SOURCE: “Russia's Doomsday Poet,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, April, 1973, pp. 170-81.

[In the following essay, Harvie examines Baratynsky's poems containing his criticism of science, technology, and the emerging capitalist-industrialist society.]

Of Baratynsky's poem “The Last Poet” (“Posledny poet”) Belinsky said that it would have been a masterpiece but for the perverse equation of poetry with ignorance and the blaming of science for the degeneration of society.¹ Later apologists for Baratynsky have generally felt constrained to argue that all he really meant was that there was a certain charm about mystery which is removed by knowledge.² No such defence is necessary today. With the benefit of 130 years of hindsight it is clear that Baratynsky was right and Belinsky was wrong; indeed, he has some claim to be called Russia's Doomsday Poet.

At its best Baratynsky's work has the same kind of latent prophetic quality that characterises Dostoevsky's great novels. His opposition to science and technology, which is much more thoroughgoing than has generally been believed, is set out with great force in a group of poems written between 1825 and 1840. The best known of these are “The Final Death” (“Poslednyaya smert'”), “The Last Poet” and “Omens” (“Primety”), which I propose to consider in reverse order, before turning to other closely related poems. This aspect of Baratynsky's thinking should be seen in close relation to the root dialectic of his philosophy, which is that the conditions of man's earthly existence deny fulfilment to his deepest aspirations. Unlike Dostoevsky, he had no great faith either in God or in the hereafter. For Baratynsky, what is imaginatively and emotionally satisfying is intellectually and experientially false. It is this tragic conflict between heart and head which is the distinctive mark of the human condition.

It should of course be pointed out that Baratynsky's antiscientific protest is but one aspect of his work, albeit an important one. Many people will be more inclined to appreciate the perfect blending of form and content that characterises much of his best poetry, the stylistic finesse which can unite the grand manner of the eighteenth century with the romantic pessimism of the nineteenth. The delicacy and precision of his psychological analysis, in which there are already hints of Chekhov, will attract others. English readers will find in him parallels, not only with the better-known romantic poets, but also with John Donne and Baratynsky's equally neglected English contemporary Thomas Lovell Beddoes. But in the last resort, if Baratynsky lives today and will continue to live tomorrow, this is because of the quality of his thinking. There are signs that our times are becoming more receptive to what he has to offer. Nevertheless, it remains true that both the anti-modern aspect of his work and its organic connection with his whole philosophy of life have been inadequately appreciated, especially in the West.³

Baratynsky's antiscientific and antitechnological poetry has also to be seen as part of the continuing romantic reaction against the Industrial Revolution which began about 200 years ago and is now almost taking the form of a moral crusade. In its Russian form this romantic protest owes something to Schelling; more perhaps to the fact that industrialisation was only just beginning in Russia and was obviously a more alien phenomenon than in Western Europe. Similar ideas were, however, in the air all over Europe, and had been at least as early as Schiller's poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” in the 1770s. Another notable landmark was Novalis' “Hymnen an die Nacht” in the 1790s. In Italy Baratynsky's contemporary Leopardi, whom he may possibly have known either in the original or in French translation, was arguing in something the same way in poems like “Alla Primavera”; in France there was the Musset of “Rolla” and “Les Vœux stériles”, while in England Keats was voicing similar sentiments in “Lamia”. Less accessible than Keats, but much more trenchant in his attack on industrialism, was William Blake, whose “dark Satanic mills” are well known. Not so well known is what he says in “Vala Night Two”. There the technological edifice is erected by means of golden compasses and the quadrant; the spirits are caught in nets, and “Quadrangular the building rose, the heavens squared by a line, Trigons and cubes divide the elements in finite bonds. Multitudes without number work incessant”. Baratynsky, however, was much more radical than any of his Western predecessors or contemporaries.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the major theme of the romantic movement, both in Russia and outside it, was the relationship between man and nature. What Grigoryan says of Lermontov is equally true for Baratynsky: “Man is bound to nature by invisible threads whose origins go far back into antiquity. At one time man was close to nature and lived the same kind of life. Then as time passed and constricting cities grew up, man became more and more alienated from nature; and the further removed he became the more his being was warped, the more he was riven by his own internal contradictions”.⁴ The myth of the Golden Age, if it is but a myth, has proved remarkably resistant to scientific debunking. As the contemporary British philosopher P. J. Saher says: “The cult of a past Golden Age, combined with a belief in its recurrence in the chequered history of mankind, had such a hold on poets that it should not be explained away too lightly, especially as it forms such a profound theme in the mythologies of almost all Eastern countries. Could it not be that the poets with their superior intuition were able to foresee something at which we with our rational apparatus can only guess?”⁵ In Baratynsky's poetry, although the Golden Age continues to haunt his imagination, alienation from nature predominates over identification and begins to appear even in 1820 with the elegy “Spring” (“Vesna”).

