PUSHKIN AND HIS SUCCESSORS Pushkin.—Zhukovsky and Batyushkov were the immediate forerunners of Pushkin (q.v.), whose apprenticeship was passed in the French and anti-Slavonic school of the Karam zinists. Later he freed himself from French influence, but his style always remained lucid and classical. His greatest popularity lasted from the appearance of his first "Byronic" poem in 1822 to about 1830. The work of his later years in which, discarding his earlier fluency and softness, he aimed at a severer and more impersonal style, met with little contemporary recognition. Only his tragic death reinstated him in public opinion and made him a national classic. He has since become to Russia what Dante is to Italy and Goethe to the Germans. The cult rendered to him has not always been kept this side of idolatry, and has tended to obscure the fact that he is an end rather than a beginning. His work is the culmi nating achievement of the period of the cultural ascendancy of the serf-owning nobility, rather than the fountainhead of later Russian literature. Of all his work only the "novel in verse" Eugene Onegin (1823-31) with its central characters of Onegin and Tatiana had a considerable influence on the writers of the following age.
Pushkin was surrounded by a whole galaxy of poets, usually referred to as "The Pushkin Pleiad." The most notable of them were Eugene Baratynsky (1800-44), a philosophical poet of pro found and noble originality, second only to Pushkin himself as a master of words, and Nicolas Yazykov (1803-46), whose verse his contemporaries liked to compare to champagne, and who possessed a poetical momentum of exceptional force. Other re markable poets were Denis Davydov (1784-1839), a hero of the Napoleonic wars, and the author of some sincere and vigorous lyrics of war and love; Prince Peter Vyazemsky (1792-1878), a master of poetical wit, and one of the most influential critics of the '2os; Baron Antony Delvig (1798-1831), an exquisite artist in classical and antique f orms; the revolutionary Kondrati Ryleyev (1795-1826, hanged as the head of the Decembrist conspiracy), who in his civic verse continued the noble oratorical tradition of Lomonosov; Dmitri Venevitinov (1805-27), whose early death was a great loss to the generation ; and Theodore Glinka (1788 188o), a devotional poet who combined striking and effective sim plicity with elevated mysticism. The movement of which Pushkin
and Vyazensky were the recognized heads began by calling itself romantic, but was in reality much rather classical in spirit.
Though they rejected the authority of Boileau they remained en tirely free from romantic vagueness, from all "intercourse with the infinite," and from all aspirations after the unknown. The most general characteristic of even the minor poets of this Golden Age is a complete mastery of technique and a perfect adequacy of form to content.
After 1830 poetry begins to lose the sense of words, and to de generate into untransformed emotion or shrill rhetoric. This is already the case with Alexander Polezhaev (1805-38), a pupil of Hugo and Byron and the direct forerunner of Lermontov in the passionate rhetoric of revolt. Lermontov himself (1814-41) (q.v.) was of ten merely a gushing emotionalist, or a thundering rhetorician. But at his highest moments of inspiration he reached summits of romantic vision that stand isolated in Russian poetry, while towards the close of his tragically ended life he was well on the way towards forming a sober and realistic style of great dis tinction and force. The general decline of poetry is not reflected in the work of Theodore Tyutchev (1803-73) whose compact and concentrated lyrics, though most of the best appeared as early as 1836, were not fully appreciated till much later. His poetry corn bines a penetrating pantheistic vision of the universe with the severe discipline of 18th century classicism. He has come to be generally regarded as Russia's second greatest poet. An inter esting by-current was the artificial folk-song. It was cultivated already in the 18th century, but reached its highest development in the work of Alexis Koltsov (1808-42), the most famous of the Russian "uneducated poets." For all their artificial and literary antecedents his songs breathe a genuinely popular spirit.