Tan Bogoraz Kolyma stories. Jesup North Pacific Expedition

Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz(pseudonyms N.A. Tan, V.G. Tan; also known as Tan-Bogoraz, when published in the USA: English Waldemar Bogoras; born Nathan Mendelevich Bogoraz) - revolutionary, writer, outstanding ethnographer and linguist (specialist on the Chukchi and other Paleo-Asian peoples), Northern historian.
Born into a teacher's family. At birth he was given the Hebrew name Nathan, at baptism in adolescence- name Vladimir and patronymic Germanovich. Pseudonym "N. A. Tan" is formed from the name Nathan. Subsequently, Bogoraz began to use the pseudonym “Tan” with his real name and/or surname.
He studied at the Taganrog Men's Classical Gymnasium.
Since 1881 he was a member of People's Will circles. Since 1885 he joined the Narodnaya Volya group. Participated in the work of secret printing houses. He was arrested several times; in 1889 he was exiled to Srednekolymsk for 10 years. In exile he began to study ethnography, and so successfully that in 1894 the Imperial Academy of Sciences included him in its expedition, equipped to study the life of the Chukchi. For about three years (1895-1897) he wandered among the Chukchi. At the end of the expedition, the Academy of Sciences obtained permission for him to return to St. Petersburg, and in 1900 he again sent him on the expedition.
In 1896 he began his literary activity, publishing essays, stories and poems. The first book of prose, “Chukchi Stories,” appeared in 1899, and in 1900, the first book of poetry (“Poems”).
It is interesting that Tan-Bogoraz did not escape the influence of contemporary poetry and wrote decadent poems that were absolutely inconsistent with his activities and prose creativity.
In 1899 he left for the USA, where he took part in an expedition led by anthropologist Franz Boas. Until 1904 he worked as curator of the ethnographic collection of the American Museum. natural history; in English, he prepared for publication the monograph “The Chukchi,” which received worldwide recognition as a fundamental work on the ethnography and mythology of the Chukchi. Here he also wrote for the Russian press a series of essays about the life of the Doukhobor community, who emigrated from persecution in Russia to Canada in 1898-1899, and which seemed to many to be an expression of the ideal of peasant socialism. In 1904, these essays were published as a separate book, “Russians in Canada.”
In 1905 - one of the organizers of the “Peasant Union”, in 1906 he took part in the organization of the “Labor Group” in the First State Duma (he himself was not a Duma deputy). At this time, he wrote a number of essays and journalistic works of a populist propaganda nature. During the years of the first revolution, he collaborated in the newspaper of the Bolshevik military organization “Kazarma”, publishing a number of poems that became popular in those years (“The Death Song”, “The Tsar’s Guests”, “Tsushima”, etc.).
After the October Revolution, in his journalistic articles published in the magazines “Russia” and “New Russia”, he acted as a Smenovekhovite.
A prominent ethnographer and anti-religionist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, professor at the Institute of the Peoples of the North, which he founded, and at a number of Leningrad universities, in particular, he taught at the ethnography department of LIFLI Leningrad State University, and conducted extensive research and teaching work. Initiator of the creation of the Northern Committee under the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In recent years, he was the director of the Museum of Religion and Atheism, which he founded in 1932 (located in the building of the Kazan Cathedral in Leningrad).

RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
INSTITUTE OF THE PEOPLES OF THE NORTHERN Central Executive Committee of the USSR
ETHNOGRAPHY MATERIALS

PART I

PUBLISHING HOUSE OF THE INSTITUTE OF BACKGROUND OF THE NORTH CEC ÇCC?
LENINGRAD

.: o I . k, St I:.:S
u n d e r t h e Central Executive Committee of USSR

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ETHNOGKA
WALDEMAR BOQORAS

CHUKGHEE
Part 1

P r e f a c e b y 1. P. Ai k or, e d i t o r
New York-Leiden 1 0 0 4 9 0 9 !
Leningrad ]934

Responsible editor Ya P.

Delivered to set 9X1 1933
Cap. type. zn. in 1 liter, 154 LLC,
Boom. sheets
Circulation 2500 copies

Tech. editor M. G. Rog^^IG

Prepared for publication on November 15, 1934,
St.-form. 72X1 0. Author, 25 sheets.
Lengorlig No. 701. Order No. 182j.
Type, .Comintern. and school FZU KW, KIM "a. Leningrad, Krasnaya. K

V. Bogoraz-Tan

PREFACE

EDITOR

In the enormous work currently underway for socialist development
In the Far North, the cultural and economic rise of the peoples inhabiting it is felt.
there is an urgent need for research that will cover the diversity of this rich, but weak
studied outskirts;1 of our great Union. In particular, we need research into the socio-economic system of the peoples of the North, which will help us better navigate the complex landscape
social relations and thereby accelerate the pace of socialist construction
in the north.
Institute of the Peoples of the North of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, meeting the urgent need, undertook
publication of studies on economics, history, ethnography and linguistics of the peoples of the North. On the line
with a series of Proceedings providing original works by the Institute’s scientists on the above-mentioned issues. The Institute began publishing the most valuable works in the Materials series
of the past, written about the peoples of the North, both in Russian and in foreign languages.
With this issue, “Materials on Ethnography”, the Institute of Northern Peoples begins
l publication translated from in English monograph, Chukchi, owned by Peru
the best modern expert on the peoples and languages ​​of the Far North is V. G. Bogoraz.
"
Before proceeding to the presentation and analysis, Chukoch, it is necessary to at least
in a condensed form, dwell on the main milestones of A I Z P I V. G. Bogoraz.
V. G. Bogoraz (pseudonym - Tan) was born on April 15, 1865 in the city of Ovrz^che, Volyn province. In early childhood he was transported to Taganrog. He studied at the Taganrog gymnasium.
simultaneously with A. P. Chekhov. In 1880, after graduating from high school, he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University, from where he transferred to the Faculty of Law, but did not graduate, since already in 1882 he was expelled from St. Petersburg to his homeland, and in U 8 3.
arrested for belonging to the Narodnaya Volya party and spent a year in prison. After his release, he switched to illegal marriage. In 1885 he was one of the organizational members of the Ekaterinoslav Congress of Narodnaya Volya and editor of the last KOMtrpa magazine
People's Will",
On December 9, 1866, V. G. Bogoraz was again arrested and, after three years of imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress, exiled for ten years to the Kolyma district of the Yakut region, where he remained
from 1890 to 1898. In Kolyma exile, V. G. Bogoroz became an ethnographer and linguist, having studied
way of life and languages ​​of local peoples: .iamutov and chui 04, and also sener'kh Russians:.. In ssobi.n1gosti
V. G. Bogoraz studied in detail the Chukchee, among whom he wandered for about three years (I895-
1897) 3 connections with the Sibiryakov expedition.
In 18Ç8 V. G. Bogoraz returned from exile thanks to the petition of the Academy of Sciences
and joined together with Tugak-Baranovsky in the editorial office of the legal Marxist Aurkh1;lov » Beginning
and Life". At the same time he becomes a research fellow at the 1st unit of anthropology and ethnography
Academy of Sciences, Soon, however, V. G. Bogoraz was expelled by the police from St. Petersburg and left
to America, where, as the head of the Anadyr department, he took over the position in the North Pacific
Jesup's expedition, organized by the famous anthropologist and linguist Fraitz Boas,
by the New York Museum of Natural Sciences and St. Petersburg Academy Sci. During
і900 ~іС0І V. G. Bogoraz traveled around Kamchatka, Anadyr Territory and Chukotka. During
* :oïi expedition, in addition to the Chukchi, he studied the Koryaks, Itelmens (Chamchadaliv) and Asian Eskimos.
and about his return to St. Petersburg, he was again expelled by the police, after which he left
New York, where until 1S04 he worked at the Museum of Natural Sciences.
Since the 1900s V. G. Bogoraz Veda: great work on the development of Russian-American
Scientific communication. Together with the late L. Sternberg, he is one of the leading Russian
about the affairs of the Union of Americans and repeatedly, until recently, took part
international congresses of Americanists.