Estrangement becomes complete in “Omens”, a philosophic lyric written in 1839 in which Baratynsky's ultimate inspiration may be Rousseau. There are some lines in Keats' “Lamia” which would admirably serve as an epigraph to “Omens”: “Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine, Unweave a rainbow”. As is well known, by “philosophy” Keats meant natural science. Baratynsky's “Omens” reads rather like an account of the Fall of Man as Rousseau might have edited it. By assailing nature with the Iron Age weapons of science and technology, man has estranged himself from the true ground of his being. For the scientist, nature is a system of physical forces and natural laws are the principles on which these forces operate. The laws are generalisations based on and confirmed by evidence obtained in investigations of a particular type—as the poet puts it here, man tortures nature “by crucibles, weights and measures” (gornilom, vesami i meroy). Except that “law” is out of favour for obvious reasons and should be replaced by “theory” or “hypothesis”, Baratynsky's account of the scientist's activities is still perfectly contemporary. In place of the old filial relationship man now exploits nature for his own short-term benefit. Man and nature have excommunicated each other, but the crime is man's for having lifted his hand against his parent and turned nature into a commodity. The old intuitive sympathy, which still holds for Lermontov's “Prophet” (Prorok)—though not for those who revile him—has been replaced in “Omens” by hostility and incomprehension. The scientist has replaced quality by quantity (“weights and measures”), and reduced personality to impersonality, the world of Thou to the world of It. He assumes that this reduction can be carried out without remainder; an assumption that the poet passionately denies. Nature is antagonised by the paraphernalia of scientific investigation; for in his “vain researches” modern scientific man, like those whom Tyutchev attacks in “Nature is other than you think” (Ne to, chto mnite vy, priroda), has denied the soul in nature—for Baratynsky, “he is immersed in vain researches” (on vdalsya v suetu izyskany). Scientific rationalism and scientific practice destroy the spontaneity on which prophecy (proritsaniya), which here means poetry, depends.

As an example of the old intuitive relationship between man and nature, Baratynsky cites the belief in omens, reflected both in the title and in the detail of the poem. With this may be compared the long-vanished empathy of “The youth once gaily cried” (“Byvalo, otrok, zvonkim klikom”). The poet of “Omens” gives three examples: the harsh cry of the raven warns against hubris, the wolf issuing from the forest is the herald of victory, the pair of doves presage domestic bliss. This belief, like that in astrology, has been so widespread and durable that it is unlikely to be without foundation, though it will continue to be scorned until some spurious scientific explanation can be contrived for it. On this view future events cast their shadows before, and the word “synchronicity” was coined by C. G. Jung to denote such a mutual adjustment of events which cannot be accounted for by the operation of causal laws. Omens involve the prediction of a future temporal pattern of events from a spatial configuration of objects in the present.⁶ They are particularly awkward scientifically because the effect is seen to precede the cause, and by instancing them in “Omens” Baratynsky is deliberately emphasising the antiscientific character of his philosophy.

In “The Last Poet” (1835) Baratynsky is concerned with two closely related issues: the public role of the poet and the corruption of art by science, technology and trade. Liberated Greece is taken as the paradigm of the contemporary world, where the advance of education (prosveschenie) has dried up the springs of poetic inspiration and greed for gain has become a public obsession. It is not surprising that trade, commerce and science flourish. However, this apparently prosperous structure is, like the utopia of “The Final Death”, fatally flawed. It is not merely that the new culture, if it can be called that, is antiaesthetic; but also that the attitude to life on which it depends has poisoned the soil on which poetry can take root. When against all the odds a new poet does arise and, like his predecessors, begins to sing of love and beauty, he is mocked and driven away by the philistines. Scorned but unbowed, he retreats to the seashore where, like Sappho of old, he plunges into the waves. To the end the poet preserves the ontological bond with nature which education and greed for gain have destroyed for his contemporaries; but his passionate accents awaken only ridicule in the devotees of Urania, the cold muse of science. While the Last Poet is a representative figure, it is not difficult to see in him the lineaments of Byron, of Baratynsky himself; also of course a reference to the unpopularity of poetry in general and Baratynsky's poetry in particular in the post-decembrist period.

