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The strongest impression which the foreigner receives
of this great figure, planted at the entrance to Russian
literature, is its typical Russian stamp. We notice,
in the next place, its quality of appropriating the
results of a foreign civilization, with such remarkable
rapidity and in so many different directions, and
how the imitative tendency has taken root and become
productive. We remark the universality which reminds
us of Peter the Great, and which, as in the case of the
latter, takes its starting-point in mechanics and technics.
Lomonósof is a real muzhik, the ingenious serf who,
in the space of one generation, goes through the
development which we trace back to the natural gifts of the
Russian peasant in the main, but which his class of
society as a whole will take a thousand years to travel
through. Lomonósof is a genuine Slav by nature,
flighty and gentle. Several years in succession he
vanishes from his wife’s range of vision without sending
a word to her; but when she reminds him of her existence
and of his child, he bursts into tears, and exclaims
to the man who brings him the letter, “My God! how
could I have left her! Circumstances have prevented
me from calling her to me. Now I will send her a
hundred rubles for the journey.” Like a genuine Slav, he
is above everything else, at the same time, a rationalist
and mystic. On his journey back to Russia he had seen
in a dream his father’s corpse cast up by the waves
on an uninhabited island in the Arctic Ocean. The
strong mathematician could not escape from this vision.
He had scarcely reached home before he inquired of
people from Archangel about his father’s fate, and learned
that now for four months after he had gone out a-fishing
on the Arctic Ocean, nothing had been heard from him.
He then sent his brother with a letter to the fishermen
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