Thus perished Ukrainian autonomy in the Russian Empire and a large number of the officers and the gentry willingly Russianized in order to reap the advantages of their new position. Ukrainian songs, manners, and customs became a subject for popular jesting. At the same time many of these Russianized Ukrainians not only distinguished themselves in the Russian service but also in Russian literature. Such men as Vasili Kapnist made a name for themselves in literature and played almost as great a role in the Russian eighteenth century as the Kievan scholars had done in the pre-Petrine period. The new culture of St. Petersburg that had succeeded the old Byzantine formalism of Moscow was heavily under the influence of the pseudo-classic culture of eighteenth century France. The leading writers vied for the honor of being the Russian Vergil, the Russian Racine, the Russian Molière, etc. They carried the use of classical allusions to an almost ridiculous extreme and outside of the comedies, there was little about their works that was distinctively Russian. Their originality lay in an almost unconscious caricature of the French models and it was the vigor and energy of the authors that kept them from being as ridiculous as they might have well become. In addition to that, the theoreticians of Russia found it necessary to develop in Russian the three styles of poetry as outlined by Boileau. There was the high style to be employed in odes, tragedies, and epics and the language of these forms was to have the highest proportion of Church Slavonic words. Then came the more ordinary styles, and finally in the low style of comedies there was to be the pure vernacular speech. It was all carefully arranged by the scholars and the arbiters of fashion by _a priori_ reasoning and not by practical experience or literary skill. It could not fail to produce smiles and hence there were several attempts to write burlesque epics and to poke a heavy fun at the excesses of the more egotistical authors. Yet it is to be noted that humor of this kind had long been a characteristic of Ukrainian writing. The intermezzos that had been inserted in the mystery plays were full of such burlesque exactly as they had been in the West in an earlier period and the Academy in Kiev had developed despite its formalism the comic element which was inherent in the Ukrainian character.