Evening Bell (song)

In 1818 Thomas Moore published his first collection of National Airs, a collection of songs which included his verses and musical scores by John Andrew Stevenson. The title of one verse from the Russian airs was Those Evening Bells with the subtitle Air: The bells of St.Petersburg. It starts with:

Moore mentioned that the verse was based on a Russian original, but all attempts to find the original failed. One hypothesis put forward in 1885 traced the source of the song to George the Hagiorite, an Orthodox monk and writer of the 11th century from the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos). Soviet researchers tried to prove the link, but found no traces of such a song. The most likely conclusion is that the verse is Thomas Moore's original creation loosely based on Russian-related themes.[1]

The verse was quite well known in the English-speaking world, e.g., it was satirised by Thomas Hood (Those Evening Bells, those Evening Bells, How many a tale their music tells, Of Yorkshire cakes and crumpets prime, And letters only just in time!.[2] It was listed in the dictionary of familiar quotations from 1919.[3]

Kozlov was a Russian poet in his own right, but also a prolific translator of contemporary English poetry (translating Byron, Charles Wolfe and Thomas Moore). His Russian text published in 1828 is more like an adaptation of the English original, as Kozlov used six-line stanzas instead of quatrains of the original, while being still faithful to the general mood and the rhythmic structure of the source (iambic tetrameter). His adaptation is credited with greater elaboration of the context, grounding the abstractness of the original with specific examples.[4]

When Kozlov published this verse, the original text was not mentioned. Combined with the fact that Moore's text claimed to be based on a Russian original, this brought some erroneous attributions (as early as in 1831) that Moore's verse is a translation of Kozlov's.[1]