[In the following essay, Leighton discusses Bestuzhev's poetry as a representation of the technical and aesthetic standards of Russia's Golden Age.]

‘Marlinsky is out of fashion these days’, recalled Turgenev in the 1870s, ‘no one reads him and his name is even sneered at; but in the thirties he thundered forth like no one else … put his stamp on the entire generation contemporary to him.’¹ A fierce literary critic on behalf of Romanticism in Russia, a glamorous revolutionary of the ill-fated Decembrist movement, the author of a brilliant variety of ultra-Romantic prose tales—these are the things for which Aleksandr Bestuzhev (pseudonym Marlinsky) is remembered today. But if he should be most properly remembered for these other achievements, he is also well worth modern scrutiny as a lyric poet. As one of those poets of Russia's Golden Age whose output D. S. Mirsky considered ‘perfect even when it is minor poetry’,² he is well worth consideration for his own sake. Moreover, in his technical practice, in his choice of verse genres, and in his Romantic attitudes, Marlinsky strikes a poetic stance which is remarkably apt as an illustration of the verse standards of his day. He himself once remarked ‘I am a true microcosm’,³ and his poetry stands as an excellent representation of the artistic problems faced by the poets of one of the most critical stages in the development of Russian poetry.

As a soldier, an exile, and a persecuted Decembrist, Marlinsky led a nomadic life, and thus the heritage he left was somewhat chaotic. It was only after over a century of painstaking scholarship that it became possible, in this decade, to publish the carefully compiled and edited Biblioteka poeta edition of his poetry.⁴ During his career as a poet, from 1816 to 1838, Marlinsky wrote 44 original lyric poems and translated, imitated, or rendered 16 poems from French, German, Persian, Turkish and Yakut (but not, surprisingly, from English, the foreign language he knew best and the literature he loved most). Although five poems of this basic group (three of them translations) were written anonymously, they have been convincingly ascribed to his authorship.⁵ To this basic group of sixty lyric poems must be added twenty ‘sets’ of epigraphs and verse passages in prose contexts. Although it is possible to break this count down to 27 separate verse passages and 22 epigraphs, it is best to consider them as sets, especially since they cannot always be extracted from their contexts without disrupting their unity. A third and final group of poems is composed of five agitatsionnyye and seven podblyudnyye songs which Marlinsky wrote in collaboration with his closest literary friend, Kondratiy Ryleyev.⁶

Marlinsky's value as a microcosm of his age is particularly evinced in his choice of verse genres. In his early poetry there can be found a number of ventures in traditional neo-classical genres—odes, satires, burlesques, epigrams, and even charades. Coincident with these genres are the poems in the ‘sentimental-elegiac’ vein of Karamzin—elegies, love poems, and the so-called ‘friendly messages’ of the Arzamas school. In the course of his development Marlinsky was influenced by the ‘civic-Decembrist’ movement, and the result is not only the revolutionary songs, but also patriotic verses on historical themes, including a quite unusual duma.⁷ It was not until the period of his Siberian exile (1827-30), however, that Marlinsky began to write mature and Romantic poetry. Among the Romantic genres he cultivated are his excellent love lyrics, especially a series of translations from Goethe, his plaints from exile on the theme of individual isolation, his nature poems, and his poetry of ‘Death and the Grave’. The most unusual genres Marlinsky practised—nay, invented—are his folk poems, comprising a beautiful Yakut ballad and, of particular interest, the fierce Caucasian war chants he wrote just before his tragic death.⁸ And finally, there are the many epigraphs and sets of verse passages, the latter a variety of ventures ranging from sentimental love elegies and epistolary declarations to patriotic rhetoric.

In terms of linear production Marlinsky's metric practice is also a reflection of the general standards of his day. During his 22 years of poetic creativity he wrote a total of 4529 lines, of which 3624 lines are iambic, 375 trochaic, 283 ternary, and 247 lines are written in folk or musical rhythms, in cadences, or in inter-linear metric mixtures. Of this total count, 1920 lines belong to the Romantic verse tale, Andrey, knyaz' Pereyaslavskiy, and the 1858 iambic lines of this non-lyric genre actually exceed the 1766 iambic lines of his lyric poetry. The preponderance of iambic lines (about 80٪), largely in iambic tetrametre, is a clear adherence to contemporary preferences, and in this he is quite close to Pushkin (84٪) and Baratynsky (195 poems in iambic metre of a total of 222 poems).⁹ His trochaic lines amount to about 8٪ of his work, as compared to Pushkin's 10.6٪ and Denis Davydov's 23٪:¹⁰ Pushkin is considered to be typical of the general standard and Davydov well above the norm. His 6.5٪ ternary usage is again quite typical for his time. Pushkin's ternary usage (1.5٪) was exceptionally low.¹¹

