As a literary prototype of this movement, we must nominate
the hero Bazarov of Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
, published in 1862, just three years after Darwin’s
Origin of Species.
This revolutionary nihilist denies all laws except those of the natural sciences. When not engaged in political schemes, he dissects frogs to build his knowledge and center his life. Vladimir and Sophia Kovalevsky were not nearly so colorful, or extreme in their sentiments and
actions. But their lives surely included sufficient adventure for a Hollywood biography. I was particularly struck by the story of Vladimir’s skullduggery in fostering the escape from France, following the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, of the imprisoned and politically radical lover of Sophia’s sister.
Sophia and Vladimir began their marriage as a sham, but as the world turns, birds fly,
and bees buzz, the best-laid plans of mice and men often depart from original intentions. When Sophia could not find employment in Europe, and Vladimir wished to go home (where he could work as a paleontologist), they returned to Russia together. They had always been fond of each other, and when Vladimir showed special tenderness to Sophia following the death of her beloved father, they did consummate
their marriage and eventually had a daughter, who later studied medicine, worked as a translator, and became quite a heroine herself within a very different Soviet system.
Their life together in Russia produced little but tension, much of their own making. Vladimir had some family money, and Sophia obtained a good sum after her father’s death. As neither found remunerative work within science
(and since they had chosen a lifestyle far above their means), they invested their cash in a variety of ill-considered business schemes, mostly in real estate and public baths—and quickly became flat broke. Vladimir then had a stroke of good fortune that eventually became his undoing. He obtained a position—at decent compensation—as spokesman for a firm that manufactured naphtha from petroleum. The
Ragozin brothers, owners of the company, wanted the prestige of Vladimir’s academic degrees, and his recognized verbal skills (arising, in part, from his efforts as a formidable soapbox orator in his political past), to lure customers and investors.
Vladimir spent most of his time on business trips to European cities. Sophia, though happy for the cash that gave her some leisure for mathematical
work, became increasingly frustrated at his absences and preoccupations—and a serious rift developed. Finally, early in 1881, Sophia boiled over and left for Berlin to pursue her academic dreams. She explained in a letter to Vladimir:
You write truly that no woman has created anything important, but it is just because of this that it is essential for me, while I still have energy and tolerable
material circumstances, to position myself so that I may show whether I can achieve anything or whether I lack brains.
(I have become fascinated with Vladimir and Sophia and have read everything I could get my hands on for this essay—including a veiled biography by Sophia’s sister, an even more hagiographical set of Soviet documents, and a fine modern biography, the source of this quote and
much else, by Don H. Kennedy:
Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky.)
After many heartrending letters, and a few meetings for attempted reconciliation, Sophia decided to remain abroad, and the couple entrusted their daughter to the care of Vladimir’s more famous (and solvent) brother Alexander (the celebrated embryologist who discovered the relationship between vertebrates and the apparently
“lowly” marine tunicates).
And the predictable tragedy finally unfolded. Vladimir had been mentally ill for years, and his periods of depression lengthened and deepened. The naphtha firm failed, and the Ragozin brothers, charged with numerous shady dealings, faced judicial proceedings. Vladimir, fearing his own disgrace and prosecution (though he was apparently innocent and not under official
suspicion), committed suicide on April 15, 1883, by putting a bag over his head and inhaling chloroform. He had earlier written (but not mailed) a letter to his brother that functioned as a suicide note:
I am afraid that I shall grieve you very, very much, but from all the clouds that have gathered from all sides over me, this was the only thing left for me to do. Everything for which I was
preparing has been broken up by this, and life is growing terribly difficult . . . Write Sophia that my constant thought was about her, and how very wrong I was before her, and how I spoiled her life which, except for me, would have been bright and happy.
On learning the news, Sophia was devastated by a complex mixture of grief and guilt. She withdrew to her room and would neither admit anyone
nor eat anything. On the fifth day, she lost consciousness. She was then force-fed by her physician and put into bed. Several days later, she sat up, asked for a pencil and paper, and began to work on a problem in mathematics.
