Page "Russian literature" Paragraph 7

Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky, a poet, playwright, essayist, translator and contemporary to Antiokh Kantemir, also found himself deeply entrenched in Enlightenment conventions in his work with the Russian Academy of Sciences and his groundbreaking translations of French and classical works to the Russian language.

A turning point in the course of Russian literature, his translation of Paul Tallemant's work Voyage to the Isle of Love, was the first to use the Russian vernacular as opposed the formal and outdated Church-Slavonic.

This introduction set a precedent for secular works to be composed in the vernacular, while sacred texts would remain in Church-Slavonic.

However, his work was often incredibly theoretical and scholarly, focused on promoting the versification of the language with which he spoke.