 Kantemir honored this tradition of reform not only through his support for Peter, but by initiating a decade-long debate on the proper syllabic versification using the Russian language.Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky, a poet, playwright, essayist, translator and contemporary to Antiokh Kantemir, also found himself deeply entrenched in Enlightenment conventions in his work with the Russian Academy of Sciences and his groundbreaking translations of French and classical works to the Russian language.A turning point in the course of Russian literature, his translation of Paul Tallemant's work "Voyage to the Isle of Love", was the first to use the Russian vernacular as opposed the formal and outdated Church-Slavonic.