III! 
 
 fUROPFM, 
 UIMAKY/
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Mrs. Myrtle Tally
 
 THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY 
 
 LDITLD BY J. E. 5PINGARN 
 
 THE 
 
 (EUROPEAN) 
 V LIBRARY;
 
 MODLRN RUSSIAN POLTRY 
 AN ANTHOLOGY 
 
 CHOSEN AND TRANSLATED BY 
 
 BABLTTL DLUTSCH 
 
 AND 
 
 AVRAHM YARMOLIN5KY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
 1921
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACK AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 
 RAHWAY. N. J.
 
 Colleg* 
 Library 
 
 TO 
 A THURSDAY IN APRIL 
 
 1C60807
 
 Acknowledgments 
 
 A few of the poems included in this volume have 
 appeared in The Dial, The Freeman, The Nation, and 
 Poetry. The excerpt from " The Twelve " was taken 
 from The Twelve, by Alexander Blok, translated from 
 the Russian by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolin- 
 sky (New York, Huebsch, 1920),
 
 Foreword 
 
 This volume heaps the anthological Pelion upon the 
 Ossa of translation. It aims to present the lyrical poetry 
 of Russia for the last hundred years by a selection of 
 poems translated by the editors. Within the fences thus 
 set up lay a wide foreign field to pick from: the old- 
 fashioned garden overrun by the rank growth of exotic 
 flowers, beautiful weeds outflanking the hothouse plants. 
 The principle of selection was, so far as might be, aesthetic. 
 Poems were chosen less for their representative quality 
 than for their immediate worth and, of course, their 
 ability to stand the test of translation. In view of the 
 pioneer character of this work, however, some conces- 
 sion was made to historical considerations, and, there- 
 fore, part of the material included may appear rather 
 jejune and vleux jeu. The effort was to give a brief 
 general glimpse of the classic poets and to treat in greater 
 detail the moderns and contemporaries who are, to the 
 translators, as to the readers, more of a living actuality. 
 
 The difficulties of selection are obvious. You may 
 add, you may alter the choice how you will, but the 
 sin of omission will cling round it still. In this case 
 the problem was sharpened by the rigors of translation. 
 These were not mere flowers for the plucking. They 
 had to be transplanted into strange soil, which was not 
 hospitable to them all. Translation has been likened to 
 " the wrong side of a Turkey carpet." The question was
 
 vi Foreword 
 
 how best to carry over, unbroken and undiminished, the 
 colors and contours of the right side. We are attached 
 to the idea that we have given as much to the originals 
 as we took from them. Adherence to metrical and 
 rhythmical structure was possible, owing to the essential 
 likeness between the two languages with regard to versifi- 
 cation. In matters of imagery and the finer aspects of 
 technique there was also an attempt to be as faithful as 
 the linguistic media allow. But juggling is a fine art, 
 not unworthy of the service of Notre Dame, and the 
 three bright balls of substance, form, and spirit were 
 not always easy to keep in the air at once. What we 
 continually sought was to produce, in the end, a poem. 
 
 The personality of each poet is brought out in a note 
 preceding the selection from his work, and the filiation 
 of poetic movements is briefly indicated in the introduc- 
 tory essay. 
 
 And finally a word pro domo nostra. While it may 
 be difficult to single out each collaborator's part in the 
 work, it is possible, and perhaps interesting, to define 
 the attitude of each. The one, native to Russian litera- 
 ture, brought to the task all the prejudices and privileges 
 of long intimacy. The other, a stranger, saw it with 
 the fresh vision and untaught caprice of a foreigner, 
 making a less practised and a more personal approach. 
 The one was aware, the other persuaded of the gold in 
 the Scythian earth. The two labored together to wrest it, 
 like the one-eyed Arimaspi, from the guardian gryphons. 
 BABETTE DEUTSCH. 
 AVRAHM YARMOLINSKY. 
 
 New York, June 28, 1921.
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FOREWORD v 
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799-1837) 3 
 
 A Nereid 5 
 
 "Behold a Sower" 6 
 
 Three Springs 7 
 
 The Prophet 8 
 
 Verses Written During a Sleepless Night 10 
 
 Work ii 
 
 Madonna 12 
 
 YEVGENY BARATYNSKY (180x3-1844) 13 
 
 Prayer 14 
 
 ALEXEY KOLTZOV (1809-1842) 15 
 
 An Old Man's Song 16 
 
 MIKHAIL LERMONTOV (1814-1841) 17 
 
 The Angel 18 
 
 The Cup of Life . 19 
 
 Gratitude 20 
 
 From "The Daemon," Part I, xv 21 
 
 Captive Knight 22 
 
 FYODOR TYUTCHEV (1803-1873) 23 
 
 Twilight 24 
 
 "As Ocean's Stream" 25 
 
 Silentium 26 
 
 Autumn Evening 27 
 
 July 14, at Night 28 
 
 " Oh, Thou, My Wizard Soul " 29 
 
 NIKOLAI NEKRASOV (1821-1877) 30 
 
 "The Capitals Are Rocked with Thunder " ... 31 
 
 " My Poems ! " 32 
 
 The Salt Song 33 
 
 ALEXEY K. TOLSTOY (1817-1875) 34 
 
 "My Little Almond Tree" 35 
 
 "A Well, and the Cherry Trees Swaying" ... 36 
 
 "Oh, the Ricka" 37 
 
 vii
 
 viii Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 APOLLON MAIKOV (1821-1897) 39 
 
 Art 4 
 
 " Upon This Wild Headland" 41 
 
 Summer Rain 42 
 
 AFANAST SHENSHIN-FOETH (1820-1892) 43 
 
 " Whispers, Timid Breathing " 44 
 
 The Aerial City 45 
 
 Swallows 46 
 
 YAKOV POLONSKY (1819-1898) 47 
 
 The Cosmic Fabric 48 
 
 Sorrow's Madness 49 
 
 VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV (1853-1900) 50 
 
 "Below the Sultry Storm" 51 
 
 "With Wavering Feet" 52 
 
 N. MINSKY (b. 1855) 53 
 
 Force . . -^ 54 
 
 My Temple 55 
 
 DMITRY MEREZHKOVSKY (b. 1865) 56 
 
 A Prayer 57 
 
 The Trumpet Call 58 
 
 The Curse of Love 60 
 
 FYODOR SOLOGUB (b. 1863) 61 
 
 The Amphora 62 
 
 The Dragon 63 
 
 " When, Heaving on the Stormy Waters " . . .64 
 
 " Austere the Music of My Songs " 65 
 
 The Devil's Swings 66 
 
 ZINAIDA HIPPIUS (b. 1869) ' .68 
 
 " I Seek for Rhythmic Whisperings " .... 69 
 
 Psyche 70 
 
 Creation 71 
 
 KONSTANTIN BALMONT (b. 1867) J2 
 
 " With My Fancy I Grasped " 73 
 
 Centuries of Centuries Will Pass 74 
 
 In the White Land 75 
 
 Hymn to Fire . . ' 76 
 
 VALERY BRUSOV (b. 1873) 81 
 
 The Tryst 82 
 
 "Radiant Ranks of Seraphim" 83 
 
 Benediction 84 
 
 Inevitability . . . ,. ., 85 
 
 The Fierce Birds 86 
 
 Eventide 87 
 
 "Oh, Cover" 88 
 
 Saint Sebastian 89 
 
 The Coming Huns 90
 
 Contents ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IVAN BUNIN (b. 1870) 92 
 
 Russian Spring 93 
 
 A Song 94 
 
 The God of Noon 95 
 
 In an Empty House 96 
 
 Flax 97 
 
 VYACHESLAV IVANOV (b. 1866) 98 
 
 The Catch 99 
 
 Autumn 100 
 
 Fountain 101 
 
 The Seeking of Self 102 
 
 Complaint 103 
 
 Narcissus: A Pompeiian Bronze 104 
 
 Funeral 105 
 
 The Holy Rose 106 
 
 Nomads of Beauty . . 107 
 
 YURGIS BALTRUSHAITIS (b. 1873) 109 
 
 The Pendulum no 
 
 The Surf in 
 
 MAXIMILIAN VOLOSHIN (b. 1877) . " 2 
 
 Cimmerian Twilight I-III 113, 114, 115 
 
 Sonnet XV (From the Sonnet-Cycle "Lunaria") . 116 
 
 Stigmata 117 
 
 MIKHAIL KUZMIN (b. 1877) 118 
 
 "Now Dry Thy Eyes" 119 
 
 " Night Was Done " 120 
 
 From Alexandrian Songs 121 
 
 GEORGY CHULKOV (b. 1879) 123 
 
 "Purple Autumn" . . 124 
 
 ALEXANDER BLOK (1880-1921) 126 
 
 "Into Crimson Dark" 127 
 
 The Unknown Woman 128 
 
 The Lady Unknown 129 
 
 "A Little Black Man" 131 
 
 Russia 132 
 
 "When Mountain-ash" 133 
 
 The Scythians 134 
 
 From "The Twelve "19 137 
 
 ANDREY BELY (b. 1880) 138 
 
 Messengers 139 
 
 Euthanasia 140 
 
 "You Sit on the Bed There" 141 
 
 VICTOR HOFMAN (1882-1911) 142 
 
 "Still Was the Evening" 143 
 
 VASILY BASHKIN (c. 1880-1909) 144 
 
 "Upon the Black Brow of a Cliff" .... 145
 
 x Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SERGEY GORODETZKY (1884-1921) 146 
 
 Yarila 147 
 
 The Birch Tree 149 
 
 ANNA AKHMATOVA 150 
 
 "Like a White Stone" 151 
 
 Confession 152 
 
 " Broad Gold, the Evening " 153 
 
 Prayer 154 
 
 IGOR SEVERYANIN 155 
 
 And It Passed by the Sea-Shore 156 
 
 A Russian Song 157 
 
 Spring Apple-Tree 158 
 
 NIKOLAI KLUYEV 159 
 
 A Northern Poem 160 
 
 An Izba Song 161 
 
 LUBOV STOLITZA 162 
 
 A Lenten One 163 
 
 SERGEI YESENIN 164 
 
 "Upon Green Hills" 165 
 
 " Hopes Painted by the Autumn Cold " . . . . 166 
 
 " In the Clear Cold " 167 
 
 Transfiguration: III 168 
 
 Z. SHISHOVA 169 
 
 "How Strange, Oh God" 170 
 
 PIOTR ORESHIN 171 
 
 Not by Hands Created 172 
 
 ANATOLY MARIENHOF 176 
 
 " Savage, Nomad Hordes " 177 
 
 October 178
 
 Introduction 
 
 Modern Russian literature took its rise in the early 
 nineteenth century. This was, more or less, the Rus- 
 sian counterpart of the Elizabethan Age. Energizing 
 liberal influences were in the air; men's pulses were 
 stirred by the Napoleonic drama; a national self-con- 
 sciousness came into being; the winds of a new world 
 were blowing from widened horizons. And there was 
 the same coincidence of favorable environment with the 
 accident of genius. Yet if the English Renaissance found 
 its expression in drama, it is notable that nascent Russian 
 literature blossomed in lyricism. England had her 
 Shakespeare, and Russia had her Pushkin, with a dif- 
 ference. 
 
 He is placed in the company of Dante, Shakespeare 
 and Goethe by his compatriots, yet even they admit that 
 he lacks the universal significance of his elder peers. He 
 remains, however, the national poet acknowledged as the 
 first and perhaps the greatest literary artist of his coun- 
 try, a figure upon whom more admiration and scholarship 
 have been lavished than upon any one else. Had he 
 been accessible to the outside world, its current concep- 
 tions of the mood and manner of Russian literature would 
 be different. The Byronism with which he began, early 
 gave place to a reconciliation with reality and to a classic 
 sobriety which made Merimee declare him " An Athenian 
 
 XI
 
 xii Introduction 
 
 captive among the Scythians." The intensity of his pas- 
 sionate nature was governed by a sense of measure and 
 harmony. His poetry has that quality of normalcy and 
 health which render it educative, and to the foreigner 
 uninteresting. The latter may agree with Flaubert that 
 the Russian master is " flat," and to suspect that his is 
 the unexciting art whose motto is propria communia 
 dlcere. 
 
 Pushkin was surrounded by a Pleiad of lyricists, whose 
 work was of a minor order, but was yet distinguished by 
 a measure of originality. Of these the sombre Baratynsky 
 is now perhaps best remembered. In a sense Tyutchev 
 too belonged to this group. A contemporary of Pushkin, 
 he was under his influence. Yet he survived the master 
 by many years, and the more significant part of his unique 
 contribution to Russian poetry was written much later. 
 Of all the classicists, Tyutchev is most likely to find a 
 way to the understanding and sympathy of the outside 
 world. His is a deep and authentic voice. Through his 
 poetry blows the wind of his thought, as a breeze bellies 
 a sail to a certain shape. It is a pantheistic philosophy, 
 instinct with the profound cosmic sympathies of a Chinese 
 sage on his lonely mountain. His universe was the battle- 
 ground of light and darkness. Both were native to him. 
 He did not dismiss the " ancient chaos " with the facile 
 gesture of tender-minded idealism, but rather saw in it 
 the dark face of God. 
 
 The mantle of Pushkin fell, not upon Tyutchev, who 
 wrote for posterity, but rather upon Lermontov. He was 
 an ego-centric creature, with a romantic nostalgia for the 
 supersensuous. His lyricism is informed with a grace-
 
 Introduction xiii 
 
 ful demonism and a proud pessimism which naturally 
 endear him to a youthful audience. 
 
 Lermontov revolted not against the Czar of all the 
 Russias, but against the God of heaven and earth. Yet 
 the growing civic bias made it possible to put a social 
 interpretation upon the disquietude which pervades his 
 work. Thus the forensic Nekrasov, who in the next 
 generation voiced the civic conscience of an epoch of re- 
 form, is considered to have issued from Lermontov. 
 Nekrasov's troubled and uneven verse dwelt with the 
 miseries of the peasant and the proletarian. It cele- 
 brated the cause of the masses, and made itself the vehicle 
 for the peccavi of the gentry, aware of its outstanding 
 debt to the people. The age was also glad to give laurels 
 to the folk-poets, such as Koltzov and Nikitin. 
 
 The sixties and seventies the period in which Nekrasov 
 flourished harnessed the literary Niagara to political 
 action. The age felt that life is real, life is earnest, and 
 that art is not its goal. The permanent abolition of serf- 
 dom was coincident with the temporary abolition of 
 aesthetics. The very existence of a socially indifferent 
 poetry was called into question. In this unfriendly atmos- 
 phere a group of poets nevertheless carried on the Pushkin 
 tradition of self-sufficient lyricism. Maikov, Foeth, Alexey 
 Tolstoy and, to a certain extent, Polonsky, all deriving 
 from the idealism of the forties, stand out unrelated to 
 the period in which they wrote. These shared with the 
 French Parnassians an allegiance to the dogma of art 
 for art's sake, and Maikov approached their plasticity and 
 impassivity. ./Esthetes are inimical to revolution, not 
 because they love justice less, but because they love
 
 xiv Introduction 
 
 beauty more. What defined the isolation of these poets 
 was the fact that they belonged to the conservative camp. 
 
 Foeth developed a great lyrical activity toward the 
 close of his life, in the eighties. Those were years of 
 social stagnation and prolific, pale poetry. It was only 
 in the next decade, when the Yellow Book was blooming 
 on London bookstalls and the sunflowers on London 
 lapels, that the first signs of a literary, and primarily lyric 
 revival showed themselves in Russia. It was preceded by 
 proclamations, somewhat like a king who is not too sure 
 of his welcome. The vanguard of theorists included 
 Volynsky, Minsky and Merezhkovsky. Here, reversing 
 the natural order, poetics came before poetry. The cham- 
 pions of modernism revolted against the traditional sub- 
 servience of literature to social progress. They asserted 
 the autonomy and primacy of art, and offered the milk 
 of mysticism to the soul starved on positivist fare. Above 
 all they preached an individualism, whose watchword was 
 Fais ce que tu voldras, and which took to its heart Stir- 
 ner's anarchy and Nietzsche's a-moralism. 
 
 Balmont, Brusov and Sologub were the leading poets 
 who initiated the practice of what Minsky and Merezh- 
 kovsky had been preaching, and who founded a school, 
 in the loose sense of the term. This was the symbolist, 
 or as some prefer to call it, neo-romantic school. They 
 were clearly inspired by foreign models, and many de- 
 clared the whole new poetry a warmed-over French dish. 
 Yet the spontaneous and indigenous character of the 
 movement is now beyond question, its studied eccentricity 
 notwithstanding. It was only for a short time that it 
 showed the earmarks of western decadence, although its
 
 Introduction xv 
 
 detractors persisted in the term. Anti-social prejudice, a 
 toying with satanism, and concentration on sex were but 
 a temporary phase. The decadent aspect of Russian 
 modernism is best exemplified by Sologub, an exasperated 
 solipsist, living in a sick, fantasmal world. 
 
 The heterogeneity and complexity of the movement can 
 hardly be exaggerated. Each writer is a law unto him- 
 self. Yet all share a fevered intensity and the literary 
 method of symbolism. To the true symbolist the measure 
 of a verse echoes the song the morning stars sing together. 
 He posits a correspondence between sensuous and mystic 
 realities, using imagery as the sign of a remote and 
 transcendent significance. It remained for the following 
 generation thus to develop the religious implications of 
 the theory. As for Balmont, with his fluent spontaneity, 
 and Brusov, in his more slow and solid achievement, they 
 are chiefly concerned with problems of form and with the 
 cult of a beauty founded upon a flight from reality. This 
 holds good for the sinister magic of Sologub in his early 
 work. All three, especially Brusov, are conscious crafts- 
 men, with an authentic musical gift. They have greatly 
 enriched the medium which they employ. 
 
 While the symbolist school united the best talents, 
 there were of course poets who remained extra muros. 
 The most important of them is Bunin, a lyricist of rare 
 economy and sensitiveness to color. He carries on the 
 classic tradition, remote from the violences and vagaries 
 of his fellows. 
 
 A curious incident in the history of Russian symbolism 
 is the career of Alexander Dobrolubov. One of the 
 earliest disciples of the French decadents, he ended as a
 
 xvi Introduction 
 
 sectarian prophet. He lived in a coffin-shaped room, 
 papered in black, where he sought Baudelaire's " paradis 
 artificiels" by consuming opium and smoking hashish, 
 and whence he issued, clad in black even to his eternal 
 gloves, to preach suicide to his fellow-students. He be- 
 came in the end a holy vagabond, wearing the coarse 
 clothes of the Volga peasant, and leading a large mystic 
 sect. Dobrolubov's evolution is to a certain extent typi- 
 cal of the development of the symbolist movement. This, 
 beginning with a revolt against the tyranny of utilitarian 
 morality, ended with the reassertion of the ineluctable 
 ethos and a deepened mysticism. 
 
 Synchronously with the revolution of 1905 a group of 
 younger men within the fold began to transvalue the 
 symbolists' transvaluations, aided and abetted by the older 
 symbolists themselves. Chief among the newcomers were 
 Ivanov, Bely, Blok and Voloshin. They were impatient 
 of the cult of beauty and looked askance at the gambols 
 of the free individual. Their poetry is passionate meta- 
 physics, groping toward religious ultimates. Spiritually 
 deriving from Solovyov and Dostoyevsky, they are en- 
 gaged with religion and, to a large extent, with the 
 messianic role of the Russian people. In Ivanov and 
 professedly in Chulkov, mysticism is wedded to a curious 
 collectivism. Ivanov declares his verse to be the carven 
 crystal cup for the sacred wine of communal religious 
 consciousness. While in France symbolism contented 
 itself with the part of a literary method, in Russia it 
 tended to become a philosophy and even an ethics. 
 
 Problems of technique as such are no longer in the 
 foreground. Symbolism is now considered the charac-
 
 Introduction xvii 
 
 teristic of all poetry. Substance is what these sophisti- 
 cated lyricists are seeking. And so we find them turning 
 to the imperishable gods of Hellas, wandering down 
 exotic vistas, exploring with Gorodetzky the native folk- 
 lore, embracing with Kuzmin the delights of stylization. 
 A doctrinaire fury rides all these poets. They are in- 
 veterate preface-writers, and, what is worse, do not leave 
 their prefaces entirely out of their art, forgetting that 
 philosophy, in Symons' words, is the dung which lies at 
 the roots of poetry. 
 
 Shortly before the war the symbolist impetus was felt 
 to have spent itself. There was a general dissatisfaction 
 with the spirit which informed it. The poets, says a 
 Russian critic, were tired of plumbing the ultimate depths 
 of the soul, and of daily ascending the Golgotha of mys- 
 ticism. After the ecstasies came the desire for the ice- 
 water of simplicity. No longer expressing mystery in 
 music, the poets sought the limited, precise, concrete image. 
 This movement manifested itself in the Acmeist secession. 
 Grouped around a publishing firm, known as the Guild 
 of Poets, which has this year been revived, the Acmeists 
 or Adamists, led by Gumilev, Akhmatova and Gorodetzky, 
 attacked symbolism, to celebrate raw reality. Proclaim- 
 ing the primitive vision of a Gauguin, they insisted on 
 immediate contact with the tangible, visible, audible 
 world. The coterie did not write much more than its 
 manifesto, though its method may be discovered in the 
 work of the later " imazhinist " (imagist) group, of 
 which Yesenin and Marienhof are representative mem- 
 bers. These build their poetics upon the concept of the 
 autonomous image, regarded as the end of all poetry.
 
 xviii Introduction 
 
 One of their number has recently declared that a poem 
 must be not an organized entity, but rather a succession 
 of such self-sufficient images, moving as in dreams. 
 
