Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Here I saw another exceptional example of the tyranny of the nobility over the peasants. A wedding party was passing through. But instead of a happy procession and the tears of a timid bride, destined soon to be turned into rejoicing, on the face of those destined to enter into matrimony could be seen sadness and grief. They hate one another and are being dragged by the power of their master to an execution—to the altar of the Father of all blessings, the giver of tender sentiments and joys, the architect of true happiness, the creator of the universe. And His servitor will accept an oath coerced with force and will confirm a marriage! And this will be called a holy union! And this sacrilege will remain as an example to others! And this irregularity in the law will remain unpunished! … Why be surprised by this? A hired hand blesses the marriage. The town governor district commander, appointed to keep the law, is a nobleman. Each of the two has an interest in the matter. The first does it for the sake of receiving reward; the second so that, even if abolishing violence that shames mankind, will himself not forfeit the flattering advantage of despotically ruling over his equals.—O bitter fate of many millions! Your ultimate condition is still hidden from the gaze even of my grandchildren….

I forgot to tell you, reader, that the Parnassian judge with whom I dined at the inn in Tver made me a gift. His mind has already tested its powers on many things. How successful his attempts have been you can judge for yourself—but tell me in my little ear what you think. If while reading you should feel like a doze, then close the book and go to sleep. Save it for insomnia.

The loveliness of the evening after a hot summer’s day chased me from my cell. I directed my steps beyond the Nevsky Monastery and rambled for a long time in the grove that lies behind it.* The sun had already hidden its face, but the light curtain of the night was scarcely perceptible on the blue vault of the sky.† While returning home I walked past the Nevsky Cemetery. Its gates were open. I entered…. In this place of eternal silence, where the firmest brow will certainly frown at having thought that here must be the end of all brilliant exploits, in this place of unshakable tranquility and steadfast equanimity, it seems hardly possible that arrogance, vanity, and haughtiness can coexist. But the magnificent sepulchers? They are doubtless signs of human pridefulness, but also the signs of man’s desire to live forever. Is this, however, the eternity that man so desires? … It is not a column erected over your mortal coil that will preserve your memory for the most distant posterity. It is not a stone with a carving of your name that will advance your glory into the next centuries. It is your language, living forever and ever in your creations, the language of the Russian tribe that you have renewed for our tongue that will fly on the lips of the people beyond the infinite horizon of centuries. Let the elements, raging conjointly, open the depths of the earth and swallow this magnificent city from which your loud singing resounded to all ends of vast Russia; let some fierce conqueror exterminate even the name of your beloved fatherland: but as long as the Russian language strikes the ear you will live and never die. If it falls silent, your glory will also burn out. It is gratifying to die this way—gratifying. But if anyone knew how to calculate the measure of this posterity, if the finger of divination assigns a span to your name, is not this eternity? … This I exclaimed in rapture, stopping before a column erected over Lomonosov’s remains.—No, it is not this cold stone that recounts that you lived for the glory of the name of Russia; it cannot say what a man you were. May your works tell us about it, may your life tell us why you are famous.

Where are you, O beloved friend! Where are you? Come to converse with me about the great man. Come that we may weave a crown for this cultivator of the Russian language. Let others, fawning before power, extol strength and might with their praise. We—we will sing a hymn to the service done for society.

Mikhailo Vasilyevich Lomonosov was born in Kholmogory…. Since he was born to a man who could not give him an education through which his understanding would be sharpened and adorned by useful and pleasant knowledge; limited by virtue of his station to spend his days among people whose intellectual horizon did not extend beyond their trade; destined to divide his time between fishing and attempts to receive payment for his labor—young Lomonosov’s mind could not attain the scope that he acquired when laboring on natural experiments, nor could his voice reach that sweetness which it acquired from consorting with the pure Muses. From the education in his parental home, he took something modest that was in fact the key to learning—a knowledge of reading and writing; and from Nature—curiosity. And this, Nature, is your triumph. Avid curiosity, instilled by you in our souls, aspires to the knowledge of things; and a heart burning with the love of glory cannot abide the shackles confining it. The heart roars, boils, groans, and, smashing the shackles in a single blow, flies headlong (nothing to stop it) to its purpose. Everything is forgotten, the mind has only this purpose; by this we breathe, by this we live.

