A Russian penfriend

摘要

It was sometime around 1980,when I was still a stamp collector,that I received a letter from a Russian chemist,Dr Igor E.Dolgy,proposing an exchange of stamps from our two countries.Years later I discovered chemists in other countries who had received similar invitations;some declined,but others,like me,joined in.For me and Igor,however,it began an exchange that lasted for 15 years until we finally lost touch.Dolgy was working at the N.D.Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.Nikolai Dimitrievich Zelinsky(1861-1953)completed his degree studies in 1884 at the Novorossiisky University near Odessa,and the following year,with support from a scholarship from the chemistry department,he went to Germany to gain research experience.He worked with Wislicenus at Leipzig and then Victor Meyer in Gbttingen,where he was the first to prepare dichlorodiethyl sulfide S(CH2CH2Cl)2 ...and the first to suffer such serious burns from it that he was hospitalised for several months.Years later,this substance was used for exactly that purpose on the battlefields of WorLd War I.Returning to Russia,Zelinsky was awarded his MSc and PhD degrees for work on stereochemistry and isomerism of organic compounds,and he was appointed to a chair at the University of Moscow in 1893.The Zelinsky Institute was created in 1934 by bringing together the laboratories of Zelinsky,A.E.Favorsky,V.N.Ipatiev and A.E.Chichibabin,with Favorsky as its first director.One of the later directors was A.N.Nesmyanov,so you can see that the senior members of the Institute constituted something of a Who's Who of Russian(later Soviet)chemistry.Zelinsky headed a department in the Institute and worked there on hydrocarbon chemistry and catalysis.This was a field in which Ipatiev made important contributions,especially after he migrated to America.