In the fall of 1904, V. G. Bogoraz returned to Russia and participated in the 8th Peasant organization
union and labor group of the State Duma. In 1906, he was one of the organizers of the People's Socialist Party, collaborated in Native Land, etc. About V. Bogoraz in connection with the 5th
newspaper we have the following remark by V.I. Lenin: .NgipraBleshie of this newspaper [,Native Earth]
undoubtedly to the left of the cadet. According to all data, this direction can be called Trudovik.
As documentary evidence of such a political characterization
can be specified
and cooperation in this newspaper in Tana. G. Tan is listed on the published list of members
Organizing Committee of the Labor (Karod-Soynalist) Party.
Lenin’s other remark is very interesting: “In the Motley Meetings” of the New Year’s issue
Mr. Tan's speech raised an important issue to which the workers should pay serious attention.
This is a question of the growth of a new democracy.
“It’s been about a year or so now, maybe more,” writes Mr. Tan,
the course of life begins again
change and melt. Instead of a loss of water, profit appears, God knows where, from the depths of the underground
and from distant sources. For three years everything was quiet and empty. Now people appear, crawl out
one after another from different crevices and bearish ones at the heads. . \"The most interesting thing is the people of the peasantry
ranks that came from below. Their name is Legion. They have filled the middle areas of life and even
higher hectares are being encroached upon, especially in the provinces. Technicians, counters, agronomists, teachers, all kinds
zemstvo servants. They all look alike. Gray in face, broad in bone, awkward
in appearance; They are not prone to reflexes; on the contrary, they are tenacious, like cats. . . Life, obviously, has moved on
one step higher, because we, the commoners, compared with them - just as the nobles were comparatively
with us.
It is aptly and correctly said, although we should not forget that both the old commoners and the “new,
"peasant rank", democratic intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia - represent
from themselves the bourgeoisie into the clashes with the courtiers - serfs 2 .
During the imperial war, V. G. Bogoraz succumbed to chauvinistic frenzy,
became a defencist and, despite his rather old age (50 years), volunteered
to the front as the head of one of the sanitary detachments of the Union of Cities. In "1 9 1 8 oi E OZ O renewed his work at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences. In 1920, V. G. Bogoraz became a "Smenovekhovite". From this time on, his active scientific and social work began, mainly related to ethnography and the Soviet North. Since 1921 V. G. Bogoraz -
Professor of Ethnography, first at the Geographical Institute. then, after the merger of the Geographical
Institute with Leningrad University, in the latter. At the university he headed the commission
on student ethnographic excursions and edited collections of ethnographic materials.
collected stz"dentamn.
V. G. Bogoraz was one of the initiators of the creation of the Committee for Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern
okrapn and since the organization of the Committee of the North (1924) has been an active member of it.
From 1925 to the present time - professor at the Leningrad Historical and Linguistic Institute.
V. G. Bogoraz also played a major role in the creation of the first special educational
institutions for the peoples of the North - the Institute of the Peoples of the North of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.
Since 193, V. G. Bogoraz has been an active member of the Scientific Research Association Insti.
tut of the peoples of the North and professor of the Northern Department of the Pedagogical Institute. Herzen.
In 1932 he organized the Museum of the History of Religion of the Academy of Sciences and since then has been its
director Since that time he has been a member editorial board magazine "Soviet
ethnography".
^
In recent years, V. G. Bogoraz has done significant work for the development of Luoravetlanskaya
(Chukchi) writing, compiled an alphabet and Persian educational books and grammar in this language
and translated a number of political pamphlets.
V. G. Bogoraz, under the name Tana, is known both as a fiction writer and poet. He started writing
in Kolyma exile (in 1896). His “Chukchi Stories” published in 1899 and in 1900
.The poems were a great success. In 1Q12, a collection of works was published in 12 volumes.
His poems "The Red Banner" (translation), The First of May and, Kronstadt sailors widely
iadestny and included in all revolutionary songbooks.
In Soviet times, Tan's novels and short stories were republished twice in five volumes; Besides,
or two new novels have been written: "The Union of the Young" and The Resurrected Tribe. Some of the stories
Tana have been translated into English, German and Polish.
..

^" j.
*
V. G. Bogoraz is the author of a number of works on ethnography
! them are;
І

ß and. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. X, p. 275.
? Right there. vol. XVI, ser, 281.

Peoples of the North. Osyaoviyma

1) Lamuts. .Earth Science", VP, book 1, Moscow, 1900.
2) Essay on the material life of the Reindeer Chukchi... Collection of the Museum of Anthropology sh atn0]graphi1g
Academy of Sciences, vol. P, St. Petersburg, IßOl.
5) The Chukchee. Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, V01.VI,R. 1-3. Leiden
New York 1904—19C9.
4) Chukchee Mythologie. Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Vol. VIJI, P. 1.
Leiden—New York 1910.
^ 6) Religious ideas of primitive man, based on materials collected among the tribes of Se>
Zero-East Asia, mainly Chukchi. ^Earth science*, book. Î, 1906 (in English in, A t e g! ^
glanders anthropologist-, vol. II,
2, 1925).
6) On the psychology of shamanism among the peoples of Northeast Asia. ,Ethnographic review,
LXXXIV-LXXXV, Moscow 1910.
7) New tasks of Russian ethnography in the polar regions. ,Proceedings of the northern scientific and fishing expedition*, c. 9, St. Petersburg, 1921 in English in Problems of Polar Researches,
7, New York 1928).
8) Ideas of Space and Time in the Conception of the Primitive Religion. American Anthropo
iogist 1925, N2 2.
9) Ancient migrations of peoples in northern Eurasia and America, Collection of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, in, 6. L. 1927.
10) New data on the issue of pro-Asians. .Izvestia of the Leningrad State
University", vol. I, 1928.
11) Le mythe de HAPTAIN Dieu, mourant et resusscicant. Atti del XXII Cottgresso Internazlonale
degll Americanisti, Roma 1928.
Along with ethnographic ones, it is necessary to mention the following main works of V. G. Bogoraz
according to the languages ​​of the North:
1) Samples of materials for studying the Chukchi language and folklore. News of the Academy
N a u k 3
№
,
, St. Petersburg. 1899.
2) Materials on the study of the Chukchi language and folklore, St. Petersburg. 1900,
3) Regional dictionary of the Kolyma Russian dialect. St. Petersburg, 1901.
4) The Folklore of North Eastern Asia as compared with North Western America, American
Anthropologist, IV, 1902.
5) Materials for learning the language of Asian Eskimos. ^Living Star 7 1 — 7 0
№ ,
6) The Eskimo of Siberia. Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Vol. VIII, p. 3,
Leiden - New York 1914
7) Koryak Texts. Publications of the\American Ethnological Society, Vol. V, Leiden 1917.
8) About the so-called Vf language of spirits (shamanic) among various branches of the Eskimo tribe;
Li s news of the Academy of Sciences 1 1 - 8
№
,
, P. 1919.
9) Chukchee (Essay of a ccmparative Study .of Chukchee Group of Languages]. Handbook of
American Indian Languages. Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, V. 2, Washington 1922.
10) Materials in the Lamut language. Tunguska collection, L. 1931.
11) Luoravetlan (Chukchi) language. Languages ​​and writing of the peoples of the North, part 3. Proceedings
Scientific Research Association of the Institute of the Peoples of the North of the USSR Central Executive Committee for Linguistics.
vol. PI, L. 1934.
12) Yuitsky (Asian-Eskimo) language. Right there.
The multi-volume monograph ^Chukchi is the most significant work of V. G. Bogoraz and was written on the basis of materials collected.ÎIM In the Chukotka Land during the years of exile
and expeditions. This work created an era in the study of the Chukchi people and set Bogoraz
into the ranks of the largest ethnographers of our time, With full right, V. G. Bogorez declares in the preface to this publication, Chukchi, that in the study of the Chukchi people he was a pioneer
rum, despite the previous works of Wrangel, Mzydel, Argentov
and some others.
Despite the fact that the Chukchi were written at the beginning of the 20th century and are based on materials from the end of the 19th century
prisoner, they have retained their significance even today, because even now there is no other work that
with such thoroughness would give a picture of material life, religious beliefs and partly
social system of the Chukchi, one of the most backward and least studied peoples of the region
him North.
Stopping to better understand ^Chukoch on outlining theoretical views
V. G. Bogoraz, we must remember that he began his scientific work as a populist
and thus a supporter of the Russian school of subjective sociology, although not very much so
convincing.
From the s ^ b e k r v n o i school in sociology, V. G. Bogoraz leads to an exaggeration of the role of * and ^
misunderstanding of the socio-economic formation, misunderstanding of mutual interconnectedness i s e x ÇTÛÎK"

