Konstantin Balmont

• 1. Introduction

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  Konstantin Balmont once sent Leo Tolstoy a copy of his most celebrated book with a letter that read: "This book is a prolonged scream of a soul caught in the process of being torn apart." That sentence captures something essential about a man who would become the most popular poet in Russian Symbolism at the turn of the twentieth century, only to end his days in a refuge for Russian emigres in France, buried beneath a grey tombstone reading simply "Constantin Balmont, poete russe."

  Balmont was born at his family's estate, Gumnishchi, in Shuya, in what was then part of Vladimir Governorate. He died in Noisy-le-Grand on the 23rd of December 1942. In the decades between those two facts, he published dozens of poetry collections, translated Edgar Allan Poe and Percy Bysshe Shelley, was expelled from universities and banned from capital cities, attempted suicide twice, and maintained parallel families across two continents. He was a man who, in his own words, could not bring himself to study law because he was "living so intensely through the passions of my heart."

  What turned this provincial nobleman's son into the defining poetic voice of a generation? And why did that voice fall so swiftly from its heights? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Troubled Formation

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  Vera Nikolayevna, Balmont's mother, knew several foreign languages and was deeply engaged with literature and theater. She was the first critic her son ever faced, and when the ten-year-old Konstantin showed her his first two poems, her reaction was so harsh that he made no further attempt at writing poetry for the next six years.

  The family moved to Shuya in 1876, where Konstantin joined the local gymnasium. He later described that institution as "the home of decadence and capitalism, good only at air and water contamination." Despite this contempt, it was there that he discovered French and German poetry. He also joined a secret circle of students and teachers who printed and distributed proclamations for the radical group Narodnaya Volya. On the 30th of June 1886, the gymnasium expelled him for those political activities.

  Transferred to a Vladimir gymnasium, Balmont published his first three poems in the Saint Petersburg magazine Zhivopisnoe obozrenie in late 1885. According to biographer Viktor Bannikov, the event "was noticed by nobody except for his tormentor," meaning his mother, who promptly forbade him from publishing anything further. He graduated from that gymnasium in 1886 and enrolled in Moscow State University to study law, was arrested for involvement in student unrest, spent three days in jail, and was expelled. He returned to the university in 1889, suffered a nervous breakdown, and dropped out again. At the Demidov Law College in Yaroslavl he tried once more, quitting in September 1890. Formal education, he concluded, was finished.

  In February 1889 he married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina, the daughter of a Shuya factory-owner. The marriage was unhappy almost immediately. On the 13th of March 1890, Balmont jumped from a third-story window in a suicide attempt. He survived, but carried a limp and an injured writing hand for the rest of his life. The year of recovery that followed became, by his own account, a turning point: he experienced what he called "extraordinary mental agitation" and first envisioned what he described as his "poetic mission."

• 3. The Literary Godfather

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  In 1890, Balmont self-financed a debut collection called Collection of Poems. Its publication was made possible in part by the established writer Vladimir Korolenko, who had received a handwritten notebook of Balmont's verse from the young man's classmates. Korolenko sent back detailed and favorable criticism, praising the schoolboy's eye for detail while warning against occasional lapses in concentration. He advised the young poet to "trust that unconscious part of the human soul which accumulates momentary impressions." His letter ended: "Should you learn to concentrate and work methodically, in due time we'll hear of your having developed into something quite extraordinary." Balmont would later call Korolenko his "literary godfather."

  The book itself was a catastrophe. Disgusted with the reception, Balmont purchased and burned all the remaining copies. He wrote in 1903 that the failure was made worse by the people close to him: his university friends dismissed the work as "reactionary" and scorned its author for "betraying the ideals of social struggle."

  Korolenko continued to help. In September 1891 he wrote to Mikhail Albov, an editor at Severny Vestnik: "The poor guy is very shy; more editorial attention to his work would make great difference." It was Moscow University professor Nikolai Storozhenko who provided the most practical assistance at that point. "Were it not for him, I would have died of hunger," Balmont later remembered. The professor accepted his essay on Shelley and in October 1892 introduced him to the authors of Severny Vestnik, among them Nikolai Minsky, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius. The publisher Kozma Soldatyonkov commissioned Balmont to translate two major works on the history of European literature; those books, published in 1894 and 1895, fed him financially for three years.

