Konstantin Batiushkov—called the “Russian Tibullus” and the “Russian Parny” by his contemporaries—was a poet whose work largely determined the evolution of Russian poetry in the Golden Age. For contemporary as well as later critics, Batiushkov and Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovsky were the founders of a new school in Russian poetry that is usually defined as Romantic or pre-Romantic. Most of Batiushkov's poems, published during the mid 1800s and 1810s, were collected in the second volume of Opyty v stikhakh i proze (Experiments in Verse and Prose, 1817). General audiences were perhaps less impressed by Batiushkov's poetry than Zhukovsky's, but the former's influence on the younger generation of poets was extraordinary; in this sense Batiushkov could be called “a poet's poet.”

Evgenii Abramovich Baratynsky, Kondratii Fedorovich Ryleev, and, to a large degree, Aleksandr Pushkin began their careers as imitators of Batiushkov. He not only created models of several important...