[In the following essay, Fusso and Stern explore Baratynsky's attitude toward his critics and the way in which he used his anger at their attacks as a stimulus to continue writing poetry.]

“Even in the grave?”
“Even under the coffin lid.”
“I cannot sing!”
“Well, sing about that!”

—Marina Tsvetaeva, 1928

[“Tak i v grobu?”
—“I pod doskoi.”
“Pet' ne mogu!”
—“Eto vospoi!”]

“On Planting a Forest” (“Na posev lesa”), written in 1842, two years before Baratynskii's death, is a cross between two of his favorite genres. It is in part an elegy, a farewell to poetry: the poet, who feels the approach of old age, sadly sets aside his lyre and replaces the writing of poetry with the planting of trees. At the core of the elegy, however, there is an angry and biting epigram, calling down God's wrath upon the poet's treacherous enemies, who have preferred stealthy sabotage to an honorable duel. The lyric subject laments not only the malice of these enemies but also the indifference of a young and barren generation, the “barren ear” (pustotsvetnyi kolos), that has failed to respond to his offer of friendship. There is scant biographical evidence regarding the targets of this invective, but it is generally agreed that they include Baratynskii's former friend, the Slavophile critic Ivan Kireevskii, and his most influential literary enemy, Vissarion Belinskii. Elegy and epigram are connected: the “feasts of ill intention” of his enemies and the indifference of the “new generation” (novye plemena) combine with his advancing age to cause the lyric subject to renounce the writing of poetry. Despite the tragic nature of this renunciation, the final strophe is mysteriously optimistic. Although at the opening of the poem the speaker feels a disjunction between his mood and the plowman's mood of “submissiveness and hope” (pokorstvo i nadezhda), by the close he too is calmly awaiting a prolific future, a fruitfulness that contrasts with the barrenness of the poet's juniors:

There is no answer! I have rejected my strings,
May a different soil be fertile for me!
And now my hand carries to it
The seedlings of firs, oaks, and pines.
So be it! Saying farewell to my lyre,
I believe: it will be replaced by these,
The powerful and gloomy children
Of poetry's secret sorrows.(1)

To be sure, the “children” now being contemplated are gloomy ones, born of sorrow: it is as though the naive peasants of the poem's opening had been dialectically merged with the feasts of ill intention to produce a somber “literary peasant” at the poem's close—a peasant inspired equally by hope and by disillusionment. Nevertheless, the last stanza remains somewhat baffling: why should a poet be so consoled by the thought that his lyre will be replaced by mute trees? A long road of disappointments, insults, and betrayals led Baratynskii to the bitter core of this poem, but a major and paradoxical revelation, which illuminates his conception of artistic freedom and responsibility, underlies its calm and triumphant close. It is that revelation, expressed in the epigram “Thanks to meddling malice” (“Spasibo zlobe khlopotlivoi”), that is the subject of the present essay.

In April 1825 Baratynskii wrote to the poet I. I. Kozlov from his exile in Finland: “You speak of our journalists; but thank God, we do not receive a single journal here, and no one hinders me from loving poetry.”² Like Pushkin, Baratynskii found little to admire in the journals that guided public opinion on literary matters in the early nineteenth century. In 1830 Pushkin wrote, “Criticism in our journals is limited to dry bibliographical news, more or less witty satirical remarks, and general friendly praise, or else it simply turns into the publisher's domestic correspondence with his colleagues, with the proofreader, etc. … These family jokes must have a key to their solution, and are probably very amusing; but meanwhile they are absolutely meaningless to us.” Pushkin also wrote a parody of the breathless and mock-naive style of his contemporaries Polevoi, Bulgarin, and Senkovskii in a hypothetical review of Racine's Phèdre: “There is nothing more repulsive than the subject chosen by the gentleman author. A married woman, the mother of a family, is in love with a young oaf, the illegitimate son of her husband (!!!) What indecency! She is not ashamed to admit her debauched passion to his very face (!!!!).”³

This parody pales before the reality of the review in the Ladies' Journal of Baratynskii's The Concubine (Nalozhnitsa), whose very title the journal was unable to print. The reviewer proudly admits that he has not even read this new work, “and therefore we do not know whether or not it lays a new wreath on its writer's head—certainly not the wreath of the Graces, but at least one woven out of the fatal kerchief so important for heroines who share the name of the heroine of Baratynskii's work in verse.”⁴ No matter how ludicrous the level of discourse in the popular journals, however, there was a somber side to this inanity: as Baratynskii wrote in another letter to Kozlov, “Our journalists have become real literary monopolists; they create public opinion, they set themselves up as our judges … and there's no help for it! They are all of one party and have formed a sort of union against everything beautiful and honest” (S, 474).

