“No consolation
Came when I fell;
In jubilation
Laughed fiends of Hell.”
He was sent to the Caucasus, where he distinguished himself and was promoted corporal. Years passed, and the tedium and hopelessness of his position were too much for him. For him it was impossible to become a poet at the service of the police, and that was the only way to get rid of the knapsack.
There was, indeed, one other way, and he preferred it: he drank, in order to forget. There is one terrible poem of his—To Whiskey.
He got himself transferred to a regiment of carabineers quartered at Moscow. This was a material improvement in his circumstances, but cruel consumption had already fastened on his lungs. It was at this time I made his acquaintance, about 1833. He dragged on for four years more and died in the military hospital.
When one of his friends went to ask for the body, to bury it, no one knew where it was. The military hospital carries on a trade in dead bodies, selling them to the University and medical schools, manufacturing skeletons, and so on. Polezháev’s body was found at last in a cellar; there were other corpses on the top of it, and the rats had gnawed one of the feet.
His poems were published after his death, and it was intended to add a portrait of him in his private’s uniform. But the censor objected to this, and the unhappy victim appears with the epaulettes of an officer—he was promoted while in the hospital.