 A sensational career awaited the other post-symbolist 
 development, futurism. It originated with the cubo- 
 futurists in Moscow in 1911 and a year later the Petro- 
 grad ego-futurists issued their manifesto. The difference 
 between them was rather like that between Tweedledum 
 and Tweedledee, the one hitting everything it could see 
 when it got really excited, the other hitting everything 
 within reach, whether it could see it or not. They hit 
 out less to epater le bourgeois than professedly to discard 
 all the canons of art and to destroy toothless Ratio. 
 Their proclaimed desire was to raze the past and build 
 the present on nothing. Their poetics provide for a 
 language consisting of elements having an audible and a 
 visual, but no intellectual value. This is merely an 
 ideal which, luckily for the rest of us, their poetry does 
 not always achieve. 
 
 " Let us gorge ourselves with the void," says one of 
 them. The poetic gift can thrive even on this futile diet. 
 Through their cacophony is sometimes heard the shrill 
 and raucous voice of a machine-made age, their distorted 
 language occasionally mirrors a time which is out of 
 joint, and their violently eccentric imagery wrests new 
 meanings from old commonplaces, as in Mayakovsky's 
 line : " A bald lantern voluptuously takes off the blue 
 stocking from the street." Naturally, they resist trans- 
 lation, except in the case of Severyanin, the early leader 
 of the Petrograd group, whose work is, however, not 
 typical.
 
 Introduction xix 
 
 Futurism showed no great vitality, and would prob- 
 ably have shared the fate of a fashion, were it not for 
 the revolution. Its unabashed iconoclasm, its plebeian 
 exuberance, may account for its recent vogue. Its man- 
 nerisms are noticeable in the work of men who do not 
 strictly adhere to the coterie, such as Oreshin and 
 Marienhof. 
 
 It is worth noting that the literature of the revolution 
 is chiefly verse. The surviving representatives of classi- 
 cism and symbolism, with the possible exception of An- 
 drey Bely, continue their work without developing it. 
 In addition to them and to the irruption of the futurists, 
 there are the peasant poets, headed by Kluyev, and a 
 large body of workman poets. The revolution has ex- 
 tended the class principle to aesthetics and takes special 
 pains to promote the literary expression of the masses. 
 Yet proletarian verse is by no means a new phenomenon 
 in Russia. From 1908 to 1915 fifty volumes of such 
 verse found their way to publication. The crudity and 
 naivete of the workmen's poetry produced since the revo- 
 lution is redeemed by a hard-handed grasp on reality. 
 The return to realism is the promise of a new develop- 
 ment in Russian poetry. Like all living things, poetry 
 endures only through change.
 
 Alexander Pushkin 
 (1799-1837) 
 
 Alexander Pushkin was born the last year of the eighteenth 
 century. He died at the age of Byron. Within these thirty- 
 seven years he crowded the activity of a great and authentic 
 initiator in literature. 
 
 His mother's grandfather was a Negro (or an Arab) who, the 
 story goes, was bought for Peter the Great at Constantinople 
 for a bottle of rum, and who married a German. His father 
 was descended from an ancient Russian family. The poet, 
 inheritor of these curious strains, was educated chiefly by 
 ineffectual French tutors and an old Russian nurse. At eighteen 
 he graduated from an aristocratic school at Tsarskoe Selo, an 
 indifferent scholar, but a writer with a reputation for light and 
 lewd verse. The next three years he spent at the northern 
 capital, where " all the vices dance upon the knees of folly." 
 He was nominally attached to the Foreign Office, but was 
 chiefly sowing his wild oats. By his liberal velleities and 
 merciless epigrams he stung the authorities to the Countercheck 
 Quarrelsome, and the enfant terrible was shipped south and 
 subsequently to his own estate. During his not too disagree- 
 able southern exile he divided his time with persistent unfaith- 
 fulness between the maids and the Muse. Back in Petersburg, 
 in 1826, he was lionized by the ladies and harassed by the 
 censors. At thirty-two he married a girl nearly half his age, 
 with the face of a madonna and the soul of a brainless coquette. 
 To provide for her needs, the poet worked feverishly, and that 
 she might be received at court, he secured a court appointment. 
 Financial cares and domestic worries soon saddened and aged 
 him. He was destroyed by the aristocratic philistines whose 
 good graces he half-unwillingly sought. An intrigue, involving 
 Pushkin's wife and her brother-in-law, Baron Dantes 
 (D'Anthes), resulted in a duel in which the poet was mortally 
 wounded, at the age of thirty-seven. 
 
 Pushkin's share of this volume is no indication of his relative 
 significance in the advance of Russian poetry. He is an over- 
 shadowing figure, and his work is an essential part of Russia's 
 
 3
 
 4 Alexander Pushkin 
 
 literary endowment. Yet an anthology which is not primarily 
 concerned with historic values, and which is addressed to a 
 foreign audience, can present but a few of his facets to the 
 reluctant light of a sophisticated intelligence.
 
 Alexander Pushkin 
 
 A NEREID 
 
 Among the glaucous waves that kiss gold Tauris' beaches 
 I saw a Nereid, as dawn flushed heaven's reaches. 
 I barely dared to breathe, hid in the olive trees, 
 While the young demigoddess rose above the seas; 
 Her young, her swan-white breast above the waters lifting, 
 From her soft hair she wrung the foam in garlands 
 drifting.
 
 Alexander Pushkin 
 
 " BEHOLD A SOWER WENT FORTH 
 TO SOW" 
 
 With freedom's seed the desert sowing, 
 I walked before the morning star; 
 From pure and guiltless ringers throwing 
 Where slavish plows had left a scar 
 The fecund seed, the procreator; 
 Oh vain and sad disseminator, 
 I learned then what lost labors are. . . . 
 Graze if you will, you peaceful nations, 
 Who never rouse at honor's horn! 
 Should flocks heed freedom's invocations? 
 Their part is to be slain or shorn, 
 Their dower the yoke their sires have worn 
 Through snug and sheepish generations.
 
 Alexander Pushkin 
 
 THREE SPRINGS 1 
 
 Three springs in life's unbroken joyless desert 
 
 Mysteriously issue from the sands: 
 
 The spring of youth, uneven and rebellious, 
 
 Bears swift its sparkling stream through sunny lands; 
 
 Life's exiles drink the wave of inspiration 
 
 That swells the limpid fount of Castaly; 
 
 But 'tis the deep, cold wellspring of oblivion 
 
 That slakes most sweetly thirst and ecstasy. 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
 
 Alexander Pushkin 
 
 THE PROPHET 
 
 I dragged my flesh through desert gloom, 
 Tormented by the spirit's yearning, 
 And saw a six-winged Seraph loom 
 Upon the footpath's barren turning. 
 And as a dream in slumber lies 
 So light his finger on my eyes, 
 My wizard eyes grew wide and wary: 
 An eagle's, startled from her eyrie. 
 He touched my ears, and lo! a sea 
 Of storming voices burst on me. 
 I heard the whirling heavens' tremor, 
 The angels' flight and soaring sweep, 
 The sea-snakes coiling in the deep, 
 The sap the vine's green tendrils carry. 
 And to my lips the Seraph clung 
 And tore from me my sinful tongue, 
 My cunning tongue and idle-worded; 
 The subtle serpent's sting he set 
 Between my lips his hand was wet, 
 His bloody hand my mouth begirded. 
 And with a sword he cleft my breast 
 And took the heart with terror turning, 
 And in my gaping bosom pressed 
 A coal that throbbed there, black and burning. 
 Upon the wastes, a lifeless clod, 
 I lay, and heard the voice of God:
 
 Alexander Pushkin 
 
 " Arise, oh prophet, watch and hearken, 
 And with my Will thy soul engird, 
 Through lands that dim and seas that darken, 
 Burn thou men's hearts with this, my Word."
 
 IO Alexander Pushkin 
 
 VERSES WRITTEN DURING A SLEEPLESS 
 NIGHT 
 
 Sleep I cannot find, nor light: 
 
 Everywhere is dark and slumber, 
 
 Only weary tickings number 
 
 The slow hours of the night. 
 
 Parca, jabbering, woman-fashion, 
 
 Sleeping night, without compassion, 
 
 Life, who stirs like rustling mice, 
 
 Why encage me in thy vise? 
 
 Why the whispering insistence, 
 
 Art thou but the pale persistence 
 
 Of a day departed twice? 
 
 What black failures dost thou reckon ? 
 
 Dost thou prophesy or beckon ? 
 
 I would know whence thou art sprung, 
 
 I would study thy dark tongue . . .
 
 Alexander Pushkin II 
 
 WORK 
 
 Here is the long-bided hour : the labor of years is accom- 
 plished. 
 Why should this sadness unplumbed secretly weigh on 
 
 my heart? 
 
 Is it, my work being done, I stand like a laborer, useless, 
 One who has taken his pay, alien to unwonted tasks? 
 Is it the work I regret, the silent companion of midnight, 
 Friend of the golden-haired Dawn, friend of the gods 
 of the hearth?
 
 12 Alexander Pushkin 
 
 MADONNA 
 
 Not by old masters, rich on crowded walls, 
 
 My house I ever sought to ornament, 
 
 That gaping guests might marvel while they bent 
 
 To connoisseurs with condescending drawls. 
 
 Amidst slow labors, far from garish halls, 
 
 Before one picture I would fain have spent 
 
 Eternity: where the calm canvas thralls 
 
 As though the Virgin and our Saviour leant 
 
 From regnant clouds, the Glorious and the Wise, 
 
 The meek and hallowed, with unearthly eyes, 
 
 Beneath the palm of Zion, these alone. . . . 
 
 My wish is granted: God has shown thy face 
 
 To me; here, my Madonna, thou shalt throne: 
 
 Most pure exemplar of the purest grace.
 
 Yevgeny Baratynsky 
 (1800-1844) 
 
 " It is a little cup, but it is nay own," thus might Baratynsky 
 sum up the small perfection of his art. He belonged to Pushkin's 
 school, but was not eclipsed by the master. His ceuvre consists 
 of one slender volume of lyrics. These are marked by the 
 originality of the discriminating eclectic, by a strong conscience 
 for form, and by the obtruding intellection of a born pessimist. 
 
 Like most of the Russian litterateurs of the first half of the 
 nineteenth century, with which he was born, Baratynsky be- 
 longed to the kept classes. An infringement of the eighth com- 
 mandment while he was at school (the Corps of Pages) reduced 
 this son of a senator to a mere private. The experience may 
 have accented his gloomy temperament. Aside from this, the 
 outward circumstances of his life, including his marriage, were 
 happy, and therefore have no history. His last years, however, 
 were saddened by the consciousness of estrangement from the 
 rising generation.
 
 14 Yevgeny Baratynsky 
 
 PRAYER 
 
 King of Heavens! Release 
 
 My sick soul to its peace! 
 
 For the errors of earth 
 
 Send oblivion's dearth ; 
 
 To thy stern paradise 
 
 Give my heart strength to rise.
 
 Alexey Koltzov 
 (1809-1842) 
 
 Koltzov might best be described as a tame Burns. The 
 adjective applies to the poetry more than to the poet, though 
 even here we find a soberer man. He was a cattle-dealer and 
 the son of a cattle-dealer: a cross between a trader and a 
 cow-puncher. He spent his life in the sordid surroundings of 
 his native town, with the exception of a few visits to the two 
 capitals. There he met the literati of the day, dinnered wi' 
 lairds, and was stared at in fashionable salons. He returned 
 with a swollen head, which caused him a great deal of misery 
 at home. The effect of his intercourse with the intellectuals was 
 seen to be equally lamentable in his attempts at philosophic 
 poetry. His last years were embittered by poverty, neglect, and 
 a tragic love which ended in a lurid disease. 
 
 His art maintained his umbilical connection with the people. 
 He carries on the tradition of the Russian folk-song, whether 
 the stuff of his lyrics is the works and days of the peasant, or 
 themes of universal emotional appeal. He uses the free rhythms 
 of the folk-song and, curiously enough, his favorite metre coin- 
 cides with that of the Sophoclean choruses. Of his one hundred 
 and twenty-four poems, three-fourths have been set to music 
 by some one hundred Russian composers, among whom are 
 Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakoff.
 
 1 6 Alexey Koltzov 
 
 AN OLD MAN'S SONG 
 
 I shall saddle a horse, 
 A swift courser, he, 
 I shall fly, I shall rush, 
 As the hawk is keen, 
 Over fields, over seas, 
 To a distant land. 
 I shall overtake there 
 My young youth again. 
 I shall make myself spruce 
 Be a blade again, 
 I shall make a fine show 
 For the girls again. 
 But alas ! no road leads 
 To the past we've left, 
 And the sun will not rise 
 For us in the west.
 
 Mikhail Lermontov 
 (18x4-1841) 
 
 Whether or not the semi-legendary Thomas of Erceldoune, 
 who received his poetic gift from the fairies, was Lermontov's 
 ancestor, it is certain that the Russian poet traced his lineage 
 back to George Learmont of Scotland, who settled in Russia in 
 the seventeenth century. His grandchildren claimed that they 
 were descended from that Learmont who fought with Malcolm 
 against Macbeth. 
 
 Lermontov's immediate heredity was rather poor. His hys- 
 terical mother died in 1817, when he was three years old, 
 and he grew up as the bone of contention between his father 
 and his wealthy, overbearing grandmother. On her estate the 
 spoiled darling received his early education, of the usual im- 
 ported type. He was extraordinarily precocious in both love 
 and literature. Between 1828 and 1832 he had written 300 
 lyrics, 15 long narrative poems and 3 dramas. He was little 
 more than a boy when he graduated from a military college at 
 St. Petersburg, having previously spent two years at the Uni- 
 versity of Moscow, and plunged into " a life of poetry, drowned 
 in champagne." His technique as a heart-breaker was only 
 excelled by his power as a poet, and that, in spite of a repellent 
 exterior. Upon Pushkin's death Lermontov's obituary poem 
 brought him rapid fame and exile to the Caucasus. This 
 region was to the poets of Russia what Italy has been to those 
 of England. The romantic glamor of the enchanted land suf- 
 fused Lermontov's work. One of his flames called him a 
 Prometheus chained to the rocks of the Caucasus, but he was 
 more like a pendulum swinging between them and the beau 
 monde of St. Petersburg. He indulged inordinately in the sad- 
 ism of sarcasm, and was as well hated by the men as he was 
 loved by the women. Spared by the bullets of the mountaineers, 
 Lermontov was killed in a duel with an outraged colleague, 
 only a year older at his death than was John Keats. 
 
 Yet this brilliant bully and egotistic rake was, after his own 
 fashion, a knight of the Holy Grail and a poetic genius such as 
 rarely graces any language. 
 
 17
 
 1 8 Mikhail Lermontov 
 
 THE ANGEL 
 
 Through the heavens of midnight an angel was sped 
 
 Who lifted his chant as he fled. 
 The moon and the clouds and the stars leaned to hear 
 
 The song rising holy and clear. 
 
 He sang of the spirits, the sinless, the blest, 
 
 Who softly in Paradise rest. 
 Of the gardens of God, and of God was his song, 
 
 Ringing true as a heavenly gong. 
 
 He bore a young soul to the dark gates of birth, 
 
 Toward the travailing, sorrowful earth. 
 And flying, he sang, and the eager soul heard 
 
 The deathless, the unuttered Word. 
 
 And the years in the world could but sadden and tire 
 
 The soul filled with wondrous desire. 
 And vainly the dull songs of earth would have stilled 
 
 The song wherewith heaven had thrilled.
 
 Mikhail Lermontov 19 
 
 THE CUP OF LIFE 
 
 We drink life's cup with thirsty lips, 
 Our eyes shut fast to fears; 
 About the golden rim there drips 
 Our staining blood, our tears. 
 
 But when the last swift hour comes on, 
 The light long hid is lit, 
 From startled eyes the band is gone, 
 We suffer and submit. 
 
 It is not our part to possess 
 The cup that golden gleamed. 
 We see its shallow emptiness: 
 We did not drink we dreamed.
 
 2O Mikhail Lermontov 
 
 GRATITUDE 
 
 For all, I thank Thee, I, the meek remitter: 
 
 For passion's secret torments without end, 
 
 The kiss of venom, and the tears too bitter, 
 
 The vengeful enemy, the slanderous friend, 
 
 The spirit's ardor on the desert squandered, 
 
 For every lash of life's deceiving thong; 
 
 I thank Thee for the wastes where I have wandered ; 
 
 But heed Thou, that I need not thank Thee long.
 
 Mikhail Lermontov 21 
 
 FROM "THE DAEMON" (Part I, xv) 
 
 On the sightless seas of ether, 
 Rudderless, without a sail, 
 Choirs of stars uplift their voices, 
 Where the mist-waves rise and fail. 
 
 Through the hemless fields of heaven 
 Wander wide and tracelessly 
 Clouds, unshepherded, unnumbered, 
 Pale, ephemeral and free. 
 
 Hour of parting, hour of meeting, 
 Neither gladden them, nor fret; 
 Theirs no yearning toward the future, 
 Theirs no haunting of regret. 
 
 On the grim day of disaster 
 These remember, worlds away: 
 Be beyond earth's reach as these are, 
 And indifferent as they.
 
 22 Mikhail Lermontov 
 
 CAPTIVE KNIGHT 
 
 Silent I sit by the prison's high window, 
 Where through the bars the blue heavens are breaking. 
 Flecks in the azure, the free birds are playing; 
 Watching them fly there, my shamed heart is aching. 
 
 But on my sinful lips never a prayer, 
 Never a song in the praise of my charmer; 
 All I recall are far fights and old battles, 
 My heavy sword and my old iron armor. 
 
 Now in stone armor I hopelessly languish, 
 
 And a stone helmet my hot head encases, 
 
 This shield is proof against arrows and sword-play, 
 
 And without whip, without spur, my horse races. 
 
 Time is my horse, the swift-galloping charger, 
 And for a visor this bleak prison grating, 
 Walls of my prison are heavy stone armor; 
 Shielded by cast-iron doors, I am waiting. 
 
 Hurry, oh fast-flying Time, fly more quickly! 
 In my new armor I faint, I am choking. 
 I shall alight, with Death holding my stirrup, 
 Then my cold face from this visor uncloaking.
 
 Fyodor Tyutchev 
 (1803-1873) 
 
 Tyutchev was rediscovered by the moderns and hailed as 
 the great fore-runner. They found in his mentality and sensi- 
 bility, as well as in his technique, elements foreign to classic 
 normalcy, and akin to their own anguished metaphysics and 
 aesthetics. The two hundred short lyrics, which are all the 
 original poetry he has left us, exhibit the organic coherence 
 and ordered beauty which belong to fine lyric art. The origi- 
 nality of his poems consists in that both man's routine passions 
 and nature's passionless routine are sensed in ultimate, cosmic 
 terms. 
 
 Tyutchev's career could not be inferred from his poetry. 
 This was the by-product of a long and largely conventional 
 life. He was a sedate bureaucrat in the diplomatic service, a 
 position which kept him in Muenchen, the German Athens, dur- 
 ing his best years. He proved the happiness of his marriage 
 to a Bavarian aristocrat by marrying again shortly after her 
 death. When he was on the shady side of fifty his career was 
 seriously injured by a liaison with his daughter's teacher. Dur- 
 ing the last twenty years of his life he acted as censor, a posi- 
 tion for which his political views eminently fitted him. He be- 
 lieved in autocracy, and he prophesied that Orthodox Russia, 
 at the head of the united Slavs, would be the sacred arc riding 
 the waves of the western revolutionary deluge.
 
 24 Fyodor Tyutchev 
 
 TWILIGHT 1 
 
 Soft the dove-hued shadows mingle, 
 Color fades, sound droops to sleep. 
 Life and motion melt to darkness 
 Swaying murmurs far and deep. 
 But the night moth's languid flitting 
 Stirs the air invisibly: 
 Oh, the hour of wordless longing; 
 I in all, and all in me. 
 
 Twilight tranquil, brooding twilight, 
 Course through me, serene and smooth ; 
 Quiet, languid, fragrant twilight, 
 Flood all depths, all sorrows soothe, 
 Every sense in dark and cooling 
 Self-forgetfulness immerse, 
 Grant that I may taste extinction 
 In the dreaming universe. 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky and Cecil Cowdrey.
 
 Fyodor Tyutchev 25 
 
 "AS OCEAN'S STREAM" 
 
 As ocean's stream girdles the ball of earth, 
 From circling seas of dream man's life emerges, 
 And as night moves in silence up the firth 
 The secret tide around our mainland surges. 
 
 The voice of urgent waters softly sounds; 
 The magic skiff uplifts white wings of wonder. 
 The tide swells swiftly and the white sail rounds, 
 Where the blind waves in shoreless darkness thunder. 
 