Social life and boundless eclecticism. The influence of this school is felt throughout the work
V. G. Bogoraz, and therefore we can limit ourselves to just giving one example, to which
V. G. Goraz himself stops in the preface to this edition. Meaning mate
rial culture, religion, social system and mythology, he says: Earlier questions,
considered in these four sections, seemed to be hovering side by side, now they were connected
® relations between the socio-economic base and superstructural forms."
N about V. G. Bogorpz was not only a supporter of the Russian school of subjective sociology; in his research work he was strongly influenced by the so-called American school of historical anthropology (of which Boas is the founder). Guided by the idea of ​​historical anthropology, according to R. Lowy, the modern luminary of this school,
is. . . avoid all-encompassing and shaky theories of the past and embrace sober historical research, coupled with intensive local study of individual areas.
Lowy considers Marxism and the teachings of L. Morgan to be comprehensive and shaky theories.
History, as understood by historical anthropologists, consists of the denial of the "chimerical"
law social evolution", in recognizing the impossibility of distinguishing between chaotic mixing
cultures", in concentrating research on limited historical and geographical areas.
The starting point of historical anthropologists when considering the initial eras of human
culture is the recognition of the eternity of private property and the individual family, therefore,
denial of primitive communism, denial of the race as a universal stage in the development of society,
in particular, the denial of the primitiveness of the maternal race.
All your attention is historical
anthropologists focus on solving particular, local problems, experiencing an aversion to synthesis
obtained conclusions. Therefore, it is not surprising that empiricism flourishes magnificently
color in the works of historical anthropologists.
“The Chukchi* represent 1YaUT typical
example of empirical
work done in the spirit
American school of historical anthropology. Material life is described in detail.
religion, etc. Chukchi, but there is not the slightest attempt to determine the stage of social development,
on which the Chukchi are located, to find the place of the Chukchi in the general chain of development of human society,
identify the main patterns of Chukotka society. Empirical character, Chukko* and his
The author himself now admits the shortcomings. Thus, in the preface to this edition, Ch u k o ch "author
speaks:
“Moving on to reviewing all the material in my monograph “son’s point of view>
I must first note the empirical nature of my work. I tried to follow
behind the facts and with some difficulty decided to make generalizations. For I must say generally that in
During my field work, and also after that, I was distrustful of all the theories of the development of primitive society at that time. In this regard, at that time I
closer to Franz Boas, who still occupies the same exaggeratedly cautious, skeptical position in all ethnographic and sociological issues
Empiricism also led V. G. Bogoraz to a disdainful attitude towards scientific
terminology, and it is characterized by extreme vagueness, indistinctness and uncertainty. Even in one of his most theoretical works, Bogoraz thought it possible to say:
, I. . . I don't attach much importance precise definition terminology K
In addition to works on the peoples of the North, V. G. Bogoraz also owns a number of general ethnographies.
scientific works, mainly on issues of primitive religion, material culture
and the spread of humankind on earth. In these works, especially in recent years, he
energetically strives to free himself from old points of view and master a materialist understanding of history. Still, it must be said that this is given to him with great difficulty, as evidenced by his “Fundamentals of Ethnogeography.” In this work, V. G. Bogoraz does not consider history
of humanity as a single process, at each stage of which special laws prevail, different from the evil ones of the organic and

Bogoraz is rightfully considered the patriarch of Soviet northern studies. He created his own ethnographic school, wrote the most comprehensive multi-volume work of his time on the Chukchi people, developed the foundations of Chukchi writing, made every effort to organize the Institute of the Peoples of the North, unique even by world standards, and educated a whole galaxy of students who became luminaries in the field of linguistics, folklore and ethnography.
Bogoraz himself admitted at the end of his life that his best years were spent in Kolyma and Chukotka. But he did not get there of his own free will. Kolyma was the place of his exile for his Narodnaya Volya beliefs. When in 1927 Bogoraz was asked for another autobiography, he wrote: “In 1889, they sent me to remote places - to Arctic Kolymsk, 12 thousand miles away and for a 10-year sentence. I traveled to Kolymsk for about a year, sailed along the Kama and Ob on prison barges, walled up in the hold. From Tomsk to Irkutsk I walked along Vladimirka on foot, in Yakutsk we rode in winter with gendarmes in troikas, almost half-naked. Out of habit, we were terribly cold - our breath froze in our chests. And in Yakutsk they found the consequences of the Yakut execution and execution of those arrested... We went to Kolymsk in twos with the Cossacks, first on sleighs, with horses, then on reindeer, and then on small Yakut horses.”

