her's Testamentary Exhortation." His "Book on Poverty and Wealth" is
also noteworthy, inasmuch as it affords a complete survey of Russia
under Peter the Great.

During this reign, the highly educated and eminently practical Little
Russians acquired more power than ever. The most notable of them all was
Feofan Prokopovitch, Archbishop of Novgorod (born in Kieff, 1681), who
had been brilliantly educated in Kieff and Rome, and was the most
celebrated of Peter the Great's colaborers, the most zealous and clever
executor of his sovereign's will, who attained to the highest secular
and ecclesiastical honors, and prolonged his influence and his labors
into succeeding reigns. His sermons were considered so important that
they were always printed immediately after their delivery, and forwarded
to the Emperor abroad, or wherever he might chance to be. Like others at
that period, he indulged in dramatic writing, for acting on the school
stage; and at Peter the Great's request he drew up a set of
"Ecclesiastical Regulations" for the Ecclesiastical College, and was
appointed to be the head of the church government, though Stepan
Yavorsky was made head of the Holy Governing Synod when it was
established, in 1721.

Peter the Great's ideas were not only opposed but persecuted, after his
death (1723), until the accession to the throne of his daughter
Elizabeth, in 1741. It was a long time before literature was regarded
seriously, on its own merits; before literary and scientific activity
were looked upon as separate departments, or any importance was
attributed to literature. Science usurped the first place, and
literature was regarded as merely a useful accessory thereto. This view
was held by all the first writers after Peter the Great's time:
Kantemir, Tatishtcheff, Trediakovsky, and even the gifted Lomonosoff,
Russia's first secular writers, in the present sense of that word.

The first of these, in order, Prince Antiokh Dmitrievitch Kantemir, was
born in 1708, and brought to Moscow at the age of three by his father,
the Hospodar of Moldavia (after the disastrous campaign on the Pruth),
who assumed Russian citizenship. Prince Kantemir published his first
work, "A Symphony (concordance) of the Psalter," at the age of eighteen,
being at that time in the military service, and a member of Feofan
Prokopovitch's circle, and his close friend. His father had left a will
by which he bequeathed his entire estate and about one hundred thousa