Pavel Katenin

Two years later, Count Miloradovich, Governor of St. Petersburg, had him deported from the capital for having booed his own favourite actress.

Katenin was an avid theatre-goer who spurned Shakespeare as vulgar and obscure and admired Corneille and Racine for their noble diction and clarity.

His enthusiasm for Neoclassical theatre induced him to translate a number of French tragedies for the Russian stage.

Disappointed by Zhukovsky's mellifluent translation of Bürger's Lenore, Katenin brought out his own version of the ballad, whose title was Russified as Olga (1816).

After 1832 he abandoned literature and lived in the seclusion of his estate near Kologriv, a profoundly embittered and dissatisfied man.