Terrible Tsarinas

had to leave the country lest he be forcibly enrolled in the Prus-

sian army. He was caught and imprisoned but managed to escape

and, out of money and out of energy, made it back to St. Peters-

burg.

These successive adventures, far from persuading him to

conform, made him resolve to fight with all his strength against

bad fate and false friends. Nevertheless, this time he sought to

distinguish himself by producing poetry rather than by consum-

ing alcohol. His admiration for the tsarina inspired him; he saw in

her not only the heiress of Peter the Great, but the symbol of Rus-

sia moving toward a glorious future. In a beautiful burst of sincer-

ity, he dedicated poems of almost religious reverence to Her Maj-

esty. Certainly, he was well aware that in this, he was following

in the footsteps of Vasily Trediakovsky and Alexander Sumaro-

kov, but these two colleagues (who hardly welcomed his advent

in the tight intellectual circles of the capital) did not intimidate

him in the least. He and they both knew that he would soon cast

them into the shade with the brilliance and scope of his visions

and his vocabulary. He was hunting on the same grounds as they.

Following their example, he penned panegyrics to Her Majesty

and anthems to the military prowess of Russia. But, while the

pretexts of Lomonosov’s poems remained conventional, his style

and prosody had a new vigor. His predecessors were mired in the

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stilted, pompous conventions of a language that was still impreg-

nated with Old Slavonic. His writings were the first in Russia to

approach — timidly, it is true — the language spoken by people

who grew up on something other than scriptures and breviaries.

Without actually descending from Mount Olympus, he took a few

steps toward everyday speech. Who, among his contemporaries,

would not find that appealing? He was widely acclaimed. But he

was so avid for knowledge that literary success was not enough

for him. Pushing the limits of ambition, he strove to cover the en-

tire spectrum of human thought, to learn everything, to experi-

ence everything, and to succeed at everything all at the same time.

He was supported by Ivan Shuvalov, who had him appointed

President of the Academy; he inaugurated his role by establishing

a course in experimental physics. His curiosity encompassed

every discipline, so that he published, one after another, an Intro-

duction to the True Physical Chemistry, a Dissertation on the Duties of Jour-

nalists in the Essays They Write on the Freedom to Philosophize (in French)

and, probably to bolster his reputation among the Orthodox

clergy, suspicious as they were of Western atheism, a Reflection on

the Utility of Ecclesiastical Books in the Russian Language. Many other

works flowed from his prolific pen — including odes, epistles, and

tragedies. In 1748, he composed a treatise on rhetoric, in Russian.

The following year, he set out to make an in-depth study on the

industrial coloring of glass; and with the same enthusiasm, he un-

dertook to draft the first lexicon of the Russian language. By

turns poet, chemist, mineralogist, linguist, and grammarian, he

would spend weeks at a time cloistered in his office in St. Peters-

burg or at the laboratory that he had set up in Moscow, in the

Sukharev Tower, built by Peter the Great. Rather than wasting

time eating, when so many pressing problems needed his atten-

tion, he would gulp down a few slices of buttered bread and a beer

or two, and go on working until he fell asleep in his chair. As the

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Terrible Tsarinas

night deepened, passersby would be worried by the light that still

shone in his window — they wondered whether his labors were

inspired by the God or the Devil. A monster of scholarship and

intellectual avidity, warring against the ignorance and fanaticism

of the people, Lomonosov even claimed, in 1753, to have preceded

Benjamin Franklin in discovering electricity. But he was also con-

cerned with the practical applications of science and so, still with

the support of Shuvalov, he reorganized the first university, built

an imperial porcelain factory, and established the art of glassmak-

ing and mosaics in Russia.

Having very quickly recognized Lomonosov’s merits, Eliza-

beth repaid him in admiration and protection for the homage that

he dedicated to her in his poems. She may have been only semi-

illiterate, but her instincts sometimes filled in where culture was

lacking. It was that same instinct that had led her to choose as her

lover, then as de facto husband, a simple peasant and former church

cantor, and to entrust the education of her empire to another

peasant, the son of a fisherman — a genius and a polygraph. In

both cases, she resorted to a child of the people to help her raise