lesa), fully reveals Baratynskii goals in writing the
grim, complicated poems of Sumerki:
На Посев Леса
Опять весна; опять смеется луг,
И весел лес своей младой одеждой,
И поселян неутомимый плуг
Браздит поля с покорством и надеждой.
Но нет уже весны в душе моей,
Но нет уже в душе моей надежды,
Уж дольный мир уходит от очей,
Пред вечным днем я опускаю вежды.
Уж та зима главу мою сребрит,
Что греет сев для будущего мира,
Но праг земли не перешел пиит,-
235
К ее сынам еще взывает лира.
Велик господь! Он милосерд, но прав:
Нет на земле ничтожного мгновенья;
Прощает он безумию забав,
Но никогда пирам злоумышленья.
Кого измял души моей порыв,
Тот вызвать мог меня на бой кровавый,
Но, подо мной сокрытый ров изрыв,
Свои рога венчал он падшей славой!
Летел душой я к новым племенам.
Любил, ласкал их пустоцветный колос,
Я дни извел, стучась к людским сердцам,
Всех чувств благих я подавал им голос.
Ответа нет! Отвергнул струны я,
Да хрящ другой мне будет плодоносен!
И вот ему несет рука моя
Зародыши елей, дубов и сосен.
И пусть! Простяся с лирою моей,
Я верую: ее заменят эти
236
Поэзии таинственных скорбей
Могучие и сумрачные дети.
210
On Planting a Forest
It's spring again, again the meadow laughs,
the forest makes merry in its youthful clothes,
and, settled, the tireless plow
draws its reins in the field with our hopes and souls.
But yet there is no spring in my soul,
But yet in my soul there is no hope,
Already the earthly world passes from my eyes,
Before the eternal days, my eyelids droop.
Already my head silvers,
that warms the soil for the coming world,
But the poet has not yet crossed the threshold of the earth,--
To her sons, the lyre still calls out.
Great is the Lord! He is merciful, but just:
There are no meaningless moments on earth;
He forgives mindless amusement,
But never malicious feasts.
210
Boratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stixhotvorennij, vol. 2, 245-246.
237
Who crushed my rushing soul,
That could cause me to fight in the bloody battle;
But beneath me, the hidden ditch has been dug,
His horns crowning his fallen glory!
I flew as a ghost to new peoples,
I loved, caressed their infertile ear:
I wasted days, knocking on people's hearts,
I gave voice to all good feelings.
There is no answer! I have rejected the strings,
Yet hoping that some other than myself will be fruitful!
And look I carry him in my hand
Seeds of firs, oaks, and pines.
And so be it! Bidding farewell to my lyre,
I have faith: it will be replaced by the
Poetry of mysterious sorrows
By mighty and gloomy children!
This poem, which Dees rightly connects with the Sumerki poems in general and “Autumn”
specifically,
211
turns to a moment suggested but never reached by the seasonal metaphysics of
“Autumn.” While the earlier poem begins in autumn but anticipates death and winter, “On Planting a
211
Dees, Benjamin. Evgeny Baratynskii, pg. 125.
238
Forrest” begins with the arrival of spring in stanza one. With spring, comes life and rebirth, which the
lyric persona internalizes in stanza two. But in stanza three, the lyric persona reveals that, even
though spring and life may be in his heart, his external reality is the winter moment in which
“Autumn” culminated. The hope implied by spring is projecting onto the next generation, the “sons”
at the end of stanza three who still raise their lyres. Stanza four connects this poem in the most
explicit way to the traditions of prophetic poetry by directly speaking for God and his mercy.
After so many poems of lamentation, in “On Planting a Wood,” Baratynskii finally
offers his audience consolation. As with the Solomonic texts, it is a consolation projected far into the
future. Stanza six further emphasizes that the lyric persona is not only a poet but a prophet by
describing the poet's soul flying about the world and trying to communicate with all the people of the
earth. In stanza seven, his prophetic efforts are rejected, but transmuted into the seeds for the poems
titular forest—pines, firs and oaks. The final stanza affirms the poet's belief that his poetic-prophetic
quest will be passed on to the “gloomy children” that emerge from the seeds the poet has left, even if
he does not live to see it. In this poem, Baratynksii recognizes that his poetry has no contemporary
audience, that his masterpiece, Sumerki, had fallen on deaf ears. But the despair and mourning that
suffuse so much of Baratynskii's work is mitigated by the hope of a new generation to inherit the
legacy that the last poet of the Golden age struggled so hard to pass on.
One could argue that Baratynskii's hopes in “On Planting a Wood” were indeed
prophetic-- or at least precognitive. The Symbolist rediscovery of the Golden Age in general and of
Sumerki in particular shows that these poems achieved just exactly what Baratynskii had hoped he
might accomplish. A later generation rejected all the philosophical fury of the 1840's in favor of a
continuation of the poetic traditions of the 1820's. Certainly Baratynskii's considerable influence not
only on the Symbolists but also on later poets-- Brodskii, for example-- suggests that his gambit in
these poems worked beyond his wildest dreams. However, the fact that Baratynskii's projected future
239
audience became a reality does not undercut the fact that this projected audience was a strategy for
rising above the prophetic model's loss of viability and the loss of cultural potency of the educated
gentry which created the prophetic model. As with the Solomonic texts themselves, Baratynskii's late
poems are structured by the ruins of a lost model of social and political authority, using both greater
control over audience and the projected future moment in order to salvage something of a lost
tradition.
Desert Fathers and Worldly Power: Pushkin's final prophetic cycle
When speaking of the prophet-poet in Russian literature, Pushkin's 1828 poem, “The
Prophet,” marks the almost instinctive starting point for the thoughts of most scholars, as well as
general readers. The substance of this poem has already been discussed at length in the introduction,
and I will return to this poem and its legacy in the conclusion. In this section, I intend to show that this
poem, though it marks a key moment in Pushkin's own development of a prophetic pose, is by no
means the final, or even most significant moment in Pushkin's exploration of the prophet as a poetic
model. Rather, the poem marks a tipping of the poet's hand-- an early, complete, and almost entire
exposure of the poet's developing view of himself as a poet and the importance of that role. “Prophet”
shows us that-- even at the moment when the failure of Decembrism insured the death of both the
Isaiah and Solomon models as possible models for poetic political engagement-- Pushkin was
expressing a nostalgia for the sort of social and political role Derzhavin had played and a desire to
occupy some analogous role himself. While Pushkin would never again expose his interest in the
prophet as a poetic pose so blatantly, a number of his later poems would modify and develop the pieces
of the prophetic puzzle that are missing in “The Prophet,” and express a complex elegiac engagement
with the loss of potential of the Isaiah model using techniques similar to the Solomonic texts.
Rather than working through every single poem in which Pushkin engages in some way
with prophetic models of poetry, I will instead examine one of Pushkin's final works that engages the
240
question-- a cycle of six poems written in 1836 that the poet seemed to intend to publish in his journal,
Sovremenik. The six poems in question are “I have erected a monument not built by human hands . . .”
(Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi . . .), “Hermit fathers and chaste women . . .” (Ottsy
pustynniki i zheny neporochny . . .), “Imitation of the Italian” (Podrazhanie italiianskomu), “Worldly
Power” (Mirskaia vlast' ), “Whenever I wander, pensive, outside of the city . . .” (Kogda za gorodom,
zadumchiv, ia brozhu . . .), and “From Pindemonte” (Iz Pindemonti). The existence of this cycle was
first suggested by Nikolai Izmailov in 1954, based partly on numbers found on Pushkin's own
manuscripts (for poems II, III, IV, and VI) and in part on Izmailov's own suppositions (for poems I and
V).
212
Like all of Pushkin's last poems, the six included in Izmailov's proposed cycle were not
published in the poet's lifetime. Because Pushkin never published the poems as a cycle and two of the
poems were never numbered as manuscripts, Izmailov's theory remains a source of some debate.