Vladimir’s paleontological career was brief and limited, both in quantity and apparent range of material. He worked and studied abroad from 1869 (the year of his marriage)
to 1874, attending lectures in several German universities, studying fossil vertebrates at museums in Germany, France, Holland, and Great Britain, and collecting fossils in France and Italy. He wrote six papers in three languages, none his own (a few Russian translations appeared later). All six, published between 1873 and 1877, treated the anatomy and evolution of the two great groups of large,
hoofed, herbivorous mammals—the perissodactyls, or odd-toed ungulates (represented today only by the few living species of horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs), and the artiodactyls, or even-toed ungulates (the greatest success story among large mammals, including the highly diverse cattle, deer, antelopes, sheep and goats, pigs, giraffes, camels, and hippos).
In the late 1970s, I edited an ill-fated
thirty-volume collection of facsimile reprints in the history of paleontology. (The volumes were lovely, but the press went belly-up—for other reasons, I trust!—soon after the collection appeared. I assume that most printed copies ended up in the shredder.) I decided to collect all of Kovalevsky’s papers together in one volume—his articles in German from the journal
Palaeontographica;
his English
monograph, submitted by T. H. Huxley for publication in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London;
and his famous French treatise on the evolution of horses, published back home in the
Mémoires de l’Academie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg
(but not in Russian, so that wide readership would be possible. Many nations today—particularly Japan—publish major scientific
journals in English for the same reason). The six papers made a substantial, but not particularly hefty, volume.
Such limited output rarely builds preeminence in a field like paleontology, so identified (however unfairly) as a profession devoted to the detailed description of minutiae. Yet, although Vladimir Kovalevsky may be virtually unknown to the larger intellectual world (except as the husband
of a famous mathematician, and brother of a celebrated embryologist), he is treasured within my small fraternity as an important innovator and a particularly careful craftsman. His few published papers created a reputation well beyond their literal heft. For fifteen years, I have stared fondly at my modest volume of his totality.
Kovalevsky has always won warm accolades from aficionados. Darwin
greatly admired his work, and singled out a monograph on horses for special praise in a letter that can only make scholars yearn for more in the same (literal) style. (Darwin had the world’s most abominable handwriting, a serious impediment for all historians of science. Some of the most important passages in his writing, and therefore in the history of Western thought, have yet to be deciphered
to everyone’s satisfaction. But he wrote to Kovalevsky in a wonderfully clear hand—no doubt laboriously and in deference to a man who usually worked in Cyrillic and might have difficulty with English penmanship. Why didn’t Darwin realize that Englishmen might also stumble over his usual scrawl?)
Darwin had good reason to cultivate Kovalevsky’s favor. Before marrying Sophia, Vladimir had worked
as a translator and publisher of scientific books. He translated at least three of Darwin’s most important works into Russian—
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
(1868), the
Descent of Man
(1871), and the
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872). Vladimir worked so feverishly on the 1868 book (Darwin’s longest) that the Russian edition actually appeared before the
“original” English version, thereby marking the premiere of this important work. In another tale from their eventful lives, Vladimir and Sophia safely carried the proofs of the
Descent of Man
through the Prussian lines and into besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
Kovalevsky’s reputation has always remained firm in the small fraternity of vertebrate paleontologists. In the first
years of this century, Henry Fairfield Osborn, America’s leader in the field, marked Kovalevsky’s work as “the first attempt at an arrangement of a great group of mammals upon the basis of the descent theory.” He then added:
If a student asks me how to study paleontology, I can do no better than direct him to the
Versuch einer natürlichen Classification der fossilen Hufthiere [An Attempt at
a Natural Classification of Fossil Hoofed Mammals
—Kovalevsky’s most important German publication] . . . This work is a model union of the detailed study of form and function with theory.
The Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo, Europe’s leader in the field, praised Kovalevsky as “the first to study systematically the great problems of paleontology on the basis of evolution . . . No paleontologist
had ever joined such an intimate knowledge of details with such an amplitude of concepts.” In his major work (
La paléontologie éthologique
, 1909), Dollo proposed a heroic epitome by depicting the history of paleontology as a forward march from foolishness to illumination in three progressive stages, each marked by a prototype: the “
époque fabuleuse, ou empirique
,” centered upon the fanciful early-eighteenth-cent
ury work of the Swiss savant J. J. Scheuchzer; the
“époque morphologique, ou rationelle,”
marked by the great Georges Cuvier in the early nineteenth century; and the culminating
“époque transformiste
[evolutionary],
ou définitive”
symbolized by the brilliant work of Kovalevsky.
We may identity the source of Kovalevsky’s fame, and his enduring place in the history of the natural sciences, in two
summary statements.
1. Kovalevsky made the first substantial application of evolutionary theory—specifically, Darwin’s version based on natural selection—to lineages of fossil organisms. (Others had published evolutionary interpretations based on vague and confused views about mechanisms of change, but Kovalevsky rigorously applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection, primarily by seeking correlations
of altered anatomy with changing external environment, and then developing functional, or adaptive, interpretations of the evolutionary transformations.) Moreover, Kovalevsky was a consistent Darwinian at a time when the great majority of scientists, although persuaded of evolution’s truth by Darwin’s arguments, rejected natural selection as an important mechanism of change. (In fairness,
Kovalevsky’s commitment need not record any superior insight or observation based on fossils, but arose largely from Darwin’s exalted status among the Russian intelligentsia, as discussed previously in this essay.)
In his English monograph of 1874, Kovalevsky wrote:
The wide acceptance by thinking naturalists of Darwin’s theory has given a new life to paleontological research; the investigation
of fossil forms has been elevated from a merely inquisitive study of what were deemed to be arbitrary acts of creation to a deep scientific investigation of forms allied naturally and in direct connection with those now peopling the globe.
As a good example of his focus on adaptation to changing environments as the motor of evolution, Kovalevsky argues, later in the same monograph, that horses
evolved their strong single toe for life on hard, dry plains (a new environment following the evolution of grasses in the Miocene epoch), while hoofed mammals living in soft and swampy ground required a broad foot and therefore retained several toes:
If the lateral digits are still retained in the Suidae [pigs] it is chiefly owing to the fact that the Hogs live generally in marshy places and
on muddy river-banks, where a broad foot is of great importance for not allowing them to sink deeply into the mud. But if, by some geological change, their habitat should be transformed into dry grassy plains, there can be no reasonable doubt that they would as readily lose their lateral digits as the Paleotheroids [horse ancestors, in Kovalevsky’s view] have lost theirs . . . in becoming transformed
into the monodactyle [one-toed] Horse.
2. Kovalevsky documented the most famous evolutionary story of all—the transformation of a small, many-toed ancestor with low—crowned teeth into the large-bodied, single-toed, long-toothed modern horse. Moreover, Kovalevsky identified, correctly we still think, the primary adaptive basis of this transformation—an environmental shift from browsing leaves
in woodlands and marshes, to grazing of grasses and running on the open plains. Kovalevsky tied this transition to the Miocene evolution of grasses, and the subsequent development of extensive plains and savannahs as a new habitat ripe for exploitation. He explained reduction of toes as an adaptation for running on hard ground, and the evolution of high-crowned teeth as a necessary response to new
diets of tough grasses with their high content of potentially tooth-eroding silica.
Thomas Henry Huxley had worked on the same problem, and had proposed a similar evolutionary sequence, but Kovalevsky provided so much more documentation that primary credit for this seminal story fell to the Russian scientist (with Huxley’s blessing). Kovalevsky and Huxley reconstructed the evolutionary sequence
of horses as passing through a linear series of four successive stages, all based on European fossils (see the accompanying evolutionary tree, reproduced from Kovalevsky’s German monograph of 1876): from the Eocene
Paleotherium
, to the early-Miocene three-toed
Anchitherium
, to the late-Miocene
Hipparion
, to
Equus
, the modern horse.