What did this 24-year-old young man manage to do? For what merit was he sent to a 10-year exile in the North?! And anyway, who is this Bogoraz?
He was born with the name Nathan on April 15 (new style 27), 1865 in the city of Ovruch, Volyn province. True, according to official documents, the city of Mariupol is listed as his place of birth. And the date on the metric was different: 1862. After graduating from high school in 1880, Bogoraz left Taganrog for St. Petersburg, where he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. But the exact sciences were not for him, and a year later he transferred to the Faculty of Law. However, he never managed to complete his education. On political charges, Bogoraz was sent back to Taganrog in 1882 for participating in student unrest.
As it appears, revolutionary ideas Bogoraz was infected by his older sister Pearl (Praskovya Shebalina) (the higher women's courses in St. Petersburg, it seems, played a cruel joke on her, prompting the girl to radically fight against the tsarist regime). True, for Praskovya herself, the games of politics ended very disastrously: first she ended up on trial in the Kyiv case, then, together with her infant child, she ended up in the Moscow transit prison, where she unexpectedly died. Later, her brothers Sergei and Nikolai tried to continue Praskovya’s work. Sergei, as they said, distinguished himself in 1905 during the Gorlovka workers' uprising. He faced the death penalty. Only fleeing abroad saved him. But Nikolai fully recognized both prison life and the ordeal of exile. He retired from politics already in Soviet times, having already become famous in the field of medicine, becoming an experienced surgeon and professor at Rostov University.
But let me return to the fate of Nathan Bogoraz. When surrounded by his family, the dropout student could no longer calm down. He organized a revolutionary circle in Taganrog, which involved young workers from a metallurgical plant, and an underground printing house. The authorities quickly discovered the troublemaker and put him in prison for eleven months, and then sent him to Yeysk.
Upon his release, Bogoraz converted to Orthodoxy. He explained his decision this way: “I happened to convert to Orthodoxy for revolutionary purposes. It was necessary to settle in Novocherkassk, but with a Jewish passport this was impossible. My immersion in the Orthodox font took place in 1885. I was Nathan Mendelevich Bogoraz - I became Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz. Germanovich - after his godfather, as it was supposed to be then.” All that remained of the old name was the literary pseudonym Tan.
While in an illegal position, Bogoraz took part in the organization of the Yekaterinoslav Congress of Narodnaya Volya in 1885 and edited the last issue of the magazine Narodnaya Volya. After which he went to Moscow. There he was almost immediately captured by the police. Bogoraz tried to leave Butyrka prison, but he failed. After an unsuccessful escape, the young revolutionary was transported from Moscow to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he awaited his fate for three whole years.
In 1889, Bogoraz was sentenced to ten years of exile and sent to the Kolyma district. Soon he found himself in Srednekolymsk. But there wasn’t much to do in this small town. And Bogoraz, in order to somehow pass the time, began to write down the songs, epics and fairy tales he heard from the Cossacks. This young rebel’s interest in folklore was supported by V.F. Miller, who later insisted that the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences allocate an entire volume for Bogorazov’s materials. The book, published in 1901, was called “Regional dictionary of the Kolyma Russian dialect.” It included 153 songs, 103 riddles, 8 tongue twisters, 27 proverbs and 5 fairy tales, which the disgraced nugget recorded among the townspeople and Cossacks of Srednekolymsk, Nizhnekolymsk and Pokhodsk. Before this, even before the release of the academic volume, Miller in two steps
heard by a failed lawyer in Kolyma.
In 1895, the Academy of Sciences began to petition that the authorities allow Bogoraz, Yokhelson and some other exiled Narodnaya Volya members to take part in the Kolyma detachment of the Sibiryakov expedition. Bogoraz was entrusted with the task of collecting materials on the language, folklore, social system, economy, way of life, and culture of the Chukchi and Evens, who wandered along the right tributaries of the Kolyma River. The organizers did not object to the former troublemaker hiring translators. But most of the public in Srednekolymsk knew only the Chukchi-Russian jargon, suitable for conducting mainly trade transactions. Therefore, Bogoraz had to choose a different tactic. As he reported on September 15, 1895 to the East Siberian Department of the Russian Geographical Society, “due to the lack of any decent translator for both the Chukchi and Lamut languages, I had to direct my main efforts to learn to speak at least somewhat with representatives of these tribes without the help of other persons. In Chukchi I have learned to a certain extent, if not to speak, then at least to understand other people’s speech, and at present I could still conduct ethnographic research among the Chukchi tribe, without being very difficult in terms of methods of expression and without needing a translator, however Moreover, Russian translators in Kolyma speak the Chukchi language no better than me.” This, by the way, was during the first general census Russian Empire The Chukchi also appreciated it. It was not for nothing that they gave the chief scribe a new name - Veip (translated as a writing person).
In 1898, thanks to the petition of famous St. Petersburg scientists, the former troublemaker was allowed to return early from exile. Upon returning to St. Petersburg, he became a researcher at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and, with a foreword by Academician K.G. Zalemana published his first monograph, “Materials on the study of the Chukchi language and folklore, collected in the Kolyma district.” However, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was very unhappy that an unreliable, in the opinion of the authorities, scientist was hired in St. Petersburg, and wanted to send him somewhere. In addition, Bogoraz himself did not always behave prudently. What was the cost, for example, of his antics on May 27, 1899 at a banquet organized by Marxists in honor of Pushkin’s centenary? He went ahead and publicly read his poem “To the Robbers of the Pen,” in which he risked stinging “New Time,” which greatly irritated him. Only the intervention of Academician V.V. saved the young ethnographer from the gendarmerie’s wrath. Radlova.
Around the same time, the American anthropologist Franz Boas began persistently persuading Bogoraz to take part in the North Pacific Jesup Expedition. Boas had long wanted to get to the bottom of the origins of ancient American civilizations, and he was very interested in the issues of mutual influence of the cultures of the Old and New Worlds. He organized several parties that began studying the indigenous populations of the United States and Canada. But for a long time he was unable to form an expedition to explore Chukotka and Kamchatka. Ultimately, the party, which was supposed to work in the northeast of Russia, included Yokhelson, Brodskaya, Bogoraz and his wife, zoologist N. Buxton and assistant A. Axelrod.
The Americans defined it this way Russian participants project scope of their tasks: “You will have to collect collections of objects reflecting the customs and physical characteristics of the population. These collections should include ethnographic objects of all kinds, skeletal bones and skulls - as far as possible, photographs and plaster casts. Your scientific research should be devoted directly to the ethnology of the population, including a careful study of language and mythology, and anthropological dimensions."
For Bogoraz, the path to the Jesupov expedition ran through the Caucasus, where he first went in November 1899 for some personal business. Then the scientist checked in successively in Berlin, Paris and London. And already at the beginning of 1900 he reached New York, where Boas announced that Bogoraz would lead the Anadyr detachment of the party.
Let me draw your attention: Bogoraz went on his already voluntary trip to the North with his wife Sophia. But, to my shame, I know practically nothing about this brave woman. In addition, on July 4, 1900, the ship delivered the couple to Novo-Mariinsk (present-day Anadyr), where they apparently separated.
Over the course of a short summer, Bogoraz rode around on a carbass to the camps of reindeer Chukchi, who went to the summer camp on the shores of the Anadyr estuary. Then the scientist rode on dogs through the village of Markovo to Kamchatka, examining groups of sedentary Koryaks and Itelmens along the way. He returned back to Novo-Mariinsk through the villages of Kerek and southern groups nomadic Chukchi. In April 1901, Bogoraz went to the north of Chukotka on dogs; already in May he was with the Eskimos of the village of Chaplino, and from there to the island of St. Lawrence. The ethnographer returned to Novo-Mariinsk in kayaks. And already from Novo-Mariinsk Bogoraz departed by steamship to Vladivostok, and from there to America to process the collected materials. Bogoraz later calculated that during the Jesup expedition he traveled about six thousand kilometers on dogs and swam several hundred kilometers in an Eskimo canoe.
Even in his youth, Bogoraz also became interested in literature. At first, in memory of his first name received before baptism, he signed his stories with the pseudonym N.A. Tan (that is, Nathan). Subsequently, the scientist published fictional works under the pseudonym Tan, and signed scientific works with his real name. Bogoraz’s first works written on Chukchi material were the stories “At the Camp” and “Bowlegged”. In 1899, the scientist published the first collection “Chukchi Stories” (although the year 1900 was indicated on the title page), which went through three editions in a short time. The book caused a huge resonance in the literary community. In a letter to V.S. Mirolyubov dated December 6, 1899 to A.P. Chekhov wrote from Yalta: “Tell Tan to send me his book. I hear and read a lot of good things about it, but there’s nowhere to buy it, and I’m ashamed to buy a book from a fellow countryman.” “Chukchi Stories” received a sympathetic response from V.G. Korolenko. In the magazine “Russian Wealth” (1900, No. 4) he noted: “...All this is original, unexpected, strange and, despite some dryness, length, repetition and excessive photographicity of the photographs, is captured in memory and gives a true picture of a peculiar unknown life. Let the ethnographer sometimes tie the artist too closely in Mr. Tan’s works. But the artist brings to life ethnographic descriptions, which in themselves would be interesting.”
However, prose appeared later, and first there were poems. They were first published as a separate collection in 1900. As the critic P.F. believed. Yakubovich, hiding behind the pseudonym L. Melshin, “Tan gives the main importance in poetry to feeling.” But feelings alone were not enough for good poetry. Therefore, the same Yakubovich-Melshin, in his “Essays on Russian Poetry” published in 1904, argued that Tan was “an unsuccessful poet.” Nevertheless, Tanov’s collection “Poems” went through four editions from 1900 to 1910. I will add that in 1905 Valery Bryusov spoke very sympathetically about this book in the magazine “Vesy”, but he, however, also signed a pseudonym - Pentaur.
In the fall of 1901, Bogoraz returned to St. Petersburg, where his “Essay on the material life of the reindeer Chukchi, compiled on the basis of the collection of N.L.” had already been published. Gondatti." As Professor A.N. believed Maksimov, this book by Bogoraz “represents a very large contribution to Russian ethnographic literature... it gives us for the first time a systematic and strictly scientific idea of ​​the Chukchi, about whom there was previously rather random scattered information in the literature...
The author’s personal acquaintance with the people described played an incomparably greater role than the study of other collections collected, and without it such a detailed and clear description as we have in this book would have been positively impossible... It would be more correct to say that the book was compiled primarily on the basis personal observations, and the collections of the Ethnographic Museum served for her only as material for illustrations” (“Ethnographic Review”, 1902, No. 2).
However, Bogoraz did not manage to stay in St. Petersburg for long. He again ran into departmental expulsion. There was nothing to do - the scientist went to New York. In America he spent processing Chukchi materials for three years. In 1904, Bogoraz published the first part of his monograph “Chukchi” in English. In total, four books were published in English between 1904 and 1910 (book 1, 1904 - about the material culture of the Chukchi; book 2, 1907 - religion; book 3, 1909 - about the social organization of the Chukchi; book 4, 1910 - about mythology). All four books made up the seventh volume of publications of the Jesup expedition. Translated into Russian, a book about social organization was published in Leningrad in 1934, a book about religion in 1939, and “Material Culture of the Chukchi” only in 1991.
In America, Bogoraz wrote a novel about the ancient life of the Far Northeast “Eight Tribes”, a novel “Over the Ocean” - about the life of Russian emigrants in America, a book of essays “Dukhobors in Canada” and a new cycle of stories about the North - “Paleolithic” - about primitive life peoples of the North-East before the Russians arrived there. All these things were highly appreciated by the critics of that time. True, each reviewer proceeded from the attitudes of certain political forces. Anatoly Lunacharsky, for example, when he praised the novel “Over the Ocean,” naturally, first of all focused on the writer’s sympathies for left-wing ideas. It seems that only academician A. Shakhmatov appreciated the artistic merits of Bogoraz. In May 1905, the academician wrote to Bogoraz: “You were so kind to send me four volumes of your works. I only recently had to read them. They gave me wonderful pleasure. But when I came to the novel “Eight Tribes,” I felt an irresistible desire to express to you all my complete admiration into which it brought me. The epic style of the story, the masterful presentation, the artistic images it evokes - all this is beyond my weak praise.”
Bogoraz lived in New York for two years. As the scientist wrote already in 1926, it is “in the midst of Japanese war returned to Europe, and from there to Russia. This happened just in time for the first zemstvo congress. Russia made a noise and got up in arms. Now the old were beating the new, as had been done from time immemorial; now the new were beating the old. I ran after them and others with a notebook. I traveled to the Volga and the steppe and to Siberia. He was a passionate newspaperman and feuilletonist. I even felt like an all-Russian art reporter. But he did not abandon his science, Chukchi-English. And so I became a two-faced, dual person. On the right side is Bogoraz, and on the left, illegal side, is Tan. There are people who can’t stand Tan, but are quite supportive of Bogoraz. There are also those, on the contrary, who feel a special inclination towards Tan, for example, the prosecutor and the police. From 1905 to 1917 I was brought to court in political and literary cases twenty times. And before that, there were administrative reprisals. I don’t know which is better and which is worse—judicial or administrative. It's getting worse.
In 1905, the revolution began. In January I ran into Gapon, became acquainted with Gapon’s workers, especially Kuzin, a teacher and mechanic, Gapon’s secretary. He was a man of crystal purity, he took in the education of the only son of the chairman Vasiliev, who was killed at the Narva Gate, when the three of them lay spread out in the snow - Gapon in the middle, Vasiliev on the left, Kuzin on the right.
Then there was Moscow October. October No. 1. I stood close to the central strike committee. Even closer to the first Peasant Union. I tried to see everything, find out. There was such insatiable greed, as if there was a sinkhole in the soul, in the depths - you grab fistfuls of boiling life, tear it into shreds and shove it into the depths. You fill the inner emptiness and cannot fill it. There’s no time to think about it—to write and give it to people. If you crumple it up, throw away a few scraps, there you go! And on to fishing, to new things, to new things. This must be because we had to go through three revolutions one after another. Bitter foam of revolution, salty, warm blood. And you won’t get drunk with it, you’ll just choke on it like sea foam. And the lips dry up, and the thirst becomes stronger and more persistent.
On November 14, 1905, five of us were arrested in the peasant union, the first after the constitution. The bailiff even threw up his hands and asked for an apology: “After all, the identity guarantee has not yet been approved.” Then they released us, then they imprisoned us again, etc.” (I quote from the reprint edition of the dictionary “Figures of the USSR and revolutionary movement Russia", M., 1989).