213
There is, however, very little question that the cycle's six proposed poems considered both separately
and together offer considerable insight into Pushkin's views on society, politics and poetry.
The first poem in the proposed cycle, “I have erected a monument not built by human
hands . . .”-- often referred to simply as “Monument,” although Pushkin never designated such a title--
is one of the most famous of Pushkin's late poems. While the poem connects far less clearly to
prophetic poetry than “Prophet,” it performs a similar function by positioning the poet in a prophetic
relationship to God, king, and people without seeking to make use of the power of that position. The
poem adapts and argues with Derzhavin's 1795 poem, “Monument,” which is itself an adaptation of
Horace. These “monument” poems all grapple with the issue of a poet's legacy and the extent to which
poetry acts as a means of immortality for the poet. But whereas Horace's poet (quoted in the epigraph
to Pushkin's poem) makes himself a monument more lasting than steel, and Derzhavin's poet makes
212
N.V . Izmailov, “Liricheskie tsikly v poezii Pushkina 30kh godov,” Pushkin: Issledovaniya i materialy, V ol. 2 (1958), 7-
48.
213
David A. Sloane, “Pushkin's Lyric Cycle of 1836 and the Lessons of Izmailov's Hypothesis: Some Notes on the
Semiotics of Cycles,” Ulbandus Review, vol. V (Fall 1987), 31-34.
241
himself a monument “eternal and miraculous,” Pushkin's poet creates a monument that is
“nerukotvornyi”--not made by hands. This curious word is rarely found in everyday Russian speech or
poetry. Indeed, it only occurs this once in all of Pushkin's works.
214
However, “nerukotvornyi”is a
well-known and significant concept in Russian Orthodoxy, particularly in connection with the icon
known as the acheiropoieton, or the Icon Not Made by Hands (Spas nerukotvornyi). Pushkin is
suggesting that his poetry is not just eternal or miraculous, but a divine creation, a gift establishing a
prophetic connection between the poet and God.
I contend that this connection is further emphasized by other prophetic elements of the
poem. First, the poem's explicit connections to earlier poets connects with and builds authority based
on of the past, yet, like all the other “Monument” poems, also relies on a projected future audience.
The monument created by the poet matters only because it will have an audience in posterity. The
moment occupied by the lyric persona in this poem is thus the telescoped prophetic moment in which
the prophet engages all times discretely and at once. It is also the Solomonic reconfiguration of
prophetic telescoping of time in that the future moment-- in which the poet's monument will exist and
the poet's legacy is secure and unchallenged-- becomes the moment on which both past and present are
oriented. The typical prophetic moment is eternal in that all the past builds towards this moment and
all the future can be interpreted through this moment. The Solomonic moment is also eternal, but in the
sense that the past is building towards some future moment which only the Solomonic “wisdom writer”
is able to properly apprehend in the present.
This telescoping effect is also extended to place and political context. On the one hand,
the poem ties the poet very specifically to the moment in which Pushkin wrote it. The third stanza of
the poem contextualizes the poet in Russia:
214
Michael Wachtel. A Commentary to Pushkin's Lyric Poetry, 1826-1836pg 355.
242
Слух обо мне пройдет по всей Руси великой,
И назовет меня всяк сущий в ней язык,
И гордый внук славян, и финн, и ныне дикой
Тунгус, и друг степей калмык.
215*
On the one hand, by using the ancient Rus instead of Russia, Pushkin suggests a connection to ancient,
pre-imperial Russia. But the poet's words are then extended not only to the “proud grandson of the
Slavs,” but also to the Finn, the Tungus and Kalmyk—representing peripheral regions of the empire
where the poet's legacy transcends the limits of the Russian language. The opening of the next stanza
extends the poet's legacy out still further by saying that, in the distant future, the he will be loved by the
people for his poetic gifts, suggesting that the poet's power and legacy is universal.
A sharp political edge emerges in line four of the poem, which refers to an
“aleksandriiskogo stolpa,” which the poet's monument will exceed in height. While this “alexandrian
column” might refer to a monument built in Alexandria in 297AD or the great lighthouse of
Alexandria, Pushkin's audience would almost certainly have assumed he meant the twenty-five meter
high column built as a monument to Alexander I which was completed in 1834.
216
Pushkin's antipathy
towards Alexander I, who by then had been dead for nine years, was so intense that the poet
intentionally left Petersburg to avoid the column's official unveiling.
217
The Alexander column was
meant as an answer to Napoleon's Colonne Vendôme in Paris. Since the Alexander column was
intentional built taller than the Colonne Vendôme as a response to Napoleon and his legacy, Pushkin's
emphasis on the greater height of the poet's unearthly monument decidedly suggests that line four's
target is the late tsar and his legacy. I would suggest that, by claiming that the poet's monument is both
215
Pushkin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 3, 340.
*
Through all great Russia's spaces shall my name be spoken, / and every living tongue of man my name shall tell; / proud
grandson of the Slavs, and the Finn, and the still wild / Tungus and Kalmyk of the steppes.
216
Wachtel. A Commentary to Pushkin's Lyric Poetry, 1826-1836, 356.
217
Roman Jakobson. Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987, 346.
243
divinely created and greater than the tsar's, Pushkin restructures his relationship to his past and present
political context in such a way that the poet's relationship to the tsar parallels that of the Hebrew
prophet and the king. The poet-prophet's spiritual power is greater than the king's and is able to
transcend the limits of time and space.
“I have built myself a monument not made by human hands . . .” thus situates the poet
within the Isaiah model prophetic triangle by asserting the poet's relationship to God through his gift
“not made by hands,” to the audience through the monument's reliance on posterity and the poet's
transcendent power over time and space, and to the king through the monument's comparison to the
Alexander Column. Much like in “Prophet,” Pushkin positions the poet as the current occupant of the
space once filled by Derzhavin's Isaiah-derived poet-prophet. And, just as in “Prophet,” after carefully
and boldly positioning his poetic persona in this powerful role, he demurs from utilizing that power in
the current moment. “Prophet” focused on the disdain and mistreatment faced by the poet in his own
time as contrasted with an implied posterity that will recognize the poet-prophet's worth. “I have built
myself a monument not made by human hands . . .” offers a mirror image of “Prophet” by focusing on
the regard posterity will have for the poet-prophet in contrast to the implied disdain and mistreatment
of his contemporaries.
The second poem in the cycle, “Desert fathers and chaste women,” very obviously
invites prophetic connections in its very first line. Taken by itself, this poem functions as a clever
exercise in adapting old church prayers into modern Russia.
Отцы пустынники и жены непорочны,
Чтоб сердцем возлетать во области заочны,
Чтоб укреплять его средь дольних бурь и битв.
Сложили множество божественных молитв;
Но ни одна из них меня не умиляет,
244
Как та, которую священник повторяет
Во дни печальные Великого поста;
Всех чаще мне она приходит на уста
И падшего крепит неведомою силой:
Владыко дней моих! дух праздности унылой,
Любоначалия, змеи сокрытой сей,
И празднословия не дай душе моей.
Но дай мне зреть мои, о боже, прегрешенья,
Да брат мой от меня не примет осужденья,
И дух смирения, терпения, любви
И целомудрия мне в сердце оживи.
218
Desert fathers and chaste women
So that their hearts would lift to holy heights,
So as to strengthen their hearts amidst worldly storms and struggles,
Laid down many holy prayers;
But not one of them touches me,
Like the one that the priest repeats
In the sad days of the Great Fast;
Most often of all that prayer comes to my lips
And falling, strengthens with unseen force:
O Lord of my days! Dull the spirit of sloth,
Lust for power, that hidden snake that it is,
218
Pushkin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 3, 337.
