Mikhail Nikitich Murav'ev's position in eighteenth-century Russian literature only came to be appreciated more than a hundred years after his death. His contemporaries did not realize the innovative nature of his writing because the majority of his work remained unknown to most of them, and that which was known was overshadowed by other aspects of his creative and civic biography. It was only in the 1930s that Grigorii Gukovsky and his pupil Liubov' Kulakova began to reveal the new directions that Murav'ev charted in Russian poetry of the 1770s and 1780s. One of the earliest representatives of Russian sentimentalism and pre-Romanticism, he was an important connecting link between the schools of Aleksandr Sumarokov and Nikolai Karamzin. Having paid tribute to Mikhail Lomonosov's "high-soaring" style and having assimilated the poetic lessons of Sumarokov and Mikhail Kheraskov, Murav'ev turned enthusiastically to European sentimentalist poetry (James Thomson, Edward Young, Ewald Christian...