The article discusses various aspects of the perception of A.D. Kantemir's literary heritage by V.A. Zhukovsky and A.S. Shishkov in 1803-1813. Despite the fact that Zhukovsky and Shishkov assessed the possibilities and prospects for the development of the literary situation in Russia differently, Cantemir turned out to be a kind of unifying figure for them: they both perceived him as the founder of a new Russian literature and a deep connoisseur of the European literary tradition and an exceptionally gifted poet, whose writings at the beginning of the XIX century lost neither their relevance nor artistic expressiveness. We assume that Iu.V. Stennik’s hypothesis on the hidden polemic with Zhukovsky in Shishkov's article "Kantemir" (1813) was insufficiently justified and at the same time too straightforwardly oriented towards the traditional, but not fully adequate to reality, ideas that the uniqueness of the Russian literary situation at the beginning of the XIX century could be explained by the confrontation of "archaists" and "Karamzinists". In fact, this confrontation was only a part of complex reality, and the disagreements of the literary parties in some cases turned out to be less significant than the intraparty ones. It is important that one of the most crucial elements of the literary background of Shishkov's article was his book "Reasoning about the old new syllable of the Russian language" (1803), in which he defended the opinion about the enduring meaning of Kantemir, arguing with Ia.A. Galinkovski, who already distanced himself from "Karamzinism" at that time, and later participated in the same "Conversation of lovers of the Russian word" as Shishkov himself.
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