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original, too peculiar, proud, and sarcastic, too much admired
and appreciated by those who understood his genius, not
to live environed by irritated envy and hate. It was
this hate which gratified itself by defending the
advances of the Franco-Dutch adventurer Dantés de
Hecheren to his wife, and which thus drove Pushkin to an
early death. The outburst of anger was, therefore,
justifiable, with which the younger generation in Russia,
through the voice of Lermontof, greeted the tidings of
Pushkin’s death in the well-known duel.
Pushkin is the first modern person in Russian poetry;
or, as it could also be expressed, the first illustrious man
in Russia who had the courage to express his personality
fully in poetry. In contrast to his predecessors, he at
once makes his appearance while a youth, asserting
himself without respect for tradition and authority in
literature, and he has, even when young, the stamp of
greatness on his forehead, style and power in his aspect
as a poet, which compel his contemporaries to greet him
as a chief. There is something manly about him, which
even his opponents do not fail to recognize. He belongs
to the number of those who are vituperated, assailed,
envied, and hated, but whom no one puts in the second
rank. The combination of power and grace in his
language surpassed, in a very high degree, anything that
had been known before.
To a foreigner, much of his poetry now seems
antiquated. The overwhelming influence of Byron, under
which he ripened, can be seen too plainly in his shorter
epic poems. Of the four which he wrote between 1821 and
1824, “The Prisoner in the Caucasus,” “The Fountain in
Bakhchisarai,” “The Brigand-Brothers,” and “The
Gypsies,” the first is the most pleasing from its pictures of
nature, the next two from a genuineness in the poet’s personal
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