A man of lower-class origins, Mikhail (or Mikhailo) Ivanovich Popov belongs to that group of eighteenth-century Russian authors whose creative work catered to the needs and tastes of the popular audience. Along with Mikhail Chulkov, he was the founder of a new tradition in Russian narrative prose and at the same time tirelessly promoted the enrichment of the comic repertoire of the national stage via a series of translations and adaptions. Popov also earned repute for his Anuita (1772), one of the first comic operas in Russian. His achievements in literary translation and popularizing love songs were no less significant.

Little information about Popov's private life has been preserved. He came from a merchant family from the city of Iaroslavl, where in the 1750s Fedor Volkov, another merchant's son, had started one of Russia's first amateur theaters, subsequently brought to Saint Petersburg to form the kernel of the new...