Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich

Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich (mēkhəyēl` vəsē`lyəvĭch ləmənô`səf), 1711–65, Russian scientist, scholar, and writer, an outstanding figure in 18th-century Russia. Lomonosov was the son of a prosperous fisherman. Concealing his peasant background, he obtained an extraordinarily broad education. He was chosen by the St. Petersburg Academy to study the sciences and philosophy in Germany. In 1741 he received a lifetime appointment to the Russian Academy of Sciences. In his experiments he anticipated such modern principles as the mechanical nature of heat and the kinetic theory of gases. To promote education, Lomonosov wrote a history of Russia (1766) and a Russian grammar (1755). In his poetry he adopted tonic versification, thus altering the character of Russian prosody. For his reform of the Russian literary language he chose an idiom midway between the Old Church Slavonic and spoken Russian.

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Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich

(born Nov. 19, 1711, near Kholmogory, Russia—died April 15, 1765, St. Petersburg) Russian scientist, poet, and grammarian, considered the first great Russian linguistic reformer. Educated in Russia and Germany, he established what became the standards for Russian verse in the Letter Concerning the Rules of Russian Versification. In 1745 he joined the faculty at the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences, where he made substantial contributions to the physical sciences. He later wrote a Russian grammar and worked to systematize the Russian literary language, which had been an amalgam of Church Slavonic and Russian vernacular. He also reorganized the academy, founded Moscow State University (which now bears his name), and created the first coloured-glass mosaics in Russia.