Dmitry Nikolayevich Anuchin was a Russian anthropologist, ethnographist, archaeologist, and geographer. He is noted as an academician of the Department of Zoology of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (1896), an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1898), a corresponding member of the Paris Anthropological Society (1879), and a full member of the Italian Society of Anthropology (1880).
Background
Dmitry Nikolayevich Anuchin was born on August 27, 1843 in Saint Petersburg. Anuchin’s father was a soldier Nikolay Vasilyevich Anuchin. His mother Tatjana Firsovna was the daughter of a peasant, but since her family was quite wealthy, she was able to get an education from the boarding school in Saint Petersburg. Dmitry was the youngest child out of six other children, the majority of whom died in early childhood. He lost both of his parents in 1860, while studying at the local school in Saint Petersburg.
Education
Anuchin first graduated in 1860 from the Larinskaja gymnasium in Saint Petersburg and then studied at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University, where Darwin’s concept of evolution and the mutual influence of natural phenomena were advocated and became the basis for his scientific research.
Career
Anuchin was attracted to anthropology and ethnography, and after graduating from the university he became secretary of the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals and Plants. He published his first scientific papers on observations of several little-studied animals. During the 1870’s he worked seriously on anthropological and ethnographical problems, publishing papers on anthropomorphic monkeys and lower forms of man, and on the ethnography of Siberia; he also prepared his master’s dissertation. In recognition of his work, Moscow University invited Anuchin to head the department of anthropology, and in 1876 he was sent to Paris and other European university cities. For more than two years he studied museums of anthropology, listened to the lectures of leading scientists, and worked in their laboratories. He also organized the Russian section of the World Anthropological Exhibition held in Paris in 1878.
In the school year 1879-1880 Anuchin instituted Russia’s first elective course in physical anthropology. In January 1881 he defended his master’s dissertation and from 1884 on, he headed the newly organized department of geography and ethnography, where he gave the first Russian lecture course on the history of geography; he also taught several courses in physical geography and specific geography (of Russia and Asia, among other areas). His study of the geographical distribution of Russia’s male population according to height (1889), a notable contribution to science, led Moscow University to award him the doctor of geography, honoris causa.
In 1890 Anuchin was elected president of the Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography, in which he brought together the few influences in Moscow making for geographical research. In the same year he organized an expedition to study the upper reaches of the Dnieper, Western Dvina, and Volga rivers. The results of his orographical investigations and his study of the lakes of the area were highly valued by Russian and foreign scholars.
After the October Revolution, Anuchin continued to work fruitfully, devoting all his strength and knowledge to the construction of the new society. He participated in the establishment of the government, especially in Gosplan (State Planning Committee of the U.S.S.R.). Upon Lenin’s recommendation, Anuchin’s services were enlisted in the compilation and editing of the first Soviet world atlas, the Atlas mira.
Anuchin’s basic works in general geography - including “Rel’ef poverkhnosti Evropejskoj Rossii” (“Surface Relief of European Russia,” 1895), “Sushcha” (“Land,” 1895), and Verkhnevolzhskie ozera i verkhov’ja Zapadnoj Dviny (“The Upper Volga Lakes and the Upper Reaches of the Western Dvina,” 1897) - played an important role in the development of geomorphology and hydrology. In studying the surface of the earth, Anuchin started from the basic methodological principle of geomorphology - the present relief of the earth is the result of endogenous and exogenous forces over a long period of time.
Accordingly, he opposed the theory that mountains were formed as the result of the cooling of the earth. Anuchin considered the endogenic forces of the earth as the basic and decisive factor in the formation of mountains. He placed the origin of the internal energy of the earth “in the pressure of strata and especially in radioactive substances, which are capable of giving off heat”. In addition, he recognized the significant role of exogenous forces in relief formation. Anuchin distinguished three basic relief types on the basis of geological structures and the degree of erosion of a mountainous terrain: mountains, hills, and plains; in each of these categories he distinguished the different surface forms. He was thus the first to formulate the basic elements of modern orography.
Anuchin had many valuable ideas in hydrology, especially in limnology. He viewed lakes as a complex element of the landscape and therefore thoroughly studied their surrounding territory. He did not accept Forel’s hypothesis of the autonomy of lakes as absolute; rather, he developed another aspect of the study of lakes—the view that lakes were related to other geographical conditions. Anuchin associated lake formation with the genesis of hollows in the watershed areas of Russia’s plain that have a moraine-hilly surface.
