Antiokh Kantemir's poetry represents a vivid expression of the Petrine reforms and of the Europeanization of eighteenth-century Russian culture. Secular in content yet nationalistic in language and style, Kantemir's writings helped bring Russian literature into the orbit of European culture and anticipated many of the peculiar features that would shape Russian literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A scathing satirist, diplomat, and arguably Russia's first indigenous Enlightenment man of letters, the European-educated Kantemir was, in the apt phrase of the nineteenth-century critic Vissarion Belinsky, "the first [writer] in Russia to unite literature with life."

Prince Antiokh Dmitrievich Kantemir was born on 8 September 1708 in the city of Iassy (in Moldova) to the family of Prince Dmitrii Kantemir (or Cantemir) and his wife Kassandra Kantakuzen, a descendant of the Byzantine imperial family. Dmitrii Kantemir spent his early years at the Turkish court as a hostage for the Moldavian...