Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev was a literary ally and close friend of Nikolai Karamzin. According to his contemporaries, Dmitriev's contributions to Russian poetry mirrored Karamzin's in prose. Unlike Karamzin, however, Dmitriev never became a professional man of letters but instead devoted much of his life to a service career, eventually attaining high government positions. Dmitriev's work, like Karamzin's, primarily developed in a sentimentalist direction. Yet in many respects Dmitriev's position was contradictory: he adhered to many of the tenets of classicism while still brilliantly mocking the epigones of the movement. Dmitriev's innovation was primarily in the development of a revived system of poetic genres. Like Gavriil Derzhavin he transformed the Russian ode. He also helped to bring together different genres and cultivated poetic trifles--minor poetic forms such as madrigals and epigrams. His poetry enjoyed broad popularity toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries; it...