Mikhail Lomonosov

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was born on 19 November 1711 (8 November in the Old Style calendar) in the village of Mishaninskaya, near Kholmogory in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia ^[1]. The settlement sat on an island in the Northern Dvina River, close to where it empties into the White Sea. His father, Vasily Dorofeyevich Lomonosov, was a state peasant who owned fishing and cargo vessels and had built a modest prosperity carrying goods along the Arctic coast ^[2].

From around the age of ten, Mikhail worked aboard his father's boats, sailing as far as the Solovetsky Islands and learning navigation, weather, and the hard rhythms of the northern fisheries ^[1]. His mother, Elena Ivanovna, died when he was young, and his relations with two successive stepmothers were strained. The boy found refuge in books. A neighbor taught him to read, and he later described a grammar by Meletius Smotrytsky and an arithmetic text by Leonty Magnitsky as the gateways of his learning ^[2].

Opportunities for a peasant's son were almost nonexistent in the far north. In December 1730, at the age of nineteen, Lomonosov left home on foot, joining a fish convoy traveling south. After weeks on winter roads he reached Moscow, roughly a thousand kilometers away, determined to obtain a formal education ^[1]. Any Mikhail Lomonosov biography turns on this decision: a young man walking out of the Arctic toward a life nobody in his village could have imagined.

In January 1731 Lomonosov gained admission to the Slavic Greek Latin Academy in Moscow, the leading school in Russia at the time. Peasants were not eligible, so he presented himself as the son of a nobleman, a deception that could have ended his studies had it been pursued ^[2]. He was nearly twenty, sharing benches with boys half his age and living on a stipend of three kopecks a day, yet he compressed the standard course dramatically, mastering Latin and the classical curriculum in about five years ^[1].

His ability drew notice. In 1735 he was among the best students sent to the academic university attached to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and in 1736 the Academy dispatched him to Germany to study chemistry, mining, and metallurgy ^[3]. At the University of Marburg he worked under the philosopher and scientist Christian Wolff, absorbing mathematics, mechanics, and the rationalist method that would mark his later work. He then moved to Freiberg in Saxony to study mining and assaying under Johann Friedrich Henckel, though the two quarreled and Lomonosov left in 1740 ^[3].

His German years were turbulent. He ran up debts, clashed with authorities, and at one point was reportedly pressed into Prussian military service before escaping. In Marburg he met Elisabeth Christine Zilch, the daughter of his landlady, whom he married in 1740 ^[2]. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1741, and in 1745 he was appointed professor of chemistry at the Academy of Sciences, becoming the first native Russian to hold such a chair, which had previously been filled by invited foreigners ^[1].

Lomonosov's scientific range was extraordinary even by the standards of the eighteenth century. In 1748 he secured the construction of the first chemical research laboratory in Russia, where he ran systematic experiments on glass, pigments, and the behavior of matter ^[3]. In a 1748 letter to the mathematician Leonhard Euler, and in later experimental work on the calcination of metals in sealed vessels, he articulated the principle that matter is neither created nor destroyed in natural processes, anticipating the conservation of mass that Antoine Lavoisier established for European chemistry decades later ^[4]. He rejected the phlogiston theory's treatment of heat as a substance, arguing instead that heat arises from the motion of particles, a position remarkably close to the later kinetic theory ^[4].

Astronomy gave him one of his most celebrated results. Observing the transit of Venus across the Sun on 26 May 1761, Lomonosov noticed a luminous ring around the planet's edge as it entered and left the solar disk. He interpreted this correctly as evidence that Venus possesses an atmosphere, a discovery published the same year ^[5]. He also improved telescope design, studied atmospheric electricity alongside his colleague Georg Wilhelm Richmann (who was killed by lightning during an experiment in 1753), and proposed that the Northern Sea Route along Siberia's Arctic coast could be navigable, backing expeditions to test the idea ^[3].

His achievements in the humanities matched those in science. His Russian Grammar of 1755 was the first systematic grammar of the Russian language written in Russian, and it went through many editions ^[6]. He developed the theory of three styles, sorting vocabulary drawn from Church Slavonic and spoken Russian into high, middle, and low registers suited to different genres, which gave Russian writers a workable framework for a modern literary language ^[6]. His odes, especially the 1739 ode on the capture of Khotin and his 1747 ode to Empress Elizabeth, established the syllabo-tonic verse system that Russian poetry has used ever since ^[2]. Among the most consequential of Mikhail Lomonosov achievements was institutional: his proposal, advanced through his patron Count Ivan Shuvalov, led Empress Elizabeth to decree the founding of Moscow University in January 1755 ^[7].