Not letting the coveted subject out of his sight, the youth amasses a knowledge of things from the most meager streams of the source of learning flowing down to the lowest levels of society. Lacking the supervision needed to make rapid progress in knowledge, he hones and adorns memory, the primary strength of his mind, in such a way as to sharpen his reason. The narrow scope of knowledge he could acquire in his birthplace was unable to slake his parched spirit, but rather more ignited in the youth an insuperable striving for learning. Blessed is one who at the age when for the first time the tumult of passions takes us out of a state of insensibility, when we near a condition of maturity, whose aspiration turns to the understanding of things.

Incited by an avidity for knowledge, Lomonosov leaves his parental home; goes to the capital city, comes to the dwelling of monastic Muses, and takes his place among the number of youths dedicating themselves to the study of the liberal arts and theology.¹²²

Knowledge of languages is the gateway to learning, but it looks like a field seeded with thistle and like a mountain covered by daunting rocks. The eye does not find here a pleasantness of arrangement, and the traveler’s feet do not find calm smoothness for resting, nor is there a greening shelter for the tired person. So it is that a student, having approached a new language, is accosted by diverse sounds. His larynx grows tired by the unaccustomed gurgling of breath emitted from it, and his tongue, forced to twist in a new way, is exhausted. The mind then seizes up, reason grows weak without activity, imagination loses its wings; only memory stays alert and sharpens and fills all its crannies and nooks with the images of hitherto unknown sounds. In learning languages, everything is disgusting and burdensome. If hope did not reassure one that, after habituating one’s hearing to unusual sounds and mastering alien pronunciation, the most pleasant subjects would open up, it would be impossible to expect anyone to want to embark on such a daunting path. But once these difficulties have been overcome, how many times will perseverance in labors endured be rewarded. New views of nature are revealed, a new chain of fantasies. Through the learning of an alien language, we become citizens of the region where it is spoken, we converse with people who lived many thousand centuries ago, assimilate their ideas, and the inventions and thoughts of all peoples and ages we combine and render in a single connection.

Persistent application in the learning of languages made Lomonosov a fellow citizen of Athens and Rome. It was thus that his perseverance was rewarded. Like a blind man, unseeing of the light since coming out of his mother’s womb, when, owing to the skilled hand of an eye doctor, the majesty of the daytime luminary begins to shine for him—with a rapid glance he runs through all the beauties of nature, marvels at its variety and simplicity. Everything captivates him, everything amazes. He feels its grace more vividly than do eyes accustomed to seeing, experiences delight, and goes into raptures. It was thus that Lomonosov, after receiving tuition in the Latin and Greek languages, devoured the beauties of ancient orators and poets. With them, he learned to feel the niceties of nature; with them, he learned to perceive all the contrivances of an art always concealed under the lively forms of poetry; with them, he learned to express his feelings, to give body to thought and soul to the inanimate.

If my powers were sufficient, I would represent how the great man gradually ensconced in his understanding foreign ideas that, transformed in his soul and mind, appeared in a new form in his works or gave birth to entirely different notions previously unknown to the human intellect. I would represent him searching for knowledge in his school’s ancient manuscripts, chasing after the semblance of knowledge everywhere its repository seemed to be. Often he was deceived in his expectations. But thanks to frequent reading of ecclesiastical books, he laid the foundation of the gracefulness of his style. Such was the reading he proposes to all who wish to acquire the skill of writing the Russian language.

Soon his curiosity received ample satisfaction. He became the pupil of the celebrated Wolff.¹²³ By jettisoning the rules of Scholasticism or, better, the delusions taught to him in religious academies, he established firm and clear steps for ascending to the temple of philosophy. Logic taught him to reason; mathematics to arrive at conclusions and reach certainty only through evidence; metaphysics taught him speculative truths that often lead to error; physics and chemistry, which he learned diligently, perhaps for the sake of an elegant power of imagination, led him to the font of nature and revealed to him its mysteries; metallurgy and mineralogy, offshoots of the previous disciplines, drew his attention to them, and Lomonosov wanted to understand the rules regulating these disciplines.

