Browse Items (73 total)

Beginning of Russian Bibliographical Statistics... The Great Soviet Encyclopedia adopts as Russians many of the European admirers of St. P. who spent much of their lives in Russia. H. F. Storch, a German born in Riga and called Andrei Karlovich…

Picture of more than a thousand words... Storch's Picture of Petersburg, 1792, set a standard for European accounts of the city and is still quoted today. Storch says, "One of the most important phenomena of this period [the 18th century] is without…

Dr. Atkins' Nemesis... Forget the killer bees; what about killer honey and beebread? Diabetics both western and eastern have A.I. Prokopovich to blame for making honey more harvestable by his invention in 1814 of beehives with removable frames. In…

Crime and Punishment ... Austria's attitude towards pre-Peterburgian but nevertheless Petrine Russia can be seen in this diary of the journey to Moscow of the Count of Guarient and his secretary to the mission, Johann Georg Korb. While Peter was on a…

The Elephantine Russian Empire... Johann Friedrich Brandt, known as well by his Russian moniker Fedor Fedorovich Brandt, was a native of Saxony, educated in Berlin as zoologist, surgeon, botanist and pharmacologist. He moved to St. P. just short of…

Into the Hinterlands of the Mother of all Hinterlands... Johann Georg Gmelin, born into a famous family of German scientists, came to St. Petersburg at the age of 18 (in 1727) and 6 years later took off with German historian Gerhard Friedrich…

Hunting the White Siberian Taiga... The "Academic Expeditions," so-called, had been organized between 1768 and 1774 by the tsardom and would demonstrate the high standards of the Academy of Sciences. The Empress Catherine II, however, wanted prestige…

How many Russians does it take to change a northern light? Whatever country we hail from, we all know from trying to fathom "foreign" movies that humor is often difficult to translate across cultural boundaries. Russian humor often fares better with…

The Trotskys and Other Awful Diseases; or, Bring Out Your Dead... One advantage of living in a frosty clime is that when the temperatures dip, the vectors for plague disappear: rats die and fleas become inactive. For this reason, in part, Petersburg…

A Raw Youth ... This samovar-table book compiled from material in the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow is chock full of wonderful color as well as black and white plates, facsimiles of party documents, and photographs, with uniformly high-quality…