Nikolay Mikhailovich Yazykov

Nikolay Mikhailovich Yazykov Poems

Nikolay Mikhailovich Yazykov Biography

Nikolay Mikhailovich Yazykov (Russian: Никола́й Миха́йлович Язы́ков, March 4, 1803, Simbirsk - December 26 1846, Moscow) was a Russian poet and Slavophile who in the 1820s rivalled Alexander Pushkin and Yevgeny Baratynsky as the most popular poet of his generation. Yazykov was born in Simbirsk to an old family of Russian landlords. His first verses appeared in print in 1819. For seven years (1822-1829) Yazykov studied at the philosophy department of Dorpat University, where he made himself famous with his riotously Anacreontic verse in praise of the students' merry life. For his summer vacations he went to Trigorskoye, where he met Pushkin. After leaving Dorpat, without a degree, Yazykov lived between Moscow and his Simbirsk estate. Later in life, he became intimate with the nationalist and Slavophile circles of Moscow, which held his poetry in high esteem. Nikolay Gogol, in particular, favoured Yazykov over all other living poets. The young idealists grouping around Nikolai Stankevich, however, dismissed his work as contemptibly lacking in ideas. Yazykov's health, undermined by the excesses of his student life, began to fail very early, and from about 1835 he was a restless wanderer from one health resort to another. The Genoese Riviera, Nice, Gastein, and other German spas are the frequent background of his later verse. His spare time was devoted to collecting Russian folk poetry, in which task he was assisted by Pyotr Kireyevsky. Apart from Pushkin, Yazykov was also close to Nikolay Gogol and was Khomyakov's brother-in-law. It was the death of his sister that triggered Gogol's fatal depression. According to his wishes, the great novelist was buried next to the Yazykovs in the Danilov Monastery. In 1931 the remains of Yazykov, Gogol and Khomyakov were reburied at the Novodevichy Cemetery. Yazykov's poetry is largely derivative: all music, without any fresh ideas. D.S. Mirsky compared Yazykov to Gavrila Derzhavin for "his power of seeing nature as an orgy of light and color". Pushkin once joked that the Castalian fount of which Yazykov drank ran not with water, but with champagne. Indeed, his early (and best known) poetry is devoted to the praise of wine and merrymaking, producing an effect of the almost physical intoxication and verbal rush.)

The Best Poem Of Nikolay Mikhailovich Yazykov

To My Dressing Gown

How I love you, dressing gown!
Oh, how I love you, dressing gown!
Attire of idleness and sloth,
Of untold pleasures, good old friend
And of poetic joys!
So let the serfs of Aries
Enjoy their binding livery;
I'm free in body as in soul.
Of the afflictions of our age,
Of all life's battles and its emptiness.
I'm saved, I live in harmony!
The waywardness and will of kings
Will never blot my youth -
For life clothed in my dressing gown
Exceeds in sweetness many times
The senseless life of kings.

The shining golden moon presides
Above the evening firmament;
The bustling cities silent lie
The thinking student does not sleep:
Wrapped in an author's dressing gown
Disdaining blind society's noise,
In ecstasies of thought, he mocks
The Herostratus of our times;
He does not fancy in his dreams
The dirks of Sand or of Louvelle,
And all our vacant fame cannot
Annoy his elevated soul.
Between his lips, a simple pipe,
Beside him beeswax candles stand;
In prideful ease he lolls about
Absorbed in living genius' dreams-
And to the patient clothier
Who sewed his dressing gown gives thanks!

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