Not long ago a bitter woman mocked
a stranger as nothing but a coarse, uncouth peasant—
shriveling her own life with stifled rage
and turning abuse into her private wharf of faith.
Yet, strangely, such derision carries
a long literary pedigree and tail.
It is a magnificent puzzlement
that a gratuitous slur could bear
so much depth unawares.
In Yungchou on the Hsiao River in 806,
Liu Tsung-Yuan dared to call himself
“rusticated”—a proscribed man,
a government’s reject—
yet the word also slipped
into another layer of meaning:
of striking root in the earth’s own reality,
in the humble wisdom of place,
and in the wonder he “couldn’t keep
from passing on to those who come.”
A thousand years later,
Book II of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin
opens with a motto on that same note:
“O Rus! O Russia!—O country!”—
O the delights of rustic life!
“The peaceful land of refined taste
from an age gone by—lofty,
vast, and wide—where pensive Dryads
kept their secret bed and home;
and much else that’s rather passé now.
A fine solitary retreat, bright and gay;
there a lover of simpler desires
would thank the heavens for his fate.”
Without those roots and rural charms
there would have been no Onegin,
no Pushkin, and far less of Russian verse
or of its stories and great novels.
Had they ever severed themselves
from that life-source and its bond,
we all would now be on a foul
and anaemic diet—
even though—O irony of ironies!—
it is precisely such “Rus,” such rustication,
even such russification,
that bored Onegin and sent Lensky—
out of spite—toward hasty death.
And now, having written this,
I cannot help but cry out in dismay—
wasn’t that woman an angry ghost,
one who died with the wish
for a rustic poet’s death?
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