by James Millar
Lomonosov’s work in science was of an encyclopedic scope; he was actively engaged in physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, meteorology, and navigation. He also contributed to population studies, political economy, Russian history, rhetoric, and
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LOMONOSOV, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH
Portrait of poet and scientist Mikhail Lomonosov from the State Hermitage Museum collection. © REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA/CORBIS grammar. He brought the most advanced scientific theories to Russia, commented on their strengths and weaknesses, and advanced original ideas. He sided with Newton’s atomistic views on the structure of matter; questioned the existence of the heat-generating caloric, a popular crutch of eighteenth-century science; and endorsed and commented on Huygens’s clearly manifested inclination toward the wave theory of light. He raised the question of the scientific validity of the notion of instantaneous action at a distance that was built into Newton’s notion of universal gravitation, conducted experimental research in atmospheric electricity, made the first steps toward the formulation of conservation laws, suggested a historical orientation in the study of the terrestrial strata, and claimed the presence of atmosphere at the planet Venus. In the judgment of Henry M. Leicester, Lomonosov’s scientific papers revealed “a remarkable originality and . . . ability to follow his theories to their logical ends, even though his conclusions were sometimes erroneous.”
In a series of odes, Lomonosov combined his poetic gifts with his scientific engagement to produce scientific poetry. These odes dealt with scientific themes and were dedicated to the popularization of rationalist methods in obtaining socially valuable knowledge. “A Letter on the Uses of Glass,” one such ode, relied on rich and poignant metaphors to portray the invincible power of scientific ideas of the kind advanced by Kepler, Huy-gens, and Newton. This poem, an ode in praise of the scientific world outlook, is the first Russian literary work to hail Copernicus’s heliocentrism.
The appearance of Lomonosov’s papers on physical and chemical themes in the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences journal Novy Kommentary (New Commentary) during the 1750s marked the beginning of a new epoch in Russia’s cultural history. They were the first publications of scientific papers by a native Russian scholar to appear in the same journal with contributions by established naturalists and mathematicians of Western origin and training. The papers, presented in Latin, dealt with major scientific problems of the day and were noticed by reviewers in Western scholarly journals.
Few of his Russian contemporaries understood the intellectual and social significance of Lomonosov’s achievements in science and of his enthusiastic advocacy of Baconian views on science as the commanding source of social progress. His relations with the members of the St. Petersburg Academy and with distinguished members of the literary community were punctuated by stormy conflicts, personal and professional. He showed a tendency to magnify the animosity, overt or latent, of German academicians toward Russian personnel and Russia’s cultural environment. Particularly noted were his outbursts against G. F. M?ller, A. L. Schlozer, and G. Z. Bayer, the founders of the Norman theory of the origin of the Russian state. On one occasion, he was sent to jail as a result of complaints by foreign colleagues regarding his abusive language at scientific sessions of the Academy. In the face of mounting complaints about his behavior, Catherine II signed a decree in 1763 forcing Lomonosov to retire; however, before the Senate could ratify the decree, the empress changed her mind. Part of Lomonosov’s obstinacy stemmed from his desire to see increased Russian representation in the administration of the Academy. In fairness to Lomonosov, it must be noted that he had high respect for and maintained cordial relations with most German members of the Academy.
Lomonosov went through a series of skirmishes with theologians who protected the irrevoLORIS-MELIKOV, MIKHAIL TARIELOVICH cability of canonized belief from the challenges launched by science, and even wrote a hymn lampooning the theologians who stood in the way of scientific progress. While attacking theological zealots, he never deviated from a candid respect for religion-and he never alienated himself from the church. Small wonder, then, that two archimandrites and a long line of priests officiated at his burial rites. After his death, the church recognized him as one of Russia’s premier citizens, and many learned theologians took an active part in building the symbolism of the Lomonosov legend.
