Date: 2020-04-23 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Poetry
Description: **Winner of the 2020 Read Russia Prize A new collection of Pushkin's great narrative and lyric verse, translated by Antony Wood A Penguin Classic** Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman , based on the statue of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg and the great flood of 1824, is widely considered to be his most successful narrative poem, the second most famous poem in Russian literature after his Eugene Onegin , and notoriously difficult to translate. One of the most influential works in Russian literature, it will appeal to readers of Dostoyevsky's The Double , Andrei Biely's Petersburg , Anna Akhmato
Publisher: Penguin UK

Alexander Pushkin

SELECTED POETRY

Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by
ANTONY WOOD

Contents

Cover
Title Page
About the Authors
Chronology
Translating Pushkin

Further Reading

1. General
2. Biography and Letters
3. Criticism
4. Pushkin’s Contemporaries in Translation

Introduction

1. Life
2. Characteristics of Pushkin’s Poetry
3. The Present Selection
4. Narrative Poems (Poemy)
5. Fairy Tales (Skazki)

SELECTED POETRY
I
LYRIC POEMS

St Petersburg, 1814–20

1. To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff (1814)

2. The Rose (1815)
3. To Baroness M. A. Delvig (1815)
4. To Princess V. M. Volkonskaya (1816)
5. The Singer (1816)
6. The Window (1816)
7. Liberty: An Ode (1817)
8. To Chaadayev (1818)
9. O. Masson (1819)
10. A Good Revel (1819)
11. Renaissance (1819)
12. You and I (1820)
13. To Yuryev (1820)

Exile, 1820–26

1. ‘The light of day has faded’ (1820)
2. The Nereid (1820)
3. ‘I have outlived desires’ (1821)
4. The Prisoner (1822)
5. A Songbird (1823)
6. Night (1823)
7. ‘I went alone before the dawn’ (1823)

8. [On Vorontsov] (‘Half trade, half grand seigneur’) (1824)

9. ‘Zephyrs share / The midnight air’ (1824)

10. To *** (‘It comes to me again, that moment’) (1825)

11. ‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’ (1825)
12. Winter Evening (1825)
13. Prose Writer and Poet (1825)

14. Mniszek’s ‘sonnet’ from Boris Godunov (1825)

15. Confession (1826)

16. The Prophet (1826)

Moscow and St Petersburg, 1826–30

1. [To my Nanny] (‘My dear companion of past times’) (1826)

2. Winter Road (1826)
3. To I. I. Pushchin (1826)
4. ‘Deep in the Siberian mines’ (1827)
5. Arion (1827)
6. The Angel (1827)
7. The Poet (1827)
8. 19 October 1827 (1827)
9. The Talisman (1827)
10. Recollection (1828)
11. Thou and You (1828)
12. ‘My beauty, sing to me no more’ (1828)
13. Portrait (1828)
14. The Drowned Man (1828)
15. The Upas Tree (1828)
16. ‘Raven flies to raven’ (1828)
17. The Poet and the Crowd (1828)
18. A Flower (1828)
19. ‘City of splendour, city of poor’ (1828)
20. Signs (1829)
21. ‘Once there lived a humble knight’ (1829)

22. ‘The mists of night enfold the Georgian hills’ (1829)

23. From Hafiz (1829)
24. ‘The drums of reveille sound …’ (1829)
25. The Monastery on Mount Kazbek (1829)
26. ‘Winter. The country’ (1829)
27. Winter Morning (1829)

28. ‘I loved you: in my heart, perhaps’ (1829)

29. ‘I walk the crowded thoroughfare’ (1829)

30. ‘Inscribe my name? What good –’ (1830)

31. ‘No, I have lost the taste for stormy pleasure’ (1830)

32. To the Poet (1830)
33. Madonna (1830)
34. Demons (1830)
35. Elegy (1830)
36. To the Bust of a Conqueror (1830)
37. Rhyme (1830)
38. Invocation (1830)

39. Mary’s song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

40. Master of the Revels’ song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

41. ‘Bound for your distant homeland’ (1830)

Married Life, 1831–6

1. To the Slanderers of Russia (1831)

2. My Pedigree (1831)

3. For the Album of Princess Anna Abamelek (1832)

4. The Beauty (1832)
5. Autumn (A fragment) (1833)
6. ‘It’s time, my love, it’s time!’ (1834)
7. [From Anacreon:] A fragment (1835)

8. ‘… I see again / That corner of the earth’ (1835)

9. ‘The ready power of suffering’ (1835)

10. The Stone Island Cycle:

1. From Pindemonte (1836)

2. ‘The desert fathers and unblemished women’ (1836)

3. Imitation of the Italian (1836)

4. Secular Power (1836)

5. ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’ (1836)

11. ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’ (1836)

II
NARRATIVE POEMS (POEMY)

1. The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1823)
2. The Gypsies (1824)
3. The Bridegroom (1825)
4. Count Nulin (1825)
5. A Little House in Kolomna (1830)
6. The Bronze Horseman (1833)

III
FAIRY TALES (SKAZKI)

1. The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831)

2. The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish (1833)

3. The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833)

4. The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834)

Abbreviations
Glossary of Metrical Terms
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright
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1. Cover
2. Frontmatter
3. Table of Contents
4. Begin Reading

About the Authors

ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. His father, a low-ranking guards officer before early retirement, was of ancient lineage sunk into obscurity. His mother was the granddaughter of a north or north-central African captured as a boy and adopted by Peter the Great – Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who became an eminent military engineer. By the age of twelve Pushkin, given the run of his father’s extensive library, was already widely read in French and Classical literature, and during schooling at the Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo he devoted his energies to mastering all the verse forms of his time.

On leaving school he spent three years in St Petersburg while holding a sinecure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made lasting friendships at literary societies and wrote anti-autocratic poems which circulated in manuscript and offended Tsar Alexander I, resulting in a six-year exile from the capital, beginning at the age of twenty-one just when he was achieving national fame with his first long poem, the mock-epic fairy tale Ruslan and Lyudmila. His four years in the Russian South saw the composition of narrative poems inspired by Byron, and he began the novel in verse Eugene Onegin. During his last two years of exile on his parents’ estate near Pskov, his mature period as a lyric poet began, and he wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov.

After the Decembrist uprising failure of 1825, Pushkin was granted conditional freedom. Over the rest of the 1820s, living in Moscow and St Petersburg and increasingly in debt, he attained the peak of his popularity before losing touch with changing public taste. He wrote some of his finest works in rural isolation, among them the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, verse fairy tales such as The Tale of the Golden Cockerel and Tsar Saltan, the prose tale The Queen of Spades, and a set of miniature verse dramas including Mozart and Salieri. In 1831 he married the young beauty Natalya Goncharova, a leading adornment at court balls. In January 1837 he was killed in a duel precipitated by a young guards officer’s pursuit of Natalya.

ANTONY WOOD learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during National Service and read Modern Languages (French and German) and English at Cambridge. After twenty years as a book-commissioning editor in London he worked as a freelance translator and founded the imprint Angel Books, devoted to translations of European literature. Paul Scofield, Simon Callow and Ralph Fiennes have been among those who have participated in readings of his own translations of Pushkin on radio and at literary festivals. He has collaborated in several bilingual publications of the Pushkin State Theatre Centre, St Petersburg. In 1999 he was awarded a Pushkin Medal by the Russian government. His published translations of Pushkin include Mozart and Salieri: The Little Tragedies (1982), The Gypsies & Other Narrative Poems (2006) and the first version of Boris Godunov (in Chester Dunning et al., The Uncensored ‘Boris Godunov’, 2006; stage production in Princeton, 2007).

Chronology

1799 Born in Moscow on 26 May, eldest of three children (with a younger brother and sister) of Sergey L’vovich Pushkin and Nadezhda Osipovna.

1800–1811 Brought up in Moscow, Pushkin has the run of his father’s well-stocked library of French literature and attends his and his father’s poet brother Vasily’s literary salons frequented by leading figures.

1801 Paul I is killed in a palace revolution. Accession of Alexander I.

1811 Pushkin enters the new Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo founded by Alexander.

1812 Napoleon invades Russia. Battle of Borodino.

1814 Napoleon’s defeat outside Paris. Poems by Pushkin published for the first time, anonymously, in a St Petersburg magazine.

1815 The poet Gavrila Derzhavin hears Pushkin read one of his poems and names him his successor.

1816 Pushkin takes a keen interest in the meetings of the literary society Arzamas while at school.

1817 Graduates from the Lycée. Appointed to a sinecure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Begins work on Ruslan and Lyudmila; writes ‘Liberty: An Ode’.

1817–20 Leads a dissipated life in St Petersburg; continues to write daring liberal verses, resulting in his exile.

1820 Ruslan and Lyudmila published, making Pushkin a national celebrity. Travels with the Rayevsky family in the Caucasus and Crimea on journey to exile in Kishinev, Bessarabia. Begins first Byronic poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus.

1821 Writes the blasphemous poem The Gabrieliad (unpublished). Meets Karolina Sobanskaya.

1822 The Prisoner of the Caucasus published.

1823 Begins the novel in verse Eugene Onegin. Transferred to Odessa under the command of the new governor-general of New Russia (i.e. the South) and Bessarabia, Count Mikhail Vorontsov. Meets Amalia Riznich.

1824 Affair with Vorontsov’s wife Yelizaveta. The Fountain of Bakhchisaray published, a great commercial success. Death of Byron. After being discovered by the authorities studying atheism, Pushkin is transferred to his mother’s estate at Mikhaylovskoye near Pskov. Writes memoirs, later burnt. Writes The Gypsies. St Petersburg suffers the most destructive flood in its history.

1825 Receives visit during first winter at Mikhaylovskoye from his close school friend and Decembrist Ivan Pushchin. Meets Anna Kern and writes ‘To ***’ (‘It comes to me again, that moment’). First chapter of Eugene Onegin published. Writes Boris Godunov and Count Nulin. Death of Alexander I; accession of Nicholas I. Decembrist uprising in support of a constitutional monarchy.

1826 Pushkin writes ‘The Prophet’. Summoned to meet Nicholas I, who ends his exile and states that he will be his personal censor. First collection of lyric poems published and quickly sells out. The tsar’s secret police organ created, responsible for censorship: the Third Department of the Tsar’s Chancellery, headed by Count Aleksandr Benckendorff. Five of the Decembrists are hanged and some hundred and twenty exiled to Siberia. Pushkin given official reprimand for reading Boris Godunov, unpublished, to friends without permission.

1827 The Gypsies published. Becomes friendly with the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in Moscow.

1828 For the last time Pushkin is accused of suspected authorship of the blasphemous narrative poem The Gabrieliad; after a confidential interview with the tsar, no more is said. Writes Poltava, a long narrative poem on Peter the Great, the Ukrainian Cossack leader Mazepa and Charles XII of Sweden; it receives a mixed reception on publication in 1829. Russian victory over Persia brings definitive absorption of Dagestan, eastern Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia into the Russian Empire. Death of Nikolay Karamzin. Pushkin meets Natalya Goncharova.

1828–9 Third Russo-Turkish War. Pushkin travels through Transcaucasia and rides with the Russian army in a skirmish.

1829 Playwright and diplomat Aleksandr Griboyedov lynched by a mob in Tehran. Second collection of Pushkin’s lyric poems published. Begins the verse drama Rusalka, to be finally revised and completed in 1834.

1830 Betrothal to Natalya Goncharova. French July Revolution; King Charles X replaced by Louis Philippe I. Quarantined on his father’s estate of Boldino in Nizhny Novgorod province in the autumn during a cholera outbreak, writes The Tales of Belkin, the last two chapters of Eugene Onegin, the ‘Little Tragedies’, A Little House in Kolomna and some thirty short poems.

1831 Pushkin marries Natalya on 18 February. Appointed Russia’s official historian laureate, succeeding Karamzin. Boris Godunov published in censored form, to a mixed reception. Publishes poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ supporting Russian suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830–31. Writes The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

1832 Third collection of lyric poems published, also containing The Tale of Tsar Saltan and the blank verse ‘Little Tragedy’ Mozart and Salieri.

1833 First complete edition of Eugene Onegin published. Pushkin works on A History of the Pugachev Rebellion; the tsar grants him an interest-free loan of 20,000 roubles to cover publication costs, to be repaid in two instalments. At Boldino in the autumn writes in four weeks The Bronze Horseman, The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish, The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions and first drafts of prose tale The Queen of Spades. The tsar demands radical cuts to The Bronze Horseman which Pushkin is unable to make, so the poem remains unpublished, apart from the prologue, in his lifetime. Appointed to the humiliatingly lowly court post of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), necessitating regular appearances at balls with his wife.

1834 A History of the Pugachev Rebellion published. Pushkin begins work on a history of Peter the Great. Continuously mounting debts. A letter from Pushkin to Natalya with a disparaging reference to Nicholas’s two predecessors and the poet’s appointment as kamer-junker is opened by the authorities, causing tensions between Pushkin and the tsar. Attempts to resign the new post and retire from the capital to the country to write and work refused by the tsar with the threat of withdrawal of access to state archives. Writes The Tale of the Golden Cockerel.

1835 Publication of selected works in volumes of narrative verse, lyric poems and prose. The tsar grants Pushkin’s request for an interest-free loan of 30,000 roubles, soon to be repaid, in lieu of salary. Georges d’Anthès, adopted son of the Dutch envoy Baron Jacob van Heeckeren, begins to pay court to Natalya.

1836 Pushkin launches quarterly journal The Contemporary, in which he publishes his own and others’ work, including his novel The Captain’s Daughter, Gogol’s story ‘The Nose’ and early lyrics by Fyodor Tyutchev. Writes the ‘Stone Island cycle’ of poems. In November receives an anonymous round-robin letter announcing his ‘cuckoldry’.

1837 In January, Pushkin provokes a duel with d’Anthès. He is severely wounded in the duel and dies two days later (29 January). The tsar pays off Pushkin’s debts, grants a pension to Natalya and further sums to his four children, and undertakes to bear publication costs of his works.

1838 Pushkin’s published works unreliably reprinted.

1841 Publication of posthumous works in three volumes edited by Vasily Zhukovsky; also unreliable.

1855–7 First attempt at a comprehensive edition of Pushkin’s works in seven volumes edited by P. V. Annenkov: lacking in editorial rigour, and corruptions remain.

1887 Expiry of Pushkin’s copyrights. A number of unrigorous and unreliable collected editions follow over the next forty years.

1937–59 The Complete Works in seventeen volumes, with textual annotation only, published by the USSR Academy of Sciences, its launch marking the centenary of Pushkin’s death; it remains the most thorough and reliable complete edition; reissued Moscow, 1994–7.

Translating Pushkin

Pushkin had a direct and contemporary sound to his first readers. His verse is immediately recognisable for the perfection and precision with which he metricises Russian, and it can translate naturally, broadly speaking, into the English of our time. I have tried to reflect the hallmarks of Pushkin’s style – in lyric verse the personal, everyday register with a contrastingly elevated level in more formal genres such as ode, elegy and sonnet, and sometimes the mixture of diction in the same poem, the informal word in a formal context in deliberate provocation of the purist reader. I have endeavoured to follow the contours of Pushkin’s lines, whether the original metre is kept or not, in word placing and emphases, enjambement, repetition and parallelism, and often punctuation.

The biggest problem for the English translator of Russian verse is that Russian abounds in long, sinuous words that can be made even longer by inflection, whereas English words are shorter and abound in monosyllables. In verse, English can have a monotonous, heavy sound unless something is done to break up successions of monosyllables. A line in Russian has the natural, swift, light rhythm of the language, and a metrically four-stress line, i.e. tetrameter, usually ripples past with only three, often only two natural word stresses, sounding more spontaneous and conversational than English does over the same metrical length. Furthermore, a Russian word, however long, takes only one stress, which can often dominate a whole phrase or even a whole line of verse. Russian word order is more flexible than English and can be arranged to match the metre more readily; Pushkin is a master in this, also in taking every advantage of variable stress patterns and inflected word endings.

The polysyllabic nature of the Russian language means that a line of verse translated literally into English will be shorter than the original. If the original metre is kept in translation, syllables will usually need to be added in English to maintain scansion. This causes padding, the arch-enemy of poetry and verse translations, especially of Pushkin. Preservation of original metrical form has therefore been a low priority in many of the lyric translations that appear in this book, though it remains an ideal that can sometimes be achieved. I have usually sought equivalence for Pushkin’s six- and five-stress lines, hexameters and pentameters, in shorter English lines. In keeping Pushkin’s favourite metre, the iambic tetrameter, I have relaxed absolute metrical strictness (in accordance with English tradition), though keeping faith with scansion: I have often, for example, chopped the initial unstressed syllable of an iambic line to suit the greater proportion of stressed syllables in English, making the line trochaic, starting with a stressed syllable (used continuously, that metre has an entirely different, weightier rhythm, but not in isolation). Or, again in iambic metre, I have from time to time practised inversion (reversed the stress in one foot), usually at the beginning of a line, starting the line on a stress and having two successive unstressed syllables as it proceeds. Both these metrical relaxations, not in Russian classic tradition, are common in English poetry.

In narrative verse, metre, the storytelling vehicle, has its own dynamic and carries more of the essence of the poem than is the case with lyric verse outside stylised genres, and so in the ten long poems in this book, with two exceptions, I have kept the original metres. In non-stanzaic narrative poems, where the lines are continuous and undivided, I have matched the syllabic loss of shorter English words by a reduction in the overall line count: my translation of The Bronze Horseman, for example, in the same metre as Pushkin’s poem, has eight per cent fewer lines, and in the case of The Tale of the Golden Cockerel the reduction is seven per cent.

In terms of sound, stressed syllables in Russian words are much more emphatic and graphic than in English, and this too presents the translator with difficulties. The literal sense of a phrase or line of Pushkin may be dead simple, but the expressiveness of the original will often lie in its sound, its assonance, alliteration or rhythm. Without the Russian sound, a close translation will tend to seem dead, and especially in verse as sparing in metaphor as Pushkin’s. His word music can never be matched wholly, but attempts can be made at some compensatory representation. At least the translator can always aim to achieve something like Pushkin’s quality of directness.

Since the eighteenth century, Russian and English poetry have shared the familiar classic range of metres in the accentual-syllabic tradition – that is, with a set number and pattern of stresses and syllables in a line – so that at least in this respect the English translator can have some feeling of common ground with Pushkin. But of course poetry, lyric verse especially, moves in its own language-specific way, and in translation verse form will often need to be translated as well as words. For maximum authenticity I have kept Pushkin’s lyric metres wherever possible without what seemed too much distortion, but have followed the metrical course in which a poem seemed to be heading in its new linguistic garb rather than impose a straitjacket that would have falsified the sense and crushed the life out of it. Whether or not the metrical form of the original is kept in any given translation, I have always followed consistent metre and scansion. Occasionally I have abandoned Pushkin’s formal architecture altogether. Original verse forms where the translation is otherwise, as in the majority of cases, are indicated in the endnotes.

Pushkin’s lyric verse until late in his career is always rhymed, and I have usually rhymed too, sometimes preferring the greater freedom afforded by near and half-rhymes and non-rhyming alternate lines. I have not followed the regular alternation of feminine and masculine rhymes that is obligatory in Russian verse but is unnatural or unwantedly light-hearted or satirical in English; however, I have sometimes used the rhythm of unrhymed unstressed English word-endings to give an echo of feminine rhyme.

My overriding aim has been to offer what seemed to work as English verse, tethered to the original as closely as possible in the ways I have mentioned.

Pushkin’s texts I have used are those of Sobraniye sochineniy v desyati tomakh [Collected Works in Ten Volumes], ed. D. D. Blagoy et al. (Moscow: State Publishing House of Literature, 1959–62), vols 1 and 2 (Stikhotvoreniya [Lyric Poems], 1814–36), and vol. 3 (Poemy, skazki [Narrative Poems and Fairy Tales]), which reproduce those of the collected edition of the USSR Academy of Sciences in seventeen volumes (1937–59) with corrections.

Antony Wood
February 2020

Further Reading

GENERAL

Richard, D. J., and Cockrell, C. R. S. (ed. and tr.), Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976). Perspectives by twenty-six writers and critics from Pushkin’s time to the Soviet era.

Tertz, Abram (pseudonym of Andrey Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin, tr. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993). A whimsical, irreverent and deeply loving extended essay on Pushkin’s poetry and its relationship with his life.

Todd, William Mills, III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). A useful general account of Pushkin’s reading public and the contemporary publishing and literary scene.

BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS

Binyon, T. J., Pushkin: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002). The definitive biography in English.

Chandler, Robert, Alexander Pushkin, in ‘Brief Lives’ series (London: Hesperus Press, 2009). A handy summary of the essentials of Pushkin’s life.

Feinstein, Elaine, Pushkin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). A nice balance between biographical and literary treatment.

Shaw, J. Thomas (ed. and tr.), The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, 3 vols (Downham Market: Milner, 1999–2001). An indispensable reference work.

Tynyanov, Yury, Young Pushkin, tr. Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush (London: Angel Classics, 2007). A novel (1935–43) by a leading Pushkinist and classic historical novelist convincingly recreating Pushkin’s personality in his formative years and the society of his time.

Vitale, Serena, Pushkin’s Button, tr. Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild, paperback edition (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). An account of the last year or so of Pushkin’s life and of the fatal duel; impeccably researched.

CRITICISM

Basker, Michael (ed.), A. S. Pushkin: The Bronze Horseman, with an introduction and notes (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000) and including the original text edited by N. V. Izmailov (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978). A comprehensive and absorbing introduction to the vast literary and historical background to this work.

Bayley, John, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971; reissued 2010). An enduring literary consideration of Pushkin’s writings.

Bethea, David M. (ed.), Pushkin Today (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993). A wide-ranging collection of essays on Pushkin by contemporary American scholars.

–——, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). A sophisticated examination of the life/work relationship, testing the critical toolkits of Sigmund Freud, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin and Yury Lotman.

Bloom, Harold (ed.), Alexander Pushkin, in the ‘Modern Critical Views’ series (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987). A selection of pieces (some translated from Russian) by leading literary critics and Pushkinists.

Briggs, A. D. P., Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998; reissued Bloomsbury, 2013). A sound survey of Pushkin’s work in all genres with some penetrating close readings.

–—— (ed.), Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration of Russia’s Best-loved Writer (London: Hazar Publishing, 1999). A bicentenary collection of essays by leading Pushkinists.

Gillespie, Alyssa Dinega (ed.), Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). A groundbreaking collection of essays on Pushkin’s use of taboo subjects (sexual, political, religious), desanctifying received notions of his literary personality; especially the editor’s contribution ‘Bawdy and Soul: Pushkin’s Poetics of Obscenity’.

Kahn, Andrew, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). An in-depth study of how Pushkin wrote, and his use of ideas, modes and writings from a huge variety of sources.

Wachtel, Michael, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry 1826–1836 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). The essential background – literary and biographical – for a fuller understanding of each poem written in the second half of Pushkin’s life; for those who can read Russian.

Wolff, Tatiana (ed. and tr.), Pushkin on Literature, revised edition (London: Athlone Press, 1986). An indispensable compilation of all that Pushkin wrote on his own and others’ writings.

PUSHKIN’S CONTEMPORARIES IN TRANSLATION

Baratynsky, Yevgeny, Half-light and Other Poems, tr. Peter France (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2015). An extensive bilingual selection of the poet Pushkin most admired among his contemporaries.

Batyushkov, Konstantin, Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry: Konstantin Batyushkov, presented by and tr. Peter France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). A substantial selection from the work of a key poet of Pushkin’s period, accompanied by a biographical account with much that is relevant to Pushkin too.

Chandler, Robert, Dralyuk, Boris, and Mashinski, Irina (eds), The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 2015). Includes representative selections of the most prominent of Pushkin’s contemporaries in translation; with a generous selection of masterly versions of Pushkin’s older contemporary the great Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov.

Lermontov, Mikhail, After Lermontov: Translations for the Bicentenary, ed. Peter France and Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014). A strikingly contrasting voice to Pushkin’s, in translations in English and Scots with original texts.

Pilkington, Anna (ed.), The Garnett Book of Russian Folk and Anonymous Verse (London: Garnett Press, 2015). Original texts with plain prose translations. Pushkin must have known the medieval byliny (oral heroic poems) published by Kirsha Danilov in 1804 and 1818.

Rayfield, Donald, et al. (eds), The Garnett Book of Russian Verse, 2nd edition (London: Garnett Press, 2013). A compendious anthology with original texts and plain prose translations: seventy-five poets from 1730 to 1996.

Tyutchev, Fyodor, Versions from Fyodor Tyutchev, 1803–1873, tr. Charles Tomlinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Free translations which get to the heart of a contemporary poet greatly admired by Pushkin.

Introduction

To non-Russians Pushkin is the most elusive of Russian writers. It is over a century since the Russian novelists began to change our lives in Constance Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy (War and Peace and Anna Karenina) and Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, followed by other leading works). But one of the summits of Pushkin’s achievement, the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, has had to wait until the present century for the first truly representative English translation, by Stanley Mitchell,1 and the rest of his verse is much less well known in English.

Pushkin was born into what is known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry, broadly speaking the first three decades of the nineteenth century, in which he became its central figure. The beginnings of generally accessible Russian poetry were made in the eighteenth century by Mikhail Lomonosov, Aleksandr Sumarokov and Gavrila Derzhavin. But by the end of the century the Russian language still lacked words with subjective and emotional meanings, such as ‘touching’, ‘influence’, ‘nuance’, ‘interesting’. The influential literary figure Nikolay Karamzin (1766–1826) then introduced a layer of new words modelled on French into the Russian literary language, which Pushkin’s immediate predecessors and older contemporaries such as the fabulist Ivan Krylov, the poet-translator Vasily Zhukovsky and the distinguished poet Konstantin Batyushkov used in their verse. But it was Pushkin most of all who brought the new vocabulary into currency.

What is special about Pushkin’s poetry? He once wrote about himself: ‘I am perhaps elegant and comme il faut in my writing, but my heart is wholly vulgaire and all my tastes third-estate.’2 This statement would seem to fit, in its way, with an opinion given in 1897 by the poet and philosopher Vladimir Solovyov:

The very essence of poetry – that which strictly constitutes poetry or which is poetic in itself – has never appeared in a purer form than in Pushkin, although there have been greater poets […]. Pushkin’s personality never held any […] dominating central content: his was simply a living, open, extraordinarily receptive and responsive soul […]. The basic distinguishing characteristic of this poetry is its freedom from any preconceived tendency and any affectation.3

This profile is perceptive about Pushkin’s nature as a poet. However, it would be totally misleading if we were to take it as suggesting that his verse lacks a core of individuality. The topics that drew poetry from him give us a most powerful sense of such a core: love and friendship; the spectacle of human foibles; political ideals allied to a painful sense of his own deprivation of privacy; the history of his country and his own genealogical place in it; his relationship with three tsars; the literature of Classical Antiquity, the Renaissance and contemporary Europe and curiosity about foreign cultures; the Gospel story as a metaphorical and parodic framework for autobiographical inquiry.

The young Gogol described the impact one of his elder contemporary’s lyric collections made on him:

This is not eloquence, this is poetry; without surface brilliance, everything simple and fitting, everything filled with internal brilliance, which does not reveal itself at once; everything is laconic, just as pure poetry always is. Words are few, but so exact that they express everything. Each word contains its own immensity of space; each word is as boundless as the poet himself. This is what makes you read and reread these short poems, and gives them an attraction not possessed by work in which a single leading theme is predominant.4

Dostoyevsky, in his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin (by A. M. Opekushin) erected in Moscow by public subscription in 1880, saw in him a unique quality of ‘pan-humanity’, a universal sympathy for people of diverse cultures, and claimed that this made him not only Russia’s national poet but the world’s. Some have commented that much in this speech is really about Russia and the author himself; nevertheless, it contains much about Pushkin too.5

Eighteenth-century Russian poets followed stylistic consistency. Pushkin mixes style and diction at various levels, and his themes in lyric verse are considerably more varied and personal than those of even the most original of his contemporaries. His short poems are typically of the present moment and constitute a kind of emotional diary throughout his life. Without obvious baggage, he was free to respond uninhibitedly in accordance with his own human experience. In the post-Soviet era the eminent dissident Andrey Sinyavsky put across the freedom and sheer variety of Pushkin’s writing in this way:

Lightness is the first thing […] we get out of his works […]. Before Pushkin there was almost no light verse [in Russia] […]. And suddenly, out of the blue, there appeared curtsies and turns comparable to nothing and no one, speed, onslaught, bounciness, the ability to prance, to gallop, to take hurdles, to do splits […].6

Pushkin is central not only to Russian culture, but to Russian identity. He gave the Russians their own language, a classical literature and an inspirational demonstration of human claims against state power. His extensive and varied oeuvre fertilised the soil for Russian literature throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and the twentieth. His completed work includes over eight hundred lyric poems, a dozen long narrative poems (poemy), six folk or fairy tales (skazki) in verse, six verse plays, a novel in verse, a novel in prose, six short prose tales and a history of the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–5. Like a number of other writers of his period, he was an internationalist, steeped in West European culture from medicine to aesthetics. Much of his inspiration and thinking is drawn from Western and Classical literature and ideas, making him a powerful influence in the tug-of-war between Westernisers and Slavophiles that has gone on in Russia from his death to the present day.

LIFE

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born on 26 May 1799 in Moscow. On his father’s side he was descended from an old boyar family (next below princely rank) that had sunk into obscurity. On his mother’s he was the great-grandson of Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696?–1781), who had been taken as a boy from Turkish captivity in some part of north-central Africa (until recently believed to have been Abyssinia/Ethiopia, now thought to be Chad), brought to the Russian capital and gifted to Peter the Great, who educated him to pursue a career as a military engineer; he was ultimately a decorated general.

Pushkin’s father, Sergey L’vovich (1767–1848), already retired from the army when he married, had taken up a low-paid administrative post by the time his children were born. An indolent, sociable wit, he had a deep love of French literature and gave literary evenings that were attended by leading writers. His brother Vasily had a minor talent for mildly obscene light verse; his racy narrative poem A Dangerous Neighbour (1811) in colloquial Russian, about a brawl in a brothel, is still anthologised.7 Pushkin’s mother Nadezhda (1775–1836) was the daughter of Gannibal’s dissolute third son Osip, who abandoned her mother Mariya and contracted a second, bigamous marriage; legal proceedings brought against him by Mariya resulted in his estate of Mikhaylovskoye near Pskov becoming her property (albeit encumbered with debt) on his death when Pushkin was seven years old. Nadezhda, well read and an excellent French speaker, known in Moscow society as ‘la belle Créole’, was charming, strong-willed and perpetually restless; during Pushkin’s childhood she was forever moving the family (Pushkin had a younger brother and sister) from lodging to lodging and shifting furniture from room to room in a chaotic household.8

Pushkin’s was a neglected childhood; his pronounced African features may have reminded his mother of her bigamous father and turned her against her first son. With his brother and sister he was brought up largely by his grandmother Mariya, who taught him Russian, and a freed serf, Arina Rodionovna, who told him folk tales (the model for Tatyana’s nanny in Eugene Onegin); a succession of émigré French tutors made no impact. He seems to have been a moody, explosive child. The best times of his early years were spent in his father’s extensive library of French literature listening to the conversation at literary evenings.

At the age of twelve, Pushkin was admitted to the Lycée for boys from cultured and noble families newly set up by Tsar Alexander I, with free tuition and board, in a wing of his palace at Tsarskoye Selo outside St Petersburg, with the aim of producing loyal officers of state – a less successful idea than had been hoped; some of Pushkin’s school friends would later be found in rebels’ ranks. Nearly one-sixth of all Pushkin’s lyric poems were written during his years at the school, in the course of which he acquired his extraordinary fluency and ease in writing verse. When in 1815 Russia’s greatest living poet, the aged Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816), paid a visit to the Lycée and heard the fifteen-year-old read his twenty-stanza ode ‘Recollections in Tsarskoye Selo’, he hailed him as his successor. Much of this early work is love poetry. During his school years, and indeed for the rest of his life, Pushkin showed himself to be highly responsive to females. ‘Pushkin was so susceptible to women at this time,’ a classmate notes, ‘that when only fifteen or sixteen, by merely touching the hand of his dancing partner at a Lyceum ball, his glance grew passionate, and he snorted and wheezed like a high-spirited horse in a drove of colts.’9 He excelled in Russian and French literature and in fencing but took little interest in other subjects, his performance in the final examinations earning him an insignificant post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

After six years at the Lycée – never going home for holidays – Pushkin spent three years in St Petersburg, where his parents had now moved; he lived in a tiny room above their apartment on the Fontanka river. His free lifestyle was more dissipated than that of Onegin as later to be depicted in the same capital. His physical appearance, which didn’t change much throughout his life, was distinctive – he was short, just under five foot six, with a shock of curly black hair, thick lips, a dark complexion and riveting eyes. Swift-moving, his features and whole figure constantly in motion, he alternated rapidly between brooding silence and high spirits; he cultivated strikingly long fingernails. His behaviour as a young adult was by all accounts an out-of-control schoolboy’s. He would disturb his neighbours at the theatre, on one occasion applauding by pounding the bald head in front of him; he was forever drawing his fencing rapier against someone he had just met over some trivial slight, real or imagined.10

Shortly after leaving school in 1817, Pushkin was formally elected to the literary society Arzamas, whose affairs he had already followed at school and whose membership comprised some of Russia’s leading poets and writers, such as Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855) and Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792–1878), and even included his uncle Vasily. Arzamas was formed in 1815 in opposition to the conservative Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word, which was dedicated to the defence of Russian literature against foreign ‘infection’ such as Karamzin’s linguistic reforms based on French. Arzamas’s programme was firmly founded on French neoclassical canons of the previous century, and its imitative approach to poetry helped to form Pushkin as a poet, as we shall see later. He also joined another literary society cum drinking club known as the Green Lamp, some of whose members were also (unknown to Pushkin) members of a secret society, the Union of Salvation, aiming at constitutional reform in Russia. He made friends for life at both Arzamas and the Green Lamp. He himself was never a member of a secret society; notoriously talkative (he later became known as a great conversationalist), he was not trusted in secret circles. However, he soaked up the liberal, anti-autocratic ideas gathering strength in Russia at this time. His close friendships with serious figures older than himself, intellectuals such as Aleksandr Turgenev (1784–1845) and Pyotr Chaadayev (1794–1856), turned the brilliant but frivolous schoolboy into a passionate and politicised energy source.

The middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century saw a sharp change of political mood in Russia. After a far-stretching empire had been built up under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), the brutal rule of the unbalanced Paul I had been ended by his assassination in a palace revolution in 1801, and in 1812 Alexander I was victorious over Napoleon, Russian autocracy looked firmly established. However, the seeds of opposition to the spread of harsh bureaucracy in all aspects of daily life had been sown among the intelligentsia and army officers returning from Western Europe. Their tsar, in contrast, so recently ‘the liberator of Europe’, relapsed into a mode of political repression and religious bigotry in the latter part of his reign.

Pushkin continued to write verse after leaving school. As unrestrained as his lifestyle (he was laid low from time to time with a venereal infection) were his poems against autocracy, which were widely copied and gave voice to the attitudes of a whole new generation in military and civil service. Some of them fell into the hands of the authorities and would have landed him in Siberia had it not been for the efforts of high-placed friends, including Zhukovsky, now Russian tutor to Tsar Alexander’s German-born wife, who also played a part in the decision to send Pushkin to the more congenial South. Once again he was appointed to a humble bureaucratic post, a supernumerary in the chancellery of the shortly to be appointed governor of Bessarabia in Kishinev; Russia had recently wrested back this semi-Asiatic territory from Turkey in the latest hostilities between the two empires. Pushkin’s superior at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Count Capo d’Istrias, who happened to be an honorary member of Arzamas, had supported this milder form of exile which was accepted by the tsar, and then commented in a letter to Pushkin’s new master:

Certain poems, especially an ode on freedom [1817], have brought Mr Pushkin to the attention of the government. […] this poem reveals dangerous principles issuing from that contemporary school, or perhaps it would be better to say, from that anarchical system which people maliciously call a system of the rights of man, of freedom, and of the independence of people. […] his patrons suppose that his penitence is sincere and that, removed for some time from Petersburg, provided with an occupation, and surrounded with good examples, one may make of him a fine servant of the government or, at least, a writer of the first rank.11

It was the latter expectation that was to be realised.

On his way south to Kishinev, in a Tatar village on the edge of the Black Sea in the company of the jovial family of General Nikolay Rayevsky, a hero of 1812, with his three daughters and two sons, Pushkin spent perhaps the happiest three weeks of his life. He fell in love, with varying degrees of seriousness, with each of the daughters in turn, and in their company read Byron in French prose translation and visited the historic ruined palace of the Tatar khans in the town of Bakhchisaray, with its famous fountain.

By the time he arrived in Kishinev in the autumn of 1820, a long poem he had worked on for three years in St Petersburg, Ruslan and Lyudmila, was published. It was customary at this time for an ambitious new poet to become established with a long, typically narrative poem, a poema, rather than scattered lyrics, and Pushkin’s older writer friends, who had great faith in his poetic gift, had urged him to make his mark in this way. The mock-heroic verse tale of the ravishing of a princess by a wicked wizard shocked some critics by its frivolity, but the perfection of its poetry delighted everyone else and made Pushkin famous overnight.12 Another accolade came from his friend and mentor Zhukovsky, who gave him his own portrait inscribed: ‘To a victorious pupil from a defeated master.’

Pushkin was intoxicated by the atmosphere of Kishinev, a multi-ethnic garrison town with a population of Moldavians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Turks, Greeks, Jews and gypsies as well as Western Europeans. His forays among the young Moldavian girls caused frequent complaints from their parents; in response to these his kindly guardian, General Inzov, in whose household he lived, had his boots removed from time to time to prevent him from leaving the house.

Settling down and inspired by Byron’s verse tales, Pushkin wrote his three finished Southern poemy in Kishinev, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bahkchisaray and The Gypsies, as well as the first three chapters of Eugene Onegin; also The Gabrieliad, a blasphemous treatment of the Annunciation in which Satan, the archangel Gabriel and the dove of the Holy Spirit successively have their way with the Virgin Mary. This poem was of course unpublished in Pushkin’s lifetime but became well known to the authorities, who were to pursue him long and wearisomely as the suspected author, which was never officially established. The Prisoner of the Caucasus soon sold out in its first edition as a booklet (1822), praised by everyone for its vivid portrayal of Circassian life and landscape but disappointing some critics unconvinced by the character of the hero, a Byronic fugitive from the ‘civilised’ world (Pushkin agreed with them). The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, however, made publishing history two years later, earning Pushkin the princely sum of 3,000 roubles and unanimous critical praise. Its commercial success decided Pushkin in his pioneering endeavour to make his living as a poet; the rest of his life was to be spent in increasing debt.

After three years in what had become a backwater for him, Pushkin requested and was granted a transfer to Odessa. In this sophisticated Black Sea port, he was given his usual modest post in the offices of Count Mikhail Vorontsov, the recently appointed governor-general of New Russia (i.e. the South), an Anglophile and veteran of the Battle of Borodino, someone his unruly charge never got on with, secretly lampooning him and conducting an affair with his younger wife. The vivacious and sociable Yelizaveta was one of two beautiful and prosperous married women Pushkin met in Odessa and fell deeply in love with; the other was a shipping merchant’s wife, Amalia Riznich. Lyrics inspired by both of them are among Pushkin’s most deeply felt love poems. His relationship with a third woman, the brilliant and flamboyant Karolina Sobanskaya, who was rumoured to be a government spy, might have developed had he not been distracted by each of the other two in turn.

From his immediate post-Lycée period to the end of his life, Pushkin was constantly under government surveillance. During his fourth year in the South, the authorities got wind that he was ‘taking lessons in pure atheism’ according to new scientific principles – ironically enough, with Vorontsov’s personal physician.13 In fact, Pushkin had simply shown a passing curiosity in ideas new to him. But Orthodoxy being one of the ideological pillars of the state (‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’, as Tsar Alexander had laid down), there was once again a cloud hanging over the poet. To minimise any possible dissemination of atheism, the tsar, in his religious zealotry, decided to change Pushkin’s place of exile to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoye, tucked away in the north-west in the province of Pskov. Here Pushkin spent two years in the company of his childhood nanny Arina Rodionovna, walking, riding and noting down folk tales told to him by the old woman. Early in 1825 the first chapter of Eugene Onegin was brought out by his friend the publisher Pyotr Pletnyov. It was enthusiastically received by the critics but the booklet considerably undersold its ambitious print run, largely due to trade mismanagement, including an excessively high price. However, Pushkin’s first collection of lyric verse, from the same publisher at the end of 1825, containing a hundred or so poems, including several of his most famous, sold out within two months despite the book’s pricing and the fact that many of the poems would have been widely familiar from initial publication in a journal.

During the last year of his exile at Mikhaylovskoye, Pushkin wrote the blank verse historical drama The Comedy of Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrep’yev, to be known since its first publication bowdlerised by the censor in 1831 simply as Boris Godunov, in which form it was unsurprisingly a critical and commercial failure. The censor’s removal of the carefully researched but politically unwelcome theme of the people’s espousal of the Pretender rather than Tsar Boris made it seem like something it wasn’t – a one-sided neoclassical tragedy focusing (like Mussorgsky’s later opera) on the unhistorical given of Boris’s personal guilt after murdering the young heir to the throne.

In November 1825, Alexander I died unexpectedly. Hoping that the new tsar might release him from exile, Pushkin set out alone for the capital but superstitiously turned back when two hares and a priest crossed his path. He distracted himself by writing the comic narrative poem on rural moeurs Count Nulin instead.

This may have saved his life. As he was courageously to tell the new tsar, Nicholas I, when summoned for interview the following year, if he had been in St Petersburg he would surely have joined his friends in the uprising that took place when 3,000 troops assembled on Senate Square on 14 December. The complete failure of the disastrously underprepared rising and severe punishment of the leaders of the rebels, known thereafter as the Decembrists – five were executed and some hundred and twenty sentenced to hard labour, including some of Pushkin’s closest friends – cast all educated Russia into a depression for the rest of the decade. The fact that Pushkin was fortunate enough to be well out of the way, and so missed sharing the punishment of his friends and allies, gave him a profound sense of guilt for the rest of his life.

The interview with the tsar took place in the Kremlin, Moscow, in September 1826. Impressed by Pushkin’s honesty about his Decembrist sympathies, Nicholas put an end to his exile but extracted an undertaking from him ‘to think and act in a different fashion’14 in future; he also declared that henceforth he would be Pushkin’s personal censor. The sovereign wasn’t to keep to his side of the bargain; it turned out that Pushkin had to submit all his work to Count Aleksandr Benckendorff, head of the newly created Third Department of the Tsar’s Chancellery, the secret police, the responsible body for censorship, a lasting source of bitterness for the most popular literary figure in the country at this time.

The 1820s saw a transformation of the writer’s world from a manuscript culture to a literary market. The Russian poets and writers of the eighteenth century had written in a world of patronage, dependent on a sovereign, a wealthy or powerful figure or a circle of friends. They were treated like servants by their noble masters – and on occasion ill-treated; the poet Vasily Tredyakovsky (1703–69) is recorded as being caned for failing to deliver an ode on schedule.15 In his early years, Pushkin’s poems were read in such a culture. Literary salons, modelled on those of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, and literary societies, often with a political fringe, played a leading role in intellectual life. These private circles began to publish their own journals and almanacs, which developed into periodicals in their own right – the origin of the thick literary journals of modern times. On Pushkin’s return to Moscow and St Petersburg in 1826 after six years in exile, bookshops and literary periodicals were in full flow in a highly competitive open market.

In Moscow, Pushkin renewed his friendships with poets and writers from his pre-exile St Petersburg days, in particular his closest literary school friend Anton Delvig (1798–1831), and got to know up-and-coming Moscow literati such as Nikolay Polevoy (1796–1846) and Mikhail Pogodin (1800–1875), founders of the new literary journals the Moscow Telegraph and the Moscow Herald. He also met the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), exiled to central Russia for several years from his Lithuanian birthplace, under Russian rule since the Third Partition of Poland (1795). The two admired each other and became warm friends until Pushkin’s literary response to the Polish uprising of 1830–31 led to mutual antagonism – which was to prove especially productive for Russian literature (see below).

Delvig and Pushkin launched a new journal, the short-lived Literary Gazette, doing battle with the hack writer Faddey Bulgarin (1789–1859), a police spy, who denigrated Pushkin’s Boris Godunov to his paymaster the tsar and then plagiarised it in his own historical novel Dmitry the Pretender (1830). Many of Pushkin’s lyric poems of the 1820s were first published in Pogodin’s Moscow Herald and especially Delvig’s almanac Northern Flowers, a showcase for him and the circle of poets who were his friends and contemporaries and known to posterity as the Pushkin Pleiad. Both these publications were at the more discerning, small-subscription end of the Russian literary journal spectrum.

The 1820s saw the composition of most of Pushkin’s poetry, and two further collections of his verse were published in 1829 (containing short poems both new and reprinted after appearing in journals and almanacs) and 1832 (with short poems and also first printings of The Tale of Tsar Saltan and the blank verse ‘Little Tragedy’ Mozart and Salieri). By this time, however, the peak of his lifetime popularity had passed. Before he was thirty, the public had lost its appetite for verse tales and lyric poetry and was turning firmly to prose. Historical novels began a new era for the reading public, and Gogol’s early stories met with immediate success. Prose translations of popular fiction thrived. In the 1830s, Pushkin himself turned to prose with the innovative Tales of Belkin, five stories of great parodic sophistication, but they were not appreciated by their first, disappointingly small readership. The intriguingly ambiguous short tale The Queen of Spades, a gambling story, was more successful, appearing in the omnivorous publisher Aleksandr Smirdin’s new monthly Library for Reading, covering literature, arts, science, news and fashion, which was winning a solid middle-class readership and was by far the most read Russian journal for the next decade, casting its net widely enough to publish some of Pushkin’s lyrics written in the 1830s in its first issues.

Pushkin’s numerous amatory relationships in St Petersburg after his return from exile have been well documented. They overlapped with his courtship of a young girl who soon became one of the most celebrated beauties of St Petersburg society. Two years after his return from exile, he met the sixteen-year-old Natalya Goncharova, whose large family – she had two sisters and three brothers – had become impoverished since the heyday of her great-great-grandfather, a rich and powerful manufacturer. After more than two years of distractions on other fronts and haggling with her mother, Pushkin married her, without a dowry – a key point in his favour. Natalya had no interest in literature; her passion was the ballroom. Exceptionally, magnetically beautiful, she even turned the head of the tsar. A young observer, a Count Vladimir Sollogub, has this description of her from the year of her marriage, included in a memoir published exactly a century later (1931):

I have seen many beautiful women, have met many women even more charming than Mrs Pushkin, but I have never seen a woman who combined to such perfection classically regular features and figure. She was tall, with a fabulously narrow waist, and luxuriously developed shoulders and bust, and her small head, like a lily on its stem, swayed and graciously turned about on her slim neck […].16

The Pushkins must have made an odd pair, the shorter, carelessly dressed, jerkily moving figure of Pushkin alongside such a picture-wife. Four children, two daughters and two sons, were born in five years.

In the summer of 1830, Pushkin’s father had settled his modest Boldino estate in the province of Nizhny Novgorod on his son to try to help his financial situation for marriage. That year and in 1833, alone in the autumn months there, he wrote a number of the works that would eventually be seen as his greatest, among them the four blank verse dramas the ‘Little Tragedies’ (including Mozart and Salieri, the inspiration for Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus), the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman and the last two chapters of Eugene Onegin.

Marriage saw Pushkin with continually increasing debt, arising from the expenses of keeping a sizeable family, low income from falling sales of his work, and Natalya’s extravagances, but most of all his own gambling losses. In 1831, reading and approving (in censored form) Boris Godunov for publication, Tsar Nicholas had appointed Pushkin Russia’s official historian laureate in succession to Nikolay Karamzin, author of the monumental History of the Russian State (at twice the latter’s salary, but still inadequate).17 At this time Pushkin planned to write a history of the reign of Peter the Great, for which task he was now granted permission to use the state archives. But three years later, the tsar appointed him to the additional and humiliating court post of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), traditionally an eighteen-year-old’s position, necessitating his attendance at balls with Natalya, who had become a favourite court beauty, thus tying him to the capital when he wanted to work in the country. When he tried to resign from this post, Nicholas insisted that would mean forfeiting his indispensable access to the imperial archives.

Pushkin set high hopes on sales revenue from his long-contemplated journal for serious literature, The Contemporary. Four issues came out under his editorship in the last year of his life, the first including poems by Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73), this great poet’s debut, and the third Gogol’s fantastic story ‘The Nose’. But he was to be bitterly disappointed. The journal was stifled by competition not only from the Library for Reading but also from Bulgarin’s popular journal Son of the Fatherland and his newspaper the Northern Bee. The public had lost the taste for poetry in general and for Pushkin’s combination of unvarnished, essentially classical writing in particular.

The last part of Pushkin’s life is the best known. In autumn 1835, after nearly five years of marriage, Natalya met a French guards officer in Russian service, Baron Georges d’Anthès, tall, blond and blue-eyed, who was claimed by the Dutch envoy in St Petersburg, Baron Jakob van Heeckeren, to be his adopted son, some suspected his lover. She was attracted to him too, and allowed him to flirt with her. D’Anthès made at least one attempt on her virtue, which was rebuffed in a striking echo of Tatyana’s rejection of Onegin as written six years earlier.18 After continued intrigue, including the dissemination of an anonymous round-robin letter declaring in mock-officialese that Pushkin had been ‘unanimously nominated coadjutor to the Grand Master of the Order of Cuckolds’,19 and also d’Anthès’s astounding move in suddenly marrying one of Natalya’s sisters – presumably to divert attention from his real intentions towards Natalya – Pushkin was goaded into challenging d’Anthès to a duel. The latter fired first and severely wounded Pushkin in the stomach. Pushkin’s return shot, taken lying on the ground, hit his opponent in the right arm but was then harmlessly deflected, probably by a silver button on the latter’s regulation tunic.20 D’Anthès quickly recovered but Pushkin died two days later, on 29 January 1837, at the age of thirty-seven.

