Russian poets of the 18th century. Poetry of the 18th century Poets of Russian literature of the 18th century names

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“Our poetry is just beginning...” About the first Russian poets of the 18th century

In 1739, young Lomonosov, who was then studying in Germany, sent his first ode to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences - an ode to the capture of the Turkish fortress of Khotin. He wrote it in iambic tetrameter - a poetic meter that was destined to become the most commonly used in Russian poetry. This event was regarded by later critics and poets as its beginning, a symbolic starting point in its history.

Years have been gnawed from my memory,
Why and who fell in Khotyn,
But the first sound of the Khotyn ode
It became our first cry of life.

That day the hills were snowy
The Russian stone has risen
And your wondrous voice for the first time
I gave it to distant sisters.

(V.F. Khodasevich, “Isn’t it iambic tetrameter...”, 1938)

Along with the ode, Lomonosov sent to St. Petersburg a “Letter on the rules of Russian poetry,” in which, outlining the principles of syllabic-tonic versification, he noted: “Our poetry is just beginning...”

In fact, by that time poetry had been written in Russia for at least a hundred years. Basically, these were syllabic poems based on Polish models (based on a simple count of syllables, without necessarily taking into account stress), and their authors were usually clergy - learned monks and clergy. Sometimes they wrote on secular topics, but remained church writers. This was, for example, the most prolific Moscow poet of the 17th century. Simeon of Polotsk (1629–1680). His “Rhyming Psalter” (1680) was one of the books that Lomonosov read in his adolescence and later called “the gates of his learning.”

At the beginning of the 18th century. In Russia there already existed a fairly developed poetic culture: dramas were composed in syllabic verses, presented in religious educational institutions, the victories of Peter I over the Swedes were glorified, and love songs were composed. Soon poets appeared who wanted to stand on a par with the Europeans. At that time, this meant writing in accordance with the norms of European classicism and the example of ancient authors.

During Lomonosov’s student years, in the 1730s, there were at least two writers in Russia who treated their work as high art and had already known literary fame. These were Prince Antioch Cantemir, “the most important and skillful Russian piita,” and the modest and hardworking V.K. Trediakovsky, who called him so. Cantemir became famous for his poetic satires - works in a genre characteristic of ancient Roman poetry (the first of them were written in 1729–1731). Trediakovsky was successful thanks to the translation of the French gallant novel “Riding to the Island of Love” (1730) and tried on himself the role of a court poet (which, however, was poorly understood by Russian nobles and brought him a lot of humiliation). Following the model and recommendations of the most authoritative theoretician of French classicism N. Boileau, in 1734 he wrote a “Solemn Ode on the Surrender of the City of Gdansk”, and in the accompanying “Discourse on the Ode in General” he gave a general definition of this new type of poem in Russian literature : " An ode is a combination of many stanzas, consisting of equal and sometimes unequal verses, which always and certainly describe noble, important matter, rarely tender and pleasant, in very poetic and magnificent speeches».

Kantemir and Trediakovsky laid the foundation for a new Russian literature, which separated itself from pre-Petrine church bookishness. Much was new in their writings: the Russian language, freed from “deeply worded Slavism”; genres that go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who did not know true religion; topics that are sometimes dubious from a spiritual point of view. The only old method of versification was syllabic. Kantemir remained faithful to him to the end, and over time, Trediakovsky’s syllabic verses began to seem like “prosaic lines.” In 1735, he published a treatise with proposals for its improvement - “A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Poems.” “Brief” here meant quickly leading to the goal - to poetry that will no longer seem like prose to anyone. He proposed measuring poetry in “feet” - repeating combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables. The simplest two-syllable feet are iambic and trochee. Trediakovsky preferred trochees and “for example” included in the book poems written in hexameter (“hexameters”) and pentameters (“pentameter”) trochees. In his “hexameters,” the verse was necessarily divided into two hemistiches, consisting of three trochaic feet, and before the “suppression” between them (caesura, pause), an extra stressed syllable was necessarily inserted. The result was a thirteen-syllable (6+1+6) familiar to readers of syllabic poetry, but with an orderly alternation of stresses within it:

Always / directly agree with the opinions of others;
Never stand / stubbornly in yours.
Listen clearly to what / people offer you;
Don’t seem smarter than they know you.

