Background
Nikolai Vasilyevich Berg was born on March 24, 1823, in Moscow City, Russian Federation. On the paternal side, he was from the Baltic nobles.
Tambov Gymnasium
the 1st Moscow Gymnasium
Imperial Moscow University
historian interpreter journalist poet
Nikolai Vasilyevich Berg was born on March 24, 1823, in Moscow City, Russian Federation. On the paternal side, he was from the Baltic nobles.
Nikolai Vasilyevich studied first at the Tomsk regional college, then (in 1834-1838) at the Tambov and Moscow gymnasiums. In 1844 he enrolled in the Philological faculty of Moscow University but left an after a year.
In the early 1850s, Nikolai Vasilyevich joined the "young faction" of Moskvityanin and became a member of what came to be known as the Ostrovsky circle. In 1853 he went to Sevastopol as a correspondent, and stayed there until the end of the siege, working as a translator at the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief. He later published Notes on the Siege of Sevastopol (Moscow, 1858) and the Sevastopol Album, a collection of 37 drawings.
After the Crimean War ended, Nikolai Vasilyevich went to the Caucasus where he witnessed the capture and arrest of Imam Shamil. He then traveled to Italy as a correspondent of The Russian Messenger to report on the progress of Giuseppe Garibaldi's army. He spent 1860-1862 traveling through Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. As the January Uprising in Poland began Nikolai Vasilyevich went to Warsaw as a correspondent for the Saint Petersburg magazine Vedomosti and stayed there for the rest of his life, teaching Russian language and literature at Warsaw University beginning in 1868, then editing the newspaper The Warsaw Diary (Varshavsky Dnevnik) from 1874 to 1877.