But his versification, his subject-matter are entirely independent of all preceding influences.

In beauty of versification and plastic worth, Batiushkoff had no predecessors in Russian literature, and no competitors in the school of Karamzin.

He was of ancient, noble family, well educated, and began to publish at the age of eighteen.
We now come, chronologically, to a writer who cannot be assigned either to the old sentimental school of Karamzin, or to the new romantic school of which Pushkin was the first and greatest exponent in Russian literature; to a man who stood apart, in a lofty place, all his own, both during his lifetime and in all Russian literary history; whose name is known to every Russian who can read and write, and whose work enjoys in Russia that popularity which the Odyssey did among the ancient Greeks.

Ivan Andreevitch Kryloff (1763-1844) began his literary work almost simultaneously with Karamzin, but was not, in the slightest degree, influenced by the style which the latter introduced into Russian literature; and bore himself in no less distant and hostile a manner to the rising romantic school of Pushkin.

He was the son of an army officer, who was afterwards in the civil service, a very competent, intelligent man, who left his family in dire poverty at his death.