and he died four years after Pushkin's death, that is, at the quite ridiculous age of twenty-seven.' Like Pushkin he was killed in a duel, but his duel was not the inevitable sequel of a tangled tragedy as in Pushkin's case. It belonged rather to that trivial type which in the eighteenthirties and forties so often turned hot friendship into cold murder-a phenomenon of temperature rather than of ethics. You must imagine him as a sturdy, shortish, rather shabby-looking Russian army officer with a singularly pale and smooth forehead, queer velvety eyes that "seemed to absorb light instead of emitting it," and a jerky manner in his demeanor and speech. Following both a Byronic fashion and his own disposition, he took pleasure in offending people, but there can hardly be any doubt that the bully in him was the shell and not the core, and that in many cases his attitude was that of a morbidly self-conscious, tender-hearted, somewhat childish young man building himself a sentimentproof defense. He spent the best years of his short life in the Caucasus, taking part in dangerous expeditions against mountain tribes that kept rebelling against imperial domination. Finally, a quarrel with a fellowofficer, whom he had most methodically annoyed, put a stop to his not very happy life. But all this is neither here nor there. What matters is that this very young, arrogant, not overeducated man, mixing with people who did not care a fig for literature, somehow managed, during the short period granted him by the typically perverse destiny which haunts geniuses, to produce verse and prose of such virility, beauty, and tenderness that the following generation placed him higher than Pushkin: the ups of poets are but the seesaw reverses of their downs. At fourteen he wrote a short lyrical poem "The Angel" which Russian critics have, not inadequately, described as coming straight from paradise; indeed, it contains a pure and truly heavenly melody brought unbroken to earth. At twenty-three he reacted to Pushkin's death by writing a poem which branded with its white fire the titled scoundrels who baited the