Although scientists and technologists—now euphemistically called developers—have ravaged the earth to a point where solitude is impossible: “But there is no more sanctuary on earth and all retreat is closed” (no svet Uzh prazdnovo vertepa ne yavlyaet, I na zemle uedinen'ya net!), they have as yet been unable to subdue the ocean. If the classical Olympus represents for Baratynsky the ideal partnership between man and nature which existed in the Golden Age and is still recoverable in art, then the advance of civilisation has destroyed that relationship for the vast majority of men. But the sea remains untarnished and invincible. Its role here should be compared with that in “The Storm” (“Burya”), where it is under the power of the Devil, and with what happens in “The Final Death”, where it is colonised by the developers. In “The Last Poet” the poet's suicide following his rejection by his contemporaries is in a sense his return to his spiritual home, for there is more empathy between him and the ocean than between him and his fellow-men. Perhaps his death also implies that salvation is no longer to be found even in reunion with nature. By calling the last poet “the son of nature's last resources” (syn poslednikh sil prirody) Baratynsky probably means that nature herself, as well as art, is being exhausted and destroyed by the technologists. The poem closes with those who have hounded the poet to his doom guilty and apprehensive on the shore in face of a possible backlash from the ocean: “But man is abashed by the ocean wave, and retreats from the sounding waters with anguish in his heart” (No v smuschenie privodit Cheloveka val morskoy, I ot shumnikh vod otkhodit On s toskuyuschey dushoy!). Which may mean, as for Blok 70 years later, that nature will be revenged on the apostles of progress who have violated her.

In this parable-poem there are, so to speak, three characters: contemporary society, the poet and the ocean; which might also be seen under the aspect of the collective, the individual and nature respectively. Science, technology and industry result in a devaluation of man's humanity; and the poet is really banished because, in affirming traditional values against the new philistines, he reminds society of what it would prefer to forget: “Simple-hearted, he sings of love and beauty, and of the vanity and emptiness of the science that resists them” (Vospevaet, prostoduchny, On lyubov' i krasotu, I nauki, im oslushnoy, Pustotu i suetu). As in “Truth” (“Istina”), Baratynsky maintains that enlightenment can be bought at too high a price; in “Truth” by the individual, in “The Last Poet” by a whole culture. Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise; the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge would have been better untasted: “There was more joy on earth, mortal, in the days of ignorance” (Lutche, smertny, v dni neznan'ya Radost' chuvstvuet zemlya). For all its glitter the Brave New World of 1835 is doomed by the technological progress in which it glories; in reality much inferior to the Naive Old World of antiquity—but against the modern Iron Age of science the poet's is “a useless gift” (bespolezny dar). Baratynsky was probably right to see art and technology as incompatible; there does seem to be a connection between the debasement of the artefact and the continued refinement and depersonalisation of its production. Perhaps under conditions of mass industrialisation art is bound to degenerate into a cosmetic.

It is not surprising that contemporaries found “The Final Death” (1827) difficult to interpret. Baratynsky's apocalypse begins with a Tyutchevian analysis of the structure of consciousness and continues as a series of visions of the future of European civilisation. The poem's first two verses also have some affinities with Byron's “Dream”, but the visions have nothing in common with those of the English poet; though the ending is slightly reminiscent of Byron's “Darkness”. Had Baratynsky completed the longer poem of which this majestic fragment was intended as a part, he might have more directly linked the two kinds of consciousness, based respectively on “awareness-intellect-day” (bdenie-um-den') and “dream-imagination-night” (son-mechta-noch'), with the rise and fall of particular types of civilisation. Knowledge of the future is of two kinds: prediction based on the observed regularities of past experience; and by direct intuition, which seems to occur in cases of paranormal cognition. Baratynsky's visions probably contain elements of both: he suggests that they may be either “the creation of a morbid dream” (sozdan'e boleznennoy mechty) or “the construct of a presumptuous intellect” (derzkovo uma soobrazhen'e), the two pejorative adjectives reflecting his characteristic scepticism. It is interesting that the poet does not here, as he so often does elsewhere, see any necessary contradiction between intellect and imagination. The first of the visions of “future years” (gryaduschie gody) reads like an account of paradise regained. Technology has made man almost complete master of his environment. There has been a great increase in population and urbanisation, famine has been eliminated, the air has been conquered, the sea tamed and populated. Although this has been accompanied by a corresponding flowering of the arts, Baratynsky does no more than mention this in passing; the new age's triumphs have evidently been scientific and technological rather than aesthetic. The poet seems to view what he sees with entire approval: “Behold the splendid banquet of Reason, the edification and shame of its foes, behold the achievement of enlightenment” (Vot razuma velikolepny pir! Vragam evo i v styd i v pouchenie, Vot do chevo dostiglo prosveschen'e!)—which, in view of what follows, is probably ironical.

