APPENDIX TO DEATH OF THE POET.
BELOW are translations of some verses that Lermontov likely should have recalled to mind while composing the poem.
FROM THE CAUCASIAN CAPTIVE (1821).The Dedication also mentions the "whispers of calumny" and the "vengeful crowd."A bondsman of unpitying honour,
His death he had seen and would not dread,
To duels' resolute cool a donor,
Expecting the pernicious lead.FROM ANDRÉ CHÉNIER (1825).Compare also the first of the following two stanzas of "My Family Tree" (1830)....What for abandon'd I this lazy, simple life,
And threw myself into the fatal, frightening strife,
Where savage passions, wanton ignorance ran high,
Where malice reign'd, and avarice! O whither, why
Have drawn you me, my hopes! What saw I in that riot,
I, faithful but to love and poetry and quiet!
...Be silent, thou weak-hearted plaint!
Pride thee, O poet, joyful grow:
Thy head droop'd not, thou wouldst not faint
Before our days' disgraceful low....
FROM EUGENE ONEGIN.
CHAPTER SIX.
XXX.
...Now five more steps they have advanced,
And Lenskiy, squinting his left eye,
Too started aiming suddenly
Onegin fired his shot... Entranced,
The poet's soul would soon move on:
Now drops he silently his gun,XXXI.
His hand but for an instant hangs
Upon his chest, and so he falls.
His misty gaze speaks death, not pangs.
Thus in the mountains slowly rolls,
And sparkles in the sun with lights,
A snowy bulk down sloping heights.
At once pour'd o'er with chilling ruth,
Onegin hurries to the youth,
And looks, and calls his name... In vain:
He lives no more. The juvenile bard
Has found his doom, by Time unmarr'd!
Did breathe the tempest, and did wane
The blossom fair at Morning's rays,
The altar fire did cease to blaze!..* * * * * * * *
XXXV.
His heart quite eaten with remorse,
The pistol in his hand still clench'd,
Ievgeniy looks at Lenskiy's corse.
"What then? he is shot," the neighbour cinch'd.
He is shot!.. Strikes this grave exclamation
Onegin, and with trepidation
He walks aside....* * * * * * * *
XLIV.
I've found the voice of different yearnings,
I've found a new kind of a fret,
And I accept the first ones' spurnings,
Though losing my old fret regret.
O dreams! where is your mirthful truth?
Where's, her eternal rhyme, my youth?
Is 't so, now really at last
Away her garland must be cast?
Is 't so in verity indeed,
No elegiacs to devise,
My spring near to its finish hies
(What jesting I'd till now concede)?
Is 't so, and I must turn the page
And soon be thirty years of age?I know the times' præposterousness,* * *
Contest not, verily, its will:
New by descent is our noblesse,
And if yet newer, then nobler still.
A fragment of an hoarying race
(And more may, sadly, oft be seen),
Of olden boyars I'm the trace,
I'm, friends, a petty meshchanine*.* * * * * * *
A stack of deeds and letters missive
Has my heraldic seal suppress'd,
And with the new I'm not dismissive,
And put my pride of blood to rest.
I'm literatus and verse-maker,
I'm Pushkin simple, not Musine**,
I'm not too rich, I'm no grace-taker,
I'm big myself: a meshchanine.The epigraph is taken from an unpublished adaptation by A. A. Zhandr (1789-1873), a Russian playwright-translator and an acquaintance of Lermontov, of Venceslas (1648), a tragedy by Jean de Rotrou (1609-50), one of Richelieu's Five Authors.
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* Meshchanine (from Pol. mieszczanin, townsman, bourgeois) bourgeois.
** An allusion to the Counts Musins-Pushkins and, it would seem, also to the banned Russian Freemasons, as earlier the former had been prominent among the latter._______
[A link to the title page.]