Alexander Palkhovsky and scientific materialism

Alexander Mikhailovich Palkhovsky, a literary critic, translator and journal writer, was born to the family of a low-ranking military clerk on 13 June 1831 in Tambov, central Russia.Footnote ¹³ His father, Mikhail Ivanovich Palkhovsky (born 1801) was a former officer, who resigned his military service at the rank of praporshchik, which granted hereditary nobility at the time, to become a government official in 1826. Mikhail Palkhovsky was employed at the various fiscal offices of provincial administrations of Ryazan and Tambov governorates until 1832, when he joined the civil personnel of the Ministry of War. There he was employed at the Tambov commissariat commission, a local division of the military supply department. In 1841 Mikhail Palkhovsky was appointed to the Stavropol commissariat commission, and one year later he was put in charge of the Temnolessky military temporary hospital deployed near Stavropol during the Caucasian War. Probably it was under his influence that Alexander chose medicine as his profession and, after graduating from the Stavropol gymnasium in 1852, enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine of Imperial Moscow University. Palkhovsky's family was apparently short of money, since he boarded and studied at the university at public expense. Palkhovsky was funded by the state programme for children of native Caucasians and Russian officials in Caucasus Krai. In return for state-sponsored higher education, after graduation the beneficiaries of the programme were obliged to enter the civil service in the Caucasian provinces. Instead, Palkhovsky quit the university without a degree in 1858 to become a man of letters.Footnote ¹⁴

When still a student, Palkhovsky wrote entries for the column entitled ‘Medical letters’ in the short-lived magazine Obshchezanimatelny Vestnik (1857–8), in which he discussed problems of natural-science education and also published some articles on various scientific topics such as electricity and atmospheric gases. Soon thereafter Palkhovsky turned to literary criticism, reviewing Oblomov (1859) by Ivan Goncharov, The Storm (1859) by Alexander Ostrovsky and other pieces of Russian fiction of the time for Moskovsky Vestnik (1859–61) and similar Moscow-based magazines. Palkhovsky also wrote much on the emancipation of women, an issue which was actively debated in Russia in the 1860s, taking the reductionist biologizing stance typical of so-called ‘vulgar’ or scientific materialists.Footnote ¹⁵ Palkhovsky openly declared that ‘a human being is foremost an animal, an organism’.Footnote ¹⁶ In keeping with this principle, Palkhovsky considered insect colonies, where reproductive and worker castes are separated, as a normative model for human society, when discussing the pros and cons of women's employment.Footnote ¹⁷ In general, Palkhovsky expressed unreserved faith in the progressive potential of natural sciences: ‘Popularization of physiology is probably the most urgent need for modern society … Science and enlightenment are all that matters. It is our only hope. It is the only force that could accomplish all beneficial changes’.Footnote ¹⁸

A similar preoccupation with natural sciences was shared by other radical intellectuals of the 1860s like Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Dmitry Pisarev and Varfolomey Zaytsev, who wrote on Pushkin and Darwin with equal ease, invariably upholding utilitarian considerations above ethics and aesthetics. Like Pisarev, the leading figure of Russian nihilism, Palkhovsky was formally a nobleman by birth, but de facto was a member of the raznochintsy intelligentsia, consisting of the educated sons of the bureaucracy, bourgeoisie, clergy and peasantry, who invaded the intellectual field in the 1860s after its domination by the wealthy landowning nobility in previous decades.Footnote ¹⁹ Raznochintsy, especially those from the student youth, were a social group that fuelled the nihilist revolutionary movement. Because the radicals of low social origin considered dissemination of scientific knowledge mixed with materialism an all-important tool of social liberation, they held a background in natural sciences in high esteem. It is not accidental that the self-proclaimed nihilist Bazarov, an iconic fictional character of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), the novel that gave currency to the word ‘nihilism’, was depicted as a student of the Faculty of Medicine.Footnote ²⁰ It is noteworthy that Palkhovsky's biography perfectly fits that of Bazarov, who is presented in the novel as a son of a provincial regimental doctor. Zaytsev, who with Pisarev wrote for Russkoe slovo, one of the most influential radical periodicals of the 1860s, also studied at the Faculty of Medicine of Moscow University and, like Palkhovsky, left it in 1862 without graduating.

