Piotr Andreevich Viazemsky

Piotr Andreevich Viazemsky Poems

Piotr Andreevich Viazemsky Biography

Prince Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky or Petr Andreevich Viazemsky (Russian: Пëтр Андре́евич Вя́земский) (23 July 1792 - 22 November 1878) was a leading personality of the Golden Age of Russian poetry. His parents were a Russian prince of Rurikid stock and an Irish lady. As a young man he took part in the Battle of Borodino and other engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. Many years later, Tolstoy's description of the battle in War and Peace would appear inaccurate to him and he would engage in a literary feud with the great novelist. In the 1820s Vyazemsky was the most combative and brilliant champion of what then went by the name of Romanticism. Both Prince Pyotr and his wife Princess Vera, née Gagarina were on intimate terms with Pushkin, who often visited their family seat at Ostafievo near Moscow (now a literary museum). Unsurprisingly, Vyazemsky is quoted in Pushkin's works, including Eugene Onegin. The two friends also exchanged several epistles in verse. In the thirties, like all the "literary aristocracy", Vyazemsky found himself out of date and out of tune with the young generation. He had the great sadness of surviving all his contemporaries. Though it was precisely in his last years that his poetical talent bore its best fruit, he was forgotten and abandoned by critics and public long before he died. He grew into an irritated reactionary who heartily detested everyone born after 1810. At that time, the elderly poet gained admission to the Russian court, in part through his daughter's marriage to Pyotr Valuev, the future Chairman of the Committee of Ministers. In the 1850s, Vyazemsky served as a deputy minister of education and was in charge of the censorship in Russia. In 1863, he settled abroad on account of bad health. Prince Vyazemsky died in Baden-Baden, but his body was brought to St. Petersburg and buried there.)

The Best Poem Of Piotr Andreevich Viazemsky

Spring

'Ah, Spring, sweet Spring, chief pride of Nature!'
The air is foul, the ground is sludge;
Men curse the mud when they go walking,
And plunged in muck, a horse can't budge.

The cab breaks down, so does the carriage;
Season of colds in chest and nose,
To you, fair Spring, is reverence tendered
By cartwrights and by medicos.

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