Nikolai Petrovich Nikolev's literary career ran its course in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when Russia witnessed the emergence of powerful new literary talents and interests that would shape the further evolution of Russian literature in the nineteenth century. This period of Russian literary history involved in part a summing up and innovative manipulation of the achievements of the Russian baroque and neoclassicist past, and in part a movement toward the new literary concerns and practices of the developing sentimentalist and pre-Romantic trends. A few Russian writers at the time, most notably Gavriil Derzhavin and Nikolai Karamzin, were proclaimed by their contemporaries to be the geniuses, leaders, and exemplars of their age and were granted niches in the pantheon of Russian literature by posterity. Nikolev, a prolific poet and playwright, although of lesser talent, similarly endeavored to embody his age and nation in his literary work...