[1] Count Khvostov, as he was widely known, was an exceedingly prolific author of poems, fables, epigrams, etc., invariably archaic and pompous, making him an easy target for humourists and fellow poets (Pushkin among them) who ridiculed him relentlessly.

[2][3] Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov was born in 1757 in Saint Petersburg, into a respected family of Russian aristocrats, the origins of which can be traced back to the 13th century.

As many people who knew Khvostov attested, he had but one vice, his abnormal passion for writing (and, what was more serious, publishing) his own poetry which, in the end, proved to be his undoing.

Jean Racine's Andromaque (1794) and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's L'Art poétique translated by Khvostov (the latter under the title of The Science of Verse-making, in 1808) went through several editions.

Never doubting his poetic gift, Khvostov produced vast amounts of poetry; odes, epitaphs, elegies, madrigals, epigrams, etc., which were generally seen as banal, wordy, extravagantly pompous, rich with unnecessary allegories and inversions.

He sent thousands of books (along with statues and busts of his own) to Russian and European universities, academies, schools, cadet headquarters, scientists and statesmen.

Each time, starting out in a coach from Saint Petersburg to his Novgorodskaya gubernia estate, he took bunches of his own books along with him, leaving copies at every postal station for anyone who'd care to read them.

In a satire called A Singer in a Colloquy Konstantin Batyushkov presented Khvostov as the cossack ataman Platov, "a reader's tyrant" whose poetry was "his drum, unbearable for the ears."

Giving credit to his love of literature, the sympathetic Nikolay Karamzin wrote to Dmitriev in 1824: "Count Khvostov with his unbroken passion for verse-making is very touching to me.