(“Poems that teach good morals to a person”)

Trediakovsky proposed a syllabic-tonic system of versification, which takes into account both the number of syllables, as in book syllabic verses of the 17th century, and the number of stresses, as in Russian folk songs based on the tonic principle (from the word “tone” - stress). “The poetry of our common people brought me to this,” he admitted about the sources of his reform. - It’s a gift that its syllable is not very red, due to the lack of art of composing<…>. Indeed, I took almost all the titles used in the verse from the French version; but the thing is in our very natural, most ancient poetry of ordinary people.”

His idea in 1739 was picked up and developed by Lomonosov, showing that Russian poetry can be measured not only with two-syllable, but also with three-syllable feet (dactyls and anapests), and that verse written in iambics is not “very thin,” as Trediakovsky claimed in 1735 g., and very good: this was evidenced by his entire Khotyn Ode written in iambics. Trediakovsky eventually agreed with Lomonosov, began experimenting with different poetic meters, and in 1752 he published a general guide on the rules of syllabic-tonic versification - “A Method for Composing Russian Poems.” Many people later learned to write poetry from it (for example, G. R. Derzhavin).

In 1744, Trediakovsky, Lomonosov and the youngest among them, A.P. Sumarokov, published the brochure “Three Paraphrastic Odes of 143 Psalms.” Each of them translated the same 143 psalm into verse for her: Trediakovsky - in trochees, and Lomonosov and Sumarokov - in iambics. So they wanted to resolve the dispute whether these two-syllable feet have a “natural property.” Lomonosov argued that iambic is characterized by “highness”, since it is an “ascending” meter (first an unstressed syllable, then a stressed one), and trochee is characterized by “tenderness”, since it is a “descending” meter, which means that only iambic is suitable for a sublime spiritual theme. Trediakovsky argued that iambic and trochee are equivalent and suitable for any matter, “taking into account all the differences in words,” and not stops. In essence, it was a dispute between like-minded people on a private issue. They unanimously came out as supporters of the syllabic tonic, irrevocably abandoning the syllabic (and in the same year, 1744, Cantemir’s treatise written in its defense was published). From this time on, the reform of Russian versification can be considered accomplished. Which of them was right about iambs and trochees was to be determined in a poetic competition. Here are the opening stanzas of the three odes:

Sumarokov:

Blessed be the Creator of the universe,
Which today I am up in arms!
These hands are now lifted up,
And the spirit is directed towards victory:
All thought turns to You with hope;
Your hand will glorify me.

Trediakovsky:

Strong, wonderful, endless,
Paul of praise, all glorious,
God! You are the only eternal one,
This is the Lord yesterday and today;
Unfathomable, unchanging,
Perfectly perfect,
Surrounded impregnably
Majesty himself with rays
And fiery servants at dawn,
ABOUT! May you be blessed forever.

Lomonosov:

Blessed be the Lord my God,
Strengthening my right hand
And teaching fingers in battle
Erase enemies with a raised horn.

“Poetry is not a great thing, but Piit is something rare in humanity,” Trediakovsky once remarked. In a joint brochure of 1744, the three “fathers of Russian poetry” demonstrated not the capabilities of iambs and trochees, but each the measure of his art and the peculiarities of his poetic manner. Trediakovsky was the oldest, most diligent and least successful among them. A learned philologist, he sometimes approached the writing of poetry as a scientific experiment, pedantically observing the conditions he himself had invented. Of course, his experiments were not always successful. In solving the task at hand, he could neglect both the euphony and the understandability of the poems: for the sake of maintaining size, he inserted plug words (“The beauty of spring! The rose, oh! beautiful!..”, “The fox wanted to eat this one...”), used inappropriately “dilapidated” Slavicisms (“Each sat down next to his girlfriend, / Smilingly bowing his eyes towards her,” that is, turning his smiling face towards her), constantly, following the example of Latin poets, used inversions (“his own chamber is a better house for him” instead of “his own home is better for him than his chambers”), etc. Some biased contemporaries, and after them many incurious descendants, ridiculed him as a mediocre graphomaniac, were reluctant to remember his obvious merits, and even spoke of his amazing hard work with the arrogance of lazy people. Meanwhile, he was not at all mediocrity, but on the contrary, sometimes in some ways he was ahead of the tastes of his contemporaries. Thus, in the epic poem “Tilemachida” (1766), written in hexameters (hexameter dactylotrochees without rhymes), which immediately after its publication became the subject of cheerful ridicule in court circles, he anticipated the verse and partly the style of Russian translations of Homer’s poems in the 19th century. It is no coincidence that Trediakovsky found defenders in the person of A. N. Radishchev and A. S. Pushkin himself, who always spoke about him with respect. He was a genuine, albeit very uneven “piit”, and could compose poetry at least as good as Lomonosov’s - such, for example, as the opening stanza of his ode “Paraphrasis of the Second Song of Moses” (1752):

