During the first half of the XVIIIth century in Russia, deep social and cultural changes led to a chaotic linguistic situation. The Russian scholar Michail Lomonosov played a key role in the grammatical and lexical organization of the Russian literary language around the middle of the century. His contributions are reviewed and their importance analyzed in the present thesis. / Chapter One provides an analysis of the linguistic situation during the first half of the XVIIIth century. The role and the functions of different linguistic elements are examined, including West European lexical borrowings, the native Russian, the Church Slavonic, and their mutual interactions. / Chapters two and three analyze M. Lomonosov's role in the standardization of Russian grammar and vocabulary by examining his two major philological works: the "Rossiaeiskaeiia Grammatika" and the article "Predislovie o polbze knig tserkovnikh v rossiiskom yazike." / Although Lomonosov's merit is widely acknowledged among scholars, the importance of his stylistic theory has been challenged lately. In Chapter Four, Lomonosov's linguistic contributions to the development of the modern Russian literary language are weighed and assessed against these critical arguments.

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