Terrible tsarinas

«187»

Terrible Tsarinas But, while Lomonosov was attracted by intellectual speculation, he also enjoyed poetry, especially since in Germany, under the aegis of Frederick II (who had a passion for culture), versification was a very fashionable pastime. Exalted by the examples from above, Lomonosov wrote verse too, plentifully and quickly.

However, these literary exercises did not keep him pinned behind his desk for too long. All of a sudden he dropped his studies and started frequenting gambling dens and chasing skirts. His conduct was so scandalous that he was threatened with arrest, and had to leave the country lest he be forcibly enrolled in the Prussian army. He was caught and imprisoned but managed to escape and, out of money and out of energy, made it back to St. Petersburg.

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 consuming alcohol. His admiration for the tsarina inspired him; he saw in her not only the heiress of Peter the Great, but the symbol of Russia moving toward a glorious future. In a beautiful burst of sincerity, he dedicated poems of almost religious reverence to Her Majesty. Certainly, he was well aware that in this, he was following in the footsteps of Vasily Trediakovsky and Alexander Sumarokov, 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