Miklouho-Maclay is a surname familiar to every graduate of a Soviet or Russian school. She is associated with the Papuans, but if you ask what made the Russian traveler so significant and famous, many will find it difficult to answer. At the same time, his personality fascinates with its contradictoriness.
Descendant of the Cossacks and a bit of an impostor
The real surname of Nikolai Nikolaevich was Miklukh - an old Zaporozhye surname. Miklukh's Cossacks actively fought against the Poles and Turks. The nobility is believed to have been granted to one of the ancestors of the famous traveler by Potemkin himself for his bravery in battle. True, no amendments to the financial situation were attached to the nobility, so Mikloukh had to achieve everything with his mind. So, for example, the father of Nikolai Nikolaevich, the grandson of the first nobleman from Miklukh, due to intelligence and diligence, managed to study at the university with brilliant testimony - and became a railway engineer (railways were a new, promising direction).
A legend has formed about the prefix “Maclay” to the surname of the traveler by our time: allegedly while still at war with the Poles, Miklouhi took prisoner of the Scotdand knight. He entered the Primakov family, at the same time converting to Orthodoxy, and his surname Miklouhi was added to their own.
In fact, it is not known that anyone before Nikolai Nikolaevich used this surname. Unlike Mikloukh, Maclay was not mentioned in any papers. Most likely, this is just a pseudonym - a tribute to the romantic moods and multiculturalist views of Nikolai Nikolaevich.
If on the paternal side the traveler was Ukrainian, and by the place of birth (both his own and his father's) he was an undoubted Russian, then for understanding his biography it is also important that his mother was from Russian Germans - her name was Ekaterina Becker. The Russian Germans presented Russia with many travelers and scientists; it is likely that a certain nourishing culture has developed among them. Flowed into the mother and Polish blood. All this explosive mixture is interesting in terms of not so much genetics as the mixing and interaction of elements of different cultures in one family.
Nikolai Miklukho at fifteen.
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It is known that Nikolai Nikolayevich deeply sympathized with the Polish uprising and strove to study Polish culture - but he hardly really felt himself to be Poles, as it is sometimes interpreted. However, he himself considered the Polish part of his cultural identity significant, on a par with the Russian and German ones (alas, he did not mention the Ukrainian part; however, the word “Russian” at that time was more related to statehood than to ethnicity).
Nikolai Nikolayevich studied in Germany and there, it seems, made a little Khlestakov: he made it clear that he was from a princely family. Later, in Great Britain and Australia, the traveler also presented himself as a baron - which, of course, he was not. Probably, his passion to find himself among prominent people, in the elite, influenced his ambition and aspirations to invest as much as possible in science.
A childhood full of hardships; youth full of hope
The childhood of Nikolai Nikolaevich in St. Petersburg could hardly be called well-fed. Father returned from the Crimean War with a far-reaching form of tuberculosis and soon died; he did not earn his pension. Mother fed the children, tracing maps. At home, everything was in the continents and oceans, which could only be touched with trepidation: not to spoil. Looking at the islands and bays, little Kolya Miklukha fell asleep.
And yet, Ekaterina Semyonovna tried to ensure that the children received not a minimum - at least in education. In addition to the most necessary subjects, they were taught French, which was already emerging from the compulsory language, together with the more relevant German, as well as drawing - and Nikolai discovered some abilities in this art.
At first, they tried to give Kolya, together with his brother Sergei, in Annenschul, where lessons were taught in German - but the fee turned out to be too high, and as a result, the boys began to be attached to the state gymnasium. To do this, the mother tried to get a certificate about Miklukh from Chernigov - but she received a notification that such a surname was not listed in the register of local nobles. Then she submitted a petition to include Mikloukh in the book of the nobility of the Petersburg province - and with difficulty, for the sake of her husband's merits in the war, he was satisfied.
Nikolai Miklukho as a student.
