Popov's book "Slavic Antiquities, or the Adventures of Slavic Princes" contains a fictionalized story about the adventures of the princes of pre-Christian Russia, set out in the genre of a fairy-tale chivalric novel. Numerous unreliable but interesting legends, folklore and ethnographic sources were used in the description of pagan rites. Although Slavic Antiquities refers to the first experiments of pseudo-historical Slavic subjects in Russian literature, many readers of the 18th century perceived the book as a historical work.