of the 1860s at least partially to them. The poet also used his high station at court to take up the cudgels for such free-thinking writers as Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen, and Taras Shevchenko (Zhukovsky was instrumental in buying him out of serfdom), as well as many of the persecuted Decembrists. On Pushkin's early death in 1837, Zhukovsky stepped in as his literary executor, not only rescuing his work from a hostile censorship (including several unpublished masterpieces), but also diligently collecting and preparing it for publication. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Zhukovsky also promoted the career of Nikolay Gogol, another close personal friend. In this way, he acted as an impresario for the developing Russian Romantic Movement. Like his mentor Karamzin, Zhukovsky travelled widely in Europe, above all in the German-speaking world, where his connections with the Prussian court in Berlin gave him access to high society in spa-towns like Baden-Baden and Bad Ems. He also met and corresponded with world-class cultural figures like Goethe, the poet Ludwig Tieck, and the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. In 1841, Zhukovsky retired from court and settled near Düsseldorf, where he married Elisabeth von Reutern, the 18-year-old daughter of Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern, an artist friend. The couple had two children, a girl named Alexandra and a boy named Pavel. Alexandra later had a much talked-about affair with Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich. Zhukovsky died in Baden-Baden in 1852, aged 69. His body was returned to St. Petersburg and buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. His crypt can be found directly behind the monument to Dostoevsky. Works In the opinion of Vladimir Nabokov, Zhukovsky belonged to the class of poets who verge on greatness but never quite attain to that glory. His main contribution was as a stylistic and formal innovator who borrowed freely from European literature in order to provide high-quality models for "original" works in Russian. His translation of Gray's "Elegy" is still cited by scholars as the conventional starting-point for the Russian Romantic Movement. He also wrote some prose, the best known example of which is the 1809 short story "Marina roshcha" ("Mary's grove"), about the ancient past of Moscow; it was inspired by Nikolay Karamzin's famous story "Bednaya Liza" ("Poor Liza", 1792). Zhukovsky translated from a staggeringly wide range of sources, often without attribution, given that modern ideas of intellectual property did not exist in his day. In his choice