UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Chemists and Spirits:
the Scientific Investigation of
Spiritualism in Late Imperial Russia
(1875-1883)
Kateryna Zorya (Student # 10847219)
Department of Religious Studies
History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents Research M.A. Thesis in Religious Studies
Supervisor: Dr. M. Pasi
Second Reader: Dr. W.J. Hanegraaf Universiteit van Amsterdam
Table of Contents
I. Introduction...3
II. Spiritualism, Science and Religion in the Late 19th Century Russian Empire...8
1. Spiritualism in Russia before the Mendeleev Committee...8
2. Education and Intellectual Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Russia...12
III. Key participants of the Mendeleev Committee debate: Aleksandr Aksakov, Aleksandr Butlerov, Nikolai Wagner, Dmitri Mendeleev...……...17
1. Aleksandr Butlerov (1828-1886)...17
2. Aleksandr Aksakov (1832-1903)...22
3. Nikolai Vagner (1829-1907)...24
4. Opponents of Spiritualism: Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) and the Committee for the Examination of Mediumistic Phenomena...27
5. Summary and Conclusion...29
IV. History of the Mendeleev Committee: 1875-1883...31
V. Methodological Aspects of the Committee’s Work...47
1. Warring hypotheses...48
2. Method and measurement: technicalities of the Mendeleev Committee...52
3. Fraud, bias and insults...62
V. Conclusion...…...70
VI. Appendix...…...74
Introduction
From the moment of its inception, spiritualism crossed cultural borders and geographical distances alike with the ease of a wildfire devouring a dry forest of pines.1 Scientists were no
exceptions to the desire to escape, in the words of Samuel Shortt, “the narrow and pessimistic finality of materialism,” and though few scientists stood at the inception of spiritualism, it soon gained prominence among such important figures as the chemists Robert Hare and William Crookes, the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, the physicists William Barrett, Lord Rayleigh, and Oliver Lodge.2 These scientists and other well-meaning individuals outside the scientific
community had made a number of attempts to prove spiritualism scientifically, both through publishing results of personal experiments, as William Crookes did from 1870 to 1874, by establishing committees, such as the one created by the London Dialectical Society in 1869, and by creating large-scale societies, such as the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. However, in most of these cases, investigations were undertaken by scientists who were already interested in finding an answer to the challenge of materialism. Scientists adhering to the materialist philosophy largely ignored the matter — until the voices of their peers in the Academy made it impossible to ignore it.
Perhaps the first organized response to the scientific interest in spiritualism from materialist scientists took place from spring 1875 to summer 1876, and was undertaken by the Committee for the Study of Mediumistic Phenomena of the Physics Society under the aegis of St. Petersburg University. Even among other similar debates, the Committee was notable for several reasons: first of all, it was the earliest large-scale investigation of mediumistic phenomena which included both pro- and anti-spiritualist scientists. Additionally, scientists of equally great caliber and hailing from the same field, chemistry, defended opposing sides, and despite this initial similarity in backgrounds and methodological training, the Committee failed to achieve consensus in its conclusions. Second, the debate was extremely well-documented, with both sides providing detailed accounts of the investigation and commentary on the official protocols. Finally, the Committee’s report and conclusion — that mediumistic phenomena had no reality beyond “unconscious movement” or “fraud” — led to an important debate on methodology, which impacted both research in the natural sciences in general and further research of spiritualism in particular.
The fascination with spiritualism began as a niche hobby in Moscow and St. Petersburg among Bohemians and aristocrats, a sort of party game to make salon gatherings more lively3, but
1 The general reasons for this are very well-documented by various scholars exploring spiritualism in various cultural
contexts. See, for example: Owen 1999 for England; Braude 2001, Albanese 2007 for America, etc.
2 Shortt 1984.
quickly turned into a point of massive public interest among people of all educational levels. The one largely responsible for this development was Aleksandr Aksakov4 (1832-1903), a Russian noble
who was introduced to spiritualism through his family, which included a number of famous writers and was naturally involved in the spiritualism fad that had spread in literary circles. Aleksandr Aksakov took this interest more seriously than the rest of his family members and soon became heavily involved in German spiritualism, which was far more developed at that point and which Aksakov had ties and easy access to as a member of the Russian educated noble class. From 1867 on he began financing the “Bibliothek des Spiritualismus für Deutschland” book series, which began with translations of Andrew Jackson Davies into German. Aksakov focused on financing translations of scientific investigations of spiritualism and worked with the Leipzig-based publisher Oswald Mutze to translate works by Crookes, Wallace, the London Dialectical Society, and many others into German.5 In 1874, Aksakov also co-founded and provided financial support for the
famous journal Psychische Studien.6
Aksakov’s circle of friends included two prominent scientists, the famous chemist Aleksandr Butlerov (1828-1886) and the zoologist and children’s story writer Nikolai Vagner (1829-1907). Both of these were privy to spiritualism not only from Aksakov’s work, but also from other sources. For Butlerov the connection was particularly personal: his wife, Nadezhda Glumelina, was Aksakov’s cousin, and her sister, Yuliya Glumelina, better known in the West in the Francophone transcription Julie de Gloumeline, was the second wife of the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home. During his third visit to Russia in 1871, Home stayed at Butlerov’s house, where he held several séances. These séancesconvinced Butlerov of the reality of mediumistic phenomena, to the extent that on February 12 (24)7, 1871, he testified to having witnessed them in public at one of
Home’s lectures. Butlerov also wrote of these phenomena to Vagner, who had been in Naples at the time, but Vagner remained unconvinced until he returned to St. Petersburg and saw one of Home’s séances himself.8 Ironically, Vagner was the first to write a public, open defense of spiritualism,
4 Also known as Alexander N. Aksakof, which was the German-style spelling he often used. 5 Pribytkov, Spiritualism in Russia from Its Beginnings to the Present Time. St. Petersburg, 1901. 6 For a general history of spiritualism in Germany, see Wolffram 2009.
7 The difference in dates is due to the Russian empire using the Julian calendar until January 26, 1918. All dates in
the text from here on that refer to events in Russia, are given according to the Julian calendar in use at the time. The corresponding date in the Gregorian calendar is given in parenthesis.
8 Several interpretations exist as to when exactly Vagner became convinced of the reality of spiritualist phenomena:
some scholars believe that it was Home’s séances that convinced him, others that he was not a supporter of spiritualism until the 1874 séances of Camille Brédif in St. Petersburg. I am of an intermediary opinion between the two. In his introduction to Butlerov’s Articles on Mediumism Vagner describes his first experience with Home in great detail, and then goes on to say that he participated in two more séances with Home, “where I was witness to even more unusual and amazing phenomena.” Then Vagner goes on to say that Brédif’s séances with their strong phenomena were the final proof he needed to become convinced, but I believe that the gradual description also belies a more gradual process of conversion.
which was published in the Herald of Europe9 journal on April 1, 1876. The article had been so
unexpected that many regarded it as an April Fool’s joke, but it caught the attention of the scientific community, and in May 1875 Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907), the creator of the periodic table, proposed at a session of the St. Petersburg University Physics Society to create the Committee for the Examination of Mediumistic Phenomena.
