"GRAND HOPES" OF THE RUSSIAN POETRY IN N. I. NOVIKOV'S HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF RUSSAIN WRITERS

In his Essay on the Historical Dictionary of Russian Writers (1772), N. Novikov states that certain writers entertain or have entertained high hopes for the future of the Russian literature. And while as far as the playwrights (Ya. B. Knyazhnin and D. I. Fonvizin) were concerned, Novikov's hopes came true, in the case of the poets they seemed to have fallen short: the poems either haven't survived at all, or only a negligible number has reached us, or the extant poems haven't lived up to the hopes. Novikov, however, was pursuing a different goal: in his opinion, Russian literature did not stand still, but remained in constant flow, and new authors who were about to appear were expected to make it glorious. Rather than address just the past and the present, Novikov's Historical Dictionary was also an attempt to predict the future.