Vasilii Trediakovsky

Download or read book Vasilii Trediakovsky written by Irina Reyfman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vasilii Trediakovsky (1703-69) was one of the eighteenth century poets instrumental in creating a Russian literature based on West European models, yet a striking discrepancy exists between his obvious importance and his notoriously bad reputation among his contemporaries and later generations of Russian writers and critics. In exploring the mechanisms of the creation and transmission of literary reputation, the author uses material that is frequently dismissed as irrelevant and unreliable: rumors, anecdotes, and opinions. This material is used to detect mythological patterns in accounts of the historical past - in this case eighteenth-century Russian literature - and to investigate the role of mythmaking in modern cultural consciousness. This book argues that the Russian literary figures of the eighteenth century regarded their age as making a complete break with the past and entering into a totally new stage of historical development.