numerous other aspiring authors. The same satire, the same social criticism inspired journalism; in fact, no clear line divided the two fields. Russian writers and publicists inveighed against the backwardness, boor-ishness, and corruption of their countrymen, and they neglected no opportunity to turn them toward civilization and light. At the same time they noticed that on occasion 'the ungainly beasts' began to admire the West, in particular France, too much and to despise their own country, and that in turn was satirized and denounced throughout the century.
The spirit of criticism developed especially in the reign of Catherine the Great and was aided by the sponsorship and example of the empress herself. Indeed, she gave, so to speak, official endorsement to the far- reaching critiques and views of the
Freemasonry became another school of criticism and thought for the Russians, and a more complicated one, for it combined disparate doctrines and trends. It came to Russia, of course, again from the West, from Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and France. Although the first fraternal lodges appeared at the time of Empress Elizabeth, the movement became prominent only in the reign of Catherine the Great. At that time it consisted of about one hundred lodges located in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and some provincial towns and of approximately 2,500 members, almost entirely from the gentry. In addition to the contribution made by Freemasonry to the life of polite society, which constituted probably its principal attraction to most members, specialists distinguish two main trends within that movement in eighteenth-century Russia: the mystical, and the ethical and social. The first concentrated on such commendable but elusive and essentially individual goals as contemplation and self-perfection. The second reached out to the world and thus constituted the active wing of the movement. Socially oriented Freemasons centered around the University of Moscow. They engaged in education and publishing, establishing a private school and the first large-scale program of publication in Russia outside of the government. They contributed heavily to the periodical literature and its social criticism. Nicholas Novikov, 1744-1818, perhaps the most
active publicist of Catherine the Great's reign, led the group which included several other outstanding people.
Of the many things to be criticized in Russia, serfdom loomed largest. Yet that institution was both so well accepted and so fundamental to Russian life that few in the eighteenth century dared challenge it. Catherine the Great herself, after some vague preliminary wavering, came out entirely on the side of the gentry and its power over the peasants. Numerous writers criticized certain individual excesses of serfdom, such as the cruelty of one master or the wastefulness of another, but they did not assail the system itself. Novikov and a very few others went further: their image of serf relations could not be ascribed to individual aberrations, and it cried for reform. Still, it remained to Alexander Radishchev to make the condemnation of serfdom total and unmistakably clear. It was Radishchev's attack on serfdom that broke through the veneer of cultural progressivism and well-being, typical of the reign of Catherine the Great, and served as the occasion for a sharp break between the government and the radical or even just liberal intellectuals.
Radishchev, 1749-1802, was educated at the University of Leipzig as well as in Russia and acquired a wide knowledge of eighteenth-century thought. In particular, he experienced the impact of Rousseau, Mably, and the entire egalitarian, and generally more radical, tendency of the later Enlightenment. A member of the gentry, an official, and a writer of some distinction, Radishchev left his mark on Russian history with the publication in 1790 of his stunning
Radishchev's philippic resulted in his being sentenced to death, changed fortunately to ten-year imprisonment in Siberia. Frightened by the French Revolution, Catherine the Great finally turned against the ideas of the Enlightenment, which she had done so much to promote. Novikov and his fellow Masons in Moscow also suffered, and their educational work came to an abrupt end. Edicts against travel and other contacts with the revolu-
tionary West multiplied, reaching absurd proportions in Paul's reign. But the import of the issue proved to be even more profound than a reaction to the French Revolution. Until 1790 the state led Russia on the path of enlightenment. From that year on, it began to apply the brakes. Radishchev's
While secular philosophy, literary debates, and social criticism stood in the center of the Enlightenment, other aspects of culture also developed at that time. Following the West as usual, Russia proceeded to assimilate modem science, scholarship, and the arts. Science took root slowly in Russia, and for a number of decades the Russians had relatively little in this field, except a number of scholars invited from abroad, some of them of great merit. But - to underline the danger of generalizations and schemes - the one great Russian scientist of the eighteenth century appeared quite early on the scene; moreover, his achievements were very rarely if ever to be matched in the entire annals of science in Russia. This extraordinary man was Michael Lomonosov, born in a peasant family in the extreme northern province of Archangel and educated both in Russia and for five years in Germany, most of that time at Marburg University. Lomonosov, 1711-65, who has already been mentioned as a pioneer grammarian, an important literary scholar, and a gifted poet, was also a chemist, a physicist, an astronomer, a meteorologist, a geologist, a mineralogist, a metallurgist, a specialist in navigation, a geographer, an economist, and a historian, as well as a master of various crafts and a tireless inventor. Pushkin was to refer to him, appropriately, as the first Russian university. In considering the work of Lomonosov, we should remember that he lived before the time of extreme scientific specialization, when a single mind still could master many disciplines, and indeed advance them. Lomonosov represented, in other words, the Russian counterpart of the great encyclopedic scholars of the West.
Lomonosov probably did his best work in chemistry, physics, and the border area between these two sciences. In fact, he developed and in 1751 taught the first course of physical chemistry in the world, and in 1752 he published a textbook in that field. The Russian scientist's other most outstanding achievements included the discovery of the law of the preservation of matter and of energy long before Lavoisier, the discovery of atmosphere on Venus, brilliant studies in electricity, the theory of heat, and optics, and the establishment of the nature and composition of crystals, charcoal, and black earth. Lomonosov's scientific work unfortunately proved far ahead of his time, especially in Russia, where it found no
followers and was fully rediscovered only by Menshutkin and other twentieth-century scholars.
Although Lomonosov remained essentially an isolated individual, the eighteenth century was also noteworthy in Russian history for large-scale, organized scientific effort. That effort took the form of expeditions to discover, explore, or study distant areas of the empire and sometimes neighboring seas and territories. Geography, geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, ethnography, and philology, as well as some other disciplines, all profited from these well-thought-out and at times extremely daring undertakings. Begun by Peter the Great, the expeditions led to important results even in the first half of the century. For example, Alaska was discovered in 1732. The so-called First Academic Expedition, which lasted from 1733 to 1742 and included 570 participants, successfully undertook the mammoth task of mapping and exploring the northern shore of Siberia. Numerous expeditions, often of great scholarly value, followed later in the century. Peter-Simon Pallas, a versatile and excellent German scientist in Russian service, deserves special credit for his part in them.
The Russians also applied themselves to what can be called the social sciences and the humanities. Mention