Soaked with scientism and anti-religious feelings, the Russian radicalized youth were deeply enthusiastic about German scientific materialism. This fact did not escape the notice of Russian novelists. Turgenev's Bazarov is eager to recommend Kraft und Stoff by Ludwig Büchner, and one nihilist described in Dostoevsky's The Possessed even worshiped volumes of Büchner, Karl Vogt and Jacob Moleschott after the manner of religious icons, burning church candles before them. Dostoevsky's description is hardly an exaggeration, as is evidenced by Zaytsev, who recollected in exile that he had been ready to suffer martyrdom for the ideas of Moleschott and, notably, of Darwin.Footnote ²¹ Less ideological naturalists were often overshadowed in the eyes of the Russian public by the fame of German materialists. As Palkhovsky put it, ‘readers would devour books by Moleschott and Vogt, because they are long familiar with the names of these scientists, and would pass Huxley's and Lyell's works by, because these naturalists are still little talked about’.Footnote ²² Riding this wave of interest in German materialists, Palkhovsky translated Physiologisches Skizzenbuch by Moleschott into Russian in 1863, the very same year as his translation of Vestiges appeared. It was no coincidence that both translations were issued by the same publisher, Anatoly Cherenin, since they were both part of the same ideological enterprise, aimed at importing the materialistic world view into the religion-ridden Russian society. If it were not for Karl Vogt, the book by an anonymous English author would have gone almost unnoticed in Russia. Because Vogt had translated Vestiges into German, Palkhovsky decided that it was worth translating into Russian too. Unlike other European translators, however, Palkhovsky translated Vestiges not from the English original, but from the German translation of Vogt, not least because that would enable him to use the name of this radical idol for the promotion of the book.

The indirect translation of Vestiges: a marketing strategy with political overtones

Vogt translated the sixth English edition of Vestiges shortly before the March Revolution of 1848, but social unrest delayed its publication until 1851. Palkhovsky used the second edition of Vogt's translation, which appeared in 1858. In the preface Palkhovsky made an attempt to justify his decision not to use the English text by saying that Vogt's translation was ‘far superior in literary quality’ to the original.Footnote ²³ This excuse seems rather far-fetched because Palkhovsky confessed in one of the footnotes that he had not even read the book before he started to translate it.Footnote ²⁴ It is more likely that Palkhovsky simply was not proficient enough in English (knowledge of French and German was much more widespread among educated Russians) or did not have access to the original. In any case, the fact that Palkhovsky translated from the German version provided him with the pretext for printing Vogt's name in bold letters on the title page of the Russian edition of Vestiges (Figure 1). This was a clever marketing ploy to draw readers’ attention to the book under the umbrella of fashionable German materialism. According to the booksellers’ catalogues, the Russian edition of Vestiges was sold alongside fresh Russian translations of Lehre der Nahrungsmittel (1863) by Moleschott, Physiologische Briefe (1863) by Vogt and other works of scientific materialists in a bookshop run by revolutionary Nikolai Serno-Solovyevich in St Petersburg.Footnote ²⁵ Because the title page of Palkhovsky's translation contained no references to the anonymous English writer, some inattentive readers even mistook Vogt for the author of the book, as Fedor Reshetnikov, one of the raznochintsy writers, did in an entry in his diary dated the summer of 1864.Footnote ²⁶

Figure 1.

Title pages of the first (1863) and second (1868) Russian editions of Vestiges, translated by Alexander Palkhovsky.

