Even as the literary circles of which he was a part began to break up, either through the death or removal to parts distant of the parties concerned or actual disintegration of the purposes that had brought them together (societies among friends were frowned upon by Nicholas I’s policemen), Evgeny began to involve himself in various publishing schemes, such as the Moscow Telegraph and Delvig’s Literary Gazette. He made new friends and in them found havens in which to shelter his fractured world-view (despite the continued tendency of some of those friends to characterize Evgeny as "the Marquis" and his orderly, classical verses "unromantic").39

Moscow did provide Evgeny the opportunity to mix with the Romanticist writers, critics and philosophers known as the "Lyubomudry" the "Wisdom Lovers" whose inspiration was the "art comes from Nature" beliefs of Friedrich von Schelling. Perhaps most famous for a single aphorism, "Architecture is frozen music," Schelling believed that God exists in Nature, and that without Nature, there is no God. In a version of pantheism, Schelling saw the entire universe suffused with godliness, in which anybody at one with Nature is perforce at one with God.40

This system of belief struck a familiar chord for Boratynski, who for all his rational, "French" mindset possessed the necessary love of nature and passivity of personality to welcome a philosophy that seemed based on unification of art with the infinite. If architecture was frozen music, a tree was a poem writing itself upon earth’s page, a poet a seed planted in the mind of God. This was a metaphoric world in which Boratynski was fully at home.

Evgeny was not completely won over by Schelling’s philosophy, or what Russian enthusiasts made of it, but it consoled him in his increasing sensation of being separated from his fellow man, more and more out of step with them while more and more in tune with nature’s music. The verse he published during this period (exclusive of his verse tales, The Ball and The Gipsy Girl), showed great stylistic maturity, an atmosphere Prince Mirsky describes as "dryer and clearer" than could be found in any other Russian poet’s work of the period. To get the gist of this atmosphere, Mirsky refers the English reader to Alexander Pope. Boratynski’s is "poetry of thought", adds Mirsky, stating that he was perhaps the one 19th century poet who went farthest using pure thought as his material.41 Compression and concentration of ideas increased the chances that Evgeny’s verses would be difficult to understand, particularly in an age when such tentative Impressionism was only just beginning to stir in art. What Boratynski himself admitted he liked most about Schelling’s thought was not so much the philosophy itself, as he wrote Pushkin in 1826, but the poetry of it.42 Like many true lovers of mathematics, Evgeny could see the beauty of form, the rhythmic life behind cold numbers. Schelling’s philosophy went far toward validating thoughts and feelings Evgeny had pondered most of his life. Unfortunately, Nicholas I’s paranoia posed too great a strain and the "Wisdom-Lovers" broke up.

The one strong personality from this period left for Evgeny was Ivan Kireevsky, whose periodical, "The European", founded in 1832, palpated the edge of the Slavophilism soon to blanket Russia by stressing the inborn spiritualism believed to exist in the Russian nation and contrasting it with the burgeoning industrialism and rationalism of western Europe. It was a rejection of materialism and a belief in the inborn gifts of every man, serf or master, which would become ingrained in several future Boratynskis. Always attracted to charismatic people, Evgeny was drawn to the six years’ younger Kireevsky as to a soul-mate: here was someone with whom he could share all his thoughts and feelings, without reserve, someone he could trust and trust did not come easily to the analytical Boratynski.

During the next ten years, Evgeny worked for the Moscow Herald, and for its replacement, the Moscow Observer Nicholas I had shut down the first journal after a few issues. Kireevsky’s "European" lasted barely longer than the Herald, being closed by the government soon after its first appearance. Distracted by these censor-foiled publications, and unable to stay in one place for very long, Evgeny was now in Moscow, at the house he purchased in Bol’shaya Spiridonievskaya Street, now at Mara, and spending more and more time on estates of the Engelgardt family.

