Semen Raich—poet, translator, and journalist—was a significant figure in the Russian literary scene of the 1820s and 1830s. His experiments in the transplantation of Italian poetry on Russian soil played a large role in the development of the so-called Golden Age of Russian poetry. An expert in Italian and Russian aesthetic culture, Raich became a teacher of a whole school of Russian poets, to whom he imparted a sense of the elevating role of poetry.

Semen Egorovich Amfiteatrov was born in September 1792 in the little village of Rai-Vysokoe, in Orel province. His father, Egor Nikitich Amfiteatrov, was a clergyman; his mother, Anastasia Amfiteatrova, died when Semen was seven years old. Father and son apparently had no affection for each other. The large family, in which there were nine children, kept patriarchal customs in their everyday life, a course typical for the Russian country clergy. All of...