If the first vision represents intellect plus will, the second vision centuries later represents imagination plus will. Total control of the environment has now been replaced by or accompanied by total indifference to the environment. We are not told whether the technology continues to function and in a measure to provide for men's wants, or whether it has been destroyed in the kind of upheaval Dostoevsky's Underground Man was later to demand. What is clear is that the earlier preoccupation with science and technology was illegitimate: “They regarded everything with indifference that had called forth their ancestors' vain exertions” (Na vse oni spokoynye vzirali, Chto suetu rozhdalo v ikh ottsakh)—science and technology are “vanity” (sueta), if not worse. Spiritual aspirations and bodily decline occur in parallel; they may be causally related or in both cases the consequences of the preceding technological triumphs. Perhaps what happened was that Iron Age technology had bound man so closely to the machine that he became incapable of independent action, so that what was initially advocated as an extension of human capacities ended by destroying them. Although man's earlier technological successes had been described at some length, nothing is now said of the content of the spiritual dreams which have replaced them. The crude outer-directed vigour of the scientific age has given way to the upward or downward-directed spiritual meditations. Men soar on the wings of thought, not on the wings of aircraft; their specifically animal attributes of locomotion and reproduction atrophy. The logic of technological advances is the maximisation of inertia, and the maximisation of inertia would mean universal death, which is for Baratynsky here the end-product of scientific progress.

In the “terrible scene” (uzhasnaya kartina) of the third vision the human race is represented at most by a few straggling survivors languishing amid the ruined opulence of their ancestors, whom they will soon follow to the grave, as their flocks wander untended and pastureless over the desolate landscape. Critics have failed to notice the movement in time between verses seven and eight indicated by the adverb “thereon” (vosled), so that the final verse could better be regarded as the fourth vision—or rather series of visions, since the predominance of perfective verbs suggests that the movement continues. The initial situation has now been completely reversed. Where once humanity exulted over nature, nature now holds sway in majestic solitude. With the extinction of the human race, the animal creation also dies out, though the plant kingdom persists for a time. However, by the final couplet only the mist rises to prevent the sun's rays from illuminating a dead planet. No sentient creature exists any longer to welcome the great luminary at dawn. As in the Genesis story before the creation of man, so now after his extinction a mist rises over the surface of the earth. Perhaps the last two lines suggest that the destruction of humanity was a fitting retribution for the crime man had committed against nature: “Only the mist swirled blue over the earth and smoked up as a cleansing sacrifice” (Odin tuman nad ney [t.e. zemley], sineya, vilsya I zhertvoyu chistitel'noy dymilsya).

“The Final Death” raises at least as many questions as it answers.⁷ It might be interpreted along the same lines as “Death” (“Smert'”), so that Death is the universal moderator which checks the hubris of man by punishing his assault on nature with extinction, thus restoring the equilibrium. On this view homo sapiens is a luxury that the universe cannot afford, at least not since the Industrial Revolution. It may be interpreted like “Stillborn” (“Nedonosok”) to demonstrate the impotence of man, incapable of returning to either the primeval chaos of his “ancient homeland” (otchizna davnyaya) or to the divine “empirium” (empirey) of heaven; in the end destroyed by his own disequilibrium, which plunges him from one extreme to the other. In either case man is a disastrous experiment, perhaps created by an evil Demiurge.

