How life had revelled, blood had burned;
But now, as in a house forsaken,
All it contains is dark and still,
A home forever silent, chill,
The windows shuttered, chalked and vacant,
The mistress vanished from the place
To God knows where, without a trace.
33
It’s pleasant with a verse to chasten
A dunderheaded clown and foe,
Pleasant to watch the fellow hasten
With butting horns descending low
To view his image in a mirror
And turn from it in shame and horror;
More pleasant, friends, if he howls out:
‘Oh look, that’s me there!’ like a lout;
Still pleasanter with quiet persistence
To plan a grave that lauds his name
And at his pallid brow take aim
From proper gentlemanly distance;
It’s hardly pleasant, though, you’ll find
To send him off to meet his kind.
34
What happens if your young companion
Is slaughtered by your pistol shot
For some presumptuous glance, opinion
Or repartee worth not a jot,
Insulting you while you were drinking,
Or if, in fiery pique, not thinking,
He calls you proudly to a duel,
Tell me the feelings that would rule
Your soul, when without motion lying
In front of you upon the earth,
Upon his brow the hue of death,
He slowly stiffens, ossifying,
When to your desperate appeal
He is insensitive and still?
35
With sharpening contrition growing,
Gripping the pistol in his hand,
Onegin watched Vladimir’s going.
‘Well then, he’s dead, you understand,’
Pronounced the neighbour. Dead! Onegin,
Crushed by the utterance, walks off, quaking,
To call his people.19 Straightaway,
Zaretsky gently on the sleigh
Settles the frozen corpse, escorting
The dreadful treasure to its home.
Sensing the corpse, the horses foam,
Wetting the steel bit, chafing, snorting,
But when they’re ready to depart,
They fly as swiftly as a dart.
36
My friends, you’re sorry for the poet:
Amid the bloom of hope, desire
From which the world will never profit,
And scarcely out of child’s attire,
Gone! Where’s the ardent agitation,
Where is the noble aspiration
Of youthful feeling, youthful thought,
Audacious, tender, highly wrought?
Where, too, is love’s acclaimed impatience,
The thirst for knowledge, thirst for work,
The dread where vice and shame may lurk,
And you, most cherished ruminations,
You, phantoms of unearthly life,
You, dreams with sacred verses rife!
37
Perhaps he was for good intended
Or at the very least for fame;
His silenced lyre might have extended
Its sound through centuries to come
With ringing music. There awaited
Perhaps a special niche created
For him at an exalted site.
Perhaps his martyred shade in flight
Carried away a holy secret,
Remaining with him, and the joys
Are lost of an uplifting voice,
While from beyond the gravestone’s remit
No hymn will rush to where he’s laid,
Nor peoples come to bless his shade.
[38]20
39
But then again the poet’s portion
Might well have been quite commonplace.
The years of youth give way to caution,
Slowing the soul’s impetuous pace.
Of poetry he might have wearied,
And, parting from the Muses, married;
A happy squire, with cuckold’s crown,
Wearing a quilted dressing gown;
He might have learned life’s true dimension,
At forty he’d have had the gout,
Drunk, eaten, moped, declined, got stout
And died according to convention
As children thronged and women cried
And village quacks stood by his side.
40
But, reader, we shall never know it;
Sufficient that upon a field
A youthful lover, dreamer, poet
Has by a friendly hand been killed!
A leftward path from the location
Where dwelt that child of inspiration
Leads to two pines with roots entwined,
Beneath which tiny currents wind
Out of the valley’s brook they border.
The ploughman rests beside their brink
And female reapers come to sink
Their ringing pitchers in the water;
There, by the brook, in deepest shade,
A simple monument is laid.21
41
A herdsman to the tomb retreating
Sings (as the spring rain dots the grass)
Of Volga fishermen, while plaiting
His mottled sandals made of bast.
A young townswoman who is spending
Her summer in the country, wending
On horseback through the fields alone,
Rides headlong, comes upon the stone
And halts her steed, before it pausing,
As, tightening the leather leads,
She lifts her veil of gauze and reads
The plain inscription quickly, causing
A tear to dim her tender eyes
At Lensky’s premature demise.
