4. The Hereafter:
Words and Deeds
© 2018 Nikolai Krementsov https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0144.04
“...Every new endeavor has to wait for its time, only then will it come into its own and fulfill its highest purpose.”
After the appearance of “Human Perfection and Degeneration” on the pages of Russian Word, their author and their publisher parted ways as suddenly as they had come together just a few months earlier. In February 1866, the imperial authorities suspended publication of Russian Word and, in early June, shut down the journal altogether. Nevertheless, in late August, Grigorii Blagosvetlov released Vasilii Florinskii’s essays in book format. He kept the book in print for more than a decade, regularly advertising it on the pages of Deed, a new journal he created after the prohibition of Russian Word. Florinskii, however, completely withdrew from further collaboration with Blagosvetlov and never published anything in his new journal, even though it continued to carry numerous articles that explored various issues raised by Florinskii’s treatise.
Much as with Francis Galton’s early works, at the time of their publication, Florinskii’s essays went virtually unnoticed. Similar to Galton’s first studies on “hereditary talents,” Florinskii’s concept of “human perfection and degeneration” held a promise of generating a viable research programme, stirring public opinion, and even initiating policy change. But it proved impotent in raising the interest of either the scholarly community, or the general public, to say nothing of the imperial bureaucracy. Furthermore, in contrast to Galton — who spent several decades and a large portion of his personal fortune gathering support for his eugenic ideas, methods, and concepts in the course of his long and distinguished career — Florinskii never returned to the subject of his eugamic treatise in any of his later works and did absolutely nothing to promote it among his colleagues or the general public. He found other avenues for applying his talents and “bringing benefits” to his Fatherland.
Numerous personal, social, scientific, and political factors contributed to the sudden end of what at first had seemed a very productive collaboration, as well as to Florinskii’s abandonment of a promising line of inquiry and to its general neglect by its intended Russian audience.
Blagosvetlov’s Deed
Blagosvetlov was more than pleased with “Human Perfection and Degeneration” and had certainly counted on Florinskii’s continuing collaboration with Russian Word. In the December 1865 announcement of the journal’s plans for the next year, the publisher stated that Florinskii would become a “regular contributor,”1 which would have been hardly possible without the professor’s explicit permission and commitment. The first 1866 issue came out on 15 February, but it did not contain anything written by Florinskii. The very next day, by order of the minister of internal affairs, publication of Russian Word was suspended for five months.2 Inventive as ever, Blagosvetlov decided to circumvent the order and to fulfill, as best he could under the circumstances, his obligations to journal subscribers by publishing at least some of the materials he had promised would appear in Russian Word as a two-volume “learned-literary” collection, under the general title The Ray. Each volume was about 800 pages in length, so that together the two volumes roughly equaled the length of the five issues of Russian Word, which subscribers would not be receiving due to the journal’s suspension. An announcement of the new collection published in early March again listed Florinskii, along with Dmitrii Pisarev and Petr Tkachev, as a contributor.3 Yet when the first volume came out a few weeks later, Florinskii was not among its authors.4 Nor did he contribute to the second volume that was scheduled to appear in early May, but was seized by the censorship office and eventually destroyed.5
Perhaps, Blagosvetlov was hoping that Florinskii would resume writing for Russian Word after the journal’s suspension was to end in July. But on the morning of 4 April, Dmitrii Karakozov, a 25-year-old member of a small “revolutionary circle” of Moscow University’s students, tried to assassinate Alexander II.6 His shot went wide and he was arrested on the spot. Karakozov’s attempt on his life profoundly shook the emperor and his closest advisors. It opened the gates to a country-wide search for “revolutionaries,” especially among the students and recent graduates of the empire’s schools of higher learning. Not unexpectedly, Russian Word — the oracle of the young generation — became one of the first victims of this witch-hunt. Ten days after Karakozov’s assassination attempt, on 14 April, the secret police arrested Blagosvetlov and, two weeks later, Zaitsev. Although both were soon released (Blagosvetlov in early June and Zaitsev in early July) because the secret police could not find any direct links between the assassin and Russian Word, on 3 June, the journal, together with The Contemporary, was shut down for good.7
We can only speculate on why Florinskii stopped writing for Blagosvetlov and his journal before this happened. Once again, available documents shed no light on the subject. Various considerations might have influenced this decision. To begin with, during the academic year of 1865-1866, Florinskii was busier than ever with his work at the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. He was teaching his regular courses and running the women’s ward. On 6 November 1865, on top of these duties, the IMSA Council put him in charge of lecturing on pediatrics and establishing a pediatric clinic.8 He also continued writing his regular 100-plus-page surveys of current foreign literature on his specialties for the Military-Medical Journal,9 as well as other scholarly works.10 Indeed, he got so busy that he declined to continue as the scientific secretary of the St. Petersburg Society of Russian Physicians, even though the society’s members had unanimously re-elected him to the post.11
Given Florinskii’s incredible productivity, if he really wanted to, he probably would have found time to write for Russian Word. But, at the beginning of January 1866, just as the November 1865 issue of the journal that carried the opening part of his third essay came out, Florinskii found himself at the center of a public scandal. On 11 January, Petersburg Leaf, Russia’s first tabloid,12 published a letter by a certain Neonilla Kondrat’eva.13 The letter claimed that a month earlier, on 13 December 1865, Florinskii had rudely refused to visit the terribly sick three-year-old child of the Andreevs family that occupied an apartment two stories up from Florinskii’s own. Kondrat’eva alleged that Florinskii had demanded a payment of 25 rubles for the visit, which was way beyond the means of low-level civil servant Andreev, and even the tears and pleadings of the child’s mother could not move him to change his mind.
Florinskii was outraged. The same evening he knocked on the Andreevs’ door and demanded an explanation. Mr. Andreev, the child’s father, declared that he did not know anything about the matter and even gave Florinskii a written deposition to that effect. Florinskii sent an indignant letter to the newspaper’s editor, with Mr. Andreev’s deposition attached. Florinskii explained that the first time he had ever heard about the sick child was from the newspaper and that the entire story was nothing but a fabrication. He demanded that Petersburg Leaf publish a retraction and provide him with Kondrat’eva’s address, so that he could ask her personally where she had gotten her story. Four days later, the editor did publish Florinskii’s letter along with Mr. Andreev’s deposition, but he refused to give Florinskii the address of his accuser.14 Furthermore, in the same issue, the tabloid carried a long letter signed by Mrs. Andreeva, the child’s mother, who repudiated her husband’s deposition. She claimed that Kondrat’eva had told the truth, while Florinskii had lied about the whole affair and had actually threatened her husband, forcing him to write the deposition.15
Apparently, Florinskii again demanded that the tabloid provide him with the address of Kondrat’eva and was again refused. He clearly began to suspect that “Neonilla” was fictional because, two days later, he wrote to the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee, asking for help in finding out the real name and address of “Neonilla Kondrat’eva.”16 He obviously thought that the censorship officials would know who was hiding under the pseudonym. But the censors replied that they did not and that he could only find out the real name of this person through a court decision, if he were to press charges against the newspaper and the author of the slanderous publication. Florinskii decided to do exactly that.
In the middle of this sordid affair, on 23 January, Florinskii’s wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter christened Olga. This joyful event perhaps helped calm Florinskii’s outrage. But he did not let the matter slide. He hired a lawyer and filed charges against Petersburg Leaf with the St. Petersburg Criminal Court, which in due time began an investigation.17 Nevertheless, the tabloid continued to harass the doctor by publishing “is he guilty, or not” commentaries and letters “from our readers.”18 The court investigation dragged on for nearly three months, during which Florinskii himself, his students, his colleagues, and even his superiors at the IMSA gave their testimonies. The testimonies proved that the stories of both Neonilla Kondrat’eva and Mrs. Andreeva were indeed a fabrication. On the morning of 13 December 1865, when, as Mrs. Andreeva claimed, she had pleaded with Florinskii to see her sick child, the professor had actually been lecturing and spent the rest of the day, until the late afternoon, at the IMSA clinics.19 The court held hearings on Florinskii’s case and on 20 May delivered its verdict: the editor of Petersburg Leaf was sentenced to four months and Mrs. Andreeva to two months in jail, while publication of the newspaper was suspended for one month.20 But the author of the first slanderous letter, a certain Mr. Balabolkin, who had hidden under the pseudonym of “Neonilla Kondrat’eva,” was acquitted.21
The court investigation and decision cleared Florinskii’s name but did not answer the key question: who had initiated the whole affair and why. In his testimony to the court, Balabolkin claimed that he did not write the letter, but only “corrected its literary style.” Yet he refused to explain where and how he had obtained the letter in the first place. The newspaper’s editor declared that he did not know either Florinskii or Mrs. Andreeva and hence had no personal stake in the matter. Balabolkin was a regular contributor to his newspaper, he explained, and he had relied on the reporter’s judgement.22 At the trial, which was held after Blagosvetlov’s arrest and imprisonment, the editor pointedly noted that Florinskii was a “former contributor to the liberal journal Russian Word.” He suggested that in accusing the professor, Mrs. Andreeva had “either been insane or deliberately served as a tool of someone’s revenge.” But he did not venture a guess at who exactly that “someone” might have been and why that “someone” would seek revenge against Florinskii.
The city’s major newspapers, Voice and St. Petersburg News, published reports on the case, along with indignant editorials against the tabloid and its editor.23 Medical Herald also published the court verdict to let the medical community know that all the accusations against one of its members were nothing but slander.24 Florinskii was vindicated, but he probably could not help wondering why he had been targeted by the newspaper. He might have thought that the major reason for the whole affair was that publishing his essays in Russian Word made him a public figure, and thus “fair game” for public scrutiny, even if it took the form of slander. Perhaps this encounter with the “free press” made him wish to stay away from the public eye altogether and to retreat to the relative obscurity of his profession.
A month later Florinskii received a further and much more compelling incentive to do just that. As a result of the Karakozov Affair, on 13 May, Alexander II issued a special edict on “measures to counteract the spread of false doctrines that undermine the very foundations of Faith.”25 The edict in part stated: “[Divine] Providence mercifully opened the eyes of Russia to what consequences could be expected from strivings and thinking that dare to encroach on everything sacred, on religious beliefs, on the foundations of family life, on property rights, on obedience to the law, and on respect towards the powers that be.” The edict commanded top-level state functionaries to pay special attention to “the upbringing of youth” and to make sure that such upbringing was directed by “the spirit of religion, respect of property rights, and maintenance of the basic principles of social order.” The emperor demanded that “the higher schools of all agencies allow neither open nor secret propaganda of those destructive doctrines that are alien to all the conditions of moral and material wellbeing of the people.”
Less than a month later, on 7 June, war minister Dmitrii Miliutin sent a special letter, accompanied by a copy of the imperial edict, to the IMSA president.26 The minister commanded Dubovitskii “to take every measure necessary [to ensure] that the entire IMSA staff without fault obeys the edict to the letter.” He emphasized that professors must teach their subjects “on the strict basis of religion, morality, and the precise fulfillment of all the duties of a true servant to His Majesty.” Miliutin stressed that they must uproot “recently developed pernicious doctrines.” The instructors must, he elaborated, “serve as examples for their students in such a way that, along with learning science, the students imbibe the spirit of discipline and love for the emperor and the Fatherland. Only under this condition could they become fully useful practitioners of their chosen vocation.” The minister demanded that the president “explain to all your subordinates that anyone deviating from the principles of the Imperial edict” would be severely punished. “If any individuals do not feel that they are able with clear conscience to carry out their required duties,” he concluded, “they better leave on their own [volition] the institution that by its very name is placed under Imperial patronage.” The same day, Dubovitskii distributed copies of the imperial edict and the minister’s letter among all members of the faculty and staff (requesting each one to sign a receipt), along with his own injunction: “do take these documents as guides to all your actions.”