Wonmi, oh! sky and river
Let the earth hear the words of the mouth:
Like rain I will flow with words;
And they will fall like dew to a flower,
My broadcasts to the valleys.

Nevertheless, Lomonosov was still called “Peter the Great of Russian literature”, “Russian Pindar” and “the glory of the Russians”, and not only for the sake of the obvious rhyme. The Khotyn ode was recognized as the beginning of Russian poetry not because it was the first to be written in iambic tetrameter, but because, unlike Trediakovsky’s poems, it does not need justification and it is flattering for everyone to have such a beginning.

“Lomonosov stands ahead of our poets, like an introduction in front of a book,” wrote N.V. Gogol. – His poetry is the beginning of dawn. In him, like a flashing lightning, it illuminates not everything, but only some stanzas. Russia itself appears to him only in general geographical outlines. He seems to care only about sketching one outline of a huge state, marking its borders with dots and lines, leaving others to apply the colors; he himself is, as it were, an initial, prophetic sketch of what lies ahead.”

The main and most characteristic thing in Lomonosov’s poetry is his odes, solemn (“praiseworthy”) and spiritual. The first ones were mostly timed to coincide with official state celebrations (anniversaries of accession to the throne, etc.). These are indeed “praiseworthy” odes, in which there is no shadow of criticism of the reigning monarch, but these are by no means flattering odes. Lomonosov saw his task in increasing the glory of Russia, his odes inspired thoughts about its greatness and brilliant future, about the invincibility of the spirit of the “Russians”, the rightness of the cause of Peter the Great and the state benefits of science. They were called upon to inspire work and exploits for the good of the fatherland, not only ordinary readers, but also the monarch himself, to whom, first of all, the poet addressed. Therefore, his odes are imbued with an optimistic mood and are aimed at the future. There is no place in them for dissatisfaction with life and, in general, for everyday and changeable human feelings: “In the ode, the poet is disinterested: he does not rejoice at the insignificant events of his own life, he does not complain about them; he broadcasts the truth and the judgment of Providence, triumphs about the greatness of his native land, places Peruns in his peers, blesses the righteous, curses the monster” (V.K. Kuchelbecker).

Lomonosov wrote odes not on his own behalf, but as if on behalf of the entire Russian people, sometimes on behalf of history, rich in instructive examples. Not the loyal poet personally (which would be inappropriate), but as if the Truth of God itself taught lessons to the kings through his lips:

Hear, earthly judges
And all the sovereign heads:
Laws to break are sacred
You are guarded by violence,
And do not despise your subjects,
But correct their vices
By teaching, by mercy, by labor.
Combine generosity with truth,
People watch the benefit;
Then God will bless your home.

(“Ode... to Empress Catherine Alekseevna on her glorious accession to the All-Russian Imperial Throne on June 28, 1762”)

Oda, according to Lomonosov, is a means of “bowing, not persuading.” The odopist is in a state of “delight,” “sacred intoxication,” and can be transported in thought from one object to another without any visible logical connection. He strives to capture the reader’s imagination, to involve him in his “delight.” This is served by the hyperbolic imagery of the ode and the abundance of rhetorical “embellishments” - unexpected comparisons, metaphors and metonymies, excursions into history and mythology, alliteration and assonance, sometimes very refined (“trodden with the sands, drowned in the streams”). In Lomonosov’s ode on the occasion of the coronation of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1742), the natural elements are endowed with the feelings and hopes of her subjects, and at the same time the size of the empire with different climatic zones is shown:

Your name is very praiseworthy
Glory in eternal ice is not false,
Always where the cold north breathes
And only by faith I am warm towards you;
And the steppes are remote in the heat,
Kindled with love for you,
They burn even harder.
They are rushing to you from eastern countries
Already American waves
The Kamchatka port is full of fun.

