Lermontov’s “Vetka palestiny” (1837) and Bialik’s “El Hatsipor” (1891)

Lermontov’s “Vetka Palestiny”, written in 1836 or 1837, belongs to a well developed genre in European romantic literature - poems  of spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Bialik’s “El Hatsipor” (To   the Bird), written circe 1891, is an example of שירי ציון, poems of  Zion, a very popular genre in Hebrew poetry during the last quarter of the 19th century.  Reading the two comparatively might give us an idea about the resemblances and the differeneces between the two genres, each deeply rooted in its own culture.

A Israeli tourist guide  told me how shocked he was, when during a tour in Jerusalem with a group of Jews coming from different countries of the  former Soviet Union, one of them asked him: so, is there any connection between Jerusalem’s other name,  Cion, and the word Cionism? So natural and self-understood to the Israeli ear sounds this semantic shift, from the name of the city to the name of the political movement for Jewish settlment in ארץ ישראל , the Hebrew name for Palestine.  Palestine-Palestina was the name of this geographical area at the time when political Zionism was founded, exactly  hundred years ago, in 1897. Thirteen years earlier, in 1884, the first conference of the Hibat Tsion, a pre-Zionist movement, took place in Katovitz. The 35 Russian Jews  who participated in it called themselves Palestinofily , and in Hebrew: Hovevei Tsion As much as I can judge, this was the moment when Palestina and Tsion became synonymous in the modern political sense. Although in Hebrew the semantic blur between Tsion as Jerusalem vs. Tsion as the land of the Bible goes back to the 12th century at least, to the poetry of Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Levi, the synonimisation of Tsion and Palestina performed by Russian speaking Jews in the late 19th century could not have been possible without the Russian  religious and literary traditions, merging together  Palestine and Jerusalem into one  holy place of pilgrimage and inner purification.

Lermontov ‘s “vetka Palestiny”, a poem of  9 quatrains,  begins with an address to a twig of Palestine, but in the eighth stanza the repeating address is changed into  ”vetv’ Ierusalima”, the branch of Jeruslaem. Already in the third stanza the poet refers to “Solima bednye syny”,  using the Russian translation of Jerusalem’s ancient, pre-Davidic name, Shalem, as a name for Jerusalem at the time of Jesus Christ. This seemingly natural passage from Palestine to Solim, and then to Ierusalim, as if the three were synonymous, did not bother the translators of this poem into Hebrew, David  Shimoni, (1956) and Dov Gaponov ( *). Both translated  the title, “vetka Palestiny” into  ענף ציון , (Branch of Tsion. The English translation is, of course, “Branch of Palestine”). Why did they not choose ענף מפלשטינה or even ענף מארץ ישראל? Probably because for the Modern Hebrew ear Tsion has become  the poetic name for both the city and the land, emphasizing its sacreness.

 In “Vetka Palestiny” Lermontov, unlike other poets writing in this genre in Russian and other European languages, does not use Cion , but rather three  other words - Palestina, Colim and Ierusalim.  Do they denote one and the same place, as it appears to many of Lermontov’s  interpretors?[1]  Looking closely at the poem, Lermontov’s reasons for using three different names become clear: He uses “vetka Palestiny” when he speaks of the concrete twig which he found at  Andrey Nilolaevich Muraviov’s  icon room. The twig was actually brought “from the east” by Muraviov, as he puts it in his memoirs. Muraviov did go  to Palestine as a pilgrim, and Lermontov might have read his two volume book, A Travel to the Holy Land, published 7 years before the composition of “Vetka Palestiny”. Lermontov prefers to use the geographical term at first. The questions addressed to the twig  in the first two stanzas make it very clear that the palm tree did not grow in Jerusalem, but in some other part of  Palestine. Of course, Lermontov names the most famous Biblical loci and arranges them in schematically contrasting   metaphores, but at the same time he keeps the very clear geogrphical realistic borders of  mid nineteenth century Palestine, the land of Christian pilgrimage, including in it not only holy places, but also Biblical landscape per se .

The second term, Calim, takes us to the historical Jerusalem, when the people of Jerusalem crying Hosana met Jesus with palm twigs  weaved into plaits. “Listy tvoi spletali”  alludes to this New Testament  story of Jesus, whose fate Lermontov compared to the fate of the poet already in his previous poem, “Smert’ poeta” . In addition, the act of weaving the leaves of the palm branch is paralleled to  both a quiet prayer and a peaceful  singing of ancient songs, the palm twig thus becomes a symbol  of mythic consolation, achieved not only by ancient religious faith  but also by elementary artistic expression.

Palestine and Calim, a place distant in space and in time, is expected to be a perfect “there”, in the romantic sense of the word.