Along with every other member of the faculty, Florinskii signed the receipt. We can only imagine how he read and reacted to these documents. Given the contents and especially the venue of its publication, his “Human Perfection and Degeneration” could easily be construed as one of those “recently developed pernicious doctrines,” to which the war minister had referred in his letter to Dubovitskii and which, according to the imperial edict, “dare[d] to encroach on everything sacred, on religious beliefs, [and] on the foundations of family life.” Even if he personally believed with all his heart in the ideas and ideals of his treatise, Florinskii certainly could not afford to resign his post at the academy for the sake of those ideals. All he could do was to obey his superiors. He clearly decided to stay away from any public engagements. He stopped contributing even to Medical Herald,27 confining his publications to the highly technical Protocols of the St. Petersburg Society of Russian Physicians that had very limited circulation.28 Only a decade later, after his resignation from the IMSA, would he resume publishing in non-professional periodicals.
It seems likely that sometime in the late spring of 1866, Florinskii notified his publisher about his decision to withdraw from any further collaboration with Russian Word. Blagosvetlov might well have been disappointed, but he was not willing to give up the fight. As early as December 1865, after his journal had received the first “warning,” anticipating the possibility that it would not survive the censorship onslaught, the editor began thinking about possible ways to deal with the situation. In January, after receiving the second “warning,” he wrote to Shelgunov: “Here is what we shall do: pick up a new title for a journal just like Russian Word and continue publishing with the same contributors and subscribers.”29 On 17 February, the next day after the suspension of Russian Word, a certain “staff-captain N. Shul’gin” applied for permission to publish “a new learned-literary journal, titled ‘Deed’.”30 As subsequent events suggest, the “staff-captain” was just another proxy whom Blagosvetlov used to continue his crusade. Blagosvetlov’s arrest in April slowed down the organization of the new journal. But the moment he was released from the Peter-Paul Fortress, he redoubled his efforts. On 7 June, just one day following his release, Blagosvetlov wrote to Shelgunov:
As you no doubt already know from the newspapers, Russian Word is definitively forbidden. In a week, I will write to you in detail on how our general situation will be resolved. One has to work, because one has to live, but [they] do not leave us any opportunity to live and work. Yet when pressed hard, a person becomes inventive and therefore I think that Russian Word will be resurrected in another form.31
Indeed, within a week, Blagosvetlov had signed an agreement with Shul’gin to publish Deed as a continuation of Russian Word, “with the same contributors and subscribers.” In late September of 1866 the first issue of the new journal came out.32
Busy with organizing a new journal, Blagosvetlov also searched for other means to spread the message of the now forbidden Russian Word. In late August, clearly undeterred by the continuing witch-hunt for “revolutionaries” and the bacchanalia of “love for the emperor and the Fatherland” unleashed by the press, Blagosvetlov released Florinskii’s essays in book format.33 Although Blagosvetlov had previously reprinted under a separate cover several novels first published in Russian Word, this was the first time that a piece of non-fiction writing that had appeared on the pages of the journal was reissued as a book.
The slim volume had no table of contents, but contained the entire text of Florinskii’s three essays with only minor technical edits. The subtitles “The second essay” and “The third essay,” which had followed the general title in the October and the November issues of the journal, were, expectedly, removed, but all the subheadings that had appeared in the individual essays were kept in place. The text was typeset anew, word for word and paragraph for paragraph, but in a different format and type size, which accounts for the book being longer (206 pages) than the three essays published in the journal combined (144 pages). Although no name of the publisher appeared anywhere in the book, its title page bore a logo of the Russian Word printing shop owned by Blagosvetlov through yet another proxy.34
Most likely, the publisher issued the book without any involvement of its author. Several features of the publication support this supposition (see fig. 4-1). The title page announced that the author of the book was “Professor F. Florinskii,” thus giving Vasilii Florinskii the wrong initial, which probably would not have happened if the author had seen the proofs.35 Furthermore, the title page, for the first time, identified Florinskii as a professor, but did not provide his institutional affiliation, which was then customary. Moreover, the book had no “preface,” “foreword,” or “note from the author” that would have indicated to its readers that the text had previously been published in Russian Word, along with the reasons for its appearance as a separate volume, which usually accompanied such publications.36
We can only guess at why Blagosvetlov decided to issue the book. Perhaps, he simply hoped to earn some money. The prohibition of Russian Word and the arrest of the second volume of The Ray put Blagosvetlov’s publishing enterprise in deep financial trouble. He had to fulfill his obligations to all the individuals (and institutions) who had prepaid their 1866 subscriptions to Russian Word. Fourteen rubles (including shipping costs) per annual subscription multiplied by approximately 4,000 subscribers made for a very large sum. The publisher had to either return the money, or compensate subscribers with other publications, which was exactly what Blagosvetlov had tried to do by publishing The Ray. He had certainly paid honoraria to all contributors, as well as the costs of production of 4,000-4,500 copies of each of The Ray’s two volumes. Given that each volume was about 800 pages (fifty typographical lists) in length, Blagosvetlov must have invested quite a sum in their production. The seizure of the second volume “froze” (and eventually forfeited) at least half of Blagosvetlov’s investment and certainly disrupted his expected cash flow.
Perhaps, since as its publisher, he “owned” the manuscript,37 Blagosvetlov counted on earning some money in reprinting Florinskii’s essays with minimal investment (only the costs of production). However, the pricing of the book — 75 kopeks at a book store, or one ruble via mail order — seems too low to suggest that he hoped for a substantial profit. Plus, the book’s title did not promise a quick sale. If Blagosvetlov were to have renamed the book, giving it a new, less obscure and more enticing title, for instance, “Marriage Hygiene,” that would have certainly attracted more buyers and thus guaranteed a quicker return on his investment. He was likely aware that Auguste Debay’s book, Hygiene and Physiology of Marriage (first published in 1848), had at that time sustained more than thirty editions in its original French, and from 1861 to 1865 had appeared in at least two different Russian translations and numerous printings.38 Yet, Blagosvetlov did not follow this simple marketing strategy, which indicates that his motivations for republishing Florinskii’s treatise were not monetary but rested elsewhere.
There is little doubt that Blagosvetlov was genuinely interested in the main themes of Florinskii’s essays: the applications of Darwin’s evolutionary concept to humans and, more generally, the role that the natural sciences could play in understanding social issues and curing “social ills.” As we saw, Russian Word had carried numerous essays that in various ways examined these themes on a regular basis, and this was why Blagosvetlov had invited Florinskii to contribute to his journal in the first place. The prohibition of Russian Word did not change Blagosvetlov’s interests — he was determined to continue publishing articles (and books) that addressed these themes. Indeed, the announcement of Deed’s publication that appeared in the fall of 1866 in Voice stated unambiguously:
“Knowledge is power” — the modern generation is called to work on this simple and great task [of converting knowledge into power]; its better present and its very future depend on the success of this work. Undoubtedly, the [complete] fulfilment of this task lies far ahead, even for the peoples leading the intellectual development of the nineteenth century; but its results are already so great that to reject this task means to understand neither the demands of [our] time, nor the needs of [our] life.
Knowledge becomes actual power only when it is aimed directly to the benefit of humanity, when there is a fundamental and solid connection between the thoughts and the deeds of society. This is what is demanded by societal conscience, the logic of events, and progress of human societies; we, Russians, especially need this, [for] there is so very little in common between [available] knowledge and actual needs of our life that, for a great majority, a journal and a book is not as much a necessity as a shot of vodka before dinner. Therefore, we do not yet know the utilitarian side of knowledge, even though this is one of the most beneficial sides of intellectual development, because an idea without utilization is nothing but a buried treasure. The journal Deed chooses this side as its direction and, in it, will seek its own strength and meaning.39
But first, as had happened after Zaitsev’s debacle with writing about the applications of Darwin’s evolutionary concept to “human races,” Blagosvetlov needed to find authors willing and capable of taking on this task of converting knowledge into power.
Apparently, when Blagosvetlov learned that Florinskii was not going to continue writing for his journal, he took certain steps to find a suitable replacement. Initially, he probably hoped that Pavel Iakobii (1841-1913), Zaitsev’s brother-in-law, who at the time was enrolled in Zurich University’s Medical School, could take on this role.40 Most likely on Zaitsev’s recommendation, Iakobii had begun writing for Russian Word nearly simultaneously with Florinskii in the summer of 1865. His first publication was a lengthy article on “the development of slavery in America,” which had come out in the July issue. Although the article promised “to be continued” in the next, August issue, its conclusion appeared only in December, immediately following the last installment of Florinskii’s treatise.41 In between, in the October issue, Iakobii published a highly critical, nearly thirty-page-long review of the Russian translation of Heidelberg psychologist Wilhelm Wundt’s Lectures on the Soul of Men and Animals.42 Unlike Florinskii’s second essay that opened the issue, Iakobii’s review caught the censor’s eye and became one of the pretexts for the first “warning” issued to the journal.43 The censor pointedly commented that Iakobii “laughs at the beliefs in the existence of the soul and ironically portrays the individuals who do not sympathize with a materialistic worldview.”44
Blagosvetlov clearly liked Iakobii’s writing style and invited him to continue his collaboration with the journal. Building on his current studies of psychiatry at Zurich University, Iakobii wrote a lengthy essay modeled to a certain degree on, and carrying almost exactly the same title as, Jacob Moleschott’s Psychological Sketches. Blagosvetlov likely planned to publish the essay in one of the spring 1866 issues of his journal, for he included it in the second volume of The Ray.45 After the arrest of The Ray and the final demise of Russian Word, Blagosvetlov asked Iakobii to write for Deed. The very first issue of the new journal carried the future psychiatrist’s lengthy article on the “physical conditions of the primeval human civilization.”46 On 14 November 1866, just before the second issue of Deed was to come out, Blagosvetlov sent Iakobii a long letter in response to the latter’s question: “what and how should I write for the journal?” “Until pressure from the government is eased,” the editor advised his author, “write serious articles on the natural sciences. However, do not touch religion. This is, for now, a strictly forbidden fruit.”47
Iakobii followed this advice: the fifth and the sixth issues of the journal that came out in April and May 1867, respectively, carried his lengthy “Chronicle of Natural Science Discoveries.”48 But he apparently felt more comfortable writing about his own specialty: the ninth issue contained Iakobii’s extensive overview of French psychiatrist Louis-Francisque Lélut’s Physiologie de la pensée.49 In the next issue, he reviewed at length recent Russian translations of several books on physiology, while in the eleventh issue he published a new version of his own “Psychological Sketches.”50 The following year, however, Iakobii stopped writing for Deed, probably because he was too busy working on his doctoral dissertation.51 As a result, the entire 1868 run of the journal contained not a single article on either science or medicine.
Blagosvetlov was certainly not happy about the absence of his trademark subject on the pages of his journal and searched for another author who could fill the niche. In early 1869, he recruited Veniamin Portugalov (1835-1896) to become a science/medicine commentator for Deed.52 A graduate of Kazan University’s Medical School, Portugalov since his student days had actively participated in various “revolutionary circles” and, during the late 1850s and early 1860s, he had been arrested and imprisoned several times. In 1863, after spending several months in solitary confinement in the Peter-Paul Fortress, he was exiled to a small town in the Perm province (not far from Florinskii’s beloved Peski). Prohibited by the conditions of his exile from practicing medicine, Portugalov began publishing articles on medicine and social hygiene topics in various journals and newspapers.53 And these articles were probably what sparked Blagosvetlov’s interest.
It seems likely that the initial stimulus for Blagosvetlov’s invitation was a series of articles on “the causes of diseases,” which Portugalov published during 1868 in the recently established Archive of Legal Medicine and Social Hygiene and also issued in book format at the beginning of the next year.54 Blagosvetlov apparently asked Portugalov to write a synopsis of his book for Deed and published it, under the title “The Sources of Disease,” in the March 1869 issue.55 What might well have prompted Blagosvetlov’s invitation was that Portugalov’s book addressed several major topics presented in Florinskii’s treatise.56 Portugalov too attempted to “synthesize,” in his own way, Darwin’s evolutionary concept, physical anthropology, and social hygiene and to discuss certain issues related to “human perfection and degeneration.”