As Julia Mannherz notes, “the Mendeleev Committee turned into a traumatic experience for spiritualists and anti-spiritualists alike.”10 The Committee initially intended to undertake a
comprehensive series of experiments, holding one séance a week from September 1875 to May 1876, but due to a combination of organizational problems and conflicts within the committee, it only held a few experiments from November 1875 to January 1876. In November and December 1875, the Committee worked with the Petty brothers from Newcastle for six séances in total, and Mary Marshall, also known as Madame Claire, in January 1876 for four séances. After these attempts, the opposing sides on the Committee parted ways, thoroughly convinced of each other’s intellectual dishonesty and a lack of understanding of what proper scientific methodology would entail in studying mediumistic phenomena. The debate, however, raged on well into the 1890s, as some of the participants, particularly Mendeleev and Aksakov, published book-length, comprehensive accounts of the events of the Committee, complete with protocols and personal attacks on each other’s expertise, gave public talks containing their versions of events, and published in journals such as Rebus.
The fact that high-profile scientists had given such prominence to the debate brought it significant public attention. By 1876, all members of the educated classes had been aware of what spiritualism is and that it had been given attention by some of Russia’s best scientists. The debate elicited a massive response in popular culture, with Russia’s version of the “mad scientist” character archetype being largely based in the events of the Committee and the spiritualists’ attempt to defend their position, and a corresponding massive spike of interest in spiritualism and its phenomena.11
However, while both sides had wanted to raise awareness of spiritualism, albeit with opposing interpretations, it can be argued that neither reached their desired goal. For the spiritualists, the Committee’s stance did not provide them the validation they had been hoping for, while Mendeleev, spiritualism’s staunchest opponent, had ironically done more than anyone to popularize spiritualism through the sheer amount of time and effort he had given to the topic.12 It would be fair to say that
9 Vestnik Evropy, also translated as Messenger of Europe, was published from 1866 to 1918. The Herald of Europe
published critical articles in history, literature and politics, and was one of the more important intellectual journals of its age.
10 Mannherz 2009; p. 29. 11 Vinnitsky 2009. 12 Panchenko 2005.
the Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena shaped the attitudes of Russian scientists and esotericists alike, both to their subject, spiritualism, and to each other.
Despite the fact that the history of spiritualism in the Russian Empire remains largely unstudied for now, it has still received some attention both from post-Soviet scholars of the period in general and from specialized historians of esotericism. However, most scholars have previously focused on spiritualism and literature,13 and there are few published studies on the interactions
between spiritualism and science. The two most important books on the subject that were written in English are Julia Mannherz’s Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (Mannherz, 2012) and Ilya Vinitsky’s Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (Vinitsky, 2009). Mannherz’s work is more general, only touching upon spiritualism in some of its chapters, while Vinitsky focuses almost entirely on the interaction between spiritualism and literature, with one chapter dedicated to Vagner specifically. Notable articles include the work of Michael Gordin, who has explored the role of Mendeleev, Dostoyevsky, and more recently Vagner in Russian spiritualism (Gordin 2001; 2004; 2007; 2011), and Richard Rice, who wrote on Mendeleev’s role in the Committee (Rice 1998). In Russia, the most prominent expert in spiritualism is Vladislav Razdyakonov, who has written numerous articles which will be referenced throughout this work and who has been overseeing master’s and bachelor’s theses on spiritualism, including one on the demarcation of scientific and non-scientific knowledge in the 19th century (Goncharov, 2015). Yuri Khalturin, an expert in occultism in the Russian Empire, has written on how the debate influenced the notion of “pseudoscience” in Russian scientific culture (Khalturin, 2009).
To date, there are no other published works exploring the methodological, scientific aspects of the debate, and it is my hope that my thesis will fill this gap to an extent. My thesis will answer the following questions: how did the opposing sides draw upon scientific methodology contemporary to them in arguing their points and what impact did their debate have on further development of scientific methodology? Why were prominent scientists, who even came from one home discipline, unable to agree on the necessary methodology for their experiments? What were the theories with which the two opposing sides engaged the matter and how did these theories impact their respective methodologies? How did the scientists’ perceptions of each other, especially trust in each others’ expertise, change during the debate?
My thesis will focus on the historical and methodological aspects of the debate, based on a close reading of primary sources related to the Mendeleev Committee, most importantly — on the accounts of the Committee’s activities provided by Mendeleev and Aksakov: Mendeleev’s
Materials to Pass Judgement on Spiritism, published in 1876, and Aksakov’s Exposures: The History of the Mediumistic Committee of the St. Petersburg University Physical Society, With All Protocols and Other Documents Attached, published in 1883. Both works attempt to provide a
comprehensive overview of the events of the Committee by compiling its protocols with relevant additional articles and comments, and thus make for good material for comparative study. Additional sources include published materials from both opponents and proponents of spiritualism: autobiographical accounts and memoirs of the participants, general articles on spiritualism and mediumism, and reports by contemporaries. Several archives exist that hold unpublished materials on spiritualism in the Russian Empire, notably an archive at the Pushkin House in Moscow, which was given a preliminary description by Razdyakonov and the Vagner personal archive in Prague; however, they are inaccessible to me at the time of writing of this work.
As can be seen from the title of Mendeleev’s work, the primary sources make no distinction between spiritism and spiritualism. I will be following the contemporary academic conventions in only using “spiritism” as a term for Kardecist thought and “spiritualism” as the more general term for the current. For ease of reference, titles of primary source texts will also be given in English throughout the text, with full titles in Russian given only in the bibliography. For the purposes of this thesis, I will also translate all primary source quotations. All translations unless otherwise indicated are mine.
I will first present an overview of the 19th century scientific and religious environment in Russia, and then will continue with a detailed analysis of the debate itself. The historical aspect of my work will provide an account of how the debate proceeded, which persons were involved, what their initial positions were, and how their stances changed as the debate developed. I will then analyze the methodological arguments presented by both sides, as well as the anti-fraud measures the Committee had desired to undertake, and demonstrate how both of them appealed to different sides on the 19th century Positivist research program. Finally, I will analyze how the participants’ perceptions of each other changed throughout the debate, and uproot some of the narratives Western historians of the debate have recorded.
II. Spiritualism, Science and Religion in the Late 19th Century Russian Empire
Previous scholars writing about the Mendeleev debate have contextualized it in two ways: how the debate fitted into the Russian religious discourse, mostly by attempting to explain Aksakov’s publishing activities in Germany by the pressure of the Orthodox Church; and where it stood in relation to the professionalization of science in Russia, in which Mendeleev played a key role. This chapter aims to expand on this contextualization by first giving a brief overview of spiritualism in Russia before the Mendeleev Committee, with an emphasis on the role of the Orthodox Church in Russian politics as well as its impact on the development of spiritualism. I will show that the Church did not have such an adverse effect as is sometimes presented. Second, I will show how scientists became the first high-profile proponents of spiritualism in Russia. This will lead me to discuss how scholarly perceptions of the key figurants have been colored by the Westernizer-Slavophile polemic which dominated 19th century Russian intellectual discourse.
