Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Irina Reyfman (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📕

his conversation with ancient writers, Lomonosov similarly thought that he could communicate to his fellow citizens the ardor that filled his soul. And although the labor he undertook for this was in vain, yet the examples adduced by him to reinforce and explain his rules can undoubtedly guide anyone bent on pursuing the glory to be gained through the literary arts.

But however vain his work proved in teaching the rules of what is better felt than learned by rote, to those who love the Russian language Lomonosov left proper examples in his compositions. In them, the lips that sucked the sweetness of Cicero and Demosthenes flowered into grandiloquence. In them, in every line, in every punctuation mark, in every syllable (why can I not say in every letter?) can be heard the harmonious and concordant sound of a euphony that is so rare, so inimitable, so natural for Lomonosov.

Endowed by nature with the invaluable right to influence his contemporaries, endowed by nature with the power of creation, immersed in the thick of the popular mass, a great man acts upon it but not always in the same direction. He is similar to natural forces that, acting from the center, by extending their action to all points of the circumference, make their effect perpetual everywhere. So, too, Lomonosov who, affecting his fellow citizens variously, opened the collective mind to various pathways of knowledge. Enticing the collective mind to follow him, unweaving an entangled language into grandiloquence and euphony, he did not leave it as a scant source of literature lacking ideas. He would tell the imagination: soar to the limitlessness of dreams and possibilities, collect bright flowers of inspiration, and, guided by taste, decorate with them even the intangible. And so again Pindar’s trumpet that resounded during the Olympic games, like the psalmodist, emitted praise to the Supreme Being. On a trumpet, Lomonosov announced the greatness of the Everlasting One sitting on the wings of wind, preceded by thunder and lightning bolts and revealing to mortals His essence, life, in the sun.126 Moderating the voice of Pindar’s trumpet, he used it to sing the fragility of man and the narrow confines of his understanding. In the infinite abyss of the worlds, like a small speck of sand in the sea waves, like a spark barely scintillating amid the never melting ice, like the finest dust in the fiercest whirlwind—what is the human mind?127—It is you, O Lomonosov! my raiment cannot disguise you.

I do not envy you the fact that you flattered Elizabeth with encomium in verse. This was consistent with the common practice of flattering tsars who, not infrequently, far from deserving the praises sung in harmonious voice, scarcely deserve the plinking of a gudok.128 And if it were possible without giving offence to truth and posterity, I would forgive you for the sake of a soul grateful for her generosity to you. But he will envy you, the writer of odes who cannot follow your tracks, he will envy a delightful picture of popular calm and peace, this strong defense of towns and villages, solace of tsardoms and tsars;129 he will envy the innumerable beauties of your language; even if someday he happened to equal the constant euphony of your poetry, although nobody has yet managed this. And so what if everyone succeeds in outdoing you for sweet singing, so what if your thoughts in the eyes of our descendants seem disordered, your poetry not overabundant in essence! … But look: on the expansive tiltyard to the end of which the eye cannot reach, among the crowding multitudes, in the lead, in front of everyone, opening the gates to the tiltyard—it is you. Anyone can be famed for their achievements, but you were the first. Even the Almighty cannot take away what He gave you. He begat you before everyone else, begat you to become a leader, and your glory is the fame of a leader. O! you who labored fruitlessly thus far to understand the essence of the soul and how the soul acts upon our corporality, this task that lies before you as a test is difficult. Tell us how the soul acts upon another soul, what kind of connection is there between minds? If we know how the body acts upon a body by touch, tell us how the intangible acts upon the intangible, producing substance; or what kind of contact there is between nonsubstantial entities. That it exists, this you know. But if you know what kind of action a great man’s mind has upon the collective mind, then you also know that a great man can beget another great man. There is the laurel crown of victory. O! Lomonosov, you created Sumarokov.

But if the influence of Lomonosov’s poems could achieve a majestic advance in the education of his contemporaries’ poetic understanding, his eloquence made no perceptible or obvious mark. The flowers picked by him in Athens and Rome and so successfully transplanted in his words—the force of Demosthenes’s expression, the eloquence of Cicero—he used in vain, since they remain cloaked in the murkiness of the future. And who, satiated on the prolific grandiloquence of your laudatory orations, will thunder in a style that is not even yours yet will be your disciple? This moment can be distant or near, the wandering gaze, straying in the uncertainty of the future, finds no footing where to stop. While we may not find a direct heir to Lomonosov’s rhetoric, the impact of his euphony and the resonant pauses of his nonpoetic speech was pervasive, nonetheless. Even if his civic oratory may have had no disciple, its influence was felt on the general character of writing. Compare what was written before Lomonosov and what was written after him, and the impact of his prose will be evident to everyone.

But do not we err in our conclusion? Long before Lomonosov, we find in Russia eloquent shepherds of the Church who by preaching the word of God to their flock taught