Baratynskii had good reason to be demoralized by the power of the journals: after his brilliant debut as the “poet of Finland,” he began to be considered passé before he was out of his twenties. In 1831, depressed by the poor reception of The Concubine, he wrote to Ivan Kireevskii: “I do not refuse to write; but I feel like not publishing for a while, and perhaps even a long while. For me poetry is not the enjoyment of self-esteem. I have no need of praise (the praise of the rabble, to be sure), but I do not see why I am obliged to subject myself to its abuse” (S, 507). By 1834 Baratynskii had acquired a more formidable and serious abuser than Bulgarin and Polevoi: that year Belinskii began a series of attacks that culminated in his crushing review of Baratynskii's last collection, Twilight (Sumerki), in 1842.

No direct reaction by Baratynskii to Belinskii's articles has come down to us, but it is not hard to imagine the effect they might have produced on the poet. For one thing, we have a specimen of Baratynskii's own criticism as a model of what he thought a critic should do. His review of the collection Tauris (Tavrida) by A. N. Murav'ev is scrupulously polite and rigorously technical in orientation. Baratynskii speaks of individual lines of poetry and discusses whether or not they work. He concerns himself with diction, meter, and rhyme. When he addresses content, it is purely from within the universe the poet has created: Baratynskii does not question Murav'ev's conceit, in which the poet converses with each of the four elements, but he demands that the fantasy be internally consistent. In attempting to show how hot the thundercloud is on which the spirit of fire is seated, Murav'ev makes the elemental force squirm and recoil: “He could not sit still on his thundercloud” (“Ne mog usidet' on na tuche svoei”). Baratynskii rightly points out how ridiculously deflating this is: “Why couldn't the spirit of fire sit still on his thundercloud? What was he afraid of? Can one really write this way and never verify the imagination with the reason?” (S, 424).⁵

Belinskii, by contrast, is scornful of the old days when criticism consisted of “philological, grammatical, and prosodic remarks.”⁶ His reviews are concerned not with technique but with philosophy and ideology, and not with the internal consistency of the poet's own philosophical universe but with its correspondence to what Belinskii considers to be the correct philosophy. He is quite shameless about his unwillingness to read a work on its own terms; he says of “The Last Poet” (“Poslednii poet”) that “in order to enjoy this harmonious verse, full of soul and feeling, one must make an effort: one must force oneself to take the poet's point of view, to agree with him for a minute that he is right in his views on poetry and science; but this is decidedly impossible!” He pokes fun at the elegance of Baratynskii's style in an execrable and long-winded style of his own. After accusing Baratynskii of superficiality, he reduces the subtleties and profundities of “The Last Death” (“Posledniaia smert'”) and “The Last Poet” to coarse slogans: “Briefly and clearly: science is to blame for everything!” “Life as the prey of death, reason as the enemy of feelings, truth as the destroyer of happiness.”⁷ The most insulting feature of Belinskii's articles, however, is his insistent repetition of a curse disguised as a literary judgment: he consigns Baratynskii to the category of poets “now for the most part forgotten or about to be forgotten.”⁸ (Belinskii predicted the same fate for Goethe.)

