Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - II
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“Oh, thou soul, my soul, my beautiful maid — in the
hour of daybreak, when the morning was red — when
the shining sun rose up in the heavens — without leave
of thy father and mother — without even once seeing
thy friend — thou left life, thou went away from here.—
“Oh, ye winds, ye warm winds, ye! — warm winds, ye
who waft towards autumn — blow ye not here, I need
ye not. — But come only thou storm, oh, thou roaring!
— From the regions of the North fly only thou hither! —
Split only with thy breath the moist earth — split the
wide field, split the broad field! — Oh, open for me,
storm! open for me here my grave. — And ah, let me,
let me for the last time — here take leave of my loved
friend — of my loved friend, of my dearly beloved. —
Only a tear-kiss amid weeping so bitter! — Then I expire
and die with her.”
When from these tones of nature you come to the
lyrical in the founder of the later Russian literature, the
transition is abrupt, so abrupt that for a man of the
present day it demands a very great interest in the
historical development of a great people, not to put
Lomonósof aside with disgust. For he, who, moreover, was a far
greater philosopher than poet, belongs absolutely to that
tendency of taste in the eighteenth century for which
the inartistic poetry of the people was no poetry at all,
and which saw the end and aim of lyric poetry in the
strained pathos of the style of the ode and its artistic
form of regular combination. The modern artistic poem,
in various parts of the country, begins in this eighteenth
century by separating itself as far as possible from the
ballads of the people and from everything which belongs
to them, so as for the first time at the beginning of the
new century to seek backwards for simplicity, unity,
and nature.
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