Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
GENEV
. Mikhalkov also studied directing at VGIK,
the state film school in Moscow, under the super-
vision of the prominent filmmaker and teacher
Mikhail Romm. By the time of his first directed
feature,
At Home Among Strangers
(1974), Mikhal-
kov had already established himself as a leading
Soviet actor, with over 20 film appearances. As a
director he first gained international recognition
with his second feature,
A Slave of Love
(1976), in
which the crew of a silent film attempts to com-
plete a movie at the time of the 1917 Russian
Revolution. His next film,
An Unfinished Piece for
Piano Player
(1977), won the first prize at the San
Sebastian Film Festival, while his adaptation of
Ivan
GONCHAROV
's classic novel
Oblomov
(1980)
confirmed his status as a major presence in the
Soviet and international world of film. Further
acclaim came in 1987 with
Dark Eyes,
another lit-
erary adaptation, this time of several of Anton
CHEKHOV
's short stories. The film's leading actor,
Marcello Mastroianni, won the Best Actor award
at that year's Cannes Film Festival as well as an
Academy Award nomination. In 1992,
Close to
Eden,
or
Urga,
a portrait of Mongols in the remote
borderlands between Russia and China, earned
Mikhalkov an Academy Award nomination for
Best Foreign Language Film. His next film, the
highly praised
Burnt by the Sun
(1994), tackled the
complex issues of the 1930s through the portrait
of a family led by a retired military hero, played
by Mikhalkov himself, and won the Academy
Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Most
recently, Mikhalkov acted and directed in
The Bar-
ber of Siberia,
a historical drama set at the turn of
the 20th century involving an American woman
and a Russian military cadet banished to Siberia.
1857, and his mother had to raise five children
alone. While still a student, Miklukho-Maklai
read the revolutionary political literature of the
day, especially the works of Aleksandr
HERZEN
and Nikolai
CHERNYSHEVSKY
. Arrested at age 15,
he spent three days in jail for his role in a stu-
dent demonstration. In 1863 he entered St.
Petersburg University but was expelled the fol-
lowing year for political activism and deprived of
the right to study at any other Russian univer-
sity. He moved to Germany and graduated in
1868 from the University of Jena, where, under
the influence of Charles Darwin's ideas, he
became interested in the impact of environment
on the mutability of organic forms and decided
to study marine fauna. After graduation, Mik-
lukho-Maklai traveled briefly along the coast of
the Red Sea, gathering zoological data while
observing the living conditions of the local
inhabitants before returning to St. Petersburg in
the summer of 1869 and joining the staff of the
Zoological Museum of the Russian
ACADEMY OF
SCIENCES
. With a growing interest in the zoology
of the Pacific Ocean, in September 1869 he sub-
mitted a proposal to the Russian Geographical
Society for a long-term expedition to the Pacific
region. The proposal was accepted.
Following the advice of other scholars, Mik-
lukho-Maklai revised his proposal to study the
almost unknown island of New Guinea, for
which he set sail in November 1870 and arrived
in September 1871. Except for a brief interlude
in 1882 when he visited Russia, for the next 16
years Miklukho-Maclay criss-crossed the region
between New Guinea, Dutch Indonesia, Aus-
tralia and the Malay Peninsula, engaging in eth-
nological research at a time when Great Britain
and Germany were asserting their interests in
the area and Australian colonists were laying
claim to eastern New Guinea. Miklukho-Maklai
emerged as a forceful defendant of the interests
of the region's indigenous population, especially
in New Guinea. In 1884 he married Joan
Robertson, the widowed daughter of a former
prime minister of the Australian colony of New
South Wales. Three years later, gravely ill from
Miklukho-Maklai, Nikolai Nikolaevich
(1846-1888)
ethnographer
An ethnographer who became internationally
recognized for his first-hand research in New
Guinea, Australia, and Southeast Asia, Mik-
lukho-Maklai was born into a railway engineer's
family in Novgorod province. His father died in
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