Boratynsky family, the future poet received his education at the Page Corps at St. Petersburg, from which he was expelled at the age of 15 after stealing a snuffbox and five hundred roubles from the bureau of his accessory's[clarification needed] uncle.

[citation needed] Through the interest of friends he obtained leave from the Emperor to retire from the army, and he settled in 1827 in Muranovo just north of Moscow (now a literary museum).

He published several books of verse which Pushkin and other perceptive critics praised highly, but which met with a comparatively cool reception from the public, and with violent ridicule on the part of the young journalists of the "plebeian party".

Even Eda, his first long poem, though inspired by Pushkin's The Prisoner of the Caucasus, adheres to a realistic and homely style, with a touch of sentimental pathos but not a trace of romanticism.

The poems from that period include fugitive, light pieces in the Anacreontic and Horatian manner, some of which have been recognized as the masterpieces of the kind, as well as love elegies, where a delicate sentiment is clothed in brilliant wit.

Baratynsky's obvious labour gives his verse a certain air of brittleness which is at poles' ends from Pushkin's divine, Mozartian lightness and elasticity.

Among other things, Baratynsky was one of the first Russian poets who were, in verse, masters of the complicated sentence, expanded by subordinate clauses and parentheses.