Vasily Kapnist

Who was Vasily Kapnist?

Count Vasily Vasilievich Kapnist, was a Russian and Ukrainian poet and playwright who wrote in somewhat rough Russian.

Kapnist, whose Greek-speaking grandfather left Zakynthos to fight for Peter the Great, was a scion of the Venetian Counts Capnissi, yet he spent all his life in the manor of Obukhovka near Poltava. Vasily's ancestors were Colonels of Cossacks in Ukraine. His lifelong friendship with Nikolay Lvov and Gavrila Derzhavin date from the early 1770s, when all three served in the Leub Guard. Derzhavin later married Kapnist's sister-in-law and visited the poet and his wife in Obukhovka more than once.

The extension of Russian serfdom to the Ukrainian lands dismayed Kapnist and occasioned his two most notable poems, Ode on Slavery and Ode on the Elimination of Slavery in Russia, in which he chastised serfdom as the principal pest of contemporary Russian society. His later poems belong to the Horatian tradition, anticipating Russian Romanticism in their social pessimism and admiration of simple family joys.