In 1759, the German-born physicist Franz Ulrich Theodor Aepinus published "Tentamen theoriae electricitatis et magnetismi" in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he served at the court of Catherine the Great. This work was the first to apply mathematical analysis to electrical and magnetic phenomena, treating electrical attraction and repulsion as inverse-square forces analogous to Newtonian gravity. Written at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Aepinus's treatise represented a major advance in the theoretical understanding of electricity, though its heavy mathematics limited its initial readership.

Aepinus's mathematical treatment of electricity, written in Latin at the Russian imperial court, illustrates the international and multilingual nature of Enlightenment scientific culture that European literary figures navigated. The idea that electrical forces could be described by the same mathematical laws as celestial mechanics reinforced the Enlightenment literary theme of universal order and the unity of nature. Catherine the Great's patronage of electrical science in St. Petersburg also connected electricity to the broader literary and philosophical culture of the Russian Enlightenment, which produced writers like Alexander Pushkin a generation later.