Like most contemporary poets, Marlinsky began his career with iambic lines, and only later turned to trochees and ternaries. Excluding the revolutionary songs written with Ryleyev, only three of his first 31 lyric poems, written in his first twelve years, are in a metre other than iambic. If anything, he is conservative on this point. The fact that Marlinsky devoted his ternary lines largely to folk poetry indicates that he shared the general belief of his contemporaries that they were best suited to this genre. Lermontov was the first to use ternary metres significantly in other ways, and not until Tyutchev, the Parnassians, and the civic poets of the mid-nineteenth century did they really come into their own. Marlinsky differs from his contemporaries in his metric practice in that no other poet of his time made such a literal and unimaginative use of syllabo-accentual versification techniques in his early poetry or, conversely, made such strikingly unusual metric experiments in his later poetry.

A clear indication of Marlinsky's initially pedestrian understanding of syllabo-accentual versification is the low number of pyrrhic feet in his early poems. It was not until 1823 or 1824 that he seems to have realised that poetry is dependent at least as much upon variety as unity, and really not until 1827 or 1828 that he introduced more variety into his metric patterns by omitting stresses more liberally and with more ingenuity. The rhythmic monotony of his early poems is both perceptible and annoying. In the poem “Mikhail Tverskoy” (1824), for example, 148 of the total of 180 iambic feet are determinedly honoured with stress, an astonishingly high rate of honour. Of the poem's 45 four-foot lines, only two have as many as two omissions of stress, only 29 omit one of the four possible stresses, and 14 lines are rigidly honoured with all four stresses. The rhythm of the poem is all the more monotonous in that of the ten pairs of rhymed lines of the first stanza—largely in couplets—seven share identical stress patterns. Added to all these sins is an obvious lack of sense of degree of stress that mars much of the early poetry. Clearly, like Lomonosov, the young Marlinsky understood the rules of syllabo-accentual versification all too literally.¹²

A curious fact: whereas Marlinsky undoubtedly learned his rules of versification from Lomonosov, his early diction is clearly Karamzinian. More than one scholar has noted that Marlinsky came to literature as a disciple of Karamzin, and thus his first poems are exactly what we should expect from a young man of his time and place. The first poem in the Biblioteka poeta edition, for example, begins with the line: ‘Bliz stana yunosha prekrasnyy’, and contains such other affectedly sentimental lines as: ‘Yego volnystymi vlasami / Vecherniy veterok igral’ and ‘Togda vy, veterki, letite / K lyubeznoy serdtsu s vest′yu sey’. The second poem, “Sebe lyubeznogo ishchu,” is also noticeably Karamzinian. Such lines as ‘S streloy smeyotsya Kupidon’ and ‘Mog plakat′ v nedrakh sladostrast′ya’, and such phrases as ‘v plamennykh ochakh’, ‘perly slyoz’, and ‘na list′yakh roz’, as well as the last melodramatic line: ‘Ili umru’, are well in the sentimental-elegiac tradition of Karamzin and his successors. Moreover, in his ventures in this genre Marlinsky is so transparently imitative of current mode that he has all the faults and none of the charm of Karamzin, Zhukovsky, or V. L. Pushkin.

Diction is not the only weakness in Marlinsky's early poetry. He was often hard put to reconcile his syntax with metric demands, and frequently forced an unnatural stress. In the first of two verse passages from early love letters, “Iz pis'ma k S. V. Savitskoy” (1816 or 1817), one line is particularly awkward in the attempt to provide a rhyme for stopóy by forcing a shift to an unnatural stress: ‘Na vse okréstnosti brosáyete vzor svóy’. A frequent compromise in syntax is also to be found in Marlinsky's resort to short-form adjectives for the sake of metric pattern, as in the line from “Sebe lyubeznogo ishchu”: ‘Kotory tmyat prelestny vzory’. The attributive use of short-form adjectives was still within the province of poetic licence in the early 19th century, but the practice had been dwindling ever since Lomonosov began avoiding it in the mid-eighteenth century. It is a common feature of the poetry of Derzhavin, but even that grammatically anarchic eccentric subordinated the usage to stylistic effect in his later years. The young Zhukovsky resorted to the practice in his first poems and quickly abandoned it, again except for stylistic effect. More comparable to Marlinsky would be Pushkin or Yazykov, and it can be found that they both used it in very early poems and then quickly abandoned it.¹³ Marlinsky, on the other hand, employed it for more than a decade with no other apparent intent than to force agreement between syntax and metre. Moreover, while ‘serdechny chuvstva,’ ‘zvuchny struny,’ and ‘granitnu tsep’ may be accepted as ‘poetic’ epithets of the early 19th-century, ‘russki uzy’ must have ground upon the ear.

