Mikhail Lomonosov Writes to his Patron Professional Ethos, Literary Rhetoric and Social Ambition

Mikhail Lomonosov Writes to his Patron Professional Ethos, Literary Rhetoric and Social Ambition The paper deals with the complex social strategy of the poet and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, often considered as the founding father of Russian academic science, and explores the evident but insufficiently appreciated links between Lomonosov’s trajectory and the sociocultural spaces of the Russian court under Empress Elizabeth and her favorite Ivan Shuvalov. Concentrating on Lomonosov’s letters to Shuvalov, his patron, the paper illuminates the discursive techniques which allowed this low-born intellectual to combine the seemingly contradictory roles of the misanthropic ‘natural philosopher’ and the astute court writer and to secure social respect through the manipulation of epistolary and literary conventions. Asserting his dignity, Lomonosov seems to appeal to the ancient tradition, revived by the Baconian ideology of “new science”, which attributed to intellectuals (“philosophers”) constant seclusion and a contempt for worldly affairs. However, Lomonosov in fact depended on the court for social and intellectual recognition, and was arguably more successful as a writer of panegyric poetry and prose than as a natural scientist. Viewing his epistolary rhetoric in this perspective, one can discern a well-established (though often neglected in contemporary scholarship) strategy of self-assertion of the client intellectuals “at the table of eminent lords”, ex pounded in epistolary manuals well-known to Lomonosov, and exemplified by the lives and oeuvre of many authors central for the literary tradition, first of all Horace, famously protected by Maecenas and Augustus. Styling himself as the Russian Horace in his literary works, as well as letters, Lomonosov used the idiom of courtly literature as an instrument for sociocultural self-fashioning. My analysis brings to light the mechanics of the social process whereby language in general, and the literary idiom in particular, could become a crucial factor in the formation of an intellectual’s social niche.