Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky | |
|---|---|
 Pyotr Vyazemsky (1824) byPyotr Sokolov | |
| Born | (1792-07-23)23 July 1792 Moscow, Russia |
| Died | 22 November 1878(1878-11-22) (aged 86) Baden-Baden |
| Buried | Tikhvin Cemetery,St. Petersburg, Russia |
| Noble family | Vyazemsky |
| Spouse | Princess Vera Gagarina |
| Issue | Pavel Vyasemsky Maria Vyazemskaya Praskoviya Vyazemskaya Nadejda Vyazemskaya |
| Father | Prince Andrey Vyazemsky |
| Mother | Jenny Quinn O'Reilly |
| Occupation | Poet |
PrincePyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky[a] (Russian:Пëтр Андре́евич Вя́земский,IPA:[ˈpʲɵtrɐnˈdrʲejɪvʲɪt͡ɕˈvʲæzʲɪmskʲɪj]; 23 July 1792 – 22 November 1878) was a Russian poet and a leading personality of theGolden Age of Russian poetry.
His parents were a Russian prince ofRurikid stock, Prince Andrey Vyazemsky (1754–1807), and an Irish lady, Jenny QuinnO'Reilly (1762–1802), in baptism Evgenia Ivanovna Vyazemskaya.[1] As a young man he took part in theBattle of Borodino and other engagements of theNapoleonic Wars. Many years later,Tolstoy's description of the battle inWar and Peace appeared inaccurate to him, and he engaged in aliterary feud with the great novelist.
In the 1820s Vyazemsky was the most combative and brilliant champion of what then went by the name ofRomanticism. Both Prince Pyotr and his wife Princess Vera (néeGagarina) were on intimate terms withAlexander Pushkin, who often visited their family seat atOstafievo near Moscow (now a literary museum). Unsurprisingly, Vyazemsky is quoted in Pushkin's works, includingEugene Onegin. The two friends also exchanged several epistles in verse.
Vyazemsky and the other leading Russian liberals, such as Pushkin andAlexander andNikolay Turgenev, were all heavily shaped by the Kantian teachings ofAlexander Kunitsyn and often discussed their attitudes on serfdom, the Russian administrative and legal system, civil society, and foreign policy through private correspondence, where Vyazemsky was highly critical of the administration's abuses in the western provinces.[2] He also published a prospectus declaring an "uncompromising war to all the prejudices, vices and absurdity that reign in our society."[3]
At that time, the elderly poet gained admission to the Russian court, in part through his daughter's marriage toPyotr Valuev, the future Chairman of the Committee of Ministers. In the 1850s, Vyazemsky served as a deputy minister of education and was in charge ofstate censorship. In 1863, he settled abroad on account of bad health. Prince Vyazemsky died inBaden-Baden, but his body was brought toSaint Petersburg and buried there.
Vyazemsky is probably best remembered as the closest friend ofAlexander Pushkin. Their correspondence is a treasure house of wit, fine criticism, and good Russian. In the early 1820s, Pushkin proclaimed Vyazemsky the finest prose writer in the country. His prose is sometimes exaggeratedly witty, but vigor and raciness are ubiquitous. His best is contained in the admirable anecdotes of hisOld Notebook, an inexhaustible mine of sparkling information on the great and small men of the early nineteenth century. A major prose work of his declining years was his biography ofDenis Fonvizin, the eighteenth-century Russian dramatist.
Though Vyazemsky was the journalistic leader of Russian Romanticism, there can be nothing less romantic than his early poetry: it consists either of very elegant, polished, and cold exercises on the set commonplaces of poetry, or of brilliant essays in word play, where pun begets pun, and conceit begets conceit, heaping up mountains of verbal wit. His later poetry became more universal and essentially classical.
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This article incorporates text fromD.S. Mirsky's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in thepublic domain.
