As for the style, nearly three-quarters of the play has passed into the Russian language. It is forcible, concise, bitingly sarcastic, it is as neat and dry as W. S. Gilbert, as elegant as La Fontaine, as clear as an icicle, and as clean as the thrust of a sword. But perhaps the crowning merit of this immortal satire is its originality. It is a product of Russian life and Russian genius, and as yet it is without a rival.
Outside the current of politics and political aspirations, there appeared during this same epoch a poet who exercised a considerable influence over Russian literature, and who devoted himself exclusively to poetry. This was BASIL ZHUKOVSKY (1783-1852). He opened the door of Russian literature on the fields of German and English poetry. The first poem he published in 1802 was a translation of Gray's _Elegy_; this, and an imitation of Bürger's _Leonore_, which affected all Slav literatures, brought him fame. Later, he translated Schiller's _Maid of Orleans_, his ballads, some of the lyrics of Uhland, Goethe, Hebbel, and a great quantity of other foreign poems. His translations were faithful, but in spite of this he gave them the stamp of his own dreamy personality. He was made tutor to the Tsarevitch Alexander--afterwards Alexander II,--and for a time his production ceased; but when this task was finished, he braced himself in his old age to translate _The Odyssey_, and this translation appeared in 1848-50. In this work he obeyed the first great law of translation, "Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one." He produced a beautiful work; but he also did what all other translators of Homer have done; he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky, and with it something sentimental, elegiac, and didactic.
Zhukovsky's greatest service to Russian literature consisted in his exploding the superstition that the literature of France was the only literature that counted, and introducing literary Russia to the poets of England and Germany rather than of France. But apart from this, he is the first and best translator in European literature, for what Krylov did with some of La Fontaine's fables, he did for all the literature he touched--he re-created it in Russian, and made it his own. In his translation of Gray's _Elegy_, for instance, he not only translates the poet's meaning into musical verse, but he conveys the intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape, and the poignant accent which makes that poem the natural language of grief. It is characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years after he translated the poem, he visited Stoke Poges, re-read Gray's _Elegy_ there, and made another translation, which is still more faithful than the first.