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- Title
The reception of Haeckel in pre-revolutionary Russia and his impact on evolutionary theory.
- Authors
Kolchinsky, Eduard; Levit, Georgy S.
- Abstract
The "German Darwin" Ernst Haeckel was influential not only in Germany, but in non-German-speaking countries as well. Due to the widespread use of German as a language of science in the Russian Empire along with growing Russian–German links in various scientific fields, Haeckel directly and indirectly influenced Russian intellectual landscape. The objective of the present paper is to investigate Haeckel's impact on Russian biology before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We outline the transfer of Haeckelian ideas to Russia and its adaptation to a national research tradition. Haeckel's ideas influenced the most crucial Russian evolutionists such as brothers Alexander and Vladimir Kovalevsky, Ilya (Elias) Metschnikoff, Mikhail Menzbier (Menzbir), Karl Kessler, Andrei Famintzyn, and Konstantin Mereschkowsky. At the same time, Haeckel's speculative hypotheses and his attempts to convert Darwinism into a universal worldview by promoting monism found little support in biological circles of Russia. Russian biology grew as an empirical science having weak connections to "romantic philosophy" as German biology did. This, among others, explains the acceptance of Haeckel as a biologist and the rejection of Haeckel as a philosopher by crucial Russian evolutionists.
- Subjects
RUSSIA; HAECKEL, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August, 1834-1919; EVOLUTIONARY theories; GERMAN language; SCIENTIFIC language; RUSSIAN language; AFRICAN swine fever; BIOLOGISTS
- Publication
Theory in Biosciences, 2019, Vol 138, Issue 1, p73
- ISSN
1431-7613
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12064-019-00280-8