An abundance of fruits and products compelled people to exchange them for those that were scarce. This generated trade. Great difficulties in the barter trade stimulated thought about symbols that would represent all wealth and all goods. Money was invented. Gold and silver, as the most precious metals because of their perfection, previously having served for decoration, were turned into symbols representing all forms of wealth. And in all truth, it was only then that this insatiable and vile passion in the human heart for riches was ignited, which like an all-devouring flame grows stronger as it feeds. Then man left his primeval simplicity and his natural practice, tillage, and made over his life to the furious waves or, disdainful of hunger and desert heat, crossed these to unknown countries in prospect of riches and treasure. Then, contemptuous of the light of the sun, the living creature descended into the grave and, breaking open the interior of the earth, dug a burrow for himself like a terrestrial reptile foraging at night for its food. So it was that man, while secreted in the chasms of the earth, sought glittering metals and, by imbibing the poisonous fumes coming out of the earth, shortened the span of his life by half. But in the same way that poison, once chronic, becomes itself a necessary habit for man, so the mining of metals, while shortening the days of the miners, is not repudiated owing to its deadliness; rather, the means to extract more metals, by the easiest means, are devised.

This indeed was what Lomonosov wanted to learn actively and for the fulfilment of his intention he went to Freiburg. I imagine that I see him approaching the shaft through which metal extracted from the bowels of the earth flows. He takes a flickering beacon designed to light the way for him in crevices to which the rays of sun never extend. He has taken the first step. “What are you doing?” screams Reason to him. “Can it be that nature has distinguished you with talents only in order that you use them for the destruction of your brothers? What are you thinking when you descend into this chasm? Do you seek to discover a better skill to extract silver and gold? Or do you not know what evil they have caused in the world? Or have you forgotten the conquest of America? … But no, descend, learn the subterranean artifices of man and, upon returning to your fatherland, have enough fortitude to offer advice to cover over and flatten these graves where thousands are buried alive.”

Trembling, he descends into the aperture and soon loses sight of the life-bearing orb. I wish I could follow him in his subterranean journey, collect his musings, and present them with the same coherence and in the same order in which they germinated in his mind. The picture of his thoughts would be entertaining and instructive for us. On passing through the first layer of earth, the source of all vegetation, the subterranean traveler found it unlike the next ones: it differed from the other ones most of all by its fecund power. Perhaps he concluded that the earth’s surface is composed of nothing other than the decomposition of animals and plants, that its fertility, nutritious and restorative power, had its origin in indestructible and primordial particles of existence of every kind, which do not change their essence but rather change only the appearance generated from random combinations. Progressing further, the traveler saw the earth consistently arranged in layers. In these layers, he sometimes found the vestiges of animals living in the seas, found the vestiges of plants and was able to conclude that the layered sedimentation of the earth took its beginnings from the fluid state of the waters, and that the waters, displaced from one part of the earthly globe to the other, gave the earth’s interior its very appearance. This uniform arrangement of layers, as it retreated from his view, sometimes looked to him like a compound of many heterogeneous strata. From this he concluded that fire, a ferocious element, had penetrated the bowels of the earth and, encountering a countervailing liquid, raged, disturbed, shook, knocked down, and hurled everything that attempted in vain to resist it with its counterforce. After disturbing and mixing diverse layers, fire with its torrid breathing triggered in the primary metals the force of attraction and unified them. There Lomonosov saw these inherently inanimate treasures in their natural state, recalled the greed and misery of peoples and, with a broken heart, left this gloomy dwelling of human insatiability.

Applying himself to natural philosophy, he did not forsake the beloved study of poetry. Even in his homeland, an occasion showed him that Nature had designated him for greatness, that he would not wander along the ordinary pathway of human progress. The Psalter transposed by Simeon Polotsky into verse revealed to him a natural mystery about himself, showed that he, too, was a poet. When conversing with Horace, Virgil, and other ancient writers, he determined long ago that Russian versification was quite uncongenial to the euphony and graveness of our language. When reading German poets, he found that their style was more fluent than the Russian, that feet in poetic lines were distributed according to properties of their language. And so, he decided to attempt a composition in new verses, having first established rules for Russian poetry that were based on the euphony of our language.¹²⁴ He implemented this by writing an ode on the Russian army’s victory over the Turks and Tatars and on the capture of Chocim, which he sent from Marburg to the Academy of Sciences. The singularity of its style, the power of expression, depictions that almost breathed, astonished those reading this new composition. And this firstborn child of an imagination propelled along an uncharted path, together with others, served to prove that once a people is directed toward perfection, it advances toward glory not along one trail, but along many pathways at the same time.

