Religion and Passion in Russia and France includes 19th- century works I have translated by Pushkin, Vigny, and Apukhtin. The three French and Russian narrative poems I translate here were shaped by gifted artists who are among their countries’ ingenious and penetrating lyrical creators. The works may differ greatly in mood and outlook. But they share a central focal interest: the roles played by religion and passion in the lives of us human creatures. Readers will see how the selected story-poems by these artists (now newly and form-faithfully rendered in lyrical English) advanced the liberation of our thinking about passion in its continuing and intensifying conflict with religious authority, leading straight toward, or even antedating, 20th-21st century psychoanalysis. No critic has ever put these three storytelling poets together to illustrate the developing thought current I describe. An introductory context including Genesis 3 and the Platonic-Aristotelian exaltation of the allegedly immortal intellect sets the stage for the unfolding rebellious French and Russian dramatic narratives. I would like to hope that this gathering of superb verse writers will help bring about a changed attitude toward their stature, their exemplary wisdom and craft, and the degree to which, as these selections may demonstrate, they merit far more extensive praise and popularity than they’ve so far attained. Pushkin, though his country’s greatest poet, offered in Gabri-iliad a comic masterwork that has so far attracted little attention among readers of English. Students of French poetry have not yet done justice to the marvelous lyrical word-magician and profound thinker Vigny. Apukhtin is far more important as a psychologist and verse technician than even Russian students and scholars have yet realized. He is a poetic virtuoso of quite remarkable skill and sensitivity. I hope also to have shown in the prefatory essay the unity of the impulse generating the three creators’ movement of thought and feeling and the scope of its implications for understanding the growing depth of our psychological vision in the course of the 19th century. RELIGION AND PASSION IN RUSSIA AND FRANCE : Gabri-iliad by Alexander Pushkin; Mystical Book by Alfred de Vigny; Year in a Monastery by Alexei Apukhtin Form-faithfully Translated from Russian and French with an Introduction by Martin Bidney
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