Terrible tsarinas

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Elizabethan Russia stilted, pompous conventions of a language that was still impregnated with Old Slavonic. His writings were the first in Russia to approach - timidly, it is true - the language spoken by people who grew up on something other than scriptures and breviaries.

Without actually descending from Mount Olympus, he took a few steps toward everyday speech. Who, among his contemporaries, would not find that appealing? He was widely acclaimed. But he was so avid for knowledge that literary success was not enough for him. Pushing the limits of ambition, he strove to cover the entire spectrum of human thought, to learn everything, to experience everything, and to succeed at everything all at the same time.

He was supported by Ivan Shuvalov, who had him appointed President of the Academy; he inaugurated his role by establis hing a course in experimental physics. His curiosity encompassed every discipline, so that he published, one after another, an Introduction to the True Physical Chemistry, a Dissertation on the Duties of Journalists in the Essays They Write on the Freedom to Philosophize (in French) and, probably to bolster his reputation among the Orthodox clergy, suspicious as they were of Western atheism, a Reflection on the Utility of Ecclesiastical Books in the Russian Language. Many other works flowed from his prolific pen - including odes, epistles, and tragedies. In 1748, he composed a treatise on rhetoric, in Russian.

The following year, he set out to make an in-depth study on the industrial coloring of glass; and with the same enthusiasm, he undertook to draft the first lexicon of the Russian language. By turns poet, chemist, mineralogist, linguist, and grammarian, he would spend weeks at a time cloistered in his office in St. Petersburg or at the laboratory that he had set up in Moscow, in the Sukharev Tower, built by Peter the Great. Rather than wasting time eating, when so many pressing problems needed his attention, he would gulp down a few slices of buttered bread and a beer or two, and go on working until he fell asleep in his chair. As the