Open the seventh-grade physics textbook and read any paragraph aloud. Pendulum, pump, refraction, atmosphere, drawing, diameter, square, minus, horizon, acid, microscope. Half of these words appeared in the Russian language thanks to a single man, and he was the one who translated, invented, and tested them in those years when science simply did not exist in Russian. It existed in Latin and German, and scientists in St. Petersburg corresponded with each other in languages that no one around understood.
A schoolchild knows three things about Lomonosov. He came on foot, was a jack of all trades, and founded a university. And each of the three requires clarification. Let's examine what actually lies behind them and, at the same time, see why the comparison to Leonardo da Vinci in the title works less well than it seems.
The boy who left to study at nineteen
He was born in 1711 near Kholmogory, in a village on an island in the middle of the Northern Dvina. The family was neither poor nor enserfed; they were Pomors, free state peasants who did not belong to anyone personally. His father owned vessels and sailed into the White Sea for fish and marine animals, and he took his son with him. By the age of fourteen, the boy knew the trade, could steer a vessel, and read everything that fell into his hands. These voyages, by the way, explain his later interest in the northern seas and the possibility of sailing to the Pacific Ocean along the Siberian coast, about which he wrote an entire work.
There was almost nothing to read. The two books he managed to get hold of, he later called the gates of learning. They were Meletius Smotrytsky's grammar and Leonty Magnitsky's arithmetic. The first described Church Slavonic, while the second contained not only arithmetic, but also the principles of geometry, astronomy, and navigation. Using these two books, which he learned almost by heart, he arrived at his decision.
Now about the famous journey. People don't walk from Kholmogory to Moscow; it is more than a thousand versts away. In December 1730, nineteen-year-old Mikhailo joined a sledge caravan transporting frozen fish to the capital and reached it in three weeks, sometimes walking alongside the carts, sometimes hitching a ride. He left secretly from his father, having obtained a passport from the local chancery, the two aforementioned books, and three rubles on loan. The caravan arrived in Moscow in January 1731.
Years of starvation and a forged background
When he arrived at the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, peasant children were not accepted. Lomonosov said that he was the son of a Kholmogory nobleman, and he was enrolled. The deception was uncovered a few years later when it became necessary to confirm his origin. By that time, the student's progress was such that they preferred to hush the matter up.
The twenty-year-old Lomonosov sat at the same desk with twelve-year-old boys who laughed at the older student. The salary was three kopecks a day, and in a letter from later years Lomonosov detailed how he spent them: a kopeck for bread, a kopeck for kvass, and the rest for paper, shoes, and candles. The full academy course lasted more than ten years, but in his very first year he mastered the three lowest classes, learned Latin well enough to write poetry in it, and took up Greek. In those years, Latin served as the working language of European science; no one considered it a school subject, and without it further study lost its meaning.
In 1735, the best students were selected for the Academic University in St. Petersburg, and a year later, three of them were sent to Germany to study mining. That is how Lomonosov ended up in Marburg with Christian Wolff, one of the leading philosophers of the era, and later in Freiberg with the metallurgist Henckel. The German years turned out to be turbulent. Science, debts, a quarrel with Henckel, escape, marriage to the landlady's daughter Elizabeth Zilch, wandering across Germany, and returning to Russia in 1741.
What was he really up to, seriously speaking
Here begins the most interesting and confusing part. The list of fields in which he worked sounds implausible, and therefore it is usually given in full, without analysis, which is why Lomonosov turns into a figure from a school poster.
He considered chemistry to be the main endeavor of his life. The title of professor, which at the time was equivalent to that of an academician, was awarded to him in 1745; prior to him, there had never been Russians of this rank. Three years later, he succeeded in securing what he had long campaigned for: his own chemical laboratory, the first in the country, where he could conduct experiments and teach students. He worked with corpuscular philosophy, deducing the properties of substances from the behavior of the smallest particles. Around the same time, in correspondence with Leonhard Euler, the famous formulation appeared regarding matter and motion, which do not arise from nothing and do not disappear without a trace, merely transferring between bodies. The following caution is needed here. Lavoisier would weigh and prove this a quarter of a century later; Lomonosov had no experimental proof. It was a conjecture that was ahead of its time.
