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- Impressions of Russian Literature
- III
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III.
With Alexander Sergeyevitch Pushkin, Russian
poetry becomes an independent power, just as it is with
Goethe, Oelenschläger, or Victor Hugo. It no longer does
duty for inculcating noble emotions or useful
instruction; it is — in principle, at least — the handmaid neither
of morals nor of patriotism. It stands erect, wild, and
free.
Like the other leading Slavic poets of this period,
Pushkin was greatly influenced by Byron, and had to go
through this experience in order to become himself. He
is very peculiar from the beginning from his violent
temperament. He descends, on his mother’s side, from the
negro Hannibal, whom Peter the Great bought and
educated in France as a civil engineer, and who died with
the rank of general, possessing a good landed estate.
The face of the author as well as his poetry plainly
betrays the African blood in his veins. His father was
a man of the world, educated in France, who had never
spoken any other language than French, and who, in the
fashion of the aristocracy, also caused his son to learn
that language. Pushkin was indebted to his nurse alone,
a good Russian peasant woman, for his early and so
fruitful acquaintance with popular ballads, bîlinî, and fairy
tales of Russia.
Precocious, dissolute at an early age, and then and for
a long time a “dandy,” he belongs to the not small
number of artistic geniuses from the beginning of the
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