SOURCE: Serman, Ilya. “The Eighteenth Century: Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment, 1730-90.” In The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Charles A. Moser, pp. 47-49, 53-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

[In following excerpt, Serman summarizes Trediakovsky's life, works, and importance in his time, placing particular emphasis on his novel translations and versification.]

In 1730, in both capitals, but especially in Moscow, where the Court and the Guards regiments were situated at the time—that is, a large part of the nobility which had by that point become Europeanized—the verse satires of Antiokh Kantemir which had first appeared in 1729 continued to circulate in manuscript. In that same year of 1730, in St. Petersburg there appeared an allegorical novel in prose by Paul Tallemant entitled A Voyage to the Isle of Love (Ezda vo ostrov Lyubvi) in a translation by Vasily Trediakovsky, who had just returned from Paris. Thus two themes entered Russian literature which had had no place in it before: laughter and love. To be sure, Russian folklore had already developed the lyrical lovesong and various humorous genres, but all this existed on a level of everyday life and ordinary holiday amusement and did not reach the basic literary genres: the chronicles, the lives of the saints, and also polemical essays, which developed especially rapidly in the seventeenth century because of the schism within the Russian Orthodox Church leading to the departure of significant numbers of clergy and laypeople, the Old Believers.

The appearance in Russia of literature of the new, Europeanized type became possible only after a whole series of political and administrative reforms and cultural and educational legislation put through in the first quarter of the eighteenth century by Emperor Peter I. Peter's reforms were primarily subordinated to the requirements of politics. In order to create a state technologically equal to the most powerful states of Europe, Peter needed industry and trained specialists; and in order to create the latter he required appropriate institutions of learning. All this came into being in the course of unceasing wars which shaped the entire life of the state. Consequently Peter had little interest in the development of the humanities or the creation of a Europeanized artistic literature.

The culture which Peter as political leader required was a secularized one liberated from the control of the Orthodox Church. By subjecting the church to the state and depriving it of its role as the nation's ideological guide, Peter did a great deal to implant within the social consciousness of the ruling stratum, the Russian aristocracy, the ideas of European political thought in that variant which viewed enlightened absolutism as the most effective instrument of cultural and social progress.

When they made their debuts in literature—or more precisely, in their consciously and carefully calculated initial literary enterprises—neither Kantemir nor Trediakovsky drew upon any sort of Russian literary tradition. With Kantemir and Trediakovsky the Russian literary consciousness acquired the conviction that the new literature of the European type could derive no benefit at all from the Russian literary experience of the eleventh to seventeenth centuries.

As Alexander Sumarokov, one of the most prolific of modern Russian authors, later phrased it in his “Eulogy to Emperor Peter the Great” (“Slovo pokhvalnoe o gosudare imperatore Petre Velikom,” 1759):

Until the time of Peter the Great Russia was not enlightened by any clear conception of the nature of things, by any useful knowledge or by any profound doctrine: our reason was submerged in the darkness of ignorance, sparks of intellect would be extinguished, because they lacked the strength to burst into flame […] But when Peter became a man the sun arose; and the darkness of ignorance was dissipated. …

Various literary impressions of the years 1727-30 found places in Vasily Trediakovsky's basic literary project implemented abroad: his translation of Tallemant's book. The dispute within French literature over the advantages of poetry in prose or in verse was not yet decided, and Trediakovsky, not adhering definitively to either side in the dispute, chose to translate a work written in both verse and prose, that is, he tested his readers' reactions to both possible resolutions of the debate.

In Paris Trediakovsky (1703-68) must have been even more greatly influenced by the arguments over the novel than he was by the disputes over verse and prose. In Russia there was no such thing as the novel as cultural phenomenon, the novel as a component part of the cultural surroundings of all levels of the population. It would acquire such popularity only in the nineteenth century.

French scholars call the years Trediakovsky spent in Paris the “golden age” of the French novel. Between 1725 and 1730 fifty-one new novels were published, and in the subsequent five-year period 129 appeared. The novel became the most popular genre, supplanting the tragedy and the comedy.

French novels of the late 1720s spoke of love as a law unto itself, a thing above all else in human existence. Novels undermined the official system of morality and were considered dangerous to religion.

The version of Tallemant's novel which Trediakovsky offered to the Russian reading public contains essentially two conceptions of love. Tallemant's novel is an allegorical one, and its prose text tells of romantic adventures and mishaps which conclude with a taking leave of love and a turning to Glory at the advice of Reason. Even the most adamant critics of the novel of the late 1720s could accept such a love story as that. But the book by Trediakovsky—Tallemant contains verse as well as prose. In his verse translations Trediakovsky abandons any sort of trivial literalness: he alters the structure of strophes, utilizes lines of varying lengths, and so forth. But the most essential alterations he introduces have to do with the treatment of love and romantic relationships. He systematically modifies Tallemant's verse descriptions of love relationships. He replaces abstract and periphrastic expressions in the original with concrete images and erotic situations.

Trediakovsky made such serious modifications of Tallemant's verse because he was attracted by the French school of free-thinker libertine poets, whose work at the time was not published but only circulated in manuscript (it gradually began to appear in print only after Louis XIV's death). Precisely that sort of philosophy of love and life made Trediakovsky the most popular poet and songwriter in Russian society of the 1730s.

In 1732 Trediakovsky became official translator for the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. This position offered him new opportunities to influence literary life, but at the same time he was required to work in conformity with the demands of the Court, which regarded Academicians in the humanities as suppliers of solemn odes and eulogies for appropriate occasions, as planners of illuminations and firework displays, and as translators of texts for theatrical presentations by touring foreign troupes.

