Boratynsky: An Outline of His Life and Work

The early years. The catastrophe. Military Service. Contacts with Delvig and Pushkin's circle. Rise to fame, oblivion and partial resurrection in the Silver Age and at present

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Evgeny Abramovich Boratynsky (February 19, 1800– June 29, 1844) was not killed in a duel and did not die of tuberculosis. The family owned an estate in the steppe region in south-central Russia not far from the town of Tambov, and Boratynsky cherished the memory of his early years until his last day. His parents were well-to-do rather than affluent; however, for some time, they could hire tutors to give their children a good education, with the emphasis laid on the perfect mastery of French.

While reading the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev and Boratynsky, one wonders not at how they managed to learn near-native (practically, native) French, while living so far from France, but where they obtained their splendid Russian, for many of their contemporaries did not. Working on German is mentioned in one of Boratynsky's letters, but in later life he complained that he did not know that language, and it is unlikely that he knew any English, though Germanophiles and Anglophiles were all around him. His correspondence with his mother, his wife and his wife's relatives is all in French.

The first blow that determined Boratynsky's fate was the early death of his father (the boy had just turned 10), whom he remembered dimly, as he confessed in “Desolation” (No. 127), but, fortunately, he was and stayed to the end very close to his mother. The offspring of some noble families did not attend school and only took exams at the end of every year to qualify for promotion to the next level. The Boratynskys were no exception, but the loss of the father made the expensive home schooling no longer possible, and Boratynsky was sent to the Pages’ Corps, an aristocratic establishment, whose graduates became Guards officers.