The Life of Peter the Great, published in a new Russian translation, is one of the very first and most popular biographies of the reformer monarch in European culture. The author of the book, published in Venice in Italian in 1736, is the Italian-Greek educator Antonio Catiforo (1685–1763), Orthodox priest and citizen of the Venetian Republic. In 1715, he was invited to Russia by A. D. Menshikov, but the ship on which he sailed was wrecked off the coast of Holland, and Catiforo eventually returned to Venice. A learned writer who retained a benevolent interest in Russia, in the mid-1730s years, at the beginning of the next Russian-Turkish war, he began to write a fundamental biography of Peter I. To do this, he creatively revised texts published in the West, including periodicals, putting them into an elegant literary form. As a result, the reader was presented not only with a biography of the emperor, but also with a monumental fresco of the history of Russia at the time of its formation as a superpower. For Katiforo, the image of the country as a potential liberator of the Greeks and other Balkan peoples from the Turkish conquerors was also important. The book was immediately translated into a number of languages, including Russian - already in 1743. Published in Russian only in 1772, it nevertheless circulated in handwritten copies, becoming widely known even before printing and seriously influencing Russian historiography - Pushkin also used it when collecting material for his history of Peter. A new translation made with expanded edition of “The Life of Peter the Great” (1748), returns a rare and valuable text to the modern reader, while commentators have carefully verified all the information presented by the Venetian biographer. For its time, Katiforo turned out to be surprisingly accurate, and the legendary information is in any case valuable for understanding the mythopoetics of Peter's image.