Trediakovsky's position as an Academy poet-bureaucrat was made more difficult by the fact that the new Empress Anna, Peter I's niece, had formed her tastes and outlook in Mittau, capital of the duchy of Courland, a vassal state of Russia's, which had been governed first by her husband and then by her. Anna's German sympathies and those of her favorite, Ernst Johann Biron, a stableman whom she had created a Duke, were reflected in the preferential treatment the Court accorded to Academy poets who wrote in German. Gottlob Friedrich Wilhelm Junker (1703-46) received special encouragement from the Court: invited to the St. Petersburg Academy in 1731, in 1734 he was made professor of poetry over Trediakovsky's head. Junker and Jakov von Stählin (1709-85), who replaced him in 1735, produced eulogistic odes and verse inscriptions for firework displays published in the German original and in Russian translation. That was the way Trediakovsky's “Solemn ode on the surrender of the city of Danzig” (“Oda torzhestvennaya o sdache goroda Gdanska,” 1734) was printed: Junker did the German translation.

By 1734 Trediakovsky, in addition to Latin and French versification, had become fairly well acquainted with German verse (since he translated the odes of the German court poets); with Italian poetry from the originals of comedies which he translated; with the poem “Tears of the Prodigal Son,” written in trochaic meter, by the Croatian poet Ivan Gundulić. And then he was familiar with Russian folksongs as well. After comparing these different versification systems Trediakovsky came to the conclusion that Russian verse should be regulated in conformity with the nature of the Russian language, and that a versification reform was necessary.

On 14 May 1735 Trediakovsky gave an address at the “Russian Convocation” of the Academy of Sciences in which he presented a proposal for a species of “Petrine reform” of all contemporary literature. Among the various projects he urged one had already been carried out: a “science of versification.”

Trediakovsky wished to replicate in literature that rupture with pre-Petrine Rus which the adherents of the Russian Englightenment saw Peter as having effected on the level of the state. It was then that people became persuaded that the syllabic system as exemplified in “Polish verse” should be replaced by a system of versification which was more national and closer to the character of the Russian language. To be sure, Russian syllabic verse—by virtue of the very fact that it made use of another language than did Polish syllabic verse—had become Russian and not Polish, and could not really resemble its model. But the adherents of the Russian Enlightenment believed that if their campaign for a new poetry were to be successful they must declare syllabic verse “foreign,” and not even poetry either, but rather prose. Trediakovsky elaborated on both these points in his New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse (Novy i kratky sposob k slozheniyu rossiyskikh stikhov, 1735).

Along with the “Ode on the surrender of the city of Dazing,” which had appeared a year earlier and to which was appended a “Treatise on the Ode” (“Rassuzhdenie ob ode”), the New and Brief Method offered a complete exposition of a system of poetic genres, a new model done in verse. For the first time in the history of Russian poetry a unified principle had been established for constructing a hierarchy of poetic genres corresponding to the relationship of each to the general idea of the new poetry. Moreover, the system of Russian poetic genres was laid out synchronically, with appropriate French examples for comparison and contrast. As a man of the Enlightenment and a rationalist, Trediakovsky held that the poetry of any nation should express the great truths of the new science which were obligatory for all enlightened countries, and that Russian poetry was fully capable of carrying out this historical task once it had grasped the “rules” and adopted a new versification system more appropriate to its nature and consequently more “correct.”

Trediakovsky's book did not contain merely a practical “poetics”: it was essentially an exposition of a new esthetic system, a programmatic statement for Russian classicism for half a century to come. Later attempts to elaborate this program in more detail added nothing substantial to Trediakovsky's ideas. The notion of the generality and universality of ideas which are identical for all nations and peoples, the conviction that poetic perfection could be achieved by imitating recognized models both ancient and modern, and that imitation could be successful only if the rules of each poetic genre were strictly observed: such were the basic ideas of the new esthetics, at the basis of which lay the notion of human nature as a good and rational product of rational upbringing shaped by the combined powers of science and art.

Since Trediakovsky failed to find a wealthy patron among influential men at court, by the end of the 1730s his position had become not simply difficult, but unbearable. In early 1740 he was beaten up at the instance of Minister Artemy Volynsky; he received moral satisfaction and material compensation only after Volynsky was executed later that year. During the 1740s Trediakovsky abandoned poetry in the proper sense to busy himself with stylistic problems and questions of Russian grammar. In the 1750s he saw several quite extensive literary projects through to fruition.

In addition to a prose translation of 1751 of John Barclay's (1582-1621) Latin novel Argenis (1621)—an apologia for powerful and enlightened monarchical authority—in the early 1750s Trediakovsky also did a verse translation of the Psalms, and the poem Feoptiya, a poetic version of Fénelon's popular treatise Démonstration de l'existence de Dieu (1713). Neither of these poetic works of Trediakovsky's was published during his lifetime, nor for a very long time after his death: Feoptiya first came out in 1963, and the Psalms have even now been published only in very small part.

In 1730, like Kantemir, Trediakovsky declined to employ what he considered the obsolete Church Slavic language in which all literary works in the Muscovite state had been written down to the period of the Petrine reforms; but in the 1750s he began composing verse in extraordinarily archaic, slavonicized, and deliberately syntactically convoluted language. His final and perhaps most significant poetic work—Telemakhida (1765), a verse translation of Fénelon's prose novel Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699)—became for contemporaries a laughing stock and symbol of artistic incompetence. Later generations of literary men—Radishchev, Gnedich and Pushkin among them—looked on Telemakhida differently: they admired Trediakovsky's innovation in employing a dactylotrochaic meter in his poem as a substitute and analogue for the ancient Greek hexameter, considering this an important contribution to the development of Russian verse.