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 demonism and a proud pessimism which naturally endear him to a youthful audience.

Lermontov revolted not against the Czar of all the Russias, but against the God of heaven and earth. Yet the growing civic bias made it possible to put a social interpretation upon the disquietude which pervades his work. Thus the forensic Nekrasov, who in the next generation voiced the civic conscience of an epoch of reform, is considered to have issued from Lermontov. Nekrasov's troubled and uneven verse dwelt with the miseries of the peasant and the proletarian. It celebrated the cause of the masses, and made itself the vehicle for the peccavi of the gentry, aware of its outstanding debt to the people. The age was also glad to give laurels to the folk-poets, such as Koltzov and Nikitin.

The sixties and seventies—the period in which Nekrasov flourished—harnessed the literary Niagara to political action. The age felt that life is real, life is earnest, and that art is not its goal. The permanent abolition of serfdom was coincident with the temporary abolition of æsthetics. The very existence of a socially indifferent poetry was called into question. In this unfriendly atmosphere a group of poets nevertheless carried on the Pushkin tradition of self-sufficient lyricism. Maikov, Foeth, Alexey Tolstoy and, to a certain extent, Polonsky, all deriving from the idealism of the forties, stand out unrelated to the period in which they wrote. These shared with the French Parnassians an allegiance to the dogma of art for art's sake, and Maikov approached their plasticity and impassivity. Æsthetes are inimical to revolution, not because they love justice less, but because they love