One of these, Muranovo, became his and Nastenka’s own on the death of her father in 1836. Originally the property of Nastenka’s mother, Muranovo was a small property, in the south-eastern corner of which stood a single story house. There Nastenka’s father, General Engelgardt, dictated his memoirs of the reigns of Catherine the Great, Paul I and Alexander I (not published until 1859), starting a chain of "literary occupancy" that would persist at Muranovo until 1918.43

Evgeny replaced the original small dwelling with a two-story, rectangular structure, sitting atop a gentle slope surrounded by his beloved trees. It was here, in the solitude of the estate’s forests and fields, that Evgeny grew both closer to nature and more pessimistic in his appraisal of the affairs of men. (Considering how seriously threatened Muranovo’s pond and forests are today by Moscow’s creeping suburban sprawl, Evgeny would probably come to the same conclusions about mankind were he alive now.) He even wrote to Prince Viazemsky that "the time of subjective poetry has passed." As if echoing this privately held belief, when Evgeny’s second collection of poetry was published in 1835 it had no success with either public or critics. He contributed nothing to the Observer after that year, and watched its slow demise, beginning with increased surveillance by the censors in 1836, and the journal’s takeover by Bakunin and Belinsky in 1838. Like so many others, it disappeared soon after.

Changes were occurring between Evgeny and Kireevsky, who was turning more zealously toward Slavophile beliefs which Evgeny could not share. In 1831, his old friend from Petersburg, Anton von Delvig, died (his widow later married Evgeny’s brother Sergei, of Mara, with whom it was rumored she had already been carrying on an affaire). And in 1837, Alexander Pushkin got himself killed in a duel in St. Petersburg with a talentless dandy, Baron Georges d’Anthès de Heckeren, whom the poet had rightly suspected of having designs on his beautiful but immature wife, Natalia.

Pushkin had certainly lost more friends than gained them during his sad last years, married to the maddeningly impecunious Natalia, writing under Nicholas I’s heavy thumb, accepting and attempting to carry out court gentleman duties humiliating for an artist of his stature but necessary for Natalia to gain access to the imperial soirées. Yet one would have hoped that Boratynski would have kept in touch with his old friend and literary champion. For killing Russia’s greatest poet, handsome Heckeren was deported from Russia, where he was wined and dined as a quasi-celebrity, ending up as the founder of the Paris Gas Company. According to a letter reproduced in part in Henri Troyat’s Pushkin biography, Evgeny tried to visit his friend Heckeren while the latter was under arrest, but was prevented by the guard.44

A Russian critic, writing in 1907, described Boratynski as having less to do with Byron than with Hamlet 45, and if any Russian poet ever struggled over whether to be or not to be, it was Boratynski. A long way from his days of posing as the "Finnish exile", his was now a spirit virtually shattered by its enduring inability to find in the greater world a niche to call his own, a place to stand and be heard. Rumors went the rounds that, holed up at Muranovo, Evgeny fell to drowning his sorrows in alcohol.

Indeed, as modern Boratynski biographer L. I. Ginzburg shrewdly points out, the Russian Schellingites were not by definition bothered by the divide between poet and society. But this division proved spiritually destructive for Boratynski, coloring his last published verses with a sense of alienation of man and nature, apocalyptic prophecies of the death of art, and perhaps subconscious fears that the way of life which had bred him and most of his fellow poets of the 1820’s secluded, classical, ruminative estate life was coming to an end.

We can fairly say that while art has managed to hold up under some severe demagogic tortures during the past century, two thirds of Evgeny’s prediction came true. The long eighteenth century longer in Russia than elsewhere was over. In the wake of its demise came Alexander II’s laudable but badly planned freeing of the serfs in 1861, which did as much bad as good for both former serfs and landowners. The estates, which had been small but effective cells of culture all their own, the nurturers of nearly every important creative talent of which Russia could boast for two hundred years, were losing their raison d’être. As they faded, there was nothing with which to replace them. As Evgeny’s old friend Kireevsky wrote in an essay called "The Nineteenth Century", popular consensus was that the age of poetry was gone "pragmatic enterprises" now took precedence, along with a cold, prosaic emphasis on purely industrial progress.46

Where was the soul in all of this? One sees the results in a writer like Nikolai Gogol (who, significantly enough, thought Boratynski a morbid moper).47 A petty nobleman bred on a small estate, who upon moving to Petersburg tried his hand at several different "trades" acting, bureaucracy, teaching Gogol found his true métier in satirical writings that catalogue the wounds of his soul, and men’s wounding actions upon all souls.

Having long before declined to polish up his pessimism with satire, Evgeny Boratynski chose to retreat to his own ground, turning his face against even poetry to shore up nature by planting trees on his estate. (Some of these still exist at Muranovo.) Yet even this he recorded in a poem, "On the Plantation of a Forest", written a year before his death, and in his poems, "The Last Death" and "The Last Poet". In the latter, Boratynski seems to paint a self-portrait: A lone poet stands on an ocean cliff, the laughter of an uncomprehending world ringing in his ears. Like Sappho, the poet who leapt to her death in the sea, Boratynski’s poet seems to ponder the inevitability of suicide for a poetic soul lost in a purely utilitarian world.

