Notes on Prosody
and
Abram Gannibal
From the commentary to the author’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin
1964
Notes on Prosody
Author’s Note
The following Notes on Prosody represent part (Appendix Two) of my Commentary to Aleksandr Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. The work, containing this commentary, with two appendixes, index, my critical translation of the novel, and a reproduction of the original 1837 edition, was published in four volumes in Bollingen Series, New York, and by Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. A few corrections, chiefly typographical, have been made for this reprinting. There was not space for a footnote that I should have liked to add, on p. 47, asterisked to the phrase "monosyllabic adjectives" in line 4 of paragraph 2, to wit: "Not counting, of course, the monosyllabic predicative forms—adverbish mongrels, really— of disyllabic adjectives, such as glup, 'is stupid,' from glup'iy, or bel, 'is white,' from belly."
The sketch of Abram Gannibal's life constitutes Appendix One of my Commentary to Eugene Onegin. Previous to its appearance in the four-volume edition, it was published in a somewhat abridged form, entitled "Pushkin and Gannibal," in Encounter (London), XIX: 3 (September 1962). V.N.
Notes on Prosody
1. Prosodies
The following notes on English and Russian iambic tetrameters are intended only to outline the differences and similarities between them. Pushkin is taken as the greatest representative of Russian poetry; the differences between his iambic tetrameters and those of other masters of the meter among minor and major Russian poets are matters of specific, not generic, distinction. Russian prosody, which came into existence only two centuries ago, is tolerably well known to native students: some good work has been done by a number of Russian theorists in relation to Eugene Onegin. On the other hand, the huge and ancient English genus is very imperfectly described. I have not been particularly interested in the question, but as much as I can recall I have not come across a single work that treated English iambics — particularly the tetrameter—on a taxonomical and comparative-literature basis, in a way even remotely acceptable to a student of prosody. In my casual perusals,
I have of course slammed, shut without further ado any such works on English prosody in which I glimpsed a crop of musical notes or those ridiculous examples of strophic arrangements which have nothing to do with the structure of verse. In other works, muddleheaded discussions of "short" and "long," "quantity" and "equivalence," not only contain various traditional nonsense or subjective illusions of sense but do not afford any systematic notion of the iambic modulation beyond tedious arguments around and around "apostrophization," "substitution," "spondees," and so forth. In consequence, I have been forced to invent a simple little terminology of my own, explain its application to English verse forms, and indulge in certain rather copious details of classification before even tackling the limited object of these notes to my translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, an object that boils down to very little— in comparison to the forced preliminaries—namely, to a few things that the non-Russian student of Russian literature must know in regard to Russian prosody in general and to Eugene Onegin in particular.
Notes on Prosody
2. Feet
If by prosodies we mean systems or forms of versification evolved in Europe during this millennium and used by her finest poets, we can distinguish two main species, the syllabic system and the metrical one, and a subspecific form belonging to the second species (but not inconsistent with certain syllabic compositions), cadential poetry, in which all that matters is lilt depending on random numbers of accents placed at random intervals. A fourth form, which is specifically vague and is rather a catchall than a definite category (not yet having been instrumental in producing great poetry), takes care of unrhymed free verse, which, except for the presence of typographical
turnpikes, grades insensibly into prose, from a taxonomic point of view. Except in one or two special cases, Greek and Latin verse forms are not taken into consideration in the following notes, and such terms as "iambic tetrameter" and so forth are not meant to suggest their ancient application, whatever that was, but are used strictly in reference to modern types of prosody, as convenient and innocuous nomenclatorial handles, instead of such ambiguous terms, in relation to metrical verse, as "octosyllables," and so forth. A foot is not only the basic element of meter but, in action, becomes the meter itself: a "monometer" is a line of one foot, and so on, to "hexameter," a six-foot line, beyond which the metrical line is no longer felt as a line and breaks into two. Taken all in all, and with our quest limited to the latter half of the millennium in question, the greatest representative of the syllabic prosody in delicacy and complexity of modulation is certainly the French Alexandrine. The student is generally taught that its three characteristics are: an obligatory equality of syllables (twelve in masculine lines, thirteen in feminine ones), obligatory rhyme (in couplets or in any other arrangement, but with no two different masculine or feminine endings occurring in adjacent lines), and an obligatory caesura after the sixth syllable, which must be accented (or, if this is followed by a final e muet, the latter must be neutralized by an apocopate fusion with the vowel heading the second hemistich). Apart from niceties of instrumentation, which, after all, can be paralleled in other prosodies, but to which the French ear seems to be especially sensitive, a major part in the composition of the Alexandrine is played by a combination of the following elements (of which the first is, of course, a feature of other syllabic lengths as well). It should always be remembered that, whatever prosody is followed, the art of the poet depend*
J
on certain contrasts and concords, constraints and liberties, denials and yieldings: (1) The e muet·. the interplay between the theoretical or generic value of the unelided e muet (which is never heard as a full semeion, as all the other vowels in the line are) and its actual or specific value in a given line. The number of such incomplete semeia and their distribution allow endless variations of melody, in conjunction with the neutralizing effect of apocopes in any part of the line. There are two main varieties of e muet, especially noticeable in rhymes (see §13, Rhyme). (2) The interplay between the prosodically existing pause in mid-line and another pause, or pauses, or absence of pause, proceeding from the inward rhythm or logical sense, or irrational hit, of the line. Especially beautiful effects have been achieved by the so-called romantics after the pedestrian eighteenth century had all but stamped out French poetry. This kind of acrobatic shifting back and forth across the constant caesural ha-ha is something not duplicated in English or Russian iambic pentameters (of the blank-verse type), in which the artificial caesural pause after the second foot is triumphantly sung out of metrical existence by a Milton or a Pushkin. In the French Alexandrine the caesura is well adjusted to the rhythm of human breath in slow reading, while, on the other hand, secondary pauses owing to "shifts" allow for precipitated or delayed exhalations. (3) The enjambment or run-on, a fertile source of modulation, which is too well known from its presence in English iambics to need any explication here. (4) The rich rhyme (which is especially beautiful when enjambed, just as the caesural pause is especially enhanced when sense glides across it). It is imitated by the Russian rule of rhyme, which will be discussed later. The metrical system, on the other hand, is based first
of all on a regular recurrence of rhythm within a line of verse, in which foot stress tends to coincide with accent (word stress), and nonstress with nonaccent. This recurrence is seen as a sequence of similar feet. Each such foot can consist of either two or three divisions (semeia), one of which is stressed by the meter but not necessarily by the syllable of the word coinciding with it. This stressed division is called the ictus, while the unstressed divisions are called depressions. Mathematically, only five kinds of feet can exist: the iamb, the trochee, the anapaest, the amphibrach, and the dactyl. For the final foot to be complete, the presence of one semeion is sufficient, provided it is an ictus. Conversely, the identity of the meter is not affected by any number of unstressed syllables coming after the final ictus of the line. This final ictus and these additions to it are called "terminals." A line terminating in an ictus is called "masculine"; a line terminating in one unstressed syllable is called "feminine." If the terminals of two, not necessarily adjacent, lines correspond in sound, the result is a "rhyme." The rhyme is masculine if the ultima of the last word of the line is stressed and coincides with the ictus. It is feminine if the penultimate coincides with the ictus, and "synthetic" or "long" if it is the antepenultimate that is stressed. The samples given below illustrate the five combinations (of one ictus and one or two depressions) mathematically possible within the limits of one metrical foot. The first two are masculine tetrameters: (i) iambic and (2) trochaic; the rest are masculine trimeters: (3) dactylic, (4) amphibrachic, and (5) anapaestic.
(x) The ros- | es are | again | in bloom
(2) Koses I are a- | gain in | bloom
(3) Roses a- | gain are in | bl0om
(4) The roses | again are | in bloom
(5) And the ros- | es again j are in bloomAn example of pausative or cadential verse using the same words would run:
And again the rose is in bloom
which the metrically trained ear hears as three anapaests
with one missed depression in the second foot causing a
little gasp or pause, hence the term.
And a syllabic line would be:
De nouveau la rose fleurit
in which the e of rose is a type of depression that cannot
be rendered in English, German, or Russian.
An iambic foot cannot be illustrated by a word unless
that word is part of a specific iambic line. An iambic foot
can be illustrated by signs only insofar as these signs are
made to express the maximal four variations in which
an iambic foot actually appears in verse:^- regular beat
- scud (or false pyrrhic)
- tilted scud (or false trochee)
^- false spondeeTo the discussion of these we shall now turn. An ordinary iambic foot (i.e., one not affected by certain contractional and rhymal variations) consists of two semeia, the first semeion being called a depression (^ or and the second an ictus (- or -). Any such foot belongs to one of the following types (with the basic metrical stress marked -, and the variable word accent '): (1) Regular foot, (unaccented nonstress followed by accented stress); e.g., "Appease my grief, and deadly pain" (Earl of Surrey, The Lover Describeth His Restless State). (2) Scudded foot (or false pyrrhic), ^ - (unaccented nonstress followed by unaccented stress); e.g., "Inexpec-
tdtion of a gu£st" (Tennyson, In Memoriam, vi) and "In
loveliness of perfect deeds" (ibid., XXXVl).
(3) Tilt (or inversion), ^ - (accented nonstress followed
by unaccented stress); e.g., "Sense of intolerable
wrong" (Coleridge, The Pains of Sleep), "Vaster than
Empires and more slow" (Marvell, To His Coy Mistress),
and "Perfectly pure and good: I found" (Browning,
Porphyria’s Lover).
(4) False spondee,^- (accented nonstress and accented
stress); e.g., "Twice holy ννάς the Sabbath-bell" (Keats,
The Eve of St. Mark).Notes on Prosody
3. The Scud
We speak of an "accent" in relation to a word and of a "stress" in relation to a metrical foot. A "scud" is an unaccented stress. "An inextinguishable flcime" has two accented and two unaccented stresses. When in verse a weak monosyllabic word (i.e., one not accented in speech) or a weak syllable of a long word happens to coincide with the stressed part (ictus) of a foot, there results a modulation that I term a "scud." If an accented syllable in speech be notated ', and a stress accent in verse -, then a scud is marked -. The unstressed part of a foot is marked (for which a "depression" is the best term). * The verse quoted above is notated: «j-w-i-u-ui. A scud can occur in any foot of any metrical line but is far more frequent in double-semeion meters or "binaries" (iambs and trochees) than in triple-semeion meters or "ternaries" (anapaests, amphibrachs, and
dactyls).* We shall be mainly concerned with scuds in the iambic tetrameter. Weali—i.e., scuddable—monosyllables may be described as follows: Monosyllables that are of comparatively minor importance (articles, prepositions, etc.), unless especially emphasized, and that are not usually rhymed on, are counted as scuds equivalent to unaccented but metrically stressed syllables in longer words (actually, this is truer of English than Russian, because in Russian verse a scud provided by a monosyllable is a trifle less fluid than one provided by a polysyllable—which, of course, has no secondary accent in Russian). Between a typical weak monosyllable (such as "the") and an indubitably accented one (such as querulous "why"), there are gradations and borderline cases ("while," "when," "had," etc.), which may be termed "semiscuds." To determine them depends so much upon context, and is often so subjective a matter—in reference to random lines, at least—that one is not inclined to furnish a special mark for them (say, —). I have disregarded them in my percentile calculations. Semiscuds are not frequent enough in either English or Russian to affect numerical results when dealing with relatively small samples (say, fifty lines per poet). A special study of scuds, however, should take into account the fact that if we examine such Russian or English dipodies as: ey-o toski, which means, and is accented, "of her distress" i on ubit, which means, and is accented, "and he is killed" we cannot but notice that if these syllables are iambized, the first ictus in each case is somewhat less strongly emphasized than in:
IO
nemoy toski, which means, and is accented, "of mute distress" i Dzhim ubit, which means, and is accented, "and Jim is killed."
Among indubitably scudded monosyllables the most
obvious ones are: "a," "an," "and," "as," "at," "but,"
"for," "from," "if," "in," "like," "of," "on," "or,"
"the," "to," etc.
The scudding of such particles as "all," "no," "not,"
"was," etc., is a question of context and individual taste.
Similarly, in Russian, obvious and unquestionable
scuds are: dlya ("for"), do ("till"), i ("and"), na ("on"),
ne ("not," a word that should never be accented in good
Russian), no ("but"), ot ("from"), po ("along"), pod
("under"), u ("at"), etc., whereas the scudding of b'il
("was"), net ("no"), etc., depends on context and elective
intonation.
When we turn to polysyllables, the first thing we
notice is an important accentual difference between English and Russian, and this has a definite repercussion on
the frequency of pure scuds. In Russian, a polysyllabic
word, no matter how long (provided it is not a blatantly
artificial compound with the seam showing), can bear
but one accent, and consequently a word of any length
can bear only one stress accent in verse. Neither
neveroyAtneyshie ("most improbable," pi.) nor vlkarabkavshiesya ("scrambled out," pi.) has more than one
accent. The first can easily be woven into a mellifluous
iambic tetrameter (in which the last word means
"dreams") .-
neveroydtneyshie sntwhereas the shortest measure into which the second
may be crammed is a somewhat bumpy trochaic
pentameter:
vikarabkavshiesya kottII
(which means, in prose, "the cats that have scrambled out"). In English polysyllabic words, on the other hand, there may occur a secondary accent, especially in American speech, but still there are numerous long words that have only one accent, such as "guardedly" or "considering." The secondary accent is found, for example, on the third syllable of the following word, when pronounced the American way: "matrimony"; but in British parlance, and thus in poetry written by Englishmen, it should be scanned "matrimony." In the various examples of verses given further I shall disregard secondary accents when not intended by an English author, but the fact remains that a number of ordinary compounds, constantly recurring in poetry, do bear the ghost of an additional accent, with a resulting semiscud, such as "overmuch" or "semidiameters," whereas their Russian counterparts, chereschiir and jioludiAmetr'i, are strictly single-accented. In regard to nomenclature, I should note at this point that Russian theorists use or have used for, or in connection with, the element I call a scud the terms pirrihiy ("pyrrhic"), peon ("paeon"), poluudarenie ("half stress" or "half accent"), and uskorenie ("acceleration"). None is satisfactory. The notation of the pyrrhic (y ^) suits, at best, two adjacent depressions in a line of ternaries, since it suggests an identical absence of stress and accent on both syllables, whereas the point is, of course, that there persists the shadow of the expected metrical beat on one of the semeia of a binary foot when it is scudded (nor can the pyrrhic be used in the sense of a foot in speaking of scuds in anapaests, amphibrachs, and dactyls, in which it is, as just said, a basic component). The same considerations apply to the paeon, which is a bulky thing containing two binaries (w -i w ^ or ^ ^ and there are other variations), so that the verse "the
inextinguishable flame" would be represented by two paeons of the type «-> ^ -, whereas the verse "extinguishable is the flame" would be represented by both types. If the "paeon" is too big for use, the "half stress" or "half accent" is too small, since it strictly limits to one semeion the idea of "scud" (which, although focused on one semeion, affects the whole foot, especially in "tilt" variations). Moreover, this would entail terming the incomplete scud a "three-quarter accent," which would lead to cumbersome complications. Finally, the term "acceleration" is misleading because second-foot scuds have an exactly opposite—namely, slowing-down —effect upon the line. In English theories of prosody scuds have been described as "weak places," which is too vague and ambiguous for recurrent nomenclatorial use, and defined as "omitted stresses," which is meaningless, since the metrical stress of a scudded foot is not "omitted," but merely not trodden upon by the unaccented syllable of the passing word, which, however, is aware of the unused steppingstone it skims. The scudding of iambic tetrameters produces, in English, four simple varieties (of which, as we shall presently see, variety IV can hardly be said to be represented in Russian poetry); the scudded feet are underlined in the following examples:
I - The disregarded thing we break
Is of the kind we cannot make;
Ii We break the disregarded thing,
Not thinking of its wistful ring;
ill Webreakthethingwedisregard,
We break the statue of a bard
i v u - tuiu - i u - NearwhichanagewasIi ngeringi1J
We take the thing and break the
thing.
(The last example is, of course, a scudless line.)
The following are examples of combinations of the
above scuds:
i + II + ivIncomprehensibility ,
I + IIIThis In the universe we see;
I + IIAnd , in the conflagration blent,
i+ivStars and the awful firmament
II + IVShine distantly and silently
11 + I I I Onwildernessesand on m e .Of the above six forms, only i + ni (not too frequent in English, but fairly frequent in Russian) and n + ra (about as infrequent in Russian as in English) have Russian counterparts. Other possibilities are, theoretically, i n + i v , i + n + in, I + III+iv, but they are artificial tongue-twisters of no prosodical importance. I have omitted the accent on "stars" for simplicity's sake; the foot is a tilt-scudded one iy -) instead of the basic ^ - . (See § 4, Tilted Scuds.) The scuds in the same verse and those in adjacent verses, when connected with lines, may form various figures, which express the modulation of the piece. Andrey Beliy (1880-1934), the inventor of this diagrammatic system, was the first to reveal that certain frequences of scuds (which he called poluudareniya, "half stresses") and certain geometrical figures resulting from their being connected by lines (triangles, quadrangles, trapezoids, etc.) were characteristic of this or that Russian poet's iambic tetrameters. * When I was still a boy, I was greatly fascinated by Beli'y's admirable work, but have not consulted it since I last read it in 1919.
H
If we apply the Belian system to the fourteen lines,
above, given as examples of scudding, but use a slightly
different kind of notation (with scudded feet represented
by X's and scudless feet by o's), we obtain the following
scheme:
i II in rvx o o o
x o o o
o x o o
o x o o
o o x o
o o x o
O O O X
0 0 0 0
X X O X
X O X O
X X O 0
X O O X
O X O X
O X X 0For the sake of easy reference I have collected, below, some English examples of scud modulation. They are mostly culled from Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850), which is by far his best work, and are then marked by the numeral of their section. The rest are added because not found in In Memoriam. Scudded feet are underlined.
Scudless:
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood [LIV]
And "Ave, Ave, Ave," said
The little village 16oks forlorn [LX]Scud I:
And with the thought her colour burns [vi]
The generations each with each [XL]
Imaginations calm and fair [xciv]Scud II:
In loveliness of perfect deeds [xxxvi]U
And. thine in undiscover'd lands [XL]
A fresh association blow [ci]Scud ill:
The far-off interest of tears [i]
She takes a riband or a rose [vi]
In vain; a favourable speed [ix]Scud IV:
The praise that comes to constancy [xxi]
Defamed by every charlatan [CXI]Scuds I + II:
As on The Lariano crept
[Tennyson, The Daisy"]Scuds I + III:
In expectation of a guest [vi]
My capabilities of love [LXXXV]A contradiction on the tongue [cxxv]
On the bald street breaks the blank day [VII]
[Cf.] To a green Thought in a green Shade [Marvell,
The Garden]
Scuds I + IV:
All-comprehensive tenderness, [LXXXV]All-subtilising intellect
Scuds 11 +IV:
On glorious insufficiencies [cxil]
"With agonies, with energies [CXIII]Scuds II +IN:
Most musicall, most melancholy [Milton,
II Penseroso]
This Extasie doth unperplex [John Donne,
The Extasie]Below is the analysis of fifty-line-long samples of scudded and scudless iambic tetrameters from ten compositions
, of which eight are by English authors. Three belong to the seventeenth century, one to the eighteenth, and four to the nineteenth: Donne's The Extasie, 11. 1 - 5 0 ; Butler's Hudibras, pt. I, can. I t 11. 187 - 236 ; Marvell's The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn, 11. 75-122; Cowper's Written after Leaving Her at New Burns, 49 11. in all; Coleridge's The Pains of Sleep, 11. 1 - 5 0 ; Tennyson's In Memoriam, 11. 1 - 5 0 ; Browning's Porphyria's Lover, 11. 1-50; and Arnold's Resignation, 11. 1—50. These are compared to two sequences of similar length from Lomonosov's Ode to Empress Elizabeth (1747), and from Pushkin's Evgeniy Oriegin, Four : rx-xn : 1—8 (1825). Semiscuds are not counted in any of the samples, and these are not large enough to permit more than a general impression of comparative scud frequency.
I II III IV I-II I-III I-IV II-III 11-rv 0
Donne 6 4 8 2 1 1 1 1 26 Butler 6 5 8 6 3 1 21 Marvell 16 4 8 1 1 1 19 Cowper 12 4 7 1 1 25 Coleridge 5 8 2 1 4 1 29 Tennyson 3 1 4 42 Browning 6 2 6 36 Arnold 6 10 5 1 1 1 26
Lomonosov 1 8 24 2 1 14 Pushkin 3 3 31 6 7 See also § 9 , Examples of Modulations.
Notes on Prosody
4. Tilted Scuds
Tn reference to an iambic line, a typical or unqualified "tilt" denotes a sequence of accented depression and unaccented stress, ^ - (instead of the expected ^ - or ^ -),
coinciding with any foot in the line.* Any tilt is a tilted
scud, since the stress in such feet is not accented. English
theorists term tilted scuds "inversion of stress"; a better
description would be "inversion of accent," since it is
the word stress that (more or less gracefully) feigns a
surrender to the meter. The meter is basic and cannot
succumb to the word.
Typical tilts in English iambics, to which they add
considerable beauty, belong to four varieties insofar as
number and length of words are involved in their
producement:
(1) The frequent "split tilt," which consists of an accented monosyllable (say, "deep") and an unaccented
one (say, "in");
(2) The not-very-frequent "short tilt," which consists of an accented monosyllable and the unaccented
first syllable of the next polysyllabic word ("dark in-";
see example, below);
(3) The fairly frequent "duplex tilt," which consists
of a disyllabic word accented on the first syllable in
ordinary speech (say, "guarded"); and
(4) The rare "long tilt,'' which consists of the first and
second syllables of a trisyllabic word, accented on the
first syllable in ordinary speech ("terri-"; see example,
below).
Examples:( 1) Deep in the night on mountains steep,
(2) Dark, inaccessible and proud,
(3) Guarded by dragons, castles sleep;
(4) Terrible stars above them crowd.The "reverse tilt," which is less interesting artistically,
denotes a combination of unaccented stress and accented
depression, instead of the expected or-and
may coincide with any even-place, odd-place segment of
the iambic line except the last. The result is a scud tilted
in reverse.
Reverse tilts come mainly in one variety, the fairly
frequent "split reverse tilt," which consists of two
monosyllables, the first unaccented and the second accented:
Sweet is the shiver of cold Spring
when birds, in garden and grove, sing.There are two reverse tilts here: "of cold" and "and grove"; both are notated -vi; but in the first line the accent (on "cold") is slighter, and metrically more acceptable, than the accent on "grove" in the second line. "Cold" is connected logically with the next word ("spring") and therefore skims on with the impetus of anticipation; it constitutes a common variation throughout the history of English iambics; but the logical beat on "grove" is equivalent in speech to that on the first syllable of "garden," with which it is phrasally linked; in result, the voice strains unduly to combine accent and stress, and the effect is jarring to the ear unless accepted as a deliberate experiment in rhythm variation transcending the meter. It will be noticed, incidentally, that if the second verse is read with a strict adherence to meaning, the prosodical result of "grove, sing" is, in binaries, the closest possible approach to a spondee (two adjacent stress accents); but they are separated by a pause (and it is in pausative variations that we take off from the metrical system in the direction of cadential forms). Another variety, the "duplex reverse tilt," consisting of a disyllabic word accented on the second syllable
against the grain of a stress-unstress sequence of semeia (in the even-odd places of an iambic verse or in the oddeven places of a trochaic one), inevitably produces a harsh and uncouth effect, since the accent does not submit to the stress as flexibly as it does in the ordinary duplex tilt. Metrically, the iambic foot is stronger than the trochaic word; dictionally, the iambic word is more self-conscious, and thus stronger, than the trochaic foot. Reverse tilts have been vaguely designated as "recession of accent" by English theorists; e.g., Robert Bridges, in Milton s Prosody (Oxford, 1895, pp. 52-61). As with all modulations in iambic meter, the beauty of tilt, especially of duplex tilt, which is such an admirable and natural feature of English iambic pentameter, and gives such allure to the rare lines in which Russian poets use it, lies in a certain teasing quality of rhythm, in the tentative emergence of an intonation that seems in total opposition to the dominant meter, but actually owes its subtle magic to the balance it tends to achieve between yielding and not yielding—yielding to the meter and still preserving its accentual voice. Only a blunt ear can perceive in it any "irregularity of meter," and only an old-fashioned pedant would treat it as the intrusion of another species of meter. In English poetry, its carefree admission by major poets, especially in the beginning of the iambic lines, is owing partly to the comparative scarcity of such words in English as conform to the regular iambic foot and partly to accents in English words not being so strong and exclusive as they are in, say, Russian. I use the new term "tilt" or "tilted scud" in preference to "nonterminal wrenched accent," because physically no special wrench is involved; on the contrary, what happens is an elegant sliding movement, the tipping of a wing, the precise dipping of a balance. "Hovering accent" is ambiguous; and still more objectionable
is the crude term "trochaic substitution," suggesting as it does a mechanical replacement of one block of elements by another block. The whole point of the device lies precisely in the iambization of a trochaic, or sometimes even dactylic, word. It is not a substitution, but a reconciliation: the graceful submission of a noniambic word to the dominant iambic meter of the verse. Further confusion arises from the fact that tilts can, and do, also occur in trochaic lines (in which case the sequence of places that a duplex tilt, say, occupies is not odd-even, as in an iambic line, but even-odd). Duplex tilts have nothing to do with certain emancipations of meter that form a gradation toward cadential verse (e.g., the recurrent substitution, in the course of a piece, of one entire foot, in, say, an iambic tetrameter, by a triplex foot represented by a word, or words, that cannot be elided). George Saintsbury, for example, who somehow sees tilts as forms of "equivalence," gets hopelessly muddled in his treatment of these modulations. The application of "wrenched accent" should be limited to forced terminals; i.e., to an artificial switch of accent, in a disyllabic rhyme word, from feminine ("England") to masculine ("England"). When we turn to an examination of tilts in Russian iambic tetrameters, the following facts transpire: Spht and short tilts are as natural a modulation in Russian as they are in English but occur less frequently. They are definitely rare in EO. The split tilt is even less frequent than the short tilt, whereas the contrary is true in the case of English, where the long word is less frequent in the ι + 4 or 1 + g or ι + 6 or χ + 7 syllable compartments of the line (where it has to sprawl in order to crowd out, as it were, the lone initial monosyllable of the line and thus produce the short tilt). Finally (and here we have one of the main differences
between English and Russian prosodies as used by major poets), the duplex tilt, in any part of the line, does not exist in Russian trochaics or iambics (except for the small group of certain two-syllable prepositions, to be discussed further). The split tilt is represented in EO by such more or less widely scattered lines as, for example:
Eight : XVIi : 3: Kak? iz glushi stepnih. seleniy . . .
How? from the depth of prairie
homesteads . . .Eight : XVII : 1 1 : Knyiz 1 na Onegina glyad.it*. . .
prince at Onegin [tum-tee] looks . . .Seven : XVII : 1 0 : Kiy na biVyarde otdi'hal . . .
cue on the billiard did repose . . .Six : XL : 13: Tdm u ruch'ya υ teni gustoy . . .
there, by the brook, in shade opaque . . .In this last example the tilt is not so strong as in the preceding ones, and there are in EO a certain number of other tiltings of even less strength, such as on gde ("where"), on ("he"), etc., which are only semitilts. The short tilt is represented by such lines as:
Three : rx : 4: P'yot oboVstiteVriiy obman . . .
drinks irresistible deceit ["imbibes
the ravishing illusion" would, of
course, be a closer rendering of the
contextual sense] . . .One : XXXIII : 7: Net, nikogda sred' ptikih dne'y . . .
No, [tum-]not once mid fervid
days . . .Six : ν : 14: VdoIgosushat ' butUkitri . . .
[The meaning is "on credit to drain
some three bottles."]Two : XXVIII : 4.: Zvyozd ischezdet horovod . . .
[Zvyozd, "of stars," ischezaet, "disappears," horovod, a choral round
dance performed in the open by
Russian peasant men and maidens.
The sense is "the choral dance of
stars is disappearing,"]The duplex tilt does not occur freely in Russian verse: * its use is strictly limited to a dozen or so humble and servile disyllables, which, in speech, are accented on the first syllable but in verse are made, if need be, to undergo a neutralization of accent by scudding. In Pushkin's poems, these words are: cherez ("across," "over"), chtob'i ("in order to," "so that," "lest"), dabi ("so as to"), ili ("or," "either"), mezhdu ("between,""among"), oto (the extended form of ot, "from," as used before some words beginning with certain combinations of consonants such as vs), and pered ("before," "in front of"):f Ruslan and Lyudmila, I : 22: Cherez lesd, cherez moryd . . . Over the woods, over the seas . . . 4I notice that on p. 3 9 of his frankly compilatory Russian Versification (Oxford, 1956), Prof. Boris Unbegaun, when speaking of the device here termed "tilts," is misled by one of his authorities and makes a singular error in his only (would-he) example of a duplex tilt in Russian verse by assuming that the first word in the iambic line that he quotes from the poem Fireplace in Moscow {Kamin ν Moskve), published in Penza, 1795, by the poetaster Prince Ivan Dolgoruki, is pronounced krasen, when actually here it should be krasydn (despite the absence of the diacritical sign)—which, of course, eliminates the "trochaic substitution." fNot only oto, but each of the other words (except dabi), possesses an abbreviated form: chtob, chrez, il\ mezh, pred; the last four are mainly used in verse (cf. "amid" and "mid," "over" and "o'er," etc.).
EO, Six : xvn : 1 1 : Chtobi dvuhutrenniy tsvetok . . .
[which means: "lest a two-mornold blossom"]Six : VII : 2: Dab'i pozavtrakat1 vtroyom . . .
[which means: "so as to lunch
all three " (a trois)]Seven : II : g: Ili mne chuzhdo naslazhden e?
[which means: " oris enjoyment
strange to me"]Eight : "Onegin's
Letter" : 17: Oto vsegochto serdtsu milo . . .
[which means: "from all that to
the heart is dear"]One : LI : 6: Pered Oneginim sobralsya , . ,
[which means: "before Onegin
there assembled"]
Lines beginning with these neutralized words are few
in EO. It is therefore of great interest to note that in
One : LVI, in which our poet affirms his eagerness to
differentiate between Onegin and himself, lest the sarcastic reader or some promoter of slander accuse him of
narcissism, Pushkin disposes consecutively three lines,
each beginning with one of the six tiltable disyllables:
4 Mezhdu Oneginim i mnoy,
Chtobi nasmeshliviy ckitdtei\
Ili ka.koy-nibud' izdateV . . .
[the last word meaning "editor,"
"publisher," or "promoter"]
One would almost think that our poet, in 1823, recalled
Sumarokov's prosodical experiment of 1759 (see pp. 45—6).
Only one scudded trisyllable occurs in EO and in Russian verse generally. This is the staple peredo (an endvowelized form of pered, "before," used in speech
+
In masculine genitive case endings the gamma of the ultimate
is pronounced v (vsevd).mainly with mrioy, "me," to buffer the clash of consonants), which is normally accented on the first syllable, but in verse may be tilted in such a way as to coincide with a depression-beat-depression compartment; e.g., in Onegin7s Journey, xvi : 9:
Razostlan bfl peredo mnoy
which may be paraphrased so as to render the tilt in the third foot:
before me spread welcoming me.
Otherwise, the long tilt, rare in English, never occurs in
Russian iambics. An approach to it appears in artificially
compounded epithets, such as this translation of "rosyfingered dawn":
Rozovo-perstnaya zarydin which the hyphen does not prevent the epithet from
becoming a word of six syllables carrying but one accent
on perst, despite the fact that in ordinary speech rozovo
as a separate adjective or adverb is accented on the first
syllable.
The split reverse tilt occurs now and then in Russian
verse, but on the whole Pushkin avoids it. Curiously
enough, our poet was far from being a lucid theorist in
prosody, but, as in Coleridge's case, the intuition of
genius was a more than sufficient substitute in practice.
In a MS footnote to EO, Four : XLi: 7, Pushkin incorrectly defends (by notating it as a pyrrhic ^ )the jarring
split reverse tilt vo ves' ("at all," "in all," "in the
whole"), which as a separate locution is accented in
speech on the ves5 ("all") and which he scud-tilted in
reverse in two passages:
Four : X L I : 7: Nesyotsya ν goru vo ves' diih . . .
goes tearing up hill at all speed . . .Three : V : 14: Iposle vo ves' put' molchdl . . . and after, the whole way was mute* . . . The duplex reverse tilt is completely banned by Russian major poets (but unintentionally used by some minor ones, such as Vyazemski, Rileev, and others) because of its association with vulgarity and ineptitude, with the efforts of inexperienced versifiers, as well as with the semiliterate ditties of the servant hall such as the strum songs (chastushki) belonging to that deadliest of all folklore, the citified. Thus, in Chapter Four of his admirable novella The Captain's Daughter (1833-36), Pushkin, wishing to indicate the poor quality of a madrigal in trochaic tetrameters written by the young "I" of the story, Pyotr Grinyov, has him start 1. 7 with a duplex reverse tilt characteristic of such stuff:
Oni duh vo τητιέ smutlli . . .
Oni (sounded as "ah-nee"), which means "they" (referring to Masha Mironov's eyes), is accented on the
second syllable in speech but is horribly tilt-scudded in
reverse here. The line means "they have confused
[smutili] the spirit in me." A criticism of this effort, and
of the young lady who inspired it, is made by a fellow
officer, Aleksey Shvabrin, and leads to an epee duel.
The only time Pushkin himself, by an unfortunate
and incomprehensible oversight, uses a duplex reverse
tilt is in 1. 21 of his The Feast at the Time of the Plague
(1830), a blank-verse translation (made from a French
prose version) of act 1, sc. iv, of The City of the Plague
(1816), a blank-verse tragedy by John Wilson, alias
Christopher North (1785-1854). The trochaically tilted
word is ego ("his"), which is iambically stressed in
speech:Ya predlagayu vfpW υ ego pdmyaf.
In memory of him I suggest drinking. *
Pushkin must have got hold of a fairly accurate version,
perhaps with the English original en regard.Notes on Prosody
5. Spondees
Strictly speaking, the spondee—i.e., two adjacent semeia bearing exactly the same stress accent -) and following each other without any break or pause (as might suggest to the ear an inner caesura or missed beat)—is an impossibility in metrical verse as distinguished from cadential or pausative forms. But a kind of false spondee (^ - or - is not infrequent. It should be noted that there are certain disyllabic words, implicitly or actually hyphenated, that in a certain type of speech or under certain emotional conditions can sound like spondees. I have heard Berliners pronounce Papa as "p4-pa." American youngsters, especially when stylized on the stage, give the two parts of "gee-whiz" practically the same value. And in slow, deliberate, ruminant American speech, especially in business pronouncements or didactic monologues, such a word as "contact" may become "con-tdct." Any number of other two-syllable formulas of a similar kind can be listed. But the matter is rather of duration and jaw action than of accent, and whenever such a word is used in metrical verse it is bound to become a trochee or an iamb, or a scud, or a tilt; but it never becomes a spondee, unless its hyphen snaps and is replaced by a pause. "Good God!" Blanche uttered slowly: "Good God! Look!" I looked, and understood. "Rise! Rise!" I loudly cried to her "0 rise! Rise!" But she did not stir.
^Incidentally, Wilson's original (1. 20) reads:
"Therefore let us drink unto his memory."If these lines are to scan at all, their only logical rhythm is:
The force of the meter sorts out the monosyllables in a
certain, iambic, way, and it would be sheer limacy on a
theorist's part to see "Good God" and "Rise! Rise!" as
spondees. Thus the first "Rise! Rise!" is a rapid attack on
a natural iambic scale, whereas the second set sounds
much more slowly, with the last "Rise" lingering on in
despair. In whatever way they are pronounced, they
belong to the meter.