Marlinsky should not be treated too harshly for his early shortcomings, however. His contemporaries for the most part had ample opportunity to destroy or polish their early poetry. Marlinsky's sudden death denied him this grace. Moreover, there are also indications of talent in his early poems. As a critic and as a person he possessed a sardonic wit, and he expressed it well in his poetry. “K nekotorym poetam” (1819), a satire in the neo-classical vein, is a sustained effort directed against the slavish imitation of foreign literature, an attack on the contemporary lack of appreciation for such poets as Derzhavin, Karamzin and Zhukovsky. Of particular promise for its wit is “Epigramma na Zhukovskogo” (1824), an expression of Decembrist dissatisfaction with the older poet's court status.¹⁴ Written in six iambic lines of mixed lengths with an ABABBA rhyme scheme (indicative of Marlinsky's decreased dependence on couplets), the epigram accuses Zhukovsky of being a lackey and ends with the strikingly contrastive and effective two-foot line: ‘Bédnyy pevéts!’, the inversion drawing immediate attention to the line, to its semantic intent, and to its play on the title of one of Zhukovsky's more popular poems of the day.

It was under the influence of Ryleyev that Marlinsky developed as a poet. This is particularly evident in the revolutionary songs, and it also becomes apparent in his poetry of the mid-twenties on civic-Decembrist themes. The poem “Mikhail Tverskoy,” actually a duma similar to Ryleyev's own duma of the same title, is a case in point, despite its metric shortcomings. Based on Karamzin's treatment of the execution of Mikhail Yaroslavovich, Prince of Tver', by the Tatar Khan in 1318 it is an outright glorification of the Russian past, and it has all the over- and undertones of the patriotic nationalism espoused by the early Russian civic poets. Treating as it does of a martyred Russian and an equally martyred Rus', such lines as: ‘V stolitse khishchnykh, zlobnykh khanov / Rossii yarostnykh tiranov,’ are especially well suited to tone and theme. The use of historical grammatical forms like ‘yunyye dni’, ‘vlasy’, ‘glavy’, and ‘mladoy’ is much more effective to a theme of Slavic antiquity than to the sentimental-elegiac poems.

A far finer civic poem is Marlinsky's treatment of Aleksandr Nevsky in a verse passage which forms part of an early prose work, “Listok iz dnevnika gvardeyskogo ofitsera” (1821). It reveals an increasing appreciation of euphony (e.g. ‘Dlya zhazhdushchey dushi moyey’), and in general the more flexible rhythm, skilful use of repetition, smoother syntax and blending of words, and a more sophisticated stanzaic articulation heighten the poem's artistic value. All of these features are well illustrated by this patriotic passage:

I dali ryцari kribit,
I plin, i кrоvs, i trup ik slid.
I nit оt gibili spasinsy
Pоsiridi bizbriznyk lsdоv,
I аliкsandr, кaк angil msinsy,
Slidil, razil, gubil vragоv …(15)

The group of podblyudnyye and agitatsionnyye songs are an expression of Decembrist civicism and political protest. The form had only recently been introduced to Russian literature. At the turn of the century Denis Davydov wrote four quite sharp political fables and satires, including Orlitsa, turukhtan i teterev (1804) which caused him to be posted to a remote military station. Pushkin's political verses, particularly ‘Noël.’ Ura! and Kinzhal, are important contributions to this tradition. P. A. Katenin's Otechestvo nashe stradayet, of which only a fragment has survived, Prince Vyazemsky's Ay da tsar', and Yazykov's Svobody gordoy vdokhnoven'ye (still incorrectly ascribed to Ryleyev in The Oxford Book of Russian Verse)¹⁶ are only three of the many political-revolutionary poems which, along with the songs of Marlinsky and Ryleyev, laid the foundation of a tradition so important to Russian literature.

The revolutionary songs were all written between 1823 and 1825 (the period in which Marlinsky and Ryleyev collaborated most closely in their Decembrist activities), and they quickly became popular accompaniments to champagne and oyster banquets. The agitation songs were first published by Aleksandr Herzen in 1859; most of the podblyudnyye songs, however, were lost until 1950 when copies were found in the Ostaf'yevsky archive of P. A. Vyazemsky.¹⁷ Soviet scholars have done a great deal of excellent work in the reconstruction of the precise form of these songs from a variety of manuscripts and hand-written copies. It has never been satisfactorily established which songs, or passages from the songs, were written by Marlinsky.¹⁸ The most notable feature of the songs is their unusual metric schemes. The Soviet scholar N. I. Mordovchenko has noted that the two authors employed ‘available peasant, soldier, and urban folk forms to which they joined their political themes of the day’,¹⁹ and most Soviet scholars agree with this. But there is also evidence, both firm and fleeting, of syllabo-accentual mixtures, and thus it is quite important that the two poets were collaborating on an aesthetic, as well as a political experiment. The stanzas of the first two of the five agitation songs, for example, are articulated on the basis of two-foot anapests counterpointed by one-foot trochees. Thus, the first song begins with these stanzas:

Ák, gdi té оstrоvá,
Gdi rastét tryns-travá,
                                                            Brátцy!
Gdi citáyt Rusélli
I lityt pоd pоstéls
                                                            Svytцy.

