Osip Senkovsky
Osip Ivanovich Senkovsky, born Józef-Julian Sękowski, was a Polish-Russian orientalist, journalist and entertainer.
Life
Senkovsky was born on his mother's estate in, located some 30 miles away from Vilnius. His father was Jan Sękowski; his mother came from the Bujko family, of Belarusian-German roots, but with a Polish national identity.He attended the piarist college in Minsk, and later Vilnius University. During his study there he became fascinated with all things oriental. In the years 1817–1822 he was closely associated with the Society of Scoundrels and contributed articles to their periodical „Wiadomości Brukowe”.
Having mastered the Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew languages, he went onto a journey to Turkey, Liban, Egypt, Nubia and Abisina, leaving Vilnius on 1 September 1819. The journey was financed from private savings, as well as by the Warsaw [Society of Friends of Learning|Royal Society of Friends of] Science in Warsaw, the Polish press, and scholarly institutions in Vilnius. In 1821 he returned to the Russian capital, where he got the chair in oriental languages at the University of Saint Petersburg.
As a professor at the principal Russian university, he continued his cooperation with main Polish scholarly institutions, and the Polish press in St Petersburg. He also maintained contacts with the Philomaths residing in St Petersburg, including Ignacy Daniłowicz, Józef Jeżowski, Franciszek Malewski, and others. He likewise met with Adam Mickiewicz during the latter’s stays in St Petersburg in the years 1824–1825 and 1827–1828.
In the 1820s, Senkovsky started publishing in the popular periodicals of Kondraty Ryleyev and Faddei Bulgarin. He is best remembered for having edited the first Russian "thick journal," Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya, whose lively and humorous style attracted to literary journals even those people who had never held a book in their hands.
Senkovsky encouraged new writers. He had a strong influence on Yelena Hahn and on Elizaveta Akhmatova. In the latter case he not only developed a writer but she regarded him as a parent, Akhmatova would eventually publish her own magazines and in time her own memoir of Senkowsky.
A very prolific writer, Senkovsky contributed articles on a wide range of topics, from mathematics to medicine. Under the pen-name of Baron Brambeus he published a series of satirical fantastic voyages, including one to the center of the Earth and another to an antediluvian Egyptian civilization flourishing on the now-frozen Siberian plain.
As a literary critic he had few principles, his motto being "easy reading and less thought". One day he would pronounce his friend Nestor Kukolnik to be Gogol's superior, only to place Gogol higher than Homer the very next day. He dismissed The Tale of Igor's Campaign as a clumsy fake, derogated Alexander Pushkin as a second-hand imitator, and declared the Tale of Bygone Years to be written in Polish.
During his last years, Senkovsky turned from literature to music. He claimed to have invented a five-stringed violin and a new type of oven. He also published pioneering studies of Chinese, Mongolian, and Tibetan languages.