---
id: sergei-nikolaev
recordStatus: draft
liveStatus: new
type: person
title: Sergei Nikolaev
titleEn: Sergei Nikolaev
titleRu: Сергей Дмитриевич Николаев
nameAlternatives:
  - name: "С. Д. Николаев"
    type: transliteration
    language: ru
  - name: "S. D. Nikolaev"
    type: variant
    language: en
description: "Russian translator of Henry George, whose 1904 edition supplied the George quotations in The Great Sin (1905)."
birthDate: ""
birthDateOldStyle: ""
birthDateApproximate: false
deathDate: ""
deathDateOldStyle: ""
deathDateApproximate: false
birthPlace: ""
deathPlace: ""
causeOfDeath: ""
nationality: Russian
religion: ""
politicalViews: ""
roles:
  - translator
occupation:
  - translator
relationToTolstoy: ""
relationshipDescription: "Henry George's Russian translator for Posrednik. Tolstoy read George in his translation in 1905 and took the George quotations in The Great Sin from his 1904 edition; scholarship records a 1906 preface to his translation of George's Social Problems."
periodOfContact:
  from: ""
  to: ""
  notes: "Attested here for the George translations Tolstoy used from 1904 and the 1906 prefaces. The relationship's full span is not established in this corpus."
authorityTier: 3
synopsis: ""
worksAuthored: []
worksTranslated: []
worksEdited: []
worksTranscribed: []
relatedWorks:
  -
    id: the-great-sin
    role: source
relatedArticles:
  - henry-george
  - leo-tolstoy
themes:
  - private property in land
  - translation
identifiers:
  wikidata: ""
  viaf: ""
  lccn: ""
  bnf: ""
fieldSources:
  birthDate:
    -
      sourceId: ""
      volume: ""
      page: ""
      notes: "The 1861–1920 span is carried from the dive's entity routing, not yet verified against an authority file (VIAF/LCCN)."
---

<!-- NEEDS PRIMARY SOURCE: birth and death dates (routed as 1861–1920), birthplace, deathplace and the Wikidata QID; nothing in the corpus attests them, they need an authority file, not a dive. -->

Sergei Dmitrievich Nikolaev (<span lang="ru">Сергей Дмитриевич Николаев</span>, 1861–1920) translated [[Henry George]] into Russian for the Posrednik press. The George quotations in [[The Great Sin]] (1905) are taken from his translation, not translated from George's English.

## Read in Nikolaev's translation

On 16 April 1905 the diary records wanting to write "about Henry George, whom I read in Nikolaev's [translation] and am again delighted by".[^1] It is the first 1905 trace of the essay's George strand.

## The source of the quotations

The <abbr title="Полное собрание сочинений — the 90-volume Jubilee edition of the complete works">PSS</abbr> commentary traces the George quotations to one book: *Selected Speeches and Articles of Henry George*, translated by Nikolaev (Posrednik, Moscow, 1904), pages 146–151, 64 and 43.[^2] A quotation in chapter III comes from the biography of George that Nikolaev compiled for the same volume, page 12.[^3]

The 1905 English translation, *A Great Iniquity*, does not translate these passages from the Russian; it prints George's original English instead.[^4]

## The 1906 prefaces

Scholarship records a 1906 preface to Nikolaev's Russian translation of George's *Social Problems*.[^5] The dive lists two 1906 George prefaces in PSS 36 but did not read them.

## Open questions

- Life dates, birthplace, and a Wikidata/VIAF identifier need an authority file.
- A copy or scan of the 1904 *Selected Speeches and Articles* was not found in the dive's image sweep.
- The details of the 1906 prefaces (which George titles, which Nikolaev editions) need checking against PSS 36; the dive has them only from scholarship.
- Which passage of chapter III (PSS 36:216, lines 31–34) comes from Nikolaev's biography of George.

## Dive provenance

- [1905-the-great-sin](../works/non-fiction/essays-and-criticism/1905-the-great-sin/index.md) (2026-06-30) — Nikolaev as the translation route for George (E21, E3); the 1904 Posrednik edition as the source of the quotations and of the compiled George biography (PSS 36 commentary). Routed to a page of its own in the entity steer, 2026-08-12; converted to the footnote style 2026-10-02.

[^1]: <span lang="ru">«о Генри Джорже, которого прочел по Николаеву и вновь восхищен»</span> (PSS 55:134). English: ours.

[^2]: <span lang="ru">«Избранные речи и статьи» в переводе С. Д. Николаева, издание «Посредника», М. 1904, стр. 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 64, 43</span> (PSS 36, commentary).

[^3]: <span lang="ru">Цитата из биографии Генри Джорджа, составленной С. Д. Николаевым и напечатанной в книге «Избранные речи и статьи Генри Джорджа», стр. 12</span> (PSS 36, commentary, note to p. 216, lines 31–34).

[^4]: See the reader edition's translation diagnostic, on chapters II and IX.

[^5]: K. Wenzer, "Tolstoy's Georgist Spiritual Political Economy (1897–1910)", *American Journal of Economics and Sociology* (1997), as summarised in the dive's `extracts/_scholarship.md`.