Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
In the fall of 1860 Kovalevsky went to Heidelberg, where he worked in the laboratory of Ludwig Carius, publishing two works in organic chemistry, and attended lectures in zoology by G. K. Bronn.
University of Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany
Kovalevsky spent three semesters at Tubingen before returning to Saint Petersburg in 1862.
Saint Petersburg University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
In 1859 Kovalevsky enrolled in the natural science division of the faculty of physics and mathematics of Saint Petersburg University, where he studied histology and microscopy under L. A. Tsenkovsky and zoology under S. S. Kutorga. In 1862 he took his examinations and prepared a thesis.
1951
A Russian stamp issued in 1951 in commemoration of Kovalevsky's scientific achievements.
Kovalevsky received the Order of Saint Anna, 1st class.
Kovalevsky received the Order of Saint Vladimir.
Kovalevsky received the Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st class.
Kovalevsky received the Pour le Mérite Order for Sciences and Arts.
1951
A Russian stamp issued in 1951 in commemoration of Kovalevsky's scientific achievements.
Saint Petersburg University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
In 1859 Kovalevsky enrolled in the natural science division of the faculty of physics and mathematics of Saint Petersburg University, where he studied histology and microscopy under L. A. Tsenkovsky and zoology under S. S. Kutorga. In 1862 he took his examinations and prepared a thesis.
Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
In the fall of 1860 Kovalevsky went to Heidelberg, where he worked in the laboratory of Ludwig Carius, publishing two works in organic chemistry, and attended lectures in zoology by G. K. Bronn.
University of Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany
Kovalevsky spent three semesters at Tubingen before returning to Saint Petersburg in 1862.
Kovalevsky received the Order of Saint Anna, 1st class.
Kovalevsky received the Order of Saint Vladimir.
Kovalevsky received the Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st class.
Kovalevsky received the Pour le Mérite Order for Sciences and Arts.
Antoine Fortuné Marion and Alexander Kovalevsky.
Александр Онуфриевич Ковалевский
educator embryologist scientist
Ethnicity:
Kovalevsky's father was a Russianized Polish; his mother was Russian.
Alexander Kovalevsky was born on November 19, 1840, in Daugavpils district, Vitebsk region, Russia (now Varkava, Latvia). He was the son of Onufry Osipovich Kovalevsky, a landowner of modest means, and his wife Polina Petrovna. He had a brother, Vladimir Kovalevsky, who became a noted paleontologist.
In 1856 Kovalevsky entered an engineering school in Saint Petersburg; but in 1859, against the wishes of his father, he left it and enrolled in the natural science division of the faculty of physics and mathematics of Saint Petersburg University, where he studied histology and microscopy under L. A. Tsenkovsky and zoology under S. S. Kutorga.
In the fall of 1860 Kovalevsky went to Heidelberg, where he worked in the laboratory of Ludwig Carius, publishing two works in organic chemistry, and attended lectures in zoology by G. K. Bronn. He spent three semesters at Tubingen before returning to Saint Petersburg in 1862 to take his examinations and to prepare a thesis. He returned in August 1863 to Tubingen, where he studied microscopy and histology with F. Leidig.
Kovalevsky received a doctor of science degree from the University of Saint Petersburg in 1867.
In the summer of 1864 Kovalevsky traveled to Naples to begin the embryological investigations on amphioxus, tunicates, holothurians, Chaetognatha, Phoronis, and Ctenophora that launched the studies in comparative embryology which were to be almost his sole scientific concern for the next thirty-five years and which formed the basis for both his master’s thesis and his doctoral dissertation. Kovalevsky apparently reached Naples in 1864 with a detailed plan of research which he subsequently followed. How this plan was formulated and how his intellectual outlook was formed are unclear: the relative importance of Tsenkovsky, N. D. Nozhin, Bronn, Leidig, Pagenstecher, Karl Ernst von Baer, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Fritz Muller’s Fur Darwin is disputed in the literature. But the importance of Kovalevsky’s studies was quickly recognized by Baer, who nonetheless criticized their evolutionary tone; by Haeckel, who was greatly excited and generalized them well beyond Kovalevsky’s conclusions into his own theory of the gastrula; and by Darwin, who saw them as providing embryological proofs for his theory of descent.
In the fall of 1866 K. F. Kessler, zoologist and rector of Saint Petersburg University, appointed Kovalevsky curator of the zoological cabinet and privatdocent. He subsequently served on the faculties of Kazan University (1868-1869); the University of Saint Vladimir in Kiev (1869-1873); Novorossisk University in Odessa (1873-1890), where for a time he served as prorector; and Saint Petersburg University (1891-1894).
Kovalevsky was active as a scientific organizer. He used his research trips to Naples, Trieste, Messina, Villefranche, Marseilles, the Red Sea, Algeria, and Sevastopol - which were almost annual - to make collections for Russian universities. At every university where he taught, he helped to found or was active in a natural history society; and he was instrumental in promoting Russian biological stations at Villefranche and Sevastopol and in furthering Russian participation in the Naples Station and at Messina.
Alexander Kovalevsky went down in history as a pioneer of comparative embryology and experimental histology, who established for the first time the existence of a common pattern in the embryological development of all multicellular animals. His demonstration provided important evidence of the evolution of living organisms.
He received the Order of Saint Anna, 1st class, the Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st class, the Order of Saint Vladimir, and the Pour le Mérite Order for Sciences and Arts. He also won two prizes in 1882 and 1886 awarded by the French Academy of Sciences.
During his lifetime Kovalevsky published nothing about politics; but privately he was not totally apolitical, especially in his youth, when a number of his closest friends were politically active. Both at Kiev and at Odessa he was distressed by the government’s increasing interference in faculty appointments and university affairs; and in the 1880s Kovalevsky seriously considered leaving Russia to join A. F. Marion at Marseilles or A. Dohrn at Naples, where he hoped to find less interference and greater appreciation of his talents.
Kovalevsky's studies proved that a wide variety of organisms - coelenterates, echinoderms, worms, ascidians, and amphioxi - develop from a bilaminar sac produced by invagination. His work also showed that later developmental stages of the larvae of ascidians and amphioxi are similar, as are the mode of origin of equivalent organs in the embryos of worms, insects, and vertebrates, and that the nerve layers of insects and vertebrates are homologous. Theoretically, his work was seen as providing embryological evidence for the descent theory and as refuting the widely accepted view, implicit in Cuvier’s work, that the organs of organisms from different emhranchements cannot be homologous.
From 1886 Kovalevsky was an honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and the Society of Naturalists of Modena; a corresponding member of the academies of sciences of Brussels and Turin; and a foreign member of the Royal Society. He became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1890.
Kovalevsky is described by contemporaries as a shy man who had almost no social life, a man totally dedicated to science, a demanding and thorough teacher who much preferred research. His only nonscientific interest seemed to be his family.
In 1867 Kovalevsky married Tatiana Kirillovna Semenova; they had three daughters. His sister-in-law was Sonya Semenova, a mathematician.
