SOURCE: Leighton, Lauren G. “Bestuzhev-Marlinsky as a Lyric Poet.” Slavonic and East European Review 47, no. 109 (July 1969): 308-22.

In the following essay, Leighton discusses Bestuzhev's poetry as a representation of the technical and aesthetic standards of Russia's Golden Age.

‘Marlinsky is out of fashion these days’, recalled Turgenev in the 1870s, ‘no one reads him and his name is even sneered at; but in the thirties he thundered forth like no one else … put his stamp on the entire generation contemporary to him.’¹ A fierce literary critic on behalf of Romanticism in Russia, a glamorous revolutionary of the ill-fated Decembrist movement, the author of a brilliant variety of ultra-Romantic prose tales—these are the things for which Aleksandr Bestuzhev (pseudonym Marlinsky) is remembered today. But if he should be most properly remembered for these other achievements, he is also well worth modern scrutiny as a lyric poet. As one...