Gorodetskii, V.V.: In the African Jungle. A Hunter’s Diary

Title

V dzhungliakh Afriki. Dnevnik okhotnika, Kiev 1914

In the African Jungle. A Hunter’s Diary

Keywords

Summary

The book recounts Gorodetskii’s journey to British East Africa, which lasted approximately three and a half months from late 1911 to late February 1912. In the preface, the author discusses the influence of renowned Western colonial writers such as Jules Verne and Thomas Mayne Reid, whose works he enjoyed as a child. For him, Africa remains “an extremely rich country, untouched by culture” and “a fairy-tale country”. Although Gorodetskii devotes most of the chapters to the safari in which he took part, describing the various animals encountered and killed in detail, he also makes precise observations about the local people and their customs. The book is accompanied by 114 photographs and drawings of both animals and people, as well as two maps showing the safari’s route.

Bio

Born in Podolia, Gorodetskii studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and later moved to Kiev (1890), where he lived and worked as a renowned architect for thirty years. A passionate traveller and hunter, he took part in many hunting expeditions both in Russia (Siberia, the Caucasus) and abroad (Tibet, Mongolia, Africa). It was for this reason that he went to British East Africa in 1911-1912, and later recollected his experience in a memoir published in 1914. In 1920 he moved to Poland, where he continued to work until his death (occurred in Tehran, where he was temporarily stationed). He is considered one of the main architects of the city of Kyiv, being responsible, among other things, for the so-called House of Chimaeras. From his travels he brought back not only a significant collection of photographs, but also trophies.

Sources

M. Zabrodskaia, Russkie puteshestvenniki po Afrike, Moskva 1955;

D. Sosnowska, Beyond the Limits – eccentric H., in Architect and their Societies. Cultural Study on the Habsburg-Slavic Area (1861-1938), ed. by A. Kobylińska, M. Falski, Warszawa 2021, p. 211-236.

A.F.

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