The Fourth Net
His fate was probably to blame. As if through a whirlpool, he kept being drawn again and again into the wide world, into the irrepressible bustle of life and science. Half the Academy had already been lured across to St. Petersburg and Moscow, where Lomonosov had stirred up the putrid mud of illiteracy and stopped up the gullets of the Germans, who had croaked for so many years about the utter ignorance of the descendants of the wild Scythians. They had forsaken their alma mater and had set off to learn, to teach others, to grab titles and support the heavy vault of the throne with their heads. It was as if a storm had passed over old Kyiv. The miserable brotherhood, which had only the sonorous sounds of Latin to their credit, renounced their near and dear ones, the steppe