It is not by chance that Belinskii ignores matters of grammar and prosody. The demands he makes on Baratynskii's poetry are demands more appropriate to prose. He laments Baratynskii's failure to adduce any proof for his praises of Goethe and utters one of the strangest criticisms ever made of a memorial poem: “Instead of an uncontrolled hymn to Goethe, the poet should have characterized him.”⁹ As Ivan Turgenev recalls in his memoir of Belinskii, the duty of the socially conscious writer in this era was to usher in the age of prose; writing poetry was coming to be perceived (especially by Hegelians) as a laughable, outmoded, and socially useless occupation. In 1859 Turgenev reported on the victory won by Belinskii and his followers: “The time of pure poetry has passed, just as the time of the pseudo-sublime phrase; the time of criticism, politics, and satire has arrived.”¹⁰

Baratynskii was not insensitive to the changes in the air. He wrote to P. A. Viazemskii that “the time of individual poetry has passed, and a new time has not yet ripened” (S, 521). About the time of the Concubine debacle, it became clear in Baratynskii's letters that he hoped to appease his critics by turning to prose. He offered Kireevskii his ideas on the novel (among other things, he says that the most interesting setting for a novel would be a provincial town, an idea later executed brilliantly by his acquaintance Gogol), and for Kireevskii's new journal The European he submitted his only attempt at prose fiction, the somewhat clumsy story “The Ring” (“Persten'”). The gravitation toward prose seems less an artistic decision than an effort to appease the spirit of the age. But more important for Baratynskii was the progression from poetry to prose as a stage not in the life of the nation but in the life of the individual.

Writing to Pushkin in 1828 about the public's incomprehension of Evgenii Onegin, Baratynskii provides an explanation for it that Pushkin later used in his own unfinished article on Baratynskii. In Russia, a poet can only be popular in his youthful immaturity, Baratynskii writes, for young people find their own thoughts and feelings reflected in a poet's early works. When the poet matures and deepens, he loses this audience and cannot find another among his coevals: “Officers find him boring, and brigadiers will not accept him, because his verse is after all not prose” (S, 490).¹¹

Of the Horatian themes that Baratynskii used, the one he truly made his own was that expressed in Horace's Epistles 1.1 and 2.2: that lyric poetry is appropriate only to youth and must be put aside in maturity. In 1831, at about the time he began his flirtation with prose, Baratynskii sent Iazykov the lyric “Once, as a lad, with a ringing call” (“Byvalo, otrok, zvonkim klikom”), with the explanation that it expressed his sorrow at no longer being able to write poetry. The poet recalls going to the forest as a boy to awaken echoes, “a true response in the wild forest.” As he grew to be a young man, rhyme took hold of his imagination, and the play of sounds answering each other replaced his delight in the echo's precise reproduction of his own voice: play with similarity, it is implied, is a more mature enjoyment than play with identity. But now the poet has outgrown both stages:

I am growing cold
Even to the harmony of verse—
And just as I no longer call to the leafy forests,
So I do not seek consonant words.

(PSS, 158)¹²

A few years later, having apparently abandoned his attempts at prose, Baratynskii revises the theme of the ages of human life in an epigram that, appropriately, provoked the rage of Belinskii. In “At first a thought, embodied” (“Snachala mysl', voploshchena”), Baratynskii traces the life of an idea. It begins enciphered into a poet's “concise poem,” like a young maiden obscured from the unheeding world. Then, in the novelist's “free prose,” it resembles an experienced woman, evasive, talkative, and visible to all. Finally it ends in the journalist's polemic as an old chatterbox, vulgarly shouting and giving birth to “what everyone has long known already” (PSS, 190).

Although Baratynskii abandoned prose, he did not abandon the promise to stop writing verse. “Once, as a lad” originally appeared as the final poem in Baratynskii's collection of 1835, thus leaving the clear impression that this was to be his last lyric word. (The fact that it was actually written four years previously and that many poems had been written since does not soften the impression made by that placement in final position.) Moreover, the poem that Baratynskii originally intended to use as a foreword to the volume, “Here is a faithful list of impressions” (“Vot vernyi spisok vpechatlenii”), speaks of the poet's struggle against his muse, his desire to plunge his lines into Lethe, hiding them “both from myself and from the world” (i ot sebia i oto sveta; PSS, 215-16). The 1835 collection was, of course, not Baratynskii's last book of lyrics, for Twilight followed in 1842. And although Belinskii promised his public that Twilight contained “nearly the last poems by this poet,” Baratynskii did stubbornly continue to write until his death.¹³

