Cycles of Love and Recovery: Batiushkov's "Vospominanie 1807 Goda" and "Vyzdorovlenie"

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Cycles of Love and Recovery: Batiushkov's "Vospominanie 1807 Goda" and "Vyzdorovlenie"Author(s): James MorganSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 1-20Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/310049 .

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ARTICLES

CYCLES OF LOVE AND RECOVERY: BATIUSHKOV'S "VOSPOMINANIE 1807 GODA" AND "VYZDOROVLENIE"*

James Morgan, Yale University

In his 1814 essay, "A Stroll to the Academy of Arts" ("Progulka v Akademiiu khudozhestv"), Konstantin Nikolaevich Batiushkov introduces a conventional elegiac paradox, claiming that "attachments of the heart ... constitute the torture and the sweetness of life" (1: 81).1 Batiushkov's erotic elegies illuminate this paradox--the "mixed emotions" that constitute elegy's dominant - with an uncommon sensitivity to the ambiguities of a person's emotional life.2 Like Petrarch and Dante, two of the Italian poets he most revered, Batiushkov was obsessed with the nuanced recollection of past emotional experience and the transmutation of that recalled experience into poetry. For him, the elegy was an outlet for passionate mediation of the past and its influence on the present and future, and for a poet's necessarily ambivalent reactions to the events of his life.

Two of Batiushkov's elegies, separated by some ten years, demonstrate the full power of his passionate meditation. The two poems treat a single autobiographical episode: his recuperation in Riga from a wound sustained in battle and the love affair that, so to speak, brought him back to life.3 The poet's memories of this episode, along with letters to his friend Gnedich, serve as an explicit "source-text" for the lengthy "Vospominanie 1807 goda" ("Mechty!--povsiudu vy menia soprovozhdali. .."; 1807-1809), which in turn informs "Vyzdorovlenie" (1816), one of his most masterful elegies. Both poems exploit the elegiac conventions of the period: the emphasis on recollection, especially the bittersweet memory of past joys; the interaction of love and death; the comparison or contrast of nature's seasonal cycle with the rise and fall of a person's health; the almost inevita-

SEEJ, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1998): p. 1-p. 20 1



2 Slavic and East European Journal

ble comparison of the poet/hero with a flower; and finally, the poet/hero's solipsistic tendency to mourn his lost youth and imminent demise. In addition, the texts are saturated with mythological archetypes and, in the case of "Vyzdorovlenie," poetic subtexts that carry associations far beyond the specific biographical context, thus demonstrating Batiushkov's capacity to transmute the ore of lived experience into the electrum of poetry.

In January, 1807, Batiushkov joined the irregular St. Petersburg Militia and participated in the Prussian campaign against Napoleon. On May 29, the poet was seriously wounded in action near the city of Heilsberg, where his battalion sustained heavy losses. "A bullet hit Batiushkov in the thigh and probably damaged his spinal cord. In any case it was this wound that became the primary cause of [his] multiple sicknesses and ailments" (Koshelev 64). Despite the seriousness of the wound, the poet was by June joking about it in a letter to Gnedich that became, in a sense, his first literary reworking of the summer's events:4

I'm alive. How- God only knows. I was seriously wounded in the leg by a bullet that went straight through the upper part of the thigh and into my rear end. The wound is two chetverti deep,5 but not dangerous, since the bone, so they say, was not touched, but how? -again I don't know.. . . My medics6 say that I will limp for a year. I have to admit that being on crutches is extremely fun (2: 70-71).

Batiushkov was transferred to Riga to recuperate from his wounds. There he was billeted with a rich merchant, Mugel. To Gnedich, he describes his reception. After labor, hunger, and horrible pain (besides which I'm penniless), I arrive in Riga and what happens? I'm received in beautiful rooms, fed and given drinks from beautiful hands: I'm [lying] in roses. ... It's enough that I'm happy and don't want [to go to] Petersburg ... I'm drinking from the cup of joy and enjoying myself (2: 71).

The "beautiful hands" belonged to Miigel's wife and his daughter Emilia, who cared for the wounded and sick poet. In a letter of June 17, he wrote to his sisters, "Sa fille est charmante, la mere bonne comme ange, tout cela m'entoure, l'on me fait de la musique" (2: 72). In the two months he was in Riga, Batiushkov managed to fall in love with Emilia, but by August, however, he had returned to Russia. He never saw Miigel's daughter again.

It is this summer romance- along with his wound, ensuing sickness and recuperation -that Batiushkov treats in "Vospominanie 1807 goda," written between June of 1807 and its publication in November of 1809 in Vestnik Evropy. It is one of the poet's most personal elegies, so personal in fact that he omitted its second half, which focuses on the romance, in his 1817 collection, Opyty v stikhakh iproze. The poet employs freely alternating lines of iambic hexameter, tetrameter, and trimeter, a form that allows



Cycles of Love and Recovery 3

him to match line length to the rise and fall of emotional tension. "Vospom- inanie 1807 goda" is not, however, wholly successful. The language lacks Batiushkov's usual precision, lapsing into conventional elegiac and erotic formulas, while its length -more than one hundred lines - tempts the poet to tackle too many subjects and gives the poem a diffuse quality that saps its power. Regardless, the poem is one of his earliest successful elegies and introduces many of the themes and images that propel "Vyzdorovlenie."

The first forty-three lines-the portion that Batiushkov published in Opyty - consider the distance between the young poet's daydreams and the actual business of war from the retrospective point of view of an older, wiser man. He recalls his peaceful state of mind before the battle, his amazement at being wounded in battle, his fear that he would die in a foreign land, and his ecstatic crossing of the river Neman, the border between Prussia and the Russian empire.7 He ends the section with a paean to the "hundredfold blessed" man who resists the call to glory.

The poem begins with an apostrophe to daydreams:

Me'TbI!-noBcIoay BbI MCeH conpoBoIanIH H MpalHbIm )XH3HH IIyTb BteTaMH ycTrHjanm! KaK cniaaKo a MeMTaJI Ha refijbc6eprcKHX nonax,

Korea Becb cTaH jpeMaa B noKoe H paTHHK, onepmilcb Ha KonIe cTaJIbHoe, CMoTpeJI B TyMaHHy anJb! . . . (11. 1-6; 1: 172)

Dreams! -you have accompanied me everywhere and have strewn the gloomy path of life with flowers! How sweetly I daydreamed on the Heilsburg fields, when the whole camp slept in peace and a warrior, leaning on his steel lance, gazed off into the hazy distance!