Zhukovsky wrote to Nicholas I seeking his charity for Natalya and the children and suggesting that a complete edition of Pushkin’s works should be published. The tsar concurred on the latter and most of his proposals for the family’s welfare, but refused Zhukovsky’s idea of an imperial pronouncement on the national importance of Pushkin’s work such as he had composed for Karamzin. ‘What a crackbrain Zhukovsky is!’ Nicholas is recorded as saying. ‘He will not understand that Karamzin was a man who was almost a saint, but what was Pushkin’s life like?’21

Nicholas nevertheless paid off Pushkin’s debts, granted Natalya a pension, settled further sums on the four children until they came of age, and decreed that Pushkin’s works should be published at state expense, with net proceeds going to Natalya and the trustees of the estate. All four children lived on well into the twentieth century, with one granddaughter marrying a grandson of Nicholas I.22

Soon after Pushkin’s death, d’Anthès was court-martialled and sentenced to death for participation in a duel and for killing Pushkin, a decision commuted by Nicholas, on the ground that the accused was a foreign subject, to expulsion from the Russian army and return to France, where he would continue his military career. Natalya, following advice Pushkin had given her on his deathbed, left the capital, taking the children to live in the country for two years. Seven years later, she married a friend of d’Anthès, Pyotr Lanskoy, an officer in the horse guards, by whom she had three daughters. The marriage, heartily approved by the tsar, who promoted Lanskoy to commander of the horse guards and stood godfather to the eldest daughter, appears to have been harmonious.

Zhukovsky, whom Natalya had asked to be a trustee of Pushkin’s estate, prepared a posthumous edition of his works. The first part, containing all Pushkin’s published work, appeared in eight volumes in 1838; produced in a hurry and with editorial collaborators, it was full of mistakes and misprints, and texts remained in their original censored forms. The second part, in three volumes containing hitherto unpublished work, also edited by Zhukovsky, came out in 1841, having undergone not only cuts and amendments imposed by the censor but also Zhukovsky’s editorial changes reflecting his own taste. In 1855–7 the first comprehensive edition of Pushkin’s works appeared in seven volumes, edited by the literary critic P. V. Annenkov (1813–87) with materials for a biography, once more a far from reliable edition; while most previously censored passages were restored, some were not, and overall Zhukovsky’s personal changes remained.23 It was not until the centenary year of Pushkin’s death in 1937 that a reliable edition of the complete works in seventeen volumes began to appear, produced by the USSR Academy of Sciences.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PUSHKIN’S POETRY

Pushkin’s lyric poetry closely reflects his life experience, and his poetic development and the emergence of his themes are clearly to be seen within the chronology of his life. The poems in this book are placed in each of the three parts in chronological order of writing (as far as may be ascertained), and this chronology can enhance our reading – for example, in the poems on a past love written on the uneasy eve of Pushkin’s marriage or the growing impatience with his public seen in poems on the poet’s calling, or the distancing from Byron that takes place between the narrative poems The Fountain of Bakhchisaray and The Gypsies.

Behind Pushkin’s formal perfection lie not only his early practice in writing verse as a prospective and then a full member of Arzamas, but also his lifelong reading of French and Russian poetry of the eighteenth century and European and Graeco-Roman literature. Arzamas upheld the ‘correctness’ of eighteenth-century French-based neoclassical tradition, and, writing in this context, Pushkin became a master of imitation and parody.24 In his hands the clarity, elegance and precision of French are organically joined to Russian, with the latter’s stress patterns miraculously disposed over the metres of the accentual-syllabic scansion system established in Russian verse in the eighteenth century, which followed English tradition. At the same early stage he acquired perfect command of verse styles and genres used by his Russian predecessors. Here lie the foundations of the prosodic mastery displayed throughout Pushkin’s poetry, from the present selection to his best-known work, Eugene Onegin, the novel in verse about an idle young St Petersburg dandy and the country girl he spurns, which contains much of Pushkin himself and surveys, with light irony, much of contemporary Russian life.

At the age of sixteen, in the same year (1815) that Derzhavin heard the young poet’s reading of his recently written ode on Tsarskoye Selo, Pushkin wrote a dazzlingly witty and accomplished mock-epic account of a literary descent into hell, the comic playwright Denis Fonvizin (1745–92) being the Virgilian guide to the narrator (Pushkin), with encounters with three untalented Russian writers and Derzhavin. Pushkin imitates and parodies the style of all of them in turn, including, respectfully, the last. Later in this same year he wrote another long poem in a similar irreverent spirit, this time a bawdy ballad, The Shade of Barkov, which has always been considered outside the canon and only recently accepted as Pushkin’s work. Both poems are harbingers of things to come. The ballad tells of a defrocked priest’s visit to a brothel, where the ghost of the celebrated (by male readers) obscene poet Ivan Barkov (1732–68) appears to him in a morale-boosting visitation. Critics Russian and Western have uncovered Barkov’s influence on nineteenth-century Russian poets only in recent decades, especially during the post-Soviet era.25 Reminders of Pushkin’s Barkovian ballad, not in its language or immediate subject matter but in certain verse patterns and rhyme echoes, have even been found in one of his greatest poems, ‘The Prophet’ (1826), and an astonishing claim has been made that both poems are linked by their author’s fundamental urge, to be thwarted throughout his life, towards personal independence and freedom from any political or social restraint.26

Parody, then, is central to Pushkin’s poetry. The first long narrative poem he published, Ruslan and Lyudmila, was conceived partly as a parody of Zhukovsky’s supernatural but serious verse epic The Twelve Sleeping Maidens (1817). Pushkin’s fantasy tale (of an abduction by an evil wizard and the quest to rescue the bride) is satirical and full of jokes shared with the reader. The comic narrative poem Count Nulin, included in the present selection, parodies the plot of Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Formal parody of the Gospel story comes into the late ‘Stone Island cycle’ of lyric poems, also included in this selection.

Allied to parody are two further practices central to Pushkin’s poetry – translation and adaptation. He was steeped in the poetry of Western countries, especially France and England, and the literature of Classical Antiquity. Although his reading of foreign literature was largely through French translations, mostly in prose (notably of Byron), later on he was able to read original texts of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and possibly Milton in English. His friend Zhukovsky, nearly a generation older than him, was also a significant early influence in this respect, with his own pioneering translations of German and English Romantic poets. Pushkin once noted that translators are ‘the post-horses of enlightenment’,27 and he made a number of translations and adaptations himself; the present selection of lyric verse includes several of his free versions of poems and passages that in his hands become his own poems. Among his most daring adaptations (not in the present selection) are a recasting of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as the dramatic-narrative poem Angelo (1833) and a treatment in lyric verse of the first chapter of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (‘The Wanderer’, 1835).

‘Pushkin possessed,’ in the words of a modern Russian critic, ‘as no one else did, the brilliant ability to rework creatively all that was best in the foregoing literary tradition, originally and independently melting it down and turning the foreign into his own.’28

THE PRESENT SELECTION

Lyric Poems

In Pushkin’s time, writers had to have their book-length work printed at their own expense; then they would distribute it to booksellers of their choice who sold it and remitted earnings at a negotiated percentage to the author on copies sold. Pushkin had his narrative poems and his four lyric collections published in this way. Lyric poems were generally far less valued and known than narrative poems in his day, and were scantly, if at all, remunerated on their individual appearance in journals and almanacs.

Surveying Pushkin’s oeuvre today, we have a rather different perspective from that of his contemporaries. His lifetime reputation and his livelihood derived from the publication of his narrative poems, individual chapters of Eugene Onegin, prose and the four collections of short lyric poems that he published. Many of his lyric poems were unpublished in his lifetime – around forty per cent of the present selection, including some now among the best known: ‘Once there lived a humble knight’, ‘Autumn (A fragment)’, ‘It’s time, my love, it’s time!’, ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’, and of course anti-autocratic poems such as ‘Liberty: An Ode’ and ‘To Chaadayev’, although these were widely read in manuscript.

Posthumous filling in of Pushkin’s lyric oeuvre gives it a centrality in his work as a whole that it did not have in his lifetime. Except in cases of conscious stylisation, Pushkin’s verse reads in everyday language that carries naturally into the modern era. Comparing his short poems with those of his exact contemporary Yevgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844), we find clear differences. Both poets write personally, but whereas Baratynsky is calm and reflective – Pushkin admired him as ‘one of our outstanding poets […] unique in that he thinks’29 – Pushkin’s lyric utterance has the immediacy of the present moment, and its emotional power is concentrated and increased by extreme precision of language and tonal sensitivity within formal balance: the right word always in the right place and in an exact fit to the metre. Most of his poems written at the Lycée are more striking for their technique than their content, though the first in this selection, ‘To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff’ (1814), is refreshingly inventive and the second, ‘The Rose’ (1815), adopts a delightfully mature stance.

‘Liberty: An Ode’ (1817) and ‘To Chaadayev’ (1818) are among the post-Lycée anti-autocratic poems that resulted in Pushkin’s six-year banishment from the capital. The first was unpublished in his or Nicholas I’s lifetime and the second printed in 1829 after his exile, without the last climactic lines.

Through the 1820s, Pushkin wrote lyric poems in a wide range of genres, beginning with ‘The light of day has faded’, written in 1820 just after he had dipped into the first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) in a French prose translation. The sound of the waves can be heard in the varying rhythms of this elegy looking back on his life as he makes a sea crossing to his first place of exile. The poems throughout this decade abound in responses to Pushkin’s daily life, and their themes often carry wider significance: love and personal admiration expressed directly or from a distance; incarceration; winter as a symbolic setting for the national condition; the poet and his public; the role of chance in life; and – perhaps most frequently of all – self-contemplation. Such a solemn-sounding array of themes belies the intimate, personal tone that runs through many of the poems.

Three of Pushkin’s greatest lyrics belong to the post-Decembrist period, ‘The Prophet’ (1826), ‘The Upas Tree’ (1828) and ‘Demons’ (1830). The first two use biblical reference and language. ‘The Prophet’, on the inspiration of Isaiah with the Word of God, is commonly interpreted to be about the poet’s calling, but there is some indication that it is the sole survivor from a group of anti-government poems the rest of which Pushkin destroyed before his interview with Nicholas I. Pushkin steps up the level of violence of Isaiah 6:6–7 to the point of shock. ‘The Upas Tree’, in which a potentate sends a slave to his death by getting him to fetch poison for military use, has a background in both the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis and the Islamic concept of the deadly tree that punishes the sins of mankind, but it has powerful political resonance too. Both these poems are key examples of how Pushkin achieves maximum expressive power by combining extreme economy, perfect construction and sonic effects and how he can achieve density and depth through the use of an intertext. A ballad of the period, ‘Demons’, on being lost in a blizzard, seems to plunge the reader into the national mood of the Russian intelligentsia following the failure of the Decembrist uprising and the execution and banishment of its leaders.

Pushkin was always pushing in new directions. In 1825, the year of writing Boris Godunov, this master of rhyme anticipated our own times by writing an essay (unpublished) in which he called rhyme, which first appeared in the West in medieval French poetry, a ‘new ornament of verse’ that ‘led necessarily to a straining in expression, a form of preciosity quite unknown to the ancients’, and went on to comment: ‘petty wit replaced feeling, which cannot find expression in triolets. We find miserable traces of this in the greatest geniuses of our own time.’30 Later, reading Wordsworth and Coleridge in English and having a desire to recapture the unadorned plainness of the poets of Classical Antiquity that he had been reading in French all his life, he turned to unrhymed verse in some of his lyrics. In the blank verse meditation written on a late lone visit to Mikhaylovskoye ‘… I see again / That corner of the earth’ (1835), he makes his best-known lyric use of this vehicle.

Two lyrics written in the early 1830s each have particularly powerful personal bite. ‘My Pedigree’ (1831), a riposte to his arch-enemy Faddey Bulgarin for a racist insult to his mother, becomes Pushkin’s gloriously taken opportunity to ridicule those he sees as the jumped-up aristocracy created by Peter the Great, while unabashedly making the most of his own lineage. The other poem caused his liberal friends and allies much discomfort – a vigorous defence of the government’s suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830–31, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ (1831), addressed to the many Western critics of the Russian campaign. It is clear that his argument that the affair was just ‘an old domestic difference’ was sincerely his own. He often hated his country; but criticism from foreigners he hated more, and in this poem it fuelled a fine piece of rhetoric, calculated to induce the aesthetically inclined reader to set politics aside while reading it.

Pushkin’s fondness for the longer line in his later verse is magnificently exemplified in the contemplative poem ‘Autumn (A fragment)’ of 1833 (intentionally without a formal ending). It is written, like ‘Winter. The country’ (1829), in hexameters, and like that poem is a vintage example of the rich combination of qualities to be found in his poetry. With the greatest of ease, it fuses spontaneous first-person utterance with metrical formality in eight-line ottava rima stanzas – not a sensuous distillation like Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ (1819) but a graphic exploration of thoughts and feelings aroused by the season.

Among the last substantial lyrics Pushkin wrote are half a dozen mysterious short poems appropriating mostly Christian texts and personae – a fourth-century Syrian prayer, the Gospel story – in a parodic and symbolic way in a search for the meaning of his own life and poetic calling. These deeply serious poems have become known in modern times as the ‘Stone Island cycle’ after Pushkin’s last holiday location in the Neva delta where they were written.

Narrative Poems (Poemy)

Having early established his reputation in 1820 in the genre of the poema with Ruslan and Lyudmila, Pushkin reached the height of his popularity in 1824 with The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, which chimed with the public’s appetite of the time, primed with the verse tales of Byron and Walter Scott, before fiction became staple fare. In this narrative of the rivalry between two concubines at the court of a Crimean Tatar khan and its tragic end, we are in a world poised between legend, a recent historical past and dream; here is Pushkin’s developed version of Romanticism, abounding in gentle suggestion, sudden breakings-off and with a continuous mellifluous flow. The poem captivatingly evokes the harem’s atmosphere and way of life, and a ruthless young Georgian girl emerges with a memorable monologue that looks forward to Pushkin’s dramatic verse.

The last of Pushkin’s three southern poemy, The Gypsies (1824), is a different kind of poem entirely. While Pushkin was writing it he was also working on the third chapter of Eugene Onegin, his enthusiasm for Byron and Romanticism was vanishing, and he was dealing with actuality. The precision with which he observes gypsy life (which he had seen at first hand) in this poem turned out to be the beginning of Russian Realism, the foundation for most of nineteenth-century Russian literature. The central figure, Aleko, a fugitive from urban society, enters a gypsy group and brings disruption and destruction to a harmonious and balanced primal society; in parodic reversal of Rousseauesque concepts of the Noble Savage and the Social Contract, he himself becomes the ignoble citizen. The voices of the main characters are stylistically distinct from the narrative style and from each other – the unfocused ‘Romantic’ style of Aleko’s utterance contrasting with the sharply in-focus style of the narrative and the old gypsy and the fiery delivery of his daughter. With its flexible language and philosophical underlay, this poem is a new direction in Russian literature. It leaves the story open to the reader’s interpretation, posing questions for answers to be supplied. What is freedom? What is fate? How free are the gypsies? Are freedom and happiness related? The libretto for Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875) owes just as much to this poem of Pushkin’s as to Prosper Mérimée’s tale (1845), a debt that seems to have been inadequately acknowledged.31

The Bridegroom (1825), Pushkin’s longest ballad, uses the energetic metre of the enormously popular ballad ‘Lenore’ (1774) by the German Romantic poet Gottfried Bürger (1747–94). The basics of its storyline come not from Bürger, however, but from the Grimms’ tale ‘Der Räuberbräutigam’ (The Robber Bridegroom), which may have reached Pushkin in some form through his old nanny during his first year of exile at Mikhaylovskoye when he wrote the poem. In Pushkin’s hands, the story of a merchant’s daughter and her traumatic experience becomes a masterly whodunnit. He offers the reader the experience of a Romantic ballad, the sinister merging of dream world and reality, but at the end, as the reader realises what has actually happened in the story, the true nature of this once again genre-subverting and dramatic narrative emerges.

When Pushkin, as he put it later, ‘was living in the country’ towards the end of 1825, he happened to read Shakespeare’s long narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, which he thought ‘rather weak’. He was struck by the thought: what if Lucrece had slapped Tarquin’s face? Perhaps he would have retreated, Lucrece would not have killed herself, Brutus would not have driven out the kings, Rome would not have become a republic; in short, ‘the world and its history would have been different’. Pushkin couldn’t resist the ‘double temptation […] of parodying both history and Shakespeare’.32 In two days he wrote his comic masterpiece Count Nulin, a light-hearted satire on Russian rural types and moeurs of his time.

A Little House in Kolomna is a jeu d’esprit in reply to Pushkin’s critics for their hostility to him at the time of writing (1830) not only for not producing work of moral and patriotic uplift (at a time of war in the South with Turkey) but also for what was perceived as frivolity and emptiness in what he did write, despite continuing praise for the quality of his verse. In mock-heroic ottava rima he tells an amusing anecdote with a shock ending. The long opening discourse on metre follows the digressive principle that has become a major Pushkinian hallmark since the beginning of Eugene Onegin. The poem, finally, fits Pushkin’s lifelong purpose of bringing literature closer to everyday life and to the less privileged; the widow and her daughter who are its central characters live in contemporary St Petersburg in the same district as the lowly Yevgeny in The Bronze Horseman, and the daughter shares her name, Parasha, with that of Yevgeny’s fiancée and with the young country wife’s housemaid in Count Nulin. Pushkin’s relaxed, conversational style and quiet rhymes, using the same metre as Byron’s Beppo (1818), are poles apart from the latter’s relentless wit and extravagant rhyming.

It is impossible to think of anything in English at all comparable to The Bronze Horseman (1833), alongside Eugene Onegin Pushkin’s supreme achievement. Concise but stylistically diverse, it synthesises and crystallises material from the most diverse of sources – literary, journalistic, apocryphal, conversation with a friend – into densely layered poetic form. The experience of a humble citizen in St Petersburg’s disastrous flood of 1824 (the most destructive of over three hundred before and since), history and the meaning of history, the founding and growth of St Petersburg and the modern Russian state, the nature of Russian autocracy – all are graphically, symbolically, philosophically and sonically brought together in fewer than five hundred lines.

The poem is richly intertextual, responding first and foremost to the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s unqualified criticism of Russian autocracy, the inauspicious siting of St Petersburg in the tempestuous Gulf of Finland, and the Russian people for putting up with both. It opposes the official report of the flood, which minimised government responsibility for the flood damage. It reflects Pushkin’s vast reading. Pushkin’s favourite free-rhyming tetrameter abounds in an unusual degree of enjambement in a syntactically complex flow, knitting together disparate elements almost in the manner of music. The prologue, in elevated style, first evokes the founding of Peter the Great’s city and its rise out of desolate wastes, and then majestically rehearses the newly created architectural splendours that were familiar to Pushkin. The following narrative, through successive stylistic shifts, follows the daily life of the clerk Yevgeny, who lives in a district particularly vulnerable to the elements, and moves swiftly through a variety of registers expressive of the humble mind of its hero, the ferocity of the elements, the panorama of the flooded city, Yevgeny’s two confrontations with the awesome statue of Peter the Great, his incoherent but ominous threat to the future of tsars, and an elegiac conclusion.

In general, Pushkin is sparing with metaphor, and his use of it always carries force. The Bronze Horseman has a higher than usual share of metaphor and simile, applying animal, human and superhuman attributes to the river Neva, giving the poem an organic dynamism up to the climactic moment when the bronze statue of Peter begins to move and to gallop. An unusually high proportion of verbs drives the narrative on at the tempo of the raging river. The overall meaning of the poem centres on our assessment of Peter’s service to the nation in creating a city in a spot so destructive of human life. The achievements of the state are set uncompromisingly beside their human cost. Only the prologue (with four lines censored) was published in Pushkin’s lifetime.

Fairy Tales (Skazki)

The fairy or folk tale in verse is a genre that Pushkin made very much his own. During his exile at Mikhaylovskoye, his old nanny Arina Rodionovna would tell him folk tales, his major source; enchanted, he noted down the storylines and later developed his prose notations into verse, mostly rhymed, in folk idiom.

The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831) is based on two variant sources, neither of which Pushkin follows exactly, pruning extraneous detail and making substantial additions of his own. He retains the basic story of his sources – the voyage by the hero who is cast into the sea with his mother in infancy and grows to adulthood beside her inside a barrel, reaches a desert island and becomes tsar of a new city that springs up there – but he adds much material detail. The wandering island of Buyan is prominent in Slavic mythology, a kind of island of the blessed, harbouring a magic stone with healing powers; Pushkin’s tale has a squirrel that gnaws nuts with wealth-producing gold shells and emerald kernels. This skazka was the literary historian D. S. Mirsky’s favourite poem in all Pushkin.

The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish (1833) is Pushkin’s only unrhymed skazka. His version of a folk tale about a covetous wife who is punished, found in many cultures, is based on the Grimms’. The overweening figure of the wife is taken to satirise Catherine the Great with her ambition of ruling over the Black Sea.

The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833) is based on the Grimms’ ‘Snow White’ and a variant told to Pushkin by Arina Rodionovna. Pushkin puts flesh on the bones of the Grimms’ rudimentary prince and princess and adds a number of episodes of his own invention to the story. A high moral thread runs through his tale: the princess behaves more like a servant than a princess as she puts the empty house she finds to rights.

The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834) is the most sophisticated and least folk-like of Pushkin’s skazki. A Russian critic has said of it: ‘It is not just another fairy tale. It is another dimension.’33 It was written at an intensely fraught stage of Pushkin’s relationship with Tsar Nicholas, who among other aggravations had broken his promise to be his confidential, ‘personal’ censor. Its source is Washington Irving’s ‘Legend of the Arabian Astrologer’ contained in his popular compendium Legends of the Alhambra (1832; Pushkin read a French translation published in the same year). From Irving’s simple story of a good king tricked in his old age by a wily astrologer who makes him a talisman – a bronze warrior supposed to warn him of approaching foes – steals his queen and disappears, Pushkin fashions his own electrifying tale, making the talisman a golden cockerel and knitting the other three, Tsar Dadon, the astrologer and the Queen of Shamakhan, into a dynamic, eerie relationship. In his tale, written in a condensed, detached and lightly ironic style, with the tsar morally culpable and a sinister aura of mystery and the supernatural about the queen, it isn’t hard to see a bitter caricature of Nicholas I in the puffed-up Dadon, the autocrat who breaks his promises. The poem, mysterious to the last, is intriguingly open to still further interpretation (see the introduction to it on p. 215).

The somewhat random criteria of selection of lyric poems in this book have been long-standing familiarity with particular poems and enthusiasm for new discoveries, judgement as to the actual possibility of translation, and the principle of overall variety of content and kind. The six poemy, half the number that Pushkin completed, have been selected to represent his essential achievement in this genre, and all except one of the completed skazki are here. The decision to exclude the third major category of Pushkin’s poetry, the blank verse of his six completed verse dramas, was taken in order to concentrate focus and to prevent overload. Recent critical attention to the literary and autobiographical background to Pushkin’s verse has contributed to both the translations and the endnotes.

It is to be hoped that enough of the genius of this poet’s poet who is also a people’s poet might come through these translations to enable the reader to enjoy the quality to which the Russian critic Yury Lotman has drawn particular attention: ‘One of Pushkin’s most remarkable faculties is to be at our side in dialogue with us.’34

NOTES

For abbreviated references here and throughout this book, see Abbreviations, p. 223.

1. The best of earlier English translations, that by the poet Babette Deutsch (New York: Random House, 1936; revised edition Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1964), was surpassed by Charles Johnston’s (London: Scolar Press, 1977; revised edition London: Penguin Classics, 2003), which was in its turn surpassed by Stanley Mitchell’s superlative version (London: Penguin Classics, 2008). Anthony Briggs’s translation (London: Pushkin Press, 2016) is attractive in its colloquial approach.

2. Letter to his country neighbour and friend Yelizaveta Khitrovo, October 1828 (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 9, note, p. 283).

3. Vladimir Solovyov, ‘The Significance of Poetry in Pushkin’s Verse’ (1897), included in D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell (ed. and tr.), Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976), pp. 101, 102.

4. Nikolay Gogol, ‘Neskol’ko slov o Pushkine’ [A Few Words on Pushkin], from Arabeski [Arabesques] (St Petersburg: 1835); this passage tr. A. Wood.

5. For an English translation of Dostoyevsky’s speech, see: http://www.speeches-usa.com/Transcripts/feyodor_dostoevsky-pushkin.html.

6. Abram Tertz (pseudonym of Andrey Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin, tr. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 50–51.

7. For instance, in Donald Rayfield et al. (eds), The Garnett Book of Russian Verse, 2nd edition (London: Garnett Press, 2013).

8. Binyon, p. 8.

9. Quoted in Simmons, p. 59.

10. These details are taken from ibid., pp. 68–88.

11. Written on 4 May 1820; ibid., pp. 100–101.

12. For a useful English unrhymed translation, with introduction, commentary, notes and facing original text, see Roger Clarke (tr.), Ruslan and Lyudmila (London: Hesperus, 2005, and subsequent revised editions).

13. Binyon, p. 175.

14. Quoted in ibid., p. 242, from a modern Russian source.

15. William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 53.

16. Binyon, pp. 381–2.

17. Chester Dunning et al., The Uncensored Boris Godunov (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 116.

18. Tatyana to Onegin: ‘I love you (why should I disguise it?), / But I am someone else’s wife, / To him I shall be true for life’ (Eugene Onegin, VIII.47.xii–xiv; tr. Mitchell, p. 195). D’Anthès to Baron Jacob van Heeckeren, 24 February 1836: ‘she told me, “I love you as I have never loved, but never ask me for more than my heart, for the rest does not belong to me, I can be happy only honoring all my duties”’ (quoted in Vitale, p. 54).

19. Quoted in Simmons, p. 390.

20. Vitale, p. 278.

21. Quoted in Binyon, p. 642.

22. Pushkin’s elder son, Alexander (1833–1914), became a general; Grigory (1835–1905) a government official; the elder daughter, Marya (born in 1832), died in 1919. The first marriage of the younger daughter, Natalya (1836–1913), was to the son of the chief of staff of the Gendarme Corps, a subordinate of Benckendorff. Her daughter Sophie (1848–1927), by her second husband, Prince Nicholas William of Nassau, whom she married morganatically, married Nicholas I’s grandson, Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhaylovich (1861–1929), and their daughter Nadezhda (1896–1963) married George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven (1892–1938), an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in London in 1916. Descendants of Pushkin today live in various countries, including the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium and the United States.

23. Bayley, p. 357.

24. Kahn, p. 17.

25. Among the first to take Pushkin’s Shade of Barkov seriously was Anthony Cross (‘Pushkin’s Bawdy; or, Notes from the Literary Underground’, Russian Literature Triquarterly, vol. 10 (1974), pp. 203–36).

26. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie, ‘Bawdy and Soul: Pushkin’s Poetics of Obscenity’, in id. (ed.), Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), pp. 185–223.

27. Note unpublished in Pushkin’s lifetime. Quoted in Wolff, p. 277.

28. I. I. Vol’pert (Moscow: The Languages of Russian Culture, 1998), quoted in Gillespie, p. 59.

29. Draft note written in 1830, unpublished in Pushkin’s lifetime. Quoted in Wolff, p. 269.

30. Draft essay ‘On Classical and Romantic Poetry’ written in 1825. Translation in ibid., p. 127.

31. Explored by A. D. P. Briggs in an essay, ‘Did Carmen Come from Russia?’, in the programme for an English National Opera production of Carmen, 1995–6.

32. A posthumous note on Count Nulin quoted in Wolff, pp. 272–3.

33. Nepomnyashchy, p. 116.

34. Yury Lotman, Stat’i i zametki [Articles and Notes] (Moscow: Vagrius, 2008), back cover.

I

LYRIC POEMS

St Petersburg, 1814–20

To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff

How can this be? Not roses, Cupid’s fancy,
Tulips at their proud best,
Fragrant jasmine, or lily of the valley,
Upon your marble breast –
Oh Clementina, how perverse you are …
You used to sniff the morning bloom’s aroma –
Now it’s that green weed
Which fashion’s restless need
Has artfully transformed to fine grey powder!
10Let some Marburg professor with snowy hair,
Hunched in his high old chair,
His awesome mind applied to Latin prose,
Take, in a coughing fit, his panacea
And stuff it up his venerable nose;
Let some young moustachioed dragoon
Viewing the crimson dawn,
Still dreaming, fill his room

With thick grey smoke from his beloved meerschaum;

Let some old beauty who has lost her bloom,
20Retired from love, forsaken by the graces,
Her body quite without unwrinkled places –

All she has left propped up with stays and trusses –

Let her pray, and yawn, and huff

And find, in one good pinch, unfailing respite; –

But if, my beauty! … you are so fond of it …

If I – the power of fancy! – were the stuff,

And your snuffbox closed on me …

Then – you took a pinch of me

In those soft fingers – rapture! Down I’d spill

30Inside your silken dress,
Over your smooth white breast,
I’d spill and spill until …
But no, an empty dream. That happiness
Isn’t for me. Fate is unkind. Enough!
Oh, if only I could be that snuff!
1814

The Rose

Where is our rose,

Friends all forlorn?

Faded, the rose,

Child of the morn.

Do not say:

So youth must pass!

Do not say:

… And happiness!

Say to the flower:

10Ah, what a pity,

Your time is over!

And show us the lily.

1815

To Baroness M. A. Delvig

I am in my seventeenth year, and you are eight.

Some time ago I was eight years old myself;

That time has long since passed. It is my fate,

It seems, to be a poet, so God help!

You can’t take back what you’ve already had,

I am already old, and I admit it.

Belief is all we have that can defend us.

You’re now a child, like Cupid, and as pretty –

When you have got to my age, you’ll be Venus.
10And if by then I haven’t died,
By the almighty will of Zeus,
And if I’m able still to write –
I’ll write you, my dear baroness,
A madrigal in Latin taste:
It will astound, but not by art –
Though it will not abound in praise,
It will be written from the heart!
I’ll write: ‘In honour of those eyes,
O baroness, and all the balls
20At which we gazed on you with sighs:
One glance, I beg you, from those eyes
For all my previous madrigals.’
And when young Cupid and great Hymen
In my adorable Mariya
Both greet a beautiful young woman –
Shall I, concluding my career,
Succeed with an epithalamion?
1815

To Princess V. M. Volkonskaya

Lady, a passing glance from Adam
Will place you firmly on the shelf;
Or you’ll be taken for a madam –
But God no, not the tart herself.
1816

The Singer

Did you hear, from distant groves at night,
The singer of love, the singer of despair?
And early on the morning air
The sad notes of his pipe –
Ah, did you hear him?
Did you see, in the shadows of the forest,
The singer of love, the singer of despair?
His laden smile and lingering tear,
His look of quiet unrest –
10Ah, did you see him?
Did you sigh when you heard his gentle voice,
The singer of love, the singer of despair?
And when you saw him passing near
And met his waning gaze –
Ah, did you sigh for him?
1816

The Window

The lone moon picked the path from shadow;
I sat alone and still;
I saw a maiden at her window,
The breaths she drew were chill;
She watched in fearful expectation
The path below the hill.
Then, ‘Here I am!’ I heard the whisper.
With trembling hand the maid,
Just as the moon was lost in darkness,
10Opened the pane. I sighed:
‘There’s happiness! When will a window
Open for me one night?’
1816

Liberty
An Ode

Away now, limp Cytherean muse,
I order you to flee!
Come to me, you who menace tsars,
Proud bard of Liberty!
Come, tear the garland from my head
And drown my minstrelsy …
I wish to scourge the vice on thrones
And sing of Liberty.
Put me on the noble path
10Of that immortal Gaul
Whom you inspired to valiant hymns
In days of gloire and moil!
Tremble, tyrants of the world,
Alumni of crude Fate!
And all you slaves, take courage, hearken,
Rise from your abject state!
Alas, as far as eyes can see
They light on chains and taws,
On tears of helplessness and bondage,
20On shameful, deadly laws;
Unrighteous Power has been imposed,
It thrives on superstition,
The cruel soul of Slavery
And Fame’s bloodthirsty passion.
The sovereign only spares his people
A life of misery
Where mighty laws are firmly linked
With sacred Liberty;
And where a solid shield protects
30All citizens alike,
The sword is held in balanced hand
Wherever it may strike,
Where, from the highest in the land
At but a single beck,
Crime receives the just response
No greed or threat can check.
Rulers! You owe your crown and throne
To Law, not Nature: though
You stand higher than the people,
40Higher still stands Law.
And woe betide the sorry peoples
Who carelessly ignore
The warning signs where ruled or rulers
Themselves command the Law!
I call you first of all to witness,
O martyr of the Terror,
You who laid down your royal head
For many a forebear’s error.
Up mounts King Louis to his death
50For all posterity;
He bends his decrowned head upon
The block of Perfidy.
Silent the Law, and silent people
Watch as the vile axe falls …
Thereupon the evil purple
Lies on the new-chained Gauls.
You and your throne I deeply loathe,
Autocratic Fiend!
Unmercifully I await
60Your and your children’s end.
Clearly marked upon your brow
The people read your curse,
Bane of the world and shame of nature,
Reproach to God on earth!
The brilliant evening star shines down
Above dark Neva’s deeps,
And while the unencumbered head
Into slumber slips,
The pensive singer turns his gaze
70On mist-enshrouded gloom,
A palace empty and abandoned –
Its tyrant in the tomb –
And hears the fateful voice of Clio
Inside that fateful tower,
Before his very eyes he sees
Caligula’s last hour,
Before him, with their ribboned honours,
Drunk on wine and spite,
With daring faces, fearful hearts,
80The murderers in the night.
The watch is silent at his post,
The bridge is promptly down,
A hired hand makes sure the gate
Draws back without a sound …
O shame! O horror of our times!
Wild beasts, the janissaries
Burst in, they deal inglorious blows …
The anointed miscreant dies.
Learn then, rulers of the world:
90No dungeon, no reward,
No piety, no punishment
Can be your faithful guard.
But if you are the first to bow
Before the trusted Law,
The People’s peace and liberty
Will keep your throne secure.
1817

To Chaadayev

The falsities of love and hope,
Of quiet glory, are outworn,
Those fantasies of childish scope
Have vanished like the mists of dawn;
But still we burn with fierce obsession,
Impatience overflows our soul;
Beneath the yoke of dire oppression
We hearken to our country’s call.
In faith and torment we await
10The sacred moment of our freedom,
As lovers, languishing, await
The longed-for moment of their meeting.
And while we burn for liberty,
And live for nobleness of mind,
Let us create our legacy
From passion of the highest kind!
My friend, believe: the star of wonder
Shall shine, the star of destiny;
For Russia will awake from slumber,
20And grave our names, once she has risen,
Upon the shards of despotism!
1818

O. Masson

Olga, child of Aphrodite,
Olga, miracle of beauty,
How you put the world to rights
With your kisses and your slights!
How you overwhelm the heart
With voluptuous caress
As the secret hour is set
For seductive happiness.
At the long-awaited hour
10In a raging amorous fever
Up we run and rap your door –
As a hundred times before,
We are met by your sly whisper
And your sleepy maid’s perusal
And the jibes of her refusal.
In the name of zestful pleasure,
Of priapic enterprise,
Bliss and gold beyond the measure,
And your captivating eyes –
20Olga, priestess of the evening,
Listen to our lovesick prayer:
Night of rapture, of oblivion,
Say you’ll grant us this for sure.
1819

A Good Revel

How I love a good night’s revel,
With merriment our president,
And legislator of our table
Liberty, my guide and friend,
When cries of Drink up! often drown
Our hoarsely shouted songs till dawn,
And as our circle grows and grows
The bottles stand in closer rows.
1819

Renaissance

Some barbarous painter daubs his brush
All over a perfect work of art,
And by his senseless strokes it seems
The picture is forever marred.
But with the years the alien paint
Falls off like worn-out scales; its essence
Is now restored for us to see
In all its first magnificence.
So from my tried and weary soul
10All delusions fall away,
And in their place come earlier visions
Belonging to a purer day.
1819

You and I

You are rich and I am poor;
I write verse and you write prose;
Your complexion blooms and glows,
Mine – I seem to haunt death’s door.
Never having any cares,
You live in a mighty palace;
I, beset by woes and tears,
Live my life upon a pallet.
You eat sweetmeats every day,
10Quaff down many a vintage – too
Indolent at times to pay
Nature its twice-daily due;
Crusts and scraps and impure water,
That’s the stuff on which I feed;
Down a hundred stairs I clatter,
Driven by the well-known need.
You, with always slaves galore
To serve your needs from head to toe,
Wipe your plump posterior
20With the best in calico;
With my sinful rear the mode,
How I wince, is quite another,
What I use is rougher, tougher –
Count Khvostòv’s most recent ode.
1820

To Yuryev

The favourite of the city’s flighty
And lover of great Aphrodite –
My dear Adonis, try to bear
Her passing slights – but don’t despair!
She gave you all the charms of youth:
That dark moustache, that lively eye,
That smiling taciturnity …
Dear friend, are these things not enough?
A stranger to desire, you miss
10The pleasure in a lover’s kiss;
No matter – at our revelries,
Our light Terpsichorean sport,
The eye of every beauty flies
To you, and pays you dreamy court.
Alas! The language of the heart,
Those sighs of inward eloquence,
Must be, my friend, as music sweet
To self-enraptured nonchalance;
You must be happy with your lot.
20By contrast, I – eternal scapegrace,
Ill-favoured scion of Negro race,
Brought up in rude simplicity
And never likely to expire
For love – I please young beauty by
The shameless rage of my desire;
Thus, scarcely fathoming the matter,
A flush arising in her cheeks,
A nymph will sometimes quietly fix
Her bashful gaze upon a satyr.
1820

Exile, 1820–26

The light of day has faded,

The dark blue sea is swallowed by the mists of night.

Sing to me, sing to me, willing sail,
Move beneath me, darkly brooding ocean.
I see the far-off shore ahead,
The enchanted regions of the midday lands;
I yearn towards them, rapt in memories …

Feelings are roused, and tears; my soul quickens,

then cools;
I am surrounded by familiar dreams,
10And all the mad love of the past,
All that I suffered, all that was dear to me,
The cruel deceits of my desires and hopes …
Sing to me, sing to me, willing sail,
Move beneath me, darkly brooding ocean.
Fly, my good ship, take me to unknown lands,
Follow the whims of indiscriminate seas,
But never back to those sad shores,
My homeland, where first passions flamed,
The gentle muses smiled to me in secret,
20My youth was spent and lost in storms,
Where light-winged joys betrayed my heart to
suffering.
In search of new experiences

I have fled from you, the country of my birth,

I have fled from you, the devotees of pleasure,

The momentary friends of momentary youth;
And you, my confidantes in aberration,
To whom I sacrificed, indifferently, myself,
Peace of mind and glory, life and liberty –
You are forgotten too, my young betrayers,
30Secret companions of my golden Spring,

You are forgotten too … But love’s old wounds,

The old deep wounds of the heart – nothing can

heal …

Sing to me, sing to me, willing sail,

Move beneath me, darkly brooding ocean.

1820

The Nereid

Out in the dark green seas that kiss the shores of Tauris

I saw a Nereid by the light of early morning.

I hardly dared to breathe; deep-hidden in the forest

I watched; in the pellucid waters the demi-goddess

High above the waves upraised her swan-white breasts

And squeezed a lingering wake of foam from her streaming

tresses.

1820

I have outlived desires,
I and my dreams must part;
Suffering is all I feel,
I have an empty heart.
Amid fate’s cruel storms
My lantern has long waned –
I live alone and sad:
When shall I meet my end?
So, on a branch stripped bare
10Under the stormwind’s breath,
The sudden chill of winter
Spares one last trembling leaf.
1821

The Prisoner

I sit behind bars. A young eagle,
My unwilling companion, my equal,
Below the unreachable light,
Tears its food, wings raised as for flight;
It looks at my window, my thoughts
Are shared as it pecks and discards;
Its look and its cry mean to say:
‘Free spirits we are – we’ll away!
‘It’s time for us both! We shall fly!
10To the blue of the sea and the sky,
To the mountain-peaks lost to the eye,
To the heights where the winds play – and I!’
1822

A Songbird

Abroad, I faithfully preserve
My land’s old ritual:
I free a songbird from its cage
For Spring’s bright festival.
And I am comforted at last;
Why should I rail at God,
While I possess the power to grant
One creature that reward!
1823

Night

My voice disturbs the silence of the night,
All yearning and all tenderness for you.
A single candle casts its fitful light
From by my bed; my murmuring verses flow
And overflow with love for you; and bright
Your eyes upon me in the darkness glow
And smile at me – and I can hear your voice:
My love, my love … I love you … I am yours!
1823

Behold, a sower went forth to sow.

I went alone before the dawn

To sow the seed of liberty;

In innocence and purity

I cast the generative corn

About the fields of slavery –

My time was wasted, nothing stood

Of all my toils and hopes for good …

Submissive multitudes, graze on!

You’ll not be roused by honour’s word.

10What use is freedom to the herd?

They must be either killed or shorn.

We know their age-old heritage:

The yoke with rattles and the scourge.

1823

[On Vorontsov]

Half trade, half grand seigneur,
Half wise man, half a fool,
Half seasoned criminal –
Ah, there’s hope he’ll mature.
1824

Zephyrs share
The midnight air.
All round
You sound,
Guadalquivir.
The golden full moon gleams;
Hush … a guitar … and see,
High on a balcony
A Spanish beauty leans.
10Zephyrs share
The midnight air.
All round
You sound,
Guadalquivir.
My angel, cast your veil!
Shine like the dawn! And put
Just one bewitching foot
Outside your iron rail!
Zephyrs share
20The midnight air.
All round
You sound,
Guadalquivir.
1824

To ***

It comes to me again, that moment:
You passed before my eyes,
A fleeting vision of pure beauty,
A spirit from the skies.
In times of hopelessness, of sadness,
The busy world’s great noise,
Long did I dream of those dear features
And hear that gentle voice.
The years went by. Their storms dispersed
10The dreams of former days,
And I forgot your gentle voice,
Forgot your heavenly face.
I lived in dark incarceration,
My days quite empty of
Divinity and inspiration,
And tears, and life, and love.
But now my soul awakes from slumber:
Once more before my eyes
A fleeting vision of pure beauty,
20A spirit from the skies.
And suddenly my heart beats faster,
For once again I have
Divinity and inspiration,
And life, and tears, and love.
1825

Late blooms I find more pleasing
Than any bright first flower.
In us they awaken
A sadness livelier far.
Livelier than sweet meeting
Can be the parting hour.
1825

Winter Evening

Heavy stormclouds hide the sky,
Whirling snowflakes wild;
Howling like a savage beast,
Sobbing like a child,
Rustling on the withered roof
Sheaves of ancient straw,
Like some late, lost traveller
Beating on the door.
Here inside our broken hovel
10All is dark and bleak.
Little old nanny at your window,
Why do you not speak?
Are you wearied, my dear friend,
By the thunder-peal?
Are you lulled into a doze
By your humming wheel?
Come, let’s drink, my dear companion,
First to take my part,
Come and drink now; where’s the tankard?
20We’ll be light at heart.
Sing to me of how the blue-tit
Dwelt beyond the sea;
How the maiden went for water
Early on the lea.
Heavy stormclouds hide the sky,
Whirling snowflakes wild;
Howling like a savage beast,
Sobbing like a child.
Come, let’s drink, my dear companion,
30First to take my part,
Come and drink now; where’s the tankard?
We’ll be light at heart.
1825

Prose Writer and Poet

Prose writer, let me share your thought,
And in a very little time,
Should your labours come to naught,
It will be pointed, fledged with rhyme
And laid upon a tautened string;
I’ll loose it from my ready bow –
High in the air the shaft shall sing
And truly it will strike the foe!
1825

Mniszek’s ‘sonnet’
from Boris Godunov

(Governor Mniszek’s castle in Sambor)

MNISZEK

Old men like us no longer join the dance;

The stamp of the mazurka has no thrill

For us who do not squeeze or kiss soft hands …

Ah, memories of those times are with me still!

Now things are different, youth is not so bold,

Nor beauty so light-hearted as we knew it –

I fear we must acknowledge that the world

Is now a duller place; we’ll leave them to it.

I would propose we don’t stay here, my friend,

10One moment more; we’ll see if we can find
A flask of Magyar vintage, earth-encrusted,
And in a corner, just the two of us,

We’ll pour the rich, fat, fragrant stream and taste it,

And there’ll be many things we shall discuss.

Dear comrade, come.

WISNIOWIECKI

Yes, just the two of us.

