LEVITSKII, GRIGORII ANDREEVICH

(b. Belki, Ukraine, 19 November 1878; d. in prison, Zlatoust, Cheliabinsk province, U.S.S.R., 20 May 1942)

botany, cytology, cytogenetics.

Levitskii was born into the family of a Russian Orthodox priest. He received his early education at a primary school in Kiev and his secondary education at the collegium of P. Galagan. In 1897 he entered the natural sciences division of the physicomathematical faculty of the University of St. Vladimir (Kiev University). There he specialized in botany, working under the direction of N. V. Tsinger and the renowned cytologist S. G. Navashin (1857– 1930), discoverer of double fertilization in plants (1898). After his graduation in 1902 he worked as an assistant in the botanical laboratory of the Kieve Polytechnic Institute. In May 1907, however, he was arrested for his involvement with the All-Russian Union of Peasants and his participation in political demonstrations. After a brief incarceration at the Butyrka prison in Moscow, he was sent into exile abroad for four years.

During his first two years in Europe (1907–1909) Levitskii traveled to Austria, Germany, England, and France, absorbed European culture, picked grapes in French vineyards, and studied cytology in the libraries of Paris and London. In March and April of 1909 he worked at the Russian marine biological station at Villefranche. Later that year he found a post at the Botanical Institute of the University of Bonn. working as a privatdocent under the plant cytologist Eduard Strasburger (1844–1912). During the next two years Levitskii studied the chondriosomes (mitochondria) of plant cells, developing fixative techniques, working out their microscopic organization, and observing their continuity through cell division. His findings appeared in a series of papers, published in German scientific periodicals (1910–1913), that established his reputation in plant cytology.

Upon his return to Kiev in 1911, Levitskii resumed his studies at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. With the outbreak of war in 1914, he was mobilized into the Russian Army. Following his demobilization in 1915, he transferred to the physico-mathematical faculty at the University of St. Vladimir, where he soon passed his examination for the master’s degree in botany. In the fall of 1917 he became a privatdocent in botany at the university and opened his own course, called “The Structure and Organization of Protoplasm.”

During the civil war (1918–1921), Kiev was taken and retaken many times by opposing armies, and normal scientific life was disrupted. In 1918 Levitskii became a docent at the Kiev Commercial Institute and a lecturer at the People’s University associated with the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, which served as his academic base. In 1920 and 1921 the Reds finally established control of the city, and the Kosianenko brothers were appointed Red director and political commissar of the polytechnic institute. Following a falling out with Levitskii, they dismissed him from the institute on the false charge that he was a Ukrainian nationalist. In subsequent years he supported himself by teaching botany at the Kiev Economic Institute (1920–1925) and the Kiev Agricultural Institute (1921–1923), where he chaired a department.

However, Levitskii soon managed to get an excellent post with the Sugar Trust, which had been established to manage the Ukrainian sugar beet industry. Beginning in 1920 he taught courses for the trust on general biology and biometrics. In 1922, together with a number of other botanists, he was invited to organize the trust’s Scientific Institute of Selection. There he created an excellent cytological laboratory, which he directed from April 1922 until October 1925.

Foreign scientific journals had not been received in Kiev since around 1915 because of war. In 1921–1922 N. I. Vavilov was sent abroad to reestablish scientific contact and obtain recent scientific books and journals. Around 1922 Levitskii spent several weeks in Petrograd poring over the new materials and acquainting himself with the spectacular results of recent research, particularly the chromosomal theory of heredity developed by T. H. Morgan’s group. According to the testimony of Theodosius Dobzhansky, who was sharing an apartment with him at the time, Levitskii returned to Kiev a changed man. On the basis of his extensive notes, he began teaching cytogenetics to a small group at the university and wrote one of the first textbooks in the field, entitled Material’nye osnovy nasledstvennosti (The material basis of heredity; 1924).

The term karyotype was first coined in 1922 by L. N. Delone (another of Navashin’s Kiev students) to signify a genus, in his view the systematic taxon whose constituent species share a uniform “typical” chromosome complement. In 1924 Levitskii used the term to signify the sum of the specific characteristics of a cell nucleus, including chromosome number, form, size, and points of spindle fiber attachment. On the basis of his extensive comparative cytological analysis of varieties, species, and higher taxa of domesticated and natural plants, Levitskii demonstrated that Delone’s conception of the genus as karyotypically uniform was mistaken, since quite different genera can have very similar karyotypes, whereas various species within a single genus can exhibit quite different karyotypes. For Levitskii the karyotype was a mediator between phenotype and genotype, since the chromosomes are not only observable physical structures, but are also the material basis of heredity and the genes. The term idiogram had been coined by Levitskii’s teacher S. G. Navashin to mean the totality of structures of the cell nucleus (in particular the complement of metaphase chromosomes) that typify a species and can serve as its symbol. Levitskii later adapted the term to mean the diagrammatic representation of a karyotype. He was thus the first to deploy these two terms in essentially their modern meanings.

Levitskii’s work brought him to the attention of Vavilov, who in 1925 was made director of the new All-Union Institute of Applied Botany and New Cultures in Leningrad (renamed the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry [VIR] in 1930). Vavilov invited Levitskii to create the institute’s Laboratory of Cytology. He accepted and moved to Leningrad, serving officially as laboratory director from 1 September 1925, although the laboratory itself was created only in 1927 outside the city at Detskoe Selo (renamed Pushkin in 1937). Concurrently he served as a professor of botany in the Institute of Domestic Farming (1930–1933) at Detskoe Selo.

At the VIR, Levitskii occupied one of the best research positions in plant cytology in the world. After 1929 the institute became the hub of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) and was in charge of dozens of plant breeding stations and hundreds of thousands of seeds, plants, and specimens sent back from all over the world by the institute’s many collecting expeditions. Levitskii was in charge of all the cytological investigations on this material, which included agriculturally important plants such as rye, barley, wheat, peas, legumes, beets, and tea, as well as Muscari, yucca, and other plants of more theoretical interest,

A 1931 volume of the VIR journal was devoted to the work of Levitskii’s laboratory during its first four years (1927–1931) and contains his 156-page review, “Morfologiiakhromosom” (The morphology of chromosomes). After surveying the history of cytology, Levitskii described special techniques he had devised for measuring chromosome length, surveyed the karyotypes of various plants, and concluded with a theoretical discussion of chromosome morphology, primary and secondary constriction, karyosystematics, and cytogenetics. In a 1933 article on the importance of cytology for plant breeding, he emphasized its role in producing polyploids, in hybridizing distant forms where infertility may result from disrupted meiosis, and in analyzing the effects of mutagens. In the 1930’s he investigated the cytological effects of X rays and other mutagens, and described the chromosomal fragmentation, deletions, duplications, and translocations they produced in the karyotypes of various species.

Levitskii also considered the implications of karyosystematics and cytogenetics for evolution, Noting that the karyotypes of distantly related plants can be quite similar, he acknowledged that much evolution takes place by natural selection acting on small genetic variations without any major alteration of chromosome structure. However, he knew that closely related plants can have remarkably different karyotypes. Increasingly impressed by the data on natural and artificially produced polyploid species, he became convinced that new species can arise quite suddenly in the plant kingdom through changes in karyotype that establish reproductive isolation.

On 29 March 1932, because of his prominence at the VIR as the country’s leading plant cytogeneticist, Levitskii was elected a corresponding member of the division of mathematical and natural sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences in cytology and genetics. However, with the advent of Stalinism in the early 1930’s, repression became increasingly widespread and indiscriminate. In January 1933 Levitskii and several of his colleagues at the Detskoe Selo branch of the VIR were arrested on the absurd charge that they had organized a terrorist group. Levitskii refused to confess, and after months of fruitless investigation he was sentenced to three years of exile. He was first sent to Achinsk, then to Biriliussy, then into the countryside some ten kilometers from the town. By the fall of 1933, through the efforts of Vavilov, H. J. Muller, and Donncho Kostov, Levitskii was permitted to live in Saratov, where he resumed his scientific work at an agricultural experimental station. In February or March of 1934 he was allowed to return to Detskoe Selo and resumed his former post. The same year he was invited by G. D. Karpechenko to join the Department of Plant Genetics of Leningrad University, where he served as a professor until 1941.

As the Soviet Union’s leading plant cytogeneticist, Levitskii came into increasing conflict with T. D. Lysenko and his philosophical ally I. I. Prezent, who also taught at Leningrad University. Beginning in 1935 Prezent attacked Levitskii’s conception of the karyotype, the chromosome, and the gene as “metaphysical,” claiming that they played no special hereditary role and were subject to constant alteration by a plant’s normal metabolic processes. At the VASKhNIL session of December 1936, Levitskii suggested that Prezent’s view was inconsistent with Darwinism and declared that thanks to the recent discovery of the giant salivary gland chromosomes in Drosophila, genes could actually be seen under the microscope.