Unlike Florinskii, however, at this point, Portugalov was concerned not with “marriage hygiene,” but with disease causality. He built much of his reasoning on the recently published (under Ivan Sechenov’s editorship) Russian translation of Darwin’s latest work, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.57 Portugalov claimed that “human perfection and degeneration” depend first and foremost on the development of “human culture.” As he put it, “culture, in the most general sense of the word, leads to the perfection of the breed in animals as well as in humans, [while] lack of culture leads to the degeneration of entire breeds.”58 For Portugalov, the most obvious sign and a leading cause of degeneration were numerous diseases that plagued humanity. Following closely the works of Rudolf Virchow and Austrian physician Eduard Reich,59 two leading proponents of social hygiene, he thought that the most important causes of disease, and, hence, of human degeneration, were “the two main deficiencies of human culture: famine and poverty.” As he noted in the conclusion of his article: “only by the force of culture could [we] eliminate humanity’s scourges — epidemics, infections, miasmas, [and] parasites.”
Portugalov further elaborated these ideas in a lengthy essay, enticingly titled “The Limitlessness of Hygiene,” which appeared in the August issue of Deed.60 The essay was based on a voluminous treatise on Popular Hygiene published by Karl H. Reclam, Leipzig University professor of legal medicine and the founder of Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege, the first German journal for “social hygiene.”61 Unlike Florinskii, Portugalov was not well versed in the biology and physiology of human reproduction, including the concepts of the cell, embryonic development, and, especially, heredity. Apparently, at this time, he was also unfamiliar with Florinskii’s treatise. He subscribed fully to the notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which Darwin had elaborated in the second volume of his latest work in the form of a “provisional hypothesis of pangenesis.”62 As a result, in his arguments about “perfection and degeneration,” Portugalov paid little attention to reproduction and heredity, focusing instead on “environment,” and especially “social environment.”
Blagosvetlov definitely found Portugalov’s writings worthy of publication in Deed — in private correspondence, he even likened Portugalov to his former star-writer Pisarev — and invited him to become a regular contributor to the journal.63 Furthermore, it seems that Portugalov prompted the editor to produce a Russian translation of Reclam’s treatise on Popular Hygiene, which stayed in print for more than a decade with Portugalov’s essay “The Limitlessness of Hygiene” as its introduction.64 But, even though he was very happy with Portugalov’s articles on social hygiene, Blagosvetlov clearly wanted more from his newfound science/medicine expert. The editor asked him to explore in much greater details the possible implications of Darwin’s evolutionary concept for social hygiene and for human affairs more generally. He even sent Portugalov copies of several publications necessary for examining the topic, which were unavailable in the small town where Portugalov was serving his sentence.65 Portugalov enthusiastically took on the job. From November 1869 to July 1870, Deed carried a series of six lengthy essays (more than 200 pages in total) under the general title “The Latest Word in Science.” The essays presented Portugalov’s analysis of Darwin’s works (both Origin and Variation) and their import for understanding human health, society, and evolution.66 None of these essays, however, even mentioned Florinskii’s pioneering study.
It seems likely that sometime in 1870, his publisher alerted Portugalov to the existence of Florinskii’s book and perhaps even sent him a copy. In November and December 1870, Deed published Portugalov’s extensive essay on “Development and Deterioration,”67 and, in the first three issues of 1871, serialized Portugalov’s lengthy tract “On Degeneration.”68 As their titles indicate, both publications dealt with a major theme of Florinskii’s treatise — the degeneration of humankind. The first presented an overview of more than twenty different works that had addressed the issue. Florinskii’s book did appear, as number twelve in the list of these works, but Portugalov did not cite it in his text. As he explained in a footnote, the presence of a particular work in his list of sources “does not mean that we fully share the views and beliefs of its author. We take from him facts and facts only, [but] whenever we actually share the views and beliefs of an author, we cite him directly in the text.”69
Judging by his in-text citations, just three books served as Portugalov’s main sources in addressing the subject. The most frequently cited was Eduard Reich’s nearly 500-page volume, On the Degeneration of Men, its Sources and Prevention,70 (which Portugalov had already used in his 1869 book on the causes of disease). The second was the first volume of Reich’s System of Hygiene that had recently come out and was devoted to “Moral and Social Hygiene.”71 And the third was Bénédict Morel’s 1857 treatise.72 Although Portugalov did not even mention Florinskii in his text, and, hence, supposedly did not share Florinskii’s views, he devoted the second series of his essays “On Degeneration” specifically to one issue that Florinskii had promised to (but for some reason did not) address in his “Human Perfection and Degeneration” — drunkenness and alcoholism. Blagosvetlov was very pleased with the job Portugalov had done in his articles. In May 1873 he reprinted all of them as a sizeable tome of more than 600 pages, titled Issues in Social Hygiene.73
Blagosvetlov’s continuing interest in Darwin’s evolutionary concept and especially its applications to humans was manifested not only in his publication of Portugalov’s essays. In 1871-1872, Blagosvetlov also edited and published a Russian translation of Darwin’s own long-awaited take on human evolution — The Descent of Man. Darwin’s two-volume work came out in London at the end of February 1871.74 Almost immediately, an abridged Russian translation began to appear in installments under the auspices of Knowledge, “a scientific and critical-bibliographic journal,” established just a few months earlier by Florinskii’s IMSA colleagues, professor of physics Petr Khlebnikov and professor of chemistry (and future famous composer) Alexander Borodin.75 From April to September 1871, each issue of Knowledge carried a portion of the translation as a supplement. In September, the supplements were bound together and released as a 440-page single tome.76
Blagosvetlov was deeply disappointed by Knowledge’s translation.77 He described it as yet another example of the typical situation when “a remarkable foreign author, at the hands of an ignorant or unscrupulous translator, appears before our public in such a clownish costume as to make it impossible not only to read his work, but even to recognize that this is indeed the very author whose name is printed on the cover of the Russian edition.”78 He saw “such treatment of Darwin” as “not merely a literary impropriety, but a crime, a forgery in the direct sense of the word.” “Instead of Darwin,” he continued indignantly, “our public is given a collection of grammatical errors, deliberate distortions, [and] omissions, [compounded by] complete ignorance of [both] the language from which [the book] is being translated and the language to which it is being translated. This is akin to selling to an inexperienced buyer a tin spoon instead of a silver one.”79
Blagosvetlov surmised that the only reason the editorial board of Knowledge had committed such a “crime” was to scoop the readership (and hence, profits) by putting out a translation of Darwin’s book before any other publisher. He was particularly infuriated by the arbitrary and, as he saw it, totally unjustifiable, abridgement of Darwin’s work, which prompted him to publish a complete translation.80 Blagosvetlov commissioned and personally edited a new translation, with Florinskii’s former literature teacher Morigerovskii acting as its nominal publisher. The first volume of what eventually became a three-volume set came out in July 1871, with the second following shortly on 1 September. The two volumes contained a complete translation of the first volume of the English original.81 The third volume of Blagosvetlov’s translation (containing the entire second volume of the English edition) was promised to be published by December, then by March of the next 1872 year, but, in the end, appeared only in May.82
Blagosvetlov’s reviews make clear that he saw Knowledge as an unscrupulous but formidable competitor who exploited his trademark themes: Darwin’s theory’s applicability to humans and the utility of the natural sciences for curing Russia’s “social ills.”83 This attitude found further expression in Blagosvetlov’s reaction to Knowledge’s release of a Russian translation of Galton’s Hereditary Genius (see fig. 4-2).
Hereditary Genius had come out in London in November 1869. Compared to the furor generated by Darwin’s Origin, Galton’s book was accorded a lukewarm reception in both England and abroad.84 As far as I was able to ascertain, no Russian periodicals even remarked on its appearance. But it did impress Darwin who cited and referenced it extensively in his own Descent of Man. Most likely, it was Darwin’s references that directed the attention of Knowledge’s editors to Galton’s work and prompted them to commission a translation of the book five years after its original publication.
While the translation of Hereditary Genius was in progress, in the late spring of 1874, in its fifth (May) issue, Knowledge published a translation of Galton’s report delivered to the Royal Society just a few months earlier “On Men of Science, Their Nature and Their Nurture.”85 This translation seems to have been the first appearance of Galton’s name and work in a Russian publication. The translation of Hereditary Genius came out as a supplement to Knowledge’s last double (November-December) issue of the same year.86 The supplement had no title, name of the author or the translator, table of contents, nor any editorial comments, just the abridged text of Galton’s book. Its author was identified only in the journal’s table of contents. In March 1875, the supplement was released as a separate volume, under the title “Heredity of Talent, Its Laws and Consequences,” and appended with the text of Galton’s report “On Men of Science.”87
In spite of being advertised continuously in Knowledge, the translation attracted very little attention. Indeed it seems that the only periodical that even noticed its publication was Deed: Blagosvetlov apparently asked his natural science expert Pavel Iakobii to write a review of Galton’s book. In its May 1875 issue, Deed carried Iakobii’s 25-page essay, provocatively titled “Modern Lack of Talent.”88 The bulk of the review recounted the main conclusions of, and emphasized the pioneering use of statistics in, Galton’s study of the heritability of special talents. Its last section assessed the implications of Galton’s findings for “the failings of modern civilization,” and his proposals to remedy the situation by changing contemporary social mores regarding such issues as marriage and children, support for talented young individuals, and immigration, which Iakobii perceived altogether as “far too remote an ideal.” “But, anyhow, it is pleasant to dream about [such an ideal],” he concluded his review. A few months later, in its regular section “Foreign literature,” Deed published an extensive critical review of Galton’s newest book, English Men of Science. The reviewer’s general attitude was unambiguously expressed in pairing the assessment of Galton’s statistical study with a review of John Timbs’s purely anecdotal English Eccentrics and Eccentricities.89
To the end of his days on 7 November 1880, Blagosvetlov continued to examine the role that the natural sciences, and, especially, their latest achievements — Darwinian evolutionary theory and social hygiene — could and should play in understanding and curing Russia’s “social ills.” In 1878, for instance, he translated into Russian and published the second edition of Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection — a collection of essays on biological evolution and its applications to humankind by Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection.90 For nearly fifteen years, he kept Florinskii’s treatise in print and continued to advertise it on the pages of Deed. Tellingly, it was only after Blagosvetlov’s death that Human Perfection and Degeneration disappeared from the list of publications available for purchase at the journal’s bookshop.
Blagosvetlov seemed to be the only contemporary who fully grasped the import of Florinskii’s essays as a synthesis of Darwinism and social hygiene, which offered a scientific solution — “rational” or “hygienic” marriage — to a number of perceived social problems in post-Crimean Russia and outlined its possible effects on the country’s future. This seemed to be the reason why he reprinted Florinskii’s essays as a book and kept it in print until the end of his life. Indeed, Florinskii’s treatise had launched a whole series of books produced by Blagosvetlov, which in one way or another explored further various issues raised in Florinskii’s tract: these included translations of Reclam’s Popular Hygiene (1869), Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871-1872), and Wallace’s Contributions (1878), as well as Portugalov’s Issues in Social Hygiene (1873).
Florinskii, however, did not take any part in the varied activities his former publisher undertook to promote and explore further the themes and subjects of Human Perfection and Degeneration. He never partook in the polemics between Deed and Knowledge over Darwin’s and Galton’s works. He kept silent even when, as if to mark the anniversary, exactly ten years after the publication of his book, the September 1876 issue of Deed opened with a voluminous essay by Portugalov on “Hygienic Conditions of Marriage.”91 Although, without once mentioning Florinskii’s name, the essay was nothing more than a — sometimes nearly verbatim — recapitulation of his own discussions of “kin” and “mixed” marriages, the role of the law in preventing degeneration and promoting perfection, and many other basic ideas of his treatise, “updated” with materials drawn from the latest works by Darwin, Galton, John Lubbock92 and Edward B. Taylor,93 Florinskii simply ignored it.
Apparently, he found other ways “to bring benefits to his Fatherland.”
