Search Results

This chapter examines Dmitrii Mendeleev's reform of Russian education. The educational reform Mendeleev proposed during the last decade of his life encapsulated his fully articulated view of how expertise should be marshaled in Russian culture and thus stands as one of the best exemplars of Mendeleev's Imperial Turn. This reform contrasted sharply with the decentralized pedagogical approach of the 1863 statute that had structured Mendeleev's vision of the Great Reforms. Now, for him, the first step toward improving education was to ban general examinations, since they stifled individual innovation. Encouraging mindless regurgitation was no way to make Newtons. Instead, more attention should be paid to training teachers from the elementary level through university. The educational reform would be monitored by continually sending inspectors, drawn from the ranks of the most experienced teachers, to all corners of the empire to ensure equivalent levels of teaching—another instance of Mendeleev's belief in Imperial systems.

This chapter examines Dmitrii Mendeleev's formulation of the periodic system. The periodic system was the product of twin pedagogical trajectories: Mendeleev's personal trajectory through the educational institutions of St. Petersburg in his attempt to solidify a scientific career and an effort to introduce the totality of chemistry through a set of easily understood basic principles. Consequently, the periodic law emerged out of the periodic system of elements, the tabular classification that Mendeleev composed in early 1869 at St. Petersburg University. He created the periodic system to address a specific set of demands that arose in the composition of a new inorganic chemistry textbook—pedagogical problems of classification and organization. How the classification of elements became a periodic system and then a law of nature was intimately tied with how Mendeleev became increasingly secure at St. Petersburg University.

This chapter discusses Dmitrii Mendeleev's “Imperial Turn.” Mendeleev had two productive reactions to his rough treatment at the hands of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. First came disillusionment with the potential of local scientific societies to overcome personal prejudices. He concluded that perhaps such societies were not the best way to mediate cultural conflict in Imperial Russia. As such, Mendeleev began to reinterpret the legacy of the Great Reforms. From believing that they were about turning state power over to a newly created public sphere, he came to believe that the Reforms' significance lay in the power of the bureaucracy to transcend personal animosity for the greater good. In February 1882, Mendeleev outlined a reform program for an institution he had previously exempted from criticism: the Imperial Academy of Sciences. His second reaction to the Academy affair was to take to heart the image of a rugged individualist given to him by the Petersburg dailies.

This chapter details Dmitrii Mendeleev's turn to gas laws. In 1871, Mendeleev's successes lay far in the future. However, his bold predictions of 1871 had two glaring deficiencies: they were unsubstantiated, and they were not in the chemical tradition. The whole thing smacked of physics, and, as the chemist abandoned his half-hearted attempts to uncover his missing elements, his wavering attention shifted to that science. In the eyes of his peers, Mendeleev had abandoned his chemical guesses—and chemistry altogether—in favor of subsidized research on gas laws, of all things. This new, broadly conceived gas project would dominate his attention throughout the 1870s, but, in contrast to the repeated successes of the periodic law, every aspect of the effort would end in dramatic failure.

This chapter focuses on Dmitrii Mendeleev's rejection from the Academy of Sciences' chair in technology. In November 1880, Mendeleev was subjected to a personal humiliation that became a national scandal, with hundreds of Russia's most vocal intellectuals entering the fray. Four years earlier, after placing himself at the center of a commission to debunk Spiritualism, he had been for a time the darling of the liberal media. Now, he would become their darling once again—but not under the circumstances of his choosing. The cause of his fame and also his embarrassment was the very institution whose recognition he had coveted for so long: the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Having combated the Spiritualists, riding a crest of public acclaim, and with two successful elemental predictions to his credit, Mendeleev was confident of nomination for the Academy's full chair in technology. As such, his rejection sent shock waves throughout elite Petersburg, not least within the Academy itself.

This chapter looks at Dmitrii Mendeleev's final years. The first six years of the twentieth century—the last six of Mendeleev's life—were difficult for both the chemist and the empire he served. Beginning with widespread student rebellion in St. Petersburg in 1899, the tsarist regime met with increasingly vocal opposition from a broader spectrum of society than ever before. Meanwhile, Mendeleev confronted a series of chemical “attacks” to his periodic law. He sought salvation in his age-old Holy Grail—the ether—and attempted to save his system by appropriating certain threats to tame others. This strategy, while temporarily effective in defending the periodic system, would fail to safeguard his vision of an unfettered, rational autocracy, the axis of the Imperial Turn. Ultimately, Mendeleev's last years were lived in the shadow of disintegrating systems—scientific and political—to which he had devoted his entire career.

This chapter looks at the controversy surrounding Spiritualism in the 1870s. Considered by many a modernized religion more suited to the day's empirical advances, Spiritualism sparked substantial disagreement as to whether actual “spirits” of the departed were responsible for the phenomena that occurred in seances. In Russia in particular, where the Great Reforms had vigorously initiated debates over the place of scientific expertise in a modernizing state, Spiritualism became the center of a controversy about the status of religion, science, and superstition. A central episode in the history of Russian Spiritualism served as a microcosm of the concerns about science's relation to the disjointed society of the Great Reforms: the creation and work of the Commission for the Investigation of Mediumistic Phenomena. The Commission was set up in May 1875 at Dmitrii Mendeleev's instigation by the Russian Physical Society—a newly created sibling to the Russian Chemical Society.

This introductory chapter discusses Dmitrii Mendeleev's autocracy. Mendeleev was one of many Russians who borrowed very heavily from liberal rhetoric while pursuing ends such as autocracy or Russian chauvinism that mesh poorly with nineteenth-century conceptions of liberalism. A liberal working in the name of autocracy, Mendeleev supported the rule of law only insofar as it was the best way, in his view, to preserve traditions essential to Russian stability—traditions embodied in the institution of autocracy. By contrast, his Russian contemporaries who identified themselves with liberalism were liberals in the name of Russia. For them, liberalism linked Russia to the legal and political traditions of European progress. For Mendeleev, these liberals were deluded or misinformed—or simply dangerous—and he had no patience for them.

This concluding chapter assesses the importance of Dmitrii Mendeleev as an individual. One could in principle similarly follow the paths of many figures in Imperial Russia or in nineteenth-century science—or, in fact, in almost any place or time. Yet Mendeleev offers a particularly valuable perspective on the history of both Russia and chemistry. The educated elite in Imperial Petersburg was quite small, and individuals who were prominent in several groups—such as Sergei Witte or Feodor Dostoevsky—were able to imprint their concepts deeply on Russia's state or its culture. Mendeleev, on the other hand, unified artists, writers, scientists, and bureaucrats while preserving their traces in his sizable personal archive; his life illustrates what it was like to live and work in St. Petersburg. Moreover, his chemical ideas demonstrate how European science functioned, as well as how barriers of language and culture placed constraints on scientific attempts at attaining universality.