Force of imagination and lively sensation do not thwart scrutiny of detail. In providing examples of euphony, Lomonosov knew that elegance of style is based on rules intrinsic to the language. He wanted to extract them from the very language, not, however, ignoring that custom always provides the primary example of word combinations, and that expressions derived from a rule become correct through usage. By analyzing all parts of speech and coordinating them with usage, Lomonosov compiled his Grammar. But not contented only with teaching the rules of the Russian language, he also affords an idea about human speech in general as the most noble endowment after reason, given to man to communicate his thoughts. Here is a summary of his General Grammar: language represents thoughts; the instrument of language is voice; the voice is modified by formation or enunciation; various modifications in the voice express different ideas; therefore language is a depiction of our thoughts through the formation of voice by means of the organs designed to that end. Departing from this premise, Lomonosov defines as indivisible the parts of speech whose representations are called letters. The combination of these indivisible parts produces syllables, which apart from the distinction of their vocal formation, are further differentiated by stress, as it is called, which is the basis of versification. The joining of syllables produces root words, or the signifying parts of word. These represent either a thing or its action. The verbal representation of a thing is called a name; the representation of an action, a verb. Other parts of language function in the depiction of relations of things each to the other and connect them in conversation. But the first two are essential and can be called the principal parts of language, whereas the others can be considered auxiliary. In discussing different parts of speech, Lomonosov discovers that some of them are not fixed. A thing can occupy different positions in relation to other things. The representations of such positions and relations are called cases. Every action occurs in time; and, therefore, verbs are also arranged according to the times in order to represent the time in which the action takes place. Finally, Lomonosov speaks about a combination of parts of speech that produces speech.

Beginning with so philosophical a consideration of language in general, based on the very nature of our bodily constitution, Lomonosov sets out the rules of the Russian language. How could they be mediocre if the mind that sketched them was led through grammatical thickets by the torch of ingenuity? Do not scorn this praise, great man. Your Grammar alone did not build your fame among your fellow citizens. Your services to the Russian language are manifold; and in this unglamorous labor you are venerated as the first founder of the veritable rules of our language and as the explorer of the natural arrangement of every kind of word. Your Grammar is the antechamber of your Rhetoric, and both of them are guides to grasping the beauties of the way your creations are uttered. Proceeding to teach the rules, Lomonosov intended to guide his fellow citizens on the thorny paths of Helicon, showing them the road to eloquence by outlining the rules of rhetoric and poetry. But the brevity of his life allowed him to complete only half of the undertaken labor.

Born with tender feelings, endowed with a powerful imagination, prompted by love of honor, a man erupts from the milieu of the people. He ascends the Tribune. All eyes are on him, everyone waits impatiently for his oration. Applause or mockery bitterer than death itself awaits him. How could he be mediocre? Such a man was Demosthenes, such a man was Cicero; such was Pitt; such now are Burke, Fox, Mirabeau, and others.¹²⁵ The rules of their speeches derive from circumstances, the sweetness of enunciation derives from their feelings, the power of arguments derives from their wit. Marveling at men so outstanding in the art of speech and analyzing their speeches, coolheaded critics thought that it was possible to outline rules for wit and imagination, thought that the path to enticement could be set out with laborious prescripts. Here is the origin of rhetoric. In following unwittingly his imagination, improved as it was by his conversation with ancient writers, Lomonosov similarly thought that he could communicate to his fellow citizens the ardor that filled his soul. And although the labor he undertook for this was in vain, yet the examples adduced by him to reinforce and explain his rules can undoubtedly guide anyone bent on pursuing the glory to be gained through the literary arts.

But however vain his work proved in teaching the rules of what is better felt than learned by rote, to those who love the Russian language Lomonosov left proper examples in his compositions. In them, the lips that sucked the sweetness of Cicero and Demosthenes flowered into grandiloquence. In them, in every line, in every punctuation mark, in every syllable (why can I not say in every letter?) can be heard the harmonious and concordant sound of a euphony that is so rare, so inimitable, so natural for Lomonosov.

