Nikolay Danilevsky

Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822 to 1885) was a Russian naturalist, economist, ethnologist, philosopher and historian, and an ideologue of pan-Slavism and the Slavophile movement. Born into a noble family in Oryol Governorate and educated at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of St Petersburg, was arrested in 1849 for belonging to the Petrashevsky Circle, and later led fishery expeditions to the Volga, Caspian, Black and White Seas, publishing Examination of Fishery Conditions in Russia in 1872. He is remembered in social thought for Russia and Europe (1869), which compared cultures to biological species and described ten historical-cultural types that each pass through youth, adulthood and old age, with the Slavic type still young. He denied any absolute progress, holding that history is circular. His view prefigured parts of Oswald Spengler and drew praise from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and opposition from Occidentalists. He also opposed Darwin, in Darwinism: A Critical Study (1885). He died in Tbilisi.