The second song has an identical stanzaic construction:

Ty sкazi, gоvоri,
Kaк v Rоssii цari
                                        ppávyt.
Ty sкazi pоsкоréj,
Kaк v Rоssii цaréj
                                                  Dávyt.

Both songs maintain their metric pattern until the very last line: ‘Khódit v kázhdyy kabák’ and ‘Bédnym lyúdyam pomóg’, respectively. It could be that these deliberate disruptions of harmony are meant to be raucous finales to essentially raucous songs. The first song is a ringing satire on Petersburg and the court, including even Bestuzhev-dragun, who at that time was a brilliant young adjutant at the Winter Palace. The second is a jeer at autocratic rule-by-assassination.

The third song, “Akh, toshno mne,” is written to the tune of a popular romance of the time, and it is an attack on the banality and brutality of Russian autocracy. The principles which unite each of its eighteen stanzas are quite unique. The first two lines are always rhymed with each other and, occasionally, with the fifth and last line. Lines three and four, both shorter than the others, are also always rhymed, and they almost inevitably have the same metric pattern (— —′—). And finally, while lines one, two, and five do not have consistent metric patterns, they are rough anapestic-trochaic mixtures and usually two, occasionally all three, will agree in metric pattern. Stanzas six and seven are apt illustrations of these articulatory principles:

а tipérs gоspоdá
Grábyt nás biz stydá,
          I оbmánоm
          Ik кarmánоm
Stála nása mоsná.
Oni кózu s nás dirýt,
My pоséim—оni znýt.
          Oni vóry,
          Zivоdëry,
Kaк piyvкi, кróvs sоsýt.

The fourth song is again a mixture of metres, each of its fourteen stanzas being comprised of a satiric couplet in trochees and ending with a common refrain in folk rhythm:

Társ nas—némiц rýssкij
Nósit mýndir ýzкij.
аj da цárs, aj da цárs,
Pravоslávnyj gоsudárs!(20)

The podblyudnyye songs, seven in all, are either composed of a few long lines or many short lines, and they are all in folk rhythm. In contrast to the politically sophisticated agitation songs, their appeal is to soldier and peasant. The term podblyudnyye—literally ‘under saucer’—stems from a Novgorodian folk custom which Marlinsky describes in his prose tale “Strashnoye gadan'ye” (1830): ‘A cock, placed in a circle along the outer edge of which were sprinkled little heaps of oats and barley with rings buried in them, proclaimed the destined marriage of the youth or maiden being divined by honouring one or another of the heaps with a peck … After placing a saucer over a cup in which were placed pieces of sanctified bread, the maidens' rings, and coals, whose significance I was never able to ascertain, everyone began singing podblyudnyye songs, that lottery of fate and its verdicts.’²¹ The colloquial appeal of the songs is indicated by their use of such jargon as ‘plut’, ‘topor’, ‘na knyaz′kov-soplyakov’, and ‘peki pirogi’. Their raucous tone is reinforced by heavy use of such exclamations as ‘akh!’, ‘ay da tsar′’, and ‘toshno tak, chto oy, oy, oy!’ They deal with subjects having more of a folk appeal—maidens, merchants, soldierly gossip, and even a fable of two rainbows.

It is not until the period of Marlinsky's exile to Siberia following the failure of the Decembrist revolt, during the years from 1827 to 1829, that a totally new artistic level, a mature Romantic creativity, can be found in his poetry. His stay in Siberia was one of intense scholarly and poetic creativity, and one of the finest results of the latter is his series of renderings of love poetry from Goethe's West-Östlicher Divan.²² To this series belong “Yunost'” (“podrazhaniye Gete”), “Iz Gafiza, Iz Gete” (“s persidskogo”), “Iz Gete” (“podrazhaniye”), “Zyuleyka, S persidskogo,” “Vsegda i vezde,” and “Magnit” (all 1828). Usually composed of stanzas of four, six, or eight lines, with none longer than two six-line stanzas, they are written in trochees or iambs, with the exception of the unusual “Magnit,” composed of two truncated dactylic couplets (′— —′— —′). Without exception they are remarkable for their clarity and simplicity, each expressing its thought with brevity.

