hest names in Russian literature--Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol.

Pushkin is Russia's national poet, the Peter the Great of poetry, who
out of foreign material created something new, national and Russian,
and left imperishable models for future generations. The chief
characteristic of his genius is its universality. There appeared to be
nothing he could not understand nor assimilate. And it is just this
all-embracing humanity--Dostoyevsky calls him +pananthropos+--this
capacity for understanding everything and everybody, which makes him so
profoundly Russian. He is a poet of everyday life: a realistic poet,
and above all things a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as an
epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief and produce a noble
fragment, he cannot set crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians
the beauty of their landscape and the poetry of their people; and they,
with ears full of pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and romantic
stage properties, did not understand what he was doing: but they
understood later. For a time he fought against the stream, and all in
vain; and then he gave himself up to the great current, which took him
all too soon to the open sea.

He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional;
and all his life he was still learning to become more and more
intimate with the savour and smell of the people's language. Like
Peter the Great, he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and his
whole energies in craftsmanship. He was a great artist; his style is
perspicuous, plastic, and pure; there is never a blurred outline,
never a smear, never a halting phrase or a hesitating note. His
concrete images are, as it were, transparent, like Donne's description
of the woman whose

"... pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought,
That you might almost think her body thought."

His diction is the inseparable skin of the thought. You seem to hear
him thinking. He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated
spontaneity. His soul was sincere, noble, and open; he was frivolous,
a child of the world and of his century; but if he was worldly, he was
human; he was a citizen as well as a child of the world; and it is
that which makes him the greatest of Russian poets.

His career was unromantic; he was rooted to the earth; an aristocrat
by birth, an official by profession, a lover of society by taste. At
the same time, he sought an