If we regard the so-called "elegiac pentameter"
(really a dactylic hexameter with the depressions of two
feet, third and sixth, missing) as one line:
— >ju — w w— v_/w — \ j <j —Cynthiaj prim and polite, Cynthia, hard to outwit
then the midway combination of "-lite" and "Cynth-"
may be regarded as a spondee, but a spondee interrupted
by the caesura. This is tantamount to considering the
two hemistichs as two separate verses, each a dactylic
trimeter with a masculine ending. In result, what we
call here a spondee is merely the combined effect of a
strong termination and a strong beginning.
A similar case may crop up in trochees:
Pity, if you have a heart, pretty Nancy Brown,
Who on winter mornings, poor girl, must walk to town.
The second line is unscannable metrically unless we
spade the spondee in two and write or hear these verses
as:
Pity, if you have a heart,
Pretty Nancy Brown,Who on winter mornings, poor
Girl, must walk to town.
The first verse of a famous, though not very good,
poem by Tennyson (1842):Break, break, break, if given to read to a person who does not know the entire piece, will probably be scanned as a trio of solid and slow beats devoid of any pathetic sense. For all we Itnnw1 it might be a boxing referee talking in his sleep. When, however, the dominant rhythm of the poem is known beforehand, then its ternary lilt, broken by pauses, affects by anticipation the scansion of the first line, which may be then scanned either as an anapaestic monometer or, more artistically, as an anapaestic trimeter, with the depressions missing and replaced by rhythmic pauses. For true spondees, we have to go not to metrical verse but to cadential ones, in which the tonic scansion of what are "irregularities" to the confirmed metrist is of little or no interest:
Gone is Livia, love is gone:
Strong wing, soft breast, bluish plume;
In the jumper tree moaning at dawn:
Doom, doom.It should be noted that in metrical verse the false spondee, when represented by a hyphenated word or by two strong monosyllables, will disclose its metrical leaning as soon as placed in any compartment of an iambic or a trochaic line and should not be confused with disyllables that may be accented either fore or aft. A false spondee will generally lean toward the iambic, for the simple reason that, while its first syllable can take care of itself, the second syllable or monosyllable must be especially strongly stress-accented in order to keep up with its predecessor and show what it can do in its turn (this is
especially clear when two strong monosyllables coming
one after the other are identical words).
In Russian poems false spondees are less frequent than
in English ones, only because strong monosyllables are
less frequent. Turning to EO, we find therein a number of these combinations behaving as English false
r J_
spondees do. Thus hleb-soV ("bread-salt," meaning
"hospitality," "welcome," "shared repast," "good
cheer") is metrically duplicated by the sounds of "prep
school" or "ebb-sole" (presumably a kind of fish), and
gde, gde or tarn, tarn by "where, where" and "there,
there" respectively. They may be placed in a trochaic
medium, but (their inclination being iambic) a split reverse tilt will be the only result.
False spondees occur here and there throughout EO,
but their presence adds little to variety in modulation.
In such lines as:Five : XVII : 7 : L a y , hohot, pen e, svtst i hlop . . .
Barks, laughter, singing, whistling,
claps . . .Six : xxxix :11: PiL, el, skuchdl, tolstel, hirel . . .
drank, ate, was dull, grew fat,
decayed . . .the accents (Lay, Pd) starting the lines are swept off their respective feet by the strong current of the iambic meter.
Notes on Prosody
6. Elisions
There are two varieties of elision in EngUsh prosody, and it is especially the second that enhances richness of rhythm (the presence or absence of an apostrophe is, of course, merely a typographical detail of no metrical significance; but for the linguist its omission in print
sometimes throws light on matters of local or periodic pronunciation). Of these two varieties the first is the rudimentary apocopation—i.e., the dropping or slurring of a final vowel before an initial vowel in the next word. A standard English apocope is the metrically suggested reading of "many a" as - w (instead of - w ^). I find it as early as c· 1SQS) 111 John Gower's Confessio amantis (bk. in, 1.
605). An especially common apocope is the one involving the definite article in such combinations as "th'advice," "th'enemy," and so forth. It is still used in modern metrical verse, but the diacritical sign is dropped, perhaps because of its association with obsolete and artificial forms of poetry. The second variety of elision is the contraction that implies the elimination from the metrical count of a vowel in the middle of a word. Common contractions are, for example, words that have ve in the second syllable, such as "heaven," "haven," "given," "never," and so forth. A well-known contraction is "flower"—with tacit acknowledgment of its French pedigree (flor, flour, Jleur) and its prosodical relationship with such rhymes as hour-our (cf. higher-fire). Shakespeare contracted not only "flower" and "being" into one semeion each, but compressed into two semeia such words as "maidenhead" and "violet" ("maid'nhead," "vi'let"). In some cases, the strange evolution affecting ve has resulted in the formation of a new word, such as "o'er" instead of "over." Among time-honored slurrings is the curious case of "spiritual" contracted from four semeia (spir-itu-al) to a disyllable sounding like something between "sprichal" and "spirchal," on the perfectly logical basis that if "spirit" is scanned, as it often is, monosyllabically (as happens with "merit" and "buried") and if, say, "actual" is scanned "actu'l," why not contract to one semeion each part of "spiritual" ("spir'tu'l") ?
The vowels u and e in the unaccented second syllable of trochaic verbs are prone to be elided in participle forms ("murm'ring," "gath'ring," "gard'ning," etc.). Numerous other cases of elision, such as the loss of the i value in "-tion" (another obvious analogy with French), come readily to mind and need not be discussed here. In result, the employment of tilt and elision can make a perfect iambic tetrameter out of a sentence that as spoken fits no meter:
watching the approaching flickering storm
watching th'approaching flick'ring storm.
The beauty of the English elision Hes neither in the
brutal elimination of a syllable by an apostrophe nor in
the recognition of an added semeion by leaving the word
typographically intact, but in the delicate sensation of
something being physically preserved by the voice at the
very instant that it is metaphysically denied by the meter.
Thus, the pleasure produced by a contraction or a liaison
is the simultaneous awareness of the loss of a syllable on
one level and its retention on another and the state of
balance achieved between meter and rhythm. It is the
perfect example of the possibility of eating one's cake
and having it.
Indiscriminate apostrophization disfigures elision by
trying to reconcile eye and ear and satisfying neither.
Judging by a certain pentametric line in The Canterbury
Tales ("Twenty bokes, clad in blak and reed"—"Prologue," 1. 294), I suppose Chaucer pronounced "twenty"
as "two-enty," as children still do today, but must a
printer try to reproduce chance mannerisms or iron out
blatant errors? Inexperienced Russian versifiers have
been known to expand oktydbr' ("October") and skiptr
("scepter") to ok-tyd-ber' and ski-pe-ter—mere prosodic
mistakes of no interest.
Elision, properly speaking, does not occur in Russian.Faintly approaching it is the substitution in verse of a "soft sign" (transliterated coincidentally by an apostrophe) for the valued i before a final vowel in such endings as -anie and -eriie (analogical to "-ion" endings in English). Thus, the contraction of the three-syllabic tlenie ("decomposition") to the disyllabic tlerie (I repeat, to avoid confusion, that the apostrophe here merely transcribes the soft sign—a letter that looks somewhat like a 6 in print or script) may be compared to the slurring of the i in "lenient" or "onion." Pushkin and other poets of his time wrote and pronounced koy-kdk ("haphazardly") for k6e-kdk\ and the archaic omission of the final vowel in adjectives, which Pushkin permitted himself now and then (stdrt gddi, "olden times," and tdyna prelest', "secret enchantment," for stdrie gddi and tAynaya prelest'), may be regarded as a crude form of elision. Otherwise, such metrical pronunciations as zhAv ronok for zhdvoronok ("lark") and dvoyur dniy brat for dvoyiirodniy brat ("first cousin") are but the blunders of poetasters.
Notes on Prosody
7. The Origination of Metrical Verse in Russia
Iz pdmyati izgrtzli g0di't
Kto i Zn chto ν Hoiine pal;
No perv'iy zvtlk Hotinskoy όάϊ
Nam pervvrn krikom zhizni stdl.
—HODASEVICH (1938)*Years have from memory eroded
Who perished at Hotin, and why;
But the Hotinian ode's first sound
For us became our life's first cry.In this section I am not concerned with the anonymous remnants of medieval narrative poetry in Russia, the unrhymed and ηon metrical recitatives, whose form, botched by centuries of oral transmission, was, by the eighteenth century, when the metrical system was first borrowed from the West, incapable of providing individual talent with a diction and a technique:
Chelovecheskoe serdtse nesmtslenno i neuimchivo: PrePstilsya Λάάτη so itwoyu, PozabUi zapoved' Bozhiyu, Vkusili ploda vinogrddnogo Ot divnogo dreva velikogo . . .
Literal English translation: The human heart is unreasonable and uncontrollable: Adam was tempted, with Eve; They forgot God's commandment, They tasted the fruit of the grape From the wondrous great tree . . . These lines (11-15) fr°m a famous recitative piece entitled The Tale of Grief and Hi-Fortune (Povest' 0 gore i zloschastii), written probably about 1625 and preserved in a single eighteenth-century MS copy, afford a good example of a loose folk rhythm or ritual rhythm that had flowed on for anything up to half a Triillpnniiimj but that in the age of Lomonosov had practically no effect at all on the evolution of verse form in Russia. Patriotic scholars have attempted to find a trochaic rhythm in short-line Russian folk songs, but I cannot think of any such piece following a regular tonic scheme before the eighteenth century had set the metrical time; the latter happened to be congenial to national speech accentuation but was, as most of modern Russian culture, a western European grafting upon an organism that, in intrinsic poetical power, surpassed the models stemming from eighteenthcentury Germany and France.
The origins of a national versification are seldom interesting. Prosody begins to matter only after poets have started to use it, and no poets were the makers of ponderous didactic doggerels who in the seventeenth century and on the threshold of the eighteenth century rhymed unscannable lines of random length, in an abruptly Westernized Russia, in an attempt to introduce a Pohsh system of syllabic verse, with strictly feminine rhyme, stumbling on in cacophonic couplets. Unendurable dullness settles upon him who peruses these imitations of structures, mediocre in themselves and completely alien to the rhythm of live Russian. His poor rewards are a few chance strains of trochaic lilt audible here and there in the otherwise amorphous heptasyllables (not counting the feminine terminals) of the learned monk, Feofin Prokopovich (1681—1736), and a few curious samples of moralistic pieces, in ludicrously incorrect Russian, put together by German pedagogues peddling various metrical imitations at the Russian court. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, the syllabic line that really threatened to stay was an uncouth thing of thirteen syllables (counting the obligative feminine terminal), with a caesura after the seventh syllable: BezwnriCy prosit νίηά; zri! miidrost' p'yot vddu. The madman clamors for wine; see! wisdom drinks water. The marks are there merely to show the accentuation of the Russian words; the English counterpart conforms exactly to the original. The order of stresses in the thirteener went in jumps and jolts and varied from line to line. The only rule (followed only by purists) was that the seventh, caesural, syllable must bear a beat. Another beat, the rhyme stress, fell on the twelfth syllable. It was on these two crutches that, as we shall presently see, a metrical form hobbled out of its syllabic prison and, casting away its props, suddenly began to dance.
In 1735, Vasiliy Trediakovski (1703-69), a wretched rhymester but a man of intuition and culture, published a muddled and yet rather remarkable New and Brief Method of Russian Versemaking, in which he proposed a theory of metrical versification applicable to Russian thirteeners and offered examples composed in accordance with this theory. His "Rule First" reads: "The Russian heroic line [or "Russian hexameter"] consists of thirteen syllables, or six feet." All these feet were, according to him, binaries,* of four species, iamb, trochee, "pyrrhic," and "spondee," placed in any order within the line, except that the last foot (forming the feminine rhyme) was always a trochee, and the third foot was never a trochee or a "pyrrhic." Now—granted that other misguided metrists had also considered the "pyrrhic" and the "spondee" as "feet"— Trediakovski's system of dividing a thirteener into six feet might have been all right if he: (1) Had postulated that one of the six feet—namely, one in the first section (of seven syllables)—should be a ternary foot (anapaest, amphibrach, dactyl, or any of the fancy varieties of the old pedants), or ( 2 ) Had transformed his ''heroic line" into a feminineending Alexandrine by moving the caesura one syllable proximad, thus cutting the line into 3 + 3 feet, with a stress on the sixth syllable, and discounting the unstressed last syllable of the second section, as being part of the (feminine) rhyme. Instead, Trediakovski, in order to divide thirteen by six without remainder, followed what seemed to him a more scholarly course: he disregarded the seventh (stressed) syllable of the first (seven-syllable) section, calling it a hypercalectic syllable; i.e., a stressed stop (by analogy with the time-honored error of counting as a 'He denounced ternary feet because their use made an "unseemly scamper1' of Russian verse!
caesura! stop, and not as the normal ictus of a truncated
dactylic foot, the third stress in the so-called elegiac
pentameter (see p. 28).
According to his system, the following typically syllabic couplet would have to be scanned as a first line consisting of a medley of myths: two iambs, a pyrrhic, the
caesural stop syllable, a spondee, an iamb, and a trochee;
and a second line consisting of another assemblage:
three iambs, the caesural stop syllable, two iambs, and a
trochee:
STOP J- J-
The mad man cla mors for wine; see! wisdom drinks water;
w J- u J- STOP| v / i
The pant- ing rake ar rives late; success
w Jis thrift's daughter.Trediakovski continues thus: "However, the most perfect and best verse is a line that consists solely or mainly of trochees, whereas a line consisting solely or mainly of iambs is a very bad one." The first part of this passage was an epoch-making statement. Trediakovski's attack on the iamb is readily explained by the fact that he so labeled an arbitrarily chosen component of a heterogeneous line broken by a gap no iamb could bridge. Well might he find fault with such doggerel rhythms as I have mimicked above. It is also of no consequence that he saw his trochaic line as a combination of trochees and "pyrrhics," with the beat of the seventh syllable not counted as part of a foot. This omission did not distort the trochaic meter, for the simple reason that what he omitted was really a trochee truncated by a masculine termination. His faulty theories were redeemed by the "elegies" he submitted as examples; they possess no literary merit but
contain the first trochees deliberately composed in Russian, and prefigure, if not inaugurate, the metrical
system.
His Elegy I i ( 1735 ) , 11. 7 9 — 8 2 , reads:
Dolgovdtoe litso i rumyano bilo,
BeLiznoyu zhe svoey vsyo prevoskhodllo;
BilcV na belost' zrish 1 litsa, to Iilei zrydtsya,
Na rumydnost' bu.de zrish', rozi to krasydtsya,Elongated was her face and of rosy brightness,
While surpassing everything by its lily whiteness;
When its whiteness you regard, lilies it discloses,
When its color you regard, lovely are its roses.In each of these lines the thirteen-syllable abomination of
the schoolman was metamorphosed, and what emerged
was not one metrical line, as Trediakovski thought, but
two trippingly scudded verses—a trochaic tetrameter
(with a masculine termination) and a trochaic trimeter
(including a feminine rhyme at the end):
When its whiteness you regard,
Lilies it discloses;
When its color you regard,
Lovely are its roses.
The birth of the iambic tetrameter, to which we now
must turn, was not a consequence of the breaking up of
the Russian heroic line—a trochaic potentiality to begin
with. The favorite meter of later poets is heard raising its
melodious voice now Eind then in syllabic verse as an undifferentiated variation of the nonasyllable. Thus, in a
"cantata" consisting of syllabic lines of varying length,
mostly unscannable, that Trediakovski, in his premetrical period, knocked together on the occasion of
Empress Anna's coronation (July 30, 1730), there is an
accidental modicum of adjacent metrical verses such as:
P r Ospleshckem gromko i rukdmi,
Zaskdchem veselo nogami . . .J*
With hands, too, loudly let's he clapping, With feet let's merrily be hopping . . . which are ordinary iambic tetrameters scudded on the third foot. * But the introduction of the iambic tetrameter as an emphatic and conscious act, and the establishment of a clearly and correctly expressed metrical system of Russian prosody, were not owing to Trediakovski. He may be deemed the sponsor of the trochee. The godfather of the iambic tetrameter is the famous reformer Lomonosov. In September, 1739, in a "Letter about the Rules of Russian Versification" (first published in 1778), which Mihail Lomonosov (1711-65) sent (from the German university town of Freiburg, where he was studying metallurgy) to the members of aphilologic committee attached to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, he advocated the total adoption of the metrical system and added as a separate illustrative item the first Russian poem, an ode, entirely and deliberately composed in iambic tetrameters. This is the Ode to the Sovereign of Blessed Memory Anna Ioannovna on the Victory over the Turks and Tatars and on the Taking of Hotin (or Khotin, a fortress in Bessarabia, SW Russia, formerly an old Genoese citadel, restored by the Turks with the assistance of French engineers, and stormed by Russian troops on Aug. 19, 1739)· The MS of this piece, now known as The Hotinian Ode, is lost. Scattered fragments of its initial text are quoted by Lomonosov in his manual,
"An h61i mdn biy0nd the se
Was bischop of a gret cite."A Brief Guide to Rhetoric, 1744 (pars. 53, 54, 79, 100, 105, 112) and 1748 (pars. 68, 163, 203). The Ode was published by Lomonosov, in a revised edition (revised both in matter and manner, to judge by the fragments in his Guide to Rhetoric), only in 1751 (Collection of Various Works by Lomonosov), though it seems to have been known to the curious long before that. It is in stanzas of ten iambic tetrameters rhymed babaccedde (as usual in my notation, the vowels represent feminine rhymes). In this particular ode the rhyme scheme reverses the feminine-masculine sequence (ababeeciic) of the usual French ode of ten-verse stanzas (inaugurated by Ronsard, popularized by Malherbe), which Lomonosov used as a stanza model, and of the later odes by Lomonosov himself and by Derzhavin, his great successor. In its preserved formof 1751 TheHotinian Ode begins:
Vostorg vnezipriiy urn plenil,
Vedyot na verh gort v'isokoy
Gde vetr ν lesah shumeV zabil;
4 V doHnc tishind glubokoy;
VnimAya nechto, klyilch molchit,
Kotoriy zavsegdd zhurchit
I s shilmom vrdz s holmov stremltsya.
8 Lavrovi v'yiltsya tdm ventsi,
Tam sluh speshlt vo vse kontsi;
Daleche dim ν polydh kuritsya.A sudden rapture thralls the mind,
leads to the top of a high mountain
where wind in woods forgets to sound;
4 there is a hush in the deep valley;
to something listing silent is
the spring that murmured all the time
and down the hills with noise went surging;
8 there, laurel crowns are being wound;
there, hastes a rumor to all points;
smoke in the fields afar is rising.The fountain is Castalia, on Mt. Parnassus.
This 1751 version of The Hotinian Ode has rather frequent scuds—for example, in π (a modulation that
Lomonosov held in better favor than did Pushkin):
41 Ne mid,' Ii ν chreve lttrii rzhyot
I, s sircyyu kipyd, klokochet?
Ne dd Ii tyizhki ύζϊ rvyot
I chelyusti razinut' hochet?Does brass in Etna's belly neigh
And bubble, with the sulphur boiling?
Is Hades tearing heavy chains,
Endeavoring his jaws to open?
I have kept the literal sense and the rhythm but have
sacrificed to their retention the alternate, masculine and
feminine, rhymes. The word "neigh" is taken in the
old sense, both English and Russian, meaning "to make
a loud, harsh, jarring, and jeering sound." (In modern
Russian rzhanie, "neighing," would apply only to the
voice of a horse, or, vulgarly, to a succession of human
guffaws.)
The rhyme sequence babaccedde in the odic stanza of
ten lines (as used in The Hotinian Ode, 11. 41-50, in
which the terminals are rzhydt, klokdchet, rvy6t, Mchet,
rab'i, rvt, brosdet, nar0d, bol6t, derzdet; * the cc rhyme
here is a poor one, as will be explained further) follows
not the musical French alternation that begins on a
feminine rhyme and ends in a masculine one (ababeeciic,
as used, for instance, by Malherbe and Boileau), but
German models in the odic department (in other respects, imitations of French, of course), which also provided Lomonosov with the predominance of scudless
lines that he advocated in his early metrical theories.
The babaccedde alternations are found, for example, in
an ode by Johann Christian Giinther (1695-1723), Aufden zwischen Ihre Rom. Kaiser I. Majestat und der Pforte An. iyiS geschlossenen Frieden, a formidable engine of five hundred verses dedicated to the peace concluded between Austria and Turkey (July a i , 1718). It has less than twenty per cent of scudded lines (not counting a few semiscuds). For example, 11. 1 1 - 2 0 :
Die Walstatt ist noch nass und lau
Und stinkt nach Tiirken, Schand und Leichen.
Wer sieht nicht die verstopfte Sau
Von Asern faul und miihsam schleichen?
Und dennoch will das deutsche Blut
Den alten Kirchhof feiger Wut
An jungen Lorbeern fruchtbar machen,
Und gleichwohl hort der dicke Fluss
Des Sieges feurigen Entschluss
Aus Morsern und Kartaunen krachen.
Using my modification of the Belian system of notation
(see p. 15), we have:
1 II III rv
0000
0000
oxoo
0000
0000
0000
0000
0000
ooxo
oxooThere are a Scud 11 in 11. 1 3 and 20 and amini . 19. The Hotinian Ode, although reversing the French order of rhymes (followed by Lomonosov in his later odes and in an earlier effort of his, in trochaic tetrameter, October, 1738, an imitation of an ode by Fenelon), contains in the quoted lines clumsy echoes of the imagery in the third stanza of Boileau's Ode sur la prise de Namur (1693; an imitation in style of Malherbe's ode Au Roy
Henry Ie Grand, sur la prise de Marseille,* composed
1596> Pub- !630), 11. 21-30:
Est-ce Apollon, et Neptune
Qui sur ces Rocs sourcilleux
Ont, compagnons de fortune,
Basti ces murs orgueilleux?
De Ieur enceinte fameuse
La Sambre unie a la Meuse
Deffend Ie fatal abord,
Et par cent touches horribles
L'airain sur ces monts terribles
V6mit Ie fer, et la mort.f
Among the fragments (1744-48) of TheHotinian Ode
we find such archaic lines as:
Pretif ne mogut ogn , νοάά,
OrHtsa kak parit tudawhich can be rendered in sixteenth-century English:
Her can ne flame, ne flood retard
When soars the eagless thitherward.
Like all Lomonosov's verses, The Hotinian Ode has
little poetic merit, but prepares the advent of Derzhavin,
who was the first real poet in Russia. It should be noted
that despite the clumsiness of Lomonosov's idiom, with
its obscure banalities and perilous inversions of speech,'That particular ode by Malherbe, and Boileau's poem, happen to be not in octosyllabics (as French odes generally are) but heptasyllabics, thus corresponding, in Russian or English, not to iambic but to trochaic tetrameters. The first Russian ode (1734), Trediakovski's Ode on the Surrender of the Town of Gdansk (Oda ο sdache goroda Gdanska, referring to Daniig taken by the Russians in a war with Poland, 1734), in syllabic verse, is also an imitation of Boileau's piece, and was present at the back of Lomonosov's mind in the course of composition. •(•The insipid rhymes sourcilleux-orgueilleux and horribles— terribles contrast oddly with the rich rhymes Neptunefortune and fameuse-Meuse, both of which, however, were at least a century old in 1693. The two gods mentioned helped to rebuild the walls of Troy.
his iambic tetrameter already includes all the modulations that Derzhavin, Batyushkov, Zhukovski, and Pushkin brought to such perfection. At first Lomonosov deemed scuds good only for light verses, but in the mid- 174o s gave in and sparingly used all the types of scuds we know. He was the first Russian to allow cross rhyme. To be quite exact, actual priority in the inauguration of the Russian iambic tetrameter should be given not to the fragments of The Hotinian Ode found scattered through the Rhetoric, but to a sample of this meter supplied by Lomonosov in his letter of 1739 (an^ marked by a subtle, perhaps unconscious, use of the same "fairface" imagery as that in Trediakovski's sample trochaic lines of 1735). This very first Russian iambic tetrameter goes: Beleet biidto sneg Htsom . . .
in which Beleet= he, she, or it "looks white," or "is fairskinned," or "whitens" (intr.); budto= uas if," "similar to"; meg·= "snow"; Zifoom=ins tr. of litso, "face"; corresponding to "in face" or "of face." The closest translation allowed by the meter would be: Appears as white of face as snow . . . A little further, in the same letter, Lomonosov devises an example of a scud in the regular iambic tetrameter (at the time he approved of these "pyrrhic" liberties only in "songs"): Tsved i rumydnets umnozhdyte!
The first word means "flowers," the second, "rosy complexion" (cf. Trediakovski's less colloquial rumydnosf), and the third is "augment" (pi. imp.). Ye blooms, augment your coloration. The samples of other meters that Lomonosov gives in his letter look similar, as if stills were taken of them while they hovered above an unknown context; but one
of his illustrations—namely, that of a dactylic hexameter
—makes at least pleasing sense:
Vyotsya krugami zmiyd po trave, obnovivshis 1 ν
rasseline . . .Windeth in circles a snake through the grass, in
a crack having molted . . .I have not managed to keep the dactylic ending, but the feminine one is the one used by Zhukovski and Pushkin in this measure. Of tremendous interest to the student of Russian prosody is a forty-four-line song (beginning Gde ni gulydyu, ni hozhzi, "Wherever ramble I or go," Grust' prevelikuyu terplyii, "I bear immeasurable woe"), which one of Boileau's Russian followers, Aleksandr Sumarokov (1718-77), produced in 1759, when, with Trediakovski's trochees and Lomonosov's iambs, the metrical system had triumphed over the syllabic one. This lyrical poem, a stylized peasant girl's love chant, is of little artistic worth but reveals a singular purity of phrasing, superior to the more imaginative but also more awkward idiom of Lomonosov. In it Sumarokov attempts to blend the liberties of stress, characteristic of the syllabic octosyllable, with a scansion that is practically an iambic one. To an iambically trained ear catching the rhythm of the first two verses, the entire piece sounds exactly like the Russian counterpart of an English poem in which the first foot, and the first foot only, is being boldly tilted in every line. There are as many as twenty duplex tilts, and even one long tilt, in it, while all the rest of the lines are split-tilted with various degrees of sharpness. Of the duplex tilts only one belongs to the small group of "neutral" words (1. 32, Hi on p6verhu plwydt, "Whether upon the surface floats"). The others are such disyllables as vesel (1. 23) and tiizhit (1· 29):
Vesel Ii it, kogdd so mnoy?
Merry are you when you're with me?Tuzhit Ii ν toy on storone?
Grieving is he in yonder land?The long tilt is in 1. 18, Sdelalsya mil mne kak dushd, "Lovable grew he as my soul." Unfortunately, Sumarokov's tilts proved stillborn. This and other poems of his were rejected as syllabic fossils by thenext generation, and not a single Russian poet, except one or two innovators of today, ever dared use the free duplex tilt that had been accidentally introduced by the rhythm of Sumarokov's curious experiment in meter.
Notes on Prosody
8. Difference in Modulation
The first thing that strikes the student visually when he compares Russian verse structures to English ones is the lesser number of words that go to form a Russian line metrically identical to an English one. This feature is owing both to an actual preponderance of polysyllables in the Russian language and to the inflective lengthening of its monosyllables such as nouns and verbs. Certain disyllabic forms, such as most nonmasculine nouns of two syllables, remain of that length despite inflective alterations (except in the instrumental plural, when a syllable is added); and, on the other hand, certain participial adjectives are capable of such a hypertrophy of caudal segments as to make them uncontainable within a tetrametrical line. Generally speaking, it is only the lower words, such as prepositions and conjunctions, not affected by inflection, that can be readily compared to their English counterparts as represented in verse. But even this is sometimes not possible, since another extreme is obtained in Russian through the scriptorial dwindling of
three common Russian words to metrical nothings in the case of the prepositions k ("to"), ί ("with"), and υ ("in"), which as such (i.e., not lengthened to ko, so, vo, as they are for euphonic reasons before certain words) are not monosyllables at all, but ethereal consonants that are allowed a discrete existence only by grammatical courtesy. I hope that in the revised, and romanized, Russian script of the future these consonantal prepositions will be connected with the mother word by means of a hyphen (υ-dushe, "in the soul"). The predominance of polysyllables in Russian verse (as compared to the prodigious quantity of monosyllabic adjectives and verbs in English) is basically owing to the absence of monosyllabic adjectives * in Russian (there is only one: zloy, "wicked") and a comparative paucity of monosyllabic past tenses among the verbs (e.g., pel, "sang"), all of which, adjectives and verbs alike, are lengthened by number, declension, conjugation, and nonmasculine gender. Inflection also results in the comparatively rare occurrence of lower words corresponding to those that speckle English verse and pullulate in English speech, although of course, in a stanza or short poem in which the notions of altitude, confrontation, or distance happen to predominate, the occurrence of na ("on"), nad ("above"), pod ("under"), pred or pered ("before"), ot ("from"), do ("to"), and so forth would be as frequent as in English. And last but not least, the quantity of words in the line is affected by the nonexistence of Russian words exactly corresponding to the English definite and indefinite articles. In result of all these facts, a Russian who wants to say "the man" uses only one word, but this word is a trisyllable: chelovik. Its dative, "to a mail" or "to the man" or "to man," is cheloveku or k cheloveku—four syllables. DushA is "soul"; and "in the soul" is υ dushe—two sylla- *&ee Author's Note, p. vii.
bles. Very seldom, in translations from Russian into English and vice versa, can one monosyllabic noun be rendered by another. Some comfort is afforded in this respect by the coincidences dni and "days," sm and "dreams," mir and "peace," and a few others, but the singular son is "a dream" or "the dream"—two syllables —and sna is "of the dream"—three syllables. And although we can find quite a few long adjectives in English to match those of five, six, and seven syllables that are so abundant in Russian, it will be immediately clear from a comparative study of serious English and Russian poets, especially those of the nineteenth century, that because of associations with the burlesque genre the lyrical English poet will use conspicuous polysyllables warily, sparingly, or not at all, whereas the Russian lyricist, especially one of Pushkin's time, who has no such worries, will feel a natural melodic association between, say, the melancholy of love and polysyllabic epithets. In consequence, the mark of a first-rate performer of the time—the i82o's, when the Russian iambic tetrameter was at its highest level of popularity with minor and major poets*—was the two-word or threeword technique; i.e., the art of making a minimum of words shape the line. This I term the "full line." The natural colloquial falling into place of large words coin-
cides with an absence of gap fillers and lame monosyllables and results in a surge of scuds, so that, in the nineteenth century, a high rate of scuds became a sign of
expert handling in matters of poetical idiom.
Masculine full lines in EO are limited to twenty-one
combinations of three words and to six of two words (the
additional possibility 1 + 7, involving the unpleasant
I-Ii scud, was not used in Pushkin's day). The following
are random samples typical of Pushkinian intonations
in EO :
2 + 5+ 1: Ego toskuyushchuyu Ien [One : vin : 8; which
means "his fretting indolence" (acc.)]
2+4+ 2: Vdali Italii svoey [One : viir : 14; which means
"far from his Italy"]
3+4+ 1: ZheLdniy svoevoVmy roy [One : xxxii: 8; which
is best rendered by the eighteenth-century
French "Des desirs Ie volage essaim"]
1 + 4+3: Chtob epigrdf'i razbirdt'' [One : VI : 4; which
means "in order to make out epigraphs"]
7+ 1: ZakonoddteVnitse zdl [Eight : XXVIII : 7; which
means "in the legislatrix of salons"]
6+2: Ostanovilasya ond [Five : Xi : 14; the first
word means "stopped," and the second
"she" (one wonders by means of what miraculous circumlocution an English versifier
might manage to compose a double-scud
iambic tetrameter merely meaning "she
stopped")]
The number of two-word or three-word lines is about
thirty per cent in EO, to judge by a number of random
samplings. In samplings from English poets, it rises
from zero to barely five per cent. Among poets who use
full lines more often than most English poets do, we find:2 + 3+3: Suspends uncertaine victorie [Donne, The
Extasie7 1. 14]
2 + 6: Upon Impossibility [Marvell, TheDefinitionof
Love, 1. 4]
4 + 2 + 2: Magnanimous Despair alone [ibid., 1. 5]and so forth-, but in romantic poets, a natural contempt for Hudibrastics restrains somewhat the urge toward the formation of full lines. * We can now sum up the main differences in modulation between English and Russian iambic tetrameters as used by major poets, f
English (1) Scudless lines predominate over scudded ones in any given poem. In exceptional cases, at the maximal frequency of scudded lines, their number is about equal to that of scudless lines. (2) Sequences of scudded lines are never very long. Five or six in a row occur very seldom. As a rule, they merely dot the background of scudless series instead of forming sustained patterns from line to line. (3) Scuds are frequently associated with weak monosyllables, duplex tilts, and scudded rhymes (Scud rv). (4) Scud ι and Scud π occur about as frequently as Scud m but often tend to predominate, with Scud iv comparatively a rarity. The line is weighted accentually toward its end.
'Paradoxically enough, it is to English that we must go to find instances, in minor poetry, of a tetrameter made up entirely of one word. I am thinking of T. S. Eliot's Mr. Eliot S Sundayj
Morning Service, which begins with the (apparently, jocular) line: ''Polyphiloprogenitive.'' This, of course, can be (but never has been) duplicated in Russian; e.g., polupereimenovdt' (which means "to rename incompletely" and illustrates the additional metrical feat, impossible in English, of obtaining three scuds in a row instead of the scud, semiscud, accented stressscudded terminal of the EngKsh example). f Among major Russian poets, the greatest masters in the form were, in the nineteenth century, Pushkin and Tyutchev and, in the twentieth, Blok and Hodasevich. Lermontov's iambic tetrameters do not reflect his genius at its best, even in his celebrated Demon. Baratinski and Yazikov are often mentioned with the major poets as tetrametric performers, but the first was definitely a minor poet and the second a mediocre one.
S0
(5) Feminine rhymes are scarce, insipid, or burlesque. (6) Elisions are more or less frequent.
Russian
(1) Scudded lines greatly predominate over scudless ones. (2) Scuds often form linked patterns from line to line, for half a dozen lines in a row and up to twenty or more. Scudless lines rarely occur in sequences above two or three lines in a row. (5) Scuds are frequently associated with the unaccented syllables of long words. Apart from the few exceptions noted, there are no duplex tilts. Rhymes are not scudded (absence of Scud iv). (4) Scud III greatly predominates over other scuds. The line is weighted accentually toward its beginning. (5) Feminine rhymes are as frequent as masculine ones and add extrametrical music to the verse. (6) There are, strictly speaking, no elisions of any kind.