245
And do not give my soul to idleness.
But give me the chance, oh God, to repair my transgression,
And that my brother will not share in my condemnation,
And the spirit of humility, patience, love
And chastity with quicken in my heart.
Not only do the first lines of this poem suggest the world of the Hebrew testament, the second half of
the poem, lines 10-16, offers a paraphrase in modern Russian of the fourth century Saint Ephrem the
Syrian's prayer of repentance, which is recited during Russian Orthodox services for during Lent:
Господи и Владыко живота моего, дух праздности, уныния,
любоначалия и празднословия не даждь ми. Дух же целомудрия,
смиренномудрия, терпения и любве даруй ми, рабу Твоему. Ей,
Господи, Царю, даруй ми зрети моя прегрешения и не осуждати
брата моего, яко благословен еси во веки веков. Аминь.
219
In the early lines of the poem, Pushkin makes frequent use of archaic language in order to build the
quasi-religious feel of the poem. For example, “neporochny” in line one and “zaochny” in line two
rather than the modern Russian “neporochnye” аnd “zaochnye”, and “vozletat'” rather than “vzletat'” in
line two. This pattern of archaisms culminates with the first word in line 10, “vladyko”, the archaic
vocative form of “vladyka” which also opens Ephrem's repentance prayer. By building archaisms up to
this one signal word, Pushkin prepares his audience to recognize the church resonances of the poem so
that when he begins adapting the repentance prayer into modern Russian, his audience will know
exactly what he is doing. The way is further prepared by line seven, in which Pushkin directly
references the Great Fast-- Lent-- and the prayers said by priests at that time-- including Ephrem's
219
O Lord and Master of my life, give me not the spirit of sloth, despair, lust for power and idle talk. But grant unto me,
Thy servant, a spirit of chastity (integrity), humility, patience and love. Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see mine own
faults and not to judge my brother. For blessed art Thou unto the ages of ages. Amen.
246
prayer of repentance. Certainly at this late phase of his life, Pushkin was very interested in biblical
translation and paraphrase of church texts into modern Russian, as were many of his contemporaries.
220
If we consider the poem not just by itself but as part of the full 1836 cycle, “Desert
fathers and chaste women” presents not only an interesting attempt at adapting a sacred text but also a
poem in which Pushkin's poet goes beyond occupying the prophetic role, as in “Prophet” and
“Monument,” and actually prophesies to his audience. As David Sloane points out in his semiotic
examination of the cycle, even though “Desert fathers and chaste women” never mentions poetry, the
theme of the poem is composition of prayers rather than poems.
221
The first poem of the cycle
connected poetic composition to the divine, and poetic inspiration and composition stand, along with
Orthodox religious motifs, as the unifying threads connecting the six poems in the cycle as a whole.
Within the context of the cycle, the composition of prayers and the composition of poems are one and
the same enterprise, both suffused with divine connection and inspiration. The first nine lines of
“Desert fathers and chaste women” establish the power and importance of prayer-- and, by extension,
poetry-- to the people, who are explicitly connected to the people of ancient Israel in the opening line.
As the poem progresses and the poet turns to Ephrem's repentance prayer, the people are transformed
from ancient Israelites into contemporary Orthodox believers attending services at Great Lent, infusing
the significance of the composed prayers across time and space. By evoking the prayers which
comforted the ancient Israelites, Pushkin suggests the words of the prophets. By connecting the ancient
Israelites to contemporary church goers, Pushkin suggests that the prayers heard by this audience are
the equivalent of the prophetic texts.
This parallel would be just an interesting spiritual meditation, however, if Pushkin
himself did not then adapt just such a prayer-- the paraphrase of Ephrem's repentance prayer in lines
220
Gabriella Safran. “Love Songs between the Sacred and the Vernacular: Pushkin's 'Podrazhaniia' in the Context of Bible
Translation,” The Slavic and East European Journal, V ol. 39, No. 2, \165-183.
221
Sloane, “Pushkin's Lyric Cycle of 1836,” 39-40.
247
10-16-- into his own poetic speech. By using such a readily recognizable prayer, Pushkin ensures that
his audience will recognize what he is doing. By adapting the prayer into contemporary Russian,
Pushkin begins to make the prayer his own. This is especially apparent in line 11: “Любоначалия,
змеи сокрытой сей.” Ephrem's prayer does mention liubonachaliia-- lust for power-- but the
metaphor, “that hidden snake,” is purely Pushkin's addition to the prayer. Grechanaia claims that
Pushkin's source for this metaphor might be found in a poem by Andre Chernier,
222
suggesting that this
metaphor reveals that Pushkin has not only adapted the text of the prayer, but is using it as the base for
composing his own prayer, in his own language, building off his own literary influences. In this poem,
masquerading as a simple spiritual meditation, Pushkin not only presents his poetry as equivalent to
prophecy and prayer, but begins to adapt the words of spiritual leaders to his own purposes. This
poem, then, even without mentioning the word “prophet” or building off of any prophetic biblical
subtext, should be seen as a type of prophetic text in which Pushkin writes himself and his poetry into
the Hebrew prophetic tradition.
The purposes Pushkin presents in the poem align not with the Isaiah model presented in
“Prophet” and suggested in “Monument,” but with the principles and goals of the Solomonic texts. The
focus of Pushkin's poem-prayer is the individual morality of his audience and their submission to God's
will, on individual choices and actions rather than great social and political evils. Additionally, by
presenting prophetic poetry as an equivalent to prayer, Pushkin emphasizes the power dynamics of the
Solomonic texts over the audience. One cannot argue with or dismiss a prayer. By arching time in
such a way that the prayer of the ancient Hebrews and the prayer of Orthodox Christians become part
of the same, ongoing spiritual tradition, Pushkin is able to project the significance of his poetry out into
the future, offering insight to his audience which illuminates all past, present, and future moments.
222
E.P. Grechanaia. “Pushkin I A. Shen'e: Dve zametke k teme.” Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii 22 (1988), 98-99.
248
The third poem in the cycle, “Imitation of an Italian,” offers a demonic inversion of
“Prophet.” Whereas “Prophet” related a visitation by an angel who calls the poet to God's service as a
prophet-- in part by ripping out the poet's sinful tongue and replacing it with a serpent's forked tongue--
in “Imitation of an Italian,” Judas is visited by a demon who revives him and calls him to Satan's
service by means of a kiss.
223
The power dynamics of both the Isaiah and David models of prophecy
rely on prophetic authenticity and the specter of the false prophet. The prophet's audience is obligated
to both identify and obey the true prophet and to identify and destroy the false prophet. The prophet is
burdened with the obligation of proving the authenticity of his calling to his audience in order for his
words to assert authority over his audience. One key difference between the more typical models of
prophecy and the Solomon model is that the Solomonic reconfiguration of the prophet as a teacher or
father renders his authenticity and authority unassailable. In “Imitation of an Italian,” we can see that
Pushkin's poet-prophet achieves the same unassailable authority by creating an image of the false
prophet whose powerful but blasphemous speech present a complete inversion of the sacred speech of
the true prophet in “Desert Fathers and Chaste Women.” The sacred speech of the first two poems is,
in part, determined by its eternal and future presence. The false prophet in “Imitation of an Italian”
suggests that the sudden emergence of a supposedly prophetic voice oriented on present concerns
should be looked on as suspect, as dangerous. It would be possible to regard this poem, then, as a
rejection of prophetic poetry in the Isaiah or David vein. However, given Pushkin's own fondness for
identifying with the demonic, we should perhaps look at “Imitation of an Italian,” instead, as a sort of
nightmare depiction of what has become of the Isaiah model of prophetic poetry. When he wrote
“Prophet” in 1826, Pushkin still had some notion of trying to become a new poetic Isaiah or Derzhavin,
and presumably thought that it would be productive for someone to occupy the role that Derzhavin had
223
David A. Sloane, “Pushkin's Lyric Cycle of 1836 and the Lessons of Izmailov's Hypothesis: Some Notes on the
Semiotics of Cycles,” Ulbandus Review, vol. V , pg 40-41.
