Min As Translator of Crabbe: A Russian Transformation of Peter Grimes (1) (Dmitrij Egorovic Min) (Critical Essay‪)‬

When George Crabbe's poem The Borough first appeared in 1810, it proved immediately popular. A collection of twenty-four verse "Letters," it was reprinted that year and five times in the following five years; since then it has reappeared several times in conjunction with other poems of Crabbe. One of its narrative Letters in particular, "Peter Grimes," has proved especially popular and has often been anthologized. In fact, in 1945 Benjamin Britten (with Montague Slater as librettist) wrote an opera about its hero, and in 1971 Michael Marland wrote a further dramatic version of the poem. (2) Crabbe's story is about a man, Peter Grimes, who lived in a Suffolk coastal town. As a boy he rebelled violently against his pious father, and as a youth, in order to pay for his cards and ale, he "fish'd by water and he filch'd by land." (3) As a grown man, seeking to exercise complete control over a human soul, he secured three apprentice boys in succession and abused them horribly, until he became responsible for each boy's death. At length the town ostracized him, and, compelled to live alone by the "bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree" (174), he gradually went mad. In his madness he ran, terror-stricken, till seized and taken to the parish poorhouse. There, "a lost, lone man, so harass'd and undone" (256), with sympathetic women crowding about his death-bed, he described the visions he had had of his father and two of the boys who came to him repeatedly and tried to lure him to his death. Finally he paused in his story, then "cried, / 'Again they come,' and mutter'd as he died" (374-5). The most striking aspect of the story is that while exposing Peter's cruelty unflinchingly Crabbe somehow manages by the end of the poem to arouse a surprising amount of charity for him.