Taken together, these three poems represent a progressive hardening of Baratynsky's attitude to science and technology between 1827 and 1839. In the first, “The Final Death”, it could be argued that the poet is not against scientific technology so much as its abuse; in any case the spiritual dreams, the fantasy (fantaziya) of the second vision hardly have his approval as a preferable alternative. The fact remains, however, that it was apparently the technological progress of the first vision that precipitated the final catastrophe. In “The Last Poet” it is marginally possible to maintain, as some Soviet critics do, that it is only science and technology in the service of capitalism to which Baratynsky is opposed.⁸ No such ambiguity is possible in “Omens”. There are also a number of other poems which are more or less connected with the same theme. In “The Imp” (“Besenok”) (1828), “A Wondrous City” (“Chudny grad”) (1829) and “The Fairy” (“Feya”) (1829), the main concern is with poetry, which is also of course a major theme of “The Last Poet” and “Omens”. The dialectic of imagination and actuality is at least as important for Baratynsky as the dialectic between feeling and intellect, with which it is closely linked. In “The Imp” and “A Wondrous City” the poetic imagination is free but quite insubstantial; in “The Fairy” it is fettered, but much more profound. The latter poem has a ballad-type lightness about it which may be regarded as part of the deception exercised by the beautiful but evil fairy. In the last few lines Baratynsky partly demythologises the poem: “So even in spirit we are slaves of earth's ironic fate; our poor minds are so enthralled by the phenomenal world that they cannot but apply its law even to the world of the imagination” (Znat', samym dukhom my raby Zemnoy nasmeshlivoy sud'by; Znat', miru yavnomu dotole Nash bedny um poraboschen, Chto perenosit ponevole I v mir mechty evo zakon). It may well be that the subordination of spirit to the laws of matter is an aspect of the enslavement of nature by science which is attacked in “Omens”.

The interpretation of “To the crowd life's daily cares are sweet” (“Tolpe trevozhny den' priveten”) (1839) has been bedevilled by the attempt to force it into the same mould as Tyutchev's “Day and Night” (Den' i noch'). What is involved in Baratynsky's poem is not dualism but trialism, to coin a word; not day and night, but “the cares of the world” (zabota zemnaya), “the magic darkness” (volshebnaya t'ma) and “the abode of spirits” (obitel' dukhov). Frizman trivialises the poem by claiming that Baratynsky's rejoinder to both poet and crowd is that there is nothing to fear but fear.⁹ The key to the meaning of this poem is provided by the Perennial Philosophy, according to which there are three planes of experience: the phenomenal, the magical and the spiritual. It is a commonplace of Eastern philosophy and religious thinking that what is real on one level of experience is not necessarily so on another. For Buddhists the phenomenal world is the realm of māyā (illusion), the Baratynskian “vanity” (sueta). The poet is most at home in the realm of magic and the realm of spirit, least so in the phenomenal world. When Baratynsky translated this poem into French as “Les Soucis matériels” (“The Cares of the World”), he called the poet significantly “le vainqueur de la matière” (the conqueror of matter), a phrase that does not occur in the Russian original.¹⁰ For the crowd, as spiritual dwarfs, only the phenomenal world is tolerable. Although they have some access to the realm of magic, they are obviously terrified by it and wish to be assured of its unreality. While at one time the magical realm was common to both poet and crowd, now science has put the phantoms of fairyland to flight, or at least shown them to be “purely subjective”. Consequently the poet now stands alone, as he does in “The Last Poet” and “What strains are these?” (“Chto za zvuki?”) (1841). Baratynsky discusses another aspect of this estrangement in “Rhyme” (“Rifma”), which closes the Sumerki (Twilight)¹¹ collection as “The Last Poet” had opened it. The difference between “The Fairy” and “To the crowd life's daily cares are sweet” is twofold: in the latter the poet rejects the scientific evaluation of his dreams and recovers, if only temporarily, his belief in the transcendental world. There is no suggestion of the situation in “The Fairy” and “A Wondrous City”, where the world of spirit and imagination had been subordinated to the ironclad laws governing the phenomenal world.

