Tatiana Hull, an amateur photographer and retired librarian, died Monday of an infection after surgery at Howard County General Hospital. She was 86 and lived in Columbia.
Mrs. Hull was a reference li- brarian at Howard Community College from 1970 to 1983.
She received first place in the Sunday Sun Magazine photo contest in 1978 for her picture of a granddaughter's first steps.
"In the days before computers, she was good technically - in biology, math and all the sciences," Jean Soto of Columbia, a former co-worker, said about Mrs. Hull's work as a librarian.
As a photographer, Ms. Soto said, "Her best pictures were of people. Everyone was drawn to her. She put you at ease as she chatted away and snapped her camera."
About 30 years ago, when Mrs. Hull moved to Columbia, she began to take photos and develop them in her darkroom. She shot weddings, travel scenes and flowers she grew in a greenhouse. She exhibited her photographs at Howard Community College, and several appeared in a 1980 book, "Russia from the Inside."
Virginia Kirk of Columbia, a friend of Mrs. Hull's, said, "`Tania' was an extraordinary person masquerading as an ordinary one. She knew what life is. She was unsentimental, nevertheless, she lived with great warmth. She accepted other people - quirky people didn't bother her."
Born in Viska, Russia, a small town east of Moscow, Tatiana Ivanova Zarudny was a member of a family of painters, lawyers and architects.
Her mother was a teacher and member of one of the non-Communist movements working to overthrow the czar. Her father was a civil engineer.
When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, her father fled east to Harbin, Manchuria, to find a safe place for his family. He succeeded in saving her, her four sisters and a brother, but his wife was executed in a Communist purge of the Russian intelligentsia.
Mrs. Hull took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Manchuria to join her father. Mrs. Hull lived with a community of Russians in Manchuria until 1935, when her father died and she had to flee again.
Charles R. Crane, the heir to the Crane plumbing supply fortune, brought her, her siblings and a servant to the United States.
Mrs. Hull received a bachelor of science degree in biology and public health from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. She worked in public health at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.
In 1938, she married Robert E. Hull, who survives her.
Services are private.
She is survived by two daughters, Mary Hull Edlavitch of North Bethesda and Nancy Hull of Spring Valley, N.Y.; four sisters, Mulia Freeman of Belmont, Mass., Lena Levin of Cambridge, Mass., Zoya Chambers of New York City and Katia Singleton of Providence, R.I.; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
