ABSTRACT
A Philadelphia magazine, the National Gazette and Literary Register, has a disputed claim to have discovered Russian poetry for the English-speaking world on the basis of the publication in 1821 of a few stanzas of poetry translated by W. D. Lewis from the Russian of Neledinski-Meletski—a minor writer of sentimental pseudo-folk songs. In 1827 the North American Review reviews Russian Tales, from the French of Count Xavier de Maistre. The Russian finds—with a certain regret for its cause, slavery—a higher level of cultivation and refinement among Southern planters than elsewhere. In 1839, 1841 and 1842 factual information of considerable extent about Russian books and authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became available. Bowring had planned a history of Russian literature, but decided to publish first 'a few translations of the poetry of a people, the political influence of whose government on the rest of Europe has been long moving with gigantic strides, and will soon be more sensibly felt'.