Anuchin analyzed the distribution of lakes and the genesis of lake beds; he also classified lakes and noted their tendency to decrease in size and disappear. But, most importantly, he paved the way for his many students and is rightly acclaimed as one of the founders of limnology in Russia. From the end of the nineteenth century, the lakes of European Russia, central Asia, and Siberia were systematically studied by his followers. The classic publication on the investigation of lakes was L. C. Berg’s monograph Aral’skoe more (“The Aral Sea,” 1908).
Having accepted the advanced anthropological ideas of scientists in France and other countries, Anuchin developed them further and created a school of Russian anthropologists. He conceived of anthropology as a vast complex of knowledge about man - his physical nature and his daily life and activity, both modem and past, especially the prehistoric. The origin of man, with which his first studies on anthropoid apes (1874) were concerned, was included by Anuchin within the realm of anthropology. These ideas were later generalized in his “Proiskhozhdenie cheloveka” (“The Origin of Man,” 1922).
Anuchin’s studies of man’s racial types were also significant. He thought that all human physical types (races) were essentially transitions from some types toward others: “Mankind represents properly one form. ... In other words, all mankind proceeds from the same ancestors, whose descendants only gradually formed different races”. Anuchin decisively rejected the view that the human races originated from distinct apelike ancestors. He wrote several fundamental works on the physical types of various nationalities, among them a monograph on the Ainu people (1876).
Anuchin’s works on ethnography were distinguished by originality and strict adherence to scientific method. Such works as the comparative study of bows and arrows (1881), “Sani, lad’ja i koni, kak prinadlezhnosti pokhoronnogo obrjada” (“Sleighs, Large Boats, and Horses as Appurtenances of Funeral Rites,” 1890), and “K istorii oznakomlenija s Sibir’ju do Ermaka” (“Toward the History of the Acquaintance with Siberia Before Ermak,” 1890) are regarded as models of scientific creativity. Anuchin was also interested in the origin of domestic animals as the basis of one of the most important branches of agricultural economics.
Anuchin did work in the history of science, writing original studies of Lomonosov, Darwin, Humboldt, Miklukho-Maklaja, and others. He published approximately a thousand papers.
He died in 1923 and was buried on the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.
Views
Anuchin understood the science of geography in a broad sense. As early as 1885 he considered it an independent branch of knowledge, on the boundary between natural science and the humanities. He classified it as follows:
I. General geography.
A. Geography of inorganic nature (physical geography).
1. Meteorology (climatology).
2. Hydrography (oceanography).
3. Orography.
B. Geography of organic nature (biogeography).
1. Geography of plants.
2. Geography of animals.
C. Anthropogeography.
II. Specific geography (geography of countries).
Anuchin was a critic of the ideas of Humboldt and Karl Ritter, the most eminent geographers of the first half of the nineteenth century. He noted that Humboldt’s ideas were more advanced than Ritter’s and pointed out the weakness of Ritter’s methodological views, which were theologically oriented.
Reevaluating and defining his views on the nature and problems of geography more precisely, Anuchin stood fast by his early positions. He was sympathetic to Richtofen’s views and criticized G. Gerland’s views as one-sided and as reducing geography to geophysics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hettner won many followers for his theory that geography was a chronological science “of the expanse of the earth’s surface according to its material composition.” According to Hettner, questions of the essence of objects and phenomena, as well as questions of development, were alien to the science of geography.
Anuchin believed that geography should concern the surface of the earth, with its inorganic nature and its variegated animal world (including man), and the relationship between them. Geography should analyze the phenomena of the surface of the earth, compare their alterations, place them within a system, and strive for an explanation of the connection between them and elucidation of their origin. He considered the historically established separation of geography into general and specific spheres as the basis for its further development.
Quotations:
Anuchin’s theoretical views were the direct opposite of Hettner’s:
"The subject of geography has remained the same for all times: our planet, the earth, and its relation to the other heavenly bodies, but more importantly, the earth in and of itself, especially its surface, which serves as the arena of various cosmic and telluric forces, as the result of which her atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and pediosphere, as well as - one can express it thusly - her biosphere and anthroposphere were established."
Emphasizing the constant changes in the earth’s surface, Anuchin wrote, “a proper understanding of a country’s surface forms, its landscapes, and its phenomena of life can be obtained only by means of an inquiry into its past and the study of those processes which elicited the consequent transformation”.
Membership
Dmitry Nikolayevich Anuchin was a member of the following organizations: Moscow Archaeological Society, Society of Devotees of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography, Society of Anthropology of Paris, Hellenic Philological Society of Constantinople. He was also a member of the Russian Geographical Society and convened the ethnographic sub-section of the Twelfth Congress of Russian Natural Scientists and Physicians held in Moscow in 1909.