249
vacated. Ten years later, in “Imitation of an Italian,” Pushkin is showing that no good will come of a
poet who tries to occupy the traditional prophetic role.
The contrast between prophetic poetry and blasphemous speech is heightened by the
fourth poem in the cycle, “Worldly Power.” This poem uses a handful of archaisms, much like those in
“Desert Fathers and Chaste Women,” to build a similar elevated, quasi-religious sensibility, but
“Worldly Power” connects to the sacred and to Orthodox ritual through an icon, rather than a prayer.
The first poem in the cycle, “I have built myself a monument not made by human hands . . ,”
established connection to the sacred by aligning poetic inspiration with the acheiropoieton icons.
“Worldly Power” connects much more explicitly through description of the crucifixion in lines 1-6:
Когда великое свершалось торжество
И в муках на кресте кончалось божество,
Тогда по сторонам животворяща древа
Мария-грешница и пресвятая дева
Стояли, бледные, две слабые жены,
В неизмеримую печаль погружены.
224*
Pushkin then contrasts this scene with the experience of Holy Friday in the Kazan Cathedral in St.
Petersburg. In this second section of the poem, another key Orthodox icon, the Epitaphios-- which
depicts Christ's supine body being prepared for burial and plays a key role in Orthodox rituals for Holy
week and Easter-- is presented in the church, but the two saints who flank Christ in the opening of the
poem-- the Mother of God and Mary Magdalene-- are replaced by two armed and uniformed soldiers:
Но у подножия теперь креста честного,
Как будто у крыльца правителя градского,
224
A. C. Pushkin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 3, pg. 333.
*
When the great triumph is accomplished / And in agony on the cross divinity died / Then at the sides of the tree of life /
Mary the sinner and the Blessed Virgin / Stood, pale, two weak women, / Submerged in immeasurable sadness.
250
Мы зрим поставленных на место жен святых
В ружье и кивере двух грозных часовых.
225**
Here the contrast between the sacred, as presented in “Desert Fathers and Chaste Women,” and
demonic parodies of the sacred, as presented in “Imitations of an Italian,” has been condensed into one
poem in which the blasphemous/secular vigil of the soldiers apes the sacred vigil of the two saintly
Marys. The poem implies that the image of the two female saints mourning Christ increases the
congregation's ability to access and share in spiritual experience, much like Saint Ephrem's prayer in
“Desert Fathers and Chaste Women.” When the two women are replaced by the soldiers, the soldiers
serve to cut off the people's connection to the mystery of the crucifixion much like Judas's emergence as
a false inversion of the prophet in “Imitation of an Italian” served to undercut Christian experience.
The final lines of the poem then integrate the themes of sacred speech and prophecy from the earlier
poems in the cycle as the poet's voice emerges to condemn and interrogate the blasphemous intrusion of
secular power into sacred ritual:
К чему, скажите мне, хранительная стража? —
Или распятие казенная поклажа,
И вы боитеся воров или мышей? —
Иль мните важности придать царю царей?
Иль покровительством спасаете могучим
Владыку, тернием венчанного колючим,
Христа, предавшего послушно плоть свою
Бичам мучителей, гвоздям и копию?
Иль опасаетесь, чтоб чернь не оскорбила
225
Ibid.
* *
But now who stands beneath the honest cross, / As if before the porch of the city's ruler, / We have visibly put in
place of the two sainted women / With guns and shakos on their heads, two terrible sentries.
251
Того, чья казнь весь род Адамов искупила,
И, чтоб не потеснить гуляющих господ,
Пускать не велено сюда простой народ?
226*
In these lines, the lyric persona does not just occupy the prophetic role, as in “Prophet,” but takes on
the prophetic function of speaking for God and his people-- the simple people (prostoj narod) in the
last line-- in opposition to the overreach of the ruler's secular power. In this poem, Pushkin's poetic
persona returns to the sort of aggressive negotiation with political power seen in Derzhavin's most
forceful prophetic poems. But unlike Derzhavin's “To Rulers and Judges,” for example, “Worldly
Power” reinterprets the prophet for a contemporary, Orthodox Christian context. Whereas “I have built
myself a Monument not made by human hands . . .” hinted at political criticism, “Worldly Power”
opens the door to the sort of intense political negotiation that-- already problematic during Derzhavin's
time-- had become not just unpublishable but dangerous after the Decembrists. This political intensity,
which continues and increases in the next poem of the cycle, offers at least one compelling explanation
for why Pushkin began numbering these poems for publication as a cycle, but then abandoned any
effort to actually publish them.
227
This poem shows that Pushkin still felt a strong desire for the
political engagement of the Isaiah model, perhaps even a sense that a Derzhavin style poet-prophet was
more necessary than ever, but the fact that he ultimately wrote this poem “for the drawer” meant that
his political/prophetic insights into the moment depicted in the poem would follow the Solomonic
pattern of focus on the future. Rather than offering the prophet's call to action in the present moment,
226
Ibid.
*
For what, tell me, are they here to guard?-- / Or is the crucifix government property, / And you are afraid of thieves and
mice? / Or do you think to save with the patronage of a powerful / master, the one who was crowned with pricking
thorns, / Christ, who surrendered his own flesh obediently / To the torments of scourge, nails and spear? / Or do you fear,
that the mob does not offend / The one, whose execution expiated all of Adam's race, / And, so as not to offend passing
gentlemen, / you've been told not to let the common people in?
227
Sloane, “Pushkin's Lyric Cycle of 1836, 48-50.
252
“Worldly Power,” because it a assumes a future-- rather than present-- audience, becomes the
experience of an elder or teacher passed on for the instruction of younger, future readers.
The fifth poem in the cycle as proposed by Izmailov is “Whenever I wander, pensive,
outside the city . . .”
228
The first half of the poem describes the poet's dissatisfaction with a gaudy,
overcrowded cemetery just outside the city. In doing so, this section of the poem takes up and inverts
the conventions of Romantic “graveyard” poetry:
Когда за городом, задумчив, я брожу
И на публичное кладбище захожу,
Решетки, столбики, нарядные гробницы,
Под коими гниют все мертвецы столицы,
В болоте кое-как стесненные рядком,
Как гости жадные за нищенским столом,
Купцов, чиновников усопших мавзолеи.
Дешевого резца нелепые затеи,
Над ними надписи и в прозе и в стихах
О добродетелях, о службе и чинах;
По старом рогаче вдовицы плач амурный;
Ворами со столбов отвинченные урны,
Могилы склизкие, которы также тут
Зеваючи жильцов к себе на утро ждут,—
Такие смутные мне мысли всё наводит,
228
This fifth poem, like the first poem in the proposed cycle, is not numbered in Pushkin's manuscripts. However, the
suggestion of this particular candidate for the fifth poem in the cycle has aroused much less controversy than Izmailov's
suggestion of “I have built myself a monument . . .” as poem one.
253
Что злое на меня уныние находит.
Хоть плюнуть да бежать...
229
Whenever I wander, pensive, outside the city
And through a public cemetery I go,
The railings, pillars, ornate tombs,
Beneath which rot all the dead of the capital,
In the swamp somehow cramped side by side,
Like hungry guests at the pauper's table,
Mausoleums of merchants, departed officials.
Cheap tools carve ridiculous ornaments,
And beneath them inscriptions in prose and verse
About virtue, about service and rank;
Coquettish widows weep for their old cuckolds;
The urns have been unscrewed from their pillars by thieves,
Slimy grave, which yawn just like
Their tenants wait for morning--
It all leads me to such troubled thoughts,
That evil and despondency find me.
