DARWIN, Charles.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Puteshestvie vokrug svet nakorable Bigl' ("Voyage Around the World on the Beagle"). Scarce first edition in Russian of Darwin's first published book, celebrated as the genesis of his theory of evolutionary biology. Among the earliest translations of the Voyage in any language, this edition attests to Darwin's popularity in Tsarist Russia.Like Britain and France, Russia was a centre of pre-Darwinian research on evolutionary theory. The Darwinian evolution proved immediately popular, as young scientists and radical social philosophers employed it to establish their independence from religious conservatives in the traumatic aftermath of the Crimean War.The Voyage of the Beagle was originally published in 1839. This translation was produced by Andrei Beketov (1825-1902), the botanist and evolutionary theorist who had also produced the first Russian translation of the Origin in 1864. Beketov's wife Elisaveta (1834-1902) was a prolific translator in her own right and it is now widely accepted that she collaborated with her husband on this translation. A variant of the famed diagram of the Galapagos finches is on page 206 of Volume II.

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