Among these last poems is one that occupies a somewhat anomalous position, the epigram “Thanks to meddling malice.”¹⁴ In the opening two lines the poet arrests our attention by thanking meddling malice and praising his enemies. What in fact is he thanking them for? He explains that the natural end to his poetic activity had been approaching; his graying hair had given him a right to subside into laziness and to drink Lethe's waters. But now his enemies have goaded him back into action: “But now your savage voice / Calls me to battle and awakens my voice.” In a characteristic travesty of biblical imagery, Baratynskii tells his enemies that, like Joshua, they have stopped the sun—but it is the setting sun of the poet's youth. In the final stanza he thanks them again for his second youth, the envy of Horace:

Thank you! I celebrate
My second youth,
Unknown till now to human sons,
To the envy of Horace, to the glory of you!

(PSS, 217)

The poet's youth, the time of lyric poetry, has been prolonged by his enemies—but what is the fruit of this “second youth”? A clue is contained in a letter of 1831 from Baratynskii to Pletnev, which illuminates Baratynskii's method of creation:

I know that poetry is not confined to the dead letter, that one can be a poet while remaining silent; but I am sorry that you have abandoned art, which consoles us in the sorrows of life better than any philosophy. To express a feeling means to resolve it, to master it. That is why the gloomiest poets may maintain their courageous spirits [bodrost' dukha]. … Let us accomplish the spiritual duty of our lives [nash zhiznennyi podvig] with firmness. Talent is a mission [darovanie est' poruchenie]. One must fulfill it no matter what the obstacles, and the main obstacle is despondency [unylost'].

(S, 496)

What is at stake here is not only the poet's solemn responsibility to his métier but also the liberating (though somewhat paradoxical) possibility of maintaining cheerfulness by expressing gloom. What do you do when your literary enemies have so poisoned the atmosphere that you would be driven to abandon poetry even if you were still young and poetry were still appropriate? One thing you could do is start writing poetry about giving up poetry forever, and this expression of gloomy thoughts might paradoxically encourage you to a new productivity, a virtual rejuvenation. Beginning with “Once, as a lad,” continuing with “On Planting a Forest” and beyond it to “I love you, goddesses of song” (“Liubliu ia vas, bogini pen'ia”), Baratynskii undertakes to cultivate a new poetic subgenre: the renunciation of poetry. If we regard “Thanks to meddling malice” as proceeding on a higher level of self-reflection, we see that Baratynskii is thanking his critics for providing him with a problem to write about and thus to resolve and master. By writing of renunciation, Baratynskii can continue to carry out his “spiritual duty.”

This reading of “Thanks to meddling malice” opens up three lines of investigation that we will consider briefly. First, let us return to the final strophe of “On Planting a Forest” and the mystery of the poet's “submissiveness and hope.” Since we know that “saying farewell to [his] lyre” is a way for the poet to hold on to it, a second referent can be assigned to the “powerful and gloomy children of poetry's secret sorrows.” On one level, of course, they are the firs, oaks, and pines that the lyric subject is planting; but on a higher level, they are the poems of renunciation that the poet's enemies have unwittingly served to provoke, of which “On Planting a Forest” is the supreme example.¹⁵ So we are dealing here with a near-paradox: the intention to abandon poetry is expressed in an ongoing series of poems that seems to have a real future. This is near-paradoxical, rather than fully paradoxical in the logical sense, because it does not involve any infinite circularity; it remains a contradictory (but stable) resonance between two levels of the utterance, the propositional content and the expression (the énoncé and the énonciation), rather like the well-known lament that, “alas, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.”

The logical structure of Baratynskii's poems of renunciation, in our reading, is far from unique to this one author. We wish to give one other famous example of it, the biblical story of the Syrophoenician Woman:

And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house, and would not have any one know it; yet he could not be hid. But immediately a woman, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he said to her, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” And he said to her, “For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” And she went home, and found the child lying in bed, and the demon gone.

