Russian literature, and it is difficult to overestimate his influence.
He is the first, and still the most generally beloved, of all their
national poets. The wild enthusiasm that greeted his verse has never
passed away, and he has generally been regarded in Russia as one of
the great poets of the world. Yet Matthew Arnold announced in his
Olympian manner, "The Russians have not yet had a great poet."* It is
always difficult fully to appreciate poetry in a foreign language,
especially when the language is so strange as Russian. 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. The glory of
English literature is its poetry; the glory of Russian literature is
its prose fiction.

*Arnold told Sainte-Beuve that he did not think Lamartine was
"important." Sainte-Beuve answered, "He is important for us."

Pushkin was, for a time at any rate, a Romantic, largely influenced,
as all the world was then, by Byron. He is full of sentiment, smiles
and tears, and passionate enthusiasms. He therefore struck out in a
path in which he has had no great followers; for the big men in
Russian literature are all Realists. Romanticism is as foreign to the
spirit of Russian Realism as it is to French Classicism. What is
peculiarly Slavonic about Pushkin is his simplicity, his naivete.
Though affected by foreign models, he was close to the soil. This is
shown particularly in his prose tales, and it is here that his title
as Founder of Russian Literature is most clearly demonstrated. He took