 And the wide heavens, starred and luminous, 
 Out of the deep in mystery aspire. 
 The strange abyss is burning under us; 
 And we sail onward, and our wake is fire.
 
 26 Fyodor Tyutchev 
 
 SILENTIUM * 
 
 Be silent, hidden, and conceal 
 Whate'er you dream, whate'er you feel. 
 Oh, let your visions rise and die 
 Within your heart's unfathomed sky, 
 Like stars that take night's darkened route. 
 Admire and scan them and be mute. 
 
 The heart was born dumb; who can sense 
 Its tremors, recondite and tense? 
 And who can hear its silent cry? 
 A thought when spoken is a lie. 
 Uncovered springs men will pollute, 
 Drink hidden waters, and be mute. 
 
 Your art shall inner living be. 
 The world within your fantasy 
 A kingdom is that waits its Saul. 
 The outer din shall still its call, 
 Day's glare its secret suns confute. 
 Oh, quaff its singing, and be mute. 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
 
 Fyodor Tyutchev 27 
 
 AUTUMN EVENING 
 
 The light of autumn evenings seems a screen, 
 Some mystery with tender glamor muffling. . . . 
 The trees in motley, cloaked in eerie sheen, 
 The scarlet leaves that languid airs are ruffling, 
 The still and misty azure, vaguely far, 
 Above the earth that waits her orphan sorrow, 
 And bitter winds in gusty vagrance are 
 Forerunners of a bleak, storm-driven morrow. 
 The woods are waning; withered is the sun; 
 Earth shows the smile of fading, meekly tender 
 As the high shyness of a suffering one, 
 In noble reticence of sad surrender.
 
 28 Fyodor Tyutchev 
 
 JULY 14, AT NIGHT 
 
 Not yet cooled, the windless night 
 Of July shone strangely still. 
 Earth lay dim, and fitful light 
 In the skyey, storm-filled height 
 Trembled over field and hill. 
 
 So might lidded eyes unclose, 
 And between vast lashes burn 
 Glances flaming and morose, 
 Over earth's remote repose, 
 Mute as lightning, swift and stern.
 
 Fyodor Tyutchev 29 
 
 "OH, THOU, MY WIZARD SOUL" 
 
 Oh, thou, my wizard soul, oh, heart 
 That whelming agony immerses, 
 The threshold of two universes 
 In cleaving these, tears thee apart. 
 
 And so two alien worlds are thine: 
 Thy day of morbid passionate living, 
 Thy sleep, vague revelations giving 
 Of spirits secret and divine. 
 
 Then let the tortured bosom beat 
 With fatal passion and vagary; 
 The soul is fain, even as Mary, 
 To cling forever to Christ's feet.
 
 Nikolai Nekrasov 
 (1821-1877) 
 
 Nekrasov's literary career began with a series of prose pot- 
 boilers, written while he was starving in St. Petersburg. He 
 had come to this city as a boy of seventeen in 1838, to follow 
 the military profession. Against the will of his father, a brute 
 of an hobereau, the young man preferred the university to the 
 army, and was forthwith thrown on his own resources. A 
 penniless hack, he became before long a popular poet and the 
 thriving publisher of the two greatest radical monthlies in 
 Russia. 
 
 As a child he had heard the bitter songs of the Volga barge- 
 towers. In the capital he had lived with filth and famine. 
 He introduced these elements into his work. Yet though he 
 suffered with the people in his poems, he enjoyed his prosperity, 
 in spite of ethical scruples. 
 
 His work is marked by a strong social and civic preoccupa- 
 tion. He declared that this interest interfered with his poetry. 
 As a matter of fact, his " Muse of Vengeance and Wrath " was 
 an uncertain creature. He threw untransmuted into his poetry 
 the raw stuff of satire and feuilleton, of parody and pamphlet. 
 At his best he can move the reader with his stinging pity 
 and his passionate self-scorn. He is perhaps chiefly remembered 
 by his epic: "Who Lives Happily in Russia?", which holds 
 in its vast frame the very essence of the misery and the thwarted 
 vigor of the Russian peasant.
 
 Nikolai Nekrasov 31 
 
 " THE CAPITALS ARE ROCKED WITH 
 THUNDER " 
 
 The capitals are rocked with thunder 
 Of orators in wordy feuds. 
 But in the depths of Russia, yonder, 
 An age-old awful silence broods. 
 Only the wind in wayside willows, 
 Coming and going, does not cease; 
 And corn-stalks touch in curving billows 
 The earth that cherishes and pillows, 
 Through endless fields of changeless peace.
 
 32 Nikolai Nekrasov 
 
 MY POEMS! WITNESSES OF UNAVAILING" 
 
 My poems! Witnesses of unavailing 
 
 Tears for the sad earth shed! 
 Born in the moment when the soul is failing, 
 
 And by the storm-winds bred; 
 Against men's hearts you beat with wistful wailing 
 
 Like waves on cliffs as dead.
 
 Nikolai Nekrasov 33 
 
 THE SALT SONG 
 (From " Who Can Live Happily in Russia? ") 
 
 God's will be done! 
 No food he'll try, 
 The youngest son 
 Look, he will die. 
 
 A crust I got, 
 Another bit 
 He touched it not: 
 "Put salt on it!" 
 
 Of salt no shred, 
 No pinch I see! 
 " Take flour, instead," 
 God whispered me. 
 
 Two bites, or one 
 His mouth he pouts, 
 The little son. 
 "More salt!" he shouts. 
 
 The bit appears 
 Again all floured, 
 And wet with tears 
 It was devoured. 
 
 The mother said 
 She'd saved her dear. . . . 
 Salt was the bread 
 How salt the tear!
 
 Alexey K. Tolstoy 
 
 (1817-1875) 
 
 Alexey Tolstoy was a playmate of Alexander II and sat on 
 the knees of Goethe. Like Ruskin, he made a cult of beauty, 
 humanitarianism and Italy. In this second fatherland of his, 
 he began to travel early in life. This courtier-assthete was a 
 mystic, with a leaning toward the occult. He regarded the 
 doctrine of equality as " the foolish invention of 1793," and was 
 wholly out of sympathy with the materialistic iconoclasts of 
 his time. Yet he was too much of an aristocrat not to despise 
 despotism. 
 
 His literary activity began in his middle years. His romantic 
 interest in the Russian past produced a novel and a dramatic 
 trilogy. The past is also the playground of Tolstoy's poetry. 
 This frequently degenerates into pastiche. Nevertheless he was 
 a major poet among the minor poets, at his best achieving a 
 neat and graceful lyricism. His technique is unusual in Rus- 
 sian poetry for its prosodic freedom. 
 
 34
 
 Alexey K. Tolstoy 35 
 
 MY LITTLE ALMOND TREE 
 
 My little almond tree 
 
 Is gay with gleaming bloom, 
 
 My heart unwillingly 
 
 Puts forth its buds of gloom. 
 
 The bloom will leave the tree, 
 The fruit, unbidden, grow. 
 And the green boughs will be 
 By bitter loads brought low.
 
 36 Alexey K. Tolstoy 
 
 "A WELL, AND THE CHERRY TREES 
 SWAYING " 
 
 A well, and the cheriy trees swaying 
 Where bare girlish feet trod the fruit; 
 Nearby the damp imprint betraying 
 The stamp of a heavy nailed boot. 
 
 Stilled now is the place of their meeting, 
 But nothing the silence avails: 
 In my brain passion's echo repeating 
 Their whispers the splash of the pails.
 
 Alexey K. Tolstoy 37 
 
 " OH, THE RICKS " 
 
 Oh, the ricks, the ricks, 
 In the meadows lying, 
 The eye cannot count 
 You, for all its trying. 
 
 Oh, the ricks, the ricks, 
 In the green morasses, 
 What do you guard: 
 You heaped, heavy masses? 
 
 Pray, behold us, good sir: 
 We were once bright flowers; 
 But the sharp scythe falls 
 And the whole field cowers. 
 
 We were littered here, 
 
 All mown down and shattered, 
 
 On the rneadowland 
 
 From each other scattered. 
 
 We have no defense: 
 
 Evil guests come clawing 
 
 And upon our crests 
 
 Perch the black crows, cawing. 
 
 On our heads they perch, 
 The starred heavens dimming. 
 Here the jackdaws flock, 
 Their foul hutches trimming.
 
 38 Alexey K. Tolstoy 
 
 Oh, thou eagle, hail! 
 Our far father flying, 
 Oh, thou fire-eyed, come, 
 Our bleak foes defying. 
 
 Oh, thou eagle, hail! 
 
 Lo, our groans grow stronger. 
 
 Let the evil crows 
 
 Blacken us no longer. 
 
 Oh, avenge us swift, 
 
 From the heavens swooping; 
 
 Punish their vile pride 
 
 Till their wings fall drooping: 
 
 Till the feathers fly; 
 Come, a bolt of thunder, 
 That the steppe's wild wind 
 Tear them all asunder.
 
 Apollon Maikov 
 (1821-1897) 
 
 Born of a mother with a literary leaning and an aristocratic 
 father, who gave up the military career for that of a painter, 
 Maikov himself was a sculptor who lost his way in literature. 
 He studied painting in his youth, and indeed his poems show 
 a clear sense of line and color, but his best work is marked 
 by a truly sculptural quality. He received a thorough classical 
 education and in his early work he imitated the Greek and 
 Roman masters. Generally speaking, he yields all too easily 
 to the indirections of erudition and to the Protean pleasures of 
 promiscuous translation. It is in the classical genre that he 
 achieves a small excellence. His finest craftsmanship is shown 
 in enamels and cameos, and in clay medallions, but he has 
 neither the paganism of Gautier nor the sensitive sophistication 
 of Regnier. Maikov's is a baptized Pan and a feigning Bacchus. 
 
 His later work was dominated by a nationalistic bias which 
 opposed the chosen Russian people to " the rotten West." A 
 typical aesthete, Maikov found himself in the conservative camp. 
 For nearly half a century he served his monarch as a censor. 
 The antinomy of east and west, of Christianity and paganism, 
 viewed with a cold objectivity, superseded his interest in the 
 antique world. This is the pivotal idea of his greatest narra- 
 tive poem, the tragedy of " The Two Worlds." 
 
 39
 
 40 Apollon Maikov 
 
 ART 
 
 Idly I cut me a reed by the shore where the sea heaves 
 
 and thunders, 
 Dumb and forgotten it lay in my simple, my wind-beaten 
 
 cabin. 
 Once an old traveler passed who remained for the night 
 
 in our dwelling, 
 (Foreign his dress and his tongue, an old man who was 
 
 strange to our region.) 
 Seeing the reed, he retrieved it, and lopping and piercing 
 
 the nodules, 
 Sweetly his lips he applied to the holes that he fashioned : 
 
 responding, 
 Swiftly the reed-voice awoke, till the noise of the sea 
 
 breathed within it; 
 Thus would wild Zephyros blow, were he suddenly 
 
 ruffling the waters, 
 Fingering lightly the reed-stems and flooding the banks 
 
 with the sea-sound.
 
 Apollon Maikov 41 
 
 " UPON THIS WILD HEADLAND " 
 
 Upon this wild headland, crowned meanly with indigent 
 rushes 
 
 And withering bush and the pitiful green of the pine- 
 trees, 
 
 The aged Meniskos, a sorrowful fisherman laid 
 
 His son who had perished. His youth the sea, motherwise, 
 nurtured, 
 
 That sea whose wide lap took him back, who re.sistlessly 
 bore him 
 
 In death, and who carefully carried the young body shore- 
 ward. 
 
 Then mourning Meniskos went forth, and beneath the 
 great willow 
 
 He dug him a grave, a plain stone he set for a mark on 
 the cliff-side, 
 
 And hung overhead a coarse net he had woven of 
 willow, 
 
 A fisherman's wreath to be poverty's bitter memento.
 
 42' Apollon Maikov 
 
 SUMMER RAIN 
 
 "Golden rain! Golden rain! out of the sky!" 
 Children sing out and run after the rain. 
 
 " Quiet, my children, we'll reap it again, 
 Only we'll gather the gold in the grain 
 In the full granaries fragrant with rye."
 
 Afanasy Shenshin-Foeth 
 (1820-1892) 
 
 It is said that Foetb, like the nightingale, sang only at dawn 
 and at sunset. Between 1840 and 1856 he published three 
 volumes of poetry. The following two decades he devoted to 
 the pleasures and profits of a gentleman farmer. He waxed 
 fat and prosperous. His famous apple-cakes were sent to no 
 less a friend than Alexander III. On the road to the ripe old 
 age of three score and ten, the poet superseded the pomeshchik 
 and paid court to the Muse with four volumes of verse. 
 
 Although an admirer and translator of Schopenhauer, Foeth 
 enjoyed the distinction of being one of the few men who were 
 actually happy in Russia. He had an Horatian serenity, and 
 the aesthete's indifference to society's ills. These elements in 
 his character alone are reflected in his poetry, which is written 
 in major, yet has withal the ethereal, insubstantial quality of 
 dream experience. His lyrics are invested with a rarefied sen- 
 suousness, a keen feeling for life's cosmic context, and a domi- 
 nating interest in melody. Tchaikovsky, who set many of his 
 poems to music, likened Foeth to Beethoven. 
 
 43
 
 44 Afanasy Shenshin-Foeth 
 
 "WHISPERS. TIMID BREATHING" 
 
 Whispers. Timid breathing. Trilling 
 
 Of a nightingale. 
 Heaving silver waters rilling 
 
 In the quiet vale. 
 
 Night's dim light and shadows dreaming 
 Through the haze of space. 
 
 Moods like faery lanterns gleaming 
 On the dearest face. 
 
 Smoky clouds show roses sleeping, 
 
 Amber lights and fawn. 
 Kisses soft, and softer weeping. 
 
 And the dawn, the dawn!
 
 Afanasy Shenshin-Foedh 45 
 
 THE AERIAL CITY 
 
 At daybreak there spread through the heavens 
 
 Pale clouds like a turreted town: 
 
 The cupolas golden, fantastic, 
 
 White roofs and white walls shining down. 
 
 This citadel is my white city, 
 My city familiar and dear, 
 Above the dark earth as it slumbers, 
 Upon the pink sky builded clear. 
 
 And all that aerial city 
 Sails northward, sails softly, sails high; 
 And there on the height, some one beckons, 
 But proffers no pinions to fly.
 
 46 Afanasy $henshin-Foeth 
 
 SWALLOWS 
 
 Calm Nature's idle spy, I follow 
 
 In joy her pathways; free and fond, 
 
 I watch the arrow-winged swift swallow 
 
 Who curves above the dusking pond. 
 
 It dashes forward, lightly skimming 
 The glassy surface, half in fear 
 Of alien clutching waters dimming 
 The lightning wings before they veer. 
 
 And once again the same quick daring, 
 And once again the same dark stream. . . . 
 Is not this flight our human faring? 
 Is not this urge our human dream? 
 
 Thus I, frail vessel, am forbidden 
 To take the foreign road, and dip 
 To scoop a drop ; the ways are hidden 
 Of alien streams I may not sip.
 
 Yakov Polonsky 
 (1819-1898) 
 
 The routine of Polonsky's uneventful life was compounded 
 of teaching, editorial work and long years of service in the 
 censorship department. It is true that he traveled abroad and 
 spent some years in the Caucasus, but this did not interrupt the 
 even tenor of his ways. 
 
 He was a prolific fiction writer, yet it is as a poet that he 
 lives in the memory of his compatriots. His poetry itself has 
 been charged with being " lukewarm and neither cold nor hot." 
 It lacks, it has been said, that cosmic nostalgia and civic con- 
 sciousness which belong to Russian poetry. Indeed Polonsky's 
 poetic effigy is rather unheroic and indistinct in outline. Yet 
 he has the virtues of his defects. His work is distinguished by 
 its homeliness. It keeps to the lighted circle of our familiar 
 and familial life, and foregoes power and passion for intimacy 
 and charm. 
 
 47
 
 Yakov Polonsky 
 
 THE COSMIC FABRIC l 
 
 This vast web, of Nature's weaving, 
 Is God's garment, so 'tis said. 
 In that fabric I a living, 
 I a still unbroken thread. 
 And the threads run swiftly, never 
 Halting, yet if once they sever, 
 Seer or sage shall not suffice 
 Then uie parted strands to splice. 
 For the Weaver so will veil them 
 That (let him who may bewail them) 
 None the ends shall ever find, 
 Nor one broken thread rebind. 
 Ceaselessly the threads are breaking, 
 Short, ah short will be my span! 
 Meanwhile, at His fabric's making 
 Toils the cosmic Artisan, 
 Curious patterns still designing, 
 Wave and crested hill defining, 
 Steppe and pasture, cloud and sky, 
 Wood and field of golden rye. 
 Though with care the wise may scan it, 
 Flawless since that Hand began it, 
 Smooth and fine with fair accord 
 Shines the garment of the Lord! 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky and Cecil Cowdrey.
 
 Yakov Polonsky 49 
 
 SORROW'S MADNESS 
 
 When, clinging to your lidded coffin, 
 
 I saw you, love, on your last journey go, 
 
 No sobs my maddened heart could soften, 
 
 And I seemed dead, like you, below. 
 
 Yours was the grave men see so often: 
 
 Your small frame fitted snugly, so ; 
 
 With leaden stupor blinded, I beheld it 
 
 Vanish, I heard the clods' soft blow. 
 
 My coffin was not thus but spacious, 
 
 And gay with leaves and a blue pall in state. 
 
 And fastened to it glared the sun of mid-day: 
 
 A gilded, gawdy coffin-plate. 
 
 Your coffin disappeared beneath wet earth and gravel, 
 
 But mine alas! still glittered mockingly. . . . 
 
 An orphaned soul and widowed, I let my sad eyes travel 
 
 About me, my heart's heart, and I could see 
 
 How, buried deep in my resplendent coffin, 
 
 And bearing death within me, I would sue 
 
 For happiness now lost forever ; 
 
 I knew my nothingness, my thirst for you. 
 
 I longed to break the spell of numbness 
 
 Lay waste my living tomb, wrench back its bars, 
 
 To tear aside the graveclothes of the heavens, 
 
 To stamp upon the sun and scatter wide the stars, 
 
 And dash across this endless graveyard 
 
 Where dead worlds fill the graves, 
 
 To find your dwelling where no memories languish, 
 
 To Death's void galley chained like sullen slaves.
 
 Vladimir Solovyov 
 (1853-1900) 
 
 Coming from a family of scholars and churchmen, Solovyov 
 was himself a mystic and visionary: an alien seed in an exor- 
 cised age. He was a cross between a Bohemian and a lay 
 monk, whose asceticism only emphasized his powerfully erotic 
 nature. A spirit dedicated to the creation of the greatest philo- 
 sophical system which Russia has given to the world was fain 
 to express itself also in poetry. His one slender volume of 
 lyrics has the quality of soaring spirituality, and is generally 
 engaged with a supersensuous reality, occasionally broken by 
 irruptions of spasmodic comedy. It is largely centered about 
 the concept of the Eternal Feminine, which also plays an im- 
 portant part in his grandiose religious system. He conceives 
 it not as Aphrodite, but rather as Sophia: Divine Wisdom. 
 
 This feminine principle materialized itself for the mystic 
 in a Dantesque experience. In a reminiscential poem written 
 eight years before his death, he relates how, as a boy of nine, 
 he first glimpsed his Eternal Mate. This was in Moscow; he 
 next sees her in the reading-room of the British Museum thir- 
 teen years later, as he bends over volumes of abstruse mystical 
 literature. She bids him follow her to Egypt. It is a bio- 
 graphic fact that the young Dozent traveled across the con- 
 tinent to Cairo, and went afoot into the desert, where he beheld 
 his beatific vision for the last time. 
 
 50
 
 Vladimir Solovyov 
 
 " BELOW THE SULTRY STORM " 
 
 Below the sultry storm that seemed to lower, 
 An alien force, again I heard the call 
 Of my mysterious mate : the prisoned power 
 Of old dreams flared and flickered in its fall. 
 
 And with a cry of horror and of dolor 
 As of an eagle in an iron vise 
 My spirit shook its cage in quivering choler, 
 And tore the net, and issued to the skies. 
 
 And up behind the clouds, unswerving, bearing,- 
 Before the miracles a flaming sea 
 Within the shining sanctum briefly flaring, 
 It vanished into white infinity.
 
 2 Vladimir Solovyov 
 
 "WITH WAVERING FEET" 
 
 With wavering feet I walked where dawn-lit mists were 
 
 lying, 
 
 To find the shores of wonder and of mystery. 
 Dawn struggled with the final stars, frail dreams were 
 
 flying, 
 
 While unto unknown gods my morning lips were crying 
 The prayers that my dream-imprisoned soul had whispered 
 
 me. 
 
 The noon is cold and candid, the road winds on severely, 
 And through an unknown land once more my journey lies. 
 The mist has lifted now, and the stark eye sees clearly 
 How hard the mountain-road that rises upward sheerly, 
 How distant looms the dream the prescient heart de- 
 scries ! 
 
