Kholodkovskii, Nikolai

Kholodkovskii, Nikolai Aleksandrovich 

Born Feb. 19 (Mar. 3), 1858, in Irkutsk; died Apr. 2, 1921, in Petrograd. Russian zoologist and translator of poetry. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1909).

Kholodkovskii graduated from the Academy of Medicine and Surgery in 1880. He became a private docent at the Forestry Institute in St. Petersburg in 1885 and a professor in 1902. In 1892 he became a professor at the Military Medical Academy. Kholodkovskii worked in various fields of zoology, mainly entomology and parasitology. He was the author of handbooks of general zoology and entomology. His studies on the complex life cycles of the insect family Adelgidae (pests of conifers) are of special interest. Kholodkovskii’s popular-science books on the theory of evolution and general biology were important in spreading knowledge of Darwinism in Russia. Kholodkovskii firmly opposed idealism in the natural sciences.

Kholodkovskii’s most important contribution to literature was his translation of Goethe’s Faust, for which he was awarded the A. S. Pushkin Prize by the Academy of Sciences in 1917. He also translated E. Darwin’s narrative poem The Temple of Nature and a number of works by Byron, Schiller, Shakespeare, Milton, and Longfellow.

In 1947 the Academy of Sciences of the USSR established the N. A. Kholodkovskii Prize for Entomology.

WORKS

Atlas chelovecheskikh glist, fascs. 1–3. St. Petersburg, 1898–99.
Ptitsy Evropy. St. Petersburg, 1901. (With A. A. Silant’ev.)
Uchebnik zoologii, 7th ed. Leningrad-Moscow, 1933.
Biologkheskie ocherki: Sb. izbr. statei. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923.
Kurs entomologii teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi, 4th ed., vols. 1–3. Moscow-Leningrad, 1927–31.

REFERENCES

Rimskii-Korsakov, M. “N. A. Kholodkovskii.” Estestvoznanie v shkole, 1921, nos. 3–5.
Pavlovskii, E. N. “Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kholodkovskii, kak uchenyi i poet.” Chelovek I priroda, 1923, no. 1, pp. 11–38.
Pavlovskii, E. N. Poeziia, nauka i uchenye. Moscow-Leningrad, 1958.