42
And, at a trot, she rides through meadows,
Sunk a long time in reverie,
Her soul pervaded by the shadows
Cast by the poet’s destiny;
And wonders: ‘How did Olga suffer?22
Was it for long she mourned her lover?
Or did she only briefly rue?
And where’s her sister now? Where, too,
Is he, the fugitive, the hermit,
Of modish belles the modish foe,
Where did that gloomy oddball go,
The slayer of the youthful poet?’
I promise in due time I’ll bring
A full account of everything,
43
But not today. Although my feeling
For Eugene has not changed a bit,
Though I’ll return to him, unfailing,
Right now I am not up to it.
To Spartan prose the years are turning,
Coquettish rhyme the years are spurning;
And I – I with a sigh confess –
I’m running after her much less.
My pen has lost its former pleasures
Of daubing fleeting leaves, it seems,
Today, quite different, chilling dreams;
Quite different, unrelenting pressures,
In stillness or in social noise,
Disturb the sleep my soul enjoys.
44
I’ve come to know new aspirations,
I’ve come to know new sadness, too;
The former hold no expectations,
And earlier sadness still I rue.
Where are my dreams, the dreams I cherished?
What rhyme now follows, if not ‘perished’?23
And is the garland of my youth
Withered at last, is this the truth?
Is it the truth, all plain, unvarnished,
Not in an elegiac cloak,
That (hitherto said as a joke)
The
springtime of my days has vanished,
Can’t be brought back and that I’m near
Already to my thirtieth year?24
45
The noontide of my life is starting,
Which I must needs accept, I know;
But oh, my light youth, if we’re parting,
I want you as a friend to go!
My thanks to you for the enjoyments,
The sadness and the pleasant torments,
The hubbub, storms, festivity,
For all that you have given me;
My thanks to you. I have delighted
In you when times were turbulent,
When times were calm… to full extent;
Enough now! With a soul clear-sighted
I set out on another quest
And from my old life take a rest.
46
Let me glance back. Farewell, you arbours
Where, in the backwoods, I recall
Days filled with indolence and ardours
And dreamings of a pensive soul.
And you, my youthful inspiration.
Keep stirring my imagination,
My heart’s inertia vivify,
More often to my corner fly.
Let not a poet’s soul be frozen,
Made rough and hard, reduced to bone
And finally be turned to stone
In that benumbing world he goes in,
In that intoxicating slough
Where, friends, we bathe together now.25
CHAPTER VII
Moscow, Russia’s favourite daughter,
Where is your equal to be found?
Dmitriyev
One can’t but love one’s native Moscow.
Baratynsky
‘Reviling Moscow! This is what
You get from seeing the world!
Where is it better, then?
Where we are not.’
Griboyedov1
1
Chased by the vernal beams, already
Down the surrounding hills the snow
Has run in turbid streams that eddy
On to the flooded fields below;
Nature, not yet from sleep returning,
Greets with a smile the new year’s morning.
The skies shine with a bluish sheen,
Transparent still, the woods turn green,
Lending the trees a downy cover,
The bee flies from its waxen comb,
Bringing the meadows’ tribute home.
The dales dry out and colour over.
Herds low, the hush of darkness brings
The nightingale that newly sings.
2
How sad to me is spring’s arrival,
Season of love, when all’s in bud!
What languid tumult, what upheaval
Disturb my soul, disturb my blood!
With what a heavy, tender feeling
I revel in the season, breathing
The vernal wind that fans my face
In some secluded, rural place!
Or am I now estranged from pleasure,
Does all that gladdens, animates,
All that exults and radiates
Cast boredom, languor in like measure
Upon a soul long dead, does all
Seem dark to it, funereal?
3
Or, cheerless, when the leaves of autumn
Are resurrected by the spring,
We recollect a bitter fortune,
Hearing the woods’ new murmuring;
Or we, in troubled contemplation
Compare with nature’s animation
The withered years of our estate,
That nothing can resuscitate.
Perhaps in thought we may recover,
When caught in a poetic haze,
Some other spring of older days
That once more sets our hearts aquiver
With dreams of some far distant clime,
A wondrous night, a moon sublime…
4
It’s time: good idlers, I beseech you,
Epicureans to the soul,
You, fortune’s favourites, I entreat you, You,
fledglings of the Lyovshin2 school,
You rural Priams3 in your manors,
You, ladies blessed with gentle manners,
Spring calls you to the country soil,
Season of warmth, of flowers and toil,
Season of blissful walks and wandering,
Betokening seductive nights.