1. Spiritualism in Russia Before the Mendeleev Committee
Spiritualism came to Russia almost immediately after its emergence in America: in 1853-1854, the Bohemian circle of Pavel Naschokin (1801-1854) in Moscow had already been summoning the spirit of their deceased friend Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837).14 Its seeds fell on
fertile ground: a discussion about spirits and the world beyond the grave had been going on among well-to-do poets and writers inclined towards Romanticism and Idealism for the entire first half of the 19th century,15 and included such important figures as the aforementioned Alexander Pushkin,
the poet Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852), Idealist philosopher and writer Vladimir Odoyevsky (1804-1869), the famous lexicographer Vladimir Dal (1801-1872), and, notably, the Aksakov family. These people, mostly nobles or people who had ties to nobility, saw spiritualism as a confirmation of their Romantic views, and would hold séances at salons, where it was something between a game and a “marvel” in the Renaissance sense of the world: something which confirmed that the world was wider and more curious than commonly recognized. As far as can be inferred at the moment, there was no systematic scientific or religious exploration of spiritualism at this stage.
In the 1860s, two distinct currents emerged: French Kardecism and Aksakov’s approach, oriented towards Andrew Jackson Davies and the German spiritualist milieu. Kardecist spiritism was first to gain popularity in Russia, though it only predated Aksakov's spiritualism by a few years.
14 Vinitsky 2005.
Its detailed history is yet to be written, but it is known that General Apollon Petrovich Boltin (1842–1871) was the first translator of Kardec’s works into Russian, as well as his most important interpreter.16 His translations of Kardec’s major works, made in 1862-1863, were subject to
censorship and remained unpublished, but Russia had its own esoteric manuscript traditions, and manuscripts soon spread like wildfire. After Boltin published the first Russian article in defense of spiritualism in the Raduga (Rainbow) journal in 1864, Archpriest G. Debolsky responded within that same journal by critically analyzing Kardecist doctrine. After Boltin and other Kardecists began publications, the Orthodox Church began to take notice and started its own, largely internal discussion on spiritualism.17
An aside must be made here on the role of the Orthodox Church in the Russian Empire. In his article Chasing Ghosts: Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev and Spiritualism, Michael Gordin notes that Western spiritualists, such as Emma Hardinge Britten, often overestimated the censoring influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.18 This position seems to have been at least partially
inherited by Western scholarship, which sometimes propagates the idea that Aksakov moved his publishing activities to Germany because of trouble with the Orthodox Church or that the spiritualists were subject to extreme censorship.19 Boltin’s example above shows that the situation
was somewhat more complex: while his books, and Aksakov’s later, did get censored, Boltin was able to carry on a discussion in a journal with an Orthodox authority with no repercussions. Aksakov’s publishing activities also show that Russian censorship was not nearly as strict towards spiritualism as it is sometimes alleged. I will thus focus on the general position of spiritualism within the religious framework of the Russian empire.
In 19th century Russia, the separation of church and state was perceived by the government
as an utterly nonsensical, even dangerous idea. Most of the Russian Empire’s laws on religion were built using the Orthodox Church as a touchstone, and Orthodox Christianity permeated everyday life as a common point of reference for people of varying social positions. The Orthodox Church was an essential part of the Russian governing and educational20 system, and held the lion’s share in
imperial propaganda.21 Even though the Russian Empire had thousands of people belonging to
16 For Boltin’s role in Kardecism, see Vinitsky 2007. 17 For a detailed examination, see Sidarenkova 2009.
18 Gordin 2007. For example, Britten presents Alexander II as a tsar who was quite interested in spiritualism, but
unable to pursue that interest to its full extent precisely due to the importance of the Orthodox Church to the government (Britten 1884).
19 Sommer 2013.
20 Russian primary education consisted of the basics of the Orthodox faith and “general useful knowledge.”
21 On the flipside, the government’s control over the Orthodox Church was also the strongest, and much of the priests’
day-to-day activities were concerned with pro-government propaganda, such as prayers for the health of the royal family and proselytizing against social-democratic politics. The church also served state interests in a variety of other ways, such as having priests report people who confessed crimes (while making it mandatory for government officials to take Confession).
minority religious groups, including Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam, as well as the multitude of “splinter sects” of Orthodox Christianity, the Russian Orthodox Church was the single yardstick according to which all other groups were measured. While a measure of religious rights was afforded to many groups, these rights had largely depended on a given groups’ proximity to Orthodox Christianity. If one belonged to a minority, it was best to belong to an established group that was not perceived as a threat to Orthodoxy — such as Buddhism, whose adherents in the east of Russia were largely left to their own devices, or Catholicism. The groups which had it the worst were the “rationalist sects,” which included many varieties of Protestants, and the various splinters of the Orthodox Church, the so-called raskolniki, “schism-makers,” also known as adherents of the Old Faith, staroobryadci. Persecution of the staroobryadci only stopped during the reign of Alexander II, as it was deemed counterproductive.22
In these conditions, spiritualism was perhaps in the best place it could possibly be: it was not singled out or actively persecuted, but was simply subject to the same laws as anyone else. In comparison to other “Christian heresies,” its privileged position was due to a combination of factors, the foremost of these being that it arrived in Russia at a fortuitous time: the reign of Alexander II was comparatively far more liberal than that of his predecessors. While other groups had been present for far longer and had gone through a history of persecution, which may be difficult to stop once begun, spiritualism never had any serious attention from the authorities. Second, many early adherents of spiritualism were nobles and aristocrats, which gave spiritualism a modicum of protection. Finally, even though the church attempted to “warn those who are capable of listening,” this did not have much of an impact on the educated elite that I am examining in this thesis, as this elite became steadily less involved with the church as the 19th century progressed.23
By the time the spiritualist fad came into full swing, there were relatively few grounds for interaction between spiritualism and the church.
