In Serbian eighteenth-century literature Orfelin's authorship of ""The Life of Peter the Great"" was recorded for the first time in 1786, by Jovan Muškatirović. The illustrations of Peter's Life had been announced by Orfelin in 1772, but he began to produce them in 1774, and the whole enterprise was not completed until 1779 when the authorship of the book had been indubitably established. All this, however, was forgotten and Dimitrije Ruvarac discovered again in 1887, on the basis of the signed illustrated copies of the ""Life of Peter the Great"", that Orfelin was the author of the Russian emperor's biography. This nineteenth-century discovery was accepted by both Serbs and Russians.