Terrible tsarinas

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Terrible Tsarinas night deepened, passersby would be worried by the light that still shone in his window - they wondered whether his labors were inspired by the God or the Devil. A monster of scholarship and intellectual avidity, warring against the ignorance and fanaticism of the people, Lomonosov even claimed, in 1753, to have preceded Benjamin Franklin in discovering electricity. But he was also concerned with the practical applications of science and so, still with the support of Shuvalov, he reorganized the first university, built an imperial porcelain factory, and established the art of glassmaking and mosaics in Russia.

Having very quickly recognized Lomonosov’s merits, Elizabeth repaid him in admiration and protection for the homage that he dedicated to her in his poems. She may have been only semiilliterate, but her instincts sometimes filled in where culture was lacking. It was that same instinct that had led her to choose as her lover, then as de facto husband, a simple peasant and former church cantor, and to entrust the education of her empire to another peasant, the son of a fisherman - a genius and a polygraph. In both cases, she resorted to a child of the people to help her raise the people. In the end, the most significant legacy of her reign would be neither the monuments nor the laws, the ministers appointed or the battles won, nor all the festivals and fireworks, but the birth of the true Russian language. Nobody around her had yet sensed that, beneath the superficial calm, the country was undergoing a revolution. Not only were the mindsets and the morals changing imperceptibly, but the way in which people were choosing and arranging words to express their thoughts. Freed from the ancestral yoke of Church Slavonic, the Russian language of the future was beginning to take shape. And was the son of a fisherman from the Far North who, through his writings, was making the nobility literate.

Lomonosov’s greatest stroke of fortune was to have Eliza«190»

Elizabethan Russia beth to help him in his extraordinary career; and Elizabeth’s greatest stroke of fortune was in having Lomonosov to create, under her wing, the Russian language of the future.