Notes on Prosody
9. Examples of Modulations
English meter came into being almost four centuries before Russian meter did. In both cases, modulation was born with the measure. Among the tetrameters of Chaucer's The Hous of Fame (1383-84), there are trochaic and iambic lines that contain all the scuds of later poets, although as usual with English poets the basic pattern is the scudless line and not, as in Russian, the third-foot scud. In The Hous of Fame we find a few third-foot scuds (1. 352, "Though hit be kevered with the mist," or 1. 1095, "Here art poetical be shewed"), a few second-foot scuds (1. 70, "That dwelleth in a cave of stoon"), a few combinations of second-foot and thirdfoot scuds (1. 223, "And prevely took arrivage"). It dis-
J1
plays such rhythmic formulas as, for example, the famous one based on two sonorous names (1. 589, "Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede"), which probably every English poet who favored the tetrameter has used once or twice, down to our own times. Even tilts are present (1. 605, " 'Gladly,' quod I. 'Now wel,' quod he"), but they are still rare, for when faced with the necessity of using an initial strong monosyllable or a strongheaded disyllable, old poets often preferred to switch for a verse or two from the dominant iambic meter to a trochaic one (i.e., to a line shorter by one, initial, syllable) rather than to tilt the iambic foot. It is not my intention here to outline, even cursorily, the history of the English iamb. But a few disjointed observations may be of some use. I think that on the whole the iambic tetrameter has fared better in Russia than in England. The Russian iambic tetrameter is a solid, polished, disciplined thing, with rich concentrated meaning and lofty melody fused in an organic entity: it has said in Russian what the pentameter has said in English, and the hexameter in French. Now, on the other hand, the English iambic tetrameter is a hesitating, loose, capricious form, always in danger of having its opening semeion chopped off, or of being diluted by a recurrent trimeter, or of developing a cadential lilt. The English form has been instrumental in producing a quantity of admirable short poems but has never achieved anything approaching, either in sheer length or artistic importance, a stanzaic romance comparable to Eugene One gin. The trouble is that with the English iambic tetrameter the pendulum of its purpose swings between two extremes—stylized primitivity and ornate burlesque. The scudless or nearly scudless iambic tetrameter has been consistently looked upon by English poets and critics as something characteristic of the "folk ditty" and conducive to an effect of "simplic-
I2
ity" and "sincerity." Now, this kind of thing is a serious obstacle to the evolution of an Eirt form. I am aware that the specious terms "simplicity" and "sincerity" are constantly employed in a commendatory sense by wellmeaning teachers of literature. Actually, of course, no matter how "simple" the result looks, true art is never simple, being always an elaborate, magical deception, even if it seems to fit in well with an author's temperament, ideas, biography, and so forth. Art is a magical deception, as all nature is magic and deception. To speak of a "sincere" poem or picture is about the same thing as to call "sincere" a bird's mating dance or a caterpillar's mimetic behavior. By the seventeenth century, the English iambic tetrameter, in the hands of some performers of genius, becomes capable of elaborate music while treating frivolous as well as metaphysical themes. But at this historical point a disaster takes place. The emancipation of the iambic tetrameter in Eingland becomes associated with the tendency toward Hudibrastics. Even the exceptionally artistic poetry of Marvell tends fatally to lapse into the atrocious genre associated with Samuel Butler's burlesque. This kind of stuff—the boisterous and obscure topical satire, the dismally comic, mockheroic poem, the social allusion sustained through hundreds of rhymed couplets, the academic tour de force, and the coy fugitive verses—is something intrinsically inartistic and antipoetical since its enjoyment presupposes that Reason is somehow, in the long run, superior to Imagination, and that both are less important than a man's religious or political beliefs. It has nothing to do with wit, but has a great deal to do with a certain persistent strain of mental archness that in modern times is so painfully audible in much of Mr. T. S. Eliot's work. The sad fact is thus that the English iambic tetrameter, despite the genius of some great poets who made it sing
SJ
and shimmer, has been maimed for life by certain, still thriving, trends and forms such ELS light verse (e.g., more or less elegant rearrangements of conventional images and ideas), the burlesque or mock-heroic genre (a dreadful category that includes political and scholarly romps), didactic verse (comprising not only catalogues of natural phenomena but also various "meditations" and "hymns" reflecting the standard ideas and traditions of organized religious groups), and various junctions Eind overlappings of these three main varieties. This is not to say that there are not many tetrametric masterpieces in English. Some of the following samples, to which diagrams of modulations are appended, come from immortal productions unsurpassed in any language by poems belonging to the same category. These samples are followed by diagrams of EO rhythms. In all the diagrams, a scudless foot is designated by an O and a scudded one by an X. Semiscuds (such as the word "when") are treated as regular beats. Duplex tilts are italicized in the text (e.g., in the second sample, 1. 6). Splittilts (e.g.,in the same sample,1. 5) are not italicized. False spondees (ibid., 1. 2) are not marked in the diagrams, even when so topheavy as to border on the split tilt (e.g., in the sixth sample, 1. 8, or in the sixteenth, 1. 1).
I. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (15177-47), The
Lover Describeth His Restless State:
ι As oft as I behold, and see
The sovereign beauty that me bound;
The nigher my comfort is to me,
Alas! the fresher is my wound.
As flame doth quench by rage of fire,
And running streams consume by rain;
So doth the sight that I desire
Appease my grief and deadly pain.Like as the fly that see'th the flame,
And thinks to play her in the fire;
That found her woe, and sought her game
Where grief did grow by her desire.
First when I saw those crystal streams,
14, Whose beauty made my mortal wound . . .In this poem of forty-five lines, with from twenty-six to thirty-one words in each of its nine quatrains, there is only one word that has more than two syllables. In the fourteen lines given above, there are ninety-seven words, a number that is interesting to compare with the eighty words in a reasonably well-scudded English sample or with the Russian average of about fifty in a fourteen-line stanza of EO.
n. William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnet CXLV
(1609):
1 Those lips that Love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said "I hate"
To me that languish'd for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet;
"I hate" she alter'd with an end
That follow'd it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,
From heaven to hell is flown away;
"I hate" from hate away she threw,
14 And saved my life, saying "not you."In this elegant little sonnet (Shakespeare's only tetrametric one)thereader should note the comparatively high rate of scudding and, in the last line, the comparatively rare third-foot duplex tilt, here eased in by means of a concettic alliteration.
SS
in. JohnDoniie(1572—1631), TheExtasie{pub. 1633):
37 A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poore, and scant,)
Redoubles still, and multiplies.
When love, with one another so
Interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.
Wee then, who are this new soule, know,
Of what we are compos'd, and made.
For, th'Atomies of which we grow,
Are soules, whom no change can invade.
But O alas, so long, so farre
50 Our bodies why do wee forbeare?A certain interesting eccentricity marks the rhythm of Donne, who has been somewhat overrated in recent years by lovers of religious verse. I have been slightly influenced in the choice of this particular passage by the presence of the very rare variation 1 +11, which, however, is a little impaired by the possibility of substituting a secondary accent for the second scud. There are plums in the rest of the pie; e.g., 1. 29, "This Extasie doth unperplex," = n+m, and 1. 66, "T'affections, and to faculties," = 11+IV. Theapostrophizationoftheuglyand trite elision in the second example is a mannerism of the time.
IV. JohnMilton (1608-74), LiAllegro (c. 1640):
103 She was pincht, and pull'd she sed,
And he by Friars Lanthorn led
Tells how the drudging
D O
Goblin swet,'
To ern his Cream-bowle duly set,
When in one night, ere glimps of morn,
His shadowy Flale hath thresh'd the Corn
That ten day-labourers could not end,
Then lies him down the Lubbar fend.And stretch'd out all the Chimney's length, o o o o
Basks at the fire his hairy strength; x o o o
And Crop-full out of dores he flings, o x o o
Ere the first Cock his Mattin rings. x o o o
Thus don the Tales, to bed they creep, o o o o
116 By whispering Windes soon lull'd asleep. 000 0It is not easy to find a sustained sequence of iambic tetrameters in Milton, who deliberately interrupts their flow by beheading the iamb every time it begins to domineer. Cadential verse for him, as for Coleridge and Keats, was a great and fertile temptation. This extract from a resplendent masterpiece (1. 112 is one of the best in English poetry) is not very abundantly scudded, but extra modulation is achieved by means of the contractions so characteristic of Milton's style: 1. 108, "His shadowy Male . . . " ; 1. 109, "That ten day-labourers..."; and 1. 116 , " B y whispering Windes . . . "
V. Samuel Butler (1612-80), Hudibras, pt. I (pub.
1662), can. I: 1 H m iv
187 For his Religion it was fit 0000
To match his Learning and his Wit: ooxo
'Twas Presbyterian true blew, x o x 0
For he was of that stubborn Crew oxoo
Of Errant Saints, whom all men grant 0000
To be the true Church Militant: ooox
Such as do build their Faith upon x o 0 o
The holy Text of Pike and Gun; 0000
Decide all Controversies by oxox
Infallible Artillery; oxox
And prove their Doctrine Orthodox ooox
By Apostolick Blows and Knocks; xooo
Call Fire and Sword and Desolation, ooxo
200 A godly-thorough-Reformation . . . ooxoHudibras teeters, of course, on the verge of jingle; in fact, it is the very parade of this teetering that barely saves it from hopeless topicality; but I give a sample of
the stuff because it displays one of the standard uses— the journalistic, mock-heroic genre—to which English and German satirists have put the most poetical of meters. The passage is scudded ostentatiously and vulgarly (a symptom of this is the frequency of iv). A rich scudding of iambic tetrameters is fatally associated in the English mind with jocose forms of minor poetry and with the same suggestion of verbal intemperance that makes the fancy rhyme odious in English.
vi. Andrew Marvell (1621—78), To His Coy Mistress
(pub. 1681):
1 Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Should'st Rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable Love should grow
Vaster than Empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
14 Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.Note the modulations in the second part of this passage. It comes from one of the greatest English short poems. I think that the "you" after the tilted "Love" in 1. 8 rates half a scud, while the next one does not. Of the hundreds of EngUsh tetrameters I have examined, this— and certain sequences in Cotton and, alas, Samuel Butler —are closest in melodic figures to those so typical of Pushkin and his contemporaries, though still falling short of the Russian predilection for the rapid ripple of Scud ΙΠ.
vn, Charles Cotton (1630—87), The New Year (pub.
1689):
25 And all the moments open are
To the exact discoverer;
Yet more and more he smiles upon
The happy revolution.
Why should we then suspect or fear
The Influences of a year
So smiles upon us the first morn,
And speaks us good so soon as born?
Pox on't! the last was ill enough,
This cannot but make better proof;
Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through
The last, why so we may this too;
And then the next in reason shou'd,
38 Be superexcellently good . . .For an English poet, Cotton is an uncommonly rich scudder and, in fact, outranks Marvell in the use of long words and rare modulations but also is much inferior to him artistically. He is the only poet among those I have studied whose iambic tetrameters contain a number of the unusual scud variation I + II, with or without tilt (e.g., The Retreat, 1. 8, "And to my admiration finde"; Valedictory, 1. 22, "Scarsely to Apprehension knowne"; The Entertainment to Phillis, 1. 25, "Vessells of the true Aritick mold"; and a few others).
vni. Matthew Prior (1664-1721), An Epitaph ("Interr'd beneath this Marble Stone"; pub. 1718):
17 Their Moral and CEconomy
Most perfectly They made agree:
Each Virtue kept it's proper Bound,
Nor Trespass'd on the other's Ground.
Nor Fame, nor Censure They regarded:
They neither Punish'd, nor Rewarded.
He car'd not what the Footmen did:
Her Maids She neither prais'd, nor chid:So ev'ry Servant took, his Course;
And bad at First, They all grew worse.
Slothful Disorder fill'd His Stable;
And sluttish Plenty deck'd Her Table.
Their Beer was strong; Their Wine was Port;
30 Their Meal was large; Their Grace was short.
I have chosen the most modulated passage in this
poem by an essentially second-rate performer true to his
pedestrian age. Another sequence of the same number
of lines (37-50) is completely scudless. The occurrence of
scuds—when they do appear—in Π is characteristic of
poorly modulated, commonplace poems in which the
scudless type of line greatly predominates. The rarity of
tilts (in accordance with contemporaneous theory) is also
symptomatic of prosodic poverty in poems of that period.IX. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Stella s Birth-day
(1726—27):
1 This Day, whate'er the Fates decree,
Shall still be kept with Joy by me:
This Day then, let us not be told,
That you are sick, and I grown old,
Nor think on our approaching Ills,
And talk of Spectacles and Pills;
To morrow will be Time enough
To hear such mortifying Stuff.
Yet since from Reason may be brought
A better and more pleasing Thought,
Which can in spite of all Decays,
Support a few remaining Days:
From not the gravest of Divines,
14 Accept for once some serious Lines.
This jogging rhythm, with isolated, halfhearted scuds
and an avoidance of tilts, is typical of the "light verse"
(a ponderous and dreary machine) of the Age of Reason.
Some may not think that 1. 8 should be allowed a full
scud in m. I am not quite sure I should have included
Swift's doggerel.X. John Dyer (i700?-58), Grongar Hill (pub. 1726):
79 And there the fox securely feeds;
And there the pois'nous adder breeds
Conceal'd in ruins, moss and weeds;
While, ever and anon, there falls
Huge heaps of hoary moulder'd walls.
Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has been this broken pile compleat,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sun beam in a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
92 Between the cradle and the grave.A tame and typical minor poet endowed with a certain delicacy of touch and not as color-blind as most of his grove-and-rill brethren in that most inartistic of centuries.
XI. Samuel Johnson (1709-84), On the Death of Dr.
Robert Levet (written 178a; pub. 1783):
1 Condemn'd to hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.
Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levet to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of ev'ry friendless name the friend.
Yet still he fills affection's eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;
Nor, letter'd arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefin'd.
When fainting nature call'd for aid,
14 And hov'ring death prepar'd the blow . . .The scant microbes of rhythm are a good test-tube sample of Samuel Johnson's plain rhythms.
ΧΠ. William Cowper (1731—1800), WriUen after
Leaving Her at New Bums (written c. 1754; pub. 1825):
12 Welcome my long-lost love, she said,
E'er since our adverse fates decreed
That we must part, and I must mourn
Till once more blest hy thy return,
Love, on whose influence I relied
For all the transports I enjoy'd,
Has play'd the cruel tyrant's part,
And turn'd tormentor to my heart;
But let me hold thee to my breast,
Dear partner of my joy and rest,
And not a pain, and not a fear
Or anxious doubt, shall enter there.—
Happy, thought I, the favour'd youth,
25 Blest with such undissembled truth!Cowper has left very few iambic tetrameters. Those of several of his flat Olney Hymns are not worth dissecting. The modulations of this poem come rather as a surprise (and perhaps reveal the concentrated music that the poor sick man had in him), seeing the pedestrian quality of most of his rhythms. I have chosen this passage to get in the very rare Ι+ Π.
xm. William Wordsworth (1770—1850), AWhirl-blast
from Behind the Hill (composed 1798; pub. 1800):
1 A whirl-blast from behind the hill
Rushed o'er the wood with startling sound;
Then—all at once the air was still,
And showers of hailstones pattered round.
Where leafless oaks towered high above,
I sat within an undergrove
Of tallest hollies, tall and green;
A fairer bower was never seen.
From year to year the spacious floor
With withered leaves is covered o'er,
And all the year the bower is green.
But see! where'er the hailstones dropThe withered leaves all skip and hop;
14 There's not a breeze—no breath of air . . .
The poem, which is an admirable one, seems to have
been deliberately kept almost scudless by its author, save
for a burst of music toward the end, with the final line
(22) scudded on Il and IV ("Were dancing to the minstrelsy"). Wordsworth's later tetrameters are also
sparsely scudded, with singing lines here and there interrupting lengthy spells of regular ones. With the
Hudibrastic nightmare hardly more than a century old,
no wonder genuine poets were chary of their scuds in
serious verse. That Wordsworth could orchestrate his
scuds brilliantly is proved by such lines as 1342-45 of
The White Doe of Rylstone (composed 1807-08; pub.
1815):
Athwart the unresisting tide
Of the spectators occupied
In admiration or dismay,
Bore instantly his Charge away
in which the combination of scuds (ll, I+ III, I+ in, 11)
produces a very Pushkinian modulation. In the same
poem occurs the very rare Ι+Π line (754):
With unparticipated gaze . . ,XIV. SamuelTaylor Coleridge (1772-1834), ThePains
of Sleep (composed 1803; pub. 1816):
14 But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
27 Deeds to be hid that were not hid . . .
In this great poem, contractions and split tilts add to
the rippling of scuds, which here and there occur in consecutive lines as they do in the verses of Andrew Marvell
and Matthew Arnold.XV. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Mazeppa (composed 1818; pub. 1819):
15 Such was the hazard of the die;
The wounded Charles was taught to fly
By day and night through field and flood,
Stained with his own and subjects' blood;
For thousands fell that flight to aid:
And not a voice was heard to upbraid
Ambition in his humbled hour,
When Truth had nought to dread from Power.
His horse was slain, and Gieta gave
His own—and died the Russians' slave.
This, too, sinks after many a league
Of well-sustained, but vain fatigue;
And in the depths of forests darkling,
28 The watch-fires in the distance sparkling . . .
Mazeppa is not one of Byron's happiest compositions,
but it serves my purpose as being mostly in iambic
tetrameter. I have selected a passage from it to show his
scudding at its poor best. The commonplace idiom is not
redeemed, as it is in Wordsworth, by a concentration of
rich poetical sense.XVI. John Keats (1795-1821), The Eve of St. Mark
(composed 1819):
1 Upon a Sabbath-day it fell;
Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell,
That call'd the folk to eveningprayer;
The city streets were clean and fairFrom wholesome drench of April rains; o oo o
And, on the western window panes, x oo o
The chilly sunset faintly told o oo o
Of unmatur'd green vallies cold, x oo o
Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, x oo o
Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, o oo o
Of primroses by shelter'd rills, o x o o
And daisies on the aguish hills. o x o o
Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell: o o o o
14 The silent streets were crowded well . . . 000 0
The iambic tetrameter is not Keats' favorite medium
of expression. He interrupts its flow either with shorter,
lilted lines, as in La Belle Dame Sans Merci (in which
each quatrain ends in a cadential line), or with sequences
of trochaic tetrameters, as in the batch coming after 1. 30
in The Eve of St. Mark. In the minds of many English
poets of the time, tetrametrics were associated with folklore, naive ditties, knights-errant, minstrelsy, fairy tales,
and so forth.xvil. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92), In Memoriam, XI (pub. 1850): 1 11 HI iv
1 Calm is the morn without a sound, 000 0
Calm as to suit a calmer grief, x o 0 o
And only through the faded leaf o x o o
The chestnut pattering to the ground: o o x o
Calm and deep peace on this high wold, x o o o
And on these dews that drench the furze, x o o o
And all the silvery gossamers o o o x
That twinkle into green and gold; 000 0
Calm and still light on yon great plain x o o o
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, 000 0
And crowded farms and lessening towers, 000 0
To mingle with the bounding main: o x o o
Calm and deep peace in this wide air, x o o o
14 These leaves that redden to the fall . . . o o x o
I have chosen this as a particularly brilliant example
of scudding (based mainly on monosyllables and partly
owing to the repetition of a specific split tilt). There are,however, other sequences of fourteen or more lines in other ρELrts of In Memoriam in which there are no scuds at all, or in which these are reduced to one half of their value (e.g., sec. XV;. See also pp. 15-16.
XVin. Robert Browning (1812—8g), Porphyrin's Lover
(1836):
29 For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
42 I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As already noted, the perception of semiscuds is a
somewhat subjective affair and depends very much on
the accentuation of adjacent words in the line. "She's,"
"me's," and "I's" may be sometimes very slightly accented, as I think, they are here. Browning crams his
iambic tetrameter so full of solid words that no wonder
this admirable poem is so little scudded. There is a wonderful long tilt in 1. 21, "Murmuring how sheloved me—
she," and the still more beautiful one in 1. 37, which induced me to choose this passage. Split reverse tilts are
also characteristic of his style.xix. Matthew Arnold (1822-88), Resignation (pub.
1849):
122 Signs are not wanting, which might raise
The ghosts in them of former days—Signs are not wanting, if they would;
Suggestions to disquietude.
For them, for all, time's busy touch,
While it mends little, troubles much.
Their joints grow stiffer—but the year
Runs his old round of dubious cheer;
Chilly they grow—yet winds in March
Still, sharp as ever, freeze and parch;
They must live still—and yet, God knows,
Crowded and keen the country grows;
It seems as if, in their decay,
135 The law grew stronger every day.
Further on, in 1. 160, there occurs the rare long tilt
("Beautiful eyes meet his—and he")· Arnold's tetrameters are splendidly modulated and marked by that
special device of artists in prosody, the interruption of
musically flowing lines by compact verses full of false
spondees. Compare all this with the snip-snap banalities
of, say, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61), a poetaster, or
the eighteenth-century meagerness of modulation in
Byron's flat iambic tetrameters (e.g., The Isles of Greece,
in which geographical names produce the few good
scuds).XX. WilBamMorris (1834-96), OldLove (pub. 1858):
9 He gazed at the great fire a while:
"And you are getting old, Sir John;"
(He said this with that cunning smile
That was most sad;) "we both wear on,
Knights come to court and look at me,
With eyebrows up, except my lord,
And my dear lady, none I see
That know the ways of my old sword."
(My lady! at that word no pang
Stopp'd all my blood.) "But tell me, John,
Is it quite true that pagans hang
So thick about the east, that on
The eastern sea no Venice flag
22 Can fly unpaid for?" "True," I said . . .This minor poet, a kind of sterile cross between the stylizations of Tennyson and those of Browning, is no "master of the iambic tetrameter" (as I think Saintsbury has termed him), but he has not unpleasingly experimented in subdued rhyme and curious run-on patterns. The enjambment from one quatrain to another via an unaccented monosyllabic rhyme word in 1. 20 is a rarity. The postverbal " o n " (closing 12) is of course accented in speech and is not a rare rhyme.
1 11 hi iv XXI. Modulations in EO, Four : EX, X, and XI: 00001 Tak tdchno dumal moy Evgeniy. ooxo On v pervoy yunosti svofy ooxo Bil zhertvoy burnih zabluzhdeniy xoxoI neobuzdannih strastey. ooxo Privtchkoy zhizni izbalovan, ooxo Odnim na vremya ochardvan, xoxo Kazocharovanniy drugim, ooxo Zheldnem medlenno torrdm, ooxo Tomim i vetrennim uspehom, ooxo Vnimaya v shume i v tishl ooxo Roptan'e vechnoe dushi, oxoo Zevdtu podavlyaya smehom: 0000 Vot, kak ubil on vdserrC let, 0000 14 Utratya zhizni luchshiy tsvet.
1 II III IV
ooxo 1 V krasdvits on uzh ne vlyublyalsya, xoooA volochilsya kdk-nibud1; ooxo Otkazhut—migom uteshalsya; ooxo Izmenyat—rad bil otdohnut'. ooxo On ih iskdl bez upoeri'ya, xoxoA ostavlyal bez sozhalen'ya, 0000 Chuf pomnya ih lyubov' i zlost\ oxoo Tak tochno ravnodushniy gdsf ooxo Na vist vecherniy priezzhdet, ooxo Saditsya; konchilas' igra: xoxo On uezzhaet so dvora,
Spokdyno doma zasipaet, ooxoI sdm ne znaet poutru, ooxo 14 Kudo, poedet wecheru. ooxo
1 II III IV
1 No, poluchiv poslarCe Tani, x o o o
Onegin zhivo tronut Ml: 0 000
Yaztk devicheskih mechtaniy o o x o
f^ nyom dumi rdem vozmuttt; o o x o
I vspornnil 6n Tafyani miloy 0 000
I bledniy tsvet, i vld untioy; 0 000
Iv sladostniy, bezgreshniy son o x o o
Dushoyu pogruzilsya 6n. o x o o
Bit' mdzhet, chuvstviy ptl starinnoy 0 000
Im na minutu ovladel; x 0 x o
No obmanut' on ne hotel x o x o
Doverchivost' dushi nevinnoy. o x o o
Teper'' mi v sad pereletim, o o x o
14 Gde vstretilas' Tat1yana s nim. o x o oNotes on Prosody
10. Counts of Modulations in Eugene Onegin
Pushkin's pet line was the chetirestopniy yamb, the iambic tetrameter. It has been calculated that during a quarter of a century, from his Lyceum period—say, 1814 —to the end of his life, January, 1837, he composed in this measure some 121,600 lines, which amounts to more than half of his entire output in any kind of verse. His most prolific years in regard to poetry were 1814, 1821 , 1824, 1826, 1828, and especially 1830 and 1833 (from above 2000 to above 3000 lines yearly); his most barren years in the same respect were 1834 and 1836, with the annual count sinking to about 280. His greatest year in the production of iambic tetrameters was 1828, with some 2350 lines, after which there is a decided decline (e.g., only thirty-five such lines in 1832). I have taken
these figures, with slight alterations, from the Metrical Guide to Pushkin's Poems (Metricheskiy spravochnik k stihotvoreniyam A. S. Pushkina, 1934). After having composed his long poem Poltava (in which, incidentally, such passages as 11. 295-305 and 401-14 form EO stanza sequences of rhyme but do not present separate entities of sense) in one fortnight (Oct. 3-16, 1829, in St. Petersburg) Pushkin seems to have experienced a certain revulsion toward his pet line, although EO was not yet completed. His remarkable piece A Small House in Kolomna (forty octaves in iambic pentameter, 1829—30) opens with the petulant statement:
Of the four-foot iambus I've grown tired.
In it writes everyone. To boys this plaything
'Tis high time to abandon . . .However, he used it again for The Bronze Horseman (1833), the most mature of his tetrametric masterpieces. In these notes on prosody, when illustrating such devices as scuds, tilts, false spondees, and so forth, I have discussed several aspects of the versification of EO. From the complete table of the scud modulations of EO, given for all 5523 lines, it will be seen that the predominant rhythm is Scud in (2603 lines). This is typical of the Russian iambic tetrameter in general. It will also be noted that the sum of all other scudded lines is about equal to the number of scudless lines (1515). Chapter One is unique in variety and richness of scudding. Two, Three, Four, and Five resemble each other in general modulation. Six, Seven, and Eight offer a certain drop in some of the categories. There are six stanzas in EO with every line scudded (Two : ix, Lenski's soul; Three : vi, gossip about Tatiana and Onegin; Three : XX, Tatiana's confession to nurse; Three : xxiv, Tatiana defended; Six : XIII1 Lenski goes to visit Olga before duel; Six : XL, Lenski's tomb) and
twenty-six stanzas with only one scudless line in each. No stanza is entirely scudless. The maximum amount of scudded lines is twenty-three in a row, and there are three cases of such sequences: Three : ν : 11 to vii: 5; Three : xxni: 11 to xxv : 5; and Six : xii: 6 to xm : 14. In all these cases the vivid sustained melody coincides with a torrent of inspired eloquence. A closer look at the six varieties of modulation (and here the bilingual reader should consult the original text of EO) reveals the following facts: The maximum of first-foot scudders for any given stanza is four (in the last eight lines of One : χχχιιι, the famous evocation of the amorous surf; and in Eight: XXIII, Onegin's second conversation with Princess N., "this painful t£te-&-tete") and five (in the first seven lines of Six : X, Onegin's dissatisfaction with himself before the duel). In Chapter Seven (in which the number of first-foot scudders ebbs almost to one half of that found in Chapter One) we find runs of six and five stanzas completely deficient in this scud (VII-XIV, Olga's marriage andTatiana's solitude; xxviil-xxxil, departure; XLIN-XLVTI, first impressions in Moscow). The number of second-foot scudders, so abundant (100) in Chapter One, dwindles by almost one half in the last three chapters, in which there are also long runs of omissions (172 lines in a row in Eight, interrupted only by a single such scud in "Onegin's Letter"). There are several stanzas containing as many as five such scuds; and one stanza (One : xxi, Onegin's arrival at the theater) breaks the record with six. There are some interesting runs of consecutive second-foot scudders; e.g., four at the end of One : xxxii (see n. to One : XXXII :11- 14) and four at the end of Four : XLVI. The commonest line in Russian poetry, the pastime of the cruising genius and the last refuge of the poetaster, is that facile and dangerous thing, the third-foot scudder.
7l
It is the predominant melody in. EO and is generally tripartite; i.e., made up of three words or three logical units. The line "sings" (and may lull the Russian versificator into a state of false poetical security), especially in the frequent cases in which the central word in the third-foot scudded line has at least four syllables after a first word of two syllables, or has at least three syllables after an initial trisyllable. No stanza in EO consists exclusively of third-foot scudders; the closest approach to this is presented by Five : xxxv (end of name-day feast), with twelve such lines, and Six : XL (Lenski's tomb), with thirteen such lines. Sustained runs of this rhythm are often associated with a technique much favored by Pushkin, the rapid listing of various objects or actions. The combination of two scuds in one verse, the fast first-foot scud and the flowing third-foot scud, is what gives vigor and brilliancy to a Russian poet's work, and Pushkin is a great artist in the use of this "fast flow." It is especially attractive when the line is followed or preceded by a second-foot scudder (see n. to One : xxni: 11— 13). The pleasure derived from the fast flow is owing not only to its euphony but also to the perception of its plenitude, of its perfect fit in regard to form and contents. The highest frequency of this line in any stanza is six {Journey, xxvm). There are three stanzas with five such lines (Two : Xl, Eugene's neighbors; Four : XXX, modish albums; and Eight: ix, defense of Onegin) and fifteen stanzas with four. Very sonorous and delightful are the runs of three consecutive fast flows in Four : XX : 9-11 (on relatives) and Six : xxvn : 3-5 (Onegin's retort to Zaretski). The frequency of the "slow-flow" line (second-andthird-foot scudder) reaches the extraordinary figure of nine in the brilliantly scudded first chapter, in which it even occurs adjacently (see n. to One : Lin : 1—7). The decrease of π+m in all the other chapters may be the
result of Pushkin's deliberate control in regard to a rococo rhythm. I find the maximum number of scudless lines in a stanza to be nine, and of such there are only two cases: Three : IL (Lenski and Onegin talk) and Six : XLIV (sober maturity). In regard to runs of scudless lines (often associated with didactic or conversational passages), I find nine stanzas having four such lines in a row, and five stanzas having five in a row. The record is six consecutive nonscudders: Three : xxi : 3-8 (Tatiana speaking to nurse) and Six : xxi : 4-9 (Lenski's lusterless elegy). My list of scudded monosyllables commonly occurring in EO comprises some forty words. Their bulk is made up mainly of prepositions: bez ("without"), chrez ("through," "across"), dlya ("for"), do ("up to"), iz ("out"), ko ("to"), mezh ("between"), na ("on"), nad ("above"), ο or ob ("about"), ot ("from"), po ("upon," "along"), pod ("under"), pred ("before"), pri ("by"), pro ("about"), skvoz' ("through"), so ("with"), sred? ("amid"), u ("at"), vo ("in"), and za ("behind"). Next come the conjunctions: i ("and"), a ("but," "and"), da ("and," "yet"), no ("but"), iV ("or"), ni ("nor"), to ("now," "then"), chem ("than"), chto ("that"), chtob ("in order to"), and hot' ("though"). Incidentally, the scuddability of the last word is nicely proved by its vowel being pronounced in good Russian as an unaccented 0. Finally, there are a few adverbs: ne ("not"), kak ("as," "like"), uzh ("already"), and the terminal particles, conditional, interrogative, and emphatic: bi, li, and zhe. The disyllables and the one staple trisyllable scudded in EO have already been discussed under §4, Tilted Scuds. They are: pered, predo, peredo ("before"), oto ("from"), mezhdu ("between"), Hi ("or"), chtobi ("in order to"), and dabl ("so as to"), all of them accented on the first syllable in speech. I have ignored the semiscuds completely (counting
them as regular beats) so as to avoid subjective preferences of intonation in assessing borderline cases. Their number is negligible; but in order that other workers may check my calculations when comparing their figures with mine, something about such weak words, which are not quite weak enough to be counted as scuds, should be said. There is, first of all, bit' ("to be"), bud' ("be"), bil ("was"), which I have invariably counted as beats, even in such combinations as chto-nibud' ("something") and mozhet bit' ("maybe"), which are generally accented as dactyls in speech but not infrequently terminate a verse with a masculine rhyme. Monosyllabic numerals (such as raz, dva, tri, etc.), personal pronouns (ya, ti, on, etc.), and possessive pronouns (mo/, tvoy, etc.) can be very weak semiscuds, especially in such dactylic locutions as bozhe may ("my goodness") or in the recurrent combination may Onegin. Chto in the sense of "what," and kak in the sense of "how," axe almost good beats, and so are kto ("who"), tak ("so"), tarn ("there"), tut ("here"), gde ("where"), vot ("now," "here"), and sey ("this"). The trickiest is the little group bliz ("near"), vdaV ("afar"), vdol' ("along"), vhrug ("around"), vne ("outside"), chut' ("barely"), and Iish' ("only"), but I have not succumbed to the temptation of having them influence my count. It is a curious thing that their allies skvozf and chrez are felt by Russian prosodists to be true scuds (among which I place them), their pronunciation being affected by the very transiency they help to express. Finally, there is vsyo ("all"), which I have left among the semiscuds, although it is very weak when spoken, especially in such anapaestic combinations as vsyo ravnd ("all the same"). And among the disyllables that produce a semiscudding effect (as examined in another section) there are several pronouns, such as οηά ("she"), eyd ("her," "hers"), ndshi ("our," pi.), and to these may be added the words sredi ("amid"), hotyd
("although"), uzh.0 ("already"), kogdA ("when"), eshchy<5 ("still"), all of which slightly weaken the heat of the foot, especially when recurring in the beginning of several adjacent lines. None of these semiscuds have I taken into account when calculating the modulations in EO. Consultation of the appended table may be facilitated by reference to the following examples of EO lines (the English versions faithfully follow the rhythm; the reader is reminded that a scud is an unaccented syllable coinciding with the stress of a metrical foot):
I: A line scudded on the first foot, or Fast:
I vozbuzh.dai' ulibku ddrri . . .
and to provoke the ladies' smiles . . .II: A line scudded on the second foot, or Slow:
SreeT modnih i starinnXh zdl. . .
in modern and in ancient halls . . .ΠΙ: A line scudded on the third foot, or Flow:
Zaretski, nekogda buy an . . ,
Zaretski, formerly a rough . . .i+πΐ: A line scudded on first and third feet, or Fast
Flow:
V filosoficheskoy pusrfne . . .
in philosophical reclusion . . .π+in: A line scudded on second and third feet, or
Slow Flow:
BlistateV na, poluvozdushna . . .
irradiant, half-insubstantial . . .0: A scudless line, or Regular:
Pora nadezhd i griisti nezhnoy . . .
the time of hopes and tender sadness . . .SCUD MODULATIONS IN "EO"
STAN- I + N + TOTAL CHAPTER ZAS I II in HI HI O LINES
One 54 58 100 306 74 9 209 756 Two 40 32 62 261 56 — 137 548 Three 41 33 50 268 58 2 157 568 Four 43 38 67 278 53 1 164 601 Five 42 41 66 282 39 2 158 588 Six 43 59 43 301 39 2 158 602 Seven 52 32 52 378 68 3 195 728 Eight 51 50 41 325 76 1 205 698 Prefatory Piece — 3 7 2 — 5 17 T.'s Letter in Three 8 6 31 6 — 28 79 O.'sLetter in Eight 8 1 26 1 — 24 60 Added in n. to Six — 1 11 1 — 1 14 Added in n. to Eight — 1 2 — — 2 5 O.'sJourney 15 15 127 29 1 72 259 Totals 374 508 2603 502 21 1515 5523
Notes on Prosody
11. Other Meters and Rhythms
These notes on prosody, meant only to give the reader a clear idea of the meter used by Pushkin in EO, cannot include a study of other metrical forms, beyond the remarks made on their origination. Suffice it to add that the similarities and distinctions between Russian and English forms remain the same throughout. What has been said of scud, tilt, elision, and contraction in special reference to the iambic tetrameter is also applicable of course to its trochaic counterpart and to the other lengths of binaries in use, such as trimeters and pentameters. In ternaries, scudding is possible too, but is of an ex-
tremely infrequent occurrence (being even rarer in
English than in Russian), whereas the tilts possible in
ternary lines belong to another type than those occurring
in duplex feet, since in triplex ones they do not involve
the stress but coincide with two adjacent depressions.
Iambic trimeters, those chimes of pocket poetry,
whose lilting rhythm in English affords an easy line of
communication between meter and cadence, have not
thrived in Russian: I can recall no serious first-rate piece
composed entirely in that measure. Tyutchev's famous
stanzas beginning:
Zimd neddrom zlitsya,
Proshla eyi pord . . .
