The Icon and the Axe

Accompanying this sudden growth in the number of books printed (and also imported) went an extraordinary spread of secular learning to the provinces. Outlying regions that had been bastions of religious conservatism and xenophobia began to make important contributions to secular enlightenment. The poet Tretfiakoysky came from Astrakhan; Lomonosov from Kholmogory; and the personnel for the first permanent Russian theater from Yaroslavl. The director and principal playwright of the theater, Sumarokov, came from Finland-as did most of the granite used for rebuilding St. Petersburg. The first provincial journals in Russian history appeared late in the eighties in Yaroslavl and in Tobol'sk in distant Siberia.6 Voltaire's best translator (and most eloquent defender even after Catherine had become disillusioned with the Russian Enlightenment) came from the Siberian city of Orenburg.7

The sudden influx of private foreign tutors, and the efforts to transform provincial cities into imperial cultural and administrative centers, increased provincial involvement in the new secular culture. Also important were the sudden rash of scientific expeditions to the north and east in the sixties and seventies led by the great biologist, mineralogist, and linguist Peter Simon Pallas. Sponsored by the Academy of Sciences, these large-scale attempts to gather and collate scientific information of all sorts necessarily drew into their activities many provincial figures with first-hand knowledge of local conditions and problems.

The arrival of the Academy of Sciences as a serious institution for the higher scientific education of native Russians can be dated from the beginnings of group research by the Russian apprentices of Pallas and of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. Despite blindness which overtook Euler shortly after he returned permanently to Russia in 1766, Euler wrote almost half of the eight hundred papers in his completed works during the years that remained in his life, which were eminently productive ones. His very infirmity forced him to rely on young Russian apprentices; and his previous experience as head of the Berlin academy fortified him with an ability to organize as well as inspire his fellow scientists. When he died in 1783, he left Russia with a significant number of Russian-speaking scientists capable of introducing advanced mathematics into the curricula of other educational institutions.8

Having taken away from Catherine the Great her personal cook, who provided his aging physique with richer food than it could digest, Euler repaid her by providing Russia with more food for thought than its youthful intellect could yet assimilate. But after his death three of his sons remained in Russia, at least for a time, to help begin the process; and Nicholas Fuss, the man who pronounced the eulogy at Euler's burial in St. Petersburg,

married his granddaughter and helped found an indigenous tradition of higher mathematical study in early-nineteenth-century Russia.

Even more important than this development of a native scientific tradition was the prior emergence of scientific self-confidence in the person of Michael Lomonosov, the best-known figure of the Russian Enlightenment. He was a scientist in both the Renaissance and the modern sense of the word: a universal man, symbolizing the arrival of Russia as a contributor to, rather than a mere dependency of, the secular scientific culture of Europe.9 The decisive moment in Lomonosov's life came in the mid-thirties, when a new director of the Academy of Sciences requested that a number of well-trained Russian students be transferred from theological academies for scientific training at the gymnasium of the academy. As one of the small group chosen, Lomonosov arrived in St. Petersburg on New Year's Day of 1736-a milestone in the cultural rise of the new capital, no less important than the arrival of Empress Anna for permanent residence just four years before.

From St. Petersburg, Lomonosov went to study with Christian Wolff, who had left the domain of Prussian pietism at Halle for the University of Marburg. There Lomonosov acquired not only the scientific training which enabled him to become a pioneer in the field of physical chemistry, but also a fascination with the institution of a university hitherto nonexistent in Russia. Upon his return, he immersed himself in the scientific activities of the St. Petersburg Academy, and also helped found Moscow University and give it an initial Germanic bias in favor of developing a library and research institutes.