Bessel’ (Rubakina) L.A.: How I Travelled Through Abyssinia

Title

Kak ia puteshestvoval po Abissinii, Moskva 1912

How I Travelled Through Abyssinia

Keywords

Summary

The book is a fictional travel diary by a Frenchman named Verdier, employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. His otherwise boring life is enlivened when he is assigned – by virtue of the fact that he knows Arabic – to take a letter to the French consul in Massawa. Once there, he soon departs to explore Ethiopia, a country that fascinates him. Episodes that occurred during his journey are interspersed with non-fiction passages devoted to the geography, nature and population of Ethiopia. The book is illustrated with pictures taken from Voyage au Choa by Henry Audon and From North Pole to Equator by Alfred Edmund Brehm.

Bio

Liudmila Bessel’ was a Russian writer, primarily known as the second wife of Nikolai Rubakin. Of German descent, she was the great-granddaughter of mathematician and astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel. She married Nikolai Kolomiitsev, a professor of meteorology, with whom she lived in Crimea. It was there that she met Rubakin, a friend of Kolomiitsev, becoming his second wife soon after. She was an excellent pianist and a Tolstoyan. She worked alongside Rubakin many years to divulge knowledge to the masses, writing various books (usually published under her maiden name Bessel’), and translating from French and German. She died in Switzerland, a few months after her husband.

Sources

A. Rubakin, Rubakin: lotsman knizhnogo moria, Moskva 1979, p. 57-59.

A.F.