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...