Yevgeny Baratynsky

Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky was a Russian poet born on 2 March 1800, or 19 February under the Old Style calendar. He belonged to the noble Baratynsky, more accurately Boratynsky, family, and came of age in the great age of Russian poetry associated with Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin himself praised him as the finest Russian elegiac poet. Yet Baratynsky’s public standing did not remain steady. After a long period in which his reputation declined, Russian Symbolism poets later rediscovered him as a supreme poet of thought.

His early life carried both privilege and rupture. Baratynsky was educated at the Page Corps in St. Petersburg, but at fifteen he was expelled after stealing a snuffbox and five hundred roubles from the bureau of his accessory’s uncle. He then spent three years in the countryside, marked by deep emotional turmoil, before entering the army as a private. In 1820 he met Anton Delvig, who helped revive his spirits and introduced him to the literary press. Soon afterward, military service took Baratynsky to Finland, where he remained for six years.

Finland shaped his first major success. During those years he wrote Eda, his first long poem, which established his reputation. Though inspired by Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus, it followed a realistic and homely style, touched with sentimental pathos but without romanticism. The stern nature of Finland was especially dear to Baratynsky, and his descriptive passages from this period were counted among his best. His early poems also show a conscious effort to write differently from Pushkin, whom he regarded as a model of perfection.

In January 1826, Baratynsky married the daughter of Major-General Gregory G. Engelhardt. Through the interest of friends, he obtained leave from the Emperor to retire from the army, and in 1827 settled at Muranovo, just north of Moscow, now a literary museum. There he completed his longest work, The Gipsy, a poem written in the style of Pushkin. His family life seemed happy, but melancholy remained in the background of both his mind and his poetry. He published several books of verse praised by Pushkin and other perceptive critics, though the public received them coolly and young journalists of the “plebeian party” mocked them sharply.

Baratynsky’s mature poetry became more severe, compressed, and inward. His short pieces from the 1820s were noted for cold, metallic brilliance and sonority, including light poems in Anacreontic and Horatian modes as well as love elegies where delicate feeling was clothed in wit. After 1829, he became above all a poet of thought, using thought itself as material for poetry. His classical style, dense sentences, subordinate clauses, and parenthetical turns could make him obscure through compression, but they also gave his verse a rare intellectual force. He died in Naples on 11 July 1844, having gone there in search of a milder climate. His words continue to matter because they ask poetry to think as well as feel, with a clarity and tension that later readers learned to hear anew.