Chapter VII: Prologue (3)

Thee, by Jordan’s limpid fountains,
Did the Eastern sunbeam bless?
Thee, on Lebanon’s great mountains,
Did the night-wind’s love caress?

Salem’s sons, with sorrow smitten,
As they twined thy leaves with care--
Sang they songs, in old times written?
Breathed they then a gentle prayer?

Is thy parent-palm yet living
Where the summer sun beats down,
Still to desert-travellers giving
Shade beneath her broad-leafed crown?

Or, thy faded palm-tree sighing,
Withered at thy parting, grieves,
While the thirsty dust is lying
Thickly on her yellow leaves?

Whose the reverent hand that bore thee
From thy country to this place?
Wept he often, bending o’er thee?
Have those hot tears left their trace?

Was he of God’s host the flower,
Shone his cheek with rapture bright,
Worthy heaven, like thee, each hour
In his God’s and comrades’ sight?

Branch from Salem, guard unsleeping
Of the golden ikon fair,
Watch before the holiest keeping,
Thou art weighed with silent care!

Beauteous twilight, lamp-beams o’er thee;
Full of peace and comfort, shine;
Ark and cross repose before thee,
Symbols of a love divine!

--Transl. by F. P. Marchant, in The Anglo-Russian Literary
Society, No. 16.

───────

Remember’st thou the day when we--
Late was the hour--were forced to part?
The night-gun boomed athwart the sea;
In painful silence beat each heart;
The lovely day found cloudy close;
A heavy mist the landscape palled;
And seemed it, when that shot arose,
An echo from the ocean called.

Alone I wander by the flood;
And when a gun booms in its might,
I think in pain how we once stood
Together on that parting night.
And as the mournful echoes roll,
Muffled, along the fluid walls,
From out the caverns of my soul
Death answeringly calls and calls.

--From W. R. Alger’s _The Poetry of the Orient_, 1865.

AT A BALL

How oft, surrounded by the motley crowd,
Mid whirling dance, and din of music loud,
I sink my senses in a dream,--
When phrased convention, polished fiction, fly
And all the men and women pass me by,--
Like masks their faces seem.

When my cold hands are met with colder still,
And callous city beauties touch me chill,
Bold but effete, with hollow cheer,
Then, to appearance wrapped in light and glare,
I cherish in my heart a fancy fair,--
Echoes a bygone year.

Forsaking all around, in heart and mind
I fly--a free, free bird--to things behind,
And see myself a child once more,
In places old and dear. The house o’erhead,--
The garden path I see,--the ruined shed,--
The pond well-weeded o’er:

And see across the pond the village lie,
From clustered roof the smoke is rising high,
The mists from meadows far away!
I enter a dark alley: evening red
Blinks through the shrubs, and underneath my tread
The dead leaves rustling stray.

Then a strange longing holds me,--yearning sore
For love,--my fancy’s love and nothing more:--
She was a dream and yet my love!
Her sky-blue eyes could flash with silver flame,
Her rosy smile with kindling sweetness came,
Like sunrise through the grove.

Thus, potent master of my fairyland,
Alone I pass my hours, and understand
The spell of those sweet days to save,
Unharmed, unstained by passion or by doubt,
Like some fair flowery islet, lying out
Where leaps the wild sea wave.

But suddenly a jar renews my sense,--
The happy, happy dream is frighted hence,
That gentle, uninvited guest.
And wild I long my steel-cold lines to fling
Upon the startled crowd, to smite and sting,
With anger from my breast.

--Transl. by Mrs. Charlotte Sidgwick, in Free Russia, vol. xi.,
No. 2.

DREAM

’Neath midday heat, in Dagestána’s Vale,
With leaden ball in breast I lifeless lay;
From a deep wound smoke rose upon the gale,
And drop by drop my life-blood ebbed away.

Alone I lay upon the sandy slopes;
The craggy cliffs around me crowded steep;
The sunlight burned upon their yellow tops,
And burned on me who slept no mortal sleep.

A dream I dreamed, and saw in sparkling bowers
An evening feast in my home,--far away,--
Where young and lovely women, crowned with flowers,
Conversed of me in accents light and gay.

But, in their happy talk not joining, one
Sat far apart, and plunged in thought she seemed;
And oh! the mystery knows God alone,--
This was the dream her young soul sadly dreamed.

She saw in vision Dagestána’s Vale,
Where on the slope a well-known body lay;
From the black wound smoke rose upon the gale,
And in cold streams the life-blood ebbed away.

--From John Pollen’s _Rhymes from the Russian_.