Dreams-specifically daydreams-are the thematic center of the poem, just as they lie at the heart of Batiushkov's entire oeuvre. Dreams have the power to suspend, however fleetingly, the forward march of time, to suspend the reality of loss, to bring what is temporally past into the dream- time present. This suspension is inherent both in the apostrophe that begins the poem and in the peaceful atmosphere of the sleeping regiment. As Jonathan Culler has argued, apostrophe locates a poem in "special tempo- rality which is the set of all moments at which writing can say 'now.' " It posits "a detemporalized space with forms and forces which have pasts and futures but which are addressed as potential presences," and where "noth- ing need happen because the poem itself is to be the happening" (66-67). Yet it is clear from the past tense of the speaker's address--and of the narrative that follows- that the power of dreams is limited, that time presses on and life intrudes upon writing.

Deep in meditation before the battle, the poet sees in the fields only the mirror-like waters of the river Alle (in East Prussia), the lofty hills sur-




rounding the town, and the moon glittering above him. This recalled landscape becomes the object of the poet's apostrophe, and as a product of his present daydreams it produces in turn a recollection of how it drew his thoughts to his homeland:

O reJinbc6eprcKH nojis! 0 x6JIMbI BO3BbIIeHHbI! rFe CTOJIbKO pa3 B HOqH, JIYHOI) ocBeueHHbIi, AI, B AyMy norpy)KaeH, o pO,HHe MeqTaJ; (11. 13-15)

O Heilsburg fields! O lofty hills! Where so often at night, illuminated by the moon and submerged in thought, I (day)dreamed of my homeland;

These are the daydreams that displace the reality of impending battle, but they disappear when the battle begins. The speaker repeats his apostrophe to the landscape, but it has taken on new, threatening characteristics. The speaker emphasizes his youth and inexperience, presenting each new horror as a revelation or a damning loss of innocence.

0 refinbc6eprcKH nojin! B TO BpeMS as He sHaJ ITO TpynbI paTHHKOB ycTrejOT BalaU HHBbI,

'ITO MemHOfi iqejOCTbIO rpoM rpaHeT c CHX XOJIMOB, 'ITO X, MeqTaTeJIb Bam CqaCTJIHBbI6i,

Ha CMepTb jieTI nPOTHB BparoB, PyKOfi 3aKPbIB TxKejiy pary

EJBa IH Ha 3ape cefl KH3HH He yaHy. - (11. 16-22)

O Heilsberg fields! at that time I did not know that the corpses of warriors would strew your cultivated fields, that thunder would chatter its bronze jaws from these hills, that I, your happy dreamer, flying towards death against the enemy, having covered my terrible wound with my hand would nearly wither at the dawn of this life. -

The flowers of the opening lines have metamorphosed into the corpses of warriors who, like flowers on a cultivated field of death, are cut down in their prime, in the full flower, if you will, of their youth. The mix of martial and agricultural imagery, familiar from Homer, echoes the motif, common in Russian folklore, of human remains sown to produce a harvest of sorrow.8 The happy dreamer has been displaced, from his dreams to reality, from peace to war, from health to near-death, from thoughts of his native land to a consciousness of how far he really is from home.

Writing at a temporal and spatial distance from these events, the speaker now switches from recollection to an expectation of future recollection, and expresses his recurring horror at the thought of dying away from home, another Homeric topos. He marks this transition with another encomium to the power of daydreams, which again can suspend time, can bridge the gulf between past experience and present and future recollection:




Mexily npoTeKImero ecTb BeqHas qepTa: Hac c6JIicIKT C HHM OAHO MeqTaHHe.

Ia OXKHBJIIO Tenepb s B naMITH CBoeii CHmo yxKacHyi MHHyTy, Korga, 6oJIe3Hb BKylmaa JIIOTy H BHIS CTO CMepTei,

Boricsr yMepeTb He B poxHHe Moen! (11. 25-31)

There is an eternal barrier between the past [and present]: daydreaming alone will bring us close to it. And I will now relive in my memory that horrible minute when, tasting the cruel disease and seeing a hundred deaths I feared I would die away from my homeland!

These hundred deaths contrast with the hundred blessings granted to the

"peaceful stay-at-home" ("spokoinyi domosed") who instead of "flying towards death," does "not step beyond his humble abode" ("ne stupia za khizhinu ubogu") and "quietly waits for death" ("i tikho smerti zhdet") (11. 36-43).9

This preference for a peaceful domestic life, so common in Batiushkov's poetry - the most famous example is "Moi Penaty" - finds further development in the second, excised half of the poem, although its setting is another foreign city, Riga.10 This portion of the poem breaks into three distinct sections. The first section (lines 44-50), the shortest, praises Miigel's fam-

ily and Batiushkov's doctor. The second, longer section (51-74) is an ac- count of his recovery and his love affair with Emilia, while the final section

(75-102) concerns his separation from her, his recollection and vision of her in his daydreams.

The first section opens with an apostrophe to the family:

CeMeieCTBO MHpHoe, y)Keab Te6s 3a6yAy H Apyxc6e H JIO6BH He6jarogapeH 6ygy? Ax, MHe JI no3a6bITb rocTenpHHMHbIiI KpOB,

B ceHH AoMauIHbIx rAe 6oroB

YcepAHbIX 3cKyjian 60oecTBeHHOfl HayKOH HcTopr H3-nOn KOCbl H AHBHO HcrenJHJ MeHs, 6opiomerocb yxcec cMepTeJIbHoi MyKoi! (11. 43-50; 1: 367)

Peaceable family, could I really forget you and be ungrateful to friendship and love? Ah, am I to forget the hospitable shelter, where under the protection of domestic gods the dedicated medic (eskulap) with his divine science wrested me out from under the scythe and miracu- lously healed me, who was already struggling with mortal torture!