1825

Confession

I love you – though it makes me mad,
Despite my hopeless toil and shame,
In folly and humility,
Before you on my knees, I love you!
It ill befits me, and my years …
It’s time, it’s time that I were wiser!
I recognise by all the signs,
However, I am sick with love:
Without you I am bored, I yawn;
10But when I see you I am sad,
I must put up with it; my angel,
I have to tell you, how I love you!
I hear the rustle of your dress,
Your light step from the sitting-room,
Your voice of girlish innocence,
And I completely lose my head.
You smile – the world is joy for me;
You turn from me – the world is sorrow;
When I endure a day of torture,
20Your pale hand is my recompense.
And when you lean at your embroidery,
With lowered eyes and locks, I gaze
In rapture, tongue-tied as a child! …
Shall I describe my jealous torment
When I observe your preparations
To go out walking in the rain?
The tears you shed in solitude?
Your chats with someone who’s not me?
Or expeditions to Opochka?
30Or evenings at the pianoforte? …
Alina, please take pity on me.
I shall not dare to ask for love.
Perhaps, my angel, for my sins
I am unworthy of your love!
Only pretend! That glance of yours –
It is so wonderfully expressive!
Deceive me – it’s not difficult …
Oh, I am glad to be deceived!
1826

The Prophet

I wandered in a lonely place;
My soul’s great thirst tormented me, –
And at a crossing of the ways
A six-winged seraph came to me.
Like slumber, fingers light and wise
He laid upon my weary eyes:
And like an eagle’s in amaze
They opened with all-seeing gaze.
My ears he touched, – and noise and sound
10Poured into them from all around:
I heard the heavens in commotion,
And angel hosts’ celestial flight,
And sea-beasts stirring in the ocean,
And vines’ growth on the valley-side.
And to my lips he bent, tore out
My tongue, an idle, sinful thing;
With bloody hand, in my numb mouth
He placed a serpent’s sapient tongue.
And with his sword he clove my breast,
20And took my trembling heart entire;
A coal alight with brilliant fire
Into my opened breast he thrust.
In that lone place I lay as dead,
And God’s voice called to me, and said:
‘Prophet, arise, behold and hearken:
Over the world, by sea and land,
Go, and fulfil my will unshaken,
Burn with my Word the heart of man.’
1826

Moscow and St Petersburg, 1826–30

[To my Nanny]

My dear companion of past times,
My angel through adversity!
Alone amongst the age-old pines
Long years you have awaited me.
Sadly at your window-sill
You watch as if on sentry-go;
Your wrinkled hands are active still,
But now your needlework is slow.
You gaze at the forgotten gate,
10The dark and disappearing path:
Cares and forebodings pile their weight,
From hour to hour, on your poor heart.
You think you hear …
1826

Winter Road

The moon breaks through the drifting cloud
And on the dismal winter road,
On glades of gloom, pours dreary light.
In a swift troika-sleigh I ride;
Unceasingly the little bell
Gives out its loud and tedious peal.
The endless songs the driver sings
Speak to me of many things,
Sometimes of wild abandonment
10And sometimes yearnings of the heart …
No beckoning lights, no black huts show …
Out of the endless stretch of snow
Only the banded verst-posts rear …
I’m sad … Tomorrow, Nina dear,
Before the fire the whole day through
I shall gaze my fill of you.
The noisy mantel-clock’s hour hand
Will at long last complete its round,
Removing tiresome stay-up-laters,
20And midnight shall not separate us.
Nina, I’m sad: the road is bleak,
The driver mute now, half-asleep,
The moon quite out of sight to us,
The bell so loud and tedious.
1826

To I. I. Pushchin

First friend from long ago!
How I rejoiced at fate –
Into my lonely yard
Wrapped in its sad snow,
A sleigh bell brought your voice.
Now may Providence
Carry my voice to you,
May it console you too,
And bring to your dark sentence
10The light of Lycée days!
1826

Deep in the Siberian mines
Hold your heads up high;
Your toils shall not have been in vain,
Your noble thoughts not die.
The faithful sister of misfortune,
Hope, in darkest gloom
Shall bring you happiness and courage,
The longed-for time shall come:
Friendship and love shall find their way,
10As surely break all bolts
As my free voice now reaches you
Deep in your penal holes.
Your heavy shackles shall be loosened,
Prisons yield up their hordes –
And joyful freedom shall embrace you,
Brothers give back your swords.
1827

Arion

On that boat there were many of us;
Some went about their task aloft,
Some cleaved the waves with heavy oars
To move the fully laden craft.
Our skilful helmsman, wordless, steered,
While I, with boldly ringing song,
Gave courage … Then a whirlwind flung
Its worst at us, the waters reared …
The helmsman perished, all the crew! –
10The tempest churned the depths and threw
Me, the mysterious bard, ashore,
Of all that ship the only one.
I sing the hymns I sang before
And dry my wet robe in the sun.
1827

The Angel

At Heaven’s gate a gentle angel
Shone with downcast eyes,
While a demon darkly hovered
Over Hell’s abyss.
The spirit of denial and doubt
Met that pure spirit’s eyes,
And deep within there came to him
A stir of tenderness.
‘Farewell,’ said he. ‘Now I behold you,
10Shining on my eyes,
Not all in Heaven do I hate,
Not all the world despise.’
1827

The Poet

As yet unsummoned by Apollo
For dedicated sacrifice,
The poet is content to follow
Paths of worldly enterprise;
Now the sacred lyre is quiet,
His soul is lost in slumber, cold;
Among the lowly of the world
None more lowly than the poet.
But when Apollo’s godly word
10Touches his attentive senses,
At once the poet’s soul is stirred,
And like a wakened eagle, tenses.
Among the world’s pursuits he yearns,
From everyday affairs he turns,
Before the idol of the crowd
His haughty head will not be bowed;
With countenance wild and stern he goes,
His ear is filled with strange commotion,
He seeks out spacious, singing groves,
20The verges of the lonely ocean …
1827

19 October 1827

My friends, amid the cares of life,
In service of the Tsar,
In comradeship’s unbuttoned revels,
In love’s sweet mysteries,
May God protect you!
My friends, through tumult and disaster,
In common pain and grief,
In foreign land, on lonely ocean,
And at the Earth’s abysses,
10May God protect you!
1827

The Talisman

Where the waves forever play
By the lonely shore,
Where the moon brings warmth of day
At the twilight hour,
Where the harem’s leisured bliss
Soothes the Mussulman,
There a sorceress, with caress,
Gave me a talisman.
Said the sorceress, with caress:
10‘Take this from my trove:
Secret properties it has!
It is the gift of love.
But from sickness, from the grave,
From the hurricane,
You will not be saved, my love,
By my talisman.
‘Nor will there arise for you
Eastern riches from it,
Nor will it subdue for you
20Followers of the Prophet;
Nor will it from this sad South
Bear you home again,
Back to your loved one in the North,
Will my talisman.
‘When, however, treacherous eyes
Cast their spell on you,
Or when lips, as daylight dies,
Kiss you, being untrue –
Then, dear love, from heart’s betrayal,
30Oblivion or pain,
It shall save you and not fail,
This my talisman!’
1827

Recollection

When all the sounds of mortal day recede,
And lucid shade
Settles upon the quiet city squares
And toil is paid,
Then the hours of agonising vigil
Drag on for me:
I feel the gnawing of the heart’s remorse
More painfully;
Images jostle and seethe; oppressive thoughts
10Flock to my mind;
The long and silent scroll of recollection
I watch unwind;
I curse and shudder with repugnance as
I read my days,
Lament with bitter tears, but those sad lines
I’ll not erase.
1828

Thou and You

She makes a slip in her address,
For vacant you says heartfelt thou;
My soul is lit with love, and how
I dream of happiness!
I stand before her lost in thought,
I cannot take my eyes from her;
I say to her: ‘How nice you are!’ –
‘I love thee!’ in my heart.
1828

My beauty, sing to me no more
Sad Georgian songs:
They bring to me
Another life, a distant shore.
Alas! Your cruel melodies
Bring back to me
The steppe, at night –
Far off, beneath the moon, a face.
The dear but fated spectre fades
10At sight of you;
But when you sing –
Again it is before my gaze.
My beauty, sing to me no more
Sad Georgian songs:
They bring to me
Another life, a distant shore.
1828

Portrait

She of passion, she of storm,
She of incandescent soul
May be seen amongst you all,
Wives of the north, from time to time,
Scorning all accepted limit
To the utmost of her powers,
Moving like a lawless comet
Through the fixed familiar stars.
1828

The Drowned Man

Home came the children in a hurry,
Calling their father as they ran:
‘Daddy! Daddy! Look what we’ve caught!
Come and see! A real dead man!’
‘Fibbing little devils yous!’
Growled the father. ‘Mercy me!
Who would have them if they chose?
I’ll give you dead men – just you see!
‘Who’s to answer to the law?
10Never get them off your back …
I must go and see though. Wife,
Give me my coat: I’ll have a look …
Where, then?’ – ‘Daddy, over there!’
Where a fishing-net is spread,
Wet still, on the river bank,
Lies a man indeed, quite dead.
What an ugly, ghastly sight,
Swollen up and greyish blue:
Some poor wretch who brought his soul
20Rest from sins he’ll never rue?
Some unsteady roisterer?
Fisher-boatman who capsized?
Some unguarded travelling merchant
Robbers savagely surprised?
No concern of his; the peasant
Took the body by the legs,
Looked about him hurriedly,
Dragged it to the water’s edge,
Grabbed an oar, and to the waves
30Sent the dead man with one toss;
Back downstream he floated off
Towards a decent grave or cross.
Long did the dead man ride the waves,
Turning and turning in the foam
Just as if a living person;
Then our peasant turned for home.
‘Now you pups! You come with me!
Each of you will get a bun –
Mind though, and a thrashing too,
40Anyone who wags his tongue!’
All night long the river roared,
Never did the storm let up;
Nearly all the spill was spent
In that smoky family hut,
On his plank-bed on the stove
Long had the weary peasant lain;
Through the storm another sound –
Knocking at the window – came.
‘Who’s there?’ ‘Master, let me in!’
50‘What can it be that brings you here?
Dead of night – you wandering Cain –
Must be Devil’s work I fear!
Should I help the likes of you?
No room here to sleep or sup.’
And unwillingly the peasant
Slowly pulled the shutter up.
Moonlight comes – what does he see?
Standing there a naked figure:
Down his beard the water streams,
60In his gaze is fixed-eyed rigour,
All about him is quite numb,
Hands hang limply at his side,
Into his blue and bloated body
Small black crayfish dig and hide.
Recognising him, the peasant
Slams the window firmly shut;
He is shaken to the core.
Whispers he: ‘Why aren’t you dead!’
Seized with dark imaginings,
70Fearing all night for his fate,
Till the dawn he hears the knocking
At the window and the gate.
This dread tale is passed around:
Doomed, that peasant will await
Year by year his visitor
That same hour, on that same date;
When a storm has raged all night,
When the storm does not abate,
Then the dead man comes and knocks,
80At the window and the gate.
1828

The Upas Tree

In a bare and barren land
Scorched and blistered by the sun
The upas tree, dread sentinel,
Stands, shunned by all, alone.
Nature on the thirsty plain
Begot it on a day of wrath
And fed with poison the deep roots
And the dead green of every branch.
Through its bark the poison trickles,
10It melts beneath the midday sun,
And when night comes, it cools and sets
Into translucent sticky gum.
No birds fly there, no tiger comes
To where it grows, only the black
Storm races to the tree of death
And, filled with poison, hastens back.
And should a passing cloud by chance
Water its thick mass of leaves,
Down to the hot sand runs the rain
20And poisons everything that lives.
But once a man’s all-powerful glance
Dispatched a man to find the tree:
And he obediently set forth,
And back he came at dawn next day.
He bore the deadly upas gum
Upon a branch with shrivelled leaves,
And on his pallid countenance
Ran sweat in cold and ceaseless streams;
He brought the poison back and, weakened,
30Lay down on matting in a tent,
And there he died, the wretched slave
Before the mighty potentate.
And with that gum the ruler smeared
His ready arrows; on command
They dealt out death and devastation
To men in every neighbouring land.
1828

Translated by Peter France and Antony Wood

Raven flies to raven,
Raven cries to raven:
Raven, can you say
What we shall eat today?
Raven to the other:
We shall get our supper;
By a willow on the plain
Lies a knight new-slain.
The slayer and the cause
10Only his goshawk knows,
And his raven mare
And his lady fair.
The hawk is in the air,
The foe sits on the mare,
Fair lady awaits her dear one,
The living, not the dead one.
1828

The Poet and the Crowd

Procul este, profani.

The poet sang; his careless hand

Upon the lyre of inspiration.

The people, cold and arrogant,

Gave ear without initiation,

Heard but didn’t understand.

Thus the empty-headed throng:

‘What is the meaning of his song?

What useful lesson does he teach us?

To what high purpose does he lead us?

10And why does he arouse the heart

Only to plunge us into pain –

Some evil sorcerer for his sport?

Free as the wind his song is, but

What does wind bring? Where’s the gain?’

POET

Enough, you stupid, senseless people,
Day-labourers, slaves of need and care!
This grumbling all the time – how feeble!
You’re worms of earth, not sons of the air,
You seek what’s useful everywhere;
20You judge the Apollo Belvedere
By weight, to you that’s all that’s real,
Not that divinity in marble!
To you the cooking pot’s the marvel,
The means by which you get your meal.

MOB

Well, if you are the heavens’ elect,
Show us your gifts to full effect.
The gods’ ambassador, your arts
Should put to rights your brothers’ hearts.
We are perfidious and half-hearted,
30Ungrateful, shameless and malicious,
On top of that we’re stony-hearted,
Slanderers, slaves and idiots, each of us;
All the vices make their den
In us. But we’re your fellow men,
We can obey stern lessons – teach us.

POET

Be off with you! A peaceful poet –
What business can he have with you?
Back to your stony vices – to it!
The lyre can’t reach the likes of you!
40You are repugnant to my soul.
You’ve long enjoyed the just deserts
Of your stupidity and gall:
The axe, the dungeon and the birch.
Away with you, you mindless crew!
On every busy avenue
There’s rubbish to be cleared, a task
For priests, if they forgot their calling,
Their sacrificing and their kneeling –
But would they take your brooms, I ask?
50Not for worldly agitation,
Not for wars, nor gainful share
Are poets born – but inspiration,
And sweet harmonious sounds, and prayer.
1828

A Flower

In some old book I’ve found, forgotten
A dried and scentless flower;
And in the grip of curious fancy
I linger past the hour.
Where did it grow? And when? What season?
Who picked it with such care?
Did a friend or stranger pick it?
And why was it placed here?
In memory of a sweet encounter,
10In sad last parting mood,
A record of some expedition
In rural solitude?
If he and she could still be living,
Where might they live now?
Or have they also long since faded,
Like this nameless flower?
1828

City of splendour, city of poor,
Spirit of grace and servitude,
Heaven’s vault of palest lime,
Boredom, granite, bitter cold –
Still I miss you rather, for
Down your streets from time to time
One may spy a tiny foot,
One may glimpse a lock of gold.
1828

Signs

I rode to you: and lively dreams
Played around me joyfully;
And on the right of me the moon
Stayed beside me eagerly.
I rode away: now other dreams …
I was lovesick and forlorn;
And on the left of me the moon
Stayed beside me mournfully.
We give ourselves, we poets, whole
10And all the time to silent dreaming;
So the signs of superstition
Chime with the movements of our soul.
1829

Once there lived a humble knight,
Scarce of word and pure of soul,
Pale and sad of countenance,
Spirit resolute and bold.
One unfading single vision,
Passing insight of mankind,
One unchanging single image
Rested in his heart and mind.
On a journey to Geneva,
10By the road, beneath a cross,
He had seen the Virgin Mary,
Mother of Lord Jesus Christ.
From that time, his soul aflame,
Never had he looked on woman,
Nor to any single one
Said a word until the tomb.
From that time the iron visor
Went unlifted from his face;
From his neck the scarf he plucked,
20Set a rosary in its place.
Never was he seen to pray
To the Father, to the Son,
Never to the Holy Spirit –
Strange and rare this paladin.
At the Holy Mother’s image
Nights in vigil he would pass,
Eyes of sorrow fixed upon her;
Silently the tears would course.
He was filled with faith and love,
30Faithful to his soul’s ideal
Blazoned Ave, Mater Dei
In his blood upon his shield.
While the other paladins
On the Palestinian plains
Would confront the trembling foe
Calling out their ladies’ names,
‘Lumen coelum, sancta Rosa!’
Louder than them all he cried,
And in threatening fervour scattered
40Mussulmen on every side.
Home once more in his demesne,
There he lived a life confined,
Still enraptured, still despondent,
Then with no last rites he died.
At the moment of his passing
One of Satan’s spirits came,
He would drag the waiting soul
To the Evil One’s domain.
Never, said the spirit, had he
50Prayed to God or kept a fast,
All too much he’d courted Mary,
Earthly mother of the Christ.
Whereupon the Immaculata
Pleaded steadfastly for him;
Into the Eternal Kingdom
She received her paladin.
1829

The mists of night enfold the Georgian hills;
Aragva sounds below.
I feel serene and sad, light-hearted sadness,
A sadness full of you,
Of you, and only you … My melancholy
Nothing can shake or move;
My heart begins to burn and love again –
Because it cannot not love.
1829

From Hafiz

(A camp on the Euphrates)

Do not be beguiled by glory,
My unblemished boy! –
Horsemen from the Karabakh
In the bloody fray!
Death, I swear, shall never claim you:
Azrael, seeing your beauty
Bright among a thousand swords,
Shall neglect his duty!
Nonetheless, I greatly fear,
10Should you go to war
Grace, and shame, and shy allure
Shall be yours no more!
1829

The drums of reveille sound …
Dante’s lines are stilled,
The tattered book falls to the ground –
The spirit flies back.
Familiar, lively sound,
In the place where I quietly grew
So long ago
How often you used to resound.
1829

The Monastery on Mount Kazbek

Soaring from your family chain,
Great Kazbek, your imperial tent
Shines with a never-fading sheen.
Over all summits, scarcely seen
Beyond the clouds, your monastery
Floats ark-like in the firmament.

I yearn for you, far sanctuary!
This valley I would bid farewell
For your high freedom, if I could,
10Up in a cloud-surrounded cell,
Keep companionship with God! …
1829

2nd November
Winter. The country. What to do? I see
A servant with my morning cup of tea;

‘Cold still?’ I ask him. ‘Has the storm died down?

Any fresh snow? Off with the eiderdown
And saddle up, or better for this sinner
To sit and read old magazines till dinner?’

There is fresh snow. We rise at once – to horse!

It’s dawn, and at the trot we set our course
With crops in hand; the pack behind us bays;
10We watch the shining snow with steady gaze
And all the open land around we scour;

We lose two hares; at last, at some late hour,

Reach home. What fun in store! A blizzard whines;

Dim candles burn; the heart contracts and pines;

I take that poison, boredom, drop by drop.
I try to read; the letters fade; I stop,
My thoughts are far away … I close the book
And take a pen, and settle in a nook:
My drowsy muse finds random words, and line
20Will not fit line; I lose control of rhyme,
My giddy-minded handmaid; vague in gist,

The stiff, cold verse limps on as through a mist.

I weary of the wrangle with my lyre,
And seek the parlour: talk before the fire
Is of the mill, the election that impends;
The hostess, frowning like the elements,

Knits with her nimble needles, sets out cards,

And guesses fortunes with the king of hearts.

What anguish, as the days go by! … But should,

30One evening, our lugubrious solitude

Be lightened, as I sit behind my draughts,

When some new sledge arrives from distant parts,

An unexpected family – one old woman,

Two girls (two blonde and shapely sisters) … human

This dismal spot, as never known before!

And life, O generous God, is full once more!

First comes discreet all-round examination,

Next a few words, which lead to conversation,

And friendly laughter; then the evening warble,

40And lively waltzes, whispering at table,

And many a languid glance and foolish speech

And lingering meeting in a stairway niche.

One girl goes out upon the darkening porch,

Her face and bosom snow-blown as I watch.

The Russian rose cannot be harmed by winter:

How a kiss in frost will warm and tint her!

How fresh a Russian girl in falling snow!

1829

Winter Morning

A marvellous day: sunshine and frost!
Still asleep, my sweet one? – Rise,
Open your bright and splendid eyes,
Those eyes voluptuousness has closed!
Yourself a northern star, come forth
And greet Aurora of the North!
Last night, remember how it blew –
Through lowering skies black stormclouds rode
And, nothing but a yellow spot
10In murk, the moon glowed palely through;
And there you sat in gloom and sighed –
But now it’s over … Look outside:
The sun shines down from purest azure,
Carpeted in brilliant snow
The countryside is all aglow;
Only the woods show dark, through hoar
The tips of fir-trees thrust their green;
Below the ice, spring waters gleam.
The room is lit with amber light;
20Merrily the heaped-up wood
Cracks and spits in the stove. How good
To lie above and ruminate.
But now it’s time to take the sleigh
And harness up the little bay!
To gallop through the morning snow,
My love, at really breakneck speed,
And give our raring mare her head –
Into the woods all leafless now,
Over the open fields, so free –
30And to that shore so dear to me.
1829

I loved you: in my heart, perhaps,
Love may not be extinguished yet;
But I will weary you no more,
Nor cause you sadness or regret.
I loved you not in words, or hope,
But shyly, and in jealous torture;
My love was tender, it was true,
As may God grant you from another.
1829

I walk the crowded thoroughfare,
I sit in youth’s mad company,
I see a multitude in prayer …
And give myself to reverie.
I tell myself, the years will flee,
The vaults already wait for us,
For those we see and cannot see;
The end is near for one of us.
I see a solitary oak;
10It will outlive my passing time,
I tell myself, that patriarch,
Just as it did my fathers’ prime.
An infant merry as a bell
I pat upon the head; to you
I willingly yield place: farewell!
Old blooms must fade before the new.
Each day, each year, before it goes
Brings food for thought; I ask myself
Which one of them am I to guess
20Will bear the annal of my death?
Where will my day of reckoning come?
At sea, in battle, east or west?
Or in a near, familiar tomb
Will my cold dust be laid to rest?
To me it will not signify,
The spot where my remains decay,
Although it would be best to die
Not far from places dear to me.
Upon the threshold of the grave
30Let young life freely dance and play,
And let indifferent Nature have
Her beautiful eternal way.
1829

Inscribe my name? What good –
To die, like the sad roar
Of waves on some far shore
Or night sound from a wood?
Upon your album-leaf
As on memorial stone
A trace of some dead tongue
Is all that it will leave.
Your bold heart will outlive
10Many a new affection,
Tender recollection
My name will never give.
But say it one sad day
With quiet melancholy;
You’ll say: I’ve not left wholly
One heart, one memory.
1830

No, I have lost the taste for stormy pleasure,

The frenzy and the riot of sensual rapture,

The young bacchante’s sighs and groans and cries,

As, writhing like a snake in my embrace,
With sudden biting kisses and caresses
She hastens on the final throes of passion!
My humble one, ah! you are dearer, truer!
Tormented, I am happier with you,
When, in response to my prolonged entreaty,

10You give yourself to me, without excitement,

Bashful and distant, seeming not to hear me,
And making no reply to my endearments,
But warmer, warmer, gradually, to me –
Until at last you share my ecstasy!
1830

To the Poet

Poet, you must not prize the people’s love:

Its shouts of praise die down a moment after.

Be always tranquil, steadfast and aloof

From fools’ critique and public’s heartless laughter.

You are a tsar: live, then, alone. And walk

At will the open highway of ideas,

Bring forth the fruits your free mind cherishes,

And do not seek reward for perfect work.

It lies in you. You are your truest critic;

10You judge your work more sternly than the rest.

Exacting artist, are you contented with it?

Are you? Then let the rabble raise its fist

And spit upon the flame that lights your sanctum

And shake your tripod in its childish tantrum.

1830

Madonna

I’ve never wanted to possess old masters
To have about my home for pure adornment,
Obediently admiring visitors,
The overweening voices of discernment.
But in a quiet corner, as I labour,
I’ve longed to gaze at one old master always,
Just one: looking upon me from the canvas

As from the clouds – the Virgin and the Saviour,

Grandeur of spirit and wisdom in their eyes,
10The gentle ones, in glory of golden rays,
No angels by, beneath a palm on Zion.
At last my wish is granted. Providence
Has granted you to me, you, my Madonna,
The purest image of pure loveliness.
1830

Demons

Stormclouds hurry, stormclouds whirl;
Moon plays hide and seek,
Faintly lights the flying snow;
Sky and night are bleak.
On we go; and ding-ding-ding
Goes the little bell …
Endless spaces frighten me
More than I can tell!
‘Hey there, driver – faster!’ ‘Horses,
10Sir … they’re tired and slow;
’sides, the blizzard’s blinding me,
No more roads – just snow;
Strike me dead, we’ve lost the way!
What are we to do?
We’re the playthings of some sprite –
Round and round we go.
‘There he is, look, up he runs,
Blowing, spitting fiend;
Trying to tug a maddened horse
20Down a deep ravine;
Next, like some fantastic milepost
At our side he rears;
Then he glimmers in the dark;
Then he disappears.’
Stormclouds hurry, stormclouds whirl;
Moon plays hide and seek,
Faintly lights the flying snow;
Sky and night are bleak.
No more strength to circle on;
30No more little bell.
Now we’ve stopped … What’s that out there?
Stump? Wolf? Who can tell?
Angry blizzard, weeping blizzard,
Horses sniff and snort;
There he is now, far away,
Burning eyes cavort;
Now the horses start afresh,
Ding-ding-ding again …
See those spirits gathering
40On the wide white plain.
Numberless and hideous
At their devilries,
Moon-dim hordes of demons whirling
Like November leaves …
What can all their wailing mean?
Where are they being driven?
Some nocturnal burial-rite?
Some witch-bride being given?
Stormclouds hurry, stormclouds whirl;
50Moon plays hide and seek,
Faintly lights the flying snow;
Sky and night are bleak.
Demons, swarm on swarm of them,
Flying to a boundless height,
Their unending doleful moan
Tears and tears my heart …
1830

Elegy

The madcap years have long since gone to waste;

They hang upon me like a drunken haze.

Meanwhile, inside me, sadness from the past

Grows in strength, like wine, with lengthening days.

The course that I must take will offer me
Troubles and toils and a tormented sea.
But I have no desire, dear friends, to die;
I wish to live, to suffer and to think;
I know that griefs and cares will burden me –
10But pleasures also life will surely bring:
I shall again drink in sweet harmony,
The mind’s creations will not cease to wring
Warm tears from me – and on my sad decline

Perhaps one day love’s farewell smile will shine.

1830

To the Bust of a Conqueror

No error – it’s intentional:
Upon the marble of the mouth
The hand of art has put a smile,
But anger on the cold bright brow.
This two-faced portrait isn’t fiction,
For thus he was, this ruler: in
Feelings a walking contradiction,
In face, in life a harlequin.
1830

Rhyme

Echo, the unsleeping nymph, took a stroll on the banks of

Peneus.

Phoebus espied her: the god – seized her, inflamed with

desire.

Great grew the nymph with the fruit of the amorous deity’s

transports;

Naiads gathered about, chattering, at the birth.

Precious was this daughter, the midwife Mnemosyne.

Pranksome of spirit she, reared with the goddess-muses,

Made in her mother’s image and prompt in all her responses,

Cherished by every Muse; mortals know her as Rhyme.

1830

Invocation

If it is true that when the living rest

And shafts of moonlight slide among the gravestones,

If it is true the quiet graves empty then –
One shade I call: my Leila, come!
Come as you were, beloved shade, before
Our parting, pale and cold as a winter’s day,
With face distorted in your agony.

Come, like a distant star or sound, or breath,

Or dreadful ghost, no matter: come!
10I call you not in order to chastise
Those whose evil malice killed my love,
Nor pry into the secrets of the grave,
Nor because I am pursued by doubt …
I only wish to say, I love you still,
Still I am yours: my Leila, come!
1830

Mary’s song
from A Feast during the Plague

MARY (sings)

Once in this our country
Peace and plenty ruled;
Once upon a Sunday
Holy church was filled;
From the crowded school-house
Children’s voices pealed,
Busy scythe and sickle
Sparkled in the field.
Church is now forsaken;
10School-house all forlorn;
Darkling groves are empty;
Wasted is the corn;
Like a burnt-out building
Stands each street of doom; –
All is still and silent
Save the swelling tomb.
Always dead are carried;
Groans of those that live
Peace to the departed
20Call on God to give.
Always room is needed;
Graves of new-interred
Draw their ranks together
Like some frightened herd.
Should my Spring be destined
Early for the grave –
You whom I have loved so,
All the joy life gave,
Pray shun Jenny’s body,
30Do not come too near
Those dead lips, but follow
From afar the bier.
Go then from this village;
Find some resting-place,
Where your soul’s affliction
May be granted grace.
When the Plague is over,
Visit my poor dust;
In the vault of heaven
40Jenny will keep trust.
1830

Master of the Revels’ song
from A Feast during the Plague

MASTER OF THE REVELS (sings)

When great Winter he throws
At his bitterest foes
Shaggy legions of frost, ice and snow –
We meet them with feasting’s glad glow.
The Black Queen with her hosts
A rich harvest she boasts,
Her dread spade taps our door night and day …
What can we do now but pray?
Let us shut out the Plague
10Like the Winter’s rampage!
We’ll carouse, and our goblets we’ll drain
To the Plague’s universal reign.
There’s a savage delight
In the thick of the fight,
The chasm, the ocean’s dark rage,
The whirlwind, the smell of the Plague.
In what threatens with death
Our mortal breath,
Should we make its discovery –
20There is joy – immortality!
To the Plague then, all praise –
None her summons dismays!
Let us drink, while the cup overflows,
Of the breath of the Maid of the Rose!
1830

Bound for your distant homeland
You left an alien shore;
I wept that hour before you
And I could weep no more.
I did my best to hold you
In pleading hands grown chill,
The torment of our parting,
I strove to hold it still.
But from that cruel embracing
10You tore your lips away,
Bid me from my dark exile
To your resplendent day.
‘We’ll meet,’ you promised, ‘under
A sky forever blue,
In olives’ shade, my darling,
We’ll kiss there, and be true.’
But where the arch of heaven
Shines a brilliant blue,
Where olives shade the waters,
20At last there’s rest for you.
Your beauty and your suffering
Are sealed for evermore –
With them, the kiss of greeting
You’ve kept me waiting for …
1830

Married Life, 1831–6

To the Slanderers of Russia

What, tribunes of the people, is all this fuss for?

Why do you heap anathemas on Russia?

So, troubles in the Lithuanian state?

This is a problem that concerns the Slav,

The answer to it you will never have;

An old domestic difference, judged by Fate.

History has forever seen

War among these people;

Now our side and now theirs has been

10The strong one or the feeble.

Which side will claim the victory?

The puffed-up Pole? Or Russian?

Will all Slav streams meet in the Russian sea?

Will it dry up? – the question.
Leave us alone: you haven’t read
The bloody chronicle,
And so you find this family feud
Incomprehensible,
Mere names to you, the Kremlin, Praga;
20You are besotted by
Heroics in this bitter struggle –
You hate us anyway …
Is it because, our capital
In flames, we would not kneel
To him before whose overbearing will
You could only tremble?
Because we hurled into the abyss
The idol spelling doom to all the sovereigns,
And won with Russian blood deliverance
30Of Europe’s honour, freedom, peace?
You threaten us in words – just try in deed!
You think the Bogatyr now keeps his bed,
Too frail to fix his old Ismailian bayonet?

The Russian emperor’s word now counts for less?

Tiffs with the West are new to us?

Our power has shrunk, we can’t sustain it?

We are too few? You think – from Perm to Tauris,

From ice-clad Finnish crags to blazing Colchis,

From our beleaguered Kremlin’s towers
40To China’s high-walled mass,
That bright steel bristles will not flash
As Russian might prepares? …
Send us then, tribunes of the people,
Your embittered braves:
Russian soil can take more rabble
Near those familiar graves.
1831

My Pedigree

The Russian scribblers in their horde
Have burst out laughing at their rival,
Saying that I have noble blood.
Look here, for heaven’s sake, what drivel!
I’m not an officer, assessor,
Or ribboned by heredity,
Not academic, not professor;
I’m of the Russian bourgeoisie.
I well know time’s vicissitude;
10Our aristocracy is young,
For new creation is the mode,
The newer – higher on the rung.
A fragment of a withering line
(And there are more, not only me)
Of boyars from a bygone time,
Now I am petty bourgeoisie.
My grandfather did not sell blinis,
Polish the footwear of the tsar,
Rise from Ukrainian serf to prince,
20Sing in the court’s appointed choir,
Desert, to wear a Russian hat,
The powdered Austrian cavalry;
How can I be an aristocrat?
Thank God, I’m of the bourgeoisie.
My forebear Racha’s mighty flail
Served Saint Alexander Nevsky;
Ivan (crowned wrath) the Terrible
Spared the lives of his descendants.
Pushkins consorted with their tsar;
30More than one of them won glory
When Polish troubles called to war
The bourgeois Nizhny-Novgorodian.
With all dissension and sedition
And armed invasion overthrown,
And when the popular petition
Called the Romanovs to the throne,
We Pushkins signed; the martyr’s son
Showed us his generosity.
Second were we those times to none …
40Now I am of the bourgeoisie.
Stubbornness didn’t get us far:
Recalcitrant like all his kin,
My ancestor displeased his tsar,
So Peter executed him.
We learn from this that arguments
Are tiresome to authority.
Rare was wise Dolgoruky, prince
Of our submissive bourgeoisie.
My grandfather, at Peterhof,
50Took sides in the rebellion there,
Supporting, though it was to prove
His great misfortune, Peter’s heir.
While the Orlovs enjoyed renown,
My grandfather was in solitary;
Our zealous family quietened down,
Fate placed me in the bourgeoisie.
I do not use the family seal,
I’ve set those testaments aside;
With new elite I never deal.
60I’ve taken down the family pride:
I’m educated, and a poet,
I’m Pushkin, not Musin, not he,
Nor rich, nor courtier, and I show it,
My own man, of the bourgeoisie.

POST SCRIPTUM

Fiddlyarin, sitting there at home,
Claims my black forebear Hannibal
Passed, for just one flask of rum,
Into the hands of some old salt.
Well, this old salt was that great captain
70Who brought us fitting cause for pride,
Who gave, with mighty hand, our nation
An impulse not to be denied.
That captain loved my great-grandfather;
The purchased negro, but no slave,
Grew up to highest ranking rather,
Tsar’s confidant, among the brave:
The father of that Gannibal
Who, also winning national fame,
Brought about Navarino’s fall
80When Turkish ships went up in flame.
Inspired Fiddlyarin has called me
A bourgeois nobleman. How neat!
What is his line – who is he?
… A nobleman from Bourgeois Street.
1831

For the Album of Princess Anna Abamelek

Boldly, long ago
I made a fuss of you,
You were a wondrous child.
Now you have grown, and bloom,
Again I am beguiled;
And with a nanny’s pride
I fix my eyes on you,
Worshipping, inside,
The glory that is you.
1832

The Beauty

She is all harmony, all wonder,
Above the world and passion;
Shyly she rests in her exalted beauty;
And when she looks about her,
She has no rivals and no friends;
The pallid circle of our beauties
Vanishes in her splendour.
Wherever it is you may be hurrying,
Even to meet a loved one,
10Whatever cherished dream you carry
In your inmost heart, –
Encountering her, you are confused,
You cannot help but stop,
And venerate the holy shrine of beauty.
1832

Autumn
(A fragment)

What doth my drowsing mind not then conceive?

DERZHAVIN

I

It is October, and the lingering leaves

Are disappearing from the naked branches;

The road is glazed, the cold of autumn breathes;

The millstream still sounds loudly as it passes,

But now the pond is hard; out in the fields
My neighbour urges on his canine forces,
The frenzied sport disturbs the winter crops,

And sleeping groves are roused by baying dogs.

II

This is my season: Spring is quite the worst,

10I hate the thaw, it makes me ill – stench, mire,

My blood ferments, my spirit is oppressed.
The sternness of Midwinter I prefer;
How I love its snow, when free and fast
The sled speeds on beneath the evening star,

When she beside you gives your hand a squeeze,

Warm beneath fur, fresh, trembling and ablaze!

III

And how uplifting, shod in fine sharp steel,

To glide on crystal rivers, far from shore!

The sparkle of a Winter festival! …

20But snow, when it has fallen half the year,

Inevitably loses its appeal,

Even for that deep burrower, the bear.

One can’t forever ride with young Armidas

Or mope by stoves in front of double windows.

IV

Beautiful Summer! You I should love best

But for your dust and flies and scorching heat.

You torture us, destroy our faculties;

Like earth, we suffer drought, our only thought –

How we can satisfy our raging thirst.

30The passing of Dame Winter we regret;

We saw her off with fruit liqueur and blinis,

And now we fête her with ice-cream and ice.

V

Late Autumn is continually berated:

That sentiment, dear reader, isn’t mine;

I love it for its quietly glowing beauty.

As to a child unloved by its own kin,

I am distinctly drawn to it – yes, Autumn,

Of all the seasons, is my favourite one.

I am no vainglorious lover: truth to tell,

40My love of it has something whimsical.

VI

How can I explain? It has for me
Something of the quality you’ll find
In a consumptive girl; condemned to die,

Meekly the poor thing wanes, without complaint.

On her thin lips a smile is visible;
She has no notion of the yawning ground;
Her wasted face suffused with hectic tone,
Alive today, tomorrow she is gone.

VII

Season of melancholy! Eye’s enchanter!
50How pleasing to me are your farewell hues –
I love the finery of fading Nature,
The trees arrayed in gold and crimson dress,

The fresh wind soughing through the lofty verdure,

The dense and darkly undulating skies,

The sun’s infrequent ray, the early frost,

And grizzled Winter’s lightly murmured threats.

VIII

Every year, when Autumn comes, I flourish;
The Russian cold brings tonic to my being;
In acts of daily life I take new relish,
60So that sleep duly comes, and duly hunger;

The blood runs through my heart in pleasant rush,

Desires seethe – I am happy again, and young
And full of life – such is my organism
(If you’ll forgive a vulgar prosaism).

IX

My mount is brought; over the open heath
It bears its rider on with flying mane;
The ice breaks up beneath each flashing hoof,
The frozen valley rings with solid sound.
The brief day fades, in the forgotten hearth
70A fire is burning once again – in turn
It leaps, dies down – in front of it I read
Or lose myself in lengthy spells of thought.

X

And I forget the world, and in sweet peace
Soon I am sweetly lulled by imagination;
With no preamble poetry appears:
My soul is caught in lyrical commotion,

It trembles, sounds, and seeks, as if in dream,

To overflow in unrestrained expression –
Here come an unseen multitude of guests,
80Visitors from oblivion, fancy’s fruits.

XI

Into my mind ambitious thoughts come swarming,

And rhymes race out to meet them on the way,
My fingers ask for a pen, the pen for paper,
And in a moment verses freely flow.
So a ship sleeps, immobile in still water,

But look! – the sailors scramble forward – high

And low they climb, and wind fills out the sails;

The giant moves, and soon she cuts the waves.

XII

She sails. But where are we to sail? …

1833

It’s time, my love, it’s time! The heart seeks peace –

Day chases day, the hours and minutes seize
Fragments of our existence; you and I
Make plans for life – and suddenly, we die.
There is no happiness on earth; but freedom

And peace there are. Long have I dreamt of Eden –

A weary slave, long meditated flight
To some far realm of work and pure delight.
1834

[From Anacreon]

A fragment

I tell the steed of mettle
By the brand upon his back;
I tell the haughty Parthian
By his stately tall klobuk;
I tell contented lovers
By how they always look:
By the languid flame in the eye,
Immodest mark of joy.
1835

… I see again

That corner of the earth where two years passed,

Quietly, of my banishment: ten years

Gone by since then – and much has changed for me,

And in accordance with the general law
Has changed in me – but here I am again,
The past enfolds me in its strong embrace,
And it seems only yesterday I roamed
These groves.
Here is the place of my disgrace,

10The house I lived in with my poor old nanny.

She is no more – and from behind the wall
No longer do I hear her heavy step
As, watchfully, she’d go about her round.
Here is the wooded hillock at whose crest
I would sit motionless and contemplate
The lake, how often thinking sorrowfully
Of other shores and other waters … this
Shining stretch of blue, encircling it
Golden fields and lush green pastures: slowly
20Over its virgin deeps a fisherman
Drags his threadbare net, about its banks

Lie scattered villages – and there behind them

Crookedly a windmill stands, its sails
Are scarcely turning …
At the furthest border
Of this ancestral land, just where the road,

Churned up by rains, begins its uphill course,

Three pine-trees stand, one on its own, the others

Close by each other; past this spot I’d ride

Beneath the moon – the soughing from their summits

30Would always greet me. Now once more I pass them

At that same hour, and there before my eyes
Those trees again: they are unchanged to me,
That soughing so familiar to my ear –
But all around the ancient roots of two,
Where all was bare before, now a new grove

Has sprouted up, a green young family; saplings

Cluster beneath their canopy like children.
Still their grim companion stands alone,
Like some old bachelor, while all around him
Is bare as it has always been.
40  Welcome,
Newcomers to the family! Never, though,
Shall I be here to see your mighty height
When you’ve outgrown my old acquaintances
And hide away their crowns from passing eyes.

But may my grandson hear your sound of greeting,

And, riding by at night with pleasant thoughts

After enjoying genial company,
May he remember me.
1835

The ready power of suffering
The heart, I thought, had lost,
Those days are long since over,
I said, the past is past!
Gone are the joys and heartaches,
The make-believe and dream …
But now I feel them stirring,
For beauty rules supreme.
1835

The Stone Island Cycle

From Pindemonte

I don’t much care for those resounding rights

That take so many heads to dizzy heights.

I won’t complain – I’ll just admit, the fact is

The gods did not shape me for battling taxes

Or parleying with emperors at loggerheads;

To me it makes no difference whether blockheads

Are hoodwinked by an unrestricted press

Or censorship cramps wit to muted jest.

All this, I have to say, is words, words, words.

10To rights of this kind I have grown averse,

Freedom of this kind is to me quite feeble:

Allegiance to the sovereign or the people?

Why should we care? To hell with it.

By no one

Held to account, to serve oneself alone,

And please oneself, and breathe without delivering

One’s conscience, thoughts or neck to power or livery;

To wander as one wishes, take one’s fill
Of nature’s beauty, perfect art, and thrill –
There’s happiness! and rights …
1836

The desert fathers and unblemished women,

To rise in their hearts to the celestial realm,

To fortify themselves through earthly fear,

Have fashioned many a memorable prayer;

None of them comes to my lips like that the priest

Says for us through the sad days of the Fast;
Its power to raise the fallen is most holy:
Lord of my days! Lethargic melancholy,
That hidden serpent, lust for authority,

10An idle tongue – keep all these things from me.

But let me, O Lord, behold my trespasses,
And not condemn my brother that transgresses;
Instil into my heart humility,
Patience, brotherly love, and chastity.
1836

Imitation of the Italian

When the traitor-disciple dropped down from his tree,

A devil flew to him, bent to his face, breathed life

Back into him, took his half-rotting prey

And cast the living corpse to Gehenna’s greedy

Gape … The demons, chortling and clapping, caught

The universal foe upon their horns
And bore him to the lord of all damnation,
And Satan rose with glee on his countenance

And with his kiss burned through and through the lips

10That on the night of the betrayal kissed Christ.

1836

Secular Power

When the great event was nearing its fulfilment,

And godhead was dying in torment on the Cross,

Then, on either side of the life-giving tree,
Mary the sinner and the Blessed Virgin
Stood […] two […] women,
Each of them plunged in immeasurable sorrow.
But now, at the foot of the Holy Cross, as if
At the portal of the city governor’s house,
We see, in place of those two blessed women,

10Two menacing sentries in shakos, armed with rifles.

Tell me, why has this guard been posted here?

Is the Crucifixion now state property,

Are you afraid of thieves, or is it mice?

Or do you think you enhance the King of Kings?

Or, with your mighty guardianship, you save

Our Lord, wearing his plaited crown of thorns,

Christ who offered his flesh obediently

To his torturers’ scourges and their nails and spear?

Or you fear the rabble might offend the One

20Whose death redeemed the entire tribe of Adam,

And to spare the strolling gentlefolk from jostling,

You would bar the common people from this place?

1836

When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city,

And walk and reach the public cemetery,

The endless rows of ornamental tombs

Above the city’s dead, the grilles and columns

All densely pressed together in the marsh
Like guests at some sparse table in a crush;
Tradesmen’s and state employees’ mausoleums,

Cheap-carved, naïve conceptions, with their themes

Inscribed on them in prose and verse – the virtues,

10The ranks, the years of dedicated service;
Some cuckold’s widow’s amour-laden grief,
A pedestal left urnless by a thief,
Many a yawning slippery, fresh-dug burrow
Awaiting its new tenant on the morrow –
All this brings troubled notions to my mind,
Malevolent despair comes over me. I want
To spit and run away …
I love, however,
To visit, on a quiet autumn evening,
A village’s ancestral cemetery;
20Its dead repose with proper dignity,
Its unembellished graves are given space,
No pale nocturnal thief disturbs their peace;
Villagers sigh a prayer whenever they pass

The ancient headstones grown with yellow moss;

Instead of petty pyramids and vases,
Noseless heroes and dishevelled graces,
A broad oak stands above the solemn graves,
Swaying and murmuring …
1836

Exegi monumentum.

I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument;

The people’s path to it will not be overgrown;

My monument’s indomitable summit rises

Higher than Alexander’s Column.

Not all of me shall die – for in my cherished lyre

My soul shall outlive my dust, it shall escape decay –

In the sublunary world my fame shall be unending

As long as a single poet holds sway.

And word of me shall spread through all the Russian lands,

10My name shall be pronounced in all its living tongues,

By the proud Slav, the Finn, the Kalmuck of the steppes,

And the unbiddable Tungùs.

Long will there be a place for me in people’s hearts,

Because my lyre awoke warm-hearted sentiments,

Because in my harsh age I sang of Liberty,
And asked, for the fallen, lenience.
O my Muse, pay all respect to the divine,
To praise and calumny in equal share be cool,
Have no fear of insult, seek no laurel-crown,
20And do not argue with a fool.
1836

II

NARRATIVE POEMS
(POEMY)

The Fountain of Bakhchisaray

On the journey to his southern exile in 1820, Pushkin visited the town of Bakhchisaray in southern Crimea and the ruined palace of the Crimean khanate there, with its famous marble fountain that had been built by one of the last rulers of the three-hundred-year-old Girey dynasty to the memory of his favourite concubine after her early death. Pushkin was moved by the legend of rivalry between Girey’s two favourite concubines to write this, his first serious narrative poem, set in the eighteenth century during ongoing hostilities between the Crimean Tatars and the Poles, a period that had ended in 1783 with Russia’s annexation of the Crimean khanate. The Crimean Tatars were one of the major population groups that had settled in Central Asia and eastern Europe in the wake of the invading warriors from the East from the thirteenth century onwards.

Written between 1821 and 1823, this poem established Pushkin’s reputation. It was first published in 1824; a second, illustrated edition followed in 1827 and a third in 1830. The appeal to its first readers of its harmonious musicality and rich visual imagery, which Pushkin never repeated in such sustained flow, retains all its force today, as does the vivid recreation of the daily life of the khan’s harem. Some elements of the action and of the main characters are influenced by Byron’s The Corsair (1814). The poem’s most developed character is the fiery Georgian, Zarema, who remembers her past life before being captured and voices her present aspirations in a quasi-dramatic monologue.

Pushkin’s metre is his favourite iambic tetrameter, kept in this translation.

Many have visited this fountain, as I have; but some are no more, and others are far away.

SAADI

With hooded eye sat Khan Girey;
The amber smoked between his lips;
His servile court in mute array
Watched as he pondered awesome deeps.
None in his palace dared give tongue;
All sought to read, in reverence,
The signs of grief and gall that hung
Upon his sombre countenance.
At last the haughty potentate
10Motioned from his chair of state,
And all departed with a bow.
In his secluded chambers now
Sighs more freely leave his breast,
And on his formidable brow
Deeper the marks of his unrest.
Thus gathering stormclouds you may trace
Upon the water’s rippled face.
What is he thinking hour by hour?
What agitates his lordly soul?
20Will he attack the northern power,
Issue his edicts to the Pole,
Repay a bloody act with blood?
Has he discovered some dark plot?
Is he afraid of wild Caucasians,
Or treacherous Genoa’s machinations?
No, his fearsome sword and shield
Now rest, the first among his passions
No more the glory of the field.
Does he see deception stain
30His favourite and most precious bower?
Has the queen of his domain
Bestowed her heart upon a giaour?
No, for the wives Girey acquires
Do not dare to have desires;
They bloom in cheerless lassitude,
In boredom’s bosom, never free
From their strict guard’s all-seeing eye,
Never found in roving mood.
In captive perpetuity
40Their secret beauties are held fast;
Thus the blooms of Araby
Will flourish under hothouse glass.
In undisturbed monotony
They pass their shaded lives, and see
The days, the months and seasons go,
And youthful charms, and love, go too.
Each dawning brings the same again;
How slow the passing of the hours,
How rare is pleasure in these bowers;
50Indolence rules the whole domain.
From time to time the captive women,
In search of some relief from gloom,
Change into resplendent dress,
Play games, find subjects to discuss,
Or walk about in fine array,
And following the limpid course
Of sounding fountains, make their way
Towards the shade of sycamores.
Among them stalks a eunuch; none
60Escapes his watchful scrutiny;
His cruel, suspicious ear and eye
At all times follow everyone.
Thus is he able to maintain
His regimen. To please his khan
Is law to him; more sacred than
The holy law of the Koran.
His soul does not aspire to love;
Statue-like, he is above
Bitterness, disrespectful jokes,
70Pranks and hoaxes unrestrained,
Outright hatred, scorn, reproach,
Shy glance, mute sigh and languid plaint.
He knows the female character,
Its out-and-out duplicity,
Both captive and at liberty:
The gentle smile, the fearful tear –
None has any hold on him,
For he believes in none of them.
When the young harem go to bathe,
80With loosened hair, on summer days,
The magic of their youthful beauty
Freshened in a flowing spring,
Their guard, forgotten at his duty,
Observes his charges frolicking;
He is indifferent to that sight –
The unveiled sirens of the harem;
He wanders in the depths of night
Without disturbance or alarum,
Stepping over soft-laid floors,
90Making his way through yielding doors;
He moves from one bed to the next
Meticulously, to inspect
The wives in their secluded sleep,
The breathing, murmurs, sighs of each,
The lightest stir – on all of which
A note he will be sure to keep;
And woe to her who in her dream
Whispers an unfamiliar name
Or touches, with a friend, a theme
100Only to be heard with shame!
Why is Girey so sunk in grief,
The hookah smokeless in his hands?
Outside his door with bated breath,
Motionless, the eunuch stands.
At last the Khan is on his feet
And through the door; he silently
Enters the wives’ abode to greet
His erstwhile favourite company.
Beside a marbled pool the Khan’s pets,
110Gathered round in carefree throng
Reclining on their silken carpets,
Have waited for him all day long,
Watching the depths in childlike glee
As fish swim round there endlessly,
The harem’s favourite stratagem –
Dropping gold earrings down on them.
Meanwhile the servant maidens bring
Sherbet of their especial choice,
And in one bright, melodious voice
120The harem all begin to sing:

‘The heavens bring our existence
Catastrophes and tears:
Blest is the sage seeing Mecca
In his sad last years.
‘Blest is the brave who honours
The Danube when he dies:
They will make him welcome,
The maids of Paradise.
‘And blest, O our Zarema,
130The ruler who well knows
Quietness and perfection
And tends you like the rose.’

All sing their pride and joy, all name her;
But where is she, where is Zarema? –
Alas, she blankly, palely gazes
And does not listen to her praises,
Her head hung low and all forlorn,
Crushed like a palm-tree in a storm;
Nothing and nobody can cheer her;
140No longer will Girey come near her.
Too well she knows she is betrayed! …
But who excels you, Georgian maid?
Your braided brow so lily-white,
Eyes bright as day and dark as night:
Whose voice can best of all express
The sudden surging of desire?
Who can tell of lips that kiss
Like yours, with such consuming fire?
How can the heart once filled with you
150Beat for other beauties too?
Girey, however, coldly cruel,
Has now cast off this precious jewel,
Has spent, allowing no intrusion,
His nights alone and scarcely slept
In all the time that he has kept
A Polish princess in seclusion.
The young Mariya first espied
Skies strange to her not long ago;
Her home had seen her beauty grow,
160She was her father’s chief delight.
The old man only cared that she
Should have contentment come her way,
And that her early years should be
Unclouded as a summer’s day,
And that the slightest griefs should roll
Out of her ken, not bruise her soul;
And that, her time once come to wed,
She should look fondly back upon
Her joyful days of maidenhood
170As some sweet dream a moment gone.
Her every attribute had charm:
Her eyes of pleading blue, her swift
And graceful movements, all with calm
Demeanour; nature’s every gift,
Augmented and adorned by art –
The gentle magic of her harp
Enchanted at her father’s feasts.
The rich and powerful of the land
Contended for Mariya’s hand,

180Striplings who glimpsed her yearned for trysts.

