Foreword
Like many a closed book, the nineteenth century has never been read through. Absorbing dust, it sits on the shelf of time, available to our scrutiny but seldom touched. This is so perhaps because whenever one bothers to peruse it one discovers its pages contain nearly every insight or concept which our century claims as its own achievement. Even if one wants to make an exception for the modern notion of speed, of qualitative acceleration, one is bound to realize that this, too, has been taken care of by that century's music; that Star Wars could be easily scored by any of Beethoven's piano sonata prestos.
A publisher more prudent than time, of course, would have had that century issued in several volumes, rather than squeeze Napoleon and Queen Victoria (or Shelley and Dostoevsky) under the same cover. Still, what is most interesting about this conventional edition is not so much the diversity of its contents as the way it robs us of the benefit of hindsight. The previous century staunchly refuses to become our past, both by shaming our present attention span and by forcing upon us an intensity of focus we are seldom capable of. The mode of mental conduct the nineteenth century's authors offer compromises modern reality to the point of our suspecting it as having been used in their works, as having already taken place among their pages — to the point of some grammatical déjà vu.
This ability — to deliver blows to our principle of causality — alone would suffice to proclaim the book of the nineteenth century closed. After all, that was precisely the century which, as it were, coined the concept of biological determinism. Besides, the sense of superiority felt by the alive and present toward the dead and absent—a sense usually conveyed by chronology—suggests, in its own right, that a century, in order to be fully comprehended, requires perhaps yet another century.
As conventions go, chronology is presumably not the worst among them and can be regarded as an attempt to structure our nostalgia for our betters, or for a better scale of reality. Today this nostalgia is most likely at its sharpest, for in our minds there still vibrate a few logical links connecting us to the nineteenth century. Tomorrow these links will be gone, missed, replaced with the sense of incongruity out of which the new world could well forge more lasting chains for its mental proletariat or bourgeoisie.
What we call the nineteenth century marks what appears to be the last period in the history of our species when its scale of reality was quantitatively human. Numerically at least, an individual's interplay with his likes was not any different from that in, say, antiquity. It was the last century of seeing, not glimpsing; of responsibility, not the incoherence of guilt. Similarly, no matter how homicidal one might have felt, one still lacked the means to commit what would pass today as mass murder. Relations with space were based on the pace of one's own step; and whenever one traveled, one did so in a charabanc driven by the same number of horses as a Roman chariot; i.e., by four or, at best, six. The invention of the engine, whose efficacy is measured in so many hundred horsepower (i.e., in such scores of these animals that there is no way to assemble and harness them for the purposes of coherent motion), chipped a lot from the reality of space and soiled what remained with abstractions hitherto confined to the works of one's imagination tackling either the life of sentiments or that of time.
That was the real, not the calendar, end of the nineteenth century. That is, its poets, up to then, could be more easily understood by their Latin counterparts than by ourselves. The acceleration of pace (subject more of enjoyment than of manly regret) has set us clearly apart, if only due to its curtailing effects on any form of commitment or concentration. For a man traveling at bullet or supersonic speed to his destination, it is difficult to comprehend wounded honor, the grid of class barriers, someone's brooding over a ruined estate, the contemplation of a single tree, or ambivalence at prayer. Yet such was the stuff of the nineteenth century's poetry, concerned with the movements of the individual soul, whose evolutions turned out to foreshadow all the laws of thermo- and aerodynamics.
To put it differently: an age ago, much less stood between man and his thoughts about himself than today. It appears he knew how to use this proximity. That is, he knew practically as much as we do about the natural and social sciences; however, he had not yet fallen victim to this knowledge. He stood, as it were, on the very threshold of that captivity, largely unaware of the impending danger; apprehensive perhaps, but free. Therefore, what he can tell us about himself, about the circumstances of his soul or mind, is of historical value in the sense that history is always free people's monologue to slaves.
A grateful and curious reader will no doubt want to learn more about the lives of those assembled within this slim volume. Sent to the right encyclopedias, monographs, dissertations, biographical notes, he, however, will not wind up with much: children of their age, Russian poets of the nineteenth century did not, with one or two exceptions, live long. Products of their class, they were not brought up to leave much of a record behind them.
A century ago, a poet's days could be shortened by, among other things, epidemics, the chains of a dungeon, a bullet received on the battlefield or in the course of a duel, a capsized boat, or a badly dressed wound. With their beloveds lost, roughly equally, to childbirth and abortion, the life expectancy of poets, even in polite society, was not terribly high. This is no doubt one way to account for the lyrical pitch of this century's poetry.
