Abstract
This article examines the poetry of E.A. Baratynskii about three specific places: Finland, the homeland (i.e. Russia), and Italy. It is the contention of this article that these place-specific poems form a contrast to Baratynskii's other poetry, and allow his poetic persona to resolve conflicts that remain unresolved in the majority of his oeuvre. In particular, this article discusses the ways in which these three places form three different "realms of the dead" or areas of contact with the divine or the supernatural, thus allowing the poet to transcend the binary conflict between intellect and feeling, and science and nature, that is so problematic for his poetic persona.
Highlights
Evgenii Abramovich Baratynskii (1800–1844) was one of Russia’s most significant writers of metaphysical and psychological poetry, dealing most notably with the conflict between the intellect and the emotions.1 Within this conflict the intellect, and its representatives in the material world, science and technology, are generally portrayed as antithetical to harmony and happiness, but too powerful to be ignored; nature and the emotions, can be positive, when representing life and harmony, or negative, when representing either excessive passions or the “laws of nature” as defined by science
The otherworldly realms to which the poet gains access through his contact with these specific geographical locations are closely linked with another frequent feature of Baratynskii’s verse: death. His poetry on Finland has already been discussed as both showing a hell-like “land of the dead,” and as being part of the identity-building that took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to refashion Russia’s image as a Northern, rather than an Eastern, country and culture
The final image of the poem is one of springtime fertility and artistic inspiration that is part of the cycle of inheritance sanctioned by the natural order in these poems about the homeland. This poem, like the poems on Finland, contains a number of contradictions and oppositions, such as the “timeless spring” and the lyrical hero’s ability to recognize his father’s forgotten image, but their treatment here is different: while the Finnish landscape in the poems discussed above challenges the lyrical hero with its contradictory nature, the abandoned garden in “Desolation,” despite being barren and deserted, is a direct point of access to a welcoming afterlife, where one achieves eternal life through dying, and all conflicts are reconciled in the most positive way possible
Summary
Evgenii Abramovich Baratynskii (1800–1844) was one of Russia’s most significant writers of metaphysical and psychological poetry, dealing most notably with the conflict between the intellect and the emotions.1 Within this conflict the intellect, and its representatives in the material world, science and technology, are generally portrayed as antithetical to harmony and happiness, but too powerful to be ignored; nature and the emotions, can be positive, when representing life and harmony, or negative, when representing either excessive passions or the “laws of nature” as defined by science.
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