Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Irina Reyfman (snow like ashes .TXT) 📖

attracted greater fame in his eight-year endeavor by having described the siege of Kazan in a meter suited to epic.110 I am not surprised that the ancient three-cornered hat fitted to Virgil was cut in the style of Lomonosov, but I would have preferred Homer to appear among us not in iambs but in feet similar to his hexameters; and Kostrov, albeit a translator rather than a poet, would have inaugurated an epoch in the history of our prosody, since he would have advanced the progress of poetry itself by an entire generation.111

“But Lomonosov and Sumarokov were not the only ones to halt Russian versification. Trediakovsky, that tireless workhorse, contributed not a little to it with his Tilemakhida. It is very difficult at present to give an example of new versification, since models of good and bad prosody have put down deep roots. Parnassus is surrounded by iambs, and rhymes stand guard everywhere. If anyone took it into his head to write in dactyls, Trediakovsky was immediately assigned as mentor, and the most beautiful child long remained ugly in appearance until such time as a Milton, Shakespeare, or Voltaire were born. That is when Trediakovsky will be dug out from a grave overgrown with the moss of neglect, and good lines will be found in Tilemakhida and set as an example.112

“An ear that has grown accustomed to rhyme will for a long time be an impediment to a beneficial change in verse form. After a long time hearing concordant endings in verse lines, unrhyming will seem crude, rough, and dissonant. So shall it be for as long the French language is in greater use in Russia than other languages. Our senses, like a soft and young tree, can be cultivated to be straight or crooked, as one wishes. Moreover, in a poem, as in all things, a fashion can dominate and if there is at least something natural, then that will be accepted without contradiction. But everything fashionable is ephemeral, especially in poetry. An external shine can become rusty, while genuine beauty will never fade. Homer, Virgil, Milton, Racine, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Tasso, and many others will be read for as long as the human race has not been destroyed.

“I consider it unnecessary to converse with you about the different verse forms natural to the Russian language. What the iamb, trochee, dactyl, or anapest are everyone knows who has even the slightest understanding of the rules of versification. But what would not be superfluous is if I were to give sufficient examples of the different types. But my ability and insight are limited. If my advice were able to do anything then I would say that Russian, indeed even the Russian language, would be greatly enriched if translations in verse were not always into iambs. It would be considerably more suitable to the epic poem if a translation of the Henriade were not in iambs, and unrhymed iambs are worse than prose.”113

All of the above my feasting companion uttered in one breath and so fluently that I did not have a chance to voice any objections although I had to say quite a lot of something or other in defense of iambs and all those who wrote in them.

“I myself,” he continued, “followed the infectious example and composed verse in iambs, but they were odes. Here is a remaining fragment of one of them, all the others were consigned to burn in a fire; and indeed the very same fate that affected her sisters awaits the remaining bit. In Moscow nobody wanted to publish it for two reasons: the first was that the sense in the verse was unclear and many of the lines were hackwork; the second that the subject of the poem was inapplicable to our country. I am now going to Petersburg to ask about its publication, hoping, like a tender father of his little child, that because of the second reason for which it wasn’t published in Moscow, they will look indulgently at the first. If it’s no trouble to you to read some stanzas,” he said to me as he handed over a sheet.—I unfolded it and read the following: Liberty … Ode … “On account of the title alone they refused me the publication of this poem. But I remember very well that in the Instruction on the Establishment of a New Law Code, in speaking about liberty, it is said: ‘liberty ought to be called the fact that all must obey the same laws.’ It follows that it is appropriate to speak about liberty in our country.”114

1

O! gift of heaven beneficent,

Originator of all great deeds,

O liberty, liberty, gift munificent,

Allow a slave to hymn as needs.

With ardor fill my heart replete,

The dark of slavery will to light retreat

When by your muscles strong is stirred,

That Tell and Brutus may yet arise

That kings enthroned in power’s guise

Will by your voice be perturbèd.

“This stanza has been faulted for two reasons; for the verse ‘The dark of slavery will to light retreat.’ It is stilted and hard to utter because of the frequent repetition of the letter T and because of the frequent collocation of consonantal letters, bstva t’mu pretv—for ten consonants there are three vowels, yet in the Russian language it is just as possible as in Italian to write harmoniously…. Agreed … although others considered this line to be successful, finding in the roughness of the verse an evocative expression of the difficulty of the very act. And here is another: ‘That kings will by your voice be perturbèd.’ To wish a Tsar perturbation is the same as wishing him ill; consequently…. But I do not want to bore you with all the comments made on my verses. Many of them, I admit, were fair. Allow me to be your reader.

2

I came into the world, and you with me….

Let us go past this stanza. Here is its content: Man is free in every way at birth….

3

What hindrance is