Birthday anniversary of Vadim V. Passek, writer, ethnographer, historian

June 20 (July 2), 1808, in the city of Tobolsk, in the family of an exiled nobleman Vasily Passek was born writer, historian and ethnographer Vadim V. Passek. Birth of Vadim coincided with the most difficult period of life of his parents in Siberia. It was I. H. Kern, medical board inspector, who helped the family, took the child under his wing and sheltered him in his house.

Vadim Passek learned about the hard life of exiles in 1818, when after the death of Kern, he returned to his parents. In 1824, after two decades of exile, Passek family moved to Moscow.

In 1826, Vadim entered the law faculty of Moscow University. In college, he became friends with Alexander Herzen. They were united by attraction to science, their literary interests also coincided, as well as moral and social ideals. Vadim V. Passek belonged to the Russian youth of 1830s, about which Herzen wrote: "Such a talented group of people, cultivated, multilateral and pure I have not seen anywhere else..."

When Passek graduated from the university, a terrible cholera spread in Moscow in autumn 1830. He was among the selfless students of Moscow State University who offered themselves at the disposal of cholera Committee and actively participated in the work of hospitals. In the cholera hospital, he was in charge of the office and the economy, cared for the sick, with assistance of some physicians he tested himself in regards of the stickiness of cholera, whose successful outcome helped to regard the disease more easily and attracted more volunteers. He described that time in his essay "Three days in Moscow during cholera.”

In 1832 Passek made his first trip to Ukraine, after which, in November of the same year he married the sister of Herzen, Tatiana Kuchina. In 1834, the first work of Passek, "Vadim’s travel notes" was issued which contained a discussion of people's characters, notes and reflections on historical events, folk life and folklore, poetic meditation on the past and future of Russia.

In the spring of 1834, Passek was offered by the trustee of the Kharkov school district, A. N. Panin, to take the chair of Russian history at the University of Kharkov, but the coincidence of this invitation with the time of arrest of Herzen deprived him of the opportunity.

Vadim V. Passek and his family returned to the estate of Kharkov, where in 1836 he made a statistical description of the Kharkov province, assigned to him by the Ministry of the Interior. Following the statistical description of the Kharkov province, submitted to the ministry in 1837, Passek was charged with the description of Tauride province. This work obliged him to move to Odessa for archival research, then to the Crimea. The description of Tauride province was completed in 1838. The same year, the first of five books of Passek, "Sketches of Russia" was published. The work was an attempt to popularize science, familiarize society with ethnography, archeology, history and geography of the Russian way of life.

In 1839, Vadim Passek returned to Moscow and made friends with the members of Slavophile circle, which included such famous writers as A. F. Veltman, M. P. Pogodin, S. P. Shevyrev, V. I. Dahl, M. N. Zagoskin and others. The article of Vadim, "Strange desire" suggests that his interest in the history and life of the people stemmed from the need of "the constant and all-presence life": traveling and studying the past and present of the Slavic peoples directly in their midst, he satisfied his desire to "be at the same time among all nations and all peoples, to survive with them all the sadness and all the joys of life on earth."

The whole year of 1840 was dedicated to the issue of three subsequent volumes of the "Sketches." Also, in 1840 the Ministry of the Interior charged him with a description of the Moscow province. At the same time, he was the editor of "The appendix to the Moscow Provincial Gazette", which published articles on archeology of the area, literary, historical and bibliographical notes. In 1841, at the request of Archimandrite Melchizedek, Vadim V. Passek literary edited his work, writing a history of the Simonov Monastery.

In 1842, Passek published "Moscow reference book", which was the first publication of its kind - a small, pocket-sized, it introduced the reader to the history of the city, architectural monuments, included the address book. At the same time, the last volume of the "Sketches" by Vadim Vasilevich was issued. October 25 (November 6), 1842, after the death of his three year old daughter, the loss of which he grieved, Vadim V. Passek died at the age of 34 of galloping consumption in the hands of Herzen and was buried in the cemetery of the Simonov Monastery.

Lit.: Дубровский К. «Первый романтик русской народности» // Сибирский архив. 1913. № 6-8. С. 377-387; Ростоцкий И. Б. Пассек Вадим Васильевичй // Краткая литературная энциклопедия. М., 1968. Т. 5; Срезневский В. Вадим Васильевич Пассек и его письма к И. И. Срезневскому // Русская старина. 1893. Май. С. 375-402. Сент. С. 545-562; Тобольский биографический словарь / сост.: В. Ю. Сафронов, Ю. П. Прибыльский [Кн. 3]. Р-Я. Тобольск, 2003. С. 363-364.

Based on the Presidential Library’s materials:

Пассек В. В. Историческое описание Московского Симонова монастыря. М., 1843.

Материал предоставлен филиалом ФГБУ «Президентская библиотека имени Б. Н. Ельцина» в Тюменской области