But in the quietness of her soul
She never knew of love at all;
Her leisured hours were always spent
Sequestered in her father’s hall
At simple pastimes with a friend.
How long is it since Tatar horse
Poured in their remorseless course
Through Poland? Harvests never fed
Their fires with such a lightning spread:
190The fertile land is ruined by war,
The peaceful pastimes are now gone,
The villages and groves forlorn;
The glorious castle is quite bare,
And silent is Mariya’s nest …
In the churchyard at their rest
Lie honoured bones; with them, emblazed
With princely coronet and crest,
Another gravestone has been raised …
The father buried, daughter taken,
200An idle, parsimonious heir
Watches over devastation
And irreversible despair.
The palace of Bakhchisaray
It is conceals the young princess,
And there she weeps and grieves, alas
And fades; it seems she will soon die.
And now the Khan too knows distress –
Her tears and moans unsettle him,
Disturb the sleep he briefly snatches;
210At her despair Girey relaxes
His harem’s rigorous regime.
The comfortless custodian
No longer comes with silent tread
As she slumbers on her bed
To rouse her with officious hand;
No longer does the eunuch dare
Humiliate her with a stare.
Mariya, tended by a slave,
Goes to a secret place to bathe;
220The Khan himself will not intrude
Upon her sorrowful retreat;
He lets her live in solitude
In one far spot where no paths meet:
And some consider that hushed place
The precinct of no mortal one.
There day and night a lamp burns on
Before the blessed countenance,
A comfort to the yearning soul;
And in that corner set apart
230Hope dwells with quiet faith; and all
Brings closer to the humble heart
A realm of purity unmarred;
There the maiden sheds her tears,
Away from envious companions;
And while the rest devote their hours
To careless luxury and dalliance,
In the still refuge which is hers
A secret shrine is strictly kept.
Subject no more to alien pressure
240Or victim to the world of pleasure,
Her heart preserves its sacred pledge
To the most merciful divine …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Night has fallen; darkness veils
Crimea’s pleasant fields; far off
I hear the song of nightingales,
And scents from blooming thickets waft;
Behind its troupe of stars the moon
Rises to a cloudless height,
And hills and vales and woods are soon
250Laid open in its gentle light.
White-shrouded shadows bring to life
The alleys of Bakhchisaray;
From house to house a Tatar wife
Calls in to chat about the day.
The palace slumbers; all is quiet,
At rest upon the lap of languor;
Nothing disturbs the peace of night.
The guard, alert for any sign of danger,
Something in some way not quite right,
260Has finished his nocturnal round;
For some hours rest will not be found
For him; through fitful sleep he fears
Betrayal, and he thinks he hears
A rustling here, a whispering there;
At night all sounds will give illusion.
Straining a bewildered ear
He wakes, his senses in confusion …
But all around is quiet still;
The marble-bedded fountains trill,
270And, boon companion to the rose,
The nightingale makes darkness peal;
At last the eunuch finds repose,
And once again his tired eyes close.
Those splendours of the Eastern night
That give the Mussulman delight
And make the fleeting hours the fewer!
His house’s open luxury,
His garden’s magical allure,
His harem solid and secure
280Beneath the moon’s serenity,
Alive with murmured confidences
And inspiration of the senses!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Among the women one, awake,
Sat up and, with the lightest breath,
Rose from her bed, began to walk
The darkness with the softest step …
Before her on the threshold stretched
The grizzled eunuch in a doze,
Menacing still in his repose –
290His baleful heart would never rest!
But she was past him like a ghost.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Her walk was brought soon to a halt
Before a door; then what surprise
When, trembling, she drew back the bolt
To see what lay before her eyes …
An inner dread pervaded her.
An icon-light’s sad lonely flare
Played on the pure and simple face
And holy symbol of the cross.
300O Georgian maid! The scene you see
Is native to your very soul,
To your forsaken self it all
Speaks of the things that used to be. –
Before her, peaceful as a child,
The princess lay; a virgin dream
Brightened her cheek where tears had been
And warmed it to a gentle smile:
Thus the moon lights up a flower
Left hanging heavy from a shower.
310It seemed, an angel sent from heaven
Not long ago alighting there
Had lain to rest with many a tear
For that poor prisoner of the harem.
Zarema, what is this despair?
With burning breast and breath held tight
She fell upon her knees, and cried:
‘Take pity on me, and hear my prayer …!’
Her passionate entreaty broke
Upon the maiden’s sleep; she woke.
320And there before her frightened eyes –
A stranger down upon her knees;
With trembling hand she helped her rise,
Then said, a little more at ease:
‘Who are you? … In the night, so late
And quite alone – Why have you come?’
‘Help me; in my unlucky fate
One hope is left me – only one …
Long did I live a life of bliss, and
Every day was free from care,
330Happiness was everywhere …
Now I can only die here. Listen.
‘The land where I was born is far
Far away … but to this day
Nothing can destroy or mar
The pictures in my memory.
Mountains rising in the sky,
Hot alpine streams that never dry,
Impenetrable oaks and bays,
Other laws and other ways;
340But in what circumstance or woe
I left my home I do not know;
All I remember is the sea,
A man high up above the sails …
And after that, no griefs or ills
Ever came to trouble me.
I blossomed in tranquillity;
Long did I keep myself apart;
I waited in the harem’s shade.
I found the yearning of my heart
350Fulfilled at last. Girey had stayed
His hand from bloody war, to cease
His fearsome raids and turn to peace,
And see his beauties didn’t fade.
Before him, fearfully in line,
We waited. Then his radiant gaze
Lighted on me; no word of praise,
He called me to him … From that time
We breathed unclouded ecstasy;
No doubt, or spite, or jealousy
360Troubled either him or me.
Mariya! You appeared before him …
At once you bore his soul away,
And then how many times I saw him
Consumed by treacherous thoughts – Girey
Shuts his ears to my reproaches;
He finds the heart’s groans wearisome;
Those feelings, confidences, touches
We once exchanged – now he knows none.
You are incapable of wrong;
370I can lay no blame on you …
I am beautiful; among
All others here, no one but you
Can rival me; but I was born
For passion, not your kind of love:
Then why disturb a helpless heart
With your impassive grace? Enough!
I am the one he’s set apart;
Still I feel his burning kisses
And hear his awe-inspiring vows,
380All his thoughts and all his wishes
Shared with me in precious hours;
I shall die if he betrays me …
Weeping on my knees before you
I don’t accuse you, I implore you –
Give me back my joy, and raise me
From my knees to be Girey’s:
For he is mine; you blind his eyes.
Disdain him, beg him, bore him, puzzle him,
Employ whatever means you can;
390Swear … (of course I am a Muslim,
Like all the captives of the Khan,
Although my faith was once another,
And that one, taught me by my mother,
Was yours) … An oath then; don’t abuse it:
Return Zarema to Girey …
I have a dagger, I can use it
In my own Caucasian way.’
And on the instant she was gone.
The princess dared not follow her.
400The language of tormenting passion
Was alien to her, but she heard
The murderous accents of obsession.
Where were the prayers and words to aid her
After such humiliation?
What was the best that could await her?
Lost wasted bloom, the sorry station
Of a neglected concubine?
If Khan Girey – O God! – forgot
His captive beauty at her shrine
410For ever – or one day cut short
The wretched years of her decline?
Then with what delight Mariya
Would take her leave of worldly strife!
The dearest moments of her life
Were over, nothing would be dearer!
What was there left for her to do,
Lost in the wasteland of this world?
Mariya’s time had come below;
The heavens smiled, and from her woe
420To peace eternal she was called.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mariya gone, the days sped by.
At rest she would forever lie.
The long-awaited world she lit
As, angel-like, she entered it.
What brought her life to its sad close?
Despair consuming her heart’s core?
Some sickness? … Something else? Who knows?
Gentle Mariya was no more!
The gloomy palace was forlorn;
430Girey was absent; now he made,
With his new-gathered Tatar horde,
Many a further deadly raid.
Black of brow, athirst for blood,
He rode the battle’s stormy flood,
But in his inmost heart the flame
Of other feelings burned its pain.
From time to time, his sabre raised,
He checked his sweep and seemed quite dazed,
Gazing at nothing, motionless;
440Then paled – was he benumbed by fears? –
And whispered something none could guess;
His cheek would show hot sudden tears.
The harem is without its khan,
Languishing in sad neglect;
The eyes that constantly suspect
Still oversee with cold command
Those fading maidens, and among them
Long has the Georgian been unseen:
The silent guardians of the harem
450Have plunged her in the deepest stream;
Her torment ceased at just the time
The princess met her sudden end;
Whatever could have been her crime,
Fearful was the punishment! –
Giving up his ravages
Through peaceful Russian villages
And lands below the Caucasus,
The Khan returned to the Crimea,
And to the memory of Mariya,
460Never ceasing to adore her,
He had a marble fountain raised
In a remote and tranquil corner.
Over it, high in a recess,
A cross was given pride of place
Above the Muslim moon (of course,
A solecism one ignores);
Also an epigraph – the years
Have not erased it from this marvel:
The water warbling over marble
470Falls on the script in cooling tears,
And they will flow for evermore.
Thus a grieving mother weeps
Over a son who fell in war.
There a passing maiden keeps
Acquaintance with the ways of old;
A spot on which grief never sleeps –
The Fount of Tears, it is now called.
Cut off from all society,
For northern friends and feasts I long;
480I’ve visited Bakhchisaray,
Its palace in oblivion.
Along the silent passageways
I’ve wandered where the Tatar scourge
Was wont to feast and take his ease,
Returned from raids, campaigns and such.
And there still, all combines to please
Throughout the empty courts and halls;
The waters run and roses glow,
And everywhere vines thickly grow,
490And gold gleams bright upon the walls.
There I’ve seen many a latticed chamber
Where, in the springtime of their years,
Fingering rosaries of amber,
The women sighed and hid their tears.
I’ve seen the graveyard of the khans;
Those columns, for each potentate,
Topped with their spiral marble crowns,
Seemed the ordinance of fate.
The khans – the harem and its guard –
500Where were they? All was silent, sad,
All changed … But no, it wasn’t that
That in this moment filled my heart:
The roses’ breath and fountains’ spill
Had led me to forget all else,
And all at once my heightened pulse
Leapt with a mysterious thrill:
A shade – a maiden passed before me!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My friends, whose image did I see?
Whose shade pursued and haunted me,
510So boldly, ineluctably?
Was it Mariya’s gentle soul
Or did Zarema hurry by,
Consumed with furious jealousy,
Alone in an abandoned hall?
Other eyes now come to mind,
Beauty belonging to this world,
And in my banishment I pine,
A living form I long to hold …
Madman, no more! You’ve long since paid
520Your tribute to unhappy love,
Do not renew vain vows you’ve made,
And dreams on which you’ve fed enough –
Come to your senses: will you long
Embrace your chains, poor prisoner,
And on your unembarrassed lyre
Announce your madness to the throng?
Peace and the Muses’ devotee
Am I: forgetting love and fame,
Soon, O Salgir, I shall be free
530And happy on your shores again!
And I shall see those once-dear slopes
Arise from memory’s fond haze;
As the Crimean coastline swoops
The sea will cheer my hungry gaze.
Enchanted region! Living dream!
The eye’s delight – whether you choose
The vineyards’ ruby-amber gleam,
Or hills and woods of all the hues,
Or poplars sheltering a stream …
540All beckons to the traveller
When at the quiet morning hour
He takes an upland path to urge
His old mount on with bridle slack,
And there before him, forth and back
The greening waters swell and surge
Beneath the crags of Ayu-Dag.
1823

The Gypsies

The transitional character of this poem in Pushkin’s development may explain some hesitation on his part in the manner and timing of its publication. He delayed the first edition in its entirety for more than two years; it appeared in a small paperbound book on its own in 1827, after his return from exile, without his name as author and with a note on the cover that it had been written in 1824. Pushkin’s farewell to Romanticism is enacted in the poem itself, which is a new beginning in the genre of the poema. In his Romantic quest for ‘freedom’ from the shackles of urban life, Aleko doesn’t Romantically melt into gypsy society and relish its free-and-easy values; his unattached vagueness is set amid the ever-active, vibrant day-to-day life of the ‘migratory horde’ (line 18). His behaviour is sharply at odds with the values of the gypsy community that takes him in; this is reflected in the language of the narrative and the individual voices of Aleko, the old gypsy and his daughter, and it leads to tragedy.

The Gypsies has been the subject of much debate among Russian thinkers and critics, Aleko being seen as a new kind of character in Russian literature, representing the played-out values of Enlightenment civilisation in contrast to those of primal, innocent, rural society (see more on this in the Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’). Dostoyevsky put Aleko and Onegin at the centre of his famous ‘Pushkin speech’ of 1880, considering Aleko ‘a stranger in his own land’ and representative of the tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia cut off from the people.

In this poem, the flexibility of Pushkin’s favourite iambic tetrameter, which is kept in the translation, makes it the ideal vehicle for conveying dramatic dialogue and stylistic contrast.

A noisy band of gypsies roams
Through Bessarabia far and wide.
Tonight their worn and tattered homes
Are pitched above the riverside.
Joyful their encampment feels,
Carefree their sleep beneath the skies,
Like freedom; screened by wagon wheels
Half overspread with canopies
A fire burns bright; a family
10Prepares its supper; on the lea
The horses graze; a bear lies free
Behind a tent. On every side
Life sounds: the cares of families thinking
Of next day’s short and early ride,
The cries of children, women singing,
And the travelling anvil ringing.
But now the hush of slumber drops
Upon the migratory horde,
And in the steppe’s vast solitude
20Neighs of horses, barks of dogs
Are all the sounds that can be heard.
Everywhere the fires have died;
All is tranquil, and the moon,
High up in the heavens alone,
Shines down upon the quiet site.
Inside his tent an old man sits,
Warmed by the lingering glow of ashes,
And doesn’t sleep; instead he watches
The far expanses wrapped in mists.
30Somewhere on the lonely steppe
His daughter is off wandering; she
Enjoys a life of liberty,
She will be back; but night has crept
Apace, and in a little time
The moonlight will not be so bold,
And of Zemfira not a sign;
The old man’s meagre meal is cold.
But here she comes, and following her
A youth no one has seen before.
40‘Father,’ declares the girl, ‘I found
Our guest out there beside the mound;
I’ve asked him in to stay with us.
He wants to be a gypsy too;
The law is after him, he says,
But I shall love him and be true.
Aleko is his name – I know
He’ll go with me wherever I go.’

OLD MAN

I’ll be most glad if you will spend

The night with us – or longer if

50You wish, and share our food, our tent.

Be one of us, and live our life –

The threadbare freedom of the road.

We’re off tomorrow with our load;

Pick your trade if you’ve a flair:

Singer, smith, or dance the bear.

ALEKO

I’ll stay with you.

ZEMFIRA

He shall be mine.

No one shall take him from my bed …

Out on the steppe tonight you’re blind:

It’s crescent moon and it has set.

60Sleep weighs heavy on my head …

*

Day comes. The sun shows through the mist.
The old man takes the morning air;
‘Zemfira, wake! Your day is fair –
Children, leave your couch of bliss!’
People pour forth noisily;
Tents are struck, and presently
The carts move off as one. Now see,
The throng of gypsies fills the plain:
In baskets slung across their backs
70Donkeys carry children playing;
Closely following in their tracks
Men, wives, girls, brothers, all together,
Young and old; din everywhere,
Songs, the roaring of the bear,
The jingling of its iron tether,
Resplendent motley raggedness,
Children’s and old men’s nakedness,
The barks and howls of dogs, the music
Of bagpipes, axles under stress –
80All of it so rudely rustic
And random, but so live and strong,
So foreign to our empty leisure,
So foreign to the life of pleasure,
Monotonous as prison song!

*

The young man fixed a doleful eye
Upon the now abandoned plain;
The reason for his melancholy
He could not fathom or explain.
Beside him was dark-eyed Zemfira,
90And he the world’s free citizen;
Merrily the midday sun
Shone down from heavens never clearer;
What was the burden that oppressed him?
What was the sorrow that obsessed him?
God’s little bird knows neither
Labour nor unrest,
Doesn’t make an effort
To build a lasting nest;
At sunrise, after sleeping
100Soundly all night long,
It hears the voice of God,
Wakes and sings its song.
After spring in glory,
Sultry summer is here,
Then comes cruel weather,
Autumn of the year,
Comfortless for man;
Off flies the bird, to be
Warm until the spring
110Over the dark blue sea.
Like that bird without a care
He too, a migrant on the wing,
Couldn’t settle anywhere,
Couldn’t get used to anything.
The way to anywhere he took,
Anywhere his night’s abode;
His every day, when he awoke,
He offered to the will of God,
Life’s tribulations never shook
120The torpor of his heart and mind.
Sometimes that distant comet, fame,
Would stir him with its magic flame,
Or unsought pleasure he might find;
Many a time the gathered thunder
Crashed above his lonely head –
Come fair or foul, still he would slumber
Careless as ever on his bed.
Innocent of human thrall
To blind and cunning destiny
130He lived … But once – how brutally
The passions had besieged his soul,
Had seethed in his tormented breast!
When, how long though, laid to rest?
They will awaken: wait and see!

*

ZEMFIRA

Tell me, my love, do you not pine

For what you’ve chosen to renounce?

ALEKO

What is it I have left behind?

ZEMFIRA

You know – your countrymen, and towns.

ALEKO

Those towns! You can’t imagine … where
140No one is free in anything,
No one breathes the morning air,
The scent of meadowland in spring;
Where love is shame, and so are brains,
They barter with their liberty
And revel in idolatry,
And all they want is gold and chains!
What have I left behind? Betrayal,
Relentless hounding by the crowd,
Judgement passed by minds gone stale,
150Disgrace – which only makes one proud!

ZEMFIRA

But those great stately chambers, those
Gorgeous rugs and carpets, those
Revels and banquets, those rich clothes!

ALEKO

What is the point of those enjoyments?

If there’s no love, then there’s no pleasure.

Those girls … But you – without adornments

And finery – you are far better!

Do not change; you’re dear and good!

I only wish to be with you

160And have you share my solitude;

And you shall always find me true!

OLD MAN

You are fond of us, although you come from
A people used to wealth and ease.
But freedom doesn’t always please
Those who have lived a life of comfort.
I have heard tell, an emperor
Banished a subject, who then came
To live with us, a southerner
(I can’t remember his strange name).
170By then he was no longer young,
But young and vigorous in his soul –
He had the magic gift of song,
And in his voice you heard the fall
Of waters – he was popular;
He lived beside the Danube here
And did no harm to anyone;
His tales enchanted everyone;
Life’s needs he little understood,
He had a child’s timidity,
180His frame was weak, his livelihood
Hung on strangers’ charity –
When the swift river was iced over
And blizzards raged and winter wind,
People from all around would cover
The saintly man with furry skins;
The life, however, of the poor
Was one to which he couldn’t take;
He wandered, pale, thin as a rake,
An angry god pursued him, for
190A crime, he said, was on his hands …
He waited for deliverance.
The unhappy man was always grieving;
Beside the Danube he would roam,
Remembering his distant home,
And bitter was that old man’s weeping;
Dying, he made a last request
His yearning bones be taken south,
For never could they be at rest
Here on alien soil in death!

ALEKO

200A son of yours, and come to this,

O Rome, O city of glorious name!

Singer of love and deities,

Can you tell me, what is fame?

The voice of praise, an endless knell,

A sound that runs from age to age?

The tale a gypsy has to tell,

A smoke-filled tent for all his stage?

*

A year goes by … another year.
The gypsies in their peaceful throng
210Wander on, and everywhere,
Wherever they settle, they belong.
Spurning the chains of civilisation,
Aleko spends, as free as they,
His each and every roaming day
Without regrets or agitation.
He and his hosts remain the same;
He gives no thought to former days,
He has grown used to gypsy ways.
He loves their new-found nightly home,
220Their language, poor but sonorous,
The rapture of pure idleness.
His shelter’s shaggy guest, the bear,
A vagrant from its native lair,
Roves the Moldavian villages,
Performs its clumsy dancing, gnaws
Its irritating chain, and roars
Before the wary villagers;
The bent old man is not averse
To beating on a tambourine,
230Aleko leads the bear and sings,
Zarema goes about to glean
The voluntary offerings.
Night falls; the three together make
Their meal of unreaped millet grain;
Soon the old man is nodding … then
The tent is tranquil in the dark.

*

The old man warms in springtime sun
Blood already growing cold;
His daughter, with her little one,
240Sings. Aleko hears, appalled:

ZEMFIRA

Old husband, dread husband,
Stab your wife, burn your wife:
Firm I stand – I don’t fear
Fire or the knife.
I hate you, despise you,
Another I love;
He has all my heart,
I shall die for my love.

ALEKO

This is a song I will not hear,

250Enough – wild songs are not for me.

ZEMFIRA

Oh, not for you? That’s as may be,
This one I don’t intend to share.
Stab your wife, burn your wife,
I shall say nothing –
Old husband, dread husband,
Huffing and puffing!
Fresh as the spring he is,
Hot as high summer;
How young and bold he is!
260Ah! what a lover!
How I caress him
Deep in the night!
How we both laugh at you,
Grizzled old fright!

ALEKO

Zemfira! That’s enough for me …

ZEMFIRA

You understand my song is true?

ALEKO

Zemfira!

ZEMFIRA

Rage at me, you’re free,

The subject of my song is you.

(Goes away singing the song.)

OLD MAN

I know that song – it’s long been sung,
270It was composed when I was young:
On winter nights my Mariyule
Would rock our daughter by the fire,
Out on the steppes of the Kagul,
And sing it, she would never tire.
These days I’ve left the past behind;
That song, though, never leaves my mind.

*

Night, and all is quiet. The moon

Adorns the azure southern sky;

Zemfira wakens the old man:

280‘Father! Aleko frightens me.

Look at him now, he’s soundly sleeping;

But listen: how he’s groaning, weeping.’

OLD MAN

You mustn’t touch him. Not a sound.

The Russians say: from midnight on

A household spirit hovers round

And cramps a sleeper’s breath; by dawn

That evil spirit will be gone.

Come and sit with me.

ZEMFIRA

‘Zemfira!’

I heard him whisper!

OLD MAN

You are his troth
290Even in sleeping; you are dearer
Than all the world to him.

ZEMFIRA

I loathe
His love. How bored I am! I long
For freedom – I am already … No,
Not out loud … Do you hear him now?
Another name is on his tongue …

OLD MAN

What name?

ZEMFIRA

Just listen! How he chews

And groans! … It’s terrible to hear it! …

I’ll wake him.

OLD MAN

It will be no use,
You mustn’t chase away the spirit –
300It leaves you when the time is right …

ZEMFIRA

He called to me … he’s turned his head …

Now he’s starting from his bed –

I’ll go to him – sleep now, good night.

ALEKO

Where have you been?

ZEMFIRA

Sitting with father.
Some spirit has been cruelly
Lashing your soul, making you suffer
During your sleep; you frightened me,
Your teeth were grinding in your mouth;
You called me.

ALEKO

You were in my dream –

310And it was this: I saw us both …

Terrible things were in my dream!

ZEMFIRA

Dreams and nightmares are deceiving.

Don’t believe them.

ALEKO

I believe in
Nothing at all, not dreams, nor sweet
Endearments – no, not even your heart.

*

OLD MAN

Why do you sigh, young hothead? Here
People are free, the sky is clear,
Our women’s beauty is above
All others’. Grief destroys. So leave
320This melancholy: do not grieve.

ALEKO

Father, I have lost her love.

OLD MAN

Be consoled; she is a child.

You are downcast unwarrantably;

Your love is labour, grief and bile;

A woman loves light-heartedly.

Look at the free moon in the sky;

Her beams shine down indifferently

On nature as she passes by.

She comes to a cloud and lights it up,

330And moves to another; she’ll not stop.

Who shall place her in the skies

And tell her where she has to stay!

To a young girl’s heart, who is to say:

Love just once, let that suffice!

Be consoled.

ALEKO

Ah, how she loved me!

In the silence of the steppe,

When all the world was fast asleep,

How tenderly she leant towards me!

Full of childlike happiness,

340How often she would put to flight

The lonely stretches of the night

With whispers or a passionate kiss! …

But now Zemfira – what to do?

Now my Zemfira is untrue!

OLD MAN

Listen: I will relate to you
A sad event I well recall.
The Danube – it was long ago –
Was still unknown to the Moskàl;
The Sultan held us all in thrall;
350From the high towers of Akkerman
A pasha ruled the Budzhak plain –
In those days I was young; my soul
Was light, my head still showed no sign
Of grey. Among the beauties, one
I admired and worshipped like the sun,
And in the end I called her mine …
Ah, how soon my youth flashed by –
As swiftly as a shooting star!
But then the time of love passed by
360More swiftly still: a single year
Maryula gave me, that was all.
Once we were skirting the Kagul
And met another gypsy band;
They pitched their tents alongside ours,
And on that wild and hilly ground
They spent the next two nights with us.
The third night came, and they had gone –
Maryula left her little daughter
And me in her hotfoot departure.
370I slept in perfect peace; at dawn
My loved one was no longer there!
I searched and called – no trace of her.
Zemfira wept and pined, and I
Wept with her – nowadays I shun
All women in the world, my eye
Will never rest with any pleasure
On one of them, my peaceful leisure
Is never shared with anyone.

ALEKO

If I’d been you, I would have gone
380Straight after her, my faithless wife –
Put her, her captors, to the knife.

OLD MAN

Why? Youth is freer than a bird;
You’ll try to hold back love in vain;
Happiness comes to all in turn,
And what has been won’t come again.

ALEKO

I could not live like that. No foe
Could take my rights from me – ah no!
I would at least enjoy revenge.
And if I found my enemy
390High on a cliff above the sea
Asleep, I swear I’d never blench –
My foot would send that dog to hell
Over the cliff, down to the surf;
His sudden terror as he fell
Would fill me with unholy mirth –
How I would laugh to hear him howl!

*

YOUNG GYPSY

One more kiss … One more, just one …

ZEMFIRA

My husband has a jealous eye.

YOUNG GYPSY

Longer … One more! … to say goodbye.

ZEMFIRA

400Well, goodbye then – quick, he’ll come.

YOUNG GYPSY

Next time – when will it be safe?

ZEMFIRA

When the moon goes up tonight –

There, past that mound, beside the grave …

YOUNG GYPSY

She’ll not come! She’s pretending!

ZEMFIRA

Hide!

He’s coming! … Here I am, my love.

*

Aleko sleeps. But in his mind
A dreadful vision is played out.
He wakes in darkness with a shout
And reaches with a jealous hand;
410A hand, however, that grows shy
Clutching a chill-grown coverlet –
His loved one is no longer by …
He sits up trembling on the bed …
Silence all around him – rent
By sudden fear, he listens, then,
Hot and cold, he leaves the tent
To wander, terrible of mien,
Around the carts. All sound has ceased,
The fields are resting in the night;
420Leaving the stars’ uncertain light,
The moon has disappeared in mist;
Faintly showing in the dew
A track meanders out of view
Beyond the mounds; without delay
He follows the ill-fated way.
Far off before him in the night,
Beside the track, a grave shows white …
A sense of dread possesses him;
Weak and tired in every limb
430He walks towards … what, some chimera?
All at once two shadows loom,
And whispering, as he comes nearer,
Sounds from the desecrated tomb.

FIRST VOICE

It’s time to go now …

SECOND VOICE

No …

FIRST VOICE

It’s time

My love.

SECOND VOICE

No, no, stay here. Be mine

Till dawn.

FIRST VOICE

It’s late.

SECOND VOICE

You love so coyly.

One minute more!

FIRST VOICE

You will destroy me.

SECOND VOICE

One minute!

FIRST VOICE

If my husband wakes

And finds that I’m not there?

ALEKO

I have.

440Where are you going? For both your sakes

You’d better stay beside this grave.

ZEMFIRA

Run, run, my love!

ALEKO

No, stop!

ZEMFIRA

My dear!

ALEKO

Not so fast, my lad! Stay here!

(Plunges his knife into him.)

ZEMFIRA

Aleko!

YOUNG GYPSY

I am dying …

ZEMFIRA

Aleko!

You’ll kill him! Look – you’re smeared with blood!

What have you done?

ALEKO

Now taste his love.

ZEMFIRA

I hate you, despise you – I am above
All threats from you: the Devil take you,
You murderer …

ALEKO

So, well and good –

You die too!

(Stabs her.)

ZEMFIRA

450… die for my love …

*

Brightly the eastern heavens shone:
Blood-steeped, and with knife in hand,
Out in the steppe beyond the mound
Aleko sat upon the stone.
Before him on the bloody ground
Two corpses lay; the murderer
Was dreadful to behold. All round
The stricken gypsies were astir.
Off to one side they dug a grave.
460The women, each with covered head,
Kissed the eyelids of the dead.
The old man, by himself, his gaze
Fastened upon his daughter’s form,
Sat immobile and forlorn.
They took the corpses, in the bare
Earth’s bosom laid the youthful pair.
Aleko looked on from afar …
And when the grave was filled at last,
Slowly, as if unaware,
470Lowered himself upon the grass.
Now the old man stood up, came near,
And spoke: ‘Proud man, be gone from here!
We are untamed, we have no laws.
We do not torture, execute –
Our way is not with groans or blood –
We cannot live with murderers …
Not for freedom were you born,
You want it for yourself alone;
Your voice is dreadful to our ears:
480We are shy and good at heart,
You are bold and bad – depart,
Farewell to you, may you find peace.’
Thus the old man; the roaming band
Was thereupon in noisy flight
From the disaster of the night,
Leaving a deserted land
But for a solitary cart,
Covered with a wretched hide,
Resting on the fateful sward.
490Thus, out of the autumnal mist
A tardy flock of cranes at dawn

Will rise and call, going south – one, pierced

By lead, will stay behind, forlorn,
Trailing its wounded wing. Night came:
No one lit a cheering flame
Inside the cart; beneath its awning
No one slept until the morning.

EPILOGUE

Thus by the magic power of song,
Out of my memory’s slumbering haze
500Visions spring to life and throng,
Sometimes of bright, sometimes dark days.
In that far land where war’s alarm
For long years never ceased to toll,
Where Russia stretched her mighty arm
And showed her frontiers to Stamboul,
And where our double-headed eagle
Still proudly flies without an equal,
There on the steppe I used to meet them,
The gypsies, as their wagons rolled
510Across the lines of camps of old,
Children of a humble freedom.
Often I roamed the wilderness
Behind their easy-going press,
And shared with them their simple fare
And fell asleep before their fire.
How grateful to my ears on long
Slow journeys was their cheerful song,
And to my lips there often came,
Unbidden, Mariyula’s name.
520But even amongst you innocents
There is no lasting happiness! …
Inside your worn and tattered tents
Surge dreams of violence and distress,
Within your shelters on the steppe
Catastrophe in hiding waits,
Dark passions everywhere run deep,
There is no refuge from the Fates.
1824

The Bridegroom

Many of Pushkin’s two dozen ballads are free translations or adaptations of foreign originals. Written in 1825, The Bridegroom is his original in all but metre. It stands at the convergence of three national cultures. First, ‘Lenore’ (1774), by the German Romantic poet Gottfried Bürger, which won enormous popularity throughout Europe. Its story, based on the brief Scottish ballad ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’, is of a girl’s immoderate and blasphemous grief at the death in the Seven Years War of her lover, whose ghost appears and takes her on a nocturnal ride to his graveyard, where she falls dead. Bürger makes powerful use of the sonic resources of the German language, and especially of popular words. Following William Taylor’s and Walter Scott’s versions of ‘Lenore’ (both 1797), Vasily Zhukovsky published two free versions of Bürger’s ballad in 1808 and a closer translation in 1831.

Pushkin wrote his own ballad, transforming the storyline of a tale by the Grimms (see Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’) and using Bürger’s metre, the only instance of Pushkin’s use of it (preserved in the present translation). This eight-line stanza, a combination of iambic tetrameter and trimeter, is dynamic in the extreme, constantly on edge and changing rhythm. It perfectly suits Pushkin’s intentions as he pitches the reader headlong into a ballad that appears to be in German Romantic mode and gives way to uncertainty and suspense as to what exactly is happening until the sinister truth is revealed at the end. As in his other ballads, Pushkin combines popular idiom with the most sophisticated effects, from dazzling onomatopoeia – the sound of wind-tossed fir-tree tops, the escalating din of a wedding feast – to subtle repetitions and even occasional rhythms and diction drawn from Bürger.

The Bridegroom was first published in the Moscow Herald in 1827 and reprinted in Pushkin’s second collection of short verse in 1829.

For three whole days the merchant’s daughter
Natasha disappeared;
The third night came: in wild disorder
Natasha reappeared.
Mother and father plied their questions,
Tried to bring about confessions.
Natasha doesn’t hear,
She scarcely breathes for fear.
Her mother grieved, her father grieved,
10Long did they catechise her,
But when at last she was reprieved
They still were none the wiser.
Natasha won back cheer and health,
Soon she was her former self,
Back with her sisters late
Outside the shingle-gate.
There she is with her companions
Beside the gate one day,
The merchant’s girl, when all at once
20A troika gallops by.
Its young and dashing driver tugs
The reins of horses wrapped in rugs;
Up he stands in his sleigh
And woe to all in his way.
He glances at her while he drives,
Natasha glances back,
On like the wind he whirls, he leaves
Natasha thunderstruck.
Back to the house headlong she flies.
30‘I recognised him – him!’ she cries –
‘I know that it was him!
Stop him, save me from him!’
Shaking their heads, the family gather
And listen full of gloom;
‘Daughter dear,’ begins the father,
‘Tell me the truth now, come:
If someone has offended you,
A sign from you, and that will do.’
Natasha doesn’t speak.
40All she can do is weep.
A matchmaker has seen Natasha:
Next day she’s in the parlour.
She utters praises for Natasha,
Then turns towards the father:
‘We’re buying – you’ve the goods for us,
And handsome is as handsome does:
The lad has strength and style,
He has no guile or bile.
‘He’s wealthy, and he’s also clever,
50He doesn’t touch his cap,
Lives like a boyar, lacked he’s never,
Luck falls into his lap;
He’ll have a mind to give the girl
A coat of silver fox, a pearl,
Gold rings and necklaces,
A fine brocaded dress.
‘He saw her sitting by your gate;
He isn’t one that dithers;
So let’s to church – why should we wait?
60And take the icons with us?’
She sits and eats a plate of pie,
She talks with sighs and slanted eye,
And what the poor bride hears
Has roused her deepest fears.
‘It’s settled, then,’ agrees the father,
‘Aren’t you the lucky one?
My dear Natasha, to the altar!
It’s dull to sit alone.
To go through life unwed is wrong,
70The swallow has to leave off song,
It’s time to build a nest,
Have children and be blest.’
Natasha leans against the wall,
She tries to speak – instead
Begins to sob, and shake and wail,
Laugh as though off her head.
The matchmaker, in the disorder,
Runs to her with a flask of water
To offer a drink – then splash a
80Dash of it on Natasha.
A family in calamity …
Natasha now comes to:
‘Your will is sacred, I shall be
Obedient to you.
Call my bridegroom to the feast,
Bake for a hundred guests at least,
Make mead that’s good and strong,
And bring the law along.’
‘We shall now, angel of my heart!
90I place your happiness
Above my life!’ Forthwith they start
To cook and bake their best.
At last the worthy guests assemble,
And now the bride is led to table;
The bridesmaids weep and sing –
A sleigh comes galloping.
The groom! Now everyone is found.
The goblets clash and clink,
The loving-cup goes round and round;
100Guests take their fill of drink.
BRIDEGROOM:
‘Dear friends, I must be satisfied:
Why does my own and fairest bride
Not drink, nor eat, nor serve?
Why does my fair bride grieve?’
‘I’ll tell you all I have to tell,’
For answer spoke the bride.
‘My life is now a life in hell,
I weep all day and night.
An evil dream oppresses me.’
110The father: ‘What can this dream be?
Dear daughter, if you please,
Put our minds at ease.’
‘This was my dream,’ came clear and loud:
‘I wandered in a wood
At night; behind a bank of cloud
A half-moon dimly stood;
I’d lost my path, and all around
No living soul, no living sound,
Only the fir-trees stirred,
120And that was all I heard.
‘And suddenly, as if I woke,
I saw, close by, a hut.
I knocked – no answer. Then I spoke –
The door stayed firmly shut.
I opened it, I went inside,
I prayed, and there in candlelight –
Gold, silver, everywhere …
All shining, precious ware.’
BRIDEGROOM:
‘How is your dream an evil one,
130Foretelling wealth untold?’
BRIDE:
‘Wait, sir, till my account is done.
On silver and on gold,
And cloths and carpets and brocade,
And silken stuffs from Novgorod –
On marvels heaven-sent
I gazed in wonderment.
‘Soon I heard shouts, and clop clop clop …
Up to the porch they drove.
I slammed the door – in one quick hop
140I hid behind the stove.
Then I heard voices once again …
Into the hut tramped twelve young men,
And with them was a maiden,
A pure and lovely maiden.
‘They entered in a noisy horde,
And none took off his hat;
To table, icons quite ignored,
Without saying grace they sat,
The eldest brother at their head,
150The youngest brother on his right,
And on his left the maiden,
The pure and lovely maiden.
‘Laughter and clamour, singing, yelling,
Unbridled merriment …’
BRIDEGROOM:
‘How can your dream be bad, foretelling
Good fortune and content?’
BRIDE:
‘Wait, sir, till my account is done.
The din and revelry went on,
The merriment was mad,
160Only the maid was sad.
‘She spoke no word, she sat in grief,
Would take no food, no mead.
The eldest brother grasped his knife
And, whistling, whetted it;
He glanced towards the lovely maid,
He gripped her swiftly by her braid,
The villain killed her and
Cut off her right hand.’
The bridegroom, with a shrug, replied:
170‘But this is downright drivel!
You mustn’t grieve, beloved bride,
Your dream cannot mean evil.’
The bride is swift to answer him:

‘Whose hand does it come from, then, this ring?’ –

Looks him full in the face;

Each guest starts from his place.

The ring rolls clinking on the floor,

The bridegroom has turned pale;

All is confusion. – Speaks the law:

180‘Bind the criminal!’

Fettered, the villain was condemned

Without delay and met his end.

Natasha’s was the glory!

And that is all our story.

1825

Count Nulin

Pushkin describes in a note published posthumously (see Wolff, pp. 272–3) how he came to write Count Nulin, conceived as a parody of Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, an elaboration of Livy’s semi-legendary account of the rape of the renowned beauty Lucretia by Sextus, son of Tarquin, king of Rome (r. 535–509 BC), a scandal that led to the overthrow of the kingdom and the advent of the Republic. Pushkin was working on the fourth chapter of Eugene Onegin when he wrote the poem – ‘in two mornings’ (Wolff, p. 273), he tells us in his note (13 and 14 December 1825) – and as John Bayley observes (p. 291), the latter is ‘virtually a comic transposition of the Lucrece situation into the world of the Larins [in Onegin]: we can imagine the heroine and her husband [a small landowner and his bored young wife, hungry for social contact] attending [the Larins’ daughter] Tatyana’s name-day feast’. The name Sextus Tarquinius is whittled down to Nulin, for nul’, ‘nought’. While Shakespeare’s Tarquin ‘throw[s] his mantle rudely o’er his arm’ (line 170 of his poem), Count Nulin puts on a ‘striped silk dressing-gown’ (line 235 in this translation). Tarquin becomes a travelling dandy who spends a jolly evening in the house of the young country housewife whose husband is away hunting and fumbles his way into her room after everyone has retired to bed. Earlier narrative poems by Pushkin in varying degrees partake of the Byronic Romantic mode. Count Nulin’s modernity of language, sensibility and characterisation had immediate appeal. Reviewers found its story, despite its origins, outrageously indecent; the public loved it.

As so often with Pushkin, however, we glimpse other concerns lurking not far beneath the carefree surface. His account of how he came to write Count Nulin continues with the cryptic sentence: ‘History does repeat itself strangely’ (Wolff, p. 273). Russian critics have suggested that Count Nulin relates to Pushkin’s concern with patterns of history at the time of writing (one month previously he had completed the verse drama Boris Godunov, which deals with cataclysmic historical events), and one of them has speculated that at this time ‘Pushkin pondered on history’s laws and on the possibility of a chain of trifling accidents jeopardising a great event’ (Lotman, p. 17). By an irony of fate, instead of participating in the abortive Decembrist uprising (see Introduction under ‘Life’) Pushkin wrote Count Nulin instead, finishing it on the very day when the uprising was taking place in the capital. It was first published in Delvig’s almanac Northern Flowers in 1827.

Pushkin’s iambic tetrameter can carry light-hearted everyday idiom as readily as a more condensed and elevated style like that, for example, of The Bronze Horseman, and is also a vehicle natural to English.

Time to be off! Loud blows the horn;
The whippers-in in hunting dress
Have mounted promptly with the dawn,
The close-leashed borzois prance and press.
The master of the house appears,
And pausing in the porch awhile
He looks about; his visage bears
A proud, proprietorial smile.
He wears a fastened Cossack coat
10With sash in which a blade is stowed,
A rum-flask hangs below his throat,
A horn upon a bronzen chain.
His blear-eyed wife, in cap and shawl,
Looks from her window, vexed, it’s plain,
By all the din and caterwaul …
They bring the master of the house
His mount; he grabs the withers, gets
Foot firmly in the stirrup, shouts
Not to wait up – and off he sets.
20The period to September’s close
(To use the lowly terms of prose)
Can drive the country-dweller mad:
The wind, the sleet, the mud, the haze,
The howl of wolves – but then how glad
The hunter! Scorning easy ways
He thunders through remote terrain,
Spends nights in every kind of place,
Curses, gets soaked and chilled in rain,
And toasts the devastating chase.
30Now what can occupy the spouse
Forsaken by the other spouse?
Not hard to find activities:
She must salt mushrooms, feed the geese,
Make sure the kitchen tasks are heeded,
Inspect the cellar and the barn –
Mistress’s eye is always needed
To see that nothing comes to harm.
I’m sad to say, our heroine …
(Oh dear! I quite forgot to name her:
40‘Natasha’ she had always been,
But let us properly proclaim her
Natalya Pavlovna) … I fear
That our Natalya Pavlovna
Had absolutely no idea
What her domestic duties were;
Her childhood had been spent, alas,
Not under sound paternal rule
But at a gentle boarding school
Run by a Madame Falbalasse.
50Upon a window-seat she sits,
Holding half opened on her knees
A sentimental novel; it’s
The Love of Armand and Élise:
A Mutual Family Correspondence,
Volume the Fourth – a classical,
Old-fashioned, long, long, long, long novel,
All moral and respectable,
With none of your Romantic nonsense.
At first Natalya Pavlovna
60Had read this epic all agog,
But soon a fight distracted her
Between a yard-goat and a dog.
Boys gathered round with many a hoot.
Meanwhile, a turkey flock pursued
A sodden cockerel, gravely gobbling;
Around a pool three ducks went hobbling,
Then paddled in, and splashed and rolled;
A peasant-woman crossed the mud
To hang a pile of washing out.
70It presently grew very cold –
Soon there’d be snow upon the ground …
And now there came a coach-bell’s sound.
He who has lived the life apart
In rural gloom, my friends, knows well
How strongly it can stir the heart,
That jingle of a distant bell.
A friend come visiting at last,
Some comrade from our dashing past?
It surely can’t be her? … Good lord!
80Nearer, nearer … The heart beats loud …
But further, further fades the sound,
And dies; the listener is ignored.
Natalya Pavlovna with glee
Runs quickly to the balcony:
Over the river, past the mill
A carriage speeds towards her – oh!
Crosses the bridge, draws nearer – no,
Turns left. Near tears, she gazes still.
But – joy! – an unexpected slope –
90The carriage topples. ‘Filka, Vash!
Where are you? Quick, there’s been a crash!
Ask them in at once. I hope
The gentleman will dine with me!
Is he alive? Just run and see,
Be quick!’
The servant hurries out.
And now our heroine flies about,
Throws on a shawl, fluffs up her hair,
Adjusts a curtain, moves a chair,

And waits. ‘Dear God, please bring them here.’

100At last, at long last, they appear.
Bespattered with the journey’s dirt,
Somehow, severely bruised and hurt,
The sorry carriage crawls along.
Behind, a youthful gentleman
Limps. His undaunted serving-man,
A Frenchman, cries: ‘Courage, allons!’
They reach the porch, now here they are
Inside the house. Dear reader, while
A bedroom is prepared in style,
110Its door flung open wide, Picard
Bustles about and mutters oaths,
His master seeks a change of clothes –
Let me describe the visitor.
Count Nulin, home from foreign tour,
Has squandered his inheritance
In fashionable extravagance.
He’s on his way to Petropole
For show like some rare animal,
With store of hats and fans and waistcoats,

120Cufflinks and corsets, cloaks and dress-coats,

Pins, studs and stockings à la mode,
Handkerchiefs with coloured edges,
Lorgnettes, a book of wicked sketches,
Guizot’s new tome (a lot of rot!),
A novel by Sir Walter Scott –
He has the Paris court’s bons mots,
The latest song by Béranger,
Arias from Rossini, Paer,
And so on and so forth – you know.
130Places were set a while ago;
Impatiently the hostess sighs.
Enter, at last, the visitor.
Up starts Natalya Pavlovna,
Questions solicitously plies:
His leg now, does it hurt to touch?
Oh, says the count, it’s nothing much.
To table then without ado.
The count moves his place nearer hers,
And starts a conversation: first
140He curses Holy Russia – who
Can live in such perpetual snow?
He misses life in Paris so …
‘How is the theatre?’ ‘In decline,
C’est bien mauvais, ça fait pitié:
Talma’s quite deaf, his voice – a whine,
And Mamselle Mars shows every sign …
But then Potier, le grand Potier!
He is the most admired by far,
As much as he has ever been.’
150‘Which writers are most popular?’
‘Oh, d’Arlincourt and Lamartine.’
‘In Russia too they’re imitated.’
‘Is that so? Then the Russian mind
Is really not so far behind?
God grant we’ll soon be educated!’
‘Where is the waistline?’ ‘Very low –
Almost to … there, that’s now the line.
But your toilette – it’s very fine:
These ruches, bows, the whole design …
160All very à la mode, you know.’
‘Well, we take the Telegraph.’
‘Oh, really? … Would you care for some
Vaudeville? This will make you laugh.’
The count proceeds to sing. ‘Count, come,
Please help yourself.’ ‘No more, I can’t.’
They rise. The hostess is in bliss.
Paris forgotten now, the count
Marvels at her: how sweet she is!
The evening passes quickly by;
170The count is quite beside himself;
His hostess’s expressive eye
Now warms, now sinks in mute reply …
And all too soon the clock strikes twelve.
His man snores in the portico,
The neighbour’s cockerel starts to crow,
The watchman strikes his iron bar,
All candles in the room are spent.
Rising, Natalya Pavlovna
Declares the evening at an end,
180Wishes the count a good night’s rest.
The dizzy, disappointed guest
Kisses her hand … And now, guess what!
What end to coquetry? The tease –
And may she be forgiven by God –
Gives the count’s hand a gentle squeeze.
Natalya Pavlovna undresses;
Parasha stands behind her chair.
To this Parasha she confesses
Her every daily thought and care:
190Parasha washes, sews, brings news,
Is grateful for cast-off fichus,
Provokes her master into laughter
And rails at him the moment after,
Lies to her mistress brazenly.
Now she holds forth imposingly
About the count and his affairs;
The thorough knowledge that she airs!
Heaven knows where she has it from.
At last her mistress, with a frown –
200‘That’s enough! You do go on!’ –
Demands her night-clothes, then lies down
And tells Parasha to be gone.
Meanwhile the count retires to rest;
Helped by his man, he gets undressed …
Climbs into bed. Monsieur Picard
Offers his master a cigar,
A silver tumbler and a bottle,
Lamp, tweezers, clock and uncut novel.
In bed, our hero runs his eyes
210Over a page of Walter Scott.
He grasps, however, not a jot,
Distracted by a wild surmise …
‘Could I,’ he wonders, ‘heavens above!
Could I really be in love?
How entertaining that would be,
What an adventure, what delight!
My hostess likes the look of me …’
Nulin extinguishes the light.
But sleep just will not come to him;
220A fever runs through every limb.
The Devil fills his wakeful mind
With fancies of a sinful kind.
Our ardent hero with a sigh
Imagines that vivacious eye,
That rather full and rounded figure,
That voice’s pleasing female flow,
That face’s rosy country glow –
Finer than paint are health and vigour.
And oh! that shapely little foot,
230And oh! the simple way she put
Her hand in his, and lightly squeezed!
The moment ought to have been seized –
How foolish to have left her. But
Time yet. Her door will not be shut …
Donning his striped silk dressing-gown,
The count is speedily abroad.
In the dark a chair goes down;
Tarquin, in hope of sweet reward,
Once more sets forth to seek Lucretia,
240Resolved to go through fire to reach her.
Thus you may see a cunning tom,
The mincing darling of the house,
Slip from the stove to stalk a mouse,
Creep stealthily and slowly on
Towards his victim, grow slit-eyed
And wave his tail from side to side,
Coil to a ball, extend his claws
And snap! the wretch is in his paws.
On through the darkness groped the count
250With passion burning in his breast,
Scarcely daring to draw breath
And trembling at each sudden sound
The floorboards gave. At last he found
The sanctum door; a gentle press
Upon the stout brass handle – yes!
Slowly, softly the door uncloses …
Inside the bedroom, fitfully
A lamp still burns, and palely glows as
The mistress peacefully reposes,
260Asleep, or she pretends to be.
In goes the count … draws back, and sighs –
Falls at her feet at last … I urge
You ladies of St Petersburg:
Picture the wild awakening eyes
Of my Natalya Pavlovna –
What shall she do? Decide for her.
She stared in sheer bewilderment;
Our hero showered her with grand
But imitative sentiment
270And coolly his audacious hand
Reached out to touch her eiderdown.
At first she was too numbed to frown …
Then realisation dawned upon her,
And full of fury for her honour,
Also, we may suppose, of fear,
With sure and swiftly swinging hand
She didn’t hesitate to land
A good hard blow on Tarquin’s ear!
Count Nulin burned with deepest shame
280At such an insult to his name.
I wonder how things might have gone,
The cut to self-esteem so deep,
Had not the barking of the pom
Woken Parasha from her sleep.
He heard her footsteps drawing close,
He cursed his refuge of the night,
The wilful belle, and quickly rose
To take humiliating flight.
How the assorted company
290Spent the remainder of the night –
I’ll leave imaginations free,
I don’t intend to say who’s right.
Comes morning. Taciturn, our guest
Rises and lazily gets dressed;
Carelessly, yawning, trims his nails,
Clumsily ties his kerchief, fails
To smooth damped locks. A call to tea
Breaks in upon his reverie.
What should he do? He strives to bury
300His painful shame and secret fury,
And leaves his room.
His hostess dips
Her mischievous and mocking eyes
And, biting pretty scarlet lips,
In various wary ways she tries
A conversation. Shy and cold
At first, our hero grows more bold,
He gives his answers with a smile
And banters with a pleasant art;
Within a very little while
310He has once more half lost his heart.
There comes a clamour from the hall.
Who’s there? ‘Natasha!’
‘Heavens above! …
This is my husband, count. My love,
Count Nulin.’
‘Glad to have you call …
What nasty weather, my, it’s raw …
I passed the forge just now and saw
Your carriage – it’s in good repair.
Natasha dear! We caught a hare
Outside the orchard … Vodka now!
320Try some of this, you really must …
It’s not from these parts, Count, you know.
Before you go – you’ll dine with us?’
‘Well, I don’t know, I shouldn’t stay.’
‘My wife and I are glad of guests:
Now Count, you mustn’t be away,
Do stay!’
But still the count requests
They let him leave. His hopes are gone,
He is both furious and forlorn.
Picard, well strengthened by a glass,
330Grunts with a heavy travelling-case.
Two servants hurry out to lash
The trunk upon the equipage
Now drawn up ready at the door.
Picard has seen to everything;
The count departs at last. What more
Can I relate? A word, my friends,
To add before my story ends.
Off, then, our hero’s carriage rolled.
Natalya Pavlovna soon told
340Her husband, neighbours, everyone
Just how my count had made so bold.
And who laughed more than anyone
To hear Natalya Pavlovna?
You’ll never guess. – Why ever not?
Her husband! – No sir. Of the lot,
He was the least amused by far;
He called the count a fool, a whelp,
He’d see to it, he’d make him yelp,
He’d raise his pack of hounds to help.
350No, Lidin laughed most heartily,
Their neighbour, aged just twenty-three.
So now then, we may safely say
A faithful wife need not give rise,
In times, my friends, like ours today,
To any very great surprise.
1825

A Little House in Kolomna

The metre of this poem, ottava rima, is of distinguished lineage, originating in the fourteenth century in Italian (Boccaccio) and the sixteenth in English (Thomas Wyatt), and used by Byron in Beppo (1818) and Don Juan (published from 1819). The poem is Pushkin’s answer to critics for their attacks on him following his trip to Transcaucasia in 1828–9 over what they judged to be the frivolous and even immoral content of his writing. On his return to St Petersburg from a spell with the Russian army of the South, he had been expected to hymn Russian arms and offer moral and patriotic uplift, but he wrote no such thing. Instead, in autumn 1830 he composed this narrative poem on an episode in the life of a widow and her daughter living in contemporary St Petersburg in a modest house in the run-down district of Kolomna where he himself had lived for a time on leaving school. Digressions, a leading feature of Pushkin’s narratives, produce much of the poem’s energy.

