Poetry
Кормчие звёзды
Not translated into English
Vyacheslav Ivanov · 1903
Opening lines
Вижу васъ, божественныя дали,
Умбрскихъ горъ синѣющій кристалъ!
Ахъ! тамъ сонъ мой боги оправдали:
Въявѣ тамъ онъ путнику предсталъ...
I see you, divine distances,
Blue-glimmering crystal of the Umbrian hills!
Ah! there the gods made my dream come true:
There, in waking life, it rose before the wanderer...
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from rvb.ru
Synopsis
The author's first book of verse, dedicated to the memory of his mother and placed under an epigraph taken from Dante's Purgatory. The poems, written in part before and during the Berlin years, draw their images from vanished cultures, Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Dionysus and his vine, the Colosseum, Dante's dark forest, Italian sonnets and Parisian epigrams. The language, nourished by archaisms and by eighteenth-century Russian poetry, seeks to approach a “language of the gods”.
Context
The book, printed in Saint Petersburg by Suvorin in 1902, bears the date 1903 in most of its copies; the author published it at his own expense, with the approval of the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, to whom one section is dedicated. Some critics reproached it for being bookish and nicknamed its author a modern Trediakovsky, after an eighteenth-century poet; Valery Bryusov, on the contrary, hailed in him a true artist.
Who it is for
Learned poems, laden with ancient references and archaic turns of phrase; no French or English translation of the collection.
Prizes and reception
The book with which the author entered Russian poetry, hailed by the most prominent critics as a new stage of Symbolism.