Endowed by nature with the invaluable right to influence his contemporaries, endowed by nature with the power of creation, immersed in the thick of the popular mass, a great man acts upon it but not always in the same direction. He is similar to natural forces that, acting from the center, by extending their action to all points of the circumference, make their effect perpetual everywhere. So, too, Lomonosov who, affecting his fellow citizens variously, opened the collective mind to various pathways of knowledge. Enticing the collective mind to follow him, unweaving an entangled language into grandiloquence and euphony, he did not leave it as a scant source of literature lacking ideas. He would tell the imagination: soar to the limitlessness of dreams and possibilities, collect bright flowers of inspiration, and, guided by taste, decorate with them even the intangible. And so again Pindar’s trumpet that resounded during the Olympic games, like the psalmodist, emitted praise to the Supreme Being. On a trumpet, Lomonosov announced the greatness of the Everlasting One sitting on the wings of wind, preceded by thunder and lightning bolts and revealing to mortals His essence, life, in the sun.¹²⁶ Moderating the voice of Pindar’s trumpet, he used it to sing the fragility of man and the narrow confines of his understanding. In the infinite abyss of the worlds, like a small speck of sand in the sea waves, like a spark barely scintillating amid the never melting ice, like the finest dust in the fiercest whirlwind—what is the human mind?¹²⁷—It is you, O Lomonosov! my raiment cannot disguise you.

I do not envy you the fact that you flattered Elizabeth with encomium in verse. This was consistent with the common practice of flattering tsars who, not infrequently, far from deserving the praises sung in harmonious voice, scarcely deserve the plinking of a gudok.¹²⁸ And if it were possible without giving offence to truth and posterity, I would forgive you for the sake of a soul grateful for her generosity to you. But he will envy you, the writer of odes who cannot follow your tracks, he will envy a delightful picture of popular calm and peace, this strong defense of towns and villages, solace of tsardoms and tsars;¹²⁹ he will envy the innumerable beauties of your language; even if someday he happened to equal the constant euphony of your poetry, although nobody has yet managed this. And so what if everyone succeeds in outdoing you for sweet singing, so what if your thoughts in the eyes of our descendants seem disordered, your poetry not overabundant in essence! … But look: on the expansive tiltyard to the end of which the eye cannot reach, among the crowding multitudes, in the lead, in front of everyone, opening the gates to the tiltyard—it is you. Anyone can be famed for their achievements, but you were the first. Even the Almighty cannot take away what He gave you. He begat you before everyone else, begat you to become a leader, and your glory is the fame of a leader. O! you who labored fruitlessly thus far to understand the essence of the soul and how the soul acts upon our corporality, this task that lies before you as a test is difficult. Tell us how the soul acts upon another soul, what kind of connection is there between minds? If we know how the body acts upon a body by touch, tell us how the intangible acts upon the intangible, producing substance; or what kind of contact there is between nonsubstantial entities. That it exists, this you know. But if you know what kind of action a great man’s mind has upon the collective mind, then you also know that a great man can beget another great man. There is the laurel crown of victory. O! Lomonosov, you created Sumarokov.

But if the influence of Lomonosov’s poems could achieve a majestic advance in the education of his contemporaries’ poetic understanding, his eloquence made no perceptible or obvious mark. The flowers picked by him in Athens and Rome and so successfully transplanted in his words—the force of Demosthenes’s expression, the eloquence of Cicero—he used in vain, since they remain cloaked in the murkiness of the future. And who, satiated on the prolific grandiloquence of your laudatory orations, will thunder in a style that is not even yours yet will be your disciple? This moment can be distant or near, the wandering gaze, straying in the uncertainty of the future, finds no footing where to stop. While we may not find a direct heir to Lomonosov’s rhetoric, the impact of his euphony and the resonant pauses of his nonpoetic speech was pervasive, nonetheless. Even if his civic oratory may have had no disciple, its influence was felt on the general character of writing. Compare what was written before Lomonosov and what was written after him, and the impact of his prose will be evident to everyone.

