Whenever one embarks on a comprehensive study of some particular historical period, one is inevitably obliged to recapitulate the natural process of development of all of contemporary scholarship on the subject and move from already answered questions to the new problems that arise in the course of the research. Analyses of the structure of separate facts and literary works such as have become customary in the last several decades require first of all that these works be classified according to two principles—in theoretical terms, according to the common elements which they comprise (distinguishing the "devices" and studying them independently), and in terms of their temporal sequence. Of primary importance here has been grouping the facts amassed under concepts such as schools, movements, or traditions. The entire field of the literature of any era can be conveniently divided into segments, and any system will be found at the point where various lines, paths, or traditions cross and continue onward. However, analyzing any system as a given of objective fact inevitably raises the question of studying the historical existence of these facts, that is, of studying their relationship and meaning within a given historical milieu. These same problems, moreover, raise the question of studying the literary historical milieu itself, the artistic background, the "spirit of the age," its "aesthetic aspect"; and this background is viewed not as the sum or result of all traditions, trajectories, or facts (which are put together more or less mechanically in the course of research by comparing separate structures), nor as a combination or generalization of features found in individual works. Rather it forms the basis of the aesthetic reality of these works, and itself in turn is created on the basis of the common assumptions of the aesthetic thinking of the era as a higher unity. What is important here is setting up the study of these higher unities again or for the first time in such a way that scholarship will focus on particular objects of study which are less substantive but no less real than those which have customarily been studied in recent years. These common concepts of the history of literature may be viewed as categories, as variables in the succession of eras which are not part of individual structures but which coexist historically within them. In the particular case at hand, establishing the characteristics which distinguish the various systems in the poetry of the mid-eighteenth century and dividing it into segments such as schools and movements ultimately forces us to ask what created the clearly apparent unity of the entire era. What was it later on that made a whole century combine such varied phenomena as, for example, the systems of Lomonosov, Sumarokov, and Kheraskov1 into the single overall concept of "false classicism" and rightfully oppose this concept to literature of the nineteenth century as a whole? Evidently, what we are talking about here above all is this overall concept, of the very contours of the entire era seen as an integral entity, and an entity which was not threatened by the battles among the various tendencies within it. In establishing a conception of the overall artistic character of this era (with regard to literature, that is), there is no need to try for any novel definitions; on the contrary, the usual view of the era on the part of contemporaries or, even more to the point, those who came immediately after or those hostile toward the era in question, has much to tell us with regard to this particular issue. In my efforts to characterize certain unique features of the overall conception or, perhaps, the background of Russian poetry of the mid-eighteenth century, the era of so-called "classicism," I do not pretend to any special originality.2 It seems useful to me to begin with details.