The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who live fast and die young. He was born of an aristocratic family, and when he was twenty he was, like most poets, a hopeful idealist, and wrote an ode to liberty, and was condemned to exile. He lived a wild life among the gypsies, and wasted himself, and finally his family persuaded the tsar to give him another chance. He was brought back to court and made a small functionary, among illiterate, dull, supposed-to-be-great people who had no understanding of his talents. He married a beautiful noble lady, who betrayed him continuously and broke his heart. Pushkin now wrote folk tales, and a great quantity of love poems in the Byronic manner. His idealism was dead; he was a court man, and went so far as to glorify the rape of Poland. He wrote a long narrative poem, “Eugene Onegin,” which tells about the tragic love troubles of an aristocratic youth, together with all the details of his life, how he got up in the morning, how he sipped his chocolate, how he read his invitations to tea-parties and balls. You might not think there would be great literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something important to say to their people. Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is supposed to be warm-hearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized “propaganda,” for the simple reason, that this would have cost him his liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of dealing with the real problems of your country and time.