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up with Bunin’s legitimate daughters, who were much
older; early developed, and spoiled in a purely feminine
atmosphere. While yet young, he read Diderot, Voltaire,
Young, Büger, Herder, Wieland, and Schiller. At the
age of nineteen, he translated Schiller’s “William Tell;”
some years later, “Don Quixote;” also wrote original
epic poems, ballads, and tales, yet without close
connection with the Russian popular spirit, because, in almost
every one of his poems, youcan point out the foreign
models.
In 1812 he participated with distinction, as an officer,
in the campaign against the army of Napoleon, and
became celebrated by the poem, “The Singer in the
Russian Camp,” and by a metrical homage addressed
to the Tsar Alexander from Paris, which for the first
time brought him in contact with the ladies of the
imperial family. He suffered the heartache of youth when
some one, on grounds of orthodoxy, refused to give him
his niece in marriage. In order to enjoy the young girl’s
society, he accompanied the family to Dorpat, passed an
instructive year in the little university town, and then,
in 1816, in St. Petersburg, joined the literary society
“Artasamas,” composed of persons similarly educated,
of which Pushkin, Nicholas Turgenief, and the later
re-actionists, Minister Bludof and Uvarof, were
members; a society which, as a league of the Phosphorists
in Sweden of that time, started the opposition of the
new century against the French classicism.
The romanticism which the society advocated as an
offset did not and could not have that relation to the
past, especially to the Middle Ages, possessed by the
German romanticism, of which it was a product. For
the Russian antiquity and Middle Ages were, at that
time, still a sealed book. They only brought forward
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