 Yet onward with unfaltering feet I shall be going 
 Toward midnight, onward toward the shore of my desires, 
 Where on a mountain-height, new stars its glory showing, 
 My promised temple waits, with plinth and pillar glow- 
 ing, 
 Beaten about with flame of white, triumphal fires.
 
 N. Minsky 
 
 (Pseudonym of Nikolai Vilenkin; born 1855) 
 
 The son of poor Jewish villagers, Minsky was, among other 
 things, tutor, lawyer, and bank employee, before he emigrated 
 to Paris in 1905, at the age of fifty, where he has lived as 
 newspaper correspondent and litterateur ever since. He had 
 previously lived abroad, and was abreast of European literary 
 movements. 
 
 His ideological and poetic career has been no less kaleido- 
 scopic. Beginning as a poet insistent upon civic virtues and art 
 as criticism of life, within some ten years Minsky became the 
 prophet of a-moralism, decadence, symbolism, and the champion 
 of Bacchic beauty. Early in the twentieth century he joined 
 with sophisticated Orthodox priests and lay God-seekers in 
 founding a society for the promotion of a new religious con- 
 sciousness, himself preaching a nebulously negative, mystic 
 doctrine of " meonism," affectionately envisaging a new 
 Nirvana. 
 
 The revolution of 1905 inspired his Muse briefly to Marxian 
 hymns, and helped him to his Parisian exile. Here, in addition 
 to his other work, he wrote a dramatic trilogy. Minsky had a 
 weakness for manifestos, of which his poetry was not always 
 a successful illustration. It is only his later work, with its in- 
 creased technical skill, that achieves the bodying forth of his 
 curious intellection. 
 
 53
 
 54 N. Minsky 
 
 FORCE 
 
 She lies, opening her teats, strong, swollen, wide, 
 And at her breasts, their equal gift bestowing, 
 Mad Nero and meek Buddha clutch, unknowing, 
 As clinging twins who suckle side by side. 
 She holds two vessels, whence, forever flowing, 
 The streams of Life and Death serenely glide. 
 She breathes and wreaths of stars are lit, and bide,- 
 She breathes anew: they fly like sere leaves blowing. 
 
 She looks ahead with cold unseeing eyes; 
 She cares not though she bear or cause to perish; 
 The children whom she nurtures she will cherish, 
 But when she weans them, every claim denies. 
 Evil and Good gather them in thereafter 
 And play the cosmic game with idle laughter.
 
 N. Minsky 55 
 
 MY TEMPLE 
 
 Who rears a temple, rears two monuments: 
 His own and the destroyer's. They who build 
 Accept Herostratos' arbitraments: 
 And to the torch the chisel's work is willed. 
 Both will stand firm before posterity, 
 And equal glory Fame to each will lend. 
 But thou, my air-domed temple, shalt not be 
 Mocked by the vengeance of the general end. 
 
 On an abyss of ruin is thy lease, 
 Thou'rt in the furnace of negation fired; 
 n thee the hymns of solace shall not cease: 
 With sorrow winged, by calm despair inspired. 
 Thee, ^gioned sufferings guard, in iron mail, 
 And in their vanguard Death, who shall prevail.
 
 Dmitry Merezhkovsky 
 
 (Born 1865) 
 
 Merezhkovsky had every opportunity of study and travel 
 afforded the son of a comfortably circumstanced, bureaucratic 
 family. He made his pilgrimage to the seats of the antique 
 Mediterranean culture, and the Parthenon brought him, like 
 Renan, to his knees. Yet this devout and learned Hellenist is 
 much of a lay theologian. He has constructed a professedly 
 mystical, but actually rationalistic religion, which dominates all 
 his work. The synthesis of paganism and Christianity, of flesh 
 and spirit, which is his religion of " the Third Testament," is 
 the Procrustean bed of both his brilliant criticism and his vast 
 historical novels. In the latter his method is chiefly that of an 
 historical mosaicist. His trilogy is accessible to the English 
 reader, as well as some of his critical work, notably a part of 
 his remarkable study on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. 
 
 His prose forms the bulk of his writings. As a poet, Merezh- 
 kovsky was one of the initiators of the modernist movement, 
 but he counts mainly as the champion of their poetics. His own 
 lyrical work is largely ineffectual and imitative of men as curi- 
 ously alien to him as Baudelaire, Poe, and Nietzsche. Against 
 a background of melancholy pieces, expressing metaphysical 
 ennui and cold intellection, one finds some poems informed with 
 spiritual beauty and religious intensity.
 
 \Dmitry Merezhkovsky 57 
 
 A PRAYER 
 
 Cast prostrate, in mourning, 
 Wingless, self-scorning, 
 Grief in a gust 
 Flings us, dust upon dust. 
 We desire not, we dare not, 
 We believe not, we care not, 
 No wisdom has worth. 
 God, do thou dower us, 
 Kindle, empower us, 
 Give of thy mirth. 
 From the languor that clings 
 Give us wings ! Give us wings ! 
 Wings of thy Spirit.
 
 58 Dmitry Merezhkovsky 
 
 THE TRUMPET CALL 
 
 Over earth awakes a whirring, 
 
 And a rustling, and a stirring, 
 
 Trumpet-voices fill the skies: 
 " Lo, they call us. Brothers, rise!" 
 " No. The darkness holds unshaken. 
 
 I will sleep, and not awaken. 
 . Do not rouse me. Do not call. 
 
 Do not strike the coffin-wall." 
 
 " Now you dare not sleep. Resounding 
 Sternly, the last trump is sounding. 
 They are rising from the tomb. 
 As from the maternal womb 
 Of the opened earth forth-flinging, 
 From their graves the dead are springing." 
 
 " No, I cannot. All unuttered 
 My words died. My eyes are shuttered. 
 I shall not believe their lies. 
 I shall not, I cannot rise! 
 Brother, I am ashamed and shrinking, 
 Dust, corruption, rotting, stinking!" 
 
 " Brother, God has seen our prison. 
 All shall wake, and all be risen. 
 All shall yet be judged by Him. 
 Cherubim and seraphim
 
 Dmitry Merezhkovsky 59 
 
 High the holy Throne are bearing! 
 Here our heavenly King is faring. 
 Brother, he must live who dies. 
 Glad or grieving, thou shalt rise."
 
 60 Dmitry Merezhkovsky 
 
 THE CURSE OF LOVE 
 
 With heavy anguish, hopeless straining, 
 The bonds of love I would remove. 
 Oh, to be loosed from their enchaining! 
 Oh, freedom, only not to love! 
 
 The soul that shame and fear are scourging 
 Crawls through a mist of dust and blood. 
 From dust, great God, my spirit purging, 
 Oh, spare me from love's bitter flood ! 
 
 Is pity's wall alone unshaken? 
 I pray to God, I cry in vain, 
 More weary, by all hope forsaken; 
 Resistless love grows great again. 
 
 There is no freedom, unforgiven, 
 We live as slaves, by life consumed ; 
 We perish, tortured, bound and driven, 
 Promised to death, and to love doomed.
 
 Fyodor Sologub 
 
 (Pseudonym of Fyodor Teternikov; born 1863) 
 
 In Sologub the sick fantast thumbed his nose at the respectable 
 schoolmaster. One would expect neither in the son of a tailor 
 and a peasant woman, who had grown up in the house where 
 his widowed mother was a servant. For ten years after his 
 graduation from Normal School the young man taught in the 
 provinces, learning to know the Main Streets of Russia, which 
 were to furnish the stuff of his prose. At the age of twenty- 
 nine he transplanted himself to St. Petersburg, where his un- 
 canny verse and short stories gave him the entree to the mod- 
 ernists' circle. In 1907 he retired from pedagogy, and devoted 
 himself entirely to literature. A few years later his com- 
 plete works were published in twenty volumes, five of which 
 were poetry, the remainder fiction and drama. He is a stay- 
 at-home, and has remained one, the revolution notwithstanding. 
 
 If Sologub did not exist, it would be necessary to invent 
 him. The decadent gesture, which was a pose or a purpose in 
 others, is bis natural attitude. He sees the universe as a 
 ghastly menagerie in which the beasts have become wonted to 
 their own stench. From this he escapes to a world of impos- 
 sible imaginings, and fills his isolation with liturgies to his own 
 ego, hymns to the devil, hosannahs to death. His unearthly 
 world is fevered with fleshly lusts. In his lucid moments, how- 
 ever, he achieves the charm of a Blake-like innocence, and his 
 hemlock is mixed with the honey of an enchanting music. His 
 poetry is the core of his work. His prose is fantastic and Poe- 
 esque, yet in one work at least, notably " The Little Demon," 
 he follows the Russian realistic tradition of revealing human 
 nature's repugnant depths. 
 
 61
 
 62 Fyodor Sologub 
 
 THE AMPHORA 
 
 In a gay jar upon his shoulder 
 The slave morosely carries wine. 
 His road is rough with bog and boulder, 
 And in the sky no starlights shine. 
 Into the dark with stabbing glances 
 He peers, his careful steps are slow, 
 Lest on his breast as he advances 
 The staining wine should overflow. 
 
 I bear my amphora of sorrow, 
 
 Long brimming with the wine it hides; 
 
 There poison for each waiting morrow 
 
 Ferments within the painted sides. 
 
 I follow secret ways and hidden 
 
 To guard the evil vessel, lest 
 
 A careless hand should pour unbidden 
 
 Its bitterness upon my breast.
 
 Fyodor Sologub 63 
 
 THE DRAGON 
 
 Evil dragon in the zenith fiercely glowing, 
 Filaments of flame across the heavens throwing, 
 Singeing all the valley with a heat that scorches, 
 From the deep, dark quiver I will pluck an arrow 
 Tipped with subtle poison that shall find thy marrow: 
 All too early flourish thy triumphal torches. 
 I shall draw my bow in valiant retribution, 
 I, executor of ruthless execution, 
 And thy groaning answer my glad ears shall cherish 
 As I speed the sudden doom long overhanging, 
 And the arrow whizzes with a brazen twanging. 
 Thou shall fade, thou evil dragon, thou shalt perish.
 
 64 Fyodor Sologub 
 
 "WHEN, HEAVING ON THE STORMY 
 WATERS " 
 
 When, heaving on the stormy waters, 
 I felt my ship begin to sink, 
 I prayed, " Oh, Father Satan, save me, 
 Forgive me at death's utter brink! 
 
 " If you will save my soul embittered 
 From perishing before its hour, 
 The days to come, the nights that follow 
 I vow to vice, I pledge to power." 
 
 The Devil forthwith snatched and flung me 
 Into a boat ; the sides were frail, 
 But on the bench the oars were lying 
 And in the bow an old gray sail. 
 
 And landward once again I carried 
 My outcast soul, bereft of kin, 
 Upon its sickly vicious sojourn 
 My body and its gift of sin. 
 
 And I am faithful, Father Satan, 
 
 Unto my evil hour's vow, 
 
 When from my drowning ship you saved me 
 
 And when I prayed you guide the prow. 
 
 To you descend my praises, Father, 
 No day from bitter blame exempt. 
 O'er worlds my blasphemy shall tower; 
 And I shall tempt and I shall tempt.
 
 Fyodor Sologub 65 
 
 "AUSTERE THE MUSIC OF MY SONGS" 
 
 Austere the music of my songs: 
 The echo of sad utterance fills them, 
 A bitter breath, far-wafted, chills them; 
 And is my back not bent to thongs? 
 
 The mists of day on darkness fall; 
 The vainly promised land I follow 
 Upon a road the shadows swallow ; 
 The world rears round me like a wall. 
 
 At times from that far land the vain 
 Faint voice will sound like distant thunder. 
 Can long abeyance of a wonder 
 Obliterate the long bleak pain ?
 
 66 Fyodor Sologub 
 
 THE DEVIL'S SWINGS 
 
 Below a pine's rough shadow, 
 Where loud the river sings, 
 The hairy-handed devil 
 Pushes his devilish swings. 
 
 He swings, and gives a crow, 
 To and fro 
 To and fro 
 
 The boards creak, bending low, 
 The taut rope rubbing slow 
 Against the heavy boughs. 
 
 The board sways back, and bracing, 
 With a long creak swings wide, 
 The devil, still grimacing, 
 Guffaws and holds his side. 
 
 I tremble to let go; 
 
 To and fro 
 To and fro 
 
 I sway and cling, but no, 
 
 My languid glances grow 
 
 Fast where the devil tows. 
 
 Above the looming pine 
 The blue fiend's sniggers sting: 
 " You found the swings so fine, 
 Well, devil take you, swing! "
 
 Fyodor Sologub 67 
 
 Below the shaggy pine 
 They squeak and whirl and sling: 
 " You found the swings so fine ? 
 Well, devil take you, swing ! " 
 
 The fiend will not release 
 The board that hangs too steep 
 Till I am thrust toward peace 
 By the dark hand's dread sweep. 
 
 Until the hemp turns round 
 Too long, and is worn free, 
 Until the broad black ground 
 Comes flying up to me. 
 
 Above the pine I'll fling 
 And bore into the mire. 
 Then swing, devil, swing 
 Higher, higher, higher!
 
 Zinaida Hippius 
 
 (Mme. Dmitry Merezhkovsky ; born 1869) 
 
 Poetry is not woman's work in Russia. Zinaida Hippius, the 
 wife of Dmitry Merezhkovsky, is one of the few who carry it 
 on. She has written a great deal of bad fiction, some partisan 
 criticism, rather indifferent dramas, and her poetry is not un- 
 exceptionable. Soon after her literary marriage she joined the 
 Petersburg symbolists, and with her husband was one of the 
 founders of the Religious Philosophical Society. A weakness 
 for religious discussion and a theosophic bias have done much 
 damage to both her prose and her verse. Her later poetry, 
 however, is interesting as the expression of her difficult and 
 distinctive personality. She has the quality of burning ice, 
 hiding under contemptuous ennui her passion for the impos- 
 sible. In any event, she is a virtuoso of verse, whose mastery 
 of tone-color and metric pattern is wholly admirable. 
 
 She is at present engaged, together with her husband, in writ- 
 ing hymns of hate against the Bolsheviki, from the bitter secu- 
 rity of the Diaspora. 
 
 68
 
 Zinaida Hip plus 69 
 
 I SEEK FOR RHYTHMIC WHISPERINGS " 
 
 I seek for rhythmic whisperings 
 Where noises bandy 
 For life I listen wistfully 
 In footless banter. 
 
 I cast wide nets and tentative 
 In lakes of sorrow. 
 I go toward final tenderness 
 By pathways sordid. 
 
 I look for dewdrops glistering 
 In falsehood's gardens. 
 I save truth's globules glistening, 
 From dust-heaps garnered. 
 
 I fain would fathom fortitude 
 Through years of wormwood 
 And pierce the mortal fortalice, 
 Yet live, a worldling. 
 
 My cup, through ways impassable, 
 
 To bear, untainted; 
 
 By tenebrous bleak passages 
 
 To joy attaining.
 
 70 Zinaida Hip plus 
 
 PSYCHE 
 
 A shameless thing, of every vileness capable, 
 
 It is as drab as dust, as earthly dust. 
 
 I perish of a nearness inescapable; 
 
 Its fatal coils about my limbs are thrust. 
 
 A shaggy poulp, embracing me, and pricking me, 
 And as a serpent cold against my heart, 
 Its branching scales are poisoned arrows sticking me ; 
 Worse than their bite : repulsion's horrid smart. 
 
 Oh, were its sting a veritable knife in me! 
 But it is flaccid, clumsy, still and numb. 
 Thus sluggishly sucking the very life in me, 
 A torpid dragon, dreadful, deaf, and dumb. 
 
 With stubborn rings it winds in mute obscurity 
 And clings caressingly, its purpose whole. 
 And this dead thing, this loathsome black impurity, 
 This horror that I shrink from is my soul.
 
 Zinaida Hippius 71 
 
 CREATION 
 
 Thou queen of all serenity, 
 Soul of my soul, most chaste, 
 I summon thee, divinity, 
 I summon thee, make haste ! 
 
 But to the tryst thy offering 
 Shall not be brought alone. 
 My guilt will come, my suffering, 
 My sin will lift its moan. 
 
 Before thy heart insulted so, 
 In shame my head will sink; 
 And I, who once exulted so, 
 My humble tears shall drink. 
 
 Forgive me that diurnity 
 Is all my love could dower ; 
 That not for all eternity, 
 I made thee for an hour. 
 
 Alone my will hath kindled here 
 
 Thy being from the void. 
 
 And thou shalt soon have dwindled here, 
 
 By my sole will destroyed. 
 
 As I, thou shalt grow tremulous, 
 Till all my strength is gone, 
 To fall, of silence emulous, 
 Into oblivion.
 
 Konstantin Balmont 
 
 (Born 1867) 
 
 Balmont revived the tradition of the wandering minstrel. He 
 traveled more widely than the old-fashioned troubadour and 
 also more comfortably. His journeys carried him to Mexico 
 and Egypt, to India and the South Seas, and winds from these 
 exotic lands blow through his songs. His stay abroad was 
 somewhat of an exile, as certain political poems written in 1906 
 barred 'him from Russia. This was a recrudescence of youth- 
 ful political ardor, which, in his student years, sent him to 
 prison for a short time, but which burned itself out early. He 
 returned home in 1913, where he remained through the war and 
 the revolution, till in 1920 he shook the dust of communism from 
 his feet. 
 
 Of late years, his reputation, which was enormous about a 
 decade ago, has been on the wane. Yet his place as a great 
 poet and as the leader of Russian modernism is assured to him 
 in the opinion of his compatriots. He brought to Russian liter- 
 ature a spontaneous lyricism and a didacticism of joy which, 
 while emancipating poetry from its gloom and social bias, failed 
 of intensity, imagery, and intellection. What impressed his 
 public was his vociferous asstheticism and a prolific versatility 
 in subject-matter. He has certainly contributed to the language 
 by his rhythmic inventions. His range includes poems about 
 the colors, children's verse, abstruse mythology, adaptations of 
 Russian folk-songs and spells, hymns to the elements, and, above 
 all, pure lyrics. He is a veritable Narcissus of the ink-pot, to 
 use a bon-mot of Tyutchev's. The " Hymn to Fire " is given 
 here, not for its quality, but solely as a typical example of Bal- 
 mont's manner. He has done a rare service to Russian letters 
 by translating the poetry of many languages, including the 
 Scandinavian. He has practically made an anthology of Eng- 
 lish verse, and also gave to Russia a partial Whitman and a 
 complete Shelley. Like Ezra Pound, he takes pleasure in 
 flaunting an obscure linguistic erudition. His fecundity, one 
 fears, has survived most of his other faculties. 
 
 72
 
 Konstantin Balmont 73 
 
 "WITH MY FANCY I GRASPED" 1 
 
 With my fancy I grasped at the vague shadows straying, 
 At the vague shadows straying where the daylight had 
 
 fled; 
 
 I ascended a tower, and the stairway was swaying, 
 And the stairway was swaying underneath my light tread. 
 
 And the higher I climbed, ever clearer were rounded, 
 Ever clearer were rounded dreaming hilltops aglow ; 
 And from Heaven to Earth twilight voices resounded, 
 Twilight voices resounded from above and below. 
 
 And the higher I rose, strange horizons defining, 
 Strange horizons defining, did the summits appear; 
 And my eyes as I looked were caressed by their shining, 
 Were caressed by their shining, their farewell, sad and 
 clear. 
 
 Now the night had appeared; Earth in darkness lay 
 
 dreaming, 
 
 Earth in darkness lay dreaming, like a slumbering star, 
 While the smoldering sun, his dim embers still gleaming, 
 His dim embers still gleaming, shone for me from afar. 
 
 I had learned to ensnare the vague shadows far straying, 
 The vague shadows far straying, where the daylight had 
 
 fled; 
 
 Ever higher I rose, and the stairway was swaying, 
 And the stairway was swaying underneath my light tread. 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahra Yarmolinsky and Cecil Cowdrey.
 
 74 Konstantin Balmont 
 
 CENTURIES OF CENTURIES WILL PASS 
 
 Long centuries of centuries will pass, unsighted 
 
 Millenniums as locusts in deathy clouds descend, 
 
 And in the muttering of centuries affrighted 
 
 The same enduring firmament will watch the end. 
 
 The dumb, dead firmament that God will not 
 
 remember, 
 
 Who breathes Eternity behind the farther skies, 
 Beyond the fading of the last star's last slow ember, 
 Beyond the utter threshold words may scrutinize. 
 Forever cold, that starry desert, clouds out-topping, 
 Is flung forth, alien to the end, on space, 
 When tearing comet-fires will crumble with it, dropping 
 As dumbly burning tears from a despairing face.
 
 Konstantin Balmont 
 
 IN THE WHITE LAND 
 
 The candid psalm of Silence rises whitely burning, 
 The icy wastes are lit with sunset's radiant yearning. 
 The drowsy elements in yawning vistas freeze, 
 And voiceless are the argent Polar liturgies. 
 
 Above the sea of whiteness, crimson curtains falling; 
 No fields or forests here, clear crystal shines appalling. 
 White altars stretch beneath the changeless icy skies, 
 A prayer, not suppliant, a psalm, not voiced, arise.
 
 76 Konstantin Balmont 
 
 HYMN TO FIRE 
 
 i 
 
 Oh, fire who purgeth us 
 In fate-kindled strife, 
 Thy beauty ruleth us, 
 Shining with life ! 
 
