Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski (Polish pronunciation: [fɛrˈdɨnant anˈtɔɲi ɔssɛnˈdɔfskʲi]; 27 May 1876 – 3 January 1945) was a Polish writer, explorer, university professor, and anticommunist political activist. He is known for his books about Lenin and the Russian Civil War in which he participated.
Early years
Ossendowski was born on 27 May 1876, at his family's manorial estate near Ludza, in what was then the Vitebsk Governorate and is now Latvia. His family was Protestant with Lipka Tatar roots. He studied at the famous gymnasium in Kamieniec Podolski, but he moved with his father, a renowned doctor, to Saint Petersburg, where he graduated from a Russian language school. Then he joined the mathematical-physics faculty of the local university, where he studied chemistry. As an assistant to professor Aleksander Zalewski, he traveled to many distant areas, including Siberia, the Caucasus and the Altay Mountains. During the summer, he was frequently enrolled as a ship's writer on the Odessa-Vladivostok line, a job that allowed him to visit many parts of Asia, including Japan, Sumatra, China, Malaya and Indonesia. For his description of his trip to Crimea and Constantinople, he received his first royalty. His record of a trip to India (Chmura nad Gangesem: A Cloud Over the Ganges) gained the prestigious Petersburg Society of Literature prize.
In 1899, after a students' riot in Saint Petersburg, Ossendowski was forced to leave Imperial Russia and move to Paris, where he continued his studies at the Sorbonne, his professors being Maria Curie-Skłodowska and Marcelin Berthelot. It is possible that he received a doctorate back in Russia, but no documents have survived. In 1901 he was allowed to return to Russia, where professor Zalewski invited him to the newly founded Institute of Technology of the Tomsk State University. There, he gave lectures on chemistry and physics. At the same time he also gave lectures at the Agricultural Academy and published numerous scientific works on hydrology, geology, physical chemistry, geography and physics.