Bogoraz dedicated his stories “On the Road”, “Days of Freedom”, short stories, political pamphlets, poems, and essays to the revolution of 1905-1907. An interesting detail: in ten years, from 1906 to 1917, Bogoraz survived 22 (!) political trials. Few people know that he read the proofs of his next collected works illegally in 1910, while in prison.
Well, for me personally, it still remains a mystery when Bogoraz, busy with the struggle, found the time to write one of his best novels, “Victims of the Dragon,” first published in 1909 in the magazine “Modern World.” Critics then put this book on the same level as the novels of Jack London “Before Adam” and “The Fight for Fire” by Roney Sr. And Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences S. Obruchev already in 1929 argued that
Bogoraz “resulted in an extremely interesting reconstruction of the possible (or imaginary?) way of life, customs, and legends of primitive man” (“Print and Revolution”, 1929, No. 1).

When the First World War began, Bogoraz supported the Bolsheviks and volunteered to go to the front, where he was the head of a hospital train. In his letters addressed to friends, he wrote: “My reputation is this: before the war, I was a “mad Chukchi,” and now I am a “Bolshevik.” Naturally, the authorities continued to pursue the scientist. The Kerensky government also disliked him. As Bogoraz later recalled, he “managed to withstand the political process even under Kerensky, which was scheduled for consideration on October 22-23.”
Bogoraz perceived the October Revolution of 1917, to put it mildly, without enthusiasm. At that time, according to his autobiography of 1926, “he went through the whole philistine calvary of the hungry time: he lost his family, was left alone like a bog, and was correspondingly angry.”
In 1921, Bogoraz became a professor in the department of ethnography at the Petrograd Geographical Institute. In the life of a scientist began new stage. He developed a completely new concept of ethnographic education in the country. In his opinion, the field school was to play a decisive role in personnel training. Almost all of his students lived without fail for at least a year among the people they studied. Another indispensable rule for ethnographers under Bogoraz was knowledge of the language of the native speaker of the culture being studied. Already in 1930, a scientist wrote about this: “Language is not only a tool for communicating with the natives without the help of translators, often careless and ignorant, it leaves the best means for understanding the people themselves - an error-free and accurate means, because from every phrase, even from of each individual form, one can extract precious details related to production stages, social institutions and associated ideology” (“Collection in memory of L.Ya. Sternberg”, Leningrad, 1930).
In addition to theory, Bogoraz thought a lot about how the life of the peoples of the North should be built under new conditions. Back in 1922, in the magazine “Life of Nationalities,” he published an article “On Primitive Tribes,”
the subtitle of which speaks for itself: “Sketches for a project for organizing the management of primitive native tribes.” On March 27, 1923, at the board of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, he made a report “On the study and protection of marginal peoples.” The scientist urged not to reject the project of creating reservations out of hand. In his opinion, there has been a substitution of concepts, the word “reservation” began to be perceived extremely negatively in society, but few people understood the essence of this phenomenon. Bogoraz was the first ethnographer to support the idea of ​​​​creating a government Committee of the North and became a member of its first composition. But Bogoraz did especially a lot to form a higher education system for the peoples of the North in their native languages.
At the same time, Bogoraz himself for a long time remained “under the hood” of the new, Soviet intelligence services. Thus, the deputy chairman of the OGPU G. Yagoda in 1926 prepared a letter to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks addressed to V. Molotov, in which he asked, in order to “complete the defeat of the Ustralovsko-Lezhnevsky group of Smenovekhites, to carry out searches without arrests” of eight scientific and cultural figures, including V. Bogoraz, A. Bobrishchev-Pushkin and M. Bulgakov, and then “initiate an investigation, depending on the results of which, expel, if necessary,” these unwanted persons. Fortunately, Yagoda was refused.
In October 1928, only three scientists from Russia - V.G. Bogoraz, V.I. Jochelson and I.L. Strelnikov — received an invitation to the XXIII International Congress of Americanists. Despite the objections of the security officers, Bogoraz was allowed to go on a business trip. In five days - from October 17 to 22 - the scientist read more than thirty reports, which amazed the entire scientific world. This fact delighted even the American ethnographer, a skeptic about the life of F. Boas. All of America then recognized the greatness of the Soviet ethnographic school.
But Bogoraz’s literary successes were no longer so impressive. In 1928 he published the novel “The Union of the Young”. The writer tried to combine two layers in it: he remembered the youth of his generation, which passed in northern exile, and on these memories he superimposed pictures of Kolyma, transformed after the October coup. If you believe A. Bogomolov, who wrote the afterword for the reprint of this book that followed in 1963, the plot of the novel is simple. The exiled Socialist Revolutionary Vikenty Avilov, having arrived in Kolyma, settles in the winter quarters of Veselaya and meets the girl Duka (that’s how the Russian name Dunya sounded here). She becomes the mother of his son, named Vikesha after his father. But “the baton came from Yakutsk itself.” Avilov learns about the 1905 revolution. He leaves for Russia. The boy grew up. New things were entering the life of the northerners. New words began to sound. The son of an exile became a “Maxol” - this is how local residents remade the new word “Komsomol” in their own way. But to familiar places at the head of one of Vikenty Avilov is marching from the Pepelyaev detachments. This is not the former exile. Before us is the executioner and punisher Colonel Avilov. His squad leaves a terrible trail behind them. A gang of sadists and murderers comes to Kolymsk. This is where father and son meet. The younger Avilov remembered his deceased mother and the words that she repeated about his father: “Evil heart.” Hands are bloody, lethal." That's how the father turned out. In the last battle, the son kills his father... Bogoraz showed in his novel strong personality Avilova." But let's tell the truth: with artistic point From a perspective, the novel “The Union of the Young” turned out to be very weak.
Here, by the way, it will be interesting to find out how the author himself assessed his own literary works. When he published his next collected works in 1929 (in four volumes), it seemed very important for him to note the following thought in the preface: “My stories and novels are always unusually concise, filled with facts and, for their own purposes, short and narrow. These are rather detailed notes, condensed extracts that should be diluted with a honey sieve and just the water of psychology and allowed to ferment. But I never knew how to do this. I didn't have enough patience. Just piss - piss...”

