Lomonosov: Patronage and Reputation at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences

Lomonosov: Patronage and Reputation at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences This article examines the eighteenth-century elevation of Mikhail Lomonosov to the role, vastly embellished over the subsequent two centuries, of a pioneering chemist and physicist and, more significantly, the father of Russian ‘science.’ This process of myth generation began with Lomonosov’s own efforts to fashion himself into a celebrated natural philosopher. Lomonosov’s self-fashioning was interwoven, even initially achieved, by his deft manipulation of patronage. My analysis explores Lomonosov’s efforts to promote his socio-professional status as a natural philosopher at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and examines the methods he employed to advance the social standing of this yet ill-defined vocation; one which had no discernible prestige or rank. To secure for himself status at the Academy of Sciences, Lomonosov vigorously sought to associate his name and works with two of the most renowned natural philosophers of the day, both intimately tied to the Academy’s early history: Leonhard Euler and Christian Wolff. Within Russia, these aims were achieved; both Euler and Wolff are thoroughly linked in Russian, Soviet, and Post- Soviet historical discourse to the progression of Lomonosov’s literal (and intellectual) path from peasant to scientist. Lomonosov’s image as the founder of Russia’s ‘first chemical laboratory’ - attached to the Academy of Sciences, as the ‘first’ indigenous professor of Russian chemistry, and, most importantly, as the developer of a Russian ‘community of scientists’ and as an apparent inspiration to generations of later, again Russian, scientists, as first elaborated by Lomonosov in the eighteenth century, is secure.