Ilya Ivanov

Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov is born in Shchigry, Kursk Governorate.

Élie Metchnikoff brings Russian biology into the orbit of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, the network that will later grant Ivanov access to its African chimpanzee station.

Ivanov graduates from Kharkiv University and gravitates toward the physiology of reproduction.

Ivanov opens Russia's first equine artificial-insemination centre, at Dolgoye in Oryol Governorate, showing one stallion can fertilize hundreds of mares. Some accounts call it the first anywhere.

Ivanov runs a zootechnical station at the Askania-Nova reserve from 1909 to 1917 and works there on acclimatizing the Przewalski horse and the wisent and on crossing wisent with buffalo.

At the Eighth International Congress of Zoology in Graz, a paper by Ivanov argues that crossing a human with an ape could be settled in a laboratory. He did not attend; on 18 August 1910 a Dr. W. Redikorzeff of Kharkov read it out for him.

Dispossessed by the revolution, Falz-Fein dies abroad, but his reserve, and Ivanov's hybrid work there, outlives him.

The Pasteur Institute lays the foundation stone in September 1923 for a chimpanzee station at Pastoria near Kindia in French Guinea; it is inaugurated in July 1924 and is the facility Ivanov will use for his human-ape crosses.

Roughly ten thousand dollars is allocated to the Academy of Sciences for Ivanov's human-ape hybridization expedition to Africa. Gorbunov, business manager of the Sovnarkom, is usually credited with arranging it; no source used here documents his part.

Ivanov reaches the Pasteur chimpanzee station at Kindia, finds no mature chimps, and moves to the botanical gardens at Conakry with his son Ilya Jr.

At Conakry, Ivanov inseminates female chimpanzees with human sperm on 28 February 1927 and again on 25 June. None conceives; the experiment fails. How many animals were used is not documented in any source in this archive.

Ivanov's proposal to inseminate African women with ape sperm without their consent is refused by the colonial governor; the Academy begins to disown him.

A commission of the Society of Materialist Biologists takes up Ivanov's reverse hybridization experiment at Sukhumi. The figure of at least five volunteer women appears only in later popular accounts, not in any source in this archive.

Ivanov is arrested and charged with organizing a counter-revolutionary conspiracy among agricultural specialists, and sentenced to five years' exile.

In exile in Alma-Ata, Ivanov dies of a stroke, aged 61. His notebooks, and his idea of a dissolvable boundary between species, outlive him.

Eight decades late, Shostakovich's unfinished 1932 satire about a human-ape hybrid, inspired by Ivanov's programme, finally premieres in Los Angeles.