a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. Lermontov's fishes
never talk like big whales.

All Russian poets have this gift of reality of conception and
simplicity of treatment in a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none
has it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. The difference between
Pushkin's style and Lermontov's is that, when you read Pushkin, you
think: "How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world
did he do it?" You admire the "magic hand of chance." In reading
Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style
at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes
notice in its absolute appropriateness. Thus, what Matthew Arnold said
about Byron and Wordsworth is true about Lermontov--there are moments
when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.

In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; but there is a great deal that
is flat and sullen. But if one reviews the great amount of work he
produced in his short life, one is struck, not by its variety, as in
the case of Pushkin,--it is, on the contrary, limited and monotonous
in subject,--but by his authentic lyrical inspiration, by the
strength, the intensity, the concentration of his genius, the richness
of his imagination, the wealth of his palette, his gorgeous colouring
and the high level of his strong square musical verse. And perhaps
more than by anything else, one is struck by the blend in his nature
and his work which has just been discussed, of romantic imagination
and stern reality, of soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as
though we had before us the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings
of a Shelley. Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you take him, one
of the most astonishing figures, and certainly the greatest purely
lyrical _Erscheinung_ in Russian literature.

With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the springtide of national song
that began in the reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for the only
poet he left behind him did not survive him long. This was his
contemporary KOLTSOV (1809-42), the greatest of Russian folk-poets.
The son of a cattle-dealer, after a fitful and short-lived primary
education at the district school of Voronezh, he adopted his father's
trade, and by a sheer accident a cultivated young man of Moscow came
across him and his verses, and raised funds for their publication.

Koltsov's verse paints peasant life as it is, without any
sentimentality or rhetoric; i