Baratynskii and French Poetry: Addenda to the Commentary on “The Stillborn” (“Nedonosok”)

The French influence can be traced in many of Evgenii Baratynskii’s works. Elements of the language of French poetry are woven into his poetic language, losing the “memory” of their origin and changing their semantics. Baratynskii’s poem “The Stillborn” (where some traces of Edward Young’s ‘Night-Thoughts’ are also recognizable) bears a resemblance to the French Romanticist Charles Dovalle’s “Le Sylphe” and, to a lesser extent, to other French poems about sylphs and similar ephemeral creatures. For all the differences in poetic systems, certain motifs that are constituent of the image of the sylph in French Romantic poetry also play a significant role in the depiction of the Stillborn, for which the author identifies a thematic tradition that goes back as far as the Anacreontea’s “rain-soaked Eros.” Russian offshoots of this tradition include A. A. Shishkov’s “The Elf” and Konstantin Sluchevskii’s poem about a sylph (“High blows the wind…”).