eoi 



POLEMO. 



POLEVOY, NIKOLAY ALEXIEVICH. 



902 



benefits upon the town. He died in his fifty-sixth year, and is said to 

 have been buried alive at bis own request, because he was unable to 

 endure the pain which he suffered from attacks of the gout. The 

 ' Life of Polemo ' has been written at length by Philostratus, who 

 mentions several of his works. These however are all lost, with the 

 exception of two funeral orations, supposed to have been spoken in 

 honour of Cynsegiras and Callimachus, who fell in the battle of 

 Marathon. These orations were first published by Stephanus, 1567, 

 and afterwards by Poussines, 1637, Toulouse. The best edition is by 

 Orellius, 8vo, Leipzig, 1819. 



3. POLEMO, surnamed PEBIEGETES, was a native of Samoa or Sicyon 

 (Athen., vi. p. 234, d), and was made a citizen of Athens. (Suidas, 

 'Polemo.') He lived about B.O. 200. A list of his works, which 

 amount to twenty-six in number, and are principally on geographical 

 and historical subjects, is given by Clinton, in the third volume of 

 his ' Fasti Hellenic!,' p. 514. None of these have come down to us 

 entire, but the fragments which are extant have been published under 

 the following title : ' Polemonis Periegeta; Fragmenta collegit, 

 dige-dt, NotU auxit, L. Preller. Ace. de Polemonis Vita et Sciiptis 

 et de Historia atque arte Periegetarum Commentatioues,' 8vo, Lipa, 

 1838. 



1'0'LEMO, the author of a work on physiognomy which is still 

 extant, of whose life no particulars are known. According to some 

 writers he was an Athenian, but Sjlburgius (in 'Prafat. ad Aristot.,' 

 vol. vi.) and Fabricius (' Bibl. Gr.,' vol. ii. p. 170) consider his style to 

 be too incorrect for a native of that city. From some expressions 

 used by Polemo (for instance, the word ei!uA<J0uTos, lib. i., cap. 6, 

 p. 197), it seems probable that he was a Christian. As to his date, it 

 is only known that he must have lived before the time of Urigen, who 

 quotes him (' Cont. Gels.,' lib. i. p. 26). His work, which appear* to 

 have Buffered much from the ignorance of transcribers, is divided 

 into two books. In the first, which contains twenty-three chapters, 

 after proving the utility of physiognomy, he lays down the general 

 principles of the science ; he speaks of the shape of the head, of the 

 colour of the hair, of the forehead, the eyes, the cars, the nose, the 

 manner of breathing, the sound of the voice, &c. In the second 

 book, which consists of twenty-seven chapters, he goes on to apply 

 the principles he had before laid down, and describes in a few words 

 the characters of the courageous man, the timid, the impudent, the 

 passionate, the talkative, Ac. The greater part of his observations 

 are very ridiculous, but several of them have been borrowed by 

 J. B. Porta and other more recent writers on the subject of physio- 

 gnomy. His work was first published by Camillus Peruscus, with 

 vKlian's ' Varia Historia' and other works, 4to, Greece, Roma;, 1545. 

 A Latin translation by Nicolas Petreius was published with Meletius's 

 'De NaturA Hominia' and other works, 4to, Venet., 1552. There is 

 also an edition of the Greek text by Franc. Montecucli, 4to, Mutin., 

 1611 ; and it is inserted by Sylburgius in the sixth volume of his 

 edition of Aristotle's works, 4to, Francof., 1587. The best edition is 

 that by J. F. Franzius, who has inserted it in his 'Scriptorcs Physio- 

 gnomice Veteres,' Svo, Gr. and Lat., Altenb., 1780, and has added a 

 learned preface and notes. 