The peaceable family, sheltered by domestic gods, provides a hospitable sanctuary for the suffering poet; the healer's art is miraculous precisely because of the setting in which it is practiced. These penates, along with the eskulap, hint in this portion of the poem at a timeless glow of classical antiquity that clashes with the specificity of contemporary events; this mix- ture of chronotope links this poem to "Moi Penaty" (which shares it) and




reinforces the dream-like atmosphere. The motif of the scythe establishes an archetypal agricultural image: the poet, like the soldiers strewn across the fields of battle, nearly falls victim to death's harvest. With this paradig- matic connection, Batiushkov has combined the conventional image of the scythe as a metaphor for death with the equally conventional metaphor of a flower for a young poet, who nearly "wither[s] at the dawn of this life." With the gods' help, however, the poet is rescued from the fate of his fellow warrior-flowers.

In the second section, the poet compares Emilia with Hebe, the goddess of youth and of spring, and links his recovery to nature's vernal rebirth:

Ha Jiowe ropecTH H cJIes TbI, re6a IOHaS, iIHJIefiHOI pyKOIO Cocyn MHe noIaJIa: <<?eif 3,gpaBbe H jno6Bb!>> Torga, Ka3aJioca, caMa nprIpoga BHOBb

Co MHOIO BocKpecaJia H1 HOBOf 3eJIeHbIO BeHaJna

oJIHHbI, X6JIMbI H Jieca. l IIOMHIO yrpO TO, KaK cJia6oio pyKOIO, CKJIOHSCb Ha KOCTbIJIH, InogAepcaHHbIf TO6OIO, a B nepBbli pa3 yspeJi iseTbi H ApeBeca ... KaKoe cqacTae c BecHOf BOCKpeCHyTb SCHOiH! (B rnia3ax JIo6OBH eue npeJiecTHee BecHa).

I, BOCXHimeH npHppOAOi KpaCHOfi, CKa3aJI 3MHJIiH: <TbI BHIHIfIb, KaK OHa,

PacToprHyB 3HMHHfi MpaK, C BeCHOOK oKHBaeT, C pybeM mIIyMHT B JIyrax H c po30so pacluBeTaeT; MTO 6 6bINo 6e3 BecHbI? . noJo6HO TaK H I Ha yTpe AHefI MOHIX yyBI 6bi 6e3 Te6a!>> (11. 57-71)

On the couch of sorrow and tears, you, young Hebe, with your lily-white hand gave me the vessel: "Drink health and love!" Then, it seemed, nature herself was once again reborn with me and wreathed with new verdure the valleys, hills and forests. I remember that morning when, leaning on my crutches with a weak hand and supported by you, I saw the flowers and the trees for the first time . . . What happiness to be reborn with bright spring! (In the eyes of love spring is more charming still.) Carried away by nature's beauty, I said to Emilia: "Do you see, how she, having dissolved winter's gloom, revives with spring, gurgles in the meadow with the creek and blooms with the rose; what would happen without spring? ... Just as I would wither in the morning of my days without you."

The compulsive development of the conventional comparison between nature's rebirth and the poet's recovery, the almost incantatory accumula- tion of pastoral details, lends the section a certain ritualistic quality that prompts a mythological reading. In the same vein, the time-frame of the poet's wound and recovery has shifted from the summer of biography- Batiushkov was wounded at the end of May and was in Riga for June and July - to the more conventionally elegiac spring of poetic recollection. Fur-




thermore, the speaker expressly identifies Emilia with spring; just as nature lies dormant until the arrival of spring, the hero would not have recovered without Emilia's tender ministrations. And finally, this identification makes clear the equation of spring with both erotic love and the feminine gender. All these elements combine to evoke the vernal Eleusinian mysteries, a ritual that celebrates the return of Kore, Demeter's daughter, known as Persephone in her role as the queen of Hades, from her four month stay in the underworld, the earth's resurrection after winter (Frazer 5: 35-91).11 Again the inevitable verb vianut' accompanies the hero's conditional down- fall, strengthening the association between him and a flower. And just as Emilia resembles Persephone, the hero himself embodies Adonis, the lover of Aphrodite and Persephone, who was killed by a boar in the flower of his youth, but whom Persephone granted resurrection every spring (Frazer 4: 3- 12). Without Emilia as Hebe or, more ambivalently, Persephone, without her sacramental proffering of the cup and her ritualistic words, "Drink health and love," the poet's withering would have been complete, just as the earth would be permanently barren--and Adonis permanently dead--if Persephone were not to make her annual trip from Hades.

The section ends with erotic motifs of the lover's consummated emotions:

TyT, rpygIb ee Kpoin ropaSHMH cJIe3aMH, COegIUHHB ycTa c yCTaMH,

Bcio qamy paAocTH MM BbIIIHJIH Ao AHa. (11. 72-74; 1: 368)

Here, sprinkling her breast with burning tears, and having united mouth with mouth, we drank the whole cup of joy down to the dregs.

The tears of sorrow from line 54 have become tears of passion, while Emilia's vessel of health and love -of life -is now the cup of voluptuous joy. The uniting of mouths - an important motif that will recur in "Vyzdorovlenie" -

gestures both at the physical consummation of their love and at the verbal quality of their attachment: Emilia offers him the cup with ritualistic words and he responds with an ecstatic monologue, both in the strict sense of his reported speech and in the wider, metapoetic sense of the poem as a whole.

The lovers' joy, however, is short lived; the final section begins in the next line with a lament over its disappearance.

YBbI, Hcie3JIO Bce, KaK npeeecTb cJIanKa CHa! (1. 75)

Alas, all has disappeared, like the charm of a sweet dream!

Love, and by extension the health that accompanied it, is decried as a dream, a temporary reprieve from the gloomy solitude and ill-health of reality. Accordingly, the elegy switches gears here, alternating between daydreams about his beloved and laments over their separation. Early in




the section, in line 80, the word teper' marks the shift in verbal tense from past to present. The past of recollection has shifted to the present of active daydreaming:

BOCIIOMHHaHHIS, JIHIIb BaMH OKpHJIeHHbIi,

K Heft MbICJImIO eqy. (11. 82-83)

Recollection, only with your wings do I fly to her in my thoughts.

He flies to her just as he flew towards death, thus linking death with his love for her. He imagines that he senses her breath, that he sees her lying in clouds, but it is no longer Emilia, the Latvian girl who nursed him back to health. Rather it is Batiushkov's standard erotic heroine, an impersonal, conventional object of his desire:

PaCKHHyTbI BnJaCbI KpaCaBHUbI BOJHO)I B He6ecHoi cHHeBe,

BeHOK H3 6ejlbix po3 6JmcTaeT Ha rJiaBe, HI nepcH JbIImaT no rI OKpoBOM ... (11. 91-94)

The beauty's hair is spread out like a wave in the cerulean heavens, a wreath of white roses shines on her head, and her breasts swell under their cover ...