Aksakov and Vagner were a prime example of the range of attitudes towards religion among educated minorities and the aristocrats, many of whom defended any kind of alternate beliefs by stating that they are in full compliance with the Orthodox Church. Some of these arguments were mere lip service or tactical trickery, as was the case with Aleksandr Aksakov, who contemplated a temporary alliance with the Orthodox Church against “narrow-minded” scientific materialism, but decided, in the end, that the Orthodox Church was just as “narrow-minded.” Aksakov represented the branch of spiritualists who had far more ties with the West and its scientific culture, were more interested in how the truths they had learned from the dead would impact their knowledge about the
22 Pavlenko 2004. 23 Ibid.
world rather than their faith. However, another participant of the debate, Nikolai Vagner, had a complex oscillation between materialism and Orthodox Christianity, and the influence of spiritualism had pushed him back to the Church. His religious and philosophical system had been quite Christian in nature. There was nothing inherently “heretical” about Aksakov’s brand of spiritualism, and the Orthodox Church largely clashed with Kardecist thought, which they perceived as a modern Christian heresy, but paid little attention to the works of Aksakov and friends, as well as to non-Kardecist spiritualists, including foreign visitors.24
After the 1866 visit of the Davenport brothers, Russia became a popular site for Western mediums to tour. As many Russian spiritualists came from an aristocratic background, there was no lack of sponsors. Aside from Home, who visited Russia a record six times due to having family there, mediums that visited Russia included Camille Bredif, Joseph and William Petty, Madame St. Claire (Mary Marshall), Karl Hansen25, Kate Fox, and Eusapia Palladino. These visits attracted vast
amounts of curious visitors and were, perhaps, the factor that played into the promotion of spiritualism the most. Some of the mediums even gave séances for the imperial family — with the help of the worldly Aleksandr Aksakov, who had already been known as the most prominent defender of scientific spiritualism. Aksakov began his work on popularizing spiritualism in the late 1860s by translating works by a variety of esoteric and spiritualist authors. He began with his youthful passion, Swedenborg,26 in 1863, and would continue to publish Eduard von Hartmann,27
Davies, Kardec and other mediums and representatives of spiritualism. His publishing efforts were self-funded, and after he he did not receive permission to publish Davies in Russian,28 he avoided
issues with Russian censorship entirely by publishing in Leipzig.
Aksakov was the ideal free agent: financially self-sufficient, educated, and with enough contacts in high society to protect his efforts from the Orthodox Church, which was not particularly concerned with non-Kardecist spiritualism anyway. Aksakov was aided in his popularizing endeavors by the Theosophical Society, of which he was at a certain point a member. Aksakov and Blavatsky held an extensive correspondence, and Blavatsky both recommended him mediums and wrote about Aksakov as an important contact in Russia to others. Aksakov was also in touch with
24 For Kardecism in Russia, see Razdiakonov, Christian Spiritism of N.P. Wagner and Rational Religion of A.N.
Aksakov: between “Science” and “Religion,” 2013, p. 60-61.
25 Hansen did not perceive himself as a medium, but the spiritualists had a different opinion.
26 By the time of Aksakov’s publication, Swedenborg was already well-known in Russia: from his honorary
membership in the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences for his fundamental scientific works, granted in 1734, and to scandals connected to French translations of his works that were banned in the 19th century. Aksakov was not the
first one to publish a translation of Swedenborg abroad — the first such publication happened in 1827. Swedenborgians were heavily connected with the movement to free serfs, and as such often suffered repressions.
27 Not to be confused with Franz Hartmann, the theosophist. This was despite a rather heated polemic between
Hartmann and Aksakov in the German milieu — for details, see Wolffram 2009.
Olcott, and when he needed to find Western mediums for the Mendeleev Committee, the Theosophical Society was one of the first sources that he turned to, and the theosophers did indeed attempt a search for powerful mediums whose abilities would work in the light of day.29 Their
efforts did not bear much fruit, but not for lack of trying. Unlike his predecessors in Boltin’s circle, Aksakov was not a fan of French spiritualism, which he associated largely with Kardecist thought rather than experimental approaches, and he took pains to distance his own promotion of spiritualism from it. Andrew Jackson Davies was Aksakov’s ideal spiritualist, and they corresponded for many years.30 Judging from his choice of translations to finance, Aksakov was
also a fan of Crookes, Wallace, and the London Dialectical Society (LDS). He financed the German translation of the LDS report, and it seems likely that when Aksakov heard of Vagner’s article and Mendeleev’s reaction to it, he saw an opportunity to replicate the LDS’s success.
Aksakov’s attempt to attract attention to spiritualism through a high-profile scientific discussion did pay off. The Mendeleev Committee provoked a stark reaction in Russian society — perhaps more so than could be expected, given spiritualism’s prior history and relative unimportance. To fully understand which notes the Committee hit in Russian society, one needs to account for the role intellectuals played in society, and how this role was impacted by the development and professionalization of science in Imperial Russia.
2.Education and Intellectual Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Russia
The 19th century in Russia was an incredibly dynamic time in terms of education and
science. The number of people in lower and mid-level educational institutions doubled in size from 1800 to 1830(from 130 thousand to 256 thousand), and quadrupled in size (450 thousand) by the 1856 census.31 This was still a relatively small number in relation to the larger, non-educated and
illiterate groups, but it became the basis for the creation of intellectuals as a particular self-conscious stratum of Russian society—the term intelligentsia appeared in the 1860s as a catch-all term for the educated class. However, when the term appeared it already had a political element. Sergey Sergeev, a historian studying Russian intellectuals, believes that the late 19th century and early 20th century view on intelligentsia is best represented by a quote from the 1912 New Encyclopedic Dictionary: “Only those persons belong to the intelligentsia whose heart and mind are together with the people and who believe their education at the expense of the people leads to a debt to be repaid by the intelligentsia to the people. This means that only the progressive part of educated
29 Olcott, 1895. 30 Razdiakonov 2013. 31 Pavlenko 2004.
society belongs to the intelligentsia, and the servants of the reaction by no means belong there, even if they are very intelligent.”32 Intellectuals saw themselves as opinion leaders, and debated the
future of Russia in what we would now term interdisciplinary journals, focusing on all issues of importance from politics to literature. One of these was the Herald of Europe, where Vagner published his article on spiritualism. The Herald of Europe was a progressive journal — but to understand what “progressive” meant for 19th century Russia, we must turn for a moment to the
major Russian polemic of the age, known as the Slavophile-Westernizer (zapadniki) debate.
The chief question in the Slavophile-Westernizer debate was whether Russia needed to look to the West to borrow and improve on its successes, with the long-term aim of overtaking the West’s leading role, or whether Russia was better off striking out on its own and disregarding the experience of the West. This debate, while not overtly present in the polemic of the Mendeleev committee, is of such central importance to 19th century Russian political and philosophical
discourse that it still implicitly colors scholarly perceptions of the Committee’s key figures, strengthening the narrative of the “rational” scientists of the Mendeleev committee opposing the “irrational” spiritualists. For example, Richard Rice has put forward the hypothesis that the Mendeleev Committee was Mendeleev’s attempt to get Russian science into the good graces of Western scientists by combating superstition, and particularly notes how it was criticized by Slavophiles such as Dostoyevsky, thus presenting Mendeleev as having had a Westernizer agenda.33
In a less obvious manner, many narratives not referring to the debate explicitly, such as Mannherz’s or Gordin’s, nevertheless focus on how Aksakov, a member of a prominent Slavophile family, convinced the arguably Westernized professors Butlerov and Vagner of the realities of spiritualism, while Mendeleev, who is never “Slavophilized” in these narratives, stands against them. I intend to dismantle this depiction both by showing that neither was the Slavophile-Westernizer distinction as clear-cut as normally depicted, nor that the position of both the spiritualists and Mendeleev was as simple as normally shown. I will demonstrate that while the spiritualists were indeed influenced by Slavophile ideas, they were also quite at home with discourses usually attributed to Westernizers, had an arguably Westernizer agenda, and should in no way be painted as mystically-minded reactionaries. I will also focus on why, despite originally learning about spiritualism through Slavophile venues, the spiritualists elected positivism as their philosophical methodology of choice when promoting spiritualism.