His separate passion, which is less known, is glass. Lomonosov developed the technology of colored smalt, obtained a privilege for a factory in Ust-Ruditsa, and recruited craftsmen to revive mosaic art in Russia. From his workshop came The Battle of Poltava, a room-sized painting that can be seen today in the Academy of Sciences building in St. Petersburg. This endeavor was not only artistic, but also industrial; the secret of colored glass simply did not exist in Russia before him, and buying smalt abroad turned out to be ruinous.
He also engaged in astronomy. On May 26, 1761, Venus passed across the solar disc. Lomonosov watched this through a telescope from his own house and saw the moment when the edge of the planet was surrounded by a thin glow. He gave the explanation immediately: the light is refracted in the gaseous envelope, which means Venus has an atmosphere. Dozens of astronomers across Europe observed this, many saw the same rim, but he was the one who explained what was seen. Humanity discovered an atmosphere on another planet for the first time.
Add physics, geography, history, metallurgy, and poetry, where he was one of the creators of Russian syllabo-tonic verse. Now the comparison with Leonardo starts to work, albeit with a caveat. Leonardo was a Renaissance man, when the boundaries between the sciences had not yet grown. Lomonosov worked in the eighteenth century, when they had already risen, and combined fields out of necessity, because in the Russia of those years one had to do everything at once, there simply were no specialists.
What did he discover and do
Chemistry
He established a laboratory at the academy for experiments and student classes, put the teaching of chemistry on an experimental basis, and developed the theory of the smallest particles of matter.
1748Physics
He investigated the nature of heat, explaining it through the motion of particles rather than a special weightless fluid as was believed at the time. He worked on electricity together with Georg Richmann, who died during an experiment with a lightning machine.
1740s and 1750sAstronomy
While observing the transit of Venus, he discovered a gaseous envelope around the planet. This was the first instance of an atmosphere being found on a celestial body outside of Earth. He also worked on the design of reflecting telescopes.
1761Glass and mosaic
I selected compositions of colored smalt unknown in Russia, obtained permission for my own glass production near Oranienbaum, in Ust-Ruditsa, and trained craftsmen. About forty mosaic works came out of the workshop.
1753Language and Literature
He compiled the first Russian grammar, developed the doctrine of the three styles, introduced hundreds of scientific terms, and in poetry established the stress-based versification that Russian lyric poetry still uses today.
1755Geography and the Northern Seas
He headed the geographical department of the academy, prepared the project of an expedition that was to find the Northern Sea Route to the east, and wrote about the movement of ice and the origin of the aurora borealis.
since 1758Metallurgy and Mining
He wrote a manual on metallurgy and mining affairs, combining factory practices with his own Freiberg experience. The book served as a textbook for Russian mining engineers for a long time.
1763Education
He developed the structure of Moscow University, insisting on the admission of non-nobles and teaching in Russian. He prepared curricula and worked to establish a gymnasium attached to the academy.
1755Words that didn't exist before him
For the reader living between two languages, this is perhaps his most important work.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Russian language lacked a scientific vocabulary. A professor wishing to explain the workings of a pump to a student was forced to switch to Latin or invent a word on the spot. Lomonosov invented systematically. Some terms he translated from Latin and Greek, some he formed from Russian roots, and some he adapted from already existing words, giving them precise meanings. Pendulum, refraction, equilibrium, acid, experiment, observation, atmosphere, microscope, drawing, air pump, specific gravity, laws of motion. Today, schoolchildren pronounce them without suspecting that someone once sat down and decided what they would be in Russian.
«He finished his »Russian Grammar" in 1755, and it was published two years later. This was the first grammar specifically of the Russian language, rather than Church Slavonic, and several generations studied from it. He is also credited with the doctrine of the three styles, which classified words into high, middle, and low levels and explained which of them were appropriate in an ode, which in a letter, and which in a comedy. Today this sounds academic, but the purpose was quite practical: the language needed to be put in order, the bookish separated from the colloquial, and a decision made on how to write about serious things in Russian at all.
