Nikolay Danilevsky

Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (Russian: Никола́й Я́ковлевич Даниле́вский; 28 November 1822 – 7 November 1885) was a Russian naturalist, economist, ethnologist, philosopher, historian, and ideologue of the pan-Slavism and Slavophile movement who expounded a view of world history as circular.

Danilevsky was born in the village of Oberets in Oryol Governorate. As a member of a noble family, he was educated at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, and after graduation, he went on to an appointment with the Military Ministry Office. Dissatisfied with the prospect of a military career, he began to attend the University of St Petersburg, where he studied physics and mathematics.

Having passed his master's exams, Danilevsky was preparing to defend his thesis on the flora of the Black Sea area of European Russia. In 1849, he was arrested there for his membership of the Petrashevsky Circle. The circle was studying the work of French socialists and also included Fyodor Dostoevsky. The most active of its members were sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment); Danilevsky was imprisoned for 100 days in the Peter and Paul Fortress and then sent to live under police surveillance in Vologda, where he worked in provincial administration.

In 1852, he was appointed to an expedition led by Karl Ernst von Baer, whose purpose was to assess the condition of the fishing industry on the Volga and the Caspian Sea. The expedition lasted four years, after which Danilevsky was reassigned to the Agricultural Department of the State Property Ministry. For over twenty years he was responsible for expeditions to the White Sea, the Black Sea, the Azov and Caspian Seas, and the Arctic Ocean. The expertise that he gained from these expeditions led to the publication of his 1872 book, Examination of Fishery Conditions in Russia.

Aside from his work on fisheries and the seal trade, Danilevsky was head of the commission setting the rules for the use of running water in the Crimea from 1872 to 1879, ran the Nikitsky Botanical Gardens from 1879 to 1880, and he was part of a commission appointed to deal with the phylloxera epidemic in the 1880s. His papers on the climatology, geology, geography, and ethnology of Russia earned him a gold medal from the Russian Geographical Society.

Danilevsky died in Tbilisi, Tiflis Governorate, and he was buried at his estate in Mshanka.

Danilevsky is remembered for his opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and for his theory of historical-cultural types.

Natural theology and rejection of Darwinism

Danilevsky's main work in this area is Darwinism: Critical research (1885), which brings together more than 1200 pages of arguments against Darwin's theory, mostly assembled from the literature that already existed at the time). It was meant to be the first volume of a longer work, the second volume containing Danilevsky's own theories (which he characterised as "natural theology"), but it was unfinished at his death. When it was published posthumously, it contained only preliminary studies.

Danilevsky had been influenced by the work of Karl Ernst von Baer, who had developed his own teleological theory of evolution and gone on to criticise Darwin's work in the 1870s. Danilevsky took from von Baer's theory the notion of Zielstrebigkeit. The German word means literally "singleness of purpose", but Danilevsky imbued it with a religious aspect and argued that evolution as well as the original creation of the world has a rational purpose and follows the will of a divine creator.

Theory of historical-cultural types

Danilevsky first published "Russia and Europe: a look at the cultural and political relations of the Slavic world to the Romano-German world" in the journal Zarya in 1869. Later republished as a monograph, the work brought him international fame.

The work pioneered the use of biological and morphological metaphors in the comparison of cultures. Danilevsky compared cultures and nations to biological species, denied their commonality and argued that each nation or civilisation is united by its language and culture, which it cannot pass on to any other nation. He thus characterised Peter the Great's reforms in Russia as doomed to failure, as they involved the attempt to impose alien values on the Slavic world.

Danilevsky distinguished four categories of historical-cultural activity:

1. religious
2. political
3. sociopolitical
4. cultural

These gave rise to ten historical-cultural types:

1. Chaldean
2. Hebrew
3. Arab
4. Indian
5. Persian
6. Greek
7. Roman or ancient Italian
8. Germanic
9. Hamitic or Egyptian
10. Chinese

Danilevsky applied his teleological theory of evolution, stating that each type went through various predetermined stages of youth, adulthood, and old age, the last being the end of that type. He characterised the Slavic type as being at the youth stage, and he developed a socio-political plan for its development, involving unification of the Slavic world, with its future capital at Constantinople (now Istanbul), ruled by an Orthodox emperor. While other cultures degenerate in their blind struggle for existence, the Slavic world should be viewed as a Messiah among them. In Danilevsky's view there is no genuine or absolute progress, however, as history is circular.

Aspects of Danilevsky's book prefigured some of the theories in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Arnold J. Toynbee mentions them in A Study of History. The Danilevsky hypothesis became the subject of much controversy and polarised its readers. On one hand, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy praised it, but on the other hand, Occidentalists such as Nikolai Kareev, Pavel Milyukov (1859-1943), and Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842-1904), subjected it to severe criticism.