The Forgotten Soviet Geographer and Famous Writer Nikolai Nikolaevich Mikhailov (1905–1982). Experience of Internet Search and Bio-bibliographic Analysis

Abstract

The article outlines a career path of a famous writer, novelist and writer-geographer, Nikolai Nikolayevich Mikhailov. It reveals that he was be a professional geographer, which previously hasn’t been recognized, who taught Economic Geography at Moscow universities, headed the Department of Economic Geography at the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers and received the degree of Candidate of Geographical Sciences for a book on the Far East published in 1940. The role of M. Gorky and his journal “Our Achievements” in the development of N. N. Mikhailov as a writer-geographer is demonstrated. The study of the memoirs of N. N. Mikhailov and the leading Soviet economic geographer N. N. Baranskii allowed to restore the episodes of the former’s activities in Alma-Ata during the evacuation, including the unsuccessful defense of his doctoral thesis in 1948. The role of the leading Soviet physical geographer, Director of the Institute of Geography, A. A. Grigoriev, in the defense of two dissertations by N. N. Mikhailov is established as well. His English-language books published abroad, unknown to Russian specialists in geography and history, are analyzed and introduced into scholarship. For the first time, the preface by the famous geographer and geopolitician Halford Mackinder, written for the first edition of the book by N. N. Mikhailov “Soviet Geography” (1935), is translated into Russian. That publication paved the way all the further English-language books of the author, which were practically the only sources of information for Western readers in the field of the grandiose changes on the geographical map of the country of the Soviets. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the death of this remarkable writer and geographer, the articles puts forward proposals to perpetuate his name.