Ivan Semenovich Barkov was a translator, poet, editor, and publisher for the Academy of Sciences and a participant in the literary debates of the 1750s and 1760s. He prepared the first edition of Antiokh Kantemir's satires in Russia as well as translations of Horace and Phaedrus. Barkov's main historical and literary reputation, however, rests on his authorship of a series of poetic works of obscene content. By the end of the eighteenth century virtually every collection of verse "not meant for print" was attributed exclusively to him, a circumstance which laid the basis for a special kind of myth that pictured Barkov as the author of almost all obscene Russian poetry. Later, even into the twentieth century, almost all popular indecent verse was attributed to him. The poem "Luka Mudishchev," for example, composed in the last third of the nineteenth century, gained particular notoriety and was consistently associated...