Suchergebnisse

People love a secret, as long as they are in on it. One might even argue that historians are more attracted to secrecy than the average scholar, or average individual, in that the tools we have for unearthing documentation from the past regularly trawl up long-dormant secrets. At one time, someone may have died to preserve this secret; for me, it is lying accessible in an archive. The challenge is not reading the secret – it is crafting an argument and a narrative that would make others care for this once tightly-held confidence. This fascination of access to privileged information, to being (whether licitly or not) in the know, and the rich texture that hidden material provides, partly explains the recurrent historiographical attention to secrecy. Historians get to have both secrecy and transparency at once, at least in many cases where the precious documents survive and are not still locked behind the classificatory walls of national-security states or profit-seeking megacorporations.

In the late 1860s, chemistry was rocked by a priority dispute over who discovered the periodic system of chemical elements: St. Petersburg chemist Dmitrii I. Mendeleev (1834–1907) or southern German chemist Lothar Meyer (1830–1895)? The dispute hinged upon whether publications in the Russian language "counted" within the credit system of European chemistry. This article excavates this dispute and places it in the context of the limited publishing opportunities in both Russian and German for chemists within the Russian Empire, and argues for the role of this particular argument in establishing the status of Russian as a viable international chemical language.

В конце 1860-х гг. химическое сообщество сотрясал спор о том, кому принадлежит приоритет открытия периодической системы хи-мических элементов: санкт-петербургскому химику Д. И. Менделееву (1834–1907) или южно-немецкому химику Юлиусу Лотару Мейеру (1830–1895). В основе спора лежали разногласия по поводу того, "за-считываются" ли публикации на русском языке в системе европейской химической науки. В статье реконструируется история этой полемики, рассматриваемой в контексте проблемы ограниченных возможностей научных публикаций для российских химиков как на русском, так и на немецком языках. Как доказывается в статье, именно спор между Менделеевым и Мейером привел к утверждению статуса русского как полноценного международного языка химической науки.

In his 1876Writer's Diary, novelist Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii wrote a series of three journalistic articles parodying both the contemporary movement of modern spiritualism and its principal critic in St. Petersburg, noted chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev. This article explores Dostoevskii's views on spiritualism and examines the rhetorical strategy he developed to help persuade Russians away from what he perceived as a dangerous mystical fad. Mendeleev had similar goals, but the two differed on the urgency of the problem—and hence the proper rhetoric for the task—and thus both spent as much time fighting the other as the movement they deplored. This article endeavors both to analyze a Russian scientific text alongside works traditionally considered more "rhetorical" and to explore in detail the specific involvement of Dostoevskii the journalist with contemporary issues in Russian culture.