Vladislav Krajewski

1841 – 1901 · Warsaw → Saint Petersburg

Vladislav Frantsevich Krajewski (Władysław Krajewski; in Russian, Kraevsky) was a Polish-born physician in Saint Petersburg who in 1885 founded the city's first circle of amateur weightlifters. Called "the father of Russian athletics", he trained, among others, George Hackenschmidt and Sergei Eliseev.

Origins

Krajewski was born in Warsaw, then in the Kingdom of Poland under Russian rule, in 1841 (Russian sources give 29 July), into a family of Polish gentry without estates. He graduated in medicine from the Imperial University of Warsaw in 1865 and moved to Saint Petersburg, where he served as a district and hospital doctor, worked in the medical department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and was for many years a physician to the Imperial Theatres. Alongside government service he built up a large private practice.

The work

On 10 August 1885 (Old Style) Krajewski founded his "circle of amateurs of athletics", which met in his flat, fitted out as a gymnasium; the date is still marked as the birthday of Russian weightlifting. Members paid nothing, were often fed at the doctor's table, and some lived in the flat at his expense; he asked only that they give up harmful habits. At the circle's tenth-anniversary dinner, on 13 January 1896, Count Georgy Ribopierre first called him "the father of Russian athletics".

In 1897 Krajewski founded the Saint Petersburg Athletic and Cycling Club and chaired it until his death. The first Russian weightlifting championship was held that April at the Mikhailovsky Manege, with Krajewski as chairman of the jury, and he chaired the jury again at the unofficial world championship in Vienna in 1898. Hackenschmidt trained under him in Saint Petersburg in 1898.

Members of the circle included Hackenschmidt, Eliseev, Ivan Lebedev, the wrestler Władysław Pytlasiński (who taught wrestling there), Georg Lurich, Ribopierre and the Meyer brothers, as well as a number of artists, actors and scholars.

Method

Krajewski kept training diaries for his pupils and set loads individually according to their health and condition. To avoid injury, the weight could be raised by no more than about four kilograms, and only once the lifter had twice made the previous weight; attempts "for luck" were forbidden. Sessions combined free gymnastics and light dumbbells with presses, snatches and jerks of barbells and kettlebells with one and two hands, with deadlifts and squats at the end, alongside swimming, running, cycling, skating and skiing.

He set out his ideas in two works written in 1896–99: Catechism of Health: Rules for Those Who Practise Sport, which passed the censor in 1899 but was never published and survives in manuscript, and The Development of Physical Strength without Weights and with Weights, published in 1900 and reissued after his death in 1902, 1909 and 1916.

Death

In October 1900 Krajewski fell on the Anichkov Bridge and broke his leg. He was ill through the winter and died in Saint Petersburg in March 1901 (Russian sources give 1 March), by Hackenschmidt's account of a stroke.

Disputed and unresolved

His surname is spelt variously in English — Krajewski, Krayevsky, Kraevsky. Russian sources give his dates as 29 July 1841 and 1 March 1901 without always making clear which calendar is used, so they may differ by twelve or thirteen days from Western-style dates.