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We find the same thing in Lermontov, who was fond of Byron, not only in a transient mood of snobbery, but because the very strong and sombre character of his imagination naturally led him to choose this kind of intense poetry. He was exerting himself to regard reality seriously and to reproduce it with exactitude, at the very time when he was killed in a duel at the youthful age of twenty-seven.

For the barefooted dreamer's life is Gorky's life, his ideals are Gorky's ideals, his pleasures and pains, Gorky's pleasures and pains. And Gorky, though broken in health now, buffeted by the storms of fate, bruised and wounded in the battle-field of life, still like Byron and like Lermontov, " seeks the storm As though the storm contained repose."

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, like Pushkin, Lermontov, Bielinski, and Garshin, died young, and although he wrote a goodly number of plays and stories which gave him a high reputation in Russia, he did not live to enjoy international fame. This is partly owing to the nature of his work, but more perhaps to the total eclipse of other contemporary writers by Gorki.

"I shall soon be dead," he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most important of all, they will forget." Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoïevsky, Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics.

However, as the rest of my recollections of that time presents nothing of a pleasurable character, except that peculiar sort of consolation which Lermontov had in view when he said there is pleasure and pain in irritating the sores of old wounds, why not indulge oneself? But one must know where to draw the line. And so I will continue without any sort of sentimentality.

It is certain that no modern European tongue has been able fairly to represent the beauty of Pushkin's verse, to make foreigners feel him as Russians feel him, in any such measure as the Germans succeeded with Shakespeare, as Bayard Taylor with Goethe, as Ludwig Fulda with Rostand. The translations of Pushkin and of Lermontov have never impressed foreign readers in the superlative degree.

Since the death of Pushkin, Lermontov alone has appeared to dispute the poetical crown with him. Many of his lyrics are exquisite, and have become standard poems in Russia, such as the Gifts of Terek and The Cradle Song of the Cossack Mother. In Gogol, who died in 1852, the Russians had to lament the loss of a keen and vigorous satirist.

But then Boyko remembered and began, with a smile, to explain. "Gentlemen, who remembers the description in Lermontov?" asked Von Koren, laughing. "In Turgenev, too, Bazarov had a duel with some one. . . ." "There's no need to remember," said Ustimovitch impatiently. "Measure the distance, that's all." And he took three steps as though to show how to measure it.

'Lermontov. 'Ah, Lermontov! Excellent! Pushkin is greater, no doubt.... Do you remember: "Once more the storm-clouds gather close Above me in the perfect calm" ... or, "For the last time thy image sweet In thought I dare caress." Ah! marvellous! marvellous! But Lermontov's fine too. Well, I'll tell you what, dear boy: you take the book, open it by chance, and read what you find!

The officers took his part. Captain Polyansky began assuring Varya that Pushkin really was a psychologist, and to prove it quoted two lines from Lermontov; Lieutenant Gernet said that if Pushkin had not been a psychologist they would not have erected a monument to him in Moscow. "That's loutishness!" was heard from the other end of the table.