Florinskii’s extensive treatise appeared in four installments in the August, October, November, and December 1865 issues of Russian Word. It actually opened the first three issues, and was the second (immediately following Shchapov’s article on “Natural Sciences and the People’s Economy”) in the December one, clearly attesting to the particular importance assigned to it by the journal’s editor. But how did it get there? Had Florinskii brought a manuscript of his treatise to Blagosvetlov requesting him to consider it for publication? Had Blagosvetlov commissioned Florinskii to write it? Why would the busy professor take up the burden of writing an extensive text on something that dealt with a subject quite remote from his immediate interests and required much of his time and effort?
Available materials are completely silent on the circumstances of Florinskii’s contacts with Russian Word and its editor. I was unable to find any information on exactly when, where, how, and on whose initiative the two men had met, and who and how, individually or collectively, had come up with the idea of “Human Perfection and Degeneration.”
In the entire collection of Florinskii’s personal documents there is not a single sheet of paper with Blagosvetlov’s name on it. Florinskii never mentioned Blagosvetlov, Russian Word, or this treatise in any of his diaries and memoirs. Nor are there any plans, drafts, notes on sources and references, or indeed anything that could illuminate the process of writing and editing it. Similarly, Blagosvetlov’s surviving materials contain no trace of Florinskii or his book. Nor does Florinskii’s
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name appear in Blagosvetlov’s surviving correspondence and various reminiscences about Blagosvetlov and his journal, such as, for instance, Shelgunov’s lengthy memoirs.157 Nevertheless, what little materials exist allow us to make certain suppositions.
It is possible that it was Zaitsev who made the initial introductions.
Zaitsev had attended lectures at the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy and had many friends among its students. He had moved to St. Petersburg in December 1862 and had transferred to the IMSA after several years of study at the medical school of Moscow University.
He might have taken Florinskii’s lecture course on gynecology offered to fourth and fifth year students in the 1863-1864 academic year, or attended the professor’s clinical demonstrations, and thus might have known Florinskii personally. Or perhaps, one of Zaitsev’s friends among the IMSA students had mentioned the young professor’s reputation as someone with a definite talent for writing clearly and succinctly on a variety of complicated subjects.
It is also possible that Florinskii’s former teacher Alexander Morigerovskii had a hand in the matter. While Florinskii had been making his way to becoming a professor, in 1858-59, in parallel with his civil service job at the Ministry of State Properties, Morigerovskii had begun teaching literature at several secondary schools.158 A year later, Morigerovskii decided to return to fulltime teaching. He quit his job at the ministry and took a position as lecturer on Russian literature at the Technological Institute. But, like Blagosvetlov, he was unable to keep his new job for long. In early 1862, he was fired for “inciting student unrest,” and the secret police placed him under surveillance for suspected “revolutionary activities.” He supported himself by teaching in a gymnasium and by taking on translating and proofreading jobs for various periodicals, including The Contemporary and Russian Word.
He built an extensive network of contacts in St. Petersburg’s literary community, among publishers, writers, and editors. He was on good terms with Nikolai Nekrasov and developed a close friendship with Nikolai Chernyshevskii: it was Morigerovskii who accompanied Chernyshevskii’s wife to the civic execution ceremony that preceded the writer’s exile in May 1864. Morigerovskii also knew Blagosvetlov quite well.159 Indeed, he became something of a confidant and even served as one of the editor’s proxies in running the Russian Word printing shop.160
119 2. The Publisher: Grigorii Blagosvetlov
Over the years, Florinskii apparently kept in touch with his former favorite teacher, who had so profoundly influenced him at the seminary and had done so much to bring him to St. Petersburg. It seems quite likely that it was Morigerovskii who introduced his former star student to Blagosvetlov.
Whoever introduced the two men to each other, Blagosvetlov and Florinskii must have met (probably more than once) sometime in the late spring or the early summer of 1865. Given the similarity of their backgrounds, they must have hit it off pretty well. Perhaps Blagosvetlov had read a few of Florinskii’s critical articles in Medical Herald and liked his writing style. It seems certain that the editor would have explained his predicament to the prospective author in some detail. He probably suggested that Florinskii use his personal expertise in writing a series of essays that in some way would address the role of the natural sciences in the understanding of social life and would discuss possible “social implications” of Darwin’s theory and its “laws.”
Judging by his previous publications, at that time, Florinskii had no particular interest in (and perhaps not even much acquaintance with) Darwin’s evolutionary concept or its “social implications.”
The topic was far removed from his immediate duties, interests, and preoccupations. But he agreed to take on the task, perhaps because, like Blagosvetlov, he certainly believed in the power of knowledge as a tool in improving the life of his country and his compatriots. After all, did he not use that power on a daily basis in his own work at the IMSA clinics to improve the health of his patients? Indeed, he would pointedly end his first essay written for Blagosvetlov with a paraphrase of Francis Bacon’s famous statement: “correctly organized knowledge becomes power!”