Florinskii’s Deeds
Neither the public scandal over Petersburg Leaf’s slanderous articles, nor Blagosvetlov’s “unauthorized” release of Florinskii’s treatise as a book seem to have had any ill effects on the professor’s life and career. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, he continued teaching his assigned courses on gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics, working on a voluminous textbook on gynecology and obstetrics,94 running the IMSA women’s ward and the children’s clinic, and carrying on various research projects, for instance, examining the use of chloroform during childbirth and obstetrics operations.95 He built the reputation of a very knowledgeable physician and a successful private practice. His family continued to bring much joy to his life: on 6 October 1867, his wife gave birth to a son (see fig. 4-3). The happy parents christened him Sergei, probably in honor of Sergii Radonezhskii, one of the Russian church’s most venerated saints. In November 1867, Florinskii was nominated and, a few months later, duly promoted, to the position of an extraordinary professor at the IMSA Department of Gynecology, Obstetrics, and Pediatrics. The promotion brought with it advancement to the next, sixth rank (equivalent to a colonel in the army) and an increase in salary and benefits. It also made Florinskii a full voting member of the Academy Council.
But then, Florinskii’s career stalled. Unlike nearly every one of his classmates at the Institute of Young Doctors, he never got the position he had been groomed for — that of an ordinary professor and a department chairman at the IMSA. This frustrating situation apparently had nothing to do with Florinskii’s contributions to Russian Word or the contents of his treatise. Rather it was a manifestation of the old animosities between the so-called “Russian” and “German” factions within the academy.
Like modern science, modern medicine in Imperial Russia was largely a product of western imports.96 Since its creation, the IMSA was thoroughly dominated by “the Germans,” a label that came to encompass all “aliens” (both ethnically and confessionally) among its administration, faculty, and student body. Indeed in its first years, the newborn academy even had two separate sections for Russian- and German-speaking students. In 1805, the Russian government invited Johann Peter Frank (1745-1821), prominent German physician and the leading ideologue of state medicine and medical police, to become the academy’s first rector.97 Although his tenure lasted only three years, it was Frank who laid down main principles that guided the academy’s operations and curricula for nearly half a century.98 Frank was succeeded by James Wylie (1768-1854), a graduate of Edinburgh University’s Medical School who had come to Russia in 1790 and made meteoric career, rising to the position of personal surgeon to the imperial family.99 In 1808 Wylie was appointed the academy’s first president and occupied the post for thirty years. But he left most of the actual administration to his “deputies,” such as Johann Georg Wallerian, Elias Gustav Eneholm, Johan Orlay, and Friedrich August Wilhelm Heuroth.100 After Wylie’s retirement, the presidency went to Johann Gottlieb Schlegel, and after the latter’s death to Ventseslav Pelikan.
As this (far from exhaustive) list of names clearly shows, for half a century the academy’s top administrative positions were occupied by individuals of Austrian, British, Dutch, German, Polish, and Swedish origin (and often training), even though during the same period a number of ethnic Russians joined the faculty, which could not but give rise to mutual resentment and considerable tensions between the two groups. As Florinskii bitterly remarked in one of his essays, “until quite recently, it was thought that only a German [man] could be a mechanic, an apothecary, a physician, a professor, and so on, but that a Russian [man] lacks both patience and mind for this kind of work.”101
Towards the end of Florinskii’s time as a student, the appointment of Dubovitskii and Glebov to the presidency and vice-presidency, respectively, placed the academy’s governance — for the first time since its creation — in the hands of ethnic Russians. Joined by Zinin who headed the IMSA Council, the triumvirate actively fostered the “Russification” of the academy and increased considerably the Russian contingent among both faculty members and students. In early 1867, however, partially in response to the newfound emphasis on “the upbringing of youth” incited by the Karakozov Affair, the positions of both president and vice-president were eliminated and replaced with a “commander” appointed by the War Ministry. Dubovitskii and Glebov were “promoted out” of the academy. The former came to head the Military Medical Department of the War Ministry, the latter became a permanent member of the department’s Scientific Council.102 With the new command structure in place, the German faction began to reassert its influence, especially in the matters of new appointments to the faculty positions.103
The dividing line between the two factions certainly did not fall purely along lines of ethnicity and/or religion.104 In fact, several ethnic Germans (for instance, Alexander Kiter and Ventseslav Gruber) supported the Russian faction, while certain ethnic Russians (such as Academy Commander Nikolai Kozlov) sided with the German one. Rather, the major source of contention was a conflict between “patriotism” and “science for science’s sake.” The Russian faction considered service to the Fatherland and its people the foremost duty of the medical profession105 and advocated the advancement of “true” Russians — those individuals who upheld this ideal — to leadership positions in medical administration and education. They accused their opponents of pursuing exclusively financial and career interests to the detriment of their obligations to the country and its population and of promoting individuals according to “ethnic” and “confessional” rather than patriotic and professional criteria and objectives.106 The German faction, in its turn, loudly advocated the notion of “science for the sake of science” and valued scholarly engagement over public service.
Florinskii’s 1862 article “Notes of a Russian Foreigner About Our Medical Life”107 clearly attests that he wholeheartedly and very vocally subscribed to the ideals and ideas of the Russian faction. The same ideals also informed to a considerable degree his concept of “human perfection and degeneration.” This, of course, did not make him very popular among the “opposition.” Plus, Florinskii’s scholarly reviews, such as his polemics with the “German” author of the St. Petersburg Foundling Home medical report108 — with their highly critical and uncompromising style, and total disregard for positions and connections held by the authors of reviewed books, dissertations, and presentations — did not win him many friends among his “German” colleagues.
The first sign of trouble appeared already at Florinskii’s promotion to the position of extraordinary professor. Usually, the chairman of the department that had a vacancy advanced the nomination for a professorial position. In Florinskii’s case, however, the nomination was proposed not by Anton Krasovskii, chairman of his department and former supervisor of his doctoral dissertation, but by Nikolai Iakubovich, chairman of the histology and embryology department. Since Kiter’s transfer to the surgery department and Krasovskii’s promotion to the chairmanship in 1858, the gynecology department had for years had a vacancy for an extraordinary professor. Yet, despite Krasovskii’s constant complaints about being overburdened with his duties at the department, the chairman did not hasten to grant Florinskii the well-earned promotion. Perhaps he saw the younger colleague as a serious threat to his own authority within the academy and even his own extensive private practice. Reportedly, Florinskii’s decidedly critical review of Krasovskii’s own textbook on obstetrics109 and a similarly scathing review of a doctoral dissertation by Krasovskii’s protégé Roman Bredov110 played an important role in Krasovskii’s attitude.
So, it was not Krasovskii, but a leading member of the Russian faction, Iakubovich, who in November 1867 presented Florinskii’s nomination to the Academy Council. On 13 January 1868, in its regular session, the council considered Iakubovich’s highly praising recommendation and voted in its favor. A few days later, in his capacity as the head of the Military Medical Department, Dubovitskii approved Florinskii’s appointment as extraordinary professor.111
Two years later, however, when the Russian faction initiated Florinskii’s promotion to the position of ordinary professor, it was effectively blocked by “German” opponents.112 On 3 January 1870, the leader of the Russian faction Sergei Botkin113 presented Florinskii’s nomination at a regular session of the Academy Council. This time, the nomination met serious opposition, mobilized and led by Florinskii’s immediate superior — Krasovskii. As a result, the vote was postponed. The next session on 24 January turned into a heated dispute that lasted for several hours, and voting was again postponed. The debate continued during the next session, held on 16 February, and in the end the council took a vote that came very close, with twelve members casting their votes “for” and eleven “against” Florinskii’s promotion.114
According to the rules that required a simple majority for a vote to pass, Florinskii was elected to the post. The council’s decision, however, had to be approved by the Military Medical Department of the War Ministry, and the “opposition” took further steps to stop the appointment. Nine out of the eleven council members who had voted against it prepared three “special opinion” letters with three signatories each (which certainly looked much more impressive than one letter signed by the nine individuals would have), protesting against the council’s decision. They sent the letters to the War Ministry, along with the protocols of the council’s deliberations and vote. The maneuver proved effective. The protest made it all the way up the bureaucratic ladder and landed on the desk of war minister Miliutin himself. In early May, after consulting with head of the Military Medical Department Nikolai Kozlov (the former commander of the academy and a staunch supporter of the German faction), the minister overturned the council’s decision. As a historian of the academy has noted, “with sorrow,” some forty years after the fact, “having obtained a department at the Academy, an ‘alien’ (inorodets) strove as much as he could to promote another ‘alien’. … Kiter promoted Krasovskii, Krasovskii obstructed the advancement of Florinskii, but promoted Karl [sic] Bredov.”115
Florinskii remained an extraordinary professor. This was a heavy blow to whatever career ambitions he had entertained, but it was certainly not the end of the world. A year later, fate delivered Florinskii a far more terrible blow. His son Sergei passed away, just a few days before his fourth birthday. We know nothing about the circumstances and causes of this tragedy.116 But whatever they were, Florinskii, who taught pediatrics and ran the children’s clinic, must have been devastated by his inability to save his own child. The tragic loss, along with the failure of his promotion, dampened Florinskii’s enthusiasm for both teaching and research. He completely withdrew from pediatrics, by first assigning his lecture course on the subject to one of his assistants, and, a few months later ceding to the same assistant the direction of the pediatric clinic he had created.117
The number of Florinskii’s publications dropped precipitously: over five years, from 1870 through 1874, he published fewer than ten articles, nearly all of them based on clinical observations, not research. Of all his previous duties, Florinskii retained only lecture courses on theoretical obstetrics and gynecology, which he had been teaching since 1860, and supervision of the IMSA women’s ward. But he stopped publishing his annual surveys of foreign literature and abandoned work on his textbook: its promised second volume on obstetrics remained unfinished.118 Perhaps as a consolation prize, on 12 September 1871, the St. Petersburg Society of Russian Physicians elected Florinskii as its vice-president,119 and on 18 January 1872, the IMSA administration advanced him to the next, fifth civil rank. Despite these accolades, he apparently gave up his ambition of becoming an ordinary professor and department chairman at his alma mater.
In the spring of 1873, however, Florinskii’s career took an unexpected turn. While retaining his post at the IMSA, he became a “permanent member” of the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment.120 Formally (re)established in 1863 as part of the sweeping reorganization of the state apparatus in the course of the Great Reforms, the Scientific Committee advised the minister on various facets of the agency’s operations, ranging from secondary school curricula to research and teaching programmes at universities to the contents of textbooks and books “for the people.”121 Florinskii was invited to join the committee to oversee all issues related to medicine. He mostly reviewed popular “self-help” medical publications and various educational and research projects submitted by the medical schools subordinate to the ministry. His duties were not too onerous, and he could carry out most of them in the comfort of his own home, coming to the ministry once in a while to attend a general session of the committee. The new job paid quite well (1,000 rubles per annum) and nearly doubled his regular income. For almost two years, Florinskii managed to serve the two masters — the academy and the ministry — without any problems. But, willingly or unwittingly, his new position drew him into ministerial intrigues.
According to the results of the secret police’s hunt for “revolutionaries” in the aftermath of the Karakozov Affair, nearly fifty per cent of all the individuals suspected of “anti-government activities” were students of various secondary and higher schools, thus making the issues of education and upbringing one of the government apparatus’s top priorities. Indeed, the day after Karakozov’s attempt on his life, Alexander II fired the head of the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and appointed the Chief-Procurator of the Holy Synod Count Dmitrii Tolstoi to the post.122 Students’ protests and unrest that swept through the Russian Empire’s higher schools in 1869-1870 added considerably to the government’s anxieties over the “university question,” as it was referred to in official parlance. In this situation, the importance of the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment that oversaw most primary, secondary, and higher schools in the country rose significantly.123 In the best bureaucratic tradition, the ministry’s officials attempted to capitalize on the situation and extend their control to the schools that were administered by other state agencies.
