low of seven in the ) ear after Peter the Great's death to twenty-three by the end of the fifties, the average in the 1760's leaped to 105 a year: the first in a series of geometric increases. Whereas almost all of the few books printed in the first half of the eighteenth century were religious, 40 per cent of the eight thousand books printed in the second half of the century (almost all of them during Catherine's reign) were purely secular.4 The number of new books put in circulation in Russia in the 1760's and 1770's was more than seven times the number for the 1740's and 1750's.5
Accompanying this sudden growth in the number of books printed (and also imported) went an extraordinary spread of secular learning to the provinces. Outlying regions that had been bastions of religious conservatism and xenophobia began to make important contributions to secular enlightenment. The poet Tretfiakoysky came from Astrakhan; Lomonosov from Kholmogory; and the personnel for the first permanent Russian theater from Yaroslavl. The director and principal playwright of the theater, Sumarokov, came from Finland-as did most of the granite used for rebuilding St. Petersburg. The first provincial journals in Russian history appeared late in the eighties in Yaroslavl and in Tobol'sk in distant Siberia.6 Voltaire's best translator (and most eloquent defender even after Catherine had become disillusioned with the Russian Enlightenment) came from the Siberian city of Orenburg.7
The sudden influx of private foreign tutors, and the efforts to transform provincial cities into imperial cultural and administrative centers, increased provincial involvement in the new secular culture. Also important were the sudden rash of scientific expeditions to the north and east in the sixties and seventies led by the great biologist, mineralogist, and linguist Peter Simon Pallas. Sponsored by the Academy of Sciences, these large-scale attempts to gather and collate scientific information of all sorts necessarily drew into their activities many provincial figures with first-hand knowledge of local conditions and problems.
The arrival of the Academy of Sciences as a serious institution for the higher scientific education of native Russians can be dated from the beginnings of group research by the Russian apprentices of Pallas and of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. Despite blindness which overtook Euler shortly after he returned permanently to Russia in 1766, Euler wrote almost half of the eight hundred papers in his completed works during the years that remained in his life, which were eminently productive ones. His very infirmity forced him to rely on young Russian apprentices; and his previous experience as head of the Berlin academy fortified him with an ability to organize as well as inspire his fellow scientists. When he died in 1783, he left Russia with a significant number of Russian- speaking scientists capable of introducing advanced mathematics into the curricula of other educational institutions.8
Having taken away from Catherine the Great her personal cook, who provided his aging physique with richer food than it could digest, Euler repaid her by providing Russia with more food for thought than its youthful intellect could yet assimilate. But after his death three of his sons remained in Russia, at least for a time, to help begin the process; and Nicholas Fuss, the man who pronounced the eulogy at Euler's burial in St. Petersburg,
married his granddaughter and helped found an indigenous tradition of higher mathematical study in early- nineteenth-century Russia.
Even more important than this development of a native scientific tradition was the prior emergence of scientific self-confidence in the person of Michael Lomonosov, the best-known figure of the Russian Enlightenment. He was a scientist in both the Renaissance and the modern sense of the word: a universal man, symbolizing the arrival of Russia as a contributor to, rather than a mere dependency of, the secular scientific culture of Europe.9 The decisive moment in Lomonosov's life came in the mid-thirties, when a new director of the Academy of Sciences requested that a number of well-trained Russian students be transferred from theological academies for scientific training at the gymnasium of the academy. As one of the small group chosen, Lomonosov arrived in St. Petersburg on New Year's Day of 1736-a milestone in the cultural rise of the new capital, no less important than the arrival of Empress Anna for permanent residence just four years before.
From St. Petersburg, Lomonosov went to study with Christian Wolff, who had left the domain of Prussian pietism at Halle for the University of Marburg. There Lomonosov acquired not only the scientific training which enabled him to become a pioneer in the field of physical chemistry, but also a fascination with the institution of a university hitherto nonexistent in Russia. Upon his return, he immersed himself in the scientific activities of the St. Petersburg Academy, and also helped found Moscow University and give it an initial Germanic bias in favor of developing a library and research institutes.
Lomonosov was not only a scientist and educator but a poet, essayist, orator, and historian. He gathered the material which was sent to Voltaire for his biography of Peter the Great; questioned the then dominant 'Norman' emphasis on the Germanic elements in early Russian civilization; and wrote a Russian grammar which served as the basic text on this subject from its appearance in 1755 until the 1830's. By praising vernacular Russian and providing guidance for its use, Lomonosov helped clear the way for truly national forms of expression-even though he wrote most of his literary production in a more bombastic language replete with Church Slavonic forms.
Lomonosov was in no sense a revolutionary. He rejected sloth and superstition wherever he found it. But he admired royalty no less than most other leaders of the European Enlightenment, and his religious beliefs were considerably more fervent. His new methods of rhetoric and panegyric were invoked for the commemoration of coronations and Christian holidays; his
new chemical techniques for glass manufacture were used for church mosaics. His curiosity extended up into the sky (where he and a colleague duplicated Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity and fascinated St. Petersburg society by producing 'thunder machines' that brought electrical charges into bottles during thunderstorms), and far out to sea (where he proposed the founding of an international academy to develop more scientific methods of navigation and championed an expedition to find a northern passage to the Orient).
Lomonosov is, together with Pushkin, one of those rare figures admired by almost all factions in subsequent Russian thought. Those who came after him have looked back longingly, not only at the breadth of his accomplishment, but at his practical-minded attitude toward life. The passion of their nostalgia no less than the uniqueness of Lomonosov himself serves as a reminder that the Enlightenment in Russia was a relatively frail and insecure phenomenon compared to that of the West. Indeed, much of Lomonosov's scientific work was not fully uncovered and understood by his countrymen until the early twentieth century.
After Lomonosov's death in 1765, the Enlightenment seemed to be moving toward its greatest triumphs under the new empress, Catherine the Great. If Peter had opened a window to Europe and Elizabeth had decorated it with rococo frills, Catherine threw open the doors and began to rebuild the house itself. She looked beyond the technological accomplishments of the North European Protestant nations to the cultural glories of France and Italy and the political traditions of England. But this early optimism was soon to fade. The all-pervading sun of the Enlightenment found the Eastern skies more cloudy than they at first appeared.
The Dilemma of the Reforming Despot
The reign of Catherine illustrates dramatically the conflict between theoretical enlightenment and practical despotism that bothered so many eighteenth-century European monarchs. Few other rulers of her time had such sweeping plans for reform and attracted so much adulation from the philosophes, yet few others were so poor in practical accomplishment. In her failure, however, she created the conditions for future change-posing vexing questions for the aristocracy while creating intolerable conditions for the peasantry. As the only articulate ideologist to rule Russia between Ivan IV and Lenin, she changed the terms of reference for Russian thought by
