Yevgeny Barthold, A Guide to Karelia and the Kola Peninsula (Moscow: OGIZ, 1935)

Jenya Kulakova
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July 20, 2019

Yevgeny Barthold was an artist and traveler. Author of A Guide to Karelia and the Kola Peninsula, Barthold hiked these places up and down on his own feet and drew them with his own hands.

A work by Barthold, currently in the collection of the Murmansk Museum

If you dip into the guide, it is obvious how in love he was with northern landscapes, how he wanted to share their beauty with readers and prepare them for their pitfalls and dangers.

When you read the Guide, published in 1935, and look at the pastels he made in the north in 1936-37, you wonder whether Barthold could have imagined that in 1938 he would travel to his beloved north not as a traveler but as a prisoner of the Oneglag camp, where he would work logging trees and building a narrow-gauge railway, and that in 1942  he would die of “cardiac paralysis.”

The Mekhrenga River in Arkhangelsk Region. In 1939, Barthold was transferred to a camp station here.

Barthold’s last address was 75 8th Line, Vasilyevsky Island, Leningrad.

You can read more about Barthold’s life and death (in Russian) on the Last Address website.

Barthold’s Guide to Karelia and the Kola Peninsula has been digitized and posted online.

Photographs and images courtesy of Jenya Kulakova. Translated by Thomas Campbell