Taking the part for the whole, critics have often misread “Wherefore should a slave” (“K chemu nevol'niku”) (1833) as advocating blind submission to the will of fate. To support the case for determinism Baratynsky takes several examples of obedience to law from the natural world: the river is confined to its banks, the fir tree stands where it has grown; even the wind, often the symbol of spiritual freedom, bloweth not where it listeth. The poet concludes this section of the poem by urging man also to confine his desires within the limits of his possibilities: “We too shall submit to our lot, subduing or forgetting our rebellious dreams; as sensible slaves we shall obediently conform our wishes to our fate” (Udelu svoemu i my pokorny budem, Myatezhnye mechty smirim il' pozabudem, Raby razumnye, poslushno soglasim Svoi zhelaniya so zhrebiem svoim). It is at this point that Dostoevsky's Underground Man so to speak enters with his explosive “Madman!” (Bezumets!) to protest against the logical but stifling deterministic world of scientific rationality. Man has not only been endowed with reason, but also with passions and dreams, which are an essential part of what it means to be human. His tragedy is that the conditions of his life deny fulfilment to his deepest urges: “Oh agonising for us is the life which pulses in the heart as a mighty wave, and is constricted within narrow bounds by fate” (O tyagostna dlya nas Zhizn', v serdtse b'yuschaya mogucheyu volnoyu I v grani uzkie vtesnennaya sud'boyu). Baratynsky offers no solution to the problem. The legitimacy of passions and dreams does not weaken the iron grip of fate; nor does the poet, as in “The Storm”, revolt against the predestined futility (poshlost') of his existence. It is almost as if man had been created in original sin, which would mean for Baratynsky in a state of permanent disharmony with himself and his environment. The thought of “Wherefore should a slave”, like that of “The Storm”, is close to the thought of the antiscientific and antitechnological poetry; the scientist, so one might argue, first mechanises or mathematicises nature with his “law” (zakon) and then attempts to subordinate man to matter, as he also does in Dostoevsky's “Notes from the Underground” (Zapiski iz podpol'ya). Baratynsky no more than Dostoevsky is prepared to accept this reduction in man's ontological status to that of a robot or vegetable.

It is only fair to point out that, even within the confines of his poetry, Baratynsky's opposition to science and technology is not completely consistent; also relevant that the Russian “nauka” has not quite the same meaning as the word “science” generally has in modern English. In the poem “The Steamer” (“Piroskaf”), written on the sea crossing from Marseilles to Naples, he speaks not so much of a conflict as of a partnership between man and Iron Age technology, one of whose artefacts was bearing him to Italy, the earthly paradise of his dreams. A few months earlier he had what may have been his first experience of rail travel on the journey between Leipzig and Dresden. His comments on the new mode of conveyance in a letter to Putyata are either naive or ironical: “Railways are a wonderful idea, they are the apotheosis of diversion. When they cover the whole world, melancholy will vanish from the earth.”¹² With this may be compared Wordsworth's sonnet written at about the same time on the projected Kendal and Windermere railway.

The degree to which art and nature have been supplanted by science and technology varies with Baratynsky from poem to poem. In both “Omens” and “The Last Poet”, the enlightened philistinism of the multitude, if it may be called that, triumphs over the dreams and intuitions of the poet. At the same time as the ontological bond between man and nature is severed, with the replacement of art by science and spontaneity by calculation, poetry is banished from the world. As Baratynsky makes clear in “Omens”, which even today remains a fairly accurate account of the scientific method and its results, the superiority of science and technology lies in the exercise of violence. Although the last poet is driven to suicide and Lermontov's prophet-outcast is stoned into the wilderness, the current of apprehension is rising; in “To the crowd life's daily cares are sweet” the crowd fear the magic darkness and are only content when the poet's visions have been pronounced by the scientist to be meaningless. The message of this poem is that for the majority of men science has destroyed the channels of communication with the spiritual world which had formerly given meaning to their lives. In “The Fairy”, imagination and spirit are corrupted and paralysed by the inexorable laws that have been discovered to apply to the material world, so that the promised benefits are debased and poisoned. The Poet's “I” (ya) is here not merely or mainly Baratynsky himself, but the representative man of the new scientific age.

