How do we know that we have really, truly
and irreversibly reached "middle age"? That, as Joseph Brodsky put it,
"we have gone over half," no matter what our physical age? On the
surface of which cold and hard blade does the notion sink into our
hearts? Is it by the hardening of the membranes of our social cells,
which suddenly absorb so much more selectively of books and music, ideas
and people? Or is it in suddenly knowing people who are dead—more and
more every year?
As the living markers of our lives tumble down and
become memories, of which we are increasingly sole custodians, what of
the piercing sadness of those increasingly frequent mornings when the
irretrievably departed faces and places, words and gestures flood the
leaky boats of our minds and it's a wonder we manage to launch ourselves
to work?
Whatever the symptoms, so much needs to be thought
through, adjusted to and coped with, and as always we look to great art
for companionship and solace and perhaps even a guideline or two.
In this quest we must not overlook a small gem:
"Elegia" (Elegy), a short poem by Russia's greatest poet, Alexander
Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837).
The key creator of modern literary Russian, Pushkin
is the author of such superb long poems as "The Prisoner of Caucasus,"
"The Gypsies," "The Fountain of Bakhchisaray," "The Bronze Horseman"
and, of course, the glorious "novel in verse" "Eugene Onegin." He has
also given us the lean prose, golden and translucent like Baltic Sea
amber, of "The Captain's Daughter," "The Tales of Belkin" and "The Queen
of Spades." He wrote the drama "Boris Godunov," as well as "Mozart and
Salieri," "The Miserly Knight," "The Stone Guest" and "A Feast During
the Plague," the last four compressed by the enormous weight of
Pushkin's talent into the diamonds of one-act "little tragedies."
But to the Russians Pushkin is first and foremost
the author of short lyrical poems, many known by heart by every educated
Russian. Almost two centuries later, they are still the brightest stars
in the firmament of Russian belle-lettres.
In Vladimir Nabokov's superb autobiographical novel, "The Gift," the
main character "fed on Pushkin" and "inhaled Pushkin." "The reader of
Pushkin has the capacity of his lungs enlarged," Nabokov wrote.
Written on Sept. 8, 1830—autumn being Pushkin's
favorite season, to which he penned several odes and during which he was
often almost inhumanely productive, usually lying in bed till noon,
filling a notebook propped on his knees—"Elegia" was created at the very
end of the six-year period between 1824 and 1830 in which he wrote his
finest lyrical poetry. (In later years Pushkin largely shifted to prose
and histories). Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, the author of the
finest one-volume history of Russian literature from the 10th to early
20th century, called these short poems "a body of lyric verse
unapproached in Russian and unsurpassed in any poetry." Their beauty,
Svyatopolk-Mirsky continued, is austere, largely free from metaphor or
imagery—a classic "Greek beauty" that depended so much on what's left
unsaid as on what is said, and "on choice of words, on the adequacy of
rhythm and intonation," and "on the complex texture of sound—a wonderful
alliteratio Pushkiniana, so elusive and so all-conditioning."
The two sestets (six-line stanzas) of "Elegia" are
meticulously metered and rhymed. The meter is an iambic pentameter: five
rhythmically stressed syllables on each line, with stress on the second
syllable. The rhyme scheme is AABBCC, with feminine rhymes (the rhymed
syllables are penultimate on the line) alternating with masculine ones
at the end of the line.
None of the existing translations is anywhere near
the original. So here's my attempt at what Nabokov called a "lexical,"
or literal translation.
Thirty-one years old at the time—and, by
contemporary life expectancy, having gone well "over half"—Pushkin
begins with a merciless probing of middle-age angst:
The burnt-out gaiety of reckless years
Lies heavy on me like a bleary hangover.
But, like wine, the sadness of the bygone days
In my soul grows stronger the older it is.
My path is bleak. Labor and sorrow is promised me
By the future's churning sea.
Is this all? Wouldn't, then, death be welcome, or at least, unobjectionable? Not quite.
But I don't want, o my friends, to die;
In the case of Pushkin, who was notoriously and
recklessly brave in duels and, at least once, on a battlefield in the
Caucasus, the desire to live is far more than the fear of death. There
follows a magical line: "Greek," in Svyatopolk-Mirsky's sense of the
word, but not only in its laconic austerity but also in its bottomless
oracular depth:
I want to live to think and to suffer.
Then, on the reader still despairing over the first
stanza, Pushkin bestows what is almost certainly among the shortest and
most powerful inventory of life's immutable treasures penned by a poet:
I know there shall be enjoyments for me
Amid sorrows, cares and anxieties:
At times I again will be intoxicated by harmony,
Weep over my fantasy's creation,
And perhaps on my sad sunset
Love will shine its farewell smile.
In the six years he had left to live (Pushkin was
mortally wounded in a duel in January 1837), the poet would again
unflinchingly confront the reality of the human condition yet continue
to hold out the "blessings" still available to him (and us). "There is
no happiness on earth yet there is peace and freedom," he wrote in "'Tis
time, my friend, 'tis time" (1834). Whether one was subject to the
despotism of the czar (in Russia) or the vagaries of the crowd's moods
(in Western democracies), one was still able to "admire the divine
beauties of Nature and to feel one's soul melt in the glow of man's
inspired design" ("From Pindemonte," 1836, translated by Nabokov).
But there would never be another poem like
"Elegia"—filled as beautifully with so concentrated a dose of bitter
truth, the courage to meet it head-on, and the hope that art, work and
love make life worth our while even on the downslope.
Thank you, Alexander Sergeyevich.
Mr.Leon Aron is
a resident scholar and director of Russian Studies at the American
Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is "Roads to the Temple:
Truth, Memory, Ideas and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution,
1987-1991" (Yale University Press, 2012).
