Sergei Nikolaev

Sergei Dmitrievich Nikolaev (Сергей Дмитриевич Николаев, 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 PSS 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 (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.