The very same horse here was dragging Those sacks with the very same sound, And those very same workmen were sitting By the rickety mill on the ground.
And that Jew, with his beard, walked past me, And those waters raced through the weir; Yes, all this has happened already, But I cannot tell when or where."
The people also produced a poet during this epoch and gave Koltsov a successor, in the person of NIKITIN; his themes are taken straight from life, and he became known through his patriotic songs written during the Crimean War; but he is most successful in his descriptions of nature, of sunset on the fields, and dawn, and the swallow's nest in the grumbling mill. Two other poets, whose work became well known later, but passed absolutely unnoticed in the sixties, were SLUCHEVSKY, a philosophical poet, whose verse, excellent in description, suffers from clumsiness in form, and APUKHTIN, whose collected poems and ballads, although he began to write in 1859, were not published until 1886. Apukhtin is a Parnassian. The bulk of his work, though perfect in form, is uninteresting; but he wrote one or two lyrics which have a place in any Russian Golden Treasury, and his poems are largely read now.
In the eighties, a reaction against the anti-poetical tendency set in, and poets began to spring up like mushrooms. Of these, the most popular and the most remarkable is NADSON (1862-87); he died when he was twenty-four, of consumption. Since then his verse has gone through twenty-one editions, and 110,000 copies have been sold; ten editions were published in his own lifetime. And there are innumerable musical settings by various composers to his lyrics. His verse inaugurates a new epoch in Russian poetry, the distinguishing features of which are a great attention to form and _technique_, a Parnassian love of colour and shape, and a deep melancholy.
Nadson sings the melancholy of youth, the dreams and disillusions of adolescence, and the hopelessness of the stagnant atmosphere of reaction to which he belonged. This last fact accounted in some measure for his extraordinary popularity. But it was by no means its sole cause; his verse is not only exquisite but magically musical, to an extent which makes the verse of other poets seem a stuff of coarser clay, and his pictures of nature, of spring, of night, and especially of night in the Riviera (with a note of passionate home-sickness), have the aromatic, intoxicating sweetness of syringa. Verse such as this, sensitive, ultra-delicate, morbid, nervous, and pessimistic, is bound to have the defects of its qualities, in a marked degree; one is soon inclined to have enough of its sultry, oppressive atmosphere, its delicate perfume, its unrelieved gloom and its music, which is nearly always not only in a minor key but in the same key. Nobody was more keenly aware of this than Nadson himself, and one of his most beautiful poems begins thus--