The attention of the Russian literati has been for some time directed mainly by the Germans to their own treasures of popular poetry.  They are particularly rich in nursery tales, for which the nation indeed has always had a great fondness; but which, during an age of a false pedantic taste, were after all not thought worthy of literary preservation until of late.  In close connection with this subject is the cultivation of popular dialects.  Grebenko and Kwitka, the latter under the name of Osnovianenko, wrote their charming novels in the Malo-Russian or Ruthenian dialect.  Several writers of talent, natives of Malo-Russia, endeavoured to establish their language as a literary language in opposition to the Great Russian.  The judiciousness of these proceedings, especially as the Russian literature has hardly passed from childhood to youth, would seem very questionable, even if their practicability was settled.

As to poetry, the reader will be surprised to hear, that Russian critics themselves think the short-lived flower of the Russian soil already in danger of fading; the productiveness of their poets being already apparently on the decline.  No genius has risen as a rival to Pushkin.  Alexander Pushkin, born 1799, showed his uncommon talents early; he was educated at one of the imperial Institutes, and was in the service of the government; when an Ode to Liberty, written in too bold a spirit, induced the emperor Alexander to banish him from St. Petersburg.  He obtained however employment in the southern provinces of Russia; and life in these wild and poetical regions was more favourable to the development of his genius, than that of the capital ever could have been.  All his poetry bears strong testimony to Byron’s influence; but he would be wrongly judged if taken as a mere imitator of that great poet.  His poetical tales, Ruslan and Ludmilla, from the heroic times of Russia; The Prisoner of the Mountains, a Caucasian scene (1823):  and the Fountain of Baktshiserai, a Tartar Story (1824); have each great beauties.  The emperor Nicholas, when at Moscow on the occasion of his coronation, recalled him, and showed himself his patron.  He made him one of the historiographers of the empire:  and the archives were opened to him.  The effect on the whole was not favourable to the poet’s genius.  The first production after his return to fashionable life was ‘Eugene Onegin,’ a novel in verse, the life of un homme blase.  Of this Byronic tendency, his Prisoner, and a great many of his small poems likewise, bear strong evidence.  And it is this feature chiefly, which, in turn, Pushkin’s followers and imitators have seized upon; for instance, Lermontof.  It is painful to see, how, instead of the freshness, the vigour, the joyfulness, which we ought to meet in the representatives of a young and rising literature, resting on the foundation of a rich, uncorrrupted, original language, we find in them the ennui, the dissatisfaction, and the indifference of a set of roues