Keppen, Petr

Born Feb. 19 (Mar. 2), 1793, in Kharkov; died May 23 (June 4), 1864, in the Crimea, on the estate of Karabag, near Alushta. Russian scholar, statistician, ethnographer, and bibliographer; academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1843). Son of a physician.

Keppen graduated from the University of Kharkov in 1814. He participated in the founding of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature in 1816. In 1825–26 he published Bibliographical Pages, one of the first bibliographical journals in Russia. He was one of the founders of the Russian Geographic Society in 1845, in which he headed the section on statistics. Keppen organized the systematic collection of statistical data on the national makeup of the population of Russia and published the first ethnographic map of European Russia in 1851. He is the author of a fundamental monograph The Ninth Census: Research on the Number of Inhabitants in Russia in 1851 (1857).

In the 1850’s and 1860’s, Keppen collaborated in initiating the publication of Record of the Populated Places in the Russian Empire (vols. 1–65, 1861–85). He compiled the ChronologicalIndex of Materials for the History of the Non-Russian Peoples of European Russia (1861). His materials served as the basis for the Geographical-Statistical Dictionary of the Russian Empire (edited by P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii; vols. 1–5, 1863–85). Keppen published several surveys of Russia’s archaeological monuments.