The lengthy passage on prosody with which A Little House in Kolomna begins was originally followed by even lengthier drafts of literary polemic which Pushkin cut from the poem when preparing it for publication, giving the whole a less serious character, though a rising note of personal sadness sounds through stanzas IX–XII and again, offset, in the digression (stanzas XXI–XXIV) on the mysterious countess; at both moments the narrator vigorously shakes himself out of the mood to return to the light-hearted level of the tale he is supposed to be telling.

The tardiness of first publication in a St Petersburg almanac in 1833 reflected critical hostility to Pushkin’s writing from the beginning of that decade. In a piece probably intended for his journal The Contemporary but not published until well after his death, he claimed the poet’s right to compose non-seriously. ‘There are people who won’t accept any poetry that is not passionate or exalted,’ he wrote, contrasting these with ‘those who love poetry not only in lyrical upsurge or melancholic elegiac inspiration […] but also in humorous play, entertainments of the mind inspired by pure pleasure’ (quoted in A. S. Pushkin, vol. 3, p. 515, note).

I

How bored I am with the tetrameter,
Used by everyone, every schoolboy rhymer.
I’ve long been drawn to the pentameter,
And thinking I would try ottava rima.
I’m confident, I’m not an amateur,
In triple harmony I need no primer;
I see a rhyme in almost every word,
Two come at once – they bring along a third.

II

To free a way to them I’ll rhyme on verbs;
10That more than anything will ease my task …
I know we have been taught to be averse
To rhyming verbal endings. Why, I ask?
Even the monk Shikhmatov wrote no worse
For using verbal rhymes. I wear no mask –

I use these rhymes myself … Our tongue is bare,

We need them all the time. I’ll leave it there.

III

I shall reject no rhyme-words out of hand,

Like, say, recruits with grave disfigurements,

Or mounts that make an unimpressive stand –

20I’ll rhyme connectives – ‘but’ and ‘hence’;

Fall in, you riff-raff, under my command!

I’ll sign on any rhyme I find – at once,

All syllables are suitable for muster:

The lot, the young, the old, however rusty.

IV

Now, all you masculine and feminine

Endings! Cross yourselves, let’s have a try!

No bent knees, stand up and keep in line!

Into the octave now, in ranks of three!

Fear not, we’ll not be hard on you this time;

30Stand at ease! I don’t mean all awry!

We’ll soon get used to it, and then, thank God,

We’ll have our feet down firmly on the road.

V

How satisfying it feels to lead my stanzas
Rank upon rank in Roman-numbered order,
Allowing none of them the slightest chances

Of straying like scattered units after slaughter!

Each syllable stands up, no backward glances,

Each line’s a hero and will never falter.

What of the poet, though? … He’s Tamerlane,

40He’s – let’s be up to date – Napoleon.

VI

Dear reader, now we’ll take a moment’s pause.

Drop out or go for broke? Which would be surer? …

I’ll just say: in a five-foot line of verse
I like to have a second-foot caesura;
I lose my sense of balance otherwise,
Even on my divan I seem to endure a
Journey full-tilt, and pitifully jarred,
Across hard-frozen ploughland in a cart.

VII

So then? We cannot always stroll, of course,
50Along the Neva’s granite shore, or step
On freshly polished parquet ballroom floors,
Or gallop freely on the Kirghiz steppe.
I only ask a ride on my good horse –
Like that eccentric Muscovite who kept
A thoroughbred and rode it to the Neva
Without a feed until he reached the river.

VIII

My steed! The beast that’s always celebrated

Couldn’t have caught him. Now though, Pegasus

Has lost his teeth. The spring that he created

60Is dry. Nettles have overgrown Parnassus;
Phoebus is long retired, the Muses’ jaded
Choral dance has no appeal for us.

Our camp has moved from Classic heights to where

The traders jostle on the market square.

IX

Sit down, my muse, and get yourself in order:

Don’t stick your feet out! Don’t look round, you tomboy!

It’s high time we began. There lived a widow

About eight years ago, a poor old woman,

And with her in their little house her daughter,

70Quietly, by St Mary’s in Kolomna

Behind the sentry-box. I see it now:

Attic, three windows, front door, portico.

X

I passed that spot again three days ago,
Off in the evening somewhere to carouse.
I looked to see the little house – but no,
There stood a newly built three-storey house.
I called to mind those two I used to know,
Sitting beneath a window there for hours,
The widow and her girl – how were they both?

80Were they alive still? – and my days of youth.

XI

I looked askance at that tall house, and felt

Sadness. If only a fire had suddenly

Swallowed it up – a sight that would have held

True happiness for my embittered eye.

From time to time, it seems, one’s head is filled

With unfamiliar thoughts and fantasy;
We find all kinds of nonsense in our mind
Out for a walk alone or with a friend.

XII

Blessed is he who can maintain his purpose

90And keep his meditations on a lead,

He who can calm his heart, or crush the serpent

That rises with no warning at his feet;
But he who is loquacious is quite certain
To court contempt … Let Lethe be my mead,
My doctor has forbidden melancholy:

And so let’s drop all this, by all that’s holy!

XIII

That old woman (ah, her aged face
I recognise from many a Rembrandt painting,
In spectacles and bonnet of black lace)
100Had for a daughter a most lovely maiden,
Her eyes and eyebrows dark as night, her gaze

Soft as a dove’s, her skin like whitest satin;

Of cultivated taste, she was determined

To get through all the works of Fyodor Emin.

XIV

She was accomplished too on the guitar,

And she would sing ‘Now mourns the little grey dove’,

‘Shall I go forth?’, and ditties old and rare,

All that is sung in winter round the stove,

In tedious autumns round the samovar,

110In springtime, walking through a green oak grove –

All that a maid may sing in Russian style;

The Russian muse performs without a smile.

XV

In figurative or literal sense, our whole
Family, our driver to our premier poet,
We all sing mournfully. That dismal wail

When Russians sing a song, how well we know it!

We start with toasting, then we never fail

To toast eternal rest, we’re always listening for it.

The harmonies of Russian maid and muse

120Are drawn from depths of sadness, yet they please.

XVI

Our pretty heroine, by name Parasha,

Could wash and iron, weave, mend worn-out frills;

In household matters she was all but pasha –
She saw to settlement of household bills
And preparation of the buckwheat kasha
(Helped in the exercise of kitchen skills
By Fyokla, dear long-standing cook, a pearl,

Who’d lost her hearing and her sense of smell).

XVII

The aged mother spent the daylight hours
130Knitting beside the window, while at night
She’d sit and practise her divining powers,
With cards set out before her as her guide.

Her daughter meanwhile flitted round the house,

Now at the window, now she’d slip outside

Just to make sure (the sex’s ready eye!)

That she’d be seen by every passer-by.

XVIII

On winter nights they’d close the shutters early,

In summer they were open to the breeze
Till well into the night, Diana palely
140Fixing the maiden with her leisured gaze
(And by-the-by, we’d all think very poorly
Of any narrative omitting this!).

The mother passed the whole night soundly snoring,

Her daughter staring at the moon till morning

XIX

And listening to the yowls of garret cats,
Stark signals of an amatory encounter,
The chiming hours, the calling of the watch,
And that was all. In undisturbed Kolomna

Night reigned supreme. Sometimes the eye would catch

150Paired shadows in the doorways. Half in slumber

And half aroused, upon the yielding sheet

Our heroine would feel her own heart beat.

XX

In summer and in winter, every Sunday,

Attendance at St Mary’s was their wont;

They’d take their stand in front of all and sundry

Beside the rood screen on the left. I don’t
Live in that quarter now, but love to wander
In dream or daydream to my erstwhile haunt,
Kolomna, on a Sunday, to St Mary’s,
160And join that couple at a Russian matins.

XXI

There without fail I always used to see
A countess; she was young, and she was rich …
I can’t recall her name. With dignity,
With pomp she’d make her entry into church;
She prayed with equal pride and piety.
I, sinner that I was, tried hard to catch
A view of her; Parasha there before her,
Already poor, appeared to me still poorer.

XXII

Although the countess, with a casual eye,

170Would chance upon Parasha, it was prayer

That filled her mind; low-voiced and fervent, she

Was not to be distracted by the pair.
Hers was an air of quiet humility;
But truth to tell, she had no further care
Than for herself, the effect of her couture,
Her own rare beauty, haughty and austere.

XXIII

At first she struck me as the cold ideal
Of vanity, for all to recognise.
Through this hauteur I then began to feel
180Another history, beyond surmise –
Of sadness and long-suffering; more real
It grew by all the signs before my eyes …
The countess, unaware I knew of this,
No doubt soon had me on her conquests list.

XXIV

In all her youth and beauty she was martyred;

Although her life was spent in luxury

And leisure unalloyed, although she laughed at

Fortune, the incense of felicity
Wreathing about her – she was heavy-hearted.
190How many, many times more blest than she,

Dear reader, let me say with greatest pleasure,

Was our new friend, the simple good Parasha.

XXV

Her braided hair coiled round a comb of horn

And copious light-brown ringlets all about

Her ears, bright wax bead necklace, kerchief worn

Crosswise or tied upon her slender throat –

Such was the style in which, each day from dawn,

She made black-whiskered officers who rode
Before her house be sure to notice her –
200She had no need of fashionable attire.

XXVI

Among those guardsmen, who had touched her heart?

Or was she wholly unappreciative

Of all of them? We’ll see. Let’s make a start.

She led a private and secluded life;
In balls, or life in Paris or at court
She took no interest (though I do believe
The life led by an elder cousin, Vera
Ivanovna, was really quite superior).

XXVII

One day the house was visited with grief:

210Returning from her bath, Cook caught a chill.

They gave her tea, and wine, with no relief,
And vinegar and mint infusion – still
No better. Then, at night on Christmas Eve,
There came the moment for the last farewell.
Next morning, at the appointed hour, the dray
Bore off the coffin to the cemetery.

XXVIII

Now there was mourning in the house, and none

Mourned more than Vasochka, the household cat.

The widow thought she might just let things run

220Up to three days without a cook, but that

Was it. They mustn’t trust to God alone

For meals. ‘Parasha, come – put on your hat!

Where can we get a cook now? On your way!

Find out! Cheap cooks are hard to get today.’

XXIX

‘I’ll try to, mother.’ Out Parasha went,

Well muffled up; for there stood grizzled winter –

Snow crunched, a cloudless heaven’s dark blue tent

Was lit by sparkling frozen stars. The widow

Sat up till late, and when her head was bent

230In sleep, there came a tapping at the window.

Parasha gently woke her mother. ‘Look!’

She proudly said to her, ‘I’ve found a cook.’

XXX

Behind the daughter, stepping timidly,

But wearing a short skirt to make a show,

With not bad looks, though tall as a young tree,

A girl came in; she made a waist-deep bow,
Sat down, and smoothed her apron carefully.
The widow turned to her: ‘Now let me know,

What is your rate?’ – ‘Whatever you think best’;

240She seemed, this girl, demure but self-possessed.

XXXI

The widow was delighted when she spoke.

‘And what’s your name?’ – ‘I’m Mavra.’ – ‘Well, Mavrusha,

You’re young, my pet, you come and share our nook;

Keep well away from men. My old Feklusha,

I had her here ten years, my faithful cook,

She’d never give the men a chance to touch her.

Look after me, my daughter too, don’t shirk,

You must be neat and honest in your work.’

XXXII

That day goes by, and then the next. The cook’s

250Success is nil; she’s constantly at fault;
She drops a tray of china, overcooks
In pot and pan and uses too much salt,
Attempts to sew but draws despairing looks,
She won’t respond however much they scold;
She makes a mess of everything she does;
Parasha’s perturbation grows and grows.

XXXIII

One fine Sunday morning saw the two,

Mother and daughter, early as ever, out

To church. Mavrusha stayed at home; all through

260The night her tooth had ached, she dragged about

Half dead although she had some jobs to do –

A cake to bake, cinnamon to be ground.

Now that she wasn’t with them there in church,

The widow’s heart went through a sudden lurch.

XXXIV

Thought she: ‘Why does Mavrusha want to bake
A cake? The cake might be a cunning ruse –
The girl might be a scheming sort – a fake!
She might have even thought of robbing us
And running off! Whatever might she take?

270And New Year’s Eve – just think what we could lose!’

With this new worry flashing through her head,

The widow nearly fainted. Then she said:

XXXV

‘Stay here, Parasha. I must hurry home,
Some awful thing …’ Her daughter had no clue
What could have caused this unexpected tone.
From the church porch the widow fairly flew;
Her heart was beating with a sense of doom.
At home, no sign of cake or smell of stew –
And no Mavrusha anywhere. She entered

280Her own room – horror, as her searches ended!

XXXVI

She saw her cook, before Parasha’s mirror,

Seated gravely upright on a chair,

Shaving. She screamed – and fell upon the floor.

The cook, with lathered cheek, leapt over her

(An indication of a downright boor),

Ran through the hall, the porch, with hidden face

And in an instant vanished from the place.

XXXVII

Parasha came back home a little later.

290‘Mama dear, what’s happened?’ – ‘Pàshenka!

That cook of ours, Mavrushka …’ – ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m shaken up still … Was it really her?

Before the mirror … All her face in lather …’ –

‘I can’t make sense of this – what’s happened here?

And where’s Mavrusha?’ – ‘Oh, she was a bandit!

I caught her shaving! … Just like my dear man did!’

XXXVIII

Here did a blush infuse Parasha’s face?

I must admit, I haven’t any notion,

And of Mavrusha there has been no trace

300Since then! She never took remuneration

And had no time for serious pillages.

Who followed her in her domestic station?

Again, I cannot say. Don’t think me rude

If I now choose the moment to conclude.

XXXIX

– That’s all? You can’t be serious! – Yes, I am.

– So that’s where your ottava rima leads!

All that fuss turns out to be a sham,

Blazing a trail, boasts of poetic deeds!

This was the way, you thought, to win the palm?

310You found no better tale to meet your needs?

And can’t we have a moral at the end?

– Well, no … well, yes, all right; if you’ll attend …

XL

Now then, here’s the moral of my tale:
To hire an unwaged cook is dangerous.
I furthermore find anyone born male
Wearing a skirt bizarre and profitless:
There’ll always be a time he cannot fail
To shave his beard, and nothing could go less
With female nature, don’t you think … Behind

320This tale of mine that’s all you’re going to find.

1830

The Bronze Horseman

A Petersburg Tale

This last of Pushkin’s poemy takes his characteristic narrative vehicle in verse, the iambic tetrameter, to a final stage of development, achieving a level of density, stylistic complexity and range of reference that places it at the summit of Russian poetry alongside Eugene Onegin. (See Introduction for further commentary.) Here the bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) by the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, unveiled in the centre of St Petersburg in 1782, which has become the emblem of St Petersburg, is the core presence in the poem, merging into the persona of Peter himself.

Pushkin’s subtitle, ‘A Petersburg Tale’, is significant. In his day the word povest’, ‘tale’, meant a Romantic verse tale with exotic setting. A non-Romantic contemporary city setting subverted the term at the outset, bringing the poem into the realm of everyday reality. But Pushkin, typically, has it both ways, first in the prologue, a paean of praise for Peter’s creation of the new capital city in 1703 on a desolate, un-human-friendly spot on the Gulf of Finland in order to ‘chastise the Swede’ (line 12), and then in the dramatic human story of a defiant but powerless victim of the catastrophic 1824 flood. While of course Pushkin had profound admiration for Peter the Great as a creative force, he was fully conscious of his destructive side. ‘He despised humanity perhaps even more than Napoleon,’ he had noted in 1822, long before conceiving The Bronze Horseman (quoted in Binyon, p. 436). This poem pits two principles irreconcilably against each other – unlimited state power and the claims of individual human lives. A manuscript sketch by Pushkin might be taken as some indication of what he predicted or dreamt of for the future of Russia: a drawing of Falconet’s horse rearing on its rock without its rider (reproduced in A. S. Pushkin, vol. 3, p. 299).

It was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s bitter criticism of Peter the Great and the Russian nation, however, that prompted Pushkin to write the poem. A poem sequence within Mickiewicz’s epic drama Forefathers’ Eve (forming Part III of the work, ‘Digression’), completed in 1832, contained sharp polemic against Russian autocracy, the creation of St Petersburg, and the Russian people for accepting their harsh treatment. Although always annoyed by foreigners’ criticism of his country, Pushkin usually largely shared their views, as he did in this case. But in his poem he sets out to put a counter-case. He parodies certain passages in Mickiewicz, such as the latter’s description of a Russian army review, ‘Monotonously, side by side they stand, / Like horses lined up at a trough to eat’ and ‘To mark the troops among this infantry / One needs a naturalist’s ability / To glance at squirming swamp-worms as they pass, / Distinguish them and place each in its class’ (translated in Lednicki, pp. 123 and 124). In his prologue Pushkin transmutes this depiction into a description of the magnificent ordered beauty of military formations. In his poem ‘The Monument of Peter the Great’ in Forefathers’ Eve, Mickiewicz gives Falconet’s equestrian statue the appearance of ‘a maddened beast’ about to fall over a precipice; Pushkin’s famous image of the statue presents Peter as a master of destiny who ‘reared up Russia / Upon the brink of the abyss’ (lines 392–3).

While he worked on The Bronze Horseman in his miraculously creative autumn of 1833, Pushkin was also immersed in Shakespeare, finishing his reworking of Measure for Measure as a narrative poem just before making a fair copy of his new poem. The Tempest has been seen as a significant Shakespearean intertext, with Peter a ‘contradictory figure of creation and destruction’, his foundation of a city so vulnerable to the elements being equivalent to Prospero’s conjuring up of a shipwrecking storm (Lednicki, p. 104).

The poem offended the susceptibilities of the tsar and officialdom. Only the prologue, with one short passage omitted, was published in Pushkin’s lifetime (in 1834, in the popular journal Library for Reading), and the first complete edition of 1841 was prepared in a version acceptable to Tsar Nicholas I, omitting Yevgeny’s defiant confrontation with the bronze statue and with some emollient rewriting by Pushkin’s posthumous editor, Vasily Zhukovsky. A complete and authoritative text was not published until a comprehensive monograph edition edited by N. V. Izmailov was produced by Nauka in Leningrad (now the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg) in 1978.

PREFACE

The event described in this tale is based on fact. Details of the flood are taken from journals of the time. Those interested may consult the account by V. N. Berkh. – A. P.

PROLOGUE

Beside the watery waste He stood,
And gave himself to lofty thought.
Before his far-fixed gaze the river
Vastly stretched; a humble boat
Strove on it in lone endeavour.
Against each mossy, marshy bank
Here and there low huts showed black,
The shelters of the wretched Finn;
The ancient forest, dark and dank,
10Perpetual stranger to the sun,
Sounded around.
He pondered well:
‘From here we shall chastise the Swede.
Here we shall raise a citadel:
Our haughty neighbour shall take heed.
Here we have been ordained to hew
A window on to Europe; new
Shall be our hold upon the sea.
Through unknown waters, every state
Shall send its ships to us to trade,
20And we shall toast the open sea.’
A century passed. Out of the forest,
Out of the marshy waste, the fort
Grew to a city of the fairest,
Jewel and wonder of the north;
Where once the Finnish fisherman,
Neglected foster-son of nature,
Standing on the low-lying bank,
Cast upon the nameless water
His time-worn sweep-seine, now along
30The teeming banks, in stately masses,
Harmonious rows of towers and palaces
Greet the nations’ ships that throng
From every corner of the earth
For moorings at the quays of wealth;
The Neva is arrayed in granite,
Bridges overhang its waters;
The art of skilful cultivators
Has clad in green the isles that span it;
Before the younger capital
40Old Moscow loses all her lustre,
Like the dowager in purple
Before the newly crowned tsaritsa.
I love you, Peter’s grand creation,
I love your stern and stately face,
The Neva in majestic motion,
Its stretching shoreline’s granite grace
And railings of ornate cast-iron,
I love your meditative night
And moonless gleam so bright that I can
50Read and write without a light,
The streets with not a soul in sight,
The slumbering mass of every building,
The brilliant Admiralty spire
Clear to the eye, and, not admitting
Darkness to the golden sky,
One twilight hurries to relieve another,
Allowing night a mere half-hour.
I love your stubborn winter’s rigour,
Your motionless sharp air and frost,
60The sledges running on the river,
Girls’ faces brighter than the rose,
The glitter and the din of balls,
The goblet’s overflowing foam
When the carousing hour falls
And the punch’s pale blue flame.
I love the warlike animation
Upon the playing field of Mars,
The ranks of infantry and horse
Meticulously in formation,
70The colours swaying in harmony,
Tattered from their victory,
The glint of bronzen helmets holed
In battles recent and of old.
I love, O martial capital,
The thunder of your citadel
When the empress of the north
Gives the imperial house a son,
Or one more victory is won,
Or when the Neva carries off
80Its cracked blue ice towards the sea,
Scenting the coming spring in glee.
Peter’s glorious city, stand
Unyielding as the Russian land,
Let the conquered element
Find respite with you in the end;
Let the Finnish waters curb
Their profitless hostility,
Their age-old malice not disturb
Peter through all eternity!
90A time of rare catastrophe
Is vivid in the memory still …
And it is what, my friends, shall give
The matter of my narrative.
Sad is the tale I have to tell.

Part One

Over murky Petrograd
Breathed November cold and hard.
With thunderous waves the river Neva
Struck against its stately railings,
Cast about in restless flailings
100Like someone in a raging fever.
It was late and it was dark;
The rain beat down, became beserk,
The wind set up a dismal whine.
Our youthful hero chose this time
To visit friends and then come home:
Yevgeny we shall have his name …
It has a pleasant sound; besides,
My pen first knew it long ago.
His family name we need not know;
110Although it may be one that rides
High in the annals of our land,
Thanks to the pen of Karamzin,
Now it has sunk to mere has-been,
Forgotten by both low and grand.
Our hero does some kind of work,
Lives in Kolomna, shuns the great,
And in his mind no memories lurk
Of bygone days or of the dead.
And so, late coming home, Yevgeny
120Threw off his coat and went to bed.
But long he lay awake, for many
And rousing thoughts ran through his head …
That he was poor, that only work
Could bring him independence, honour –
If only God would one day make
Him sharper-witted, earn more money;
That some there were, well-fed, bone-lazy,
Not clever – their life was so easy! –
While it was two years altogether
130That he had laboured. What foul weather,
He thought too; it had not abated –
With such a swiftly rising river
They’d take the bridges off the Neva;
And so he might be separated
From his Parasha for, who knew,
Longer than a day or two.
Yevgeny, with a heartfelt sigh,
Turns to poetic reverie:
Get married? Well … why not? He’ll see.
140It will be hard, he’ll not deny;
However, he is young and strong,
There’s nothing he’ll refuse to try;
It certainly won’t take him long –
He’ll make a simple home one day,
And with Parasha as his wife
He will enjoy a peaceful life.
‘A year, and I’ll be on the way.
I’ll have a post – Parasha, she to
Take charge of household matters, see to
150The children’s upbringing … And so,
Until the grave lays claim to us,
Hand in hand through life we’ll go;
Our grandchildren will bury us …’
Thus he mused. And he was sad
That night; he wished the angry rain
Would beat less madly on the pane,
The wailing of the wind would fade …
He closed his sleepy eyes at last.
The next he knew, the stormy night
160Had ended; came pale dawn … Aghast
He saw the day.
With all its might
The river Neva all night long
Had strained towards the open sea
Against its savage adversary,
To prove, though, in the end, less strong …
Now people gathered all along
The riverside to watch the night’s
Aftermath – the foaming heights.
The sea-winds blowing up the gulf
170Had checked the Neva’s flow; it reared,
Forced backwards, in a mighty huff,
And all the islands disappeared.
Soon the weather grew still worse,
The angry Neva roared and swelled
And like a cauldron seethed and swirled,
As if a captive beast let loose
Fell on the city … Before it
The people flee; soon none to see –
And now the waters suddenly
180Gush into cellars underground,
Canals and hidden sluices sound –
Behold Petropolis like Triton
Appearing, waist-deep, to Poseidon.
Siege! Assault! Malicious waves
Swarm over window-sills like thieves.
Sterns of loose careering boats

Smash through panes. Soaked street-stall boards,

Pieces of houses, roofs and logs,
Bundles adrift from warehouse stocks,
190The worldly goods of poverty,
Coffins from a cemetery,
Parts of bridges – helter-skelter
Down the streets!
The people see
God’s anger, and the penalty.
Nothing is left now: food and shelter –
Where have they gone?
At this dark time
The late tsar ruled with glory still.
Out on the balcony he came
And, troubled, spoke. ‘It is God’s will;
200The elements no tsar can rule.’
In gloomy thought he sat; his eye
Was fixed upon calamity,
Each mighty square a rising pool
Into which new rivers streamed.
Amongst it all the palace seemed
A hapless islet. But the tsar
Through the perils of the flood,
Through the city near and far,
In due course sent his generals out
210To save the helpless from the foam,
Or else from drowning in their home.
And on that day, on Peter’s Square,
Upon an elevated porch,
Pride of a new-built mansion, where
A pair of marble lions stood watch,
Each with raised paw as if alive;
Without a hat, arms crossed, astride
One of these poor Yevgeny sat,
Fearfully pale, but not afraid
220On his account. He did not hear
The greedy waves advancing near,
Feel on his face the rain that lashed,
The squall that had removed his hat,
He did not feel his soles being splashed.
His desperate gaze was firmly set
Upon a single spot, and there
Like mountain summits, jet on jet
The furious waters clove the air –
The howling centre of the storm,
230Spewing debris in every form …
Out where – oh God! – it was most rough,
Very nearly on the gulf –
A fence, unpainted, and a willow,
A time-worn little house, a widow
There with Parasha, with his dream …
Or was this really all a dream,
Can all our life be nothing worth,
A trick that heaven plays on earth?
Bewitched he sat, as if in fable,
240As if he too were made of marble,
Immobile. And on every quarter
All he sees is water, water!
And high above the invaded land,
Above the raging of the flood,
With back to him, and outstretched hand
In overmastering command,
The bronzen mounted idol stood.

Part Two

But now, well wearied with destruction,
The Neva rests its sated maw,
250And having relished insurrection,
Begins to settle down once more,
Dropping its prey. A band of robbers
Thus takes a village, slashes, clobbers,
Smashes, wrecks and seizes; howls,
Violence, terror, oaths and wails! …
The robbers tire; weighed down by spoils,
They fear pursuit and disappear,
With booty scattered in their rear.
The waters fell, the thoroughfares
260Opened again; Yevgeny hastened,
Clinging to hope, but full of fears,
Towards the river scarcely chastened.
Filled with the flush of victory,
The waves still boiled maliciously,
As if on top of smouldering fires,
Capped still with foam from shore to shore;
The Neva breathed with heavy sighs,
Spent as a steed returned from war.
Yevgeny looks about: he spies
270A boat; at once his spirits rise;
He hails a boatman heaven-sent –
The boatman names a modest fee
And launches off audaciously
Into the fearsome element.
The oarsman, skilled through many a year,
Struggles with the turbulence;
And he is ready more than once,
With daring strokes, to disappear
Between the billows deep and sheer –
At last he makes the shore.
280Poor soul!
Down the street Yevgeny hastens,
Seeking out familiar places
But recognising none at all.
Dreadful sight! The street is shattered,
Everything is strewn and battered:
The houses stand there crooked, many
Collapsed, some vanished; unconcealed,
As upon a battlefield
Bodies lie all around. Yevgeny,
290Tormented, trembling in his shoes,
Utterly oblivious,
Still hurries headlong to the place
Where fate awaits him with its news,
Like an unopened letter. Here –
The settlement, the gulf, he’s near
The house … But what is this?
He stops.
And back he turns; retraces steps.
He looks … walks on … another look.
Here’s where it was, the little nook,
300And there’s the willow. But the gate –
Has it been torn off in the spate?
And where’s the house? In deepest slough
Round and round he walks and walks
And loudly to himself he talks –
Suddenly he strikes his brow
And laughs out loud.
Darkness lies deep
Upon a city all in fear;
Its people do not try to sleep,
The talk is ceaseless everywhere
310Of what has come to pass this day.
From tired, pale clouds the morning ray
Shone on the silent capital
And found no traces of disaster,
The ill work crimson-covered. All
Was as before. The streets now free
Saw no concern or sympathy.
Clerks, work-bound, left their night’s abode;
The intrepid trader, undismayed,
Opened his cellar robbed by flood,
320Hoping to win back losses made
From fellow traders. Many a boat
Appeared from courtyards.
Count Khvostòv,
Poet beloved of heaven above,
Began to sing in timeless verse
The Neva settlements’ distress.
But poor, my poor Yevgeny … He,
Troubled, alas, in heart and mind,
Could not withstand catastrophe.
The fury of the waves and wind
330Roared in his ears. He roamed aghast,
Consumed by wordless thoughts of doom;
He was bedevilled by a dream.
Days, and soon a week went past –
A month, and he did not go home.
His term was up, the landlord let
The empty niche to some poor poet.
Yevgeny did not come to fetch
His few belongings there. Poor wretch,
An alien to society,
340He went about all day on foot,
And slept upon the embankment; food
Was offered him in charity
On window-sills. His tattered clothing
Rotted away on him; with loathing
Children pelted him with pebbles.
The coachman’s whip would often find him –
He never looked ahead, behind him,
Deaf with the din of inner troubles.
And so his miserable span
350Was dragged out, neither beast nor man;
Not an inhabitant of earth
And not a phantom from the dead,
Not one and not the other …
Berth
One night he found to lay his head
Above the Neva. Autumn breathed
Its wind. Frustrated waters seethed
Against the embankment, beat its steps
Like a petitioner who raps
Despairingly upon the door
360Of deaf officials of the law.
Rain began; Yevgeny woke.
Wind howled, and in the distant dark
A sentinel exchanged his call
With it … He started to recall
The horror that had passed. He rose,
And quickly walked about … and froze –
It was as if his end was nigh.
He stood beneath the columned arch
Of that great mansion, on the porch
370A pair of marble lions on watch,
Each with raised paw, as if alive,
And on a palisaded rock
The bronzen idol, hand held high,
Rode above him in the dark.
Yevgeny trembled. In his mind
All was dreadfully defined.
How could he not recognise
Where he had seen the grim waves spill,
The waters in rebellion rise,

380The lions, the square, while stark and still

He whose indomitable will
Had raised a city from the sea
Towered in bronze above it – He,
Fearsome from the gloom below!
What thoughts are pressing on that brow!
Within him, what unbounded force!
What fire comes flashing from that horse!
Where, proud stallion, are you bound,
Where will your hooves put down to ground?
390Destiny’s great lord and master!
Was it not exactly thus
Your iron bridle reared up Russia
Upon the brink of the abyss?
Around the idol’s pedestal
The madman had begun to pace;
His poor wild eyes saw face-to-face
The ruler over half the world.
His chest was tight. He pressed his brow
Against cold railings; fire ran through
400His heart, his blood was boiling over;
His gaze was visionless in mist.
Before the mighty image, sombre
He stood, and clenching teeth and fist –
As if possessed by some dark power –
‘Miracle builder! – Now!’ he hissed,
‘Just you wait …!’ The awesome tsar,
It seemed, had slowly turned his head,
In mounting rage begun to glare …
Headlong across the empty square
410He ran, behind him as he fled,
Like rumbling thunder, hooves resounding
Upon the shaken thoroughfare.
And all night long, astride his bounding
Steed the Horseman, hand held high,
Outstretched beneath the moonlit sky,
Followed Yevgeny, and no matter
Whither the poor madman bent
His steps, with heavy, echoing clatter
After him the Horseman went.
420Whenever next he chanced to pass
That square, he would be overtaken
By inner turmoil; he would press
His heart as if to ease its aching,
Take off his threadbare cap; his gaze
He could not bring himself to raise;
He kept his distance.
Off the shore
A tiny islet can be seen.
There a fisherman will moor,
Out fishing late, bring in his seine
430And cook his meagre supper; or
A clerk will of a Sunday row
To that place where no blade will grow.
The flood had borne there, in its sport,
A time-worn little house. Above
The waves, like some black bush, it stood.
Last spring, a wherry took it off,
Empty and ruined. They discovered
My madman on its threshold; there
Upon that spot his corpse was covered
440And was committed to God’s care.
1833

III

FAIRY TALES
(SKAZKI)

The Tale of Tsar Saltan, His Son the Mighty and Renowned Prince Guidon Saltanovich and the Fair Swan-Princess

This second of Pushkin’s five completed skazki was written in friendly rivalry with Vasily Zhukovsky, who was working on a skazka of his own (The Tale of Tsar Benderey). In quarantine in Tsarskoye Selo in August 1831 during the cholera epidemic that had confined him the previous year at Boldino and had now reached St Petersburg, Pushkin dashed off this fairy tale based on two variant synopses of a folk tale he had noted down some years earlier (see Introduction under ‘Fairy Tales’), developing his prose notation into rhyming couplets. The tsar’s name, Saltan, and that of his son, the young prince Guidon, are taken from a medieval romance of French origin, which as Bova Korolevich became very popular in Russia from the seventeenth century (there is a fourteenth-century English version titled Bevis of Hampton). The long subtitle of Pushkin’s skazka is in the style of the booklets of folk and fairy tales illustrated with popular prints (lubki) that were widespread in Russia from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. His title includes the word bogatyr as part of the designation of Guidon, a term normally denoting the giant mounted warrior-heroes of folk legend; this word is here untranslated since Guidon is a distinctly more domesticated figure. In the title of The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions, as translated in this book, another variation may be found for the term.

The trochaic tetrameter is Pushkin’s vehicle for three of his five completed skazki, including this one; it has a more stylised effect in the original than in iambic translation. Pushkin published this poem in his third verse collection in 1832.

Three sisters sat up late and spun
Before their window. Thus spoke one:
‘If ever I became Tsaritsa’ –
This one was the eldest sister –
‘I would cook a splendid feast,
I’d have ten thousand guests at least.’
‘If ever I, though, were Tsaritsa’ –
She had her say, the second sister –
‘Single-handed I would weave
10Rich cloth for all – no make-believe.’
‘If ever, though, I were Tsaritsa,’
Now the third and youngest sister,
‘I would give the Father-Tsar
A mighty hero-warrior.’
The moment after she had spoken,
A gentle creak – the door was open;
And there before them who should stand
But the ruler of the land.
He’d overheard their conference
20Listening from behind the fence;
The last to speak of those fair three
Delighted him enormously,
And heartily he greeted her
As fitting partner for a tsar.
‘You shall bear,’ said he, ‘my son
Before the winter has begun.
And you, good maidens, make your home
With me and your dear sister, come –
For also, in this pretty nook,
30I’ve found a weaver and a cook.’
The Father-Tsar strode from the house
And off for the exchange of vows.
That same evening they were married,
For he was not a tsar who tarried.
A feast of splendour set the scene
For honoured guests to meet the queen;
Then to an ivory marriage bed
The newly wedded pair were led.
The cook took on a face of doom,
40The weaver whimpered at her loom;
Both were jealous of the life
Enjoyed by Tsar Saltan’s new wife.
The young tsaritsa, keen enough
Not to put her duty off,
That very night became with child.
That was a time when war ran wild.
The Tsar made ready his good steed
And told the queen to take good heed,
And love him always.
Far away
50The Tsar saw battle every day.
Meanwhile, at home, the queen’s time came:
A long-limbed son God gave to them.
Like a mother-eagle, bent
Above her young, the queen now sent
The swiftest, trustiest messenger
With the glad news to cheer the Tsar.
But then the two, the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha,
Determined to undo the queen,
60Removed the rider from the scene
And sent another in his stead.
This is what their message said:
‘This night the queen has given birth
To something quite unknown on earth,
Not quite a mouse, and not a frog –
Who could imagine … What a shock!’
When the Father-Tsar heard this
How he began to rage and hiss,
He seized the messenger and swore
70That courier would live no more;
But then relenting just this once,
He was minded to announce:
He’d act according to the law
When he came home and not before.
The messenger rode hard and fast
And bore this message back at last.
But then those two, the cook and weaver
With Widow Baba Babarikha,
A moment after they had learned
80The messenger had just returned,
Refreshed him with a drop too far,
Seized the message from the Tsar
And put another in its place;
The rider read it flushed of face:
‘The Tsar pronounces this decree:
The queen and her new spawn must be –
Without delay, in secrecy –
Cast to the bottom of the sea.’
The nobles of the realm were seen
90Thronging the chamber of the queen;
They grieved for tsar and queen and son,
But there was nothing to be done.
They read to the Tsaritsa what
Would be her own, her son’s sad lot;
Then put her, still in full apparel,
With her son inside a barrel,
Tarred it and rolled it to the sea,
Following the Tsar’s decree.
From dark blue sky the bright stars shone,
100In dark blue sea the waves beat on;
Above the sea a stormcloud ran,
Below, the laden barrel swam.
The queen, with none to share her fears,
Shed, as if widowed, bitter tears;
The infant was a rapid grower,
Not day to day but hour by hour
He grew. Time passed. His mother wailed …
The boy, however, loudly hailed
A wave: ‘You waves, you splash and play!
110You splash all night, you splash all day!
You can do anything you wish;
You carve the rocks and carry ships,
You topple cliffs and swallow sand –
So save us, splash us to dry land!’
There and then the wave obeyed,
And gently, gently it conveyed
The precious barrel to a shore,
Then it withdrew and splashed no more.
The pair, thus spared a watery fate,
120Felt firm ground beneath their feet.
But now they wondered who would take them
Out of their cask – would God forget them?
The son stretched up and pressed his head
Against the barrel-top. He said:
‘We need a window on the world’,
Knocked through the top, and out he rolled.
The mother and her son were free;
They walked beside the dark blue sea.
Not far off, upon a rise,
130A broad green oak-tree met their eyes.
The son had one thought: ‘What we need
Most now is something good to eat,’
And from the oak broke off a bough
From which he made a good strong bow,
And on the oaken bow he strung
The cord on which his cross had hung.
He took a twig, and then with care
Shaped an arrow light as air,
And off along the shore he strode
140To see what he could find for food.
He was only a moment gone
When he was startled by a groan …
He looked, and in the swirling sea
There was an evil sight to see:
A swan was struggling in the water,
A big black kite was diving at her;
The wretched creature splashed and splashed,
The sea all round was churned and lashed …
The kite’s great claws were at the ready,
150Its beak was razor-sharp and bloody …
But all at once an arrow whirred;
It struck the neck of that dread bird –
The waves turned crimson with its blood;
With lowered bow the archer stood.
He looked and saw the kite was dying
But heard no bird-sound in its crying;
The swan beside it in the sea
Pecked at it unceasingly
And beat it with her wings beneath
160The waves towards a speedy death –
And at the end of all her anguish
Her voice was heard in Russian language:
‘O Prince, my keen-eyed rescuer,
My noble-souled deliverer,
You mustn’t mind that you must fast
Until three days and nights have passed
And lose your arrow in the sea
Because of this you’ve done for me:
No great loss for you today;
170I shall make good; I shall repay.
It is no swan that you have saved,
No, your debtor is a maid;
No kite you’ve just shot through the gizzard,
But a cruel and evil wizard.
I’ll always have you in my mind,
Be anywhere for you to find;
Tell your mother not to weep –
Leave this place, lie down and sleep.’
And off it flew, the grateful swan.
180Tsarevich and Tsaritsa, long
With empty stomach, thought it best
Without ado to get some rest.
When he shook off the dreams of night,
The prince beheld a wondrous sight:
A city lay before his eyes;
The domes of shrines and monasteries
Shone above many a stately hall
Behind the battlemented wall.
He woke the queen; she marvelled too …
190Was that promise coming true?
‘It seems,’ said he, ‘my friend the swan
Is helping me.’ Mother and son
Approached the city. Through the gate
The two did not have long to wait:
A deafening peal of bells rang out,
The son was welcomed by a crowd;
Towards him fine-dressed figures rolled
In spacious carriages of gold;
The people hailed him in a ring,
200A holy choir began to sing.
With ceremony, on his head
The cap of majesty was set,
To be the city’s sovereign,
And with the blessing of the queen
He was to reign from that day on:
He would be known as Prince Guidon.
The wind was chasing, in its sport,
A little ship far out from port,
So that it seemed to dance and skip
210Upon the waves, the little ship.
The sailors gathered in a crowd,
And wonderstruck, they cried out loud;
On the bare island that they knew
A miracle had soared to view:
A new-built city, proud and tall,
A harbour with a stout sea-wall;
Cannon smoking on the quay
Bade the ship put in from sea.
The visitors took food and rest,
220A merchant was an honoured guest
For Prince Guidon. He asked them straight:
‘Where are you bound? And what’s your trade?’
They told him what they bought and sold:
‘We’ve traded over all the world,
And silver fox and sable fur
Are what rich buyers most prefer.
But now our time is nearly up,
This will be our final stop;
We’ll pass the island of Buyan
230East to the realm of Tsar Saltan.’
This reply made Prince Guidon:
‘I wish you, sirs, fair passage on
The seas and oceans to Saltan;
My greetings to the great Saltan.’
Prince Guidon, with heavy heart,
Watched the merchant guests depart,
And from the shore long kept his eyes on
The ship still faint on the horizon.
Then, on the billows of the sea,
240He saw the white swan floating; she
Greeted him: ‘Prince, my brave one – why
As gloomy as a cloudy sky?
What troubles you?’ The prince replied:
‘A longing – I am sorely tried –
It eats my heart: I see in dream
My father I have never seen.’
Thus the friendly swan’s reply:
‘That’s all? Well, would you care to fly,
And catch up with the merchants? Right ho!
250I’ll turn you into a mosquito.’
She flapped her wings with mighty sound
And beat the water all around;
Over Guidon it splashed, and so
The prince was soaked from head to toe.
But this was not an idle prank:
Into a tiny speck he shrank,
And off he flew with high-pitched whine,
It took him hardly any time
To catch the ship; he rubbed his back
260And settled down inside a crack.
Merrily the sea-wind blew
And merrily the ship sped too
Beyond the island of Buyan
Towards the realm of Tsar Saltan.
The country of the glorious Tsar
Was duly sighted from afar;
And when the merchants stepped ashore
The Tsar was waiting at his door.
He signalled them to come to him;
270Our tiny traveller followed them.
There on his throne sat Tsar Saltan
Before his court and everyone,
Upon his head a shining crown,
Upon his brow a heavy frown;
On either side the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha
Each sat bolt upright in her chair
And each face wore a rigid stare.
The Tsar now bade his guests be seated,
280And after they had all been greeted,
‘Have you been long,’ he asked, ‘at sea?
Where will your next landfall be?
What is it like where you have been?
Tell me what wonders you have seen.’
And this is what the merchants told:
‘We have sailed around the world;
In other lands life isn’t bad,
This wonder, though, made us most glad.
There was an island in the ocean,
290It had no quay, no population,
Steep-cliffed and barren utterly;
One oak on it there used to be;
Now there is a city there,
This city rises in the air
With gold-domed monasteries and churches,
A palace, gardens, towers and arches;
There lives the young and worthy Prince
Guidon; he sends his compliments.’
The Tsar was lost in wonder. ‘While
300I live,’ said he, ‘that splendid isle
I’ll surely visit, and anon
I’ll be the guest of Prince Guidon.’
Those two again, the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha,
They did not wish the Tsar to see
The wondrous island in the sea.
As if astonished, said the cook,
Giving the other two a look:
‘A city standing in the sea –
310What a curiosity!
But here’s a real wonder, sir.
In the forest there’s a fir;
Beneath that fir a squirrel squats,
Singing songs and gnawing nuts,
You never saw, though, nuts like those –
Where they come from no one knows,
Their shells are all of solid gold,
Their kernels of pure emerald.’
While Tsar Saltan was lost in wonder
320The insect raged and raged like thunder –
And bit his aunt in her right eye,
Which lost its sight immediately.
The cook turned deathly pale and swooned,
Servants and everyone around
Chased the insect, loudly shouted –
And then, triumphantly, they caught it:
‘Now we’ve got you, cursed creature,
You’ll trouble us no more – we’ll teach you!’
But through the window it was off
330And homeward hardly soon enough.
The prince was walking on the shore
Beside the dark blue sea once more
When on the billows of the sea
He saw the white swan swimming; she
Greeted him: ‘Prince, my brave one – why
As gloomy as a cloudy sky?
What ails you?’ And the prince replied:
‘A yearning gnaws me deep inside –
One wonder of all wonders known,
340I’d dearly like it for my own
Of all the things that ever were.
In the forest there’s a fir;
Beneath that fir a squirrel squats,
Singing songs and gnawing nuts,
You never saw, though, nuts like those –
Whether it’s true or not, who knows:
Their shells are said to be of gold,
Their kernels of pure emerald.’
Thus the answer of the swan:
350‘The story’s true, my Prince Guidon,
I know of it; do not be sad;
I’ll do you service, I’ll be glad.’
Home went the prince with cheerful heart.
Inside the spacious palace court,
Beneath a stately fir-tree, squats
A squirrel gnawing golden nuts,
Taking out an emerald
From each, collecting shells of gold,
Placing them neatly in a pile,
360Singing merrily the while
And in a pretty whistling tone:
I have an orchard all my own.
In high delight was Prince Guidon:
‘I’m deeply grateful, my dear Swan,
May God grant you fair-handedly
The happiness you give to me.’
And so that it might safely browse,
The little beast was built a house
Of crystal, with a guard, beside
370Whom always sat a trusted scribe
To keep a careful count: thus came
Profit to prince, to squirrel fame.
The wind was chasing, in its sport,
A little ship far out from port,
So that it seemed to dance and skip
Upon the waves, the little ship;
It reached the steep-cliffed isle, on which
Now stood a city proud and rich;
Cannon smoking on the quay
380Bade the ship put in from sea.
The visitors took food and rest,
A merchant was an honoured guest
For Prince Guidon. He asked them straight:
‘Where are you bound? And what’s your trade?’
They told him what they bought and sold:
‘We have sailed around the world;
We have been trading in fine horses,
Stallions from the Don – no losses
There. Our time is up now, though,
390For we have many leagues to go
Beyond this island of Buyan
On to the realm of Tsar Saltan.’
This reply made Prince Guidon:
‘I wish you, sirs, fair passage on
The seas and oceans to Saltan;
My greetings to the great Saltan.’
The merchants bade the prince farewell
And then, their thoughts on home, set sail.
The prince was by the sea once more –
400The swan came swimming to the shore.
With all his yearning soul astir
He instantly appealed to her …
The friendly creature wasn’t slow
To sprinkle him from head to toe:
This time he became a fly;
Between the ocean and the sky
He caught the ship; he rubbed his back
And settled down inside a crack.
Merrily the sea-wind blew
410And merrily the ship sped too,
Beyond the island of Buyan
Towards the realm of Tsar Saltan;
The country of the glorious Tsar
Was duly sighted from afar;
And when the merchants stepped ashore
The Tsar was waiting at his door.
He signalled them to come to him;
Our tiny traveller followed them.
There on his throne sat Tsar Saltan,
420Before his court and everyone,
Upon his head a shining crown,
Upon his brow a heavy frown.
The one-eyed cook and Babarikha
Sat together with the weaver,
Their evil toads’ eyes on the Tsar,
Who asked his guests: ‘Have you come far?
What is it like where you have been?
Tell me what wonders you have seen.’
And this is what the merchants told:
430‘We have sailed around the world;
In other lands life isn’t bad,
This wonder, though, made us most glad.
There is an island in the sea;
A city sprung from one lone tree
Stands there with its towers and arches,
Churches and monasteries and gardens,
In one of which a fir-tree grows
Over a little crystal house,
And there a squirrel lives – none tamer!
440And such a marvellous entertainer!
There that cheery squirrel squats,
Singing songs and gnawing nuts;
You never saw, though, nuts like those –
Where they come from no one knows:
Their shells are all of solid gold,
And kernels of pure emerald.
A guard is always on his beat,
And serves that squirrel’s every need.
And Prince Guidon’s chief treasurer
450He keeps strict count and does not err;
Coins of gold are minted fast,
Men salute while marching past,
Maidens hide in secret vaults
The gathered piles of emeralds:
This is an island for the rich
With palaces, in one of which
There lives the young and worthy Prince
Guidon; he sends his compliments.’
The Tsar was lost in wonder: ‘While
460I live,’ said he, ‘that splendid isle
I’ll surely visit, and anon
I’ll be the guest of Prince Guidon.’
Those two again, the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha,
They did not wish the Tsar to see
The wondrous island in the sea.
Grinning slyly, said the weaver:
‘Surely that’s no wonder – never!
A plump performing squirrel nibbles
470Emeralds and golden pebbles
And sorts them into tidy piles:
Where’s the wonder – truth or lies?
I’ll tell you of a real wonder.
Somewhere the ocean bursts asunder,
Froths and boils, begins to roar,
And crashes on the empty shore,
And from the thundering foam appear
In scaly chain-mail bright as fire
Three-and-thirty warriors bold,
480Out of legends told of old,
Young and handsome and defiant,
Each of them a mighty giant,
Closer-matched you never saw,
Under their leader Chernomor.
Now there you have a wonder – say,
For more than one year and a day.’
The guests were willing to believe her;
They wished no quarrel with the weaver.
While Tsar Saltan was lost in wonder
490Prince Guidon buzzed, buzzed in thunder
And fell upon his aunt’s left eye,
Which too was dimmed immediately.

What hue and cry! ‘Quick! Catch it! Catch it!’ –

‘Just you wait!’ – ‘Now! Squash it! Smash it!’

