A forerunner of Darwin in the service of nihilists: the translation and reception of in Russia.

by Robert Chambers, a Scottish publisher and popular writer, was one of the most influential evolutionary works in the pre-Darwinian age. This article examines the circumstances in which this treatise was published in Russia in 1863 and went through a second printing in 1868. was translated into Russian by Alexander Palkhovsky (1831-1907), a former medical student, ideologically close to the nihilist movement, and was initially printed by the radical publisher Anatoly Cherenin, later prosecuted for his ties with revolutionary circles.