Mikhail Lomonosov
born Nov. 19 [Nov. 8, old style],
1711, near Kholmogory, Russia
died April 15 [April 4, O.S.], 1765, St.
Petersburg
Russian poet, scientist, and grammarian
who is often considered the first great
Russian linguistic reformer. He also
made substantial contributions to the
natural sciences, reorganized the St.
Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences,
established in Moscow the university
that today bears his name, and created
the first coloured glass mosaics in
Russia.
Lomonosov was the son of a poor
fisherman. At the age of 10 he too took
up that line of work. When the few books
he was able to obtain could no longer
satisfy his growing thirst for
knowledge, in December 1730, he left his
native village, penniless and on foot,
for Moscow. His ambition was to educate
himself to join the learned men on whom
the tsar Peter I the Great was calling
to transform Russia into a modern
nation.
The clergy and the nobility, attached
to their privileges and fearing the
spread of education and science,
actively opposed the reforms of which
Lomonosov was a lifelong champion. His
bitter struggle began as soon as he
arrived in Moscow. In order to be
admitted to the Slavonic–Greek–Latin
Academy he had to conceal his humble
origin; the sons of nobles jeered at
him, and he had scarcely enough money
for food and clothes. But his robust
health and exceptional intelligence
enabled him in five years to assimilate
the eight-year course of study; during
this time he taught himself Greek and
read the philosophical works of
antiquity.
Noticed at last by his instructors,
in January 1736 Lomonosov became a
student at the St. Petersburg Academy.
Seven months later he left for Germany
to study at the University of Marburg,
where he led the turbulent life of the
German student. His work did not suffer,
however, for within three years he had
surveyed the main achievements of
Western philosophy and science. His
mind, freed from all preconception,
rebelled at the narrowness of the
empiricism in which the disciples of
Isaac Newton had bound the natural
sciences; in dissertations sent to St.
Petersburg, he attacked the problem of
the structure of matter.
In 1739, in Freiberg, Lomonosov
studied firsthand the technologies of
mining, metallurgy, and glassmaking.
Also friendly with the poets of the
time, he freely indulged the love of
verse that had arisen during his
childhood with the reading of Psalms.
The “Ode,” dedicated to the Empress, and
the Pismo o pravilakh rossiyskogo
stikhotvorstva (“Letter Concerning the
Rules of Russian Versification”) made a
considerable impression at court.
After breaking with one of his
masters, the chemist Johann Henckel, and
many other mishaps, among which his
marriage at Marburg must be included,
Lomonosov returned in July 1741 to St.
Petersburg. The Academy, which was
directed by foreigners and incompetent
nobles, gave the young scholar no
precise assignment, and the injustice
aroused him. His violent temper and
great strength sometimes led him to go
beyond the rules of propriety, and in
May 1743 he was placed under arrest. Two
odes sent to the empress Elizabeth won
him his liberation in January 1744, as
well as a certain poetic prestige at the
Academy.
While in prison he worked out the
plan of work that he had already
developed in Marburg. The 276 zametok po
fizike i korpuskulyarnoy filosofi (“276
Notes on Corpuscular Philosophy and
Physics”) set forth the dominant ideas
of his scientific work. Appointed a
professor by the Academy in 1745, he
translated Christian Wolff’s
Institutiones philosophiae
experimentalis (“Studies in Experimental
Philosophy”) into Russian and wrote, in
Latin, important works on the
Meditationes de Caloris et Frigoris
Causa (1747; “Cause of Heat and Cold”),
the Tentamen Theoriae de vi Aëris
Elastica (1748; “Elastic Force of Air”),
and the Theoria Electricitatis (1756;
“Theory of Electricity”). His friend,
the celebrated German mathematician
Leonhard Euler, recognized the creative
originality of his articles, which were,
on Euler’s advice, published by the
Russian Academy in the Novye kommentari.
Battle of Poltava. M. Lomonosov's
mosaic. Academy of Sciences.