For a family where a child is growing up between two languages, there is a convenient twist hidden here. Russian scientific language did not fall from the sky; it was put together by hand, and it was assembled, among others, by a specific person with a biography that can be told in ten minutes.
The university that got its name
The story of the founding of Moscow University is usually told in a nutshell: Lomonosov founded it. In reality, everything was more subtle and interesting.
The founding decree was signed by Elizaveta Petrovna in 1755, while Ivan Shuvalov, her favorite—a well-educated man with a taste for the sciences—campotted for it and is listed as its founder. He did not devise the structure of the future university. Shuvalov's correspondence with Lomonosov dragged on for months, and everything essential, from the selection of faculties to the admission rules, came from there. Lomonosov had three demands. To open the doors to more than just the nobility. To teach in Russian. To establish three faculties—philosophical, legal, and medical—and to abandon the theological one entirely, without which European universities were unthinkable. The first two points sounded almost daring for Russia of that century.
The university received the founder's name only in 1940, when it celebrated its one hundred and eighty-fifth anniversary and, at the same time, one hundred and seventy-five years since the death of Lomonosov himself. In international documents and rankings, the university has since been listed as Lomonosov Moscow State University, and it is by this line that its name is most often recognized abroad.
Lomonosov himself passed away in April 1765 in his fifty-fourth year of life. He was buried in St. Petersburg at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
Facts that are usually confused
Around Lomonosov, a set of school formulas has developed, each of which simplifies the matter beyond recognition. Examining them together with a child is useful, and at the same time it will make a lesson in working with sources.
He was an illiterate peasant boy who taught himself from scratch
In fact. He could read and write since childhood, as Pomors were literate more often than other peasants, and by the time he left home, he had managed to memorize two serious books. He arrived at the academy as a well-read man, albeit without a systematic education.
He invented the world's first helicopter
In fact. Lomonosov actually built a model of a flying machine with rotors, but he intended it as a device for lifting meteorological instruments into the upper layers of the air, rather than as an apparatus for human flight. The model was shown to the academicians, and the experiments went no further.
He laid the mosaics with his own hands
In fact. Lomonosov developed smalt formulas and directed the workshop, while the pictures were assembled by masters trained by him, among whom Matvey Vasilyev was the chief. This work required many hands and months of labor; such canvases cannot be made alone.
The glass factory was his personal venture
In fact. The Ust-Ruditsa factory was opened by a state decree, with granted villages and a treasury loan, since smalt for palace works had to be imported from Italy. The enterprise was conceived as a way to avoid purchases abroad.
«Russian Grammar is a school textbook
In fact. The book was written as a scientific description of the language, a compendium of rules and observations, closer to contemporary academic grammars than to a school textbook. It came into classrooms later and not directly; other authors compiled textbooks based on it, and through them several generations were educated.
He was a quiet, bookish scholar
In fact. He spent half his life in lawsuits and petitions. He fought to secure funding for his laboratory, battled the academic chancellery over staff positions and salaries, defended the right to teach students in Russian, and argued with colleagues about the origin of Kievan Rus. There is far less of study work in this biography than there is of going from one government office to another.
What of this should I tell the child
A biography is good because it has a clear plot and material for debate, and children love debating more than listening.
Younger ones will do with the story about the boy who left home at nineteen and sat at a desk with twelve-year-olds, and about three kopecks a day. A teenager will be interested in something else: how a person with no money, connections, and background broke into an academy where everyone spoke German. This immediately invites a conversation about what in his biography is the truth and what is a school cliché, starting with the famous journey on foot.
If the topic takes off, there is more material nearby about other scientists from Russia, which features both the creator of the periodic table and the world's first female mathematics professor.
Such a conversation requires a vocabulary that does not exist in everyday speech. Experience, observation, proof, recognition, science. Palme School accepts students from four to seventeen years old and tailors classes to the specific child; some need their first phrases, while others need a serious conversation about books and science in Russian. You can evaluate the format at two free lessons. At the first one, the child is met by a methodologist who will assess their level and select a group. The second one takes place in a mini-group with a teacher, and after it, the child will decide for themselves whether they want to continue.
Life year by year
1711
Birth in a Pomor family on an island in the middle of the Northern Dvina, not far from Kholmogory.
