Dear Carolyn,
Yes, the author of Dushen'ka ("Little
Psyche", 1783) is Bogdanovich (1743-1803), not Batyushkov (1787-1855). In his
article on the former (1939), Khodasevich says that in writing his poem
Bogdanovich imitated La Fontaine rather than Apuleius
whose tale he probably didn't even know. Only one line from
Bogdanovich's poem is now memorable:
Vo vsekh ty, Dushen'ka, naryadakh khorosha
("you are beautiful, little Psyche, in every attire"),
mainly, because men often misquote it, when
making a compliment to their beloved and using it in the sense "all your
dresses, my dear, are very becoming".
I am neither a doctor, nor a historian of
literature and can not say more than Nabokov does in his Commentary
(see note to Six:XII:9 of VN's Commentary to his Translation of
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin; vol. 3, pp. 13-14) about the
circumstances of Batyushkov's madness. All I can do is reproduce one of
Batyushkov's last poems, a little masterpiece, written (during a lucid interval
in 1824?) with a charcoal on the wall of his room (or perhaps scratched on
the windowpane, I don't remember exactly), in Nabokov's
translation:
Do you recall the cry
Of gray Melchizedek when he prepared to die?
Man, he exclaimed, is born a slave; a
slave
He must descend into the grave,
And Death will hardly tell him why
He haunts the magic vale of tears,
Suffers and weeps, endures and
disappears.
Batyushkov attempted to take his own life several
times. He continued to write poetry (that a promising Wunderkind might have
composed) during his illness. In the late 1820s or early 1830s he wrote a
letter to Lord Byron, in which he asked the long dead
English poet to send him, Batyushkov, his, Byron's, works in
the original and to pray for his, Batyushkov's, future
fiance.
Nabokov's wonderful versions of several poems by
Tyutchev (including the famous Silentium) can be found in The
Three Russian Poets (1944).
Alexey