Beschreibung:

[METROPOLITAN PHILARET (DROZDOV, Vasily Mikhailovich, 1782-1867). Manuscript copy of Philaret's poem ‘Ne naprasno, ne sluchaino’, Russia, [c.1830]. 13 lines, in a chancery hand on a single leaf, 350 x 216mm, with blindstamp monogram of Tsar Nicholas I at upper right (slight age browning, a few small, clean marginal tears, small hole along centre fold, couple of minor spots). The poetic dialogue between Alexander Pushkin and Metropolitan Philaret. In 1828, a difficult year in his personal and public life, Pushkin published a poem beginning ‘Dar naprasnyi, dar sluchainyi’ (‘A gift is vain, a gift is random’). It was a disconsolate statement on the meaninglessness of life – a life which, with all its sufferings, seemed to him anything but a gift from God. Philaret, who had been metropolitan of Moscow since 1826, learnt about Pushkin’s poem. Himself an occasional writer of verse, he decided to reply to the poet with a palinode poem which turned line by line Pushkin’s pessimism (the vanity and randomness of faith) into Christian providence (life is a gift from God). Philaret replied not in print, due to his political and religious status, but in manuscript, and the distribution of such copies was sufficiently wide for it to reach Pushkin, who replied to him in 1830. Philaret’s poem was first printed in 1840, after Pushkin’s death; a variant version was included in N.V. Sushkov's Notes on the Life and Times of Saint Philaret (1868), and it was only with the rediscovery of the present copy, as a witness to the original manuscript circulation, that the Sushkov text could be identified as the prime version. The fact that the present manuscript was transcribed on paper from the imperial chancery indicates a striking interest in the exchange within the immediate circle of Nicholas I. A remarkable survival of this important episode in Russian literary history. M. Al’tshuller, ‘Diptikh Pushkina i palinodiia mitropolita Filareta’, pp. 233-40, which discusses the present copy.