Peripatetic careers of Vsevolod and Eugenie Gorsky, mid-20th century Slovenian-educated geoscientists

Abstract

In September 1947, South Africa’s most famous geologist, Dr Alexander Logie du Toit, FRS, well known for his support of the concept of Continental Drift, received a visit from a Slovenian-educated Russian émigré couple, Vsevolod and Eugenie Gorsky, who were newly arrived in South Africa. Vsevolod, born in what is now Ukraine, was a mining engineer, geologist and geophysicist with vast experience in the minerals industry, while his wife Eugenie, born in the Russian Caucasus, was an analytical geochemist. Vsevolod had a brief exchange of letters with du Toit, seeking his help in obtaining employment in South Africa’s minerals industry. Included in the first letter to du Toit were detailed curricula vitae of both Vsevolod and Eugenie Gorsky. These detailed CVs allow us to reconstruct the training (at the University of Ljubljana, under the influence of Russian mineralogist V.V. Nikitin) and careers of these two earth science professionals in Slovenia and Macedonia, in the early Twentieth Century, and to follow their peripatetic careers as they left the Kingdom of Yugoslavia before the start of the Second World War, in Cyprus, Egypt, Tanganyika and South Africa. They ultimately ended up in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, and probably retired there. Eugenie was constrained to follow her husband wherever his career led him, but she always ended up working in most of the countries and places they found themselves in. As a professional couple who travelled the world, the Gorskys were pioneers in a way of life that is commonplace now in a globalized world.