Yevgeny Baratynsky
Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (Boratynsky
Russian: Евге́ний Абра́мович
Бараты́нский (Боратынский), 2 March [O.S.
19 February] 1800 – July 11, 1844) was
lauded by Alexander Pushkin as the
finest Russian elegiac poet. After a
long period when his reputation was on
the wane, Baratynsky was rediscovered by
Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky as a
supreme poet of thought.
Life
Of noble ancestry, Baratynsky was
educated at the Page Corps at St.
Petersburg, from which he was expelled
at the age of 15 after stealing a
snuffbox and five hundred roubles from
the bureau of his accessory's uncle.
After three years in the countryside and
deep emotional turmoil, he entered the
army as a private.
In 1820 the young poet made his
acquaintance with Anton Delvig, who
rallied his falling spirits and
introduced him to the literary press.
Soon Baratynsky was transferred to
Finland, where he remained six years.
His first long poem, Eda, written during
this period, established his reputation.
Through the interest of friends he
obtained leave from the tsar to retire
from the army, and settled in 1827 in
Muranovo near Moscow (now a literary
museum). There he completed his longest
work, The Gipsy, a poem written in the
style of Pushkin.
Baratynsky's family life seemed to be
happy, but a profound melancholy
remained the background of his mind and
of his poetry. He published several
books of verse that were highly valued
by Pushkin and other perceptive critics,
but met with the comparatively cool
reception of the public, and violent
ridicule on the part of the young
journalists of the "plebeian party". As
the time went by, Baratynsky's mood
progressed from pessimism to
hopelessness, and elegy became his
preferred form of expression. He died in
1844 at Naples, where he had gone in
pursuit of a milder climate.
Poetry
Baratynsky's earliest poems are
punctuated by conscious efforts to write
differently from Pushkin who he regarded
as a model of perfection. Even Eda, his
first long poem, though inspired by
Pushkin's The Prisoner of the Caucasus,
adheres to a realistic and homely style,
with a touch of sentimental pathos but
not a trace of romanticism. It is
written, like all that Baratynsky wrote,
in a wonderfully precise style, next to
which Pushkin's seems hazy. The
descriptive passages are among the best
— the stern nature of Finland was
particularly dear to Baratynsky.
His short pieces from the 1820s are
distinguished by the cold, metallic
brilliance and sonority of the verse.
They are dryer and clearer than anything
in the whole of Russian poetry before
Akhmatova. The poems from that period
include fugitive, light pieces in the
Anacreontic and Horatian manner, some of
which have been recognized as the
masterpieces of the kind, as well as
love elegies, where a delicate sentiment
is clothed in brilliant wit.
In his mature work (which includes all
his short poems written after 1829)
Baratynsky is a poet of thought, perhaps
of all the poets of the "stupid
nineteenth century" the one who made the
best use of thought as a material for
poetry. This made him alien to his
younger contemporaries and to all the
later part of the century, which
identified poetry with sentiment. His
poetry is, as it were, a short cut from
the wit of the 18th-century poets to the
metaphysical ambitions of the twentieth
(in terms of English poetry, from
Alexander Pope to T. S. Eliot).
Baratynsky's style is classical and
dwells on the models of the previous
century. Yet in his effort to give his
thought the tersest and most
concentrated statement, he sometimes
becomes obscure by sheer dint of
compression. Baratynsky's obvious labour
gives his verse a certain air of
brittleness which is at poles' ends from
Pushkin's divine, Mozartian lightness
and elasticity. Among other things,
Baratynsky was one of the first Russian
poets who were, in verse, masters of the
complicated sentence, expanded by
subordinate clauses and parentheses.
Philosophy
Baratynsky aspired after a fuller
union with nature, after a more
primitive spontaneity of mental life. He
saw the steady, inexorable movement of
mankind away from nature. The aspiration
after a more organic and natural past is
one of the main motives of Baratynsky's
poetry. He symbolized it in the growing
discord between nature's child — the
poet — and the human herd, which were
growing, with every generation, more
absorbed by industrial cares. Hence the
increasing isolation of the poet in the
modern world where the only response
that greets him is that of his own
rhymes (Rhyme, 1841).
The future of industrialized and
mechanized mankind will be brilliant and
glorious in the nearest future, but
universal happiness and peace will be
bought at the cost of the loss of all
higher values of poetry (The Last Poet).
And inevitably, after an age of
intellectual refinement, humanity will
lose its vital sap and die from sexual
impotence. Then earth will be restored
to her primaeval majesty (The Last
Death, 1827).
This philosophy, allying itself to his
profound temperamental melancholy,
produced poems of extraordinary majesty,
which can compare with nothing in the
poetry of pessimism, except Leopardi.
Such is the crushing majesty of that
long ode to dejection, Autumn (1837),
splendidly rhetorical in the grandest
manner of classicism, though with a
pronouncedly personal accent.