Aleksyéy Vasílevich Koltsóv. (1808-1842.)

Koltsóv was the son of a burgher of Vorónezh who dealt in hides and
tallow. He received very little training in his coarse and ignorant
family, and at ten years of age went to a school just long enough to
learn to read and write. After that his father put him to work at his
business, but the boy found enough time to read some Russian fairy
tales and a few novels. Dmítriev’s poems, which fell into his hands,
gave him a taste for poetry, and a “Russian Prosody,” given him by a
local book-dealer, for the first time taught him the harmony of verse
and its technical structure. He at once began to compose poems in
imitation of such as he could procure, while a seminarist whose
acquaintance he cultivated corrected and guided his first attempts. In
1831 Koltsóv went to Moscow where he was introduced to the critic
Byelínski, who at once recognised the unusual talent of the untutored
bard. After a second visit, in 1836, the two became staunch friends,
and under Byelínski’s influence Koltsóv produced the best of his
poems. He soon returned to the sordid surroundings of his native
place, and died shortly after of consumption. The striking
picturesqueness of his verse, which is based on the inimitable,
untranslatable diction of the peasant, has given rise to two
diametrically opposed views: according to the one, he is the popular
bard _par excellence_; according to the other, he has only made
artistic use of the peasant’s language for productions that are
eminently refined and, therefore, removed from the understanding of
the masses.

In English translation have appeared: _Season of Love_, _A Prayer_,
_Two Lives_, _First Love_, in _A Russian Poet_, by W. R. S. Ralston,
in Fortnightly Review, vol. vi., 1866; _The Abundant Harvest_, _The
Mower_, _The Peasant Musing_, in _Russian Idylls_, by W. R. S.
Ralston, in Contemporary Review, vol. xxiii., 1874; _The Ploughman’s
Song_, _The Peasant’s Misgivings_, _The Orphan_, _Love’s Invitation_,
in C. T. Wilson’s _Russian Lyrics_, 1887; _The Forest_, _Betrayed by a
Bride_, by I. H. Harrison, in The Anglo-Russian Literary Society, No.
16, and _A Winter Wooing_, _The Mower_, by Mrs. Rosa Newmarch, _ib._,
No. 30.

FIRST LOVE

Her whom I loved in early years
So well, so tenderly,--who filled
With a first passion’s hopes and fears
A heart which time has not yet stilled,--
Can I forget her? Day by day I strive
Her well-loved image from my mind to drive;
To find new dreams my old dreams to efface,
And let another love my early love replace.
But all in vain. I strive and strive, and yet
Whate’er I do I never can forget.
When in the silent hours of night I sleep,
She comes in dreams; once more I see her stand
Beside my couch; once more her accents steep
My suffering soul in bliss; once more her hand
In mine so gently, mournfully, she lays,
While her dark eyes on mine in sadness gaze.
Speed, kindly Time, my thoughts from her to sever,
Or set me free with her to live for ever.

--Transl. by W. R. S. Ralston, in Fortnightly Review, 1866 (vol.
vi.).

THE ABUNDANT HARVEST

I

With a rosy flame the dawn burns on high, but the fog still broods over
the face of the earth;
Till the day has caught the fire of the sun, and rolled up the mists
higher than the tops of the hills,
And has pressed them into a black cloud. The black cloud has begun to
knit its brows,--
Has begun to knit its brows, as if reflecting, as though musing upon
the place of its birth,
As though remembering how the wild winds will drive it before them
across the face of the wide world.
Then it arms itself with the hurricane and the thunderbolt, with the
lightning’s flash and the bow of the cloud.
It has taken up arms, and flown abroad, and struck its stroke, and
poured itself forth
In a torrent of tears, in a flood of rain, over the copious bosom of
the earth.

II

Now from heaven’s heights the dear sun looks down. The earth a
plenteous draught has drunk.
On their corn-fields and gardens, and meadows green, the rustic folk
cannot gaze enough.
For the grace of God these rustic folk have waited long with trembling
and prayer.
Together with the spring there have come to life the secret thoughts of
their quiet minds.
Thought the first: To pour into sacks the grain in the bins, and to set
their carts in order.
Thought the second: Forth from the village by night to drive their line
of carts.
Thought the third----When of this they thought, to God the Lord arose
the prayers.
With early dawn have they gone afield. There in handfuls heaped each
scatters the grain, furrows the soil with the ploughshare’s blade,
or rips it across with the harrow’s tooth.