Florinskii’s was likely flattered by the invitation to write for the most influential journal of his time. Blagosvetlov offered him a chance to contribute to the current heated debates on the future of his Fatherland and its people, to make his personal views on important social concerns known in the farthest corners of the country, and to reach a much broader audience than the one he had addressed in his previous writings (which was limited to his fellow physicians and medical students). It seems that the young physician accepted the invitation, at least partially, because he felt that he could do it. As he remarked in one
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of his articles, “anyone, who feels his inner strengths, who recognizes his literary abilities, cannot remain silent. The need to write, as the need to speak up, is irresistible.”161
Florinskii was undoubtedly aware of the considerable public resonance that the essay on “Reflexes of the Brain” written by his fellow IMSA professor Ivan Sechenov had generated less than two years earlier in 1863. In this essay, initially slated to appear in The Contemporary, Sechenov used his expertise in physiology to discuss much broader issues of the human psyche, such as free will, desires, and consciousness.162 Even though the censorship had prohibited its publication in The Contemporary, the essay did appear on the pages of Chistovich’s Medical Herald.163 Sechenov suggested that all of the phenomena of “psychic” life could be explained by the simple reflexes he had observed in his experiments on the inhibition of nervous impulses in a frog’s brain, which provoked a prolonged debate among the Russian educated public. Perhaps, Florinskii hoped that he too could stir the public opinion by using his professional expertise to illuminate another vitally important biological aspect of human life — reproduction, and its social embodiment in the institution of marriage.
Florinskii’s intellectual style well prepared him to take on the new task. Even though his main scientific interests focused on the seemingly narrow medical specializations — gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics
— he was far from a narrow specialist. He read widely. He researched and published on a variety of very diverse subjects, from physiology to therapy and clinical diagnostics, from histology to the ethics of medical practice, and from the principles of medical education to surgery. Most important, unlike Blagosvetlov’s “staff” writers, Florinskii was well aware that one particular branch of his own profession, named variously
“public hygiene,” “social medicine,” or “social hygiene,” had already begun to address the health issues of, in Shelgunov’s terminology, not only “separate physiological human beings,” but also such “social organisms” as families, professions, occupations, classes, and nations.
In contrast to the focus of clinical medicine on health and disease treatments of an individual, the nascent field of social hygiene focused on the issues of health and disease prevention in particular groups of people through various legislative measures. Florinskii was also well aware that Virchow, his idol whom he had admired since attending the
121 2. The Publisher: Grigorii Blagosvetlov
German professor’s lectures in Berlin in 1861, had already identified
“social conditions” as one of the most important determinants of health and disease.
From this awareness it was but a short step to connecting Darwin’s
“laws of selection” with social issues through the discussion of “human perfection and degeneration” and “marriage hygiene,” as the subjects of Florinskii’s essays would be defined in their title and introduction.
And it was perhaps an even shorter step to connect the contemporary legislative initiatives to prevent the spread of communicable disease and to promote the health of a nation to the proposal of legislative interventions in marriage aimed at preventing degeneration and promoting the perfection of humankind.
Moreover, Florinskii definitely had a personal interest in examining these subjects in some depth. As we saw in the previous chapter, just a few months prior to his meeting(s) with Blagosvetlov, in early February, Florinskii got married. In late April or early May, his wife got pregnant, and, most certainly, Florinskii monitored her pregnancy very carefully.164 He must have thought about their future child and pondered his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a physician.
His specialization in gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics provided him with the necessary knowledge to see these subjects not merely as a personal matter but as an important social issue, which he, as a physician, could address in detail. And this is exactly what he set out to do in his essays.
The author and the editor must have discussed Florinskii’s ideas and the possible ways of presenting them. Since no drafts or proofs of, nor any correspondence regarding “Human Perfection and Degeneration” have survived, all we have to go on in our analysis is the published text. We thus can only guess at just how much or how little Blagosvetlov influenced its author and the actual writing.
Based on what we have learned about Blagosvetlov, the editor, on the preceding pages, it is safe to assume that he allowed his newest “find”
of an author considerable freedom in choosing the specific topics and composition of the essays. But he must have approved the general shape and goal of the entire treatise as it was outlined on the opening pages of the first essay: to discuss the key components of Darwin’s evolutionary concept — variability, heredity, selection, extinction/
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degeneration, and progress/perfection — and the ways that they could be applied to humans.
The writer and the editor must have also agreed on the total length and number of essays, for this would determine the journal’s size, contents, and composition for several months running, as well as the amount of Florinskii’s honorarium. At the time Russian publishers paid their writers per each “typographical” list, which, in the then most popular “octavo” format, meant sixteen printed pages.165 Since the total length of the published essays is 142 journal pages, which translates into almost exactly nine lists, it is quite likely that Blagosvetlov had asked Florinskii to write three, not four, essays, each about three lists in length. The first and the second essays are roughly three lists in length each. And it certainly looks like the third essay was split into two parts and published in the two consecutive (November and December) issues for some editorial reasons that had nothing to do with its contents.