He reaches out for this apparition "in, sweet ecstasy" ("V vostorge sladostnom"), but he is "deceived by his dream" ("obmanutyi mechtoi"): the apparition disappears and he embraces a shadow. The poem ends, then, on the limitations, even the deceitful nature, of daydreams; if dreams can bring us closer to the past or to a desired object, they-and it-always disappear in the passage from fantasy to reality.

Like "Vospominanie 1807 goda," "Vyzdorovlenie" is concerned with the recollection of the past and the transition into the present, but it also extends into the future. The latter poem clearly recycles motifs and content from the former, but its date of composition is not certain. Blagoi, and Semenko after him, argue that since the two poems treat the same autobiographical episode, they must have been written simultaneously (Blagoi 453; Opyty 538). Serman, noting the resemblance between "Vyzdorovlenie" and the poet's later elegies, argues more persuasively that it was written nearly a decade later, in 1816 (120). The poem does indeed seem too mature to be so early: the syntax is too elegant, the imagery and semantics too compressed, the manipulation of psychology and generic conventions too subtle. Further- more, the poem's meter - alternating lines of iambic hexameter and tetrameter equipped with masculine and feminine rhymes respectively -links it to later poems with the same meter, "K drugu" (1815) and "Est' naslazhdenie i v dikosti lesov" (1819).12




"Vyzdorovlenie" consists of twenty lines that divide neatly into three parts. The first eight lines establish a comparison between the poet and a flower and describe his decline as both a cyclical progression and an irre- versible transition. The second eight lines take up, in a single period, his beloved's power to call him back to life by means of a spiritual, physical and verbal connection. The final four lines form a coda with an ironic tag. The first two lines restate his attachment to life and the beloved, while the second renew the comparison to the wilting flower-now that she has brought him back to life, his love for her will make him wilt anew. 13

The text of the poem is as follows:

KaK JIaHjbIL nog cepnoM y6HicTBeHHbIM xaHena CKJIOHIeT rOJIOBy H B;IHeT,

TaK a B 6ojie3HH xcgani 6e3BpeMeHHO KOHua 4 14H yMaJ: napKHl ac HacTaHeT.

YXK O'H noKpbIBaaJ 3pe6a MpaK rycToii, Yx cepgge MegineHHee 6HJIocb,

I BSHyJI, HcIe3aJI, H aKH3HH MOJIOoi4, 8 Ka3ajiocb, conjre 3aKaTHnocb.

Ho Tbi npIH6nmoKIHJacb, o KH3Hb Aymi Moefi, I1 aJIbIx yCT TBOHX gbIXaHbe,

1 cJie3bi njiaMeHeM CBepKaioInHx oqefi, 12 14 noIeenyeB coueTaHbe,

H1 B3oOXH CTpaCTHbIe, H cHma MHJbIX CIOB MeHa H3 o6niacrT neiaJiH,

OT OpKOBbIX nonieii, OT JIeTbi 6eperoB 16 J,aI cinaaocTpacTrHI npH3BaJIH.

TbI cHOBa >KH3Hb gaemb; OHa-TBOii gap 6naroi, To6ofi abimaTb go rpo6a cTaHy.

MHe cinagoK 6ygeT Iac H MyKH POKOBOi; 20 I OT JIO6BH Tenepb yBsHy. (1: 174)

Just as a lily of the valley bows its head and wilts under the murderous sickle of the reaper, I, in sickness, prematurely awaited my end and thought: the hour of the Parcae approaches. Already the dense gloom of Erebus was covering my eyes, already my heart was beating more slowly, I was wilting, disappearing, and the sun of my young life, it seemed, had set. But you approached, O life of my soul, and the breath of your scarlet lips, and the tears of your eyes, sparkling with a flame, and the connection of kisses, and passionate sighs, and the force of tender words called me from the region of sorrow, from the fields of Orcus, from the banks of Lethe for voluptuousness. You give me life anew; it is your blessed gift, I will breathe you until the grave. For me even the hour of fateful torture will be sweet; I will now wilt from love.

The poem's opening simile --familiar from "Vospominanie 1807 goda" - is hardly innovative. However, Batiushkov renders it in striking (and as we will see, strikingly inaccurate) figurative language. The flower here is landysh, lily of the valley, notably a springtime flower,14 which bows its head and wilts in expectation of the violence of the reaper's murderous sickle. This violence, however, is immediately marked as cyclical, not only




by the circular blade of the sickle, but also in its agricultural connotations. The reaper's imminent decapitation of the flower recalls death's harvest of the warrior-flowers in "Vospominanie 1807 goda." This threat of violence within the generally life-affirming context of the harvest brings to mind the ritual dismemberment of the vegetation god (such as Adonis), an annual harvest ritual that prepares for the earth's death in winter and its resurrection the following spring.15 The image of the sickle contains within it the paradox of harvest time- the bountiful, life-giving produce of the earth is obtained at the cost of violence to the earth and the onset of winter and death. These hints at an archetypal seasonal cycle of death and rebirth prepare the poem's individual recapitulation of the cycle: the poet's symbolic death, his rebirth and subsequent redeath. Furthermore, as Serman has pointed out, the first two lines "are essentially outside time, and are therefore given in the present tense" (122). This "archetypal" present tense lends further weight to the cyclical movement of the seasons and of time.

Batiushkov's figurative language, however, is inaccurate. In the context of his poetics of "harmonious precision," such imprecision is jarring and, in this case, highly significant. In his marginal notes to Opyty v stikhakh i proze, Pushkin chides Batiushkov for imprecise agricultural imagery: "Not 'under a sickle' ('pod serpom') but 'under a scythe' ('pod kosoiu'): lily of the valley grows in meadows and groves - not in cultivated fields" (Pushkin 6: 575).16 It is hard to imagine, however, that Batiushkov hadn't realized where lily of the valley grows, or what instrument would be used to harvest it. It is also incongruous that a springtime flower would be harvested in the fall. Beyond this, the poem's meter would admit kosoi in place of serpom.17 Finally, the scythe, conventionally associated with death, would fit more comfortably into the semantic scheme of the poem, further linking it to "Vospominanie 1807 goda."

