Mikhail Petrovo-Solovovo

Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo (граф Михаил Михайлович Перовский-Петрово-Соловово; 1868–1954) was a Russian diplomat, psychical researcher and skeptic.

Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo
Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo (right) with psychical researcher Rudolf Lambert
OccupationPsychical researcher

Career

Mikhail Petrovo-Solovovo, a scion of an ancient aristocratic family that owned a Neoclassical palace on Nevsky Avenue, inherited the comital title from his maternal grandfather, General Boris Perovsky, in 1907. He held the rank of chamberlain at the imperial court and, for some time, was the first secretary of the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Empire.

Solovovo joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1890.[1] He published several controversial papers in the SPR Journal arguing that many spiritualist mediums had been caught in fraud. In 1936 he moved to London.

In 1904–1905, Solovovo translated Frank Podmore's Modern Spiritualism (two volumes) into Russian with a new supplement that included an exposure of the fraudulent medium Jan Guzyk. In December 1910, Solovovo attended séance sittings with Everard Feilding and the magician William Marriott to test the medium Eusapia Palladino. The results were negative and the conclusion was that the phenomena was entirely fraudulent.[2]

In 1912, Solovovo described a letter written by Dr. Barthez, a physician in the court of Empress Eugenie, which claimed the medium Daniel Dunglas Home was caught using his foot to fake supposed spirit effects during a séance in Biarritz in 1857. The letter proved controversial within the parapsychology community and has become a source of debate between Home's defenders and skeptics.[3][4][5]

Solovovo attended many séances with the Russian medium Stephan Fomitch Sambor (S. F. Sambor).[6] On one occasion a chair was found hanging from the mediums arm even though his hand was allegedly held by a séance sitter. Solovovo later discovered that this sitter had intentionally released Sambor's hand and was likely to have worked as an accomplice for the medium on other occasions.[7][8]

Selected publications

Books

  • The Scientific Investigation of Physical Phenomena with Mediums (In Russian, St. Petersburg, 1900)

Papers

References
  1. "Count Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo". Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology.
  2. Kurtz, Paul. (1985). A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. p. 208. ISBN 0-87975-300-5
  3. Casey, John. (2009). After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. Oxford University Press. pp. 373–374. ISBN 978-0-19-509295-0
  4. Stein, Gordon. (1993). The Sorcerer of Kings: The Case of Daniel Dunglas Home and William Crookes. Prometheus Books. pp. 99–100. ISBN 0-87975-863-5
  5. Lamont, Peter. (2005) The First Psychic: The Peculiar Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard. Abacus. pp. 90–94. ISBN 0-349-11825-6
  6. Anderson, Rodger. (2006). Psychics, Sensitives and Somnambules: A Biographical Dictionary with Bibliographies. McFarland & Company. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-7864-2770-3
  7. Richet, Charles. (1923). Thirty Years of Psychical Research. New York: The Macmillan Company. p. 540
  8. In his paper My Experiments with S. F. Sambor (1937), Solovovo stated that the accomplice had worked for the Chancery of the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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