Bashmakov, A.A.: Nubia and Egypt

Title

Nubiia i Egipet, “Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik”, 1910, N° 256, 276, 284

Nubia and Egypt

Keywords

Summary

At the beginning of the essay, Bashmakov explains that the past spring he travelled to the Sennar region and the White Nile in order to collect materials on the history and ethnography of North-Eastern and Central Africa. On his way back, he crossed the Nubian desert, an experience which made a great impression on him, transporting him from the colonial present to ancient times. The following treaty combines together specific episodes occurred to him with detailed historical notes about the region.

Bio

Aleksandr Bashmakov was a writer, ethnographer and jurist, a member of the Pan-Slavist movement. Born in Odessa into a Swiss family, he obtained Russian citizenship only in 1877 following a petition of the governor of Kherson, A.D. Bashmakov, who had adopted Aleksandr and his siblings after the death of their parents. He studied in Geneva and Odessa, graduating from the faculty of Law. He served in Bulgaria for a few years, prior to moving back to Odessa where he continued to pursue a legal career, becoming the legal advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1898). He travelled quite extensively through Europe, the Balkans, Altai, writing essays with an ethnographic orientation. He recorded a trip he made to Egypt and Sudan in the periodicals “Rossiia” and “Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik” (1910). He published many of his works, especially those in journals and newspapers, under the pseudonym “Veshchii Oleg” (Oleg the Wise). After the 1917 Revolution he left Russia for Turkey, Serbia and finally France, where he worked as a lecturer at the Higher School of Anthropology in Paris. During the emigration years he published books and articles in French.

Sources

“Bashmakov Aleksandr Aleksandrovich”, in Rossiiskoe zarubezh’e vo Frantsii (1919-2000). Biograficheskii slovar’, t. 1, ed. by L. Mnukhina, M. Avril’, Moskva 2008, p. 127;

M. Beklemisheva, A.A. Bashmakov (1858-1943): obshchestvenno-politicheskie vzgliady i deiatel’nost’ v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, PhD dissertation, Moskva 2021.

A.F.