This inability to create powerful artistic images was especially evident in Bogoraz's last novel, The Resurrected Tribe, which was first published in 1935. Here the unusual topic related to the history of the Yukaghir people did not help the writer, and folklore inserts did not save him. As L. Yakimova correctly noted, “the scattered vital material has become unruly, the author has found himself captive of complex stylistics.” Although I personally think that it’s not just a matter of style. The writer drove himself into a trap, captured by false illusions. He tore his hero away from his usual soil and decided for him that the true happiness of the Yukaghir taiga dweller lies in abandoning the centuries-old traditions of his native people and in joining the achievements of others, European civilization. At the same time, the novelist did not feel what a terrible psychological breakdown his hero had. The forcible imposition of unusual values ​​has never passed without leaving a trace on anyone.
In the last years of his life, Bogoraz maintained an amazing capacity for work. He compiled several textbooks, including “A primer for northern peoples” (1927) and a Chukchi primer “Red Letter” (1932), a Chukchi-Russian dictionary, books on Chukchi folklore, and published monographs “Einigein and Religion” (1923) and “Dissemination of Culture on Earth: Fundamentals of Ethnogeography" (1928), published "Materials on Lamut language" (1931), plus wrote two already mentioned novels about the North, "The Union of the Young" (1928) and "The Resurrected Tribe" (1935).
I will add that in 1932 the scientist organized a new institute in Leningrad - the Museum of the History of Religion. What kind of policy this museum pursued can be judged by one of the professor’s confessions. In my opinion, in 1930 he said: “Talking about our Orthodoxy or Christianity, of course, is ridiculous. It seems that I was born an atheist, grew up a pagan, and at present I am a militant atheist.” It was this position—militant atheism—that determined all the activities of Bogorazov’s last brainchild.
Naturally, Bogoraz was not right about everything. Thus, his article “Religion as a brake on socialist construction among the small nationalities of the North” (Soviet North, 1932, No. 1 - 2) brought a lot of harm. The authorities, somewhat based on this article, then exterminated almost all the shamans.
Although, in fairness, I note that Bogoraz himself rethought some things over time. So, cooking in 1934 Russian edition the first part of the monograph “Chukchi”, the scientist admitted that in many places his work was outdated. He wrote: “I could now change the very method of analysis. I, however, have chosen to print my main text without any changes as historical material written and published thirty years ago... In proceeding to revise all the material in my monograph from a new point of view, I must first of all note the empirical nature of my work. I tried to follow the facts and had some difficulty in making generalizations. For I must say in general that during my field work, and also after that, I treated with distrust all the theories of the development of primitive society that existed at that time. In this regard, at that time I was closer to Franz Boas, who still occupies the same exaggeratedly cautious, skeptical position in all ethnographic and sociological issues.”
Another thing is that these confessions were not enough for the authorities. Perhaps they seriously hoped to turn the old professor into a convinced Marxist. Fortunately, Bogoraz gave as many reasons for this as he wanted. In 1928, he published the book “The Spread of Culture on Earth. Fundamentals of Ethnography,” in which he crossed incompatible things: the anthropological ideas of F. Ratzel with the postulates of Marxist theory. I do not rule out that the scientist hoped that after this the authorities would accept him as one of their own and finally get rid of him. But everything turned out differently. Bogoraz was first to be “turned in” by his student Ya. Koshkin (Alcor), who publicly stated that the professor had never achieved any success on the Marxist front. Then V.B. attacked the former Narodnaya Volya member. Apothecary, S.A. Tokarev, N.M. Matorin and other influential scientists. It ended with Bogoraz’s colleagues, under the influence of the authorities, beginning to zealously deny the existence of ethnography as an independent science with its own theoretical base, inviting scientists to focus on studying only “socio-economic formations in their specific variants.”
But most of all, Bogoraz was finished off by Matorin’s instructive article in the journal “Soviet Ethnography”. In it, a very eminent scientist throughout the country declared that “sooner or later” “field ethnography”, located under the shadow of the Geographical Institute and giving off a strong scent of old-fashioned populism, must give up its position ... to victorious, effective Marxism everywhere.” , what immediately after this
Matorin’s attack was followed by a command to close the ethnographic department at the Faculty of Geography of Leningrad State University.
In short, by the beginning of the 1930s, Bogoraz was besieged from all sides. The professor began to lose his nerve. The last straw was the wave of arrests that took place in 1935 at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography, which was close to him. It is no coincidence that Bogoraz then hastened to send a letter to Boas in America, in which, indignant at the situation in the country, he admitted that he was seriously considering emigration.
Bogoraz died on May 10, 1936 on a train on the way from Leningrad to Rostov-on-Don. He was buried at the Volkovskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg.
After the death of the scientist, his large archive remained. In 1949, famous northern experts G.A. Menovshchikov and E.S. Rubtsov published a book by V.G. Bogoraz "Materials on the language of Asian Eskimos." In 1937 in Leningrad, under the editorship of Academician I.I. Meshchaninov published a collection of articles “In Memory of V.G. Bogoraz." In addition, books about Bogoraz were published by B.I. Kartashev “Through the Country of Reindeer People” (M., 1959), N.F. Kuleshova “V.G. Tan-Bogoraz: Life and Creativity" (Minsk, 1975), other works.