I want to spit and run . . .
Levitskii links this description of the city graveyard with Pushkin's notes on visiting Del'vig's grave and
the poet's aversion to such tawdry resting place for his closest friend.
230
The poem's emphasis on the
229
Pushkin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 3, 338.
230
Aleksandr Levitskii, “Derzhavin kak izpovednik Pushkina,” Russkaia Literatura, no. 1 (2011), 10.
254
hypocrisy, inadequacy, and impermanence of the various tombstones in this graveyard connects back to
the overreaching theme of “I have built myself a monument not made by human hands . . .” by
displaying and mocking the failures of those who try to build their own monuments.
The second half of the poem then contrasts the poet's aversion to the city graveyard with
the meditative satisfaction of visiting a simple village graveyard in autumn:
Но как же любо мне
Осеннею порой, в вечерней тишине,
В деревне посещать кладбище родовое,
Где дремлют мертвые в торжественном покое,
Там неукрашенным могилам есть простор;
К ним ночью темною не лезет бледный вор;
Близ камней вековых, покрытых желтым мохом,
Проходит селянин с молитвой и со вздохом;
На место праздных урн и мелких пирамид,
Безносых гениев, растрепанных харит
Стоит широко дуб над важными гробами,
Колеблясь и шумя...
231
but what a pleasure for me
In autumnal times, in the quiet evening,
To visit in the village an ordinary country churchyard,
Where the dead rest in solemn peace,
There one finds room for unadorned graves;
231
Pushkin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 3, 338.
255
The pale thief will not come in the dark night;
Near ancient stones, covered in yellow moss
A villager passes with a prayer and a sigh;
In place of trifling urns, petty pyramids,
Noseless geniuses, and disheveled Graces
Stout oaks stand on the most important graves,
Trembling and rustling . . .
Wachtel argues that, like the poet's aversion to the city graveyard, this description of the pleasing rural
graveyard may also have had a biographical point of origin. Pushkin's mother died in 1836 and was
buried in a similar graveyard in the Sviatogorskii Monastery near the family estate; Pushkin had
selected a plot for his own eventual burial next to hers.
232
In this second half of the poem, Pushkin
reasserts many of the conventions of “graveyard” poetry that he overturned in the first section of the
poem.
The contrast between the two graveyards echoes the contrast between genuine prophetic
poetry and false, blasphemous speech. The poet's description of the city graveyard sets up a series of
monuments that, unlike the poet's monument in the first poem of the cycle, are both made by human
hands and impermanent. He then heightens the implied contrast between the poet's sacred monument
in the earlier poem and the tawdry graveyard monuments by emphasizing and mocking the moral
depravity of those buried in the city graveyard. The evils committed by those interred in the city
graveyard reflect the sort of eternal, individual sins that texts like Proverbs and Wisdom are most
concerned with. In line 11, adulterous widows cry over their cuckolded husbands. The issue of sexual
promiscuity is suggested again in line 26, in which the poet claims that the rural graveyard lacks the
“nose-less geniuses” present in the city graveyard. While noses are the first part of most statues to
232
Wachtel. A Commentary to Pushkin's Lyric Poetry, 1826-1836, 350.
256
break off or wear away, in Pushkin's time, “nose-lessness” would also have strongly suggested tertiary
syphilis.
233
Additionally, lines 7-10 mock greedy merchants and official who are overly concerned with
epithets and rank for trying to build grand tombs with cheap labor, graves which will ironically be
looted and vandalized by equally greedy thieves in lines 12-13 and line 23. Together greed, adultery,
and stinginess account for the majority of the father/prophet's warnings to the son figure in Proverbs.
The city graveyard is not only tawdry, but sinful, bringing the dramatic representation of evil in
“Imitation of an Italian” down to a much more mundane, human level.
The poem also echoes the rhetorical structure of Proverbs by contrasting these mundane,
individual vices with the simple mundane signs of divine favor to be gained by avoidance of such sins.
The vandalized, dilapidated tombs of the city's sinful residents are contrasted with oak trees which
grow on the graves of the village's most solemn coffins in line 27. The empty, impermanent epitaphs in
the city graveyard are contrasted with the prayers and sighs of a passing villager in line 24. These
prayers in turn suggest the eternal and unifying force of prayer suggested in “Desert Fathers and Chaste
Women,” as well as the cycle's cumulative equation of prayer with prophetic poetry. In contrasting the
worthless inscriptions on the city tombstones with the prayers of the villager in the rural graveyards,
Pushkin uses this poem to reassert one of the key themes of the cycle-- the contrast between
false/blasphemous poetry and divinely inspired/prophetic poetry.
234
The poem also shows the poet
prophet asserting control over his audience, not only by telling them how best to be buried, but also
how best to live. In this, as in the earlier poems, Pushkin follows the Solomonic, rather than Isaiahian
pattern. The poem speaks to individual and eternal sins and virtues, rather than decrying community-
wide or political problems. And the cycle of punishment and reward is projected into the future. The
message of the poem is basically that if you live wisely and well, you will be buried wisely and well,
233
Ibid., 351.
234
Sloane, “Pushkin's Lyric Cycle of 1836,” 41-42.
257
but that if you live foolishly, you'll be buried foolishly. There is no prophetic call to social action or the
prophetic promise of immediate divine intervention based on current action. Divine will manifests
slowly, over time, and the Solomonic poet's only task is to offer wise insight into the process.
The final poem in the cycle, “From Pindemonte,” builds upon the different threads of
thought in the other poems of the cycle in order to offer Pushkin's final statement on the poet's role,
power, and authority. It does this first and foremost by returning even more aggressively to one of the
key themes of “I have built myself a monument not made by human hands”-- the theme of the poet's
relationship to his audience and his political context. In the earlier poem, the poet was quite literally
“above” political concerns in that his monument dwarfs the tsar's column. In “From Pindemote,”
political concerns are represented as petty and insignificant compared to the greater concerns of art and
the rights and dignity of the individual.
(Из Пиндемонти)
Не дорого ценю я громкие права,
От коих не одна кружится голова.
Я не ропщу о том, что отказали боги
Мне в сладкой участи оспоривать налоги
Или мешать царям друг с другом воевать;
И мало горя мне, свободно ли печать
Морочит олухов, иль чуткая цензура
В журнальных замыслах стесняет балагура.
Всё это, видите ль, слова, слова, слова.*
Иные, лучшие мне дороги права;
Иная, лучшая потребна мне свобода:
258
Зависеть от царя, зависеть от народа —
Не всё ли нам равно? Бог с ними.
Никому
Отчета не давать, себе лишь самому
Служить и угождать; для власти, для ливреи
Не гнуть ни совести, ни помыслов, ни шеи;
По прихоти своей скитаться здесь и там,
Дивясь божественным природы красотам,
И пред созданьями искусств и вдохновенья
Трепеща радостно в восторгах умиленья.
— Вот счастье! вот права...
235
* Hamlet
(From Pindemonte)
I do not hold dear the noisy rights,
Which have made more than one head spin.
I do not grumble, that the gods have denied
Me the sweet lot of quarreling over taxes
Or preventing tsars from doing battle;
And it is small woe to me, whether the press freely
Deceives fools, or the clever censor
Restrains some joker through the intrigues of journals.
All of this, you see, is words, words, words.*
235
Pushkin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 3, 336.
259
Other, better rights are dear to me;
Another, better freedom is my need:
Dependence on the tsar, dependence on the people-
Isn't it all the same to us? Forget them.
To no one
Give account, serve and oblige
Yourself alone; for power or for its servant
Bend neither conscience, nor will, nor your neck;
Wander here and there according to your whim,
Marveling at the divine beauties of nature,
And trembling joyously in the ecstasies of grace
Before the creations of art and inspiration. -
That is happiness! those are rights ...