No wonder winter glowers,
His season has gone by . . .belong definitely to the lightweight category. The iambic pentameter, rhymed or unrhymed, is not so abundantly represented in Russian as it is in English, but its blank-verse form vies with its English and German models in monosyllabic tilts, enjambments, and shifts of caesura (see especially Pushkin's "diminutive dramas"), while a greater variety of scuds and the free admission of sonorous feminine terminations among crisp masculine ones go far to compensate for the absence of elision and disyllabic tilting. The iambic hexameter, which can breathe freely only if the modulations of long scuddable words lend sinuosity to its hemistichs, withers in English, being choked by fill-up words, dull masculine rhymes, and gritty monosyllables; but in Russian poetry it becomes an extremely musical meander because of fluid scuds and the melody of true cross rhyme (feminines interlaced with masculines). It should be noted that the Russian iambic hexameter permits a scudded caesura, which is taboo in its model, the French Alexandrine. Here is an example of
what a Russian elegiac stanza would sound like if transposed into English iambic hexameters: A linden avenue where light and shadow mingle Leads to an ancient slab of opalescent stone, Whereon the visitor distinguishes a single Unperishahle word to scholarship unknown. Trochaic tetrameters are considerably more seldom used for serious verse than iambic ones in Russian but have provided a form for several memorable poems (such as Pushkin's Fairy Tales). Their system of scuds is exactly similar to that of the iambic tetrameter. It should be marked that in a tetrametric piece iambic lines are never combined with trochaic ones, as they have been by several EngHsh experimentators (Milton, Blake, Coleridge). On the other hand, a form that is very rare in English poetry—namely, the trochaic pentameter (used, for instance, by Browning in One Word More, 1855)—WCLS established by Trediakovski in an idyl of 1752 and has provided Lermontov, Blok, and others with a remarkably musical medium of expression, which I can only mimic here: Nobody has managed to unravel That inscription on the stone; and yet Fools get formidable grants to travel To the limits of their alphabet. Ternary meters have thrived in Russia. Owing to the facility with which a Russian rhymester can launch a line upon a dactyl, Russian dactylic hexameters are not so repulsive as English ones, and ternary trimeters are among the most harmonious forms extant. The amphibrachic trimeter in EngUsh is generally intermixed with anapaestic lines. The purest example is probably Swinburne's, otherwise dreadful, Dolores (1866). Scuds and tilts occur also in ternary feet, but the situation is somewhat different from that obtained in binaries. Scudded feet in ternaries are comparatively rare; here
are some examples of such modulations in (i) anapaestic,
(2) amphibrachic, and (3) dactylic trimeters scudded on
the second foot:
J- _ L·
(1) None too prosperous but not a pauper
ι. _ -L
Nezazhitochrdy, no i ne nishchiy
J_ _ t_
(2) Lived opulently but not wisely
J_ _
Roskoshestvoval, no ne mud.ro
J. — .L
(3) Sorrowful but not submissive
j_ _ j_
Gorestmy, no ne pokormyIncidentally, as every poet knows, (1) can be also
scanned as a trochaic pentameter (with a scud on
"-rous" and a semiscud on both "None" and "not");
(2), as an iambic tetrameter (with two adjacent scuds in
II and III, "-lent" and "but"); and (3), as a trochaic
tetrameter (with scuds also in Π and III, "-ful" and
"not").
Disyllabic tilts in ternaries are not associated with
scuds (as they are in binaries), since, as already mentioned, they coincide with two adjacent depressions. The
disyllable is practically neutralized into a pyrrhic. Their
occurrence is common. An obvious example in Russian
is the third verse of Zemfira's song in Pushkin's The
Gypsies (composed 1824):
Jm J_
Stariy muzh, grozniy muzh . . .Husband old, husband fierce . . .
For an English example we may select the word "only"
in an amphibrachic line (12) of Wordsworth's The
Reverie of Poor Susan (composed 1797; pub. 1800):
J - 1 . 1 . J -
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
-L J - J - J -
Odno tol'ko ν mire ey lyubo zhiVyo.Notes on Prosody
12. Differences in Use of Meter
In both English and Russian there is a definite predominance of binaries over ternaries; but this predominance is perhaps more marked in English than in Russian. For reasons basically associated with the brevity of English words, an English poem in ternaries seems more diffuse, more self-conscious, more dependent on artificial gap filling, and, in fact, more difficult for the reader to tackle than a poem in binary meter. There is no such effort attending the assimilation of ternaries in Russian, in which long words are frequent and in which, in consequence, a greater number of memorable dactyls, anapaests, and amphibrachs than those in English have been produced. Pausative forms (connecting meter and cadence) came naturally to English poets since ancient time and did a great deal to alleviate both the monotony and the ornamentality of English ternary feet. In Russian, omissions of depressions, resulting in pausative verse, did not come into general use until Blok (by far the greatest poet of the first two decades of this century), borrowing the device from German cadence (rather than from English cadence), composed a number of magnificent short poems in it. But Tyutchev, as early as 1832 (in the poem Silentium, first published that year in Molva), had already inaugurated the musical gasp of mixed or broken meter, which he followed up by his Heinian Last Love, first published in 1854 (Sovrerrwruiik). Cadential forms might have been evolved directly out of syllabic ones in Russia if a poet of genius had thought of it before Lomonosov introduced metrical prosody. Derzhavin did leave some experimental verse in that direction, but the rigid adherence of the Zhukovski-Batyushkov-Pushkin school to regular meter in serious poetry precluded the acceptance of cadential lilts.
English poets, when they do turn to temions, so consistently and so naturally intermingle anapaestic lines with amphibrachic ones that the English student of verse, unacquainted with other languages, is apt to dismiss the amphibrach altogether as an arbitrary meter devised by the ingenuity of prosodists (along with the molossus and what not) * and to regard the amphibrachic lines, even when they predominate in a poem, as acephalous anapaests. In Russian, on the other hand, until the emancipation of meter associated with Blok's name, there was a definite tendency on the part of poets using ternaries to have every line of the poem, no matter how long (except for imitations of the so-called classical hexameters, in which omissions of depressions were permitted), run strictly amphibrachically, or strictly anapaestically, or strictly dactylically. The most striking difference between Russian and English poems in binaries is the application to English iambics of the device of decapitation (which the anapaest, being bicephalous, can after all survive). The introduction of random trochaic tetrameters, or sequences of them, starting and affirming themselves as iambic tetrameters, is so usual with English poets, and has assisted them in producing such enchanting pieces, that in the light of these examples the trochee is demoted by the theorist to the rank of acephalous iamb. The interruption of an iambic sequence of lines by a trochaic line or lines is completely alien to Russian prosody, as studied in retrospect, but there is no particular reason why such variations could not be introduced. However, an organic reason for their absence may be traced to the general difference between Russian and English, a difference reflected both in speech and in metrical composition. This
difference is the greater rigidity, strength, and clarity of the single accent in a Russian word of any length, which leads to a sharper shock in the unexpected passage from an iambic line to a trochaic one (the looser and duller modulations of ternaries in Russian allow the passage from one ternary meter to another much, more easily). In an English long word, on the other hand, a secondary accent often takes some of the burden of emphasis off the back of the main accented syllable; and in English verse, the existence of duplex tilt and scudded rhyme (both of which occur only in a rudimentary form in Russian poetry) illustrate the EngUsh elasticity of meter, of which, in tetrameters, the trochaic line takes such delightful advantage in rippling the couplet that had been ostentatiously begun by an iambic smoothness of sound in the preceding verse.
Notes on Prosody
13. Rhyme
If we exclude a few scattered masterpieces (such as Pushkin's beautiful but obviously derivative dramas), we can say that the medium of blank verse has not produced in Russia, during the two hundred years of its metrical history, anything similar in scope, splendor, and universal influence to the unrhymed iambic pentameter in England since Chaucer's day. On the other hand, there has not appeared, in the course of half a millennium, a rhymed English romance in iambic tetrameter comparable in artistic merit to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Further on, to simplify the comparison, the discussion of Russian and English rhymes is limited to nineteenthcentury practice. Rhyme is not a component of meter, not part of the final foot, but rather its stub or its shoe, or its spur. It may closely fit the ultima when it coincides with the last ictus in masculine lines (hence masculine rhymes or
masculines, stressed on the only, or last, syllable of a word) or else it may be an ornamental and (in French and Russian) very beautiful appendage of feminine lines or of long lines (hence feminine rhymes or feminines, stressed on the penultimate, and long rhymes, stressed on the antepenultimate). The terms "single," "double," and "triple" used by some English theorists for masculine, feminine, and long are ambiguous because rhyme is not the participating word but the effect of two, three, or more "like endings" (to use a famous definition of rhyme); therefore, a "single rhyme" would correctly mean one set of such endings in a piece of verse (e.g., "like endings" throughout a poem). What I term the "long rhyme" Russian theorists call a "dactylic rhyme," which is extremely misleading not only because rhyme lies outside meter and should not be expressed in metrical terms, but also because along rhyme, or long terminal, when attached to a line of binary verse, does not sound at all like the dactylic chime of the long rhyme, or long terminal, in ternary verse. In the case of iambics or trochees, the ear distinguishes an extrametrical echo of the binary measure, and the voice (while not giving the ultima the kind of value it gives a scudded masculine) reads the final, unaccented syllable more abruptly than it would the same syllable, had ternaries been scanned. A further removal proximad of the accent results in stunt rhyme, which has not yet been instrumental in producing any major poetry either in English or in Russian. It should be noted that the feminine rhyme and the longer variants may involve two or more words. Rhyme may be adjacent (in couplets, triplets, etc.) or alternate (bcbc, bcbcbc, abab, baba, AbAb, etc.)* or in- * Here and elsewhere vowels denote feminines, consonants denote masculines, and capital vowels denote long rhymes.
Sj
closing (one rhyme inclosing or "embracing" a couplet or a triplet; e.g., abba, bcccb, etc.). The more distant a rhyme word is from its fellow in level of sense or grammatical category, the "richer" the rhyme is felt to be. A rhyme may be formed by terminals spelled differently, such as "laugh-calf," "tant-temps," lyod-kot (Russian for "ice-cat"), which are then termed ear rhymes. Eye rhymes, no longer used in French ("aimer-mer''), are permissible by tradition in English ("grove-love")* and are barely possible in Russian, as in the case of rog- Bog ("horn-God"), the latter being pronounced generally "boh," with A as in "hob"; or vdroni'-stdrom ("ravens—sides"), in which the second ο in the second word is slurred so as almost, but not quite, to make the word sound disyllabic—a very rare case in Russian, in which, as a rule, the ear hears what the eye sees. + Perhaps the nearest approach to the English gynandrous type of rhyme, "flower-our," would be storozh—morzh ("watchman-walrus"), but I do not think that this has ever been tried. Strictly speaking, there are no laws or rules of rhyme except the very general rule that a rhyme should afford at the best "satisfaction and surprise'' (as the French say) or at least a sense of euphoric security (which goes for the routine rhyme in all languages), with a hereditary acceptance of certain conventions. But even these sensations can be altered Eind these traditions broken by any poet whose genius proves powerful and original enough to inaugurate imitable trends. *In English, such inexact rhymes as "love-off" or "groveenough" rather curiously combine visual and auditory satisfaction or pain. fit should be noted, however, that to elide storoni to make it a trochee in a binary line would be considered in even worse taste than to rhyme it with voroni.
S4
The general difference between English and Russian rhyme is that there are considerably more feminine rhymes in Russian and that in diversity and richness the Russian rhyme is akin to the French rhyme. In result, Russian and French poets can afford the luxury of demanding more from the rhyme than English poets can afford to do. There is a certain subdued and delicate beauty of gray, gentle rhyme in EngUsh that is not duplicated in the dazzlingly brilliant romantic and neoromantic arrays of French and Russian poets. In French, the presence of at least two different consonants before a final e muet gives the latter a semblance of voice (maltre, lettre, nombre, ckambre, etc.) and allows the French poet to mimic both the meter and the feminine rhyme of English and Russian verse. If we devise the line: Le maitre siffle, son chien tremble it may be scanned (if we do so with more deliberation than a Frenchman would) not much differently from, say: The master whistles, his dog trembles
or from its Russian counterpart (in which, incidentally,
the split reverse tilt is eliminated, together with the
weak monosyllables) :
Hozyain svishchet, pyos trepeshchet.Similarly, if we take the words:
Phedre (Fr.)
feather (Eng.)
Fedra (Russ.)
we may say that roughly they rhyme and that' 'Phedre—
cedre" is as fully a feminine rhyme as "feather-weather"
or "waiter-viler" (Russ. "wind")- A closer inspection,
however, reveals that "Phedre" is somewhat shorter,Ss
and "feather" (or "waiter") just a trifle shorter, than
Fedra (or veter). This difference becomes immediately
apparent if we take another set:
mettre (Fr.)
better (Eng.)
metr (Russ. "meter,"
the measure of length)
Metr-vetr (archaic veter) is a masculine rhyme, but it is
almost identical in terminal sound to the French
"mettre" or "metre." On the other hand, if an Englishman manages to pronounce metr correctly, it will form a
gynandrous association with "better" only insofar as
"fire" does with "higher."
Another type of e muet affecting the eye is what might
be termed the deaf-mute e. If we take the words:
palette (Fr.)
let (Eng.)
let (Russ. "of years")it will be seen that what in French makes a feminine rhyme ("palette-omelette") is to theEnglish and Russian ear a harmony with masculine endings in "-et." Consequently, if we devise the line: Telle montagne, telle aurore it comes to the metrist as something of a shock that it is syllabicaHy identical to the iambically sounding:
Le maitre siffle, son chien tremble. We are now in a position to draw a comparison between English and Russian rhyme: There are poems in Russian that consist of only masculine rhymes or only feminine rhymes, but whereas in English a feminine rhyme may crop up at random among a long sequence of masculines, no such cases occur in serious Russian verse. Neither in English nor in Russian
is it necessary for a rigid scheme of rhyme to be sustained throughout a poem, but in a Russian freely rhymed poem, in which both kinds of rhymes occur, terminals belonging to different sets of rhymes will not be placed in adjacent lines (say, ababaececded, etc.) unless a certain standard scheme is deliberately repeated over and over again. The Russian masculine rhyme allows identity to be limited to a final vowel if the latter is preceded by a vowel or a soft sign (moyd, "my," fem.; tayd, "concealing"·, ck'ya, "whose," fem.); otherwise, it demands at least a two-letter coincidence (moy, "my," masc., and Tolst0y, or son, "dream," and ba.lk.0n, "balcony") and it conforms to the rule of the consonne d'appui ("supporting consonant") whenever a consonant precedes the final vowel. Da ("yes") rhymes with vodA ("water") but not with MoskvA-, and tri ("three") rhymes with dari ("give") and utri ("wipe") but not with prosi ("ask") as "tree" and "see" would in English. In this respect a certain freedom is traditionally granted—owing to obvious lyrical reasons—to case endings of lyubdv': lyubvi ("of love") is allowed to rhyme with words in which the penult is a vowel; e.g., tvoi ("thy," pi.). Pushkin happens to go further: in Three : XIV, he rhymes lyubvi-dni ("days"), which is not admissible and constitutes the one really bad rhyme in the whole of EO. In English it is, of course, the other way round, and although the support of a consonant is sometimes unavoidable—given the paucity of rhyme in general—such coincidences of sound as "sea-foresee" or "Peter-repeater" have been distasteful to most poets of the past. A curious characteristic of Russian feminine rhymes is the license accorded to certain common unaccented endings. Let us consider the words
ζάίϊ ("halls")
S7
miliy- ("small")
aloy ("of the red," fem. gen.)
zhilo ("sting")
Urila ("of the Ural")The endings after the Z are all slightly different in sound, but a Russian poet of Pushkin's time and later will think nothing of rhyming zali-maliy, maliy-aloy, and zhalo-Urala. Of these three types, the first is not inelegant; the second is absolutely correct (indeed, in oldfashioned or declamatory style the adjectival ending Iy is actually pronounced as an unaccented oy), and zhalo- Urala, though shocking to the purist, is frequently used (Pushkin rhymes both rana, "wound," and rano, "early," with "Tatiana"), Zal'i, on the other hand, does not rhyme with aloy or zhalo or Urala, and the last does not rhyme with any of the first three in the column. There is no analogy for this in French, and only a very distant one in English (cf. "alley" and "rally" or such cockney assonances as "waiter-potato"). The feminine rhyme in Russian, as already mentioned, sounds a jot fuller and more fluent to theear than the feminine rhyme in English. It is also (as well as the masculine) more of a masquerader than its English counterpart. The further proxrmad identity of spelling is carried, the more striking and more delightful the rhyme is deemed, granted that in the course of this improving consonance difference of sense grows in inverse ratio to that of sound. Thus, the identical rhyme supruga ("wife") and supruga (sing. gen. oisuprug, "husband"), while conforming to the wonderful comical tone of the narrative poem wherein it occurs (Pushkin's Graf Nulin, 1825), would be weak in a serious piece. In feminine rhymes or in two-letter masculine endings the consorme cTappui is welcome but not obligatory. Examples of rhymes that are rich owing to its presence and to other reasons are:
sklon ("slope")
ΛροΙΙόηprostdy ("simple")
zolotoy ("golden")
pro sidy
Tolstoy
prostaya (fern.)
zolotaya (fern.)
pro staya
staya \li& flock")
vstrechdet ("meets")
otvechaet ("answers")Richness of rhyme can also be achieved by such subtle shuttles of critical consonants as in balkdn-sklon, in which ornamental support is provided by alliteration. The existence of a scudded terminal in binary meters depends on the line's ending in a word of at least three syllables with a secondary accent either upon the ultima or on the antepenult; and since organically a Russian word can have but one accent, it follows that scudded rhyme (Scud W in iambic tetrameter) does not occur in Russian poetry. A few cases occur as prosodic mistakes in old doggerels going back as far as the eighteenth century, and a few experiments by genuine poets have been made in our time. In 1918, during the Civil War, I remember Maksimilian Voloshin, an excellent and erudite poet (1877-1932), reading to me at a Yalta cafe, one cold and gloomy night with the sea booming and splashing over the parapet onto the pavement, a fine patriotic poem in which the pronoun moya or tvoya rhymed with the end of the lmeinepreodoltmaya ("and [tum-tee-]unsurmountable"), producing a I+Π+rv scud combination. The English situation is quite different. If we choose the word "solitude" for the ending of a line, we observe that a normal secondary accent on the ultima (especially
conspicuous in American speech) affords a perch for a perfectly banal rhyme (say, "solitude-rude")· Not all long words, though, provide this support or, if they do, do so under coercion (e.g., "horrible" forced into rhyme with "dull" or "dell"). In other cases, tradition comes into play, and by an ancient rule of the poetical game or prosodical agreement, polysyllables ending in y ("-ty," "-ry," "-ny," etc.) may yield a dubious solace to the English versifier by rhyming with "see," "me," "tree," etc. In Russian verse I find something faintly resembling a Semiscud IV only in the following case, which needs a brief preface. The Russian locution rendering the idea of "some" in relation to time, place, person, thing, or manner (sometime, somewhere, someone, something, somehow, etc.) is -rubitd\ and when properly printed is connected by a hyphen with the words for "when" (kogda), "where" (gde), "who" (kto), "what" (chto), "how" {kaK), etc. Thus, kogda-nibud' means "sometime" or "someday," gde-nibud' means "somewhere," kto-nibud' means "someone" or "somebody," chto- Tiibud' means "something," kak-mbucT means "somehow," etc. Now, the point is that in ordinary speech, or in any part of a metrical line other than its terminal in binary verse, these compounds are accented on the syllable preceding the neutralized -nibud'. A line going:
Ktd-nibud', kto-nibud', kto-nibud''
Somebody, somebody, somebodyis a regular dactylic trimeter with a long terminal. Moreover, a few of these forms, when inflected—e.g., kakAya-mbud' ("some kind of," fem.)—automatically receive a single accent on the first part of the compound and lack all accent on the end of the second part when participating in a binary line in which otherwise they could not find a scannable place.
Pushkin and other poets of his time rhyme kto-nibud\
gde-nibud\ etc., with grud' ("breast"), put' ("way"),
blesniit' ("to flash"), etc. In describing Onegin's desultory and haphazard education, our poet starts a famous
stanza (One : v) with the lines:
Μϊ vse uchilis' ponemnogu,
Chemii-nibud' i kdk-nibiid' :
Tak vospitdrC em, sldva Bogu,
U nds nemudrend blesniit',All of us had a bit of schooling
in something and [tum-te-]somehow:
therefore with culture, God be lauded,
with us it is not hard to shine.
Chemu-nibud' is the dative of chto-nibud', and the second
line, in which it occurs:
Chemu-nibud' i kak-nibud 1
^ L· — kj JL
is modulated very much like
With Cherubim and Seraphim
(Christina Rossetti, The Convent Threshold,1. 24). However, the Russian reader so little expects a scud on the
final ictus that in reading Pushkin's line he would accent the bud' more than in ordinary speech.
In the first third of the nineteenth century in Russia
there is a tendency on the part of good poets to resist the
facile rhyme depending on verb endings (infinitives in
-at', -et\ ~itf, -ixt'; past tenses in -al, -ala, -alo, -ali, -il,
-ila, etc.; present tenses in -it, -yat, -aet, -ayut, and
many other overwhelmingly repetitious forms), either
by using it as seldom as possible or by enriching it with a
consonne d'appui. Although in EO poor verbal rhymes,
as well as poor noun rhymes (in -arCe and -en β corresponding roughly to "-ition" and "-ation," and case
endings, such as -oy) are perhaps more frequent than
our poet's miraculous art might warrant, the above-mentioned tendency obtains too, even in such passages
in which the dehberate Hsting of actions or emotions
makes it difficult to avoid monotony of rhyme.
In scooping at random a handful of rhymes from EO
we can sift out such rich ones as:
pirov ("of feasts")
zdordv ("in good health")
zeval ("yawned")
zal ("of halls")
da-s ("yessir")
glas ("voice")
krov'yu ("blood," instr.)
Praskov yu (fem. name, acc.)
nesnosniy ("odious")
sdsni ("pine trees")
istdr'ya ("story")
Krasnogor^ya (place name, gen.)
dovdlen ("pleased")
kolokdlen ("of steeples")
rdda ("glad," fem.)
maskardda (gen.)
and the best rhyme in the whole poem:
siniy ("blue")
RossiniThere is also an abundant crop of weak or poor rhymes
such as:
Richardsdna (acc.)
Grandisdna (acc.)
blizhe ("nearer")
nizhe ("lower")
easy case endings:
umdm ("mind," instr.)
Iitsdm ("face," instr.)
the easy and inexact:pravdrno ("nimbly")
pokorna ("submissive")
priezd ("arrival")
prisest ("a sitting down")
and banal rhymes such as:
lyubov' ("love")
ArroV ("blood")
dchi("eyes")
ndchi ("nights")
In English, fancy rhymes or split rhymes are merely
the jester bells of facetious verselets, incompatible with
serious poetry (despite Browning's talented efforts to
glorify them). The Russian Pushkin can quite naturally
and artistically rhyme gdd vl—dAvl ("where are you"—
"maidens"), but the Englishman Byron cannot get away
with "gay dens"—"maidens."
The beginning of Four : XLIV contains one of the most
ingenious rhymes in the whole of EO, an unexpected
but at the same time completely natural and delightful
chiming of a foreign name with a very Russian locution
accented on the preposition:
Pryamtm Onegin CkiVd Gardfdom
Vdalsya ν zadiimchivuyu Ien':
So snd saditsya ν υάηηιι sd-Vdom,
I posle, ddma tse'liy derC . . .
which means (in free iambics, unrhymed):
Onegin lite a regular ChiIde Harold
lapsed into pensive indolence:
right after sleep he takes a bath with ice,
and then remains at home all day . . .
but all Byron could have achieved, had the roles been
reversed, might have resulted in the burlesque:
And similar to the boyar Onegin,With a cold bath my Harold would the day 'gin
or perhaps he might have rhymed "licent" with "ice in't" (for other remarks oil this curious subject see my n. to Four : XLIV : i). Another striking rhyme in the same canto, st. XLm, coming on the heels of a quip regarding weak rhymes, is W. Scott-raskhdd, an ear rhyme with the second word sounding ras-h6t, a comic echo of the English writer's name. A few words remain to be said concerning the long rhyme. Since so many thousands of Russian words are accented on the antepenult, or incur this accent by inflection, a long rhyme, especially a weak one (e.g., ndzhnie—myatdzhnie, "tender-restless," orpUdyushchiy— mechiAyushchiy, "the flaming-the dreaming"), is easier to find and is used far more extensively in Russian than in English. Nor does it have in Russian any particular association with the extravagant and the trivial. It was neither rich nor popular during the first third of the last century, but then steadily increased in fancifulness and charm with poets experimentally inclined. Probably the most famous short poem in long rhyme (alternating with masculines) is Blok's The Incognita (Neznakomka;), a set of iambic tetrameters in which the rhymal concatenation of extra syllables looks like the reflection of lights in the suburban puddles of the poem's locus. The long rhyme, however, leads to a deadly monotony of rhythm in a protracted piece, whereas its more striking specimens (Fet's skr<5mno ti-kdmnati, "demurely you—room," or Blok's stdlikov-krdlikov, "of tables-of rabbits") become so closely associated with the poems in which they were initially used that their occurrence in later verse inevitably sounds like a reminiscence or an imitation. The quest for spectacular rhymes eventually led Russian poets to the incomplete or assonant rhyme, but this matter lies outside the scope of our present inquiry. The reader should be careful not to confuse the scudded masculine rhyme with the long rhyme. In the following
example, all six lines are in iambic tetrameter, with a
long rhyme in ι and 5, a masculine rhyme in 2 and 4,
and a feminine rhyme with contraction in 5 and 6.
The man who wants to write a triolet,
When choosing rhymes should not forget
That some prefer a triple violet
And some a single violet;
Nor should he spurn the feminine vi'let
Blooming, contracted, on its islet.
The fact that the rhyme, no matter its length, lies outside the metrical scheme of the line leads to some droll
results. If we devise, for example, an iambic couplet in
which the rhyme is not merely long, but monstrous and,
indeed, a very sea serpent in length, we shall see that
despite there being six additional syllables after the ictus,
malting fourteen syllables in all of the line, the latter
still remains a tetrameter (or "octosyllable," as some
would call it):
Est'1 rifmi prdchriie, napraskivayushchiesya,
I mnogonozhki est\ podkashivayushchiesyawhich means, in prose, "There are solid rhymes that
suggest themselves readily, and centipedes, whose legs
buckle under them." This couplet is identical in metrical
length with, say:
Esi 1 rifmi tochnie, i est 1
Drugte. Vseh ne perechest''which means, "There are exact rhymes, and there are other ones. All cannot be listed."
Notes on Prosody
Index
Devoted to the literary materials chiefly.
A One Word More, 7 8 ; Por-
. _ . „ phyria's Lover, 9, 1 7 , 66
Academy of Sciences, St. BugaeV ) Boris Nikoiaevich
Petersburg ("Audrey Betty"), 14 & n,
Allegro, U, see Milton 1 5 , 4 2 , 4 8 n s Simvolizm (Sym-
Anna Ivanovna / Ioannovna, holism), i 4 n
Empress, 3 8 ; see also Butler , Samuel : Hudibras, 17,
Lomonosov ^ 5 7 _ 8 ) 63
Arnold, Matthew , 64, 6 7 ; Res- Byrotlj George Gordolli Baroll)
ignation, 1 7 , 6 6 - 7 g^ g 3 ; M e s a j Greece> The,
Auf den zwischen Ihre Rom. 6?. Mazeppa>
Kaiserl. Majestcit und der
Pforte An. 1718 geschlossenen
Frieden, see Giinther
Au Roy Henry le Grand, sur Canterbury Tales, The, see
la prise de Marseille, see Chaucer
Malherbe Captain's Daughter, The, see
Pushkin
B Castalian Fountain, 40
„ ... , . T, . Chaucer, Geoffrey, 0 Canter-
Baratinski, Eugeniy Abramo- ' . -" ' ,
vich on bury Tales, The, 3 2 ; Hons of
vie , s o n Fame, The, J5 1 - 2
Batvushkov, Konstantm Niko- ' , ',
CLTY
laevich
laevicn, A.1
44, 80
00 °FTHE FLASUE> THE> SEE
Wilson
Belly, Andrey , see Bugaev Civil W a r (Russian} 80
Belle Dame Sans Merci, La, , A\, TT
see Keats Clough, ArthurHugh , 67
Berberov, Nina Aleksandrovna, Coleridge, SamuelTaylor , 2 5 ,
3 5 n 57»7o; Pains of Sleep, The, 9,
1
Blake, William , 78 7 , 63^4
Blok Aleksandr iuciualllil
-DIUIL, illcmallux Aleksandrou Confessio r ramantis,
n
see Gower
r . , n-1,
. , o a a t Convent I hreshola, 1 he, see
vich, 5on, 78, 80, 8 1 ; Incog- Rossetti, . j tamment to Fhillis, 1 he, 5 0 :
4145 ; Ode sur la prise de ^ > Retreat,
3
Namur, 14 2 - 3 a n J . . ,.
»' U 595 Valedictory, 59
T on "Count Nul1'"see Pushkin
C
Brid^rRobert: AflW , ™ T e r ' ™ llia ™ > 625
p j Hymns, 6 2 ; Written After
Brief°Guide to Rhetoric, ^ * ^
1
(Kratkoe rukovodstvo k ritorike), see Lomonosov J)
Bronze Horseman, The, see
Pushkin Daisy, The, see Tennyson
Browning , Robert , 66, 68, 9 3 ; Danzig, ode on, 4 3 nDefinition of Love, The, see Gower, John : Confessio aman-
Marvell tis, 3 1
Demon, see Lermontov Graf Nulin, see Pushkin
Derzhavin, Gavrila Romano- Grongar Hill, The, see Dyer
vich, 40, 43, 44, 80 Giinther, Johann Christian:
Doigoruki, Prince Ivan Mihay- Auf den zwischen Ihre Rom.
lovich: Fireplace in Moscow Kaiserl. Majestat und der
(Kamin v Moskve), 2311 Pforte An. IJ1& geschlossenen
Dolores, see Swinburne Frieden, 41—2
Domik v Xolomne, see Pushkin Gypsies, The, see Pushkin
Donne, John, 56; Extasie, The,
1 6 , 1 7 , 49, 56 -U-
Dyer , John, 6 1 ; Grongar Hill,
®1 Hodasevich / Khodasevich,
Vladislav Felitsianovich, 3 3 n ,
E 5on; Sobranie srihov (Collected
Verses), 3 3 n ; " Years have
Elegy II, see Trediakovski from memory eroded" ( I z
Eliot, T . S., 5 3 ; Mr. Eliot s pamyati izgrizli yodi), ^
Sunday Morning Service, 5 on HotinjKhotill ; s e e Lomonosov,
Entertainment to Phillis, The, Hotinian Ode
see Cotton Hotinian Ode, see Lomonosov
Epitaph, An, see Prior Hours of Fame, The, see
Eugene / Evgeniy Onegin (EO), Chaucer
see Pushkin Howard, Henry , Earl of Surrey ;
Eve of St. Mark, The, see Keats Louer Describeth His Restless
Evgeniy Onegin, see Pushkin SroXe, The, 8, 5 4 - 5
Extasie, The, see Donne Hudibras, see ButlerF I
Fairy Tales, see Pushkin Incognita, The, see Blok
I n
Feast at the Time of the Plague, Memoriam, see Tennyson
Isles
The, see Pushkin °f Greece, The, see Byron
I z
Fenelon, Francois de Salignac pamyati izgrizli godi, see
de la Motte-, 42 Hodasevich
Fet, A. A . , see Shenshin
Fireplace in Moscow, see J
Doigoruki
Johnson, Samuel, 6 1 ; On the
Q Death of Dr. Robert Levet, 61Garden, The, see Marvell Gde ni gulyayu, ni hozhu, see Sumaxokov Kamin v Moskve, see Doigoruki Good-Night to the Season, see Kapitanskaya dochka, see Praed Pushkin
Keats, John, 57, 65; Belle Dame M
Sans Merci, La, 65; Eve of St.
Mark, The, 9, 64-5 Malherbe, Prangois de, 40, 41;
Khotin, see Hotin Au Roy Henry Ie Grand, sur
King Lear, see Shakespeare la prise de Marseille, 42-3 &
Kratkoe rukovodstvo k ritorike, η
see Lomonosov Marvell, Andrew, 53, 59, 64;
Definition of Love, The, 49;
L Garden, The, 16; Nymph
Complaining for the Death of
Last Love, see Tyutchev Her Fawn, 17; To His Coy
Lenski (EO)1 70, 72, 73 Mistress, 9, 58
Lermontov, Mihail Yurievich, Mazeppa, see Byron
50η, 78; Demon, 50η Mednty vsadnik, see Pushkin
Letter about the Rules of Rus Metrical Guide to Pushkin's
sian Versification, see Poems (Metricheskiy spra-
Lomonosov vochnik k stihotvoreniyam A.
