Nikolay Przhevalsky

Nikolay Przhevalsky had a relationship with Tasya Nuromskaya, whom he met in Smolensk. She died of sunstroke while Przhevalsky was on an expedition.

There was also another woman in his life, a mysterious young lady whose portrait, along with a fragment of poetry, was found in his album. There have also been claims that Przhevalsky was a homosexual who might have had relationships with his young male assistants.

In 1888, he was planning for another expedition with the aim of reaching Lhasa. However, he fell ill with typhus after drinking water from a contaminated river and died on 1 November 1888, at the age of 49.

Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky was born on April 12, 1839, in Kimborovo, Smolensk Governorate, Russian Empire, into a noble polonized Belarusian family.

He received his education at the gymnasium in Smolensk from 1849 to 1855 and later attended the General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg from 1861 to 1863. His graduation thesis was ‘Voeimo-statistkheskoe ohozrenie Priamurskogo kraya’ (“A Military-Statistical Survey of the Amur Region,” 1862).

Upon his graduation, he was commissioned a lieutenant and appointed as a teacher at the Warsaw Military School in 1864, where he taught history and geography. During this time he also gave public lectures on the history of geographical discoveries and published a textbook on general geography (1867).

He had a very deep interest in travelling and petitioned the Russian Geographical Society to send him to Irkutsk, in central Siberia. He aimed to explore the basin of the Ussuri River, a major tributary of the Amur on the Russian-Chinese frontier.

This would be his first major expedition and he prepared himself by studying the works of Humboldt and Karl Ritter on Asia, and acquired considerable knowledge on plants and avian taxidermy. The expedition lasted two years from 1867-69. On his return, he published a memoir ‘Travels in the Ussuri Region, 1867-69’.

He gave a detailed account of the expedition in his records and had amassed a collection of 310 bird specimens, about 2,000 plants, 552 eggs of 42 bird species, and seeds of 83 plant species.

Impressed by his expedition to the Ussuri Region, the Russian Geographical Society sent Przhevalsky to Mongolia and northern China on a three-year expedition, starting in 1870. On this journey, he traveled through to Urga (now Ulaanbaatar), Mongolia, and crossed the Gobi to reach Kalgan (Zhangjiakou), China.

Przehevalsky was awarded the Constantine Medal by the Imperial Geographical Society after his first expedition to Central Asia in the early 1870s.

In 1879, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him their Founder's Gold Medal in recognition of his achievements.

He was honored with the Vega Medal in 1884.