a Polish-Russian orientalist, journalist, and entertainer. In the 1820s, Senkovsky started publishing in the popular periodicals of Kondraty Ryleyev and Faddei Bulgarin. He is best remembered for having edited the first Russian "thick journal," Library for Reading (1833-1856), whose lively and humorous style (as Nikolai Gogol put it) attracted to literary journals even those people who had never held a book in their hands. A very prolific writer, Senkovsky contributed articles on a wide range of topics, from mathematics to medicine. Under the pen-name of Baron Brambeus he published a series of fantastic voyages, including one to the center of the Earth and another to an antediluvian Egyptian civilization flourishing on the now-frozen Siberian plain.
