Between the formative years of the eighteenth century, when Russian literature was at school to Western Europe, and the decade of the 1840's, when the native genius achieved unequivocal expression, there lie three significant decades during which the Russian spirit strove to find itself. The weight of tradition lay with British and French literary models, the displacement of which is effected not by head-on revolt, but by the introduction of German literary models as a counterweight. It has long been recognized that the process was initiated by the poet V. A. Zhukovskij, tentatively and uncertainly at first, and then sustained by him with vigor, especially in the years 1815-18, when his translations from the poetry of Goedie and Schiller appeared in profusion.