III

I will go and gaze with gladdened eye at what God has sent to men for
their toil.
Above my waist the large-grained rye rises, then dreamily bends well
nigh to the ground.
On every side the corn, guest sent by God, greets with a smile the
joyful day.
Over it the breeze floats lustrously, streaming this way and that a
wave of gold.
Now in whole families the peasants commence their harvest, cutting
close to the roots the stalks of the lofty rye.
Into close-packed mows are the sheaves collected; from the lines of
carts sounds music all the night long.
On every side do the stacks erect their heads in the barnyards,--taking
up much room, like nobles of yore in their robes of state.

IV

The dear sun sees that the harvest is done; so colder gleam his last
autumnal rays.
But with warm light glows the peasant’s taper--burning before the
pictured form of the Mother of God.

--Transl. by W. R. S. Ralston, in The Contemporary Review, 1874
(vol. xxiii.).

THE FOREST

IN MEMORY OF PÚSHKIN

What does the silent wood
Dream of so pensively?
What is the sorrow that
Rides in its mystery?

Why dost thou, Knightly One,
Under its charm’s spell,
Head undefended
Hold ’gainst the wind-stroke,--

Standing there shamedly
Letting the storm-clouds
As they pass momently
Burst on thee savagely?

Thy helmet of green leaves
Bound fastly together
Is whirled from thee far off
And scattered to dust;

Thy boughs, as a mantle falls,
Lie all around thee;
Thou standest ashamedly,
Forced to submit thee.

Where hath vanished now
Speech that was mighty,
Strength that was prouder than
All a king’s bravery?

A night there hath been for thee,
A calm night within which
Thou heardest the nightingale’s
Deluge of song--

A day there hath been for thee
Triumphant, forgetless--
A friend and an enemy
Sought thy cool freshness;

’T was late in the evening,
And loud blew the storm-blast
Of him that was speaking
Unto thy detractor.

His wrath drove the clouds off
That round thee had gathered,
His love clung around thee
Like wind-gusts, but warmer.

Thou said’st to the other,
With voice that changed loudly,
“Go, fall back beyond me!
Go, leave me in peace!”

That voice of his dizzied,
As tone on tone sounded;
Thy very depths trembled,
Their stoutest trunks reeling.

Then, startled from silence,
To life thou awakest;
A whistling of tempest
Re-echoed throughout thee;

’T is the cry of the wood-sprite,
A witch’s note shrilling,
Until the loud rumble
Is borne away seaward.

Where now all thy glory
Of verdure and leaf?
Thou ’st put on dark clothing
Of rain-mist and grief;

Wild art thou and silent,
But, when the wind quickens,
Thy plaint sadly peals out
For him lost untimely.

And so, thou dark forest,
Life-long hast thou harassed
The Knightly, the Noble,
To combat for thee.

Against thee prevailed not
Those stronger than thou art;
Life’s autumn in him, though,
Seemed cruelly short.

The woods know in dreamland
That forces of evil
Their malice did spend on
Who least had deserved it:

From off Knightly shoulders
A head had been struck--
Not by a hero’s hand,
But by a recreant.

--Transl. by I. H. Harrison, in The Anglo-Russian Literary
Society, No. 16.

BETRAYED BY A BRIDE

Warm the summer sun in heaven,
But for me no heat is given!
Frozen is the very heart’s blood,
Through the bride that played me false.

Grief’s black pall hath fallen o’er me,
On my sorrow-bowed-down head:
Mortal anguish tears my soul, and
From this body would it break.

Neighbours asked have I to help me;
No man gave me aught but laughter;
Then, to the grave of either parent--
Neither heard the voice I called with.

Light then changed for me to darkness,
Senseless on the ground I lay,
Dull the night, until a tempest
Roused me from the tombstone cold.

Raged the storm--a horse I saddled,
Bent on riding--God knows where--
Life is heartless toil to laugh at,
Man’s fate evil alone to share.

--Transl. by I. H. Harrison, in The Anglo-Russian Literary
Society, No. 16.

THE MOWER

I can’t understand it,
I can’t make it out--
Yet why I can’t see
How it all came about?
In an unlucky day,
In an ill hour, alack,
I came into this world
With no shirt to my back!
Yet my grand-dad’s broad shoulders
Are mine, as you see;
And my mother’s deep chest;
In my cheeks flowing free
Burns the blood of my sire,
Like milk set afire
By dawn’s crimson light;
And my locks lie in clusters
As black as the night.
Yet, whatever I do--
Oh, it never goes right!
In an unlucky day,
In an ill hour, alack,
I came into this world
With no shirt to my back!

