Miklukho-Maclay N.N., (1846-1888), ethnographer

Categories / Science. Education/Personalia
MIKLUKHO-MACLAY Nikolay Nikolaevich (1846-1888, St. Petersburg), traveller, ethnographer, anthropologist, biologist. Spent his childhood in St. Petersburg, then, from 1863 to 1864, audited courses at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University of St. Petersburg. After being expelled from the university "for his repeated violation of order", he went on to study in Germany, where in 1868 he graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Jena. From 1866 to 1867, together with German zoologist E. Haeckel, he studied marine fauna on the Canary Islands. He achieved renown for his ethnological and anthropological research conducted in Papua New Guinea (1871-72, 1874, 1876-77, 1880, 1881, 1883), the Philippines and Indonesia (1873), the Malay Peninsula (1874-75), and the islands of Melanesia and Micronesia (1876). Miklukho-Maclay made an argument for the unity of all human races and the commonness of cultures pertaining to different nations; he also advocated the rights of aborigines. In 1882, the voyager came to St. Petersburg several times to give public lectures at the Russian Geographic Society. In 1886, he finally settled in St. Petersburg at 53 Galernaya Street being his last address here (memorial plaque installed), where he prepared his travel notes for publication, though the first edition didn't come out until 1923. He was buried at Literatorskie Mostky. N. Miklukho-Maclay's ethnographic collections are kept at the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. From 1933 to 1992, the institution also bore his name.

References: Путилов Б. Н. Н. Н. Миклухо-Маклай: Путешественник, ученый, гуманист. М., 1985.

A. Y. Chistyakov. Haeckel Ernst
Miklukho-Maclay Nikolay Nikolaevich
Galernaya St./Saint Petersburg, city, house 53
Путилов Б. Н. Н. Н. Миклухо-Маклай: Путешественник, ученый, гуманист. М., 1985 Russian Geographical Society
Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
Literatorskie (Literary) Mostki, the museum-necropolis