Koltsoff

Such was certainly KOLTSOFF (1808–1842), a poet from the people, who has sung in his songs, so deeply appealing to every poetical mind, the borderless steppes of Southern Russia, the poor life of the tiller of the soil, the sad existence of the Russian peasant woman, that love which is for the loving soul only a source of acute suffering, that fate which is not a mother but a step-mother, and that happiness which has been so short and has left behind only tears and sadness.

The style, the contents, the form — all was original in this poet of the Steppes. Even the form of his verse is not the form established in Russian prosody: it is something as musical as the Russian folk-song and in places is equally irregular. However, every line of the poetry of the Koltsóff of his second period — when he had freed himself from imitation and had become a true poet of the people — every expression and every thought appeal to the heart and fill it with poetical love for nature and men. Like all the best Russian poets he died very young, just at the age when he was reaching the full maturity of his talent and deeper questions were beginning to inspire his poetry.