Baratynsky's central argument against science and technology is that they have destroyed the harmonious balance between man and the rest of creation. The final consequences of the Gadarene plunge down the Precipice of Progress are set out in “The Final Death”. For Baratynsky, as for the Perennial Philosophy, what a man is capable of perceiving and experiencing depends on the quality of his life. It follows, as in “Omens”, that what is impossible today was not necessarily impossible in the past; since human capacities can not only develop but also atrophy, which had happened in “The Last Poet” under the pressure of industrial progress. In his anti-industrial poetry Baratynsky claims that the spontaneity of life and in the end life itself are being destroyed by what passes for progress; that the initiates of art have insights into the meaning of existence which could once be communicated to and accepted by the generality of mankind; that with the rise of industrial philistinism society has forsaken the poet to worship the false gods of science and technology. He would have rejected the naive but convenient view that science is ethically neutral, being good or bad only according to its results. Today, when it is perhaps already too late, a few are beginning to realise that the poet's insistence on the need for harmony between man and nature is not just an attractive figure of speech, but a condition of man's physical and spiritual survival on this planet. Without this harmony, the dark forebodings of “The Final Death” look like becoming accomplished fact.

Inseparable from Baratynsky's attack on science and technology is his negative attitude to the developing capitalist and industrial society. He would have entirely agreed with what his English contemporary Shelley had said in 1821 in his “Defence of Poetry”: “While the mechanist abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. … The rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer, and the vessel of state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the consequences which must ever flow from the unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty”.¹³ It is indeed calculation which is basic both to the scientific method and the computerised civilisation that it is everywhere creating. In “Omens” Baratynsky attacks calculation in its application to the natural world and for its effect on human personality; in “The Last Poet” he describes what happens when the unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty becomes the principle of social organisation and greed the cardinal virtue; “The Fairy” sets out the spiritual bankruptcy which results from the enthralment of mind and imagination by science; and “The Final Death” foretells the end of the present Gadarene period in human history. Particularly in the apocalyptic “Final Death”, Baratynsky looks forward, not only to Dostoevsky and Solovyev, but also to the twentieth-century dystopias of Zamyatin, Orwell and Aldous Huxley.¹⁴

Notes

1. V. G. Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochineny v 13-i tomakh (Moscow, 1953-59), vol. VI, pp. 466-469.

2. Thus S. A. Andreevsky, “Poeziya Baratynskovo” (in his book Literaturnye chteniya [Petersburg, 1891], p. 30).

3. Two recent articles on Baratynsky in English are J. B. Woodward, “The Enigmatic Development of Boratynsky's Art”, Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, III (1970); G. R. Barratt, “Eighteenth Century Neoclassical French Influences on E. A. Baratynsky and Pushkin”, Comparative Literature Studies, vol. VI, No. 4. Perhaps the best Russian introduction to his poetry is provided by the chapter on Baratynsky in vol. I of the Istoriya russkoy poezii v dvukh tomakh (Leningrad, 1968-69). A few of his poems are translated in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse.

4. K. N. Grigoryan, Lermontov i romantizm (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), p. 188.

5. P. J. Saher, Eastern Wisdom and Western Thought: A Comparative Study in the Modern Philosophy of Religion (London, 1969), p. 281.

6. See J. G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, vol. II: The Foundations of Moral Philosophy (London, 1961), pp. 43 f.

7. The most stimulating comments on this enigmatic poem are by A. Arkhangel'sky, “Baratynsky i evo poeziya” (in his book Pod znamenem nauki [Moscow, 1902]), and V. Sadovnik, E. A. Baratynsky 1800-1900: kritichesky ocherk (Moscow, 1900). See especially p. 35 and p. 19 respectively.

8. For instance L. G. Frizman, Tvorchesky put' Baratynskovo (Moscow, 1966), p. 101. See also St. Rassadin, “Vozvraschenie Baratynskovo”, Voprosy literatury, 1970, No. 7, p. 100.

9. L. G. Frizman, op. cit., p. 107.

10. See Sochineniya E. A. Baratynskovo, pod red. N. E. Baratynskovo, izd. 4-e (Kazan', 1884), p. 566.

11. One may conjecture that the title was inspired by Victor Hugo's “Chants du crépuscule”.

12. Russky arkhiv, 1867, No. 2, p. 285.

13. P. B. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry” (in The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R. H. Shepherd [London, 1888], vol. II, pp. 28-29).

14. See F. M. Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground” (in Constance Garnett's translation published by Heinemann in the volume entitled White Nights); V. Solov'ev, the third of Tri razgovora (Three Conversations) (New York, 1954); E. Zamyatin, We, tr. B. G. Guerney (London, 1970). Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World need no references.