Moreover, Russian popular shows began to be offered to the public on feast days in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Among others, The Mystery of the Nativity was staged; however, out of respect for Orthodox dogmas, Elizabeth prohibited anyone from impersonating the Blessed Virgin; thus, instead of having an actress play that role, an icon would be brought on stage whenever the play called for the mother of God to speak. Moreover, a law enforced by the police prevented any plays (even those of religious inspiration) from being produced in private residences.
At around this time a young author, Alexander Sumarokov, created a hit with a tragedy written in the Russian language:
Khorev. And a 1000-seat theater, considered an incredible innovation, was built in Yaroslavl, in the provinces. It was founded by a certain Fyodor Grigorievich Volkov, who put on plays that he had composed, in prose and in verse. Often, he acted in them himself.
Astonished by the Russian elite’s sudden passion for the theater, Elizabeth took her benevolence as far as authorizing actors to bear swords, an honor previously reserved for the nobility.
For the most part, the plays presented in St. Petersburg and Moscow were pallid Russian adaptations of the most renowned French plays. Moliere’s The Miser and Tartuffe and Corneille’s Polyeucte were favorites. Suddenly, struck by a flash of inspiration, Sumarokov wrote a Russian historical drama, Sinav and Truvor, based on the history of the republic of Novgorod. This experiment in national literature made it all the way to Paris, where its novelty was hailed as a curiosity in Le Mercure de France. Little by little the Russian public, impelled by Elizabeth and Ivan Shuvalov, became interested in this new form of expression; while it began as an imitation of the great uvres of Western literature, when rendered in the mother tongue it acquired a semblance of original«186»
Elizabethan Russia ity. Sumarokov was on a trajectory; he launched a literary review, The Busy Bee, which evolved in a year’s time into a weekly magazine, Leisure, published by the Cadet Corps. He even enlivened the texts with a bit of irony, in the style of Voltaire but devoid of the least philos ophical provocation. In short, he was a whirlwind, stirring up something new every day in this virgin field. And still, he and other pioneers as talented as Trediakov and Kantemir were bested by yet another author who had sprung to prominence.
And in this case, too, it was Shuvalov who “discovered” the genius in that odd character, part intellectual, part Jack-of-all-trades, part vagabond, that was Sergei Lomonosov.
Son of a humble fisherman in the Arkhangelsk region, Lomonosov spent most of his childhood on his father’s boat, on the cold and stormy waters between the White Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. A parish priest taught him to read and, inspired by an abrupt passion for scholarship and for wandering, he fled the family home and set off on foot, ragged and famished, sleeping anywhere he could, eating anything he could find, living on charity and thievery but never deviating from his goal: Moscow. He was 17 years old when he finally arrived, with his belly empty and his head full of dazzling plans. Picked up by a monk, he presented himself as the son of a priest who had come to study under the great minds of the city; and lo and behold, he was admitted, as the monk’s protege, to the Slavo-Greco- Latin Academy (the only educational institution then in existence in the Russian empire). He was quickly noted there for his exceptional intelligence and sharp memory, on the basis of which he was sent to St. Petersburg and from thence to Germany. His principals instructed him to complete his knowledge in all areas. In Marburg, the philosopher and mathematician Christian von Wolff befriended him, encouraged him in his readings, introduced him to the works Descartes and to intellectual debate.
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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
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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
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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
