He imitated the Koran, blending sensuality with religious enthusiasm and even the element of nonsense in a way that is inimitably reminiscent of the Eastern Law.
Equally brilliant are his Imitations of Dante ... the Divine Comedy lives again for us in Pushkin's rendering: again, in The Journeying of Cæsar, we seem to be reading the Latin classics themselves. But his prose-work as a whole is perhaps below his poetry, though Baring does not think so. Unfortunately in England it is on these very prose works that we have for the most part to rely, because so few of his poems are translated.
He was not born with a passion to reform the world: he was neither Liberal nor Conservative: he was a democrat in his love for the Russian people, a patriot in his love of his country.
There seem to have been in him, however, two distinct spirits, as in so many other Russians—the inspired priest of Apollo and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children of the world. The former characteristic predominated, but the people, his readers, preferred his latter mood; they like the dazzling colours, the sensuousness of his early poems—they could not appreciate the nobler, simpler and more majestic harmonies of Borìs Godunòv and Onyégin.
It is this two-sidedness that makes for his all-embracing humanity—Dostoievsky called him πανανδρωπος—this capacity for understanding everybody which makes him so profoundly Russian. He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional and, like Peter the Great, spent his whole life in apprenticeship and all his energies in craftsmanship. He is completely the artist and never the fighter, which explains the coldness of much of his work.
He was no innovator of forms in his verse: he was content to follow the accepted types; nor did he ever fly too high ... he does not try to unlock the gates of the Unknown: the old iambic introduced by Lomonòsov was good enough for him. Only in Borìs Godunòv does he break out into an imitation of Shakespearean form: the play is rather like Henry VIII. in its plan: it is a succession of isolated scenes, not a coherent drama; there is no definite beginning or end.
On the other hand his scenes, taken by themselves, tragic or comic, are as vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters all live and are convincing.
As a chronicle it is completely successful. There are scenes so inspired as to be really in spirit Shakespearean, an absence of all conscious effort and visible artifice which only the greatest artists can attain to.
As there are no innovations, so are there no mannerisms: metaphors and similes are few and apt. Of Peter the Great we read: