Alexander N. Aksakov and the domestication of ‘scientific spiritualism’ in Imperial Russia, 1865–1875
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decades scholars have traced the intersections between science and spiritualism during the second half of the nineteenth century in a variety of locales around the world. This essay examines such intersections in one setting that has largely eluded their attention, Imperial Russia. It investigates the pivotal role played by Alexander N. Aksakov (1832–1903) in developing a scientific approach to ‘mediumistic phenomena’. It follows Aksakov’s personal journey from Swedenborgian mysticism to ‘scientific spiritualism’ by tracing his extensive network of contacts with like-minded individuals around the world. It details Aksakov’s labours in forging close links between spiritualism and science from 1865 to 1875 and in fostering lively discussions – in Russia, Britain, France, and Germany – on the intersections of these two elements of contemporary cultures. By analysing his translating and publishing activities in multiple languages, up to the founding in 1874 of Psychische Studien, the first journal dedicated to scientific investigations of spiritualist phenomena, it explores Aksakov’s role in both ‘domesticating’ spiritualism in his homeland and ‘internationalizing’ Russian contributions to its development on the world stage. It argues that the particularities of social and cultural landscape in post-Crimean Russia both facilitated and hampered Aksakov’s efforts to educate the Russian public and Russian scientists about ‘scientific spiritualism’, shaping their forms, locales, and outcomes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".