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 …
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