POLEVOY, NIKOLAY ALEXIEVICH, one of the few distinguished 

 authors whom Siberia has jet produced, was born on the 22nd of 

 June (old style) 1796, at Irkutsk. His father, who was descended 

 from an adventurous family of merchants, settled for some generations 

 at Kursk, where the names of Polevoy and Golikov are excessively 

 common, had been left an orphan at the age of thirteen, and sent to 

 Tobolsk in the employ of a relation of the name of Golikov. Most 

 of the elder Polevoy's life was spent in commercial enterprises in 

 Sibei in, and at one time he had the prospect of making a fortune by 

 establishing a new company for commerce with Russian America, but 

 the union of the two old companies crushed the plan. In 1805 he set 

 up a manufactory of earthenware at Irkutsk, and "he used," says his 

 son, " to pronounce with enthusiasm the name of Wedgwood." In 

 'ng in the business of this manufactory, and of a brandy dis- 

 tillery with which his father was also connected, the early years of 

 Polevoy were passed. He never apparently received any schooling ; 

 he learned to read from an elder sister at six years old ; at eight he 

 used to read aloud to his mother novels, and to his father the Bible 

 and the 'Moscow News,' and at ten he af sifted his father in the 

 counting-house, and amused himself by composing a manuscript 

 newspaper in imitation of the ' Moscow News ' (' Moskovskiya Vie- 

 domoeti '), which he called the 'Asiatic News '(' Aziyatskiya Viedo- 

 mosti '). The father was in the habit of boasting of his relation the 

 historian Golikoy, who had written a history of Petir the Great in 

 thirty volumes, and the boy formed the singular project of writing 

 additions to a work already so voluminous, lie also tried his hand at 

 composing plays, and produced a drama, 'The Marriage of the Tzar 

 Alexis Mikhailovich," and a tragedy entitled ' Blanche of Bourbon.' 

 " At last," says Polevoy in the autobiography prefixed to his ' Ocherki 

 liutwkoy Litteraturui,' published in 1 839, ' I became my father's 

 walking dictionary in geography and history, for my memory at that 

 time was such as I have never met with in anybody else. To learn 

 by heart a whole tragedy cost me nothing. In a word, if I must 

 describe my mental progress up to the year 1811, it was this, I had 

 read about a thousand volume* of all kinds and sorts, and remembered 

 all that I read from the verses of Karamzin, and the articles in the 



'Courier of Europe' (a Russian Magazine), to the Chronological 

 Tables and the Bible, from which I could repeat whole chapters by 

 heart. I was known iu the town of Irkutsk as ' the wonderful 

 boy," with whom the governor himself used to converse, and the 

 director of the grammar-school to dispute as with a learned man." 

 In 1811 his father resolved to leave Siberia and establish himself in 

 Moscow ; the son, who was sent on before him, then on the first 

 occasion of his quitting Irkutsk, passed through all Siberia, saw a 

 play for the first time at the theatre of the great fair of Makariev, and 

 on his arrival at Moscow, spent much of his time at the theatre and 

 the bookshops, wrote tragedies and romances, and was unwillingly 

 recalled to business and the brandy distillery by the arrival of his 

 father. This took place in June 1812, and both business and pleasure 

 were soon at an end in the devoted city, where the conflagration was 

 witnessed by father and son as fugitives from before the army of 

 Napoleon I. For a few years afterwards Polevoy was almost in constant 

 movement from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, and from Irkutsk to 

 Kursk, and his literary ardour, deadened by the reproaches of his 

 father, who now wished him to become a ' man of business,' appears 

 to have been all but extinguished. It suddenly revived when he was 

 about eighteen, a clerk at Kursk ; but the main cause of its renewal 

 according to his own account, was his discontent with his then situa- 

 tion and its limited prospects, and his conviction that in Russia there 

 was no other way to consideration for a person iu his position but 

 through learning and literary success. Himself aud his younger 

 brother, Xenophont, began to study French and German in secret, 

 devoting many hours of the night to their books, and the knowledge 

 of foreign languages led him into a new world of reading. In 1817, 

 when the Emperor Alexander paid a visit to Kursk, Polevoy sent to 

 the 'Russian Courier' an article describing the event, and had the 

 pleasure of seeing for the first time his name in print. Other con- 

 tributions followed, the name became known ; on a visit to St. Peters- 

 burg he was introduced to Zhukovsky, Griboyedov, Grech, and 

 Bulgarin, and in 1825 he commenced at Moscow the publication of a 

 magazine entitled the 'Moscow Telegraph.' 