In the spring of 1937 the university newspaper Leningradskii Universitet published articles attacking Levitskii and questioning his loyalty, but his position at the university apparently remained secure. He was arrested once again, but was released a day later. At the VIR, however, his situation gradually deteriorated. Lysenko became president of VASKhNIL in 1938 and used that position to harass Vavilov and his protégés, refusing to allow Levitskii’s work to be displayed at agricultural and academy exhibitions. Supporters of Lysenko were appointed to the VIR staff, including an officer of the secret police (NKVD) without scientific qualifications who was made Vavilov’s assistant director.

In August 1940 Vavilov was arrested by NKVD agents while on a collecting trip in the western Ukraine. During the preparation of the case against him, several of his closest colleagues were also seized. On 28 June 1941 Levitskii was arrested and was not heard from again. At the end of World War II, all members of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences were given honorary awards in connection with its 220th anniversary, and the 14 June 1945 issue of Izvestiia announced that Levitskii had won the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. Taking this to mean that he was still alive and exonerated. Levitskii’s wife turned to the authorities for information. As a result of this inquiry Levitskii’s wife and daughter were arrested; his wife died shortly thereafter; his daughter, N. G. Levitskaia, survived. Apparently Levitskii’s award had been the result of a bureaucratic mistake.

Shortly after release, Levitskaia petitioned the office of the chief prosecutor on 6 January 1956 to reconsider her father’s case. On 14 September she was informed that on 17 December 1955–even before her petition–all charges against her father relating to his 1941 arrest had been dropped for lack of evidence. Four months later she received a similar notice concerning his 1933 arrest. Thus Levitskii was formally rehabilitated in the mid 1950’s.

In the mid 1960’s his works began to be republished, but for many years the date and circumstances of his death remained uncertain. As recently as 1974, an official academy source indicated that he died “no earlier than July 1945.” Only in mid 1988 were the details of his various arrests published in the Soviet Union. According to this account, written by A. A. Prokof’eva-Bel’ govskaia in the 1970’s. Levitskii was arrested 28 June 1941 on charges of counterrevolutionary “wrecking” and was evacuated to a prison in Zlatousk in early July, where he died on 20 May 1942. The cause of his death and the place of his burial remain unknown.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Many of his publications have been reissued in G. A. Levitskii, Tsitologiia rastenii: Izbrannye trudy (Plant cytology: selected works; Moscow, 1976), and Tsitogenetiki rastenii: Izbrannye trudy (Plant cytogenetics: selected works; Moscow, 1978). Two of his papers appear in the anthology Klassiki sovetskoi genetiki (Classics of Soviet genetics; Leningrad, 1968), 171–244.

Transliterating his name as “Lewitsky,” he published a number of works in German, including “Über die Chondriosomen in pflanzlichen Zellen,” in Berichte der Deutschen botanischen Gesellschaft, 28 (1910), 528–546; “Vergleischende Untersuchung über die Chondriosomen in lebenden und fixierten Pflanzenzellen,” ibid., 29 (1911), 697–703; “Über die Chondriosomen bei den Myxomyzeten,” in Zeitschrift für Botanik, 16, no. 2 (1942), 65–80; and “Zur Frage der karyotypischen Evolution der Gattung Muscari Mill.,” in Planta, 9, no. 4 (1930), 760–775, written with E. Tron.

Levitskii’s two texts are Elementary biometriki: Obschedostupnoe posobie dlia naturalistov i agronomov, Chast’ I, Statisticheskii analiz iavlenii izmenchivosti (Elements of biometrics: a general handbook for naturalists and agronomists, Part 1, The statistical analysis of variation phenomena; Kiev, 1922); and Material’nye osnovy nasledstvennosti (The material basis of heredity; Kiev, 1924).