Lomonosov, Mihail Vasilievich, S. Pushkina, Ν. V. Lopatin,
34, 39—40, 80; Brief Guide to I. K. Romanovich, & Yarho,
Rhetoric, A (Kratkoe rukovod V . I.), 70
stvo k ritorike), 39—40, 44; Milton, John, 6,57,78; Allegro,
Collection of Various FVorks, -L', 56—7; Penseroso, II, 16
40; Letter about the Rules of Milton's Prosody, see Bridges
Russian Versification (Pis'mo Molva (Report, suppl. of Tele-
ο pravilah rossiyskogo stiho- skop, ed. Nadezhdin), 80
tvorstva), 39, 44—50; Ode on Morris, William, 68; Old Love,
the Anniversary of the Ascent 67-8
to the All-Russian Throne of Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning
Her Majesty Empress Eliza Service, see Eliot
veta Petrovna, All-Russian
Autocratrix (Ode to Empress
Elizabeth) (Oda na den' vos- N
shestviya na vserossiyskiy prestol eyo velichestva Imperatritsi N., Princess (in EO), 71
Elizaveti Petrovni, samoder- Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseevich1
zhtsi vserossiyskiya, 1746), 17; 48η
Ode to the Sovereign of Blessed New and Brief Method of RusMemory Anna Ioannovna on sian Versemaking, see
the Victory over the Turks and Trediakovski
Tatars and on the Taking of New Year, The, see Cotton
Hotin (Hotinian Ode) (Oda Neznakomka, see Blok
blazhenniya pamyati Gosuda- North, Christopher, see Wilson
rine Imperatritse Anne Ioan- Northumbrian Psalter, 39η
novne na pobedu nad turkami Novty i kratkiy sposob k sloi tatarami i na vzyatie Hotina zheniyu rossiyskih stihov, see
IJW goda), 33, 39-44 Trediakovski
Lover Describeth His Restless "No wonder winter glowers,"
State, The, see Howard. see TyutchevIOI
Nymph. Complaining for the Porphyria's Lover, see Brown-
Death of Her Fawn, The, see ing
Marvell Poslednyaya lyubov', see
Tyutchev
Q Povest' o gore i zloschastii, see
Tale of Grief and Ill-Fortune
Oda blazhenniya pamyati . . . Praed, W . M . : Good-Night to
Hotina (Hotinian Ode), see the Season, ion
Lomonosov Prior, Matthew : Epitaph, An,
Oda na den' vosshestviya . . • , 59—60
see Lomonosov Prokopovich, Feofan, 3 5
Oda o sdache goroda Gdanska, Pushkin, Aleksandr SergeseeTrediakovski evich, 3 , 6, 3 3 , 4 1 , 44, 45, 48,
Ode on the Surrender of the 5on, 58, 63, 69, 70, 7 7 , 80,
Town of Gdansk, see 91; Bronze Horseman, The
Trediakovski ( Medniy vsadnik), 7 0 ; Cap-
Ode sur la prise de Namur, see tain's Daughter, The (Kapitan-
Boileau skaya dochka), 26; Eugene /
Ode to Empress Elizabeth, see Evgeniy Onegin {EO), 3, 4,
Lomonosov 1 7 , 2 1 - 7 , 3 0 , 49, 52, 54, 55,
Ode to the Sovereign of Blessed 68—76, 82, 87, 9 1 - 4 ; Fairy
Memory Anna loarmovna . • • Tales (Skazki), 7 8 ; Feast at the
on the Taking of Hotin, see Time of the Plague, The (Pir
Lomonosov vo vremya chumi), 2 6 ; Graf
Old Love, see Morris Nulin ( " CountNull " ) , 88;
Olga (in EO), 70, 7 1 Gypsies, The (Tsigani), 7g;
Olney Hymns, see Cowper Onegin's Journey, 2 5 , 7 2 , 76;
Onegin, Evgeniy (in EO), 70— Poltava, 70; Ruslan and
74, 9 1 , 93 Lyudmila, 2 3 ; Small House
Onegin's Journey, see Pushkin in Kolomna, A (Domik v
"Onegin'sLetter , " 7 1 , 76 Kolomne), 7 0
On the Death of Dr. Robert
Levet, see Johnson
One Word More, see BrowningResignation, The, see Arnold
p Retreat, The, see Cotton
Reverie of Poor Susan, The, see
Pains of Sleep, The, see Wordsworth
Coleridge Rlleev , KondratiyFyodorovich,
Parnassus, Mt., 40 26
Penseroso, II, see Milton Ronsard, Pierre de, 40
Pir vo vremya chumi, see Rossetti, Christina: Convent
Pushkin Threshold, The, 91
Pis1 mo o pravilah rossiyskogo Ruslan and Lyudmila, see
stihotvorstva, see Lomonosov Pushkin
Poland, Russian w a r with, 4 3 n Russian Versification, see
Poltava, see Pushkin UnhegaunS 45, 78; Elegy II, 38; Neui and
Brief Method of Russian
St. Petersburg, 70; Academy of Versemaking (TVoufy i kratkiy
Sciences (Nauk), 39 sposob k slozheniyu rossiyskih
S a i ntsbury, George, 21, 68 stihov), 36; Ode on the SurShakespeare, William, 31, 55; render of the Town of Gdansk
King Lear, 18η; Sonnet (Oda ο sdache goroda Gdan-
CXLV, 55 ska), 43η
Shenshin, Afanasiy Afanasie- Tsigαηϊ, see Pushkin
vich ("Fet"), 48η, 94 Tyutchev, Fyodor Ivanovich,
Silentium, see Tyutchev 48η, 50η, 80; Last Love
Simvolizm, see Bugaev (Poslednyaya lyubov1), 80;
Skazki, see Pushkin Silentium, 80; "No wonder
Small House in Kolomna, A, see winter glowers" (Zima ne-
Pushkin darom zlitsya), 77
Sonnet CXLV, see Shakespeare
Sovremennik (The Con temporary, first ed. Pushkin), 80 U
Stella's Birth-day, see Swift Uiibegaun, Boris, 23η; Russian
Sumaroiov, Aleksandr Petro- Versification, 23η
vich, 24, 45-6; "Wherever
ramble I or go" (Gde ni
gulyayu, ni hozhu), 45—6 V
Sunday Homilies, 39η
Surrey, Earl of, see Howard, Valedictory, see Cotton
Henry Voloshin, Maksimilian Alek-
Swift, Jonathan: Stella's Birth sandrovich, 89
Vyazemski, Prince Pyotr
day, 60
Swinburne, Algernon Charles: Andxeevich, 26
Dolores, 78
Symbolism, see Bugaev W
"Wherever ramble I or go," see
T
Sumarokov
Tale of Grief and Ill-Fortune, Whirl-blast from Behind the
The (Povest' ο gore i zlo- Hill, A, see Wordsworth
schastii) (anon.), 34 White Doe of Rylstone, The,
Tale of a Usurer (anon.), 39η see Wordsworth
Tatiana (in EO), 70, 71, 73 Wilson, John ("Christopher
"Tatiana's Letter," 76 North"): City of the Plague,
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 68; The, 26, 27η
Break, Break, Break, 29; Wordsworth, William, 63, 64;
Daisy, The, 16; In Memori- Reverie of Poor Susan, The,
am, 9, 15-16, 17, 65-6 7g; Whirl-blast from Behind
To His Coy Mistress, see the Hill, A, 62-3; White Doe
Marvell of Rylstone, The, 63
Trediakovski / Tred'yaiovski, Written After Leaving Her at
Vasiliy Kirilovich, 36-9, 44, New Burns, see CowperΙΟβ
Y Yalta , 89 Yai'ikov, Nikolay Mihaylovich, 5011 " Years have from memory eroded," see Hodasevich
z Zaretski (in E O ) , 7 2 Zemfira ' s song, 79 Zhukovski, Vasiliy Andreevich, 44, 4 5 , 80 Zima nedarom zlitsya, see Tyutchev
Part two
Abram Gannibal
Abram Gannibal
Foreword
Pridydt li chas moiy svobodi?
Will [it] comethehour of myfreedom ?
Pord, pord!—vzivdyu k ney;
Time , time ! — I call toit ;
Brozhu nad morem,1 zhdu pogodi,
Iroamabove the sea, Iwait for t h e [right] weather ,
4 Manyu vetrila korabley.
Ibeckontothe sails of ships.
Pod rizoy bur\ s volnami sporya,
Underthe cope of storms , withwavesdisputing ,
Po vdVnomu rasput'yu mdrya
onthefreecrossway of t h e sea
Kogda zh nachnu ya vofniy beg?
whenshallIstart [on m y ] freecourse ?
8 Pord pokinu? skuchniy breg
Time to leavethedreary shore1 . Thenumeral " 1 0 " attached to " s e a " in the established textrefers the reader to Pushkin ' s note: " Written in Odessa " ; i.e., on the northern shore of the Black Sea, in 1823 .
IOJ
Mne nepriydzntnnoy stikii,
of a to me inimical element,
I Sred f polildenriih zibey,
and 'mid the meridian ripples,
Pod nebom Afriki moey,
beneath the sky of my Africa,2
12 Vzdihat 1 ο silmrachnoy Rossii,
to sigh for somber Russia,
Gde yd straddl, gde yd lyubil,
where I suffered, where I loved,
Gde serdtse yd pohoronil.
where [my] heart I buried.
—Evgeniy Onegin, One : LThe following sketch, which deals mainly with the mysterious origin of Pushkin's African ancestor, has no pretensions to settle the many difficulties encountered on the way. It is the outcome of a few odd moments spent in the admirable libraries of Cornell and Harvard universities, and its purpose is merely to draw attention to the riddles that other workers have either ignored or answered wrongly. Although in several instances I have keenly felt the want of original documents, preserved in Russia (where, it seems, they are inaccessible even to native Pushkinians), I am consoled by the fact that any material pertaining to any research is incomparably easier to obtain in the institutions of this country than in those of a wary police state. A list of some of the works consulted in the present case will be found at the end of these notes.
Abram Gannibal
Pushkin’s Comments Published During His Lifetime
Pushkin's η. 11 to EO, One : L : 11 (". . . my Africa"), reads in the 1833 edn.: "The author, on his mother's
2. Here another numeral, "11," refers to a note discussed further.
side, is of African descent," and in the 1857 edn.: "See the first edition of Eugene Onegin,'' which is a reference to the 1825 (Feb. 16) separate edition of Chapter One, in which there is a long note (written probably in mid- October, 1824,3 and certainly after Aug. 9, 1824, the date of his arrival at his estate Mihaylovskoe (near Opochka, province of Pskov) from Odessa, and presumably before his brother's departure for Petersburg, in the first week of November, with the apograph of the canto), based mainly on the MS biography in German of his maternal great-grandfather. Pushkin's note reads: The author, on his mother's side, is of African descent. His great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Annibal,4 in his eighth year was kidnaped on the coast of Africa5 and brought to Constantinople. The Russian envoy, having rescued [viruchiv] him, sent him as a gift to Peter the Great, 6 who had him baptized 7 in Vilno. In his wake, his brother arrived, first in Constantinople, and then in St. Petersburg, with the offer to ransom him; but Peter I did not consent to return his godchild.8 Up to an advanced age, Annibal still remembered Africa, the luxurious life of his father, and nineteen brothers, of whom [sic] he was the youngest; he remembered how they used to be led into his father's presence with their hands bound behind their backs, whilst he alone remained free and went swimming under the fountains [or "cascades"] of the paternal home; he also remembered his beloved [or
5. Old Style (Julian calendar) is used throughout for the dating of events in Russia. 4. This is the French form of the English and German "Hannibal" and of the Russian "Gannibal" or "Ganibal"; we should constantly bear in mind that our poet's classical education was entirely dependent on French versions of, and French commentaries on, the ancients. See further my discussion of Abram's assumed surname. 5. Or, lexically, "was stolen from the shores of Africa." 6. Peter I, emperor of Russia, reigned 1682-1725. 7. Krestil ego, which Eilso implies "godfathered him." 8. Here, and elsewhere in Pushkin's notes, I have italicized passages that axe not supported by, or are in blatant contradiction to, possible or actual facts, as discussed further.
"favorite"] sister, LagarC,9 swimming in the distance after the ship in which he was receding. At eighteen, Annibal was sent by the tsar to France, where he began his military service in the army of the regent; he returned to Russia with a slashed head10 and the rank of French lieutenant [Fr. capitaine]. Thenceforth he remained continually near the person of the tsar. In the reign of Anna,11 Annibal, a personal enemy of Buhren,12 was dispatched, under a specious pretext, to Siberia. Getting bored with an unpeopled place and a harsh climate, he returned to St. Petersburg of his own accord and appeared before his friend Miinnich. 13 JVlunnich was amazed and advised him to go into hiding without delay. Annibal retired to his country estates and dwelled there all through the reign of Anna, while nominally serving in Siberia. When Elizabeth ascended the throne, she lavished her favors upon him. A. P. Annibal lived to see the reign of Catherine II, when, relieved of important duties of office, he ended his days with the rank of general in chief, dying in his ninety-second year [in 1781]. [An authorial footnote to this reads: "We hope to publish in due time his complete biography."] His son, Lieutenant General I. A. Annibal, undoubt-
9. An inept, albeit traditional, Russian transliteration; the name is spelled "Lahann" in the German biography. 10. The fact of his having been wounded seems to be supported by the headaches he suffered in later years. The regent was Philippe d'Orleans, who ruled from 1715 to 1723, during the minority of Louis XV. 11. The succession of Toyal personages in Russia during Gannibal's lifetime was: Catherine I, Peter's widow (r. 1725—27); his grandson, Peter II (r. 1727-30); Anna, daughter of Ivan, Peter I's, brother (r. 1730—40); Anna, daughter of Charles Leopold, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and Peter I's grandniece, regent (1740—41) during the minority of her son, who never reigned; Elizabeth, Peter's daughter (r. 1741—61); another grandson of Peter's, Peter III (1761—62); and Catherine II, called the Great (r. 1762—96), self-made widow of Peter III. 12. Anna's powerful favorite; in Russian, Biron; Ernst Johann Biihren, Duke of Courland (1690-177¾). 13. In Russian, Minih. Burkhard Christoph, Count Muniiich (1683—1767), field marshal.
IIO
edly belongs to the number of the most distinguished men of Catherine's age. He died in 1800 . In Russia, where the memory of eminent men is soon obliterated owing to the absence of historical memoirs, the bizarre life of Annibal is known only through family tradition.
Abram Gannibal
Pushkin’s Ancestors
On the Russian nobility side, Pushkin's family name can
be traced back to one Konstantin Pushkin, born in the
early fifteenth century, younger son of aGrigoriy Pushka.
From Konstantin, there is a direct line of descent to
Pyotr Pushkin (d. 1692), the ancestor of both parents of
our poet (the paternal great-grandfather of his father
and the maternal great-great-grandfather of his mother).
Pyotr Pushkin's son, Aleksandr (d. 1727), was the
father of Lev (d. 1790), who was the father of Sergey
(1770-1848), who married Nadezhda Gannibal (1775-
1836) in 1796 and fathered our poet, Aleksandr Pushkin
(1799-1837).
Pyotr Pushkin's younger son, Fyodor (d. 1728), was
the father of Aleksey (d. 1777), who was the father of
Maria (d, 1818). Maria Pushkin married Osip Gannibal
(1744—1806), third son of Avraam Petrov, alias Gannibal, a Russianized African (i6g3?-i78i). Osip's and
Maria's daughter, Nadezhda, married Sergey Pushkin
(her mother's second cousin) and was our poet's mother.
Abram (Avram, Avraam, Ibragim) Petrovich, or
Petrov (baptismal patronymic), Annibal, or Gannibal,
or Gaaibal (assumed surname), hereafter referred to as
"Abram Gannibal," had eleven children by his second
wife, Christina Regine von (?) Schoberg, or Scheberch
(b. 1706, d. two months before her husband): among
them, Ivan Gannibal (1731?-1801), a distinguished
general; Pyotr Gannibal (1742-1825?), artillery officer
and country squire; Osip Gannibal (1744—1806), also amilitary man of sorts, our poet's maternal grandfather (in 1773 he married Maria Pushkin, second cousin of Sergey Pushkin); and two obscurer Gannibals, IsaELk (1747-1804) and Yakov (b. 1749). The following notes, in so far as my own research goes, mainly concern the origins and the first third of Abram Gannibal's life.
Abram Gannibal
The Documents
The basic documents regarding Abram Gannibal's origins are: The petition: a clerical copy of a petition addressed in February, 1742 (i.e., in the reign of Elizabeth, Peter's daughter), by Major General Abram Gannibal, oberkomendant of Revel, or Reval (now Tallin), NW Russia, to the Senate, applying for a nobleman's diploma Etnd heraldic arms. The German biography: ff. 40—45 of a manuscript some 4000 words long (classified in the Lenin State Library, Moscow, as Cahier 2387A, which is a batch of sheets sewn together, to form a book, by the police immediately after Pushkin's death), comprising an anonymous biography of Abram Gannibal, written in a small Gothic hand, and pompously worded in idiomatic but none-too-literate German. All we know about this German biography (the MS of which I have not seen) is that it was written after Abram Gannibal's death (1781); that it contains certain details, such as a few names and dates, that only Gcinnibal would have remembered; and that it also includes a number of passages, contradicted either by historical documents (such as Gannibal's own petition) or by plain logic, that were obviously inserted by the biographer with a view to pad the story, to span its gaps, and to give a eulogistic (but actually absurd) interpretation of this or that event in the hero's life. I
think, therefore, that whoever spun this grotesque fabric had before his or her eyes some autobiographic notes left by Gannibal himself. The German seems to me to be that of a Rigan or Revalan. It may be the work of some Livonian or Scandinavian relative of Mme Gannibal (nee Schoberg). The bad grammar seems to preclude its being a professional genealogist's job. Pushkin's n. 11 to EO (mainly based on the biography, but with some new details supplied by family tradition or romantic imagination) has already been quoted. We have in addition four items, curious and important in themselves, but not casting any new light on the subject: (i) an anonymous, very clumsy and incomplete, Russian version of the German biography, on ff. 28-29 and 56-58 of the same Cahier 2387A, in Pushkin's hand, but obviously dictated to him, judging by the uncouth style, probably in October, 1824, and certainly not later than the end of the year, by someone who had more German than he, with some desultory marginalia by Pushkin; (2) a very brief curriculum vitae, written or dictated to somebody by Pyotr Gannibal in his old age,14 when he lived near the Pushkins' Mihaylovskoe, at his small countryseat, Petrovskoe; (3) a few words concerning Abram in a genealogical note, written by Pushkin in the early 1830's, known as Rodoslovnaya Pushkinlh i Ganibalov, in which a short passage concerning Gannibal begins: "My maternal great-grandfather was a Negro . . ." (same Cahier 2387A, ff. 25, 60, 26, 59, 62); and (4) the factual as faintly seen through the fictional in Pushkin's unfinished historical romance (1827), six chapters and the beginning of a seventh, published
14. In a letter dated Aug. 11, 1825, Pushkin wrote to his country neighbor, Praskovia Osipov. "I plan to look up my old Negro great-uncle, who, I suspect, will die one of these days: I am anxious to obtain from him certain memoirs regarding my great-grandfather." Was this all he was able to get?
IZ3
posthumously (1837) as Arap Petra Velikogo (The Blackamoor of Peter the Great), in which Abram appears as Ibragim (Ibrahim, Turkish form of Abraham).
Abram Gannibal
Dates of Abram Gannibal’s Birth and Death
The three biographers nearest to Gannibal in time, Helbig (see "Works Consulted"), the unknown author of the German biography (c. 1785), and Bantish-Kamenski (1836), are not in agreement. Helbig says that Abram died in 1781, and reckons his age at eighty-seven. The German biography says he died May 14, 1781, in his ninety-third year, which would have made him about seventeen years old when he first arrived in Moscow, whereas the same document says that he was "unter zehn Jahren" at the time, and in his twenty-eighth year in 1723-24. Banti'sh gives the date of Abram's death as 1782 and his age as ninety-one (a figure he obtained presumably from Pushkin's published note of 1825). This gives us a range of possible birth dates between 1689 and 1697; I am inclined to take 1693 as the nearest to historical truth. On the grounds of Pushkin's marginalia in Cahier 2387A (as given in the descriptions of that MS), we can establish the fact that, except for the German biography, our poet had no chronological information regarding his great-grandfather's origin and youth. When beginning (July 31, 1827) his historical romance "Arap Petra VelikogoP Pushkin attempted to calculate Gannibal's birth and death dates from the scanty and conflicting data of the German biography (he appears not to have known, or to have ignored, Helbig at the time). In the margin of the first.page of the Russian version of the German biography (f. 28 in the batch of sheets in the order in which they were posthumously sewed), our poet computed that if Abram was twenty-eight in 1725
(which would make him only eighty-four at the time of his death), he must have been born in 1697, and at the age of nine (in accordance with the statement in the German biography, a statement that might have set the numerative ball rolling in the first place) was brought to Russia in "1708" (either a mere slip for the correct 1706 or wishful miscalculation). Like many great men, Pushkin was a sedulous and wretched mathematician. In another abstruse task—namely, at the top of the fourth page of the abridged Russian version of the German biography dictated to him (2587A, f. 56)—our poet apparently attempted to find the date of Gannibal's birth if, say, he were not twenty-eight, but twenty-six, in 1725. He discovered this to be 1699 and, adding nine, obtained the desired "1708," the year in which he thought that Gannibal had been baptized immediately upon his arrival in Russia. A cryptic note in the right-hand corner of the second page (2387A, f. 57) reads: "brought [to Constantinople] [^696," which is evidently the result of reckoning based on the fact that the German biography says that Gannibal was seven when removed from Abyssinia and ninety-two at the time of his death. We do not know how Pushkin coped with the awkward mathematical consequence that makes the little Moor spend ten years in the sultan's seraglio and appear as a gangling youth of seventeen before the tsar in Moscow. The only other jotting of interest is the name "Shepelyov," written in the left-hand margin of the same page. It would seem that Pushkin thought Dmitri Shepelyov (d. 1759)15 to have been the Russian envoy at the time in Turkey. The envoy was, of course, Pyotr Tolstoy.
15. As gofmarshal (earl marshal, master of ceremonies), Shepelyov accompanied Peter I on his journey to western Europe in 1716—17; he was made a general by the tsar's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1743.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal’s Origin
The German biography begins: "Awraam Petrowitsch Hannibal war . . . von Geburt ein Afrikanischer Mohr [a blackamoor, an African black] aus Abyssinien. . . ." This fact therefore was known to Pushkin (who took down the Russian translation), but nowhere in his own notes does he ever refer to a specific region when speaking of his ancestor. The EO1 Chapter One, note (see earlier, "Pushkin's Comments . . .") begins: "The author, on his mother's side, is of African descent." Aleksey Vulf, in an entry in his journal, mentions retrospectively that Pushkin showed him, on Sept. 15, 1827, at Mihaylovskoe, "the two first chapters he had just written of a romance in prose [now known as Arap Petra Velikogo\, in which the main character represents his great-grandfather Gannibal, the son of an Abyssinian emir, captured by the Turks and sent from Constantinople by the Russicm ELmbassador as a gift to Peter I, who had him educated and grew very fond of him." In the Russian version of the German biography our poet's unknown dictamentor translates "Afrikanischer Mohr" "African Negro." And the German biography itself, in a further passage, refers to Gannibal as a Neger. Abyssinians (or Ethiopians, in the strict sense) have a skin color varying from dusky to black. Their type represents a Hamito-Semitic component of the Caucasian race; and a Negroid strain may so strongly predominate in some tribes that the term "Negro" is in such cases applicable in a general sense; but apart from these considerations (to which I shall return at the end of these notes), the European layman of the time—and, in fact, Abram Gcinnibal himself—would classify colloquially as a "Negro" or "blackamoor" (in Russian, negr or arap—note the ultima) any more or less darkskinned
African who was not an Egyptian and not an Arab (in Russian, arab). In his brief curriculum vitae, in badly misspelled Russian, written or more probably dictated in his dotage, Pyotr Gannibal makes the following statement (probably in the autumn of 1825, when our poet presumably consulted him):
My father . . . was a Negro; his father was of noble origin; that is, a ruling seigneur. My father was taken as an amanat [a Caucasian term meaning "hostage"] to the court in Constantinople, whence he was stolen and dispatched to Tsar Peter I.
This is repeated in Pushkin's note Rodoslovnaya . . . Ganibalov. The German biography continues thus:
[He was] the son of a local ruler, powerful and rich, who proudly traced his descent in direct line from the house of the famed Hannibal, the terror of Rome, [Abram's] father was a vassal of the Turkish emperor or the Ottoman Empire who by the end of the preceding century, because of oppression and molestation [Druck und Belastigung], had revolted, with other Abyssinian princes, his countrymen and allies, against his overlord, the sultan; whereupon various petty but bloody wars followed, in which, however, might eventually triumphed and this Hannibal [Abram], still a boy, the youngest son of the ruling prince, with other highborn youths, was sent in his eighth year to Constantinople as a hostage. Although, given his youth, this fate should not have befallen him so early, still, owing to the fact that his father, according to the Moslem custom, had very many wives (even up to about thirty, with a correspondingly large progeny), the numerous old princesses and their children joined forces in the common intention of protecting themselves and their offspring; and since [Abram] was the youngest son of one of the youngest wives, who did not have at court as many supporters [as the elder princesses had], these contrived through trickery and intrigue, almost by force, to put him on a Turkish vessel
[.Fahrzeug ] and turned him over to the fate that had been assigned him.
I shall presently show that in the 1690's, the period referred to here, no Abyssinian was a vassal of the Ottoman Porte, and no Abyssinian prince could have been a Moslem or could have been forced to send any tribute to Constantinople. The "terror of Rome" will also be discussed. But before I attempt to clear up all this muddle, let us glance at the geographical situation.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal’s Birthplace
Abrarn Gannibal's petition (1742) contains the following brief but important information:
I, your humble subject, am a native of Africa \rodom ya . . . iz Afriki], of the high nobility there [tamoshnego znatnogo dvoryanstva]. I was born in the demesne [yo Vladenii] of my father, in the town of Lagona [or Lagono or Lagon: ν gorode Lagone—this is the locative case, which in Russian does not disclose the ultima of the nominative]. Moreover, my father had under his rule [imel pod soboyu] two other towns . . .16 It will be noted that (in so far as we have to rely on this text as it appears in the various biographical works listed at the end of this appendix—e.g., Anuchin) no particular region in Africa is indicated in the petition. On the strength of the German biography, I assume that this town is in Abyssinia. The locative case, as already stated, does not provide one with any clue to the orthography of the nominative; moreover, the ridiculous Russian custom of transliterating both h and g by means of a Russian gamma does not tell us whether this African name in a Roman transcription17 should be "Lagon,"
16. For the next sentence of the petition see the section "Gannibal and Raguzinski." 17. I.e., the characters universally accepted in geographic
Il8
"Lahon," "Lagona," "Lahona," "Lagono," or "Lahono." I suspect that "Lahona" is the correct transcription of the unknown original but shall further refer to the place as "L." ThesimiIaritybetweenthe name of the sister mentioned in the German biography and the name of the native town mentioned only in the petition is very disturbing. I have not found—within the limited scope of my reading—any instance of an Abyssinian child receiving the name of its birthplace. In the course of a work that in its historical, ethnical, and geo-nomenclatorial portions is below criticism, Dmitri Anuchin (1899), an anthropologizing journalist, states that after talking to a "French traveler, Saint- Yves" (Georges Saint-Yves?), and to "Professor Paulichke" (presumably, Philippe Paulitschke), he has come to the conclusion that "L" is a town and a district located "on the right bank of the river Mareb in the province of Hamasen." The "Loggo" supplied by Paulitschke (teste Anuchin), and also by an Italian map of 1899 (which I have not seen), and the "Logo" of Salt (to be discussed presently), somehow, in the course of Anuchin's comments and deductions, evolve first a caudal t and then a caudal n, which none of my "LY' do; for at this point I abandoned Anuchin and launched upon some research of my own. Charles Poncet (traveling in 1698-1700) divides the empire of Ethiopia into several kingdoms (provinces), such as the Tigre. He divides the Tigre (ruled by Viceroy "Gaurekos") into twenty-four principalities (districts),
nomenclature. This has nothing to do with individual mistakes or transliterative predilections (Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, French, etc.) within the range of this alphabet, or the tendency on the part of experts in this or that language transliterated to break into a rash of diacritical signs. This writer fervently hopes that the Cyrillic alphabet, together with the even more absurd characters of Asiatic languages, will be completely scrapped some near day.
IJp
of which he names only a few, such as the "Saravi" (Serawe), a plateau 6000 feet high. Henry Salt, a century later, divides the Tigre proper ("commonly called the Kingdom of the Baharnegash") into less than half of Poncet's number of districts, among which he names the Hamiazen in the north, the Serawe south of it, and, still farther south, the tiny district of Logo. At some later date, when the Hamazen (or Hamasen) and the Serawe became provinces, the latter, in its spread or shift southward to the Mareb River, engulfed the Logo district and other small districts. The Mareb is easily located, and its name hardly varies in travelers' accounts, of which there are so few prior to the nineteenth century. An examination of the reproductions of the old maps in the splendid work of Albert Kammerer (1952) shows that this is the Mareb of Jacopo d'Angiolo (alias Agnolo della Scarperia), Rome MS, c. 1450; of Melchisedec Thevenot (after Balthazar Tellez), 1663; of Job Ludolf, 1683; of Bourguignon d'Anville, 1727; of Bruce, 1790 (drawn 1772); it is the Marib of Fra Mauro, 1460; the Marabo of Jacopo Gastaldi, 1561; the Marabus of Livio Sanuto, 1578; the Marab of Father Manoel de Almeida, 1645 (sketched c. 1630). It is also the Moraba of Poncet's account (1704)- Anuchin's informer, or more probably Anuchin himself, has confused two separate places: Logo and Logote. Saint-Yves, traveling, I suppose, sometime in the latter part of the nineteenth century, had seen from a mesa (Tokule Mt.) the town of "Logot" (teste Anuchin, Russian transliteration) in the valley of the Mareb. In Salt's time (1810), Logo and Logote (or Legote) were separate townlets in two adjacent districts, the northern Logo and the southern Legote, the latter bounded south by the Munnai stretch of Mareb River. According to the only other author who mentions Logote (T. Lefebvre,
1846, III, 21, 28; whom, no doubt, Anuchin's French informer had read), the district of Logote (Salt's Legote) is separated from the districts of "Tserana" and "Tokoule" by the Belessa River (which is the Mai Belessan of Salt (1816 edn., p. 195), a tributary of the Mareb. Lefebvre describes the Belessa as following the example of the Mareb by disappearing under the sands during the dry season, when, however, a little digging provides one with plenty of water. "Cette vallee de Logote etant tres malsaine et remplie d'animaux carnassiers [lions, panthers], tous Ies villages sont situes sur la chaine," and the villagers, having to come from those arid heights for water into the valley, are "tres avares de leurs provisions." The Mareb, which in its central course may be roughly said to separate northern Abyssinia from the rest of the country, is at various seasons and at various points of its meandering progress a raging torrent, an underground stream, or a dribble losing itself among the sands. Its various stretches bear, or have borne, local names. Its headwaters arise in the northeast, within fifty miles of Annesley Bay on the Red Sea; it is a tiny rivulet with a narrow bed below Debarwa; then it swells, sweeps south, turns west, and, collecting numerous other streams from the northern mountains, flows west toward the Sudan frontier, to disappear in the soil near Kassala, though in very wet weather an ultimate trickle reaches Atbara. Among these little northern tributaries we find the Seremai, the Belessa, and the Obel. The last appears on Bent's map (1893) and on the U. S. Army map (1945); the Seremai River, which is apparently just east of the Obel, is mentioned by Salt (1814), who, on his way inland from the Red Sea and the town of Dixan, which he left Mar. 5, 1810 (p. 242), arrived the following day at the picturesque village of Abha (p. 245):
March 7th,—We struck our tents at five in the morning, and after proceeding about a mile southward, brought the hill of Cashaat to bear due east of us, at which point . . . we turned off a little to the west, and travelled about eight miles . . . until we reached an agreeable station, by the side of a river called Seremai. This river shapes its course through the bottom of a small secluded valley, surrounded on every side by steep and rugged hills, in a nook of which, about a mile to the eastward, lay a large town called Logo, whence the surrounding district takes its name.
Logo at that time (1810) was commanded by a rebellious chieftain "who in the campaign of the preceding year had been reduced to obedience by the Ras," and who made an attempt to stop and rob Salt's caravan. For all we know, he may have been Pushkin's fourth cousin. From Logo the Salt party traveled SSW (p. 248) "Our road now [Mar. 7, 1810] lay . . . through a wild and uncultivated country; we crossed the stream called Mai Belessan . . . and, after mounting a steep ascent, reached the village of Legote. . . . The distance we had travelled from our last station [on the Seremai River, one mile west from the village of Logo] may be computed at about eight miles." Scdt then crossed the Mareb and proceeded southward toward the "completely scarped" mountain (Debra Damo), "which in the earliest periods of the Abyssinian history, served as a place of confinement for the younger branches of the [royal] family" (p. 248), at which point Salt recalls Dr. Johnson's "beautiful and instructive romance." This is a reference to Samuel Johnson's insipid tale, The Prince of Abissinia or (in later editions) The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia,16 which appeared anonymously in two volumes
18. Rasselas was represented in Pushkin's library (Ballantyne's Novelist Library, vol. V, London, 1823, which also contains Sterne's Sentimental Journey and Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield), but Pushkin had not enough English to
in the spring of 1759—at a time readers managed to find poetry and talent in the journalism of Voltaire's flat Contes. Earlier (1735) Johnson had translated for a few shillings Joachim Le Grand's Voyage historique d'Abissinie, du R.P. Jerome Lobo, Paris, 1728 (and this is the explanation of the spelling "Abissinia" in Rasselas, which puzzled James Macaulay, author of the preface to the 1884 facsimile edition of that work). Jeronimo Lobo, whose own text has never been printed, was a Portuguese Jesuit; he visited Abyssinia during the years 1624-32, in the reign of Susneyos (Malak Sagad III, later known as Seltan Sagad I), who publicly made his submission to Rome; the hero of Johnson's tale was that emperor's brother, Ras (Prince) Ce'ela Krestos (spelled also Cella Christos), the Rasselas of Le Grand (p. 502), governor of Gojam, and one of the stanchest supporters of the Jesuits (Beckingham and Huntingford, 1954, pp. XXV, 59). It is most pleasing to reflect that Salt may have seen on the very same day the birthplace of Pushkin's ancestor and the scene of Johnson's story. The only maps on which I have been able to locate Logo are: the one in Salt's work and a smaller one (obviously copied from Salt, without acknowledgment) illustrating the 1830-32 journal kept by Samuel Gobat (a Swiss clergyman born in 1799). On Salt's map, this townlet or village of Logo is situated at 39^5" E and 14°7'g"N. Itlies about forty-five miles NNWof Aksum and about fifty miles S of Debarwa. I doubt if it exists today;
read it. If he knew Johnson's tale at all, as he probably did, it was in a French translation, of which there were several (Belot, 1760; Fouchecour, 1798; Louis, 1818; Notre, 1823). A Russian translation was published in Moscow, 1795, but a Russian gentleman would ignore the wretched Russian adaptations of the time and prefer the more fluid, though hardly more exact, French versions. Thus the poet and rebel Kiichelbecker read Rasselas in French in prison, at Sveaborg, Feb. 2, 1832.
perhaps it has wandered to some other site, as Abyssinian villages have been known to do; but its ghost should be sought N of the Munnai stretch of the Mareb River and E of its little northern tributary, the Obel (obel means "tamarisk" in Tigre), in the former province of Seraoe (Serae, Serawe). On Baratieri's map (1896) there is a "Mai Laham" at 3807' E, 14^5" N, and on the U. S. Army map (194,3), there is an "Adi Mai Laam" on the "Asmara" at 38^' E, i4°8' N. Adi means "village," mai is "water" or "ford," laham may be "cattle" or (according to Salt, 1811, III, 12) a "mango-like tree" (which is, I presume, Eugenia owariensis Beauv.). On none of the numerous maps made prior to the eighteenth century have I found any locus suggestive of "Logo," or "Lagon," or "Lagona," except obvious Italian or Spanish descriptive terms for "lake," "canal," "hot spring," or "pool" (lagone). The trouble is that at exactly the necessary period, between the last visits of Jesuit priests in the 1630's and James Bruce's travels in the 1770's, no vocal European except Poncet (1698-1700) journeyed to northern Abyssinia—and neither Lobo (in Le Grand), nor Almeida, nor Poncet, nor Bruce mentions "L." I have discovered, however, another candidate for GannibaTs birthplace. Salt, in his earlier journal (1811, III, 61), mentions the village of "Lahaina,"19 which he saw on Sept. 9, 1805, on his way northward from "Antalow" (Antalo), the capital of Tigre-Endorta, to "Muccullah" (Macalle), in the same province. This Lahaina is, or was, about six miles from Antalo, in a direction nearly NNE, and thus about a hundred miles SSE of Logo. I cannot locate it on any map, but judging by
19. Or is this a misspelling· for itLahama1' or "Lehama," a small district in Endorta mentioned by Lefebvre (III, 43)? There is, of course, another "Lahaina" in the world—namely, the former residence of the king's in the Hawaiian Islands.
Salt's account (he had just passed by "a picturesque village called Haraque," which I identify with Gargara of the U. S. Army map, 1943), I should place Lahaina midway between 390 and 400 E and midway between 130 and 140 N. Beyond "Haraque," after proceeding from one hill to another, Salt saw "on a rising ground to our right [to the east] a village of considerable extent called Lahaina, from which place the road, turning a little more to the west, led through a more cultivated country, thickly set with acacia and brushwood . . ." There is no reason why this Lahaina, rather than Logo or Logote, should not have been the Lagona or Lahona of Gannibal's petition, and there may have existed other similarly sounding place names (on a "Laham" basis, for instance). I would consider therefore the determination of "L" as not settled at the time of writing (1956); but I am inclined to assume that it was situated in the general region of northern Abyssinia, where we have been following, through the bibliographic dust, the mules and camels of several adventurous caravans.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal’s Sister
After the passage concerning the scheming senior wives, who managed to have the youngest one's son turned over to the Turks, the German biography continues thus:
His only full sister, Lahann, who was some years older than he, had yet sufficient courage to oppose this act of violence. She tried everything, but had to yield to number; she accompanied him to the very deck of the small ship, still nursing the hope that she might obtain by entreaties the freedom of this much beloved brother or purchase it with her jewels; but when she found that her tender efforts [zartliches Bemuhen] remained fruitless to the last, she cast herself in despair into the sea and was drowned. To the very end of his days, the venerable old man [Abram] would shed tears of the tenderest friendship
and love as he recollected her; for although he was still
very young at the time of that tragic event, yet whenever
he thought of her this vague memory would become new
and complete for him; and this offering [Abram S tears]
1was the better deserved by her sisterly tenderness since she had struggled so hard to free him, and since these two were the only siblings from the same mother. Pushkin, in his note to the 1825 edn. of Chapter One of EO, obviously improves upon the German biography when he says: "[Abram] also remembered his beloved [or "favorite"] sister, Lagan' [Russ.], swimming in the distance after the ship in which he was receding." As I have already mentioned in a footnote to his Lagan\ Pushkin carelessly follows here the Russian tradition of rendering the Latin H by the Russian gamma (so that, for instance, Henry becomes Genri and Heine masquerades as Geyne). Moreover, he attempts to feminize the ending of the name, which terminates in a consonant (an impossible ending for a feminine name in Russian), by closing it with a' 'soft sign'' (an apostrophe in transliteration). The receding ship, in whose wake swam—somewhat ahead of the romantic era—a passionate sister, might be easily condemned to dwindle to a reed raft on a seasonable river; indeed, the entire event might be dismissed by the cynic as one of those fairy-tale recollections that old age confuses with true happenings; but there is one reason it should command attention: the name "Lahann" is, I find, a plausible Abyssinian name.20 Generally speaking, names in L, and particularly in
20. In Turkish, a language that GannibaI must have been able to understand at one time, lahana means "cabbage" and lahin "note," "tone," "melody." In Arabic, lahan means "melody," "modulation," "mispronunciation," and layan means "softness," "gentleness," Zartlichkeit. In several Oriental languages, the stem Iah- is associated with "loose woman" (cf. the Russian lahanka, a slattern, Pskovan dial,, and lahudra, an inferior whore).