Thus, “Iz Gete” (“podrazhaniye”) is composed of two four-line stanzas with alternating rhyme scheme, the first expressing the brilliance and gaiety of a ball, the second providing this intimate contrast:

Nо v mraкi i v tisi
Tiby, ni vidy, nakоzu y
Pо zaru divstvinnоj dusi,
Pо sladкоj nigi pоцiluy.

Closely related to these responses to Goethe is the original poem “Yey” (also 1828), the first four of its eight iambic lines offering proof:

Kоgda mоij lanitоj vnimly
Pylaniy tvоik lanit,
Mni radоsts nibisa i zimly
I zоlоtit i siribrit …

It may be noted here that while the odd lines are almost fully honoured with stress, the even lines, especially line four with its double masculine paeon, are more free. Full cadence is thus alternated with rapid rhythm to lend a quick-shifting pace to the stanza. To this is added the metric, syntactic, and semantic repetition of line four, as well as the entire poem's excellent alliteration.

More in keeping with Marlinsky's fate and his milieu is a new contemplative, even religious, tone in his poetry. For it is at this stage of his life that we find a post-Zhukovsky treatment of the pre-Romantic theme of death and the grave. The first hint of this new quality appears in 1828 in the poem “Nadpis′ nad mogiloy Mikhalevykh v Yakutskom monastyre.” Indicative of theme and tone are the lines:

Scastlivцy! Zdiss i tam ni znali vy razluкi,
Ni znali pirizits rоdnyk tyzëlоj muкi.(23)

Further indication of Marlinsky's contemplative attitude, as well as a religious flavour, is to be found in the brief and sudden consideration of the final line: ‘I vse my svidimsya v ob′yatiyakh tvortsa.’ (‘And we shall all be reunited in the arms of the creator’). Marlinsky's concept of death and the grave is quite different from that of Zhukovsky, who introduced into Russian literature the melancholy tone and pastoral descriptiveness of the German and English Romantics and pre-Romantics, particularly of Gray's Elegy. He refuses to be passive before the mystery of death and he actually defies the grave, thus dissociating himself from Zhukovsky's less passionate attitude. Perhaps this, as well as the contemplative tone and metaphysical pondering of Marlinsky's poetry on the theme, is best illustrated by this passage from “Cherep” (1828):

Gdi z dоblisti? Otdaj mni grоba dans,
Pоznanij svitlyk tëmnyj vistniк!
Ty ls bytiy tainstvinnay grans?
Ils duk mоj—vicnоsti rоvisniк?

From the theme of Death and the Grave Marlinsky turned to the enigma of his own fate, first as a recurring motif, then as a theme which came to dominate his poetic creativity. The two themes are closely related—both are contemplative and both have an introspective concern with death and eternity. But where the first is religious, sometimes morbid, even daemonic, the second becomes more and more the plaint of an isolated human being yearning desperately for ‘homeland and freedom’. The plaint of exile first appears as a motif in 1829, in the poem “V den' imenin.” A promise to appear cheerful for the sake of the addressee's name day, it is nevertheless plaintive in tone, as in the opening lines: ‘Nevol′nyy gost′ v krayu chuzhbiny, / Zabyvshiy svet, zabyvshiy lest′ …’ In the very next poem, “Lide,” the motif is extended to encompass the desperation of a young man cut off from the normal needs of life, and the same note of desperation engulfs another poem of the same year, “E. I. B[ulgarinoy]”:

Zacim, zacim zi vy zilali
Mni sirdцi prоbudits оpyts,
V svоi litucii sкrizali
Mоy кrucinu zapisats?

In this poem, however, there is still a note of optimism, even of good humour:

Nо dajti gоda dva tirpinsy,
I, mоzit byts, кaк vaznyj guss,
I y pо оziru smirinsy
Bisstrastnо plavats naucuss.

At the point where the motif becomes a fully mature theme, Marlinsky turns to an image which was already of significance in Russian literature, especially in regard to the fate of the Decembrists, and was to have further import through Marlinsky's influence on Lermontov. This occurs in the poem “Son” (1829), which begins with the image of horse and rider and then turns to the image of the bark (chelnok) already employed by Pushkin in his Arion (1827). “Son” is comprised of two parts, the first built on the swift, nightmarish pace of horse and rider racing over the Siberian tundra:

I slucaj, priкlоnyy timy,
Dirzal mni zоlоtоi strimy,
I, gоrdо brоsiv pоvоda,
Я pоsкaкal tuda, tuda! …

Then, with a pause after a nightmarish plunge through space, the poem's second part resumes with the calm, placid pace of the lines introducing the image of the bark:

Ocnulsy y оt strasnоj grëzy,
Nо vsë dusa tоsкi pоlna,
I mnilоss, gnut miny zilëzy
K vislu ubоgоgо cilna.

