Vasily Trediakovsky
born February 22 (March 5, New
Style), 1703, Astrakhan, Russia
died August 6 [August 17], 1768, St.
Petersburg
Russian literary theoretician and
poet whose writings contributed to the
classical foundations of Russian
literature.
The son of a poor priest,
Trediakovsky became the first Russian
not of the nobility to receive a
humanistic education abroad, at the
Sorbonne in Paris (1727–30). Soon after
his return to Russia he became acting
secretary of the Academy of Sciences and
de facto court poet. In 1735
Trediakovsky published Novy i kratky
sposob k slozheniyu rossiyskikh stikhov
(“A New and Concise Method for the
Composition of Russian Verses”), which
discussed for the first time in Russian
literature such poetic genres as the
sonnet, the rondeau, the madrigal, and
the ode. In 1748 appeared his Razgovor
ob ortografii (“A Conversation on
Orthography”), the first study of the
phonetic structure of the Russian
language. He continued his advocacy of
poetic reform in O drevnem, srednem i
novom stikhotvorenii rossiyskom (1752;
“On Ancient, Middle, and New Russian
Poetry”). Trediakovsky was also a
prolific translator of classical
authors, medieval philosophers, and
French literature. His translations
frequently aroused the ire of the
censors, and he fell into disfavour with
his Academy superiors and conservative
court circles. In 1759 he was dismissed
from the Academy. His last major work
was a translation of Fénelon’s Les
aventures de Télémaque (1766;
Tilemakhida), which he rendered in
Russian hexameters.