La, occur comparatively seldom in Abyssinian chronicles. According to Amharic dictionaries, there is a man's name "Layahan"; and in the reign of King Bahafa (1719-28) there was a general named Lahen, who died about 1728 when governor of Hamasen (R. Basset, 1881, XVIII, 363). We do not know how old was Ras Fares, governor of Tigre, in the 1690's, nor do we know the number of his wives or concubines. But we do know that Fares must have been an elderly man at the time, and we also know from the chronicles (Basset, XVIII, 310) that a young wife of his, who died at the latest in 1697, bore the name of Lahia Dengel or Lahya Dengel (meaning in Tigre "beauty of the Virgin"), which has a striking resemblance to that of the girl who may have been her daughter.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal’s Parentage
To understand the various improbabilities and absurdities in the German biography, the history of Abyssinia should be briefly recalled. The Gospel was introduced there about A.D. 327 by Frumentius (c. 290-c. 350), a native of Phoenicia, who was consecrated bishop of Aksum by Athanasius of Alexandria. An awareness of that primitive empire, so near to Arabia, so far from Rome, was slow in reaching western Europe. The first reliable information was the fortunate outcome of ill-fated ventures on the part of heroic Jesuit missionaries who affronted the nameless dangers of a fabulous land for the holy joys of distributing images of their fair idols and of secretly rebaptizing native children under the pious disguise of medical care. Some of these brave men were successful as martyrs, others as mapmakers. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese troops helped the Abyssinians to break a relatively brief spell of Moslem domination that began about 1528
12η
and lasted till the middle of the century. At one time, c. 1620, under King Susneyos, Abyssinia was actually converted by Portuguese Jesuits into a grotesque form of Catholicism, which petered out about 1630, in the beginning of the reign of Fasilidas, who restored the old religion and had the churches occupied again by the Monophysite clergy. In modern times, Russians have been pleasantly surprised at finding a kind of natural Greek-Orthodox tang to certain old eremitic practices still persisting in Ethiopia; and Protestant missionaries have been suspected by the natives of paganism because of their indifference to pictures of female saints and winged boys. In the period that alone interests us—the last years of the seventeenth century and the first ones of the eighteenth—most Abyssinians were Christians; i.e., members of the AbyssinicLn Church, a dreary, Copticflavored brew of the more absurd ideas of old Christian and Jewish priests, all this spiced with barbarous local abominations. Despite the memory of cruel invasions, the state tolerated, for commercial reasons, Moslems and, for sporting ones, heathen Negro tribes, such as the Shangalla group, to which belonged the black savages inhabiting at the time a region not far from, or including, Logo, at a point "where the river Mareb, leaving Dobarwa, flows through thick bushes" (Bruce, 1790, II, 54g). In the late seventeenth century, and afterward, these heathens were enthusiastically hunted by Abyssinian kings in periodical safaris, and there is nothing impossible in a hypothesis that Pushkin's ancestor was captured in the process and sold to the Turks. By 1700, little trace remained of the Moslem invasion that had been led by Ahmed ibn Ibrahim el Ghazi, surnamed Gran (Lefty), possibly a Somali, more than a century and a half before. Indeed, by the time of John I (c. 1667-81), the Moslems, although holding the eastcoast
islands, had no political power inland and were compelled to live in separate quarters in Abyssinian towns. It is conceivable that Gannibal's father was a pagan warrior or a well-to-do Moslem trader, and it is likewise conceivable that he was a local chief of princely blood, ruling over a district or a province, but it is impossible for one to imagine (as does Anuchin, blindly followed by Vegner and other ovine compilers) that about 1700, some 150 miles north of Gondar, the proud capital of Abyssinia, and less than 50 miles north from her sacred city Aksum, an Abyssinian nobleman governing three towns would be a subject of the Turkish sultan and thus a vassal of the Ottoman Empire! We shall now suppose that (1) Gannibal's father was indeed a regional governor in northern Abyssinia and that (2) GannibaTs recollection of "taxes" and "tributes" corresponded in a twisted and nebulous way to certain historical realities. Gannibal was born in a town beginning with L, in the Tigre proper or the Tigre-Endorta, about 1693, in the reign of Jesus the Great (Jyasu I; throne name, Adyam Sagad I), who succeeded his father John in 1680 (according to Basset), 1681 (according to J. Perruchon), or 1682 (according to Beckingham and Huntingford) and was assassinated in result of the machinations of Queen Melakotawit (Fr. transliteration), who wanted her son, Tekla-Haymonot, to reign. Poncet, when spending the summer of 1700 in Debarwa, then the capital of Tigre, feasted there with two regional governors: one of them was apparently the governor of the whole Tigre province (bahrnegas or bahr-negus, a title that originally meant "lord of the sea," but that by the beginning of the preceding century had lost much of its importance); the other chief was either a temporary coruler or a district governor. Poncet gives the name of the first as "Gaurekos." This, I suspect, should read
I2p
"Gyorgis" (or "Guirguis"21), which is the Arabic Jirjis and the European George. The chronicle published by Basset mentions only one governor of Tigre about 1700, namely, Ras Fares (ras or raz meaning "head" in the Geez language). He became governor in the eleventh year of the reign of Jesus I and was still governor in the twenty-second year of that reign. In the first years of the eighteenth century he seems to have been assigned to other, presumably military, duties, although exercising his governorship off and on; and perhaps the other fellow, George, ruled in the intervals—and was being broken in at the time Poncet found the bahrnegas twinned.22 Ras Fares survived the two-year-long reign of Tekla-Haymonot I and was exiled to the isle of Mesrah by the next emperor, Theophilus (Tewoflos), who reigned for three years (c. 1708—11). At this point I lose track of Fares, who presumably died in exile. Jesus I (1682-1706, according to Beckingham and Huntingford and to Budge) was a not-untalented despot, and a mighty hunter, inordinately fond of chasing the buffalo and the Galla. He also kept a sharp eye on his provincial and district administrators. In the seventeenth year of his reign—that is, in the late 1690's (when Gannibal was five or six years of age)—the exactions of the officials and their robbery of the nation in collecting taxes became so outrageous that the emperor summoned all the notables from Endorta and other districts and
21. The Portuguese Jesuit Almeida, who journeyed inland from the Red Sea in 1621, mentions Keba Christos, governor of Tig-re, "encamped in a beautiful meadow near Debaroa [Debarwa]," and Asma Guirguis, his brother. 22. Poncet later met "Guarekos' " brother, an eremite whom he saw in September on his way to Massawa and the Red Sea, in the Monastery of Bizen (Debra Bizan, near Asmara), where the sixty-six-year-old holy man was making- himself dreadfully ill by trying to subsist on a diet of raw rack-tree leaves.
IJO
demanded an explanation of them. The principal article of merchandise was rock salt. The officials, in the name of customs dues, used to confiscate most of the salt that the merchants brought on their asses into the town. The emperor decided that the tax on salt should be uniform throughout the country. The tax on five mules laden with salt was to be one slab (see Basset, XVIII, 303-20, and Budge, I, 4x7). The scandal coincided with Poncet's arrival in Abyssinia, and it is possible to believe that Ras Fares and various district governors in the province of Tigre (including Endorta) were involved. In these cases the emperor would no doubt feel even freer than usual to exact tribute from the governors—and probably would think nothing of ordering them to send their children as samples of Abyssinian nobility to the court of a Frankish king.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal’s Enslavement
In the Abyssinia of those days everybody seems to have been selling everybody else into slavery. There is a charming story about an Abyssinian priest who is sent young divinity students by a friend, another priest, sells these youths one by one to a Moslem trader, then sells him his friend the priest, and then gets sold himself. Inhis TVaweZi(1790),BrucementionsDixan(at i4°59'55" and 39°38/3o", according to Salt), the first frontier town he reached in Abyssinia from the coastal island of Masuah (Massawa), on the Red Sea. "Dixan is built on the top of a hill, perfectly in form of a sugar loaf" (III, 84), and consists of Moslems and Christians; "the only trade of either of these sects is a very extraordinary one, that of selling of children. The Christians bring such as they have stolen in Abyssinia to Dixan as to a sure deposit; and the Moors receive them there, and carry
ΙβΙ
them to a certain market at Masuah, whence they are sent over to Arabia cind India" (III, 88). About 1700, according to Poncet, the price for a robust male slave was only ten ecus (fifty shillings). In 1880, according to Enid Starkie, the average price of a small boy was twenty strips of copper cut from a kettle. Some eight years later, in the days of "trader Rainbow" (as the English called the French ex-poet Rimbaud), Christian Abyssinian boys cost eighty Levant dollars (about 150 shillings) per head. One suspects that most of the little Africans shipped to Arabia and Turkey were used there as catamites before reaching the age of toil. I do not know how probable it may have been for the child of a seigneur, a province governor, or district governor to be directly or indirectly sold into slavery; but there is definite information (for instance, in Poncet) that in 1700 Emperor Jesus could and did command the noblemen—i.e., various relatives of his, as all nobles were—to dispatch their children to a distant European court, with the result that these unfortunate Abyssinian youngsters were captured en route by the Turks. Poncet, a French pharmacist in Cairo, who was invited to Abyssinia to treat Jesus I for conjunctivitis, left Cairo June 10, 1698, and, via the Nile and Dongola, reached Gondar July 21, 1699. The emperor proclaimed a young Armenian merchant (named "Murat" or, more exactly, Murad ben Magdelun, said to be the nephew of one of the emperor's ministers) ambassador to France: he was to accompany Poncet to Paris with gifts for King Louis XIV such as elephants, horses, and jeunes enfans ethiopiens, scions of noble families. On his return voyage to Cairo (now via the Red Sea), Poncet left Gondar May 2, 1700, for Massawa, planning to stop on the way in the capital of Tigre, Debarwa, which he reached in mid-July, and to wait there for
1)2
Murad, who was still collecting the animals and the children. But there were further delays; several horses and the only elephant, a young tuskless beast, died while crossing the Serawe Mts., and on Sept. 8, 1700, after waiting for Murad for almost two months, Poncet left Debarwa for the coast. Nine days later he reached the island of Massawa, embarked for Jidda on Sept. 28, and arrived there on Dec. 5. Murad being still delayed, the next meeting place was fixed at the head of the Red Sea in Suez, for which Poncet set out Jan. 12, 1701. At the end of April he reached the Mt. Sinai Monastery, where a month later Murad finally caught up with him, bringing a sad report: in Jidda, "le Roy de la Mecque" (the Grand Sherif Saad?) took away from him the highborn Ethiopian children that Murad had collected for the king of France—and it is not inconceivable that some of these the governor of Mecca (or that of Jidda) forwarded to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa II, as his own little tribute. All Murad now had were two young attendants obtained on the way at Suakin, ' 'the bigger one an Ethiopian, the smaller a [Negro?) slave" (Le Grand, p. 431). Poncet's and Murad's caravan reached Cairo in the first week of June, and Poncet presented himself there before the French consul, Maillet. In Cairo Poncet, now impatient to leave for France, got into trouble with Maillet, who questioned Murad's ambassadorial status, and with the Turks, who questioned the religion of the two slave boys (Murad's acquisition?) whom Poncet was taking with him. Says Le Grand (pp. 417—18): "L'Aga et Ies gens de la Douane [vinrent] l'avertir [June 26, 1701] que ses deux domestiques Abissins etant Mahometans devoient etre rachetes . . . [Poncet] repondit que si ces enfans etaient Mahometans" he would make a gift of them to the Turkish governor of Egypt. But the local Jesuit superior, "touche de zele pour Ie salut de ces deux enfans," intervened,
and Poncet was not bothered any more. Whether he got the two youngsters out of Cairo, we do not know. It is also not clear if we should count as one of these boys or count separately as a third item, or consider as representing both, a "jeune esclave ethiopien" (Le Grand, p. 432) whom Murad had brought to the French consul at Cairo, to be shipped to France together with the remains —ears and trunk—of the young elephant. This petit esclave, when already placed on the Nile barge that was to take him to the ship, began to cry that he was a Moslem, that he was being kidnaped, that he did not want to go to Christendom, which provoked a tumult, in consequence of which the Turkish officials removed the boy from the barge and placed him in the keep of one Mustafa Kiaya Kazdugli, after which Poncet sailed for France. Incidentally, the episode is curiously distorted in its retelling by Bruce (II, 488-89), who says that Poncet, when embarking at Bulaq, on the Nile, for his voyage to France, "watched helplessly as a bought slave, a poor Abyssinian lad, whom he was bringing for Louis the Fourteenth . . . was being taken out of ship by the Janizaries . . . and made a Mahometan before his eyes"—which implies, if I correctly understand what Bruce means, that the boy was an uncircumcised heathen Negro, and not a Christian Ethiopian, who would have been circumcised anyway (on the eighth day after his birth).
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal in Turkey
After describing Lahann's death at the time of her brother's departure from Abyssinia or some neighboring seaport, the German biography continues: Not long after [nickt lange nach] this separation forever, Hannibal arrived in Constantinople and with the other young hostages was confined in the seraglio, to be raised there among the noble pages of the sultan, and there he
1H
spent one year and some months [ein Jahr und etliche Monate\. Let us pause here for a moment in order to check the chronological situation. We shall see presently that the Russian envoy could have obtained the young arap only between the autumn of 1702 and the summer of 1705 and that the most probable year is 1703. Working backward, we arrive at the following conclusion. The journey from his home in inner Abyssinia— which, according to the German biography, Gannibal was forced to leave at seven years of age ("in seinem achten Jahre . . . nach Constantinopel gesandt")—to Turkey must have taken considerably longer than the meaningless gap-filler "nicht lange nach" implies — even if we choose for him the shortest itinerary of the time, from the Tigre Province to northwestern Turkey. There was an initial trek to a Red Sea port, then the tricky passage up the Red Sea to Suez, then another land journey to a Mediterranean port, and finally the long, awesome, and nauseous voyage to Stambul. TaJting into account the difficulties of navigation and many delays, we must reckon the whole journey to have lasted at least one year—probably longer, especially if we take into consideration that Gannibal might have been conveyed to Turkey not by sea but by the caravan road via Arabia and Syria. In other words, he must have left home in 1700 if, by 1703, he had been living in Constantinople since the end of 1701. We now have to choose between two possibilities: (1) that the boy landed in the Constantinople slave market in the ordinary course of the trade or (2) that, as the German biography avers, he was smuggled out of the sultan's seraglio and delivered to the Russian envoy, with the help of a grand vizier. If we consider the first proposition, all we can say is either that the Russian envoy's agent may have induced
his employer to show more gratitude by persuading him that the young slave had really been a highborn prisoner in the palace or, more likely, that the Russian envoy, having purchased the boy by ordinary means, cooked up the exotic version to impress the tsar. Since, however, we are inclined to accept the story of Gannibal's noble origin, for want of a better hypothesis, we may as well see what historical background there is to support the contention of the German biography, which, after the sentence referring to the length of time spent by Gannibal in Constcintinople, launches upon the account of his deliverance with the following idiotic argument: At that time the Emperor Peter I [was] introducing the arts and the sciences in his realm and endeavoring to spread them among [his] noblemen. He did succeed to some extent in this undertaking; yet considering the great multitude of nobles in that most extensive of the world's empires, the number of people who showed inclination toward learning proved much too insignificant, a state of affairs that caused the late emperor most grievous and vexing pain. He cast around for means to extract from among the nation . . . examples and models. Finally, he conceived the idea of writing to his ambassador in Constantinople, requesting him to obtain for him and send him some young black boys of good abilities. His minister followed his orders with the utmost fidelity: he got acquainted with the supervisor of the seraglio where the sultan's pages were being reared and educated, and then, through the intermediation of the grand vizier obtained, in a secret and dangerous manner, three lads. . . . One of these was GannibaL Prior to the era of more or less normal diplomatic relations between Russia and Turkey, a councilor of Peter I, Emelian Ukraintsev (1660?-1708), had been sent as envoy extraordinary to Constantinople in 1699, after the cessation of a long and confused war. 23 He
23. The Karlowitz Treaty between Turkey on one side and Austria, Poland, and the state of Venice on the other was
IJ6
concluded a peace treaty (July 3, 1700), supposed to be good for thirty years, and returned to Russia.24 In 1700- 01 Russia was briefly represented at the Porte by the grand envoy, Prince Dmitri Golitsm (1665-1737), who was in Constantinople only to ratify the treaty. The first regular Russian ambassador to reside in Turkey (where he stayed for twelve years) was Count Pyotr Tolstoy (1645-1729), who was appointed Apr. 2, 1702, and arrived in August. The sultan in power, Mustafa II, had one more year to reign before being dethroned (Aug. 22, 1703), in consequence of a thirtysix-day-long military rebellion, by his brother Ahmed III (who was to last till 1730). Mustafa granted Tolstoy h is first audience in November, 1702. During the period interesting us (1702-05), seven grand viziers succeeded one another. Of these, Hussein Kuprulu,25 an intelligent and amiable pasha, retired Sept. 5,1702. During his rule, the mortality among Turkish poets was, for some reason, very great: as many as twelve died in 1699. The next grand vizier (krayniy vizir', in the Russian of the time) was Daltaban the Serbian, whom European observers signed the same year. Incidentally, Emelian Ignatievich (patronymic) Ukraintsev is split into three persons in my edition of Hammer-Purgstall (XIII, 37η): the councilors Amilianusch, Ignatodesich, and Oukraintzov! 24. Subsequently this tough politician was appointed to settle the Russian-Turkish frontier on the river Bug, after which he headed the Department of Provisions, was accused of profiteering, and survived a thrashing with dub'yo (a collective noun meaning oak cudgels or knotted clubs), to become envoy to Hungary. 25. The transliteration of Turkish names is the whim of this or that European historian, and the right form is hard to choose without special study. Kuprulu, for instance, appears as Koeprulu in Hammer, Kuprulis in Bonnac, and Kiuprili, Koprulu, or Kuprullu in English works on the subject, As in the case of Abyssinian history, there is also a bothersome discrepancy in matters of dates (I have, on the whole, followed Hammer, with some misgivings).
Π7
call an illiterate brute, and who among other wise and important decrees forbade Christians and Jews to wear kalpaks of red cloth. His bellicose spirit made him unpopular, and four months later he was quietly strangled by the palace executioner. He was succeeded on Jan. 25, 1703, by Rami Pasha, said to be an honest and enlightened personage who wrote verse in a polished style. He fell with his master, Sultan Mustafa. The next grand vizier (Aug. 23-Nov. 16, 1703), the first to serve Sultan Ahmed, was a pasha of Russian extraction, Chancellor Ahmed, a very corrupt, rotund little man, dubbed Beehive because of his squat shape and his ability to store up the sweets of life. Less than four months later he was exiled to Lepanto, after having been made to disgorge the treasures he had accumulated. His successor, Hasan, a son-in-law of the sultan, reigned for less than a year (till Sept. 28, 1704). He was a very honest and comparatively humane pasha of Greek origin and cannot be suspected of selling the sultan's pages to a foreigner. His successor was the bad-tempered and violent Kalailikoz, who detested Frenchmen and Russians and who, in his turn, was succeeded on Dec. 26, 1704, by Baltaji Mohammed (a former governor of Jidda), a wily pasha who lasted till May 3, 1706. During his rule, not later than the summer of 1705, Abram Gannibal was shipped to Azov, so we do not have to bother about the next grand vizier (the tyrannic Ali, 1706-10); but if any of these worthies was involved in GannibaTs surreptitious removal from the seraglio to the Russian embassy or to a moored Russian vessel, I would suggest it was Beehive or Mohammed. Pyotr Tolstoy is described by historians as a crafty, unscrupulous, and sinister character. In 1717, he was sent by the tsar to retrieve Prince Alexis, the heir to the throne, who had taken advantage of his ferocious sire's journey abroad to escape from Russia to Austria and
I3S
Italy, and whom the tsar's agents tracked down and brought back, in a series of quiet moves marked by the kind of hypnotic tenacity, persuasion, and deceit that we associate today with the forced repatriation of fugitives by Soviet thugs. The man who could lure Alexis from the security of Naples to his terrible fatherland, to be tortured to death there under Peter's supervision, might easily have devised a means to obtain a poor little blackamoor for his master's amusement. My opinion that the tsar's envoy to the Ottoman Porte obtained Gannibal, by the tsar's order and for the tsar's service, not earlier than 1703 and not later than 1704 is corroborated by Gannibal himself in the following two documents: (1} In a letter from Paris to Councilor Makarov, dated Mar. 5, 1721 (probably, N.S.), Gannibal mentions that he has served the tsar for seventeen years. (2) In an address to Empress Catherine I, in 1726 (when presenting her a textbook on military engineering that he had compiled on the basis of his La Fere or Metz notes; see below, "Gannibal in Western Europe"), he mentions that he has lived for twenty-two years pri dome (at the domicile, in the entourage, in the household) of the late tsar (who died in 1725).
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal and Raguzinski
"In the meantime," the German biography continues, using its favorite formula: the father of the late general [of Abram Gannibal], who had been ripe in years and almost senile at the time of [Abram's] departure, died, and the succession of his rule [Regierung] fell to the lot of one of Abram's stepbrothers. . . . The Russian envoy, who was glad to observe the will of his emperor, sent to Moscow [the three Ws]: Ibrahim Hannibal; another black boy—a compatriot of his of noble birth—who, however, died of smallpox on the way;
and a Kagusan of nearly the same age, i.e., under ten. Although deploring the loss of one of the boys, the emperor was delighted that the two others arrived safely, and took over personally the care of bringing them up; the more eagerly because, as already said, he wished to make examples of them . . . and put [Russians] to shame by convincing them that out of every people, and even from among wild men—such as Negroes, whom our civilized nations assign exclusively to the class of slaves— there can be formed men who by dint of application can obtain knowledge and learning [and thus] become helpful and useful to their monarch. . . . A no mean connoisseur of mankind, the emperor investigated in advance the inclinations of his newly arrived objects [sic], He destined Hannibal, who was a quick, keen, and fiery young fellow, for a military career; and he destined the Ragusan (later known in Russia as Count Raguzinski), who was of a quieter and more meditative nature, for the civil service.
We can ignore the passage concerning the succession of rule, which is only there to dismiss a possible accusation of secondary abduction, this time on the part of the beloved monarch, and turn to Abram Gannibal's petition (1742). This petition, after mentioning the three towns Abram's father governed (see earlier, "Gannibal's Birthplace"), proceeds thus: "In 1706, at an early age [υ mallh letah], I set out for Russia from Constantinople, in the retinue [ pri ] of Count Savva Vladislavich, by my own will, and was brought to Moscow. . . ." The date 1706 refers to his arrival in Moscow. As we shall presently see, he left Constantinople in the summer of 1705.The Ragusan Vladislavich is the same person that the German biography describes as Gannibal's coeval and fellow page, a preposterous allegation that can be explained only as an attempt to puff up the prestige of the biographee by giving him reputable companions in misfortune and fortune. This Ragusaii was thirty-seven years old in 1705, when, according to the relevant passage in the German biography, Gannibal was about ten
years of age—or about twelve, according to a more plausible computation. Curiously enough, Pushkin preserves the fictional synchronization of the two men's respective ages in his mediocre romance known as Arap Petra Velikogo: when "Ibragim" at the age of almost thirty (he is "twenty-seven" at the beginning of the novel, when, c. 1720, he falls in love in Paris with a French lady) returns to Petersburg in 1723, he sees in the emperor's palace "young Raguzinski, his former chum [bivshego svoego tovarishcha]"—who, historically, was fifty-five years of age at the time. Who, then, was this Ragusan of the changeable years? As early as 1699-1700 Ukraintsev had employed in Constantinople the services of secret agents of Illyrian extraction. One of these was a Servian trader named Sawa (Christian name) Lukich (patronymic) Vladislavich (surname), known later as Count Vladislavich- Raguzinski (1668-1738). He was born in Popovo, Herzegovina, was brought up in his father's merchant business in Ragusa, and when about twenty-five (thus in the 1690's) was transferred to Constantinople. Rightly or wrongly, his father, Luka Vladislavich, considered himself descending from a Rosnian princely family of that name. Upon his removal from Rosnia to Ragusa, he assumed the composite surname Vladislavich- Raguzinski. His son's title of count, or at least its formal fixation, seems to have been a favor granted by Tsar Peter in recognition of Sawa's services, Under Mustafa II and Ahmed III, Turkey exacted a tribute from Ragusa (e.g., the sum of 4000 ducats in 1703) as well as from Arab tribes;26 but (according to
26. The Arabs, on the other hand, kept pilfering the yearly caravan (a stately affair led by a bejeweled camel) that was sent yearly from Constantinople to Mecca with money for the poor. Some of this pilfering seems to have been organized from Constantinople by the grand viziers themselves.
Β. Η. Sumner, p. 811) the law for collecting Christian tribute boys, although nominally in existence until 1750, had not been enforced since the middle of the preceding century. There is no reason not to believe that Sawa Vladislavich had been dispatched to Constantinople in the natural course of personal adventure and paternal trade; but the fact of there having been Ragusan tribute boys in the past may have somehow influenced the account of GannibaTs boyhood. On Sept. 25, 1702, a month after his arrival in Turkey, Pyotr Tolstoy wrote to Count Fyodor Golovin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, thus: A Ragusan dwelling in Constantinople, Sava Vladislavov [sic], who as you know is a good man, has now, by my advice, set out with wares for Azov and from there will proceed to Moscow. [He] is here an infinitely useful person to His Muscovite Majesty. Sometime in the autumn of that year Vladislavich arrived in Azov with an ostensible cargo of olive oil, cotton, and calico, and eventually (by the first week of April, 1703) reached Moscow, where in result of the secret reports he brought he was made much of by Peter I. Bringing sables and ermines, Russian fox (whitecollar and red) and wolf (Muscovite and Azovan), he returned to Constantinople in 1704 or early 1705, and then in the summer of 1705 set out again for Azov and Moscow, carrying more calico and more secret dispatches from Pyotr Tolstoy as well as a live present for the tsar. It is evident that Gcinnibal was obtained sometime between the dates of Vladislavich's two departures from Constantinople. To judge by a letter from the tsar to the Constantinople ambassador's brother, Ivan Tolstoy, commander of Azov, Vladislavich was in Moscow with the reports, and presumably with the little blackamoor, not later than Jan. 12, 1706 (the exact date of his arrival
might be easily settled by consulting unpublished papers in the local archives). Vladislavich traveled in 1716—22 on diplomatic missions to Venice and Ragusa and in 1725—28 was envoy to China.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal’s First Years in Russia (1706–16)
At the time of Gannibal's arrival in Russia, Peter was in the midst of the Swedish campaign, with the battlefield—a fluctuating and somewhat phantomic affair—in Poland. He had stayed in Vilno from July 8 to Aug. 1, 1705, and arrived in Moscow (from Grodno) on Dec. 19, 1705, remaining there till Jan. 13, 1706, when he went back, via Smolensk, to the martial sport in Poland. In Moscow he amused himself with establishing an anatomical and biological museum, with a botanical garden in front of it. The young blackamoor was no doubt welcomed as an additional curio. Peter visited Kiev in July- August, 1706, and, traveling north again, was just in time to enjoy watching, on Sept. 11, 1706, the first inundation in "Piterburh" (or "Paradis," as he fondly called the town he had just founded). Especially entertaining was the sight of men and women huddling on the roofs of submerged shacks. Peter was again in Vilno (on his way back from Warsaw to Petersburg) by Sept. 24, 1707, and stayed there till Oct. 10. It is within these time limits that the, at least, fourteen-year-old Abyssinian was baptized and given the name Pyotr. More or less synchronously (Sept. 27, 1707), his royal sponsor jotted down a little memorandum dealing with the naming of the progeny of Lenita or Lenta (from the Latin lenis, "gentle," or lentus, "tenacious," "slow"), an English mastiff: two years before (Iune 50, 1705), in the monastery of Polotsk, the tsar had had this hound maul Theophanus, an outspoken Uniate monk of the St. Basil Order, whom
he had then hacked in two with his sword. The pseudoclassical names for her seven pups, which the tsar translated no doubt from some current nomenclator, read—as translated back from Peter's uncouth Russian —Pirrhous (reddish), Eous (dawn), Aethon (bright), Phlegethon (blazing), Pallas, Nymph, and Venus. The eventual surname Annibal given to the blackamoor may also have been thought up by the enlightened monarch, although there are other possibilities (see further, "Gannibal and Annibal"). The fate of the young mastiffs can be traced to another note, a fortnight later (Oct. 10, 1707), in which the tsar commands Lenita's pups to be taught by some foreign-born fancier on his staff to perform various tricks, such as doffing a cap, shouldering a toy musket, and marching under arms into water. At the time, according to western European observers, reiteration of baptism, and baptism anew, of youths and adults, was performed at Peter's court by pouring cold water three times over the whole body from head to foot. If Gannibal had been born an Abyssinian princeling, he would have been baptized at birth, since Abyssinia had been Christianized six centuries before Russia; but it is quite probable that upon capture the Turks had him Moslemized (pobasurmanili, in the Russian of the time), whatever that process implies. The question, however, is completely futile because, first, any African was to Russians a heathen and, second, the ceremony performed on the young blackamoor, at the Pyatnitski church, in late September or early October, 1707 (not "1705," as the memorial plaque there oddly says), with Peter I as godfather and Christiana Eberhardina, wife of King Augustus II of Poland, as godmother (fide the German biography), was conducted in the rowdy and slapstick atmosphere of Peter's court and smacks of mock marriages between freaks or the elevation of jesters to the
I44
rank of governors of Barataria. Indeed, there seems to
have been an attempt by some zealous courtiers, a few
months before, to marry the blackamoor: in a letter
from Poland, dated May 13, 1707, the tsar writes to
Councilor Avtonom Ivanov that he does not wish to have
the arap conjugated—with, presumably, the daughter
of some grandee's Negro servant, or a dwarf, or a Russian female house fool (domashnyaya dura, shutiha).
This was a critical moment for the gene that participated
in the making of Pushkin, and the tsar should be thanked
for directing the course of chance.
With the light of history now beginning to glimmer
upon our subject, we can drop the tedious task of following the burlesque and bombastic German biography,
which rambles on for as many pages as I have already
quoted or paraphrased. We shall still have to refer to it,
however, now and then in connection with certain
bothersome trivia. Let us turn to some of the anecdotes
about young Gannibal.
The best-known story is one given in preposterous
detail by the German biography, and repeated with
personal variations by Golikov and Pushkin. The gist of
it is that young Abram, upon becoming the tsar's valet
or assistant valet, slept in an adjacent room and proved
his intelligence by transcribing the drafts of decrees that
his master would scribble at night on slates. Among a
series of Pushkin's notes entitled "Table Talk" (Eng.),
1836-37, the posthumously published eighth item
(1873, Festnik Evrο ρϊ), described by Pushkin as "A
story [that] is not particularly clean but depicts Peter's
ways," reads:One day a little blackamoor accompanying Peter I on his promenade [canceled beginning: "The blackamoor Gannibal accompanied Peter I on one of his journeys. One day the child"] stopped for a certain need and all at once cried out in terror: "Sir, sir! The gut's a-coming out of me!"
HS
Peter went up to him and, having perceived what the matter was, said: "Bosh, this is no gut, it is a worm," and pulled it out with his own fingers.
In a document dated Dec. 20, 1709 (quoted by M. Vegner, p. 23), a passage reads: "By [the tsar's] order, in view of the Christmcis holidays, coats have been made for Joachim the dwarf and Abram the blackamoor, with camisoles and breeches. Moreover, eight arshins [six yards] of scarlet cloth . . . and brass buttons have been purchased for both." E. Shmurlo (1892) vaguely refers to some documents in which "Abrcim is mentioned three times, in the same breath, with the tsar's jester Lacosta." This is Yan Dekosta or, correctly, Jcin d'Acosta, Peter's favorite court jester, a Christianized Jew born in Holland.27 According to another anecdote, one day in the summer of about 1715, on board ship, just before a royal cruise from St. Petersburg to Revel, the tsar's physician, Lestocq,28 and a gentleman of the chamber,
27. He was a man of parts and a member of a well-known marrano family (da Costa, or Mendez da Costa) that had fled from Portugal in the seventeenth century and settled in Italy, Holland, England, and other countries. Jan d'Acosta, who was a lawyer in Hamburg, sought a more colorful life and finding a patron in the Russian consul followed him to Muscovy. The tsar was delighted with his wit, made him a count, and gave him a barren island off the Finnish coast. 28. The high spirits of this adventurous French nobleman, Count Jean Armand de Lestocq (1692—1767), also known as "Hermann Lestock" and "Ivan Lestok" (he emigrated to Russia in 1713), appealed to the tsar, who nonetheless would give him a sound thrashing now and then. That despot's guffaws and snarls easily intergraded. Dr. Lestocq seems to have been a confirmed jester-baiter, whereas the tsar, on the other hand, had a special tenderness for his fools. In 1719, Lestocq got into trouble with d'Acosta, whose daughter he had seduced. Peter banished his gay bloodletter to Kazan, in eastern Russia, where Lestocq remained till the reign of Elizabeth. The source of the nautical story is a collection of Anecdotes pertaining to Russian customs, etc., published (London, 1792) anonymously by a friend of Lestocq, the
Jonson,29 two merry fellows, having found the tsar's Russian jester Tyurikov fast asleep on the deck, played a period prank upon him: they took some tar and glued his long beard to his bare chest. Upon awakening, the poor jester howled, at which the tsar, interrupted in his studies of navigation and keelhauling, came pounding along, bumped into the innocent Gannibal, and, in a rage, flogged him unmercifully with a length of rope. At dinner the two pranksters could not help chuckling at the sight of the Moor's glum face. When the good tsar, a humorist in his own right, learned the cause of their mirth, he burst out laughing too and told Abram that to mend matters he would ignore his next misdemeanor. This is about all I was able to gather in the way of published material pertaining to Gannibal's first ten years in Russia. We can dismiss as family fantasy a passage in the German biography that asserts that "the ruling half brother" of Gannibal instructed a young brother to travel to Constantmople to ransom Abram; that, not finding him there, this brother traveled on to Petersburg, bringing as gifts "precious weapons and Arabic writs," which established Abram's princely origin; that the latter refused to go back to heathendom; and that the brother set out on his return journey "with tears on both sides." There is hardly any need to remark that no Abyssinian seigneur could have traveled to Muscovy via Turkey without being enslaved there, nor is there any historical information of any free Abyssinian undertaking such a journey in the first part of the eighteenth century. It is likely that the tsar took his arap along on some of his travels or campaigns, but hardly on all his marches,
German and French writer Johann Benedikt (Jean Benoit) Scherer (1741-1824), who came to Russia about 1760 and joined the French embassy in St, Petersburg. 29. The son of a Livonian architect.
as family tradition has it. We get a ghostly glimpse of a stylized young blackamoor in more or less Turkish garb lurking in the emblematic background—holding a battle horse or a bunch of grapes—in several portraits of Peter I. He is present in an engraving executed by Adriaan Schoonebeeck (d. 1705) from a lost picture painted about 1704.; there he stands at the back, and to the anatomical right, of the tsar, who, for the nonce, sports a French king's dress. I am not sure there is not some error in the dating of the thing itself or of its engraver's death. But if we accept the date, and the possibility of the pictured blackamoor being Gannibal, we have to suppose that either he was brought by Raguzinski on the latter's first trip to Moscow (1703) or that he was portrayed—prospectively, as it were—on the strength of information received in Moscow from Constantinople: a blackamoor in attendance was a symbol of supreme luxury and grandeur, and the tsax must have awaited his 1706 New Year gift from his envoy with as much eagerness as he did shipments of lilies and lilacs.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal in Western Europe (1716–23)
In January, 1716, Peter I set out on a European tour. After spending a month or so in Copenhagen, he pursued his journey to Holland and France. He landed in Dunkerque on Apr. 30, 1717, N.S., and arrived May 7 in Paris, where he forthwith asked for beer and bawds. Philippe, Duke of Orleans, was regent of France (1715— 23) during the minority of Louis XV. The Muscovite tsar's six-week stay produced little more than a crop of dirty stories—though why the grandees of the Regence, a filthy pack in a disgusting and talentless age, should have been so puzzled by Peter's habits is not quite clear. In the same spring of 1717, four young men arrived in France from Russia to study fortification and military
mining. They may have come with the tsar, but more
probably they voyaged separately from him and did not
sojourn in Denmark, The four were: Abram Arap,
Stepan Korovin, Gavrila Rezanov, and Aleksey Yurov,
our hero's chum.
