Vitaliy Nikolaevich Tanasijtshuk (1928-2014)
Posted by Nosferatumyia on 08 December 2014 12:13:10
In the last 10 years he has published a series of non-fiction books concerning field diaries of his father, who took a collecting trip to Paraguay in 1916-1918, about cryprozoology, and memoires based on his biography, collecting trips to Crimea, Pamir Mts., about his colleagues in the Zoological Institute, St. Petersburg, as well of his childhood in the terrible years of Stalin's Soviet Big Horror of 1934-1938 (in Russian).
He was also known to many younger entomologists of the former Soviets as an author of popular stories about insects and other animals written for children and always well-illustrated. He gave a brilliant annotation of Stuempke's "Monograph of Rhinogradentia", which has become my pillowbook for many years after that.
His last project was an album of historical photographs taken by the poet of the "Russian Silver Age", Maximilian Kirienko-Volochine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/106729287@N03/sets/
They were saved and processed by VNT after 35 years after Volochine's death and are now a real treasure for the history of Russian literature.
But his Opus Magnum was of course the Monograph of Chamaemyidae in the "Fauna of the USSR". We are really missing him.
Valery Korneyev