Alchemy and the Virtues of Stones in Muscovy

Abstract

There are only two modern book-length studies of alchemy in Russian; they are by the same author and are concerned with alchemy as a cultural phenomenon without reference to alchemy in Russia.¹ Modern general histories of Russian science which include some history of chemistry have for the most part, until recently, avoided alchemy as a “pseudo-science”, more to be condemned as a western aberration than examined historically.² Rainov’s standard history of science in Russia up to the seventeenth century³ has no entry in the index for alchemy at all, although he does not ignore the subject entirely; the Academy of Sciences’ standard history of Russian science⁴ denies, probably correctly, that Russian craftsmen ever engaged in alchemy or that there is any evidence for the existence of alchemy in Russia before the fifteenth century; and Kuzakov in a recent work⁵ correctly notes that some non-alchemical works of what he calls, without further comment, the “West European alchemists—Albertus Magnus, Ramon Lull and Michael Scot”⁶ were known in seventeenth-century Russia but incorrectly states, as we shall see, that not a single alchemical treatise in Russian is known.