Constantly striving to modernize his country, Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov had a tremendous influence on a wide range of fields of science and culture: the formation of the literary language and classical versification, chemistry, optics, oceanography, the study of atmospheric electricity, history, astronomy, and more. No wonder that he was an extraordinarily versatile and unconventional personality—both in the good sense and the bad. By drawing on a broad range of sources, literary historian Valery Shubin painstakingly reconstructs both Lomonosov’s path as an innovator and Lomonosov’s portrait as a person.