There’s darling Grunyúsha,
The Stárosta’s daughter--
Well, all through the spring
Did I patiently court her;
But he, the old churl,
Was finely put out!
To whom has he planned
That he ’ll marry the girl?
Oh, I can’t understand
How it all came about.
Does he think, the old ass,
I was after his money?
Let him stick to his brass
If he give me my honey--
’T is for her that I pine.
Oh, her face is bright
And as rosy as sunrise,
Her rounded cheeks mellow,
And the flash of her eyes
Might drive a young fellow
Clean out of his wits.

Ah, ’t was only last night
That she wept so for me,
But her tears were in vain.
For her dad said downright
That it never could be.
Shall I never again
From my sorrow be free?
Come, I ’ll buy a new scythe,
And I ’ll sharpen it well,
Aye, its edge I will whet,
Ere I bid a farewell
To my own native place.
Nay, Grúnya, don’t fret,
Don’t worry, dear maid.
Though keen is the blade,
I ’ll not cut myself down;
Good-bye, little town.
You, hard parent, good-bye!
To a land far away
Will the young mower hie.
Down the Don’s bank I ’ll stray
Till I reach the quayside,
Where the suburbs stand gay
And the Steppe stretches wide.
There, wherever I glance,
The tall plume-grass is blown.
O Steppe, thou, my own,
How thy fertile expanse
Lies green on each hand,
So free and so vast,
Till it reaches at last
To the Black Sea’s far strand!
I have come as thy guest,
But I come not alone,
I have brought thee a friend,
One, my closest and best.
See, my sharp scythe is here,
As myself he is dear.
Oh, from end to far end,
What a joy it will be
To wander with him
O’er the Steppe’s grassy sea!

Swish, work away shoulders;
Swing arms to and fro,
While cool on my face
The light southern winds blow,
Refreshing and rippling
The Steppe’s endless space.
Now, scythe, hum a song,
Flash in circles thy blade;
How the long grass-ranks fall
As the steel moves along!
O ye poor blossoms all,
Your heads are low-laid!
Ye must dry up and fade
In the straight swathes of grass
As my young heart, alas,
Withers up for a maid,--
And I languish for Grúnya!
I ’ll rake up the hay
Till so high my stack stands
That the wife of the Cossack
Must pay with both hands.
I shall sew up my pocket,
My treasure to guard,
Then, home I ’ll betake me,
To the Stárosta say:
“Though tears could not make thee
Give Grúnya away,
Thou art not so hard
But my good pieces may.”

--Transl. by Mrs. Rosa Newmarch, in The Anglo-Russian Literary
Society, No. 30.

Nikoláy Vasílevich Gógol (--Yanóvski). (1809-1852.)

Gógol was born in the Government of Poltáva, in Little-Russia, and was
educated at home up to his twelfth year. His father was a landed
proprietor of more than ordinary culture, who had a private theatre at
his estate, on which were played Little-Russian comedies, some his
own. His grandfather had held an important post with the Zaporóg
Cossacks, and being an excellent story-teller, had imbued his grandson
with the spirit of the recent Cossack past. At the Gymnasium, Gógol
evinced little interest in his studies, but devoted himself with
enthusiasm to drawing and to the theatre which he himself created for
his schoolmates. He even then composed some comedies and edited a
manuscript periodical. After graduation he went to St. Petersburg in
search of some occupation, but found himself unfit for any work. He
also tried literature, and in 1829 appeared his romantic tale _Hans
Küchelgarten_. It was so severely criticised that Gógol bought up the
whole edition and committed it to the flames. He busied himself with
the history of Little-Russia, and shortly after he wrote his beautiful
_Evenings on the Farm near the Dikánka_, in which the idealisation of
the past and of his native country is already tempered by realism.
These _Evenings_ at once made him known, and he became intimate with
Zhukóvski and Púshkin. He dreamed of devoting himself to history, but
prolonged labour was distasteful to him, and he did not go beyond
collecting material for his Little-Russian epic, _Tarás Búlba_. He
really obtained a professorship at the university, but his
professional career was a failure. Instead, he brought out a series of
admirable stories, such as _Old-fashioned Landed Proprietors_, _The
Nose_, _The Phaeton_, _The Mantle_, and his comedies, of which the
_Revizór_ has remained a classic in the Russian repertoire. He was now
completely launched into naturalism, and was at once recognized by the
critic Byelínski (see p. 205), as forming a new school in literature.
A few years later he gave to the world the first part of the _Dead
Souls_, in which he reached the highest point of his artistic
development. The plot of the story is simple: an unscrupulous
ex-official travels about the country to buy up peasants, that in
reality are dead but before the Government are still accounted alive
until the following census and are subject to taxes; by nominally
transferring them to his own estate, he is able to mortgage them at
the rate of three hundred roubles for each “soul.” This plot served
Gógol as a thread on which to string his different types of people. In
1836 Gógol went abroad, and slowly succumbed to a species of
melancholia, which showed itself in an increased tendency to
mysticism. This led him to burn the greater part of what was to form
the second book of the _Dead Souls_, and to practice
self-chastisement.