*Hamlet
Lines 1-5 belittle political concerns, particularly in line 4 and line 5 by putting squabbles over taxes on
a level with convincing rulers not to go to war. Derzhavin and Zhukovskii, modeling their lyric
personae on the Isaiah model, very decidedly situate war and peace as one of the key political issues a
poet-prophet could and should engage. Taxes, on the other hand, were something Derzhavin the
statesman might have squabbled about with Catherine, but they are not the kind of elevated political
issue addressed by Derzhavin the poet. Pushkin has reduced the Isaiah model's formerly elevated
political engagement-- which he himself flirts with in “Worldly Power”-- down to the level of petty
bureaucracy.
Having dismissed Derzhavin's model of the poet's political role, Pushkin uses lines 7-9
to dismiss the models of the poet's role put forward by the major literary journal editors-- with whom
260
Pushkin had been on very bad terms since the late 1820's-- and the censor. These two sections of the
poem reject a sociopolitical role for the poet both from the poet's perspective and from the perspective
of the sociopolitical establishment. Lines 10 and 11 then turn to the favorite themes of the Decembrist
poets-- rights and freedom-- only to qualify his conception of those rights and that freedom in line 12
by rejecting dependence on the tsar and the people. The Decembrist's David model of prophetic poetry
derived its rhetorical momentum from the poet-prophet's obligation to speak to and for the people.
Pushkin's poet-prophet is not only above concern for the ruler and politics, he is above concern for the
people and any implication of a popular audience. His concerns are eternal, and projected into the
future.
Yet in line 12, it becomes clear that the poet is speaking to and for someone when the
lyric persona turns outward and begins to address a second person. The subsequent lines of the poem,
with their emphasis on individual happiness and desires, make it clear that this second person is
singular rather than collective, and that this second person is also a poet with Romantic sensibilities
towards nature, emotion, and art that mirror the poet's. Pushkin divides his lyric persona in “From
Pindemonte” into an objective and subjective persona not unlike those that Baratynskii used to
structure “Autumn.” As we saw in Baratynskii's poem, this division of the lyric persona serves as a
framework for asserting the rhetorical dynamics between the teacher and student figures in the
Solomonic texts. The subjective persona's words to his objective counterpart consist of imperative
instructions about how to live and what to value. The audience of the poem is put in the position of the
objective persona, forced to accept the poet's wisdom and instruction without question.
Through this cycle of poems, Pushkin engages with all the key concerns of the prophetic
triangle. Throughout the six poems, he references different aspects of the Isaiah model, but only fully
embraces the axis between God and the prophet. Engagement with the ruler is suggested and, in the
final poem, rejected. The poet-prophet's connection to the people and his power over them are
261
established and asserted, but the corresponding obligation to the people is also rejected. The model of
prophetic poetry that finally emerges is that of a poet who derives his inspiration and authority from
God, and whose words are significant on an individual and eternal level that lies, like the poet's
monument, above and beyond the concerns of social and political context. The poet's concerns are
instead issues of asserting continuity of past, present, and future while emphasizing that the important
moment in which the poet's wisdom will matter is in the future. While the six poems of this cycle
never directly quote a biblical subtext, Pushkin uses the poems to assert a model of the poet-prophet
who mirrors exactly the dynamics of the Solomon model.
Through their late poems, Pushkin and Baratynskii both, in their very different ways,
mourn for the lost Isaiah model of Derzhavin. This model was a poetic representation of a political
reality that, for their generation of poets, formed the background of their youthful poetic experience in
the 1820's-- the tense negotiation between the imperial court and the educated gentry over the political
and cultural role to which the educated gentry were entitled. The Decembrists had pushed the potential
of the gentry's ambiguous role to its breaking point, leading the tsar and the censors to shut down any
attempt by the educated gentry to push for political influence. The window of political potential that
had opened for this class at the dawn of Catherine's reign slammed shut at the beginning of Nicholas I's
rule. Heightened censorship combined with the imprisonment and early death of so many key figure of
the 1820's gentry literary elite lead to a vacuum in Russia's cultural life which new voices-- the
raznochintsy intelligentsia-- began to fill. Although many of these intelligentsia figures had similar
political values to those held by the more liberal educated gentry, the key cultural values of the
educated gentry-- poetry, education, and a place in cultural history extending back to ancient Greece--
were dismissed and reviled in the changing literary climate of the 1830s and 1840s. Derzhavin's Isaiah
model of the poet-prophet became not only politically impossible but culturally impotent.
262
If, in 1826 when “Prophet” appeared, Pushkin and the rest of his generation were not
aware of that fact, by the 1830's and 1840's, both Pushkin and Baratynskii were painfully aware of that
fact. However, both went beyond simply eulogizing the prophetic model. By adopting patterns from
the biblical texts that came after the end of the prophetic period-- the Solomonic texts-- these two poets
were able to create an alternative version of the poet-prophet, in which the focus of poetry is to convey
wisdom, not to the present, but to the future.
263
Conclusion: Our Everything: Russia's National Literary Myth and the Legacy of the
Poet-Prophet
The main argument of this dissertation has been that evolution of the poet-prophet in
Russia was, to a large extent, generated and shaped by the political and social friction between an
autocratic imperial government and the gentry, the ostensibly privileged but ultimately quite powerless
social class within that autocracy. European education and values-- especially the introduction of
liberal, Enlightenment ideals-- led certain members of the gentry to push for some greater, more
substantive role in the political and cultural life of the empire. An eighteenth century statesman, who
also happened to be a gifted poet, looked to scripture and found a religious model-- the Hebrew
prophets-- which echoed the role he felt the educated gentry could and should play in the Russian
Empire. That statesman-- Derzhavin-- was blessed, at least for a time, with an autocrat who was
content to allow him to play the role of imperial prophet, even if only in poetry. In time, Derzhavin
passed his status as Russia's national poet-- and the prophetic model that helped build that status-- on to
new generations.
For Derzhavin's immediate successor, Zhukovskii, a cultural shift towards intimate
personal emotion and away from civic poetry combined with an increasingly insular autocrat, wrapped
ever more tightly in his own religious mysticism. The result was a dangerously solipsistic implosion
that underlined the weaknesses of Derzhavin's prophetic model. As the educated gentry became ever
more frustrated with their political situation and the perceived “backwardness” of the empire, the
Decembrist poets would find a new model of poet as prophet in David and the Psalms that reflected
their radical political ambitions. Chapter two showed how the Decembrist poets used the model of
David the Psalmist as a means of taking on the tsar's political authority while also claiming to act as the
voice of the people. In doing so, their political reach far exceeded their grasp, leading the new tsar to
shut down any further attempt by the educated gentry to modulate or interfere in politics in art as well
264
as life. Those poets of this last generation who remained were left scrambling for a way to disengage
the cultural power of the prophetic model from its now deadly political implications. Eventually, the
best poets of this generation-- in particular, Pushkin and Baratynskii-- would find an ingenious solution
to the problem in the writings attributed to Solomon. Yet these works had little to no impact during
their authors’ lifetimes. Sumerki was virtually ignored until decades after its publication. Most of the
poetry Pushkin wrote in the last years of his life was left unpublished until the 1880's, and Pushkin's
artistic reputation was already under attack in the years before his death. This final evolution of
prophetic poetry-- the Solomon model-- came too late and deeply tinged with elegy for a time when the
poet-prophet had been a viable role for the educated gentry.
