Pavel Apollonovich Rovinskii

Born Feb. 22 (Mar. 6), 1831, in Saratov; died Jan. 15 (28), 1916, in Petrograd. Russian Slavic historian, ethnographer, and publicist.

Rovinskii graduated from the University of Kazan in 1852. A revolutionary democrat, he actively participated in Land and Liberty in 1862 and 1863. He maintained contacts with the participants of the Polish Uprising of 1863–64 and the Russian Section of the First International. In 1871, Rovinskii was unsuccessful in his attempt to free N. G. Chernyshevskii from the Aleksandrovskoe Prison, which was located near Nerchinsk.

As a correspondent for various Russian publications, Rovinskii visited Bohemia and Slovenia in 1860 and 1861, Serbia and Croatia from 1867 to 1869, Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878 and 1879, and Siberia and Mongolia from 1870 to 1873. He collected archaeological and ethnographic materials and described his travels in My Travels in Mongolia (1874) and Sketches of Eastern Siberia (1875). In 1878 he protested the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

From 1879 to 1906 Rovinskii lived primarily in Montenegro, where he worked in the Russian diplomatic mission and where he studied the country’s history and ethnography. The results of Rovinskii’s research were presented in his fundamental work Montenegro—Its Past and Present (vols. 1–3. 1888–1915), which was a major contribution to scholarship.