Even though Westernizers are usually depicted as “progressive” and Slavophiles as “reactionary,” the groups’ early representatives had far more in common than is often recognized.34
32 Sergeev 2009. 33 Rice 1998, pp. 89-90. 34 Lossky 1991.
Both sides pushed for civil freedoms (freedom of press and speech, freedom of conscience), both sides argued against censorship (and both sides were targeted by it), both argued against serfdom. The Slavophiles’ political beliefs ran more alongside having a parliamentary monarchy, with significant democratic elements, while the Westernizers wanted to copy Western forms of government, but the arguments between the two groups mostly concerned the best way towards reforming Russia into a better and more liberal society. Both groups also believed that intellectuals would be the guiding light in their brave new world: for Slavophiles, they would elucidate the “inner” laws and morality stemming from the church to the masses; the Westernizers believed intellectuals, would act as cultural ambassadors and translators. When individual intellectuals changed their opinions on what would be the better way forward, they also changed allegiances. In this view, both groups stood in stark contrast to the actual political reactionaries, such as Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827-1907, who would later ban Butlerov’s idea to read public lectures on spiritualism)35 or Mikhail Menshikov (1859-1918), who were largely pro-government. Both the
Slavophiles and the Westernizers were seen by the government as a threat, if a mild one.
While the participants of the 1870s spiritualism debate would seem to all have been Westernizers at first glance, save possibly Aksakov, none of them are quite what they seem. Despite their heavy involvement with Western Europe, the three spiritualist ideologues were all heavily influenced by the older generation of Slavophiles via Aleksandr Aksakov’s family members,36 and
seem to have explicitly identified as such in their younger years. Aksakov and Butlerov first learned about séances from their Aksakov relatives, and thus owed their initial framework to Romantic Slavophile interpretations of spiritualism. However, Aksakov, perhaps the most explicitly-recognized Slavophile of the group, was also the one to move away from his roots most starkly, becoming the groups’ loudest proponent of Western-style rationality and science. The two actual scientists were far less overtly “rationalist” in their convictions: Butlerov seems to have retained a quiet, private mixture of the two approaches, and Nikolai Vagner oscillated back and forth, starting out as a Christian and a Slavophile, then losing his faith in both Christianity and Russia’s special way several years before the spiritualism debate, and becoming re-converted into a more religious view through Butlerov. Their opponent, Mendeleev, while painted as pro-Western scientist in Western historiography, is often seen as a Slavophile in Russian discourses, due to his philosophical musings on Russia’s potential development and his dislike of depending on Western Europe. Mendeleev is a complex figure, but the only explicit reference to his position that I am aware of involved an attempt to distance himself from the Slavophile/Westernizer polemic, identifying
35 Gordin 2007, p. 274.
himself as an “Asian” and his worldview as “realist.”37
Another important side of the Slavophile/Westernizer polemic was the battle between university-based theology, which was the dominant philosophical current in the Russian Empire, and the philosophies of materialism and nihilism, which were believed to have been brought in by Westernizers. Theology traditionally had a strong position in Russian universities, and while theological education was the province of special ecclesiastical academies, many university disciplines, particularly philosophy and some areas of history, were taught by theologians. Professional philosophy, on the other hand, suffered a range of restrictions and bans,38 and until the
1880s, it largely existed as a university discipline subservient to theology. As Vagner recalled about his university days: “We had no philosophy at all in us. Neither did the university, even though there was a lecture course, even published in 5 volumes, by the Archimandrite (!) Gavriil” (emphasis Vagner’s).39 Thus, despite the fact that many intellectuals overtly rejected religious philosophy, it
still formed the background against which they worked, as other currents were barely accessible. At the same time, the systematic pogroms of university philosophy lead to the existence of a strong countercurrent of philosophical nihilism and atheism conducted by individuals outside university settings. Enthusiasts such as Alexander Gertsen (1812-1870), Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), Pyotr Lavrov (1823-1900), and others took leading roles in philosophical discussions, but most of them were concerned with the practical applications of philosophy on a social level rather than with the full range and scope of philosophical problems.40 Moreover, even Russian
positivism did not escape the roundabout influence of religious philosophy, Platonism and Hegel41,
particularly through the vigorous discussions about materialism and Marxism. This created an interesting double-sided situation in Russian philosophy, where the background philosophical discourse would be idealist and religious, with a focus on ethics and morality (often at the expense of a historical approach to philosophy), but the enthusiastic, non-professional newcomers to the
37 “I would ask you to read these last words precisely as they were written, without interpreting them in the sense of
those small peculiarities which distinguish our so-called ‘Slavophiles’ from ‘Westerners.’ And to clearly express my personal view on the matter which divides the two aforementioned views, I should add to the occasion that I am an “Asian” born, as I first saw the light of God [was born -transl.] in Tobolsk and there I first received the first light of man, my early education. As an “Asian,” I first of all believe Europe to be but a small part of the continent where humanity’s development is taken place, and, second, I am not forgetting the stories of the yet slumbering, but perhaps fated to awaken peoples of Asia.” (Mendeleev 1884)
38 Restrictions ranged from outright bans on teaching philosophy at a university level to bans on teaching philosophy
outside of Plato and Aristotle (Malinov and Troitsky, 2013).
39 Vagner’s Introduction to Butlerov’s Articles on Mediumism, p. v (Butlerov 1889).
40 In their case, philosophy was systematically relegated to the role of a discipline subservient to politics. The focus of
their philosophy was in subverting “traditional” values and practices, including serfdom and class distinctions, but also bourgeois culture, through adopting a combination of atheism, materialism and positivism and using that as a background for revolutionary ideas.
