| This dissertation explores the career of Russian chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907) in the context of the late Imperial Russia from the 1861 Emancipation of the serfs to the Revolution of 1905. At the heart of Mendeleev's activities both in chemistry and in politics was the question of order. Throughout his life, Mendeleev typified a conservative reformism, appropriating selected elements of past tradition to produce stable frameworks by which state, culture, and science could gradually evolve. The Emancipation and the consequent Great Reforms provided professionals like Mendeleev with unheard-of opportunities to advance in the vibrant culture of St. Petersburg, and Mendeleev took advantage of his local resources to craft a series of “ordered societies.” These societies embodied heterogeneously organized dispositions of expertise designed to mediate elements of the natural and social worlds and to stave off the threats of disintegration. This study shifts the emphasis of both late Imperial Russian history and the history of chemistry from “revolutionary” activities toward a cultural history of the place of conservatism in chemistry and in Russia.; Seven focused case studies form the core of this narrative, beginning with Mendeleev's most famous accomplishment—the formulation of the periodic system of chemical elements in 1869. Faced with pedagogical and financial pressures in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, Mendeleev appropriated elements of older organic chemistry and imported them into his textbook in inorganic chemistry. From this starting point, Mendeleev moved on to an experimental gas program lavishly funded by the Russian Technical Society, battles against Petersburg Spiritualists through an ad hoc commission, cultural celebrity following his rejection from the Academy of Sciences, consultation on economics for the Ministry of Finances, the Directorship of the Chief Bureau of Weights and Measures, and research on a form of smokeless gunpowder for the Navy. Each of these cases demonstrates both a conservative approach to change and a deep intertwining of both the chemical and social worlds, which Mendeleev used both as resources and models in his constant quest for stability and order. |
