Pushkin drew his subjects from life; they shut themselves up in aesthetic contemplation of the beautiful forms of classical art of ancient and modern times, and isolated themselves from life in general.

The result was, that they composed poetry of an abstract, artistically dainty, elegantly rhetorical sort, whose chief defect lay in its lack of individuality, and the utter absence of all colors, sounds, and motives by which Russian nationality and life are conveyed.

The poetry of this school contains no sharply cut features of spiritual physiognomy.

All of them flow together into a featureless mass of elegantly stereotyped forms and sounds.
Count A.K.Tolstoy, who enjoyed all the advantages of education and travel abroad (where he made acquaintance with Goethe), began to scribble verses at the age of six, he says in his autobiography.

Born in 1817, he became Master of the Hounds at the imperial court in 1857, and died in 1875.