Aleksandr Pushkin, unquestionably Russia's greatest poet, wrote of Vasilii Zhukovsky: “I am not his successor, but rather his pupil. . . . Nobody has had or will have as powerful and varied a poetic voice as his.” Zhukovsky was indeed one of the most influential figures in the making of modern Russian poetry. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century Russia entered a new era of national pride and self-awareness, fueled by the respect for national cultures engendered by the Romantic movement and by the successes in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte. While educated Russians were developing a new sense of their place in the European intellectual community, the Russian literary language was in a state of flux, pulled one way by a proud attachment to the pre-Petrine written language and in another direction by the equally natural impulse, exemplified by the work of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, to imitate...