An Outline of Russian Literature. Baring Maurice

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ sources. But as time went on, he began to invent fables of his own; and out of the two hundred fables which he left at his death, forty only are inspired by La Fontaine and seven suggested by Æsop: the remainder are original. Krylov’s translations of La Fontaine are not so much translations as re-creations. He takes the same subject, and although often following the original in every single incident, he thinks out each motif for himself and re-creates it, so that his translations have the same personal stamp and the same originality as his own inventions.

      This is true even when the original is a masterpiece of the highest order, such as La Fontaine’s Deux Pigeons. You would think the opening lines—

      “Deux pigeons s’amoient d’amour tendre,

       L’un d’eux s’ennuyant au logis

       Fut assez fou pour entreprendre

       Un voyage en lointain pays”—

      were untranslatable; that nothing could be subtracted from them, and that still less could anything be added; one ray the more, one shade the less, you would think, would certainly impair their nameless grace. But what does Krylov do? He re-creates the situation, expanding La Fontaine’s first line into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps on it the impress of his personality and his nationality. Here is a literal translation of the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously trying a third English version.)

      “Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother.

       Neither would eat nor drink without the other;

       Where you see one, the other’s surely near,

       And every joy they halved and every tear;

       They never noticed how the time flew by,

       They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh.”

      This gives the sense of Krylov’s poem word for word, except for what is the most important touch of all in the last line. The trouble is that Krylov has written six lines which are as untranslatable as La Fontaine’s four; and he has made them as profoundly Russian as La Fontaine’s are French. Nothing could be more Russian than the last line, which it is impossible to translate; because it should run—

      “They were sometimes sad, but they never felt ennui”—

      literally, “it was never boring to them.” The difficulty is that the word for boring in Russian, skuchno, which occurs with the utmost felicity in contradistinction to sad, grustno, cannot be rendered in English in its poetical simplicity. There are no six lines more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly poetical in the whole of Russian literature.

      Krylov’s fables, like La Fontaine’s, deal with animals, birds, fishes and men; the Russian peasant plays a large part in them; often they are satirical; nearly always they are bubbling with humour. A writer of fables is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is sometimes to convey pregnant sense, keen mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human foibles, or to express wisdom in the form of wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. But Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in remaining a poet. It has been said that his images are conventional and outworn—that is to say, he uses the machinery of Zephyrs, Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,—and that his conceptions are antiquated. But what splendid use he makes of this machinery! When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is a Zephyr blowing, for instance, as when the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze. Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse he conveys a picture, and more than a picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and the Mole, in the first lines of which he makes you see and hear the eagle and his mate sweeping to the dreaming wood, and swooping down on to the oak-tree. Or again, in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, he gives in a few words the sense of height and space, as if you were looking down from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over the mountains of the Caucasus, sees the end of the earth, the rivers meandering in the plains, the woods, the meadows in all their spring glory, and the angry Caspian Sea, darkling like the wing of a raven in the distance. But his greatest triumph, in this respect, is the fable of the Ass and the Nightingale, in which the verse echoes the very trills of the nightingale, and renders the stillness and the delighted awe of the listeners,—the lovers and the shepherd. Again a convention, if you like, but what a felicitous convention!

      The fables are discursive like La Fontaine’s, and not brief like Æsop’s; but like La Fontaine, Krylov has the gift of summing up a situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect by the sudden evocation of a whole picture in a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable of the Peasants and the River: the peasants go to complain to the river of the conduct of the streams which are continually overflowing and destroying their goods, but when they reach the river, they see half their goods floating on it. “They looked at each other, and shaking their heads,” says Krylov, “went home.” The two words “went home” in Russian (poshli domoi) express their hopelessness more than pages of rhetoric. This is just one of those terse effects such as La Fontaine delights in.

      Krylov in his youth lived much among the poor, and his language is peculiarly native, racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the language of the people and of the peasants, and it abounds in humorous turns. He is, moreover, always dramatic, and his fables are for this reason most effective when read aloud or recited. He is dramatic not only in that part of the fable which is narrative, but in the prologue, epilogue, or moral—the author’s commentary; he adapts himself to the tone of every separate fable, and becomes himself one of the dramatis personæ. Sometimes his fables deal with political events—the French Revolution, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Congress of Vienna; the education of Alexander I by La Harpe, in the well-known fable of the Lion who sends his son to be educated by the Eagle, of whom he consequently learns how to make nests. Sometimes they deal with internal evils and abuses: the administration of justice, in fables such as that of the peasant who brings a case against the sheep and is found guilty by the fox; the censorship is aimed at in the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing in the cat’s claws; the futility of bureaucratic regulations in the fable of the sheep who are devoured by their superfluous watchdogs, or in that of the sheep who are told solemnly and pompously to drag any offending wolf before the nearest magistrate; or, again, in that of the high dignitary who is admitted immediately into paradise because on earth he left his work to be done by his secretaries—for being obviously a fool, had he done his work himself, the result would have been disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they deal merely with human follies and affairs, and the idiosyncrasies of men.

      Krylov’s fables have that special quality which only permanent classics possess of appealing to different generations, to people of every age, kind and class, for different reasons; so that children can read them simply for the story, and grown-up people for their philosophy; their style pleases the unlettered by its simplicity, and is the envy and despair of the artist in its supreme art. Pushkin calls him “le plus national et le plus populaire de nos poètes” (this was true in Pushkin’s day), and said his fables were read by men of letters, merchants, men of the world, servants and children. His work bears the stamp of ageless modernity just as The Pilgrim’s Progress or Cicero’s letters seem modern. It also has the peculiarly Russian quality of unexaggerated realism. He sees life as it is, and writes down what he sees. It is true that although his style is finished and polished, he only at times reaches the high-water mark of what can be done with the Russian language: his style, always idiomatic, pregnant and natural, is sometimes heavy, and even clumsy; but then he never sets out to be anything more than a fabulist. In this he is supremely successful, and since at the same time he gives us snatches of exquisite poetry, the greater the praise to him. But, when all is said and done, Krylov has the talisman which defies criticism, baffles analysis, and defeats time: namely, charm. His fables achieved an instantaneous popularity, which has never diminished until to-day.

      Internal СКАЧАТЬ