This is one of the extreme examples of the “magnificent” Lomonosov style, which could not only delight, but also repel readers. “Perish such splendor, in which there is no clarity,” wrote Sumarokov, who constantly competed with Lomonosov and, not without reason, then claimed the title of best writer.

Sumarokov was the first Russian playwright, “the father of the Russian theater,” and in addition, he wrote in almost all genres provided for by the literary theory of classicism. Lomonosov was only the “Russian Pindar” (as an ode-writer), and Sumarokov was the “northern Racine” (tragedies), the “Russian Moliere” (comedies), the “Russian Boileau” (satires and epistles about poetry), the “Russian Lafontaine” (poetic fables ) etc. He also wrote eclogues and elegies, spiritual and philosophical odes, composed songs that were extremely popular, etc. Unlike Lomonosov, who was busy with various scientific works, the main and only work of Sumarokov’s life was literature, belles-lettres. In his poetry, for the first time, a private person appeared to us with all the diversity of his emotional life - love and civil feelings, spiritual thoughts and black despondency, compassion for his neighbor and irritability, tenderness and indignation. True, for different feelings Sumarokov had different genres that should be differentiated. He called for this in his “Epistole on Poetry” (1748), written in imitation of N. Boileau’s “Poetic Art”:

In poetry, know the difference between genders
And when you start, look for decent words,
Without annoying the muses with your bad success:
Thalia with tears, and Melpomene with laughter.

It was necessary to distinguish not only tragedies and comedies, but also genres that were thematically close to each other. For example, eclogues and elegies spoke about love experiences, but in eclogues - about the “joys” of love, and in elegies - about its suffering. The author of such poems was required not to surprise readers, but to be simple and sincere.

But the verse will be cold and all your crying will be a pretense,
Once upon a time only poetry speaks;
But the warehouse will be pitiful, leave it and don’t bother:
If you want to write something, then first you fall in love!

Sumarokov and his followers valued clarity and purity of style, naturalness and simplicity of feeling in poetry, and called “magnificent” odes “inflated.” In Russian literature, the tradition of apology (defense) of natural human feelings, arising from the idea that man is by nature reasonable and kind, begins with Sumarokov. The very “naturalness” of a feeling (love, for example) sometimes served as its justification even in the face of religion and morality, and even more so in the face of bad customs, superstitions, injustice and violence (however, only feelings in agreement with reason were recognized as natural). Not the prayer and repentance of a Christian and not the indifference of a Stoic philosopher, but the fight against social vices and prejudices has become the moral right and duty of everyone who loves virtue and believes in the rightness of the human heart. This idea is developed in Sumarokov’s “Ode on Virtue” (1759):

Our hearts feel it,
What nature gave us;
Strict Stoics! Not yours
I preach works.
I don't ignore fun
I don’t fly higher than mortals,
I run from lawlessness
And when I see him somewhere,
I hate it more than death
And I can’t remain silent.

Sumarokov considered his work to be socially useful, dreamed of eradicating vices and instilling noble thoughts, but often instead of sympathy and recognition he received ridicule and insults. And he really couldn’t remain silent then. Sumarokov's most direct and sincere poems are those in which he complains about the insults inflicted on him as a writer and pours out his frustration and indignation. In 1759, taking care of educating readers, he published the magazine “Hardworking Bee” (the first literary magazine in Russia), and ended its last issue with a short poem “Parting with the Muses”:

For many reasons
The writer's name and rank disgust me;
I descend from Parnassus, I descend against my will
During the height of my heat,
And after death I will not ascend to him again, -
The fate of my share.
Farewell, muses, forever!
I will never write again.

Of course, he didn’t stop writing then, and maybe he didn’t even intend to, but he couldn’t help but express his grief at the ingratitude of his compatriots. Later, on the occasion of a conflict with the Moscow commander-in-chief over the staging of his tragedy, he experienced similar feelings and complained bitterly:

Enemies and friends are going to scold me.
Is this for my services, Russia?
<…>
For my work, you, Moscow, will see me dead:
My poems and I are victims of science to the villains.

(“My annoyance has now surpassed all measures…”, 1770)

With such poems and some everyday antics, Sumarokov gained fame as a man with restless pride and excessively vain. They were caused, however, not only by personal touchiness, but also by the desire to protect the dignity of literary pursuits that were not understandable to everyone. Pushkin, who generally had a cool attitude towards his work, noted this as one of his merits: “Sumarokov demanded respect for poetry.” And his labors were not in vain: the poets of the next generation were no longer considered funny eccentrics just because they wrote poetry.