41 For instance, Nikolai Grot, one of the more recognized positivists of his day, eventually switched to metaphysics
field of philosophy were positivist nihilists, focused on tearing down tradition. Notably, these newcomers were also popular with the newly-emergent caste of professional scientists and sympathizers of Aksakov’s ilk.42 Their support for materialism and positivism was important,
because the natural sciences had also gained a great deal of prestige in the 19th century, with their
obvious technical usefulness for the empire, and rapidly became professionalized, with scientists also becoming opinion leaders.43
The history of the Slavophile/Westernizer debate shows that the simple opposition of “rationalist Western scientists” versus “reactionary Slavophile spiritualists,” which is often an undercurrent in scholarly portrayals of the Mendeleev Committee, is both a remnant of this polemic and does not correspond to reality. Even though the Committee’s spiritualists either had roots in or were at some point engaged with Slavophile approaches, which are commonly characterized as more “mystical”, Russia’s most important spiritualist debate44 was based in positivist methodology
— on the philosophical level, all participants in the discussion were positivists in the vein of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Positivism was particularly popular with natural scientists, and the fact that history of philosophy was barely existent as a discipline (and where it did exist, it was concerned with theology) likely impeded the development of possible alternative debates. However, a glance at the Slavophile/Westernizer polemic also explains why the positivists had an interest in such matters in the first place, as well as why the debate did not remain confined to the halls of St. Petersburg University and became such a high-profile affair. The “higher” questions of morality and religion were of paramount concern to Russian intellectual discourse, and contemporaries often accused positivists of being too narrow-minded to engage with these subjects.45 The spiritualism debate, however, shows that these accusations were unjust: like in
many other countries, spiritualism became one of the answers to the challenges of materialism – an answer given by people inclined towards positivism and the scientific exploration of reality. The particularities of that answer, however, were different for each of the debate’s participants, whose positions I will be examining in the next chapter.
42 According to the observations of Theobald Ziegler, a contemporary at the end of the nineteenth century, this kind of
scientific materialism found its greatest resonance among ‘many naturalists’ and a ‘number of the half-educated’— that is, among the lower middle classes and in parts of the liberally minded educated classes.
43 For very similar reasons, history and ethnology also gained prestige — they were useful for the empire’s internal
and external policies.
44 There were some philosophical discussions — for example, with the famous pochvennik Nikolay Strakhov
(1828-1896), who saw religion as the basis of all knowledge, and criticized materialism and spiritualism from these positions (Strakhov 1887) — but they were not nearly as popular as the debate of the Mendeleev Committee.
45 For example, the influential Russian philosopher Nikolay Lossky (1870-1965) has a number of telling comments in
his influential History of Russian Philosophy (1952), such as “However, he [Mikhailovsky] was a positivist and thus denied the possibility of metaphysics. His positivist views stopped him from giving a clear and consistent solution to this problem” (Lossky 1991). The very moniker “narrow materialism” is also telling.
Key participants of the Mendeleev Committee debate: Aleksandr Aksakov, Aleksandr Butlerov, Nikolai Wagner, Dmitri Mendeleev
1. Aleksandr Butlerov (1828-1886)
Of the three key figures of the spiritualism debate, Aleksandr Butlerov was the one with the most scientific credentials. Known as a pioneer of the theory of chemical structure and the discoverer of formaldehyde and hexamine, Butlerov was of particular importance to the Russian scientific establishment, as he had significantly contributed to the professionalization of chemistry and to its establishment as a “normal science.” What irony, then, that only a few years later, already an established authority, he would attempt to do the same for spiritualism — and fail.
The scholarly narratives of Butlerov’s professional life are somewhat different in Russian and Anglophone sources. The Russian narratives either focus on Butlerov’s professional achievements while leaving out most of his additional interests, or base themselves on Vagner’s posthumous recollections of Butlerov, which are linked more closely to his personality and pursuits in spiritualism.46 Among Western scholars, Butlerov is mostly of interest to historians of science,
who document his work in professionalizing chemistry, and thus are interested in the path he took towards his greatest period.47 What both narratives agree on, together with Butlerov himself in his
recollections, is that he seems to have been relatively unremarkable as a young scholar, somewhat unfocused due to his varied interests in things like botany, agriculture and apiculture. He also made attempts to find an industrial use for his chemical knowledge, but they were quite unsuccessful.
The bulk of the university system in 19thcentury Russia was not geared towards original
research but towards learning and transmitting established knowledge. In his early years Butlerov excelled at specifically that, teaching at the University of Kazan’ even before he defended his master’s thesis in 1851.48 A year later, once he had defended his thesis, his mentor Karl Klaus
transferred universities, and Butlerov remained in charge of teaching all chemistry-related subjects. As Butlerov did not do any research at the time, he had time to teach a wide range of subjects, and his early range of interests gave him the competence to do it. His doctor’s thesis was defended in 1854, though not at his home university. As Butlerov was the most authoritative chemist in the university, his thesis was given for evaluation to a physics professor, who did not approve of Butlerov’s more outdated theoretical views. Instead of editing the thesis, Butlerov simply
46 Vagner, Introduction to Articles on Mediumism. 47 Brooks 1998.
48 Degrees in 19th century Russia went from: Candidate (equivalent to a current honors university degree); Master
resubmitted his work to a different university with a weaker reputation, and defended it there. Both of his theses were compilations based on already-published literature, and neither included original research.
Everything changed after Butlerov’s trips to Western Europe in 1857-1858. The new tsar, Alexander II, lifted the ban on studying in foreign countries that had been in place from 1848-1855, and Butlerov was able to plan a year-long trip that was as much vacation as mingling with other scientists in Europe. However, he soon got drawn in by the rather active scientific community and changed plans from travelling around Europe and sporadically listening to lectures, to staying in Paris for entire lecture courses and, importantly, for working in the laboratory of one Adolphe Wurtz. This laboratory made ample use of Justus Liebig’s teaching methods,49 and Butlerov adopted
them wholesale. When he returned to Russia, the previously-passive professor who taught everything they would throw at him became a whirlwind of activity. After a fairly disastrous tenure as rector of Kazan’ University (1860-1863),50 he gave up teaching everything except the essentials,
making room for other professors to teach, and instead introduced important laboratory time both for himself and his students. He also pushed through a crucial upgrade to the university’s laboratories, which were earlier equipped only for the most basic of demonstrations for lectures, and let postgraduate students be in charge of those laboratories to support themselves financially while they studied for their master’s or doctoral degree.51 Before Butlerov’s ideas were implemented,
working at a university alongside established professors while earning one’s degrees was exceptional, reserved only for postgraduates who snatched very limited teaching positions. After Butlerov’s changes, enough students no longer washed out of chemistry to create a sustained chemical research school. This school was a huge success, producing a number of notable chemists, who, in turn, created a burst of Russian publications in foreign journals. The school became internationally recognized, and it soon became the model for other chemistry and other natural sciences departments in Russia. In 1869, Butlerov moved to St. Petersburg University to the position of Chair in organic chemistry, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
49 Liebig could be said to be one of the earliest popular writers in chemistry, combining ample theoretical knowledge
with a simple and clean presentation and, importantly, with an emphasis on personal research and experimental work. His and his students’ practical attitude, which emphasized that chemistry would be of immense use to manufacture and technology, must have resonated with Butlerov’s unorthodox interests in agriculture and his failed attempts to produce soap and matches in bulk (Blondel-Megrelis 2007). Interestingly, Liebig and his followers had apparently already had Russian students, but most of them stopped doing research shortly after returning to Russia due to inadequate local conditions simply not supporting full-time studies (Markovnikov 1955, p. 682). Butlerov was the exception who had been able to change his environment rather than falling prey to it.
