Dmitri Mendeleev’s “cherished thoughts”

February 8, 2020 marks the 186th anniversary of Dmitri Mendeleev’s birth, the great scientist and chemist who discovered the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements; an encyclopedist and a statesman who had all his original and comprehensive eyes. A year ago, on the occasion of the 185th anniversary of the scientist’s birth, the Presidential Library built up the electronic collection “Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907)”. It included Mendeleev’s works, correspondence, archival documents and studies relating to his scientific, pedagogical, social activities, and much more.

Mendeleev was the seventeenth child in the family of the director of the Tobolsk gymnasium. He was in the first year when his father went blind, and his mother, in order to financially support the family, took up the management of the glass factory. Maria Dmitrievna often took her young son to production, where he spent hours watching the process of making glass, asking questions to masters...

After graduating from a gymnasium in Tobolsk, Mendeleev was admitted to the department of natural sciences of the physical and mathematical faculty of the Main Pedagogical Institute in St. Petersburg. During this period, he became seriously ill: doctors assumed the last degree of consumption. But it turned out that the true cause of the disease was not at all fatal and not even very dangerous heart valve disease.

“Imagine a thin, blue-eyed young man, weakened by the loss of blood and even worse feeling from being in bed. Stillness depresses him. He reads and writes a lot - more than hospital rules allow”, - we read in the book of O. Pisarzhevsky “Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev” (1951). The disease did not prevent Mendeleev from graduating from college with a gold medal in 1855.

“The largest accomplishment of the scientific genius of Mendeleev was the discovery of the mutual connection of all atoms in the universe, which found its expression in the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements”, - Pisarzhevsky further says in the publication “Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev”. “This law, which Mendeleev himself worked on for almost forty years, finding more and more confirmation of his discovery, over time has gained the significance of the deepest law of nature”.

People know and honor Dmitri Ivanovich not only as a brilliant scientist and great creator of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements, but also as a responsible citizen.

The materials of the collection of the Presidential Library perfectly show that the interests of Mendeleev were much broader than the study of chemistry. He was engaged in research in the fields of physics, meteorology, geology, instrument engineering, economics and even aeronautics, was one of the founders of modern metrology. In addition, the Presidential Library’s collections contain documents representing Mendeleev as a philosopher and one of the first Russian sociologists. The economic, political and social science questions raised by scientists more than a century ago remain relevant today.

At the dawn of the industrialization of agrarian Russia, Dmitri Ivanovich worked on "On the conditions for the development of factory business in Russia", wrote such works as "Fundamentals of factory industry", "Where to build oil plants?" There is not enough knowledge - he goes abroad to study, about which he tells in detail "The case of the assignment of an associate professor of St. Petersburg University Dmitri Mendeleev abroad, for two years, for scientific purposes, with the assignment of benefits in 1858 and 1859".

Where to get funds for economic development? And a chemical scientist was thinking about this basic economic issue, proposing solutions to the problem.

In the research paper “Perception of Russia”, which is available on the Presidential Library’s portal, Mendeleev made a capacious analysis of the first systematic general Russian census of the population of the Russian Empire, which began in 1897 and ended in 1905.

Deeply and accurately, the scientist was aware of social problems. In his final work Cherished Thoughts (1905), written two years before his death, he raises them, uncompromisingly considering the most pressing issues that worried and continue to worry Russian society. Mendeleev could not remain silent and over the years more and more needed to share his most cherished thoughts about the transformation of Russia, as evidenced by the following lines: “When the seventh decade ends, when the dreaminess of youth and the seemingly determined determination of mature years were digested in the cauldron of life experience, < ...> when the inevitable necessity and the complete naturalness of past and upcoming gradual but decisive changes appear in the mind, then you try to forget that “the thought uttered is a lie”, and of silencing required to write "cherished thoughts"