Morshen, or a Canoe to Eternity

Abstract

Some poets are astonishingly precocious: Arthur Rimbaud, for example, wrote everything he had to write by the time he was nineteen. Nikolai Morshen’s development as a poet offers an opposite example. Gradually maturing in a leisurely and deliberate manner over almost four decades, this poet’s work, when viewed in its totality, is a study in ever deepening philosophical thought and ever more finely honed verbal mastery. The stages of Morshen’s development and their chronology are obvious enough: the verse of 1936 to 1946 (written prior to Morshen’s first published collection and, for the most part, not included in it); the three published books of verse, Tiulen' (The Seal, 1959), Dvoetochie (Punctuation: Colon, 1967), and Ekho i zerkalo (The Echo and the Mirror, 1979); and a few poems that have appeared in émigré journals from his fourth, unpublished collection, “Umolkshii zhavoronok” (“The Now-Silent Lark”).