But here follow questions about the fate of the palm tree and about its present situation, reminding the reader that  consolation and protection are the natural functions of this tree, especially for people who live in the desert - and in fact, Palestine of the present time is  here identified   with desert (“pustynie”).  Can the palm tree still supply consolation and support?  The poet is not sure, for  the palm tree might well  be now dry and dead like its desert country. It is the twig, although it is no less dry and dead,  that does supply consolation,  peace, comfort and delight (“mira I otrady”).  Being torn from his mother palm tree the twig is worthy of tears, but it is just the possibility to cross  the border between “there” and “here”, to be a wandering poet, that intesifies its sacred ness.

Sstanding before the Russian icon it becomes “a sacred symbol” (simvol sviatoi”).  Now it deserves the name of “vetv’ ierusalima”, the twig of Jerusalem. In contrast to the geographical Palestina and to the historical Calim, Jerusalem is a psychological  and mystic concept. Palestina and Salim are not needed any more. The twig can stand  bravely and peacefully, even if  he is torn away from his protecting origins, the palm tree and the land. By being a spiritual object, it saves the spirit.

In this sense the three names denote three different concepts. But the passage between them is very smooth, almost synonimical. The inner Jerusalem  grows naturally from Palestina, the Eastern land of Christian pilgrimage,  and from Calim,  the Russian name for the ancient city of Jesus. This gradual, natural passage from one name to another contributes to the emotional dynamics of the poem, leading from semi-classicist  rhetoric to deep religious feeling of faith and peace of mind .

In 1902 Hayyim Nahman Bialik received the title “poet of national revival”  bestowed  to him by the Zionist dominant critic Yosef Klauzner. Bialik was born in 1873 in the Ukraine pale of settlement, grew up in Zhitomir, and most of his oeuvre was written while he was living in Odessa. He left Russia only in 1921, when cultural activity in the Hebrew language there was clearly doomed to perish by the Soviet regime and the Evsektsia. His poem “El Hatsipor” was canonized as Bialik’s first poem, although 8 poems were written before.  Bialik placed it at the opening of  the third and fourth editions  of   his collected  poems  (1923, 1933), organized chronologically.[2]  In the second edition (1908), organized thematically,  “El Ha-tsipor” opens the fifth  and last “book” or part, which consists of  poems concerning  the Zionst theme. In the first (1902) edition it stands second, after a darker and more personal  poem.  Already in his earliest attempts to organize a copybook of poems, in the early 1890s,  when Bialik was still a student of the Volozhin yeshive,  “El Hatsipor” was placed by the poet in a salient position among the other poems.  The composition of this poem  took  a long time, and left us with four different versions, three of which were written between Spring 1891 to Spring 1892, the fourth is  a shortened adaptation for children, published in 1903.[3]  The canonized version includes 16 stanzas, but  there is also versions of 28 and 12 stanzas. The Russian translation  by Camuil Marshak  published in 1906 In “Evreiskaia Zhizn’”, [4]   is also a shortened version, omittinig 4 stanzas from the canonized poem.

While writing and re-writing “El Hatsipor 18 years old Bialik also became acquainted with Lermontoiv’s poetry. The yeshive studies included Russian language and literature as much as needed for the attestat zrelosti examinations, and Lermontov’s poems  were included in the section History of Russian literature for the eighth class according to the official 1878 curriculum.[5]

 At that time Bialik used  to include new poems in his letters sent from Volozhin to his  friends in Zhitomir. One of “El Hatsipor”’s versions is included in a letter from November 9 1891. Three months earlier, in July 1891, Bialik includes in such a letter  a short poem, just a four lines well-rhimed stanza, which is a shortened translation of Lermontov’s “Angel”, as if it was his own poem. Lermontov’s influence can be traced in many of Bialik’s poems written  during the 1890s.  Thus, for example, Bialik’s  first poema, “Hamatmid” (podvizhnik), published in  1894, resembles in many ways Lermontov’s “Mtsyry”,  transforming the story of the monastery  apprentice into the story of the ascetic yeshive student.

 Lermontov wrote: “Niet, ia nie Byron, ia drugoi”, although Byron was for him an important source of inspiration. In the same way  it was important for Bailik to emphasize the difference between the Russian and the Jewish experience.  Unlike Mtsyry the Bialik’s yeshive student does not yeals to the temptations of nature. Unlike Lermontov’s poet, who  appears as holding  a dagger in his hand (“Poet”, “Kinzhal”),  Bialik opens his poem “Shirat Israel” (Jewish poetry) with the declaration, that he - the Jewish poet  - gets  frightened even from the smell of war, turns round at the sound of trumpet, and if he can choose between violin and sword he’ll certainly prefer the first.