But through the window it was off
And homeward hardly soon enough.
The prince was walking on the shore
Beside the dark blue sea once more
When on the billows of the sea
500He saw the white swan swimming; she
Greeted him: ‘Prince, my brave one – why
As gloomy as a cloudy sky?
What troubles you?’ The prince replied:
‘A yearning gnaws me deep inside –
One wonder of all wonders known,
I’d dearly like to take it home.’
The swan: ‘What is it, then, this wonder?’
‘Somewhere the ocean bursts asunder,
Froths and boils, begins to roar,
510And crashes on the empty shore,
And from the thundering foam appear
In scaly chain-mail bright as fire
Three-and-thirty warriors bold,
Out of legends told of old,
Young and handsome and defiant,
Each of them a mighty giant,
Closer-matched you never saw,
Under their leader Chernomor.’
Thus the swan to Prince Guidon:
520‘So this your heart is set upon …
My dearest prince, do not be sad,
I know this wonder; I am glad:
Those noble warriors of the sea,
They are my brothers thirty-three.
Do not fret, and say no more,
Go home and wait for Chernomor.’
The prince went home, forgot his plight,
And from a battlemented height
Looked down; and all around, the ocean
530Was rising up in strange commotion;
It frothed and boiled, began to roar,
And left upon the empty shore
Three-and-thirty warriors bold,
Out of legends told of old,
Smartly marching two by two,
In scaly chain-mail shining new;
Their leader’s silver beard too shone
As he led them to the town.
The prince threw open wide his doors
540To greet his welcome visitors;
The people hastened to look on.
Thus spoke the leader to Guidon:
‘The swan has put us on patrol;
To guard your city is our role.
Every day, unfailingly,
We’ll leave the waters of the sea
And posted round your city-wall
Ensure that it will never fall.
We’ll meet again, now we must be
550Back at the bottom of the sea;
We can’t endure the air for long.’
And then the warriors were gone.
The wind was chasing, in its sport,
A little ship far out from port,
So that it seemed to dance and skip
Upon the waves, the little ship;
It reached the steep-cliffed isle on which
Now stood a city proud and rich;
Cannon smoking on the quay
560Bade the ship put in from sea.
The visitors took food and rest,
A merchant was an honoured guest
For Prince Guidon. He asked them straight:
‘Where are you bound? And what’s your trade?’
They told him what they bought and sold:
‘We have sailed around the world;
In silver and in gold we deal;
We also trade in Damask steel.
Our time is nearly up now, though,
570For we have many leagues to go
Beyond this island of Buyan
On to the realm of Tsar Saltan.’
This reply made Prince Guidon:
‘I wish you, sirs, fair passage on
The seas and oceans to Saltan;
My greetings to the great Saltan.’
The merchants bade the prince farewell
And then, their thoughts on home, set sail.
The prince was by the sea once more –
580The swan came swimming to the shore.
With all his yearning soul astir
He instantly appealed to her …
The friendly creature wasn’t slow
To sprinkle him from head to toe:
Once more he shrank immediately;
And he became a bumble-bee.
Loudly he buzzed, and off he flew;
He caught the ship without ado,
Made for the stern, then rubbed his back
590And settled down inside a crack.
Merrily the sea-wind blew
And merrily the ship sped too,
Beyond the island of Buyan
On to the realm of Tsar Saltan.
The country of the glorious Tsar
Was duly sighted from afar;
And when the merchants stepped ashore
The Tsar was waiting at his door.
He signalled them to come to him;
600Our tiny traveller followed them.
Before his court and everyone
The Tsar was seated on his throne,
Upon his head a shining crown,
Upon his brow a heavy frown.
And those two still, the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha
Sat, the three of them, beside
The Tsar and gazed at him, four-eyed.
Saltan made sure his guests were seated
610And were supplied with all they needed.
‘Have you been long,’ he asked, ‘at sea?
Where will your next landfall be?
What is it like where you have been?
Tell me what wonders you have seen.’
And this is what the merchants told:
‘We have sailed around the world;
In other lands life isn’t bad,
This wonder, though, made us most glad.
There is an island in the sea,
620A city sprung from one lone tree,
Where every day you see a wonder:
The ocean swells and bursts asunder,
Froths and boils, begins to roar,
It crashes on the empty shore –
And from the thundering foam appear
In scaly chain-mail bright as fire
Three-and-thirty warriors bold,
Out of legends told of old,
Young and handsome and defiant,
630Each of them a mighty giant,
Closer-matched you never saw.
The silver-bearded Chernomor
Leads them two by two in column
Out of the ocean, and they follow him
And round that island they patrol;
They perfectly perform their role –
Bolder, braver, trustier
Than any guards that ever were.
There lives the young and worthy Prince
640Guidon; he sends his compliments.’
The Tsar was lost in wonder: ‘While
I live,’ said he, ‘that splendid isle
I’ll surely visit, and anon
I’ll be the guest of Prince Guidon.’
The cook, however, and the weaver
Said nothing. Baba Babarikha
It was who spoke, and with a smirk:
‘That’s not, you know, how wonders work!
Warriors from the sea – how droll!
650And turning into a patrol!
Whether it’s true or false, it’s clear
There isn’t any wonder here.
Who will believe it? Very few.
Listen to me now. This is true:
There dwells a princess far from here,
No eye can take itself from her;
She puts in shade the light of day,
By night she makes the daylight stay;
Moonbeams shimmer in her hair,
660On her forehead shines a star;
With a peahen’s grace she walks,
You hear a brook flow when she talks.
This time I can vouch to you –
There is a wonder, I speak true.’
The guests, in such a peaceful harbour,
Would not dispute this with the baba.
While Tsar Saltan was lost in wonder
Prince Guidon raged, raged in thunder,
Sparing both the eyes, however,
670Of his excited grandmother;
He buzzed and circled round and round –
Plumb on her nose he settled down,
Our princely hero, stung her nose
And on that nose a swelling rose.
And once more, panic and alarm:
‘God spare us all from serious harm!
Fetch the guards! Quick! Catch it! Catch it!
Just you wait, you … Squash it! Smash it!’
But on the instant he was off
680And homeward hardly soon enough.
The prince was walking on the shore
Beside the dark blue sea once more
When on the billows of the sea
He saw the white swan swimming; she
Greeted him: ‘Prince, my brave one – why
As gloomy as a cloudy sky?
What troubles you?’ The prince replied:
‘A yearning gnaws me deep inside –
Everyone I see is wed;
690I am the only one unwed.’
‘Who is it who has won your heart?’
‘There is a princess, I have heard,
Who dwells in some land far from here;
No eye can take itself from her;
She puts in shade the light of day,
By night she makes the daylight stay;
Moonbeams shimmer in her hair,
On her forehead shines a star.
With a peahen’s grace she walks,
700You hear a brook flow when she talks …
Can all this be,’ the prince asked, ‘true?’
He burned to hear the white bird’s view …
The swan was silent, searched her head
In careful thought, and then she said:
‘Yes, I know of such a maiden.
But now a wife is not a mitten,
To be put on, removed and held
And then tucked back inside your belt.
Let me give you some advice:
710Do not decide this in a trice;
Be sure to think about it first,
And not be sorry afterwards.’
‘I’ve thought about it long and hard,’
Replied the prince, ‘the choice I’ve made;
Never, I swear, shall I regret
That choice of mine; I must be wed.’
The prince declared he’d never cease
His quest for the far-off princess,
He’d walk the mountains, plains and sands
720The length of three-times-thirty lands.
The swan politely listened. ‘Why
So far?’ she answered with a sigh.
‘Your wish will soon come true, you’ll see;
For that princess of yours – is me.’
And then she beat her wings and flew
High up above the watery blue
Until she came down on the land
Amongst some bushes near at hand.
She started, shook her feathers off,
730And stepped, a princess, from the fluff:
Moonbeams shimmered in her hair
And on her forehead shone a star;
With a peahen’s grace she walked,
One heard a brook flow when she talked.
The prince embraced the fair princess;
Her white breast to his own he pressed,
And straightway led her to his mother.
Kneeling, ‘Your Majesty – dear Mother!’
The son implored her. ‘See, my bride,
740And faithful daughter at your side.
We ask your blessing, may we live
Our life in harmony and love.’
On two bowed heads the mother shed
Her tears of grateful joy and said,
Beneath a holy image, ‘God
Will grant you, dear ones, his reward.’
Without ado the pair were wed,
A fruitful, happy life ahead.
The wind was chasing, in its sport,
750A little ship far out from port,
So that it seemed to dance and skip
Upon the waves, the little ship;
It reached the steep-cliffed isle, on which
Now stood a city proud and rich;
Cannon smoking on the quay
Bade the ship put in from sea.
The visitors took food and rest,
A merchant was an honoured guest
For Prince Guidon. He asked them straight:

760‘Where are you bound? And what’s your trade?’

They told him what they bought and sold:
‘We have sailed around the world,
A handsome profit we have made:
Contraband has been our trade.
Our home is in the east, and so
We still have many leagues to go
Beyond this island of Buyan
Back to the realm of Tsar Saltan.’
This reply made Prince Guidon:
770‘I wish you, sirs, fair passage on
The seas and oceans to Saltan;
But please remind your Tsar Saltan:
He promised he would visit us
And now he has forgotten us.
Our greetings to the great Saltan.’
The merchants sailed, but Prince Guidon
This time was content to bide
At home with his beloved bride.
Merrily the sea-wind blew
780And merrily the ship sped too,
Beyond the island of Buyan
Back to the realm of Tsar Saltan.
The country of the glorious Tsar
Was duly sighted from afar;
And when the merchants stepped ashore
The Tsar was waiting at his door.
From there he welcomed everyone,
And then he sat upon his throne,
While those two still, the cook and weaver
790And Widow Baba Babarikha
Sat, the three of them, beside
The Tsar and gazed at him, four-eyed.
Saltan made sure his guests were seated
And were supplied with all they needed.
‘Have you been long,’ he asked, ‘at sea?
Where will your next landfall be?
What is it like where you have been?
Tell me what wonders you have seen.’
And this is what the merchants told:
800‘We have sailed around the world,
In other lands life isn’t bad,
This wonder, though, made us most glad.
There is an island in the sea,
A city sprung from one lone tree
Stands there with its towers and arches,
Churches and monasteries and gardens,
In one of which a fir-tree grows
Over a little crystal house,
And there a squirrel lives – none tamer!
810And such a marvellous entertainer!
There that cheery squirrel squats,
Singing songs and gnawing nuts;
You never saw, though, nuts like those –
Where they come from no one knows:
The nutshells are of solid gold,
And kernels of pure emerald.
A guard is always on his beat
And serves that squirrel’s every need.
That isle contains another wonder:
820The ocean swells and bursts asunder,
Froths and boils, begins to roar,
Crashes on the empty shore,
And from the thundering foam appear
In scaly chain-mail bright as fire
Three-and-thirty warriors bold,
Out of legends told of old,
Young and handsome and defiant,
Each of them a mighty giant,
Closer-matched you never saw,
830Under their leader Chernomor;
Bolder, braver, trustier
Than any guards that ever were.
A wife the prince has, not from there –
No eye can take itself from her;
She puts in shade the light of day,
By night she makes the daylight stay;
Moonbeams shimmer in her hair,
On her forehead shines a star.
That isle is ruled by Prince Guidon,
840And he is praised by everyone;
He sends his friendly greetings – though,
We have to say, reproaches you:
You promised once to visit him
And now you have forgotten him.’
No moment longer could he wait,
The Tsar at once prepared his fleet.
Again those two, the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha
Tried with every kind of wile
850To head the Tsar off from that isle.
The Tsar, however, paid no heed;
He it was who took the lead;
This time he shouted, he was wild:
‘Who am I? Tsar am I or child?
I shall sail this minute’ – slammed
The palace door, and off he stamped.
Beneath a window, gazing on
The sea in silence sat Guidon:
It was silent, like a mirror,
860But showed the very slightest tremor;
For out upon the azure deep
Sailed Tsar Saltan with all his fleet:
Out of the blue from far away
His ships began to fill the bay.
Up from his seat leapt Prince Guidon,
And with a mighty shout he ran:
‘My own princess, my dearest mother!
Look over there! Here comes my father!’
The fleet came closer to the isle;
870Guidon looked through his spyglass, while
The Tsar stood up before the mast
And looked at them through his spyglass,
With him those two, the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha –
All of them agog to see
The wondrous city in the sea.
Cannon smoked along the quay,
Church bells rang in harmony;
Out stepped Guidon upon the shore
880To give his greeting to the Tsar,
Also to the cook and weaver
And Widow Baba Babarikha;
Into his land, without, thus far,
A single word, he led the Tsar.
They enter through the palace gate;
By shining shields their eyes are met,
By three-and-thirty warriors bold,
Out of legends told of old,
Young and handsome and defiant,
890Each of them a mighty giant,
Closer-matched you never saw,
Under their leader Chernomor.
And there beneath a stately tree
A squirrel sings a melody
And gnaws gold nuts; it takes from each
An emerald, filling many a pouch;
Discarded nutshells lie around
In golden masses on the ground.
The guests press on – what next to see?
900The princess comes before them – she
With moonbeams shimmering in her hair,
Upon her brow a shining star;
With a peahen’s grace she walks,
One hears a brook flow when she talks.
She leads the mother of Guidon;
In wonderment the Tsar looks on –
And thunderously his heart now beats:
Who is this he sees? It’s … it’s …
His scalding tears he cannot hide,
910Embracing wife and son and bride.
The moment was a fit occasion
For right and proper celebration –
From which those two, the cook and weaver
With Widow Baba Babarikha
Took flight down some deserted track –
But they were found and soon brought back,
Broke down in sobs, and one by one
Confessed to everything they’d done.
Overcome by joy, Saltan,
920Wishing the three of them no harm,
Had them sent home; then left the feast
And laid his merry head to rest.
I too enjoyed that mead and fare,
Though scarcely wet my whiskers there.
1831

The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish

This tale was written during the most productive of Pushkin’s autumns spent at his father’s estate of Boldino in the autumn of 1833. It takes its storyline from ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ by the Brothers Grimm, with significant changes. In the Grimms’ tale, the magic agent that grants the escalating wishes of the fisherman’s wife, covetous beyond her station, takes the unaesthetic form of a flounder (a prince in disguise); Pushkin makes it a golden fish – traditionally a symbol of wealth and success in Russian folk tales. In Pushkin’s tale the wife receives punishment (by ultimate return to her original situation) not only for her overweening ambition but also for treating her husband with marked cruelty in each new station she is initially granted.

In the autumn of 1833, Pushkin wrote two prose works dealing with the reign of Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), the story The Queen of Spades and his history of the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–5, and his skazka also has this empress in mind, satirising the costly ambitions that led her to undertake two wars (1768–74 and 1787–92) against Turkey with the aim of ruling over the Black Sea, and her ruthlessness in coming to the throne by having her husband Tsar Peter III murdered.

In this unrhymed skazka Pushkin contrives a three-stress anapaestic metre with the feel of folk verse, also used in the first of the lyric poems ‘Songs of Stenka Razin’ (1826) and most of the ‘Songs of the Western Slavs’ (1834), neither of these groups being represented in the present selection. The tale was first published in the widely circulated monthly Library for Reading in 1835.

On a shore of the dark blue sea

Lived an old man and his wife;

They had lived in their tumbledown hut

For all of thirty-three years.

The old man caught fish with his sweep-net,

The old woman sat spinning her yarn.

One day the old man cast his sweep-net –

Back it came bearing nothing but slime.

Once more he cast out his sweep-net –

10Back it came bearing nothing but weed.

A third time he cast out his sweep-net –

Back it came bearing one little fish,

No ordinary fish, but a golden one.

The little golden fish, how it begged!

In a human voice it begged him:

‘Put me back in the sea, good father!

I shall pay you a very fair ransom –

You may ask whatever you want.’

The old man was astounded and frightened:

20For thirty-three years he’d been fishing

And not heard of a talking fish.

He put it back in the sea

And gently spoke to it:

‘Golden fish, may God go with you!

I have no need of you;

You can swim wherever you wish

In the dark blue sea, golden fish.’

The old man went home to his wife

And described this wonder to her:

30‘I caught a little fish today,

Not an ordinary fish, but a golden one.

The little fish spoke in our language;

It begged to go back to the sea,

It offered to pay a high ransom,

Whatever it was I wished.

I didn’t dare take a ransom from it,

It went back in the dark blue sea.’

The old woman fairly flew at her husband:

‘You numbskull! Where are your brains?

40You didn’t dare take a ransom,

Dare ask for a brand-new washtub!

Our one is cracked all over!’

Back by the dark blue sea

The old man saw a ripple in the water.

He called to the little golden fish;

The fish swam up to him and asked:

‘What is your desire, good father?’

The old man bowed low, and answered:

‘O mighty little fish, forgive me;

50My old wife has been scolding me,

She will not leave me in peace;

You see, she wants a new washtub,

Our one is cracked all over.’

And the little golden fish replied:

‘Do not worry, for God shall be with you.

So be it, you shall have a new washtub.’

The old man went back to his wife,

And there was a brand-new washtub.

But worse than before his wife swore at him:

60‘You numbskull, you imbecile!

What is this you have got us – a washtub!

Where will a washtub get us?

Go back to the fish, you numbskull,

And ask it for a proper house.’

Back by the dark blue sea

(And the dark blue sea was restless)

The old man called to the fish;

And the golden fish swam to him and asked:

‘What is your desire, good father?’

70The old man bowed low, and answered:

‘O mighty little fish, forgive me,

My old wife has been scolding me dreadfully,

She won’t leave her old husband in peace:

It’s a proper house she wants now.’

And the little golden fish replied:

‘Do not worry, for God shall be with you;

So be it, a house you shall have.’

And the old man went back to his hovel –

But no trace of it could be seen;

80In its place stood a two-storeyed house,

With a chimney of whitewashed brick

And a patterned oak gate. At the window

The old woman sat cursing her husband:

‘You numbskull, you’ve mislaid your brains!

You’ve got us an ordinary house!

Now go to the golden fish;

I’ll not be a common peasant,

I want to be a lady of rank.’

Back by the dark blue sea

90(And the dark blue sea was troubled)

The old man called to the fish,

And the golden fish swam to him, and asked:

‘What is your desire, good father?’

The old man bowed low, and answered:

‘O mighty little fish, forgive me!

My wife is scolding worse than ever,

She will not leave me in peace:

She’ll not be a common peasant now,

She wants to be a lady of rank.’

100And the little golden fish replied:

‘Do not worry, for God shall be with you.’

The old man went back to his wife.

And what did he see? – A tall tower,

And his old wife standing in the porch;

She was wearing a rich-woven headdress

And a costly sable gown;

Her neck was laden with diamonds

And her fingers with jewelled gold rings,

On her feet were crimson shoes.

110About her ran hard-working servants,

Whom she beat and pulled by the hair.

Thus the old man spoke to his wife:

‘Greetings, most honourable ladyship!

Is your dear soul now contented?’

The old woman shouted abuse at him

And put him to work in the stables.

A week went by and another;

The old woman made even more fuss,

Sent her husband again to the fish:

120‘Go back to the golden fish:

I’ll not be just a lady of rank,

I want to be a reigning queen.’

The old man was astounded and terrified,

Tried to get her to change her mind:

‘Old woman, you must have gone mad!

You can’t walk, you can’t talk like a queen!

You’ll be the laughing stock of the land.’

The old woman threw a tantrum

And struck her old spouse on the cheek:

130‘You peasant! How dare you defy me?

I’m a person of noble class!

Off to the sea with you – or else,

This I swear, you’ll be sent there by force.’

The old man set off for the sea

(And the dark blue sea had grown darker).

He called to the little golden fish.

The fish swam up to him and asked:

‘What is your desire, good father?’

The old man bowed low and answered:

140‘O mighty little fish, forgive me!

My wife’s giving even more trouble:

She’ll not be just a lady of rank,

She wants to be a reigning queen.’

And the little golden fish replied:

‘Do not worry, for God shall be with you!

So be it, a queen she shall be.’

The old man returned to his wife.

What did he see? – A fine palace,

And his wife seated there at table,

150A powerful reigning queen;

She was tasting spicy gingerbread,

And being served by noble guests

With rare and precious wines;

Around her stood threatening guards

Holding hatchets over their shoulders.

The old man was filled with terror;

He bowed low at the old woman’s feet.

‘Greetings,’ said he, ‘mighty queen,

Now is your dear soul contented?’

160With not so much as a glance at him,

She ordered him out of her sight.

Nobles and courtiers ran up to him

And bundled the old man away.

At the doorway the guards surrounded him,

They’d have hacked him down with their hatchets.

Outside, the people jeered at him:

‘Serves you right, you bumpkin!

This will teach you a lesson:

You should sit in the sledge that belongs to you!’

170A week went by and another;
The old woman, beside herself now,
Sent her courtiers to fetch her husband,
And back to the palace they brought him.
And the old woman said to her husband:
‘Go back to the golden fish.
I’m tired of being just a queen,
I wish to be empress of the seas,
And live in my ocean home,
With the golden fish to serve me
180And be always at my command.’
The old man did not dare to object,
Not a word did he say to oppose her.
He went to the dark blue sea,
And the waters had risen in fury;

How they rushed, how they crashed, how they roared,

While the black storm thundered around them.
The old man called to the fish;
The fish swam up to him and asked:
‘What is your desire, good father?’
190The old man bowed low and answered:
‘O mighty little fish, forgive me!
What to do with the cursed old woman?
She’s tired of being just a queen,
She wants to be empress of the seas,
And live in her ocean home,
And have you, golden fish, to serve her
And be always at her command.’
The little golden fish said nothing
But just smacked its tail on the water
200And swam off in the dark blue sea.
The old man waited and waited,
He waited in vain for an answer,
In the end he went home to his wife –
And see, there was the hovel before him,
And there sat his wife in the doorway
With the tub that was cracked all over.
1833

The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions

This skazka is based partly on a synopsis Pushkin made of a folk tale told to him by his childhood nanny Arina Rodionovna, but his major source is the Grimms’ story ‘Snow White’. Pushkin pares and enhances the Grimms’ storyline. He limits the disguised evil stepmother’s attempts to kill Snow White to her single appearance with the poisoned apple and conceals (or considers it superfluous to reveal) her true identity; he omits the Grimms’ gruesome details of the stepmother’s death. As in his Russian source, the brothers are not dwarves but, like the hero of The Tale of Tsar Saltan, termed bogatyri, the warrior-champions of Russian folklore; Pushkin makes the prince the bridegroom at the outset, and gives him a name, Yelisey; he creates a small but striking role for the brothers’ brave house-dog; he adds the episode of Prince Yelisey’s search for his bride. The princess cleans and tidies up the empty house she enters instead of taking food and drink from each of the absent brothers’ table settings as in the Grimms’ tale. The brothers’ joint declaration of love for the princess and respectful acceptance of her prior betrothal are also Pushkin’s inventions.

Pushkin achieves a folk tale’s simplicity that abounds in diminutives – a feature of colloquial Russian. This translation removes the first stressed syllable of his rhymed trochaic tetrameter (the same original metre as in The Tale of Tsar Saltan and The Tale of the Golden Cockerel) to make an iambic trimeter and limits rhyme to every four lines (once in a while two lines apart) in order to lessen the constraints on due attention to other aspects of the poem.

The Dead Princess has attracted fewer translations than Pushkin’s other skazki, perhaps because the storyline is so familiar. A Russian critic, however, has considered it ‘the most lyrical and poetic of all Pushkin’s verse folk-tales […] containing passages […] that belong among the finest poetry that Pushkin ever wrote’ (S. M. Bondi in A. S. Pushkin, vol. 3, p. 529, note). He instances the account of the Princess’s ‘burial’ (lines 369–400) and the Wind’s reply to Prince Yelisey (lines 470–80).

Completion of this skazka dates from November 1833, a few days after that of The Bronze Horseman. It was first published the following year in the popular monthly Library for Reading.

A king went on a journey
And bade his queen farewell;
She sat down by the window
To watch for his return.
Alone she sat and waited
And watched the empty plain
From white dawn up to nightfall,
Her eyes began to burn;
No sign of her dear husband!
10All she could see was snow,
The whirling of the blizzard,
White upon all the world.
Nine months went by; her vigil
Was kept without a break.
And on the night of Christmas,
God gave the queen a girl.
Early that very morning
At last the king and sire,
Long days and nights awaited,
20Came back to her, his bride.
Setting eyes upon him
She sighed the deepest sigh,
She could not bear such rapture;
Towards morning mass she died.
Long grieved the king, a twelvemonth
Passed like an empty dream;
But he was only human,
And so once more he wed.
Truth to tell, the maiden
30Was every inch a queen,
Tall and fair and graceful;
She also had a head,
Though prone to obstinacy,
And pride, and jealousy.
Now in the young queen’s dowry
There was a looking-glass
With one especial virtue:
The power of human speech.
Only before this mirror
40Could she be at ease;
She’d primp and preen and banter,
The mirror she’d beseech:
‘Mirror, mirror, tell me,
And mind you speak the truth:
Am I not the fairest,
The fairest in the land?’
And then would come the answer:
‘No doubt of it, O Queen,
Indeed you are the fairest,
50The fairest in the land.’
The queen would give a chuckle,
And stretch and squeeze her shoulders,
And throw a glance slit-eyed,
And swiftly snap her fingers,
And turn with arms akimbo,
And view herself with pride.
Meanwhile, the king’s young daughter
Quietly grew and bloomed,
A fair-skinned, black-browed beauty,
60A kind and gentle soul.
A suitor came to see her,
The young Prince Yelisey.
The king gave his agreement;
Her dowry was in all
A hundred and forty towers
And seven market towns.
The day before the marriage,
Before the bridal ball,
The queen was at her mirror
70And spoke to it once more:
‘Am I not the fairest,
The fairest in the land?’
‘Indeed,’ the mirror answered,
‘Fair you are, O Queen;
The princess, though, is fairest,
The fairest in the land.’
Up leapt the queen in thunder,
She raged and waved her hands,
And swearing she’d destroy it
80She beat upon the glass …
‘Ah, you wicked mirror!
You’re lying out of spite.
How could you admire her –
I’ll teach that silly ass!
Look what she’s grown into!
No wonder she’s so pale:
Carrying her, her mother
Just sat and watched the snow!
How can she, I ask you,
90Be compared with me?
Find me in all our kingdom –
The world! – my equal; no,
Of course I am the fairest.’
The mirror on the wall:
‘The princess is the fairest,
The fairest one of all.’
The queen, with blackest hatred,
Flung the glass to the floor;
Her servant-girl, Chernavka,
100She ordered to contrive
A long walk with the princess
Into the deepest wood,
Then bind her to a fir-tree
For wolves to eat alive.
The Devil cannot answer
A woman in a rage.
Chernavka led the princess
To wildwood so far off
She feared the worst intentions.
110Seized by mortal dread,
‘Upon my life,’ she pleaded,
‘What am I guilty of?
If you do not kill me,
One day, when I am queen,
Be sure I shall reward you.’
The girl was fond of her;
She didn’t kill or bind her,
But bade her not be sad,
And saying, ‘God be with you,’
120She then abandoned her …
‘So where is our young beauty?’
The queen desired to know.
‘I left her in the forest,’
Chernavka made reply,
‘Bound firmly by the elbows,
She’ll not survive for long;
If some wild beast gets at her,
The sooner she will die.’
Now all the people knew it:
130The young princess was lost!
While the poor king was grieving,
The brave Prince Yelisey,
With many a fervent prayer,
In search of his princess,
His beautiful beloved,
Set forth upon his way.
Meanwhile, in deepest forest
His young bride walked till dawn;
On and on she wandered,
140And came upon a tower.
A dog ran towards her, barking,
But then began to play;
She walked straight through the gateway;
Silent was the hour.
With firm resolve, the princess,
Nuzzled by the dog,
Climbed the steps to the threshold
And grasped an iron ring:
Gently, the door swung open
150Into a bright-lit room –
Benches she sees before her
With homely covering,
Icons, an oaken table,
A tiled shelf on the stove.
The princess sees a household
Good-hearted people keep;
She’ll surely not be harmed here …
Yet not a soul in sight.
All round the rooms she hastened,
160Began to clean and sweep;
She lit a holy candle,
Made sure the stove was hot,
Then she climbed to a plank-bed
And soon was fast asleep.
Came the time for supper;
Tramping feet in the yard:
In stepped seven champions,
Red moustaches seven.
The eldest spoke: ‘A wonder!
170Everything bright and clean,
Everything tidy. Someone
Seems to expect us seven.
Who is it? Show yourself,
And be our true companion:
An old man? – Be our uncle;
A young man? – Be our brother;
If you’re an older woman –
Our pride and joy, our mother;
If you’re a lovely maiden –
180Our sister and none other.’
Now the princess appeared;
She paid her hosts due reverence,
Bowed to the waist and blushed,
And asked for their forgiveness
That she was in their house
Quite without invitation.
They knew from how she spoke
Their guest must be a princess;
They showed her to the ingle,
190Before her set a pie
And goblet on a salver.
But wine she would have none,
And of the pie she tasted
Only a piece of crust;
Rest was what she wanted
Now her day was done.
The seven led the maiden
Up to a light, bright room,
And there they left her sleeping
200Until next day, alone.
The days speed by, the princess
Lives quietly in the wood,
And of the seven champions
It seems she’ll never tire.
Before first light the seven
Go forth in happy throng
To try their skill and sinews;
On the grey duck they fire,
Or chase the mountain Cherkess
210Straying through the wood,
Or down a mounted Saracen,
Or chop a Tatar’s pate;
While for her part the princess
Keeps house; she cleans and cooks;
With no dispute or quarrel
Days pass at rapid rate.
To that good maid the brothers
All lost their hearts as one.
They came to her one morning,
220Into her room, all seven.
The eldest spoke: ‘Dear maiden,
Dear sister to us all,
We are in love with you,
Each brother of us seven
Would take you for his own:
How could that be, however?
And so, for mercy’s sake,
Decide between us: you
Be wife to one of us
230And to the rest a sister.
Why do you shake your head?
No one of us will do?’
‘Oh, faithful, honest brothers,
Brothers most dear to me,’
The princess gave her answer,
‘Were I to lie, I’d pray
To God that I might perish.
I am betrothed. To me,
You’re all so wise, so fearless,
240I love you equally,
I could not choose between you;
But I have given my heart,
I’ve made my choice for ever:
It is Prince Yelisey.’
The brothers listened, silent;
They stood and scratched their heads.
The eldest of them answered:
‘Forgive us,’ bowing low;
‘If that’s the case, you’ll never
250Hear more from us.’ ‘I’m not,’
Replied the princess, ‘angry,
I’m only saying no;
No fault of yours.’ Politely
The suitors left the room;
And so their lives continued
Without dissent or woe.
Meanwhile, the evil stepmother,
Remembering the princess,
Sulked and could not forgive her;
260The mirror roused her bile.
At last, returning to it,
She ceased her rage, sat down,
Began to preen before it,
And asked it with a smile:
‘Mirror, mirror, tell me,
And mind you speak the truth:
Am I not the fairest,
The fairest on all earth?’
‘Indeed,’ the mirror answered,
270‘Fair you are, O Queen,
But somewhere in the greenwood
A maiden keeps her hearth,
Quietly, with seven champions;
She is most fair on earth.’
The queen flew at Chernavka:
‘Up to your tricks again!
How did you dare deceive me!’
And brought her to confess.
An iron penal collar
280The cruel queen put on her,
And vowed that one must perish –
She or the princess.
One day, beside her window
The princess sat and spun,
Waiting for the champions.
She heard, close by the wall,
The house-dog fiercely barking;
She raised her eyes and saw
A holy beggarwoman
290Fend off the animal.
‘Wait there,’ she cried, ‘old woman!
I’ll chase the dog away
And bring you down a morsel.’
The holy woman: ‘Child!
That cursed dog half killed me,
That savage beast of yours –
Come down here and help me!
I’ve never seen so wild!’
The princess fetched her something,
300She’d hardly left the stair –
The dog came swiftly at her,
Barking as if to keep
Its mistress from the stranger,
Fierce as a forest bear
Leapt at the holy woman.
‘He’s been disturbed from sleep,’
The princess said, ‘catch this now!’
A loaf flew through the air;
The little old woman caught it –
310‘Thank you dear,’ she cried,
‘God bless you for your kindness;
And this for you now – catch!’
A fresh and juicy pippin,
A golden one, she shied
To the princess on the stairway …
How the dog leapt and whined …
But, hands outstretched, the princess
Caught it neat and clean.
‘When you’re bored, my darling,
320Just eat that fruit, and say
Your grace …’ The little old woman
Bowed, and was no more seen …
Up the stairs with the princess,
Looking in her face,
The dog ran, whined its heart out,
And growled, as if to say:
‘You mustn’t touch that apple!’
The princess smiled at him,
Stroked him, and asked him gently:
330‘What’s up with you today?’ –
Then went into her chamber
And quietly shut the door,
To spin before the window
And see the brothers in,
Always eyeing the apple
So ripe and rich with juice,
So pure and fresh and fragrant,
With such a golden skin
It seemed to ooze with honey!
340Inside she saw the pips …
She tried to wait till supper,
But she could wait no more;
She raised the golden apple
Up to her scarlet lips,
And took a stealthy nibble …
A piece went down her throat …
At once the poor thing, breathless,
Grows faint, and sways and slips,
Her pure white hands fall lifeless
350And drop the golden fruit,
She falls beneath the icons
And upwards roll her eyes;
Her head upon a wall-bench,
Motionless she lies …
Just then the seven brothers
Returned in merry throng,
Fresh from some bold adventure.
Towards them, head stretched high,
The dog came howling, led them
360Home to the tower. ‘For sure,’
The brothers cried, ‘misfortune
Awaits us here!’ Inside
They hastened – woe! Next moment
The dog rushed in and snatched
The apple – barking, snarling,
He gulped it down. And more
He never breathed: that apple
Was poisoned to the core.
Before the lifeless princess
370The seven in their grief
Spoke a holy prayer,
And stood with heads hung deep.
They raised her up and dressed her
For burial – but paused,
In doubt if they should do so.
As on the breast of sleep
She lay, so fresh and peaceful
It seemed as if she breathed.
Three days the brothers waited;
380The princess did not wake.
Done with the doleful ritual,
The body of the maid
They laid in a crystal coffin,
And then set forth to take
Her corpse at hour of midnight
To a far-off mountain cave,
Where they affixed the coffin
To six stout pillars, girt
With six stout chains of iron,
390And round it built a grille;
And there they paid their sister
Their last respects on earth.
‘Sleep in your grave,’ – the eldest –
‘On earth your beauty fell
All too soon to evil;
Heaven receive your soul.
With all our hearts we loved you,
And kept you for your love –
But you belonged to no man,
400The grave now has you whole.’
The wicked queen, that morning,
Eager to hear good news,
Went to take her mirror
In secret from the wall.
‘Now am I not the fairest,
The fairest one of all?’
Asked she, and came the answer:
‘No doubt of it, O Queen,
Indeed you are the fairest,
410The fairest one of all.’
Meanwhile, ever seeking
His dear-beloved bride,
Round the world and weeping
Rode Prince Yelisey.
But always those he questioned
Were hard put for reply;
They answered him with laughter
Or simply turned away.
At last he put his question
420To the glorious golden Sun:
‘Dear Sun! All year you wander
About the skies, you bring
Warm spring to end the winter,
You see all humankind.
You won’t refuse to help me? –
Have you, while journeying,
Seen a fair young princess?
I’m her betrothed.’ ‘Dear friend,’
The golden Sun gave answer,
430‘I have not … no. I fear
She’ll be no longer living.
Although, perhaps, the Moon,
My neighbour, may have met her,
Or seen some sign of her.’
And so the Prince, in torment,
Waited for the night.
And when the Moon had risen,
He swiftly put his case:
‘O Moon, my dear companion,
440Shining heavenly horn!
You get up in the darkness,
Bright-eyed and round of face;
All the stars admire you,
They love to see you rise.
You won’t refuse to help me? –
Have you, in your journeys,
Seen a fair young princess?
I’m her betrothed.’ ‘My friend,’
The shining Moon gave answer,
450‘I only watch in earnest
When my turn comes round –
I might have missed the princess,
No princess have I seen.’
The king’s son in reply:
‘My bride is lost for ever!’
The Moon: ‘No, wait; perhaps
The Wind has seen her. Ask him.
Do not be sad – goodbye.’
Prince Yelisey, undaunted,
460Sped on to ask the Wind:
‘Wind, you are strong and mighty,
You chase the cloudy flocks,
You stir the dark blue ocean,
And blow through all the world,
You fear no higher power,
But only bow to God’s.
You won’t refuse to help me? –
Have you, in your journeys,
Seen a fair young princess?
470I’m her betrothed.’ ‘Well now,’
The wild Wind spoke in answer,
‘I know a quiet stream,
A craggy peak beyond it,
A cavern deep below,
And in that dismal cavern
A crystal coffin hangs
On chains from six stout pillars.
There, in that mountainside
Which carries no man’s footprint,
480You will find your bride.’
Onward the wild Wind hastened.
Sobbing bitterly,
Prince Yelisey pressed forward
To that deserted place
To see his heart’s beloved
One last time. He saw
A barren land before him;
To that steep mountain-face
And that deep cavern’s entrance
490He quickly made his way.
There in the dismal darkness
A crystal coffin hangs,
And in that crystal coffin
His princess lies at peace.
Upon his dear bride’s coffin
In grief he beats and bangs.
The coffin cracks. The maid
Immediately awakens.
Amazed, she looks about:
500‘How long have I been sleeping?’
She sighs a long deep sigh,
And from the hanging coffin
Carefully climbs down …
Ah! Both of them are weeping.
By the hand he takes her
And leads her to the light;
Happily conversing,
Homeward they make their way;
‘Safe and sound our princess!’
510The trumpeters convey.
Meanwhile, the evil stepmother
Idly sat at home,
Talking to the mirror
That hung upon the wall:
‘Am I not the fairest,
The fairest one of all?’
And this she heard for answer:
‘Yes, fair you are, O Queen,
The princess, though, is fairest,
520The fairest one of all.’
Up leapt the wicked stepmother,
She smashed the glass to bits,
And stamping to the doorway –
She met the young princess.
Sharp pangs ran through and through her,
She died of her distress.
The moment she was buried
The marriage was prepared,
And with his heart’s intended
530Prince Yelisey was wed.
There followed celebration
Unknown before to man;
I tasted mead and ale there,
With whiskers scarcely wet.
1833

The Tale of the Golden Cockerel

Pushkin’s last skazka was written in autumn 1834, the beginning of the humiliating final period of his life. Chained for most of the time to the capital when he wanted to write in the country, subjected to constant police spying, he was thoroughly disenchanted with Tsar Nicholas, who had broken his undertaking to be his personal censor.

This most personally loaded of Pushkin’s skazki is written detachedly, almost without descriptive detail, with light irony and slight archaisms among popular turns of phrase. The condensed language makes its gait slower and weightier than that of the other two rhymed skazki in the present selection, Tsar Saltan and The Dead Princess and the Seven Champions, in the same metre (Pushkin’s trochaic tetrameter, retained in translation only in the case of The Tale of the Golden Cockerel). In the ludicrous figure of Tsar Dadon we see a caricature of not only Nicholas I but possibly also the other two tsars of whom Pushkin had had personal experience – Paul I and Alexander I. The wise eunuch-astrologer and his fate might be taken as Pushkin’s warning to himself not to go too far with tsars (see note to line 188, and for more detail about this poem see Introduction under ‘Fairy Tales’).

In a sketch that Pushkin made on the cover of the fair copy of The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, the American scholar Sona Hoisington sees indication of an astrologer–cockerel–Pushkin nexus. Facing the bust of Tsar Dadon is an ambiguous coxcombed grotesque – presumably representing the astrologer – with ‘phallic-like features who appears to be making an obscene gesture at Dadon’. Pushkin refers sardonically in correspondence of this time to his role as ‘court jester’, and this might be read in the depiction, in which, further, ‘the strong sexual overtones associated in the poem with the cockerel are […] transferred to the astrologer’. Hoisington suggests that the cockerel might be taken as a symbol of Pushkin’s masculinity in a creative sense, ‘that part of himself which he felt the tsar in real life had rendered impotent’, observing that when the astrologer speaks or acts on his own account, he is called ‘the wise man’, but when he is the object of the tsar’s perception he is called ‘the eunuch’ (Hoisington, pp. 25–33, from which quotations here are taken).

This tale was first published in 1835 in the Library for Reading, with lines 58 and 209–10 (in this translation) removed by the censor. The full text with these lines restored appeared in St Petersburg in 1869 in the second volume of a second edition of Annenkov.

Somewhere in the Thrice-Ninth Clime
In the Thrice-Eleventh Time
Reigned the glorious Tsar Dadon.
Fearsome from first boyhood on,
He would unrelentingly
Cause offence and injury;
When, however, he grew old,
His campaigns were not so bold,
He desired a rest from war.
10Then his neighbours by the score
Shook the tsar from his repose,
Dealt him many fearful blows.
Every outpost sent alarms;
Men in thousands under arms
He was forced to keep on hand
Guarding his invaded land.
Generals did what they could do;
Hopeless, they were far too few.
Danger from the south they guessed –
20In came raiders from the east;
Saved from one calamity –
Evil visitors by sea.
Tears of rage shed Tsar Dadon,
Sleepless nights went on and on.
What a life! And what despair!
Seeking guidance everywhere,
One astrologer the monarch
Chose from his wise men, a eunuch;
Sent for him by messenger.
30When the wise astrologer
Came before Dadon, he pulled
From his bag a cock of gold.
Boldly he addressed his sire:
‘Set this cockerel on a spire;
There he’ll keep good watch for you,
This my golden bird and true:
When he sees it’s quiet all round
He will sit without a sound;
But should ever foe be spied
40Creeping up on any side,
Threat of any dangerous course
From some unexpected source –
Then my golden bird will rise,
Raise his comb toward the skies,
Ruffle up his plumes and crow;
He will turn towards the foe.’
Tsar Dadon, at last consoled,
Promised quantities of gold.
‘For the service you have done,’
50To the eunuch glad Dadon,
‘Whatsoever is your will
As my own I shall fulfil.’
So the cock with faithful eye
Watched the frontiers from on high.
Danger spied, he’d stir and shuffle,
Face the foe – cry, plumes a-ruffle:
‘Now, sire – cock-a-doodle-do!
What an easy life for you!’
And the neighbours of Dadon,
60Soundly beaten one by one,
Once more held the tsar in awe:
By and by they gave up war.
Two years passed; without a sound
Sat the cockerel; calm all round.
Then one day a mighty rumpus
Roused the ruler from his slumbers.
‘Father of the people! Save us!’
One of his best generals quavers.
‘Sire! Wake up! Calamity!’
70‘What d’you want, good man, of me?
What calamity?’ Dadon
Answers slowly with a yawn.
‘Listen, sire – the cock is crowing:
In the city fear is growing.’
To the window! Facing east,
See! the cockerel swells its breast.
‘Warriors – no time to waste!
Every man to horse! Make haste!’
Eastwards with his elder son
80Moves the army of Dadon.
Now the cockerel’s cries have ceased;
Peace; the tsar retires to rest.
Seven days and not a word
From his army to be heard;
Was there, was there not, a battle?
No word ever reached the capital.
Once again the cockerel crows.
Off a second army goes;
Now his younger son Dadon
90Sends to save the elder one.
Soon the cockerel crows no more.
No word back, just as before!
Seven days again go past,
All the city is aghast.
Once again the cockerel crows;
Off Dadon’s third army goes:
Praying to heaven for the best,
This one he leads toward the east.
Night and day his men of war
100Marched till they could march no more:
Not a sign of battle found,
Bivouac or burial-mound.
Tsar Dadon, in puzzlement
As to what this mystery meant,
Passed through uplands near the sky.
Seven days again went by,
And upon the mountainside –
See – a silken tent is spied.
All is silent, all serene;
110Close by, down a deep ravine
Lie the armies he has sent.
Tsar Dadon draws near the tent …
Horror! Both his sons lie dead,
Armourless, with naked head,
Plunged in each the other’s sword.
Back and forth upon the sward,
On the trampled bloody grass
Their abandoned horses pass …
Wailed the tsar: ‘My sons – my sons!
120Our two falcons both at once
Fallen to the snare! Oh woe!
Now my hour has come, I know.’
All lamented for Dadon,
Valleys groaned with heavy groan
And the mountain’s heart was rent.
Suddenly the silken tent
Opened wide its flaps, and ah! –
Slowly, softly toward the tsar
Walked a maiden like the dawn,
130Walked the Queen of Shamakhan.
As in sun the bird of shade
He was mute before the maid;
Gazing long upon her eyes
He forgot each son’s demise.
She with bow and smiling face
Led him to her resting-place,
Set before him fare untold,
Bade him eat all he could hold,
Then lay down his weary head
140On a rich-brocaded bed.
Seven days passed by again;
Willing slave in her domain,
With the maiden queen Dadon,
Charmed, in rapture, feasted on.
Then the tsar, so long delayed,
With his warriors and the maid
Set off on his journey home
By the route that he had come.
All the way before him flew
150Rumour true and not so true.
From the town gates with a shout
All the people hurried out,
Hailed the chariot from afar –
Ran behind the queen and tsar;
All were greeted by Dadon …
Now he sees amidst the throng,
In the wise man’s hat and tunic,
All swan-white, his friend the eunuch.
‘Father! What have you to say?
160Closer … What’s your business, pray?’
Thus the wise man to the tsar:
‘Let us clear accounts now, sire.
Long ago you promised me,
For my services in fee
Whatsoever was my will
As your own you would fulfil.
Give me therefore, sire, the queen,
Give me the Shamàkhan queen.’
Answered Tsar Dadon in thunder:
170‘Are these ears my own? – I wonder,
Has the Devil seized your wits?
So, I promised … It befits
Age and wisdom to maintain
Limits. You – to ask the queen?
Don’t you know, then, who I am?
Ask for gold, a noble name,
Horses from the royal stud,
Half my kingdom if you would!’
‘No, sire, none of these – the queen,
180Give me the Shamàkhan queen,’
Said the wise man to the tsar.
‘Devil take you! You, I swear,’
Spat the tsar, ‘will never win her.
You torment yourself, you sinner –
Off, while you possess your soul!
Take away this doddering fool!’
Still the old man would persist;
Best with some though not insist –
Prompt the rod upon his brow:
190Down, but this time not to bow,
Dead he dropped. – The people shuddered …
No lament the maiden uttered:
‘Ha-ha-ha!’ and ‘He-he-he!’
Unafraid of sin was she.
Tsar Dadon, alarmed the while,
Turned on her a tender smile.
On he drove towards the town …
Came a gentle ringing: down –
Full in view of all the people –
200Flew the cockerel from its steeple,
Met the chariot as it sped,
Perched upon the tsar’s bare head,
Pecked it, plumes a-ruffle, flew
Up and off into the blue …
On the instant Tsar Dadon
Fell – and perished with one groan.
Wholly vanished was the queen,
Quite as if she’d never been.
This our tale, though far from truth,
210Holds a lesson for our youth.
1834

Abbreviations

Abbreviated references are made to the following in the Notes, in the notes accompanying the Introduction and in the introductions to the narrative poems and fairy tales:

Annenkov

P. V. Annenkov (ed.), Sochineniya Pushkina [Works of Pushkin], ‘with materials for his biography, a portrait, and reproductions of autographs and drawings’, 7 vols (St Petersburg: published under the name of P. V. Annenkov, 1855–7)

Arndt | Walter Arndt (ed. and tr.), Alexander Pushkin: Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry (Dana Point, CA: Ardis, 1984)

A. S. Pushkin

A. S. Pushkin, Sobraniye sochineniy v desyati tomakh [Collected Works in Ten Volumes], ed. D. D. Blagoy et al. (Moscow: State Publishing House of Literature, 1959–62), vol. 1 (Lyric Poems, 1814–22), vol. 2 (Lyric Poems, 1823–36), vol. 3 (Narrative Poems and Fairy Tales), vol. 9 (Letters, 1815–30) and vol. 10 (Letters, 1831–7)

Basker

Michael Basker (ed.), A. S. Pushkin: The Bronze Horseman, with an introduction and notes (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000) and including the original text edited by N. V. Izmailov (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978)

Bayley | John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971)

Bethea

David M. Bethea, ‘“Secular Power”: An Introduction to Pushkin’s “Mirskaia Vlast”’, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Series, no. 15 (1999)

Binyon | T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002)
Briggs | A. D. P. Briggs, Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998), chapter 5

Gillespie

Alyssa Dinega Gillespie, ‘Sidestepping Silence, Ventriloquizing Death: A Reconsideration of Pushkin’s Stone Island Cycle’, Pushkin Review, vol. 6–7 (2003–4), pp. 39–83; quotations from this source here slightly emended and expanded for greater clarity, with the author’s permission

Gorodetsky | B. P. Gorodetsky, Lirika Pushkina [Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry] (Moscow and Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962)
Herzen | Alexander Herzen, Polyarnaya zvezda [Pole Star] (London: 1855 and 1856)

Hoisington

Sona Hoisington, ‘Pushkin’s “Golden Cockerel”: A Critical Re-examination’, in The Golden Age of Russian Literature and Thought, ed. Derek Offord (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)

Kahn | Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Ketchian

Sonia I. Ketchian, ‘For Two Centuries We Have Cherished – Alexander Pushkin’, in A. D. P. Briggs (ed.), Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration of Russia’s Best-Loved Writer (London: Hazar Publishing, 1999)

Lednicki

W. Lednicki, Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’: The Story of a Masterpiece (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955)

Lotman

Yury Lotman, quoted in Boris Gasparov, ‘The Apocalyptic Theme in Pushkin’s Count Nulin’, in Peter Alberg Jensen and Barbara Lönqvist et al. (eds), Text and Context: Essays to Honor Nils Åke Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1987)

Nepomnyashchy

Valentin Nepomnyashchy, ‘A Few Words about the Tale [of the Golden Cockerel]’, Soviet Literature, no. 1 (1987), pp. 115–19

Simmons | Ernest J. Simmons, Pushkin (New York: Vintage Books, 1964)

Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry, tr. Angela Livingstone (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 1992)

Vatsuro and Fomichev

V. E. Vatsuro and S. A. Fomichev (eds), Pushkin v prizhiznennoy kritike [Pushkin in Lifetime Critical Responses], vol. 1 (1820–27) (St Petersburg: State Pushkin Theatre Centre, 1996)

Vitale | Serena Vitale, Pushkin’s Button, tr. Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Wachtel | Michael Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826–1836 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011)
Wolff | Tatiana Wolff (ed. and tr.), Pushkin on Literature, revised edition (London: Athlone Press, 1986)

Wood

Antony Wood, ‘Reading the Meter: Translating Two Lyric Poems by Pushkin’, Cardinal Points Literary Journal, vol. 7 (2017), pp. 202–5

Zhukovsky

Vasily Zhukovsky (ed.), collected edition of reprinted published works of Pushkin in eight volumes (St Petersburg: 1838), plus three supplementary volumes containing unpublished work (St Petersburg: 1841)

Glossary of Metrical Terms

The following terms are used in the Introduction, ‘Translating Pushkin’, and introductions and notes to the poems.

alexandrine line of verse consisting of six feet, usually iambic in Russian and English; in Russian often in rhymed couplets
anapaestic syllabic sequence of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one
caesura pause in the middle of a line of verse, usually marking a break in sense or phraseology
elision suppression of a sound, syllable or letter, commonly a final e, to keep scansion in verse
enjambement running over of the sense from one line to the next without punctuation
feminine/masculine rhyme rhyme ending with an unstressed syllable (feminine) or a stressed syllable (masculine)

foot (feet) unit(s) of verse consisting of two or three syllables of a given stress pattern
hemistich half a line of verse
hexameter line consisting of six feet
iambic syllabic sequence of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable
inversion reversion of stress pattern in a foot while otherwise keeping scansion
ottava rima stanza of eight lines rhyming abababcc
pentameter line of verse consisting of five feet
reversed stress see inversion
ring rhyme rhyme scheme abba
tetrameter line consisting of four feet
trimeter line consisting of three feet
trochaic syllabic sequence of a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable

Notes

In these notes, differences from the metre of the original in translation are indicated; absence of comment indicates that the original metre is kept, with certain freedoms traditional in English verse (see ‘Translating Pushkin’). Pushkin’s verse apart from blank verse always has full rhymes; where these are translated in this book by half-rhymes, near-rhymes and rhymes in alternate lines only, or the rhyme scheme differs from that of the original, this has not been annotated. See the glossary on p. 227 for an explanation of terms regarding metre and rhyme used in this book.

