Nikolai Rezanov
Rezanov wrote a lexicon of the Japanese language and several other works, which are preserved in the library of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, of which he was a member.
[4] In August 1794 Rezanov arrived at Irkutsk, the center of the Shelikhov-Golikov Company, a city where his father Pyotr had once served as a civil servant for several decades.
As a civil servant, Rezanov couldn't be directly named a director of the company, so he was officially designated the RAC's "High Representative in the Capital".
Initially the company turned a favorable profit until the first years of the 19th century, after which mismanagement and scarcity of nourishing food threatened it with serious losses, if not ultimate ruin.
In order to get a fleet to the area, the First Russian circumnavigation was undertaken, with Rezanov on board, taking the route from Sankt Petersburg to Brazil to the Kingdom of Hawaii to Kamchatka.
The ships would not only supply the colonies in America but also begin a Russian fur trade between Alaska, Japan and China, and collect scientific data.
[10] Rezanov was appointed as minister plenipotentiary and given the special assignment of opening diplomatic relations with the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate.
[11] The Neva, one of the two ships in the expedition, was dispatched north on 31 May 1804 and was critical in taking back Saint Michael in the Battle of Sitka later that year.
[12] Nadezhda returned to Petropavlovsk on 24 May 1805, where Rezanov found orders directing him to remain in the Russian colonies as Imperial inspector and plenipotentiary of the company, and to correct the abuses that were ruining the great enterprise.
While touring the colonies, Rezanov established measures to protect the fur-bearing animals from reckless slaughter, especially on the Pribilof Islands, along with punishing or banishing the worst offenders against the company's laws.
In desperation, on 26 Feb. 1806 Rezanov put together a small crew and left Sitka sailing south on the Juno on a life-or-death expedition to California to buy food and supplies from Russia's chief competitor in colonizing the Pacific coast, the Spanish.
During a stay of six weeks, Rezanov was successful in bartering and buying wheat, barley, peas, beans, flour, tallow, salt and other items.
The couple became engaged, causing a sensation in the tight-knit California society, especially because of their differences in religion and nationality, but Rezanov's diplomatic skill won over the clergy.
He proceeded to Petropavlovsk, where he dispatched his ships, without the consent of the Emperor of All Russia—in effect declaring war on his own—to attack the Japanese island Sakhalin of the lower Kuril group.
Rezanov's romance with Concepción became the subject of Concepcion de Arguello, a ballad by the San Francisco author, Francis Bret Harte, and a 1937 novel, Rezánov and Doña Concha, by the largely forgotten San Francisco author Gertrude Atherton, who had also written a biography of Rezanov on the centennial of his romance with Concepcion.
The original actor playing Rezanov from 1979 to 2005, Nikolai Karachentsov, was seriously injured in a car crash in 2005, and has been replaced in the production by Dmitry Pevtsov and Viktor Rakov.
