PIONEER OF RUSSIAN STUDIES IN AUSTRALIA N. M. KRISTESEN-MAKSIMOVA G. I. KANEVSKAYA Doctor of Historical Sciences Far Eastern State Federal University Keywords: Australia, Russian studies, N. M. Kristesen-Maksimova, Melbourne University, St. Petersburg, Russian emigration in Australia In the first quarter of the last century, millions of Russian people were forced to leave their homeland for certain reasons and then live abroad. Among them, there were many who, while living in foreign countries, studied Russian culture and, moreover, sought to promote it and introduce it to representatives of educated circles in the countries of their forced stay. Among these" missionaries of Russian studies "(materials about many of them at different times published the magazine "Asia and Africa today") not the last place is taken by Nina Mikhailovna Kristesen (23.12.1911, Blagoveshchensk - 8.08.2001, Melbourne). It is no exaggeration to say that few other Russian emigrants (and many thousands of them have made it to a distant continent in the Southern Hemisphere) have done so much to help Australians learn Russian culture and the Russian language, and many thanks to the work of this outstanding woman sincerely fell in love with our country. N. M. Kristesen was born in the city on the Amur, where her mother, nee Tatyana Semyonovna Alekseeva-Podoskina (1888-1979), came for a while from the capital of the empire to her husband who was then serving in the Far East. But, as Nina Mikhailovna reports in her autobiography, in the documents the place of her birth is indicated as St. Petersburg 1. It was in this city that her family lived, and her early childhood years were spent. N. M. Kristesen's father, Mikhail Ivanovich Maksimov (d. 1967), graduated with honors from the St. Petersburg School of Long-distance Navigation named after Emperor Peter the Great, after which he began his naval service, mainly in the Far East. During the First World War, he commanded ships that brought medical su ... Читать далее