Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Miklucho-Maklai

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Nikolai Miklucho-Maklai

Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay (also Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay , Russian Николай Николаевич Миклухо-Маклай ., Scientific transliteration Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklucho-Maklaj * July 5 . Jul / 17th July  1846 greg. In Jasykowo near the city of Novgorod , † 2 April. jul. / 14. April  1888 greg. in Saint Petersburg ) was a researcher, artist and humanist , and is in addition to its biological and zoological works primarily as an anthropologist and explorer of New Guinea known.

Life

Miklucho-Maklai's father was an engineer and belonged to a young Russian noble family - the hereditary nobility created by Catherine the Great . Another ancestor had immigrated to Russia from Scotland - hence the second surname Maclay. The spelling of his name can be argued anyway: from Miklouho-Maclay to Miklukho-Maclay, Mikloucho-Maclay, Miklukho-Maclaj to Nicholas Maclay, all possible spellings are in use.

Nikolai was eleven years old when his father died and the family impoverished. A study of physics and mathematics in Saint Petersburg that had begun in 1863 had to be broken off because the young Nikolai took part in banned political student meetings. Miklucho-Maklai was banned from studying and went to Germany, where he studied philosophy and medicine in Heidelberg , Leipzig and Jena and worked on the side to finance his living.

Ernst Haeckel and Nicolai Miklucho-Maklai in the Canary Islands in 1866

The nineteen-year-old caught the eye of the well-known naturalist and Darwinist Ernst Haeckel , who took him on an extended trip to Madeira , the Canary Islands and Morocco as a scientific assistant . In Jena, Miklucho-Maklai continued his studies of zoology, anatomy and botany and made a trip to Sicily in 1867 and, dressed as a Muslim , made his first independent trip to the Red Sea and Arabia in 1869 . Around 1871 he broke off contact with Haeckel, presumably because of technical differences.

He returned to Saint Petersburg via Constantinople and worked as an assistant to Karl Ernst von Baer , who also influenced Friedrich Engels with his Darwin-critical views of human equality . It was there that he came across a book by the German South Seas researcher Otto Finsch , which made him enthusiastic about the strange and almost unexplored island of New Guinea .

With difficulty he raised the funds for a two-man expedition and left the port of Kronstadt in October 1870 on the Russian corvette Vityas . The trip lasted a year and led via Brazil and Chile to the South Seas . After stops on Easter Island , Tahiti and Samoa , Captain Nasimov deposited the intrepid explorer on September 20, 1871 in Astrolabe Bay on the north coast of New Guinea, not far from today's city of Madang , in a piece of land that no white man had ever set foot on. He was to stay here for 15 months, only in the company of his timid and pessimistic servant, the Swedish sailor Olsson.

From 1873 to 1875 Miklucho-Maklai carried out research in the interior of the Malacca peninsula .

Miklucho-Maklai is still a legend in Papua New Guinea today . He fearlessly met the indigenous people who were supposed to eat human flesh and became known as the "moon man" - the Papuans had never seen a white man and believed that he had his supernatural powers from the moon god. Miklucho-Maklai became the immortal demigod for the Papuans, and he promoted the belief in his magical powers as much as he could. Even today Miklucho-Maklai is famous in his Russian homeland as "the moon man".

In Australia he is also known as "the white Papuan". After a further stay in New Guinea from 1876 to 1877, he came to Australia in 1878 and settled there. With his almost namesake Macleay , he published three scientific papers and opened the first marine biology station in Australia. He became known to the public less through his groundbreaking work on New Guinea, but more through the way in which he stood up for the rights of indigenous people and viewed the role of whites critically. He visited New Guinea twice more.

He wrote to the British and Russian governments to prevent them from further colonizing New Guinea. In 1881 he created a plan according to which the not yet colonized part of the island should be ruled by a "Native Great Council", whose adviser and ambassador he wanted to be.

But in 1884 the disaster came from a side he had not thought of. The German anthropologist Otto Finsch - the very one whose book made him enthusiastic about New Guinea - landed in Astrolabe Bay, pretended to be a friend or even brother of Miklucho-Maklai and took possession of the land for Germany. Germany was on the hunt for its own colonial empire and took what the older colonial powers had left. By the end of 1884, the whole of East New Guinea was divided between England and Germany - the West of New Guinea had long been Dutch.

In the same year, after the Tsar had given him permission, Miklucho-Maklai married Margaret Emma Robertson, the daughter of a high-ranking Australian politician who, by the way, was against marrying the poor Russian. The young family moved to Russia with their two sons in 1887, where Maklai died a year later, at the age of 42, of a rare disease that he contracted in the tropics.

Some contemporaries suspected that he was just hiding. The University of Melbourne believes, based on documents in its possession, that he did not die in Melbourne until January 1, 1936, at the age of almost ninety, while the Sydney University website states the generally accepted date of death 1888 (see links).

In any case, his wife had the following chiseled on his tombstone in Saint Petersburg: "Nothing but death can separate us" and returned to Australia. Miklucho-Maklai had three grandchildren and several great-grandchildren, one of whom became an astronomer and named a star after his great-great-grandfather.

The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences is named after Miklucho-Maklai . The same applies to the Zaliv Mikluho-Maklaja Bay in Antarctica.

Leo Tolstoy judged him: "You were the first to demonstrate unequivocally from your own experience that a person is a person everywhere."

literature

  • The only biography appeared in English in 1984: Webster, EM: The Moon Man: A Biography of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay , University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1984, 448 pp.
  • With the Papuans. The travel diaries of Miklucho-Maklaj . Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-355-00144-9 .
  • Friederike Schneider: Mikloucho-Maclay and the heroic ethnology . Heusweiler 1997.
  • Tamo Russ. Travel diaries from NN Miklucho-Maklaj. Translated from the Russian by E. Sabel. Illustrations by Erich Gruner . SWA-Verlag / Berlin. Without a year.

Web links

Commons : Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Miklucho-Maklai  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrike Wagener: A person is a person. From 1871 Nikolai Miklucho-Maclay refuted the racist theses of his teacher Ernst Haeckel. Hardly anyone in this country knows his work. In: Neues Deutschland from 6./7. June 2020, p. 19
  2. ↑ Ulrike Wagener: A person is a person. From 1871 Nikolai Miklucho-Maclay refuted the racist theses of his teacher Ernst Haeckel. Hardly anyone in this country knows his work. In: Neues Deutschland from 6./7. June 2020, p. 19
personal data
SURNAME Miklucho-Maklai, Nikolai Nikolajewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baron Nikolai Nikolajewitsch von Miklouho-Maclay; N. Miklukho-Maclay; N. Mikloucho-Maclay; N. Miklouho-Maclai; Nicholas Maclay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Artist, humanist, anthropologist and biologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH Jasykowo, Novgorod Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 1888
Place of death St. Petersburg