ABSTRACT
Modern Russian literature dates from the establishment of a continuous tradition of secular imaginative literature in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The adoption of French classical standards by four men, all born in the reign of Peter, and their variously successful attempts to transpose these standards into Russian and to produce original work according to them are the starting point of all subsequent literary development. The four men were Kantemir, Trediakóvsky, Lomonósov, and Sumarókov.