50 Butlerov did not run for rector — he was appointed, much to his own surprise. The full story can be read in
Vagner’s biography of Butlerov, but the crux of it consisted of Butlerov being utterly incapable of dealing with university politics.
51 Earlier, there was usually one experienced chemist taking complete care of a university laboratory and all of its
educational activities, a position held for many years rather than as a temporary support for fresh graduates (Brooks 1998, p. 21).
With all of the above considered, Butlerov was arguably more important for Russian chemistry than Mendeleev was at that point in time. However, Western scholars of the Mendeleev debate have to date cast Mendeleev as the clearly more authoritative figure at the time of the debate, which is an entirely anachronistic view. Richard Rice, for example, notes: “As a member of this new generation of Russian chemists, Mendeleev must have found it particularly galling that such eminent scientists as Butlerov and Vagner publicly stated their belief in supernatural phenomena and added to the stereotypic view of Russians – even those trained in science – as believers in superstition and mysticism.”52 While Mendeleev is the scientist who is better remembered by future
generations due to his discovery of the periodic table of elements, at the time when he and Butlerov worked together, Butlerov was the older, more respected scientist, who had also been the founding father of the “new generation of Russian chemists” fifteen years before the Mendeleev committee debate took place. Butlerov and Mendeleev were both superstars of Russian chemistry, with Butlerov being the higher authority on experimental research methods. Rice’s hypothesis — that the Committee was Mendeleev’s attempt to gain international recognition for Russian chemistry — thus does not seem likely after a detailed examination of Butlerov’s background: Butlerov had already done that by creating a world-reknowned research school.
Butlerov’s fame in chemistry has another important implication: spiritualism was never Butlerov’s main concern, and neither were its scientific implications – he had been far too busy with his main line of work. While Butlerov was certainly interested and engaged with the subject, he was essentially in the position of a scientist who believed he was witnessing the birth of a new scientific field, with all of the appropriate trials and tribulations, the most important of which were a difficult subject and an as-of-yet unrefined methodology. However, by the time of the debate, he was no longer a young scientist, and while he was willing to lend personal support, he would not go through the effort of single-handedly establishing yet another field professionally, and he prioritized chemistry instead. Of the three spiritualists, Butlerov was the only one who lost interest in the holding of actual séances as time went on, instead opting to spend his evenings at the opera or theater, although he remained interested in the theory of spiritualism until the very end of his life.
Butlerov first became acquainted with spiritualism proper when he witnessed séances held by the Davenport brothers in Nice, in 1868. At the time, he was extremely skeptical of their performances, and asked a plethora of questions not unlike those asked by skeptics today.53
52 Rice 1998, p. 90.
53 “My efforts remained fruitless; I was unable to explain anything. However, I was able to note some small
circumstances that, I thought, should not have been in place were the phenomena natural and which corresponded to a degree to the presumption that the phenomena were fake. Thus I asked myself: why do the phenomena not begin immediately after the wardrobe is closed, but only in a few seconds? Why do the flying guitars not move away from Davenport Jr. and Fay, who are sitting bound on stage? Why does Davenport need to be on-stage if only
However, in 1869 Butlerov moved back to St. Petersburg and encountered Aksakov, a family member whom he then knew only in passing, but as a man of honesty and integrity. Aksakov had a moderate stance that Butlerov found appealing: he agreed that some mediumistic phenomena were likely fakes, but said that he experienced genuine ones and offered Butlerov a chance to try out séances with only a few people present, whose integrity Butlerov had not doubted: Aksakov and his wife, Butlerov himself and one more unnamed relative. The group began their experiments in November 1870, and over the course of their home-made experiments and several séances held by Home, Butlerov became finally convinced. Spiritualism fit quite naturally into the realm of the possible as Butlerov saw it, and he believed the field to have potential.54
Butlerov’s public defense of spiritualism began in 1871, when Daniel Dunglas Home began reading lectures on spiritualism in St. Petersburg. At one of these lectures, Aleksandr Butlerov stood up and said that he personally witnessed some of the phenomena Home was speaking about. A sort of informal proto-Committee was formed to test Home, with the participation of Aksakov and Butlerov as supporters, and the mathematician and expert in mechanics Pafnuty Chebyshev, founder of the St. Petersburg school of mathematics, with several other university professors as skeptics. This proto-Committee held two failed séances, which Vagner later attributes to an over-reliance on Home’s exceptional skills as a medium, and to adversary circumstances, including the overbearing skepticism of the testers.55 After that, the next time Butlerov would speak out publicly in defense of
spiritualism would be in print, after Vagner’s initial publication, and participate in the Mendeleev Committee.
After the failure of the Mendeleev Committee, Vagner reports that he and Butlerov had significant differences in how to proceed next in popularizing spiritualism. Butlerov seems to have decided that mediumistic phenomena are too fickle to study without proper research schools, and research schools would only be forthcoming if the majority of the scientific community would at least entertain the spirit hypothesis. In that sense, he believed that promotion of the concept rather
Fay’s jacket flies off? The natural answer was that the Davenports need time to free their hands, that the flying guitars are supported by the hands of the magicians, that Davenport somehow knows how to help Fay take off the jacket, and so on. […] Today I would also not vouch for the authenticity of everything I saw then. However, I am convinced that similar phenomena can take place without being fake [...]”. (Butlerov, Articles on mediumism, p. 22-23, emphasis Butlerov’s).
54 Butlerov had prior experiences with magnetism: in particular, when he was 15, a relative of his suffered from
seizures which were relieved through mesmerism applied by the family doctor. Fascinated, Butlerov attempted to learn the technique, only to find he was rather weak in this department. Still, he was able to make his relative fall asleep and magnetize glasses of water so that she could “almost always” choose the one he magnetized over a glass of plain water. When Butlerov later met with skepticism towards magnetism in scientific circles, all it did was make him skeptical of scientific authority rather than his own experiences. He also had experiences with home-made ouija boards as a family past-time and concluded that unconscious thoughts could be expressed by muscles moving the plate. (Butlerov, Articles on mediumism, p. 13-19)
than in-depth research was the proper course of action at that stage.56 Therefore, his strategy
together with Aksakov was to translate seminal texts on spiritualism and continue bringing powerful mediums to Russia, casting as wide a net as possible in convincing Russian society. Butlerov also wanted to read a series of lectures on spiritualism in 1883, but was forbidden to do by Pobedonostsev.57 Vagner believed in first proving something small, and then going public. To that
end, he held solitary experiments, hoping to get concrete data, which he even kept secret from Butlerov, believing that Butlerov would interfere.