Bibliography:

Literature

1. Chukotka stories, 1899;
2. Poems, ed. S. Dorovatovsky and A. Charushnikov, St. Petersburg, 1900; ed. N. Glagoleva, St. Petersburg; ed. "Enlightenment", St. Petersburg, 1910;
3. Eight Tribes, 1902
4. Sacrifice of the Dragon, 1909;
5. Collected Works, ed. "Enlightenment", vol. I-XII, St. Petersburg, 1910-1911;
6. On Lake Loche, 1914
7. Collected Works, ed. "Land and Factory", vol. I-IV, M. - L., 1928-1929;
8. Union of the Young, Guise, M. - L., 1928; ed. ZiF, M. - L., 1930;
9. Northern hunting, ed. "Young Guard", M., 1931;
10. Kolyma stories, GIHL, M. - L., 1931;
11. USA, ed. "Federation", M., 1932; Ed. 2nd. - M.: Book house "LIBROKOM", 2011. -216 p.;
12. Resurrected tribe. Novel, Goslitizdat, M., 1935.

Language and Folklore

1. Works on language and folklore: Samples of materials on the study of the Chukchi language and folklore, “Izvestia Acad. Sciences", vol. 10, No. 3, St. Petersburg, 1899;
2. Materials on the study of the Chukchi language and folklore, ed. Academician Sciences, St. Petersburg, 1900;
3. Regional dictionary of the Kolyma Russian dialect, ed. Academician Sciences, St. Petersburg, 1901;
4. Materials for studying the language of Asian Eskimos, “Living Antiquity”, book. 70/71, Pb., 1909;
5. Materials on the Lamut language, in the book: Tunguska collection, I, ed. Academician Sciences of the USSR, Leningrad, 1931;
6. Chukchi. Social organization. Authorized translation from English. Part I. L., 1934;
7. Luoravetlan-Russian dictionary, State. educational and pedagogical publishing house, M. - L., 1937;
8. Chukchi. Religion. Authorized translation from English. Part II. L. 1939;
9. Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Leiden - N. Y., 1904, 1910;
10. The Chukchee, vol. 7; Chukchee Mythology, vol. 8, part I; Chukchee - Handbook of American Indian Languages, p. 2, Washington, 1922;
11. The Eskimo of Siberia; Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 8, part 3, Leiden - N. Y., 1913
12. Koryak texts. Bogoras, Waldemar Leyden: E. J. Brill; New York, G. E. Stechert, 1917.

Excerpt from the story by V. Tan-Bogoraz “On the Wolverine River”

When I emerged from the canopy the next morning, preparations for the run were in full swing. The chauns and cavalrymen have already arrived from their camps. The reindeer inhabitants were also fully assembled. Besides the Chukchi, about twenty Lamuts also showed up, not so much to take part in the competition, but in the vague hope of somehow snatching a piece of meat from the generosity or innocence of the owners.

Old people stood in groups near the tents, young people anxiously examined the hooves of the deer and the runners of the running sleds. Akomlyuka stood idly by his tent. Not relying on the speed of his team, he decided to refuse to participate in the race.

Sleep well, Vaip! - he greeted me. - Tyluvia must have softly laid it on you... Did you see it? - he added in a mysterious tone, coming closer.

How will I see? - I asked again. - However, I think it’s a woman!...

Well yes, woman! - the restless Amrilkut intervened. - There is an old woman here among the Cavralins, from the same land as them, she came at the same time - listen to what she says!... “I spent the night, she says,
last summer in the same canopy with them, and they lie open... So what is Yatirgin? - a child, not a man. But the real man is Tyluvia...”

The Chukchi laughed, but old Roltyirgin, with fear, persuaded them to speak more quietly.

She will still hear! - he nodded his head towards Tyluvia’s tent, as if the shaman could hear our conversation from there.

Akomlyuk called me aside.

You wouldn’t bet on the fight!...” he spoke in confusion. - Different people there are, from all lands... Thin people!... There may be a fight!...

It’s impossible not to put it!... - I answered. - All people know. They will pester you! Who are the skinny ones? - I asked not without a second thought. - Kergak?...

Empty! - he answered with displeasure. - I can throw my mind further than the white sea, let him live with the bears...

I smiled. The name Umki really means polar bear in Chukchi...

In my opinion, let it be! - Akomlyuka continued.
- Just tell Mitroshka not to fight! Even if they begin to pull at the skirts, even if I myself begin to call, let him strengthen himself!... Russian!... It’s bad!... There will be turmoil again!...

He was referring to the clash between Russians and Chukchi that took place in 1895 at the Anyui fair.

I promised to keep Mitrofan from participating in the fight. Etynkeu solemnly brought out a bunch of birch poles from behind his tent, drew a line in the snow, stuck a twig branch on the line and placed his stake next to it. I stuck the branch a little further and tied to it a large knife in a leather sheath, a rather crude product of Yakut blacksmithing. The third prize consisted of a seal skin and was supplied by Akomlyuka. The women lit a small fire near each stake and threw several grains of fat into the fire. The riders were already harnessing the reindeer. Tolin pulled himself up tightly and tucked the wide flaps of his cuckoo into his belt.

Wow! - he said, turning to us. - I’m still your fellow countryman, the only one on this land from the west. Wish me luck so that I get ahead. They are all against me, nosey and deer!... Wow, how I want to overtake!...

Kokoli-Yatirgin carefully equalized the length of the lines and tested the strength of the straps connecting the ends of the belt clamp.

There were about forty teams of teams that wanted to take part in the race. To the great joy of the young people, the nimble Kalyai brought out her team, wanting to compete with the men.

Ho-ho! - Akomlyuka shouted. - Important! Wants to chase bulls!

Kalai joked smartly as she tidied up the harness of her runners. Perhaps she wanted with her daring to win the love of her husband from her happy rival. He, however, was not at the camp. A few days ago he went to visit relatives who lived on the southern bank of the Sukhoi Anyuy, and has not yet returned.

As soon as all the reindeer were harnessed, the participants in the race, without any order, rushed forward, each from the place where his sled was located, and rushed along the road at a large trot, gradually leveling out and stretching out into a long line. Two minutes later they had all disappeared into the depths of the road, but a new sled rode out from the middle of the camp, arousing the general delight of the spectators. Ten-year-old Wanga, eldest daughter Etynkeu, having caught
the old important woman, calm as a cow, harnessed her to a half-broken storage sledge and, having loaded a whole bunch of children, rode out onto the road.

The important woman ran at a small trot, lowering her head and moving her legs lazily, but Wanga mercilessly pulled the reins and waved her long waist, which replaced a whip. She wanted at all costs to catch up with the older runners who had rushed forward.

Goto, goto, goto, goto! - Amrilkut whistled. - Here are the fastest ones coming! The best are at the back!

Several of the most respectable old men and women, in a fit of uncontrollable delight, rushed to the sledge and snatched up the children.

Love for small children is the brightest feature of Chukchi life and is often expressed in such violent outbursts.

The kids fought back with all their might.

Leave me alone! - they shouted. - We're in a hurry! Don't pester!...

The old men, however, did not listen and dragged them back to the camp.

Instead of running on reindeer, - said Amrilkut, - better fight!... Of course, such strong men do not want to stand idle!... Let them! - he pointed to two small pot-bellied boys, looking like self-propelled bundles of tattered fur rags.

The boys grappled immediately, without leaving the road, and very conscientiously began to drag each other over the potholes of the well-worn ruts.

Get, get, get!

Whoop, whoop!

Goto, goto, goto!

The spectators whistled and stamped their feet, more carried away by this puppet wrestling than by the serious competition of adult wrestlers.

They're coming, they're coming! - shouted the other older boys, who ran forward to be the first to see the return of the competitors.

The spectators began to look into the distance in bewilderment. On a narrow strip of road that ran into the depths of the river valley, two tiny clouds of snow dust actually appeared, quickly approaching the camp.

We didn't run much! - Roltyirgin said in a dissatisfied tone. - The bet is big, we must run further!