1730
Leaving home for Moscow, secretly from his father, with a passport from the local chancery and borrowed money.
1731
Admission to the Slavic Greek Latin Academy using a fictitious noble origin.
1735
Transfer to the Academic University in St. Petersburg among the top students.
1736
Departure to Germany to study mining, studies with Christian Wolff in Marburg.
1740
Marriage to Elizaveta Ziltch, wanderings through German lands before returning.
1741
Return to Petersburg and the beginning of service at the Academy of Sciences.
1745
The professorial title, the first for a Russian in the academy of that time.
1748
Opening a chemical laboratory and a letter to Euler discussing the indestructibility of matter.
1753
Privilege for the glass factory in Ust-Ruditsa and the beginning of the mosaic business.
1755
Foundation of the Moscow University according to the plan developed by him, completion of the «Russian Grammar».
1761
Observation of the transit of Venus and the conclusion that the planet has an atmosphere.
1765
Death in St. Petersburg and burial in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
1940
Naming it after him in the year of the double anniversary.
Turning points are highlighted in light green, and the rest are in blue. Details of what has been done are gathered in a separate section.
Home
Lomonosov was born in 1711 into a Pomor family near Kholmogory, educated himself using two accidental books, and in December 1730 set off with a sledge caravan for Moscow, arriving there in January. The path to the academy opened up through a fabricated nobility; he lived there on three kopecks a day and sat with boys half his age. Germany took five years, and upon his return came, one after another, a professorship—the first for a Russian—a chemistry laboratory the likes of which the country had never seen, the revival of mosaic art, the atmosphere of Venus, and a grammar of the Russian language. Empress Elizabeth Petrovna signed the decree establishing Moscow University in 1755; Ivan Shuvalov is listed among the founders, while Lomonosov developed the structure of the future university. Lomonosov's name was given to the university in 1940. Yet his main achievement, which is spoken of less than the others, remains the Russian scientific language, in which physics and chemistry have been explained to children ever since.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was his real name?
In the documents of the Pomor North, he was listed as Mikhailo Vasilyev son of Lomonosov, that is, by his given name, patronymic in the old form, and family surname. The given name and patronymic familiar to us, Mikhail Vasilyevich, became established later, when the modern naming system was adopted in Russia. The surname derives from an ancestor's nickname, widespread among the Dvina Pomors.
What happened to his family?
His wife Elizabeth, the daughter of his Marburg landlady, came to him in St. Petersburg two years after his return and lived with him until his death. Of their children, a daughter named Elena survived, who married the librarian Konstantinov. Lomonosov left no direct male descendants. The family line continued through his granddaughters, among whom were members of famous noble families.
Is it true that he had a violent temper?
There is plenty of evidence. The most famous episode dates back to 1743, when Lomonosov quarreled with his colleagues right at a meeting of the Academic Chancery, uttered insolent remarks, and was taken into custody. He spent several months under arrest, after which he had to apologize, and his salary was cut in half for a year. This temperament is explained both by his origin and by the years of humiliation he endured while fighting his way into science.
What can be seen from what he made with his own hands?
First of all, the mosaics. The most famous one, «The Battle of Poltava,» room-sized, is exhibited in the St. Petersburg academic building on Vasilyevsky Island. Mosaic portraits of his work have also survived. In the Kunstkamera museum, there is a section dedicated to him featuring eighteenth-century instruments and tools.
Why was he arguing about the origins of Rus?
In the late 1740s, Academician Gerhard Miller prepared a work tracing the origins of Russian statehood back to the invited Varangians. Lomonosov spoke out sharply against this, arguing for the independent origin of Slavic statehood. This dispute, known as the Normanist question, continues in science to this day, with modern historians acknowledging some of the arguments from both sides, whereas back then the matter went as far as an investigation and the destruction of the print run.
What of his writings can be read together with a child?
The short poem «Two Astronomers Happened to Meet at a Feast» works well. Ptolemy and Copernicus argue there about what revolves around what, and an intervening cook resolves the issue with a single remark about the hearth and the roast. It's a funny, short piece and at the same time explains how people argued about the structure of the world in the eighteenth century.
