Poem of the Day: ‘A Winter Evening’

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is the foundation of Russian literature. No matter the place of Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy; the poets Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam. They all rest on Pushkin, building on the stones that he laid down.

It would be wrong to say that Pushkin is unknown to English readers. The verse novel “Eugene Onegin” is often named by critics. Such short stories as “The Queen of Spades” and “The Shot” get mentioned, along with the dramas “The Stone Guest” and “Mozart and Salieri.” But these are, in truth, more often gestured at than read.

Interestingly, however, his 1825 poem “A Winter Evening” has been translated into English at least ten times, including today’s Poem of the Day: a translation by Emily Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1866–1943), in her 1910 book “Russian Lyrics and Cossack Songs.” Bianchi was not the poet her aunt was, but she was competent at rhyme and meter, with the languages to undertake this small bit of Pushkin — having learned Russian during her brief and bad marriage to a Russian imperial horse guard she met in Bohemia in 1902.

In Pushkin’s Russian, the four eight-line stanzas are rhymed ababcdcd, but Bianchi simplifies by skipping the a and c rhymes, while keeping the four-beat trochaic lines of Pushkin’s tetrameter. In the old American classic, John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1866 “Snow-Bound” (a Poem of the Day last winter), the answer to the season’s snow is companionship and reading. For the Russian Pushkin, the answer is also companionship — and alcohol: “Thou true-souled companion dear, / Let us drink!” Sure, “Fearsome darkness fills the kitchen, / Drear and lonely our retreat,” but “Wine will fill our hearts with cheer.”