[8] February 27 - Russian schools of science
Section outline
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By the late nineteenth century the ethnically diverse scientists of the Romanov Empire came to embrace the social mechanism of Russian science: the school, "in the sense that research methods peculiar to scientists of Russian nationality, and that in many areas their own Russian schools have already been formed, schools which take their origin from scientists who are either of Russian nationality or from scientists of non-Russian origin active on Russian soil (thus there is a Russian medical school, there is a Russian chemical school, etc.), and in some areas these schools are evidently in the process of forming (in history, in philology). In this fashion there is undoubtedly a phenomenon at the present time which we consider ourselves entitled to call Russian science."
Presentations: Marina, Dmitrii
Assigned reading:
А. M. Butlerov, "[A Russian or only an Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg?]" (1882), in Сочинения, vol. 3 (1958), 118-138 (abridged). (Original Russian text.)
Michael D. Gordin, “Points Critical: Russia, Ireland, and Science at the Boundary” Osiris 24 (2009): 99–119.
Russian options: V. I. Modestov, Русская наука за последние двадцать пять лет (1890).
A. I. Vvedenskii, "Возможна ли национальность в науке?" (1900).
N. Kareev, "Мечта и правда о русской науке. (По случайному поводу, но не по случайной причине)," Русская мысль 5 no. 12 (1884): 100-135. (Concentrate on Part I and skim the rest.)
German option: "Russland," Allgemeine Zeitung (23 December 1880): 5264.
Suggested reading:
Daniel A. Alexandrov, “The politics of scientific ‘kruzhok’: Study circles in Russian science and their transformation in the 1920s,” in Na perelome: Sovietskaia biologiia v 20-30-kh godakh, edited by E. I. Kolchinskii, 255–67 (St. Petersburg, 1997).Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals, Osiris 8 (1993).
D. Gouzévitch, “Научная школа как форма деятельности,” Вопросы истории естествознания и техники, no. 1 (2003): 64–93.Karl Hall, “The Schooling of Lev Landau: The European Context of Postrevolutionary Soviet Theoretical Physics,” Osiris 23 (2008): 230–59.Michael D. Gordin, “The Heidelberg Circle: German Inflections on the Professionalization of Russian Chemistry in the 1860s,” Osiris 23 (2008): 23–49.Michael D. Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (2004). (Cf. pp. 121-126 for his indispensable reading of Butlerov and the Mendeleev affair.) (By contrast, see the high-Stalinist view of the affair.)I. S. Dmitriev, "Скучная история (о неизбрании Д. И. Менделеева в Императорскую академию наук в 1880 г.)," Вопросы истории естествознания и техники 23 (2003): 231-280.Iu. A. Khramov, Научные школы в физике (1987).Marina V. Loskutova, “S"ezdy russkikh estestvoispytatelei i professorsko-prepodavatel’skii korpus universitetov rossiiskoi imperii (1860-1910-e gg.),” in Professorsko-prepodavatel’skii korpus rossiisskikh universitetov 1884-1917 gg., edited by M. V. Gribovskii and S. F. Fominykh (2012), 76–93.See also Olga Valkova's research on female participation in the Russian congresses of scientists and physicians.Loren R. Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (2009).Andy Bruno, “A Eurasian Mineralogy: Aleksandr Fersman’s Conception of the Natural World,” Isis 107 (2016): 518–39.
Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society (1978).J. B. Morrell, “The Chemist Breeders: The Research Schools of Liebig and Thomas Thomson,” Ambix 19 (1972): 1–46.
Loren Graham, "Russia and the former USSR," in Hugh Slotten, ed., Modern Science in National, Transnational, and Global Context, vol. 8 in The Cambridge History of Science (2019), 278-304. -