Poem translated: “A Riddle” by Pyotr Vyazemsky (originally published in Jan 2024)

Alexander Pushkin is the Mozart of Russian poetry. A Mozart is a blessing for posterity, but not so much for the other talent in the room, which tends to get crowded out. In Russia’s Golden Age of Poetry, there was a lot of talent in the room, and inevitably Pushkin’s genius dimmed some of the other stars. One of the poets forever destined to remain in Pushkin’s shadow was Pyotr Vyazemsky. Traditionally, he occupies a much lower place on the literary totem pole than Pushkin and is rarely mentioned in the same breath. But, as Joseph Brodsky once said in the same context, an epoch can rarely accommodate more than one great poet in the minds of future generations. For Brodsky, who knew a thing or two about outstanding literary merit, Vyazemsky easily rivaled Pushkin when it came to poetic depth and style. This might strike some as borderline blasphemy — Pushkin is not supposed to have any equals. But this is to forget that in his own day Pushkin wasn’t the demigod and national treasure he would later become. His brilliance was not sufficiently appreciated by contemporaries, something that is confirmed by his senseless death — national treasures are not allowed to be squandered in pointless duels. Even Vyazemsky, though he rarely failed to praise Pushkin’s work, could be surprisingly irreverent, opining in one letter that Eugene Onegin, one of Pushkin’s masterpieces, was, on the whole, nothing to write home about. The remark makes Vyazemsky look silly only in hindsight. Proximity to genius gives rise to myopia; greatness is harder to recognize at close quarters. And Pushkin really was close: the two men were bosom friends. To attain immortality, Pushkin had to die first, and it was only after his romantically tragic death that Vyazemsky, along with many others, realized what Russia had lost.

Pushkin did not need to go the way he did to become Pushkin. But it helped that he did die that way; his untimely end in a duel at age thirty-seven helped shape the Pushkin cult. Vyazemsky, on the other hand, lived a life so long it befitted a burgher more than a poet; somehow, his own guardian angel never deserted him. Vyazemsky was born at the tail end of the rococo age, when Catherine the Great was still the Russian empress. His father, a Russian prince, was an enlightened, broad-minded man and a colorful character worthy of a picaresque novel. During his travels in Europe, he had met and fallen in love with an Irish noblewoman by the name of Jenny O’Reilly. Although the woman was married, Vyazemsky père managed to cart her off to Russia, get her to obtain a divorce, and marry him in the teeth of opposition from his own family. From this union sprang Pyotr Vyazemsky, in the year of 1792. His mother died when he was still a child, but his father lived long enough to exercise a formidable influence on him. Someone wrote that when it comes to talent, the right parents count for a lot more than the right tutor. If so, Vyazemsky had lucked out. Vyazemsky senior may have never fully appreciated his son’s immense gifts, but his manor served as a petri dish for Vyazemsky’s literary talent. Aside from a large library, there were all sorts of notable guests — a veritable who’s who of Catherine’s more sophisticated elites. One of the guests was the great Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin, who became Vyazemsky’s brother-in-law and eventually his guardian when Vyazemsky’s father had passed away. Karamzin encouraged his protégé’s early writing efforts and facilitated his entry into Russia’s leading literary circles.

Vyazemsky’s personal flowering coincided with the magnificent flowering of Russian literature in the first decades of the 19th century. Having valiantly served in the Russian army during the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, Vyazemsky went on to make a name for himself as a literary critic as well as a poet. Bearing a mild resemblance to Schubert thanks to his round spectacles and tousled hair, Vyazemsky fraternized with some of the greatest poets of his time: Baratynsky, Zhukovsky, Adam Mickiewicz, and of course, Alexander Pushkin, with whom he grew especially close. Although he imbibed the political idealism of his reform-minded milieu and sympathized with the Decembrists during their revolt in 1825, Vyazemsky would drift towards conservatism as he got older. He combined his literary activities with work in the imperial government, as was customary for Russian noblemen. Though his heart was in literature not government, he made a spectacular career as a civil servant, rising to considerable heights and serving as an official censor at one point. He died in Germany in 1878, aged eighty-six.

Great poets are not known for their longevity, and Vyazemsky did not especially enjoy his. By the 1840s, he had become isolated and cut off from the literary world. He stuck to an essentially aristocratic conception of literature and deplored the influx of literary men from the lower classes (men like the famous literary critic Vissarion Belinsky). This could not have made him attractive to the new generation that found its way into Russian letters; he must have been positively reviled for his duties at the helm of the censorship apparatus. Politically, too, he cut a solitary figure. While he had abandoned his erstwhile liberal sentiments, he never gravitated towards the Slavophile movement or any reactionary “isms.” He was too enlightened to be ensnared by doctrines and, ideologically, remained a bachelor. For this he paid a price. The progressives viewed him as a mummy and an imperial scarecrow; the tsar didn’t trust him either, having never quite forgotten the poet’s Decembrist flirtations. Vyazemsky was out of step with his times. Worse, some heavy blows had rained on him in his personal life. One after another, his dear friends had departed; he’d been especially affected by the loss of Pushkin. Though his marriage to princess Gagarina was a happy one, of the eight children she’d borne him Vyazemsky had outlived all but one. For much of his life, he’d been racked by a nervous illness of some kind (most likely, depression) and had to take to the waters for treatment. He must have felt not a little like Job in his dotage.

Vyazemsky’s dark feelings and black moods informed his late poems. Their tone is that of weariness, resignation, and deep-seated pessimism; at times, the poet almost seems to shake his fist at God. Written in 1876, “A Riddle” (“Zagadka”) belongs to that “nocturnal” output. This exquisite poem is not much of a riddle; the metaphor of the book for the author’s own life is obvious. The real mystery lies elsewhere. Vyazemsky was not some atheist smirking in the manner of the philosopher from Ferney. Quite the opposite. As late as 1850, following the death of his seventh child, Vyazemsky and his wife made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He described the pilgrimage in his diaries, and it is clearly not a record left behind by an unbeliever. But “A Riddle” leaves no doubt that its author does not take the Nicene Creed — and, by extension, Christianity itself — very seriously. According to the editor’s notes at the back of an edition I own, Vyazemsky was skeptical of the “Christian legend concerning the afterlife.” But the edition is a Soviet one, and Soviet editors played down religious sentiment. Which Vyazemsky was the real one, then? The man who went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land or the poet who wrote “A Riddle”? Did Vyazemsky repudiate his Christianity, or did he make peace with God on his deathbed? Did Vyazemsky believe in God? For me, that is the real riddle.

I have not been able to find an English translation of this poem; the translation that follows is my own modest effort to help Vyazemsky’s star glow a little brighter.

I am made to read a weighty book;
It is a most laborious read,
In which both fact and fiction look
Like an uninspiring, tiresome screed.

No flaws escape my weary eye:
The typo-riddled, withered pages
And unaccountable lacunae —
The text is meant for younger ages.

The oil lamp is nearly spent;
The darkness that descends right after,
The intimations of an end,
Are spelled out in the final chapter.

They say the reader shouldn’t worry:
The genre makes all outcomes equal;
This underwhelming, gloomy story
Will have a merry, joyous sequel.

No, thanks! This tome will quite suffice;
Of things I have their proper measure
And would not care to sample twice
A work that gives so little pleasure!