PÚSHKIN: Beauty of form -- Púshkin and Schiller -- His youth; his exile; his later career and death -- Fairy tales: Ruslán and Ludmíla -- His lyrics -- "Byronism" -- Drama -- Evghéniy Onyéghin -- LÉRMONTOFF:Púshkin or Lérmontoff? -- His life -- The Caucasus -- Poetry of Nature -- Influence of Shelley -- The Demon -- Mtzyri -- Love of freedom -- His death -- Púshkin and Lérmontoff as prose-writers -- Other poets and novelists of the same epoch.PÚSHKIN Púshkin is not quite a stranger to English readers. In a valuable collection of review articles dealing with Russian writers which Professor Coolidge, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, put at my disposal, I found that in 1832, and...
It was in August, 1857, when I was nearly fifteen, that my turn came to enter the corps of pages, and I was taken to St. Petersburg. When I left home I was still a child; but human character is usually settled in a definite way at an earlier age than is generally supposed, and it is evident to me that under my childish appearance I was then very much what I was to be later on. My tastes, my inclinations, were already determined. The first impulse to my intellectual development was given, as I have said, by my Russian teacher. It is an excellent habit in Russian families --- a habit now, unhappily, on the decline --- to have in the house a student who aids the boys and the girls with their lessons, even when they are at a gymnasium. For a better assimilation of what they learn at school, and for a widening of their conceptions about what they learn, his aid is invaluable. Moreover, he introduces an intellectual element into the family, and becomes an elder brother...