But neither his official post nor his personal dignity prevented his receiving, also, violent and ignominious treatment at the hands of the powerful nobles.

His "New and Brief Method of Composing Russian Verses" constituted an epoch in the history of Russian poetry, since therein was first set forth the theory of Russian tonic versification.
But although he endeavored to create a distinct Russian style, and to put his own system into practice, he wrote worse than many of his contemporaries, and his poems were all below mediocrity; while not a single line of them supported the theory he announced.

They enjoy as little consideration from his literary posterity as he enjoyed personally in the society of Anna Ioannovna's day.

Yet his work was very prominent in the transition period between the literature of the seventeenth century and the labors of Lomonosoff, and he undoubtedly rendered a great service to Russian culture by his translations, as an authority on literary theories and as a philologist.
The first writer of capital importance in modern Russian literature in general was the gifted peasant-academician Mikhail Vasilievitch Lomonosoff (1711-1755)--a combination of the scientific and literary man, such as was the fashion of the period in general, and almost necessarily so in Russia.

Born in a village of the Archangel Government, near Kholmogory on the White Sea, he was a fisherman, like his father, until the age of sixteen, having learned to read and write from a peasant neighbor.