Lunkevich, Valerian Viktorovich

Born June 10 (22), 1866, in Yerevan; died Dec. 1, 1941, in Sverdlovsk. Soviet biologist; popularizer and historian of the natural sciences.

Lunkevich studied at the universities of St. Petersburg and Kharkov and graduated from Kharkov in 1888. He was exiled for antigovernment activities in 1905. He lived and worked in Paris and was active in founding the Russian People’s University, where he became a lecturer. He returned to Russia in 1917. In 1923 he began working at the University of the Crimea (from 1925, as professor and chairman of the subdepartment of general biology). In 1933 he became head of the subdepartment of Darwinism at the Moscow Oblast Pedagogical Institute, and in 1940, head of the subdepartment of Darwinism at the City of Moscow Institute of Pedagogy. Lunkevich was the author of many popular books on the natural sciences (chiefly on biology). He also wrote the fundamental three-volume history of biology From Heraclitus to Darwin (1936-43; reissued, vols. 1-2, 1960).