Lomonosov married Elisabeth Christine Zilch in Marburg in June 1740, before returning to Russia; she later joined him in St. Petersburg and took the Russian name Elizaveta Andreyevna ^[2]. The couple had several children, but only a daughter, Elena, born in 1749, survived to adulthood. Elena later married Alexei Konstantinov, librarian to Catherine II, and through her the Lomonosov line continued, eventually connecting to the Raevsky family prominent in the following century ^[2].

Contemporaries described Lomonosov as physically powerful, quick tempered, and unwilling to defer to men he considered his intellectual inferiors. His disputes with the German administrators of the Academy of Sciences, above all the secretary Johann Daniel Schumacher, were long and bitter, and in 1743 he was placed under house arrest for months after insulting fellow academicians, securing release only after a formal apology ^[3]. He fought throughout his career to open the Academy and its schools to Russians of ordinary birth, remembering how nearly his own origins had barred him ^[1].

His energy went into craft as well as theory. After thousands of experimental melts in his laboratory, he revived the art of colored glass mosaic in Russia and won state backing for a glass factory at Ust-Ruditsa near St. Petersburg in 1753 ^[3]. His workshop produced portraits and monumental panels, the most famous being the enormous mosaic of the Battle of Poltava, assembled in the early 1760s and now displayed in the Academy of Sciences building in St. Petersburg ^[5].

Recognition accumulated in Lomonosov's final decade. In 1757 he became a councillor in the Academy's chancellery, gaining real administrative authority, and in 1758 he took charge of the Academy's geographical department, where he organized work toward a new atlas of Russia ^[3]. He was elected an honorary member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1760 and of the Academy of Sciences of the Bologna Institute in 1764, marks of a European reputation that few Russians of his generation possessed ^[1].

He also turned to history. Commissioned to counter what he saw as the distortions of the Norman theory, which credited Scandinavians with founding the Russian state, he wrote an Ancient Russian History covering the earliest periods, published after his death in 1766 ^[6]. Modern historians treat the work as more patriotic than critical, but it fed a debate about Russia's origins that continued for generations. In these years he also completed a treatise on the origins of light and color and continued his campaign for scientific education in Russian rather than Latin or German ^[4].

His health declined sharply in the 1760s, worn down by overwork and by the long conflicts within the Academy. Mikhail Lomonosov died of pneumonia in St. Petersburg on 15 April 1765 (4 April Old Style), at the age of fifty three ^[1]. He was buried in the Lazarevskoye Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Shortly after his death, Catherine II ordered his papers sealed and removed, and many manuscripts subsequently disappeared, a loss that still frustrates scholars ^[3].

Few figures in Russian culture carry a comparable weight of commemoration. Moscow State University, the country's largest and most prestigious, was renamed in his honor in 1940 and is officially Lomonosov Moscow State University ^[7]. His name marks the city of Lomonosov near St. Petersburg (formerly Oranienbaum), a lunar crater, a crater on Mars, the Lomonosov Ridge running beneath the Arctic Ocean, and the Lomonosov Gold Medal, the highest award of the Russian Academy of Sciences ^[1].

Alexander Pushkin, writing in the 1820s and 1830s, famously judged that Lomonosov was himself Russia's first university, a remark that captures how completely later generations identified him with the birth of Russian learning ^[2]. In science his priority claims were long overlooked in Western Europe, partly because he published in Russian and Latin from a peripheral academy; twentieth century historians of chemistry recovered his conservation experiments and his kinetic account of heat, securing his place among the significant natural philosophers of his era ^[4].

The basic Mikhail Lomonosov facts explain his durability as a national symbol: a fisherman's son who walked to Moscow, deceived his way into school, and ended his life having reformed his language, founded a university, and anticipated fundamental physical laws. For Russians he became proof that talent could rise regardless of birth, and his insistence on educating commoners in their own tongue outlived every one of his academic quarrels ^[6]. His mosaics survive, his verse system still structures Russian poetry, and students in Moscow pass beneath his statue on their way to lectures every day ^[7].