One such school was the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. Sometime in the fall of 1874, the officials proposed to subordinate the academy (once again)124 to the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment. Since St. Petersburg University had no medical school, the officials argued, the ministry had very little insight and even less input into the matters of medical education in the capital and the country as a whole. Expectedly, the War Ministry was loath to cede its control over the empire’s premier medical school, which led to a serious conflict between the two agencies and their respective heads, Dmitrii Tolstoi and Dmitrii Miliutin.125 It so happened that Florinskii got caught right in the middle of it.
Florinskii thought that moving his alma mater out from under the War Ministry would be very beneficial to both its faculty and its students. As his diaries make clear, he had thoroughly disliked the military spirit (discipline, uniforms, inspections, and so on) that permeated the school during his student years. It is doubtful that this attitude changed after he became a faculty member. Perhaps, it was even strengthened by the further militarization of the academy manifested in the appointment of a “commander” instead of a president. Tellingly, there is not a single photograph of Florinskii’s dressed in his official military uniform, either from his student days or professorial tenure. Furthermore, Florinskii might have hoped that the IMSA’s transfer to civic authority would improve the provision of medical services to the people. The academy was the country’s largest medical school, but the majority of its graduates served first of all the military, not the populace. The IMSA’s “demilitarization” would increase dramatically the supply of doctors to the new zemstvo system of health services, which was taking shape and was Russian physicians’ major concern at this very time.126 As Florinskii’s various publications, including Human Perfection and Degeneration, demonstrate convincingly, he fully shared this concern.
But why would the personal opinion of a relatively low-ranking, part-time official matter in the power struggle between the two ministries? As the only expert on medical issues employed by the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment, Florinskii certainly had the ear of minister Tolstoi, with whom he developed good working relations. More important, however, sometime over the summer of 1874, by sheer accident, Florinskii made a personal acquaintance with, and became a close confidant of, the second most powerful man in the Russian Empire — the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich Romanov (1827-1892), the younger brother of Alexander II, the head of the State Council (the highest government agency), and one of the main architects of the Great Reforms.127 Florinskii met the grand duke in his professional capacity as a physician, but under very unofficial and sensitive circumstances: he was called in to attend to the duke’s “second family.”128
As all dynastical marriages, the grand duke’s was prearranged.129 In 1846, the nineteen-year-old duke met his bride-to-be, Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Altenburg (1830-1911). By all accounts, the sixteen-year-old princess was incredibly beautiful, and Konstantin fell in love at the first sight.130 Two years later, they were married. The first years of their married life were happy and filled with joy: from 1850 to 1862, Grand Duchess Alexandra bore her husband six children. But, towards the end of the decade, the couple drifted apart and the marriage began to crumble: the grand duke had a series of affairs, while his wife sought solace in mysticism.131 Sometime in the early 1870s, Konstantin found his true love — Anna Kuznetsova (1847-1922), a young ballerina of the Imperial Mariinskii Theater. Divorce was, of course, out of the question, and Anna became the grand duke’s wife in all but name. Reportedly, the duke himself referred to Grand Duchess Alexandra as his “government-issue wife” and to Anna as his “true wife.”132 Konstantin bought for Anna a large, comfortable house near his personal estate in Pavlovsk, the former imperial palace built for Emperor Paul I at the end of the previous century. Situated just a stone’s throw from his official residence, Anna’s house became the duke’s real family home where he spent every moment he was free of official duties. On 17 July 1874, Anna gave birth to their first child, a boy.133 It was during the summer of 1874 that the duke met Vasilii Florinskii.
As did many well-off St. Petersburg families, in the summer the Florinskiis rented a dacha so that they could spend a few months away from the “miasma-laden,” treeless capital, in the much healthier atmosphere of a rural setting. As it happened, the Florinskiis had for years rented their dacha in Pavlovsk, perhaps attracted by the easy access to the town and its renowned imperial parks opened to the public. One day in the summer of 1874, apparently in some emergency, Florinskii, as the nearest reputable physician, was called on to attend to a patient among the grand duke’s “second family.” It is unclear from available documents whether Florinskii was called in as a gynecologist/obstetrician to see Anna herself or as a pediatrician to take care of her sickly firstborn, or both. Whatever the case, Florinskii clearly made an impression on Anna and the duke, who doted on his “true wife” and their firstborn. The emergency call led to regular visits. Although, in the end, Florinskii was unable to save the infant (six months later, the boy died), the duke obviously trusted the doctor and, reportedly, consulted him not only on health issues of his “second family,” but on many other medical matters.
According to the diaries of war minister Miliutin, it was Florinskii who advised the State Council chairman Konstantin Nikolaevich in the spring of 1875 during the “territorial” conflict between the War Ministry and the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment over which would have control of the IMSA.134 Indeed, probably on the grand duke’s recommendation, Florinskii was appointed a member to a special commission struck by the State Council to look into the matter. Florinskii managed to swing the commission’s decision in favor of the transfer, and the State Council decreed that the academy be transferred to the authority of the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment. The council’s decision, however, had to be approved by the emperor, and, by threatening to resign his post, the war minister prevailed. Alexander II overturned the State Council decree, and the academy remained under Miliutin’s control. A few days later, Florinskii resigned from the IMSA and moved to a full-time position at the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment.
The official reason for this move was that Florinskii’s duties at the ministry got vastly expanded. In early 1875, the ministry initiated a “revision” of the 1863 University Statute in the spirit of “love for the emperor and the Fatherland” engendered by the Karakozov Affair. Adopted at the height of the Great Reforms, the 1863 Statute had granted considerable autonomy to the faculty in governing universities, but now it was seen as “too liberal” and thus responsible for students’ “anti-government” opinions and actions.135 In April 1875, Alexander II approved the membership of a special six-member commission charged with preparing the draft of a new university statute. The emperor appointed Ivan Delianov, a career bureaucrat, who had served in the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment in various capacities since 1857, the commission chairman.136
Florinskii was appointed a member. As a preliminary step, the commission was to conduct a thorough review of all universities and Florinskii’s responsibility was to inspect their medical schools. The inspection tour was to begin in the early fall of 1875 and to last several months, since, in addition to St. Petersburg University, the commission had to visit universities in Dorpat, Kazan, Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, Odessa, and Warsaw. During the fall, however, Florinskii had to teach his regular courses at the academy. Delianov asked the IMSA administration to release Florinskii from his teaching duties, but, apparently after consulting with war minister Miliutin, the Academy Commander refused.
The refusal meant that Florinskii could no longer serve the two masters. He faced a choice: to resign his post at the academy or at the ministry. Perhaps he decided to follow his motto: “to bring to my Fatherland as much benefit as possible, specifically by acting in that area where I could be most useful.” At this point, he probably felt that the area where he “could be most useful” was medical education writ large, not his research, clinical work, or lectures attended by just 100 or so students. Career considerations might well have played a role in his decision too. After the 1870 debacle with his promotion and the war minister’s personal hostility spurred by his role in the “territorial dispute” between the War Ministry and the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment, Florinskii’s further prospects at the IMSA looked bleak indeed. On 17 June 1875, he submitted his letter of resignation to the Academy Commander. The letter was promptly accepted.
On 11 July, Florinskii’s transfer to the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment was made official. He became the ministry’s expert on all matters related to medicine and its representative in the Medical Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the country’s highest medical agency. Two weeks later, he was promoted to the next, fourth civil rank (equal in military terms to a major-general), which required the emperor’s personal approval and brought him not only a substantial increase in salary and benefits, but also hereditary nobility. Alas, Florinskii had no male heir to pass on this highest mark of his achievements — after the death of his son Sergei, he and his wife had no more children.
In September, the commission on the new university statute began its inspection tour. Since at the time only five Russian universities — in Dorpat, Kazan, Kharkov, Kiev, and Moscow — had medical schools, Florinskii’s duties were less time-consuming than those of other commission members. But it did not mean that he did not give them his full attention. During the tour, he compiled a huge amount of data on every aspect of education at each school, ranging from the composition of the faculty to the necessary equipment for research and teaching to the physical conditions of buildings and auditoria. He spent several months working through the information he had collected. In the fall of 1876, he published the results of his inspection as a 300-page volume titled Materials on the Conditions and Needs of Russian Medical Schools, which presented a detailed plan of improving medical education throughout the empire.137
The same year, Florinskii resumed writing for the general public. His resignation from the IMSA apparently re-awakened the “irresistible” need to speak up he had felt at the height of the Great Reforms, some fifteen years earlier. He became a regular contributor to New Time, a popular newspaper run by Aleksei Suvorin, a successful journalist, theater critic, and publisher.138 In the course of 1876, Florinskii published more than two dozen articles, reviews, and opinion pieces not only on various subjects in science and medicine, but also on history, geography, and politics. He continued his collaboration with Suvorin’s newspaper in the next year.
Florinskii’s work at the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment also involved him in another large project — the establishment of a university in Siberia.139 The idea of creating such a university had been around since the first expansion of the country’s university system during the reign of Alexander I and had been promoted by Florinskii’s distant relative Mikhail Speranskii. But for nearly seventy years it did not get beyond the stage of being merely “a good idea.”140 In the early 1870s, however, just as Florinskii began working for the ministry, the idea gained support from various local groups and leaders (including from the Governor of Western Siberia), as well as from St. Petersburg officials (most importantly, Minister Tolstoi).
Since Florinskii had spent his early years beyond the Urals, his colleagues and superiors saw him as something of an expert on “Siberian matters.” In the spring of 1875 Tolstoi put him in charge of preparing the ministry’s preliminary plans, budgets, memoranda, and all other paperwork to get the “Siberian University” off the ground. Florinskii enthusiastically dove into the project. He developed a network of informants throughout Siberia, gathered all sorts of necessary information, and mobilized several local groups of merchants and civil servants in support of the project. He prepared an extensive position paper for the State Council, arguing for the establishment of a university in Tomsk, a large trading center in Western Siberia.
But navigating the seas of imperial bureaucracy proved much slower and more difficult than Florinskii had anticipated. The project got bogged down in the contrary interests of numerous central and local officials. The exact location of the projected university turned to be a major point of contention. Some wanted the university established in Omsk, the administrative center of Western Siberia, others in Tobol’sk, the former capital of Western Siberia, still others in Irkutsk, the administrative center of eastern Siberia, yet others in Tomsk. Florinskii was convinced that Tomsk presented the only viable option. In the course of the next year he campaigned in favor of the city, even publishing several articles in Suvorin’s New Time defending his position.141 But the debate dragged on and eventually led to the appointment by the emperor of a special commission to decide on the matter.142 Expectedly, Florinskii became a member. Tolstoi fully supported Florinskii and clearly groomed him for the post of rector at the projected university. But Florinskii apparently got fed up with endless meetings, countless papers, and bureaucratic infighting. He began looking for an opportunity to leave the ministry.
Such an opportunity soon presented itself. In 1877 the chairman of the gynecology and obstetrics department at Kazan University’s Medical School retired. One of Florinskii’s former students, who worked at the school as a professor of pathology, suggested that the University Council offer the position to Florinskii. Florinskii immediately agreed, and on 17 October 1877, the council elected him to the vacant post. The appointment, however, required ministerial approval. Tolstoi was disappointed by Florinskii’s decision to leave the ministry and return to teaching. But Florinskii promised the minister that he would not discontinue his involvement with the Siberian University, and, if and when a final decision on its establishment would come to pass, he would gladly accept responsibility for its implementation. Tolstoi approved Florinskii’s appointment to Kazan University, but Florinskii stayed in St. Petersburg for another six months to see the decision on the Siberian University through. He continued to lobby for Tomsk as the site of the new university and reportedly even used his personal connections to the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich to swing the decision in the city’s favor.