The educated gentry, by the late 1830's into the 1840's, were no longer the sole
proprietors-- or even major shareholders-- in Russian cultural life. Intellectuals of slightly lower, but
more diverse classes-- the raznochintsy-- were coalescing into the new driving force of Russian literary
life, the intelligentsia. Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Gogol-- supported by influential critics like
Vissarion Belinskii-- had turned the cultural tide towards prose. The “great questions” of the Russian
nineteenth century were being asked. More and more intelligentsia critics were demanding that art
must have clear sociological utility. By the 1860's, nihilist critics like Dmitri Pisarev were attacking
Pushkin and his whole generation as useless relics, certainly no help at all in the practical struggles of
human existence. The critic Apollon Grigor'ev's famous defense and appreciation of Pushkin--
“Pushkin is our everything,” appeared in 1864. However, while at least this one line of Grigor'ev's
defense of Pushkin is now almost universally known and much quoted, during the heyday of Russian
sociological criticism, no one was taking much notice of Grigor'ev and his “organic” theory of
criticism.
236
The prophetic model of poetry, the class that had motivated it, and the literary climate in
which it had thrived and evolved seemed to be irrevocably over.
236
Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev,and Native Soil Criticism, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), Chapt. 3.
265
Furthermore, if we look at the whole phenomenon as a literary solution to a social
problem-- what role could the educated gentry play in the cultural and political life of the Russian
Empire?-- then the prophetic model failed almost as soon as Derzhavin's era ended. No poet after
Derzhavin was able to successfully step in to the same literary and political role that he had occupied,
even though some, like Pushkin when he wrote “Prophet,” seemed minded to try. The Isaiah model
was unable to survive changing cultural and political circumstances. The David model was irrevocably
tied to the disastrous events of December, 1825, which decimated the ranks of the educated gentry and
led to the loss of what limited political power and cultural freedom that the educated gentry had
enjoyed under Catherine II and Alexander I. As for the Solomon model, even as the last wave of poets
engaged in this struggle seemed finally to have found a model which gave poets social, if not political
authority, Russian cultural life was more and more passing these poets by. All the poetry of what
would later be called the Golden Age seemed on the verge of vanishing completely from Russian
cultural life. The idea of poet as prophet-- with its quasi-religious overtones and elitist, aristocratic
origins-- might easily have become just a curious footnote-- not unlike Polotskii's Psaltyr-- to a
developmental dead end in Russian culture. What changed things?
The simple answer is that the Silver Age happened. As the nineteenth century wound to
a close, the cultural winds shifted yet again, the era of the Great Russian Realist novel was over, and a
new wave of young intellectuals turned back to poetry. Art as an instrument of social utility gave way
to art for art's sake. The first major movement of the Silver Age, the Symbolists, embraced and
rehabilitated the poets of nearly a century earlier, and rediscovered the lost achievements--
Baratynskii's Sumerki poems, for instance-- of many of their poetic predecessors. As for how the Silver
Age poets picked up, interpreted, and adapted the idea of poet as prophet-- that would require a second
dissertation and remains a question for further study. However, it is worth noting that the Symbolist
cult of the Divine Sophia owes much to the same biblical texts that gave rise to the Solomon model,
266
Proverbs and Wisdom being the two major scriptures in which a female personification of divine
wisdom appears. Perhaps Vladimir Solov'ev, who practically invented the cult of Sophia in Russian
Symbolism, was acting as a sort of prophet of holy wisdom in poems like “Three Meetings” (Tri
svidaniia), for example. Cult of Sophia aside, much of the Symbolist movement was infused with
quasi-religious mysticism which led some of these poets-- Dmitri Merezhkovsky, for instance-- to
proclaim themselves prophets who had actual, divine visions of the future.
237
Even among the
Symbolists' arch-enemies, the Futurists, who sought to destroy, rather than embrace, Russia's cultural
past, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov claimed to have visions of the future and wrote an ecstatic drama--
Zangezi-- in the language of gods, stars, and birds, perhaps as a sort of prophetic communication. Even
the Silver Age's final movement, the explicitly anti-mystical Acmeist poets, could be said to have a
prophetic strain. Certainly some of these poets, most especially Anna Akhmatova, attempted to take on
the social and political aspects of the poet-prophet.
238
Yet even ignoring, for the moment, the Silver
Age poets and the ways in which they responded to and adapted the idea of poet as prophet, there is a
more complicated answer as to why the Golden Age poet-prophet is more than just an interesting
footnote in Russian literature. For that answer, we must look to the events leading up to the Silver Age.
In particular, we must look to an event which turned Pushkin from Pisarev's despised relic into Russia's
mythic national poet.
The 1880 Pushkin Celebration
Statues of Russia's national poet have become so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine a
time when no such monuments existed. But until early June of 1880, no monument to Alexander
Pushkin existed. The public outpouring of grief after the poet's death in 1837, so alarmed Nicholas I
237
Merezhkovksy's tendency to mix politics with “prophetic” religious proclamations probably cost him the Nobel Prize
after he infamously declared that Hitler would be the holy warrior who would take down the antichrist Bolsheviks.
238
See, for instance, Roberta Reeder's biography of the poet, which uses the prophetic mask which Akhmatova wore often
in her poetry as a frame for analyzing her life beyond her verse. Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1994.
267
that the tsar changed the time and location of Pushkin's funeral at the last minute. The poet's corpse
was transported for burial to the Sviatogorsk monastery under police escort with as much secrecy as
possible. None of Pushkin's family members were even present at the burial.
239
Nicolas I's government
censors had reprimanded Pushkin's colleague, Andrei Kraevskii, for publishing Odoevskii's short
encomium for Pushkin (“The sun of our poetry has set!”) surrounded by a black border.
240
An up and
coming young poet, Mikhail Lermontov, was banished to the Caucasus for writing “Death of a Poet” as
a eulogy to Pushkin.
241242
The fact that those cultural figures sympathetic to Pushkin were silenced,
combined with the tsar's great generosity to Pushkin's widow and children in the years after his death,
meant that Pushkin's public legacy had been left open to attack and debate.
243
Matters were only made
worse by the fact that Pushkin's best poetic works of the mid 1830's-- including the 1836 cycle
discussed in Chapter Three-- had been blocked from publication by the censor and were only known to
a few of Pushkin's friends and acquaintances who'd seen the poems as manuscripts.
However, by 1880, information about the true state of affairs between Pushkin, Nicolas
I, and the secret police in the 1830's was beginning to trickle into public discourse.
244
Around the same
time, uncensored versions of Pushkin's late works were finally being published. The Russian
intelligentsia’s early hostility to the poet was long forgotten and the Russian reading public was
beginning to appreciate what they had lost in 1837. When funds were finally raised and imperial
permission given for a statue of Pushkin to be built in Moscow, the monument and the three day
celebration of its unveiling were seen as a long overdue eulogy that Russia had long owed the great
239
T.J. Binyon. Pushkin: A Biography, London: Harper Collins, 2002, 630-636.
240
Ibid., 632-633.
241
Elizabeth Cheresh Allen. A Fallen Idol is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transition, Stanford:
Stanford Universally Press, 2007, 54-55.
242
Lermontov, as the last and tragically short-lived hope of Golden Age poetry, offers a potentially interesting entry in the
development of the poet-prophet. However, like so many issues with Lermontov, his death in a duel at the age of 26--
just four years after Pushkin's eerily similar death-- meant that his engagement with Pushkin, Derzhavin, and the other
developers of the poet-prophet would never develop into a mature, coherent formulation.
243
Marcus Levitt. Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989,
20-21.
244
Ibid., 21-23.
268
poet. The need to celebrate and consolidate Pushkin legacy began to crystallize around the poem, “I
have built myself a monument, not made by human hands . . .”
245
Lines of this poem would, in fact,
grace the base of the statue itself.
The fact that this poem was so central to the 1880 celebration in itself lent a touch of
recognition to Pushkin's presentation of the poet as prophet. Furthermore, the 1880 celebration was
seen not only as a celebration of Pushkin, but a critical moment in the raging debates about Russian
history, identity, culture, and destiny that had shaped the previous forty years.