Marlinsky was undoubtedly aware of Pushkin's poem to the Decembrists, Arion, for both its vocabulary and its use of the image of the bark is similar:

Nas bylо mnоgо na cilni;
Inyi parus naprygali,
Drugii druznо upirali
Vglubs mоsny visla … V tisini
Na ruls sкlоnyss, nas коrmsiк umnyj
V mоlcansi pravil gruznyj ciln;

He could not have been aware of Arion during the writing of his Romantic verse tale, Andrey, knyaz′ Pereyaslavskiy, in 1827, yet perhaps the most beautiful lines of the verse tale fragment are similar to Pushkin's lines in their use of the images of bark, sail, and storm:

I grоm кatitsy vdaliкi.
Nо vоt yrysimsy Dunaim,
Tо vidim, tо оpyts sкryvaim,
Lоviц plyvët na cilnокi.
Biliit parus оdinокij,
Kaк libidinоi кrylо,
I grustin putniк ysnоокij;
U nоg коlcan, v ruкi vislо.
Nо, s bizzabоtnоy ulybкоj,
Litucij pinоj оrоsën,
Vistripitnо vо vlagi zybкоj
Pоryvоm buri mcitsy оn.

The images of sail and storm are, of course, the focus of Lermontov's famous Parus (1832), and his use of Marlinsky's line from the verse tale to begin this poem indicates how greatly he admired Marlinsky: ‘Beleyet parus odinokiy’. Marlinsky's use of imagery differs from that of Pushkin and Lermontov. In Parus and Arion ‘bark’ or ‘storm’ or ‘sail’ are used symbolically, in the former to dramatise the rebellious Byronic figure tempting fate, in the latter to allude covertly to its author's role as a passive fellow-traveller of the Decembrists and to the fate of the Decembrists themselves. Marlinsky's images, on the other hand, are concrete and pictorial, direct references to an actual setting in his verse tale.²⁴

Before the year 1829 was over Marlinsky's plaint of exile lost its optimism and revealed itself as a theme centering on homeland and freedom. In the poem of that year, “K oblaku,” he likens himself and his fate to a cloud, ending with the lines: ‘I ya pogibnu vdaleke / Ot rodiny i voli!’ (‘And I shall perish far away from homeland and freedom’). The theme of personal fate is again evident in the poem “Shebutuy” (1829). Drawing a personal analogy to the vivid and sounding waterfall, he addresses Shebutuy:

Tibi pоdоbnо, gоrdyj, sumnyj,
Ot vysоty rоdimyk sкal
Vliкоmyj strastiy bizumnоj,
Я v bizdnu gibili upal!(25)

In reading Marlinsky's prose works, both fictional and factual, one is struck by the great value he placed on language, ethnography, history, and folklore. In point of fact, he was a serious scholar, and used his talent for languages to saturate his works with authentic linguistic, historic, ethnographic, and folkloristic facts and atmosphere. It is little wonder then, that in that very period of the thirties when he was fascinating Russia with his ultra-Romantic prose tales, he was also writing undeniably excellent folk songs and poems of the Caucasus, such as the Yakut ballad “Saatyr′” (1828) which, as Marlinsky noted, was based on a popular Siberian folk legend. Written in alternating four- and three-foot amphibrachic lines, the ballad comprises fourteen ten-line stanzas. Quite reminiscent of Zhukovsky's Lyudmila (his 1811 adaptation of Bürger's Lenore), the ballad falls not into the purely death-and-the-grave category, but into the realm of the supernatural and the fantastic. “Saatyr′”—Marlinsky also noted that the name meant igrivaya—is the tale of a young Yakut beauty who, having been a faithful wife, asks on her deathbed that her ring be given to the man she truly loved, Prince Buydukan. Using the ring, Buydukan calls his beloved from the grave to a tryst. For having dared to defy the grave, the lovers are doomed to a terrible death. The supernatural tone of the ballad is well illustrated by this sensual stanza:

I vоt pоцiluiv tainstvinnyj zvuк
          Pоd кrоvоm mоgilsnоj svytyni,
I sladкii rici—Nо vdrug i vокrug
          Slitilisy duki pustyni.

Two of the finest sets of folk songs and poems are embodied in the Caucasian prose tales, Ammalat-bek (1831) and Mulla-Nur (1836). The excerpts from the latter are a chorus sung to welcome the rain, approximately iambic, and a folk song in trochees. Both are translated from Azeri. Of better, perhaps because stranger, quality is the set of verses from Ammalat-bek, especially the smertnyye pesni which D. S. Mirsky has called ‘a thing unequalled of its kind in the language’.²⁶ The first passage of the set is a song of Kabardinian antiquity sung by one of the tale's characters to the accompaniment of a balalaika. Written in trochaic tetrametre, its first stanza is illustrative:

Na Kazbiк slitiliss tuci,
Slоvnо gоrnyi оrly …
Im navstricu, na sкaly
Uzdinij оtryd litucij
Vysi, vysi, кruci, кruci
Sкacit, russкimi razbit:
Slid ik кrоviy кipit.

