The Space Between Language and Gut
by Kate Nicholls
Sitting at my desk in Rome, creating a class on the poetic wonder of the Periodic Table and watching the River Tiber rolling by, I stumbled upon an article about Dmitri Mendeleev’s mother. I had never heard of Maria Mendeleeva, and frankly I hadn’t given her a moment’s thought. Yet, by the time the sun had set behind domes and rooftops, an indelible picture was painted on my mind. The brief article about the Russian genius’s mother, written by the Australian chemist Alf Larcher, had touched my heart.
Maria Mendeleeva was born in January, 1793. Her mother died months later. She and her older brother were raised in Siberia by a loving, mentally fragile father and their nanny. Maria was a clever child and hungered for new knowledge and education. However, due to her sex, she was denied access to formal school. Undaunted and supported by her father’s library, she taught herself. Aged sixteen, she married Ivan Mendeleev, a gently radical teacher, and she bore seventeen children, of whom Dmitri was the youngest. When Ivan went blind, Maria took over her grandfather’s run-down glass factory to support her family. Life in 19th-century Siberia was harsh, to say the least, and her journey was elemental. After losing her fragile livelihood to fire, she determined her teenage son should not languish in the backwaters. Thus, despite being infected with tuberculosis, widowed and impoverished, she undertook a perilous two -thousand -mile journey, with Dmitri and one of his sisters, over the Urals to get to her son to university. Larcher’s admiration and affection for Maria radiated from his article, and I needed to know more about this woman and her family.
Just as there were gaps in Mendeleev’s first periodic table of the elements, there were tantalising gaps in Maria’s story. Who influenced her childhood? What was her nanny’s story? Maria’s marriage was it a love story? What drove her lifelong curiosity? How did she maintain her passion for female education against so many odds? Why was Ivan sacked from a prestigious job? Dmitri was the youngest of a tribe of siblings. Who were Maria’s other children? As a mother of five, I knew first-hand that families are evolving organisms energised by entangled stories meshing, diverging, nourishing, starving, wounding, healing, loving and inspiring: unique familial networks reach back into the deep past and forward into an unpredictable future. Yearning to meet each Mendeleev, I was frustrated by stale information: all I could find were different versions of the same events. But a telephone call with a friend changed everything.
He told me about a rare book of family letters written between 1837 and 1850 and compiled by one of Maria’s granddaughters. This was gold. Using DeepL to translate, and supported by my Russian students and friends, I read the letters over and over again, immersing myself in the Mendeleev’s daily life. The little narratives were emotionally visceral and told an epic domestic story. The shifts in tone, depending on to whom Maria was writing, revealed the turmoil of her inner life and her keen emotional intelligence. Household members and acolytes fascinated me as much as the family. I had to get under the covers of each story. Hunting down the details of Maria Mendeleeva’s life was complicated, but caring about her and the people she loved was easy: I grew to love them too. In time the book became a novel. Yet still there were many gaps to fill. Context was critical.
What socio- political events would have affected the family? What information would have been available? How long would it have taken for them to receive it? What books would have been in her ever-expanding library? What food would they have eaten? How was glass made? What scientific innovations would she have been familiar with? The list of questions grew longer every day. Sharing Maria’s insatiable curiosity, I delved deep and during the next four years tantalising details emerged from biographies, 18th- and 19th-century scientific papers, historical lectures, historical papers, letters, and precious primary sources: scratchy Cyrillic letters on yellowed official documents revealed facts about Ivan’s working life that helped me to colour in between the lines with confidence. I delighted in every detail. Trifles carried tender messages. Little truths revealed deep experience. Nothing was insignificant.
During my research, a nuanced word taught me a valuable lesson about the connection between language and gut. The word was cult. It carried dark connotations. It appeared in all translations. After asking Russian friends to verify the meaning, and speaking to academics who were experts in 19th-century Siberian religious cults, there was no getting away from the fact that one of Maria’s daughters had joined a cult and, in doing so, had broken her mother’s heart. That is what language told me. But my gut knew language had failed to bridge the space between experience and expression. As a novelist, the darker story offered rich pickings, but by then I had learned to honour the Mendeleev family’s values. I understood the strength of Maria’s faith and the profound role Eastern Orthodox Christianity played in Ivan’s life. No imaginative leap led me to believe their principled daughter would have joined a cult. So, I waited. A year later, while reading a paper about Dmitri Mendeleev’s return to the village where his mother had run her glass factory, it was noted that one of his sisters, guided by one of Maria’s friends, had become devoted to the teachings of the renegade missionary Michael Glukharev. Here at last was solid ground. Glukharev’s controversial, yet humanitarian ideals meshed with many Mendeleev family principles, and I had read letters exchanged between Maria and a friend who had declined marriage to follow an egalitarian missionary’s teachings. Things were falling into place. I was glad I had followed my gut and waited. Fact was more interesting than fiction.
The drama of the narrative required no embellishment: it was driven by real-life events that tumbled one upon another, at times so rapidly that I needed to give the reader a respite. The evolution of Mendeleev’s dynamic marriage was shaped by moral, environmental, emotional and socio-political challenges. Their story was intensely human: they loved and struggled while juggling the needs of self and other, and, as a mother, I identified with Maria’s flaws and frustrations as easily as I did with the couple’s parental mistakes. The challenges the 19th-century family encountered were familiar. However, during my research, I encountered a ‘fact’ that was both an embellishment and an injustice.
It was said that Dmitri was Maria’s favourite child. I found no data to support that. It was clear she and Ivan loved their children with equal passion. It was true that, as the youngest, Dmitri held a privileged place in the family, and it was true that Maria’s final hopes and dreams lay with him, but Ivan and Maria loved and worried about all their children. I was to discover that it was the Mendeleev’s oldest son Vanechka, about whom little is commonly known, whose story impacted the trajectory of family life. The more I learned about the troubled boy, born into a grieving family, the more I sympathised with him. Soon I realised Vanechka’s experience was pivotal. Dmitri was to become the famous genius, but he was part of a close-knit tribe of siblings each supported by parents who shared a complex, maturing love for each other and their family.
Did Ivan and Maria view the world from the same perspective? Of course not. In their own way Ivan and Maria navigated working life, domestic life, the impact of grief, fulfilling personal desires, and parental hopes. 19th- and 21st-century challenges come in many flavours, but the basic ingredients are the same.
Writing about Maria Mendeleeva has been humbling and enriching. I will be forever grateful to the chemist on the other side of the world who cared enough to write an article about a forgotten woman in Siberia and post it online. Today many women are living unheard and unseen lives: their stories are waiting to be told. We are entangled in the lives of those unknown to us. Our small lives generate large ripples that undisturbed spread outwards towards infinity.
Kate Nicholls was born in the UK in 1954. Raised in a theatrical family, she had a successful acting career but gave it up to study evolutionary biology. She raised and homeschooled her five children while researching lions in the Okavango Delta. A passionate believer in liberal arts education she founded a homeschool company in 2011. She lives happily in Rome where she studies, teaches and writes overlooking the Tiber. She is the author of Under the Camelthorn Tree; (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019).