S.-Petersburg. 1762–1764
In 1748 the laboratory that Lomonosov
had been requesting since 1745 was
granted him; it then began a prodigious
amount of activity. He passionately
undertook many tasks and, courageously
facing ill will and hostility, recorded
in three years more than 4,000
experiments in his Zhurnal laboratori,
the results of which enabled him to set
up a coloured glass works and to make
mosaics with these glasses. Slovo o
polze khimi (1751; “Discourse on the
Usefulness of Chemistry”), the Pismo k
I.I. Shuvalovu o polze stekla (1752;
“Letter to I.I. Shuvalov Concerning the
Usefulness of Glass”), and the “Ode” to
Elizabeth celebrated his fruitful union
of abstract and applied science. Anxious
to train students, he wrote in 1752 an
introduction to the physical chemistry
course that he was to set up in his
laboratory. The theories on the unity of
natural phenomena and the structure of
matter that he set forth in the
discussion on the Slovo o proiskhozhdeni
sveta (1756; “Origin of Light and
Colours”) and in his theoretical works
on electricity in 1753 and 1756 also
matured in this laboratory.
Encouraged by the success of his
experiments in 1760, Lomonosov inserted
in the Meditationes de Solido et Fluido
(“Reflections on the Solidity and
Fluidity of Bodies”) the “universal law
of nature”—that is, the law of
conservation of matter and energy,
which, with the corpuscular theory,
constitutes the dominant thread in all
his research.
To these achievements were added the
composition of Rossiyskaya grammatika
and of Kratkoy rossiyskoy letopisets
(“Short Russian Chronicle”), ordered by
the Empress, and all the work of
reorganizing education, to which
Lomonosov accorded much importance.
From 1755 he followed very closely
the development of Moscow State
University (now Moscow M.V. Lomonosov
State University), for which he had
drawn up the plans. Appointed a
councillor by the Academy in 1757, he
undertook reforms to make the university
an intellectual centre closely linked
with the life of the country. To that
end, he wrote several scholarly works
including Rassuzhdeniye o bolshoy
tochnosti morskogo puti (1759;
“Discussion of the Great Accuracy of the
Maritime Route”); Rassuzhdeniye o
proiskhozhdenii ledyanykh gor v
severnykh moryakh (1760; “Discussion of
the Formation of Icebergs in the
Northern Seas”); Kratkoye opisaniye
raznykh puteshestviy po severnym moryam
. . . (1762–63; “A Short Account of the
Various Voyages in the Northern Seas”);
and O sloyakh zemnykh (1763; “Of the
Terrestrial Strata”), which constituted
an important contribution both to
science and to the development of
commerce and the exploitation of mineral
wealth.
Despite the honours that came to him,
he continued to lead a simple and
industrious life, surrounded by his
family and a few friends. He left his
house and the laboratory erected in his
garden only to go to the Academy. His
prestige was considerable in Russia, and
his scientific works and his role in the
Academy were known abroad. He was a
member of the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences and of that of Bologna. His
theories concerning heat and the
constitution of matter were opposed by
the empiricist scientists of Germany,
although they were analyzed with
interest in European scientific
journals.
The persecutions he suffered,
particularly after the empress
Elizabeth’s death in 1762 (1761, Old
Style) exhausted him physically, and he
died in 1765. The empress Catherine II
the Great had the patriotic scholar
buried with great ceremony, but she
confiscated all the notes in which were
outlined the great humanitarian ideas he
had developed. Publications of his works
were purged of the material that
constituted a menace to the system of
serfdom, particularly that concerned
with materialist and humanist ideas.
Efforts were made to view him as a court
poet and an upholder of monarchy and
religion rather than as an enemy of
superstition and a champion of popular
education. The authorities did not
succeed in quenching the influence of
his work, however. The publication of
his Polnoye sobraniye sochineny
(“Complete Works”) in 1950–83 by Soviet
scholars has revealed the full
contributions of Lomonosov, who has long
been misunderstood by historians of
science.
Luce-Andrée Langevin
