Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Irina Reyfman (snow like ashes .TXT) 📖

orators and poets. With them, he learned to feel the niceties of nature; with them, he learned to perceive all the contrivances of an art always concealed under the lively forms of poetry; with them, he learned to express his feelings, to give body to thought and soul to the inanimate.

If my powers were sufficient, I would represent how the great man gradually ensconced in his understanding foreign ideas that, transformed in his soul and mind, appeared in a new form in his works or gave birth to entirely different notions previously unknown to the human intellect. I would represent him searching for knowledge in his school’s ancient manuscripts, chasing after the semblance of knowledge everywhere its repository seemed to be. Often he was deceived in his expectations. But thanks to frequent reading of ecclesiastical books, he laid the foundation of the gracefulness of his style. Such was the reading he proposes to all who wish to acquire the skill of writing the Russian language.

Soon his curiosity received ample satisfaction. He became the pupil of the celebrated Wolff.123 By jettisoning the rules of Scholasticism or, better, the delusions taught to him in religious academies, he established firm and clear steps for ascending to the temple of philosophy. Logic taught him to reason; mathematics to arrive at conclusions and reach certainty only through evidence; metaphysics taught him speculative truths that often lead to error; physics and chemistry, which he learned diligently, perhaps for the sake of an elegant power of imagination, led him to the font of nature and revealed to him its mysteries; metallurgy and mineralogy, offshoots of the previous disciplines, drew his attention to them, and Lomonosov wanted to understand the rules regulating these disciplines.

An abundance of fruits and products compelled people to exchange them for those that were scarce. This generated trade. Great difficulties in the barter trade stimulated thought about symbols that would represent all wealth and all goods. Money was invented. Gold and silver, as the most precious metals because of their perfection, previously having served for decoration, were turned into symbols representing all forms of wealth. And in all truth, it was only then that this insatiable and vile passion in the human heart for riches was ignited, which like an all-devouring flame grows stronger as it feeds. Then man left his primeval simplicity and his natural practice, tillage, and made over his life to the furious waves or, disdainful of hunger and desert heat, crossed these to unknown countries in prospect of riches and treasure. Then, contemptuous of the light of the sun, the living creature descended into the grave and, breaking open the interior of the earth, dug a burrow for himself like a terrestrial reptile foraging at night for its food. So it was that man, while secreted in the chasms of the earth, sought glittering metals and, by imbibing the poisonous fumes coming out of the earth, shortened the span of his life by half. But in the same way that poison, once chronic, becomes itself a necessary habit for man, so the mining of metals, while shortening the days of the miners, is not repudiated owing to its deadliness; rather, the means to extract more metals, by the easiest means, are devised.

This indeed was what Lomonosov wanted to learn actively and for the fulfilment of his intention he went to Freiburg. I imagine that I see him approaching the shaft through which metal extracted from the bowels of the earth flows. He takes a flickering beacon designed to light the way for him in crevices to which the rays of sun never extend. He has taken the first step. “What are you doing?” screams Reason to him. “Can it be that nature has distinguished you with talents only in order that you use them for the destruction of your brothers? What are you thinking when you descend into this chasm? Do you seek to discover a better skill to extract silver and gold? Or do you not know what evil they have caused in the world? Or have you forgotten the conquest of America? … But no, descend, learn the subterranean artifices of man and, upon returning to your fatherland, have enough fortitude to offer advice to cover over and flatten these graves where thousands are buried alive.”

Trembling, he descends into the aperture and soon loses sight of the life-bearing orb. I wish I could follow him in his subterranean journey, collect his musings, and present them with the same coherence and in the same order in which they germinated in his mind. The picture of his thoughts would be entertaining and instructive for us. On passing through the first layer of earth, the source of all vegetation, the subterranean traveler found it unlike the next ones: it differed from the other ones most of all by its fecund power. Perhaps he concluded that the earth’s surface is composed of nothing other than the decomposition of animals and plants, that its fertility, nutritious and restorative power, had its origin in indestructible and primordial particles of existence of every kind, which do not change their essence but rather change only the appearance generated from random combinations. Progressing further, the traveler saw the earth consistently arranged in layers. In these layers, he sometimes found the vestiges of animals living in the seas, found the vestiges of plants and was able to conclude that the layered sedimentation of the earth took its beginnings from the fluid state of the waters, and that the waters, displaced from one part of the earthly globe to the other, gave the earth’s interior its very appearance. This uniform arrangement of layers, as it retreated from his view, sometimes looked to him like a compound of many heterogeneous strata. From this he concluded that fire, a ferocious element, had penetrated the bowels of the earth and, encountering a countervailing liquid, raged, disturbed, shook, knocked down, and hurled everything that attempted in vain to resist it with its counterforce.