- Antiochus Kantemir
Prince Antiokh Dmitrievich Kantemir ("Антиох Дмитриевич Кантемир" in Russian, "Antioh Cantemir" in Romanian, "Dimitri Kantemiroğlu" in Turkish, "Antioche Cantemir" in French;
September 8 ,1708 —March 31 ,1744 ) was aMoldavia n-born Russian Enlightenment man of letters anddiplomat .Kantemir was born to the Moldavian Prince
Dimitrie Cantemir and Princess Kassandra Cantacuzene inIaşi .Educated by his father and at the
Saint Petersburg Academy, having spent much of his youth as a hostage in OttomanIstanbul , Antiokh joined Dimitrie in Russia at their estate in the vicinity ofKharkov .His work reflects the scope and purpose of Peter the Great's European-style reforms, standing out as a contribution to the integration of Russian culture into the world circuit of
Classicism . In this respect, the most noticeable effort is his "Petrida", an unfinished epic glorifying the Emperor.From 1731 he was Russian envoy to
London (where he brought along themanuscript to Dimitrie's "History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire", also writing thebiography andbibliography of his father that accompanied the English 1756 edition). From 1736 until his death, Antiokh was minister plenipotentiary in Paris, where he was a noted intellectual figure and close friend toMontesquieu andVoltaire .Kantemir's language seems dull and antiquated to the modern reader, because he stuck to the gallic system of rhyming, which was subsequently discarded. His best known poems are several
satire s in the manner of Juvenal, including "To My Mind: On Those Who Blame Education" and "On the Envy and Pride of Evil-Minded Courtiers".Kantemir translated de Fontenelle into Russian (1740 - "
Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds "), although this was partly censored as heretical. He also produced a tract on old Russian versification (1744) and translated the poetry ofHorace and Anacreon into Russian. His own philosophical work is the 1742 "Letters on Nature and Man" ("O prirode i cheloveke").Antioch Kantemir died a bachelor in
Paris , while the litigation concerning his illegitimate children dragged on for yearsFact|date=March 2007.References
*1911
External links
*ru icon [http://www.rvb.ru/18vek/kantemir/toc.htm A collection of Kantemir's poetry]
*ru icon [http://russia-today.narod.ru/past/gen/cantemir_ant_dm.htm The ancestors Prince Antiokh Dmitrievich Kantemir]
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