In his time, and shortly after his death, Lomono-sov was known almost exclusively as a poet; only isolated contemporaries grasped the intellectual and social significance of his achievements in science. A good part of his main scientific manuscripts languished in the archives of the St. Petersburg Academy until the beginning of the twentieth century. Lomonosov was known for having made little effort to communicate with Russian scientists in and outside the Academy. On his death, a commemorative session was attended by eight members of the Academy, who heard a short encomium delivered by Nicholas Gabriel de Clerc, a French doctor of medicine, writer on Russian history, newly elected honorary member of the Academy, and personal physician of Kirill Razumovsky, president of the Academy. While de Clerc praised Lomonosov effusively, he barely mentioned his work in science. See also: ACADEMY OF ARTS; ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; EDUCATION; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; SLAVIC-GREEK-LATIN ACADEMY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leicester, Henry M. (1976). Lomonosov and the Corpuscular Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Menshutkin, B. N. (1952). Russia’s Lomonosov, Chemist, Courtier, Physicist, Poet, tr. I. E. Thal and E. J. Webster, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Pavlova, G. E., and Fedorov, A. S. (1984). Mikhail Vasil’e-vich Lomonasov: His Life and Work, Moscow: Mir.
ALEXANDER VUCINICH
LORIS-MELIKOV, MIKHAIL TARIELOVICH
(1825-1888), Russian general and minister, head of Supreme Executive Commission in 1880-1881. Mikhail Loris-Melikov was born in Tiflis into a noble family. He studied at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow and at the military school in St. Petersburg (1839-1843). In 1843 he started his military service as a minor officer in a guard hussar regiment. In 1847 he asked to be transferred to the Caucasus, where he took part in the war with highlanders in Chechnya and Dagestan. He later fought in the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856. From 1855 to 1875 he served as the superintendent of the different districts beyond the Caucasus and proved a gifted administrator. In 1875 Loris-Melikov was promoted to cavalry general. From 1876 he served as the commander of the Separate Caucasus Corps. During the war with Turkey of 1877-1878 Loris-Melikov commanded Russian armies beyond the Caucasus, and distinguished himself in the sieges of Ardagan and Kars. In 1878 he was awarded the title of a count.
In April of 1879, after Alexander Soloviev’s assault on emperor Alexander II, Loris-Melikov was appointed temporary governor-general of Kharkov. He tried to gain the support of the liberal community and was the only one of the six governor- generals with emergency powers who did not approve a single death penalty. A week after the explosion of February 5, 1880, in the Winter Palace, he was appointed head of the Supreme Executive Commission and assumed almost dictator-like power. He continued his policy of cooperation with liberals, seeing it as a way of restoring order in the country. At the same time, he was strict in his tactics of dealing with revolutionaries. In the underground press, these tactics were called “the wolf’s jaws and the fox’s tail.” In April 1880 Loris-Me-likov presented to Alexander II a report containing a program of reforms, including a tax reform, a local governing reform, a passport system reform, and others. The project encouraged the inclusion of elected representatives of the nobility, of zemstvos, and of city government institutions in the discussions of the drafts of some State orders.
In August 1880 the Supreme Executive Commission was dismissed at the order of Loris-Melikov, who believed that the commission had done its job. At the same time, the Ministry of Interior and the Political Police were reinstated. The third division of the Emperor’s personal chancellery (the secret poli
ce) was dismissed, and its functions were given to the Department of State Police of the Ministry of the Interior. Loris-Melikov was appointed minister of the interior. In September 1880, at the initiative of Loris-Melikov, senators’ inspections were
LOTMAN, YURI MIKHAILOVICH
undertaken in various regions of Russia. The results were to be taken into consideration during the preparation of reforms. In January 1880 Loris-Melikov presented a report to the emperor in which he suggested the institution of committees for analyzing and implementing the results of the senators’ inspections. The committees were to consist of State officials and elected representatives of zem-stvos and city governments. The project later became known under the inaccurate name of “Loris-Melikov’s Constitution.” On the morning of March 13, 1881, Alexander II signed the report presented by Loris-Melikov and called for a meeting of the Council of Ministers to discuss the document. The same day the emperor was killed by the members of People’s Will.
