          Dear Alexey and List:

          Thank you for your reference to Eidelman's "Poslednie stikhi" ("Last Verses") article. He certainly demonstrates that central elements of Derzhavin's "grifel'naya oda" (slate ode) ["truba," horn/trumpet,
          "lira," lyre, "vechnost'," eternity, "reka," river], were present thematically and as reference points throughout the great poet's mature period. When memorizing the eight lines, I somehow got the Pushkin           version of line one as ending in "techen'i" (flow), but Eidelman's proof--three powerful repetitions of "re" when the last word in the line is "stremlen'i" (striving/coursing)--makes good poetic sense.

          Interestingly, Nabokov the translator as presented in V&V, does not mention Derzhavin's famous last ode at all in his introductory preface, and chooses to render in English only "Monument" of 1795.            In that hexameter poem Derzhavin extols his immortality as a great, pioneering poet in Russian. Though the philosophy is the opposite of that found in the slate ode, key terms--"vremya,"                                 (time), and "chtit'," (to honor/respect), are found. Here's the first quatrain by Nabokov, which is pretty good in my opinion, certainly, pun intended, not the end of the world:

                               I've set up to myself a monument,
                               wondrous, eternal. Stronger 'tis than metals,
                               higher than pyramids. Neither fleet thunder,
                               nor whirlwinds, nor the flight of time can break it.

          Best wishes,

          Jerry Katsell

          PS I too enjoyed the description of the finding those papyrus mss. in that huge, ancient "pomoyka," (garbage dump), south-west of Cairo.

Alexey Sklyarenko wrote:

For those who are interested in it: the description of the picture ("The River of Time, ot the Emblematic Representation of the World History", a kind of allegoric map) that hung in Derzhavin's room and was the source of his inspiration can be found in "Last Verses", a wonderful article by Natan Eidelman: http://vivovoco.rsl.ru/VV/PAPERS/NYE/LASTLINE.HTM (text in Russian). Alas, I failed to find in the Internet the image of the map itself.

Funny, in his article (written in 1985) Eidelman calls Oxyrynchus (the Greek name of Pemdje, aka el-Bahnasa, a town in Upper Egypt, about 160 km south-west of Cairo, an archaeological site where so many papirus texts dating from the time of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history were discovered) "the greatest rubbish dump in the world". The Internet (where one can find so many gems, precious stones and spurious stones) seems to be an even greater one these days. I occasionally enjoy rummaging in it.

Alexey Sklyarenko

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