Palkhovsky's footnotes to Vestiges echoed the strict empiricism of German materialists. According to him, ‘in the present time rational minds hold as an indisputable truth that knowledge in any sphere could be obtained only by observation, experience and induction. Only idiots could talk about ideas independent of experience’.Footnote ²⁷ Büchner, for example, argued exactly the same thing, believing that even mathematical concepts are empirically rooted. The person, he wrote in Kraft und Stoff, ‘achieves all its thinking and knowledge only from observing the objective world around it’.Footnote ²⁸ Or, as summed up by Turgenev's Bazarov, ‘there are no principles at all, it is only sensations that exist’. Under the spell of this naive realism Palkhovsky recognized the reductionist programme as self-evident and prophesied that in the future all social sciences would be based on anthropology, ‘whose contents are derived from observing man as natural phenomena’.Footnote ²⁹ The author of Vestiges himself gave some ground for this conclusion, discussing the laws of social statistics outlined by the Belgian mathematician and criminologist Adolphe Quetelet. When Vestiges claimed that ‘mental action, being proved to be under law, passes at once into the category of natural things’, it definitely appealed to the materialistic-minded Russian radicals.Footnote ³⁰ The reductionist mood of the book was noticed in the anonymous review of Palkhovsky's translation which was probably written by Yevgeny Edelson and published in the popular periodical Biblioteka dlya chteniya: ‘the author [of Vestiges] is trying, and not without success, to unambiguously link all so-called human “spiritual qualities” to the general history of the material development of Earth’.Footnote ³¹

Palkhovsky frequently used footnotes for digressions on political issues, which of course had to be managed within the limitations placed by censorship. For instance, the crime statistics discussed in Vestiges gave Palkhovsky a pretext to call for a thoroughgoing reform of the criminal-justice and penal system. He reasoned that if there are regular patterns in criminal activity, it is the social environment and not individuals that should be blamed for crimes. It follows, Palkhovsky said, that the science of criminal law has to ‘find out what social conditions would make the commission of crimes naturally impossible’ – a suggestion that could be deciphered as a disguised call for a radical change of the politico-economic system.Footnote ³² According to Palkhovsky's utopian ideals, penal policy should be transformed into a kind of ‘moral therapy’ designed not to punish but to cure.Footnote ³³ His stance was met with full approval by nihilist journalist Zaytsev, who remarked in the review of Palkhovsky's translation for the radical magazine Russkoe slovo that ‘punishing someone for a crime is like punishing someone for stumbling and falling’.Footnote ³⁴

Nonetheless, the discourse of Vestiges in general seemed overly optimistic and too politically passive for the Russian radicals. In their opinion, the author placed too much trust in inevitable progress, which would lead to the development of ‘higher types of humanity’ in the distant future – a weak consolation for those suffering poverty and hunger now. Commenting on the evolutionary theodicy offered by Vestiges, Palkhovsky accused its author of being too concerned with natural evil, about which nothing could be done: ‘you would better tell us about social evil, for example, about your famous English proletariat – teach us how to eradicate this evil. The problem is that when it comes to this question every liberal benevolent-looking Englishman keeps his mouth shut’.Footnote ³⁵ Prevented by censorship from discussing tsarist autocracy and the miserable state of the Russian narod (lower classes), Palkhovsky diverted his anger to the English establishment, questioning in a Chartist-like manner why the working classes were still not represented in the English parliament.Footnote ³⁶ Palkhovsky was not alone in criticizing Vestiges for blindness to social injustice. Later a fictional story was published in the satirical magazine Iskra, accusing the book translated by Palkhovsky of downplaying thousands of years of human sufferings, which ‘compared to eternity are like a drop compared to the ocean’ in the providential perspective. According to the story's plot, such an optimistic Vestiges-inspired reasoning enabled a complacent character to reassure himself when faced with an indigent and desperate young mother and her crying baby.Footnote ³⁷

