W. F. Ryan

Alchemy and the virtues of stones in Muscovy

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.