Yet it is "The Last Death" which makes the greatest impact on our modern sensibilities, dealing as it does with a modern problem: Man’s thoughtless exploitation of nature, his ruination of its sacredness. In three separate visions the poet sees the world first as a glowing garden, populated by happy beings who had calmed the oceans with "artificial islands" and conquered the heavens with "invented wings" (both of which sound curiously like the ocean liners and jet planes of the distant future). The poet gazes upon a world where seasons are summoned at will, where man gets exactly what he wants from nature. In a second vision, mankind has become sated, lazy, and fruitless with the abundance it forced from nature, careless of replacing what it has taken. The third vision is like a scene from Revelations. Here the poet witnesses the disintegration of "the last families" of the world, decayed like crumbling temples on the frontiers, sees the ruined cities and shepherdless, starving cattle wandering in search of food. What can follow this but the silent Götterdämmerung of an earth which has cleansed itself of godless humankind, reverting to its old, wild splendors?

As if sensing that the past was slipping away fast, in 1840 Boratynski began to travel back in time, making his first return to Petersburg in fifteen years. The old Petersburgian magic enthralled him as he visited old friends Zhukovsky, Prince Viazemsky (who was to live on and die, forgotten and embittered, in the 1870’s), his brother-in-law Nikolai Putyata as well as meeting the darkly Romantic Lermontov for the first time. Evgeny went back to Moscow intent on moving to St. Petersburg in the near future. He also prepared for his long-awaited "pilgrimage" to Europe, where, as he wrote his mother, he wanted to see Schelling’s Munich, "the Athens of Germany". He was farther than ever from the Slavophilism that was infiltrating the art and politics of Russia.

Evgeny’s last collection of verse was, hauntingly enough, titled "Twilight". On its publication in 1842, "Twilight", when greeted with any reaction at all, was described as a "ghost" appearing among the astonished living, who were puzzled as to what it could want from its descendants.48

By this time, Boratynski had made up his mind: First the European pilgrimage, then the move from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

In that most European of Russian cities, poised on the edge of an empire transforming itself as a temple of retrogressive Slavdom, did Evgeny expect his melancholy voice to be heard with more understanding? Would the Neva, reflecting back the architectural confetti of Baroque palaces and the endless silver plains of the sky, have helped him decide whether to be or not to be, a suffering Hamlet forever on the periphery of life, or simply persuaded him to leave his tortures behind for the serenity of finally belonging?

Evgeny, Nastenka, and their elder children left for France in September of 1843, and by November were in Paris. The poet’s dream of pilgrimage seemed to be coming true. While in the city of bourgeois King Louis-Philippe and elegant courtesan Marie Dupleissis,

(La dame aux caméllias), Evgeny met a constellation of famed French writers, including Prosper Merimée (already one of many admirers of the future Empress Eugénie), Charles Nodier, and Alphonse de Lamartine.

It is not known whether Evgeny’s path crossed that of the Marquis de Custine, whose Russia in 1839, a scathing critique of Nicholas I’s empire that sounds more like a journey through the Russia of Joseph Stalin in 1939, was published in Paris this year. Astolphe and Evgeny would have had much to share on that score.

These years leading up to the 1848 revolution were artistically full of promise: Wordsworth was England’s Poet Laureate, Tennyson had published his "Morte d’Arthur", Mendelssohn’s shimmering music to "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" was first performed (in Potsdam), and Wagner’s stormy operatic love story, "Der fliegende Holländer", went on the boards of Dresden’s fairytale opera house. The world’s first nightclub, called "le Bal des Anglais", was opened in Paris, in which city Karl Marx was to meet Friedrich Engels the next year. (Setting off another kind of can-can in time to come.) Turner’s paintings were opening the door to Impressionism, and the telegraph was on its way to becoming a functional tool of communication. Of more importance to Boratynski, however, was his success with the Russian émigrés he met in Paris a fact which, taking the poet’s sense of alienation at home into account, should not surprise us.

The Boratynskis spent the winter of 1843-44 in Paris. When spring came, they headed south. They boarded ship in Marseilles for Naples, with plans to visit Rome and Florence and then to return to Russia by fall. Already swept up in the excitement of travel, before the ship was far from land Evgeny took up pen and paper. The uncharacteristically serene poem he wrote rejoices in the waves beating against the vessel’s sides, the shrill captain’s whistle, the seagulls flapping about in the open ocean, the exclamatory rippling of the sails. To Evgeny, just to see the Marseilles seamen hoist the anchor seemed a sign of hopefulness.

