Science, text and space: thoughts on the geography of reading 
David N Livingstone
The very principle that made Darwinian theory attractive to Wellington audiences, namely struggle,  was precisely what most perturbed the circle which gathered at the St Petersburg Society of Naturalists in late nineteenth-century Russia. Of central importance here were the interventions of Karl Kessler, who was appointed professor of zoology at St Petersburg University in 1861. In 1879 he declared on Darwin’s theory in an essay tellingly entitled ‘On the Law of Mutual Aid’. Here he condemned ‘the cruel, so-called law of the struggle for existence’. To be sure, he allowed that overpopulation could generate intraspecific competition for resources; but he was sure that Darwin had given way too much weight to it. The sciences of zoology and sociology, he believed, had ignored ‘the law of mutual aid, which . . . is if anything more important than the law of the struggle for existence’ (quoted in Todes 1989, 110–11). He reported that he himself had witnessed the survival value of reciprocated care and cooperation among bees, beetles, spiders, reptiles and a host of other creatures. In the human species, mutual aid undergirded society’s material and moral progress. Kessler’s reading of Darwin did not remain an isolated textual event. It inaugurated a reading history that steered later Russian engagements with the text. In fact a number of Kessler’s associates – such as Alexander Brandt, Mikhail Filippov, Vladimir Bekhterev and Modest Bogdanov – constituted what Daniel Todes (1989, chapter 6) describes as the ‘Russian Mutual Aid Tradition’. And perhaps most visibly of all, Kessler’s cooperative gloss was vigorously promulgated in the writings of the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin, who achieved prominence through radical publications and political activism (Woodcock and Avakumovic 1950; Miller 1976). A member of the St Petersburg fraternity, he read the published version of Kessler’s ‘mutual aid’ speech and later published the book on which his scientific reputation very largely rests, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Here, in grand cosmic style, he traced the principle of correlative sociability from its application in the animal world, through primitive human society and medieval urban life, up to his own day. Like the evolutionism of his St Petersburg associates, this was Darwinism with its Malthusian teeth extracted. As he put it in a letter to Marie Goldsmith: Kessler, Severtsov, Menzbir, Brandt . . . and finally myself . . . stand against the Darwinist exaggeration of struggle within a species. We see a great deal of mutual aid, where Darwin and Wallace see only struggle. (quoted in Todes 1989, 104) In Mutual Aid itself he insisted: The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress . . . The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay. (Kropotkin 1939, 293; see also discussion in Livingstone 1992, 254–8) These St Petersburg readings of Darwin, of course, were not conjured out of thin air. To the contrary, as Daniel Todes (1989) makes clear, the St Petersburg engagement with Darwinian evolution was moulded by earlier textual encounters, notably with Thomas Malthus’s theory of population. Both on the political left and right in Russia, Malthus’s atomistic conception of society had already been castigated, mostly since the 1840s, as a cold, soulless and mechanistic product of English political economy. Malthus may have rationalized poverty and inequity in England, but his commentators were certain that his theory would not apply in a harmonious Russia. It ‘violated Russians’ vision of a cohesive society in which all of its members were valued parts of the whole’ and its ethos was seen as inimical to ‘the cherished peasant commune’ (Todes 1989, 29). In an environment where the laws of nature and society ran in tandem, Darwin’s theory of organic change was interpreted in the shadow of the Russian rendezvous with Malthus. But reading lineage was not the only force shaping the encounter. Physical space also had a role to play. Kropotkin had spent lengthy periods of time in Siberia during the 1860s just prior to encountering Kessler’s theory. There he found an environment, as did other scientific travellers, where scarcity and severity predominated. Nature displayed no plenitude here; no tightly-packed, wedged-in, ecological niches; no super-abundance and swarming life forms. The vocabulary of fecundity, overpopulation and intraspecific competition that Darwin and Wallace employed in the tropics just didn’t seem right in this sparse northern world (see Livingstone 2002b). Just as the teeming tropics never left Darwin’s mind, the wastelands of Russia’s high latitudes remained with Kropotkin. The St Petersburg engagement with Darwin, then, was a compound product of textual pre-history and environmental reality. Here Darwin was read through the twin spectacles of Russian geopolitics – social structure and territorial configuration. Just Science, text and space 399 as the colonial politics of New Zealand predisposed Wellington readers of Darwin to embrace its robust selectionism and the cut-throat ethics of struggle; just as the Charleston naturalists read Darwin through the lens of a racialized Agassiz-type creationism that lent support to southern social structure; so in St Petersburg, Darwin’s theory of evolution, construed in the light of a customary disquiet over Malthusian social theory, was translated into the language of cooperation and reciprocal sociability. Malthus might have been a credible intellectual source of inspiration for Darwin and his disciples in England; his philosophy was profoundly troubling to a Russian society whose class structure and political traditions made it suspicious of competitive individualism. In all three venues, political factors were crucial to the local constitution of Darwinian meaning.