In 1865, the same year in which the British polymath Francis Galton published “Hereditary Talent and Character,” a little-known Russian gynecologist Vasilii Florinskii began to serialize a treatise, Human Perfection and Degeneration. The two men appear never to have heard of each other and, while Galton's book became synonymous with the rise of the eugenics movement, Florinskii's own work fell into obscurity until it was given a new lease on life in post-revolutionary Russia. The first part of Nikolai Krementsov's With and Without Galton situates Human Perfection and Degeneration not merely in the history of scientific thought but rather as a lens onto the multiple contexts—social, medical, political, cultural—in which the work was first written, published, and read. The second part examines how the work was subsequently republished and re-read in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With and Without Galton “is not a biography of Vasilii Florinskii but rather a ‘biography’ of his treatise” (11).

Human Perfection and Degeneration was first serialised in the radical journal Russian Word, part of a broad campaign waged by the editor, Grigorii Blagosvetlov, to popularize science and scientific solutions to the “social ills” (15) plaguing post-Crimean Russia. Just as Galton's eugenics was an “amalgam quite specific to late Victorian England” (5), so Florinskii's work can be read, Krementsov shows, as a meditation on the aspirations and anxieties of Imperial Russian culture in the midst of the Great Reforms. In contrast to Galton, for whom the British upper classes represented the “hereditary wealth” and the lower classes were the source and locus of “hereditary degeneration” of the nation, Florinskii saw the situation in Russia to be “almost in complete reverse” (180). There, it was the aristocracy and nobility, whose unions were determined by wealth and status rather than individual merit, that were the source of degeneration. Florinskii's overriding concern was the promotion of “hygienic” or “rational” marriages that would cut across the existing divisions of ancestry, class, ethnicity and religion. While Galton argued that hereditary degeneration was a cause of poverty, for Florinskii the causality was inverted. Amidst the general enthusiasm for social engineering that characterized the 1860s, Human Perfection and Degeneration was thus a plea for reform and an assault on the power of the Russian Orthodox Church to control marriage and divorce.

For sixty years after its initial publication, Florinskii's treatise remained “apparently unread and its major ideas dormant” (239). Then, in 1926, amid the growing international popularity of eugenics, it was republished by Mikhail Volotskoi, one of the founding members of the Russian Eugenics Society. Volotskoi promoted Florinskii's work both to establish the pedigree of eugenics in Russia and, by contrasting it with Galton's “bourgeois” eugenics, to insist on the compatibility of eugenics and Marxism in Soviet Russia. The resurrection of Florinskii's ideas proved, however, short-lived. In 1930, eugenics was condemned as a “bourgeois” and “fascist” science and Human Perfection and Degeneration was once again cast into the dustbin of history.

It was (together with Galton) retrieved from that dustbin in the 1970s, hailed this time as a foundational work not of eugenics but of medical genetics (which was itself undergoing a renaissance after its suppression by Lysenkoism), and it entered the contemporary discourse on human reproduction, variability, heredity, development, and evolution. Its appeal once again waned during the intellectual stagnation of the Brezhnev era before it enjoyed a brief renaissance in the mid 1990s. From there, Florinskii's work went on feature in the post-Soviet crackpot theories of “racial genetics” fronted by the self-styled “bio-politician” (391) Vladimir Avdeev.

What explains the enduring appeal of Florinskii's book? Krementsov identifies “an interesting regularity: each time the book appeared or was extensively discussed was within approximately a decade from a series of events that redefined the course of Russian history” (411). Each period of rupture—the 1860s, the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1990s and the 2010s—sparked renewed enthusiasm for the book's message about the possibilities of purposeful reform while each ensuing period of “restoration” has seen it fall once again into disfavor. Drawing on an extensive body of both published and archival sources, With and Without Galton is an impressive work of scholarship that will appeal to historians of Russian science and thought. In exploring the multiple lives of a single book that was itself devoted to the possibilities of change, it uncovers a deep continuity in Russian culture.