Thus, I would argue that Batiushkov's imprecision, if not intentional, is overdetermined.18 First, the replacement of the expected scythe with the incongruous sickle reveals a subtle play with the generic conventions of the elegy. And second, if we allow biographical data to inform our reading, the spatial dislocation of the lily of the valley from meadows to cultivated fields, and the temporal dislocation of the harvest from autumn to springtime convey the poet's own dislocation, both in a physical and an ontological sense.19 He was away from home and severely, perhaps fatally wounded, in danger, as is explicit in "Vospominanie 1807 goda," of dying in a foreign land. This dislocation is the result of an earlier one, from his peaceful pursuits as a poet to active service as a soldier on a foreign battlefield, a cultivated field of death.

The second two lines complete the simile, introducing the poet-hero as the object of the flower metaphor. The hero is waiting for death, for the Parcae to cut the thread of his life, just as the lily of the valley wilts in




expectation of the sickle's blow. But in the move from the general to the specific, the archetypal present gives way to the recollected past, which in turn gives way to the perfective future of the poet's reported speech: his fate is inescapable. This shift in tense moves the poem from cyclical to linear time, where the "untimely end" is exceptional and final. In the poem as in life, these two conceptions of time, of the passage from life to death stand in opposition and struggle for dominance.

This struggle continues - again with reference to classical mythology - in the first section's second period, where the poet's eyes are covered by the thick gloom of Erebus. Erebus, born of Chaos, is eternal gloom, the "dark and gloomy space under the earth through which shades pass into Hades" (Bell 61). He is also, however, the brother and later the husband of Night, and together they produce day. It is significant that in an earlier variant of this line, the epithet smertel'nyi stood in place of Ereba (Blagoi 453). This adjustment effects a shift from a single focus on the permanent state of death to a dual focus on the linear passage across the threshold of Erebus and on the cyclical progression from night into day, on a darkness that dawn can disperse.

Batiushkov's syntax in lines 5-8 further supports this reading. He deploys five imperfective verbs (pokryval, bilos', vianul, ischezal, kazalos') in four lines, then crowns the period with a single perfective, zakatilos'.20 The perfective past denotes a completed action; in a conventionally elegiac paradox, the sun of the poet's young life has set, the process of sickness has led to a result: death. The range of imperfective verbs, however, militates against the finality of this death. Beyond the hesitation implicit in kazalos', the imperfective past denotes actions that were in progress but subject to cessation. Furthermore, the very image of the setting sun, like the image of Erebus's gloom, contains its own contradiction. Just as the darkness engen- dered by the setting sun will be dispersed by sunrise the following day, the wilting poet--the vocabulary again reinforces the association of the poet with the lily of the valley -will recover. In the figure of sunset and sunrise, as in the figure of the seasonal cycle, the end begets the beginning. Death, real or symbolic, is a necessary constituent of rebirth.

This conception of a cycle of death and rebirth is fundamental to the world-view of classical mythology. The ancients had "an image of death in which the Earth, both the earth mother and the earth of fertility, is in the foreground. This theme underlies the happy return to the womb of an ever fertile soil and at the same time the beneficent circularity of a death trans- forming itself into fertility" (Kahn-Lyotard and Loraux 405). This "beneficent circularity" commonly finds literary (and specifically elegiac) embodi- ment in the figure of Adonis (cf. Shelley's Adonais or Milton's Lycidas), who has a shadowy presence here, just as he did in "Vospominanie 1807 goda." The connection, however, between the poet and a lily of the valley,




a plant of a relatively low order of fertility that wilts prematurely, recalls not a conventionally literary Adonis, but that of the Adonia (i.e., the festival of Adonis) of Athens.

"The Adonis of the Athenians could not have been a god of vegetation but the very opposite" (Detienne 434; also see Frazer 4: 223-59). The gardens of Adonis were planted not in cultivated fields, but in small pots that were left in the sun, unwatered, to wither and dry. They are "diametri- cally opposed to the crops of Demeter, the plowed earth. . . . They are the image of all that is light, superficial, immature, barren, rootless -a garden of stone, cold and opaque as death." The mythology of Adonis confirms these associations:

As the seducer of deities of opposing reigns [Aphrodite and Persephone], Adonis is for the Greeks neither a husband nor even a virile being. ... This young man of abundant seed ... is the antithesis of marriage and fertile sexual union.. . . The itinerary of the precocious seducer follows the same course as his gardens: deprived of offspring and condemned to perish in the flower of his youth.

Upon his untimely death, Adonis is wrapped in lettuce, "a recognized symbol" of impotence (Detienne 434).

In "Vyzdorovlenie," the wilting lily of the valley, displaced from its nor- mal, peaceful home to the cultivated violence of the fields, provides but a shadowy parallel, perhaps, to wilted plants displaced from the fields to Adonis's gardens of stone, but the overarching theme of displacement remains. More important is the motif of impotence, or more precisely stunted fertility, the poet's untimely death in the morning of his life, before he reaches sexual maturity. The poet's impotence receives further confirmation from the image of the decapitating sickle, which, in another classical myth, Cronus uses to emasculate his father Uranus upon the orders of his mother Gaia, the goddess of the earth. The sickle itself comes from Gaia, and thus links the earth with both fertility and impotence. While the poem is hardly an uncomplicated appropriation of the Adonia of Athens (it is unlikely that Batiushkov was familiar with this ritual), the striking parallels -references to displaced vegetation, death at an early age, and symbols of impotence - add further resonance to the portrait of a dying poet.

Rebirth, or in the context of this poem, healing and the promise of renewed sexual potency, arrives in the second section of the poem. After the conjunction no, which clearly marks the boundary between the sections and the reversal of the hero's fortunes, follows ty, a feminine figure whose approach reinvigorates the poet. The concentration in the first section on the poet gives way to a focus on the beloved; the ty of line 9 replaces the ia of lines 3 and 7. The beloved's actions, expressed with two perfective past tense verb forms that stand like syntactic bookends at either end of the




single, eight-line period, reverse the action of the first section's imperfective verbs and annul the result of its single perfective past. A series of life-affirming motifs provide a metonymic portrait of the beloved that coun- teracts the poet's resignation and banishes the gloom of the first section.

