Aleksei Apukhtin was a talented late-nineteenth-century poet who deserves credit as a gifted and witty litterateur; his lyric verse occasionally reaches the quality of that produced by his illustrious elder contemporaries, Afanasii Afanas'evich Fet and Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev. A fundamentally apolitical person living in a fiercely politicized era, Apukhtin generally sought to distance himself from firm ideological stances in both his life and his art. While his poetic legacy is large and rich, his contemporaries felt that he failed to live up to the promise he had shown as a child prodigy. He wrote much fine lyric poetry, but perhaps Apukhtin's most striking works are his dramatic first-person monologues, meant especially for declamation and aural pleasure.

Aleksei Nikolaevich Apukhtin was born the first child of Nikolai Fedorovich Apukhtin and Mar'ia Andreevna (Zheliabuzhskaia) Apukhtina on 15 November 1840 in the town of Bolkhovo, Orel Province. The registry of births gives the...