Only in mid-February 1878 had Florinskii wrapped up all his remaining work at the ministry and come to Kazan. As he wrote in his memoirs: “After twenty-five years of life in the capital, the quiet province enveloped me with a life-giving atmosphere of a bright sunlight and a piece of mind. … Here I have disengaged from countless commissions and dry bureaucratic work, belonging only to myself and my department, and can do what I wanted.”143
But what did he want? He was 44 years old and in 25 years had traveled a long way from a poor seminarian contemplating his uncertain future in Perm to a civil-service general occupying a high office and rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful in St. Petersburg. From a career perspective, leaving the capital made little sense. But, at this point in his life, Florinskii was apparently not very interested in advancing further his already quite remarkable career. Following his motto, he was looking for a place where he “could bring the most benefit” to Russia and its people. Shuffling papers and fighting bureaucratic wars in the capital’s corridors of power apparently was not what he had in mind. In Kazan, he began working on his Thoughts and Notes on My Childhood and Education — a clear sign of his desire to reflect upon his own origin, choices, and life trajectory. What, for a time, remained unspoken and unwritten, but likely also occupied his thoughts, was his legacy. He had lost his son, the natural heir to his accomplishments, who could carry his name and further his legacy. What would he leave to posterity? What would he be remembered for by his Fatherland and his people? Florinskii’s varied activities undertaken after he had left St. Petersburg provide some clues to what he considered to be the answers to these questions.
Immediately upon arrival in Kazan, Florinskii took up his official duties as the department chairman. He began to teach lecture courses on gynecology and obstetrics, reorganize the department’s clinics, and set up a laboratory for his research. He joined the university’s Society of Physicians and in May delivered his first presentation to the society’s meeting. He became involved in extensive studies of various local health issues, especially the plague.144 He resumed work on the textbook that he had abandoned after the debacle with his promotion, and a few years later, its second volume devoted to obstetrics finally came out.145
Florinskii’s new job gave him plenty of free time — the entire summer, from mid-May till mid-September while university students were on vacation — to take up several new large scholarly projects. One of them was writing a “domestic medicine” manual. His work in the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment had alerted him to the poor quality of available “self-help” medical literature. He decided to remedy this situation by producing a book that would provide any literate person with all the necessary knowledge to diagnose and treat the most common medical conditions and ailments. In 1880, the 900-page volume came out to much public acclaim — it won Florinskii a prestigious prize named after Peter the Great from the Ministry of the People’s Enlightenment.146
The second project was also connected to the “self-help” genre, but was more historical in nature. Those “seeds of [historical] scholarship,” which his professor of church history Father Makarii had planted in Florinskii’s heart at Perm Seminary, germinated and sprouted numerous shoots. He joined Kazan University’s Society of Archeology, History, and Ethnography and became very active in its meetings, publications, and expeditions. One of the first ideas he offered to the society was to create a “historical-ethnographic museum” open to the public.147 The idea did not find much support at the time, but Florinskii found another way to pursue his renewed interest in history.
Since childhood, Florinskii had been a passionate collector. His profession gave this passion a particular direction: he began collecting old medical books and manuscripts, combing antiquarian shops, booksellers, and libraries wherever he went. Now he decided to share some of his finds with the public. He edited and annotated nine rare manuscripts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian herbal and medical manuals from his personal collection. In 1879, he published each manuscript as a supplement to Scientific Memoirs — Kazan University’s official outlet — and, at the beginning of the following year, he issued them together in book format.148
Alas, the delightful freedom to pursue whatever scholarly project he fancied did not last long. After more than two years of bureaucratic delays, the decision to build the Siberian University in Tomsk was finally made official. In May 1880, keeping his promise to Tolstoi, Florinskii travelled to Tomsk to take up the duties of the ministry’s representative on the Building Committee of Tomsk University.149 Although the Tomsk Governor was the Building Committee’s nominal head, Florinskii became its main engine. He came to oversee every facet of the herculean task of creating from scratch a modern university in Siberia, from its budget (which, of course, had to be revised several times) and architectural plans to the hiring of a workforce and the procuring of building materials. In August, as part of a publicity and fund-raising campaign, Florinskii arranged a ceremony to mark the symbolic placing of the first cornerstone in the foundation of the future university’s main building.150 For the next five years, while continuing his professorial duties at Kazan University, every summer Florinskii made the journey of nearly 3,000 kilometers (one way) to Tomsk to oversee personally the construction, fund-raising, and furnishing of the new university.
In the late summer of 1885, the construction was completed and Tomsk University was ready to open its doors to the first cohort of students (see fig. 4-4). But its opening was put on hold. The five years that Florinskii spent building the university saw drastic changes in the life of his Fatherland and, especially, its educational system. The assassination of Alexander II and the ascendance of his son Alexander III in the spring of 1881 signaled the final end to the policies of the Great Reforms and the return to “reaction” reminiscent of the reign of Nicholas I. Over the same five years, the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment witnessed a succession of three different heads. Florinskii managed to maintain good working relations with each of them, which certainly was a decisive factor in his success in building the university. The new university statute, whose contours Florinskii had helped define, was finally promulgated in 1884, after nearly a decade of numerous revisions and edits, and amply manifested the oppressive tenor of the new times. It radically curtailed the autonomy of the faculty and the student body and instituted strict administrative control of bureaucracy in St. Petersburg over all university affairs (from hiring and firing of personnel to admission policies).151 Students’ protests and unrest that shook the Russian Empire after the adoption of the 1884 statute made the central bureaucracy wary of creating in Siberia a “center of revolutionary propaganda,” as all universities came to be seen in the aftermath of the 1881 regicide.152
The fate of Tomsk University hung in the air, and with it, the fate of Florinskii. He had fulfilled his promise to Tolstoi, yet the post of the university’s rector — that Tolstoi had promised him — remained unavailable. However, the new minister Ivan Delianov (who had known Florinskii since the two worked together on the 1875 imperial commission on the university statute) found an even better use for Florinskii’s administrative talents. In the fall of 1885, Delianov appointed him “supervisor of the Western Siberia educational district,”153 a de facto deputy-minister in charge of all matters related to education in a territory six times the size of France. Florinskii resigned his professorial position at Kazan University and moved to Tomsk to oversee not only the still-unopened university, but also nearly fifty other educational institutions (primary and secondary schools) scattered throughout the region (see fig. 4-5).154
Florinskii attended to his new duties with his customary efficiency and dedication.155 He certainly saw expanding access to education — which he had presented in his treatise as a major condition for the realisation of the Russian people’s “hidden hereditary potentials” — as a worthy cause. He made regular inspection tours of his domains that stretched from China to the Arctic Ocean, assessing the needs and demands of the educational system entrusted to his administration. Using his experience with building Tomsk University, he focused on the construction of new buildings for existing schools and establishing new schools. He founded a new gymnasium in Vernyi (today’s Almaty, Kazakhstan), erected new buildings for gymnasia in Tobol’sk and Tomsk, and created new primary and low-level technical schools throughout the region. In a dozen years during Florinskii’s administration, the number of schools (and their students) in Western Siberia more than doubled. His efforts were certainly appreciated by his superiors and in 1892 earned Florinskii a promotion to the next, third civil rank in the Table of Ranks (equivalent to a lieutenant-general in the military service).
Opening Tomsk University remained his overriding priority and Florinskii lobbied the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and the State Council for permission. It took him nearly three years to convince government officials that he could prevent turning the new university into a “nursery” of revolutionary propaganda in Siberia.156 Finally, in July 1888, Tomsk University — complete with a student dormitory, apartments for the professoriate, an extensive Botanical Garden with several greenhouses, and an excellent library — was officially opened.157 Alas, the original plan of having a fully-fledged university with four separate schools (natural sciences, history and philology, law, and medicine) got severely truncated: only its medical school was permitted to open.158
Another crown jewel of Florinskii’s work in Siberia was a new higher technical school in Tomsk. Shortly after the opening of the university, Florinskii launched a campaign for establishing a Technological Institute that would supply Siberia — and especially the Trans-Siberian Railroad whose construction was to begin in 1891 — with badly-needed cadres of engineers, architects, and other technical specialists. It took Florinskii almost a decade to push the project through the layers of state bureaucracy. Only after the death of Alexander III in the fall of 1894 and the ascendance of his son Nicholas II to the throne, did Florinskii manage to obtain imperial permission for its implementation. In 1896, the construction of the first higher technical school in Siberia began.159
Each of these projects required visits to the chosen construction sites, lengthy negotiations with the local administration, continuous fundraising campaigns, extensive correspondence with ministry officials and other state bureaucrats, and regular trips to the capital. Florinskii had a small support staff to assist him with technical work, but every year he spent four to six months on the road. Yet, busy as he was with his numerous administrative duties, the former professor did not abandon his scholarly pursuits.
His new job profoundly influenced his scholarly interests. Immediately upon opening the university, Florinskii spearheaded the establishment of the Tomsk Society of Naturalists and Physicians under the university’s aegis and was unanimously elected its first chairman.160 He presided over the society’s regular meetings and delivered several reports on the endemic and epidemic diseases affecting the region, such as influenza and the plague.161 But the main focus of his scholarly work shifted from medicine to history, archeology, and ethnography.
Even before construction of Tomsk University was completed, Florinskii had started to implement his idea of creating a public museum of history and ethnography, which he had first voiced at the meetings of the Society of Archeology, History, and Ethnography in Kazan.162 Already in 1882, he began collecting various objects that would form the future museum’s exhibits. He persuaded several wealthy local patrons and private collectors to support this endeavor, and by the time the university finally opened in 1888, its Archeological Museum had acquired a large collection of Siberian archeological and ethnographic materials. For the opening of the university, Florinskii published an extensive, 500-page catalogue of this collection, complete with detailed descriptions, annotations, and photographs of its various holdings.163 In the subsequent years, this collection became the major foundation of his personal scholarly work.
Since childhood Florinskii had been fascinated by the old burial mounds (kurgany) scattered all over the Southern Urals and Western Siberia. Now he made the artefacts dug out from these mounds into a subject of intensive study. On his numerous travels through the region he mapped out the location of various mounds and recruited local enthusiasts to conduct their excavations and send all the materials they dug out to Tomsk. In just two years, 1889 and 1890, he published nearly a dozen articles on burial mounds found in various locales.164 These studies culminated in a monumental, nearly 1,000-page-long treatise on “Slavic archeology.” From 1894 to 1898, the treatise appeared in installments as a supplement to the Herald of Tomsk University, and simultaneously as a multi-volume monograph under the general title The Primordial Slavs according to the Monuments of their Prehistoric Life.165 Based on careful comparison of various objects (weapons, jewelry, ceramics, sculls, etc.) from the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages found in different mounds, Florinskii advanced a hypothesis of the early migration of the prehistoric “Slavic tribes” from India to Siberia and farther on to Europe.166
In June 1898, just as the last installment of his “Slavic Archeology” came out, Florinskii’s career reached a point — forty years of service — that allowed him to retire with a full pension. He was 64 and, under the stress of constant travel, perpetual administrative conflicts, and non-stop scholarly work, his health had begun to deteriorate. The new minister of people’s enlightenment, Nikolai Bogolepov, offered him a post at the ministry, but he declined. He and his wife wanted to move back to Kazan. Their only child, Olga, resided in the city with her husband and a ten-year-old daughter, christened in honor of her grandmother, Maria (see fig. 4-7). Upon learning of his retirement, the Tomsk City Duma bestowed on Florinskii the title of “honorary citizen” to mark his contributions to education in the city and Siberia writ large.
Over the summer, the Florinskiis packed up their belongings, including Vasilii Florinskii’s extensive collections of paintings, china, manuscripts, and personal papers, and shipped them to Kazan. On 30 August, taking advantage of a new railroad that connected Tomsk to the Trans-Siberian Railway, they boarded a train to St. Petersburg.167 Florinskii had to formally present his final reports, along with resignation and pension paperwork, to the ministry. On arrival at the capital, they took up residence in a fancy hotel in the center of the city. But shortly thereafter, Vasilii Florinskii fell ill. On 3 January 1899, a few weeks short of his 65th birthday, he died of a heart failure in his hotel room.
A Superfluous Synthesis?
