Born in Moscow into a petty noble family and educated at the university there, Shpilevskii’s first posting sent him to Kazan in 1860. He blossomed into a champion of the historical archeology of the region, organized the KOAIE, and proved instrumental in getting the 4th Archeological Congress there. His magnum opus, “Ancient Cities and Other Bulgaro-Tatar Monuments in the Province of Kazan” won numerous academic honors. In 1885, he was transferred to the Demidov legal lyceum in Iaroslavl, where he formed other academic societies and worked on the provincial statistical committee.
Institution: Kazan_University
Born and educated in Germany, Vasilii (b. Friedrich) Radlov came to St. Petersburg in 1858 to study at the Asian Museum. In Russia, he had many opportunities to study Turkic languages, and he moved to the Altai region where he pioneered in Turkology. His work also took him to the Steppes and to Central Asia; a linguist in an era when that was considered a branch of archeology, he also excavated in these area. In 1872 he was appointed to curate the Kazan educational district, where he remained until 1884. Upon his return to Petersburg, he was appointed director of the Asian Museum in 1890, which he invigorated and made into a major international museum. He studied the language of the Crimean Tatars and the Karaites who had emigrated to the NW Region, thereby covering almost all of the Russian empire.
The son of a village priest in Novgorod Province, Modestov trained initially at the Petersburg Pedagogical Institute to become a teacher. Instead, he became one of the leading figures in the history of Rome, beginning with the Neolithic Age in Italy. After retiring from New Russia University, he moved to Rome. Perhaps surprisingly for a leading classicist scholar, he opposed the reforms of Minister of Education Dmitrii Tolstoi, who in the 1870s returned the university curriculum to emphasize the ancient languages over history or philosophy. He also translated Tacitus into Russian.
Iznoskov remained in his native Kazan where he taught at secondary schools and took active part in the society. He compiled the archeological map of Kazan, a major undertaking. Not surprisingly, he was a member of the Kazan Statistical Committee.
Though from Muscovite pedigree, nephew of the influential scholar K. D. Kavelin, Korsakov studied at the University of Kazan, where he remained throughout his career. His wife, interestingly, had divorced the archimandrite who would serve the Orthodox flock in Rome.
Grigorevich was an important collector of early Christian manuscripts, collecting them in the Balkans in the 1840s.
A founding member of the IMAO, Eshevskii personified the dilettante who developed a keen interest from studying with the many infleuntial historians at Moscow University, and then traveling abroad to Western Europe; he focused on this rather than any Russian areas. He had no archeological speciality, but edited many publications for the IMAO. One of his more interesting papers was on the Bronze-Age pile dwellings in Switzerland.
Evlentev came from a modest family in the provinces and spent most of his life as a school teacher in provincial cities, where he developed a keen interest in archeology. In 1872 he was named the secretary of the Pskov section of the Archeological Commission. Grand Princes Sergei and Pavel Alexandrovich subsidized his excavations in Pskov, where he served on the Statistical Commission and with the local district archives.
Arkhangelskii, the son of a provincial priest, rose to become a distinguished professor in Slavic religious literature at Kazan University, and retired to the Chancellory of Her Royal Highness the Tsaritsa Maria.
Artemev is difficult to classify because he spent many years working on Kazan’s history. He was a great bibliographer and statistician, and Nikolai Miliutin made him a member of the the Emancipation Commission. Wounded during a near ship wreck when in 1868 he was touring the Caucasus, Athens, and the Mediterranean with Grand Prince Alexei Alexandrovich, he died from it six years later.