Ippolit Fedorovich Bogdanovich--poet, translator, playwright, and journalist during the reign of Catherine the Great--earned an enduring place in Russian literary history with his long verse tale Dushin'ka (1783; revised as Dushen'ka, 1794). The light tone and playful eroticism of Dushen'ka entranced generations of Russian readers and started a vogue for light poetry that continued well past Aleksandr Pushkin's time. This poem brought Bogdanovich such fame that his admirers created a posthumous image of him as a carefree, mercurial bohemian, thus inventing a poet who corresponds to the poem. While this personality had its attractions, it obscured the details of an active service career and intellectual life during Catherine's reign.

Bogdanovich, the son of an impoverished nobleman, was born around 23 December 1743 in a little village in Ukraine called Perevolochna. Parents in the Russian nobility often started their children on their service careers at an early age, and at the age of...