246
A case could definitely
be made that the celebration-- by using Pushkin's words as a means of reflecting on the past,
understanding the present, and shaping the future-- embedded Pushkin's oeuvre with the same
telescoping of time associated with the literary Hebrew prophets. Many journals, reporting on the
celebration, picked up on a quasi-religious atmosphere, likening the three day celebration to a sort of
intelligentsia Holy Week.
247
It may or may not be reaching too far to connect this aspect of the
celebration with another of Pushkin's late prophetic poems, “Worldly Power.” Certainly such reports
indicate that the intelligentsia participating in the celebration were primed to imbue the event with
mystical undertones.
When Fedor Dostoevsky rose to give his speech on the third day of the celebration,
these religious undertones took center stage and became the defining aspect of the whole celebration.
The author was already riding high off the success of his thoroughly religious novel, The Brothers
Karamazov, which had begun appearing in serial publication in The Russian Herald the year before. It
is not at all surprising that his speech attempted to shape Pushkin's legacy into conjunction with his
own Orthodox, Slavophile views of Russian culture and destiny. What is perhaps surprising is that
Dostoevsky's speech-- in contrast to the moderately well-received speeches of leading intelligentsia
245
Ibid., 23.
246
Levitt. Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880. This issue is the main argument of the book.
247
Ibid., 123-124.
269
figures like Ivan Turgenev, who had actually helped organize the whole celebration in the first place--
garnered riotous, ecstatic approval from the audience.
248
In his speech, Dostoevsky made a somewhat
contradictory claim that Pushkin had been a great, inherently Russian and Orthodox genius, but also a
universal genius, even more so than Shakespeare or Goethe. Furthermore, Pushkin was not just a spirit
of uniquely national, yet universal genius. According to Dostoevsky, the poet was also a prophetic
genius.
249
Something in Dostoevsky's speech struck a chord with the reading public that the other
speakers had not been able to touch. As the last day of the celebration ended, the audience demanded
that Dostoevsky recite Pushkin's “Prophet” twice.
250
In a letter to his wife describing the celebration,
Dostoevsky even claimed that his declaration of Pushkin's prophetic status had lead the audience to
declare that, not only had Pushkin truly been Russia's prophet, but that Dostoevsky was their prophet as
well.
251
Almost as soon as the celebration was over, Dostoevsky's critics were attacking the speech and
undermining the public's joyous response.
252
Yet the speech and the public's reaction had lasting impact
on how Russia came to view not only Pushkin, but all great authors and poets. The idea of poet as
prophet was revived as a historical, cultural truth beyond a mere rhetorical pose.
Just seven years after the Pushkin Celebration, the fifty year copyright on Pushkin's
works expired. In spite of government fears that the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death might be
met with an even more socially disruptive repeat of the 1880 celebration, January 29th, 1887 passed
with very little public recognition. The next day, however, police had to be called to deal with the
crowds overrunning the bookstores after new, inexpensive editions of Pushkin's works.
253
The cult of
Pushkin, just at this moment when the idea of Pushkin as prophet had taken hold in an almost literal
sense, was beginning to spread beyond the relatively limited circles of the intelligentsia of Petersburg
248
Ibid., 124-126.
249
F. M. Dostoevsky. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: Nauka, 1972, vol.26, 129-174.
250
Levitt. Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, 127.
251
F.M. Dostoevsky. Pis'ma, ed. A.S. Dolinin. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971, vol. 4, 171-172.
252
Levitt. Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, 127.
253
Ibid., 155.
270
and Moscow. Pushkin's poems-- with the prophetic poems “Prophet” and “Monument” at the
forefront-- were memorized early and often by school children around the empire. Even the Imperial
government, which had been so hostile to the poet in his life and in the years after his death, began to
try to co-opt Pushkin and his poetry as a tool of Imperial policy.
254
In time, the Stalin and the Soviet
regime would try to do the same, as evidenced by the 1837 Pushkin Jubilee on the hundredth
anniversary of the poet's death. Indeed, much of the Symbolist interest in Pushkin and his
contemporaries in the 1890's was meant to counteract the government's “vulgarization” of Russia's
national poet.
Much of the critical debasement of Pushkin and his era was rooted in the Russian
intelligentsia’s deep anxieties over Russian cultural identity. The debate over Russian literature and
whether or not Russia could finally say it had a literature equal to those of other European nations
predated even Derzhavin, and had been a key part of the literary debates that had shaped the literary
community of the educated gentry in the 1820s, before the Decembrist Uprising, personal tragedies,
and the policies of Nicholas I had shut down such debates. But in the 1840's and 1860's, renewed
debate on the subject became especially bitter, even violent. At the 1880 celebration, Dostoevsky's
Pushkin speech had declared, finally and emphatically, that Russia did have a literature and a national
culture, and that Pushkin was the proof. The mythic national poet who emerged was, as Grigor'ev had
proclaimed in 1864, Russia's everything, who then had to be integrated into and accounted for by any
serious cultural movement from then on.
Pushkin took on any number of rhetorical poses and voices over the course of his career.
But the 1880 celebration, during which the mythic form of Pushkin was enshrined in cultural memory,
chose Pushkin's prophetic pose over all others as the defining face of the poet and his significance. The
authority over audience embedded in the Solomon model became a reality far more powerful than its
254
Ibid., 157.
271
developers had likely intended. Through Pushkin's cultural enshrinement, the Silver Age poets were
able to look back and recover the work and reputations of the other poets of the era who develop the
poet as prophet pose. What had been a decade long, mostly futile grab for cultural and political
authority by a small, insular social elite became a defining national archetype. The changes and
permutations these later poets would make in the poet-prophet model remains an issue for further study.
Even though the model of the poet-prophet enshrined in Russian cultural memory would be the last of
the Golden Age attempts to find a successful model of prophetic poetry, that prophetic model carries--
just below the surface-- the weight of all the prophetic models that came before.
272
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This dissertation reevaluates the model of poet as prophet in Russian literature as a mechanism of political and social negotiation between the early nineteenth century Russia educated gentry, the imperial state, and the Russian reading public. Beginning in the Catherinian era, poets such as Derzhavin begin modeling their lyric personae on the Hebrew literary prophets as a means of defining a more powerful political role for the educated gentry. Precise readings of Derzhavin's prophetic poems against their biblical subtexts reveal that Derzhavin was using the voice of the prophet in his poetry in order to pressure the empress to adhere to Enlightenment political values by setting himself as a poet and statesman in political position parallel to that of the prophet Isaiah. In the era of Alexander I, Zhukovskii inherits Derzhavin's prophetic role, but the Sentimental focus on the individual in his poetry leads to the collapse and failure of this model of prophetic poetry. ❧ In the wake of the failure of the Isaiah model of poet as prophet and the social tumult brought by Russia's contact with Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, members of the educated gentry-- later known as the Decembrists-- began plotting to overthrow the emperor. In poetry, the Decembrist poets would present themselves as prophets in the model of David the Psalmist in order to achieve the same overthrow of the ruler in poetry that they sought to achieve in real life. This model also allowed poets like Ryleev and Kuchelbecker to take on a poetic voice with democratic pretensions that mirrored their political philosophy. ❧ After the failure of Decembrism, the poets of the educated gentry who survived struggled to find a poetic, social, and political voice in an environment in which the educated gentry's cultural dominance of Russian culture was threatened both by heightened censorship from above and the rising Intelligentsia from below. In this environment, the poets best known for shaping the Russian model of poet as prophet began modeling themselves after the politically impotent but socially powerful prophetic voice found in the biblical texts connected with Solomon. These texts offer both a turn away from politics and an elegiac mourning for the political power that educated gentry poets were able to enjoy during Derzhavin's era.
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Voice of the age, voice of the ages: evolution of the Russian poet-prophet complex through three models
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