 2 
 
 Still and meek in the glow of a taper in church, 
 
 But in riot tumultuous-tongued, 
 
 Unmoved by wild prayers, multi-faced, 
 
 Shot with color in walls overthrown, 
 
 Mad with passion, and nimble and gay, 
 
 So triumphantly beautiful 
 
 That my eyes are alight with thy joy 
 
 Though thou feed on my own, 
 
 O fair Fire, all my dreams are devoted to thee! 
 
 3 
 
 Eternally changeful, 
 
 Thou art Protean-faced. 
 
 Thou art smokily crimson 
 
 In the bonfires' roar. 
 
 Thou art as a flower of terror with petals of flame, 
 
 A bright mane of radiant hair. 
 
 In the tremulous flame of a taper thou burn'st 
 
 First in blue, then in shuddering gold. 
 
 In the silence of midsummer lightnings thou wak'st, 
 
 Burning coldly in storm-burdened clouds, 
 
 Eerily livid and dark.
 
 Konstantin Balmont 77 
 
 In the thunder that crashes, the chanting of rain, 
 
 Thou art writ in the lightning's brief hieroglyphs, 
 
 In a quick broken flash 
 
 Or a long mighty shaft, 
 
 Now a ball with a nimbus of air all aglow 
 
 Where the swift-running gold 
 
 Is with scarlet besprent. 
 
 Thou art in the crystal of stars, in the comets' strong urge. 
 
 Sun-sent, thou dost enter the chambers of plants 
 
 With the gift of a quickening warmth. 
 
 Thou workest, thou wakest the secret of sap : 
 
 Flaming up in a scarlet carnation, 
 
 Pale gold in the whispering corn, 
 
 Or carelessly flung in a lithe drunken vine. 
 
 Thou art lying in wait : 
 
 As a spark in the night 
 
 So thou leapest elate. 
 
 Thou art still in thy flight. 
 
 Soon thy glow shall abate, 
 
 But alive thou art great, 
 Than thy beauty is nothing more strange or more bright. 
 
 4 
 
 I shall chant thy high praises forever! 
 O sudden, O subtle, O terrible Fire! 
 Thy work is the melting of metals; 
 By thy aid are they fashioned and forged: 
 The ponderous horse-shoes; 
 The resounding and bright-bladed scythes: 
 That mow and that reap, 
 That mow and that reap;
 
 78 Konstantin Balmont 
 
 Many circlets for lily-white fingers, 
 For ring-bounded lives, 
 For ring-fettered years, 
 As with lips growing cold the word ' love ' 
 We repeat. 
 
 Thou Greatest the tools and machines 
 That shake mountains and shatter and smite, 
 The tools that find deep-buried gold, the keenness of 
 weapons that kill. 
 
 5 
 Unto thee, omnipresent and sovereign, my dreaming I 
 
 vow. 
 
 I am even as thou. 
 
 Thou dost light, thou dost burn, thou dost strive, 
 Thou art 'live, thou art 'live ! 
 Of old a winged dragon thou wert, to the altar didst 
 
 glide 
 
 Thence to ravish the bride. 
 
 And a fiery guest, a consoler who warmed to the bone 
 The young wife left alone. 
 O brilliant, O burning, O biting, O fierce, 
 In thy flame all the colors arise. 
 
 Thou art crimson and yellow, thy gleaming doth pierce 
 With the glow of chameleon gold and the scarlet that 
 
 lights autumn skies. 
 
 Thou art as a diamond with facets that shine, 
 As the feline caress of soft eyes that are heady as wine, 
 As the wave in its ecstasy breaking, an emerald line. 
 Like the leaf's iridescence agleam with reiterant Springs 
 In the dewdrop that trembles and swings.
 
 Konstantin Balmont 79 
 
 Like the green dream of fireflies kindled at night, 
 
 Like the will-o'-the-wisp in the haze, 
 
 Like the dark, scalloped clouds the grave evening has 
 
 gilded with light, 
 That have spread forth their mourning upon the dim face 
 
 of the smoldering days. 
 
 6 
 
 I remember, O Fire, 
 
 How thy flames once enkindled my flesh, 
 
 Among writhing witches caught close in thy flame-woven 
 
 mesh. 
 
 How, tortured for having beheld what is secret, 
 We were flung to the fire for the joy of our sabbath. 
 But to those who had seen what we saw 
 Yea, Fire was naught. 
 Ah, well I remember 
 The buildings ablaze where we burned 
 In the fires we lit, and smiled to behold the flames wind 
 About us, the faithful, among all the faithless and blind. 
 To the chanting of prayers, the frenzy of flame, 
 We sang thy hosannahs, oh strength-giving Fire: 
 I pledged love to thee from the pyre ! 
 
 7 
 
 Oh, Fire, I know 
 That thy light with an ultimate splendor our being shall 
 
 drench ; 
 It shall flare up before eyes that Death fain would finally 
 
 quench. 
 
 With swift knowledge it burns, and with joy heaven-high 
 At the vastness of vistas unfolding afar.
 
 80 Konstantin Balmont 
 
 Who has summoned those visions to being? And why? 
 Who has rayed them in colors befitting a star? 
 Beyond life is the answer. 
 
 Oh thou heavenward heart of the element ever in flight, 
 On my twilight horizon, let Death, necromancer, 
 Shed perpetu ! light!
 
 Valery Brusov 
 
 (Born 1873) 
 
 Brusov's biography coincides with his bibliography. He has 
 filled his life with the labors of a curious-minded poet and 
 a sensitive erudite. In 1913, at the age of forty, he began 
 publishing the complete edition of his works in twenty-five 
 volumes. In addition to poetry, original and translated, it in- 
 cludes two novels, tales, dramas, and critical work. His tales 
 and dramas have a timeless, abstract quality, a curious com- 
 bination of the Wellsian and the Poe-esque. His two large 
 novels are marvelous studies in the archaeology of the soul, 
 restoring as they do the psyche of the Roman decadence and 
 of Germany's dying Middle Ages. 
 
 Before he came of age he fell under the spell of the French 
 symbolists and his argosy began by sailing under their colors. 
 His European years sharpened these sympathies. He tried to 
 transplant the French vers librf into Russian soil, and among 
 other things, an anthology of French lyrics of the nineteenth 
 century bears witness to his Gallic apprenticeship. Indeed, he 
 achieved a leading place among the Russian symbolists, becom- 
 ing an editor of their Moscow organ (Vesy: The Balance). 
 Yet although he adopted all the manners and mannerisms of 
 the neo-romantic reaction, such as aversion to reality, violent 
 eroticism and extreme individualism, by temperament Brusov is 
 more of a Parnassian. His later work shows a gravitation to- 
 ward a soberer and more objective conception of art. His 
 craftsmanship is careful and conscious, whether he wanders 
 down the ages, dedicating a line to every god. or traces the 
 pattern of his own moods, or, like his master Verhaeren, finds 
 a rhythm for the voices of the city. According to Gautier's 
 precept, he works "dans le bloc resistant.'' He has an eye for 
 imagery and an ear trained to complex orchestration. 
 
 The revolution has not exiled Brusov, and he is laboring to 
 preserve the continuity of Russia's culture. In a literary capac- 
 ity he holds an important Government post 
 
 8l
 
 82 Valery Brusov 
 
 THE TRYST 1 
 
 In the land of Ra the flaming, by the shores of Nile's slow 
 waters, where the roofs of Thebes were seen, 
 
 In the days of yore you loved me, as dark Isis loved 
 Osiris, sister, friend and worshiped queen! 
 
 And the pyramid its shadow on our evening trysts would 
 lean. 
 
 Oh, the mystery remember of our meeting in the temple, 
 in the aisle of granite, dim and straight, 
 
 And the hour when, lights extinguished, and the sacred 
 dances broken, each to each was sudden mate ; 
 
 Our caresses, burning whispers, ardors that we could not 
 sate. 
 
 In the splendor of the ball-room, clinging to me, white 
 and tender, through Time's curtain rift in twain, 
 
 Did your ear not catch the anthems, mingling with the 
 crash of cymbals, and the people's answering refrain ? 
 
 Did you not repeat in rapture that our love awoke again ? 
 
 Once before, we knew existence, this our bliss is a remem- 
 brance, and our love a memory; 
 
 Casting off its ancient ashes, flames again our hungry 
 passion, flames and kindles you and me, 
 
 As of old, by Nile's slow waters, in the land beyond the 
 sea. 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
 
 Valery Brusov 83 
 
 " RADIANT RANKS OF SERAPHIM " 
 
 Radiant ranks of seraphim 
 Stir the air about our bed. 
 With their windy wings and dim 
 Our hot cheeks are comforted. 
 
 Low the circling seraphs bend, 
 And we tremble and rejoice 
 At hosannas that ascend, 
 Winged with their unearthly voice. 
 
 Cloudy luminous faces hover, 
 And the wing-swept candles wane. 
 And our fiery breasts they cover 
 As with hidden holy rain.
 
 Valery Brusov 
 
 BENEDICTION 
 
 Que tes mains soient benies, car elles sont impures. 
 
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 
 
 The shining of your golden eyes I bless ! 
 That broke my dark delirium with light. 
 
 The smile that wavers on your lips I bless! 
 It kindled me like wine, it rent my night. 
 
 The poison in your kisses hid, I bless ! 
 
 All thoughts, all dreams are poisoned by your kiss. 
 
 The scythe that sings in your embrace I bless! 
 All my past years you have mown down with this. 
 
 The fire of your awful love I bless! 
 I wrapped its flame about me joyfully. 
 
 The darkness of your spirit, lo, I bless ! 
 
 For that its wings were outstretched over me. 
 
 Blessed all you gave, blessed what your soul denies : 
 I bless you for the grief, the dread, the pain ; 
 
 That after you I strove toward Paradise; 
 That here without its gates, I stand in vain.
 
 Valery Brusov 
 
 INEVITABILITY 
 
 If you kept faith, or not, does it avail? 
 If I was faithful or unfaithful to you? 
 Our eyes that would look elsewhere flinch and fail, 
 Yet not my will has power to undo you. 
 Once more I tremble, so once more you pale, 
 As the forebodings of old pain break through you. 
 The moments pour with noise of torrents streaming : 
 Above us passion's lifted blade is gleaming. 
 
 Whoever made us, lips and lit eyes drinking 
 Of lips and eyes, be it or God or Fate, 
 Is it not one ? Within the circle shrinking 
 We stand to hear the spell reverberate! 
 We bend with happiness and fear, and sinking, 
 We fall : two anchors on the sea-floor grate. 
 Fancy, nor chance, nor passion overpowers 
 Us, whom the ineluctable devours.
 
 86 Valery Brusov 
 
 THE FIERCE BIRDS 
 
 Kindling the air, fierce birds with feathers of fire, 
 Through the white portals of Paradise flamed like desire. 
 Virgin vistas reared, lit with quivering red, 
 And beyond seas were the trackless wanderers fled. 
 
 But on the pillars of marble, on the threshold were thrown 
 Crimson shadows incredible, sunk in the stone. 
 And, under the arch, in eternity's radiance hidden, 
 Angels exulted in fruits that are secret and sweet and 
 forbidden.
 
 Valery Brusov 87 
 
 EVENTIDE 
 
 The posters shout, their gorgeous motley blares, 
 
 The signboards' groaning fills the street, 
 
 And from the shops a shrill light sharply flares, 
 
 As cries of triumph mock defeat. 
 
 Behind the glimmering panes soft fabrics sleep, 
 
 And diamonds pour their poison daze, 
 
 Above massed coins the lottery numbers leap 
 
 Like northern lights ablaze. 
 
 The burning streets like long canals of light 
 
 Flow on the city is alive. 
 
 It swarms to celebrate the dawn of night 
 
 Like some unloosed and monstrous hive. 
 
 The sky and all its sentient stars are hid 
 
 By scattered arc-lamps beaming blue. 
 
 And harlots jostle sages where they thrid 
 
 The dancers in a rippling queue. 
 
 Between the gay quadrilles that form and break, 
 
 Among the waltzers, clanking slide 
 
 The tramways, with blue lightnings in their wake; 
 
 Like sheaves of fire, the motors glide. 
 
 Shame, like a leader his bright baton wielding 
 
 To the rank music of the wheels, 
 
 Has fused the thousand-throated throng, that yielding 
 
 As one, a holy chorus peals: 
 
 " Dust, we enthrone thee; brief and radiant Dust, 
 
 Dancing the round, we glorify, 
 
 About electric altars where they thrust 
 
 Their spears into the empty sky."
 
 88 Valery Brusov 
 
 Oh, cover thy pale feet !
 
 Valery Brusov 
 
 SAINT SEBASTIAN * 
 
 On slow and smoky fire thou burn'st and art consumed, 
 
 Oh, thou, my soul. 
 On slow and smoky fire thou burn'st and art consumed, 
 
 With hidden dole. 
 
 Thou droopest like Sebastian, pierced with pointed arrows, 
 
 Harassed and spent, 
 Thou droopest like Sebastian, pierced with pointed arrows, 
 
 Thy flesh all rent. 
 
 Thy foes encircle thee and watch with gleeful laughter 
 
 And bended bow, 
 Thy foes encircle thee and watch with gleeful laughter 
 
 Thy torments slow. 
 
 The embers burn, and gentle is the arrow's stinging, 
 
 'Neath the evening sky, 
 The embers burn, and gentle is the arrow's stinging, 
 
 When the end draws nigh. 
 
 Why hastens not thy dream unto thy lips, now pallid 
 
 With deadly drouth? 
 Why hastens not thy dream unto thy lips, now pallid 
 
 To kiss thy mouth? 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
 
 90 Valery Brusov 
 
 THE COMING HUNS 
 
 "Trample their Paradise, Attila! " 
 
 VYACHESLAV IVANOV. 
 
 Where do you stray, heavy Huns, 
 Who weigh on the world like a cloud? 
 Far, under Asian suns, 
 Your cast-iron tread is loud. 
 
 Swoop down in a drunken horde 
 From your dark encampments, rise 
 In a tide of crimson poured 
 Over this land that dies. 
 
 O slaves of freedom, pitch 
 Your tent by the palace gate. 
 Plow deep, dig wide the ditch 
 Where the throne shone on your hate. 
 
 Heap books to build a fire! 
 Dance in their ruddy light. 
 Foul altar steps with mire: 
 You are children in our sight. 
 
 And we, the poets, the wise, 
 
 From the onslaught that darkens and raves, 
 
 Defending the torch you despise, 
 
 Shall hold it in deserts and caves.
 
 Valery Brusov 91 
 
 Under the scattering storm, 
 The tempests that raven and tear, 
 What will the hazards of harm 
 From our long labor spare ? 
 
 All that we only knew 
 Shall perish and sink and grow dim. 
 But you who shall slay me, you 
 I salute with hosanna and hymn.
 
 Ivan Bunin 
 
 (Born 1870) 
 
 When Bunin came to Petersburg at the age of twenty-five 
 he brought with him memories of shabby manorial grandeur, 
 of hack work in the provinces, and of a Tolstoyan influence 
 that at one time persuaded him to become a cooper. The young 
 man, meeting the modernists for the first time, dubbed them 
 " sick boys with complete chaos in their heads." Bunin is him- 
 self a traditionalist in an age of iconoclasm, a realist in a neo- 
 romantic generation, a sober lyricist solitary among his ecstatic 
 fellows. His minor music has the simplicity and sincerity of a 
 sorrowful Mozart. He celebrates the melancholy charm of 
 vanishing things, never foreswearing his classic clarity. Yet 
 there is a growing exotic strain in this poet of the Northern 
 Russian landscape. He is a less vivid Leconte de Lisle, revivi- 
 fying forgotten deities and filling his verse with Oriental color, 
 fragrance and warmth. His nostalgia for the distant seems to 
 grow by the travel upon which it feeds. Perhaps this intimacy 
 with what is foreign gives his translations from Longfellow, 
 Byron and Tennyson their remarkably rich quality. 
 
 When in 1909 Bunin was elected to the Academy of Sciences, 
 this rare distinction was conferred upon him for his prose as 
 much as for his poetry. Indeed the former is the part of his 
 work which bulks largest. His prose eeuvre consists of his 
 black and bitter sketches of the Russian peasantry, naked studies 
 in psychology, and tales in the manner of a diminutive Joseph 
 Conrad. " The Gentleman from San Francisco," one of his 
 most recent and impressive stories, is the only one available 
 in English. 
 
 Bunin was one of the first to flee Soviet rule, eventually 
 settling in Paris.
 
 Ivan Bunin 93 
 
 RUSSIAN SPRING 
 
 In the valley the birches are bored. 
 On the meadows, fog billows and weighs. 
 Sodden, with horse-dung floored, 
 The highroad blackens in haze. 
 
 Rich on the steppe's sleepy air, 
 The odor of freshly-baked bread. 
 Bent to their packs, slowly fare 
 Two beggars to look for a bed. 
 
 Round puddles gleam in the streets. 
 The fumes of the ovens stun. 
 Thawing, the bleak earthen seats 
 Smolder and steam in the sun. 
 
 By the corn-bin, dragging his chain, 
 The sheep-dog yawns on the sill. 
 Walls smoke with the charcoal stain. 
 The steppe is foggy and still. 
 
 The carefree cock will perform 
 Day-long for the sap-stirred earth. 
 In the fields it is drowsy and warm, 
 In the heart indolent mirth.
 
 94 Ivan Bunin 
 
 A SONG 
 
 I'm a plain girl, whose hands are stained with earth. 
 He is a fisherman he's gay and keen. 
 The far white sail is drowning in the firth. 
 Many the seas and rivers he has seen. 
 
 The women of the Bosphorus, they say, 
 Are good-looking . . . and I I'm lean and black. 
 The white sail drowns far out beyond the bay. 
 It may be that he never will come back. 
 
 I shall wait on in good and evil weather. 
 If vainly, take my wage, go to the sea 
 And cast the ring and hope away together. 
 And my black braid will serve to strangle me.
 
 Ivan Bunin 95 
 
 THE GOD OF NOON 
 
 Black goats I herded with my sister; they 
 
 Grazed by red rocks; the grass rose stiff and stinging. 
 
 Warming their backs, stones to the foot-hills clinging 
 
 Slept dumbly on. And sheer blue shone the bay. 
 
 By the gnarled silver of an olive flinging 
 
 My drowsy limbs, in its dry shade I lay, 
 
 He came like a hot cobweb net, asway, 
 
 Or like a cloud of flies about me singing. 
 
 He bared my knees. Kindled my quiet feet. 
 
 The silver on my shirt his white fire burned. 
 
 His hot embrace is heavy, ah, and sweet. 
 
 He laid me on my back. The whole sky turned. 
 
 He tanned my naked bosom to the teat. 
 
 From him the cammomile's kind use I learned.
 
 96 Ivan Bunin 
 
 IN AN EMPTY HOUSE 
 
 From the walls the paper's blue is vanished, 
 The daguerreotypes, the ikons banished. 
 Only there the deepened blue appears 
 Where these hid it, hanging through the years. 
 
 From the heart the memory is perished, 
 Perished all that long ago it cherished! 
 Those remain, of whom death hides the face, 
 Leaving their yet unforgotten trace.
 
 Ivan Bunin 97 
 
 FLAX 
 
 She sits on tumulus Savoor, and stares, 
 Old woman Death, upon the crowded road. 
 Like a blue flame the small flax-flower flares 
 Thick through the meadows sowed. 
 
 And says old woman Death: " Hey, traveler! 
 Does any one want linen, linen fit 
 For funeral wear? A shroud, madam or sir, 
 I'll take cheap coin for it! " 
 
 And says serene Savoor: " Don't crow so loud! 
 Even the winding-sheet is dust, and cracks 
 And crumbles into earth, that from the shroud 
 May spring the sky-blue flax."
 
 Vyacheslav Ivanov 
 
 (Born 1866) 
 
 Ivanov's life was not one to " hurry to a sphere, and show, 
 and end." Rather, its fruit slower grew, and later hung. He 
 began to write at the age of thirty-seven, after having spent 
 half as many years abroad as a student, and joined the ranks 
 of the symbolists. He learned antiquity from " Mommsen, 
 Athens and Rome," and modernity from Nietzsche and Dostoyev- 
 sky. A curious feature of Ivanov's thinking is a synthesis of 
 Dionysos and Christ, which is characteristic of the Greek re- 
 vival in Russia, and which is attested to in his profound treatise 
 on "The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God." His exqui- 
 site art feeds on the Dionysian grape, but this has a sacramental 
 flavor, and strangely through the features of his Dionyscs shows 
 the effigy of a tragic Christ. To him religion is the very stuff 
 of culture, and art a myth-making, and eren a theurgic power. 
 Unlike his older fellow-symbolists, he builds not upon individ- 
 ualism, but upon the principle of sobornost, or communal reli- 
 gious expression suggestive of Vachel Lindsay's creed. He has 
 the mentality and the manner of a mystagogue and a pontiff. 
 
