Terrible tsarinas

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Terrible Tsarinas the privilege of staging comedies and operas in both capitals.

Moreover, Russian popular shows began to be offered to the public on feast days in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Among others, The Mystery of the Nativity was staged; however, out of respect for Orthodox dogmas, Elizabeth prohibited anyone from impersonating the Blessed Virgin; thus, instead of having an actress play that role, an icon would be brought on stage whenever the play called for the mother of God to speak. Moreover, a law enforced by the police prevented any plays (even those of religious inspiration) from being produced in private residences.

At around this time a young author, Alexander Sumarokov, created a hit with a tragedy written in the Russian language:

Khorev. And a 1000-seat theater, considered an incredible innovation, was built in Yaroslavl, in the provinces. It was founded by a certain Fyodor Grigorievich Volkov, who put on plays that he had composed, in prose and in verse. Often, he acted in them himself.

Astonished by the Russian elite’s sudden passion for the theater, Elizabeth took her benevolence as far as authorizing actors to bear swords, an honor previously reserved for the nobility.

For the most part, the plays presented in St. Petersburg and Moscow were pallid Russian adaptations of the most renowned French plays. Moliere’s The Miser and Tartuffe and Corneille’s Polyeucte were favorites. Suddenly, struck by a flash of inspiration, Sumarokov wrote a Russian historical drama, Sinav and Truvor, based on the history of the republic of Novgorod. This experiment in national literature made it all the way to Paris, where its novelty was hailed as a curiosity in Le Mercure de France. Little by little the Russian public, impelled by Elizabeth and Ivan Shuvalov, became interested in this new form of expression; while it began as an imitation of the great uvres of Western literature, when rendered in the mother tongue it acquired a semblance of original«186»

Elizabethan Russia ity. Sumarokov was on a trajectory; he launched a literary review, The Busy Bee, which evolved in a year’s time into a weekly magazine, Leisure, published by the Cadet Corps. He even enlivened the texts with a bit of irony, in the style of Voltaire but devoid of the least philos ophical provocation. In short, he was a whirlwind, stirring up something new every day in this virgin field. And still, he and other pioneers as talented as Trediakov and Kantemir were bested by yet another author who had sprung to prominence.

And in this case, too, it was Shuvalov who “discovered” the genius in that odd character, part intellectual, part Jack-of-all-trades, part vagabond, that was Sergei Lomonosov.

Son of a humble fisherman in the Arkhangelsk region, Lomonosov spent most of his childhood on his father’s boat, on the cold and stormy waters between the White Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. A parish priest taught him to read and, inspired by an abrupt passion for scholarship and for wandering, he fled the family home and set off on foot, ragged and famished, sleeping anywhere he could, eating anything he could find, living on charity and thievery but never deviating from his goal: Moscow. He was 17 years old when he finally arrived, with his belly empty and his head full of dazzling plans. Picked up by a monk, he presented himself as the son of a priest who had come to study under the great minds of the city; and lo and behold, he was admitted, as the monk’s protege, to the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy (the only educational institution then in existence in the Russian empire). He was quickly noted there for his exceptional intelligence and sharp memory, on the basis of which he was sent to St. Petersburg and from thence to Germany. His principals instructed him to complete his knowledge in all areas. In Marburg, the philosopher and mathematician Christian von Wolff befriended him, encouraged him in his readings, introduced him to the works Descartes and to intellectual debate.