est hour
of anarchy, when the Poles occupied Moscow. It was then that Russia
had arisen, expelled the invaders, reasserted her nationality and her
independence, and finally emerged out of all these vicissitudes, the
great Slavonic state; while Poland, Russia's superior in culture and
civilization, had sunk into the position of a dependency.

The man whom the epoch needed was forthcoming. His name was Peter. He
carried on the work which had been begun, but in quite an original
manner, and gave it a different character. He not only made a breach
in the wall, but he forced on his stubborn and conservative subjects
the habits and customs of the West. He revolutionized the government
and the Church, and turned the whole country upside down with his
explosive genius. He abolished the Russian Patriarchate, and crushed
the power of the Church once and for all, by making it entirely depend
on the State, as it still does. He simplified the Russian script and
the written language; he caused to be made innumerable translations of
foreign works on history, geography, and jurisprudence. He founded the
first Russian newspaper. But Peter the Great did not try to draw
Russia into an alien path; he urged his country with whip, kick, and
spur to regain its due place, which it had lost by lagging behind, on
the path it was naturally following. Peter the Great's reforms, his
manifold and superhuman activity, produced no immediate fruits in
literature. How could it? To blame him for this would be like blaming
a gardener for not producing new roses at a time when he was relaying
the garden. He was completely successful in opening a window on to
Europe, through which Western influence could stream into Russia. This
was not slow in coming about; and the foreign influence from the end
of the reign of Peter the Great onwards divided directly into two
different currents: the French and the German. The chief
representatives of the German influence in the eighteenth century were
TATISHCHEV, the founder of Russian history, and MICHAEL LOMONOSOV.

Michael Lomonosov (1714-1765), a man with an incredibly wide
intellectual range, was a mathematician, a chemist, an astronomer, a
political economist, a historian, an electrician, a geologist, a
grammarian and a poet. The son of a peasant, after an education
acquired painfully in the greatest privation, he studied at Marburg
and Freiburg. He was the Peter the Great of the Russian language; he
scratched off