Tackling the religion of Vestiges

Needless to say, the religious overtones of Vestiges were welcomed neither by Vogt nor by the Russian nihilists. However, theistic assumptions were an essential part of Chambers's evolutionary scheme, not mere rhetoric disguising godless naturalism, as was sometimes assumed. Although it is often overlooked, the author of Vestiges is not just another pre-Darwinian evolutionist. Instead, he should be recognized as a founder of theistic evolutionism, an approach which is still exceedingly popular within Western theology. It was Chambers who laid the ground for understanding evolution as a means by which God creates the universe and all living things (‘creation by law’, in his words). Many of the early supporters of theistic evolution, like the Oxford mathematician Rev. Baden Powell and English naturalists William Carpenter and Alfred Russel Wallace, were sympathetic readers of Vestiges. Footnote ³⁸ Chambers was not content with the distant God of deism, but stressed instead that God ‘must be continually present in every part’ of evolving creation.Footnote ³⁹ In Chambers's view, God is not a bystander, but had preordained the course of evolution to provide a final redress for evil.Footnote ⁴⁰ In short, Chambers anticipated the main themes occurring in the writings of many subsequent theistic evolutionists up to such recent writers as Jürgen Moltmann and John Polkinghorne. Unbelievers of radical stripe found this very hard to stomach.

Vogt uncompromisingly expressed his atheist creed in several footnotes to the German edition, maintaining that ‘every notion of transcendent God or Lawmaker leads to absurd conclusions’.Footnote ⁴¹ However, contrary to Podani and Morrison, who argue that all the comments and footnotes by Vogt found their way into the Russian edition, in fact all of Vogt's anti-religious invectives had been dropped from it.Footnote ⁴² No doubt this was a deliberate omission caused by censorship considerations, because Palkhovsky accurately translated all of Vogt's other footnotes on scientific matters, including those with which he strictly disagreed. Despite this, Palkhovsky made an attempt to neutralize religious passages of Vestiges (to his honour, he refrained from cutting them out of the translation) in his own more cautiously worded comments. Palkhovsky castigated those ‘who are unfamiliar with the essence of the natural phenomena and not used to strict philosophical reasoning’ for assuming that ‘there is a force in nature capable of consciously acting on purpose’.Footnote ⁴³ He clearly declared that any attempts to find ‘design and purpose in nature’ are a result of self-deceit. At low stages of intellectual development, Palkhovsky claimed, people believed that ‘nature is inhabited by beings similar to them but invisible – spirits that govern over it’, but by now these ‘childish notions’ have been left behind.Footnote ⁴⁴ Without openly attacking religion, in this way Palkhovsky made clear his disdain for it.

In his review of Palkhovsky's translation, Zaytsev also spared no effort in dismantling the religious component of Vestiges. Zaytsev blamed the author of the book for a lack of courage and insincerity because of his attempts to distance himself from materialism and dress evolution in religious clothes. ‘To what a degree of naivety and hypocrisy the author has been drawn by his desire to earn the favourable opinion of the venerable English clergy and all the bigots of the United Kingdom’, Zaytsev exclaimed.Footnote ⁴⁵ Vogt's footnotes, omitted from the Russian edition, argued in a similar vein, asking whether ‘the author implies the existence of the eternal spirit only to mitigate theologians?’Footnote ⁴⁶ Opponents of nihilists from the religious camp likewise raised doubts about the sincerity of the Vestiges author. Viktor Kudriavtsev-Platonov, Eastern Orthodox theologian and professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, pointed out that

A clear parallel could be seen in controversies surrounding Vestiges in England, where many readers from both camps also dismissed references to the ‘Eternal One’ made by its author as ‘meaningless conventions, tacked on to placate the saints’.Footnote ⁴⁸

