C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical Introduction by Eugene Mark Kayden (18861977)
By Russian Realistic School of Poetry
I
If Koltsov was of the people, Nekrasov was for the people, the platform and inspiration of revolutionists and reformers. In the main his poetry was denunciatory, mocking in its bitterness against the social order, rank, and social morality; and uncompromising in its purpose. His burden was his mighty and continuous passion in the cause of social justice, a poetry “of vengeance and of grief.” He had an angry fancy, this poet of the masses trodden under foot; in the city he saw only unfortunate women, the slum and the gutter; in the villages—hunger and famine and never-ending suffering. It was only when he turned to the past story of heroic self-sacrifice of Russian men and women who gave up youth and career for freedom, or to the silent grief of mothers, or to peasant children, that his wrath was stilled; then purpose vanished, and he became wonderfully lyric, objective, rising to imaginative sublimity in his descriptions of nature and human passions. “Fancies! But I believe in the people!” he often repeated, and this dream of the future was the asylum of his distracted soul from the world of actuality.
After the death of Nekrasov, the problems of personal perfection and æsthetic idealism in poetry again seemed to lure men away from the ugly business of the struggle with wrong. But this deflection was only temporary. The lyricism of Semyon Nadson (1862–1887), who was carried off by consumption at twenty-four, came like “a voice with a nervous tremor, like a brother’s voice in a lonely hours to the despairing men of the stagnant black days of reaction in the eighties. Tender, nervous, gloomy, feeling that he was dying hourly, he sang of the melancholy dreams of youth, disillusionment, and this strain filled his poetry like one long sob. He knew his own limitation. “My verse is barren of all strength, and pale, and delicate…. I suffer and often weep in secret in the silence of the night,” but at least, he avowed, he never wrote to amuse or to chase away tedium. His morbid verse, magical in form, color and its emotional appeal, reflected the general weary feeling in society. But Nadson was also the poet of new effort, service, and hope. His message of deliverance, when the earth “weary of strife and the cries of the fallen will lift its eyes to all-comforting Love,” stirred his generation; and, popular beyond comprehension, he became the most representative poet of the end of the nineteenth century and the forerunner of the twentieth,—the Russia of revolution and change.