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Aleksyey Grigorevich Evstafev, or, as he wrote his name in English, Alexis Eustaphieve, was born in 1779 in the Territory of the Don Cossacks. It is not known what his early education was, but apparently his family was able to grant the children better advantages than fell to the lot of most Cossacks, for a brother of his is mentioned by him later as a surgeon of a hospital in the Ukraine. When Alexis was twenty years old, he was sent to London to serve as a chorister in the Russian church which had always been maintained there in connection with the Russian embassy. The two years passed by him in the English metropolis he spent not only in perfecting himself in music, the chief object of his vocation, especially in learning to play the violin, but also in acquiring a literary knowledge of the English language. He soon developed an indomitable desire to become an English man of letters. He made his anonymous debut in 1806 with a prose translation of Sumorokov's tragedy, "Demetrius the Impostor."

Eustaphieve's Russian training fell within the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the rhetorical element, mingling with the newly borrowed English sentimentalism, formed the prevailing tone of all literary productions, and neither his studies in England, nor his sober experiences in Boston and New York ever succeeded in eradicating that dialectic exultation which lies at the basis of all of Sumorokov's works. The Press received this attempt favorably, as the first of its kind, and thought that the translation did credit to a foreigner's skill in the English language.

Encouraged by his first success and sharing the enthusiasm of his countrymen for Russia under Alexander the First, he next year uttered some rhapsodical prophecies in a pamphlet, "Advantages of Russia in the Present Contest with France," to which he appended a short description of the Cossacks, who then formed the subject of universal interest, and gave still wider scope to his blind admiration of Alexander in another pamphlet, "A Key to the Recent Conduct of the Emperor of Russia" (1808), in which he put the best possible interpretation on the Emperor's