"Steven A. Usitalo's The Invention of Mikhail Lomonosov: A Russian National Myth is a pioneering study of Mikhail Lomonosov's scholarly reputation in the Russian cultural imagination. As every Russian has been learning in school beginning in the mid-nineteenth century until the present, Lomonosov was a polymath, a genius to whom Russian culture is indebted for the creation of not only poetry but also of virtually every other scientific and social discipline, including chemistry, physics, geography, history, and linguistics. The author convincingly demonstrates the mythological nature of this reputation and traces its emergence from the eighteenth-century biographies of Lomonosov to the work of the most enthusiastic twentieth-century historian of Lomonosov's life and work, Boris Menshutkin, whose many articles and books have solidified and perpetuated the myth of Lomonosov as the greatest national genius. Erudite and skillfully argued, the book is bound to become obligatory reading for every Lomonosov scholar, science and literary historians alike.".