Osip Senkovsky

Who was Osip Senkovsky?

Osip Ivanovich Senkovsky, born Józef Julian Sękowski, was a Polish-Russian orientalist, journalist, and entertainer.

Senkovsky was born into an old family of Polish szlachta. During his study in the University of Vilno he became fascinated with all things oriental. Having mastered the Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew languages, he was assigned to the Russian mission in Constantinople, which occupation gave him ample opportunities to travel in Syria, Nubia, and Egypt. In 1821 he returned to the Russian capital, where he got the chair in oriental languages at the University of St Petersburg.

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," Library for Reading, whose lively and humorous style attracted to literary journals even those people who had never held a book in their hands.

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 fantastic voyages, including one to the center of the Earth and another to an antediluvian Egyptian civilization flourishing on the now-frozen Siberian plain.