Владимир Николаевич Семенкович (1860-1932)

Vladimir Nikolaevich was trained as a naval mechanical engineer, but in 1887 he resigned his commission to devote himself full-time to various political, journalistic, and ethnographic pursuits. Following the death of the poet Afanasii Fet in 1892, Semenkovich, whose grandmother was the sister of Fet’s father, became the executor of the poet’s literary estate. Semenkovich’s contemporaries recalled his energy and volatile temper. Anton Chekhov would jokingly call him his “savage neighbor.” (Photo credit: Natalia Gorbacheva)