[In the following essay, Terras offers a brief overview of Trediakovsky's life and works, focusing on his poetry.]

Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky (1703-69), the son of a village priest, left his home near Astrakhan at the age of twenty to attend the Moscow Slavonic-Latin Academy, where, in his words, he “went straight into rhetoric,” having learned some Latin from Catholic missionaries in Astrakhan. At the academy he was taught to write syllabic verse. In 1726 he made his way to Holland, whence he traveled to Paris on foot. Supported by the Russian ambassador, he was able to attend the Sorbonne. Having received his diploma, he returned to Russia in 1730, an erudite humanist who could write bad but correctly versified French, Latin, and Russian verse. His “Celebratory Verses to the City of Paris” (c. 1728) follow the conventions of a laus urbis but ring true, as they conclude:

Beautiful city! dear banks of the Seine!
Who does not love thee? Only a brutish mind would not!
But I will not ever be able to forget thee
So long as I live on earth.

Trediakovsky's verse translation, still syllabic, of Abbé Tallement's Voyage à l'isle d'Amour ou La Clef des coeurs (1730), awkward and graceless though it was, still was the first published attempt to bend the Russian language to the requirements of modern belles lettres. It earned Trediakovsky a position as a secretary-translator with the academy.

In 1735 Trediakovsky presented to the academy a treatise, A New and Brief Method of Composing Russian Verse, with Definitions of the Pertinent Terms, in which he correctly described the natural prosody of Russian and drew from it a new system of versification, the syllabotonic, used in German and English poetry. In this system a line of verse is defined by a constant number of syllables and by rules that determine stressed and unstressed positions in the line. In a trochaic line, for example, only the odd-numbered syllables may be stressed, and all even-numbered syllables must be unstressed. Trediakovsky added to his treatise various examples of his own poetry, written according to the new rules. Trediakovsky's insights were substantially correct, and his suggestions pointed in the right direction, but his cautiously worded paper is so poorly focused and so badly organized that its important message almost gets lost. A comparison with Lomonosov's lucid and vigorous presentation of the subject, which goes further than Trediakovsky's, shows Lomonosov to be much the superior theorist.¹ Trediakovsky's system was soon amplified by Lomonosov, and since the 1740s both, along with a rapidly increasing number of other poets, wrote verses whose versification was essentially the same as that of most Russian poetry to this day.

In 1745 Trediakovsky was appointed professor of eloquence at the academy. A tireless worker, he produced further grammatical and philological treatises,² many volumes of translations in verse and in prose, some plays, and a great deal of secular and spiritual verse, including a complete version of the Psalter. He also fulfilled the functions of a court poet, a position that was not highly regarded at the time. In 1740 Trediakovsky, after a run-in with a minor court aide, was taken to the guardhouse and given a severe flogging by order of Empress Anna's court minister. Trediakovsky's modest success was also short-lived. He was soon superseded as court poet by Lomonosov. In the 1750s his poetic efforts were no longer taken seriously or even printed. He lost his position with the academy in 1759 and died forgotten and in poverty.

Trediakovsky's panegyrical verse, syllabo-tonic or syllabic, hardly rises above the level of Symeon Polotsky and his school. Both versions of his “Solemn Ode on the Surrender of the City of Gdansk” (the syllabic version of 1734 and the syllabotonic of 1742) are clumsy and wooden, lacking any sustained rhythm. This ode, inspired by Boileau's “Ode sur la prise de Namur,” from which it borrows metric and strophic structure, much of the imagery and phraseology, as well as whole lines verbatim, drastically exhibits the characteristic deficiencies of Trediakovsky's poetry. He needlessly expands his own work beyond the limits of the original. He turns the elegant conceits of the original into ludicrous bathos: “Quelle docte et sainte ivresse” becomes “What sober drunkenness.” A tortuous Latinate syntax often makes comprehension difficult. On the positive side, the Russian poet clearly understands Boileau's conceits and adds many of his own from a rich arsenal of classical mythology.

Trediakovsky also wrote elegies, sonnets, epigrams, fables, madrigals, and songs. Some of the songs have poetic merit. Quite a few were set to music and survived their creator. Trediakovsky's more ambitious longer poems contain some sonorous lines and felicitous images but are invariably spoiled by his tone-deafness, which let him allow grotesque tongue-twisters to stand, destroy his tonic rhythm by putting heavy syllables in the upbeat, and mix pompous Slavonicisms with prosaic vulgarisms. Trediakovsky tended to lapse into profusion and verbosity, and numbing accumulations of tautologies. This is true even of his more successful efforts, such as the ode “Praise to Ingermanland and the Imperial City of Saint Petersburg” (1752), which launched a long tradition of verse and prose devoted to that city. The ode has some good lines, and its dozen quatrains in iambic pentameter flow smoothly; but it also has some cacophonous, awkward, and pedestrian lines that spoil the whole.

Trediakovsky's complete versified rendition of the Psalter is his finest poetic achievement. The sacred text forced him to refrain from unwarranted improvisation. His version is simple and dignified, borne by genuine religious feeling.

Trediakovsky's Theoptia (1750-54), inspired by Pope's Essay on Man, which he read in French translation, consists of six epistles in alexandrines, altogether some five thousand lines. It was an attempt to formulate a worldview consistent with modern science and Deist philosophy, yet acceptable to an only moderately enlightened Orthodox church. The Theoptia is not without merit. It shows an erudite mind familiar with Plato and Lucretius, Descartes and Newton, and a host of ancient and modern philosophers. But the whole is vitiated by awkward formulations, as well as lapses into crude materialism and literalism when Trediakovsky introduces examples and observations of his own.

Trediakovsky's Telemachis (printed in 1766), a heroic epic in hexameters based on Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque, a work which earned him mostly vituperation and ridicule, was in fact of considerable merit. It introduced the dactylic-trochaic hexameter to Russian poetry, having enough well-formed lines to show that this was an attractive addition to a Russian poet's repertory. The translation of Fénelon's thoughts and conceits is often vigorous. It is likely that the reasons Catherine II and her courtiers heaped scorn on Trediakovsky's Telemachis were similar to those that caused Louis XIV and his court to reject Fénelon's work. The moralizing tone of the Telemachis and its direct attacks on tyranny, favoritism, and court intrigue hardly appealed to Catherine. An episode in which crazed King Pygmalion of Tyre is first poisoned and then strangled by his consort, who wants to elevate her young lover to the throne, must have elicited unpleasant associations. On balance the Telemachis deserved a better fate. The idea of versifying Fénelon's novel was in itself a good one. Even as a poem the Telemachis is not as bad as it was made out to be by Trediakovsky's enemies. Its moral message was certainly in tune with the spirit of the Enlightenment. It has many lines of which no poet would have to be ashamed, though just as many are spoiled by awkward versification or infelicitous phrasing.

Notes

1. A new edition of Trediakovsky's work, A Method of Composing Russian Verse, corrected and amplified from that published in 1735 (1752), adopted Lomonosov's suggestions.

2. For example, Trediakovsky's Discourse on Old and New Orthography (1748) demands that Slavonic spelling be replaced by Russian, partly anticipating Lomonosov.