Prince Alexander Odóevskiy (1803-1839) and Polezháeff (1806-1838) are two other poets who died very young, and whose lives were entirely broken by political persecution. Odóevskiy was a friend of the Decembrists. After the 14th of December, 1825, he was arrested, taken to the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and then sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, whence he was not released till twelve years later, to be sent as a soldier to the Caucasus. There he became the friend of Lérmontoff, one of whose best elegies was written on Odóevskiy’s death. The verses of Odóevskiy (they were not printed abroad while he lived) lack finish, but he was a real poet and a patriot too, as is seen from his Dream of a Poet, and his historical poem, Vasilkó.
The fate of Polezháeff was even more tragic. He was only twenty years old—a brilliant student of the Moscow University—when he wrote an autobiographical poem, Sáshka, full of allusions to the evils of autocracy and of appeals for freedom. This poem was shown to Nicholas I., who ordered the young poet to be sent as a soldier to an army regiment. The duration of service was then twenty-five years, and Polezháeff saw not the slightest chance of release. More than that: for an unauthorised absence from his regiment (he had gone to Moscow with the intention of presenting a petition of release to the Tsar) he was condemned to receive one thousand strokes with the sticks, and only by mere luck escaped the punishment. He never succumbed to his fate, and in the horrible barracks of those times he remained what he was: a pupil of Byron, Lamartine, and Macpherson, never broken, protesting against tyranny In verses that were written in tears and blood. When he was dying from consumption in a military hospital at Moscow Nicholas I. pardoned him: his promotion to the grade of officer came when he was dead.
A similar fate befell the Little Russian poet Shevchénko (1814-1861), who, for some of his poetry, was sent in 1847 to a battalion as a common soldier. His epical poems from the life of the free Cossacks in olden times, heart rending poems from the life of the serfs, and lyrics, all written in Little Russian and thoroughly popular in both form and content, belong to the fine specimens of poetry of all nations.
Of prose writers of the same epoch only a few can be mentioned in this book, and these in a few lines. Alexander Bestúzheff (1797-1837), who wrote under the nom de plume of Marlínskiy—one of the “Decembrists,” exiled to Siberia, and later on sent to the Caucasus as a soldier—was the author of very widely-read novels. Like Púshkin and Lérmontoff he was under the influence of Byron, and described “titanic passions” in Byron’s style, as also striking adventures in the style of the French novelists of the Romantic school; but he deserves at the same time to be regarded as the first to write novels from Russian life in which matters of social interest were discussed.
Other favourite novelists of the same epoch were: Zagóskin (1789-1852), the author of extremely popular historical novels, Yúriy Miloslávskiy, Róslavleff, etc., all written in a sentimentally patriotic style; Naryézhnyi (1780-1825), who is considered by some Russian critics as a forerunner of Gógol, because he wrote already in the realistic style, describing, like Gógol, the dark sides of Russian life; and Lazhéchnikoff (1792-1868), the author of a number of very popular historical novels from Russian life.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The great composer Glínka has made of this fairy tale a most beautiful opera (Ruslán i Ludmíla), in which Russian, Finnish, Turkish, and Oriental music are intermingled in order to characterise the different heroes.
[11] For all translations, not otherwise mentioned, it is myself who is responsible.
PART III
Gógol