  It was also in 1894 that Balmont first met Valery Bryusov, who was so struck by the young poet's "personality and his fanatical passion for poetry" that he soon became Balmont's closest friend.

• 4. Burning Buildings

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  Under the Northern Sky came out in 1894 and marked the real starting point of Balmont's literary career, with several critics praising his originality and versatility. In Boundlessness, published in 1895, saw him experimenting with the musical and rhythmical structures of the Russian language. Mainstream critics were cool, but the cultural elite hailed him as a gifted innovator.

  In 1896, Balmont married Yekaterina Alekseyevna Andreyeva, a well-educated woman from a rich merchant's family. The couple traveled through Western Europe that year. In the spring of 1897, Oxford University invited Balmont to read lectures on Russian poetry. He wrote to critic Akim Volynsky from England: "For the first time ever I've been given the opportunity to live my life totally in accord with my intellectual and aesthetic interests."

  Those European impressions fed his third collection, Silence, in 1898. After two years of continuous travel, he settled at Sergey Polyakov's Banki estate. In a letter to the poet Lyudmila Vilkina in late 1899 he wrote: "I write non-stop. My love of life grows and now I want to live forever. You won't believe how many new poems I've written: more than a hundred! It's madness, it's fantasy, and it's something new."

  The book in question was Burning Buildings, published in 1900. It became the apex of his legacy. In it, Balmont's Nietzschean individualism reached near-religious intensity. One representative line ran: "O yes, I am the Chosen, I am the Wise, I am the Initiate / The Son of the Sun, I am a poet, the son of reason, I am emperor." He sent a copy to Tolstoy with the letter about the soul being torn apart.

  Burning Buildings made Balmont the central figure of Russian Symbolism. He introduced melodic rhythms, abundant rhymes, and a method of organizing short lyric poems into larger narrative cycles. Bryusov later wrote: "For a decade he was a towering presence in Russian poetry. Others either meekly followed or struggled painfully to free themselves from his overbearing influence."

  In 1903, Let Us Be Like the Sun. The Book of Symbols came out to enormous acclaim. Alexander Blok called it "unique in its unfathomable richness." The memoirist Teffi recalled of that period: "Russia was passionately in love with him. Young men whispered his verses to their loved ones, schoolgirls scribbled them down to fill their notebooks."

• 5. Exile and Longing

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  In March 1901, Balmont took part in a student demonstration on the square before Kazan Cathedral, which Cossack units and police violently broke up. Days later at a literary event, he recited a poem called "The Little Sultan" that was an open attack on Tsar Nicholas II. The poem circulated widely in handwritten copies. As a result, Balmont was deported from the capital and banned for two years from living in university cities.

  On the 31st of December 1905, he fled to Paris to avoid arrest after participating in street unrest and, according to Yekaterina Andreyeva, carrying a pistol wherever he went. His pose as a political exile was widely mocked in Russia at the time; years later researchers found evidence that the Russian secret police had indeed classified him as a "dangerous political activist" and attempted to spy on him abroad. He returned to Russia only in 1913, after an amnesty marking the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty.

  The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 ended Balmont's Russian career for good. He had welcomed the February Revolution and even entered the competition for a new national anthem, but the October Revolution left him bitterly disappointed. In 1920, Anatoly Lunacharsky, urged by the Lithuanian diplomat Jurgis Baltrušaitis, granted Balmont permission to leave the country. Boris Zaitsev later argued that what Baltrušaitis did was to save Balmont's life; according to one account, a secret Cheka meeting had discussed his fate, and those demanding a firing squad were simply in the minority.

  On the 25th of May 1920, Balmont and his family left Russia permanently. In Paris he found himself caught between two hostile camps: radical emigres suspected him of being a Communist sympathizer because of his easy departure, while the Bolshevik press accused him of treachery. "Not a single other Russian poet in exile suffered so painfully from having been severed from his roots," the memoirist Yuri Terapiano later wrote. Balmont described his European life as existing "among aliens." In a December 1921 letter to Andreyeva he wrote: "Emptiness, emptiness everywhere. Not a trace of spirituality here in Europe."