 Ivanov's poetry is caviar to the general. His Pegasus is 
 caparisoned with abstruse erudition and weighed down with 
 intricate thought. Yet a limpid, golden beauty triumphs over 
 the shadows in many lyrics. These are cast in the pure Grecian 
 mold, these burn with " ft. " 's spiritual flame, and these are the 
 ordered ecstasies of a Francis Thompson. His latest poems 
 are a cycle of Winter Sonnets written in blockaded Petrograd 
 in 1920 filled with the sadness of resignation to loss and 
 change.
 
 Vyacheslav Ivanov 99 
 
 THE CATCH 
 
 Now the golden leafage is beggared. 
 Shining through the porches of autumn, 
 Shows the cool blue stillness of heaven. 
 Lo, the thin-trunked grove is transcended: 
 Carved in stone, a columned cathedral. 
 Smoke-scrolls wind about the frail friezes; 
 Flung above the doors is a curtain 
 Open-work : like nets of God's fishers 
 That the catch has slipped through and broken, 
 Like thy tatters, sacred and lovely, 
 At the entrance of a white temple, 
 Oh thou golden mendicant music!
 
 ioo Vyacheslav Ivanov 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 The air is sad and still. A bright transparency ! 
 Enskied a woman veiled in light invisibly 
 Upholds a balance high above the clear sun's pouring, 
 The instant's equipoise, serene and frail, adoring. 
 
 But each sere leaf that from the trees falls, separate, 
 And lays upon the golden scales its trembling weight 
 May force the balance Summer's plenty freighted 
 Down to the wintry regions soon to darkness fated.
 
 Vyacheslav Ivanov 101 
 
 FOUNTAIN 
 
 Clear the fountain waters glowing, 
 Living streams, the well-springs flowing, 
 Cold, in darkling woods, a spring. 
 In the shed, cool stillness streaming, 
 O'er the well, a candle gleaming 
 On Christ's crown its gilding flings. 
 
 In the Eden field a bower, 
 
 And a fountain, and a flower. 
 
 Christ, star-voiced, the spirit stills: 
 
 " Come, before the well-spring stooping, 
 
 Of my quiet waters scooping, 
 
 For the stintless bucket fills."
 
 IO2 Vyacheslav Ivanov 
 
 THE SEEKING OF SELF 
 
 Dying, the seed will discover the self it finds in the losing. 
 That is, oh, Nature, thy law! That is thy lesson, oh, 
 
 Man! 
 Hearing dark music, the poet knoweth no rest; he 
 
 abideth 
 Purer and purer the sound, clearer the fore-uttered word.
 
 Vyacheslav Ivanov 103 
 
 COMPLAINT 
 
 Your soul, born deaf and blind, inhabits 
 Jungles of sunless reverie, 
 Where with the crash of trampled saplings 
 Wild droves of dark desires roam free. 
 
 A torch I kindled in the darkness 
 To lead you to my starry gate, 
 With seeds of light in shining handfuls 
 The furrows of your night to sate. 
 
 I stand amid the trackless stretches 
 And hail you in the wilderness ; 
 But lost in dark and dreary caverns 
 My cry sinks silent, answerless.
 
 104 Vyacheslav Ivanov 
 
 NARCISSUS: A POMPEIIAN BRONZE 
 
 Beautiful boy, like a faun here in loneliness roaming, 
 who art thou? 
 
 Surely no child of the woods : thine is too pridef ul a face. 
 
 Music that moves in thy gait, the wrought grace of thy 
 sumptuous sandal 
 
 Tell thou art son to the gods, or the high offspring of kings. 
 
 Poised, with thy listening limbs, thou hast followed the 
 lips of the forest, 
 
 Harkening, bending thy head, fingering softly the sound. 
 
 Was it the piping of Pan or the amorous sighing of Echo ? 
 
 Whisper of dryads, or words fluent-limbed naiads repeat ? 
 
 Pressing thy thigh with thy arm, now the light shoulder- 
 fleece like a garland 
 
 Thou hast entwined on thy wrist, thou, like Liasus at rest. 
 
 Wonderful, art thou in truth the gay Bacchus, Nysaean 
 nymphs cherished, 
 
 Hunter, whom goddesses loved, naked and idle and 
 
 young 
 
 Or art thou haughty Narcissus, whom secret sweet har- 
 monies guided, 
 
 Wandering, languid with sleep, drunken, alone with his 
 dream ? 
 
 Go, seek the summoning nymph, oh thou blind, not yet 
 knowing thy image, 
 
 Go thou, but dare not to bend over the slumbering wave. 
 
 Oh, if thou art not Narcissus, yet seeing thy face in the 
 waters, 
 
 Stranger, I tremble, anew, thou a Narcissus shalt be.
 
 Vyacheslav Ivanov 105 
 
 FUNERAL 
 
 Of funerals, the saddest 
 
 Is love's that dies unanswered. 
 
 The soul has two to bury : 
 
 The soul of the beloved 
 
 And its own other selfhood. 
 
 And a third enters, living, 
 
 The funeral flame that wraps them; 
 
 His wings a yoke has weighted: 
 
 Him the wise lips of lovers 
 
 Call in their kisses, Eros, 
 
 And gods : the Resurrector.
 
 106 Vyacheslav Ivanov 
 
 THE HOLY ROSE 
 
 The rfoly Rose her leaves will soon unfold. 
 The tender bud of dawn already lies 
 Reddening on the wide, transparent skies. 
 Love's star is a white sail the still seas hold. 
 Here, in the light-soaked space above the wold, 
 Through the descending dew the arches rise 
 Of the unseen cathedral, filled with cries 
 From the winged weavers threading it with gold. 
 
 Here on the hill, the cypress, in accord 
 With me, stands praying : a cowled eremite. 
 And on the roses' cheeks the tears fall light. 
 Upon my cell the patterned rays are poured. 
 And in the East, the purple vines bleed bright, 
 And seething, overflow. . . . Hosannah, Lord!
 
 Vyacheslav Ivanov 107 
 
 NOMADS OF BEAUTY 
 
 " You are artists, Nomads of Beauty." 
 
 " Flamings." 
 
 For you ancestral acres, 
 And, choked, the graveyard waits. 
 For us, the free forsakers, 
 The camp that Beauty fates. 
 
 For us the daily treason, 
 The tents we daily flee, 
 Mocked by each dawning season 
 Of our captivity. 
 
 Believe the dimmer distance, 
 All curtains: magic veils, 
 All Springtides' green persistence, 
 Whole heaven's vasty gales ! 
 
 Oh, vagrant artists, shepherd 
 Your droves of dreams unbound ; 
 And sow, although you jeopard 
 The soon-abandoned ground. 
 
 And from your open spaces 
 Rush down, a whirling horde, 
 Where slaves tamed to the traces 
 Adore their overlord.
 
 io8 Vyacheslav Ivanov 
 
 Trample their Edens, plow them, 
 Oh, Attila, with scars. 
 And grow to Beauty vow them- 
 Your steppe flowers like stars.
 
 Yurgis Baltrushaitis 
 
 (Born 1873) 
 
 Born into a peasant family of Lithuanian Catholics, this 
 member of the symbolists' younger generation began by herding 
 cows in his native village. He tutored his way through high 
 school, and reached the University of Moscow, where he soon 
 veered from science to letters. He became both a linguist and 
 a traveler, going west as far as Chicago. 
 
 Although Baltrushaitis may be claimed by the Lithuanian as 
 well as the Russian literature, this reticent poet does not often 
 avail himself of either tongue. He carries on the philosophical 
 tradition of Russian poetry. His disciplined and concentrated 
 art moves on a plane of abstractions. His is a mystical auster- 
 ity and a Buddhistic aloofness from things personal. 
 
 109
 
 HO Yurgis Baltrushaitis 
 
 THE PENDULUM 
 
 When tne dumb darkness most heavily clings, 
 Rhythmic and ruthless my pendulum swings. 
 Rustily creaking or whining dismay, 
 Urging each tarrying moment away. 
 
 Longing, it seems, for the days that are fled, 
 Down ancient stairways resounds someone's tread. 
 Heavy the footfall on flagstones unlit, 
 Lower and lower and down to the pit. 
 
 Praying, it seems, for a long-vanished shore, 
 Dumbly the Helmsman with slow stubborn oar 
 Brokenly rows me, morosely alone, 
 Into my harbor, afar and unknown. 
 
 Evil the Ferryman, darkly he pounds; 
 Farther and farther, more muffled resounds, 
 Hostile and hopeless, the long downward climb: 
 Cold, ineluctable footsteps of Time.
 
 Yurgis Baltrushaitis III 
 
 THE SURF 
 
 The day's wild ocean sings and thunders, 
 And beats against the fatal shore, 
 This breaker with dumb sorrow sunders, 
 And these like laughing victors roar, 
 Their sheen the joy of vernal wonders, 
 Their sheen vast winter's shining hoar. 
 
 In wrath triumphant forward-swinging, 
 The lifted billow calls, and fails, 
 A joyous giant, shouting, singing, 
 Its voice the voice of sounding gales, 
 Its glory in the sunlight flinging 
 Whose noonday glow it holds and hails. 
 
 Across the sea, now lightly foaming, 
 
 Another rears, that stirs the deep, 
 
 And floods the shore with silence, gloaming; 
 
 Morose and slow it seems to creep 
 
 Like one who drops, worn out with roaming, 
 
 From his bent back a fatal heap. 
 
 Each moment new, with changing power, 
 The surf is thundering, alone. 
 Now idle, now it seems to lower, 
 Hymning a Silence all unknown, 
 Like a dark heart asleep, for hour 
 On hour in restless monotone.
 
 Maximilian Voloshin 
 
 (Born 1877) 
 
 Of the three confessed elements of Voloshin's life: places, 
 books, and men, places came first. Born in Kief, his early 
 impressions were associated with the Crimea, the Hellenic 
 promontory of the Scythian plain. At twenty-three he glimpsed 
 the desert of central Asia. But in his own words he found 
 "the fatherland of his spirit" on the Mediterranean littoral. 
 And Paris was the peak on which the climbing poet came to 
 rest, finding there the lifting consciousness of rhythm and form. 
 Books came second: Russian, of course, and later foreign 
 books: the sophistry of France and the wisdom of immemorial 
 India. Men, Voloshin admits, came last. And so his acid 
 bites into the plate most frequently to etch still life, or a 
 landscape where the presence of God or man is a thing 
 remembered. 
 
 By his own acknowledgment, he learnt the art of verse from 
 Ivanov, Balmont and Heredia. Whatever he may have de- 
 rived from the Russian poets, it is clear that he shares Heredia's 
 precision and plastic perfection, his sonority and color. Volo- 
 shin's is a richly visual poetry. Indeed, he has earned his 
 bread as a 'painter. Like Heredia, he is a sonneteer of con- 
 summate skill. The sonnet from " Lunaria ", given here, con- 
 cludes a cycle of fifteen, which are so written that the last line 
 of each forms the first line of the next, the final sonnet being 
 composed of the first lines of the preceding fourteen. And 
 finally, it may be said of him, as it was of Heredia, that this 
 Parnassian is a modernist. Yet he has ever stood aloof from 
 coteries, an aristocratic and solitary figure. 
 
 Although seemingly depayse and above the battle, Voloshin 
 has quite recently written several poems of exasperated and 
 retrograde patriotism, which, irrespective of their politics, are 
 magnificent poetry. 
 
 112
 
 Maximilian Voloshin 113 
 
 CIMMERIAN TWILIGHT I 
 
 The evening light has soaked with ancient gold 
 
 And gall the yellow hills. Like tawny fur 
 
 Grass rises shaggy in a ruddy blur; 
 
 Past fiery bushes metal waves unfold ; 
 
 And enigmatic cliffs and boulders hold 
 
 Worn troughs that are the sea's chronologer. 
 
 In the winged twilight figures seem to stir: 
 
 A heavy paw, a jowl grins stark and bold, 
 
 Like swelling ribs the dubious hillocks show ; 
 
 On what bent back, like wool, does savory grow? 
 
 What brute, what titan, to this region cleaves? 
 
 The dark is strange . . . and yonder, space is clean. 
 
 And there the tired ocean, panting, heaves, 
 
 And rotting grasses breathe of iodine.
 
 114 Maximilian Voloshin 
 
 CIMMERIAN TWILIGHT II 
 
 Here stood a sacred forest. Here the messenger 
 
 Wing-footed went, his touch upon the dumb glades leav- 
 ing ... 
 
 Upon the site of cities, nor stones, nor ruins heaving : 
 
 Now on burnt slopes but sheep in scattered patches stir. 
 
 The mountain peaks: cut crowns! Across each bitten 
 spur 
 
 The clear green twilight flows, mysteriously grieving. 
 
 By whose dim longing stung, what is my soul retrieving? 
 
 Who knows the road of gods ? The dawns and dusks that 
 blur? 
 
 In its sonorous caves the rubble, churned, is sounding; 
 
 Lifting its weighty crests, the troubled sea is pounding 
 
 Upon the sandy dunes, upon the ringing shore. 
 
 The heavy nights pass on in tears through starry 
 spaces . . . 
 
 The outcast gods command, whom men invoke no more, 
 
 And ineluctably they show dark, alien faces.
 
 Maximilian Voloshin 
 
 CIMMERIAN TWILIGHT III 
 
 Above dark, rippled waters rises in retreat 
 
 Earth's heavy mass: the spines and rocky crests defying 
 
 The tortured steep in torrents of red rubble lying 
 
 A lifeless land, its mourning reaches at my feet. 
 
 Sad dreams and solemn dreams flow by me, bitter-sweet: 
 
 Earth ancient and obscure, whose echoing bays are sigh- 
 
 ing, 
 
 Where in late twilight with a sadder beauty dying 
 The waves in waste hexameters billow and beat. 
 And where no roadways run upon the dark's still rivers, 
 Breathing an ancient mystery, the dim sail swells and 
 
 quivers 
 
 With winds of tossed desire and seas that lift and fall. 
 An alien tremor takes my ship upon its going 
 Where destined roads of daring and retribution call. 
 And lamp-like in the sky the Seven Stars are glowing.
 
 Ii6 Maximilian Voloshin 
 
 SONNET XV 
 
 (From the Sonnet-cycle "Lunaria") 
 
 Pure pearl of silence brooding on the sky, 
 Presider o'er conception, lamp of dreams, 
 Altar of nightly spells, of crystal gleams, 
 Queen of the waters where thou lov'st to lie, 
 With what desire, where the long waves sigh, 
 Through my dark crucifixions, toward thy beams, 
 Toward Dian, toward fierce Hecate, there streams 
 The vision yet unlived that shall not die. 
 
 How strange thy diamond delirium shines 
 
 In thy fair hollows, in thy joyless lines, 
 
 And in the flashing mica of thy seas. 
 
 In listless ether thou art horror's face, 
 
 Thou, longing's cry, whom icy gaolers freeze, 
 
 Thou, dead world's avid corpse, cast out on space.
 
 Maximilian Voloshin 117 
 
 STIGMATA 
 
 Whose the flying hands, about me shedding 
 
 Fire, and leading me on passionate ways? 
 
 No sonorous stones my feet are treading, 
 
 But where vatic waters fill the days. 
 
 Piercing through the spirit, sharp pilasters 
 
 Rise, and candle sting the dark like bees. 
 
 Oh, the hearts that bloom like crimson asters, 
 
 Petalled with gold-bladed ecstasies. 
 
 Now the evening on the temple flinging 
 
 Patterned, carven crimson, shines and mourns. 
 
 Oh, the pale brow to the altar clinging, 
 
 Stung anew with stinging scarlet thorns ! 
 
 The whole soul, high vaults and portals glowing, 
 
 Fear like incense swathes with dim blue bands: 
 
 Ah, I know you, sacred corals, growing 
 
 On the pierced palms of these outstretched hands.
 
 Mikhail Kuzmin 
 
 (Born 1877) 
 
 This sensitive and precious decadent, who flaunts his descent 
 from French emigres and Russian noblemen, delights in literary 
 masquerading. He is in turn an eighteenth century dandy, a 
 Byzantine romancer, a contemporary of Boccaccio, or a fin de 
 siecle Alexandrian. His Alexandrian Songs imprison all the 
 exquisite fatigues and refined perversions of a culture cynical 
 about its own passing. The texture of his poetry shows the care 
 and competence lavished by a belle upon her complexion. His 
 lyrics have the perfumed fragility and piquant charm of Somov's 
 paintings. 
 
 118
 
 Mikhail Kuzmin 119 
 
 " NOW DRY THY EYES " 
 
 Now dry thy eyes, and shed no tears. 
 In heaven's straw-pale meadows veers 
 Aquarius, and earthward peers, 
 His emptied vessel overturning. 
 No storming snows, no clouds that creep 
 Across the sheer pure emerald steep, 
 Whence, thinly-drawn, a ray darts deep 
 As a keen lance with edges burning.
 
 I2O Mikhail Kuzmin 
 
 " NIGHT WAS DONE " 
 
 Night was done. We rose and after 
 Washing, dressing, kissed with laughter,- 
 After all the sweet night knows. 
 Lilac breakfast cups were clinking 
 While we sat like brothers drinking 
 Tea, and kept our dominoes. 
 
 And our dominoes smiled greeting, 
 
 And our eyes avoided meeting 
 
 With our dumb lips' secrecy. 
 
 " Faust " we sang, we played, denying 
 
 Night's strange memories, strangely dying, 
 
 As though night's twain were not we.
 
 Mikhail Kuzmin 1 21 
 
 FROM "ALEXANDRIAN SONGS" 
 
 Dying is sweet 
 
 On the battle-field 
 
 In the hissing of arrows and spears, 
 
 When the trumpet sounds 
 
 And the sun of noon 
 
 Is shining, 
 
 Dying for country's glory 
 
 And hearing around you: 
 
 "Hero, farewell!" 
 
 Dying is sweet 
 
 For an old, venerable man 
 
 In the house 
 
 On the bed 
 
 Where your forebears were born, where they died, 
 
 Surrounded by children 
 
 Grown men, 
 
 And hearing around you: 
 
 "Father, farewell!" 
 
 But sweeter, 
 
 Wiser, 
 
 Having spent the last penny, 
 
 Having sold the last mill 
 
 For a woman 
 
 Who the next day is forgotten, 
 
 Having come 
 
 From a gay promenade 
 
 To the sold, dismantled mansion 
 
 To sup,
 
 122 Mikhail Kuzmin 
 
 And to read the tale of Apuleius: 
 
 The hundred and first reading, 
 
 In the warm, fragrant bath, 
 
 Hearing no farewell, 
 
 To open your veins; 
 
 And through the long skylight 
 
 Must come the scent of stock-gilliflower ; 
 
 Dawn must be glowing, 
 
 And flutes be heard from afar.
 
 Georgy Chulkov 
 
 (Born 1879) 
 
 Chulkov has versified in the strained mode current ten years 
 ago, and has written novels that are diluted Dostoyevsky. He 
 shared the latter's Siberian experiences, in fact, being exiled 
 for participation in student disturbances. He early began to 
 theorize about the necessity for a return to a more sober and 
 realistic art enriched by the modernistic adventures. 
 
 123
 
 124 Georgy Chulkov 
 
 " PURPLE AUTUMN " 
 
 Purple Autumn unloosened her tresses and flung them 
 
 On the heavens and over the dew-heavy fields. 
 
 She came as a guest to the old, silent house, 
 
 Singeing the grasses with red; 
 
 Through the garden she moved, 
 
 Up the balcony; scarcely she touched 
 
 The fragile old rails. 
 
 She pushed the door-panel softly, 
 
 Softly she entered the room, 
 
 Sprinkling the rugs with her sun-yellow dust, 
 
 Dropped a red leaf upon the piano . . . 
 
 Ever after that hour, we heard her unceasing, her tireless 
 
 rustling, 
 
 Rustle and stir and soft whisper. 
 And our hands suddenly met 
 With no new words, new and forever false. 
 As though we had hung a wreath of red roses 
 On a black, wrought-iron door 
 Leading into a vault 
 Where lay the rotting body 
 Of a beloved dream. 
 Autumnal days were upon us, 
 Days of inscrutable longing; 
 We were treading the stairs 
 Of autumnal passion. 
 In my heart a wound, 
 Like the lamp of an ikon, 
 Burned and would not be quenched.
 
 Georgy Chulkov 125 
 
 The cup of autumnal poison 
 
 We pressed to our lips. 
 
 By the serpentine garden path Autumn had led us 
 
 To crepuscular lilies 
 
 Upon the pale, sand-humbled pond. 
 
 And over the lilied waters and in the roses of evening, 
 
 We loved, more superstitiously. 
 
 And through the dark night, 
 
 On the languorous bed, 
 
 At the feet of my love, 
 
 I loved death anew. 
 
 The minutes rang tinkling like crystals 
 
 At the brink of an autumn grave: 
 
 Autumn and Death drunkenly clinked their glasses. 
 
 I pressed my thirsty lips 
 
 To the feet the ikon-lamp burnished, 
 
 I drank the cup of love. 
 
 Burned by the fires of sins, 
 
 Stretched on the cross of lusts, 
 
 Shamed, being needlessly faithless, 
 
 I drank the cup of love. 
 
 In the hour of ineffable dalliance 
 
 I sensed the whisper 
 
 Of autumn pain, of autumn passion. 
 
