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Mikhail Lomonosov: The Misremembered Hero

April 18 @ 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

Mikhail Lomonosov: The Misremembered Hero

An online lecture with Dr. Susan Smith-Peter

The lecture will discuss how Mikhail Lomonosov, the 18th century polymath and poet, turned into a culture hero. A culture hero personifies the transition from one era to another, in this case from old Russia to new Petrine Russia. While this made Lomonosov a central figure in Russian culture, his importance to Russian history has not always been clear. Making things more difficult is Lomonosov’s connection to Peter III, the unlucky and deposed spouse of Catherine the Great. While Catherine dismissed Peter as disloyal to Russia and lazy, new work shows that he was highly involved in governance and had a tight-knit circle around him. Lomonosov was part of that circle.
Already in the 18th century, former members of that circle reshaped Lomonosov’s memory after his death so that it became apolitical and linked to poetry and physics. This has meant that Lomonosov’s work on geography has not been seen as central to his life and legacy, even though his influence on the provinces was considerable. Lomonosov did reshape Russia’s approach to geography by introducing the idea of economic geography. By moving beyond the tropes of the culture hero, we can begin to see the outlines of an important figure in mid-eighteenth century Russia who has not yet been fully appreciated.

 

About the Speaker

Dr. Susan Smith-Peter is Professor of History at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York. Her first monograph, Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia, was published with Brill in 2018 and she annotated and published the work of one of the first Russians to write in English, The Great Republic Tested by the Touch of Truth, by Aleksei Evstaf’ev, which came out with Slavica in 2022. This was conceived as a Russian answer to Alexei de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. She has published widely, including in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Kritika, and elsewhere. Dr. Smith-Peter is presently working on a new project dealing with the Siberian regionalists and their connections to the Ukrainians of Siberia and the Far East during the Russian Civil War.

Connecting with Zoom

This virtual lecture is presented live via Zoom. Registered users will be emailed a link to join this Zoom program. To get started, please download Zoom on your chosen device and explore the Frequently Asked Questions.

This program will be recorded and posted to the museum’s YouTube channel.

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