Poems are arranged in chronological order following the exact date of composition, as far as can be ascertained, within the year indicated. Where occasionally a poem was composed over a longer period, only the year of completion is given. Transliteration of Russian names and words broadly adopts the British Standard system. Syllabic stress is indicated as necessary.

First publication details of poems published in Pushkin’s lifetime are not regularly given in these notes. For the third or so of those here translated that were posthumously published, only first publication dates are given, with full identification of only the four most important sources – Vasily Zhukovsky’s editions of 1838 and 1841; P. V. Annenkov’s of 1855–7, the first comprehensive edition of Pushkin; and the Russian émigré Alexander Herzen’s almanac Polyarnaya zvezda (Pole Star), published in London in 1855 and 1856 – and in some cases special mention of locations of publication outside Russia.

Translations of quoted material are by the present translator except where otherwise stated. For abbreviated references, see Abbreviations, p. 223.

I
LYRIC POEMS

St Petersburg, 1814–20

To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff (1814)

Pushkin wrote this poem, which takes the form of a madrigal, at the age of about fifteen; it is taken to be addressed to the married sister of a school friend. Two centuries previously, under the first Romanov, Mikhail I (r. 1613–45), snuff-taking had been punishable in Russia by removal of the nose, and even when the practice later became fashionable, this draconian measure could have lingered in the folk memory in Pushkin’s time.

The original varies hexameter with tetrameter, and exceptionally trimeter, with free rhyming. First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

5 Clementina: Original Klimena; a name of decorously chosen Classical origin.

The Rose (1815)

Written at the age of sixteen at the Russian and Latin teacher’s invitation to a Lycée class to write a poem on the theme after an early end to the lesson.

To Baroness M. A. Delvig (1815)

Written during a holiday spent at Tsarskoye Selo over Christmas 1815 at the house of the family of Pushkin’s friend the future poet and literary journalist Anton Delvig. The addressee was Delvig’s sister Mariya, to whom Pushkin addressed a second poem (‘To Masha’) the following year, set as a song which became popular in the Lycée community.

First published in Annenkov, 1857.

23 Hymen: God of marriage in Greek mythology.

To Princess V. M. Volkonskaya (1816)

Written at the age of seventeen during Pushkin’s penultimate year at the Lycée. The original is in French: ‘On peut très bien, mademoiselle, / Vous prendre pour une maquerelle, / Ou pour une vieille guenon, / Mais pour une grâce, oh, mon Dieu, non.’

This epigram is mock-addressed to a court lady Pushkin bumped into one dark evening running along a palace corridor which connected with the Lycée, mistaking her for her pretty maid and kissing her. Obliged to send a letter of apology to the princess, Pushkin secretly wrote these four lines. According to a school friend’s memoir, Tsar Alexander, discussing the incident with Pushkin’s headmaster, commented sotto voce that the old woman had probably been delighted by the young man’s mistake.

First published in 1871.

The Singer (1816)

One of the ‘melancholy elegies’ Pushkin wrote in 1816 at the Lycée in the spirit of early nineteenth-century French models. It attracted several composers in due course, including Tchaikovsky, who drew upon it for the words of the duet which the Larin sisters practise at the beginning of the opera Eugene Onegin.

The original is in stanzas of iambic pentameters ending in a two-stress line. The rhyme scheme in the translation (as far as it is recognisable) is Pushkin’s.

5, 10 and 15 Ah, did you hear him? […] Ah, did you see him? […] Ah, did you sigh for him?: Pushkin’s sound pattern is central in this poem. The pervasive melting palatised l sounds, notably in the opening words (‘Slykhali l’ vy …’), and their repetition in the refrain of each stanza, are produced naturally in Russian by past-tense endings and the interrogative particle.

The Window (1816)

Pushkin has fun with the melancholy elegy genre. The original is in iambic tetrameters throughout. First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

Liberty: An Ode (1817)

This poem, written at the age of eighteen a few months after finishing school, was widely circulated in manuscript with other poems of the period by Pushkin; its title gave rise to the unexamined belief that it was subversive and opposed autocracy, and it was one of the poems that caused Pushkin to be exiled. Like ‘The Village’, however, a plea for the abolition of serfdom written some eighteen months later, it is actually supportive of the monarchy. Pushkin began to write it in his friends the Turgenev brothers’ apartment overlooking the grim Mikhaylovsky Castle where the unbalanced cruelty of Tsar Alexander I’s father, Paul I, had led to his assassination in a palace revolution in 1801. Someone suggested this gloomy sight as a subject for a poem. Pushkin threw himself on to a table at the window and began to write, completing the poem at home at night on the same day.

The original is in iambic tetrameter rhyming ababcddc throughout. First published in Herzen, 1856.

1 Cytherean muse: Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, said to have landed on the island of Cythera after being born in the sea and thus often referred to as ‘the Cytherean’ in Classical texts.

10 that immortal Gaul: Pushkin may have had in mind Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836), author of the words and music of ‘La Marseillaise’, or André Chénier (1762–94), passionately imitated in the poem titled by his name (1825) – not in this selection – which became wrongly associated with the Decembrist uprising and nearly resulted in serious trouble for Pushkin.

46–54 O martyr of the Terror […] Watch as the vile axe falls: On the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793.

55 the evil purple: Pushkin annotated these words ‘Napoleon’ in his manuscript, and the following stanza continues to refer to Napoleon.

73 Clio: The Greek muse of history.

76 Caligula’s last hour: The cruel and insane Roman emperor Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula (Latin: ‘little boot’), was assassinated in AD 41.

77 with their ribboned honours: The assassins of the unbalanced Paul I in the palace revolution of 1801 were senior army officers.

88 The anointed miscreant dies: After the word ‘dies’ in one of his draft manuscripts, Pushkin sketched the face of Paul I.

89–96 Learn then […] throne secure: In a manuscript copy of this poem, Pushkin has put a concluding flourish after the last line of the penultimate stanza, and the final stanza is written to one side in the hand of A. I. Turgenev. This might suggest that Pushkin saw some discrepancy between the visceral hatred of a specific autocrat (Napoleon) contained in lines 57–64 and the markedly different tone of liberal constitutionalism in the final stanza, more expressive of the proto-Decembrist sentiments of the Turgenev circle in which Pushkin moved after finishing school.

To Chaadayev (1818)

Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadayev (1794–1856) was a profound and daring liberal thinker who shook Russia with his Lettres philosophiques (1827–31), a radical critique of Russian historical evolution widely read in manuscript. He was a close friend of Pushkin in his immediate post-Lycée period, turning him towards serious thought for the first time. This is one of the anti-autocracy poems by Pushkin that achieved wide unofficial circulation throughout Russia and caused his banishment.

First published in Russia in truncated form without Pushkin’s permission in 1829 (with the last five lines cut and ‘liberty’ in line 13 changed to ‘hope’). The whole poem first found uncensored publication in Herzen, 1856.

O. Masson (1819)

First published in Annenkov, 1857.

A Good Revel (1819)

Olga Masson, the subject of the previous poem, comes into a discarded continuation of this poem written in the same year.

The original metre is trochaic throughout.

Renaissance (1819)

The exhibition of Raphael’s newly restored Madonna with Beardless St Joseph (1506) in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, at the beginning of the nineteenth century occasioned a number of copies by worthless painters. Shostakovich used this poem as the first of his four Pushkin settings, opus 46a, written soon after Stalin/Pravda’s annihilating attack on his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936; the song is quoted in the finale of his Fifth Symphony (the whole work being tagged, with self-preservatory irony, ‘A Reply to Just Criticism’).

You and I (1820)

Pushkin had become disenchanted with Alexander I for his failure to bring about any of the liberal reforms he had promised. The tsar read one poem he wrote around this time, however, with warm approval, ‘The Village’, a plea for the abolition of serfdom which it was vainly hoped the tsar might bring about by benevolent exercise of his autocratic power (first published in full in Herzen, 1856).

The present poem was first published in its entirety in émigré anthologies in Berlin and London, both in 1861.

24 Count Khvostòv: A talentless but amiable poet (1757–1835) whom Pushkin never ceased to make fun of (see, for example, The Bronze Horseman, Part Two, line 322).

To Yuryev (1820)

One of two poems addressed to Pushkin’s friend Fyodor Filipovich Yuryev, a fellow member of the Green Lamp (see Introduction under ‘Life’). The poet Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855) is reported to have exclaimed on reading this poem: ‘Oh! how this scoundrel can write!’ (Annenkov, vol. 1, p. 55).

Exile, 1820–26

‘The light of day has faded’ (1820)

Pushkin wrote this elegy during the crossing of the Kerch Strait into the Crimean peninsula on his way south to begin his exile.

This translation broadly preserves, on a shortened scale, the variety of line length of the original.

The Nereid (1820)

A memory of the southern Crimean coast and of Yekaterina Rayevskaya, with whose family Pushkin had undertaken the latter part of the long journey from St Petersburg to his exile in the South a few months earlier than the time of writing this poem.

Pushkin’s hexameters (in couplets) are appropriate to his Classical setting.

1 Tauris: The Classical Greek name for Crimea.

‘I have outlived desires’ (1821)

This neat elegy, a favourite among Pushkin’s early poems for English translators, has its origins in his first serious narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, of which he wrote out the first fair copy on 23 February 1821, the day after writing the lyric poem. Its first two stanzas are based on a draft passage from the Russian prisoner’s hopeless speech rejecting a Circassian girl’s love early in the second part of the narrative poem; the final stanza is entirely new. The whole poem reflects Pushkin’s prevailing mood of loneliness and dejection after the first few months of exile in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev.

The original is in iambic tetrameters.

The Prisoner (1822)

Written after some recent experiences of prison and prisoners in Pushkin’s first place of exile, Kishinev. He had been shocked by the sudden arrest of his close Decembrist friend Major Vladimir Rayevsky for disseminating ideas of constitutional government; the latter would be held in prison for five years while his case was sub judice and then sent to Siberia.

Pushkin’s metre is anapaestic tetrameter.

3 and 5 light […] window: The original for both these words is okno, ‘window’. J. Douglas Clayton (personal correspondence) has pointed to the significance of this word here and elsewhere in Pushkin (the beginning of the prologue to The Bronze Horseman, for example – St Petersburg seen as ‘A window on to Europe’, line 16), and maintains that, as with the use of this word by Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) in the poem ‘I have always said that fate is a game’, written in 1971, in Pushkin’s poem the prison may be taken as ‘standing for Russia, teasing ordinary citizens with its windows looking out on a freedom to which they can have no access’.

A Songbird (1823)

Sending this poem to his friend the poet Nikolay Gnedich (1784–1833), admired translator of Homer, Pushkin commented on the ‘touching’ Russian peasant custom of releasing a caged bird on Easter Sunday. The editor of the journal Literary Leaves in which the poem was published soon after it had been written deflected the censor’s attention from political interpretation by noting that the poem referred to ‘those benefactors of humanity who donate some of their income towards the charitable release from prison of innocent persons, petty debtors and the like’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 61, note).

Pushkin’s metre is iambic tetrameter throughout.

Night (1823)

The first of the great love poems inspired by Amalia Riznich, the shortest but not least powerful in its concrete concentration. The striking appearance of this young shipping merchant’s wife whom Pushkin met in Odessa was remembered, long after her death, in the monthly Russian Herald:

Mrs Riznich was young, tall, graceful, and extraordinarily beautiful. Particularly attractive were her fiery eyes, a neck of amazing form and whiteness, and a plait of black hair, nearly five feet long. But her feet were too large; in order to conceal this deficiency, she always wore a long dress, to the ground. She went about wearing a man’s hat and dressed in a semi-riding habit. (Binyon, pp. 163–4)

This translation, in an attempt to keep up with the steady flow of the original rhymed hexameters, is in pentameters with increased enjambement.

‘I went alone before the dawn’ (1823)

Pushkin sent this poem to his high-placed friend Aleksandr Turgenev with a note: ‘The other day I wrote an imitation of one of the parables of that moderate democrat Jesus Christ.’ The poem expresses Pushkin’s disappointment that the radical sentiments he had voiced in poems and conversations since leaving the Lycée appeared to have fallen on deaf ears. The closing sestet, however, reached an especially wide readership, including the secret police, in manuscript as a separate poem.

First published in Herzen, 1856; in Russia (Moscow), 1866.

Epigraph: Matthew 13:3.

[On Vorontsov] (1824)

‘On Vorontsov’ is not Pushkin’s title but is commonly used to identify this poem. Relations between Count M. S. Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia and Bessarabia, and Pushkin, appointed to his chancellery in Odessa in 1823, were soon strained, as this poem reflects, especially when the young poet began an affair with his wife Yelizaveta (Elise).

The original is in tetrameters. First published in Berlin, 1861; in Russia (Moscow), 1876.

‘Zephyrs share / The midnight air’ (1824)

Pushkin is fond of foreign locales and a master at conjuring up telling atmosphere with minimal brushstrokes; in the four ‘Little Tragedies’ in verse, for example, he convincingly enters in turn the world of medieval France, eighteenth-century Vienna, seventeenth-century Madrid and medieval England. Aleksey Verstovsky (1799–1862), chief rival of the younger Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), Russia’s first recognised great composer, set this poem for voice and piano; he was famous for his setting of Pushkin’s version of the words of a Moldavian song ‘The Black Shawl’ (1820).

Pushkin’s longer lines are alternately rhymed trochaic tetrameters; the refrain in translation is in the original metre.

5 Guadalquivir: One of Spain’s principal navigable rivers, passing through Cordoba and Seville and ending on the Gulf of Cadiz.

To *** (1825)

One of the best known of Pushkin’s lyric poems. The addressee is Anna Kern, unhappily married to a general much older than herself, who visited a neighbouring estate to the Pushkins’ at Mikhaylovskoye near Pskov in 1825 and there met the exiled Pushkin, who had first seen her six years before in St Petersburg when he was nineteen and she was already married. She describes in a memoir how he presented her with the published first chapter of Eugene Onegin out of which fell this poem – on a folded sheet which Pushkin unsuccessfully tried to snatch back. Glinka set the poem for voice and piano.

The original is in iambic tetrameter throughout.

1 that moment: Original: ‘Chudnoye mgnoven’ye’ (‘wondrous moment’). The exact English equivalent of Pushkin’s word chudnoye would seem overdone here to the present translator, who has preferred to avoid exaggeration, archaism or cliché (such as ‘wonderful’) and leave it to the reader to pick up the ineffable effect of the rest of the stanza.

‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’ (1825)

At Mikhaylovskoye, Pushkin enjoyed the regular company of the family of a widow in her forties, Praskovya Osipova, a distant relation of his, and her large family consisting mostly of marriageable daughters living on the neighbouring estate, Trigorskoye. Pushkin and Osipova became close friends and probably no more. A manuscript copy of this poem in Osipova’s hand exists with the undated heading: ‘Lines written on P.’s receipt of flowers from P. O., late autumn.’

The metre of the original is iambic tetrameter. First published in Pushkin’s journal The Contemporary, 1838.

Winter Evening (1825)

Winter is a favourite subject of Pushkin’s, inspiring some of his finest lyric verse. This poem was written during the last two years of his exile, spent alone on his parents’ modest estate, Mikhaylovskoye, with the old nanny of his childhood (the model for Tatyana’s nanny in chapter 3 of Eugene Onegin, written around this time – and see Introduction under ‘Life’ for more about Arina Rodionovna).

A trochaic metre, kept in this translation, contributes to the poem’s folk idiom and atmosphere, as often in Pushkin; compare the ballad ‘The Drowned Man’ (1828) and Mary’s song from A Feast during the Plague (1830). The original is in tetrameters throughout.

Prose Writer and Poet (1825)

Written just before the high point of Pushkin’s lifetime reputation with publication of early chapters of Eugene Onegin and his first lyric collection.

Mniszek’s ‘sonnet’ from Boris Godunov (1825)

A quiet moment during a ball scene in Pushkin’s historical drama about the guilt-ridden Tsar Boris, supposed to have murdered the seven-year-old heir to the throne which he himself assumed. This speech by a supporter of the Pretender Dimitry takes the form of a sonnet, rounded off with an extra line at the end.

2 The stamp of the mazurka: Invented in the sixteenth century, the mazurka became a popular dance throughout Poland in the seventeenth, but Pushkin knew the more rumbustious Russian ballroom version of his time. It is this that he describes in the words ‘mazurki grom’ (literally ‘the thunder of the mazurka’), both in this passage from the original version of Boris Godunov and later in Eugene Onegin, chapter 5, XLII.2.

11 earth-encrusted. In premodern practice, bottles of fine wine were sometimes kept buried in the ground in order to ensure a consistent temperature.

Confession (1826)

Addressed to one of the unmarried daughters of Pushkin’s neighbour Praskovya Osipova (see note to ‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’, 1825). The form of this poem, varyingly rhymed and running on undivided into stanzas, makes it look like a spontaneous letter, an effect aimed at in this translation with sacrifice of rhyme.

First published anonymously in 1837 after Pushkin’s death.

29 Opochka: The nearest town to the estate of Mikhaylovskoye.

The Prophet (1826)

For this great poem Pushkin takes his setting, style and diction from Isaiah 6:1–10; also from the solemn, archaic diction of his school friend V. K. Kyukhel’beker’s lengthy poem ‘Prophecy’, which on a first reading three years earlier he had found ludicrously over the top; now, in late summer 1826, an elevated style chimed with his purpose in writing (Wachtel, p. 25).

The theme of the poem is commonly taken to be the poet’s calling; but four lines of political content thought to be by Pushkin and written at the same time as the poem have been taken by some to be possibly an alternative ending. They read: ‘Arise, arise, prophet of Russia, clothe yourself in a shameful garment, go with a halter about the neck, and appear before the abhorrent murderer’ (literal translation by Bayley, p. 146). Pushkin dated the poem not by the date of composition or completion but with the more significant date of 8 September 1826, the day of his reconciliatory meeting with the newly crowned Tsar Nicholas I.

One of Pushkin’s editors, Mikhail Pogodin, wrote to Pushkin’s friend Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky two months after his death: ‘[Pushkin] wrote “The Prophet” on his journey to Moscow in 1826 [for his interview with the tsar]. There were supposed to be four poems in all, but only the first (“I wandered in a lonely place”) was printed’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, pp. 689–90, note). The other three poems were destroyed. The above four-line political fragment seems unlikely to be Pushkin’s, but if it is, these lines surely have no place in this poem, although it might be conjectured that they once belonged to one of the poems destroyed.

Bayley (p. 145) compares ‘The Prophet’ to ‘The Upas Tree’ (1828): ‘Where [the latter] condenses its apprehension of power in a few heavy drops, “The Prophet” pours it out like a stream of molten lava. It is a poem of inner power, the inspiration of an Old Testament prophet compressed into a few lines of visionary fervour.’

2 My soul’s great thirst tormented me: A variant line in Pushkin’s hand, which would seem to relate to the first printing of the poem in the Moscow Herald (1828), reads: ‘My soul’s great shame tormented me’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 690, note). Pushkin’s feelings about not being with his friends in the Decembrist uprising of 1825 might be read in this alternative wording.

Moscow and St Petersburg, 1826–30

[To my Nanny] (1826)

This poem, untitled by Pushkin and not quite finished, was written shortly after Pushkin’s return from his last two years of exile spent at Mikhaylovskoye in close and warm companionship with his old nanny, Arina Rodionovna (very much a presence in ‘Winter Evening’, 1825, and an affectionate memory in the late poem about Mikhaylovskoye ‘… I see again’, 1835). The original sprinkles folkloric-sounding words into a basically formal style. The title given here is commonly used to identify the poem.

Winter Road (1826)

Written after a journey from Pskov to Moscow, rather more than four hundred miles, in December 1826; Pushkin had made a brief visit to Mikhaylovskoye to bring back some belongings left there after the end of his exile.

The original is in quatrains of alternately rhyming lines. Ellipses are put to particularly expressive use in this poem.

13 verst-posts: A verst was an old Russian measure of length, the equivalent to two-thirds of a mile.

14 Nina: The name may be fictional.

To I. I. Pushchin (1826)

Written on the eve of the first anniversary (13 December 1826) of the Decembrist uprising, addressing Pushkin’s closest school friend, Ivan Pushchin, a Decembrist, who had courageously paid an officially prohibited personal visit to him the previous winter during his last period of exile at Mikhaylovskoye. The two had got through three bottles of Veuve Clicquot during an extended but curtailed evening; Pushchin had left at three in the morning after less than twenty-four hours, and the two never met again. Pushchin received a death sentence that was commuted to twenty years’ hard labour in Siberia, where on the day after his arrival at the town of his exile he was given a copy of this poem, in handwriting unknown to him, by the wife of another Decembrist. Writing of his last meeting with Pushkin thirty-three years later in a valuable memoir was to bring him to tears.

The original is in iambic tetrameters, with each stanza rhyming abaab. First published in The Contemporary, 1841.

‘Deep in the Siberian mines’ (1827)

Addressed to the Decembrists sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia, many of whom Pushkin knew, two of them close school friends. As with the previous poem, it was not long before this one reached its audience. Pushkin sent it off as soon as he had written it, via the wife of one of them who was embarking on a visit to her husband. The first stanza holds an echo of words in a song written for Pushkin’s class’s graduation from the Lycée. Too fervently taking the poem as a call to armed rebellion, one of the recipients composed a spirited poem in reply, containing the line ‘From a spark a flame shall flare up’, which Lenin was to take as the motto for his peripatetic newspaper Spark (1900–1905).

The original is in tetrameters throughout. Widely read along with the Decembrist’s lines in response and other political poems by Pushkin, it first saw publication in London (Herzen, 1856).

Arion (1827)

Pushkin clothes his real subject, his own survival after the suppression of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, in a story originally from Herodotus. The famous Greek poet and singer Arion, returning home by ship after winning a competition, is set upon by the crew, eager to steal his riches. Offered the choice between being thrown into the sea alive or killing himself on board (carrying the right to a funeral on land), he persuades the crew to let him sing one last song, after which he leaps overboard and is borne to the shore by dolphins that have gathered to hear his singing.

The poem was written on the anniversary of the execution of five of the Decembrists, but Pushkin showed it to no one for three years and then published it anonymously in the Literary Gazette, edited by Anton Delvig with Pushkin (five issues weekly, 1830–31).

The Angel (1827)

The positive power of Pushkin’s angel firmly sets off this poem and its author from the Romanticism so powerfully exemplified in Mikhail Lermontov’s famous poem with the same title, written at the age of seventeen, four years after Pushkin’s was published. Lermontov’s angel carries a new soul to be born on earth, where it will always be homesick for its heavenly fatherland.

The original is in tetrameters throughout, with a single rhyme through the even-numbered lines that is reflected, as far as found possible, in this translation (though the triple repetition of ‘eyes’ is not Pushkin’s).

The Poet (1827)

One of a number of poems by Pushkin about poetry and the poet; six or seven of them, counting ‘The Prophet’ (1826), with which this poem shares some images, are included in the present selection: ‘Prose Writer and Poet’ (1825), ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828), ‘To the Poet’ (1830), ‘Rhyme’ (1830) and possibly ‘Autumn (A fragment)’ (1833).

1 Apollo: The ancient Greek sun god, patron of music, poetry, etc.

19 October 1827 (1827)

Written for the 1827 anniversary celebration of Pushkin’s Lycée class, which he attended after an absence of seven years. The third and fourth lines of the second stanza seem to refer to five identifiable classmates, two of them being the Decembrists (unnoticed by the censor) Ivan Pushchin (see note to ‘To I. I. Pushchin’, 1826) and the Russian-(Baltic) German poet Wilhelm Kyukhel’beker. By an extraordinary coincidence, Pushkin’s path had crossed with the latter’s five days before the celebration, at a coaching station as he was returning to St Petersburg after a visit to Mikhaylovskoye. Kyukhel’beker was with a gang of prisoners on the way to Siberia; the two had embraced before being separated by gendarmes (Binyon, p. 269).

This unrhymed translation focuses on content, comprehensively recasting the original metrical form of two four-line stanzas of tetrameters and separating the opening refrain of each into two parts spread over the first and additional fifth line of each translated stanza.

The Talisman (1827)

Remembering Yelizaveta Vorontsova (see note to ‘[On Vorontsov]’, 1824). In Odessa, Pushkin had fallen deeply in love with the vivacious Yelizaveta, who had given him, on his departure for Mikhaylovskoye, a ring with a Cabalistic inscription, which he was to wear during his fatal duel. Another well-known poem, ‘Guard me, my talisman’ (not in the present selection), written two years earlier (1825) in iambic tetrameters, treats the same affair more personally. In this later poem, Pushkin stylises his personal experience by turning to the more formal, less personal trochaic metre to create an atmosphere of Eastern exoticism.

Recollection (1828)

Drafts of this poem, entitled ‘Insomnia’ and also ‘All-night Vigil’, include a continuation longer than the final version of the poem, spelling out feelings of slights endured, remorse towards others and regret over wasted years.

The original metre alternates hexameters and tetrameters.

Thou and You (1828)

The addressee of this poem wrote in her copy of it: ‘Anna Alekseyevna Olenina mistakenly said ty [informal ‘you’] when she was talking to Pushkin, and on the next Sunday he brought this poem’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 702, note). What most attracted Pushkin about Anna, in accordance with his best-known female predilection, were her famously small feet. He proposed to her but was turned down flat by her father, a high-placed government official.

The original metre is iambic tetrameter throughout, with the last four lines expressively set off from the first four by a change in rhyme scheme – from alternate rhyming to ring rhyme (rhyming abba), as both quatrains in this translation.

‘My beauty, sing to me no more’ (1828)

Like the previous poem, addressed to Anna Olenina, who was a singing student of Glinka, the leading Russian composer of the time. The ‘face’ and ‘dear but fated spectre’ (lines 8 and 9) are taken to refer to Mariya Rayevskaya, a daughter of General Nikolay Rayevsky, with whose family Pushkin had spent an idyllic few days on the Black Sea coast on his way to his first place of exile eight years earlier; she had since followed her Decembrist husband to Siberia. (See note to ‘The mists of night enfold the Georgian hills’, 1829, for more on Pushkin’s relations with the Rayevsky family on the Black Sea coast in 1820.)

The original is in consistent alternately rhyming iambic tetrameters with the same first and third line rhyme throughout except in the third stanza, bringing a sharp change of mood there, dramatically rendered in Balakirev’s setting for voice and piano (1863).

Another effect of rhyme in the original that has proved unobtainable in translation is feminine following masculine rhyme, an unusual way round for Pushkin, so that the unstressed final syllable concluding each couplet and each stanza and concluding the poem dies away like an echo.

Glinka and Rakhmaninov also composed settings of this poem.

Portrait (1828)

Agrafena Zakrevskaya was already notorious well before Pushkin wrote this poem about her. She was married to a dull but successful civil servant, in whom she took little interest. She fascinated Pushkin, who had a brief affair with her in 1828, the year in which this poem was published. The poet Yevgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844) was scarred by her, thus portraying her in his narrative poem The Ball of the same year: ‘Her heat is the heat of a drunken maenad, / The heat of fever – not the heat of love’ (translated in Binyon, p. 275).

The original is in iambic metre; the present trochaic translation might be taken as echoing Pushkin’s usual metrical tendency in dealing with the legendary and exotic (see note to ‘The Talisman’, 1827).

The Drowned Man (1828)

One of the most powerful of Pushkin’s winter poems. In the year following composition, 1829, this ballad appeared in two separate publications, subtitled ‘Folk Song’ and ‘Folk Tale’ respectively. It demonstrates Pushkin’s use of simple folk language in poetry (brought out by the trochaic metre) in emulation of Wordsworth and other English Romantics whose work he read largely in French translations. His style and diction here have a down-to-earth directness, avoiding the embellishments that he had come to see as a mark of general outmodedness in Russian poetry of the late 1820s. At the same time he employs his own sophisticated touches, such as not only repeating the final line of the last two stanzas but also keeping the same emphatic rhyme running through the last dozen lines (both rendered in this translation).

51 you wandering Cain: An image of violence and evil verbally etched on the popular mind from Genesis 4:12: ‘a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth’.

The Upas Tree (1828)

Pushkin’s title, ‘Anchar’, is the name of a highly poisonous tropical tree, and this would seem to be its first use in Russian (Wachtel, p. 107). References to the ‘poison tree’, the tree of death, run through English Romantic poetry, but Pushkin’s source seems to have been a French translation of a long poem, The Loves of the Plants (published in 1789), by the English botanist-poet Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) – grandfather of Charles Darwin – who gave lurid details of the supposed death-dealing properties of this tree’s poison. In Eastern lands, the tree was regarded as ‘a holy instrument of the great Prophet to punish the sins of mankind’ (Wachtel, p. 110). In this poem as in ‘The Prophet’ (1826), Pushkin employs exalted, biblical language for his deeply felt humanitarian theme, and Genesis 2:17 is relevant in this later poem: ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’

Pushkin exploits the menacing sound of the word anchar; the explosive ch in combination with harsh n and r dominate the poem, especially the first stanza:

V pustyne chakhloy i skupoy,

Na pochve, znoyem raskalyonnoy,

Anchar, kak groznyy chasovoy,

Stoit – odin vo vsey vselennoy.

It was four years before this poem was published in Anton Delvig’s almanac Northern Flowers (on this publication, see Introduction under ‘Life’).

‘Raven flies to raven’ (1828)

A free translation of a French prose translation (1826) of the Scottish ballad ‘The Twa Corbies’. Pushkin simplifies and prunes his French original, leaving the raw savagery, such as ‘Je lui arracherai avec mon bec ses beaux yeux bleus’ (‘I’ll pike out his bonny blue een’), unstated. He uses the Russian folk-style metre of trochaic tetrameter.

The Poet and the Crowd (1828)

At the time when this poem was written Pushkin was losing his readership (see Introduction under ‘Life’) and wrote several poems upholding his position as a poet vis-à-vis his public, sometimes, as here, distinctly aggressively (see also ‘To the Poet’, 1830). A ready assumption that Pushkin’s sympathy lies firmly with the poet is put in its place by one present-day critic, who notes the moral high ground of the crowd in the poem, well aware of its limitations as it seeks moral instruction from the poet, who is consumed by callous egotism (Kahn, pp. 210–13). Although the poet is not to be equated with Pushkin, something like a telling self-image may be read here. A contemporary reviewer of Pushkin’s third collection of lyric poems (1832) interpreted Pushkin’s falling sales as the public’s ‘revenge over disappointment that the formerly “thoughtful and awesome, strong and fiery speaker of ideas and dreams” has gone cold’ (quoted in Kahn, p. 213).

Epigraph: Latin: ‘Away, profane ones.’ From Virgil’s Aeneid (6.258): words spoken by the Cumaean Sibyl before she begins her prophecy.

6 throng: Pushkin’s first published title was ‘The Mob’, the Russian word for which, chern’, is used here (translated ‘throng’) and as the designation for the speakers of the fourth stanza; it sounds very like the word cherv’ (‘worm(s)’, line 18).

20 Apollo Belvedere: A Roman statue depicting the Greek god Apollo, an image of aesthetic perfection for the Western world. It has long stood on display in the courtyard of the Belvedere in the Vatican.

A Flower (1828)

The original is in consistent tetrameters.

‘City of splendour, city of poor’ (1828)

Addressed to Anna Olenina (see notes to ‘Thou and You’, 1828, and ‘I loved you’, 1829), whom Pushkin had seen in St Petersburg on the eve of a journey to Mikhaylovskoye in autumn 1828. In her diary entry on the meeting, Olenina noted: ‘When he left, Pushkin told me he had to go off to his estate – if he could pluck up the courage, he added with feeling’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 704, note). See ‘Winter Road’ (1826) on the ‘dismal’ nature of this journey.

Signs (1829)

On which side of you the new moon shone was significant in Russian folklore, as set out in this poem in reiterative folkloric style. The addressee, if any actual person, is unknown. The prosodic shape of this translation broadly echoes that of the original.

‘Once there lived a humble knight’ (1829)

In this ballad-like poem Pushkin uses the stock figure of the crusading knight for an almost dramatic exploration of mystic devotion, rather in the direction of the four dramatic psychological studies he wrote the following year and called ‘Little Tragedies’ (Mozart and Salieri, etc.). He included a shortened version of the poem as a song in the unfinished drama ‘Scenes from the Days of Chivalry’ that he worked on in 1835. The completed version, published in Pushkin’s journal The Contemporary in 1837 not long after his death, plays a significant role in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot (1868–9).

11 the Virgin Mary: Pushkin’s term is a literal translation, strikingly not the standard Russian Bogomater’ (Mother of God).

31 Ave, Mater Dei: Latin: ‘Hail, Mother of God’.

37 ‘Lumen coelum, sancta Rosa!’: Latin: ‘Light of the heavens, holy Rose!’

51 courted: Pushkin uses an everyday term, volochilsya, which has a shocking effect in the context of the iconic image before which the humble knight kneels in devotion; the word usually has a connotation of sexual attraction, ‘running after’ a love object.

‘The mists of night enfold the Georgian hills’ (1829)

Written in the spring of 1829 on a visit to the North Caucasus, where Pushkin was reminded of his idyllic stay in the region nine years before in the company of the Rayevsky family. The first draft had four four-line stanzas, with a first line setting the poem, true to his memories, in ‘the Caucasus’ and with the last two stanzas devoted to the memory of Mariya Rayevskaya (see note to ‘My beauty, sing to me no more’, 1828), although he announced that the poem expressed his new love for Natalya Goncharova, to whom he was already but uncertainly engaged. The last two stanzas on the overwhelming memories of a previous love were removed and the first two lines rewritten, substituting the more generalised ‘Georgian hills’ for the giveaway mention of ‘the Caucasus’. The poem’s emotional charge, whatever its source or sources, is maximised in its shorter final form.

Mariya married the Decembrist Major-General Prince Sergey Volkonsky (1788–1865), whom she followed to Siberia and had a son who died at the age of two; at General Rayevsky’s request, Pushkin wrote an epigraph for the gravestone, and in a letter to her brother Nikolay, a close friend of Pushkin’s, Mariya expressed her gratitude for his moving words.

The metre of the original is alternating hexameters and tetrameters.

From Hafiz (1829)

Not a translation of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz but a stylisation, written during Pushkin’s trip to the Caucasus in the summer of 1829, when he took part in a skirmish with the Russian army against the Turks. In the general enthusiasm for Russian expansion in the South, there was disappointment that Pushkin did not glorify Russian arms. This poem with a camp setting is addressed to a Caucasian soldier serving in a Muslim cavalry regiment in the Russian army.

The original is in trochaic tetrameters throughout.

3 Karabakh: A region in the southern Caucasus renowned for its breed of horses.

6 Azrael: The Islamic angel of death.

‘The drums of reveille sound …’ (1829)

Written during or after Pushkin’s time with the Russian army in the Caucasus in the summer of 1829. The sound of reveille prompts memories of a similar sound he used to hear regularly at the Lycée, situated in the tsar’s palace complex in Tsarskoye Selo next to the barracks. In the present, Pushkin can be imagined reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in a sixteenth-century French verse translation that he possessed.

The original is in trochaic tetrameters throughout. First published in Annenkov, 1855.

The Monastery on Mount Kazbek (1829)

What Pushkin actually saw on his travels through the Caucasus in 1829 was probably the Tsminda Sameba (Holy Trinity) church on a peak near Mount Kazbek, the highest mountain in Georgia. He describes this sight in the same terms in Journey to Arzrum, written in the same year.

Pushkin’s unusual rhyme scheme is approximated in this translation.

‘Winter. The country’ (1829)

Written on one of the estates of a friend’s family in the province of Tver in a break from a winter journey from Moscow to St Petersburg. Pushkin’s alexandrines (iambic hexameters; pentameters in this translation) set up an oppressively dull tone and language (underlined by the date, ‘2nd November’, given at the head of the poem), with enjambements from time to time that seem to be trying to break the monotony, until life enters the scene and the poem with the sudden arrival of unexpected female company. Briggs devotes a chapter of close reading to this exemplar of Pushkin’s essential characteristics as a poet.

The original is in couplets, its formality loosened by occasional enjambement, strikingly in the first line; and the last line is playfully left unrhymed.

Winter Morning (1829)

The composition date of this poem, 3 November 1829, the day following that of the previous poem, ‘Winter. The country’, and the convincing realism of both poems have actually prompted some critical debate on whether a sexual encounter has taken place between the two occasions.

21 Cracks and spits: Original: ‘treskom / Treshchit’. Typical Pushkinian onomatopoeia.

‘I loved you: in my heart, perhaps’ (1829)

This famous poem, seeming to conceal more than it reveals, published in Pushkin’s friend Delvig’s almanac Northern Flowers at the end of 1829, used to be thought inspired by his love for Anna Olenina, to whom he had proposed but been rejected (see note to ‘Thou and You’, 1828). But it has now begun to be thought that the brilliant, dangerous figure of Karolina Sobanskaya lies behind it, and that Pushkin was rekindling feelings from the past; he had just met Sobanskaya for the third time following a brief but intense friendship in 1821. Five years older than Pushkin, Sobanskaya was married to a powerful military commander with secret-intelligence responsibilities (which it was rumoured she shared). At the beginning of February 1830, at a time when his courtship of Natalya Goncharova was meeting with a cool reception from her family, Pushkin drafted a letter to Sobanskaya in French (not known to have been sent) containing four of the five key words, here italicised, in the two penultimate lines of the poem: ‘To you I owe all I have known of what is most convulsive and torturing in the intoxication of love, and all that is most incapacitating. Out of this, all I am left with is the feebleness of a convalescent, a single attachment, very tender, and true – and not a little shyness, which I cannot overcome’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 9, p. 307, note).

The present translator found it impossible to match Pushkin’s pentameters – that seemed to require too many words in English; the attempt is the subject of a short article (Wood).

‘I walk the crowded thoroughfare’ (1829)

A poem that Pushkin began to write entirely with thoughts about death ends on the theme of the equal inevitability of continuing young life. Striking in his draft is the strict precision with which he records the time of its completion – ‘26 Dec 1829 St. P.B. [St Petersburg] 3 o’clock 5 m.’ (Wachtel, p. 159) – reminiscent of the acute consciousness of the passing moment in ‘It’s time, my love, it’s time!’ (1834). One feature of the original impossible to take over in translation is the weighty, ringing a sound in nearly half the rhymes, having the effect perhaps of a tolling bell. What can be rendered, however, is the great preponderance of the first-person pronoun through the first five stanzas, sinking into the possessive and dative in the next two stanzas, and finally the disappearance of any personal pronoun with the extinction of the self.

‘Inscribe my name? What good –’ (1830)

Written in response to Karolina Sobanskaya’s request to Pushkin to inscribe his name in her album, next to such signatories as Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Adam Mickiewicz, Madame de Staël, William Pitt the Younger and the Duke of Wellington. On Sobanskaya, see note to ‘I loved you’ (1829).

Pushkin appears to have borrowed the idea for this album poem from Byron’s eight lines ‘As o’er the cold sepulchral stone’ (1809) on the thought of his name being read on a page; if Pushkin had read this poem, it would probably have been in a French prose translation of 1822.

The original metre is iambic tetrameter.

15–16 I’ve not left wholly / One heart, one memory: The addressee (the ‘I’ of line 15) refers to the ‘heart’ and ‘memory’ of the poet.

‘No, I have lost the taste for stormy pleasure’ (1830)

No surprise that Pushkin could not publish ‘this extraordinary poem [apparently dedicated to his future wife], a technical tour-de-force in which one woman is described almost entirely through nouns, the other through verbs, in view of its unabashed mimicry of two sexual climaxes’ (Binyon, p. 359).

The original is in hexameter couplets (alexandrines). First published in 1858.

To the Poet (1830)

In this sonnet, written after increasingly negative public and critical reactions to his work since his early popularity, Pushkin develops the theme of popular misunderstanding of and hostility to poetic originality treated in ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828).

The original is in iambic hexameters with varying rhyme pattern.

14 your tripod: On which the priestess at the ancient Greek shrine of Apollo at Delphi sat to deliver oracular words.

Madonna (1830)

Like the previous poem, this is another sonnet in hexameters, again varyingly rhymed, written the day after ‘To the Poet’ in July 1830. A painting by Raphael (The Virgin and Child, also known as ‘The Bridgewater Madonna’, c.1507) had gone on sale in Moscow. In a letter to his future wife from St Petersburg, Pushkin wrote (in French) shortly after composing this poem: ‘The fine ladies ask to see your portrait, and won’t forgive me for not having one. I console myself by spending hours on end in front of a blonde madonna who is as similar to you as one drop of water to another, and I would have bought it if it didn’t cost 40,000 roubles’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 720, note).

This poem was published three times in Pushkin’s lifetime; the censor was not concerned by the merging of the sacred with the profane since the double subject involved not an icon but Natalya and a Western painting.

Demons (1830)

Written, like ‘Arion’ (1827) and ‘The Upas Tree’ (1828), at a time of increased tensions between the regime and educated society and some national debate about the future of the nation following the suppression of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Pushkin began to write the poem a few months after his friend the radical philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev had written him a letter (March/April 1829) in which he had expressed the hope that Pushkin would play an important part in the debate: ‘I am convinced that you can bring infinite good to unhappy Russia, which has lost its way’ (Gorodetsky, p. 377). The poem took a year, an unusually long time for Pushkin, to reach its final form late in 1830, during the most famously productive of his autumns spent alone on his father’s estate of Boldino. A significant subtext is the well-known poem ‘Evening Meditation on God’s Greatness’ (1743) by Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65) taking the aurora borealis as an indication of God’s benevolent design, with Pushkin ‘replacing Lomonosov’s Enlightenment belief in cosmic order with a Romantic view of demonic nature’ (Wachtel, p. 187).

This ballad abounds in folkloric touches – colloquialisms, personifications and repetitions, and is in the appropriate trochaic metre, continuous tetrameters in the original. The immediate realistic situation – the experience of being lost in a blizzard – can be read with dark undertones on the future course of both Russia and Pushkin’s own life. In successive redrafting, he changed his narrative from third person to first, ending the poem resoundingly in first person.

2 Moon plays hide and seek: Pushkin plays with a phrase that gives the idea of putting on an invisible hat.

9 Hey there: A colloquialism (Ey) in advance of its time and place.

13–16 and 45–48 These lines form the first of two epigraphs to Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons (1871–2); the second is from Luke 8: 32–6 (the miracle of the Gadarene swine).

18 Blowing, spitting fiend: According to traditional Russian belief, one blows and spits to banish the Devil; here the situation is reversed with sinister mockery.

44 Like November leaves: This comparison draws on an epic tradition going back to Homer and Dante likening fallen leaves to dead people.

47–8 burial rite […] witch-bride: These lines touch on two of Pushkin’s central concerns at this time: death from the cholera epidemic that prolonged his autumn stay at Boldino and mixed feelings about his impending marriage (see note to next poem).

56 Tears and tears: Pushkin’s term (as a noun, nadryv, laceration), is central to Dostoyevsky’s Demons.

Elegy (1830)

This poem was written in sombre mood on 8 September 1830, the day after Pushkin completed ‘Demons’. ‘Sadness is not unexpected to me,’ he wrote to a friend on the eve of his marriage; ‘it’s in my household reckoning. Any happiness will be a surprise for me’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 10, p. 20, note). Pushkin looks almost a generation back in terms of genre as well as autobiographically in writing an ‘elegy’, in the formal pentameters with caesura and melancholy tone fashionable during that earlier period. At the same time it is natural to him to bring in a jarringly informal term like ‘drunken haze’, pokhmel’ye (line 2).

The original is in rhyming couplets.

To the Bust of a Conqueror (1830)

The bust is that of Alexander I by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), commissioned by the tsar in 1820.

First published in Annenkov, 1855.

Rhyme (1830)

Following Nikolay Gnedich’s completion of his translation of the Iliad into hexameters in 1829, Pushkin took an interest in Classical metres, and wrote three other short poems also in elegiac couplets – hexameters alternating with (also) six-stress lines with a spondee (two consecutive stresses) on either side of the central caesura. This metre is preserved in the present translation.

Making rhyme a nymph, Pushkin creates a convincing legend of his own out of the world of Greek mythology. The wasting, lovesick nymph Echo is memorably presented as ‘unsleeping’ (line 1). It is appropriate that Rhyme should be her daughter and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, the midwife for the birth of that daughter; and it has perfect aesthetic logic that a poem about the birth of rhyme should be unrhymed – though in the original the final line contains a resounding internal rhyme or near-rhyme with the word Rifmoy (Rhyme) echoing nimfa (nymph) in the first line.

1 Peneus: A river near Mount Olympus, and the name of a river god, father of the nymph Daphne, who was also pursued by Phoebus Apollo.

2 Phoebus: i.e. Phoebus Apollo, sun god and patron of music, poetry and the arts.

Invocation (1830)

The concept of this poem came from an English poet known by his pseudonym Barry Cornwall (real name Bryan Procter, 1787–1874), whose poems Pushkin read, alone on the family estate of Boldino in the autumn of 1830 not long before his marriage, in an English edition recently published in Paris. Three or four lines of Pushkin’s poem have echoes of Cornwall’s graveyard poem of the same title that are typical of its mood. Pushkin was thinking back over past relationships, and in particular of the Austrian-Italian Amalia Riznich, with whom he had become obsessed in Odessa before she departed with her husband to Italy (see note to ‘Bound for your distant homeland’, 1830).

The aim of this translation of a ‘speech to a ghost’ was to keep closely to the sense of the original, which is in three eight-line stanzas of tetrameters. Considering that soon after he wrote this poem Pushkin turned to the pentameter in his blank verse ‘Little Tragedies’, also inspired by Cornwall’s example, this metre might be found not inappropriate in the present translation. First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

4 Leila: The name of the central female figure in Byron’s The Giaour (1813) who appears to the hero as a shade.

11 Those whose evil malice killed my love: Amalia Riznich’s husband seems to have been unsympathetic towards his wife, which might have hastened her death from consumption five years previously.

Mary’s song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

This and the following poem are Pushkin’s two original compositions incorporated into his free translation (from the original) of a fragment from the rambling verse drama The City of the Plague (1816) by John Wilson (1785–1854), set in fourteenth-century London at the time of the Black Death, which he made into one of his ‘Little Tragedies’ (see note to previous poem). The sorrowful Mary is one of the two prostitute characters. She sings this ‘sad and slow’ song at the request of Walsingham, Master of the Revels (an incidental character in the broad canvas of Wilson’s play).

This translation keeps the folk-style trochaic metre but shortens the original tetrameter to trimeter.

29 Jenny: Probably a fictitious name.

Master of the Revels’ song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

After hearing Mary’s song (see previous poem) the Master of the Revels sings a celebratory song of his own. Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) was fascinated by this poem, writing of it as expressive of ‘Bliss, with no equal in all the world’s poetry. Bliss of complete surrender to the elemental – be it Love, or Plague, or whatever else we may call it’ (Tsvetaeva, p. 154).

The original is in six-line stanzas of iambic tetrameters.

24 Of the breath of the Maid of the Rose: Reference to the signs of deadly infection, dark red and black spots on the skin of plague victims.

‘Bound for your distant homeland’ (1830)

Another poem in memory of Amalia Riznich – on whom see notes above to ‘Night’ (1823) and ‘Invocation’ (1830). To Pushkin she was a mesmerising image of Italy, and the idea of being with her in that country, her ‘homeland’, had long been his impossible dream. Bayley finds this lyric ‘the finest of Pushkin’s love poems’ and also comments: ‘The simple vocabulary of blue skies is as moving as a popular song […]’ (Bayley, pp. 300 and 301).

The original is in alternately rhyming iambic tetrameters throughout; in the last two stanzas the same rhyme is used in three of the four pairs of odd-numbered lines, falling on key words. First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

Married Life, 1831–6

To the Slanderers of Russia (1831)

This ode was written during the Polish revolt of 1830–31 against Russian rule. It is addressed to the liberal members of the French Chamber of Deputies and all those in the Western and American press, and in liberal circles in Russia itself, who were vociferously condemning the uncompromising Russian military action that would result in high casualties on both sides. The poem made Pushkin unpopular in liberal circles in Russia for what was seen as his uncritical pro-government stance, especially by those who didn’t believe he really meant it but was toadying to Tsar Nicholas I for his own advantage. However, he was actually completely sincere (see below).

The original is in hexameters and tetrameters.

