SOURCE: Terras, Victor. “The Eighteenth Century: Trediakovsky.” In A History of Russian Literature, pp. 124-26. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.

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...