Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - II
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and went ten miles on foot to catch a wagon-train of
frozen fish which was going from Archangel to Moscow.
There he was dropped in the market-place, and by the
accidental kindness of a monk a few days later was taken
to a cloister school, which indeed only received the sons
of the nobility, but where his ancestry was overlooked.
Here, and for a short time in Kief, his progress in Latin
and Greek, in the Slavic language, in philosophy,
physics, and mathematics, is that of a genius. “When
he had completed his courses at Moscow and Kief, he
obtained the privilege of being sent to the Academy at
St. Petersburg and to Germany, where at Marburg he
attended Chr. Wolf’s lectures on philosophy, and at
Friburg he studied practical metallurgy and mining.
He had previously made attempts at writing verse in
St. Petersburg, and now he showed his enthusiasm for
the poet Johann Christian Gunther, forgotten in our
time outside of Germany, by transferring his metres to
the Russian language. His first ode to the Tsaritsa
Anna, a memorial ode celebrating the conquest of
Chotin, is an exact imitation of a poem by Gunther
in honor of Prince Eugene. Lomonósof, perhaps,
surpasses his German model in spirit, and is possibly his
equal in the domain of the ode in bombast; but he does
not at all succeed, like Gunther, in writing bold and
audacious verses about his personal experiences or his
erotic inclinations.
In 1740 he is secretly married to the daughter of a
poor tailor in Marburg, runs in debt, and, when he is
threatened with the debtor’s prison, flies secretly from
the town without even telling his wife, and begins to
beg his way on foot with the intention of getting to
Holland. On the way he falls in with a Prussian
recruiting officer with recruits, who gets him drunk, gives
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