A RUSSIAN POET.1

A RUSSIAN traveller was complaining, a few years ago, that the literature of his native land was completely ignored by foreign readers. On one occasion, he said, happening to be paying a visit to a great public library, he asked the official who conducted him over it whether it contained any Russian books. "Certainly," was the reply, "we have some of Pushkin's works, and some of Lomonosof's and Karamzin's." "But have you none by other writers ?" the visitor proceeded to inquire. "The Russians have no other writers," was the prompt reply. If the possession of books involved the appreciation of them, the traveller's complaint would be a groundless one as far as England is concerned, for our national library is rich in every department of Russian literature; but it is to be feared that he would not on that account find that English readers had a very familiar acquaintance with the publications issued at Moscow or St. Petersburg. The very name of the man of whose life and works it is now proposed to give a brief sketch, is most probably all but unknown in this country, although his writings are very popular in Russia, and few readers there are unacquainted with the sad story of his life. Very sad, indeed, it is, but on that account, perhaps, all the more interesting. We hear so much of self-made men who have achieved success, that we too often feel inclined to hold a comfortable creed to the effect that the battle of life is ever in favour of industry and virtue, that genius is always sure to be acknowledged, and that merit needs nothing but a little self-help to link happiness to its side. It is as well sometimes to turn from the one who has succeeded to the many who have failed, and to try to discover the moral which is pointed by their annals of useless struggles and of unfulfilled hopes, as well as by his story of triumphant exertions and gratified desires.

Alexis Vasilevich Koltsof was born in the year 1809 at Voronej, a considerable town in the south of Russia. His father occupied a respectable position as a dealer in sheep and cattle; but he was an uneducated man, and he did not take any pains to have his son taught more than he knew himself. The little Alexis had no schooling at all until his tenth year; and the companionship of those among whom he was brought up was not of a kind likely to refine or edify him. Intellectual society was not easily to be found at that time in Voronej, even in the highest circles; it was not probable that any traces of it would be apparent in the dwelling of a petty tradesman. The boy grew up in the midst of ignoble domestic troubles, brought (1) STIKHOTVORENIYA KOL'TSOVA. (Koltsof's Poems, with a Sketch of his Life and Writings, by V. Bielinsky. Moscow.)

into contact with none but inferior natures, listening to little but the coarsest of speech, and breathing anything but a pure moral atmosphere. But the evil influences by which he was surrounded had scarcely any effect upon him. From his earliest childhood he lived apart from others in a special world of his own, and in it " the holy forms of young imagination" kept his heart pure. A great part of his time during the summer months of every year was spent in following his father's flocks and herds in the open country; and as soon as he got away from the stifling air of his city home, the impressions made upon his mind during his stay there faded away, and were replaced by others of a higher and more durable nature. The conversation of his acquaintances at Voronej was suggestive of little but mean and gross ideas; but when once out of their sight he became conscious of utterances in the blue sky, the green meadows, the sombre forests, and above all in the sweeping ranges of the Steppes, which roused a very different set of thoughts within his mind. Left almost entirely to himself, he spent the greater part of his time in rambling about the country as far as so young a child could go; and there, beneath the open sky, he began to educate himself, more to the benefit of his mind than of his body. For while his mental frame gained unmixed good from his vagrant life, his physical health was considerably injured, and the seeds were sown of maladies which caused him much suffering in after life.

In his tenth year he began to learn reading and writing, and as soon as he had made sufficient progress in his studies, he was sent to the provincial school. There he was allowed to remain only four months; for at the end of that time his father took him away, thinking he must have learnt to read and write tolerably, and that no other knowledge was necessary for the life he was intended to lead. During the four months which he spent at the school, the boy managed to rise from the lowest class into the one above it, but it was impossible for him to learn a great deal in so short a time. In after years he taught himself much, but he was never able entirely to make up for the want of that early education which his father denied him. One great benefit, however, he gained from his school life, in the creation of that love for books to which he always remained faithful. His father allowed him a small sum for pocket-money, and he devoted it entirely to literary purchases, delighting for the most part in tales of heroes like Bova Karolevich and Eryslan Lazarevich, the Slavonic counterparts of our Jack the Giant-Killer and similar adventurers. Even as a child he felt a strong desire to imitate the stories he read, and he soon began to wander in imagination through enchanted realms in the performance of heroic deeds; but as yet the faculty of expression was denied him, and his castles in the air, and their ætherial inhabitants, floated idly before his mental vision.

As soon as he left school he was initiated into business. Every spring his father took him to the Steppes where his flocks wandered, and left him there till the autumn, at the end of which he sent him to attend the bazaar where his commercial transactions were carried on with the agents of the various houses of business. "And so," says

his biographer, "at the age of ten years Koltsof was dipped in the pool of sufficiently muddy materialism; " but the boy does not seem to have been any the worse for it. The pettinesses of trade never contracted his mind, nor did they stunt its growth; and the life of freedom he led during the summer season called out the better qualities of his nature, and quickened his mental development. The open country was to him a paradise, and there the whole summer long he gloried in his liberty. He loved the Steppe passionately, "like a friend, like a lover," we are told; "he loved the evening fire above which boiled the Steppe porridge; he loved the bivouac under the pure sky, on the green grass; he loved to spend whole days on horseback, chasing the flocks from one place to another.” This poetic life, it is true, was not free from very prosaic drawbacks. He had to pass whole days, even weeks, exposed to driving rain and chill autumnal winds; to wade at times through seas of mud, and to sleep on the bare ground, scantily protected against the pelting of the storm by a cow-hair blanket or a sheep-skin robe. But the freedom of the sweeping Steppe in the warm days of spring and summer more than compensated him for all the discomforts of autumn's stormy weather.