(Mark 7.24-30, RSV)

The parallel with Baratynskii lies in the woman's astonishing response to the mini-parable with which Jesus has apparently attempted to confound her: “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” On the level of propositional content, the woman is more or less admitting her status as a “dog” and pointing out one mitigating consequence of that admission, namely that dogs occasionally receive crumbs. But we miss the point of the story entirely if we imagine that Jesus cures her daughter merely because of this tiny loophole in the argument. The whole point is that Jesus, especially in the Gospel of Mark, is always attempting to baffle his interlocutors and demonstrate their alienated incomprehension: the woman was not expected to interpret correctly the central metaphor of the children and the dogs. The fact that she does comprehend it and is able to respond accordingly goes a long way toward establishing that she is not a dog—an outsider—but rather an insider who has mastered the language of insiders. Jesus honors her petition not for her “great faith,” as Matthew would have it (15.28), but “for this saying”—an act of saying that astonishingly contradicts its own propositional content. One could say that the entire mission of Paul to the Gentiles is invented in this one moment of near-paradox.¹⁶

The second line of investigation concerns the figure of Joshua in “Thanks to meddling malice”: as we have seen from the advice to Murav'ev, Baratynskii believed in carefully thinking through the implications of his figuration, in “verifying the imagination with the reason.” Thus his biblical allusions are complex and problematic, never simple tags. Here the inclusion of Joshua is not just shorthand for the theme of stopping time; instead, it provides material for at least two readings. Joshua stops the sun so that he will have time to destroy the Amorites to the last man. Here, Baratynskii thanks his enemies for stopping the sun of his youth and thus giving him time to mount a counterattack. But there is a deeper and more tragic message. The enemies are compared to the “God-chosen Hebrew”; they, like him, are given the power to stop the sun for their own purposes. Even as he offers gratitude for the extended day, the poet knows that the purpose of its prolongation is the completion of his destruction. The fruits of his “second youth,” he knows very well, will fare no better with his critics than those of his first.

Finally, “Thanks to meddling malice” brings us into the problem of Baratynskii's peculiar use of expressions that are, in Iurii Ivask's somewhat imprecise formulation, “negative in form but not always in meaning.” Ivask gives such examples as “unlimited spring” (nesrochnaia vesna) instead of “immortal spring” (bessmertnaia vesna), “noncommon expression” (neobshchee vyrazhenie) instead of “unusual expression” (neobychnoe vyrazhenie), “non-Russian supervision” (nerusskii nadzor) instead of “foreign supervision” (inostrannyi nadzor). What these unusual negatives do is call attention to the quality being negated.¹⁷ In “Thanks to meddling malice,” Baratynskii calls his enemies literally “nonfriends” (nedrugi). The word “friend” (drug) is a phantom presence, implying a certain intimacy between speaker and addresses. A gloss on this situation is provided by an epigram of 1832:

Who unfailingly abuses me?
Inevitably betrays me?
Unfailingly envies me?
There's no need to think about the answer: the person close to me [rodnoi]!
An enemy is more often of use to us than a friend:
The sublunary world is ordered thus;
O how dear, how obliging
Is an enemy given by nature itself!

(PSS, 170)

[Kto nepremennyi moi rugatel'?
Neobkhodimyi moi predatel'?
Zavistnik nepremennyi moi?
Tut dumat' nechego: rodnoi!
Nam chashche druga vrag polezen,—
Podlunnyi mir ustroen tak;
O kak zhe dorog, kak liubezen
Samoi prirodoi dannyi vrag!]

The “intimate enemy” (vrag rodnoi) is also the underlying subject of the epigram “To the Coterie” (“Kotterii”), directed against Kireevskii and his circle, which contains a reference to an earlier period during which Baratynskii and Kireevskii were still intimate friends.¹⁸ In “Thanks to meddling malice” the intimacy is not simply a matter of one's enemies being former friends; these enemies are even now friends of a sort. They have rendered the poet a service that well-wishers could not have rendered: out of his despair at their attacks he has created poetry. The renunciation poems, poetry about not writing poetry, express on a higher level Baratynskii's curiously positive negativity.