The smertnyye pesni are the more unusual in that they are written for full- and half-choruses, each choral part written in a different metre or even in a metric mixture. The opening and closing refrain, for example, is composed of a couplet, both lines of which are hemi-stiched, each hemi-stich comprised of an amphimachris:

Sláva nám—smérts vragý,
Álla-gá, Álla-gý!

While the first half-chorus sings one choral accompaniment in dactyls and a second in a mixture of iambs and trochees, the second half-chorus sings first in a mixture of trochees and anapests and then in pure iambs. The full chorus then concludes with an arrangement in amphibrachs and the trochaic refrain. The smertnyye pesni were to be sung high in the mountains on the eve of battle; perhaps the first arrangement for the second half-chorus exemplifies both content and form:

Dévy, ni plácsti; vási sistriцy,
          Gýrii, svétlоj tоlpój,
K smélym sкlоnyy sólnцa-ziniцy,
          V raj uvliкýt za sоbój.
Brátsy, vy nas pоminájti za cásij:
Bólsnay smérts nam bissláviy кrási!

Another strange folk song is “Adlerskaya pesnya,” which Marlinsky wrote on the eve of his death in 1838. The song comprises twenty four-line stanzas, the second and fourth lines being a repeat and the third being a refrain common to all stanzas. The song has no metric pattern, and is written to the tune of a Russian song. Each of the stanzas is a curse of the Russians and a challenge to battle:

Plyvit pо móry stiná коrabléj,
Slóvnо stádо libidéj, libidéj.
Áj, zgi, zgi, zgi, gоvоri,
Slóvnо stádnо libidéj, libidéj.
Ij vy, gój isi кavкázцy-mоlоdцy!
Událsцy, gоsudárivy strilsцy!
Áj, zgi, zgi, zgi, gоvоri,
Událsцy, gоsudárivy strilsцy!

Particularly striking is the third line, the jeering refrain with its four consecutive initial stresses, but the entire poem is indicative of the fact that Marlinsky had come a long way, from his first awkward attempts and erring imitations of mode, to some very bizarre and extremely original experiments in metre and rhythm.

‘We are like winged fish’, Marlinsky once mused, ‘we wish to fly to the heavens and we fall back into the sea.’²⁷ The remark is markedly Romantic, and it is as equally apt to a final evaluation of him as a poet. For he did indeed wish to fly to the heavens, and he did fall back into the sea. But in his attempt he did create a body of lyric poetry which cannot be denied proper appreciation even after all these years. Moreover, as this examination has attempted to show, he was very much a man of his time and ran the gauntlet of the creative areas of his age. His maturing artistic attitudes, his choice of lyric genres, his concept of versification, and his attempts to enlarge the potential of syllabo-accentual versification—all of these make him a lyric microcosm of the Pushkin era.

Notes

1. The statement was made by a character in Turgenev's story Stuk … stuk … stuk … Aleksandr Bestuzhev, who took his pseudonym Marlinsky from the pavilion of Marli at Peterhof, was the first Russian writer to enjoy wide public popularity, and Turgenev was one of many 19th-century Russian writers who grew up on Marlinsky's tales. Born in 1797, Marlinsky sacrificed his career in the army and at court by his active role in the preparation and carrying out of the Decembrist revolt of 1825. Thanks largely to his already considerable reputation as a literary critic and theoretician, journalist, writer, and poet, he was able to resume his literary career in 1830. In the next eight years, he published a whole series of exciting adventure tales written in Siberia and the Caucasus. The degree to which these stories influenced Russian literature has not yet been estimated.

2. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, New York, 1958, p. 73.

3. ‘Pismo k N. A. Polevomu, 13 avgusta 1831 g.' (Russkiy vestnik, XXXII, 3, 1861, p. 304).

4. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Polnoye sobraniye stikhotvoreniy (cited hereafter as PSS), Bol′shaya seriya, 2nd ed., Leningrad, 1961.

5. Izveshcheniye, Zavtra! and Bespechnyy (all 1818 translations from Parny), K sochinitel′yu poemy ‘Ruslan i Lyudmila’ (1822), and Nadpis′ na ‘Polyarnoy zvezde’ (1825?) (ibid., pp. 298-300).

6. Excluded from this consideration of purely lyric poetry is Marlinsky's Romantic verse tale, Andrey, knyaz' Pereyaslavskiy, which he began while in prison in 1827. Written on a patriotic historical theme, it is composed of two almost complete initial chapters and two fragments of a fifth and final chapter.

