Danilevsky, Nikolaj Jakovlevich (1822–1885)

Eduard I. Kolchinsky

The main place amongst Russian antagonists to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and especially his conception of descent of man, belonged to Nikolaj Jakovlevich Danilevsky (1822–1885), the prominent Russian naturalist, economist, historian, philosopher, a head of the late Slavophils, and the author of the original conception of exclusive types of mankind cultures and natural laws of their development. His two-volume work Anti-Darwinism (1885, 1889) directly split the biological community by giving rise to heated controversy between advocates of the evolutionary theory and its antagonists. Twenty years earlier, his book West and East (1869) predetermined, to a great extent, further development of the theory of “cultural-historical types” that had been, for the first time, formulated by the German historian Henrich Rükkert. The work of Danilevsky, in the environment of pre-revolutionary Russia, supported the official religion and monarchy as the most suitable for the existing cultural-historical type of Russian ethnos, taking into ...

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