Baratynskii's reward to his “nonfriends” (nedrugi) for their unfriendly service was a poem “to the glory of you” (v slavu vam). While Belinskii wished oblivion upon Baratynskii, Baratynskii promised his critics immortality. This too was a curse. For as long as we read Baratynskii, we will know what he had to thank his enemies for.

Notes

1. E. A. Baratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. V. M. Sergeev, 3d ed. (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1989), 218. Subsequent page references are included in parentheses in the essay, marked PSS. For the full text of the poem, see the appendix to this essay. All translations are ours unless otherwise indicated.

2. E. A. Boratynskii [Baratynskii], Stikhotvoreniia. Poèmy. Proza. Pis'ma, ed. O. Muratova and K. Pigarev (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1951), 481. Subsequent page references are included in parentheses in the essay, marked S.

3. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. B. V. Tomashevskii, 10 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1962-66), 7: 98, 185.

4. Damskii zhurnal, pt. 34, no. 20 (1831): 111.

5. The review appeared in Moskovskii telegraf in 1827.

6. V. G. Belinskii, “Sumerki. Sochinenie Evgeniia Baratynskogo …,” Otechestvennye zapiski (1842), cited in Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. N. F. Bel'chikov et al., 13 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1953-59), 6: 465.

7. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 6: 469, 471, 476. Cf. S. A. Andreevskii: “It is strange to see the zeal with which Belinskii proves to Baratynskii, as to a small boy, the usefulness of science, the invention of the railroad, etc.” Andreevskii, Literaturnye ocherki, 4th ed. (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1913), 23-24. See also Geir Kjetsaa: “In our view, when analyzing Baratynskii's work, Belinskii clearly abuses the position of the critic: instead of reading and interpreting the poet's works in accordance with their own premises and then dispassionately investigating the degree to which these premises have been observed, Belinskii arbitrarily takes on the role of the poet's judge, dogmatically declaring that his ideas are ‘false’ and ‘incorrect.’” Kjetsaa, Evgenii Baratynskii: Zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Oslo: Universitatsforlaget, 1973), 203-4.

8. V. G. Belinskii, “Literaturnye mechtaniia (Elegiia v proze),” Molva (1834), cited in Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 1: 74.

9. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 6: 480.

10. Ivan Turgenev, Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 135.

11. For Pushkin's unfinished article on Baratynskii (“Baratynskii prinadlezhit k chislu otlichnykh nashikh poètov …”), see his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 7: 221-25.

12. For the full text of the poem, see the appendix to this essay.

13. V. G. Belinskii, “Russkaia literatura v 1842 godu,” Otechestvennye zapiski (1843), cited in Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 6: 532.

14. For the full text of the poem, see the appendix to this essay.

15. That these lines refer to poems was first suggested to us by Nancy Pollak, whom we take this opportunity to thank. The present paper attempts to document the logical and philological evidence for her insight.

16. Another example is Pushkin's “Egyptian Nights” (“Egipetskie nochi”) of 1835. In this prose fragment, an itinerant Italian improvvisatore asks the poet Chatskii to assign him a theme for extemporaneous verse. Chatskii offers the theme of the poet's absolute freedom to choose his own subjects and the complete independence of poetic inspiration from outside influence. The Italian improvises brilliantly on the assigned theme, the propositional content of which seemingly forbids the very process through which he gives it artistic embodiment.

17. Iurii Ivask, “Boratynskii,” Novyi zhurnal 50 (1957): 141. On the metonymics of negativity, see Michael Shapiro and Marianne Shapiro, “Pushkin's Modus Significandi,” in their Figuration in Verbal Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 131.

18. In a letter of 1832 to Kireevskii consoling him for the banning of his journal The European, Baratynskii invites Kireevskii to join him in an intimate isolation like that of the early Christians, “the possessors of a world persecuted in its time but now triumphant” (S, 516). In “To the Coterie,” Baratynskii bitterly travesties this allusion. Here a personification of “Talent” speaks to Kireevskii's circle of “talentless meddling scribes,” negating Christ's words to his disciples: “‘Amen, amen,’ he announced to you, ‘wherever there are three of you—I will not be there with you’” (“Amin', amin', veshchal on vam, gde troe / Vy budete—ne budu s vami ia”; PSS, 217).