Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov

Russian scientist and scholar

• Born: November 19, 1711
• Birthplace: Denisovka (now Lomonosovo), near Kholmogory, Russia
• Died: April 15, 1765
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

Through his reform of the Russian literary language, his scientific investigations, and his reinterpretation of early Russian history, Lomonosov was at the beginning of modern Russian intellectual history and a founder of Russian nationalism.

Early Life

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (myihkh-uh-EEL vuhs-YEEL-yihv-yihch luh-muh-NAW-suhf) was the son of prosperous peasant parents who lived near Kholmogory, Russia. His father was a fisherman. Lomonosov seems to have been a voracious reader at an early age, and gradually he came to outgrow the small village of his birth. In 1730, he went to Moscow on foot, pretending to be the son of a priest, to enroll in the Slavo-Greco-Latin academy of the Zaikonospassky monastery, where he studied Greek and Latin. From there, he continued to study at the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1736, but he soon secured a newly created traveling scholarship to study in Germany.

From 1736 to 1739, Lomonosov studied principally the humanities under the mathematician Christian von Wolff at the University of Marburg. From 1739 to 1741, he changed his program of study to chemistry, mining, and metallurgy at the University of Freiburg in Saxony. He may have married a German woman in 1740, but, apparently to escape from her, as well as from his own drunkenness and debts and the threat of imprisonment they carried, Lomonosov joined the Prussian army later in that same year. In 1741, he returned home to Russia to become a professor of chemistry at the new University of St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences and a member of the academy.

Life’s Work

In St. Petersburg, Lomonosov became Russia’s first great scientist. By 1748, he had founded the first chemistry laboratory in the Russian Empire. He worked on the mechanical nature of heat and developed a kinetic theory of gases. In 1752, his investigations led to the initial discovery of the law of conservation of matter eighteen years before similar work of the French chemistAntoine-Laurent Lavoisier was published, earning for Lavoisier the lion’s share of the credit. Lomonosov also had an impact on the development of Russian geography and cartography. For example, he redrew and reconstructed an immense globe of 10 feet (3.1 meters) in diameter that had been a gift from Duke Christian August of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf to Peter the Great at the end of the Great Northern War in 1721. Lomonosov and his team took almost seven years (1748-1754) to complete the work.

Under Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the Russian Empire was still somewhat too far out of the mainstream of Western civilization for achievements such as Lomonosov’s to be fully noticed, yet his work could not be denied. He published numerous scientific studies of importance, including Slovo o proiskhozhdeni sveta (1756; comments on the origin of light representing a new theory of color). For his accomplishments in the fields of chemistry, optics, metallurgy, geography, natural sciences, physics, and astronomy, Lomonosov was made a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1760 and the Bologna Academy of Sciences in 1764.

As important a scientist as Lomonosov was, his influence on the development of the arts, especially literature, in Russia, was far greater. He revived the ancient art of mosaics in Russia and was a folklorist, poet, dramatist, historian, and philologist. In 1755, Lomonosov contributed to the founding of the University of Moscow, which is now called Mikhail Lomonosov University.

While his poems and plays were very artificial, mechanical, and typically classicist (many being in honor of Elizabeth), Lomonosov’s most important achievement was in the field of philology. In 1757, he published his monumental Rossiyskaya grammatika (Russian grammar), which initiated the reform of the Russian literary language. In opposition to the ideas of many of the leading Russian literary figures of the time, including Vasily Trediakovsky, Lomonosov adopted a syllabotonic versification system (one dominated by the number of stressed syllables in a line) between Old Church Slavonic and vernacular Russian for the standard written Russian language. These linguistic changes, fostered by Lomonosov in the middle of the eighteenth century, formed the basis for the literary achievements of the golden age of Russian literature in the first half of the nineteenth century.

During his study of Old Church Slavonic, Lomonosov came to know the early Russian chronicle literature quite well. He wrote several works critiquing this genre, including Kratkoy rossiyskoy letopisets (1759; brief Russian chronicle). Gradually, his examinations of the chronicles led him into the field of historiography to challenge the Normanist interpretation of the founding of the first Russian state, the Kievan Rus’, in the ninth and tenth centuries.