After 1925 most of his major works were published in the VIR periodical, Trudy po prikladnoi botanike, genetike i selektsii. See “Kario- i genotipicheskie izmeneniia v protsesse evoliutsii” (Karyotypic and genotypic changes in the evolutionary process), 15, no. 5 (1925), 3–28; and “Kariologischeskii method v sistematike i filogenetike roda Festuca (podrod Eufestuca)” (The karyological method in the systematic and phylogenetic of the genus Festuca [subgenus Eufestuca]), 17, no. 3 (1927), 1–36; written with N. Kuz’mina. In Trudy, 27, no. 1 (1931), see “Obzor rabot tsitologischeskoi laboratorii Vsesoiuznogo institute rastenievoedstva” (Survey of the work of the Cytological Laboratory of the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding), 9–17; “Morfologiia khromosom; istoriia, metodika, fakty, teoriia.” (The morphology of chromosomes; History, methodology, facts, theory), 19–174; “Morfologiia khromosom i poniatie ’Kariotipa’ v sistematike” (The morphology of chromosomes and the concept of “karyotype” in systematics), 187–240; “Tsitologiia pshenichno-rzhanykh amfidiploidov” (The cytology of wheat-rye amphidiploids), 241–264, written with G. Benetskaia; and “Preobrazovaniia khromosom pod vliianiem rentgenovykh luchei” (Transformations of chromosomes under the influence of Roentgen rays), 264–303, written with A. Araratian.

See his chapter “Ocherk geneticheskoi tsitologii” (Essay on genetic cytology) in Posobie po selektsii (Handbook on selection; Moscow, 1936), 1, 81–174. See also his notes in Doklady Akademii nauk SSSR. “O zakonomernostiiakh i preobrazovaniiakh khromosom, vyzyvaemykh X-luchami” (On regularities and transformations of chromosomes caused by X rays), 4, no, 1–2 (1934), 84–87, written with M. A. Sizova; “Novye dannye po zakonomernostiiam v preobrazovaniiakh khromosom, vyzyvaemykh X-luchami u Crepis capillaries Wallr.” (New data on regularities in chromosome transformations caused by X rays in Crepis capillaris Wallr.). 4 (9), no. 1–2 (70– 71) (1935), 67–70, written with M. A. Sizova; “O genotipicheskoi obuslovlennosti strukturnykh preobrazovanii khromosom” (On genotypic conditioning of structural transformations of chromosomes), 15, no, 9 (1937), 551– 554; and “Sravnitel’naia morfologiia khromosom pshenits” (Comparative morphology of wheat chromosomes), 25, no. 2 (1939), 144–147, written with M. A. Sizova and V. A. Poddubnaia-Arnol’di.

See his comments in Spornye voprosy genetiki i selektsii (Issues in genetics and selection), O. M. Targul’ian, ed. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1937), 153–155. Finally, Levitskii published some important popular articles, notably “Tsitologicheskii metod v selektsii” (The cytological method in selection), in Sotsialisticheskoe rastenievodstvo, 1933, no. 5–6, 30–47; and “Tsitologicheskie osnovy evoliutsii” (The cytological basis of evolution), in Priroda, 1939, no. 5, 33–44.

II. Secondary Literature. The most complete biography is P. K. Shkvarnikov and N. I. Savchenko, “Grigorii Andreevich Levitskii,” in Biulleten’ Vsesoiuznogo instituta rastenievodstva, no. 83 (1978), 9–15. The most complete bibliography is N. G. Levitskaia, “Bibliografiia rabot G. A. Levistkogo” (Bibliography of the works of G. A. Levitskii), ibid., 15–21. On Levitskii’s cytological work see A. A. Prokof’eva-Bel’govskaia, “Grigorii Andreevich Levitskill,” in Vydaiushchiesia sovetskie genetiki (Outstanding Soviet geneticists; Moscow, 1980), 24–36.

See also the following studies by Z. M. Rubstsova: “Razvite evoliutsionnoi tsitognetiki rastenii G. A. Levitskim i ego shkoloi” (The development of the evolutionary cytogenetics of plants by G. A. Levitskii and his school), in Istoriia i teoriia evoliutsionnogo ucheniia (Evolutionary theory and its history; Leningrad, 1973), 101–112; and Razvitie evoliutsionnoi tsitogenetiki rastenii V SSSR (1920–1940-e gody) (The development of the evolutionary cytogenetics of plants in the USSR [1920’s–1940’s]; Leningrad, 1975).

On the date of Levitskii’s death, see also Akademiia nauk SSSR: personal’nyi sostav (Personnel of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences; Moscow, 1974), II, 171; Biologi: Biograficheskii spravochnik (Biologists: biographical handbook; Kiev, 1984), 363; and “Stranitsy istorii sovetskoi genetiki v literature poslednikh let” (Pages of the history of Soviet genetics from the literature of recent years), in Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 1988, no. 2, 109–110.

Mark B. Adams