Selected Poetry (Penguin) Read online

  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 o
f 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,