SOURCE: Reyfman, Irina. “Criticism, Parody, and Myth.” In Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the “New” Russian Literature, pp. 70-131. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.

In excerpt below, Reyfman discusses the use of parody in the critical discourse between Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, and Sumerokov. She goes on to examine the role parody played in the creation of myths about these authors.

Two forces produced a distorted picture of literary life in the middle of the eighteenth century: the mythogenic spirit that underlay the cultural self-conceptions of the epoch, and the passion with which the participants in the literary process asserted their individual artistic principles as exclusively correct and therefore universal. The details of this distorted picture were worked out in fierce literary clashes over normative aesthetic principles. The myth of a new Russia, transfigured by Peter, provided the pattern for the formation of the distorted historical picture and ensured the...