At the meeting of the Council of Ministers on March 20, 1881, Loris-Melikov’s project was harshly criticized by Konstantin Pobedonostsev and other conservators, who saw this document as a first step toward the creation of a constitution. The new emperor, Alexander III, accepted the conservators’ position, and on May 11 he issued the manifesto of the “unquestionability of autocracy,” which meant the end of the reformist policy. The next day, Loris-Melikov and two other reformist ministers, Alexander Abaza and Dmitry Miliutin, resigned, provoking the first ministry crisis in Russian history.
Having resigned, but remaining a member of the State Council, Loris-Melikov lived mainly abroad in Germany and France. He died in Nice. See also: ALEXANDER II; AUTOCRACY; LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION; ZEMSTVO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zaionchkovskii, Petr Andreevich. (1976). The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Zaionchkovskii, Petr Andreevich. (1979). The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878-1882. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
OLEG BUDNITSKII
LOTMAN, YURI MIKHAILOVICH
(1922-1993), scholar, founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School.
Yuri Lotman was a widely cited scholar of Soviet literary semiotics and structuralism. He established the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School at Tartu University in Estonia. This school is famous for its Works on Sign Systems (published in Russian as Trudy po znakovym systemam). Unusually prolific, he published some eight hundred works on a high scholarly level. He is sometimes compared to Mikhail Bakhtin, another well-known Russian scholar.
Lotman began teaching at the University of Tartu in 1954. Starting as a historian of Russian literature, Lotman focused on the work of Radishchev, Karamzin, and Vyazemsky and the writers linked to the Decembrist movement. His later books covered all major literary works, from the Lay of Igor’s Campaign to the classic nineteenth-century authors such as Pushkin and Gogol, to Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Brodsky. From traditional philology Lotman shifted in the early sixties to cultural semiotics. His first key publication of that time, Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964), introduced the abovementioned series Trudy po znakovym sistemam, which was one of the main initiatives of the Tartu-Moscow school.
Lotman’s theory of literature rests upon two closely related sets of fundamental concepts-those of semiotics and structuralism. Semiotics is the science of signs and sign systems, which studies the basic characteristics of all signs and their combinations: the words and word combinations of natural and artificial languages, the metaphors of poetic language, and chemical and mathematical symbols. It also treats systems of signs such as those of artificial logical and machine languages, the languages of various poetic schools, codes, animal communication systems, and so on. Each sign contains: a) the signifying material (perceived by the sense organs), and b) the signified aspect (meaning). For words of natural (ordinary) language, pronunciation or writing is the signifying aspect while content is the signified aspect. The signs of one system (for example, the words of a language) can be the signifying aspect for complex signs of another system (such as that of poetic language) superimposed on them.
Lotman defined structuralism as “the idea of a system: a complete, self-regulating entity that adapts to new conditions by transforming its features while retaining its systematic structure.” He argued that any chosen object of investigation must be viewed as an interrelated, interdependent system composed of units and rules for their possible combinations. He defined culture itself as “the whole of uninherited information and the ways of its organization and storage.” From the point of view of
LOVERS OF WISDOM, THE
semiotics, anything linked with meaning in fact belongs to culture. Since natural language is the central operator of culture, Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow school deemed natural language to be a primary modeling system containing a general picture of the world. Language was the most developed, universal means of communication-the “system of systems.” Lotman took keen interest in the way philosophical ideas, world views, and social values of a given period are enacted in its literature (via language). For Lotman, a period’s literary and ideological consciousness and the aesthetics of its trends and currents have a systemic quality. These categories are not a hodgepodge of convictions about the world and literature, but a hierarchic group of cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic values.
