Nikitin, V.N.: On the Shores of Lake Victoria

Title

Na beregakh Viktorii Niiantsa, “Priroda”, 1914, 5, clmns. 585-608

On the Shores of Lake Victoria

Keywords

Summary

The piece is an account of Nikitin’s expedition to German and British East Africa. The author recollects the main stops along the journey, which began in Odessa (i.e. Alexandria, Port Said, Suez, Mombasa, Nairobi, Port Florence [Kisumu], Lake Victoria and its surroundings, Entebbe, Bukoba [where he spent more than a month and met a Russian friend, Puzanov, who went there for a safari]). The author describes the landscape, the cities, the various peoples and their customs with an ethnographic eye and with the help of 13 photographs. He often praises the British efforts to “improve” and “modernise” the colony. His intellectual distance from this foreign and possibly dangerous land is also stressed.

Bio

Born in Moscow, Vasilii Nikitin graduated there in 1911. The following year he organised an expedition to German and British East Africa, in order to study the local flora and fauna. As a result, a biological collection, later acquired by the State Darwin Museum in Moscow (1919-1920), was established. He was appointed director of the biological station of the Academy of Sciences in Sevastopol from 1920 to 1931, when he moved to Batumi and then to Tbilisi (1937) to work as a university professor. After the war, he moved back to Moscow, where he died having been granted the Order of Lenin. On his African experience he also published an essay in the journal “Okhotnichnii vestnik” (Through the East African Savannas, 1913, 18-23).

Sources

Professor V.N. Nikitin. K sorokaletiiu ego nauchnoi i pedagogicheskoi deiatel’nosti, “Trudy instituta okeanologii AN SSSR”, 1953, 7;

S. Mileikovsky, In memoriam of Professor Vasilii (Basil) Nikitich Nikitin, “Marine Biology”, 1973, 18, p. 87-88.

A.F.

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