Nikolay Nekrasov
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Behold it once again, the old familiar place,
Wherein my fathers passed their barren, vacant days!
In muddy revels ran their lives, in witless bragging,
In little bullying ways, in gluttonies unflagging;
The swarm of shivering serfs in their oppression found
An enviable thing the master’s meanest hound;
And here to see the light of heaven I was fated,
And here I learned to hate, and bear the thing I hated;
But all my hate I hid within my soul for shame.
And I at seasons too a yokel squire became;
And here it was my soul, untimely spoilt and tainted.
With blessed rest and peace too soon was disacquainted;
Unchildish trouble then, and premature desires,
Lay heavy on my heart, and scorched it with their fires.
The days of a man’s youth in memory, ’tis notorious,
Are like a sumptuous dream, are trumpeted as glorious;
— Those beauteous memories file in order before me.
Only to fill my heart with anger and ennui.

Here is the dark, dark close. See, where the branches thicken
What figure glimpses down the pathway, sad and stricken?
Too well the cause I know, my mother, of thy tears;
Too well I know who marred and wasted all thy years.
For ever doomed to serve a sullen churl untender,
Unto no hopeless hope thy spirit would surrender;
To no rebellious dream thy timorous heart was stirred;
Thy lot, like any serf’s, was borne without a word.
No frigid soul was thine, I know, or void of passion,
But resolute, and framed in proud and lovely fashion;
And all the wrongs that still thy ebbing strength could bear
Thy last faint words forgave thy slayer, watching there!

And thou, too, with that sad mute sufferer partaking
Her dreadful lot, and all the outrage and the aching.
Thou also art no more, my heart’s own sister, mine!
Out of those doors by cur and servile concubine
Infested, thou must flee from shame unto disaster.
Commit thy lot unto a strange, an unloved master.
Aye, and rehearse afar the doom that fell on her.
Thy mother. Even he, the executioner.
Shuddered before thy bier, was once betrayed to weeping.
To see thee with that smile so cold and rigid sleeping.

— Now it is blind and blank, that mansion old and grey;
Women and dogs, buffoons and lackeys, where are they?
Gone: but, of old, I know not what oppression leaden
Weighed upon great and small, the weary heart to deaden.
— Unto the nurse I fled. But ah! the nurse! how smarted
The tears I wept for her, when all too heavy-hearted!
To hear her name may stir the springs of old emotion.
But long, how long ! has been extinct my heart’s devotion;
Chance memories arise to trace and trace again
How her insensate love and kindness were my bane;
And lo! my heart again with wrath and rancour swelling!

Nay, from those younger years of harshness and rebelling
No recollection brings one comfortable ray;
But all that from the first ensnared my life, and lay
Upon me like a ban irrevocably blasting,
All, all began at home, in this my birthplace. Casting
My gaze in loathing round, it gives me comfort still
To see that they have felled the dark pinewood, the chill
Shelter for tired men from summer heats reposing;
The fallows are burnt up, the herds are idly dozing
And hang their heads above the streamlet parched with drought;
The crazy mansion, void and sullen, bulges out.
Where once the long dull note of stifled lamentation
Chimed with the clash of cups and shouts of exultation;
Where he who ground the rest beneath him — only Jie
To live his life, or act, or draw his breath, was free.

Translated by O. Elton