By the end of his life, Butlerov no longer participated in many séances personally, dividing his time between laboratory work in chemistry and popularization of spiritualism on a theoretical level. In 1887, Aksakov published Butlerov’s final work on spiritualism: a translation of Eduard von Hartmann’s Der Spiritismus, which Butlerov dictated to a stenographer each Sunday evening. Butlerov’s death in 1886 caused a major split in the movement. First of all, both Vagner and Aksakov attempted to contact him from beyond the grave and got wildly conflicting results. Second, Butlerov’s authority was important not only for spiritualism’s external image, but for the spiritualist scientists themselves. Butlerov was a mediating presence; his familial connection with Aksakov and friendship with Vagner was key in holding the trio together, and when Butlerov died twenty years earlier than the other two, their approaches took radically different directions.58
Butlerov’s primary motive seems to have been less an investment in the truth of spiritualism, but rather sympathy towards the difficulties inherent in establishing the professional study of a fickle, elusive phenomenon. As we have established above, Butlerov knew academia’s organizational problems better than almost anyone else in Russia, and he seems to have been decidedly sympathetic to others starting completely from scratch, without even the meager benefits of his own initial position. In the end, while he spoke up in the support of scientific spiritualists, but instead of committing himself to designing conclusive experiments and taking an active stance in championing spiritualism on an institutional level, he largely restricted himself to the role of eyewitness, who lent his authority to the idea that something existed and deserved serious scientific investigation. He thus elected to attempt attracting the attention of the scientific community before conducting conclusive experiments. In the end, Butlerov’s stance was less pro-spiritualist than
anti-56 Vagner quotes: “At that, he [Butlerov] said, these studies are generally not easy. The phenomena are fickle and
capricious, much work will be needed to only accidentally hit upon facts that might provide some explanation. We cannot conduct experiments here in the same way we did in our laboratories. Here, experiments might give fruit once or twice, and the next ten or twenty might be fruitless, and we will not know why. Finally, we need to finance the experiments, and where could we get the funds? Things will be different when academic societies take it up: then we can hire mediums and invent and devise measurement instruments and devices.” (Vagner, Introduction to
Articles on mediumism, p. L).
57 Letter from Vladimir Solovyov to Ivan Aksakov, February 1883. Cited in: Losev, Vladimir Solovyov and His Time,
2009, p. 385.
skeptical: it was important for him that the public does not arbitrarily disregard spiritualism, but rather gives the new field a chance.
2. Aleksandr Aksakov (1832-1903)
Aleksandr Aksakov, the most vocal supporter of spiritualism in Russia, was a scion of the famous Aksakov family — Slavophiles, writers, typical representatives of Russian nobility, whose roots allegedly go as far back as the 11th century. An educated young man, his interest in esotericism
started early: he read Swedenborg when he was merely a lyceum student, and his very first translations, published in Leipzig to avoid censorship, were of Swedenborg’s works. After graduating from his lyceum in 1852, Aksakov began a career at court, as was compulsory for Russian nobles since Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks. Aksakov seems to have served in a largely administrative capacity, beginning his career in the Ministry of the Interior with an expedition to Nizhegorodskaya province (guberniya) to investigate the Raskol, a religious schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, and ending it in the State Chancellery. By the time Aksakov left service in 1878, his final rank was Active59 State Councilor, which is the fourth rank from the top
out of a possible fourteen listed in the Table of Ranks.
The full scope of Aksakov’s spiritualist activities is too extensive to summarize here, so I will focus on presenting his work in the broadest of strokes, explicating only his general strategies for the promotion of spiritualism. It is safe to say that Aksakov’s noble background played a key role in him becoming the driving force behind the spiritualist movement in Russia — or at least its non-Kardecist branch. He read spiritualist texts in three languages and pursued an extensive correspondence with most influential contemporaries in spiritualism from all over the world in no less than six.60 He had enough free time to travel abroad extensively and do full-length translations
of spiritualist texts personally, and was rich enough to support private experiments, bring mediums to Russia using personal finances, and publish translations made by himself and others. His position at court enabled him to become a mediator between the Russian Imperial Court and the mediums, particularly Daniel Dunglas Home, and, in turn, the court’s favoring of spiritualism exempted it from the many religious troubles of XIX-century Russia. There were no persecutions and no
witch-59 Действительный. For an explanation of the Table of Ranks and compulsory Russian imperial service see: Schuler
2009, p. 16-19.
60 Aksakov’s letter archive awaits its scholar: the only scholar who has worked with it extensively, Razdiakonov, is of
the opinion that it would be easier to name those major figures in spiritualism whom Aksakov did not correspond with. According to Razdiakonov, Aksakov sent up to 250 letters on spiritualism alone per year. His correspondents included Andrew Jackson Davies, with whom Aksakov corresponded for approximately fifty years and whom he greatly admired, Helena Blavatsky, colonel Olcott, and many others.
hunts, and while Aksakov was as subject to the censorship laws as anyone, his publishing endeavors were still largely fruitful.
A writer coming from a family of writers, Aksakov is perhaps best known in the West for his publishing activities. His main base of publishing was in Leipzig, to evade Russian state censorship, and he published his own works, translations made from English and German, and other authors’ works. Most publications that the spiritualist trio made were through Aksakov. Besides the aforementioned “Bibliothek des Spiritualismus für Deutschland” series, he co-founded the monthly
Psychische Studien in 1874, and its publication continued until well after his death, to 1925, when it
rebranded itself into Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie. His bestseller, Animismus und Spiritismus (1890), was first published in German, and then received Russian, Italian, and French versions. Aksakov’s publishing activities were large-scale enough that he was not only the face of spiritualism in Russia — he was the face of Russian spiritualism in the West.
Within Russia, Aksakov was in touch with everyone who had an interest in spiritualism, from its supporters to its opponents, and it seems that neither his social status nor his work on promoting spiritualism suffered for it, as is sometimes supposed by Western historians. For example, Andreas Sommer notes that “after all, Aksakov’s transference of activity to Germany occurred after his study of mediums got him into trouble with the Russian Orthodox Church.”61
However, I have not been able to find any evidence of this trouble. It seems to have simply been logistically easier for Aksakov to avoid dealing with Russian censorship entirely by publishing in Leipzig. Later he would even try several schemes to make publication of spiritualist material easier, such as first publishing a criticism of Swedenborg to “sweeten the censors” and make other publications more palatable. In the end, he was able to publish an extensive collection of spiritualist works, including both his own and important translations. In comparison with what “trouble” with the Church usually implied in imperial Russia, Aksakov and his spiritualist pursuits seem to have been in a very privileged position. In fact, Razdiakonov notes that Aksakov even seems to have sought an alliance with the Orthodox Church, and that one of the reasons he preferred the “spirit hypothesis” was that a non-materialistic explanation of mediumistic facts would help secure the church as an ally. This alliance, however, was always meant to be temporary, as Aksakov believed the Orthodox Church to be too dogmatic — the very same accusation he would later throw at the scientific establishment.62
Whenever Aksakov would write to a specific potential ally, he would go out of his way to find common ground between spiritualism and the ally’s own views, adapting his discourse.63
61 Sommer 2016. 62 Razdyakonov 2013.
