1934 - The Soviet steamship Cheliuskin sinks in the Arctic Ocean.
SS Chelyuskin was a Soviet steamship reinforced to navigate through polar ice that became ice-bound in Arctic waters during navigation along the Northern Maritime Route from Murmansk to Vladivostok. The expedition's task was to determine the possibility to travel by non-icebreaker through the Northern Maritime Route in a single navigation season.
It was built in Denmark in 1933 by Burmeister and Wain (B&W, Copenhagen) and named after the 18th century Russian polar explorerSemion Ivanovich Chelyuskin. The head of the expedition was Otto Yuliyevich Shmidt and the ship's captain was V. I. Voronin. There were 111 people on board the steamship. The crew members were known as Chelyuskintsy, "Chelyuskinites".
I can't but mention that this day is also a birthday of Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (February 13, 1769 – November 21, 1844). I think everyone in Russia knows him. He is Russia's best known fabulist. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop's and La Fontaine's, later fables were original work, often satirizing the incompetent bureaucracy that was stifling social progress in his time.
ReplyDeleteKrylov is sometimes referred to as 'the Russian La Fontaine' because, though he was not the first of the Russian fabulists, he became the foremost and is the one whose reputation has lasted. His first three fables, published in a Russian magazine in 1806, were imitations of La Fontaine; the majority of those in his 1809 collection were likewise adaptations of La Fontaine. Thereafter he was occasionally indebted to La Fontaine for themes, although his treatment of the story was independent. One might cite Krylov's pithy "Man and his shadow" with the more lengthy "The man who ran after fortune and the man who waited for her in his bed" of La Fontaine (VII.12), or the satiric "The Peasant and the Snake" with The Countryman and the Snake
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