SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 584 of the Siberian pine; Sir Francis Galton; and the quality of Sysert´-forged cold weaponry being superior to the one manufactured in Birmingham and Sheffield is unnecessarily duplicated on pp. 44 and 304; pp. 247 and 317; and pp. 51 and 76 respectively. As for mistakes, gostinyi dvor is no ‘coaching inn’ (p. 74) but a shopping arcade; and Lucy is said to have died ‘at the age of seventy-six’ (p. 271), while her dates are given on the same page as 1819–93. Perhaps more importantly, Stewart does not provide an answer to the intriguing question of how the Atkinsons could afford their travels. For him this ‘remains a mystery’ (p. 259). Did Lucy subsidise much of the voyage from her savings after years of service as a well-paid governess to a rich and influential Russian aristocratic family? Did Thomas marry Lucy for her money? Was he doubling as a British spy, given the perceived Russian advance towards what the British considered to be their sphere of influence during the so-called Great Game? Stewart duly discusses the question whether Thomas spied on Russia (see, for instance, pp. 233, 248, 251, 257, 305), and replies in the negative. Yet it is known from a letter by the British Ambassador in Russia to the Foreign Secretary in London that in early 1854 Thomas ‘was glad to make [the Great Game related] information available to Her Majesty’s Government but anxious not to be credited’ (p. 233). What are we to make of this? Until these and other puzzling issues in the Atkinsons’ lives are convincingly resolved, one can rest assured that there will be more research about them forthcoming. UiT The Arctic University of Norway Andrei Rogachevskii Eimeleus, K. B. E. E. Skis in the Art of War. Translation and commentary by William D. Frank, with additional commentary by E. John B. Allen. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2019. xxxix + 246 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $37.95. On a Finnish night bus in 2017, E. John B. Allen and William D. Frank, both American authors of numerous books on skiing and its history, struck up a conversation. They knew each other, and had shared ‘an obsession’ — Frank’s words — since 2009. The ‘obsession’ was an utterly extraordinary individual, K. B. E. E. Eimeleus (1882–1935). After two years’ more work, Allen and Frank produced an outstanding translation with commentary of Eimeleus’s 1912 book, Skis in the Art of War. They, and the university presses of Northern Illinois and Cornell, and the numerous editors and graphics advisors whom they fulsomely acknowledge, must be congratulated for producing a superbly REVIEWS 585 presented, brilliantly researched and readable book. All the original 119 illustrations, line drawings and photographs are reproduced with remarkable clarity — given that the originals must have been grainy and heavily screened. They include a photograph (p. xxvii) of Eimeleus fencing in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics as part of the Modern Pentathlon — the first time that discipline had featured as an Olympic sport. There is still a pervasive idea in some quarters that the Imperial Russian Army was backward and, compared with its adversaries, incompetent. Russian military theory and practice prevalent before the First World War shows this to be misguided. Eimeleus’s extraordinary 1912 work, melding the interlinked fields of sport and war in a detailed tactical manual, appeared in the same year as Aleksandr Neznamov’s Contemporary War: The Action of the Field Army, a blueprint for imperial Russian and then Soviet operational art. The Imperial Russian Army had some very good ideas and, at the tactical and training level, Eimeleus’s advocacy of ski troops was one of them. Eimeleus was born in Porvoo in 1882 to Edvin Aejmelaeus (hence the Russian patronymic Edvinovich) and Johanna Simolin. Finland was at that time an Independent Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire which it remained until 1917, gaining independence on 6 December that year. Porvoo lies 50 km east of Helsinki, in the Swedish-speaking diocese of Borga. This not only explains his...
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Oct 9, 2020
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