The Russian Boileau, the Russian Racine, the Russian Molière, the Russian Lafontaine, the Russian Voltaire--these are some of the titles contemporaries accorded Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov. The foremost representative of Russian classicism, Sumarokov aspired to be the founder of a new, modern European literature in Russia. He founded and directed the Russian national theater (for which he supplied most of its early repertory), published the first private literary journal in Russia, helped establish the norms of the new literary language, and provided models of virtually every current European poetic and dramatic genre, including fable, song, sonnet, elegy, satire, eclogue, idyll, epigram, ballad, madrigal, rondeau, folktale, and a wide variety of odes--panegyric, spiritual, philosophical, Anancreontic, Horatian, and Sapphic--as well as the first Russian tragedies, comedies, operas, and ballets. While his reputation declined in the early nineteenth century when a new Romantic generation repudiated the tradition Sumarokov had tried...