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 thousand serfs to that one of his children who should prove "the most successful in the sciences"; and one of Prince Antiokh's brothers having married a daughter of Prince D.M.Galitzyn, one of the most influential men of the day, Peter the Great naturally adjudged him the heir to the estate.
This embittered Prince Antiokh Kantemir, and he revealed his wrath against the Emperor and his party in his first two notable satires, which appeared about the time the Empress Anna Ioannovna ascended the throne (1730).