ed by his
brother Nicholas. December 14 (O.S.) was fixed for the day on which
the Emperor should receive the oath of allegiance of his troops. An
organized insurrection took place, which was confined to certain
regiments. The Emperor was supported by the majority of the Guards
regiments, and the people showed no signs of supporting the rising,
which was at once suppressed.

One hundred and twenty-five of the conspirators were condemned. Five
of them were hanged, and among them the poet RYLEEV (1795-1826). But
although the political results of the movement were nil, the effect of
the movement on literature was far-reaching. Philosophy took the place
of politics, and liberalism was diverted into the channel of
romanticism; but out of this romantic movement came the springtide of
Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the soul of the Russian
people found adequate expression. And the very fact that politics
were excluded from the movement proved, in one sense, a boon to
literature: for it gave Russian men of genius the chance to be
writers, artists and poets, and prevented them from exhausting their
whole energy in being inefficient politicians or unsuccessful
revolutionaries. I will dwell on the drawbacks, on the dark side of
the medal, presently.

As far as the actual Decembrist movement is concerned, its concrete
and direct legacy to literature consists in the work of Ryleev, and
its indirect legacy in the most famous comedy of the Russian stage,
_Gore ot Uma_, "The Misfortune of being Clever," by GRIBOYEDOV
(1795-1829).

Ryleev's life was cut short before his poetical powers had come to
maturity. It is idle to speculate what he might have achieved had he
lived longer. The work which he left is notable for its pessimism, but
still suffers from the old rhetorical conventions of the eighteenth
century and the imitation of French models; moreover he looked on
literature as a matter of secondary importance. "I am not a poet," he
said, "I am a citizen." In spite of this, every now and then there are
flashes of intense poetical inspiration in his work; and he struck
one or two powerful chords--for instance, in his stanzas on the vision
of enslaved Russia, which have a tense strength and fire that remind
one of Emily Bronte. He was a poet as well as a citizen, but even had
he lived to a prosperous old age and achieved artistic perfection in
his work, he could never have won a brighter aureole than that which
his dea