Poet, dramatist, and translator Lev Mei drew his subjects from history, folklore, mythology, and the Bible. Mei's works were influenced by the early-nineteenth-century German and English Romantic writers Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, as well as by Russian writers and poets such as Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Iazykov, Mikhail Iur'evich Lermontov, and Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Mei's lifelong efforts to create and promote a national literature organically rooted in the Russian experience have linked him with the Slavophile movement, whose chief objective was national self-definition. Though criticized by his contemporaries for his failure to address himself adequately to the important social questions of his day, he was admired by later critics for his virtuosic facility with Russian verse and the profoundly humane vision reflected in his works.

Lev Aleksandrovich Mei was born on 13 February 1822 in Moscow into an impoverished gentry family of German...