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Lomonósof, whom Byelinski has called the “Peter the
Great of Russian literature,” was obliged to shape the
modern Russian language, as a literary language, entirely
anew. Before the time of Peter the Great they wrote
in Church Slavic, after that a mixture of Church Slavic
and Russian. As a boy, Lomonósof had drawn the
language of the people from the purest fountain, had heard
it as it fell from the lips of the Russian fishermen in
Archangel, but he had studied Slavic at an early age in
the old church books. He was thus able to mould his
language with the confidence of a man of intellect, and
created the newer prose style and the Russian metre and
wrote the first sonorous verse existing in Russian,
composed by any poet whose name is known.
Lomonósof’s importance for Russia is, as already stated,
closely akin to that of Holberg for Norway and
Denmark. He had a wonderfully many-sided genius,
developed by a career which is almost marvellous. Mikhaïl
Vasilyevitch Lomonósof was born in 1711, in a village in
the department of Archangel. His father was a royal
serf, who earned his living as a fisherman, and who used
to take the boy with him out in his boat. From his
tenth to his sixteenth year the intelligent boy thus
sailed about every summer over the White Sea and the
Arctic Ocean, receiving impressions of a great and wild
nature, experiencing the poor man’s hard fight for bread,
seeing salt-works, cloisters, religious meetings, and among
the people of the region he acquired a knowledge of the
character of the Russian people in its purity. — He
learned to read and write from the village priest, devoured
one or two old church books, which were the only reading
available to him, discovered that Latin must be learned
in order to acquire knowledge of a wider scope, and
therefore ran away from home at the age of seventeen
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