Early Years
Zaitsev was the son of a tea and sugar merchant, who had decided that his son should follow him into the mercantile trades. However, at the urging of his maternal uncle, the physicist Lyapunov, Zaitsev was allowed to enroll at Kazan' university to study economics. At this time, Russia was experimenting with the cameral system, meaning that every student graduating in law and economics from a Russian university had to take two years of chemistry. Zaitsev was thus introduced to Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov.
Early on, Zaitsev began working with Butlerov, who clearly saw in him an excellent laboratory chemist, and whose later actions showed that he felt that Zaitsev was an asset to Russian organic chemistry. On the death of his father, Zaitsev took his diplom in 1862, and immediately went to western Europe to further his chemical studies, studying with Hermann Kolbe at Marburg, and with Charles Adolphe Wurtz in Paris. This went directly against the accepted norms of the day, which had the student complete the kandidat degree (approximately equivalent to today's doctor of philosophy's degree), and then spend two or three years in study abroad (a komandirovka) before returning to Russia as a salaried laboratory assistant studying for the doctorate.
Between 1862 and 1864, he studied with Kolbe at Marburg, and here Zaitsev discovered the sulfoxides and trialkylsulfonium salts. In 1864, he moved to Paris, where he worked for a year in the laboratories of Wurtz before returning to Marburg in 1865. At this time, Kolbe accepted the call to Leipzig, and Zaitsev, now out of money, returned to Russia. On his return, Zaitsev again joined Butlerov as an unpaid assistant. During this time, he wrote a successful kandidat dissertation.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Mikhaylovich Zaytsev
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