 And kisses like keen needles 
 
 Burned and pierced, 
 
 Weaving a wreath of thorns.
 
 Alexander Blok 
 (1880-1921) 
 
 Alexander Blok was educated at the University of St. Peters- 
 burg, of which his grandfather was the rector. He belongs to 
 the second generation of symbolists, and his first volume, which 
 appeared in 1905, savors strongly of Solovyov's spirituality. 
 The upheaval which was shaking his country is ignored in this 
 book, instinct with vague eschatological expectations and de- 
 voted to the Eternal Feminine. Yet here she wears the medieval 
 aspect of the Lady Beautiful, and spirit in her is married to 
 flesh. These songs, employing an easy symbolic cryptogram, 
 mingle the prayers of the postulant with a rarefied sensuousness. 
 This asserts itelf in the succeeding volumes. The white melody 
 is muffled by the voices of earth. Blok flees monastic walls for 
 the confusion of the thoroughfares. The skirts of the Lady 
 Beautiful are defiled, and the poet is stretched upon the cross of 
 passion, with the bitter conviction that he is " fated to love her 
 in Heaven only to betray her on earth." Christ and Russia are 
 the other hypostases of Blok's trinity, their Golgotha strangely 
 at one with his own. Whether he is a maker of masques for 
 monastic harlequins, or another CEdipus before the Russian 
 sphinx, whether he writes children's verse, lyrical dramas of an 
 elusive symbolism, or poems reminiscent of the earlier Yeats, 
 he reveals a keen emotional intensity and an unfailing sensi- 
 tiveness of technique. 
 
 It was given to this delicate and remote lyricist to produce 
 the most significant poem of the proletarian revolution. This 
 is his striking epic, called " The Twelve," which is known far 
 beyond the confines of Russia, and is accessible in half a dozen 
 languages. 
 
 126
 
 Alexander Blok 127 
 
 "INTO CRIMSON DARK" 
 
 Into crimson dark thou goest, 
 Thy vast orbits mock the eye. 
 Small the echo that thou throwest, 
 Far, I hear thy footfalls die. 
 
 Art thou near? too far for greeting? 
 Lost in topless altitudes? 
 Shall I wait a sudden meeting 
 Where sonorous stillness broods? 
 
 In the solitude resounding 
 Distant footsteps echo free. 
 Is it thou who flamest, bounding 
 Circles of infinity?
 
 128 Alexander Blok 
 
 THE UNKNOWN WOMAN 
 
 I have foreknown Thee! Oh, I have foreknown Thee. 
 
 Going, 
 
 The years have shown me Thy premonitory face. 
 Intolerably clear, the farthest sky is glowing. 
 I wait in silence Thy withheld and worshiped grace. 
 The farthest sky is glowing : white for Thy appearing. 
 Yet terror clings to me. Thy image will be strange. 
 
 And insolent suspicion will rouse upon Thy nearing. 
 The features long foreknown, beheld at last, will change. 
 How shall I then be fallen ! low, with no defender : 
 Dead dreams will conquer me; the glory, glimpsed, will 
 
 change. 
 
 The farthest sky is glowing ! Nearer looms the splendor ! 
 Yet terror clings to me. Thy image will be strange.
 
 Alexander Blok 129 
 
 THE LADY UNKNOWN 
 
 Of evenings hangs above the restaurant 
 A humid, wild and heavy air. 
 The Springtide spirit, brooding, pestilent, 
 Commands the drunken outcries there. 
 
 Far off, above the alley's mustiness, 
 
 Where bored gray summerhouses lie, 
 
 The baker's sign swings gold through dustiness, 
 
 And loud and shrill the children cry. 
 
 Beyond the city stroll the exquisites, 
 At every dusk and all the same: 
 Their derbies tilted back, the pretty wits 
 Are playing at the ancient game. 
 
 Upon the lake but feebly furious 
 
 Soft screams and creaking oar-locks sound. 
 
 And in the sky, blase, incurious, 
 
 The moon beholds the earthly round. 
 
 And every evening, dazed and serious, 
 I watch the same procession pass; 
 In liquor, raw and yet mysterious, 
 One friend is mirrored in my glass. 
 
 Beside the scattered tables, somnolent 
 And dreary waiters stick around. 
 "In vino veritas!" shout violent 
 And red-eyed fools in liquor drowned.
 
 130 Alexander Blok 
 
 And every evening, strange, immutable, 
 (Is it a dream no waking proves?) 
 As to a rendezvous inscrutable 
 A silken lady darkly moves. 
 
 She slowly passes by the drunken ones 
 And lonely by the window sits; 
 And from her robes, above the sunken ones, 
 A misty fainting perfume flits. 
 
 Her silks' resilience, and the tapering 
 Of her ringed fingers, and her plumes, 
 Stir vaguely like dim incense vaporing, 
 Deep ancient faiths their mystery illumes. 
 
 I try, held in this strange captivity, 
 To pierce the veil that darkling falls 
 I see enchanted shores' declivity, 
 And an enchanted distance calls. 
 
 I guard dark secrets' tortuosities. 
 A sun is given me to hold. 
 An acrid wine finds out the sinuosities 
 That in my soul were locked of old. 
 
 And in my brain the soft slow flittering 
 Of ostrich feathers waves once more; 
 And fathomless the azure glittering 
 Where two eyes blossom on the shore. 
 
 My soul holds fast its treasure renitent, 
 The key is safe and solely mine. 
 Ah, you are right, drunken impenitent! 
 I also know: truth lies in wine.
 
 Alexander Blok 131 
 
 "A LITTLE BLACK MAN" 
 
 A little black man ran through the city. 
 
 He extinguished the lanterns, climbing the stairs. 
 
 Slow and white, dawn was approaching, 
 
 With the strange little man climbing the stairs. 
 
 Where quiet, soft shadows brooded over the town, 
 
 Where the yellow strips of the lanterns were sleeping, 
 
 Morning twilight upon the steps lay down, 
 
 Into the curtains, into the door-shadows creeping. 
 
 Oh, how poor is the city with dawn at her windows 
 
 lying! 
 Crouching outside, the little black man is crying.
 
 132 Alexander Blok 
 
 RUSSIA 
 
 To sin, unshamed, to lose, unthinking, 
 
 The count of careless nights and days, 
 
 And then, while the head aches with drinking, 
 
 Steal to God's house, with eyes that glaze; 
 
 Thrice to bow down to earth, and seven 
 Times cross oneself beside the door, 
 With the hot brow, in hope of heaven, 
 Touching the spittle-covered floor; 
 
 With a brass farthing's gift dismissing 
 The offering, the holy Name 
 To mutter with loose lips, in kissing 
 The ancient, kiss-worn icon-frame; 
 
 And coming home, then, to be tricking 
 Some wretch out of the same small coin, 
 And with an angry hiccup, kicking 
 A lean cur in his trembling groin; 
 
 And where the icon's flame is quaking 
 Drink tea, and reckon loss and gain, 
 From the fat chest of drawers taking 
 The coupons wet with spittle-stain; 
 
 And sunk in feather-beds to smother 
 In slumber, such as bears may know, 
 Dearer to me than every other 
 Are you, my Russia, even so.
 
 Alexander Blok 133 
 
 " WHEN MOUNTAIN ASH " 
 
 When mountain-ash in clusters reddens, 
 Its leafage wet and stained with rust, 
 When through my palm the nail that deadens 
 By bony hands is shrewdly thrust, 
 
 When leaden-rippling rivers freeze me, 
 As on the wet gray height I toss, 
 While my austere-faced country sees me 
 Where I am swinging on the cross, 
 
 Then through my bloody agonizing 
 My staring eyes, with tears grown stiff, 
 Shall see on the broad river rising 
 Christ moving toward me in a skiff. 
 
 And in his eyes the same hopes biding, 
 And the same rags from him will trail, 
 His garment piteously hiding 
 The palm pierced with the final nail. 
 
 Christ ! Saddened are the native reaches. 
 The cross tugs at my failing might. 
 Thy skiff will it achieve these beaches, 
 And land here at my cruciate height?
 
 134 Alexander Blok 
 
 THE SCYTHIANS 
 
 " Pan-Mongolism though the word is strange, 
 My ear acclaims its gongs." 
 
 VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV. 
 
 You are the millions, we are multitude 
 And multitude and multitude. 
 Come, fight! Yea, we are Scythians, 
 Yea, Asians, a squint-eyed, greedy brood. 
 
 For you : the centuries ; for us : one hour. 
 Like slaves, obeying and abhorred, 
 We were the shield between the breeds 
 Of Europe and the raging Mongol horde. 
 
 For centuries your ancient hammers forged 
 And drowned the thunder of far hates. 
 You heard like wild fantastic tales 
 Old Lisbon's and Messina's sudden fates. 
 
 Yea, so to love as our hot blood can love 
 Long since you ceased to love; the taste 
 You have forgotten, of a love 
 That burns like fire and like the fire lays waste. 
 
 All things we love: clear numbers' burning chill, 
 
 The ecstasies that secret bloom. 
 
 All things we know : the Gallic light 
 
 And the parturient Germanic gloom.
 
 Alexander Btok 13$ 
 
 And we remember all: Parisian hells, 
 
 The breath of Venice's lagoons, 
 
 Far fragrance of green lemon groves, 
 
 And dim Cologne's cathedral-splintered moons. 
 
 And flesh we love, its color and its taste, 
 
 Its deathy odor, heavy, raw. 
 
 And is it our guilt if your bones 
 
 May crack beneath our powerful supple paw? 
 
 It is our wont to seize wild colts at play : 
 They rear and impotently shake 
 Wild" manes we crush their mighty croups. 
 And shrewish women slaves we tame or break. 
 
 Come unto us, from the black ways of war, 
 
 Come to our peaceful arms and rest. 
 
 Comrades, while it is not too late, 
 
 Sheathe the old sword. May brotherhood be blest. 
 
 If not, we have not anything to lose. 
 We also know old perfidies. 
 By sick descendants you will be 
 Accursed for centuries and centuries. 
 
 To welcome pretty Europe, we shall spread 
 And scatter in the tangled space 
 Of our wide thickets. We shall turn 
 To you our alien Asiatic face. 
 
 For centuries your eyes were toward the East. 
 
 Our pearls you hoarded in your chests, 
 
 And mockingly you bode the day 
 
 When you could aim your cannon at our breasts.
 
 136 Alexander Blok 
 
 The time has come! Disaster beats its wings. 
 
 With every day the insults grow. 
 
 The. hour will strike, and without ruth 
 
 Your proud and powerless Paestums be laid low. 
 
 Oh pause, old world, while life still beats in you. 
 Oh weary one, oh worn, oh wise! 
 Halt here, as once did QEdipus 
 Before the Sphinx's enigmatic eyes. 
 
 Yea, Russia is a Sphinx. Exulting, grieving, 
 
 And sweating blood, she cannot sate 
 
 Her eyes that gaze and gaze and gaze 
 
 At you with stone-lipped love for you, and hate. 
 
 Go, all of you, to Ural fastnesses, 
 
 We clear the battle-ground for war ; 
 
 Cold Number shaping guns of steel 
 
 Where the fierce Mongol hordes in frenzy pour. 
 
 But we, we shall no longer be your shield. 
 But, careless of the battle-cries, 
 Shall watch the deadly duel seethe, 
 Aloof, with indurate and narrow eyes. 
 
 We shall not move when the ferocious Hun 
 Despoils the corpse and leaves it bare, 
 Burns towns, herds cattle in the church, 
 And smell of white flesh roasting fills the air. 
 
 For the last time, old world, we bid you come, 
 Feast brotherly within our walls. 
 To share our peace and glowing toil 
 Once only the barbarian lyre calls.
 
 Alexander Blok 137 
 
 FROM " THE TWELVE " 
 
 9 
 
 The city's roar is far away, 
 Black silence broods on Neva's brink. 
 No more police! We can be gay, 
 Comrades, without a drop to drink. 
 
 A boorzhooy, a lonely mourner, 
 His nose tucked in his ragged fur, 
 Stands lost and idle on the corner, 
 Tagged by a cringing, mangy cur. 
 
 The boorzhooy like a hungry mongrel: 
 A silent question stands and begs; 
 The old world like a kinless mongrel 
 Stands there, its tail between its legs.
 
 Andrey Bely 
 
 (Pseudonym of Boris Bugayev; born 1880) 
 
 Reared in a professorial atmosphere, in which science was 
 the major element, Boris Bugayev, better known under his 
 pseudonym of Andrey Bely, has lived a double life of artist and 
 analyst. The artist was engrossed in problems of form. He 
 created an interesting, experimental genre which he called 
 " symphony," with cadenced prose, verbal instrumentation and 
 musical development of themes. The analyst, on his part, used 
 mathematic formulae on the poet's fine frenzy, inaugurating a 
 science of rhythmics, at least for the Russians. Yet Bely is no 
 aesthete, but a mystic, who gropes toward the light of Christ, 
 " the timeless taper," and who lives by the uncertain hope of 
 the ineffable coming. The metaphysical conflict is constantly 
 invading the field of his poetic endeavor, until his lyrics be- 
 come the battle-cries of his spiritual tourneys. He is respon- 
 sible for more theorizing about symbolism than any one else, 
 but characteristically enough, he erects this nebula into a 
 Weltanschauung and almost into an ethics. 
 
 His poetry is rarefied and difficult. Its delicate imagery is 
 but an overtone of a resonant spiritual note. His poems have 
 an esoteric quality which is also evidenced in his two famous 
 novels, "The Silver Dove" and "Petersburg." Through both 
 moves a curious counterpoint of the apocalyptic and the homely, 
 muffled by theosophic speculation. 
 
 The proletarian revolution elicited from Bely a cycle of 
 poems, suggestively entitled "Christ Is Risen!" Herein he 
 envisions Russia, of which he once despaired, as the new 
 Nazareth. Quite recently he completed the first part of a 
 monumental epic planned for ten volumes. 
 
 138
 
 Audrey Bely 139 
 
 MESSENGERS 
 
 In fields hopeless and dumb 
 Droops the pale-bladed grain; 
 It is dozing and numb 
 Amid dreams that are vain. . . . 
 With a high sudden hum 
 The field tosses its mane: 
 " Unto us Christ is come! " 
 The wild news shakes the plain. 
 Like a wind-beaten drum 
 Shouts the quivering grain. 
 
 The bells ring soft and slow, 
 There is clamor and pain 
 In the church, and a low 
 Voice is lifted again 
 That reiterates: "Woe!" 
 To the poor folk and plain 
 Are brought candles aglow: 
 " Christ is coming again ! " 
 But with voices of woe 
 They file doorward, in pain.
 
 140 Audrey Bely 
 
 EUTHANASIA 
 
 The shining and ponderous goblet 
 I empty: the earth drops below me, 
 All things sink away, I am treading 
 Cold space the vast void the dim ether. 
 But distant, in ancient space looming, 
 My glimmering goblet: the Sun. 
 
 I look far below me are lying 
 The rivers, the forests, the valleys, 
 Estranged in the vanishing distance. 
 A cloud, blowing fog on my eyelids, 
 Trails gossamer gold in its going. 
 
 The flickering landscape is burning 
 
 Its last: mid-day stars newly-kindled 
 
 Look into my soul, sparkling : " Welcome," 
 
 With radiance silently streaming: 
 
 " The end of long wanderings, brother, 
 
 Lies here, in your motherland, welcome ! " 
 
 Slow hour upon hour in procession, 
 Slow centuries, smiling, pass onward. 
 In ancient space proudly I lift it, 
 My glimmering goblet: the Sun.
 
 An drey Bely 141 
 
 " YOU SIT ON THE BED THERE " 
 (Opening poem of the " Funeral Mass" cycle) 
 
 " You sit on the bed there 
 In the sunset's full crimson, 
 Pillows crumpled, 
 Looking distracted, what 
 Troubles you ? " 
 
 " Oh, swept by 
 Transparent 
 Gold cataracts, 
 The fir-tree tops 
 Loom athwart the sky's blue." 
 
 " Orphaned, alone, I shall 
 Languish, 
 Through summery 
 Twilights and Winter nights. 
 There are new flights, but 
 Try them I dare not. 
 Oh, do not die!" 
 
 " Oh, above the pines 
 I float off into aether seas. 
 Who, there, what, there, 
 Swathes the sky with whitenesses, 
 As with vestments of silver? "
 
 Victor Hofman 
 (1882-1911) 
 
 Hofman has to his credit some short stories and two books of 
 lyrics, the second of which appeared two years before his 
 suicide in Paris. 
 
 142
 
 Victor H of man 143 
 
 " STILL WAS THE EVENING " 
 
 Still was the evening of the ball, 
 The summer ball, with dancers wending 
 Where ancient linden shadows fall 
 Upon the river steeply bending; 
 
 Where in the trees the breezes breathe 
 And willows droop like drowsy dreamers; 
 Where it seemed beautiful to wreathe 
 The lanterns and the colored streamers. 
 
 A languorous waltz of slow retreatings, 
 A waltz that singing hardly sounded; 
 And many faces, many meetings, 
 Soft clouds like women's shoulders rounded. 
 
 The river looked a sculptured stream, 
 Serenely the whole heaven holding, 
 A fluent and enchanted dream 
 Of joyous miracles unfolding. 
 
 A crimson mantle, golden-bright, 
 
 Upon the clouds the sun was flinging; 
 
 The dream-swept waltz was drowned in light, 
 
 And calling through the dusk and singing. 
 
 A languorous waltz beside the river, 
 And many meetings, many faces, 
 And near cheeks' warmth, and lovely quiver 
 Where eyelash with curved eyelash laces.
 
 Vasily Bashkin 
 
 (c. 1880-1909) 
 
 In his pro'se Bashkin chronicled the career of Russia's radical 
 intellectuals, and as a poet he acted the part of a tame Tirtaeus 
 in the camp of the revolution. He was cut off by tuberculosis 
 early in life. 
 
 144
 
 Vasily Bash kin 145 
 
 " UPON THE BLACK BROW OF A CLIFF " 
 
 Upon the black brow of a cliff where no life ever stirred 
 Alighted strong, hoary-winged eagles, grave bird upon 
 bird. 
 
 They whetted their claws on the stones, sitting massive 
 
 and grum, 
 And loudly they called on their lately-fledged comrades 
 
 to come. 
 
 Slow-measured and heavy the beat of their wings on the 
 
 skies, 
 Assuageless the rage that tempestuous burned in their eyes. 
 
 And each newly-come they acclaimed with the pride of the 
 
 peer: 
 " Hail, comrade ! Delay not ! The days we have longed 
 
 for are near."
 
 Sergey Gorodetzky 
 (1884-1921) 
 
 This rather uneven and sometimes slovenly poet worshiped 
 at many shrines. He was a lyric myth-maker with Ivanov, 
 a symbolist with Blok, an advocate of several fashionable 
 doctrines, including mystical anarchy and mystical realism. 
 At the head of the " Guild of Poets " which was formed shortly 
 before the war, Gorodetzky attacked symbolism with Johnsonian 
 zeal in the name of the " Acmeist " faith in realities. The 
 poet became a jingo patriot when Russia entered the war, and 
 later was as vociferously allied to the Bolsheviks as he had 
 been to his Czar. His best work is informed with spirited spon- 
 taneity. The poetic restoration of the obscure Russian pagan- 
 ism, and a few lyrics carrying the dancing lilt of the folk- 
 song, form his chief contribution. 
 
 146
 
 Sergey Gorodetzky 147 
 
 YARILA 1 
 
 First to sharpen the ax-flint they bent, 
 On the green they had gathered, unpent, 
 They had gathered beneath the green tent. 
 There where whitens a pale tree-trunk, naked, 
 There where whitens a pale linden trunk. 
 By the linden tree, by the young linden, 
 By the linden tree, by the young linden, 
 The linden trunk 
 White and naked. 
 
 At the fore, shaggy, lean, hoar of head, 
 
 Moves the wizard, as old as his runes; 
 
 He has lived over two thousand moons. 
 
 And the ax he inhumed. 
 
 From the far lakes he loomed 
 
 Long ago. 
 
 It is his : at the trunk 
 
 The first blow. 
 
 And two priestesses in their tenth Spring 
 
 To the old one they bring. 
 
 In their eyes 
 
 Terror lies. 
 
 Like the trunk their young bodies are bright, 
 
 Their wan white 
 
 Hath she only, the tender young linden. 
 
 1 The Russian Dionysos.
 
 i Sergey Gorodetzky 
 
 One he took, one he led, 
 
 To the trunk roughly wed, 
 
 A white bride. 
 
 And the ax rose and hissed 
 
 And a voice was upraised 
 
 And then died. 
 
 Thus the first blow was dealt to the trunk. 
 
 Others followed him, others upraised 
 
 That age-old bloody ax, 
 
 That keen flint-bladed ax: 
 
 The flesh once, 
 
 The tree twice 
 
 Fiercely cleaving. 
 
 And the trunk reddened fast 
 
 And it took on a face. 
 
 Lo, this notch is a nose, 
 
 This an eye, for the nonce. 
 
 The flesh once, 
 
 The trunk twice 
 
 Till all reddened the rise 
 
 And the grass crimsoned deep. 
 
 On the sod 
 
 In the red stains there lies 
 
 A new god.
 
