Gregory de Wollant

Grigory de Wollant (1847–1916), known in Washington as Gregory de Wollant, combined diplomacy with ethnography, travel writing, and fiction. He studied in Moscow and Leipzig and earned a legal qualification at the university in Odessa in 1869. As a young diplomat in Pest, he investigated the history and songs of the Carpathian Rusyn population. His interests also drew him into Slavic political causes; he volunteered in the Serbian army in 1876. ¹

He later headed the press section of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Asian Department and served in Japan, first at Hakodate and subsequently in Tokyo. His journeys generated books about Asia and the Pacific. He worked as first secretary in Washington from 1896 to 1902 and published an account of American life, In the Land of Billions and Democracy, in 1907. ¹

As acting head of the Washington mission, de Wollant pressed the compensation claim of Captain Gustav Isak Dahlberg, illegally arrested in Mississippi. In December 1897 he rejected the adequacy of a $1,000 offer and explained the captain’s financial losses. In April 1898 he accepted an arrangement under which the United States would recommend a $5,000 congressional appropriation. ²

During his subsequent Mexican posting, he wrote about the country’s history and culture. He retired in 1910 and later published memoirs. The antiquities he collected in Mexico entered the Hermitage’s holdings in 1931. ¹

De Wollant tried unsuccessfully to publish novels and received skeptical responses from literary correspondents. His 1881 political pamphlet was prohibited in Russia, while his collection of Rusyn songs eventually appeared through the Russian Geographical Society in 1885 and earned its silver medal. ³