In English translation have appeared: _The Portrait_, in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine and in Living Age, 1847; _Home Life in Russia_, by
a Russian Noble (a literary forgery), 2 vols., London, 1854; _Cossack
Tales_, translated by G. Tolstoy, London, [1860]; _St. John’s Eve and
Other Stories_, translated by Miss I. F. Hapgood, New York, [1886],
and London, 1887; _Taras Bulba_, by I. F. Hapgood, New York, [1886],
(Lovell’s Library, No. 1016), and London, 1887; _Tchitchikoff’s
Journey; or, Dead Souls_, by I. F. Hapgood, New York, [1886], and
London, 1887; also _Dead Souls_, 1887 and 1888, and _Taras Bulba_,
1887 and 1888, published by Vizetelly; _A May Evening_, in
Cosmopolitan, vol. iii.; _The Cloak_, in Short Stories, 1891, and
(with _The Portrait_ and _Old-fashioned Farmers_) in _Wayward Dosia_,
by Gréville, Chicago, 1891; _Inspector General, or, Revizór_,
translated by A. A. Sykes, London, 1892, 1893; _The Inspector_, a
comedy, translated by T. Hart Davies, London, 1892; _On Christmas
Eve_, translated by F. Volkhovsky, in Free Russia, vol. x., No. 12;
_Marriage_ and _A Madman’s Diary_, in the _Humour of Russia_, by E. L.
Voynich, London and New York, 1895; extracts from _The Inspector_, and
from _Mirgorod_, translated by I. F. Hapgood, are given in the Library
of the World’s Best Literature.

THE DNIEPER

Wonderful is the Dnieper in quiet weather when softly and smoothly he hurries his full waters by forests and hills. He neither rustles, nor thunders. You look at him, and you do not know whether his majestic breadth is in motion, or not, and it looks as if he were all cast of glass and as if his blue, mirrored path, measureless in breadth and endless in length, meandered and wound over the wide green world. The hot sun then joyfully looks down from his height and plunges his beams in the coolness of the glassy waters, and the woods of the shore are brightly reflected therein. Green-locked ones! They crowd together with the field flowers to the brink, and bending over look into the water, and do not get tired looking at their bright image, and smile to it, and greet it, shaking their branches. They dare not look into the middle of the Dnieper; none but the sun and the blue sky look upon it; rarely a bird flies to the middle of the Dnieper. Proud one! There is not a river in the world like him.

Wonderful, too, is the Dnieper in a warm summer night, when all is asleep,--man, and beast, and bird,--and God alone majestically surveys heaven and earth and majestically waves His garment. From the garment fall stars; stars burn and gleam over the world, and all together are reflected in the Dnieper. The Dnieper holds them all in his murky lap; not one of them will escape him, unless it be dimmed in heaven. The black forest, weighted down by sleeping ravens, and anciently disrupted mountains hang down over him and attempt to cover him with their long shadows. In vain! There is nothing in the world that could cover the Dnieper. Ever blue, he spreads his gentle floods in the night as in the day, and may be seen as far as the human eye can see. Proceeding in his voluptuous course and hugging the shore in the coolness of the night, he leaves behind him a silvery streak which flashes like the blade of a Damascus sabre, but the blue one again falls asleep. Even then the Dnieper is wonderful, and there is no river like him in the whole world!

But when the grey clouds pass like mountains over the sky, the black forest shakes to its roots, the oaks crack, and the lightnings, piercing through the clouds, at once illumine the whole world,--then the Dnieper is terrible! The mounds of water thunder as they beat against the mountains, and with a splash and groan they rush back, and weep, and lose themselves in the distance. Thus grieves an old Cossack mother as she leads her son to the army: in his best spirits and boldly he rides forth on his black charger, his arms akimbo, his cap poised jauntily; but she sobs and runs after him, seizes him by his stirrup, catches his bridle, and wrings her hands, and is dissolved in bitter tears.

THE REVIZÓR