Quick, to the fields, the land invites
Your coaches, ponderously trundling;
By private horse or postal chaise,
Forsake the city gates, make haste!
5
You, too, my reader, ever gracious,
Into your foreign carriage climb,
Leave now the noisy city spaces
Where you caroused in winter time;
On my capricious Muse depending,
Let’s hear the oak wood’s sound ascending
Above a river without name,
Where my Eugene, the very same,
Reclusive, idle and dejected,
Spent winter only recently
In Tanya’s close proximity,
My dreaming maid whom he rejected;
But now, no longer at his place,
He’s left behind a dismal trace.
6
Midst hills in semi-circle lying,
Let us go thither where a brook,
By way of a green meadow plying,
Runs through a linden, forest nook.
The nightingale, through night’s long hours,
Sings to the spring; the dog rose flowers,
And there is heard the source’s sound –
There, too, a tombstone can be found
The inscription tells the passer-by:
‘Vladimir Lensky doth here lie,
Who died a young man and courageous,
Aged such and such, in such a year.
Young poet, rest and slumber here.’
7
Upon a pine branch, low inclining,
Time was, there hung a secret wreath,
Rocked by the breeze of early morning
Over that humble urn beneath.
Time was, two girls in evening leisure
Would come to mourn this doleful treasure,
And, on the grave, in moonlight glow,
Embracing, they would weep… but now
The monument’s forgot by people.
The trail to it is overgrown,
The wreath upon the bough is gone.
Alone, beside it, grey and feeble,
The shepherd sings still as before,
Plaiting his wretched shoes of yore.
[8,9]
10
My poor, poor Lensky! Pining, aching,
Not long did his beloved weep,
Soon was the youthful bride forsaking
A grief that went not very deep.
Another captured her attention,
Another’s flattering intervention
Restored the sufferer to calm,
A lancer wooed with practised charm,
And, by this lancer overpowered,
Already at the altar she
Stands with becoming modesty
Beneath the bridal crown, head lowered,
And, as her fiery eyes she dips,
A smile alights upon her lips.
11
Alas, poor Lensky! In the kingdom
Of distant, dark eternity,
Was he perturbed by vows reneged on,
Reports of infidelity,
Or, on the Lethe, lulled to slumber,
Where, blessedly, no thoughts encumber,
The poet is no more perturbed,
The earth is closed and no more heard?
Just so! An earth that will ignore us
Awaits us all beyond the gra
ve.
The voice of lover, friend or knave
Breaks off. Alone, the angry chorus
Of heirs to the estate is raised,
Disputing in indecent haste.
12
Soon Olya’s voice no more resounded
Inside her old environment,
The lancer, as his lot demanded,
Must take her to his regiment.
With tears of bitter sorrow flowing,
The mother at her daughter’s going
Seemed almost ready now to die,
But Tanya simply could not cry,
Only a deathly pallor covered
The maiden’s melancholy face.
When all came out to view the chaise
And, bustling, said goodbye and hovered,
Still holding back the newly wed,
Tatiana wished the pair God speed.
13
And after them, outside the manor,
Long did she gaze as through a mist…
Alone, alone now is Tatiana!
Alas, her sister, whom she missed,
Companion of so many seasons,
Her youthful little dove now hastens
To somewhere far off, borne by fate,
From her for ever separate;
And, like a shade, she wanders, goalless,
Glances into the garden bare…
She finds no comforts anywhere
Nor anything to give her solace
For all the tears she has suppressed,
And torn asunder is her breast.
14
And in her cruel isolation
She feels more strongly passion’s sway,
Her heart with greater perturbation
Speaks of Onegin far away.
She will not see him, maybe never,
She should abhor in him for ever
The slayer of her brother. Woe,
The poet’s dead… already, though,
He is forgot, his bride has given
Herself already to be wed,
The poet’s memory has fled
As smoke across an azure heaven,
There are two hearts yet, I believe,
That grieve for him… but wherefore grieve?