The two parts actually have continuing pagination, which indicates that they might have even been typeset as a single piece. Combined, they match exactly the length of the second essay. Blagosvetlov paid his lead authors, like Pisarev and Shelgunov, fifty to sixty rubles per list.166 To Florinskii, as a novice, he might have offered a bit less, but considering the total length of the published essays, this still amounted to a considerable sum (about a third of Florinskii’s annual salary), which must have been discussed and agreed upon.
It is also quite likely that the editor and the author had agreed on the specific timing of publication and, hence, the delivery schedule.
The contents of Florinskii’s work strongly suggest that he had written it piece by piece during the summer and early fall of 1865. Given the time necessary for typesetting, proofreading, and getting a censor’s permission, in order to appear in the August issue the first essay should have been delivered to the editor no later than mid-July. The next essay had perhaps been delivered at the end of the summer, before Florinskii had to resume his teaching at the academy, and the last — sometime in October. It is likely that all these technical details had been discussed and settled in May or early June.
But there was one more issue that Blagosvetlov and Florinskii must have discussed — censorship. Since all of his previous publications had appeared in professional journals or as academic monographs
123 2. The Publisher: Grigorii Blagosvetlov
and textbooks, which had summarily been exempted from the general censorship, Florinskii had had no experience in dealing with censors.167 Blagosvetlov, on the other hand, dealt with them on an almost daily basis. For the editor, avoiding the censor’s merciless pen — that could not merely cripple a piece of writing but actually forbid its publication altogether — was a matter of utmost importance. At the time of his discussion(s) with Florinskii, Blagosvetlov definitely knew that new censorship rules would come into effect on 1 September 1865, which might have influenced his choice of the exact timing of publication for each essay.
The new laws promulgated in early April changed the Russian censorship system profoundly.168 The old rules of “preventive”
censorship had required that every piece of writing be screened before publication and had placed responsibility for permitting something
“unallowable” to appear in print on the shoulders of the censor first, and the publisher second. Indeed in 1862, one of the censors responsible for monitoring Russian Word had actually been fired for permitting the publication of several articles that his superiors found totally unacceptable and which led to the journal’s eight-month suspension.
The new laws instituted a system of “punitive” censorship, whereby a publisher could print virtually anything, but, if the censor found a certain published piece “objectionable,” the publication would be arrested and destroyed, while its publisher — in addition to losing initial investment — along with its author, would incur stiff penalties imposed by the court, ranging from large fines to imprisonment. In the case of a periodical, the situation could also result in an official
“warning,” and, after the periodical received three such “warnings,”
it could be suspended or even shut down completely. Blagosvetlov certainly wanted to avoid such an eventuality, and most likely advised the novice author regarding various ways to evade the censorship’s clutches.
The first essay appeared in the August issue, and thus Blagosvetlov had to abide by the old rules and to get the censorship approval prior to its publication. Perhaps this is why it contained only a synopsis of the latest scientific views on “the variability and heredity of the human type.” Based on his previous experience in publishing “scientific-popular” texts, Blagosvetlov might have hoped that in this form the first essay would unlikely attract much attention from any censor. As far as
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we know, it did not. But the subsequent essays came out after the new rules had come into effect, and their contents put the editor on much shakier ground. The second and third essays discussed various factors, from “material well-being” to “rational marriage,” which, according to Florinskii, could produce the perfection or the degeneration of the human kind, but which, from the viewpoint of the authorities, also presented certain potentially subversive issues. To begin with, the whole matter of marriage in Russia was the exclusive domain of the church, and thus constituted a particularly sensitive subject, especially considering Florinskii’s advocacy of inter-confessional marriages, which were explicitly forbidden by Orthodox rules. Moreover, “materialism,”
“rationalism,” “realism,” and other similar “isms” had long been tell-tale watchwords that the censors saw as undermining the authority of the church and its doctrine.169 The contents of the second and third essays were bound to invite the censorship attention and, perhaps, intervention.
Florinskii and/or Blagosvetlov took certain steps to deflect the unwanted attention, which proved quite effective.170 Although it was the October, November, and December 1865 issues that elicited the three “warnings” to the journal under the new censorship laws and resulted in its suspension for five months in February 1866, Florinskii’s essays published in these issues were not to blame.
Pisarev’s and Zaitsev’s articles printed in the October issue provided the foundation for the censor’s wrath that led to the first “warning.”
Similarly, the main reasons for the second “warning” issued after the appearance of the November issue were Pisarev’s and Shelgunov’s articles. The third “warning” announced after the publication of the December issue was, in turn, provoked by Shelgunov’s and Tkachev’s essays.171 In the censorship reports that justified these warnings and the ensuing suspension of Russian Word, Florinskii’s treatise was not even mentioned.172
In the end, however, no matter how much input Blagosvetlov had in defining the overall theme of “Human Perfection and Degeneration,”
or how much guidance he gave to its author on its particular parts and issues, the treatise was the result of the extensive effort and careful thought of Vasilii Florinskii.