Various

“ 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 suffused 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 sadism of sarcasm, and was as well hated by the men as he was loved by the women. ”

“ 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 Hérédia. Whatever he may have derived from the Russian poets, it is clear that he shares Hérédia's precision and plastic perfection, his sonority and color. Voloshin's is a richly visual poetry. Indeed, he has earned his bread as a painter. Like Hérédia, he is a sonneteer of consummate skill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Modern Russian literature took its rise in the early nineteenth century. This was, more or less, the Russian counterpart of the Elizabethan Age. Energizing liberal influences were in the air; men's pulses were stirred by the Napoleonic drama; a national self-consciousness 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. ”

“ 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 starkness.
The peasant-hut is scowling; pewter eye agleam,
The lonely window stares out at the thaw and darkness. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 oeuvre 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 littérateurs of the first half of the nineteenth century, with which he was born, Baratynsky belonged to the kept classes. ”

“ 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 disarming,
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. . . . ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 æsthete'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 sensuousness, a keen feeling for life's cosmic context, and a dominating interest in melody. Tchaikovsky, who set many of his poems to music, likened Foeth to Beethoven. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 prideful 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. ”

“ Here, reversing the natural order, poetics came before poetry. The champions of modernism revolted against the traditional subservience 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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, blasé, incurious,
The moon beholds the earthly round. ”

“ 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? ”

“ A curious feature of Ivanov's thinking is a synthesis of Dionysos and Christ, which is characteristic of the Greek revival in Russia, and which is attested to in his profound treatise on "The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God." His exquisite 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Tyutchev was rediscovered by the moderns and hailed as the great fore-runner. They found in his mentality and sensibility, as well as in his technique, elements foreign to classic normalcy, and akin to their own anguished metaphysics and æsthetics. 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 originality of his poems consists in that both man's routine passions and nature's passionless routine are sensed in ultimate, cosmic terms. ”

“ The heterogeneity and complexity of the movement can hardly be exaggerated. Each writer is a law unto himself. 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 toward 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. ”

“ Their poetry is passionate metaphysics, groping toward religious ultimates. Spiritually deriving from Solovyov and Dostoyevsky, they are engaged with religion and, to a large extent, with the messianic rôle 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. ”

“ 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, æsthetic. Poems were chosen less for their representative quality than for their immediate worth and, of course, their ability to stand the test of translation. ”