Two images, the ocean in this poem, long dreamed of since childhood, and his Italian tutor, Borghese, in his very last poem, occupied Evgeny’s mind during a journey that begins to take on the joyfulness of a soul certain it is going to heaven. In "To the Italian Tutor", Boratynski seems to look back over his own life: Listening enraptured to Borghese’s stories of Italy and Napoleon; mourning General Boratynski’s death and return to the solace of Mara; and now the seductive sleepy beauty of Naples in the poet’s own eyes, drowsing in eternal sunset light. It saddens Evgeny that Borghese died not in all this golden warmth of his homeland but in the icy solitudes of Russia.

Was this a premonition? Poetry had become for Evgeny a sort of sylvan retreat, a refuge into which he might escape an increasingly noisy world. His estate at Muranovo, with its quiet woods and controlled but natural harmony, came to symbolize a more tangible retreat, safe from Russia’s changing political and artistic scene, a place where both classless poet and aristocratic "Marquis" could contemplate and immortalize what made life, and art, worthwhile.

The joy of seeing the volcano-crowned city at last was attenuated by a serious illness (of unknown nature) which at first posed a grave threat to Nastenka. Thanks to poor sanitation and frequent summer epidemics, the constitutions of foreign visitors frequently fell prey to Neapolitan sicknesses, and this or something picked up in France or on board ship may account for Nastenka’s trouble.

The crisis was obviously surmountable, since Nastenka lived on until 1860. Though it is believed (and is plausible) that Evgeny worried himself sick over his wife’s condition, his own health cannot have been in optimum condition, because only a few weeks after arriving in Naples the poet died suddenly at Villa Reale, possibly of a heart attack, on June 29, 1844.

The cradle of Evgeny’s boyhood dreams, Naples may have been denied Borghese in death, but it was to prove the poet’s doorway between his world and that of his beloved tutor: The old saying "See Naples, then die" taken literally. Evgeny’s death there becomes even more haunting when it is recalled that the old Greek name for Naples was "Parthenope" after the siren who, when she found she was unable to charm the worldly Odysseus, threw herself into the sea. In this setting, the figure of the misunderstood bard, standing on a sea cliff contemplating suicide in Evgeny’s "The Last Poet", seems all too apposite in a man who felt increasingly alone in a world hardened against the charms, and the inspiration, of poetry.

Unlike the appearance of his last book of verse, not even Evgeny’s ghost seemed to bother the critics of Moscow and St. Petersburg now few seemed to care. A year later (1845), his body was brought back to Russia, and buried in that final resting place of so many of Russia’s immortals, Petersburg’s St. Alexander Nevsky Cemetery. There, at the very top of the memory-haunted Nevsky Prospekt, a marble memorial was raised above Evgeny’s grave, its marble front carved with a bas-relief profile portrait of the poet, his name picked out in gold below.

Boratynski had bridged the divide between flesh and spirit, to become, using the words of his near contemporary and brother-in-sentiment, Percy Bysshe Shelley, ...a poet hidden In the light of thought.

Sources: A History of Russian Literature, Prince D.S. Mirsky, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1927/ 1934 A Souvenir For Friends, Olga Ilyin and Boris Ilyin (unpublished) Catherine the Great, Vincent Cronin, William Morrow, New York 1978 Catherine the Great, Henri Troyat (transl. Joan Pinkham), E. P. Dutton, New York 1980 Dawn of the Eighth Day, Olga Ilyin, Holt Rinehart, New York 1951 Ilyin Archives Evgeny Baratynsky, Benjamin Dees, Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York 1972 Life on the Russian Country Estate, Dr. Priscilla Roosevelt, Yale University Press, 1995 Pavlovsk: The Life of a Russian Palace, Suzanne Massie, Little, Brown 1990 Pushkin, Henri Troyat (transl. Nancy Amphoux), Doubleday & Co., New York 1970 Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii, Sarah Pratt, Stanford University Press, California 1984 Russian Nineteenth Century Verse, ed. Irina Zheleznova, Raduga Publishers, Moscow 1983 So Dark a Stream, E. M. Almedingen, Hutchinson & Co., London 1959 The Romanovs, W. Bruce Lincoln, The Dial Press, New York 1981