The Normanist view was the product of the serious scholarship of several prominent German historians who had been brought into Russia since the reign of Peter the Great to help staff the Russian Academy. Largely based on the evidence provided by the chronicle literature, the Normanist historians, including G. A. Bayer, G. F. Müller, and August Ludwig von Schlözer, attributed the establishment of the first Russian state to outside (primarily Norse and Germanic) influences. This interpretation was an affront to Lomonosov’s nascent Russian nationalism, evident in his work in Russian philology and based on his critique of the chronicles. He sought to counter it and to combat the influence of the so-called German Party in the Russian Academy. In so doing, he became, along with a fellow Russian historian, Vasily Nikitich Tatischev, a founder of the anti-Normanist interpretation of early Russian history and the nationalist or state school of Russian historiography. Lomonosov’s final ideas on the subject appeared posthumously in 1766.

As an early Russian nationalist, Lomonosov came to admire Peter the Great for making the Russian Empire great. In part because of his praise for Elizabeth Petrevna and her father and because he shared her anti-German sentiments, Lomonosov was favored by Elizabeth but not by her more Germanic-oriented successors, Peter III and Catherine the Great. Lomonosov died in St. Petersburg in 1765, probably of complications of alcoholism.

Significance

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was the unheralded founder of modern Russian science, literature, and culture. He was a protean intellect and a genius, rightfully compared to Benjamin Franklin, another universal thinker of the eighteenth century. Lomonosov laid the foundation for scientific investigation in Russia, and many times his own discoveries led to or even predated later accredited advancements in the West. He pointed the way to the greatness of Russian literature and historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In his Russian self-consciousness, Lomonosov mirrored and stimulated the early stirrings of nationalism that were beginning to manifest themselves among some of the more progressive members of Russia’s elite. He not only felt them and reflected them in his linguistic, literary, and historical works but also began to provide these nationalist feelings with a sound intellectual matrix. In this respect, Lomonosov can be seen as an early advocate of what would become the early nineteenth century conservative Romantic nationalism of Russian Slavophilism. At the same time, his achievements became a source of pride, inspiration, and direction for the Russian nation and helped it to contribute to and to move closer to the mainstream of Western civilization.

Bibliography

Florinsky, Michael T., ed. McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. This older standard reference work offers a rather lengthy and balanced listing on Lomonosov. His artistic and scientific achievements are generally treated equally.

Jones, W. Gareth. “Russian Literature in the Eighteenth Century.” In Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, edited by Neil Cornwell. New York: Routledge, 2001. This survey of Russian literature includes information on the works of Lomonosov.

Kudryavtsev, B. B. The Life and Work of Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov. Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1954. A rare English translation of a Soviet biography. A thorough treatment, stressing Lomonosov’s scientific achievements and offering the standard Stalinist-nationalist view of him.

Menshutkin, B. N. Russia’s Lomonosov: Chemist, Courtier, Physicist, Poet. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952. An updated and edited translation of the czarist 1912 original. Still one of the best and most readable biographies of Lomonosov.

Mirsky, D. S. A History of Russian Literature. Rev. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964. This work goes well beyond placing Lomonosov in perspective with the development of modern Russian literature, lionizing him as the father of modern Russian civilization.

Rice, Tamara Talbot. Elizabeth, Empress of Russia. New York: Praeger, 1970. Chapter 8 of this cultural biography of the daughter of, and successor to, Peter the Great and her times is largely about Lomonosov and his literary achievements. Easy reading and well illustrated.

Rogger, Hans. National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. Lomonosov is put into perspective with the development of Russian nationalism in the eighteenth century and the eighteenth century Russian intelligentsia. Includes essential background on Lomonosov and his Russia. Scholarly and well written.

Segel, Harold B., ed. The Literature of Eighteenth Century Russia. Vol. 1. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967. This multivolume anthology includes several good examples of Lomonosov’s more important literary works, with rather extensive introductions.

Silbajoris, Frank R. “Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov.” In Handbook of Russian Literature, edited by Victor Terras. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. A capsulization of the more current interpretations of Lomonosov and his literary work. De-emphasizes his scientific contributions.

Stacy, Robert H. Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1974. This volume contains an informative chapter on Lomonosov’s life and achievements.