Critics might object to perceived “scientific optimism,” reductionism, and polemics of the Tartu-Moscow School. The ideological pressures within the USSR with which the school coped probably discouraged internal debates and explicit criticism of its own views. See also: BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH; EDUCATION; ESTONIA AND ESTONIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lotman, Iu. M.; Ginzburg, Lidiia; et al. (1985). The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lotman, Iu. M. (2001). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (The Second World), tr. Ann Shuk-man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Staton, Shirley F. (1987). Literary Theories in Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
JOHANNA GRANVILLE
LOVERS OF WISDOM, THE
The Lovers of Wisdom (Liubomudry), writers based in Moscow during the 1820s, were strongly influenced by Romanticism and set out to explore the philosophical, religious, aesthetic and cultural implications of German Idealist philosophy. The Society for the Love of Wisdom met secretly in the apartment of its president, Vladimir Odoyevsky (ca. 1803-1869) from 1823 to 1825. While the Society formally disbanded following the Decembrist uprising, its members’ works continued to display unity of interest and purpose through the late 1820s. The group’s core consisted of Odoyevsky, Dmitry Venevitinov (1805-1827), Ivan Kireyevsky (1806-1856), Alexander Koshelev (1806-1883), and Nikolai Rozhalin (1805-1834). But the number of people generally considered Lovers of Wisdom is much broader, including Alexei Khomyakov (1804-1860), Stepan Shevyrev (1806-1864), Vladimir Titov (1807-1891), Dmitry Struisky (1806-1856), Nikolai Melgunov (1804-1867), and Mikhail Pogodin (1800-1875).
In secondary literature, the Lovers of Wisdom have long been overshadowed by the Decembrists. While the Decembrists pursued political and military careers in St. Petersburg and allegedly conspired to force political reform, the Lovers of Wisdom bided their time at comfortably undemanding jobs at the Moscow Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They indulged in speculation on the most abstract issues, with a bent toward mysticism. Even their choice of name, “Lovers of Wisdom” as opposed to “philosophers”, or philosophes, is thought to have marked their opposition to the progressive tradition of the radical Enlightenment.
Yet the Lovers of Wisdom thought of themselves as enlighteners in the broader sense. They aimed to reinvigorate Russian high culture by attacking the moral corruption of the nobility and promoting creativity and the pursuit of knowledge. They contrasted the superstition and petty-mindedness of the nobility to the moral purity of the “lover of wisdom,” who often appeared in their satires and oriental tales i
n the guise of a magus, dervish, brahmin, Greek philosopher, or sculptor, or a misunderstood Russian writer. Whether in short stories, metaphysical poetry, or quasi-philosophical prose works, Odoyevsky, Venevitinov, Khomyakov and Shevyrev emphasized the great spiritual and even religious importance of the young, creative individual, or genius. The special status of such individuals was only highlighted by their apparent moral fragility and vulnerability in a hostile environment.
The group was heavily indebted to Romanticism and to German Idealist philosophy. Admittedly, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s philosophy seems to have appealed in part because it was difficult to understand. As Koyr? (1929) remarked, their Romanticism was characterized by a “slightly puerile desire to feel ‘isolated from the crowd,’ the desire for the esoteric, which is complemented by the possession of a secret, even if that secret consists only in the fact that one possesses one.” (p. 37). But their works also display a genuine
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commitment to principles such as the fundamental unity of matter and ideas, and the notion that these achieve higher synthesis in the absolute, the spirit that guides the world. To them, creating a work of art, or striving for any kind of knowledge, brought the individual into contact with the absolute, lending the artist or intellectual special religious status.
Such views did not accord with Orthodox Christianity. The political authorities did not welcome them either. Yet the Lovers of Wisdom found ways of promoting their views in poetry and prose they published in journals and almanacs, especially in Mnemozina (1824-1825), edited by Odoyevsky with the Decembrist Wilgelm Kyukhelbeker, and Moskovsky vestnik (1827-1830), edited by Pogodin. They also published translations from leading voices of Romanticism such as Goethe, Byron, Tieck and Wackenroder.