The most salient resemblance between Lermontov’s “Vetka Palestiny” and Bialik’s “El Hatsipor” lies in the rhetoical situation and structure: both poems are  built on a long series of questions, addressed to an object coming from  Palestine and functioning as its metonymy. In Bialik’s poem  it is a bird of passage, coming  “from the lands of warnth to my window”. After the questions the poem ends with lyrical reflections of the poet. But this is not unique to these two poems (Pushkin “Tsvetok” is traditionally mentioned at this point).

For us the most  important resemblance lies in the fact that  the questions are an inquiry into the situation of the land of Palestine, whose landscape, as well as its flora and fauna, although they are streotyped Biblical loci,  have metaphorical meaning. Palestine  and its messengers in both poems are at first expected to be the positive, bright contrast to the poet’s miserable, dark situation. In both poems there are also hints  that Palestine has a perfect, supernatural qualities: in Lermontov’s poem  it is the pure water of the river Jordan and the  “luch vostoka”, the ray coming from the East;  Bialik says that in this country there is an eternal spring. Both poets turn to the messenger of Palestine in time of persecution, hoping to receive from it a salvation from their psychological stress, as well as a feeling of protection and consolation. This hope is based on the metonymic relationship between the messenger (twig, bird) and the sacred land. Sacredness is at the beginning connected with protection. Lermontov speaks of the protecting  palm tree, Bialik - of the protecting cloud over the mountains of Zion. In both poems it is a feminine protection: Vetka, Palestina, palma, צפור - all feminine (the Hebrew translation,  ענף ציון misses this point). They  might represent a motherly figure, the contact with whom enables the poet to return to his childhood,  and thus to regain his vitality - a well recognized topos in romantic literature.

But both poets are sceptic of  the idea that Palestine at the present can be a source of such a protection. For both she might be found as  disappointingly too much similar to the poet’s hopelessness and inner death. Just as Lermontov suspects that the palm tree might have already  withered and covered by dust, so does Bialik ask, even more explicitly: העוד לא נבלו הפרחים שתלתי/ כאשר נבלתי אני  (“ and the flowers which I once planted there - have they not whithered, just as I have withered?”). Not only in its present situation, even in the past Palestine is no less a country of death and sadness than a country of life and spring: the inhabitants of the historical Colim are “bednye syny” and  Bialik says: “ Sing, my bird, about a country where my forefathers found their lives and their deaths”. The optimistic ending of both poems relies on a new contact, between the poet and the messenger, who is looked at as an independent  source of spiritual and artistic inspiration.

Here the similarities end and the differences begin

For Bialik Palestina is not a country of pilgrimage, and he is not in the least interested in Jerusalem. For him Palestine is the place where his “brethren”  might live happily, in contrast to the  pains and troubles that he as a Jew has to suffer in the Diaspora. Religious experience cannot repair this suffering. This is why Bialik, after  expressing his wish to have wings and fly together with the bird to the country  of almonds and palms, consecrates three stanzas (and in other versions even more) to the Jewish desperate political and economical situation, thus moving from the romantic to the realistic mode.

“Vetka Palestiny” is a purely lyrical poem. “El Ha-tsipor” is both a lyrical and a national-political one. Still, in Bialik’s poem we hear many times the word “I”, while  Lermontov avoids this word  completely, together with any information about his troubles.  But Bialik’s  Lyrical I is  stereophonic,  it is both personal and national. He introduces himself as an old man (line 36) although the  biographical  poet was  just 19 years old, and the reason is that  when young Bialik says “I”  it is the Jewish nation that he speaks from his throat. Bialik succeeded in expressing the national situation in convincing psychological metaphores, which he borrowed from his own biogrphical experience.   Thus, for example, in his “In the Field” (1894), reminding of Lermontov’s

“Kogda volnyetsa zhelteiushcaia niva”  the field, which does not belong to the Jew,  becomes a mother who refuses to suck the poet, her son of old age,  just as Bialik’s own mother could not take care of  him  when  he was four years old. Bialik finishes  “El Hatsipor” by saying that  there is no point in weeping,  for no more tears were left, and this is why he asks the bird to sing and rejoice: she, the messenger of  the real Palestine is his only hope. This ending has both a personal and a national meaning, the last one absent from Lermontov’s  “Veka Palestiny”. 

Still, following Bialik’s many versions of the poem it is interesting to see its  gradual  Lermontovisation: the realistic descriptions of the troubles become shorter and shorter, until they almost disappear,  and instead of  the contrast between  the happy “there”  and the miserable “here” Bialik finishes  “El Hatsipor” by saying that  there is no point in weeping,  for no more tears were left, and this is why he asks the bird to sing and rejoice: she, the messenger of  the real Palestine is his only hope.   ending with a desperate complaint,  the bird becomes  a symbol of new hope.

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