For the twenty-one years that followed, Polevoy was in incessant 

 literary activity. The ' Moscow Telegraph ' soon made itself con- 

 spicuous by the vigour and spirit of its remarks on the literature of 

 the day ; the example was extensively followed, and the Russian lite- 

 rary historians date a new era in criticism from the articles of Polevoy. 

 It was naturally supposed that the editor had little spare time at his 

 disposal, but the public was surprised to hear in 1829 that he had 

 completed a history of the Russian nation, in 12 vols., containing a 

 continuous narrative from the earliest times to the reign of the 

 Emperor Nicolas. The early volumes of this history were assailed 

 without mercy by many who were astonished at the presumption of 

 its author in measuring himself with Karamzin, and of the twelve 

 volumes only six appeared in print, "the last in 1833. Possibly its 

 further progress may have been checked by the censorship, as the 

 ' Moscow Telegraph ' was thought too liberal iu its tendencies, and 

 suppressed by the Russian government. This was in or about 1835. 

 Polevoy removed to St. Petersburg, and his activity, instead of 

 slackening, became greater than ever. " In Moscow," says Nikitenko, 

 in an article on his works in the ' Biblioteka dlya Chteniya ' for 1846 

 (voL Ixxvi.), "Polevoy was a journalist, an historian, a romance- 

 writer. In St. Petersburg he was both an editor and a contributor 

 to several journals ; he composed romances, tales, essays, translations 

 from Shakspere, and such a multitude of dramas, tragedies, comedies, 

 vaudevilles, national farces, and so on, that criticism gave up the 

 attempt to follow him. We do not kcow what to be most astonished 

 at the number and bulk of his productions, the variety of their 

 character, or the rapidity with which he threw them off." The 

 natural result of this rapidity was, that the name of Polevoy, which 

 at one time promised to be one of the brightest in the Russian literary 

 horizon, lost much of its lustre. For the last ten years of his life his 

 reputation suuk instead of rising. He died at St. Petersburg, on the 

 22ud of February 1846 (o.s.), after three weeks of nervous fever, and 

 it was declared by his medical attendants that his constitution was 

 completely worn out by his incessant literary labours. He died in 

 poor circumstances, and left a large family. 



The most interesting work of Polevoy is perhaps his ' Ocherki 

 Russkoy Litteraturui,' or ' Sketches of Russian Literature,' 2 vols. 8 vo, 

 St. Petersburg, 1839. It consists of reprints of select critical articles 

 which had appeared in the ' Telegraph and elsewhere, on Devzhavin, 

 Karamzin, Pushkin, and other of the most prominent names in 

 Russian literature. The collection entitled 'Dramatic Works and 

 Translations of N. A. Polevoy ' (' Dramaticheskie Sochineniya i Pere- 

 vodui'), 4 vols., St. Petersburg, 1842-43, comprises only the more 

 popular of his productions, several of which enjoyed a great success, 

 iu particular the 'Grandfather of the Russian Fleet' ('Diedushka 

 Russkago Flota '), founded on the history of the old boat which bears 

 that name, which Peter the Great took as the model for his ship- 

 building. The author's favourite, as he tells us himself, was ' Parasha 

 Siberiachka ' (' Parasha the Siberian Girl ), founded on the same 

 historical anecdote which supplied Madame Cottin with the ground- 

 work of 'Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia.' In another play, 

 ' Soldatskoe Serdtse ' (' A Soldier's Heart '), the hero is his still-living 

 friend Bulgarin [BULGAIUN'], on a real incident in whose life it is 



