The poet and essayist Konstantin Batyushkov was seen as a master by the young Pushkin. Together with his friend Vasily Zhukovsky, he paved the way for the great flowering of poetry in the 1820s; his relatively small body of poetry offered models for several different genres: literary satires, witty personal epistles, longer more elaborate elegies. His contemporaries admired what Mandelstam later described as his “curves of sound” – the haunting melody of his verse, often inspired by or translated from the poets of classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance or the French eighteenth century. His essays were similarly ground-breaking, and he left a remarkable body of vivid and witty letters to friends. Although he was principally known in his lifetime as the author of playful…
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Citation: France, Peter. "Konstantin Batiushkov". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 July 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13788, accessed 04 December 2024.]