Vasilii Petrovich Petrov was a leading writer during the reign of Catherine II and one of the most remarkable figures of the eighteenth-century Russian Parnassus. He was renowned for his odes, which, for the most part, glorify the main events of the period and its heroic military leaders, as well as Catherine, the "Russian Minerva." During his day Petrov's name was also closely associated with Virgil's Aeneid, which his contemporaries felt the poet had "mutilitated" in his translation. Petrov was one of the first to sense the decay of the triumphal ode by midcentury, and in his work the poet attempted to renovate the genre. Petrov's muse received the greatest recognition in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when poets and critics noted the rare degree of erudition, the boldness, and the depth of intellect displayed in his verse.

Petrov is closely associated with Moscow. He was...