In two cases, the repetition of a key word marks this contrast. His life (zhizn'), on which the sun set in lines 7-8, has reappeared in line 9 in the beloved, whom he apostrophizes as "the life of my soul" ("zhizn' moei dushi"). In line 11, her eyes (ochi), sparkling with flame, produce tears that collaborate with her passion to wash and burn away the gloom covering his eyes (ochi) in line 5-recall his burning tears (goriachie slezy) from "Vospominanie 1807 goda." In addition, her scarlet lips (alye usta) provide a visual erotic image that contrasts with the image of the wilting poet, disappearing in the setting sun. Her scarlet lips and their kisses hold the promise of renewed sexual potency: the noun usta is a symbol for sexual, spiritual and even verbal union--again compare "Vospominanie 1807 goda."

The beloved's mouth is the main focus of the poet's attention: her breath, her kisses, her passionate sighs and her gentle words. This series of metonymic figures paints a portrait of the beloved that is remarkable in the context of Batiushkov's elegiac poetry. While the heroine is clearly voluptuous-it is her passion that calls him back from death--she lacks the conventional erotic features of his usual heroines: the cascading hair, the wreath of roses and the swelling bosom familiar from "the beauty" in "Vospominanie 1807 goda." By contrast, her portrait consists only of a face, or more precisely, of eyes and a mouth. The portrait is further remarkable for the power that these features contain. While the erotic imagery of "Vospominanie 1807 goda" belongs to a fleeting vision, the beloved in "Vyzdorovlenie" is a living woman with the power to revive the poet. Her kisses produce a connection (sochetan'e) between their lips, between the dying poet and renewed life; her breath resuscitates him; the power of her tender words and passionate sighs is enough to call him back from death.21

Once again, the poet does not name death directly. Rather it is "the region of sorrow," located in the mythic space of classical allusion: "the fields of Orcus" and "the banks of Lethe." This periphrasis further devel- ops the poem's allegory of rebirth. As in "Vospominanie 1807 goda," the beloved's spring-like presence has brought the poet back from death, a journey that echoes the ancient belief in the reincarnation of souls: a person's spirit would traverse a huge arid plain--the fields of Orcus--and finally cross Lethe, drinking from its waters to erase the experience of their previous life and death (cf. Oswalt 171). The motif of forgetting links "Vyzdorovlenie" with the 1818 elegy, "Est' naslazhdenie i v dikosti lesov" ("There is pleasure in the wilderness of the forests as well"), the poet's




well-known adaptation/translation of stanza 178 from the fourth canto of

Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Here, the Russian poet celebrates the

power of mother nature (priroda-mat'):

C TO6oi, BinajbIqHia, npHBbIK a 3a6bIBaTb H1 TO, tIeM 6bIJ, KaK 6bIJi MOJIOxe,

1 TO, qeM HbIHe cTaJi nog XOJIOgOM rogOB. To6oio B qyBCTBaX OxHIBaoK: (1: 414)

With you, mistress, I have become accustomed to forget both that which I was when I was

younger, and that which I have become under the chill of the years. By you I revive in my emotions:

In this passage, nature allows the poet to forget both his blessed past and his difficult present, to be reborn with renewed emotional resources. And this forgetting has become a cyclical progression, like nature's seasons, in which his senses fade and revive. In "Vyzdorovlenie," then, Lethe is like nature, healing the poet's wounds, cleansing him of the defilement of war and the proximity of death, preparing him for rebirth in love.

Lethe, along with the notion of an underworld journey from death back to life, also recalls Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Beatrice commands the living poet to travel through hell and purgatory-the regions of the dead--into earthly and heavenly paradise, to replicate, albeit implicitly, Christ's passion. Batiushkov knew Dante well: he intended to write an article about him and included him in his planned collection of translations from Italian literature.22 The link to "Vyzdorovlenie" is especially clear in Cantos 27-28 and 30-31 of II Purgatorio, where Dante, with the help of Matilda, the mysterious "lady of the forest," travels across Lethe and drinks its purifying waters.23 As Dante travels up the mountain of purgatory, cleansing himself of his sins (by the erasure of the seven letter P's - one for each cardinal sin -carved on his forehead), he joins briefly in the penance on several levels. The Italian poet therefore joins the shades, comparing himself to a "one that is laid in the grave" (350-351). After this death in life, Dante rises to the Garden of Eden, the earthly paradise disused since Eve's disobedience and inhabited now only by Matilda, whom John Sinclair sees as the "genius" of Eden and who represents the ideal of an active life, complementary to Beatrice, who leads a more con- templative one (Dante 373).

Dante is separated from Matilda and the garden, however, by the stream of Lethe, and he cannot cross until he had confessed his sins to Beatrice, who soon appears, veiled, glorious and imposing. When he has reproached himself sufficiently for his inconstancy to Beatrice's spirit, Matilda comes to drag him through Lethe, forcing him to drink and thus purifying him, wiping away any mental trace of the bloody wounds of sin (compare Batiushkov's war




wounds). After this ritual re-baptism, a chorus of nymphs calls on Beatrice show herself to the penitent, to "unveil [her] mouth to him, that he may discern the second beauty" (408-409). Dante, then, like Batiushkov after him, emphasizes the fundamental importance of the mouth in the spiritual (and by extension physical) connection between the beloved and her lover, who has made a harrowing journey through the region of death to reach her.

Batiushkov's beloved, however, is substantially different from Beatrice. Above all, she is alive - Batiushkov's journey is back from the regions of death, not up from a Christian hell to paradise. While Dante's beloved seems to split into two complementary figures, Batiushkov's beloved alone calls the hero back from death and leads him from the shores of Lethe. Finally, the sensual aspect of their relationship is not fully subordinated to the spiritual. The importance of the sensual is most apparent in the final line of the second section, where after seven lines of preparation, that the beloved's actions, words and characteristics call the poet back from death for rebirth in voluptuousness.24 This call (prizvali), metonymically hers, corresponds to her approach (priblizhilas'), not only by the prefix they share (pri-, indicating arrival, attachment or addition) and their position at either end of the sentence, but also by their emphasis on physical proximity, on connection. The poem identifies life with voluptuousness, with pleasure, with the beloved, and her kiss, her words, her breath--in fact any connection via the mouth - is the path back to life.