If the fates of most of this volume's contributors sound somewhat similar, it is because to be born a century ago into the Russian Empire was to be born into a fairly rigid existential pattern. Most of these writers belonged to the class of impoverished gentry—the class which is almost solely responsible for the emergence of literature everywhere. Most of them joined the Hussars or some such thing and fought either Napoleon or national minorities at the Empire's outskirts. All of them tried and failed to live by the pen. All stayed for a while in Saint Petersburg to make a splash there, and then retired to their native estates or their spouse's. Hence, perhaps, this incessant quest in Russian literature for the unique through the thick of the ordinary—the quest in the course of which both the Grail and the obstacle develop equally sacred dimensions, their shabby appearances notwithstanding. And in Russia this sensibility was voiced for the first time by Russian poets of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. This is what binds together the poems in this volume—more so even than the fates of their authors.
From the point of view of a Russian, the main events of the nineteenth century were the Great Patriotic War of 1812, the Decembrists' rebellion of 1825, the Crimean War of 1853–56, and the Peasant Reform of 1861. To that, one may well add, the assumption of power in 1825 by Nicholas I and in 1855 by Alexander II—as well as the assassination of Alexander in 1881. Of these events, the first two left a more noticeable trace in poetry than the others—presumably because it was easier for poets of that time to identify themselves with the defense of the homeland or with republican sentiments than with the geopolitical and legislative issues of the subsequent epoch. With a few exceptions, Russian poetry of the nineteenth century appears to be introspective and personal rather than overtly topical. This is partly why, even a hundred years later, it does not speak in unison.
A good poem, in a sense, is like a photograph that puts its subjects' metaphysical features into sharp focus. Accordingly, a good poet is one who does this sort of thing in a camera-like fashion: quite unwittingly, almost in spite of himself. A poem, of course, should be memorable, yet what commits it to memory is not its linguistic texture alone. The push is given by the metaphysics, by the semblance of universal value in the statement. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this effect was created by a poem's tremolo; in the second, it would come in the guise of psychological observation. Russian poetry of the nineteenth century — of its first half especially — should be read if only because it gives you an idea of what gave birth to that century's Russian psychological novel.
Frequently, a certain stylistic idiom is the work of one generation. In the case of this anthology's contributors, one can argue about an entire literature being the product of one generation. Furthermore, this literature — the literature of a constellation of poets known as the Pushkin Pleiad — was also the product of singular friendships. It grew out of supper conversations, morose card games, letters, brawls, the sharing of servants, mistresses, or an opera box, as much as from the common knowledge of Greek and Latin classics, fascination with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, worship of Lord Byron and reading of Karamzin. But, apart from all these, what the members of that Pleiad had in common were their aesthetic ideals, entertained against the most unlikely background of their country — that is, they were equally haunted by the radiance of those ideals and by the impossibility of their attainment. It is the incompatibility of those ideals with that background which earned them the label of Romantics, which fueled their absolutist attitude toward art, which enabled them to put their subjects into universal perspective, which introduced into their work a rather abstract and otherworldly tune of pure time. Indeed, incompatibilities of this sort can only be resolved through high-pitched lyricism or by way of a metronome monotone.
By the end of this volume, the reader will have come to terms with those strange-sounding un-English names and will even feel a bit suspicious of the cadence of their verses. "No doubt the translator is pulling my leg!" he will exclaim. "This is simply a stylization. The translator uses this dated diction to convey a sense of distance, of a different century."
This remark will be correct only insofar as the distance between the modern and the previous century's locution is really measurable. For, young though Russian poetry was a century ago, metrically, to say the least, it was as mature as her Western sisters. If the music of some of these poems sounds familiar, it is not because Mr. Alan Myers did not know better but because meters are meters no matter the language in which they are employed. That is what they are meters for.
In fact, one should be grateful to Mr. Myers for his consistent attempt to retain as many formal aspects of the original as possible. If, because of that, a poem in translation appears to resemble a poem written a century ago in English, so much the better. What dictates a translator's choice of this or that piece of work in a foreign language is the existence of equivalent means in his own. However, the aforementioned resemblance is unlikely to occur. And by the same token, one should not make the mistake of searching for English or American parallels to Evgeny Baratynsky, Prince Vyazemsky, Aleksandr Pushkin or Feodor Tyutchev, Mikhail Lermontov, or others. There are none; but it is not so much a sense of futility that should prevent such quests as an apprehension that thinking in parallels bypasses a lot of reality. Alien to the nature of literature, this type of analysis reduces one's sense of existential options; ultimately, it compromises time itself.
Benefit of hindsight this type of thinking has not. Looking through the little window of this anthology onto the nineteenth century, we should try to see it for what it was, for what it felt about itself. We should not apply here our new, high-resolution lenses—which lose the whole for the sharp details—for the main virtue of the nineteenth century was, precisely, its ability to keep both things steadily in focus. That is why the translator has tried to preserve as many features of the original as he could. This way, perhaps, we may see better that century's noble though somewhat shabby figure, a silhouette really, of somebody who was born at Austerlitz, who died with the steam engine and legislation, and who had us for the future.
Joseph Brodsky
January 16, 1986
