Dr. Irena G. Malakhova Department for the History of Geology Vernadsky State Geological Museum Russian Academy of Sciences malakhova@sgm.ru Dmtry Ivanovich Sokolov (1788-1852) has graduated from the Mining Military School in Saint-Petersburg. He devoted his life to geological education and enlightenment. More then four decades Sokolov lectured in the Mining Military School and the University of Saint-Petersburg. He was the teacher for few generations of Russian geologists and the author of the first Russian text-books on mineralogy (1832) and geology (1839, 1842). Sokolov was well-known as the ‘founding father’ of the first Russian magazine on mining and geology – “Mining Journal” (1825). As the editor-in-chief he promoted publications of J. Berzelius (1826), H. Davy (1826, 1829); F. Mohs, G. Rose, L. Élie de Beaumont (1830), A Boué (1833), L. von Buch (1840) in Russian. The experience of Sokolov in geoscience, and his literary talent were claimed by the Imperial Russian Academy. This society founded by Catherine the Great in 1783 was aimed at research of Russian language and literature. Six volumes of the ‘Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language’ were published in 1789-1794. This work was continued, and Sokolov was charged with description of mining and geological terms for the 6-volume ‘Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Languages’ (1847). The modern Russian language has been creating at the time when ‘erudition, politics and philosophy have not yet spoken Russian’ (Pushkin, 1825). The terms interpreted by Sokolov enriched the language as a whole and its scientific lexicon at the early stage of geological studies in Russia. The efforts of Sokolov were appraised by election a member of the Imperial Russian Academy (1839). In 1841 it was merged into the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint-Petersburg, and since that time Sokolov has been a honorary member.