The appeal of Vestiges to nihilists: evolution and spontaneous generation

So what, after all, attracted the Russian radicals to Vestiges, despite its seemingly compromising and indecisive tone? It was the masterful presentation of the development hypothesis. However, Palkhovsky and his fellow nihilists differed in this matter from their beloved Vogt. Curiously enough, Vogt was a staunch supporter of the immutability of species while preparing the translation of Vestiges. Before he was converted to evolutionism by Darwin's Origin, Vogt supported a rather whimsical autochthonous generation theory, which holds that the new species sprang from the earth under unknown physical conditions at the beginning of each new geological age, like warriors from the dragon's teeth in the myth of the Argonauts.Footnote ⁴⁹ In consequence, Vogt furnished his translation of Vestiges with numerous anti-evolutionary footnotes, which asserted that no species ever turned into another and that complex organisms periodically went extinct to emerge anew after geological cataclysms.Footnote ⁵⁰ But Palkhovsky sided with the author of Vestiges in this regard and decided to counterbalance Vogt's anti-evolutionary comments (translated by him along with the original text, despite disagreement) with his own footnotes, where he defended the idea of evolution. In doing so Palkhovsky often appealed to the authority of Darwin: ‘the remark by Vogt, as well as the whole doctrine of immutability of species, lost their significance with the appearance of Darwin's On the Origin of Species’.Footnote ⁵¹ It is important to note that, although Origin had not yet been published in Russia, the author of Vestiges was, for Palkhovsky, first of all a forerunner of Darwin. In the preface to his translation Palkhovsky advertised Vestiges as the first (after Lamarck's ‘failed attempts’) ‘more or less scientific’ solution to the problem of the origin of species, ‘agreeing in the main points with Darwin's theory, which is in the first place in science now’.Footnote ⁵²

Zaytsev, in his review of the translation of Vestiges, wholeheartedly supported evolutionism, dismissing Vogt's criticism as ‘nonsense’ and, like Palkhovsky, invoking Darwin's name: ‘fortunately, nobody could think after Darwin that species of organisms are immutable and absolute’.Footnote ⁵³ Edelson in Biblioteka dlya chteniya also perceived Vestiges as a prelude to Darwinism: ‘how clever is the author of the English book is clear from the fact that he anticipated Darwin's theory of the mutability of organic species that made so much noise in recent times’.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, Palkhovsky himself showed sympathy for evolutionism even on the eve of Darwin's Origin, as is evident from his article of 1858 dealing with electricity and atmospheric gases. As the article explained, it is not enough to simply describe electrical phenomena, since the main task of science is to determine their underlying causes such as the motion of atoms. Palkhovsky illustrated his point with an example taken from comparative morphology, saying that a full understanding of the distinctive characters of any particular group of organisms is impossible without knowledge of their evolutionary origin:

Palkhovsky also concurred with Vestiges in accepting the theory of spontaneous generation. To persuade readers that the transition from inorganic matter to life could have happened without any interference on the part of God, Vestiges argued that not only animalculae, but even mites, could be produced from scratch, referring to the notorious electrochemical experiments of Andrew Crosse. While Vogt in his footnotes refuted the credibility of Crosse's experiments, Palkhovsky insisted that the question of the spontaneous generation of ‘the simplest forms of animal and plant kingdoms’ was still on the table.Footnote ⁵⁶ Palkhovsky strongly criticized Louis Pasteur and the French Academy of Sciences, which in 1862 had awarded Pasteur the Alhumbert Prize for disproving the theory of spontaneous generation. According to Palkhovsky, Pasteur and the like were ‘bad philosophers’ who ‘cannot even properly formulate the problem’.Footnote ⁵⁷ He prophesied that chemists eventually would create in vitro ‘the simplest zoological forms’ just as they had previously synthesized some organic molecules.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is suggestive that Pisarev, the golden pen of Russian nihilism, likewise took the side of Félix Pouchet, a leading French advocate of the idea of the spontaneous generation against Pasteur and the Parisian academy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Evidently, Russian radicals viewed the theory of spontaneous generation as an essential part of the materialist doctrine, since it filled a breach where religion might potentially encroach into an otherwise impregnable naturalistic world view. Vestiges was regarded as an ally in this struggle.

The second Russian edition of Vestiges in the wake of the assassination attempt on the tsar

