“The world in shadow slipped away
And, like a silent dream took flight,
Like Adam, I in Eden lay
Alone, and face to face with night.”
He sings about the southern night amidst the hay; or again about the dawn—
“A whisper, a breath, a shiver,
The trills of the nightingale,
A silver light and a quiver
And a sunlit trail.
The glimmer of night and the shadows of night
In an endless race,
Enchanted changes, flight after flight,
On the loved one’s face.
The blood of the roses tingling
In the clouds, and a gleam in the grey,
And tears and kisses commingling—
The Dawn, the Dawn, the Day!”
Polonsky’s verse, in contrast to Fet’s gentle epicurean temperament, his delicate half-tones and illusive whispers, is made of sterner stuff; and, in contrast to Maikov’s sculptural lines, it is pre-eminently musical, and reflects a fine and charming personality. His area of subjects is wide; he can write a child’s poem as transparent and simple as Hans Andersen—as in his conversation between the sun and the moon—or call up the “glory that was Greece,” as in the poem when his “Aspasia” listens to the crowds acclaiming Pericles, and waits in rapturous suspense for his return—an evocation that Browning would have envied for its life and Swinburne for its sound.
But neither Maikov, Fet, nor Polonsky, exquisite as much of their writing is, produced anything of the calibre of Nekrasov, even in their own province; that is to say, they were none of them as great in the artistic field as he was in his didactic field. Compared with him, they are minor poets. There is one poet of this epoch who does rival Nekrasov in another field, and that is Count Alexis Tolstoy (1817-75), who was also a Parnassian and remained aloof from didactic literature; yet, under the pseudonym of Kuzma Prutkov, he wrote a satire, a collection of platitudes, that are household words in Russia; also a short history of Russia in consummately neat and witty satirical verse. As well as his satires, he wrote an historical novel, Prince Serebryany, and more important still, a trilogy of plays, dealing with the most dramatic epoch of Russian history, that of Ivan the Terrible. The trilogy, written in verse, consists of the “Death of Ivan the Terrible,” “The Tsar Feodor Ivanovitch” and “Tsar Boris.” They are all of them acting plays, form part of the current classical repertory, and are effective, impressive and arresting when played on the stage.
But it is as a poet and as a lyrical poet that Alexis Tolstoy is most widely known. Versatile with a versatility that recalls Pushkin, he writes epical ballads on Russian, Northern, and even Scottish themes, and dramatic poems on Don Juan, St. John Damascene, and Mary Magdalene; and, besides these, a whole series of personal lyrics, which are full of charm, tenderness, music and colour, harmonious in form and transparent. No Russian poet since Pushkin has written such tender love lyrics, and nobody has sung the Russian spring, the Russian summer, and the Russian autumn with such tender lyricism. His poem on the early spring, when the fern is still tightly curled, the shepherd’s note still but half heard in the morning, and the birch trees just green, is one of the most tender, fresh, and perfect expressions of first love, morning, spring, dew, and dawn in the world’s literature. His songs have inspired Tchaikovsky and other composers. The strongest and highest chord he struck is in his St. John Damascene; this contains a magnificent dirge for the dead which can bear comparison even with the Dies Iræ for majesty, solemn pathos, and plangent rhythm.
His pictures of landscapes have a peculiar charm. The following is an attempt at a translation—
“Through the slush and the ruts of the highway,
By the side of the dam of the stream,
Where the fisherman’s nets are drying,
The carriage jogs on, and I dream.
I dream, and I look at the highway,
At the sky that is sullen and grey,
At the lake with its shelving reaches,
And the curling smoke far away.
By the dam, with a cheerless visage
Walks a Jew, who is ragged and sere.
With a thunder of foam and of splashing,
The waters race over the weir.