Sumarokov created a whole school of followers who sought “purity of style” in their writings and appealed to the “reason” of readers, thinking of instilling in them moral and civic virtues. The largest of his followers eventually created fundamentally new works that bear little resemblance to Sumarokov. This is M. M. Kheraskov, the creator of “Rossiyada” (1779), the first Russian epic poem based on national historical material; V. I. Maikov, author of the comic parody poem “Elisha, or the Irritated Bacchus” (1771); I. F. Bogdanovich, author of the poem “Darling” (1783), which became a classic of Russian poetry in the “light” genre. In lyrical genres, however, they developed the traditions of Sumarokov.

A worthy successor to Lomonosov’s “magnificent” style, intended for things exceeding human measure, was V.P. Petrov, whom Catherine II declared in 1770 “the second Lomonosov.” In the 1770s. he was almost an official court poet, an exponent and propagandist of the ideas and plans of the Empress and Prince G. A. Potemkin, in particular, the project for the reconquest of Constantinople and the restoration of Greece. His odes are often larger in size than Lomonosov’s, and are distinguished by an even more Slavicized and florid style, but they amaze not so much with the abundance of words, but with thoughts - the seriousness and depth of assessments of the foreign policy situation, historical and philosophical ideas. Petrov's admirers, in addition to his poetic inventiveness, valued his deep intelligence and noble moral convictions. “Smart Petrov”, “fiery Petrov, impetuous and compressed,” - this is how the writers of Pushkin’s time spoke about him. Here, for example, is the final stanza of his ode “To the Capture of Warsaw” (1794), addressed to Catherine II:

Live while your power
A picture of brilliant miracles,
Stories of beauty and glory
And the image of the rightness of heaven,
He will delight everyone's eyes and rumors,
It will elevate everyone's feelings and spirits.
So far I'm fine
The light will be safe from aphids,
I agree with the Creator's intention,
Pure, bright, like your soul.

Like Lomonosov, Petrov presents Russia without details, “in one huge essay,” while his thought is directed not even to her, but to the “intention of the Creator,” which he strives to unravel, to the “rightness of heaven,” in which he firmly believes and the image of which he wants to see in the Russian state. In contrast to Lomonosov, Petrov, a contemporary of the French Revolution, looks into the future without enthusiasm and with some anxiety: after all, this is “while” the world is “in order” and safe “from aphids”, this is only “while” the power of Catherine II exalts “ everyone’s feelings and spirits” (and someday, obviously, this will come to an end). In other words, behind these verses, which have the appearance of immoderate praise, there is a certain historiosophy, the poet’s thoughts about the destiny of Russia and world history, and in particular, about the place allocated in it to the reign of Catherine II. Petrov realized the potential of a commendable ode of the Lomonosov type almost to the limit.

* * *

A new era in Russian poetry began with G. R. Derzhavin. He took his own from each of the three “fathers of Russian poetry.” Lomonosov has flights of imagination, ingenuity (“wit”), elation (“delight”) and heroic-patriotic pathos; Sumarokov has humanity, sincerity of feeling, the heat of satirical indignation and concern for the moral side of public life; Trediakovsky has a manner of fearlessly mixing styles and use rare words. But Derzhavin cannot be called a follower of either each of them individually, or all of them taken together. In his own words, in 1779 he “chose his own very special path” and began to develop his own poetic style, a distinctly individual style serving the purposes of direct self-expression.

Derzhavin abandoned the seemingly obligatory principle of correspondence between style and genre, that is, from speaking about serious things seriously and without jokes, writing about sublime subjects in a high style, about base ones in a rude manner, etc. With him everything seems to be mixed up. The famous ode “Felitsa” (1782), addressed to Catherine II, is both an ode of praise and satire: the poet praised the empress and laughed at her nobles. At the same time, he did not extol the monarch to the skies, as Lomonosov and Petrov would have done, but glorified her human, everyday-specific virtues - for example, her abstinence in food and love for walking, which was the honest truth, since the empress took care of her figure. But he did not denounce the nobles and did not cover them with eternal shame, as a consistent satirist would have done, but with good-natured playfulness and even sympathy he depicted their human weaknesses, from which he did not consider himself free: “That’s how I am, Felitsa! / But the whole world is like me...” Derzhavin in his poems easily moves from delight to jokes, from the overwhelming fear of death to everyday pleasures, and all this is often within the framework of one poem. In such things he later saw his rights to poetic immortality:

Everyone will remember this among countless nations,
How from obscurity I became known,
That I was the first to dare in a funny Russian syllable
To proclaim Felitsa’s virtues,
Talk about God in simplicity of heart
And speak the truth to kings with a smile.

