cal writers. The new principles
found many adherents, and the new style many admirers, but this only
intensified the hostility of the literary Conservatives. The staid,
respectable leaders of the old school, who had all their lives kept the
fear of Boileau before their eyes and considered his precepts as the
infallible utterances of aesthetic wisdom, thundered against the impious
innovations as unmistakable symptoms of literary decline and moral
degeneracy--representing the boisterous young iconoclasts as dissipated
Don Juans and dangerous freethinkers.

Thus for some time in Russia, as in Western Europe, "a terrible war
raged on Parnassus." At first the Government frowned at the innovators,
on account of certain revolutionary odes which one of their number had
written; but when the Romantic Muse, having turned away from the present
as essentially prosaic, went back into the distant past and soared into
the region of sublime abstractions, the most keen-eyed Press Censors
found no reason to condemn her worship, and the authorities placed
almost no restrictions on free poetic inspiration. Romantic poetry
acquired the protection of the Government and the patronage of the
Court, and the names of Zhukofski, Pushkin, and Lermontof--the three
chief representatives of the Russian Romantic school--became household
words in all ranks of the educated classes.

These three great luminaries of the literary world were of course
attended by a host of satellites of various magnitudes, who did all
in their power to refute the romantic principles by reductiones ad
absurdum. Endowed for the most part with considerable facility of
composition, the poetasters poured forth their feelings with torrential
recklessness, demanding freedom for their inspiration, and cursing the
age that fettered them with its prosaic cares, its cold reason, and
its dry science. At the same time the dramatists and novelists created
heroes of immaculate character and angelic purity, endowed with all the
cardinal virtues in the superlative degree; and, as a contrast to these,
terrible Satanic personages with savage passions, gleaming daggers,
deadly poisons, and all manner of aimless melodramatic villainy.
These stilted productions, interspersed with light satirical essays,
historical sketches, literary criticism, and amusing anecdotes, formed
the contents of the periodical literature, and completely satisfied
the wants of the reading public. Almost no one at that