Our Notes & References

First Russian edition of “Charles Darwin’s forgotten masterpiece and […] his only book on psychology” (Abed).

Published the same year as the first English edition and prepared by Darwin’s Russian scientific connections and major enthusiasts of his work, including “the first female ophthalmologist surgeon from the Russian Empire” (Dionesov, our translation here and elsewhere).

“The first ever systematic application of Darwinian theory to the expression of emotions, […] considered by some to be the foundational text of evolutionary psychology” (Abed), Darwin’s Expression of Emotions initiated scientific studies of human emotions. It completed Darwin’s “great cycle of evolutionary writings” (Desmond) after On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Exploring the biological aspects of emotional behaviour and the animal origins of human traits, it was initially intended as a chapter in The Descent of Man, but soon grew in length and was published separately in 1872.

This first Russian edition contains the same impressive illustrations as the English one, including seven plates of heliotypes that show various emotions expressed by humans and facial expressions recreated by professional actors, captured by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne and James Crichton-Browne among other prominent photographers. These images are considered “some of the earliest commercially reproduced photographs in a printed book” (ODNB), making this edition perhaps the first Russian scientific publication to use photographs.

Curiously, Darwin’s theory found broader acceptance in Russia than in Western Europe at that time, largely thanks to the revolutionary-minded young Darwinian enthusiasts and scientists, such as the Kovalevskii brothers, Vladimir (1842-1883) and Aleksandr (1840-1901), the translator and editor of this edition, respectively. “The scientific work of the Kovalevsky brothers […] represented the crowning point in the reception and early application of Darwin’s ideas by Russian natural scientists” (Glick). Both brothers contributed their research to the development of Darwin’s theory. The evolutionary palaeontologist Vladimir Kovalevskii’s “remarkable memoirs [..] are monuments of exact observation of the details of evolutionary change in the skull, teeth, and feet, and of the appreciation of Darwinism” (Osborn, quoted by Glick).

“No Russian scientist of the early phase of evolutionary science had had more personal contact with Darwin than [Vladimir] Kovalevsky” (Glick), who maintained correspondence with Darwin and met him personally in 1867 and 1870. Darwin mailed Kovalevskii his set of proofs for the Russian translation of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, which came out in St Petersburg in 1867, several months before it did in English (London, 1868). Darwin valued findings and contributions of both brothers and in The Descent of Man, twice mentioned Vladimir’s observations; in a letter to Vladimir he also wrote: “If I am right in my supposition, few men will have made such fine discoveries as your brother with respect to his case and that of the Ascidians” (quote from Rogers). In 1873, after earning a doctorate in palaeontology from the University of Jena, Vladimir asked Darwin for permission to dedicate his monograph to him, which Darwin accepted with honour (Gall, quoting Darwin’s letter).

Already before meeting Darwin, Vladimir Kovalevskii had a highly eventful life: an acquaintance and supporter of Alexander Herzen, he took part in the Polish uprising of 1863 and then returned to St. Petersburg, where he translated and published scientific and other books, including Herzen’s novel Who is to Blame (1856), miraculously omitted by censors but destroyed shortly after the publication. In 1868 he fictitiously married Sofia Korvin-Krukovskaiia in order to free her from parental authority so that she could study at the University of Heidelberg — in Russia at that time higher education for women was inaccessible. Later the marriage became real, and Sofia Kovalevskaia was “the first woman in modern Europe to gain a doctorate in mathematics, the first to join the editorial board of a scientific journal, and the first to be appointed professor of mathematics” (Britannica).

Aleksandr Kovalevskii is considered “the founder of evolutionary embryology” (Gall); he studied at the University of Heidelberg under the first German translator of On the Origin of Species, Heinrich Georg Bronn. Aleksandr supervised and edited the present translation, created apparently not only by Vladimir: “with the help of his brother, Alexander, and [physiologist Ivan] Sechenov’s wife, M. A. Sechenova-Bokova, [Vladimir] Kovalevsky also translated and edited Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals […] M. A. Sechenova-Bokova also translated Darwin’s Descent of Man” (Rogers).

Mariia Sechenova (1839-1929) is credited as a translator of this text also by other scholarly articles in Russian, even though her and Vladimir’s name are not mentioned in the title. One of the first Russian women to earn a doctorate in medicine (Koblitz), Sechenova received her degree from Zurich in 1871; she was licensed as a doctor in St. Petersburg in December the same year to become one of the first female doctors in Russia. She additionally specialised in ophthalmology in Vienna and subsequently worked as a researcher and oculist in laboratories of the Russian Academies of Sciences and Medicine (Koblitz). She was the model for Vera Pavlovna in Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s groundbreaking novel What Is To Be Done? (1862).

Very rare outside Russia, as we could not trace any example at auction in the West in recent decades, and only two copies in North American libraries (Harvard and Huntington in California). Apparently only one copy in the British Isles (BL).

Provenance

Indistinct name, Saratov, 1944 (signature in blue ink to title); Saratov bookdealer’s stamps to lower fly-leaf.

Bibliography

Abed R, St John-Smith P. “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: Darwin’s forgotten masterpiece.” BJPsych Advances, 30(3), 2024, pp. 192-194.

Browne, E. Janet, Charles Darwin: The power of place, Princeton University Press, Vol. 2, 1996, pp. 286-287.

Desmond, Adrian, James Moore and Janet Browne. “Darwin, Charles Robert”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), 2004.

Dionesov S. M. “Sechenova-Bokova Mariia Aleksandrovna”, Bolshaia Meditsinskaia Entsiklopediia, pod red. Petrovskogo B. V., 3 izdanie, Tom 23.

Gall Ia. M. “Vladimir Kovalevskii kak perevodchik i izdatel truda Charlza Darvina «The variation of animals and plants under domestication».” Vestnik VOGiS, 2007, T. 11(1), pp. 40-44.

Glick, Thomas F. The Comparative Reception of Darwinism. University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Koblitz, Ann Hibner. “Science, Women, and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Generation of the 1860s.” Isis, vol. 79, no. 2, 1988, pp. 208–26.

Kolchinskii, Eduard Izrailevich. “Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevskii”, Bolshaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 2009.

Konashev, Mikhail Borisovich, Polevoi, Anatolii Vsevolodovich, Retunskaia, Svetlana Vladimirovna. “Bibliografiia trudov Ch. Darvina na russkom iazyke, postupivshikh v 1860-2008 gg. v rossiiskie biblioteki.” Istoriko-biologicheskie issledovaniia, #1, 2009.

Rogers, James Allen. “Charles Darwin and Russian Scientists.” The Russian Review, vol. 19, no. 4, 1960, pp. 371–83.

Rogers, James Allen. “The Reception of Darwin’s Origin of Species by Russian Scientists.” Isis, vol. 64, no. 4, 1973, pp. 484–503.

Shtraikh S. Ia. “Iz perepiski V. O. Kovalevskogo s Gertsenom i M. A. Bakuninym”. Pisma k Gertsenu i Ogarevu. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 1956, pp. 259–272.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya”, Encyclopaedia Britannica.