Being a delicate child, his grandmother took him at the age of
ten to the Caucas,--which he deeply loved ever after. In 1827 he was
placed in the Adelige Pension at Moscow, having been previously much
influenced by a German nurse who inspired him with a love of German
legend and poetry, and also by his tutor, an officer in the Napoleonic
guard, who had taught him French. Up to 1831 he was under the German
unfluence [Transcriber's note: sic] in literature, but then he came
under the influence of Byron, and from this time he was never free of
the impression of the poet so congenial to his own spirit and nature. In
1830 he was matriculated by the Moscow University as a student of moral
and political science. In 1832 he went to what is now the Nicolai
Military school in Petersburg, where he wrote his censurable and erotic
poems that were passed about by thousands and won an immense popularity
with the jeunesse dore of the time, but which were regarded as
discreditable by the more serious and thoughtful society. In November,
1832, he was appointed Second Lieutenant in the Life Guard Hussar
regiment, and the young poet now plunged into the vortex of society life
as Pushkin had before him. In 1836 appeared his "Song of the Tsar Ivan
Wassiljewitsch,"--a truly classical achievement in the record of
literature. In 1837 came the poem on the death of Pushkin, that stirred
the aristocratic world and caused his banishment to the Caucas by the
Emperor Nicholas I.
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