This is of course my personal taste and I could care less what is the official POV on the subject. I do not like Tolstoy at all. Pushkin - I think he is a genius. Calling him overrated I think is not very sincere.
I think this one is especially highly overrated. When you read the poem of someone you willingly or unwillingly trying to read his mind and vision of the world. When I read this one I am simply disgusted. I have the feeling that he is just cold and cynical to the level that I can't stand it! And the general feeling of fakeness in his writings is to the level of realising that this human being simply doesn't understand a few concepts about this life. The same feeling you have when you are listening to some primitive music and you feel that author simply 'doesn't get it' in the first place.
I also can't help but notice some cheap/dirty tricks in his poetry when rhythm doesn't work. Even when I write some 'poetry' as a joke to entertain my friends even I manage to avoid such cheap tricks and then I think that surely some great poet must be able to do it too? Isn't it? I mean small kids when they are missing words to express their thoughts use those tricks to make some rhythm to work. In the poem 'Evgeny Onegin' I've counted a few of those and then I had to stop counting in order to somehow finish the poem.
Surely like any author he has something in his poems but I do have a feeling that this author is highly overrated.
