[Poggioli was an Italian-born American critic and translator. Much of his critical writing is concerned with Russian literature, including The Poets of Russia: 1890-1930, which is one of the most important examinations of this literary era. In the following excerpt, he discusses Bagritsky's work, particularly the Lay of Opanas, as a politically compromised expression of Romantic escapism.]

[Bagritsky's] early collection Southwest (1928) looks almost like the work of a jejune Pasternak. Like Sel'vinskij, he adopted the verse-tale form and produced the best work of this kind in the Lay of Opanas (1925), relating the adventures of a Ukrainian peasant who joins the Greens, the agrarian anarchists led by the rebel Makhno, who fought with the Red against the Whites, and with the Whites against the Red. The story ends with the death of the protagonist, executed for killing a commissar sent into the countryside to seize wheat. As indicated by its title ("lay" renders the duma of the original, which means "folk ballad" in Ukrainian), this poem is patterned after the heroic rhapsodies of old Little Russia, and it is quite significant that its author chose the form of the popular epos to sing of those who fought not for the Revolution, but against it. It is equally significant that Bagritskij was one of the many poets of his generation that were ultimately led to abandon these pure lyrical forms which, for giving expression to private feeling and personal experience, seemed to the regime even more dangerous than the semi-popular narrative poems by which the same poets were evoking the picturesque and pathetic figures of some of its defeated enemies. By choosing to sing of outlaws and outcasts, Bagritskij and his companions attempted the only kind of romantic escape which was still possible at that time; yet by doing so they reduced poetry to a picturesque fancy, episodic and anecdotal, superficial and fragmentary, in brief, almost to a parody of itself.