With and Without Galton Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia Nikolai Krementsov Publisher: Open Book Publishers Year of publication: 2018 Published on OpenEdition Books: 21 March 2019 Serie: OBP collection Electronic ISBN: 9791036525063 http://books.openedition.org Printed version ISBN: 9781783745111 Number of pages: xxvi + 668 Electronic reference KREMENTSOV, Nikolai. With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia. New edition [online]. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018 (generated 04 mai 2019). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/obp/7333>. ISBN: 9791036525063. © Open Book Publishers, 2018 Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported - CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 WITH AND WITHOUT GALTON About the Publisher Open Book Publishers is a not-for-profit, scholar-led Open Access academic press and we are dedicated to revolutionising academic publishing, breaking down the barriers of high prices and restricted circulation so that outstanding academic books are available for everyone to read and share. If you believe that knowledge should be available to everyone, you can support our work with a monthly pledge or a one-off donation and become part of the OBP community: https://www.openbookpublish/pledge About the Author Nikolai Krementsov is a Professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto (Canada). He has published several monographs and numerous articles on various facets of the history of science, medicine, and literature in Russia and the Soviet Union. His latest publications include A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science (2011), Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in the Bolshevik Science and Fiction (2014), and The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon (2017), 2 vols. (co-edited with William deJong-Lambert). With and Without Galton Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia Nikolai Krementsov https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Nikolai Krementsov This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Nikolai Krementsov, With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0144 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/800#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active 23/7/2018 unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/800#resources EISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-511-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-512-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-513-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-514-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-515-9 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0144 Cover image: Portrait of Vasilii Florinskii by Vasilii Cheremin (1997). Photo courtesy of V. Puzyrev. Cover design by Corin Throsby. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) To A.-E. and E. F. “Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli.” Terentianus Maurus, c. 2nd century CE Contents Preface xi List of Abbreviations xiii List of Illustrations xvii Note on Names, Transliterations, and Translations xxi Acknowledgments xxiii The Faces of Eugenics: Local Mirrors and Global Reflections 1 I. “HYGIENIC” AND “RATIONAL” MARRIAGE 23 1. The Author: Vasilii Florinskii 25 2. The Publisher: Grigorii Blagosvetlov 73 3. The Book: Darwinism and Social Hygiene 125 4. The Hereafter: Words and Deeds 183 II. “BOURGEOIS” AND “PROLETARIAN” EUGENICS 237 5. Rebirth: Eugenics and Marxism 239 6. Resonance: Euphenics, Medical Genetics, and 293 Rassenhygiene 7. Afterlife: Medical Genetics and “Racial” Eugenics 351 8. Science of the Future: With and Without Galton 409 Apologia: The Historian’s Craft 461 Notes 495 Index 655 Preface This book is an outgrowth of a project I have been pursuing on and off for nearly thirty years: a fully-fledged history of eugenics in Russia. I became interested in the subject at the very beginning of my career as a historian of science in the mid-1980s. Indeed, it was in one of my first public talks, delivered to a May 1989 conference on the social history of Russian science in Leningrad, that I first ventured into this peculiar history. But for the next two decades, numerous other topics captivated my attention and overshadowed this particular interest. Plus, during this very time several scholars in the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere, most notably, Mark B. Adams in Philadelphia, Vasilii V. Babkov in Moscow, and Mikhail B. Konashev in St. Petersburg were publishing extensively on various aspects of that history, and I felt that I did not need to pursue it any further. Nevertheless, I kept reading on the history of eugenics worldwide and kept collecting whatever materials pertinent to the history of eugenics in Russia I would stumble upon in archives and libraries while going after other subjects. Eventually, I came to realize that the history of eugenics I wanted to write would differ substantially from the works produced by many others who have taken up the subject during the intervening years. So, I decided to actually do it. In 2010-2014, a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada enabled me to launch the project in earnest and to spend several months each year hunting for relevant materials in Russian archives, libraries, and museums. At first, I approached my subject in a rather conventional way. I studied the institutions, publications, patrons, methods, agendas, and practices of eugenics; followed individuals and various disciplinary and professional groups involved with its development; and explored its representations in contemporary journalism, literature, cinema, xii With and Without Galton and theater in Russia. The stacks of copies, notes, drafts, and plans for projected chapters steadily grew and soon threatened to completely overflow my modest home office and to turn my little project into a multi-volume edition of unmanageable length and undetermined duration. I began writing up (and occasionally publish) pieces and bits of a complex story that was slowly emerging out of the mountain of materials I have collected over the years. I would perhaps still be searching through the numerous nooks and crannies of this mountain, if it were not for a Guggenheim Fellowship that gave me a twelve-month leave in the 2015-2016 academic year. The wonderful freedom (from teaching, committees, and other delights of university life) afforded me a peace of mind to rethink my project and reshape it into something very different from what I had at first envisioned. Instead of writing a history of eugenics in Russia by going systematically through its institutional, intellectual, cultural, personal, disciplinary, political, ideological, and many other dimensions, I decided to experiment and to approach my subject from a decidedly different angle. In my explorations of various episodes in the history of eugenics in Russia, I noticed a recurrence of one particular book, Vasilii Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration. Originally published as a series of essays in 1865, it came out in book format less than a year later. For sixty years it lay dormant and apparently unread, but in 1926 it was reprinted and actively discussed. Yet, just a few years later, any references to its existence disappeared and resurfaced again only in the early 1970s. A new edition of the book came out a quarter of a century later, in 1995, and then — just as I was in Moscow doing my archival research — in 2012, it was republished once more. This seemed rather peculiar. Why would an obscure mid-nineteenth-century book be repeatedly revived and forgotten and revived again during nearly 150 years? Intrigued, I began going through my materials with a fine- tooth comb looking for clues. Soon I realized that the life story of this book — of its author, contents, publishers, editors, commentators, and readers — offers a unique lens to cast the history of eugenics in Russia in an unusual and very revealing light. In addition, a novel (for me) way to write a history of science by means of a “biography of a book” promised to be quite challenging and exciting. I hope the