The Icon and the Axe

Lomonosov was not only a scientist and educator but a poet, essayist, orator, and historian. He gathered the material which was sent to Voltaire for his biography of Peter the Great; questioned the then dominant "Norman" emphasis on the Germanic elements in early Russian civilization; and wrote a Russian grammar which served as the basic text on this subject from its appearance in 1755 until the 1830's. By praising vernacular Russian and providing guidance for its use, Lomonosov helped clear the way for truly national forms of expression-even though he wrote most of his literary production in a more bombastic language replete with Church Slavonic forms.

Lomonosov was in no sense a revolutionary. He rejected sloth and superstition wherever he found it. But he admired royalty no less than most other leaders of the European Enlightenment, and his religious beliefs were considerably more fervent. His new methods of rhetoric and panegyric were invoked for the commemoration of coronations and Christian holidays; his

new chemical techniques for glass manufacture were used for church mosaics. His curiosity extended up into the sky (where he and a colleague duplicated Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity and fascinated St. Petersburg society by producing "thunder machines" that brought electrical charges into bottles during thunderstorms), and far out to sea (where he proposed the founding of an international academy to develop more scientific methods of navigation and championed an expedition to find a northern passage to the Orient).

Lomonosov is, together with Pushkin, one of those rare figures admired by almost all factions in subsequent Russian thought. Those who came after him have looked back longingly, not only at the breadth of his accomplishment, but at his practical-minded attitude toward life. The passion of their nostalgia no less than the uniqueness of Lomonosov himself serves as a reminder that the Enlightenment in Russia was a relatively frail and insecure phenomenon compared to that of the West. Indeed, much of Lomonosov's scientific work was not fully uncovered and understood by his countrymen until the early twentieth century.

After Lomonosov's death in 1765, the Enlightenment seemed to be moving toward its greatest triumphs under the new empress, Catherine the Great. If Peter had opened a window to Europe and Elizabeth had decorated it with rococo frills, Catherine threw open the doors and began to rebuild the house itself. She looked beyond the technological accomplishments of the North European Protestant nations to the cultural glories of France and Italy and the political traditions of England. But this early optimism was soon to fade. The all-pervading sun of the Enlightenment found the Eastern skies more cloudy than they at first appeared.

The Dilemma of the Reforming Despot

The reign of Catherine illustrates dramatically the conflict between theoretical enlightenment and practical despotism that bothered so many eighteenth-century European monarchs. Few other rulers of her time had such sweeping plans for reform and attracted so much adulation from the philosophes, yet few others were so poor in practical accomplishment. In her failure, however, she created the conditions for future change-posing vexing questions for the aristocracy while creating intolerable conditions for the peasantry. As the only articulate ideologist to rule Russia between Ivan IV and Lenin, she changed the terms of reference for Russian thought by

i linking Russian culture with that of France, and by attempting to base imperial authority on philosophic principles rather than hereditary right or religious sanction.

The attractions of France had, of course, been noticed earlier. Peter had visited the Sorbonne and sent three students to Paris for study in 1717. Kantemir and Tred'iakovsky both spent most of the thirties absorbing French culture in Paris. The former translated Moliere and wrote independently in the manner of French satire; the latter, as secretary of the Academy of Sciences and court poet, began the wholesale introduction of Gallicisms into Russian speech. From the beginning, the uneasy aristocracy looked to French thought for philosophic guidance as well as forms of expression; and this philosophic thirst brought them into conflict with the guardians of Orthodoxy in the new state Church. Throughout Elizabeth's reign the Holy Synod made repeated efforts to suppress Fontenelle's Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds, with its popularized image of an infinite universe.10