“It Was All So Recent…”. The Poem “To Russia” by Vladimir Gippius

Abstract

The author presents an analysis of Vladimir Gippius’s poem “To Russia” (in the manuscript of the first redaction of the unpublished collection “Eclipses of Stars”, the poem has the title The Lay of Igor’s Campaign). The poem was written at the beginning of World War I, presumably in the autumn of 1914. The text is reproduced from the publication in the collection War in Russian Poetry (1915). The analysis involves materials of a lecture on The Lay of Igor’s Campaign that Vladimir Gippius gave to his students at the Tenishev School. The poem is an artistic interpretation of the ancient text with free paraphrasing of some fragments. The poem contains a considerable number of references to its source and echoes of it. Gippius’s poem is compared with translations of other poets (V. A. Zhukovsky, L. A. Mei, A. N. Maykov). Special attention is paid to the original images and metaphors of Gippius’s text. For example, in other renderings there is no such expression as “the clear Don” (in the original: “the blue Don”). In Gippius’s poem, an eclipse of the sun is a good sign that opens rather than block Igor’s path, and foxes do not “bark” but “sing”. Gippius’s text also echoes poems from the cycle “On the Field of Kulikovo” by Alexander Blok. A short discussion of Gippius’s unpubliched poem “What is the noise of military weapons to me?” completes the analysis. In the first redaction of the collection “Eclipses of Stars”, this poem immediately follows The Lay of Igor’s Campaign and is latently associated with it. This poem was also written in the autumn of 1914.