upported the theory he announced. They enjoy as
little consideration from his literary posterity as he enjoyed
personally in the society of Anna Ioannovna's day. Yet his work was very
prominent in the transition period between the literature of the
seventeenth century and the labors of Lomonosoff, and he undoubtedly
rendered a great service to Russian culture by his translations, as an
authority on literary theories and as a philologist.

The first writer of capital importance in modern Russian literature in
general was the gifted peasant-academician Mikhail Vasilievitch
Lomonosoff (1711-1755)--a combination of the scientific and literary
man, such as was the fashion of the period in general, and almost
necessarily so in Russia. Born in a village of the Archangel Government,
near Kholmogory on the White Sea, he was a fisherman, like his father,
until the age of sixteen, having learned to read and write from a
peasant neighbor. A tyrannical stepmother forced him to endure hunger
and cold, and to do his modest studying and reading in desert spots.
Accordingly, when he obtained from the village authorities the
permission requisite for absenting himself for the space of ten months,
he failed to return, and was inscribed among the "fugitives." In the
Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy at Moscow, which he managed to enter, and
where he remained for five years, he distanced all competitors (though
he lived, as he said, "in incredible poverty," on three kopeks a day),
devoting himself chiefly to the natural sciences. At the age of
twenty-two he was sent abroad by the government to study metallurgy at
Freiburg. There and elsewhere abroad, in England, France, and Holland,
he remained for five years, studying various practical branches.

In 1742 he became assistant professor at the Academy of Science in St.
Petersburg, at a wretched salary, and in 1748 professor, lecturing on
physical geography, chemistry, natural history, poetry, and the Russian
language. He also was indefatigable in translating scientific works from
the French and German, in writing a work on mining, a rhetoric-book, and
so forth. By 1757 he had written many odes, poetical epistles, idyls,
and the like; verses on festival occasions and tragedies, to order; a
Russian grammar; and had collected materials for a history, and planned
extensive philological researches. Eager to benefit his country, and
conscious that he was capable of doing so, he made practical application
o