The German biography, with its usual overstatement,
bad grammar, and inexactitude, says that Peter I sent
Gannibal straight to the Regent, asking the latter "to
assume supervision," and that Gannibal at first studied
"under the great Belior [sic] at a military school for
young noblemen." The reference is, I suggest, to Bernard
Forest de Belidor (1693-1761), a brilliant young French
engineer who taught at the EcoIe d'Artillerie of La Fere
(in the Aisne, NW of Laon) and wrote a Sommaire d'un
cours d'architecture militaire, civile ethydraulique (1720)
and other distinguished works. As to the Regent's
"personal supervision," I cannot find any indication
among French sources that he (or any member of his
entourage) was aware of Abrain's existence.
According to the German biography, Gannibal then
joined an artillery regiment in France and as a capitaine
of a company participated in a war against Spain. This
war was declared Jan. g, 1719, and peace was signed
Feb. 17, 1720. During an undermining operation—
somewhere in Catalonia, I suppose—he was severely
wounded in the head and taken prisoner (it is odd that he
never mentions this event in his letters from France).
Upon his return to France, Abram apparently went on
with his studies at another school, the Ecole d'Artillerie
of Metz, an institution founded by the illustrious military engineer Sebastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban
(1633-1707). According to E. A. Begin (1829, p. 592),
the subjects taught there at the time were mathematics,
physics, and chemistry, on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday; "I'ecole pratique se faisait Ies autres jours,
excepte Ie dimanche, dans l'ile Champiere, ou existaitUii pare. . . . Ce n'etait, a bien dire, qu'une ecole regimentaire dont Ies cours cessaient des que Metz etait prive du corps d'artillerle qui y tenait habituellement garnison." By January, 1722, the Russian ambassador, Prince V. L. Dolgorukov, had announced to the four young men that they would have to return to Russia, but a year of procrastination followed. It would seem that part of that year Abram and his companions spent in Paris—in the hectic Paris that had been left a financial shambles by John Law. Early spring was marked by fabulous balls and illuminations in honor of the arrival of a tentative bride for the king, the blonde little infanta, aged four and a half, whom, however, the twelve-yearold Louis did not like. The Regent was energetically pursuing his life of debauchery. Courtesans wore stockings of flesh-colored silk. Thieves and highwaymen were subjected to the iron boot, the toasting of toes against an ordinary or extraordinary fire, and foot baths of boiling oil. The financial term "liquidated" {liquide) was used in regard to executed criminals. The poet Arouet (better known as Voltaire) was thrashed by the footmen of an officer whom he had called a police spy. Prodigious sums were won and lost at faro. The Marquis de Saillant successfully wagered he would ride ninety miles on horseback in six hours. In the midst of these dazzling frolics, little is known of Abram's existence, except that he was continuously and abjectly hard up. I can find nothing in the French memoirs of the Regence that would corroborate statements made by Pushkin in his novel that all the ladies desired to entertain Ie negre du Czar, that he hobnobbed with Voltaire, and that the playwright Michel Guyot de Merville introduced him to a woman of fashion, "Countess Lenore de D.t" who bore him a black baby. The letters Abram wrote in Russian from France to
I5O
various officials (clamoring for money, pleading not to be sent home by sea, saying he would rather walk than sail, begging in vain to be left in France for further studies, and so forth) seem to me to have been worded not by him but by his companion in hyperbolic distress, Aleksey Yurov. After six or seven years abroad, Abram appears to have forgotten Russian so thoroughly that upon his return the autocrat bundled him off to grammar school at the Aleksandronevskiy Monastery, where he was enrolled on Mar. 14, 1723, O.S. He seems to have been returned to the imperial household on Nov. 27, 1724 (see P. Pekarski, 1862, I, 112). Commentators have wondered if perhaps the event might refer to some other "Abram the blackamoor" (though no other is known), since it seemed to them to clash with the fact that on Feb. 4, 1724, by a ukase in the tsar's own hand Abram ("in dem 28-sten Jahre seines Alters," says the German biography) was made a lieutenant (poruchik) in the bombardier company of the Preobrazhenskiy regiment. However, the whole age was a freakish one. Gannibal brought from France a small library (sixtynine titles) consisting mainly of historical works, military manuals, travels, and a sprinkling of fashionable exotica; all these volumes he sold (in 1726) for two hundred rubles to the Imperial Library but bought them (or a similar set) back in 1742. Although the list is quite conventional, with works by Bossuet, Malebranche, Fontenelle, Corneille, and Racine representing its literary section, there is a distinct stress on various voyages, with Chardin taking the reader to Persia to discover that a milk diet cures ulcers; Lahontan visiting, in a kind of proto-Chateaubriandesque America (1688), the Gnacsitares and the Mozemleks, whom none saw after him; and Cyrano de Bergerac journeying to the moon, where people have names only expressible by little melodies of a few musical notes.
I51
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal and Annibal
Officially, the name of Peter I's godchild had become Pyotr Petrovich Petrov (Christian name, patronymic, and surname), but he had grown used in Turkey to the name of Ibrahim and was allowed to call himself by its Russian counterpart, Avraam or Abram. Actually, he should not have boggled at bearing his godfather's name: after all, it had been a Petrus Aethiops (Pasfa Sayon Malbazo) who published in Rome, about 1549, after thirteen years of labor, the New Testament in the language of Abyssinian liturgy (that is, Geez, the ancient Ethiopic, which was later replaced by Amharic). The statement in the beginning of the German biography to the effect that Abram's father, a proud Abyssinian seigneur, traced his lineage two thousand years back to Hannibal, the famous Carthaginian general, is of course nonsense: it is impossible to conceive that an Abyssinian of the seventeenth century should have known anything of him. The surname Gannibal was applied to Abram in official documents as eaxly as 1723, upon his return from France. In other references, and in all earlier ones, he is called Abram arap or Abram Petrov Arap, where the middle term is the patronymic in the act of changing into a surname. It is interesting to mark how puzzled Russian commentators are by this choice of name, which in reality is such an obvious one. Anuchin, for example, absurdly suggests that Abram or Abram's family might have derived "Gannibal" from Adi Baro (a village just north of Debarwa, northern Abyssinia)! Why not from Lalibala (an Abyssinian emperor of the thirteenth century), or from Hamalmal (a provincial governor who rebelled against, his royal cousin, MalakSagad I, in the late 1500's), or, still better, from gane bal, which means "strange master" in Tigre; there are no holds barred in these linguistic petits-jeux.
IP
Actually, of course, our hero's eponym was as trite and familiar a figure in the pseudoclassically minded Europe of the eighteenth century—in its textbooks, essays, historical works, newspaper articles, and academic speeches—as were Caesar and Cicero. In Tsar Peter's Russia no illumination was complete without the names of Greek and Roman heroes appearing in a pyrotechnical display of old saws. Pushkin was quite right in Gallicizing the adopted surname that Abram had most probably brought from France in 1723. There, and in Italy, it was not infrequently met with as a given name (e.g., Francis Annibal, due d'Estrees, d. 1687). He had certainly encountered it in his military studies. He had read about "le grand genie d'Annibal" in Bossuet's Discours sur Vhistoire universelle. If he really took part in the Spanish War, he must have been stationed in 1719 at the fort of Bellegarde (rebuilt by Vauban in 1679) and have trodden there, on the Spanish border, near the village of Le Perthus (Pyrenees Orientales), the Elephant Steps of Hannibal's Highway, still visible today among the arbutus and oak brush. And one also wonders if in Metz he had not had for schoolmate a certain Pierre Robert dit Annibal (1699-1785), who must have been living there about 1720, according to the parish records published by Poirier.
Abram Gannibal
Gannibal’s Later Years in Russia (1723–81)
Le capitaine Petrov dit Annibal, having acquired in France some knowledge of bulwarks and buttresses, lived, from 1723 on, in Russia, teaching mathematics and building fortresses. I have not performed any special research in regard to this final lap of his life; it is fairly well known in its main features, and, as Russian commentators have pointed out, Pushkin's presentation of Abram's Siberian period is false. On May 8, 1727, im-
1S)
mediately" after the end of Catherine I's reign, he was dispatched to inspect a fort in Kazan and then to build one in Selenginsk, on the Chinese border—where, incidentally, Lieutenant Gannibal encountered his former patron, Count Vladislavich-Raguzinski, who was returning from his Chinese embassy. Vaguely accused of political intrigue, Gannibal found himself kept at work in Selenginsk and Tobolsk for a couple of years, and only in the beginning of Anna's reign the governor of St. Petersburg, Miinnich, needing a good military engineer, had him transferred to a Baltic fort. In 1731, Gannibal married Evdokia (Eudoxia) Dioper, daughter of a sea captain, Andrey Dioper, presumably of Greek origin. She was unfaithful to him, and so was he to her. According to documents described by Stepan Opatovich (in Russkaya starina, 1877), Gannibal, in 1732, rigged up at his home a private torture chamber complete with pulleys, iron clamps, thumbkins, leathern whips, and so forth. An obstinate and formalistic man, he thenmanaged to have his victim imprisoned by the state for marital betrayal. She stayed five years in jail, after which—while divorce proceedings were dragging on-—she was more or less at liberty till 1753, when the final separation was accorded; upon which, the unfortunate woman was packed away to a remote convent, where she died. In the meantime, in 1736, Gannibal had married (unlawfully) his mistress of four years' standing, the daughter of another captain, an army captain this time, named Matthias Schoberg, Lutheran, of Swedish-German descent. By this second wife (whose first name was Christina Regine, according to the German biography) Gannibcd had eleven children, of whom the third son, Osip, was to be Pushkin's maternal grandfather. Gannibal spent a few years as a country squire on a piece of acquired land, and then went on building fortresses. In 1742, Elizabeth, Peter I's younger daughter,
made him a major general Eind four years later granted him the countryseat Mihaylovskoe in the province of Pskov, which was to be forever linked up with Pushkin's name. During these years, Gannibal proved himself an expert at arranging fireworks at state festivals and composing denunciations of various officials. In 1762, after building his last fortress and propelling his last rocket, he was retired and lived in obscure senility for another twenty years on yet another country estate (Suida, near Petersburg), where he died in 1781, at the advanced age of (probably) eighty-eight.
Abram Gannibal
Conclusions
Besides the unfinished romance (1827) ilThe Blackamoor of Peter the Great" (in which a greatly glamorized
Ibrahim is given fictitious adventures in France and
Russia—all this not in the author's best vein), there is
among Pushkin's works a remarkable piece in verse
referring to the same character. In this postscriptum of
five stanzas to a poem on his paternal lineage (Moya
rodoslovnaya), in iambic tetrameter, Pushkin has this
to say about his maternal ancestor (I have not rendered
the rhymes, feminine and masculine, which alternate
in the original):
Figlyarin, snug at home, decided
That my black grandsire, Gannibal,
Was for a bottle of rum acquired
And fell into a skipper's hands.
This skipper was the glorious skipper
Through whom our country was advanced,
Who to our native vessel's helm
Gave mightily a sovereign course.
This skipper was accessible
To my grandsire; the blackamoor,
Bought at a bargain, grew up stanch and loyal,
The emperor's bosom friend, not slave.^SS
"Figlyarin" (from Jiglyar1 a zany, a coarse buffoon) is a play on the name of a hated reviewer, Fadey (Thaddeus, Thady) Bulgarin. It was thought up by the minor poet Vyazemski, Pushkin's friend, and first used by another poet, Barat'inski, in a published epigram of 1827. Pushkin's piece was written on Oct. 16, 1830, and revised on Dec. 3 of the same year. It is his answer (posthumously published in 1846) to the following vicious innuendo by Bulgarin in his magazine Severnaya pchela (The Northern Bee), no. 94 (Aug. 7, 1830): Byron's lordship [lordstvo] and aristocratic capers, combined with God knows what way of thinking, have driven to frenzy a multitude of poets and rhymesters in various countries: all of them have started talking about their six-hundred-year-old nobility! . . . It is openly related that some poet or other in Spanish America, likewise an imitator of Byron, being of mulatto descent on his father's or (I do not quite remember) mother's side, began to affirm that one of his ancestors was a Negro prince. A search in the town hall's archives disclosed that in the past there had been a lawsuit between a skipper and his mate on account of that Negro, and that the skipper maintained he had acquired the Negro for a bottle of rum. And Nikolay Grech adds in his memoirs (Zapiski moey zhizm, St. Petersburg, 1886, p. 456) that the story of the transaction supposedly made in Kronstadt was first told by Count S. Uvarov at the Olenins'. It would be a waste of time to conjecture that Abram was not born in Abyssinia at all; that he had been captured by slave traders in a totally different place—say, the Lagona region of equatorial Africa, south of Lake Chad, inhabited by Mussulman Negroes; or that he was, as Helbig (1809) affirms, a homeless little Mohr (Negro), acquired in Holland by Peter I to serve as a ship's boy (Bulgaria's source); we may also brood on the puzzling question why Gannibal, with his sense of the political, and Pushkin, with his sense of the exotic, never once
allude to Abyssinia (Pushkin, of course, knew of its mention in the German biography, the Russian translation of which had been dictated to him). Nonetheless, it is upon nonbelievers in the Abyssinian theory that the burden of the proof rests; while, on the other hand, those who accept it must waver between seeing in Pushkin the great-great-grandson of one of those rude and free Negro nomads who haunted the Mareb region or a descendant of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, from whom Abyssinian kings derived their dynasty. According to N. Barsukov (1891), who had it from Elizaveta Pushkin, widow of our poet's brother Lev, the hands of Nadezhda Gannibal, Pushkin's mother, had yellowish palms; and according to another source, quoted by V. Vinogradov (1930), all the daughters of Isaak Gannibal, Pushkin's grand-uncle, son of Abram, spoke with a peculiar singsong intonation—"an African accent," quaintly says an old-timer, who remarks that they "cooed like Egyptian pigeons." There exists no authentic portrait of Abram Gannibal. A late eighteenth-century oil, which some suppose represents him, wearing a decoration he never received, is, anyway, hopelessly stylized by the dauber. Nor can one draw any conclusion from the portraits of his progeny as to what blood predominated in Abram, Negro or Caucasian. In Pushkin, admixtures of Slavic and German strains must have completely obscured whatever definite racial characteristics his ancestors may have possessed, while the fact that certain portraits of Pushkin by good artists, and his death mask, do bear a remarkable resemblance to modern photographs of typical Abyssinians is exactly what one might expect in the descendant of a Negro married to a Caucasian. It should be repeated that "Abyssinian" implies a very complicated blend of the Hamitic and the Semitic and that, moreover, distinct Negroid types commingle with Caucasian ones on the northern plateau and among
'S7
ruling families almost as much as they do among the nomadic heathens of the lowland brush. The Gcdla tribes (the Oromota), for example, who overran the country simultaneously with the Turkish invasion in the sixteenth century, are Hamites with a strong Negro strain. Abram may have had the characteristics that Bent found in the Tigre and Hamasen tribes: "skin . . . of a rich chocolate color, the hair curly, the nose straight with a tendency toward the aquiline, the lips thickish," or— while still technically an Abyssinian—he might have possessed the traits that Pushkin, a conventions 1ist in these matters, gives Ibrahim in his novel: "a black skin, a flat nose, inverted lips, and rough woolly hair" (ch. 5). The taxonomic problem remains unsettled and will probably remain so despite "anthropological sketches" of the Anuchin brand. And although Abram Gannibal used to refer to himself, in humble letters to grandees, as "a poor Negro," and although Pushkin saw him as a Negro with "African passions" and an independent brilliant personality, actually Pyotr Petrovich Petrov, alias Abram Gannibal, was a sour, groveling, crotchety, timid, ambitious, and cruel person; a good military engineer, perhaps, but humanistically a nonentity; differing in nothing from a typical career-minded, superficially educated, coarse, wife-flogging Russian of his day, in a brutal and dull world of political intrigue, favoritism, Germanic regimentation, old-fashioned Russian misery, and fat-breasted empresses on despicable thrones. Basing himself on the fact that in 1899, under Italian domination, Debarwa, once the capital of Tigre, was included in a district called at that time "Logon-Chuan" (an assemblage of letters I have been unable to check), Anuchin comes to the singular conclusion, for which there is not a scrap of evidence, that two centuries earlier Logo was synonymous with Debarwa. In Poncet's day
1S8
(summer, 1700), Debarwa was divided into two towns, upper and lower, the lower one being assigned to Mohammedans; in Bruce's time, seventy years later, not Debarwa but Adowa, a neighboring town, was the capital of Tigre; and by the end of the nineteenth century, Debarwa was "a place of abject squalor and misery" (Bent, 1893). But if Anuchin is right in identifying "L" with Logo or Legota, it is in that general district that clues should be sought today; for there may still persist a faint chance of experts in Abyssinian history and lore discovering on the spot some trace, some memory, of the circumstances and events that resulted in the son of an Abyssinian becoming a Russian general in the eighteenth century. We shall now go back to a certain passage in Pushkin's note to One : L : 11, in the separate edition of Chapter One of EO (1825). It reads: Up to an advanced age, Annibal still remembered Africa, the luxurious life of his father, and nineteen brothers, of whom he was the youngest; he remembered how they used to be led into his father's presence with their hands bound behind their backs, whilst he alone remained free and went swimming under the fountains of the paternal home . . . Had Pushkin explicitly stated here that the paternal home was in Abyssinia, we might have argued that he had borrowed from literary sources of his time this strikingly specific detail of an Ethiopian ruler's sons being treated as captives, potential parricides, possible usurpers. The banishment of young princes to bleak hilltops in the Tigre Province by kings and viceroys as a precaution against violent succession had had a great romanesque impact on the imagination of western Europe in the eighteenth century. And, most curiously, the Abyssinian chronicler Za-Ouald (French transcription) tells us that in the twenty-second year (1702, 1703,
or 1704) of Jesus I's reign he caused all his sons to be put in chains—and was assassinated a couple of years later by his only free son, Tekla. I do not thmk that Pushkin deliberately introduced here this local note—to corroborate a statement of locus he had never made and allude to a specific incident he could not have known. It seems more plausible to suppose that the governor of "L" dutifully followed his "sultan" in this colorful custom. In fact, I would say that this, and the sister's name Lahann, are the only details that have a true Abyssinian flavor. The other detail, concerning the swimming under the fountains, pod fontanami, is less convincing, unless we take it to imply cascades, small waterfalls, etc., and not the playing sprays of an African Versailles, Abram's paternal home. Of that home we know even less than we do of a certain farm at Snitterfield, near Stratford. One thinks of the faucets in Johnson's watery Rasselas (of which Salt thought in Abyssinia) as well as of the cent mille jets cTeau of King Belus' marble palace on the Euphrates in Voltaire's unreadable novella Voyages et Aventures (Tune princesse babylomenne, pour servir de suite a ceux de Scarmentado, par un vieux philosophe qui ne radote pas toujours (Geneva, 1768): "... Chacun sait comme Ie roi d'Ethiopie devint amoureux de la belle Formonsante" (daughter of Belus, king of Babylon) "[et] qu'Amazan" (her lover) ". . . coupalateteperverse du negre insolent." Kammerer (1949), pi. CXII, reproduces the picture of "le Roi d'Ethiopie abusant de son pouvoir" (embracing a distraught pale-skinned lady in her bed), which is a vignette by Monnet, engraved by Vidal, in Bevillon's edition (Paris, 1778) of Voltaire's Romans et contes. If one likes to think that Dr. Johnson's contemporary, Pushkin's great-grandfather, was born practically in "Rasselas' " lap, at the foot of the joint memorial blending
EthiopicUi history and the didactic romance of the French eighteenth century, one may allow oneself also to visualize a Frenchman of Louis XIV's time feasting with Pushkin's dusky great-great-grandfather in the land of Prester John. Let me conclude these rapid notes about Gannibal with the following poetical excerpt from the anonymous English translation (1709) of the travels of Charles Poncet, who stayed in Debarwa in the summer of 1700 (pp. 149-50):
After a solemn service for the emperor's son [Fasilidas, heir to the throne], who had just died, the two Governors \les deux Barnagas] seated themselves in a great hall, and placed me in the middle between 'em. After that, the officers and persons of note, both men and women, rang'd themselves round the hall. Certain women with tabors [tambours de basque] . . . began to sing [commencerent des re'cits en forme de chansons] . . . in so doleful a tone that I could not hinder being seized with grief. . . .
One's marginal imagination conjures up here many a pleasing possibility. We recall Coleridge's Abyssinian maid (Kubla Khan, 1797) singing of "Mount Abora," which (unless it merely echoes the name of the musical instrument) is, I suggest, either Mt. Tabor, an amba (natural citadel), some 3000 feet high in the Sire district of the Tigre, or still more exactly the unlocated amba Abora, which I find mentioned by the chronicler Za- Ouald (in Basset's translation) as being the burial place of a certain high official named Gyorgis (one of Poncet's two governors?) in 1707. We may further imagine that Coleridge's and Poncet's doleful singer was none other than Pushkin's great-great-grandmother; that her lord, either of Poncet's two hosts, was Pushkin's great-greatgrandfather; and that the latter was a son of Cella Christos, Dr. Johnson's Rasselas. There is nothing in the annals of Russian Pushkinology to restrain one from the elaboration of such fancies.
Abram Gannibal
Works Consulted
ABBADIE, ANTOINE D', and PAULITSCHKE, PHILIPPE [PHILIPP], trs. Des Conquetes faites en Abyssinie en XFIe siecle par Γ Imam Muhammad Ahmad dit Gragne [Gran or Gaurane]; version frangaise de la chronique arabe [for the years 1523-55] Futuh el-Habacha [of Ahmad ibn 'Abd al-Kadir ibn Salim ibn 'Uthman]. Paris, 1898. ALMEIDA, MANOEL DE. See BECKINGHAM, C. F., and HUNT- INGFORD, G. W. B., trs. and eds. Some Records of Ethiopia. ANUCHIN, DMITRI. "A. S. Pushkin. Antropologicheskiy eskiz 1 ' (A. S. Pushkin. An Anthropological Sketch), Russkie vcdomosti (Russian Gazette; Moscow), nos. 99, 106, 120, 127, 134, 143, 172, 180, 193, 209 (Apr. 10-July 31, 1899). A very poor and misleading work. ARMBRUSTER, CHARLES HUBERT. Initia Amharica. Pt. ILL: Amharic-English Vocabulary. Cambridge, 1920. BANTISH-KAMENSKI, DMITRI. Slovar dostopamyatmh lyudey Russkoy zemli (Dictionary of Distinguished Russians). Moscow, 1836. 5 vols. BARATIERI, ORESTE. Memoires d' Afrique (1892—r 896). Paris, 1899. Map: "Carta generale della colonia Eritrea" (1 : 1,000,000). BASSET, RENE. "Etudes sur l'histoire d'ilthiopie," Journal asiatique (Paris), 7th ser , XVII (1881), 315 - 434 ; XVIII (1881), 93-183, 285-389. Contains (XVIII, 293-324) a "Chronique ethiopienne" (a French translation of the chronicle of the reign of Jesus I) begun by the imperial secretary Haouarya Krestos (French transliteration), killed in battle in 1698, and continued by the next secretary, Za-Ouald (Fr.). BECKINGHAM, C. F., and HUNTINGFORD, G. W. B., trs. and eds. Some Records of Ethiopia, 1 646; Being Extracts from The History of High Ethiopia or Abassia, by Manoel de Almeida, together with Bahrey's History of the Galla. London, 1954. (Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., CVII.) BEGIN, EMILE AUGUSTE. Histoire des sciences, des lettres, des arts et de la civilisation dans Ie pays Messin. Metz, 1829. BENT, J. THEODORE. The Sacred City of the Ethiopians, Being a Record of Travel and Research in Abyssinia in 18j). London, 1893. Maps. BOGOSLOVSKI, M. Pyotr I MateriaVi dlya biografii (Peter I .
Materials for a Biography). Leningrad, 1940-48. 5 vols.
BONNAC, JEAN LOUISDUSSON , MARQUISDE . Memoire historique sur L'ambassade de France a Constantinople (early
eighteenth century), ed. Charles Schefer. Paris, 1894.
Contains (pp. 113 - 3 3 ) "Memoire de Monsieur de Ferriol
pour rendre compte de son ambassade" (to the Ottoman
Porte, Dec. 25, 1699, to 1708).
BRUCE , JAMES . Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in
the Fears 1768, 1769, 1771, 1772 and 177j. Edinburgh,
1790. 5 vols. Maps.
BUDGE , SIRE . A . WALLIS . A History of Ethiopia. London,
1928. 2 vols.
BURTON , SIRRICHARDF . First Footsteps in East Africa; or,
An Exploration of Harar. London, 1856.
BUVAT , JEAN . Journal de la Regence (171 J—1723), ed. Emile
Campardon. Paris, 1865. 2 vols.
CASTANHOSO, MIGUEL DE. SeeWHITEWAY , R . S . , t r . a n d ed.
The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in if^i—ij^j.
DANGEAU , PHILIPPE DE COURCILLON, MARQUIS DE. Journal,
ed. E. Soulie, L. E. Dussieux, P. de Chennevieres, P.
Mantz, A. de Montaiglon, avec les additions du due de
Saint-Simon. Paris, 1854—60. 19 vols. Vol. XVII ( 1717 -
19)-
Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed.M. Th. Houtsma, A. J. Wensinck,
et al. Leiden and London, 1911—38. 4 vols, in 8.
FOSTER , SIRWILLIAM , ed. The Red Sea and Adjacent
Countries at the Close of the Seventeenth Century, as
Described by Joseph Pitts, William Daniel, and Charles
Jacques Poncet. London, 1949. (Works Issued by the
Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., C.)
Gallereya Petra Velikogo v imperatorskoy publichnoy biblioteke (Gallery of Peter the Great in the Imperial Public
Library). St. Petersburg, 1903.
GANNIBAL , ANNA . "Gannibal'i. Novle dannie dlya ih biografiy" (The Gannibals. New Data for Their Biography),
pt. I. In Pushkin i ego sovremenniki (Pushkin and His
Contemporaries; Petrograd), V, 17—18 (1914), 205-48.
Pt. II (Catalogue of Abram Gannibal's Library) in ibid.,
V, 19-20 (1914), 270-309.
GASTFREYND , N . "Pis'ma Abraama Gannibala" (Abram
Gannibal's Letters), Vsemirniy vestnik (International
Messenger; St. Petersburg), XI (1903); separate edition,
1904 (fide Vegner).GOBAT, SAMUEL . Journal of Three Years' Residence in
Abyssinia, tr. Sereno D. Clark. New York, 1851 . Map
(evidently copied from Salt).
GOFMAN , M . , ed. "Dnevnik A . N . Vulfa. 1828-1831"
(Journal of A. N. Vulf. 1828 - 1831 ) . In Pushkin i ego
sovremenniki (Pushkin and His Contemporaries; Petrograd), VI, 2 1 - 2 2 (1915), i - S 1 0 -
GOLIKOV , IVAN . Anekdoti, kasayushchiesya do Petra V. (sic)
(Anecdotes Concerning Peter the Great). Moscow, 1798.
. Deyaniya Petra Velikogo, mudrogo preobrazitelya
Rossii, sobrannie iz dostovernih istochnikov i raspolozhennie po godam. (Acts of Peter the Great, Compiled
from Authentic Sources and Arranged Chronologically.)
1st edn., Moscow, 1788—89; 2nd edn., Moscow, 1837—43.
15 vols.
HAMMER - PURGSTALL , JOSEPH VON. Histoire de VEmpire
ottoman depuis son origine jusqiia nos jours, tr. (from
German) J . J . Hellert. Paris, 1835-43. 18 vols. Vol. XIII
(1699-1718).
HARRIS , MAJORW . CORNWALLIS . The Highlands of Aethiopia. London, 1844.. 3 vols.
HELBIG , H . VON. Russische Giinstlinge. Tubingen, 1809
(written 1787?). Russian tr. in Russkaya starina (Russian
Antiquity; St. Petersburg), L (1886), 1 4 - 180 .
HERVEZ , JEAN . La Regence galante: Les Chroniques du
XVIIIs siecle. Paris, 1909.
JOHNSON , SAMUEL . The Prince of Abissinia (The History of
Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, in later edns.). London,
1759. Russian version: Rasselas, prints abissinskiy.
Moscow, 1795.
JONES , A . H. M . , and MONROE , ELIZABETH . A History of
Abyssinia. Oxford, 1935.
KAMMERER , ALBERT . La mer Rouge, VAbyssinie et VArabic
depuis Vantiquite. Cairo, 1929—52. 3 vols, in 7. Vol. I l l :
La mer Rouge, i' Abyssinie et V Arabic au XFIe et XFIIe
siecles et la cartographic des Portulans du monde oriental.
Pt. I: " XVIe siecle. Abyssins et Portugais devant l'lslam."
Pt. II: " XVIIe siecle. Les Jesuites portugais et l'ephemere
triomphe du catholicisme en Abyssinie ( 1603 - 1632 ) . "
Pt. I l l : " L a Cartographie du monde oriental, mer Rouge,
ocean Indien et Extreme-Orient jusqu'au XVIII e siecle.
Cartographes portugais et franca is."
KORB , JOHANNGEORG . Diary of an Austrian Secretary ofJ64
Legation at the Court of Czar Peter the Great, tr. (from
Latin; Vienna, 1700) Count Charles MacDonnell. London, 1863. 2 vols.
LECLERCQ, HENRI. Histoire de la Regence pendant la
minorite de Louis XV. Paris, 1921. 3 vols. Vol. I, ch. 17.
LEFEBVRE, THEOPHILE; PETIT, A.; QUARTIN-DILLON, R., and
VIGNAUD . Voyage en Abyssinie execute pendant Ies annees
1840, 1841, 1842, 1843. Paris, 1845—51. 6 vols.
Pt. I (vols. I, II): "Relation historique," by Lefebvre.
Pt. II (vol. Ill): "Itineraire," etc., by Lefebvre.
LE GRAND or LEGRAND, JOACHIM. Voyage historique
d'Abissinie, du R.P. Jerome Lobo de la Compagnie de
Jesus, traduite du Portugais, continuee et augmentee de
plusieurs dissertations, lettres et memoires. Paris and
La Haye, 1728.
LONGINOV, MIHAIL. "Abram Petrovich Gannibal," Russkiy
arhiv (Russian Archive; Moscow), II (1864), 218—32.
LUDOLF, JOB (HIOB LEUTHOLF). Historia aethiopica. Frank
fort, 1681. And the commentary to it (Ad suam Historiam
aethiopicam antehac editam commentarius). Frankfort,
1691. (Seen in quotations and in a French version.) His
map (in Kammerer) was made from the accounts of
Portuguese Jesuits and pub. 1684 in the 2nd edn. of the
English tr. of the Historia. It was engraved as late as 1728
for Le Grand's edn. of Father Lobo's narrative.
MARAIS, MATHIEU. Journal de Paris, 1721-1723. In Revue
retrospective; ou, Bibliotheque historique (Paris), 2nd ser.,
VII-IX (1836-37).
MATHEW, DAVID. Ethiopia: The Study of a Polity, 1^40-
193 J. London, 1947.
MODZALEVSKI, B. "Rod Pushkina" (Pushkin's Ancestry). In
S. Vengerov's edn. of Pushkin's works, vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1907. Posthumously repub. with some corrections,
Leningrad, 1929.
MUNZINGER, WERNER. Vocabulaire de la langue tigre.
Leipzig, 1865.
OLDEROGGE, D., ed. Abissiniya (Efiopiya). Sbornik statey
(Collected Papers). Moscow and Leningrad, 1936. Of
little interest.
OPATOVICH, S. "Evdokiya Andreevna Gannibal, pervaya
zhena Abraama Petrovicha Gannibala. 1731—1753"
(Evdokiya Andreevna Gannibal, Abram GannibaFs First
Wife), Russkaya starina (Russian Antiquity; St. Peters-16 5
burg), XVIII (1877), 69-78.
PEKARSKI, PYOTR. Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre
Velikom (Russian Science and Literature in the Era of
Peter the Great). St. Petersburg, 1862. 2 vols. (Vol. I
seen in excerpts.)
PERRCJCHON , JULES . "Notes pour l'histoire d'Ethiopie: L e
regne de Iyasu (Ier)> roi d'Ethiopie de 1682 a 1706,"
Revue semitique (Paris), IX (1901), 161—67.
PETER I. Pis'ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikogo
(Letters and Documents of Emperor Peter the Great).
Vols. V and VI. St. Petersburg, 1907 and 1912 .
. Zhurnal Hi podyonnaya zapiska (Journal or Diary).
Pt. I (1698-1714). St. Petersburg, 1770.
. See also Gallereya Petra Velikogo.
PEZHEMSKI , PYOTR . "Panorama Irkutskoy gubernii" (Panorama of the Province of Irkutsk), pt. II, Sovremennik (The
Contemporary; St. Petersburg), XXII (1850), 1 - 3 8 .
PIOSSENS , CHEVALIERDE . Memoires de la Regence. Paris,
1749. 5 vols. Vol. II.
PoiRIER , ABBEF . J . Metz. Documents genealogiques, 1561—
1792. Paris, 1899.
PONCET , CHARLES . Relation abregee du voyage que M.
Charles Poncet fit en itthiopie en 1698, 1699 et 1700. In
Lettres edifiantes et curieuses, ecrites des missions etrangeres,
par quelques missionaires de la C l e de Jesus. Vol. IV, pp.
251-443. Paris, 1713 . English version: A Voyage to
Aethiopia, Made in the Years 1698, 1699, and 1700, tr.
anon, (from the French of a lost 1st edn., 1704, of Poncet's
account). London, 1709.
——. See also FOSTER , SIRWILLIAM , ed. The Red Sea and
Adjacent Countries.
PUSHKIN , ALEKSANDR . Polnoye sobranie sochineniy (Complete Works). Akademiya nauk, Leningrad, 1937—50,
1959. 17 vols, in 20.
Rukoyu Pushkina. Nesobrannie i neopublikovannie
teksti (By Pushkin's Hand. Uncompiled and Uncollected
Texts), ed. and annot. M. Tsyavlovski, L . Modzalevski,
and T. Zenger. Leningrad, 1935. "Biografiya A. P.
Gannibala," pp. 34-59. German text of biography, pp.
43—49; first published; annot. by Zenger.
Russkiy biograficheskiy slovar' (Russian Biographical Dictionary). St. Petersburg, 1896 - 1913 . Set seen has 25 vols.,
with " V " and " M " missing.SALT, HENRY. "Mr. Salt's Narrative." In Valentia, George,
Viscount. Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red
Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt. 4 vols. London, 1811. Vol. II,
pp. 421-89; vol. Ill, pp. 1-249.
. A P r oyage to Abyssinia and Travels into the Interior
of That Country, Executed under the Orders of the British
Government in the Years 1809 and 1810. London, 1814.
Another edn., Philadelphia, 1816. With a map of Abyssinia (not present in the Cornell University library copy
of the 1814 edn.).