A final aspect of the hero's underworld journey and the life-giving power of the beloved's words is its evocation of Orpheus's quest to bring Euridyce back from Hades. In "Vyzdorovlenie," however, the roles are reversed. The hero is a poet, but it is the beloved who leads him back from death, allows him to express his gratitude and love. That she does this by means of her breath, her kisses, and her words points not only to her mouth but also to the poet's mouth, which receives her breath and kisses, and thus re- vived, reciprocates with words of its own, the poem itself, the artistic representation in language of his journey and of the beloved's role in it, her role, in essence, in the creation of poetry. The focus on the mouth, then, introduces a meta-literary level to the poem's web of meaning, calling our attention to the production of the poetry itself, a remembering that over- comes even the power of Lethe.

The poem concludes with a four line coda that moves the action from the recollected past to the present and future while it restates the poem's main themes and mirrors its structure. The poem's key words, "life" ("zhizn' ") and "to wilt" ("vianut', uvianut' "), reappear to frame this final section. Their placement at either end of the section corresponds to its division into two sentences of two lines each, the first concerning the beloved, the second the poet/hero. Batiushkov deploys a personal pronoun at the beginning of




each line. The first two lines are saturated by forms of the second-person singular (ty, toboi, as well as the possessive tvoi). Life becomes the beloved's blessed gift, and the act of giving represents the single present-tense action in the poem, is the pivot on which the poem shifts from past to future.25 The beloved herself will be transformed into the air the poet will breathe (dyshat', cf. dykhanie and vzdokhi from lines 10 and 13), further emphasiz- ing the importance of the mouth in the poet's attachment to her. By contrast, the second two lines each begin with a form of the first person pronoun (mne, ia). The emphasis on time and fate (chas, rokovaia) recall the Parcae's hour, while the torture (muka), now sweet, recalls the poet's initial disease-- compare the mortal torture (smertel'naia muka) in "Vospominanie 1807 goda." Words that have hitherto remained unspoken now appear explicitly, but have, ironically, switched places. Death is now represented by the grave (grob) in the expression do groba ("until death," lit. "until the grave"; Slovar', "Grob"), appearing in line 18 as an affirmation of the beloved's power. Likewise, the life-giving emotion that the poet avoids naming in the second section appears explicitly in line 20 as love (liubov'), but stands, ironically, as the cause of the poet's ultimate withering. In an erotic key, it points to sexual fulfillment, the consummation of his renewed potency.26 In the context of elegiac paradoxes, however, love is both a source of healing and life and a source of torture or even death. The cycle is now complete: the sick man, wilting under disease, has been reborn and is now wilting again, waiting for the cycle to begin anew. Love and death, the dynamic duo of the elegy, are inseparable.

"Vyzdorovlenie," then, presents the reader with a wide array of elegiac topoi that Batiushkov exploits through skillful deployment of mythological, conventionally elegiac and biographical material, and by means of elegantly controlled syntax. The poem offers subtle psychological insight into the ambivalence that accompanies the development of a love affair, while render- ing these emotional states palpable by transferring them into physical sensa- tions: the resignation of a heart beating more slowly, the spiritual connection of a kiss. It manipulates verbal tense, shifting from the archetypal present to the imperfective past, whither to the perfective past, through the present - the beloved's gift of renewed life - into the perfective future, an inescapable fate of suffering and eventual death. As a reenactment (intentional or not) of the Adonis story, it contains the full ambivalence of that myth: the joy of rebirth and the knowledge of certain death, the promise of sexual union and the impotence of a man cut down in his youth. And finally, its reworking of an earlier poem, itself an aestheticized reenactment of episodes from Batiushkov's own life, provides a insight into Batiushkov's poetic development, the mature subtlety with which he revives both conventional elegiac formulae and motifs from classical mythology. No longer are these uncompli-




cated stamps, signs with a single, set meaning, but polysemes that contain multiple, often contradictory, signification. In the end, these elements collaborate to lend "Vyzdorovlenie" the full paradoxical power of the elegiac mood - the mixed emotions, the contrast of recollection and prediction, the contiguity of beginnings and endings, and the individual reenactment of archetypal human experience.

NOTES

* I would like to acknowledge the generosity, at times verging on collaboration, of several colleagues and friends: Vladimir Alexandrov, Michele Baker, Vladimir Golstein, Kerwin, Michele Martinez, John MacKay, Karla Oeler, Elizabeth Papazian, Sarah Pratt and Tomas Venclova. Portions of this paper were presented at the 1996 AATSEEL Conference in Wash- ington, D. C. 1 Fridman cites this passage in reference to "Vyzdorovlenie" to demonstrate the poem's

psychological acuity (113-114). Variations on this paradox recur frequently in Batiush- kov's prose, not only in reference to love, but also to poetry and memories. In "Some- thing About the Poet and Poetry" ("Nechto o poete i poezii," 1815), he begins with the premise that "poetry is often the torture and delight [uslazhdenie, which shares a root with sladost', sweetness] of people who were created solely for it" (1: 40), while in "A Fragment From the Letters of a Russian Officer About Finland" ("Otryvok iz pisem russkogo ofitsera o finliandii," 1809), he speaks of "episodes, the recollection of which is both sweet and regretful" (1: 98). These citations come from the latest, 1989 edition of Batiushkov's works; references include volume and page number. For textual variants, I will cite Blagoi's edition.

2 In early nineteenth-century Russia, the most important European proponents of elegy as an expression of "mixed emotions" were Johann Gottfried von Herder and Conrad Malte- Brun. The former's ideas found resonance in A. I. Galich's Opyt nauki iziashchnogo (262- 63), while the latter's article on elegy was translated in 1814 in the journal Syn otechestva. See Vatsuro 15-19 and Senderovich, who connects the idea of mixed emotions to the rise of dialectical philosophy and mixed genres (i.e., tragicomedy) (110-22).

3 Such a combination of martial and emotional material is characteristic of Batiushkov, who saw much similarity between the two realms: ". . . tender thoughts, passionate daydreams, and love somehow merge very naturally with the noisy, stormy, and active life of a warrior" (2: 54). Fridman also cites this passage to argue that the poet picked up where Zhukovsky left off in "merging [war poetry] with intimate, psychological poetry" (183).

