ught to express the adventures of their
souls, which were emotional and artistic, either in dreamy music or in
exquisite shapes and colours. This neglect of verse lasted right up
until the end of the seventies. When, however, in the eighties, the
wave of political crisis reached its climax and, after the
assassination of Alexander II, rolled back into a sea of stagnant
reaction, the poets, who had been hitherto neglected, and quietly
singing all the while, were discovered once more, and the shares in
poetry continued to rise as time went on; thus the poets of the
sixties reaped their due meed of appreciation.

A proof of how widespread and deep this neglect was is that TYUTCHEV,
whose work attracted no attention whatever until 1854, and met with no
wide appreciation until a great deal later, was four years younger
than Pushkin, and a man of thirty when Goethe died. He went on living
until 1873, and can be called the first of the Parnassians.
Politically, he was a Slavophile, and sang the "resignation" and
"long-suffering" of the Russian people, which he preferred to the
stiff-neckedness of the West. But the value of his work lies less in
his Slavophile aspirations than in its depth of thought and lyrical
feeling, in the contrast between the gloomy forebodings of his
imagination and the sunlike images he gives of nature. His verse is
like a spring day, dark with ominous thunderclouds, out of which a
rainbow and a shaft of sunlight fall on a dewy orchard and light it
with a silvery smile. His verse is, on the one hand, full of
foreboding and terror at the fate of man and the shadow of
nothingness, and, on the other hand, it twitters like a bird over the
freshness and sunshine of spring. He sings the spring again and again,
and no Russian poet has ever sung the glory, the mystery, the wonder,
and the terror of night as he has done; his whole work is compounded
of glowing pictures of nature and a world of longing and of
unutterable dreams.

The dreamy dominion of the Parnassian age, on whose threshold Tyutchev
stood, was to be disturbed by the notes of a harsher and stronger
music.

NEKRASOV (1821-77), Russia's "sternest painter," and certainly one of
her best, drew his inspiration direct from life, and sang the
sufferings, the joys, and the life of the people. He is a Russian
Crabbe; nature and man are his subjects, but nature as the friend and
foe of man, as a factor, the most important factor in man's life, and
not