d served beauty, strenuously and
faithfully; he was perhaps too faithful a servant of Apollo; too
exclusive a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find none of the
piteous cries, no beauty of soaring and bleeding wings as in Shelley,
nor the sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no tempest of defiant
challenge, no lightnings of divine derision, as in Byron; his is
neither the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that "brave soldier in the
war of the liberation of humanity," nor the agonized passion of a
suffering Catullus. He never descended into Hell. Every great man is
either an artist or a fighter; and often poets of genius, Byron and
Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently fighters than they are
artists. Pushkin was an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what
makes even his love-poems cold in comparison with those of other
poets. Although he was the first to make notable what was called the
romantic movement; and although at the beginning of his career he
handled romantic subjects in a more or less romantic way, he was
fundamentally a classicist--a classicist as much in the common-sense
and realism and solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the
perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form. And he soon cast aside
even the vehicles and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively followed
reality. "He strove with none, for none was worth his strife." And
when his artistic ideals were misunderstood and depreciated, he
retired into himself and wrote to please himself only; but in the
inner court of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired he created
imperishable things; for he loved nature, he loved art, he loved his
country, and he expressed that love in matchless song.

For years, Russian criticism was either neglectful of his work or
unjust towards it; for his serene music and harmonious design left the
generations which came after him, who were tossed on a tempest of
social problems and political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when
Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin's memorial at Moscow, the homage which he
paid to the dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of the whole of
Russia. His work is beyond the reach of critics, whether favourable or
unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of his countrymen, and
chiefly upon the lips of the young.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Not 1763, as generally stated in his biographies.

[3] The poem was originally called _Mazepa_: Pushkin changed the title
so as not to clash with Byron.