altogether those folk-songs which the reviving spirit of national literature in Russia, and that of social study in Europe generally, are at length beginning to examine. This Russian imitation of France may be illustrated by the works of Prince Kantemir (1709–1743), who has been called "the first writer of Russia," the friend of Montesquieu, and the imitator of Boileau and Horace in his epistles and satires; by those of Lomonossoff (1711–1765), "the first classical writer of Russia," the pupil of Wolf, the founder of the University of Moscow, the reformer of the Russian language, who by academical Panegyrics on Peter the Great and Elizabeth sought to supply the want of that truly oratorical prose which only free assemblies can foster, attempted an epic Petreid in honour of the great Tsar, and modelled his odes on the French lyric poets and Pindar;[1] or by those of Soumarokoff, who, for the theatre of St. Petersburg established by Elizabeth, adapted or translated Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, much as Plautus and Terence had introduced the Athenian drama at Rome. As in Rome there had set in a conflict between old Roman family sentiments and the individualising spirit of the Greeks, as in Rome nobles of light and leading had been delighted to exchange archaic sentiments of family life and archaic measures like the Saturnian for the cultured thought and harmonious metres of Greece, so in Russia there set in a conflict between French individualism, dear to the court and nobles, and the social feelings of the Russian commune and family. The most ancient monuments of Russian thought—the Chronicle of the monk Nestor (1056—1116) and the Song of Igor—were as unlikely to
- ↑ The son of the fisherman of Archangel did much, no doubt, to create national literature, especially by his severance of the old Slavon of the Church from the spoken language; but his works contain evidences of French influence in spite of his national predilections.
