Apollon Maykov

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Apollon Maykov : biography

1821 – 1897

Maykov’s assets, the critic asserts, relate to the fact that he used to learn painting and, in away, extended the fine art into his poetry. What Aykhenvald gives him unreserved credit for is the "plasticity of language – the unequalled turn at working on a phrase as if it was a tangible material". Occasionally "his lines are so interweaved, the verse looks like a poetic calligraphy; a scripturam continuam… Rarely passionate and showing only distant echoes of original inspiration, Maykov’s verse strikes you with divine shapeliness. It is so tangible, one is tempted to stretch out fingers and caress it, follow its curves like those of sculpture… What he presents you is a material thing, not a description of it… That was, apparently, how Apelles painted, making viewers take his drawings for real objects… Maykov’s best poems resemble statues, driven to perfection with great precision and so flawless as to make a reader feel slightly guilty for their own imperfection, making them inadequate to even behold what’s infinitely finer than themselves," Aykhenvald wrote.

Another Silver Age critic who noticed how painting and fishing might have influenced Maykov’s poetry was Innokenty Annensky. In his 1898 essay on Maykov he wrote: A poet usually chooses their own, particular method of communicating with nature, and often it is sports. Poets of the future might be cyclists or aeronauts. Byron was a swimmer, Goethe a skater, Lermontov a horse rider, many other of iur poets (Turgenev, both Tolstoys, Nekrasov, Fet, Yazykov) were hunters. Maykov was a passionate fisherman and this occupation came in perfect harmony with his contemplative nature, with his love for a fair sunny day which has got such a vivid expression in his poetry. Putting Maykov into a ‘meditative masters’ category alongside Ivan Krylov and Ivan Goncharov, the critic continued: "He was one those rare harmonic characters for whom seeking for beauty and working upon its embodiment was something natural and easy, the nature itself filling their souls with its beauty. Such people, rational and contemplative have no need in any kind of outward stimulus, praise, strife, even a flow of new impressions… their artistic impressions getting filtered through gradually and slowly, artistic imagery growing as if from soil. Such contemplative poets produce ideas that are clear-cut and ‘coined’, their images are sculpture-like."

Annensky praised Maykov’s gift for creating unusual combinations of colours, which was "totally absent in Pushkin’s verse, to some extent known to Lermontov, ‘a poet of mountains and clouds’ …and best represented by the French poets Baudelaire and Verlaine," according to the critic. "What strikes one is Maykov’s poetry extraordinary vigorousness, the freshness and firmness of the author’s talent: Olympians and Antiquity heroes he befriended in his childhood years "among th dusty marbles of Potyomkin’s rooms" must have shared with him their eternal youth," Annensky wrote.

D. S. Mirsky called Maykov "the most representative poet of the age," but added:Maykov was mildly "poetical" and mildly realistic; mildly tendentious, and never emotional. Images are always the principal thing in his poems. Some of them (always subject to the restriction that he had no style and no diction) are happy discoveries, like the short and very well known poems on spring and rain. But his more realistic poems are spoiled by sentimentality, and his more "poetic" poems hopelessly inadequate — their beauty is mere mid-Victorian tinsel. Few of his more ambitious attempts are successful.D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, Northwestern University Press: 1999, pp. 230-31 By the mid-1850s Maykov has got the reputation of a typical proponent of the "pure poetry" doctrine, although his position as such was rather special. Unlike Afanasy Fet (a much more prominent poet by far) he was going for precision of imagery, and purity of meaning, according to scholar I.Yampolsky. The main mood of his poetry was not lyrical passion but "objectivity" and "peace of mind", sought after in harmony.