Astrakhan, where he was educated in a Catholic school. His move to Moscow,
where he studied at the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy, followed by studies in The
Hague and Paris, prepared him for a career in the Russian Academy of Sciences as
translator and professor. In the next generation novelist and poet Mikhail Chulkov
(1734?–92) was born araznochinetsin Moscow and worked as an actor and in the
household staff at the St. Petersburg court before taking up a civil service career and
writing on the side; the poet Vasilii Petrov (1736–99) was born the son of a priest
and educated at the Moscow Academy where he became a teacher until Catherine
II installed him at court as her favored odist. The great poet Gavrila Derzhavin
(1743–1813) was born the son of an army officer and served in military and civil
service through his life, even as he also published exquisite odes that transformed
Russian classical verse. Other notable writers of humble background included the
poets M. N. Murav’ev (1757–1807), son of a military engineer, and S. S. Bobrov
(1763–1810), son of a priest.
In science as well as literature, humbly born men made careers. Ivan Kirillov,
whom we discussed in Chapter 16 as explorer, surveyor, cartographer, and compiler
of Russia’sfirstAtlas, was born in 1689 in a bureaucratic family and parlayed his
literacy into education in a Petrine naval school. Born a half-century later in 1750,
Ivan Mikhailovich Komov was the son of a village priest sent to the school of the
Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. A specialist in agriculture, he spent years in
England studying agricultural reform that he then disseminated in Russia as a
member of the Free Economic Society. Even more spectacularly, Russia’s cele-
brated polymath, M. V. Lomonosov (1711–65), represents the social opportunities
of the age. Son of afisherman who prospered in trade and shipping in the White
Sea, Lomonosov received a religious education in his childhood village; when he
moved as a young man to Moscow, still a state peasant, he presented himself as son
of a nobleman and won admission to the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy. Luckily,
by the time his deception was found out, he so excelled in his studies that he was
not dismissed. Rather, he found support to study sciences, languages, and literature
there and in Kyiv, St. Petersburg, and the University of Marburg. He spent his
career in St. Petersburg at the Academy of Sciences. In the physical sciences
Lomonosov made contributions in physics, chemistry, geology, geography, and
astronomy. He, along with Trediakovskii, contributed fundamentally to the theory
of Russian versification; he wrote odes and panegyrics and engaged in a spirited and
patriotic polemic with Gerhard Friedrich Muller over the latter’s“Normanist”
theory of the origin of the Kyiv Rus’state (whereby the state was founded by
Viking traders). Lomonosov’s work was discussed and reviewed in scholarly jour-
nals in Paris and London. Few surpassed the social bounds of his birth as did
Mikhail Lomonosov.
URBAN REFORM FROM PETER I TO CATHERINE II
By and large the skills and energies of Russia’sraznochintsywere an urban phe-
nomenon, clustered in the few cosmopolitan cities of the realm: by 1782,five
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 377