Background

Ethnicity: Kovalevsky's father was a Russianized Polish; his mother was Russian.

Vladimir Kovalevsky was born on August 2, 1842, 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, Alexander Kovalevsky, who became a noted embryologist.

Education

Kovalevsky graduated in 1861 from the School of Jurisprudence. From 1869 to 1874 he attended lectures on various aspects of natural science in Heidelberg, Munich, Wurzburg, and Berlin; made geological observations and collected fossils in northern Italy and southern France; and studied paleontological collections in the museums of Germany, France, Holland, and Great Britain.

In 1872 Kovalevsky passed his doctoral examinations in Jena and submitted a thesis on the paleontological history of horses; this was later the subject of his master’s degree (1875).

Career

After traveling to Heidelberg, Tubingen, Paris, and Nice, Kovalevsky settled in London where he taught the daughter of exiled radical Alexander Herzen. This attracted the attention of the agents of the tzar. When he returned home, he published many scientific texts and, in 1866, Herzen's "Who is to Blame" of which the entire printing was burned by order of the censors.

Kovalevsky edited many scientific books, and on February 27, 1867, he wrote to Charles Darwin about translating his latest book, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. His translation work was so fast that the Russian copy of Variation was published several months before the "original" English version. He also translated The Descent of Man, which he and Sofia had to carry through Prussian lines into besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In his lifetime, his only original work was his thesis, On the Osteology of the Hyopotamidae, in which he "documented the most famous evolutionary story of all," the transformation of a small ancestor with many toes into the large, single-toed modern horse. He also identified the primary basis for this transformation, which was a shift in their environment from eating leaves in the woodlands and marshes to grazing grass on the open plains.

Kovalevsky returned with his wife to Russia by 1878, with the hopes of becoming a professor of paleontology, which he was unable to attain in Europe. However, the teaching job did not come through. Kovalevsky subsequently entered a bad business situation which led to his disgrace. Humiliated, Kovalevsky committed suicide.

Achievements

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  Vladimir Kovalevsky went down in history as a noted paleontologist and publisher of scientific works. He was one of the first adopters of Charles Darwin in Russia, and is most notable for his early work on the evolution of the Hippomorpha family.

Works

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  • Complete Works of Vladimir Kovalevsky 1980

Views

The paleontological researches of Kovalevsky deal with the evolution of morphological characteristics of the teeth apparatus and skull of mammals as related to change of plant food composition; and with the phylogeny of ungulates, particularly of horses and pigs. Basing his evolutionary argumentation on Darwin's theory, Kovalevsky established the conception of inadaptive and adaptive evolution in the special case of the extremities of the ungulates. He suggested that adaptive reduction ensured survival, but that nonadaptive reduction - of the fingers of the Entelodon giant pig, for example - could not save a species from extinction. Kovalevsky was the first to attempt to construct the genealogy of hoofed animals, in particular, the horses. Developing Darwin’s views on divergency, he advanced the idea of adaptive radiation as a means of evolutionary transformation.

The opinion put forward that Kovalevsky is a forerunner of E. Cope and H. Osborn, the founders of Neo-Lamarckism in paleontology, is groundless. Kovalevsky was a consistent Darwinist and attributed evolutionary changes in fossil forms not to autogenesis, nor to use or disuse of parts, but to natural selection.

Connections

Kovalevsky was engaged to a young radical woman, but the couple broke eventually. In 1869 he married Sofia Korvin-Krukovsky. In October 1878 their daughter Sofia was born.

Father:

Onufry Osipovich Kovalevsky

Mother:

Polina Petrovna Kovalevsky

Spouse:

Sofia Korvin-Krukovsky

Brother:

Alexander Kovalevsky

Daughter:

Sofia Kovalevsky

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973