Peter’s idea of conviviality consisted in getting drunk in a room filled with tobacco smoke, as he had known it in the taverns of Holland, and the whole aspect of literature of his period is that of a crude democracy, such as he advocated in his own circle. In whatever he or his followers wrote there is a tone of rough simplicity, practical liberalism, and the ardour of manful youth. Everything that could be useful to the State and nation received his equal attention. He familiarised his people with the German and Dutch jurists, who were translated under his care, and with text-books on the most necessary sciences and arts; he corresponded with German, French and English scholars on the subject of establishing universities and academies; he invited actors from Slavic Austria to play in his theatre; and superintended the translation of Ovid, of encyclopedias, and of romances. In this burning activity there could be no such a thing as a literary school; everything was welcome, provided it advanced his cherished reforms. There was no time to waste on the mere externals of language. The authors of the day had to grope their way as best they could. Some interlarded their style with hybrid words from all the tongues of Europe; others wavered between a purely Slavic and a more or less Russianised language, and Peter the Great, though he was fond of a display of Dutch words, could use a very idiomatic style. While Stefán Yavórski and Feofán Prokopóvich charmed their congregations with elegant sermons in which Byzantine rhetoric and Western eloquence had the fullest sway, Tatíshchev laboured to find the proper expressions for the historical truths which he had well learned in the West, and the peasant Pososhkóv dimly guessed the economic problems that presented themselves to the country, vainly trying to clothe them in an intelligible language.