4 Serman points out the differences between Batiushkov's letter to Gnedich and another he wrote to his sister at the same time and on the same subject, finding the former much more self-consciously literary (23-24).

5 This is likely jocular exaggeration. The academy dictionary (Slovar') defines chetvert' as an old Russian measure of length equivalent to 17.775 centimeters, so if Batiushkov were serious, his wound would have been more than a foot deep.

6 Batiushkov uses the alternately jocular and bookish word eskulapy, which derives from "Aesculapius," the Greek god of medicine (Ushakov). He uses the same word in "Vospominanie 1807 goda."

7 The Neman (in Lithuanian Nemunas and in Polish Nieman) runs from present-day Belarus through Lithuania to the Baltic Sea (Britannica).

8 The apposite passage is from Book 11 of The Iliad: "Imagine at each end of a rich man's




field / a line of reapers formed, who cut a swath / in barley or wheat, and spiky clumps of grain / are brought low by the scything: even so / those armies moved to cut each other down, / and neither Trojans nor Akhaians thought / of ruinous defeat" (253).

Compare these lines from Slovo o polku igoreve (The Lay of Igor's Campaign): "On the river Nemiga they built haystacks of heads. / They are threshed with steel flails / and lives are left behind of the threshing floor. / Souls abandon their bodies. / The bloody shores of the river Nemiga / were sown with misfortune, / were strewn with the bones of Russia's sons" (Zenkovsky 185). On the use of agricultural imagery in the Slovo, see Gasparov 17-32.

9 Batiushkov also takes on the role of the wanderer in his fable, "Stranstvovatel' i domosed" (The Wanderer and the Stay-at-home; 1: 241-49).

10 Although Riga was not a foreign city in the strict sense -Latvia was at that time part of the Russian empire -it was sufficiently far from Petersburg for Batiushkov to consider it foreign.

11 Given the appearance of many figures from Greek and Roman mythology throughout Batiushkov's poetry, one can likely assume his familiarity with the basic corpus of myths. While it would be interesting and helpful to know whether Batiushkov was aware of a given myth, such knowledge can neither prove or disprove a reading based on archetypal material.

12 This meter might be seen as a personal variation of the elegiac distich, an unrhymed couplet consisting of one line each of hexameter and pentameter. Batiushkov rarely attempted stylizations of classical meters, and even more rarely dispensed with rhyme, which he felt was a constituent element of Russian prosody. On Batiushkov's attitude towards classical meters, see Sandomirskaia, "Iz istorii" 23-30. For a history of the elegiac distich in early-nineteenth-century Russian poetry, see Wachtel; Burgi 139-53; Scherr 127-34.

13 For another reading, see Serman 122. 14 Landysh refers to the European variety of lily of the valley, Convallaria majalis, whose

Latin names mean, respectively "in the valley" and "flowering in May" (Fasmer 457; Shosteck 166).

15 In the following discussion I rely on Sacks's use of archetypal imagery in his interpreta- tion of elegy's conventions, although in the context of Batiushkov's poem, I resist the critic's Lacanian leanings (1-37).

16 On Pushkin's marginal notes, also see Sandomirskaia, "K voprosu" 16-35; Semenko 487-91; Zubkov 336-39.

17 Semenko argues that Pushkin did just this in his 1814 poem, "K Batiushkovu" ("To Batiushkov"), which she mistakenly dates to 1815 and tendentiously calls a paraphrase of "Vyzdorovlenie" (490):

TbI nan, H xjilaHOIK KOCOIO EjBa cKoIieHHbIi, He ysBJI! . (Pushkin 1: 71).

You fell, and cut down by the cold scythe, nearly wilted! These lines, however, with their uncomplicated use of conventional images (kosa, vianut') are a direct borrowing from "Vospominanie 1807 goda," to which Pushkin refers in a footnote, and not a paraphrase of "Vyzdorovlenie."

18 My argument puts me in at least partial conflict with Pushkin and, after him, Ginzburg, who have famously characterized Batiushkov and Zhukovsky as "the school of harmonious precision" (see Ginzburg 19-50).

19 The image of a displaced plant was a resonant one for Batiushkov, who also deployed it in his 1815 essay, "Something About Morality, Based on Philosophy and Religion" ("Nechto o morali, osnovannoi na filosofii i religii"), in which he compares "human wisdom" to




"those tender plants that under their native sky thrive, bloom and adorn themselves with fruit; but in a foreign land, surrounded by unfamiliar plants, they wilt incessantly and lose their leaves in a puff of the lightest wind" (1: 154).

20 Serman has also discussed the subtle manipulation of aspect in this poem (122). 21 Serman remarks the incongruous, at least for the period, combination of the words sila

(force) and milyi (tender) (51-52). While he is certainly correct that the words come from distinct semantic spheres--classical bombast and sentimental pabulum respectively -I am not sure that such a combination would be so jarring by 1816, when the hegemony of the Karamzinians over the Shishkovites was already more or less certain. In any case, their internal rhyme attracts the words to one another.

22 On the article about Dante, see Batiushkov's letters to Gnedich from September 25 and November 7 of 1816 (2: 403, 411); on his plans to publish a critical anthology of Italian literature, see his letters to Gnedich from February 7 and March of 1817 (2: 421, 433- 434) and to Viazemsky from March 4, 1817 (2: 424-426). Also see the discussion of Batiushkov's interest in Italian literature in Varese 89-103.

23 Batiushkov mentions II Purgatorio twice in letters to Gnedich in 1817 (2: 447, 452); also see the quotation from II Purgatorio in his 1815 essay "A Journey to the Castle Cirey" ("Puteshestvie v zamok Sirei"; 1: 106).

24 Compare the opposite progression in the eighth poem of the cycle "Iz grecheskoi antologii," where the poet entices the beloved to voluptuousness with oaths (kliatvy) and kisses (potselui). In this case, the beloved wilts and pales as a result of passion (1: 412).

25 Contrast this present tense action with that of the first two lines, which contain an archetypal, constantly repeated action.

26 I must acknowledge both of SEEJ's anonymous readers for pointing me to this reading.

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Documents

Cycles of Love and Recovery: Batiushkov's "Vospominanie 1807 Goda" and "Vyzdorovlenie"