 Sergey Gorodetzky 149 
 
 THE BIRCH TREE 
 
 Upon an amber day I loved you first, 
 
 When, summoned by the radiant azure, 
 From every grateful twig there burst 
 Sweet indolence in dripping measure. 
 
 Your whitely shining body gleamed as white 
 As heady foam on lakes unfolding, 
 Gay laughing Lei 1 drew out the bright 
 Black hair, its beauty lightly holding. 
 
 Himself, the god Yarila 2 crowned your hair 
 
 With garlands green in gorgeous pleasure, 
 And flung it, plaited, to the air: 
 Green glory tossed upon the azure. 
 
 1 The Russian Pan. 
 
 2 The Russian Dionysos.
 
 Anna Akhmatova 
 
 Anna Akhmatova was at one time identified with the 
 Acmeist group, which represented a reaction against sym- 
 bolism. The work of this talented lyricist is notable for its 
 classic tendency and an insistence on purely personal themes. 
 Her tenuous verse delights in a sophisticated simplicity. The 
 first of her four slender volumes appeared in 1912. 
 
 ISO
 
 Anna Akhmatova 151 
 
 " LIKE A WHITE STONE " 
 
 Like a white stone deep in a draw-well lying, 
 As hard and clear, a memory lies in me. 
 I cannot strive nor have I heart for striving: 
 It is such pain and yet such ecstasy. 
 
 It seems to me that someone looking closely 
 
 Into my eyes would see it, patent, pale. 
 
 And, seeing, would grow sadder and more thoughtful 
 
 Than one who listens to a bitter tale. 
 
 The ancient gods changed men to things, but left them 
 A consciousness that smoldered endlessly, 
 That splendid sorrows might endure forever. 
 And you are changed into a memory.
 
 Anna Akhmatova 
 
 CONFESSION 
 
 From my poor sins I am set free. 
 In lilac dusk the taper smolders; 
 The dark stole's rigid drapery 
 Conceals a massive head and shoulders. 
 
 "Talithakumi": Is it He 
 
 Once more? How fast the heart is beating 
 
 A touch: a hand moves absently 
 
 The customary cross repeating.
 
 Anna Akhmatova 153 
 
 "BROAD GOLD, THE EVENING" 
 
 Broad gold, the evening colors glow, 
 The April air is cool and tender. 
 You should have come ten years ago, 
 And yet in welcome I surrender. 
 
 Come here, sit closer in our nook, 
 And turn gay eyes at what my nurses 
 Might never glimpse: the blue-bound book 
 That holds my awkward childish verses. 
 
 Forgive me that I did not look 
 Sunward with joy, but dwelt with sorrow, 
 Forgive me all whom I mistook 
 For you, oblivious of the morrow.
 
 154 Anna Akhmatova 
 
 PRAYER 
 
 Give me comfortless seasons of sickness, 
 Visitations of wrath and of wrong 
 On my house ; Lord, take child and companion, 
 And destroy the sweet power of song. 
 
 Thus I pray at each matins, each vespers, 
 After these many wearying days, 
 That the storm-cloud which broods over Russia 
 May be changed to a nimbus ablaze.
 
 Igor Severyanin 
 
 (Pseud, of Igor Lotarev) 
 
 The story goes that at the beginning of his poetic career 
 Severyanin took his constitutional on the Nevsky Prospekt wear- 
 ing a yellow shirtwaist, with green roses painted on his cheeks. 
 He enjoys the distinction of having founded the ego-futurist 
 group in Petrograd, which opposed the cubo-futurist group 
 in Moscow. He later betrayed the coterie, but remained 
 faithful to its canons of sound against sense. His insistence 
 on neologisms and words created ex nlhilo has produced a 
 style which is becoming a poetic idiom. Yet a genuine musical 
 quality saves some of his intolerably clownish and vacuous 
 verse. His first book, " The Thunder-Seething Cup," was pub- 
 lished in 1913 and ran into seven editions in two years, and he 
 has now some ten volumes to his credit. His poetry recitals 
 have diverted both Czarist and Bolshevist Russia. 
 
 155
 
 156 Igor Severyanin 
 
 AND IT PASSED BY THE SEA-SHORE 
 Poeza Mignonette 
 
 And it passed by the sea-shore, where the foam-laces 
 
 flower, 
 
 Where the city barouches only rarely are seen. . . . 
 There the queen played her Chopin in the high palace 
 
 tower, 
 And there, listening to Chopin, the young page loved the 
 
 queen. 
 
 And what passed there was simple, and what passed there 
 was charming: 
 
 The fair page cut the pomegranate as red as her dreams, 
 
 Then the queen gave him half thereof, with graces dis- 
 arming, 
 
 She outwearied and loved him in sonata-sweet themes. 
 
 Then she gave herself stormily, till night shut her lashes. 
 Till the sunset the queen lay, there she slept as a 
 
 slave. . . . 
 And it passed by the sea-shore where the turquoise wave 
 
 washes, 
 Where sonatas are singing and where foam frets the wave.
 
 Igor S every anin 157 
 
 A RUSSIAN SONG 
 
 Lace and roses in the forest morning shine, 
 Shrewdly the small spider climbs his cobweb line. 
 
 Dews are diamonding and blooming faery-bright. 
 What a golden air! What beauty! Oh, what light! 
 
 It is good to wander through the dawn-shot rye, 
 Good to see a bird, a toad, a dragon-fly; 
 
 Hear the sleepy crowing of the noisy cock, 
 And to laugh at echo, and to hear her mock. 
 
 Ah, I love in vain my morning voice to hurl, 
 Ah, off in the birches, but to glimpse a girl, 
 
 Glimpse, and leaning on the tangled fence, to chase 
 Dawn's unwilling shadows from her morning face. 
 
 Ah, to wake her from her half-surrendered sleep, 
 Tell her of my new-sprung dreams, that lift and leap, 
 
 Hug her trembling breasts that press against my heart, 
 Stir the morning in her, hear its pulses start.
 
 158 Ig r Severyanin 
 
 SPRING APPLE TREE 
 Aquarelle 
 
 An apple-tree in Spring shakes me, to see it grow, 
 Its branches whitely weighted with unmelting snow. 
 So might a hunch-backed girl stand, beautiful and dumb, 
 As trembling, the tree stands, and strikes my genius 
 
 numb. . . . 
 
 It looks into the wide, pale shallows, mirror-clear, 
 Seeking to shed the dews that stain it like a tear ; 
 And stilled with horror, groans like a rude, rusty cart, 
 Seeing the dismal hunch mocked by the pool's bright art. 
 When steely sleep alights upon the silent lake 
 For the bent apple-tree, as for a sick girl's sake, 
 I come to offer tenderness the boughs would miss, 
 I press upon the petal-perfumed tree a kiss. 
 Then trustingly, with tears, the tree confides her care 
 To me, and brushes with a touch my back-blown hair. 
 Her boughs encircle me, her little twigs enlace, 
 And I lift up my lips to kiss her flowering face.
 
 Nikolai Kluyev 
 
 This sophisticated folk-poet, a peasant by birth, began to 
 write just before the outbreak of the war, when he brought 
 out three volumes of verse within two years. His mastery 
 of his medium has developed steadily. His imagery, vivid and 
 concrete, derives from two sources: the routine of rural life 
 and Christian symbolism. Kluyev hailed the social revolution, 
 and Russia as its messiah. His most recent work, " The Izba 
 Songs ", has a quality of deep and original homeliness. 
 
 159
 
 160 Nikolai Kluyev 
 
 A NORTHERN POEM l 
 
 Sunset dreams on fir-tree cones, 
 
 Green the hedge, and brown the field ; 
 
 Mossy rifts in weathered stones 
 Meekly vernal waters yield. 
 
 Oh, look up the wooded steep 
 God has touched it with his palm; 
 
 Piously wild berries weep, 
 T listening to the grassy psalm. 
 
 And I feel no fleshly tie; 
 
 And my heart's a springing mead. 
 Come, ye pilgrims white and shy, 
 
 Peck the early wheaten seed. 
 
 Tender evening twilight searches 
 Cottage windows, gabled byres, 
 
 And the leaves of slender birches 
 Glimmer soft as wedding fires. 
 
 1 Tr. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
 
 Nikolai Kluyev 161 
 
 AN IZBA SONG 
 
 The stove is orphaned now; the old housewife has died, 
 The trivet tells the pot with tears; their talk is harried. 
 Behind the pane two trustful magpies, side by side, 
 Chirp : " May is near, today the finches will be married, 
 Smith Woodpecker with busy knocking has stripped his 
 
 throat, 
 The mole the sullen miner creeps sunward, meekly 
 
 leaving 
 
 His tunneled, dark estate to bugs without a groat. 
 The cranes are homing now, the sparrow, pert and 
 
 thieving, 
 
 Has heard the jackdaw blurt the secret of her egg." 
 The tangled mop awaits the bucket, limp and tired. 
 She thinks the unwashed porch for spuming suds must beg. 
 How gay would be the splash of water, how desired 
 A windowful of sunray tow, an endless fairy-tale. . . . 
 Behind the stove the house-sprite gabbles, quick and 
 
 clever, 
 
 Of the new tenant's stillness within the churchyard's pale, 
 Of crosses listening to things nameless forever, 
 Of how the dark church-entrance lulls the linger dream. 
 The house-sprite gabbles on above the bleak hour's stark- 
 ness. 
 
 The peasant-hut is scowling ; pewter eye agleam, 
 The lonely window stares out at the thaw and darkness.
 
 Lubov Stolitza 
 
 This young woman poet exhibits a charm which is insistently 
 and delightfully feminine. 
 
 162
 
 Lubov Stolitza 163 
 
 A LENTEN ONE 
 
 Noon in golden thaw is garbed with glory, 
 Midnight's wrap of silver snows is hoary. 
 Pink the buds among the aspen's ashes 
 Where the diamond hoar-frost softly flashes. 
 My kind cat has furtively departed, 
 But the swallow has returned, high-hearted. 
 Winter grief no more our dumb lips locking, 
 But upon the heart Spring grief is knocking. 
 And at noon we weep, our bosoms crossing, 
 Midnight sees us in hot slumber tossing: 
 Quiet lips, knees pressed as though in prayer, 
 But our shadowed eyes are our betrayer.
 
 Sergei Yesenin 
 
 Otic of the latest comers, Yesenin is also one of the most 
 gifted of the younger Russian poets. His first book was pub- 
 lished in 1916. He is a member of a group which has come 
 into being during the revolution and which calls itself 
 " imazhinisty " (imagists). Like Kluyev, he came from the 
 masses, and, like him, operates with the intimate details of the 
 peasant's life and faith. Whatever his political and literary 
 associations, he is a poet dei gratia. 
 
 164
 
 Sergei Yesentn 165 
 
 " UPON GREEN HILLS " 
 
 Upon green hills wild droves of horses blow 
 The golden bloom off of the days that go. 
 
 From the high hillocks to the blue-ing bay 
 Falls the sheer pitch of heavy manes that sway. 
 
 They toss their heads above the still lagoon 
 Caught with a silver bridle by the moon. 
 
 Snorting in fear of their own shadow, they, 
 To screen it with their manes, await the day.
 
 (1 66 Sergei Yesenin 
 
 " HOPES PAINTED BY THE AUTUMN COLD " 
 
 Hopes, painted by the autumn cold, are shining, 
 My steady horse plods on, like quiet fate, 
 His moist dun lip is catching at the lining 
 When the coat, flapping, flutters and falls straight. 
 
 On a far road the unseen traces, leading 
 Neither to rest nor battle, lure and fade; 
 The golden heel of day will flash, receding, 
 And labors in the chest of years be laid.
 
 Sergei Yesenin 167 
 
 " IN THE CLEAR COLD " 
 
 In the clear cold the dales grow blue and tremble ; 
 The iron hoofs beat sharply, knock on knock. 
 The faded grasses in wide skirts assemble 
 Flung copper where the wind-blown branches rock. 
 
 From empty straths, a slender arch ascending: 
 Fog curls upon the air and, moss-wise, grows, 
 And evening, low above the wan streams bending, 
 In their white waters washes his blue toes.
 
 1 68 Sergei Yesenin 
 
 TRANSFIGURATION: III 
 
 Eh, Russians, 
 
 Fowlers of the universe. 
 
 You who trailed heaven with the net of dawn, 
 
 Lift your trumpets ! 
 
 Beneath the plow of storm 
 The dumb earth roars. 
 Golden-tusked, the colter breaks 
 The cliffs. 
 
 A new sower 
 
 Roams the fields. 
 
 New seeds 
 
 He casts into the furrows. 
 
 A guest of light drives toward us 
 In a coach. 
 Across the clouds 
 A mare races. 
 
 The breech-band on the mare: 
 The blue; 
 
 The bells on the breech-band: 
 The stars.
 
 Z. Shishova 
 
 This is one of the more gifted of the woman poets in the 
 youngest choir. 
 
 169
 
 170 Z. Shishova 
 
 " HOW STRANGE, OH, GOD " 
 
 How strange, oh, God, as in sleep's euthanasia, 
 Thy earth today. 
 
 Behind the window, each like an acacia, 
 The poplars sway. 
 
 From my small muff my hand withdrawing slightly, 
 I find it dry. 
 
 And from my furs, as though May touched them lightly, 
 Faint perfumes fly. 
 
 And through the night dark troubled dreams are rearing: 
 
 They choke and cling. 
 
 How shall I then forbear a*- last from fearing, 
 
 Oh, God, thy Spring?
 
 Piotr Oreshin 
 
 Oreshin belongs to the poetic progeny of the Revolution. 
 
 171
 
 172 Piotr Or f shin 
 
 NOT BY HANDS CREATED 
 
 i 
 
 Fall on your face, 
 Drop 
 
 Mug-forward into the swamps. 
 With your old were-wolf's eye, 
 Cataract-blinded, 
 Look 
 What a blade I am ! 
 
 2 
 
 Carrot-haired 
 
 Big-browed dawns, 
 
 And the darkness of forests, 
 
 Rye, 
 
 And the sheaves behind the village,- 
 
 My body. 
 
 3 
 
 Long ears, 
 
 Tufted with red hair, 
 Wag 
 
 Like asses' ears 
 Through the heavens! 
 
 4 
 
 Two 
 
 Convulsed eyes 
 Two 
 Oceans resting in me,
 
 Piotr Oreshin 173 
 
 And thick 
 Bulbous lashes 
 Burning green 
 On my cheek-bones. 
 
 5 
 
 My stone mouth 
 Is stretched with song 
 From east to west. 
 
 6 
 
 Legs 
 
 And hoofs 
 
 Kicked skyward 
 
 And 
 
 The claw 
 
 On my hairy paw 
 
 Blazes. 
 
 7 
 
 Gorged 
 
 And motionless, 
 
 Like a bull, 
 
 I have squatted, rock-fast, 
 
 In a long shirt 
 
 Of sunsets, 
 
 And I sit now 
 
 Sprawled out 
 
 On the fat hill of the universe.
 
 174 Piotr Ore shin 
 
 8 
 
 Dark forests 
 Grow 
 
 On my hairy belly, 
 And in the stony fir-trees 
 Gray wolves, 
 In cope and coif, 
 Having lit a taper, 
 Serve 
 The mass. 
 
 9 
 
 Eternal, 
 
 Not by hands created, 
 
 I roll my eyes heavily 
 
 As roll the mill-stones 
 
 Of the blue 
 
 Mills 
 
 Of heaven. 
 
 IO 
 
 Slowly 
 
 I chew the cud of gray clouds, 
 
 And 
 
 Think 
 
 Of perishing brothers 
 
 With my wise 
 
 Cheerful belly.
 
 Piotr Oreshin . 175 
 
 ii 
 
 Through closed lids 
 
 I see 
 
 Between my legs new rivers 
 
 Heave 
 
 New ground 
 
 Upon golden 
 
 Crests. 
 
 12 
 
 Listening to the earth, 
 I spit 
 
 With out-thrust, lower lip, 
 And lo! 
 Rains 
 
 Pour with the sound of spears 
 And, clinking, 
 Pierce the earth. 
 
 13 
 
 Eternal, 
 
 Not by hands created, 
 With the spirit of Life-giving Spring 
 I sweep 
 
 The tilled field, 
 And 
 
 On the naked knees of the universe 
 I pour 
 
 The blue waters 
 Of My Eternal Triumph. 
 Hosannah in the highest!
 
 Anatoly Marienhof 
 
 This young poet belongs to the Imagist coterie. His verse 
 is interesting for its sophisticated technique and its angular 
 ruggedness. The title of the second poem given here refers 
 to the month when the Soviets assumed power. 
 
 I 7 6
 
 Anatoly Marienhof 177 
 
 "SAVAGE, NOMAD HORDES" 
 
 Savage, nomad hordes 
 
 Of Asia 
 
 Poured fire out of the vats! 
 
 Razin's execution is avenged, 
 
 And Pugachov's pain 
 
 Whose beard was torn away. 
 
 Hooves 
 
 Have broken 
 
 The scruff of the earth, 
 
 Cold with centuries, 
 
 And the supernal sky, like a stocking 
 
 With a hole in its heel 
 
 Has been taken out of the laundry-trough 
 
 Wholly clean.
 
 1 78 Anatoly Marienhof 
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 We trample filial obedience, 
 
 We have gone and sat down saucily, 
 
 Keeping our hats on, 
 
 Our feet on the table. 
 
 You don't like us, since we guffaw with blood, 
 Since we don't wash rags washed millions of times, 
 Since we suddenly dared, 
 Ear-splittingly, to bark: Wow! 
 
 Yes, sir, the spine 
 
 Is as straight as a telephone pole, 
 
 Not my spine only, but the spines of all Russians, 
 
 For centuries hunched. 
 
 Who makes a louder noise on earth now than we ? 
 
 You say: Bedlam 
 
 No milestones no stakes 
 
 Straight to the devil . On the church porch our red 
 
 cancan is glorious. 
 
 What, you don't believe? Here are hordes, 
 Droves of clouds at men's beck and call, 
 And the sky like a woman's cloak, 
 And no eyelash of sun. 
 
 Jesus is on the cross again, and Barabbas 
 
 We escort, mealy-mouthed, down the Tverskoi Pros- 
 
 pekt. . . . 
 
 Who will interrupt, who ? The gallop of Scythian horses ? 
 Violins bowing the Marseillaise ?
 
 Anatoly Marienhof 179 
 
 Has it ever before been heard of, that the forger 
 Of steel bracelets for the globe 
 Should smoke his rotten tobacco as importantly 
 As the officer used to clink his stirrups? 
 
 You ask And then? 
 
 And then dancing centuries. 
 
 We shall knock at all doors 
 
 And no one will say: Goddamyou, get out! 
 
 We! We! We are everywhere: 
 
 Before the footlights, in the center of the stage, 
 
 Not softy lyricists, 
 
 But flaming buffoons. 
 
 Pile rubbish, all the rubbish in a heap, 
 
 And like Savonarola, to the sound of hymns, 
 
 Into the fire with it. ... Whom should we fear? 
 
 When the mundiculi of puny souls have become worlds. 
 
 Every day of ours is a new chapter in the Bible. 
 
 Every page will be great to thousands of generations. 
 
 We are those about whom they will say: 
 
 The lucky ones lived in 1917. 
 
 And you are still shouting: They perish! 
 
 You are still whimpering lavishly. 
 
 Dunderheads! 
 
 Isn't yesterday crushed, like a dove 
 
 By a motor 
 
 Emerging madly from the garage?
 
 Index of Authors 
 
 Akhmatova, Anna, 150-154 
 
 Balmont, Konstantin, 72-80 
 Baltrushaitis, Yurgis, 109-111 
 Baratynsky, Yevgeny, 13, 14 
 Bashkin, Vasily, 144, 145 
 Bely, Andrey, 138-141 
 Blok, Alexander, 126-137 
 Brusov, Valery, 81-91 
 Bunin, Ivan, 92-97 
 
 Chulkov, Georgy, 123-125 
 Foeth, see Shenshin-Foeth 
 Gorodetzky, Sergey, 146-149 
 
 Hippius, Zinaida, 68-71 
 Hofman, Victor, 142, 143 
 
 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 98-108 
 
 Kluyev, Nikolai, 159-161 
 Koltzov, Alexey, 15, 16 
 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 118-128 
 
 Lermontov, Mikhail, 17-22 
 
 Maikov, Apollon, 39-42 
 Marienhof, Anatoly, 176-179 
 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 56-60 
 Minsky, N., 53-55 
 
 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 30-33 
 Oreshin, Piotr, 171-175 
 
 Polonsky, Yakov, 47-49 
 Pushkin, Alexander, 3-12 
 
 Severyanin, Igor, 155-158 
 Shenshin-Foeth, Afanasy, 43-46 
 Shishova, Z., 169, 170 
 Sologub, Fyodor, 61-67 
 Solovyov, Vladimir, 50-52 
 Stolitza, Lubov, 162, 163 
 
 Tolstoy, Alexey K., 34-38 
 Tyutchev, Fyodor, 23-29 
 
 Voloshin, Maximilian, 112-117 
 Yesenin, Sergei, 164-168 
 
 iSr
 
 Edited by J. L. 5PINGARN 
 
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