SHMURLO, E. "Gannibal." In Brokgauz [Brockhaus] and
Efron Entsiklopedickeskiy slovar (Encyclopedia). Vol.
VIII. St. Petersburg, 1892.
STARKJE, ENID. Arthur Rimbaud in Abyssinia, Oxford, 1937.
SUMNER, B. H. Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire
Oxford, 1949.
TURAEV, B., tr. Abissinskie hroniki XIf-Xf r I vv. (Abyssinian Chronicles of the XIV—XVI Centuries), tr. from
Ethiopian. Moscow and Leningrad, 1936.
U. S. ARMY MAP SERVICE. Asmara (1 : 1,000,000). No.
100052. Washington, D. C., Feb., 1943.
USTRYALOV, N. Istoriya tsarstvovaniya Petra Velikogo (A
History of the Reign of Peter the Great). Vol. Ill, St.
Petersburg, 1858; vol. IV, pts. 1 and 2 (Appendixes),
bound separately, St. Petersburg, 1863.
VALENTIA, GEORGE, VISCOUNT. Foyages and Travels to . . .
Abyssinia . . . See SALT, HENRY. "Mr. Salt's Narrative."
VEGNER, M. Predki Pushkina (Pushkin's Ancestors). [Moscow], 1937. A very poor compilation.
VINOGRADOV, L.; CHULKOV, N., and ROSANOV , N. A. S.
Pushkin ν Moskve. Sbornik statey (A. S. Pushkin in
Moscow. Collected Papers). Moscow, 1930. (Trudi
Obschestva Moskovskoy oblasti VII.)
VULF, ALEKSEY. See GOFMAN, M., ed. "Dnevnik A. N. Vulfa.
1828-1831."
WHITEWAY, R. S., tr. and ed. The Portuguese Expedition to
Abyssinia in 1541-1 Slh a s Narrated by Castanhoso.
London, 1902. (Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society,
2nd ser., X.)16η
Abram Gannibal
Index
A Anna Ivanovna j Ioannovna,
empress, 110 & n, 154
Abbadie, Antoine d': Des Con- Anna Leopoldovna, empress,
quetes faites en Abyssinie, 162 1 1 on
Abha, 121 Annenkov, P. V., see P., PUSH -
Abissinya. see Olderogge KINXANA : Pushkin
Abissinskie hroniki, see Turaev Annesley B a y , 121
Abora (amba), 161 Annibal, A. P., see Gannibal,
Abram arap / Petrov arap, see A. P.
Gannibal, A. P. Annibal, I. A., see Gannibal,
Abyssinia/.-ian (Ethiopia), I. A.
118 - 3 4 , 155 , i 3 7 n , 143 , 144, " Annibal , " Pierre Robert, 153
147, 152, 156, 157 - 6 1 Antalo, 124
Abyssinian Church, 128 Anuchin, Dmitri Nikolaevich,
Acosta/Dekosta,Jand', 146 & n 118 , 119 , 120 , 121 , 129, 152 ,
Acts of Peter the Great, see 158, 159
Golikov: Deyaniya Anville, Jean Baptiste Bour-
Adi Baro, 152 guignon d', 120
Adowa, 159 Arab / -ia / -ic, 117 , i 2 6 n , 127 ,
Adyam, see Jesus I 132 , 135 , 141 & n , 147
Africa / - a n , 108, 109, 116 , " Arab Petra Velikogo," see P.,
117, ll8, 132, 144, 156, 157, WORKS
158 , 159, 160 Armbruster, C. H.; Initia Am-
Ahmad ibn . . . ' Uthman , 162 harica, 162
AhmedIII , sultan of Turkey , Armenia, 132
137, 138, 141 Arouet, Francois Marie ("Vol-
Ahmed Pasha ( " Beehive " ) , 138 taire " ) , 150 ; Romans etcontes,
Aisne, 149 123 , 160 ; Voyages et aven-
Aksum, 123 , 127 , 129 tures d\ine princesse babylo-
Aleksandronevskiy Monastery nienne, 160
I -tir', 151 Asmara, 124 , i 3 o n
Aleksey Petrovich, tsarevich, Atbara, 121
see Alexis, Prince Athanasius, 127
Alexandria, 127 Augustus I I , king of Poland,
Alexis, Prince (s. of Peter I), 144
138-g Austria, i 3 6 n , 138
Ali Pasha, 138 Azov, 138 , 142
Almeida, Manoel de, 120 , 124,
1 on
3 > 162 R
Amazan, 160 ; see also Arouet: D
Voyages
America, 151 Bahafa , king of Abyssinia, 127
Amharic, 127, 152 Bahrey / Bahri : History of the
Anecdotes, see Scherer Galla, 162
" Anekdot , " see Bulgarin Ballantyne'sNovelist'sLibrary ,
Anekdoti, see Gilokov i22n
Angiolo, Jacopo d' (Angola Baltaji, Mohammed , 138
della Scarperia), 120 Baltic Region / Sea, 154IJI
Bant'ish-Kamenski, D. N., 114 ; historique sur Vambassade de Slovar1 dostopamyatnih lyu- France a Constantinople, 165 dey Russkoy zemli (Diction- Bosnia, 141 ary of Distinguished People of Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, 151 ; the Russian Land), 162 Discours sur Thistoire univer- Barataria (in Cervantes), 145 selle, 153 Baratieri, Oreste, 124 ; Mem- Brockhaus / Russ. Brokgauz, oires d*Afrique, 162 and Efron , 167 ; see also P., Baratinski, Evgeniy Abramo- PUSHKINIANA : I Forks 'ed. Venvich, 156 gerov) Baruskov, N. P., 157 Bruce, James (traveler), 120, Basset, Rene , 127 , 129, 130, 124, 128, 134, 159 ; Travels, 151 , 161 , 162 131-2, l65 Beckingham, C. F., and Hun- Budge, Sir E. A. Wallis, 130 , tingford, G. W . B., 123 , 129, 131 ; History- of Ethiopia, A, 130 ; Some Records of Ethi- 163 opia, 162 B u g River, i 3 7 n Begin, Emile Auguste, 149; Biihren, see Biron Histoire . . . de la civilisation Bulaq, 134 dans Ic pays Messin, 162 Bulgarin, Fadey / Faddey Yen- Belessa River, 121 , 122 ediktovich, 156 ; " Byron ' s Belidor, Bernard Forest de, lordship," 156 149; Sommaire d'un cours Burton, Sir Richard F.: First d'architecture militaire, 149 Footsteps in East Africa, 163 Bellegarde, fort de, 153 Buvat, Jean- Journal de la Belus, King, 160; see also Regence, 163 Arouet: Voyages Byron / Russ. Bayron, George Bent, J . Theodore, 121 , 158 , Gordon, Baron, 156 159 ; Sacred City of the Ethiopians, The, 162 Bevillon, 160 Biografiya A. P. Gannibala Caesar, Gaius Julius, 153 (anon.), see Gannibal, Abram, Cairo, 132 , 135 , 134 German biography of Carthage, 152 Biron / Biihren, Ernst Johann, Cashaat, 122 110 & n Castanhoso, Mignel de, 163 , Bizan / Bizen, see Debra 167 "Blackamoor of Peter the Catalonia, 149 Great , " see P., WORKS : " Arap Catherine I, empress, n o n , Petra Velikogo" 139, 154 Black Sea / Chyornoe More / Catherine II, empress, 110 & n , Pontus Euxinus, i07n 111 Bogoslovski, M. M.: Pyotr I, Caucasian race, 116 , 117 , 157 142-5 Chad, Lake , 156 Bondi, S. M., see P., PUSH - Champiere Island, 149 KINIANA : Works Chardin, Jean, 151 Bonnac, Jean Louis Dusson, Chateaubriand, Viscount Fran- Marquis de, I 3 7 n ; Memoire cois Rene de, 151
I72
Chennevieres, P. de, 163 Deyaniya Petra Velikogo, see
China / -ese, 145 , 154 Golikov
Christian / -ity / -iie, 127 - 8 , Diary, see Vulf , Aleksey
131 , 132, 134, 138, 142, 144 Diary of an Austrian, see Korh
Christina Eberhardina, queen Dictionary of Distinguished
of Poland, 144 People, see Bantish-Kamen-
Christos, Gella / Krestos, R a s ski: Slovar'
Ce'ela, 123 , 161 Dioper, Andrey, 154
Christos, Haouarya, 162 Dioper, Eudoxia / Evdokia, sec
Christos, Keba, i 3 o n Gannibal, Eudoxia
Chronique ethiopienne (Krestos Discours sur Vhistoire ltnivcrand Za-Ouald), 162 selle, see Bossuet
Chulkov, N. P . , 167 Dixan, 121 , 131
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 153 Dnevnik, see Vulf , Aleksey
Clark, Sereno D . , 164 Dobarwa, see Debarwa
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Dolgoruki, Prince Vladimir
Kubla Khan, 161 Lukich, 150
Constantinople, l o g , 115 , 116 , Dolgorukov, see Dolgoruki
117 , 118 , 134 - 7 , 140, 141 & Dongola, 152
n, 142, 147 , 148 Dunkerque, 148
Contemporary, The, see Sovre- Dussieux, L . E , , 163
mennik
Corneille, Pierre, 151
Cornell University Library , JT,
108, 167
Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien, Ecole d'Artillerie, see L a Fere;
151 Metz
Cyrillic, 11911 Egypt / Egyptian, 117 , 133,
i_57
Q Elizaveta Petrovna, empress,
110 & n, 112 , 115 , i 4 6 n , 154 -
D . , Countess Lenore de, 150 ; 155
see also P., WORKS: " Arap Encyclopaedia of Islam, 163
Petra Velikogo " Endorta(Tigre-Endorta), 12411,
D a Costa, Mendez, i 4 § n 129, 130 , 131
Daltaban the Serbian, 137 - 8 England, i 4 6 n
Dangeau , Philippe de Courcil- Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar'
Ion, Marquis de: Journal, 163 (Brockhaus & Efron Encyclo-
Daniel, William, 163 pedia), 167
Debarwa, 121 , 123, 128, 129, Estrees, Francois Annibal,
i3on, 132, 133, 152, 158-9, Duke d \ 153
161 Ethiopia, see Abyssinia
Debra Bizan / Monastery of Ethiopia, see Mathew
Bizen, i 3 o n Etudes sur Vhistoire d'Ethiopie,
Dekosta, Y a n , see Acosta see Basset
Denmark , 149 Eugenia owariensis, 124
Des Conquetes faites en Abys- Euphrates River , 160
sinie, see Abbadie Euxine Sea, see Black SeaJ
p Gannibal; P.'s grandmother),
111, 112
Fares, Ras, 127 , 130 , 131 Gannibal , Nadezhda (daughter
Fasilidas (s. of Jesus I), 161 of Osip), see Pushkin , Nadezh-
Fasilidas (s. of Susneyos), 128 da
Figlyarin ( = Bulgarin ) , 155, Gannibal, Osip (son of Abram ;
156 ; see also Bulgarin P.'sgrandfather ) , 111-12,
First Footsteps in East Africa, 154
see Burton Gannibal, Pyotr Abramovicli
Formosante, 160 ; see also (P.'s granduncle), 111 , 113 &
Arouet: Voyages n, 117
Foster, Sir William : Red Sea Gannibal, YakovAbramovich ,
and Adjacent Countries, The, 112
163 Gastaldi, Jacopo, 120
France / French, 110 , 132 , 133 , Gastfreynd, N., 163
134, 148 - 5 1 , 152, 153, 155 " Gaurekos " / Gyorgis /
Franks, 131 Guirguis, 119 , 129 - 3 0 & n
Frumentius, 127 Geez language, 130 , 152
German, 157
Gesckichte des osmanischen
Q. Reiches, see Hammer -
Purgstall
Galla (tribe), 130 , 158 Gnacsitares, 151
Gallereya Petra Vehkogo (Gal- Gobat, Samuel , 123 ; Journal,
lery of Peter the Great), 163 164
Gannibal, (General) Abram / Goldsmith, Oliver: Vicar of
Avram Petrov / Abram Pet- Wakefield, The, i 2 2n
rovich / Pyotr Petrov (P.'s Golikov, I. I., 145 ; Anekdoti . . .
great-gTandfather), 107 - 6 7 ; Petra Velikogo (Anecdotes . . .
German biography of (ed. [about] Peter the Great , 164 ;
Zenger , m Rukoyu Pushkina), Deyaniya Petra Velikogo
109, 112 - 1 9 , 123 - 6 > 127, (Acts of Peter the Great ) ,
1
3 4 - 6 > »39-+°> ' 4 4 ; ' 4 5 ; H7> l6
4
149 , 151 , 152 , 157 , 166 Golitsi'n, Prince DmitriMihayl -
Gannibal, AnnaSemyonovna , ovich, 137
163 Golovin, Count Fyodor Alek-
Gannibal, Christina ( Abram ' s seevich, 142
2nd wife ; P . ' s great-grand- Gondar, 129 , 132
mother), 111 , 113 , 154 Gospel, 127
Gannibal, Eudoxia (daughter " Gragne " / Gran' / Gran j
of Andrey Dioper; Abram ' s Gaurane , see Muhammad
wife), 154, 165 Ahmed
Gannibal, Isaak Abramovich , GreatBritain , see England
112, 157 Grech , Nikolay Ivanovicli ,
Gannibal, L t . G e n . Ivan Zapiski tnoey zhizni (Mem-
Abramovich, 110 - 1 1 oirs of MyLife ) , 156 ; see also
Gannibal, Maria (daughter of Severnaya pchela
Aleksey Pushkin , m . Osip Greek, 153M
Greek Catholic / ism / Russ. History of Abyssinia, see Jones
Pravoslavni'y, 128 & Monroe
Grodno, 143 History of Ethiopia, see Budge
Guirguis, Asma, 13011 History of High Ethiopia or
Guirguis, Bahr-negus, see Abassia, see Beckingham &
"Gaurekos" Huntingford
Gyorgis, 130 , 161 History of the Reign of Peter
the Great, see Ustryalov:
H Istoriya
Holland, 146 & n, 148, 156
Hamalmal, 152 Houghton Library , see Harvard
Hamasen / Hamazen, 119 , 120, University
iB8 Houtsma, M . T h . , 163
Hamites, 158 Hungary, i37n
Hamito-Semitic, 116 , 157 Huntingford, G. W . B., see
Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph Beckingham
von, i 3 7 n ; Histoire de Vempire ottoman, L', 164,
Hannibal / Fr. Annibal / Russ. J-
Gannibal, 117 , 1 ^ 2 , T1
Hannibal, Awraam Petro- '*'< '58;
, ' , .•> see also P., WORKS : " Arap
witsch, see Gannibal, Abram petj Vel'ko 0 "
Hannibal'sHighway , 153 . .a 1
°
Haracrue ( = Garffara?), 1 2 s T j^J
Harris, W. Comwallis: High- ^ma Amhanca, see Armbruslands of Aethiopia, 164 T , ..
vt j • tt 1. international Messenger, see
Harvard TT University: Houghton . „ ., a
'
T o ' semirniyJ vestnik
Library , 100 Tr. . _
Hasan Pasha, 138 slTl'Sr
Hawaiian Islands, i 2 4 n ^
Heimkehr, Die, see Heine ^ / Itallan ' 139 ' 146n, 153,
Heine, Heinrich, 126 ® r
tt li - tt ' ,, Ivan V (brother ol and coruler
Helbig, H. von, 114 , 150 ; with P ter II lion
Russische Giinstlinee, 164 _ ''
Hellert, J . J . , 164 Ivanov, Avtonom, H 5
Hervez, Jean : Regence galante,
La, 164 J
Herzegovina, 141
Highlands of Aethiopia, see Janizaries / Janizeries / Russ.
Harris Yanichari, 134
Histoire . . . de la civilisation Jesus I the Great / Adyam
dans le pays Messin, L\ see Sagad I , emperor of Abyssinia,
Begin 129, 130 - 1 , 132 , 160, 162 ,
Histoire de la Regence, L\ see 166
Leclerccf Jidda, 133 , 138
Histoire de Vempire ottoman, Joachim (jester of Peter I), 146
L\ see Hammer - Purgstall John I , emperor of Abyssinia,
Historia aethiopica, see Ludolf 128, 129NS
Johnson, Samuel, 160 ; Ras- Lagan ' , see Lahann
selas, 122 - 3 & n > 164 Lagona / Lagon / Lahon , see
Jones, A. H. M • History of Lahona
Abyssinia, A, 164 LagonaRegion (equatorial
Jonson (son of aLivonian Africa), 156
architect), 147 & n Lahaina, 124 - 5
Journal, see Dangeau ; Peter I: Lahaina (Hawaii), 12411
Zhurnal LahamRiver , see Mai
Journal asiatiquc, 162 Lahama, 124n
Journal de la Regence, see Lahann (Abram Gannibal's
Buvat sister), 110 & n, 1 1 q, 125 - 7 ,
1
Journal de Pans, see Marais 34i ' 6 °
Journal o f . . . Residence in Lahen (Abyssinian general),
Abyssinia, sec Gobat 127
Julian Calendar, 10911 Lahia Dengel, 127
JyasuI, sec Jesus I Lahona / Lagona / Lagon,
118—19, 1 24, 125
Lahontan , Baron Louis Arm a n d de Lorn d'Arce de:
Tr , .,,, „ , ,, Voyage du baron de Lahontan
Kalailikoz, Pasha, 1=18 , ,, . , .
,, .,, „ dans l Amerique septentrion-
Kammerer , Albert, 120 , 100, ,
ale 1 ^ l
165 ; La Mer Rouge, I'Abrs- T i-u 1 c ,,
. . . " - Lahbala , emperor 01 Abyssinia,
sime, etc., 164
Karlowitz Treaty , i ^ 6 n - * 7 T
, Laon , 140
Kassala, 121 T . ,
. .. , . L a w , John, 150
Kazan / Kazan , 14611, 154 Layahan 127
Kazdugli, 0
Mustafa Kiaya, 134 T , ' TT' rr. , ,
... Leclercq, Henri : lhstoire de
Kiev, 143 ^ ence 16^
Korb, JohannGeor ee : Diary of T r .3 .
' . . ,, Leiebvre , i heophue, 120-1,
an Austrian . . . at the Court '
1 en
of Czar Peter the Great, 164 - 5 ^
m c, 165
Korovm, Mepan, 140 T i , T , .
,, . ,T r 7 c. LeGrand , Joachim , 133 , 1 J3 4 :
Krestos, Haouarya, 162 ; see T- . . .
also Christos loyagehzstortque, 123,124,
Kronstadt, 156 Leningradskaya Publichnaya
Aubla Akan, see Coleridge 0-1.1- ^ i c^ r> ^
Biblioteka (PB), see St. Peters-
Kucheibecker, Wilhelm von, , „ , , , ,
K Vi 'Vi
ixVUllCl V
D6Kvl" /burg :\ Publichnaya Biblioteka
T"1~0
Kuprulu , Hussein, 137 & n T • , , , ,,,„,
v i>i! ! . , , , Leranska Jy a Biblioteka ( M B ) ,
Kyuhel beker / Kucheibecker, ,T ^
,, ,, , . , , see Moscow: Publichnaya
\ 1 gel m Kariovich / W d- Biblioteka ( M B )
helm, i 2 ^ n T ,x
J
Lenita / Lenta, 143 - 4
Lenore , Countess de D . , 150 ;
L see also P . , WORKS: " Arap
Petra Velikogo"
L a Fere, 139, 149; Ecole Lepanto, 138
d'Artillerie, 149 L e Perthus, 153Ij6
Lestocq, Count JeanArmand Charles Leopold, Duke of,
de, 146 & n - 4 7 & n lion
Lestok, Ivan / Hermann , see Mediterranean, 135
Lestocq Melakotawit, queen of Abys-
Leutholf , see Ludolf sinia, 129
Livonia, 113 , I 4 7 n Mernoire kistorique sur Vam-
Lobo, Jeronimo, 123 , 124, 165 bassade de France a Constan-
Logo, i i g , 120 , 122 , 123 - 4 , tinople, see Bonnac
125, 128, 158-9 Memoires d\4frique, see
Logon-Chuan, 158 Baratieri
Logote / Legote, 120—1, 122 , Me moires de In Regence, see
125 , igg Piossens
Louis X I V , king of France, 132 , Memoirs of My Life, see
134, 161 Grech: Zapiski
Louis X V , king of France, 1 1011, Mer Rouge, I'Abyssinie ct
148, 150 VArabie, La, see Kammerer
Louis (French translator), 12311 Merville, Michel Guyot de, 150
Ludolf, Job, 120 ; Historia Mesrah Island, 130
aethiopica, 165 Messenger of Europe, see Vest-
Lutheran, 154 nik Evropi
Metz, 139, 149, 153 ; Ecole
d'Artillerie, 149 - 5 0
]yj Metz, see Poirier
Mihaylovskoe, 109, 113 , 116 ,
Macalle, 124 155
Macaulay, James, 123 Minih / Munnich, Count
MacDonnell, Count Charles, Burkhard Christoph, 1 1 o & 11,
165 15+
Mai Belessan, see Belessa River Modialevski, B. L . , 165
Mai Laham / Laam , 124 Modzalevski, L . B . , 166
Maillet (French consul), 133 , Mohammedan , see Moslem(s)
134 Monnet, 160
Makarov, Aleksey Vasilievich, Monophysites, 128
139 Monroe, Elizabeth, 164
Malbazo, see " Petrus Aethiops" Montaiglon, A. de, 163
Malebranche, Nicolas de, 151 Moscow, 114 , 115 , 139 , 140,
Mantz, P . , 163 142, 145 , 148 ; Publiehnaya
Marais, Mathieu: Journal de Biblioteka (MB), 112
Paris, 165 Moslem(s), 117 , 118 , 127 , 128 -
Mareb River , 119 , 120, 121 , 129, 151 , 133 , 134 , 144, 156 ,
122, 124, 128, 157 159
Massawa / Masuah Island, Moya rodoslovnaya, see P . ,
i3on, 131, 132, 133 WORKS
Masuah, see Massawa Mozemleks (in Lahontan), 151
Mathew , David : Ethiopia, 165 MuhammadAhmed ibn Ibra-
Mauro, Fra, 120 him el Ghazi ( " Gran " ) , 128 ,
Mecca, 133 , 1 4 m 162
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Munnai River, 120, 124J77
Munnich, see Miriih P
Munzinger, Werner : Vocabulaire de la langue tigre, 1 65
Murad ben Magdelun / Paris / -ian, 132 , 159 , 141 , 148 ,
" Murat , " 132, 133, 134 15°
Mussulman, see Moslem(s) Paulitschke, Philippe, 119 , 162
MustafaII , sultan of Turkey , P B , see St. Petersburg : P u b -
133 , 137, 138, 141 lichnaya Biblioteka
My Pedigree, see P., WORKS: Pecherski, Andrey , see Mel-
Moya rodoslovnaya nikov
Pedigree of My Hero, see P . ,
WORKS : Rodoslovnaya moego
geroya
Pedigree of the Pushkins and
the Cannibals, see P., WORKS :
. ap es, 139 Rodoslovnaya Pushkinih
Nauka 1 hteratura v Kossn pri _ . , . _ ._x>„t -„\,
_ T, i 1 • Pekarski, Pyotr Petrovich, 1 51;
Petre, see Pekarski ,, , ,
' , Nauka i hteratura v D Kossupri
Negro(es), . 1 3 & n, > 1 a6 - 1 7 ,
0
^ Velikom {Russian128, 133 , 134, 140, 145, 15b, Science and Literaturein the
157
' .15° E r a of Peter the Great), 166
^ t ^ ^ . race > *57
6
Perruchon, Jules, 129 , 166
N e w Testament, 152 Persia 151
Nile River , 132 , 134 „ ? „ x
,T , r> c- Peter I the Great , tsar, 100 &
Northern Bee, see isevernaya „
n , n o & n , . 1 2 , , i 5 n , n 6e ,
117
Notes pour I'histoired'Ethiopie, > H'- H2>
Perruchon >49,• '53- '54.
150 , 164 ; Pis ma 1 bumagi
(Letters a n d Documents),
166 ; Zhurnal (Journal), 166
Q Peter I I , tsar, 1 1 on
Peter I I I , tsar, 1 1 on
Obel River , 121 , 124 Peter the Great and the Ottoman
Odessa, i 0 7 n , 109 Empire, see Sumner
Olderogge, D . : Abissiniya, 165 Petit, A., 165
Olenin, Aleksey Nikolaevich, Petrov, Pyotr Petrovich (Peter
156 I's godson), see Gannibal ,
Opatovich, S. I., 154 , 165 Abram
Opochka, 109 Petrovskoe, 113
Oriental, I 2 6 n " PetrusAethiops " (Pasfa
Orleans, Philippe, Duke of, Sayon Malbazo), 152
n o n , 148 , 149, 150 Pezhemski, Pyotr , 166
Oromota tribe, 158 Phoenicia, 127
Orthodox, see Greek Catholic Piossens, Chevalier de: Mem-
Osipov, Praskovia Aleksandro- oiresdela Regence, 166
n a (b. Vindomski / Windom- Pis'ma i bumagi, see PeterI the
sky, m . Vulf ) , i i 3 n Great
Ottoman Empire , see Turkey Pitts, Joseph, 163IJ8
Poirier, Abbe Francois Jacques, in Moscow (Pushkin v Moskve,
153 ; Metz, I66 Vinogradov, Chulkov, & Roz-
Polotsk, 143 anov), 167 ; Pushkin's Ances-
Poncet, Charles, 119 - 2 0 , 124 , tors (Predki Pushkina, Veg-
129 , 130 & n, 131 , 132 - 4 , ner), 167 ; IVorks ( 1906 - 1 5 ,
1
5®~9! 163 ; Relation . . . ed. Vengerov), 165 ( 1937 - 5 0 ,
du voyage, 166 1959, ed. Blagoy, Bondi, et
Popovo, 141 ah), 166
Portugal / Portuguese, 123 , Pushkin, Aleksey Fyodorovich,
127 - 8 , i30n, i46n, 165 111
Portuguese Expedition to Abys- Pushkin, Elizaveta ( L e v Sergesinia, see Whiteway evich's wife), 157
Predki Pushkina, see P., PUSH - Pushkin, Fy odor Petrovich, I L L
KINIANA ; Pushkin's Ancestors Pushkin, Konstantm (Grigoriy
Preobrazhenskiy Regiment , Pushka's son), 111
151 Pushkin, L e v Aleksandrovich
Prester John, 161 (P.'s grandfather), i n
Prince of Abissinia, The, see Pushkin, L e v Sergeevich (P.'s
Johnson: Rasselas brother), 109 , 157
Protestant, 128 Pushkin, Maria Alekseevna
Pskov / Pskovan, 109, 12611, (m. Osip Gannibal), see Gan-
155 nibal, Maria
Pushka, Grigoriy (ancestor of Pushkin, Nadezhda (Osip Ganthe Pushkins), 111 nibal's daughter, Sergey
Pushkin, Aleksandr Petrovich Pushkin'swife , P.'s mother),
(P.'s great-grandfather), 111 111 , 157
PUSHKIN, ALEKSANDR Pushkin, Pyotr (descendant of
SERGEEVICH Konstantin, ancestor of P.'s
LETTERTO : Osipov, P., 1 i3n; parents), 111
WORKS: " Arap Petra Veliko- Pushkin, Sergey Lvovich (P.'s
g o " ( " T h e Blackamoor of father), 111 , 112
Peter the Great " ) , 113 - 4 , Pyatnitski Church, 144
i i 6, 141 , 150 , 155 , 158 ; Pyotr I, see Bogoslovski
Moya rodoslovnaya (My Ped- Pyrenees-Orientales, 153
igree), 155 - 6 ; Rodoslovnaya
rnoego geroya (Pedigree of
My Hero), 117 ; Rodoslovnaya Q
Pushkinih i Ganibalov (Pedigree of the Pushkins and the Quartin-Dillon, R . , 165
Gannibals), 113 , 117 ; " Table
Talk , " 145 - 6 ; PUSHKINIANA:
In Pushkin's Hand (Rukoyu R
Pushkina, ed. Tsyavlovski, L .
Lodzalevski, & Zenger), 166 ; Racine, Jean , 151
Pushkin (Annenkov), 114; Ragusa, 140, 141 , 142, 143
Pushkin and His Contem- Raguzinski, see Vladislavichporaries {Pushkin i ego sovre- Raguzinski
menniki), 163 , 164 ; Pushkin Rami Pasha, 138Rasselas, 125 , 160, 161 ; see Russkiy arhiv \Russian Aralso Johnson. Rasselas chives), 165
Red Sea, 121 , 13011, 151 , 132 , Russkiy biograficheskiy slovar'
133, 135 (Russian Biographical Die-
R e d Sea and Adjacent Conn- tionary), 166
tries, see Foster
Regence galante, La, see
Hervez
Relation abregee du voyage . . . S
en Ethiopie, see Poncet
Revel / Tallin, 112 , 113 , 146 Saad, GrandSherif , 153
Revue retrospective, 165 Sacred City of the Ethiopians,
Revue semitique, 1 66 The, see Bent
Rezanov, Gavrila, 149 Sagad I, Malak, emperor of
Rimbaud, Arthur, 132 Abyssinia, 152
Rimbaud in Abyssinia, sec Sagad I I I , sec Susneyos
Starkie Saillant, Marquis de, 1 50
Rodoslovnaya mocgo geroya, St. Basil Order, 143
see P., WORKS St. Petersburg / Petersburg /
Rodoslovnaya Pushkinih i Ga- Russ. Sankt Peterburg / Petnibalov, see P., WORKS rograd / Leningrad , l o g , 110 ,
Roman Catholicism, 128 J 4 1 , !45i 147 & 11, 134 ,
Rome / Roman, 117 , 118, 125, 155 ; Publichnava Bibhoteka /
127, 153 Imperatorskaya Publichnaya /
Rozanov, N. P., 167 Leningradskaya / imeni
Rukoyu Pushkina, see P., PUSH - Saltikova-Schednna f'PB), 151
KINIANA : In Pushkin's Hand Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouve -
RumyantsovMuseum , see roy, Duke de, 163
Moscow: Publichnaya Biblio- Saint - Yves , Georges, 119 , 120
teka Salt, Henry , 119 , 120 , 121 - 2 ,
12
Russian Ancientry, see Russ- 3 , 124, 125, 131 , 140, 164;
kaya starina Voyage to Abyssinia, 167
Russian Archives, see Russkiy Sanuto, Livio , 120
arhiv Scandinavia, 113
Russian Biographical Diction- Scarperia, see Angiolo
ary, see Russkiy biografiches- Schefer , Charles, 163
kiy slovar' Scherer, Johann Benedikt /
Russian Gazette, see Russkie Jean Benoit, 14711; Anecdotes,
vedomosti i46n—47
Russian Science and Literature Schoberg / Scheberch, Chrisin the Era of Peter the Great, tina Regine (m. Abram Gansee Pekarski: Nauka nibal), see Gannibal, Christina
Russische Giinstlinge, see Hel- Schoberg / Scheberch,
big Matthias, 154
Russkaya starina (Russian Schoonebeeck, Adriaan, 148
Ancientry), 154 , 164, 165 Selenginsk, 154
Russkie vedomosti (Russian Seraoe / Serae, see Serawe
Gazette), 162 Serawe, 120, 124Serawe Mts., 133 'p Serbia, 141 Seremai River , 121 , 122 " TableTalk , " see P., WORKS Severnaya pchela (Northern Tabor, Mt., 161 Bee, ed. Bulgarin & Grech), Tekla-Haymonot I, emperor of 156 Abyssinia, 129, 130, 160 Shangalla, 128 Tellez, Balthazar, 120 Sheba, Queen of, 157 Theophanus / Russ. Feofan, Shepelyov, Dmitri Andreevich, 143 115 & n Theophilus / Tewoflos, emper- Shmurlo, E . F., 146, 167 or of Abyssinia, 130 Siberia / Russ. Sibir', 110 , 153 Thevenot, Melchisedec, 120 Sinai, Mt., Monastery, 133 Tigre, 119 - 2 0 , 124, 127, 129, Sire, 161 130 & n, 131 , 132 , 135 , 152 , Slavic, 157 158, 139, 161 Slovar' dostopamyatnih lyudey Tigre-Endorta, see Endorta Russkoy zemlt, see Bantish- Tobolsk, 154 Kamenski Tokule, Mt., 120 , 121 Snitterfield, 160 Tolstoy, Count Ivan Andree- Solomon, King, 157 vich, 142 Somali, 128 Tolstoy, Count Pyotr Andree- Some Records of Ethiopia, see vich, 115 , 137 , 138 - g , 142 Beckingham Travels, see Bruce Sommaire d^un cours d'archi- Tserana, 121 tecture militaire, see Belidor Tsyavlovski-Zenger, Tatiana, Soulie, E . , 163 166 Soviet, 139 Turaev , B . A.: Abissinskie Sovremennik (The Contem- hroniki (Aybssinian Clironporary, first ed. P.), 166 icles), 167 Spain / Spanish, 149, 153 Turkey / Turkish, 115 , 116, Spanish America, 156 117 , 118 , 125 , I26n, 128 , Stambul / Russ. Tsargrad, see 129, 132, 133 , 134-9, 141 - 2 , Constantinople 144, 147 , H 8 i 152 i Starkie, Enid, 132 ; Rimbaud in Tyurikov (court jester), 147 Abyssinia, 167 Stratford on Avon, 160 Suakin, 133 U Sudan, 121 Suez, 133 , 135 Ukraintsev, Emelian Ignatie- Suida, 155 vich, 136 - 7 & n, 141 Sumner , B . H., 142 ; Peter the United States Army Map Ser- Grcat and the Ottoman Em- vice, 121 , 124 , 125 , 167 pire, 1 67 Ustryalov, Nikolay Gerasimo- Susneyos / Sagad I I I , emperor vich: Istoriya tsarstvovaniya of Abyssinia, 125 , 128 Petra Velikogo (History of the Sveaborg / Suomenlinna, i 2 3 n Reign of Peter the Great), 167 Sweden / Swedish, 143 Uvarov, Count Sergey Semy - Syria, 135 onovich, 156
l8l
y Voyage historique (TAbissinie,
see L e Grand
Valentia, George, Viscount: Voyage to Abyssinia, see Salt
Voyages and Travels, 167 Voyages and Travels, see
Vauban, Sebastien L e Prestre, Valentia
Marquis de, 149, 155 Voyages . . • dhme princesse
Vegner, M., i 2 g , 146, 163 ; see babylonienne, see Arouet
also P., PUSHKINIANA : Push- Vsemirnly vestmk (internakin's Ancestors tional Messenger), 163
Vengerov, S. A., see P., PUSH - Vsesoyuznaya Biblioteka imeni
KINIANA : fVorks Lenina , see Moscow: Publich-
Venice, i36n, 143 naya Biblioteka
Versailles, 160 Vulf , Aleksey Nikolaevich:
Vestnik Evropi (Messenger of Dnevnik (Diary), 116 , 164,
Europe, first ed. Kachenov- 167
ski), 145 Vulf, Praskovia (b. Vi'ndomski),
Vicar of Wakefield, The, see see Osipov, Praskovia
Goldsmith Vyazemski, Prince Pyotr An-
Vidal, 160 dreevich, 156
Vignaud, Henri, 165
Vilno, 109, 143
Vinogradov, L . A., 167 ; see VY
also P., PUSHKINIANA: Pushkin in Moscow Warsaw, 143
Vinogradov, V. V., 157 Wensinck, A. J . , 163
Vladislavich, Luka , 141 Whiteway , R . S.: Portuguese
Vladislavich-Raguzinski, Expedition to Abyssinia, The,
Count Savva Lukich, 139 - 4 3 , 163 , 167
148, 154
Vocabulaire de la langue tigre,
see Munzinger Z
Voltaire, see Arouet
Voyage du baron de Lahontan, Za-Ouald, 159 , 161 , 162
Le, see Lahontan Zapiski moey zhizni, see Grech
Voyage en Abyssinie, see Zenger, T . G . , see Tsyavlovski-
Lefebvre Zenger, T .