Though a poet, dramatist, novelist, librarian, and publisher, Nikolai Gnedich is best known as the translator of Homer's Iliad. He entered Russian literature as both an advocate of Sturm und Drang and an elegiac poet but soon yielded to the lure of the epic, hoping to create a new style for it that would avoid didacticism. He found his models not in the French Neoclassicism of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, so influential in Russia during the eighteenth century, but in the heroic grandeur, simplicity, and even crudeness of Homer and Theocritus. His metrical innovations, in particular his creation of a true logaoedic (dactylo-trochaic) Russian hexameter to replace the iambic hexameter customarily used to translate ancient Greek poetry up until his time, his use of combinations of trinary meters to translate contemporary Greek folk poetry, his naturalization of unrhymed verse, his mixture of lofty and colloquial vocabulary in his...