Towards the end of September the Steppes become almost untenable for civilised inhabitants, and about that time Koltsof used to return to town life in Voronej. There he hailed with pleasure the sight of his books and the friends in whose company he read them, of whom the dearest was a former schoolfellow, whose father, a rich shopkeeper in Voronej, possessed a fair library, and permitted the two boys to use it as they liked. Koltsof was allowed to take home with him any books he wished to read, and he joyfully availed himself of the privilege. Works of imagination formed his favourite reading, that in which he revelled most being the "Arabian Nights"-the Russian popular tales, which had formerly pleased him so much, losing their attraction by the side of the glowing romances with which he had now become acquainted. For three successive winters the two boys found unceasing delight in reading such stories, and in talking them over together. At the end of that time Koltsof made his first acquaintance with sorrow, for his little friend grew ill and died. It was a great blow to the boy, who was of a very tender and affectionate nature, and he long mourned bitterly over his loss. But when the summer came, and he found himself again on the Steppe, with plenty of books to keep him company,-for his little friend had

bequeathed his modest library to him, his spirits began to recover their wonted elasticity.

By this time he had read a considerable amount of prose, but he was entirely ignorant of verse. Suddenly one day, by mere chance, he lighted upon a cheap copy of Dmitrief's poems. A new world immediately seemed to open before his eyes, and from that moment his vocation in life appeared to him to be fixed. A passionate desire to imitate what had given him so intense a pleasure took hold of all his mind, and, although he was quite ignorant of anything like poetic laws or precepts, he began incessantly murmuring to himself what was soon to be song. One day, when Koltsof was about sixteen, a friend told him of a singular dream which had recurred on three successive nights, and had greatly disturbed him. It made so deep an impression on Koltsof that he determined to write a poem on the subject. As soon as he was alone he sat down to his task, in happy unconsciousness of the existence of laws of prosody, and guided only by one of Dmitrief's poems, which he selected as his model. The first few lines gave him great trouble, the next came more readily, and before night he had produced a poem called "The Three Visions," which, however, he subsequently destroyed. Whatever may have been its merits, it had the effect of confirming Koltsof's taste for poetry.

For some time he utterly neglected prose, not even reading anything but verse. Voronej boasted one small bookshop, and Koltsof was able to purchase, with the pocket-money allowed him by his father, the works of some of the chief Russian poets, such as Lomonosof, Derjavin, and Bogdanovich. What he had read he proceeded to imitate, and before long he produced a considerable amount of verse. For a time he kept his secret to himself, but at last, feeling the necessity of having an adviser, and not knowing to what other quarter he should turn, he laid his works before the bookseller, imagining that one who sold books must be able to criticise them. The bookseller was a man who had received little or no education, but he was shrewd and candid, so he gave it as his opinion that the poems were exceedingly bad, but he could not tell why he thought so. He proceeded to say that if any one wanted to write poetry he ought to have the textbook called "Russian Prosody," and ended by presenting that work to Koltsof, and offering to lend him as many books as he liked to borrow free of all charge. The boy's delight may well be imagined at thus receiving the key to the fairyland in which he so ardently longed to roam. Instead of being obliged to read the same volumes over and over again, he was allowed to revel in a whole library, through which he read his way steadily, devouring everything he found, good, bad, or indifferent, urged by an insatiable appetite, and too eager to get on to lose time in selection. Whenever a book of

poems gave him unusual pleasure he bought it, and thus his little. library could boast, in addition to its former treasures, of the works of such men as Delvig, Jukovsky, and Pushkin.

In such pursuits time went happily by with Koltsof till an event occurred which exercised a powerful influence on all his after life. One of the servants in his father's house was a young girl of great beauty, with whom, when he was about seventeen, he fell desperately in love. She must have possessed more than mere personal attractions, for she produced an impression upon him which no ordinary woman could have caused. He loved her with all the strength of youth, with all the devotion of a first attachment; he absolutely worshipped her, looking on her as his ideal of womanhood, and considering her as something holy. He loved with all his heart, and she returned his love, but it met with little approbation from his relatives. One summer, while he was absent on the Steppe, they sent the girl away. When he returned home in the autumn, and found she was no longer there, he felt the blow so keenly that he was taken ill, a violent fever ensued, and for a time he was utterly prostrated. As soon as he recovered he borrowed as much money as he could get from his friends and set off for the Steppe to try and recover his lost love, riding as far as he could go himself, and hiring messengers to go still farther in search of her. How long the investigation lasted is not known. All that resulted from it, at the end of a terrible period of suspense, was the information that the poor girl had been banished into the land of the Don Cossacks, and that there she had pined away and ultimately died of a broken heart.

"Koltsof told me these facts himself in the year 1838," says his biographer. "Although he was alluding to a loss sustained more than ten years previously, his face grew deadly pale, he was so agitated that he could scarcely speak, and while he was speaking he never once raised his eyes from the ground. That was the only occasion on which he referred to the subject, and I never alluded to it again. Sad as was its ending to his heart, Koltsof's first love had a beneficial. effect upon his genius. The happiness and the sorrow arising from it alike seemed to develop his poetic faculty, and its memories infused into his love verses a tone of earnestness and deep feeling which at once gave them a real value. He no longer had to search for a subject for his verse. His own sorrows afforded him an inexhaustible theme, and for a time he was inclined to wander exclusively "amid the ruins of his heart." Fortunately for Koltsof, his moral nature was as sturdy as his physical frame, and though he felt acutely the blow he had received, yet he bore it bravely. He did not go wailing through the world, refusing to be comforted, and shutting his eyes wilfully to the consolation which it could offer. He kept his grief to himself, and went out silently into the battle of life. In the exercise