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 the crust of foreign barbarisms, and still more by his example than his precepts--which were pedantic--he displayed it in its native purity, and left it as an instrument ready tuned for a great player. He fought for knowledge, and did all he could to further the founding of the University of Moscow, which was done in 1755 by the Empress Elizabeth. This last event is one of the most important landmarks in the history of Russian culture.