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PARTISAN REVIEW
jauntily went on his way, and I picked up the thread of my poem.
During the short time I had been otherwise engaged, something
seemed to have happened to such words as I had already strung
together: they did not look quite as lustrous as they had before
the interruption. Some suspicion crossed my mind that I might be
dealing in dummies. Fortunately, this cold twinkle of critical percep–
tion did not last. The fervor I had been trying to render took over
again and brought its medium back to an illusory life. The ranks of
words I reviewed were again so glowing, with their puffed out little
chests and trim uniforms that I put down to mere fancy the sagging
that I had noticed out of the comer of my eye.
Apart from credulous inexperience, a young Russian lyricist
had to cope with a special handicap.
In
contrast to the rich vocabu–
lary of satirical or narrative verse, the Russian elegy suffered from
a bad case of verbal anemia. Only in very expert hands and with the
very subtle aid of association and melody could it be made to trans–
cend its humble origin-the pallid poetry of eighteenth-century
France. True, in my day a new school of versification was in the act
of ripping up the old rhythms, but it was still to the latter that the
conservative beginner turned in search of a neutral instrument–
possibly because he did not wish to be diverted from the simple ex–
pression of simple emotions by adventures in hazardous form. Form,
however, got its revenge. The rather uniform designs into which early
nineteenth-century Russian poets had twisted the pliant elegy resulted
in certain recurrent couplings of words, or types of words (such as
the Russian equivalents of
«fol amour"
or
r<langoureux et revant")
which later lyricists could not shake off for a whole century.
In
an especially obsessive arrangement, peculiar to the iambic
of four to six feet, a long, wriggly adjective would occupy the first
four or five syllables of the last three feet of the line. A good tetra–
metric example would be
«ter-pi bes-chis-len-ny-e mu-ki"
(en-dure
in-cal-cu-la-ble tor-ments). The young Russian poet was liable to
slide with fatal ease into this alluring abyss of syllables, -for the illus–
tration of which I have chosen
beschislennye
only because it translates
well; the real favorites were such typical elegiac components as
«
tainstvennye"
(mysterious),
«
zadumchivye"
(pensive),
"utrachen–
nye"
(lost), and so forth. Despite its great length, a word of that kind
had but a single stress of its own, and consequently the penultimate
