Koropchevskii, D.A.: D. Livingstone: Life, Travels and Geographical Discoveries

Title

D. Livingston, ego zhizn’, puteshestviia i geograficheskie otkrytiia, Sankt-Peterburg 1891

D. Livingstone: Life, Travels and Geographical Discoveries

Keywords

Summary

The book was part of the series The Lives of Remarkable People founded by Florentii Pavlenkov. It is divided into eleven chapters, and it covers the entire life of Livingstone, from his childhood to his death, with a particular emphasis on his travels through Africa. Written in a simple and accessible language, the volume was meant to popularise Livingstone’s figure to the public. It is based on the memoirs and travel notes by Livingstone, as well as on previous biographies by William Garden Blaikie and Gustav Plieninger.

Bio

Dmitrii Koropchevskii was a Russian author, translator, editor and ethnographer. Born in Moscow into a noble family, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University in 1863, becoming interested in anthropology and ethnography thanks to professor Grigorii Shchurovskii. It was with the purpose of popularising this knowledge that he became the editor of the journals “Znanie”, “Slovo”, and “Novoe obozrenie”. He published articles, novels and short stories also with the pseudonym “G. Taranskii”, and translated several Western authors like E. Tylor, G. de Maupassant, J. Lubbock, F. Ratzel, whose ideas strongly influenced him. From 1899 he started to teach ethnography and anthropogeography at various institutions, including Saint Petersburg University. A member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, he served as a chairman of the Russian Anthropological Society from 1899 to 1902.

Sources

D. Klements, Dmitrii Andreevich Koropchevskii (nekrolog), “Ezhegodnik Russkogo antropologicheskogo obshchestva”, 1905, 1, p. 256-258;

E. Rogalina, “Koropchevskii, Karapchevskii Dmitrii Andreevich”, in Russkie pisateli. 1800-1917, t. 3, Moskva 1994, p. 85-86.

A.F.