Tanais Gallery
Isaac Levitan. Evening Bells.
1892.
Oil on canvas. 87 x 107,6.
The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
once said, “The basis of human happiness is the possibility to be together with nature, to see it and to talk to it”. Levitan was granted this happy feeling as hardly any other human being ever was.
Isaac Levitan is the greatest Russian landscape-painter and poet of the end of the 19th century; he is a craftsman of a soulful “landscape-mood”. An unusual seeing of light, which is one in a thousand, advertence to a movement, and imperceptible changes in nature life are peculiar for his dowry. The Levitan's name became symbolical long ago, and his work became the most completed and perfect soul of the Russian lyrical landscape idea.
Vyacheslav Ivanov.
The Eye of Eternity
January 1897.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Above white earth a single, single
Star burns
And draws one along a path of ether
To iself - there.
Oh, why is it so? In one steady gaze
All wonders dwell,
The mysterious sea of all life,
And the heavens.
That gaze is so close and so clear -
Behold it,
You, too, will be measureless and sublime -
Master of all.
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In 1818 Thomas Moore published his first collection of National Airs, a collection of songs which included his verses and musical scores by John Stevenson. The title of one verse from the Russian airs was Those Evening Bells with the subtitle Air: The bells of St.Petersburg.
Moore mentioned that the verse was based on a Russian original, but all attempts to find the original failed.
The most likely conclusion is that the verse is Thomas Moore's original creation loosely based on Russian-related themes.
Kozlov was a Russian poet in his own right, but also a prolific translator of contemporary English poetry (translating Byron, Charles Wolfe and Thomas Moore). His Russian text published in 1828 is more like an adaptation of the English original, as Kozlov used six-line stanzas instead of quatrains of the original. His adaptation is credited with greater elaboration of the context, grounding the abstractness of the original with specific examples.
When Kozlov published this verse, the original text was not mentioned. Combined with the fact that Moore's text claimed to be based on a Russian original, this brought some erroneous attributions (as early as in 1831) that Moore's verse is a translation of Kozlov's.
Thomas Moore.
Those evening Bells
Those evening bells! Those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells,
Of youth, and home, and that sweet time,
When last I heard their soothing chime.
Those joyous hours are pass'd away;
And many a heart, that then was gay,
Within the tomb now darkly dwells,
And hears no more those evening bells.
And so 't will be when I am gone;
That tuneful peal will still ring on,
While other bards shall walk these dells,
And sing your praise, sweet evening bells!
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Томас Мур.
Вечерний звон
Вечерний звон, вечерний звон!
Как много дум наводит он
О юных днях в краю родном,
Где я любил, где отчий дом,
И как я, с ним навек простясь,
Там слушал звон в последний раз!
Уже не зреть мне светлых дней
Весны обманчивой моей!
И сколько нет теперь в живых
Тогда веселых, молодых!
И крепок их могильный сон;
Не слышен им вечерний звон.
Лежать и мне в земле сырой!
Напев унывный надо мной
В долине ветер разнесет;
Другой певец по ней пройдет,
И уж не я, а будет он
В раздумье петь вечерний звон!
Translated from original by Ivan Kozlov
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