  In the early 1930s, as financial support from the Czech and Yugoslav governments dried up, Balmont fell into poverty. He had to support three women. In April 1936, a charity event marking the 50th anniversary of his literary career was organized by a group of Russian writers and musicians abroad; among them were Ivan Shmelyov, Ivan Bunin, Boris Zaitsev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Mark Aldanov. He died on the 23rd of December 1942 at the Russian House, a refuge for Russian emigres, of complications from pneumonia.

• 6. The Man Behind the Pose

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  Those who knew Balmont personally collected contradictions. Boris Zaitsev, his closest friend and someone who gently mocked his eccentricities, recalled moments when Balmont "could be an altogether different person: very sad and very simple." Andrei Bely described a lonely and vulnerable man "totally out of touch with the real world."

  Teffi wrote that Balmont was a poseur, but that laughter gave him away: "Just like a child, he was always moved by a momentary impulse." Marina Tsvetaeva, who became a friend during the hard years of 1918 to 1920 in Petrograd, insisted he was "the kind of man who'd give a needy one his last piece of bread, his last log of wood." Mark Talov, a Soviet translator who was penniless in Paris in the 1920s, remembered finding money in his pocket after visiting Balmont's home; the poet, himself very poor, preferred anonymous generosity so as not to embarrass his guest.

  His private life was as complicated as his public one. Larisa Garelina's marriage to Balmont was severed early. She later married the journalist Nikolai Engelgardt; their daughter Anna Engelgardt became the second wife of the poet Nikolay Gumilyov. Balmont's second wife, Yekaterina Andreyeva, was described by Zaitsev as a "strong, healthy and loving" presence in whose hands Balmont led a "disciplined, working man's life." Their daughter Nina Balmont, later Nina Bruni, died in Moscow in 1989.

  From the early 1900s Balmont also maintained a relationship with Yelena Tsvetkovskaya, a mathematics student and passionate fan twenty years his junior. Their daughter Mirra was born in 1907, named after the poet Mirra Lokhvitskaya, who had died in 1905 and with whom Balmont had what he described as passionate platonic relations. Torn between the two households, Balmont attempted suicide a second time in 1909, again by jumping from a window. From 1919 he was also romantically linked with Dagmar Shahovskaya, who bore him two children, Georges in 1922 and Svetlana in 1925. He sent her letters or postcards almost daily; 858 of those survived. It was Yelena Tsvetkovskaya, however, who remained with him until his death. She died in 1943, one year after him.

  The publisher Sergey Sabashnikov remembered Balmont as "accurate, punctual, pedantic and never slovenly," adding that such accuracy made him "a very welcome client." Bryusov defended him differently: "He lives his everyday life as a poet, trying to discover each moment's full richness. That is why one shouldn't judge him by common criteria."

• 7. Translator and Composer

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  Balmont's translations outlasted many of his own poems in reputation. His rendering of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" into Russian became the text Sergei Rachmaninoff used as the basis for his choral symphony of the same name, Op. 35. Modern Russian literary scholars still regard Balmont's Poe translations as exemplary. The lawyer and philanthropist Prince Alexander Urusov, an expert in Western European literature, financed the publication of two of those Poe volumes.

  Among the composers who set Balmont's original poetry to music were Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Taneyev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, and Mikhail Gnessin. Balmont himself collaborated with Prokofiev on musical works during the First World War years. He also influenced Alexander Scriabin's Poeme de l'extase.

  In the 1890s he was already translating from German and French. During his European travels in the late 1890s and early 1900s he learned several new languages and became an expert in subjects ranging from Spanish art to Chinese culture. In 1897 Oxford University invited him to lecture on Russian poetry. After 1905, Walt Whitman became a particular focus. From the mid-1920s he traveled to centers of Russian emigration in Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, translating poetry from those languages and weaving their folklore into his own work.

  His 1915 volume Poetry as Magic was described by the critic Vladimir Markov as the most coherent and influential statement of Balmont's theoretical positions on poetry. His theoretical and practical interests, spanning nearly every European and several non-European literary traditions, were one of the features that set him apart from contemporaries who worked in narrower registers.