* one and three-quarters inches.—Trans.
CHORNAYA GRYAZ
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.
An Oration About Lomonosov
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 beauti
es 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 o
ur 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.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Page 23