As the “superfluous man” of classic nineteenth-century Russian literature, whose views and ideas were misunderstood, unwanted, and ultimately marginalized by his contemporary society,168 so too Florinskii’s treatise did not find a response or a place in any of the scholarly fields it attempted to unify in his concept of “human perfection and degeneration.” As happened to Galton’s 1865 article, at the time of publication Florinskii’s essays went virtually unnoticed. Much like a “superfluous man,” Florinskii’s synthesis had a definite potential that went unrealized. Similar to Galton’s first publications on “hereditary talents,” Florinskii’s concept of “rational” or “hygienic” marriage had the potential to generate a viable research programme and even initiate policy changes, but it failed to raise the interest of either the scholarly community or the general public, to say nothing of the government bureaucracy. In contrast to Galton, who personally carried out his research programme and spent several decades gathering support for his ideas, methods, and concepts, Florinskii never returned to the subject of his treatise in his subsequent works and did absolutely nothing to promote it among fellow scientists and physicians or the general public.
Perhaps, an important factor in Florinskii’s abandonment of any further work on “Human Perfection and Degeneration” was the near total silence that greeted the first appearance of his treatise. Contrary to Pisarev’s assertion that “in just a week after the publication of each new issue [of Russian Word], all thoughts and even all separate expressions it contained have already been counted, measured, weighted, sniffed at, felt over, and taken under consideration,”169 the publication of Florinskii’s essays attracted no attention either from the censor, or from reviewers and commentators in contemporary periodicals. In late October 1865, in its regular review column, St. Petersburg’s leading newspaper Voice carried a lengthy overview of the August issues of the three major “thick” journals: The Contemporary, Russian Herald, and Russian Word. But it did not even mention Florinskii’s essay that opened the issue of Russian Word under review.170 The same situation was repeated in December when Voice reviewed the contents of Russian Word’s October issue.171 Only on 17 February 1866, in a review of the last two 1865 issues of the journal did Voice’s columnist briefly mention Florinskii’s treatise: “In the December issue, the conclusion of a voluminous investigation by V. M. Florinskii on human perfection finally came out. The essay is very remarkable in its goal [and] clearly imbued with love for humanity whose wellbeing is undoubtedly very close to its author’s heart.”172
The release of Florinskii’s essays as a book did nothing to break the silence that had greeted their publication in the journal. On 6 August, a member of the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee reported to his superiors on the book’s contents. He had read the book very closely, identifying its subject as “the hygiene of marriage, i.e. those physiological and hygienic conditions, which, if ignored at the time of marriage’s arrangement, [could] carry fatal consequences for the next generation.”173 His report is the only explicit evidence that Florinskii had succeeded in making his very complicated subject accessible to any educated reader. The censor did note “a certain democratic (philanthropic) tint that expresses, in some places, its author’s sympathy for the simple, uncorrupted masses of the people, and, in other places, his disapproval of the aristocracy and his contempt for degenerating aristocratic families.” He also noticed Florinskii’s comment about “the perfection of the peasant type” by billeting elite military regiments in the provinces and by the migration of peasant laborers to the cities. Nor did he miss Florinskii’s critique of church regulations of “kin” and “mixed” marriages as “too strict.” He clearly bought the double-talk devised by Florinskii and/or Blagosvetlov to avoid the censorship’s wrath. He stated that the book’s “direction” cannot be defined as “purely materialistic,” pointing out that its author himself had specifically refuted such reading of his text and offering as proof a long quote from Florinskii’s “aside” to his “female readers.” According to the censor’s assessment, the book as a whole “did not contain any infringements on censorship laws, which could provide a reason for its arrest or a court injunction.”
On 31 August 1866, Voice ran an advertisement announcing that Florinskii’s treatise “has been published as a separate volume and is available for purchase … at a new bookstore, established at the former editorial office of Russian Word.”174 The book’s publication was also duly announced on the pages of several other newspapers and journals.175 Starting with its very first issue, Blagosvetlov’s Deed carried an advertisement of the book in its back matter on a regular basis (see fig. 4-8).176 Yet I did not find a single review of the book in any of the numerous contemporary literary-scholarly, medical, and scientific periodicals I examined.
Various factors might have been responsible for this silence. The reaction to the Karakozov Affair in the highest echelons of the imperial government led to the shutting down of not only The Contemporary and Russian Word, but also several other periodicals, which otherwise might have reviewed Florinskii’s work. Thus, Book-lover (Knizhnik), a major bibliographic journal entirely devoted to reviewing contemporary literature (including scientific and medical publications), was shut down in June 1866. The same month the same fate befell Medical News, a weekly newspaper published by Florinskii’s younger colleague, gynecologist Martin Gorovits, and, two months later, Self-Education, a popular journal issued by Emanuil Khan, yet another physician-turned-publisher.
It looks like none of the journals that — despite mounting government pressure — survived beyond 1866 noticed Florinskii’s book. Book Herald, another important bibliographic journal that continued publication until July 1867, carried only a one-line bibliographic record of the book in its October 1866 issue, but nothing else.177 None of the “thick” journals that systematically reviewed new scientific and medical publications lent its pages to a review of Florinskii’s treatise. An illustrative example is Women’s Herald, a new “learned-literary” journal established in September 1866, which provided “refuge” for many of the former contributors to both Russian Word and The Contemporary. The journal regularly reviewed scientific and medical publications in its bibliographic section. Thus, its third issue that came out in early 1867 carried a critical review of Hygiene: A Manual for the Preservation of Health (1860), written by well-known popularizer Stepan Baranovskii.178 The next issue reviewed Popular Lectures on Cholera (1866), delivered and published by a staff physician of the Russian army in the Caucasus, which propagated many ideas closely resonating with Florinskii’s, especially regarding the role of poverty in the spread of diseases and the advocacy of social hygiene.179 But, despite the fact that Florinskii’s book had directly addressed many issues dear to the hearts and minds of the journal’s contributors and readers — especially “the women’s question” — it was never mentioned in the pages of Women’s Herald. Many other “thick” journals and newspapers during the same time period also regularly reviewed various scientific and medical publications, but not Florinskii’s book.180
Perhaps, it was the book’s explicit critique of existing marriage regulations as both a major potential source of degeneration and a major obstacle to human perfection that deterred contemporary observers from discussing it in newspapers and journals. During the nineteenth century, unlike elsewhere in Europe, marriage in Russia remained the exclusive domain of the church, not the state (the very notions of “civic marriage” and its derivative “fictitious marriage” were just beginning to enter the Russian social conscience at the time).181 Although the Russian Civic Code had a number of relevant laws on the books, their actual administration (including solemnization, matrimony, divorce, annulment, and so on) was kept firmly in the hands of the clergy that saw marriage as a sacrament and a covenant.182
The winds of change that blew over the empire in the aftermath of the Crimean War began to undermine the church’s authority, including its grip on the matters of marriage and family.183 Many educated Russians felt that “the political, social, [and] familial forms of human life had grown old, unsuitable for the present times and are destined to shatter [and] disappear.”184 During the first decade of Alexander II’s rule, officially endorsed glasnost’ stimulated a pointed debate (that unfolded largely on the pages of “thick” journals) over civic laws and the church directives pertaining to the “familial forms of life,” including the regulation of “kin” marriages, allowable marital age, age differences between prospective spouses, and “mixed” marriages.185 Public dissatisfaction with various aspects of what US historian Gregory L. Freeze has described as “a marital order of a rigidity unknown elsewhere in Europe”186 also found vivid expression in a number of artistic and literary works, such as, to give only two pertinent examples, Vasilii Pukirev’s painting The Unequal Marriage and Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s novel What is to be Done?, both of which captivated public attention in 1863. These and other similar works demonstrate that in the first half of the 1860s, a large section of Russian educated society was openly challenging the ecclesiastical cannons, precepts, and mores surrounding marriage.187 With their explicit commentary on church regulations of “kin” marriages, age differences between prospective spouses, and “mixed” marriages, Florinskii’s essays fit quite comfortably into the prevailing atmosphere of critiquing the existing marital order.
The Karakozov Affair changed that atmosphere radically. The imperial edicts and government actions prompted by the affair aimed first and foremost at upholding “the strict basis of religion and morality.” This new atmosphere found immediate expression in the fierce defense of traditional church marriage, as Nikolai Cherniavskii’s comedy Civic Marriage, which premiered in St. Petersburg in November 1866, clearly attested.188 The play provoked much indignation in the press, which even prompted its author to write a special “foreword” for its second edition justifying his views.189 These new conditions were hardly conducive to publically discussing Florinskii’s treatise. As Blagosvetlov warned Iakobii, after Karakozov’s assassination attempt, religion became “a strictly forbidden fruit.”190
If these “ecclesiastical” dimensions of Florinskii’s work could indeed prevent contemporary commentators from discussing it in newspapers and “thick” journals, they did not necessarily preclude a discussion of his “secular” ideas about human variability, heredity, and evolution by Russian scientists. Nor did they automatically exclude debates about the role of social hygiene in human perfection and degeneration or about the more general issues of the applicability of Darwin’s evolutionary concept to the understanding of “social ills” by Russian physicians. Yet, neither the scientific nor the medical community seemed to even notice Florinskii’s essays. No existing medical periodicals published a review.191 Neither did any natural science magazines. For instance, Naturalist, a popular bi-weekly journal published in St. Petersburg from 1864 through 1867, carried a variety of articles, reviews, and surveys on anthropology, Darwin’s theory, human evolution, and other subjects discussed in Florinskii’s work, but none of them ever mentioned his book.192
It is impossible to estimate how many people actually read Florinskii’s treatise, either in the journal or the book versions, but the absence of reviews in popular and specialized periodicals likely decreased its potential readership. We do not know how many copies of the book Blagosvetlov printed in 1866, but he kept it in print for more than a decade and regularly advertised it in his journal.193 In 1869, he apparently tried to boost sales by reducing the price of the book by a quarter, with an additional twenty per cent discount for the subscribers to Deed.194 Furthermore, there are some indications that sometime in 1871, just as Blagosvetlov published Portugalov’s essays “On Degeneration” and released the first volume of his own edition of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, he also ran an additional printing of Florinskii’s book (see fig. 4-8).195 But, even during the late 1860s and 1870s, with the exception of Portugalov, no one referred to or cited Florinskii’s treatise in various publications on any of the subjects it addressed.
A variety of factors might have played a role in the failure of Human Perfection and Degeneration to raise any interest in the Russian scholarly community. Florinskii’s “thought piece” attempted to synthesize the newest data, ideas, methods, and concepts from a variety of scholarly fields, including anthropology, physiology, and general biology, as well as from a host of medical fields, such as social hygiene, gynecology, psychiatry, and pediatrics. But it failed to find a sympathetic “thought collective,” as Ludwik Fleck has perceptively described it, in any of them.196 In the mid-1860s, nearly all of these fields were in the process of (re)formation. Their practitioners were divided on almost every issue, while their concepts and methods were in flux. In particular, the then current ideas about heredity, reproduction, and evolution were bitterly contested and their application to humans and social issues highly contentious.
Furthermore, Florinskii’s treatise came out exactly during the period when the two fields most closely connected and thus, theoretically, most receptive to his ideas — physical anthropology and social hygiene — were becoming fully-fledged disciplines. Their practitioners were in the process of constructing specialized disciplinary communities, building institutional structures, negotiating a consensus over the methods, subjects, and objects of future research, and establishing intellectual and institutional boundaries with competing fields and communities.
As elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, in Russia discipline building in physical anthropology unfolded during the 1860s and involved first and foremost its separation from a hodgepodge of such fields as ethnography, geography, archeology, and ethnology.197 In 1864, the Society of Enthusiasts for the Natural Sciences (organized just a year earlier by a group of Moscow University professors) established a special anthropology section that almost immediately began to issue its own journal.198 Three years later, in 1867, the society also instituted a separate ethnography section that the same year held the empire’s first ethnographic exhibition in Moscow.199 Also that year, the ethnography section of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society began to issue its own Memoirs.200 Amid these events, in the fall of 1866, Anatolii Bogdanov, a leading figure in the institutionalization of both anthropology and ethnography, attempted to articulate the differences between the subjects, objects, and methods of the two newborn disciplines and to draw a distinct boundary between them.201
Discipline building in social hygiene occurred during exactly the same period, but took a different form. If the institutionalization of anthropology was largely the result of public initiatives carried out by learned societies, the institutionalization of social hygiene was primarily a state affair. In 1863, Florinskii’s former professor Evgenii Pelikan was appointed head of the Medical Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.202 The very next year, the radical reform of local administration (which inaugurated the establishment of zemstvos in the European part of the Russian Empire) and court reform (which dramatically reshaped the entire judicial system) necessitated corresponding reorganizations in the provision and administration of medical services to both the state (and its courts)203 and the populace.204 Following the precepts of official glasnost’ that encouraged a limited and carefully controlled debate on state policies, in early 1865 Pelikan created a new journal, the Archive of Legal Medicine and Social Hygiene, modeled on the French Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, as a forum for discussion of necessary reforms in both legal medicine and public health. A year later, the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy split its existing Department of Forensic Medicine, Hygiene, and Medical Police into two separate departments: the Department of Forensic Medicine, and the Department of Social Hygiene.205 Over the next few years, both the new journal and the new departments were engaged in shaping the agendas of social hygiene and establishing boundaries that would delineate the new discipline from such competing fields as experimental hygiene, community medicine, and epidemiology.206 It took longer than a decade to consolidate the diverse views of numerous physicians on what constituted the proper domain of social hygiene in Russia. Only in 1877, was the first society of social hygiene established under the name of “the Russian Society for the Protection of People’s Health,” and it took another seven years for the society to begin publishing its own journal.207
Florinskii did not belong to any of the networks responsible for the institutionalization of either anthropology or social hygiene. He never attended their meetings, or published in specialized periodicals organized by the proponents of the two disciplines, and thus took no part in shaping their agendas. Nor did he promote in any way the ideas of his treatise among the members of these newborn specialized communities. Unlike Galton, who used every opportunity to publicize his ideas, methods, and concepts by delivering reports to existing scientific societies in London and elsewhere (especially those of anthropologists, sociologists, statisticians, and physicians), Florinskii never even mentioned the ideas of his treatise at any public gathering he attended.
Furthermore, Florinskii’s ideas about human degeneration and perfection appeared largely irrelevant to the agendas of both Russian physical anthropology and Russian social hygiene. As a thought piece based essentially not on his original research, but on published, predominantly western literature, Florinskii’s treatise responded to the debates within — and hence reflected the current concerns of — western (especially, French) anthropology and western (mostly French and German) social hygiene. The institutionalization of these two disciplines in Russia, however, required first and foremost the support of domestic patrons and the mobilization of their domestic practitioners and thus prompted the discipline-builders to gear their agendas to local interests and local concerns, quite different from those of their European counterparts. In the 1860s and 1870s, Russian anthropologists were largely engaged in cataloguing the empire’s “human diversity” through extensive craniological and anthropometric studies of its various populations, proudly presented at the country’s first anthropological exhibition held in 1879 in Moscow.208 During the same time period, as numerous articles published in the Archive of Legal Medicine and Social Hygiene clearly attest, Russian social hygienists focused mostly on the endemic and epidemic diseases that plagued the empire and their relation to such social factors as housing, occupation, sanitation, nutrition, prostitution, and alcoholism.209 An outbreak of cholera in the summer of 1866, which quickly reached epidemic proportions in Russia, certainly reinforced this focus and perhaps also contributed to social hygienists’ neglect of Florinskii’s book that came out at the height of the epidemic.210
The ideas of human degeneration and perfection were not completely new to the Russian educated public.211 Florinskii was certainly not the first to write about them in Russian, though he was the first to place them explicitly in the context of Darwin’s evolutionary concept and of the fledgling discipline of social hygiene. Yet Florinskii’s notions of degeneration and perfection had very little traction with Russian scientific/medical commentators. Consanguineous marriages, which Florinskii presented in his treatise as a major cause of degeneration, as well as “mixed” marriages, which he saw as a major instrument of perfection, were expressly forbidden by both the church rules and the state laws, thus making this part of his argument largely irrelevant to his target audience. His condemnation of slavery, serfdom, and, more generally, the economic and political inequality of various social groups as an important condition conducive to degeneration was, as he himself had readily admitted in his treatise, also clearly beyond the purview of the medical and scientific communities. At best, they might have conceived of any practical implementation of Florinskii’s ideas as belonging to a very distant future. But busy with debating a mountain of urgent social, political, economic, and cultural issues of their respective vocations, Russian scientists and physicians seemed to follow Chernyshevskii’s advice to focus on the present and to “leave the taking care of great-great-children to the great-great-children themselves.”212
Furthermore, Florinskii himself declared that the Russian people were in no danger of degeneration, thus making the entire subject of a purely “theoretical” concern, in contrast to the very practical and immediate concerns over the provision of medical care to the populace under the new zemstvo system, which preoccupied the medical community at the time. Even Portugalov, the only social hygienist who at Blagosvetlov’s direction had taken up the further development of Florinskii’s ideas, completely abandoned his studies of degeneration after 1876 and devoted his formidable energies to practical work as a physician in the Samara zemstvo.
One reason for the marked lack of interest in degeneration concepts in post-Crimean Russia, as well as for Florinskii’s optimistic declaration, was the absence of reliable demographic and vital statistics,213 which underpinned much of the attention such concepts generated in other countries and which Florinskii discussed at length in his treatise.214 Although “medico-topographical surveys” that usually included some data on demographic and vital statistics of the region under investigation had begun to be conducted in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, by the 1860s they covered only a small fraction of the empire’s huge territory and population.215 Moreover, the “raw,” aggregated data presented in such surveys did not lend itself easily to the differential statistical assessments covered by Jean-Marc Boudin’s, Johann Ludwig Casper’s, Francis Devay’s, Adolphe Quetelet’s, and Thomas Willis’s studies, which Florinskii utilized and cited in his essays.216 The very first statistical analyses of Russian fertility, mortality, and morbidity figures began to appear exactly at the time Florinskii was writing his essays, largely through the efforts of the country’s foremost expert on probability theory, the vice-president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Viktor Buniakovskii.217 And it was during the exact same time — at the October 1865 meeting of the St. Petersburg Society of Russian Physicians — that Iakov Chistovich voiced a passionate plea to collect “materials for medical geography and medical statistics in Russia” and offered a detailed plan on how to do this.218 Only in the 1870s and 1880s, however, did the systematic collection of fertility, mortality, and morbidity data become a serious concern of Russian physicians,219 though it still remained limited largely to the European part of the empire.220 And only in 1897, did the Russian government conduct the first census of its entire population, providing social hygienists with a baseline for their statistical studies.221 By that time, however, Florinskii’s treatise had long been overshadowed by numerous newer publications and seemed to have been completely forgotten.
From 1865 to 1898, in the course of 33 years since the first publication of Human Perfection and Degeneration, Florinskii never returned to the subjects of his treatise — human heredity, variability, and evolution, and various conditions that could lead to either the perfection or the degeneration of the human species — in any of his published works. Only once, in the “preface” to his manuscript Thoughts and Notes on My Childhood and Education, considering his own pedigree and life trajectory and noting that he had likely inherited his strong physique and health from his parents, did Florinskii briefly remark:
It would be interesting to investigate the laws of heredity of human mental and moral characteristics. In this respect, there must exist an anatomical continuity too, but it often gets obscured by the secondary influences of upbringing and environment. Nevertheless, one cannot but admit that the progressive development of civilized nations, estates, and separate families is the result of the gradual perfection of mental organs through exercise and heredity.222
But he never pursued this interest. It seems that he simply wished to forget he had ever written his essays on “rational marriage.” Indeed, he never included them in any of the lists of publications appended to his official curriculum vitae. Only towards the end of his life, answering requests from the authors of various encyclopedia and biographical lexicons, did he begin to list the 1866 book published by Blagosvetlov (but not the original essays published in Russian Word) in the bibliography of his works.223 Still, when in the mid-1890s he contemplated the possibility of publishing a multi-volume edition of his “Collected Works,” Florinskii did not include Human Perfection and Degeneration in its projected contents.224
With the notable exception of Veniamin Portugalov, it seems that nobody even mentioned in writing Human Perfection and Degeneration during its author’s lifetime. An illustrative example may be found in the various works by Florinskii’s fellow gynecologist Manus Pargamin. In 1891, Pargamin published a “popular-medical essay,” On Degeneration.225 Yet even though, like Florinskii, he advocated “mixed” marriages as the major instrument for preventing degeneration, he did not mention his predecessor, basing his essay exclusively on western literature. Five years later, Pargamin produced a voluminous overview, titled Heredity and Marriage Hygiene.226 In the preface, its author claimed that he “had spared neither effort, nor time and had diligently and carefully combed foreign and Russian literature to collect materials for the fullest and all-sided illumination of the subject expressed in its title.” Indeed, the volume cited more than 200 English, French, German, and Russian sources. But, though Pargamin addressed many of the issues raised by Florinskii’s treatise, he did not mention it at all.
Yet at least once in the course of his post-“Perfection and Degeneration” life Florinskii was forcefully reminded of his treatise. Sometime during the late 1880s, he received a letter from Paris with a request for a copy of his essays from Pavel Iakobii.227 The correspondent apologized profusely for sending the letter without being personally acquainted with its addressee, but felt that its subject was important enough to grant forgiveness. He introduced himself as a doctor and the author of a book, Etudes sur la sélection dans les rapports avec l’hérédité chez l’homme, that had been published in 1881 in Paris. The book had received a special prize from the Madrid Academy of Sciences,228 Iakobii boasted, as well as favorable reviews in various scientific and medical journals.229 It had been sold out and he now planned to produce a second, “revised and augmented” edition. It was this project that prompted his request: “I know that you have written an absolutely extraordinary article about the degeneration of the human type. The same theme is examined in my own work and in a published-somewhat-later treatise by [Francis] Galton.”230 “You understand how much I need to thoroughly study your work to reference it in the new edition of my book,” he continued, “which is particularly important because you had been the first to articulate this fundamental idea in the literature, and, though both Galton and myself developed the same view independently, not knowing about your work, the priorité undoubtedly belongs to you.” Alas, he could not find a copy of Florinskii’s work anywhere, Iakobii complained, “it has become a bibliographic rarity,” and that was why he had decided to trouble the “respected professor” with his request. He concluded:
I would like very much to produce a historique [introduction] to the question of the degeneration of the human type, and I think, not without certain pleasure, that this question — first raised by you, elaborated in detail in my own work, though supplemented by Galton and partially by De Candolle231 — would remain in science as a result of Russian efforts.
We cannot even guess how Florinskii reacted to Iakobii’s letter. Was he flattered? Dismayed? Annoyed? In all likelihood, he did not answer it. Iakobii did publish a second edition of his book. Prefaced by voluble praise from the famous French sociologist, criminologist, and social psychologist Gabriel Tarde, it came out in Paris in 1904, five years after Florinskii’s death.232 But it did not mention even Florinskii’s name, to say nothing of his “absolutely extraordinary article.” Contrary to what he had promised in his letter to Florinskii, Iakobii did not write a “historical introduction” to his book’s subject and did not mention Florinskii’s (or Galton’s) contributions to its examination. In regard to Florinskii, it seems to be a deliberate omission. Perhaps, Iakobii took offence at Florinskii’s refusal to respond to his request for a copy of his work. Iakobii published the new edition of his book almost fifteen years after he had returned to Russia in 1890, and, therefore, he had had ample opportunities to obtain a copy of Florinskii’s treatise, if not from its author, then from a public library. After all, his “revised and augmented” volume did include plenty of statistical materials collected by Russian social hygienists over the course of those fifteen years, as well as references to their publications. But not to Florinskii’s.
Four years after Florinskii’s death, his wife published a large collection of his articles and speeches.233 The 600-page tome included about forty pieces Florinskii had published during his lifetime in various periodicals on a variety of issues, ranging from women’s education to the origins of the word “Siberia.” But his treatise on “marriage hygiene” was not mentioned on its pages.
It looked as if with the death of its author, his ideas of human perfection and degeneration died too.