In the seventeenth century Russian treatises on language and literature had the forms of Grammar, Rhetoric and Poetics. The eighteenth century saw a further development of systematic classifications of poetic forms, mostly reworked from Classical and West-European models, with original elaborations of specifically Russian versification by V.K. Tred’iakovskii (1703-1769) and M.V. Lomonosov (1711-1765). In the early nineteenth century, normative “theory” continued to dominate academic discourse on literature – e.g. in courses by professors A.F. Merzliakov (1778-1830), Ia.V. Tolmachev (1779-1873) and I.S. Rizhskii (1758-1811).
The subsequent development of literary scholarship was more closely tied to Imperial Russia’s nation-building efforts. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the humanities academy organised itself around the tasks of accumulating and legitimating socially valued artefacts and information for the purposes of constructing a distinct national culture. In literary scholarship,...
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Citation: Byford, Andy. "Russian Literary Scholarship, 1830-1917". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 August 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1582, accessed 09 June 2026.]