3 the Lithuanian state: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map in 1795, and a sovereign Polish state ceased to exist until 1918. Pushkin is referring to Poland partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria.

6 An old domestic difference: In a letter to Prince Vyazemsky (1 June 1831) at the height of the revolt, Pushkin referred to Russian suppression of it as a ‘family affair, an age-old, hereditary quarrel’, and no concern of other peoples ‘to bark and bellow about’.

8–16 War among these people […] The bloody chronicle: During the Time of Troubles following the death of Boris Godunov in 1605, the Poles had held Moscow and a number of western Russian cities before they were thrown back and Mikhail Romanov was elected tsar in 1613. In the seventeenth century, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been for a time the most powerful polity in Europe; the last quarter of the eighteenth century had seen war between the two countries and Russia had taken part in the three Partitions of Poland.

19 Praga: An eastern suburb of Warsaw, the scene of a rising in 1794 which saw heavy fighting and the deaths of many civilians.

23–6 our capital / In flames […] You could only tremble: Reference is not only to Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 but also to events of two hundred years earlier (see note to lines 8–16).

32 the Bogatyr: Warrior-champion of Russian legend, here a personification of Russia.

33 his old Ismailian bayonet: Reference to Aleksandr Suvorov’s capture of the Turkish fortress of Ismail in 1790.

37 Perm to Tauris: Perm is a city at the foot of the Ural Mountains, a traditional boundary between Europe and Asia. Tauris is the name given to Crimea in Classical Antiquity.

38 Colchis: Graeco-Roman name of a polity on the south-eastern coast of the Black Sea – one of the hottest regions in the Russian Empire.

My Pedigree (1831)

This indignant poem raises a personal gripe to satirical socio-political comment – somewhat stretched at times, but broadly in accordance with most of the known facts about the poet’s ancestors. In August 1830 an inveterate enemy of Pushkin, the journalist and government spy Faddey Bulgarin, who popularised the authoritarian policies of Alexander I and Nicholas I (see Introduction under ‘Life’), published a satirical letter referring to Pushkin’s mother as a ‘Mulatto’. Always intensely conscious of his identifiable lineage going back to the early seventeenth century, Pushkin found the term highly insulting and might well have called out his antagonist had he seen him as a social equal. Instead, he wrote this poem. He regarded the newly ennobled as upstarts, and he was proud to see himself as a genuine self-made bourgeois, not relying on his superior family history on both sides. (Information on Pushkin’s ancestors given in the following notes is mostly from Wachtel, pp. 220–23.)

First published in full in Annenkov, 1857.

2 burst out laughing: Reflecting Pushkin’s own response to the spectacle of a poet known for his pride in forebears of mid-ranking nobility but who himself neither dressed, behaved nor lived like an aristocrat.

5 assessor. ‘Collegiate Assessor’ was the eighth in the Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great, at which level hereditary nobility began to be conferred.

21–2 Desert […] Austrian cavalry: The ‘deserter’ from the Austrian cavalry was the grandfather of General P. A. Kleinmikhel (1793–1869), a favourite of Nicholas I.

25 My forebear Racha: A Prussian émigré nobleman who arrived in Russia in the thirteenth century.

26 Alexander Nevsky: A celebrated early Russian ruler (1221–63) whose defeat of invading German and Estonian armies on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242 was a turning point in Russian history; he was canonised in 1547.

27–8 Ivan […] his descendants: Some of these served in the Oprichnina, the much-feared repressive special army of the first tsar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547–84).

30–32 More than one of them won glory […] Nizhny-Novgorodian. The only one of these Pushkins to be historically identified is the patriot Gavrila Pushkin, comrade in arms of the Nizhny-Novgorodian Kuzma Minin, who drove the Poles out of the country in 1612; he features as a younger character and a political opportunist in Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov (1825).

37 We Pushkins signed: Some half-dozen Pushkins (two of whom, according to Pushkin, simply made their marks as illiterates) are recorded among the signatories of the election document which established the Romanov Dynasty in 1613. the martyr’s son: The first Romanov tsar, Mikhail (r. 1613–45), whose father was imprisoned by successively Boris Godunov and the Poles occupying Russia (see note to lines 8–16 of ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, 1831).

41–4 Stubbornness […] executed him: A Fyodor Pushkin was executed by Peter the Great for conspiracy in 1697.

47 Dolgoruky: Yakov F. Dolgoruky (1639–1720), of an illustrious family claiming descent from Rurik, founder of the first Russian state; a friend and associate of Peter the Great. Legendary for his boldness, he once publicly tore up an edict issued by Peter, who tolerated the act.

49–54 My grandfather […] in solitary: Lev A. Pushkin (1723–90) was Pushkin’s maternal grandfather, an artillery officer. After the palace coup of 1762 which deposed Peter III, he was in fact sentenced only to house arrest for two years, and for a non-political offence.

53 the Orlovs: Grigory Orlov was a lover of Catherine the Great and leader of the coup which installed her as empress.

62 Musin: The Musin-Pushkin branch of the family retained their wealth and standing.

post scriptum: Written a few months later than the rest of the poem.

65 Fiddlyarin: Pushkin uses a current nickname for Faddey Bulgarin based on the word figlyar, meaning ‘charlatan’ or ‘trickster’.

66–8 Claims my black forebear Hannibal / Passed […] some old salt: The anecdote was maliciously made up by Bulgarin.

69 that great captain: Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725).

73 my great-grandfather: Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696?–1781). See Introduction under ‘Life’.

77–9 that Gannibal […] Navarino’s fall: Pushkin’s great-uncle Ivan Gannibal (1735–1801), a naval officer and hero of the decisive battle of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 that saw the capture of the Turkish fort of Navarino (now Pylos in Greece).

84 Bourgeois Street: Meshchanskaya (meaning ‘bourgeois’) Street, famous for its brothels.

For the Album of Princess Anna Abamelek (1832)

Pushkin first saw the addressee, of the renowned Lazarev family, founders of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, Moscow, as an adorable child when he was a schoolboy. Later he knew her as a gifted young beauty fluent in English, French and German, who wrote poetry and translated some of his poems into French and English (Ketchian, pp. 130–31).

The original is in iambic tetrameters; this translation retains the rhyme scheme. First published in 1840.

2 made a fuss of: Pushkin makes a verb, nyanchit’, from the noun nyanka (nanny) and the latter word appears in the last line of the original (l. 6 of the translation), and in the middle of the poem (l. 4 in the translation) he echoes its sound in one of the commonest of words, nyne, ‘now’.

The Beauty (1832)

Inscribed in the album of Countess Yelena Zavadovskaya, whose marmoreal beauty is identified with ‘the Cleopatra of the Neva’ in Eugene Onegin (VIII.16). This poem departs from the album convention of a direct addressee, being a meditation on the qualities of the subject.

The original consists of two eight-line stanzas of iambic tetrameters.

Autumn (A fragment) (1833)

This poem was written on the family estate of Boldino in one of Pushkin’s famously creative autumns. Here he puts ottava rima to more serious use than in the narrative poem A Little House in Kolomna (1830); in the original the present poem is in hexameters, the earlier being in the lighter pentameter metre. In ‘Autumn’, formal and informal language and tone are perfectly blended. In content the poem would appear to be satisfyingly finished, but the last, uncompleted line carries a strong dose of doubt and wistfulness about the poet’s personal future and fate.

First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

Epigraph: Taken from Gavrila Derzhavin’s poem about life in the countryside, ‘To Eugene: Life at Zvanka’ (1807).

7 the winter crops: Planted in the autumn and in the first stages of growth below the surface of the earth through the winter.

23 Armidas: Decorously literary use of the name of the beautiful sorceress Armida in La Gerusalemme liberata (‘Jerusalem Delivered’, 1591) by Torquato Tasso (1544–95).

31 fruit liqueur and blinis: Served at the Russian Shrovetide festival marking the end of winter.

43 In a consumptive girl: Pushkin borrows an image from a poem by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69) from the collection Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) that had caused critical controversy in Paris in 1829; in a review of Sainte-Beuve’s poetry published in 1831, he had quoted some words of medical content: ‘his muse coughs up blood’.

80–81 Between stanzas X and XI, Pushkin drafted an extra one listing an abundance of his past ‘fancy’s fruits’ – steel-clad knights, gloomy sultans, corsairs, dwarves, bogatyrs (warrior-champions), captive princesses, ‘sleek-templed, bare-shouldered beauties’ – that he excluded from the final poem.

85–8 So a ship sleeps […] cuts the waves: These four lines seem to distil a long passage describing a ship’s crew setting sail in Sainte-Beuve’s poem ‘Le Calme’ (1829), which Pushkin knew.

89 She sails. But where are we to sail? …: In rough draft, Pushkin began this last stanza with six lines listing prospective (all landbound) places to visit: the Caucasus, ‘the burning Moldavian plains’, Scotland, Switzerland, ‘the brilliant snows of Normandy’. It is easy to imagine Pushkin’s geographical and cultural yearnings, prevented as he was all his life from visiting foreign countries. This last line might be taken on a deeper symbolic level, as expressing his frustration and despair at the limitations imposed on citizens’ lives in Russia (see also note to lines 3 and 5 of ‘The Prisoner’, 1822).

‘It’s time, my love, it’s time’ (1834)

Pushkin wrote these lines, taken to be addressed to his wife, at a time of deep frustration after not being allowed to resign from his humiliating court post and live permanently in the country and write. They are only the beginning of what was first intended as a longer poem; on his manuscript page Pushkin left a plan, never realised, for a continuation on ‘moving to the country – fields, garden, peasants, books; work on poetry – family, love etc. – religion, death’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 733, note). The eight lines he wrote, elevated but spontaneous alexandrine couplets, are among his best-loved poems. He treated the context and themes of ‘religion, death’ two years later in the Stone Island cycle.

First published in 1886.

6 Long have I dreamt of Eden: Here Pushkin has a whole line which reads literally: ‘Long have I dreamt of an enviable lot –’. The rest of the translation closely follows Pushkin’s words and word order.

[From Anacreon:] A fragment (1835)

Pushkin translated this and two other poems by the ancient Greek lyric poet Anacreon, through an unknown translation, on the same day, 6 January 1835, intending to incorporate them in a prose piece on ‘Roman life’ he never completed. Like Lomonosov and Derzhavin before him, he renders Anacreon in rhyme, here in trochaic ottava rima tetrameter.

First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

4 klobuk: A tall flat-topped hat, familiar as the headgear of Russian Orthodox priests.

‘… I see again / That corner of the earth’ (1835)

Written at Mikhaylovskoye in the penultimate autumn of Pushkin’s life, nine years after his two-year exile on the estate. The previous day, 25 September 1835, he had written to his wife describing his return there and finding that a new generation of pine-trees had sprouted up beside the familiar time-honoured ones, giving him the same feeling of irritation he experienced at the sight of young guards officers at balls where he no longer danced. In this poem written on the following day, he shed his irritation to produce a meditative poem in the mode of Wordsworth; he had recently sampled The Excursion (1814) in English. True to his classical temperament, he cut lengthy draft passages on his younger self expressing feelings of persecution and alienation.

This poem reflects Pushkin’s interest in lyrical use of blank verse in his final years as he came to see rhyme as being among the superfluous ‘embellishments’ and ‘artificiality’ of contemporary verse when the stylistic ideal he now sought was the bare directness of the poets of Classical Antiquity.

First published in The Contemporary, 1837.

‘The ready power of suffering’ (1835)

Pushkin began this poem in 1831, and by the time he completed it in 1835 its subject may have changed. The emotional situation, the return of the experience of love, is reminiscent of ‘To ***’ (1825), and one draft reuses the second line of that poem, ‘You passed before my eyes’. However, this later poem has no addressee direct or implied.

The original is in iambic tetrameters. First published in Annenkov, 1855.

The Stone Island Cycle

The following six poems have come to be seen as constituting the ‘Stone Island cycle’, though the case for including the last in the group is controversial and in this book the set will be taken to exclude it. The six poems were all written between 5 June and 21 August 1836 on a family holiday on Kamenny Ostrov (Stone Island) near St Petersburg in Pushkin’s last summer, a time of great personal stress for him. In the five-poem cycle Pushkin chooses various settings and personae in a poetically parodic way which frees him to express his own thoughts and values without being held to account for them. The three central poems of this group have come to be thought of as constituting an inner cycle, an ‘Easter Triptych’, in which Pushkin makes metaphorical use of the Gospel story to reflect upon the meaning of his own life, his poetic calling and his future death.

Pushkin made no attempt to have any of these poems published, and their full meaning first began to emerge only in the 1950s. The poet’s numbering of four of them to indicate their sequence is ambiguous, and the pattern has had to be pieced together from the evidence, by Alyssa Dinega Gillespie and others (Gillespie, pp. 39–83). Gillespie’s bold and original reading of the cycle is a good example of what modern criticism can find in Pushkin, aided by the record of his life, and informs these notes throughout. Bracketed numerals before individual poem titles given below indicate Gillespie’s suggested sequence.

Whether or not Pushkin came to hold Christian belief has been debated. Gillespie cites two balanced views: (1) that he was never a truly ‘Christian poet’ but remained poised in a ‘half-pagan, half-Christian obeisance to beauty and creation, human and divine’; and (2) that the ‘divine Providence’ he worshipped in his late poems ‘merges with the poetic gift whose call Pushkin had always heeded – the poetic gift that was itself his fate, bestowed upon him from heaven’ (Irina Surat and Sergei Davydov, cited in Gillespie, p. 41).

In the originals, the five poems of the Stone Island cycle are all in hexameter alexandrine couplets, Pushkin’s habitual metre for the philosophical mode. The present translations of three poems keep the original rhymed metre but in pentameters. The more flexible medium of blank verse pentameters was chosen for the translations of the complex content of the poems ‘Imitation of the Italian’ and ‘Secular Power’.

‘From Pindemonte’ and ‘When, alone with my thoughts’ were first published in Annenkov, 1855; ‘The desert fathers and unblemished women’ in The Contemporary, 1837; ‘Imitation of the Italian’ and ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’ in Zhukovsky, 1841; and ‘Secular Power’ in full in Herzen, 1856.

Gillespie (p. 72) offers this analysis of the structure of the Stone Island cycle:

At the two far edges of the cycle, poems 1 (‘From Pindemonte’) and 5 (‘When, alone with my thoughts …’) reject public existence and publicly audible speech in favour of privacy, silence and peace; while poems 2 (‘The desert fathers …’) and 4 (‘Secular Power’) express Pushkin’s simultaneous reverence for Christianity and reluctance to make himself over in Christ’s image – he prefers to maintain his pride and independence even at the possible cost of his own salvation. […] This overview indicates that the architectural design of the Stone Island cycle is best thought of as cruciform rather than either linear (as interpretations that foreground the Christian calendar suggest) or circular. Thus, we can think of the above two pairs of poems as two separate axes of the cycle: poems 1 and 5 consider the problem of public vs. private identity from a secular point of view and span the emotional distance between umileniye (tender emotion) and unyniye (despondency), between fantasy and oblivion; poem 1 begins with a rejection of social striving and ends in solitary fantasy and ecstasy before the beauties of art and nature, while poem 5 surveys the futility of life before going on to posit a less dark vision of posthumous oblivion. Poems 2 and 4 consider the same problem of public vs. private identity from a religious point of view, ranging in response from humility to anger, submission to resistance. All four of the cycle’s outer lyrics contemplate death and position the poet as a reader, an imitator, or a ventriloquist as a means to self-preservation of sorts.

The seething core lyric of the Stone Island cycle, poem 3, ‘Imitation of the Italian’, which retells the story of Judas’s suicide and entry into hell following his betrayal of Christ, constitutes the intersection of the cycle’s two separate axes – the point at which all its varied moods and ideas converge. Here, secular and spiritual allegiances and motivations overlap, in a turbulent admixture of despair and love, pride and humiliation. Judas, who doubles as disciple and traitor, is reminiscent of Pushkin’s ventriloquistic role-playing in the other poems of the cycle: in poem 1 as the poet Pindemonte conflated with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in 2 as Ephraim the Syrian, in 4 as Jesus, and in 5 as the poet Thomas Gray mediated through Vasily Zhukhovsky’s translation of the ‘Elegy written in a Country Church-yard’.

[1] From Pindemonte (1836)

The title of this first poem of the Stone Island cycle is a stratagem to lull the censor, though the name of the Italian Romantic poet Ippolito Pindemonte (1753–1828) looks to have been chosen for the resemblance of his work to that of Thomas Gray (see note to poem 5, ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’). Pushkin has written an original poem.

9 words, words, words: Hamlet is a crucial intertext, this quotation marking out the private, inviolate world upon which the poet/poem insists, a defence for survival against the harsh real world of state coercion in which Pushkin lived. The mood returns in the cycle’s concluding poem 5.

[2] ‘The desert fathers and unblemished women’ (1836)

In this opening poem of the ‘Easter Triptych’, Pushkin tries on the mask of the fourth-century Saint Ephraim the Syrian, introducing (in the first seven lines in translation) and then presenting (in the last seven lines) the latter’s well-known Lenten prayer in his own modernised wording. But he slips in significant changes from its original text. In the second line of the prayer (line 9 of the poem in translation), he adds the words ‘That hidden serpent’ to introduce ‘lust for authority’, jarringly conjuring up the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In line 11 (in translation) he omits the words ‘your servant’ after ‘let me’. In lines 13 and 14 he changes Saint Ephraim’s order of desirable attributes, placing self-warning ‘chastity’ in emphatic last place instead of ‘love’. Much as he values the qualities set out in the prayer, Pushkin cannot suppress his true spirit – not one of humility but of firm earthly desires.

[3] Imitation of the Italian (1836)

This central poem of the ‘Easter Triptych’, a demonic parody of Judas’s betrayal and entry into hell and Christ’s Resurrection, is a condensed and transformative ten-line version of a sonnet on Judas by Francesco Gianni (1760–1822) that Pushkin read in a French translation published in 1835. Gillespie sees Pushkin’s treatment of Judas as audaciously involving his own preoccupations, ‘questions of poetic responsibility, the ethics of the poetic calling […]’ (Gillespie, p. 75). She goes on to observe (p. 76):

There are two possible ways in which Judas can be viewed in this poem. On the one hand, he is a traitor and speculator who sells out to the secular authorities; on the other hand, he is the artist of his own fate who accepts full responsibility for his deeds. This ambiguity lies at the heart of Pushkin’s cycle and of Pushkin’s interrogation of his own poetic actions; it also captures his ambivalent discomfort and guilty admiration of the Decembrist rebels’ self-sacrifice […] in which he himself did not share. The nagging question implicit throughout the Stone Island cycle is whether, given the limitations of Pushkin’s current situation, his strategy of ambitious imitation is a valid and honourable mode of poetic self-expression – a legitimate means of veiled protest – or the equivalent of surrender to the powers that be, the damning equivalent of complicity, obedience, betrayal?

1 dropped down from his tree: Three of the five Decembrists hanged in July 1826 had to be hanged again. Their ropes were rumoured to have broken. (See Introduction under ‘Life’ on the Decembrist uprising.)

[4] Secular Power (1836)

The setting of this third poem of the ‘Easter Triptych’ was prompted by an incident that had taken place on the latest Good Friday in St Petersburg; an image of Christ taken down from the Cross had been exhibited in Kazan Cathedral, but strictly guarded from the public by armed sentries.

Against a summary, in exalted language, of the events of the Crucifixion, with the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene standing in mourning at the foot of the Cross (lines 1–6) comes the shocking actuality of the armed sentries preventing the people’s access to the holy image (lines 7–10). Then, in what David M. Bethea has called ‘as close as Pushkin’s normally subtle and understated pen can come to an Old Testament Jeremiad’ (Bethea, p. 156), a scornful voice ridicules those who have assumed unwarranted power over a higher, spiritual authority.

3 the life-giving tree: Gillespie (pp. 67 and 72) points out that Pushkin’s word drevo (a tree or structure made of wood) links this poem, in an associative way characteristic of this poem cycle, with the cycle’s core, poem 3, ‘Imitation of the Italian’: in line 1 of that poem the same word refers to the tree from which Judas hanged himself, and here in ‘Secular Power’ to the Cross. The word thus can refer to both an instrument of torture and a source of ‘eternal life’, Pushkin seeing his own position as poet-martyr and poet-prophet.

5 Stood […] two […] women: Pushkin originally wrote: ‘Stood, pale, two weak women’ but deleted the adjectives without further amendment and not intending a hemistich.

[5] ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’ (1836)

Vasily Zhukovsky’s translation (1802) of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) set a popular trend in Russian poetry. But Pushkin’s poem has a personal weight beyond that tradition. It was written four months after he attended his mother’s funeral and selected his own burial place next to hers. Pushkin’s anguished antipathy to the social life of the capital fuels the first section of the poem, which breaks off before continuing in the elegiac mode and ending in the Romantic fragmentary manner.

27 A broad oak stands: Throughout Pushkin’s poetry an ancient tree or trees represent/s security, venerable durability and freedom; examples in this book are the ‘spacious, singing groves’ in ‘The Poet’ (1827), the ‘palm on Zion’ (line 11) in ‘Madonna’ (1830), the lone oak on the island of Buyan in The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1830), and the ‘Three pine-trees’ (line 27) in ‘… I see again’ (1835).

‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’ (1836)

A parody of Gavrila Derzhavin’s translation of the last poem of Horace’s third book of Odes, which provided Pushkin with a metrical model. Some authoritative opinion places it as the final poem in the Stone Island cycle (see the above headnote on the cycle). Pushkin follows Derzhavin’s alternately rhyming alexandrines but shortens the final line of each stanza, making his poem more informal and personal than Derzhavin’s; this metre is kept in the present translation. Pushkin retains only a few isolated phrases from Derzhavin. He enumerates not only his own achievements but also their national significance, and instead of a grand ode in praise of the Russian Empire he represents it by naming some of its most humble outlying peoples.

Epigraph: Exegi monumentum: The first two words of Horace’s poem, to be followed by ‘aere perennius’, its whole first line translating as: ‘I have made a monument more durable than bronze.’

1 not with hands: Echoing Mark 14:58: ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands […] I will build another made without hands.’ Pushkin uses the word nerukotvornyy (‘not made by [human] hands’), from the recent Russian Synodal translation of the New Testament (for more on Russian literary use of this word, see Wachtel, p. 355).

2 The people’s path to it will not be overgrown: Not because it will be worn bare by use but because it will be spiritual not physical.

4 Alexander’s Column: The Alexander Column in Palace Square, the tallest structure in St Petersburg, was built between 1830 and 1834 in commemoration of Alexander I and victory over Napoleon in 1812. Pushkin left the capital to avoid attending the unveiling ceremonies in 1834 (Wachtel, p. 356).

11 Kalmuck of the steppes: A Mongol subgroup in Russia who migrated from north-west China to the north Caucasus in the seventeenth century.

12 Tungùs: An ethnolinguistic group native to Siberia and North-East Asia.

13–16 Long will […] lenience: These lines contain generalised references to Pushkin’s early political poems, including ‘Liberty: An Ode’ (1817) and ‘To Chaadayev’ (1818).

II
NARRATIVE POEMS (POEMY)

The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1823)

Epigraph: Saadi: Saadi of Shiraz (1210–91), one of the great Persian poets.

2 The amber: A hookah made of amber.

21–2 Issue his edicts to the Pole […] blood: Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was constant cross-border conflict between Poles and Crimean Tatars on the southern edge of the Russian Empire.

25 treacherous Genoa’s machinations: An anachronism on Pushkin’s part; these belonged to an earlier historical period – by the time of the tale, set in the eighteenth century, Genoese settlements in the Crimea had proceeded more peaceably.

32 giaour: A Turkish word applied to non-Muslims. Byron uses the term as a title for one of his eastern tales (The Giaour, 1813).

242 To the most merciful divine …: A line left unrhymed by Pushkin. The continuous dotted lines that follow on the next two lines and elsewhere (not included in the line numbering) are Pushkin’s – his touch of Romantic mystery, a unique feature of this poem.

245–50 I hear the song […] gentle light: Pushkin’s relish in the Crimean landscape he glimpsed on his way to southern exile in 1820 surfaces here, as again in the conclusion to the poem.

299–301 holy symbol of the cross […] Is native to your very soul: See lines 392–4.

418 Mariya’s time had come below: i.e. in the mortal world below heaven.

420 To peace eternal she was called: As one reviewer perceptively pointed out on first publication: ‘If [Pushkin] had given us the shy beauty under the dagger of the frenzied Georgian, he would have destroyed our enjoyment of the whole poem. Indignation would have driven out all other feelings aroused by it’ (Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland), 16 March 1824; in Vatsuro and Fomichev, p. 211).

529 Salgir: The longest river in the Crimean peninsula, flowing into the Sea of Azov near Simferopol.

546 Ayu-Dag: A historic Crimean summit, a laccolith, near Yalta, which Pushkin would have seen from the Tatar village of Gurzuf on the Black Sea coast on his way south a year before starting to write this poem.

The Gypsies (1824)

2 Bessarabia: Successively colonised by the Greeks, Romans, Genoese and Ottomans, this territory bordering the north-west of the Black Sea – today divided between Moldova, Ukraine and Romania – was ceded to Russia in 1812 on the conclusion of the second of the many Russo-Turkish wars.

41 the mound: Ancient burial mounds (kurgàny; singular: kurgan) are found in large numbers on the southern Russian steppes. They have nothing to do with the humbler and more modern graves that also feature in the poem.

46 Aleko is his name: Also a form of Pushkin’s given name. Pronounced Alyèko.

64 couch of bliss: Pushkin’s diction here, ‘lòzhe nyègi’, as also occasionally elsewhere in the poem, was thought too archaically poetic by some contemporary critics. But Pushkin may be characterising the philosophical old man.

85–94 doleful […] abandoned […] melancholy […] oppressed […] obsessed […]: The narrative describing Aleko and his own utterances brings in a Byronic-Romantic stylistic register in marked contrast to the poem’s concrete realism up to this point.

95–110 God’s little bird knows neither […] Over the dark blue sea: Pushkin changes from iambic to trochaic tetrameter, his favourite ‘folk’ metre, which he uses in most of his fairy tales (skazki). This translation renders the contrast from iambic tetrameter in trochaic trimeter.

135–207 ZEMFIRA: Tell me, my love […] A smoke-filled tent for all his stage: Pushkin added this section, including the passage on Ovid in exile, after he had made a fair copy of what had at first been the whole poem including the epilogue.

166–9 I have heard tell, an emperor […] his strange name: The emperor Augustus banished Ovid, in his fifties, to Tomis on the western shore of the Black Sea, to the south of Bessarabia, apparently because of an unfortunate coincidence between Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and adultery scandals in the imperial family. The old man’s account of Ovid’s exile chimes with the latter’s own in the collection of elegiac verse Tristia (Sorrows), written during his exile (and which Pushkin had read in French translation three years earlier).

237 The old man warms in springtime sun: Having completed the poem, Pushkin drafted a passage to precede this line, including a thirty-nine-line diatribe against the ‘depravity of civilisation’, addressed by Aleko to his newborn son, but abandoned it in rough draft.

241–64 Old husband, dread husband […] Grizzled old fright!: The words and rhythm of Zemfira’s song are based on a Moldavian folksong. Pushkin’s words, along with much else from The Gypsies, feature in Bizet’s Carmen (see Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’).

273 the Kagul: A tributary of the Danube, to which a Russian victory on this river in 1770 paved the way for Russian entry.

348 the Moskàl: Pushkin uses the contemptuous Slavic, especially Polish, term for ‘Muscovite’.

350 Akkerman: Turkish fortress on the mouth of the Dniester; it became Russian at the beginning of the war of 1806–12 with Turkey.

351 the Budzhak plain: A large plain in the south of Bessarabia.

361 Maryula: Pushkin consistently has ‘Mariula’ (four syllables), but in the present translation it takes three forms – also Mariyule and Mariyula – to suit the metre, and as one varies the form of a loved person’s name.

447 and 450 I hate you, despise you […] die for my love: Here Pushkin’s verse has verbal echoes of Zemfira’s song; in this translation, metrical (anapaestic) echoes are added. The theme ‘I die loving’ is a stock-in-trade of early Russian Romantic verse, and concludes Pushkin’s poem ‘Desire’, written when he was seventeen.

472 Proud man: Pushkin first wrote ‘violent man’ (‘buynyy chelovyèk’). His amendment gets to the heart of the difference between Aleko and the gypsies.

473–6 We are untamed […] We cannot live with murderers: The old man’s argument has rigorous logic: gypsies have no laws, and so do not exact punishment; yet, wild and lawless though they are, they cannot accept murder or associate with murderers: it is law-based ‘civilisation’ that produces violence.

494 Trailing its wounded wing: One of Pushkin’s sketches of gypsy tents in his working notebook is rather suggestive of the shape of a trailing wing.

502–5 where war’s alarm […] Stamboul: See note to line 2 above.

522 worn and tattered tents: Pushkin repeats his adjective for ‘worn and tattered’ (iz(ò)drannye) from the opening of the poem, as he does the words for ‘noisy throng’ in lines 483–4 (‘roaming band […] in noisy flight’ in the present translation).

527 There is no refuge from the Fates: Pushkin’s friend Pyotr Vyazemsky found this concluding line ‘too Greek for its context. You would think that these words come from a chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy’, and he pointed to the contrasting ‘epigrammatic’ style of Zemfira’s expiry at line 450: ‘… die for my love …’ (Vatsuro and Fomichev, p. 322). However, it would seem to fit the meaning of the poem more closely than he saw (see Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’ for some questions it poses).

The Bridegroom (1825)

25–8 He glances […] thunderstruck: In these dynamic lines, Pushkin’s ratio of verbs to other parts of speech is almost 1:1, as compared with 1:3 in this translation.

117–20 I’d lost […] all I heard: Pushkin’s onomatopoeia is unmatchable in translation. No less than six s and six sh sounds create the soughing of a dense wood: ‘S tropìnki sbìlas’ ya: v glushì / Nye slyshno bylo ni dushì, / I sosny lish’ da yeli / Vershìnami shumèli.’

137 clop clop clop: In one of his notes to Eugene Onegin, Pushkin defends his use of Russian words like top (for the sound of horses’ hooves) against reviewers’ objections, citing their use in Russian folk literature. ‘These are native Russian words,’ he writes. ‘One should not interfere with the freedom of our rich and beautiful language.’

143–4 and 151–2 Pushkin substantially repeats the final couplet of each of these stanzas with the rhyme-words golubìtsa, ‘pure creature’, and devìtsa, ‘maiden’, the last line of each stanza consisting of the weighty double noun ‘Krasàvitsa devìtsa’, ‘Beauty-maiden’.

167–8 The villain […] right hand: In the original, consecutive a, u and r sounds create a savage and sinister expression of the killer’s relish: ‘Zlodey devìtsu gùbit, / Yey pràvu rùku rùbit.’ The exact phrase ‘pravu ruku’, ‘right hand’, has already been heard in a subliminal pre-echo in line 150; it has had to be incompletely retained in the present translation, ‘on his right’.

Count Nulin (1825)

7–8 his visage bears / A proud proprietorial smile: Pushkin’s vowels are graphic: ‘Yegò dovòl’noye litsò / Priyàtnoy vàzhnost’yu siyàyet.’ Literally: ‘His satisfied face / With pleasant importance shines.’ See also note below to lines 127–30 of The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834).

20–21 The period […] prose: The prosaic elements in Count Nulin (including everything about the heroine) irritated reviewers, as they were supposed to.

29 And toasts the devastating chase: Pushkin exploits the long polysyllabic Russian adjective: his ‘toasts’ comes at the end of the preceding line, leaving ‘the devastating chase’ to occupy a whole line – ‘Opustoshìtel’nyy nabèg’.

40–42 ‘Natasha’ […] Natalya: Play with nomenclature. ‘Natasha’ is the name of wholesome ‘Russian’ characters in Pushkin’s poems, as in The Bridegroom (1825). Here the more formal version is a veneer that goes with Natasha’s affected Europeanism, covering her true rural Russian self.

56 long, long, long, long novel: Pushkin’s line reiterates the adjective dlinnyy, ‘long’, three times within the line.

106 ‘Courage, allons!’: Nearly a dozen French phrases and names occur in Count Nulin in the Latin alphabet.

117 Petropole: A poetic Russian name for St Petersburg.

119–23 With store of hats […] Lorgnettes: These details are reminiscent of the ‘young philosopher’s’ items of toiletry and dress listed in the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, published on its own in the year The Bridegroom was written, 1825.

124 Guizot’s new tome (a lot of rot!): The voluminous historical works of the French Liberal politician François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874) were much admired throughout Europe during the post-Napoleonic era.

127 and 128 Béranger […] Paer: The songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857), voicing the aspirations of the Parisian working class, were hugely popular throughout Europe, including progressive circles in Russia, for much of the nineteenth century. Ferdinando Paer (1771–1839) was an Italian composer who settled in France; his forty-three operas include one, Leonora, that uses the same plot as Beethoven’s Fidelio.

145–7 Talma […] Mamselle Mars […] Potier: Leading lights of the theatre of the Napoleonic era.

151 d’Arlincourt and Lamartine: C.-V. Prévot, vicomte d’Arlincourt (1788–1856), a Romantic French novelist much read in his time, and the poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), a leading figure in the French Romantic movement.

155 God grant we’ll soon be educated!: Not yet. Alexander I’s reactionary educational policies centred on the eradication of subversive, un-Russian ideas and freethinking; staff of Russia’s five universities were sacked for their ideas of constitutional government.

161 the Telegraph: The Moscow Telegraph was a popular literary review that included a pictorial supplement showing foreign fashions in clothes, furniture and so on. Pushkin resisted (not always successfully) efforts to get him to contribute, for he thought the magazine superficial.

334 Picard has seen to everything: If Pushkin’s work on the poem had run to a third morning, he might have rhymed this line.

A Little House in Kolomna (1830)

3 pentameter: When he wrote this poem, Pushkin had reached his summit with the pentameter, the vehicle of all his dramatic verse, such as the blank verse ‘Little Tragedies’ written at this time.

13 Shikhmatov: The limited number of inflected verb endings in Russian makes it very easy to rhyme verbs. The versifying academician Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1790–1853), who eventually entered a monastery, took pride in avoiding such rhymes. Pushkin was fond of mildly poking fun at him.

42 go for broke: Pushkin uses an equivalent term from the card game of faro.

58–60 Pegasus […] Parnassus: In Greek mythology the fountain Hippocrene on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses and whose waters were believed to give poetic inspiration to whoever drank them, was said to have sprung from a hoofprint of the winged horse Pegasus; its name means ‘Horse’s Fountain’. Mount Helicon is in the same range in central Greece as Parnassus, home of the god Apollo and the Muses.

71 sentry-box. There is an army barracks in the area (see stanza XXV).

104 Emin: Fyodor Aleksandrovich Emin (1735–70), of Turkish Muslim background, whose numerous moralising, sentimentalist novels of adventure had long been popular in Russia.

162 A countess: Pushkin’s friend and literary agent P. A. Pletnev identifies this character as a real-life beauty who married a wealthy septuagenarian count in order to save her family from bankruptcy, and tells us that Pushkin would visit St Mary’s Church specifically to set eyes on the young countess, with whose sad history he was acquainted (Arndt, p. 469, note).

210 bath: Located in the bathhouse, an outbuilding.

285 (An indication of a downright boor): The last line of the sestet, i.e. the line following this one, is lacking in the original. Line numbering includes the missing line.

The Bronze Horseman (1833)

Title: Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great was commissioned by Catherine the Great and unveiled on 7 August 1782, the official centenary date of Peter’s accession to the throne, in an area on the Admiralty Embankment then known as Peter’s Square, later developed to form Senate (today called Decembrists’) Square.

preface: The official record of the St Petersburg flood of 1824, incorporated in a detailed historical account of all previous St Petersburg floods compiled by the naval engineer V. N. Berkh and published in 1826, was propagandistic, downplaying its exceptional nature (comparable disasters having occurred in other countries) and exaggerating the tsar’s measures to alleviate the consequent distress and disease. It included an eyewitness account by Pushkin’s bitter enemy, the journalist, writer and police informer Faddey Bulgarin (on whom see more in the Introduction under ‘Life’ and ‘Lyric Poems’). In his preface, Pushkin stresses his authentic realism and makes a show of respectability before the censorship. Although he himself, in exile at Mikhaylovskoye at the time, had not witnessed the 1824 flood, his poem, drawing on a variety of published accounts, firmly contradicts Berkh’s official account.

1–20 Beside […] open sea: A prosodically subtle opening to the prologue. Anthony Briggs (pp. 128–9) observes that in the original the first ten lines, describing an undisturbed natural scene, a ‘watery waste’ (line 1) and ‘ancient forest’ (line 9), consist of two five-line stanzas with rhymes in a rather special arrangement. The next ten lines change to a more regular rhyme scheme when Peter the Great begins to plan his transformation of the bleak spot, and man-made order, or disorder, supplants nature – the setting for the story to come. Behind this opening lies a passage from the poet Konstantin Batyushkov’s essay ‘A Walk to the Academy of Fine Art’ (published in 1817), in which he imagines what the site of St Petersburg might have been like before the founding of the city; Batyushkov’s words are much more unequivocally positive than Pushkin’s.

15–16 hew / A window on to Europe: In the first of the five elliptical notes that Pushkin offered the reader with the poem (see Basker, pp. 15 and 49–52, giving these notes in the original and discussing their buried meanings) he quotes from the Enlightenment writer Count Francesco Algarotti’s description (in a French translation that Pushkin may have read) of a visit to Russia in 1738–9: ‘Petersburg is the window through which Russia looks at Europe.’ Pushkin’s barbed version of this suggests, rather than a conduit for enlightened European values, the unenlightened use of the axe to create a spyhole. Basker’s close analysis of Pushkin’s elliptical notes to the poem shows them to be a Pandora’s box of intentional and typically Pushkinian misdirections that both conceal and reveal the poet’s own both negative and positive attitudes to St Petersburg. For present purposes it has been thought best not to distract the reader from the poem itself by detailed consideration of these semi-private notes but to make brief references to them.

57 Allowing night a mere half-hour: Pushkin’s second note directs the reader here to a poem by his friend the poet Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky repudiating his previous dislike of St Petersburg, the third stanza of which several lines in this paragraph echo.

67 the playing field of Mars: The largest open space in central St Petersburg, the parade ground for the Imperial Guards, still known as ‘the Field of Mars’.

109–14 His family name […] low and grand. In early drafts of the poem, Pushkin made Yevgeny a prosperous figure, then further and further reduced his material and social status until his end as a beggar.

112 Karamzin: Nikolay Mikhaylovich Karamzin, author of the monumental History of the Russian State (1818–29). Pushkin hints in the previous three lines that Yevgeny’s forebears may have been illustrious before the social reforms of Peter the Great.

133 They’d take the bridges off the Neva: In Pushkin’s time, the two bridges over the main channel of the Neva were on pontoons that could be temporarily removed when the water level became dangerously high.

159–60 the stormy night / Had ended; came pale dawn: In his third note to this poem, Pushkin seizes on meteorological detail to begin to articulate his concern at what he saw as Mickiewicz’s distorted portrayal, in verse included in Forefathers’ Eve (see Introduction under ‘Narrative Poems’) written after Russian suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1830–31, of the 1824 flooding of St Petersburg as a retributive act of God rather than a man-caused disaster. ‘It is a pity that [Mickiewicz’s] description is inaccurate,’ he observes in his third note to his poem. ‘It was not snowing – the Neva was not iced over. Our account is truer, although lacking in the vivid colours of the Polish poet.’

176–7 As if a captive beast let loose / Fell on the city: This poem has a pervasive imagery rare in Pushkin. The river Neva is an almost living human and animate, even at one point superhuman presence. See also lines 182–5, 249–58 and 267–8, for example.

177 Fell on the city … Before it: One of three lines in this poem Pushkin left unrhymed; the others in this translation are lines 313 and 341 (rhymed in translation). In this case, a rhyming draft line was omitted in revision. But Thomas Shaw suggests that here Pushkin might have intended to disrupt a succession of harmonious couplet rhymes (not reflected in the present translation) in order to represent the sudden chaos of the flood (Basker, p. 33). The first explanation would seem the most likely for this and Pushkin’s other exceptional unrhymed lines.

182–3 Behold Petropolis […] Poseidon. Carrying the idea that Triton, the merman sea god of Greek myth, surfaces from the city’s substratum either in confirmation of a chaotic reversal of the natural order or, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when summoned by his father Neptune (Greek Poseidon) – iconographically associated with Peter the Great – to signal the sea to return to its normal level.

184–5 and 344–5 Malicious waves / Swarm and with loathing / Children pelted him: The same word in Pushkin, zlyye, ‘malicious’, lies behind both these translations, linking the elements and human society in its destructive hostility towards Yevgeny (though human charity has not entirely vanished: ‘food / Was offered him […] / On window-sills’, lines 341–3).

197 The late tsar ruled with glory still: Alexander I (r. 1801–25), an early liberal who turned into a repressive reactionary in the second part of his reign.

209 In due course sent his generals out: In his fourth note to The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin names Count Miloradovich and Adjutant-General Benckendorff; the former was military governor-general of St Petersburg, the latter the founder of the notorious Third Department of the tsar’s Chancellery, the tsarist secret police, and Pushkin’s de facto censor. It is part of Pushkin’s satire on the ineffectiveness of officialdom in dealing with the flood to relegate these names to a note, while naming the McGonagallian poet Count Khvostov (see note on line 322 below) in the poem itself.

271–80 He hails a boatman […] he makes the shore: Commentators have seen symbolic Greek mythological reference here, the Neva boatman standing for Charon on the Styx as he ferries Yevgeny to the realm of the dead about to be portrayed.

313 And found no traces of disaster: Another line unrhymed by Pushkin.

314 The ill work crimson-covered: Crimson or purple was the ceremonial colour of the tsar’s mantle, so standing for imperial power, and this line, besides referring to the normalising light of dawn, could be taken as an ironic allusion to the tsar’s inadequate dealing with the flood.

322 Count Khvostòv: Dmitry Khvostov (1757–1835), a ludicrously bad poet and self-publisher who wrote continuously for sixty years. Pushkin and other leading poets were forever poking fun at this surprisingly amiable figure.

391–3 Was it not exactly thus […] the abyss: Basker (p. xlii) comments that in his published copy of The Bronze Horseman Pushkin’s friend Prince Vyazemsky noted: ‘My expression, uttered to Pushkin and Mickiewicz as we were walking past the statue’, and that this must have been among many conversations to have taken place about the statue’s meaning.

393 Upon the brink of the abyss: Pushkin’s last laconic note to The Bronze Horseman reads: ‘See the description of the statue in Mickiewicz.’ In his poem ‘The Monument of Peter the Great’ (see introduction to The Bronze Horseman), Mickiewicz has the statue depicting Peter tottering as if out of control on the edge of a precipice.

III
FAIRY TALES (SKAZKI)

The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831)

58 And Widow Baba Babarikha: In the original this phrase, to be repeated throughout the tale, has an infectious ring with a prominent a sound: ‘S svat’yey baboy Babarikhoy’. The word svat’ya here goes with baba, denoting the oldest woman of a household; we learn later in the poem that she is Prince Guidon’s grandmother (line 670). Babarikha is a common nickname in Russian folk tales.

229 the island of Buyan: See Introduction under ‘Fairy Tales’.

484 Chernomor: Also the name of the evil wizard in Ruslan and Lyudmila (1817–20).

568 Damask steel: A special patterned steel made in India and exported by Arab traders to Damascus for sword-making from the early centuries AD up to the seventeenth century.

923–4 I too enjoyed […] whiskers there: The traditional Russian storyteller’s standard closing lines, after which he will pass round the hat and get his whiskers properly wet. The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833) ends with a similar form of words.

The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish (1833)

165 They’d have hacked him down with their hatchets: With previous details of the old wife’s cruelty to her servants (lines 110–11) and menacing guards with hatchets (lines 154–5), this picture of royal court style is reminiscent not of Catherine the Great’s era but of earlier, harsher times, perhaps of the court of Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547–84).

The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833)

22 She sighed the deepest sigh: Pushkin’s folk-tale style in this poem abounds in diminutives, giving colour and emphasis in various ways. Here, in language appropriate to a loved child’s ears, tyazhelò, ‘heavy’, is lengthened to five-syllable tyazhelyòshen’ko, weightily taking up most of the line and enacting the sigh.

65 towers: In early Russia, and in Russian legend and folk tale, the typical domestic dwelling took elevated form.

154 A tiled shelf on the stove: A sleeping place on the flat top of a Russian stove, used when the fire has died down but still emits warmth.

192 wine: Literally, ‘green wine’, a term in folk poetry for vodka.

209 Cherkess: Anglicised Russian word for ‘Circassians’, a people of the north Caucasus.

309 The little old woman: Pushkin refines what is already a diminutive, starùshka, ‘little old woman’, by adding a syllable, starushònka. Twelve lines further on, he dazzlingly adds yet another syllable, starushònochka, to which the translator cannot respond. See also note to line 22 above. Diminutives in Russian often denote the opposite of affection, as here (and another example: in Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov (1825) the diminutive form of the Pretender’s given name, Grishka for Grigory, is used by supporters of Tsar Boris with belittling intention, and even appears in the uncensored version of the work’s original title.

489 that deep cavern’s entrance: The deep o sounds of ‘Pòd goròyu tyòmnyy vkhòd’, ‘Beneath the mountain the dark entrance’, graphically convey the gaping entrance-hole of the cave.

533–4 I tasted mead and ale […] scarcely wet: The traditional Russian storyteller’s standard closing lines. The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831) ends with a similar form of words.

The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834)

1–2 Thrice-Ninth Clime […] Thrice-Eleventh Time: Terms meaning ‘Once upon a time’ in Russian fairy and folk tales.

14 Men in thousands under arms: Pushkin’s ‘full line’ here, consisting chiefly of a single polysyllable, ‘Mnogchìslennuyu rat”, is one of a number of two-word lines in The Tale of the Golden Cockerel that contribute significantly to the slow, measured rhythm of this tale and have an incantatory quality.

58 What an easy life for you!: Literally: ‘Rule, lying on your side!’ This line was removed by the censor on first publication.

116–18 Back and forth […] horses pass: Pushkin deliberately slows the tempo. ‘The image of grass, red with blood,’ Valentin Nepomnyashchy (p. 117) has written, ‘grows to a monstrous size in close-up […] in the middle of a narrative shorn of colourful adjectives’. The mode of repetition is now set up for the tsar’s histrionics, in his own words and the next three lines of narrative.

127–30 Opened wide […] Walked the Queen of Shamakhàn: Pushkin has twenty a sounds in these four lines, seven of them in the climactic line 130, ‘Shamakhànskaya tsaritsa’, making the passage into one long gasp of surprise.

188 Best with some though not insist: Pushkin first wrote ‘But with the mighty [singular] it is bad to quarrel’, changed this in his fair copy to ‘But with tsars it is bad to quarrel’, and finally, before sending his manuscript to the censor, altered the line to (literally) ‘But with a certain one it is costly to quarrel’. In a letter to his wife written two months before composition of The Golden Cockerel, Pushkin wrote: ‘The other day I came within a hair’s-breadth of disaster: I nearly quarrelled with him […]. If I quarrel with this one – I won’t survive to see another’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 10, p. 202, note).

209–10 This our tale […] our youth: The censor, fearful of any possible political allusions, removed these lines too on first publication.

Acknowledgements

For their critical comments on a number of drafts of translations for this book, I am especially grateful to Angela Livingstone and Peter France, always generous with their time, whether spare or not; and as ever, to my wife Hazel, whose sure ear for spoken language has often guided me.

I am also grateful to Alla Gelich and Masha Karp, ready providers of sound advice on anything put to them; to Boris Dralyuk and Svetlana Pike, who responded to appeals for critical readings with energetic thoroughness; to Alyssa Dinega Gillespie, who gave me a master class on the ‘Stone Island cycle’ of lyric poems and from whose seminal article on these poems I have liberally quoted in my endnotes; to J. Douglas Clayton, who put me right on Pushkin’s use of the elegiac couplet; to Sonia Ketchian, who drew my attention to the remarkable Princess Anna Abamelek and Pushkin’s album poem to her; and to Michael Wachtel for helpful correspondence, and whose book (see Further Reading) has deepened my understanding of Pushkin’s poems in both literary and autobiographical contexts and which has often been my authority in annotation.

I should also like to express my gratitude to Jessica Harrison of Penguin for taking this book on and her encouragement and support throughout its progress; to Kate Parker for her imaginative curiosity and meticulous contribution to its editorial preparation; and to two most vigilant proofreaders, Anthony Hippisley and Stephen Ryan, the former especially for his input on consistency and the latter for his inescapable eye in the checking of a great variety of quotations.

At an early stage in working on translations of Pushkin, I was given memorable encouragement by the late Ed Hogan of Zephyr Press, then in Boston, and at a later date by the late Stanley Mitchell, who led me to significantly improve my version of The Gypsies.

*

My translations of The Gypsies, The Bridegroom, Count Nulin, The Dead Princess and the Seven Champions and The Tale of the Golden Cockerel first appeared in The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 2006) and are included in the present book, with revisions, by kind permission of the original publishers.

The translation of Parts One and Two of The Bronze Horseman first appeared in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 2015), and of ‘I loved you: in my heart, perhaps’ and ‘Elegy’ in Cardinal Points, vol. 7 (2017).

Earlier versions of the following translations of lyric poems first appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, New Series, no. 15 (1999): ‘To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff’, ‘O. Masson’, ‘I went alone before the dawn’, ‘To ***’ (‘It comes to me again, that moment’), ‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’, ‘Winter Evening’, ‘Confession’, ‘The Prophet’, ‘Winter Road’, ‘Raven flies to raven’, ‘City of splendour, city of poor’, ‘From Hafiz’, ‘Madonna’, ‘Invocation’, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, ‘Autumn (A fragment)’, ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’ and ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’.

Passages from Alyssa Dinega Gillespie’s article ‘Sidestepping Silence, Ventriloquizing Death: A Reconsideration of Pushkin’s Stone Island Cycle’, Pushkin Review, vol. 6–7 (2003–4), pp. 39–83, are quoted in the Notes by permission of the author and Slavica Publishers, Indiana University.

A passage from Russian Views of Pushkin, ed. and tr. D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976), is quoted in the Introduction by permission.

A.W.

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