7. The Russian duma (literally ‘thought’ or ‘council’) is based on an Ukrainian oral source, the so-called narodnaya pesnya which began to replace the bylina in the late seventeenth century. As a literary genre, it was cultivated by Katenin, Yazykov, Vyazemsky, and Pushkin, but it was the acknowledged speciality of Kondratiy Ryleyev who dramatised the historical significance of Dimitriy Donskoy, Yermak, Ivan Susanin, Bogdan Khmel'nitsky, Peter the Great, and many others.

8. Marlinsky was killed in a battle with Circassian mountaineers at Cape Adler on the Caspian Sea on 7 June 1837. Because of his notoriety and the fact that his body was never found, a great many legends grew up concerning his fate. His correspondence of the later thirties leaves no doubt that he was cruelly persecuted by the government, and his letters to his brothers in the months just preceding his death indicate that he may have deliberately sought a ‘Byronic’ death in battle.

9. Data on Marlinsky are my own. For figures on Pushkin and Baratynsky, see: B. O. Unbegaun, Russian Versification, Oxford, 1956, p. 14.

10. The Davydov count is my own; for Pushkin count, see: ibid., p. 27.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 19.

13. Thus, Zhukovsky: ‘Tam mrámorny stolpý stoyát’ (Dobrodetel', 1798), or Pushkin: ‘Il′ mós′ku prestarélu’ and ‘Il′ smótrish′ v tyómny dál′’ (K sestre, 1814), or Yazykov: ‘V plenyónnom sérdtse nézhnu strást′’ (Poslaniye k Kulubinu, 1819). Derzhavin, who is notorious for his willingness to sacrifice grammar to almost any aesthetic effect, used the form until well along in his career, but had abandoned it almost entirely by the advent of the 19th century. Finally, so far as I am aware, no other poet of the period relied so much upon this device as did Marlinsky.

14. PSS, pp. 271-72.

15. ‘And the knights turn tail, / And captives, and blood, and corpses (mark) their way. / And there is no salvation from death / Amidst the merciless ice, / And Aleksandr, like an angel of vengeance, / Pursued, struck down, destroyed the foes …’

16. See: N. M. Yazykov, Polnoye sobraniye stikhotvoreniy, Moscow/Leningrad, 1934, pp. 726-27. The poem was sent to Ryleyev for inclusion in Zvezdochka na 1826 god, a new almanac he edited with Marlinsky, and was confiscated after the Decembrist revolt.

17. M. A. Briskman, ‘Agitatsionnyye pesni Dekabristov’, in M. P. Alekseyev and B. S. Meylakh (eds.) Dekabristy i ikh vremya, Leningrad, 1951, pp. 20-21.

18. A definitive study is: Yu. Oksman, ‘Agitatsionnyye pesni Dekabristov’ (Literaturnoye nasledstvo, LIX, 1954). See also: PSS, pp. 288-98.

19. N. I. Mordovchenko, ‘A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky,’ in ibid., pp. 19-20.

20. The Russian theorist of versification Georgiy Shengeli would call the first line of the refrain a double amphimachris (′—′) and the second a combination anapest and paeon (— —′/— — —′). Shengeli is quite useful in cases like this in that he concentrates on the foot, rather than the line, and defines four two-syllable, eight three-syllable, and sixteen four-syllable feet: Traktat o russkom stikhe, 2nd ed., Moscow/Petrograd, 1923, I, p. 136.

21. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Sobraniye sochineniy v dvukh tomakh, Moscow, 1958, I, p. 318.

22. PSS, pp. 280-1.

23. ‘Fortunates! here as there you knew no parting, / Knew not the bearing of loved ones' heavy burdens.’

24. A less widely known poem also influenced by Marlinsky is Aleksandr Polezhayev's Pesn′ pogibyushchego plovtsa (early 1830s): Veter svistit, / Grom gremit / More stonet— / Put′ dalyok … / Tonet, tonet / Moy chelnok!

25. Quite relevant here is Professor Dmitrij Čiževskij's study of the motif of the waterfall in Slavic Romantic literature (On Romanticism in Slavic Literatures, The Hague, 1957, pp. 16, 22), for he has pointed out that not only Shebutuy, but also a verse passage from the prose work Poyezdka v Revel′ (1821), and the poem Finlyandiya (1829) are direct descendants from Derzhavin's introduction of the motif in Vodopad (1791-94). In his opinion, Marlinsky exhibits a more mature Romanticism in his new imagery, in his ‘psychologisation’ of a natural phenomenon, and particularly in his lyric address to a phenomenon of nature.

26. Mirsky, op. cit., p. 120.

27. ‘Pis′mo k N. A. Polevomu, 12 fevralya 1831 g.’ (Russkiy vestnik, XXXII, 3, 1861, p. 294).