(“Monument”, 1795)

In Derzhavin's poems there was a place for his personal preferences and even quirks, the vicissitudes of his official activity, his wives (he was married twice), friends and neighbors. They abound in picturesque details in descriptions of nature, home life and feasts, the morals of his amazing contemporaries, like G. A. Potemkin and A. V. Suvorov, etc. With every right, Derzhavin once remarked that a book of his poems “...may to be a monument to posterity of the deeds, customs and morals of his time, and<…>all his works are nothing like a picture of Catherine’s century.”

Derzhavin's poetry is truly autobiographical, it contains his whole life as a poet and statesman, his worries and concerns, faith and moral principles. What it doesn’t have are subtle intimate experiences that can only be entrusted to a loved one. Derzhavin is all in plain sight, he has nothing and no need to hide: “Throw, sage, a stone on my coffin, / If you are not a man” (“Confession”, 1808).

The intimate inner life in Russian lyrics was discovered by his younger contemporaries, whose work reflected the worldview of the era of sentimentalism. M. N. Muravyov and N. M. Karamzin expressed feelings and thoughts that there is no need to broadcast loudly to the whole world: it is better to talk about them quietly, in an undertone, in a narrow circle of select people - enlightened people who understand each other perfectly. Thus, Muravyov, like Derzhavin, poeticizes private life, but he is focused not on everyday life, but on the “life of the soul,” striving for the ideals of goodness and beauty and despondent from its own imperfection. For Muravyov, creativity is an experience of self-education, establishing harmony between ideal and reality. His “feelings” are inseparable from reflection, enthusiasm and disappointment are tempered by irony, self-absorption by recognition of the rights of “society” over a person (this is discussed, for example, in his “Message on an easy poem to A. M. Br<янчининову>", 1783). Karamzin puts his skeptical thoughts about politics and human nature into the form of a confidential conversation with a friend or “nice women,” while seemingly consoling the reader and counting on consolation himself. Self-absorption, readiness to sympathize with the unfortunate, emotional moderation, refined taste, attention to the nuances of the inner life of a person subject to doubts, disappointments and causeless despondency, melancholy and a look at oneself and the surrounding reality full of sad irony - all this, to varying degrees, is characteristic of the works of sensitive authors of the new generations (primarily Karamzin’s prose and poetry). Sentimental lyrics of the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. - this is the prologue to the elegiac poetry of V. A. Zhukovsky and K. N. Batyushkov and, in general, to the psychological lyrics of Pushkin’s time (which, however, greatly expanded the narrow spectrum of “feelings and thoughts” of sentimental authors).

Poetry of the 18th century became the foundation of classical Russian literature of the 19th century, a number of its specific features appeared even then - when “our poetry was just beginning.” Poets of the 18th century and their works were well known by Pushkin and the writers of his time, they were their rightful property, the subject of admiration or ridicule, captious or balanced judgments, but not an indifferent and indifferent attitude. For them, they did not merge into an indistinguishable mass of half-forgotten authors, as for the reading public at the end of the 19th century. But soon this poetry was, as it were, rediscovered by writers, critics and scientists of the 20th century, who discovered a lot of valuable and interesting things in it. Russian poetry of the 18th century, especially lyric poetry, to this day is capable of making an impression even on a poorly prepared reader, and has a certain special and enduring charm. The reason for this is probably that among our first poets there were true poets, over whom time has almost no power, since “there is something rare in humanity.”

V. L. Korovin

. “Letter from Khariton Mackentin to a friend about the composition of Russian poetry.” Chariton Mackentin is an anagram of the name Antioch Cantemir.

A poetic adaptation of the political educational novel by François Fenelon (1651–1715) “The Adventures of Telemachus,” which tells about the wanderings of the son of Odysseus (Tilemachus). Pushkin noted that “thought<Тредиаковского>translating it into verse and the very choice of verse prove an extraordinary sense of grace.”