Vladimir Grigor'evich Benediktov
Vladimir Grigor'evich Benediktov was a Russian poet born on November 5, 1807, in St. Petersburg. He was the son of a civil servant and began writing poetry during his education at the Olonets provincial high school. Benediktov had a successful military career before shifting to a civil service role in the Ministry of Finance. His debut poetry collection, published in 1835, garnered significant attention and showcased themes such as nature, love, and the bureaucratic class of Russia. Despite initial acclaim, Benediktov's subsequent works did not achieve the same level of success, leading to a decline in his literary prominence by the late 1830s. He briefly returned to publishing in 1854 and continued to experiment with language in his later writings, although they received mixed reviews. After retiring from public life in 1862, Benediktov lived in seclusion while also contributing translations of notable foreign literary figures. His influence is acknowledged in the context of the Symbolist and Futurist movements that followed his era.
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Vladimir Grigor'evich Benediktov
Poet
- Born: November 5, 1807
- Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
- Died: April 14, 1873
Biography
Although known today as only a minor poet, Vladimir Grigor’evich Benediktov created quite a stir with his debut collection, which he published in 1835. Benediktov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on November 5, 1807, to Grigorii Stepanovich Benediktov, a successful civil servant from the Smolensk region, and Pelageia Iakobovna (Vinokurova) Benediktova, the daughter of a gentleman who served the czar’s court. Shortly after Benediktov’s birth, his father was transferred to a position in Petrozavodsk, whose severe landscape and climate no doubt influenced such poems as “Ozero” (1835). Benediktov’s first tutors were seminarians, and in 1817 he entered the Olonets provincial high school, where he first began to write poetry. Upon graduation in 1821, Benediktov returned to St. Petersburg to continue his education at the Second St. Petersburg Cadet Corps. He displayed interest in and aptitude for the military sciences and mathematics, and he was a regular contributor of verse to the cadet paper. Benediktov finished in 1827 at the head of his class, with an ensign’s commission in the prestigious Izmailovsky guards regiment. In 1831 Benediktov resigned from military service to enter the Ministry of Finance, where, in 1837, he rose to the position of senior secretary of the General Chancellery.
Concurrently, Benediktov was beginning his career as a published poet. He found patronage from Elizaveta Alekseevna and Vil’gelm Ivanovich Karlgof, who held the salon at which he first read his work. The couple helped him to publish the well-received The Poems of Benediktov. At the peak of his poetic career, Benediktov published his work in the leading literary journals. Important themes in his verse include nature, Russia’s bureaucratic class, and love, though he remained unmarried. Benediktov’s contemporaries celebrated him as a verbal innovator and as a poet mysli, a poet of ideas. His vocabulary was wide-ranging and neologistic, a feature of his poems that some critics attacked. Modernist critics, however, have suggested that Benediktov influenced both Symbolist and Futurist poets. His second collection, Stikhotvoreniia: Vtoraia kniga (1838), was not as widely heralded as his first, though it sold well. After 1838, Benediktov’s participation in the literary scene and his fame declined, and it was not until 1854 that he resumed publication, with the poem “K moei muze” (to my muse), which welcomes the return of a less “boisterous” and more mature muse. Though Benediktov’s verse continued to appear in literary periodicals, subsequent collections of his work received scathing reviews. Later works demonstrate a continued interest in linguistic experimentation, and include meditations on the problems of life, quiet lyrics, and narrative and historical poems. After Benediktov’s retirement from civil service and his final retreat from the literary world in 1862, he lived in seclusion but continued to write and to contribute to the world of letters with his translations of such authors as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and Adam Mickiewicz.