Throughout the century the state took the lead in introducing the nobility to new ideas, new genres, and new habits oflife, which they deepened by investing in a European education (for the wealthiest, French and German tutors and university education in Germany, for lesser families, tutors and schools as best they could afford). Noblemen and women read voraciously, in French, German, and Italian, in translations into Russian and eventually a burgeoning world of Russian poetry, prose, and plays. European books were imported by traveling noblemen and booksellers; the domestic publishing industry expanded gradually as a source for Russian elite readers. Newspapers were primarily organs for official decrees and political news: the Moscow News (Vedomosti) was published (erratically, with a small distribution) from 1702 until 1727, when it was replaced by the St. Petersburg News, published by the Academy of Sciences bi-weekly in Russian and German. While the News itself was official, its monthly Supplement (1755-64) provided a varied content of scientific, practical, and literary articles and translations from European literature and press. Private printing presses were not allowed until 1783, but official organs (Academy of Sciences, Moscow University, the Synod) spurred the development of a reading public. Vasilii Trediakovskii, for example, was employed by the Academy of Sciences not only for research into Russian linguistics and versification, but also as a translator of contemporary European literature and history. The Academy published his work, as well as the work of official odists and playwrights such as Mikhail Lomonosov, Vasilii Petrov, Gavrila Derzhavin, and Aleksandr Sumarokov, in addition to scientific treatises in translation or by Academy scholars.
The century was one of tremendous ferment in literary genres, language, and style; Russians "telescoped" two centuries of intellectual change into an indiscriminate, simultaneous embrace of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genres and themes; they "transplanted" European literature and made it their own with turbulent, charged intensity. Russia's intellectuals from the 1730s through the century and beyond consciously considered themselves the creators of "new" Russian literature, as Irina Reyfman, Luba Golburt, and others have argued. The stakes were high and the tasks were momentous: What form of versification works best for Russian? Shall Church Slavonic or more vernacular be preferred? What exactly was Russian vocabulary for the new scientific, philosophical, and narrative needs of the day? Did different genres merit different registers of language? How deeply should Russian poets, writers, and playwrights emulate classical genres, often through the intermediary of French or English models? How much of secular, free- thinking, Deist European thought should Russian writers accept in their pursuit of European Enlightenment?
Russia's great triad of writers in the middle of the eighteenth century—Vasilii Trediakovskii (1703-69), Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-65), and Aleksandr Su- marokov (1717-77)—struggled mightily with these and other issues of language, linguistics, and poetics across the century, bequeathing a legacy to early nineteenth-century writers such as Nikolai Karamzin and Alexander Pushkin who also were called to define "new Russian literature." Irina Reyfman calls the process the forging of a "creation" myth, in which unambiguous answers needed to be found and a canon established. Tempers flared, polemics raged, but in the end these eighteenth-century authors were, well into the twentieth century, dismissed as inferior to the nineteenth-century greats. In their own day, Lomonosov and his supporters managed to win the upper hand in issues of versification and eminence, relegating Trediakovskii even in his day to a reputation as a buffoon and pushing Sumarokov to the sidelines as well. Nineteenth-century critics tended to dismiss the eighteenth century entirely, dismissing its baroque and classical forms and language as not authentically Russian, awarding those laurels to the Romanticism and realism of Pushkin and his followers. The eighteenth century's dismissal was perhaps cemented in the twentieth century, when Soviet scholars latched on to Lomonosov as a peasant hero and Renaissance man of science and underplayed his literary work.
Observing such myth making and paradigm creation, scholars now are working to recognize the tremendous work done by Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov, and many others, to advance language and literature in the eighteenth century. Trediakovskii and Lomonosov laid the foundations for versification; Trediakovskii wrote a Russian grammar; all developed vocabulary for the literary language. Sumarokov founded Russian theater with an oeuvre of nine short comedies and nine tragedies, four operas or ballet-operas and a religious drama, and he worked out a Russian idiom of tragedy that encompassed Russian Orthodox values in the face of French Enlightenment skepticism. Sumarokov also founded one of the earliest literary journals (Industrious Bee, 1759). Lomonosov excelled at poetry, developing the ode in particular. Trediakovskii, Sumarokov, and others did yeoman's work in introducing educated Russians to European literature in their translations and adaptations of French, English, Italian, and German novels, histories, plays, and poems; playwright Sumarokov was particularly wide-ranging (Amanda Ewington calls him Voltairian), publishing religious and secular poems and essays that popularized current trends in European philosophy and literature or explored Russian history. Particularly in poetry, these three authors' language was complex, even esoteric; they struggled to shape Russian content into classical genres like the ode; in the 1780s Gavrila Derzhavin worked out a "lighter" register of narrative prose that paved the way for Karamzin's and Pushkin's more vernacular- based Russian literary language.
By mid-century journals of literature and social commentary were appearing; most survived only briefly, but editors' willingness to try again testifies to ongoing interest. In 1759 both Sumarokov's Industrious Bee and a Cadet Corps publication (Holiday Time) came and went, struggling economically with a limited reading public and distribution network. Nevertheless, that reading public made its presence known in the second half of the century, supporting publications and shifting its tastes towards European belles-lettres and other topics of personal edification. Gary Marker's study of eighteenth-century printing and "intellectual life" found that publications in religion steadily declined (46 percent of all publications 1725-55, 20 percent 1756-75, 17 percent in 1787) in favor of belles-lettres (16 percent 1725-55; 17 percent 1756-75; 30 percent in 1787), history and geography (6 percent 1725-55; 10 percent 1756-75; 14 percent in 1787) and secular philosophy (1 percent 1725-55, 11 percent 1756-75; 16 percent in 1787).
The foundations were laid for an efflorescence of intellectual and literary life in Enlightenment mode in Catherine's time by the state itself. Literary and satirical journals revived in 1769 when Catherine II openly patronized such work and many were founded. Often anonymously, she supported and contributed to journals from 1769 through the 1770s, sparring in debates about morality and social criticism. She wrote a great deal, usually of didactic content expressed allegorically. In the Tale of Prince Khlorus (1781), dedicated to her grandson, wise Tsarina Felitsa models to the young prince the virtue of taming one's passions and the triumph of reason; in a series of plays Catherine satirized corrupt officials, boorish gentry, and Masonic "superstition." Catherine encouraged lively discourse, in print and in salon society, even permitting satire and "humorous" critique of herself as long as it did not cross the line into political opposition. Nikolai Novikov and others sparred with her in satirical journals; at his press at Moscow University Novikov also published an array of geographies, histories, dictionaries, primary sources from Russian history, children's literature, medicine, and pedagogy. Theater also burgeoned as a forum for modeling Enlightenment civility: Denis Fonvizin's comedic genius in Brigadir (1769) and The Minor (1783) spelled out a morality based on religion, education, and service.