Timiryazev, Kliment Arkadyevich

TIMIRYAZEV, Kliment Arkadyevich (1843–1920), professor at Moscow University and the former Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy, a European-renowned scientist (botanist-physiologist) and materialist, who became famous for his propaganda and popularization of the natural-scientific foundations of materialism and Darwinism. He was born into a noble family that had ties to the Decembrist uprising of 1825. The era of the 1860s left its sharp imprint on the character and activities of Timiryazev. During his student years and after graduating from St. Petersburg University (in 1866), in addition to his scientific specialty—plant physiology—Timiryazev worked in the field of socio-political and philosophical sciences. While still a student, he published his first brief essay on Darwin's theory in the pages of the radical journal Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland). He spent the years 1868–1871 abroad, working with famous scientists: Kirchhoff, Bunsen, Hofmeister, Helmholtz, Claude Bernard, Berthelot, and especially Boussingault, who exerted a huge influence on all of Timiryazev's subsequent scientific activity. This activity of Timiryazev was directed toward establishing a connection between plant physiology and agriculture. Timiryazev's main scientific works, which brought him worldwide fame, relate to the question of the assimilation of carbon dioxide and light by green plants and the study of the chemical and physical conditions of the process of forming organic matter from inorganic matter. The introduction of the first scientific experiments in Russia on growing plants in artificial cultures is also associated with the name of Timiryazev. Timiryazev authored more than one hundred scientific works, not counting articles on questions of evolution and Darwinism, as well as popular and socio-political articles. Major works: The Life of the Plant (Moscow, 1878; 11th ed., Moscow-Leningrad, 1925); Charles Darwin and His Teaching (Moscow, 1882; 8th ed., Moscow, 1924); Agriculture and Plant Physiology (Moscow, 1891); The Sun, Life, and Chlorophyll (collection of works, Moscow, 1920); Science and Democracy (Moscow, 1920); Vital Tasks of Natural Science (Moscow, 1923), and others. The role of Timiryazev as a scientist-revolutionary, who devoted all his strength to the struggle "against all forms of reaction," the struggle against "enlightened despotism," vitalism, and obscurantism, is exceptionally great. The passion that characterized all of Timiryazev's service to science was explained by the fact that he saw the popularization and propaganda of materialism and Darwinism and the struggle against anti-Darwinism primarily as the social duty of a scientist. Unyielding in his views, under the conditions of the tsarist regime, Timiryazev, as an "unreliable" professor, was "removed" from the Petrovskaya (now Timiryazev) Agricultural Academy (1897), was forced to stop lecturing at the university, and in 1911, thanks to Minister Kasso, had to leave the university entirely. As an anti-defencist, from the very beginning of the World War, Timiryazev scourged militarism, exposed all the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, and collaborated in the internationalist journal Letopis (Chronicle). He was critical of the Provisional Government of the February Revolution of 1917, and with the onset of the October Revolution, at the age of 75, with exceptional devotion to the proletarian cause, he openly sided with the October Revolution. Timiryazev's dying words (1920) were: "...The Bolsheviks, who are implementing 'Leninism,' I believe and am convinced, are working for the happiness of the people and will lead them to happiness... Convey to Vladimir Ilyich my admiration for his brilliant resolution of world issues in theory and in practice...". A monument to Timiryazev has been erected in Moscow, and the Biological Research Institute, the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy, and a number of other educational institutions have been named after him.