But do not we err in our conclusion? Long before Lomonosov, we find in Russia eloquent shepherds of the Church who by preaching the word of God to their flock taught it and themselves were renowned for their sermons. It is true that they existed, but their language was not Russian. They wrote the way it was possible to write before the Tatar invasion, before Russians entered into contact with the European peoples. They wrote in the Slavonic language. But you who saw Lomonosov himself, and perhaps learned eloquence from his works, shall not be forgotten by me. When in defeating the proud Ottomans the Russian army surpassed the expectations of everyone who cast an indifferent or envious eye over its exploits—you, summoned to give solemn thanks to the God of war, the God of strength, O! you, in the rapture of your soul, invoked Peter at his grave that he come to contemplate the fruits of his planting: “Arise, Peter, arise!” When you charmed my hearing, and my hearing then enchanted my sight, that was when it seemed to everyone that in coming to Peter’s grave you, invested with higher powers, wanted to resurrect him. That would be the moment when I, too, would have declared to Lomonosov: “Look, look, even here we see your cultivation.” But if he could teach you language…. In Platon there is Plato’s soul, and how to charm and to understand us his own heart taught him.¹³⁰

Servile gestures are incompatible not only with what may arouse our veneration but even when we love. While doing justice to the great man, we shall, therefore, not consider him God the creator of all, we shall not cherish him as an idol to be worshipped by society, and we shall not collude in implanting any kind of prejudice or false assumption. Truth is the highest divinity to us, and if the Almighty should want to change its image by revealing Himself not through truth, our face will be averted from Him.

Consonant with the truth, we shall not search in Lomonosov for a great historian, we shall not compare him to Tacitus, Raynal, or Robertson; we shall not put him on the level of Marggraf or Rüdiger since he worked in chemistry.¹³¹ If he liked this science, if he spent many days of his life in studying the truths of natural science, his pathway was but the pathway of a follower. He roamed along well-worn ways and in the innumerable riches of nature found not a single blade of grass that eyes better than his had not looked at. He did not scrutinize even the crudest catalyst in matter that his predecessors had not discovered.

Can we juxtapose him with someone who merited the most flattering inscription that a man can see beneath his portrait? The inscription, etched not in flattery but a truth daring to be powerful: “Here is one who wrested thunder from heaven and the scepter from the hand of tyrants.” Do we place Lomonosov next to him because he researched the power of electricity in its effects; and that he was not repelled from its study after seeing how his teacher was mortally struck down by its power?¹³² Lomonosov knew how to produce electrical power, knew how to deflect thunderbolts, but in this science the architect is Franklin, Lomonosov just a craftsman.

But if Lomonosov did not achieve greatness in his investigations of Nature, he depicted its magnificent works in a style both pure and articulate. And while we do not find in his works about the natural sciences a graceful teacher of natural philosophy, we nonetheless find a teacher of language and a permanent model worthy of imitation.

And thus, by giving the great man his due, by placing Lomonosov’s name in an aura worthy of him, we do not seek to arrogate for him merit for what he did not do and what he did not influence; or only to get carried away by frenzy and enthusiasm by using uninhibited language. This is not our goal. We want to show that in the domain of Russian literature the one who blazed a path to the temple of fame is the prime mover in the achievement of glory, even when he could not enter the temple. Is not Bacon of Verulam worthy of remembrance solely because he was able to say how to multiply branches of learning? Are brave writers who rise up against ruin and dominion not deserving of appreciation even if they were unable to deliver humanity from chains and captivity? And we do not reverence Lomonosov because he could not understand the rules of theatrical poetry and languished in epic; because he was out of his depths in the poetry of sensibility; because he was not always discerning in his judgment; and because even in his odes he sometimes put more words than thoughts. But listen: before the beginning of time when existence had no foundation and everything was lost in eternity and immeasurability, everything was possible for the Source of power, all the beauty of the universe existed in His thought since there was no action, no beginning. And then when the all-powerful hand intruded matter into space set it in motion. The sun shone forth, the moon took light, and rotating celestial bodies formed on high. The first jolt of creation was omnipotent. All the wonders of the world, all its beauty are only consequences. This is how I understand the action of a great soul upon the souls of contemporaries or descendants; this is how I understand the action of mind upon mind. In the trajectory of Russian literature, Lomonosov is the first. Envious crowd, be gone; it is for posterity to judge him, it is not hypocritical.