But now for the poetry part.
I first read the below poem in my first semester of college. I was eager and scared and confident that I had the scientific abilities to become an astrophysics major enrolled in late-night labs while also rowing on the crew team at four in the morning and generally adjusting to the Wellesley workload.
Cue a brief fling with insanity, lots of self-doubt, and a very confusing autumn. In the midst of all of this, I was also taking a class about nineteenth-century Russian literature, which quickly became my favorite class. While physics required that I problem-solve to arrive at specific, correct answers, literature let me explore the very subjective and flexible manners in which language intersects emotion. I couldn't understand how people felt entitled to translate Tolstoy, or why English-speakers like myself thought it was okay to read translations.
The point around which I'm circling is that there's something unspeakably empowering about the ways in which language allows us to make sense of the world and ourselves. This feeling, among lots of others, was at the heart of my decision to study writing. While I'm still holding my breath for the post-graduation world, I--perhaps naively--feel confident in my decision, if only because I know I'm a million times more fulfilled writing verse than I could ever be writing research papers about (admittedly incredible) exoplanets.
But that's enough blathering for a day. Here's the aforementioned poem by Alexander Pushkin, who's widely considered to be Russia's answer to Shakespeare. My favorite part of the poem is in stanza six, when Pushkin compares Autumn to a young girl dying of tuberculosis. I don't think it gets more Russian than that.
(a fragment)
"What then does not invade my drowsy mind?" -Derzhavin
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October's here already; the grove already
is shaking from bare branches its last leaves; the breath of autumn begins to ice the roadway, the stream still rushes gurgling past the mill, but the mill pond is frozen; my sporting neighbour hurries off with his pack to the far fields. The winter corn suffers his boisterous pleasure, his yelping hounds disturb the forest's slumber.
Now is my time. I bear no love for spring:
the floods, the mud, the stink - I feel unhealthy, my blood ferments, longing chokes heart and mind. Better harsh winter; then I can feel happy, I love the snows, and then beneath the moon the freedom of a sleigh ride, gliding swiftly, a fresh-faced girl, wrapped in sable furs, giving your hand a timid, passionate squeeze.
And what a joy to race across the mirror
of frozen ponds with sharp steel on your feet! And the excitement of those winter parties...! But there's a limit; the snow goes on for weeks and months, even a bear at length would suffer from boredom. After all, we can't devote a life to sleigh rides with these young Armidas or moping by the stove behind sealed windows.
Ah! gorgeous summer, I would love you, but
the heat, the dust, the flies, and the mosquitoes! You torture us; our souls, once rich, grow flat, we suffer like the barren fields, drought-stricken, just longing for some freshness, for a glass - that one thought fills our minds. We miss old winter, and having seen her off with cakes and wine, with ice and ice-cream we recall her reign.
People have harsh words for these days of autumn,
but, reader, they are dear to me, I love their unassuming light, their quiet beauty. Autumn attracts me like a neglected girl among her sisters. And, to be quite honest, she is the only one that warms my heart. She has her good points; whimsically dreaming and free from vanity, I find her charms appealing.
How can I put it? She perhaps appeals
as sometimes a young sufferer from consumption catches my eye. Unseen, her death awaits, and without protest, quietly she sickens; she cannot sense the yawning of the grave, but life fades from the lips that still are smiling; a rosy hue still plays around her eyes, today she is alive, tomorrow dies.
A mournful time of year! Its sad enchantment
flatters my vision with a parting grace - I love the sumptuous glow of fading nature, the forests clad in crimson and in gold, the shady coolness and the wind's dull roaring, the heavens all shrouded in a billowing mist and the rare gleams of sun, the early hoarfrosts, and distant grey-beard winter's gloomy portents.
Each autumn's coming makes me bloom anew;
my health is well served by the cold of Russia; I feel a new love for the old routines, sleep has its turn, and after it comes hunger; the blood runs light and cheerful through the veins, desires flock in - happy again, and youthful, I'm full of life again - my organism is like that ( pardon my prosaicism).
Tossing his mane, my steed carries his rider
over the open flatlands, and beneath his glistening hooves he rouses up the echoes in frozen valleys and cracks the ringing ice. But then the short day fades, a fire blazes in the forgotten hearth, now casting a bright flame, now crumbling slowly, while I sit there reading or give my drifting thoughts their hour of freedom.
And I forget the world, in blissful peace
I am sweetly lulled by my imagination, and poetry awakens in me then; my soul, hard pressed by lyric agitation, trembles, resounds and seeks as if in sleep to surface finally in free expression - and I receive a host of guests unseen, old-time acquaintances, fruits of my dreams,
And in my head thoughts spring into existence,
and rhymes dance out to meet them, and the hand stretches toward the pen, the pen to paper, and verse comes unimpeded pouring out. So a ship, motionless in motionless water, lies dreaming, then suddenly the sailors race and climb aloft, wind swells the sails, the vessel moves slowly out, bow cutting through billows,
and sails away. Where shall we sail to ...?
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I see better now. No dry eye ever finished this verse.
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