Yevgeny Baratynsky was a poet of thought, not of feeling. His poems are not about what hurts but about why it hurts. "He is original among us," Pushkin said of him, "for he thinks."
He was born in 1800 in Tambov province. Expelled from the Corps of Pages for a theft — petty, boyish — he served out a kind of penalty as a private soldier in Finland. There he wrote his verse: Finnish nature and Russian melancholy.
The Ball, The Concubine, Autumn — the narrative poems. Twilight (1842) was his last collection, where pessimism hardened from a mood into a system of views: the "malady of the age," a disenchantment with progress and enlightenment.
He died in Naples in 1844, suddenly. Belinsky did not value him in his lifetime. The twentieth century thought again.