Lev Pisarzhevskii

Born Feb. 1 (13), 1874, in Kishinev; died Mar. 23, 1938, in Dnepropetrovsk. Soviet chemist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1930; corresponding member, 1928). Member of the CPSU from 1930.

Pisarzhevskii graduated from Novorossiia University in Odessa in 1896. He was a professor at the University of Iur’ev (now Tartu) from 1904 to 1908. From 1908 he was a professor at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute; he resigned in 1911 in protest against the reactionary policies of the minister of education, L. A. Kasso. From 1911 to 1913, Pisarzhevskii taught at the Bestuz-hev Courses and the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg. After 1913 he was a professor at the Mining Institute and the university in Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk). In 1927 he was appointed director of the Ukrainian Institute of Physical Chemistry (now the L. V. Pisarzhevskii Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR), which he founded. He also worked at the Polytechnic Institute in Tbilisi from 1929 to 1934.

Together with P. G. Melikishvili, Pisarzhevskii obtained and studied a number of new peroxide compounds. He studied the thermodynamics of reactions in solutions, proposed a theory of equilibrium electrode processes, and completed a number of studies that laid the foundation for the electron theory of heterogeneous catalysis. He was the author of the textbooks Introduction to Chemistry (1926) and Inorganic Chemistry (1930; with M. A. Rosenberg). He received the V. I. Lenin Award (1930) and the Order of Lenin.