sychical emotion, but they are all filled with
enchanting, artistic charm. His poetry is the quintessence of aesthetic
voluptuousness, such as was evolved on the soil of the sybaritism of the
landed gentry in the circles of the '40's of the nineteenth century.

The oldest of all these worshipers of pure art was Feodor Ivanovitch
Tiutcheff (1803-1873). At the age of seventeen he made a remarkably fine
translation of some of Horace's works. He rose to very fine positions in
the diplomatic service and at court. Although his first poems were
printed in 1826, he was not widely known until 1850-1854. His scope is
not large, and he is rather wearisome in his faultless poems. The
majority of them are rather difficult reading.

A poet who did not wholly belong to this school, but wrote in many
styles, was Yakoff Petrovitch Polonsky (1820-1898).[26] Under different
conditions he might have developed fire and originality, both in his
poems and his prose romances. His best known poem is "The
Grasshopper-Musician" (1863). He derived his inspiration from various
foreign poets, and also from many of his fellow-countrymen. Among
others, those in the spirit of Koltzoff's national ballads are not only
full of poetry and inspiration, art and artless simplicity, but some of
them have been set to music, have made their way to the populace, and
are sung all over Russia. Others, like "The Sun and the Moon" and "The
Baby's Death" are to be found in every Russian literary compendium, and
every child knows them by heart.

But while the poetry of this period could not boast of any such great
figures as the preceding period, it had, nevertheless, another camp
besides that of the "pure art" advocates whom we have just noticed. At
the head of the second group, which clung to the aesthetic doctrine that
regarded every-day life as the best source of inspiration and contained
several very talented expositors, stood Nikolai Alexyeevitch Nekrasoff
(1821-1877). Nekrasoff belonged to an impoverished noble family, which
had once been very wealthy, and was still sufficiently well off to have
educated him in comfort. But when his father sent him to St. Petersburg
to enter a military school he was persuaded to abandon that career and
take a course at the University. His father was so enraged at this step
that he cast him off, and the lad of sixteen found himself thrown upon
his own resources. He nearly starved to death and underwent such
hardships that his h