born Nov. 19, 1711, near Kholmogory, Russia
died April 15, 1765, St. Petersburg
Russian scientist, poet, and grammarian, considered the first great Russian linguistic reformer.
Educated in Russia and Germany, he established what became the standards for Russian verse in the Letter Concerning the Rules of Russian Versification . In 1745 he joined the faculty at the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences, where he made substantial contributions to the physical sciences. He later wrote a Russian grammar and worked to systematize the Russian literary language, which had been an amalgam of Church Slavonic and Russian vernacular. He also reorganized the academy, founded Moscow State University (which now bears his name), and created the first coloured-glass mosaics in Russia.