A tyrannical stepmother forced him to endure hunger and cold, and to do his modest studying and reading in desert spots.
Accordingly, when he obtained from the village authorities the permission requisite for absenting himself for the space of ten months, he failed to return, and was inscribed among the "fugitives." In the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy at Moscow, which he managed to enter, and where he remained for five years, he distanced all competitors (though he lived, as he said, "in incredible poverty," on three kopeks a day), devoting himself chiefly to the natural sciences.

At the age of twenty-two he was sent abroad by the government to study metallurgy at Freiburg.

There and elsewhere abroad, in England, France, and Holland, he remained for five years, studying various practical branches.
In 1742 he became assistant professor at the Academy of Science in St.
Petersburg, at a wretched salary, and in 1748 professor, lecturing on physical geography, chemistry, natural history, poetry, and the Russian language.

He also was indefatigable in translating scientific works from the French and German, in writing a work on mining, a rhetoric-book, and so forth.

By 1757 he had written many odes, poetical epistles, idyls, and the like; verses on festival occasions and tragedies, to order; a Russian grammar; and had collected materials for a history, and planned extensive philological researches.