After 1863, when Cherenin published his translations of Vestiges and Moleschott's Physiologisches Skizzenbuch, Palkhovsky continued to stay in close touch with him. In 1865 Cherenin launched the book review magazine Knizhnik, and Palkhovsky started to contribute reviews of new books on natural sciences. As with other aspects of Cherenin's publishing activities, Knizhnik was marked by radicalism and popularized works by French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of which, La guerre et la paix, was published by Cherenin in 1864 in Russian translation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Soon afterwards, however, an attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II, made by the revolutionary Dmitry Karakozov in the Summer Garden in Saint Petersburg on 4 April 1866, put an end to all Cherenin's businesses. The first public attempt to murder a tsar in Russian history, this attack deeply shook Russian society and unleashed state repression against radicals.Footnote ⁶¹ Cherenin was one of the dozens of people personally affected by the political reaction to Karakozov's attempt. The police investigation revealed that the bookshop with a subscription library run by Cherenin in the centre of Moscow was frequented by members of Nikolai Ishutin's circle, a revolutionary group that maintained close contacts with Karakozov, Ishutin's cousin. As a result, the police searched Cherenin's private flat and bookshop on 5 August 1866. It is suggestive that excerpts from Büchner's Kraft und Stoff translated into Russian by revolutionary Petr Zaichnevsky were among other suspicious materials seized by police in Cherenin's properties. Predictably, Knizhnik and others of Cherenin's publishing projects ceased to exist in 1866, and his bookshop with the subscription library was finally closed by the edict of the minister of internal affairs on 18 June 1867. Three months later, on 13 September 1867, Cherenin was arrested and exiled to Pensa under a lifelong prohibition on bookselling and publishing imposed on him by a direct decree of Alexander II.Footnote ⁶²

Palkhovsky's translation of Vestiges, however, outlived this political disaster and was republished by Vladimir Gautier, a large-scale publisher and book salesman, not engaged in politics, who kept a shop on Rozhdestvenka Street in the same rental house of Torletsky's where Cherenin's shop used to be quartered. The second Russian edition of Vestiges lacked Palkhovsky's preface and some of his footnotes but was embellished with black-and-white illustrations, mostly on palaeontological subjects, taken from Vogt's translation (Figure 2). In contrast, Cherenin's edition contained no illustrative materials, except for the schematic embryological–phylogenetic tree devised by Chambers.Footnote ⁶³ A parallel could be traced here with the English editions of Vestiges, which initially also had no illustrations until the tenth edition (1853). After this point, further issues were released richly illustrated, which prolonged the survival of the book in the niche of popular literature in the shade of more solid and up-to-date scientific volumes. The same could be said of Vestiges in Russia since it was reissued in 1868 despite the fact that Darwin's Origin had appeared in Russian twice by that time (in 1864 and 1865). As a commercial publisher sensitive to public fashion, Gautier felt that Vestiges was still in demand and would serve as a kind of popular encyclopedia for a wide audience.

Figure 2.

Illustrated pages from the second Russian edition of Vestiges.

Nevertheless, the turmoil related to Karakozov's attempt had a significant impact on Palkhovsky's career.Footnote ⁶⁴ Having prepared other translations of popular-science books in the mid-1860s, Palkhovsky then ceased his literary activity in 1868 to become a solicitor in the Moscow commercial court.Footnote ⁶⁵ In his new position Palkhovsky still showed an interest in radical politics, as is clear from his involvement in the trial of the Nechaevists in 1871. Nechaevists were the followers of the revolutionary, nihilist and conspirator Sergey Nechaev, famously fictionalized in Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed. Nechaev was a close friend of journalist Filipp Nefyodov, who was editor-in-chief of Cherenin's Knizhnik, to which Palkhovsky had contributed as an author. In 1865, the very time when Palkhovsky actively wrote for Knizhnik, Nechaev lodged with Nefyodov during his visit to Moscow, so it cannot be excluded that Palkhovsky met Nechaev in person.Footnote ⁶⁶ Anyway, Palkhovsky's involvement in the trial of the Nechaevists on the defence side of the courtroom does not seem unexpected. Palkhovsky defended the revolutionary Alexander Buturlin, who was acquitted at that time but arrested again in 1879 on suspicion of a terrorist act aimed at the tsar's train. As a solicitor and a member of the Moscow Jurisprudence Society, Palkhovsky published several books on legal issues in the 1870s, but never resumed translating natural-science books. He died on 14 July 1907 and was buried in the local cemetery in Nikolskoye-Shipilovo village in the vicinity of Moscow.Footnote ⁶⁷