Kolya studied badly, skipped a lot. He was more interested in participating in student unrest and protests; even once he was arrested, but released as a young man - they believed that just out of curiosity he was standing next to him. As a result, Nikolai left the gymnasium and instead went to college as a volunteer; it means - attended lectures, but was not listed as a student. But finally he began to show zeal, which was no longer expected of him. Nicholas was jokingly interested in natural sciences. Ultimately, he entered one of the best universities in this regard - Heidelberg.
Later he went to study medicine at another German university in Jena. During the practice, a romance broke out between him and the dying patient. As a result, she bequeathed her skull to “Prince Maclay” - he made a lamp out of it, which he took on all his travels. To be loved, so to speak. illuminated his path.
A Journey for Equality
Going to study the Pacific peoples, Miklouho-Maclay set an unusual goal for himself. At that time, the theory of evolution was just beginning to spread, and people were occupied with the question of "a transitional link between ape and a man." For this transitional link, without thinking twice, many appointed black inhabitants of the planet, for example, the Papuans. Nikolai Nikolaevich believed that they were just one of the many variations of modern man, and wanted to study them and prove his opinion.
At that time, the family cut off communication with Nikolai, dissatisfied with his more than strange behavior and impractical projects. Even when his sister Olga died, no one considered it necessary to tell the “lousy” son about it. Later, of course, when Nikolai Nikolayevich returned as a renowned traveler, the pride of Russian geographers and ethnographers, family relations improved again.
Miklouho-Maclay in Queensland.
Before his famous life among the Papuans, Miklouho-Maclay made many single, without funds, at his own peril and risk, travels, and also as part of someone else's expedition studied some already known biological species and discovered a new species of fish. That is, the views that prompted him to study the Papuses can no longer be called student idealism; people from both the good and the bad side, he had known for a long time. But his observations and reports helped him attract the attention of the Russian Geographical Society and raise money for a real expedition.
As a result, Miklouho-Maclay lived among the Papuans for several years, surprising them and amazed at them. He was given the nickname "Moon Man", and when he left for his homeland, his image became more and more mythical. Legends began to form around his “exploits” - in them, for example, he stopped wars and opened new technologies to the Papuans. With the popularity of new ideas Miklouho-Maclay received new roles in myths. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was said that he called for the desire for independence, and already in the twenty-first century they said that secret magical knowledge was once passed on to him, a white man, and nothing bad happened from this - which means that now you can tell those same things to white scientists.
As a result of his life among the Papuans, Nikolai Nikolaevich not only found out and proved as a biologist that blacks are obvious representatives of a biological species, but also wrote one of the first extensive ethnographic works of his time. Many ethnographers and anthropologists in our time in Russia celebrate his birthday with reverence.
Traveler's women
It is believed that in order to gain confidence in the Papuans, Nikolai Nikolaevich temporarily took a local woman as his wife. To this woman, he later left his house with all the acquired property. Before leaving, he convinced the locals … to hide their families when ships with Europeans approached. The traveler was seriously afraid of slave traders and simply ill-treatment of the locals by Europeans.
His permanent, married wife was a white Australian, a young widow, Margaret Clark, the daughter of the Prime Minister. They had two sons, whom the Russians know by the names Alexander and Vladimir, and the Australians - Niels and Allen.
Miklouho-Maclay's wife and children.
In fact, Miklouho-Maclay's field wives are the dark side of his life. He constantly cohabited with servants hired in different countries, very often - without being embarrassed by their age. So, about the eleven-year-old servant-Micronesian, he wrote that she could be a wife no earlier than in … a year. In Chile, he slept with a fourteen-year-old conductor.
The traveler rejected the slave trade and spoke with indignation about those Europeans who bought themselves slaves for pleasure, but that was where his morality towards women ended. Miklouho-Maclay clearly saw that teenage girls differ in behavior and appearance from women, but he consoled his conscience with phrases like the fact that girls in the south mature quickly.