The restless Amrilkut tried to climb onto a huge pile of frozen skins dumped near the last tent, but it immediately crawled away under his feet and for a minute completely obscured the approaching riders from his eyes. They rushed at full speed, forcing the deer to strain their last strength. Lumps of snow kept flying from under their hooves. The small, light sleds bounced convulsively on every bump.

Look in vain,” Akomlyuka suddenly said. - These are not the front ones!

How do you know? - I asked in surprise.

Do you think the front deer throw their legs back like that? - he retorted sarcastically. - These are some lame people, they must have returned halfway!...

Indeed, when a few minutes later the sledges galloped up to the camp, the riders, embarrassed, began to unharness the reindeer on the sidelines, without touching the stake.

The real front sledges appeared almost half an hour later. This time, only one cloud appeared in the depths of the road, which rushed with amazing speed, much faster than the two sledges that had arrived earlier.

Amrilkut climbed onto his skins again.

Two sledges! - he said confidently. - Tolin and Kokoli, there is no one else.

The cloud actually split in two, and the back half gradually began to lag behind the front. Behind, at the very edge of the horizon, a long strip of snow dust appeared, lying low to the ground and also quickly rolling towards the camp. Five minutes later the entire train was in sight. Tolin and Kokoli-Yatirgin really galloped at the head of the competitors. Tolin was ahead of everyone: his tall, lean reindeer stretched out like greyhounds and threw his long legs so far that his hind hooves almost hit his front ones. The rider sat huddled and just patted the reins. Tolin was most proud of the fact that his deer did not need blows from the whip. Kokoli-Yatirgin, who was twenty meters behind him, on the contrary, showered the deer with merciless blows from a sharp bone tip.
His deer had obviously reached the highest speed of running and did not have the strength to speed up their movement.

A wide smile spread across Amrikult's face. Tolin was married to his niece and, coming to Wolverine, lived at his camp.

Give it up, Tolin! - he shouted and, not hoping that his words would be heard, he pulled his wide fox hair from his head and excitedly waved it in the air.

Tolin cast a quick glance towards the spectators and, standing up on the runners, raised the whip. His deer rushed forward and left Kokoli-Yatirgin a few more meters away. His victory was assured. There were no more than sixty or eighty meters left until the end of the run. Suddenly the left deer awkwardly shifted its front legs in the air and suddenly stuck its nose into the snow. Tolin swung his whip and this time hit the deer with such force that blood sprayed from under the tip. The deer made an effort to rush forward, but instead began to lean to the side and finally fell onto the snow, dragging with it another deer, connected to it by a common short bridle.

Tolin twitched the reins again, then wanted to jump off the sledge and finish the competition on foot, but it was too late. Kokoli-Yatirgin managed to grab the main stake, and from behind, like a storm, a chaotic line of running sleds flew in.

Wow! - Tolin moaned pitifully, hitting his thighs with his hands, and walked to the side, not even bothering to unharness his runners, who were entangled in the harness and struggling in the snow.

However, two or three teenagers immediately jumped up to his sledge and, carefully unraveling the harness, unharnessed the reindeer and led them to the tethering point. The left deer rose to its feet and now, as if nothing had happened, walked through the snow after the boy holding the bridle in his hand.

Amrilkut, who was standing next to me, frowned.

Look,” he told me mysteriously, pointing to the retreating deer. - It's definitely let down! The deer were not tired at all. Without witchcraft, will the deer fall before the end of the run? Someone's malicious intent, secret words!...

I listened to him without surprise, because I knew the place of all kinds of conspiracies and enchantments in Chukchi life.

Amrilkut's attention was immediately diverted in another direction. Running participants continued to arrive either in groups or individually, trying to show off the speed of their teams until the last minute. Those riding together tried so hard to overtake each other, as if not a single bet had yet been taken. To the great consolation of all the spectators, Kalyai returned among the very first and, flying up to the camp, quickly jumped off the sled, sharply besieging the reindeer. Her ugly face flared up from the cold and movement and seemed to be transformed; she seemed younger and fresher now; her nimble figure in clothes made of disheveled red fur flashed around the camp, appearing in one place or another. The rear ones returned at a pace on exhausted deer, barely moving their legs. Others rode on one deer, and led the other on a leash from behind. Yetinkau, boastfully intending to seize his own headquarters, arrived twentieth. The only Lamut who dared to enter into competition with the Chukchi arrived at the tail of the riders and hurried away to the side, avoiding ridicule.

Kalyun, the most daring of the Chaun farmers, whose deer took more than one prize in various races from Chaun to Kolyma, was the last to return. He was leading three or four deer on a long leash. They were the sticky ones, abandoned along the road by various riders, in the care of the one who would ride behind everyone.

Ooh! - the Chukchi laughed, looking at this train. - The leader of the nomad is coming! Friend, where is your nomadic caravan?

A nomadic caravan usually moves at a walk.

Close! - Kalyun joked. - Yes, and the herd is right there. So, is there any moss? Your hooves have trampled all the moss!...

What to do? The deer have arrived,” he later explained to the audience. - I just arrived from Chaun the day before!...

The young guys who were going to compete in the foot race had long been burning with impatience. Small and inconspicuous Kelekkak, a poor relative of Akomlkzhi, who lived as a shepherd with his flocks, ran up to me with a worried look.

If you want to bet, then bet! - he spoke bluntly. - Young people want to run away. You see, the sun has crossed the top of the sky. There's still a lot of work to do until the evening!...

I told one of my companions to get the promised bet.

Just put more! - Kelekkak said. - We'll run far! It's a pity for our legs with a small bet!

Why do you care? - I objected jokingly. -Will you take it? Your legs are kind of short!...

Keep it short! - Kelekkak objected confidently. - I'll take it anyway! Place your bet! Slow down!...

The bet received approval from all those present. It consisted of half a brick of tea and a puff of leaf tobacco, which at South Siberian prices was worth a little more than fifty dollars, but it cost me at least two rubles, and for the surrounding residents it was the exchange price of two young deer. Kelekkak and his comrades immediately began to prepare to run. They took off their shoes and outer dress and left only their underwear, made of thin and soft skins, and thin fur stockings, worn with wool inside, running under trousers and tightly tied with laces around the ankle. In their hands, each had a short and strong staff with a wide horn tip, in order to support themselves while running. There were about twelve people in total running. Most of them grouped around the headquarters, not caring at all about aligning themselves in a line, and only waiting for the last ones to finish changing their clothes. Akomluk's thick figure stood out noticeably among the others.

He did not take off his cuckoo and only tightened his belt around his waist and stood motionless, leaning on his staff, leaning forward and ready to take off at any moment. Three young Lamut boys who also wanted to take part in the competition, skinny and short, with legs like matchsticks, looked like pygmies next to him.

Like spring calves near the elk! - the Chukchi said smugly, looking at the group of young people. The old Lamuts standing in the crowd only agreed. They were too afraid of the Chukchi and dependent on them to defend their national dignity before them. Even the sedate Pavelka Pavel (Pavel Filippov), a corporal of the Balaganchikov family, considered it his duty to note in broken Chukchi:

Lamuts are weaker, Lamuts eat little! There's never any food - that's why!...

As soon as the last of those who had changed their clothes rose from the ground, the whole group rushed in all directions, pushing and overtaking each other, but still, apparently, trying to save their strength for the further part of the competition. Due to the importance of the stake, the run was expected to be long. “Until we get exhausted! Until the marrow shrinks in the bones!” - the guys said. The decisive factor, of course, was to belong to the reverse half of the journey, towards the camp.

The spectators stood without leaving and looked after those who were running away. I began to look for Tolin with my eyes. They stood with Amrilkut aside and talked animatedly about something. I came over to listen.

“I’m telling you again,” Amrilkut insisted, “don’t chase the prize!” Their minds are all against you! They'll spoil you too, yes!... If you can't help but compete, stay behind, come third or fourth!... Let others have fun!...

Tolin stubbornly shook his long earrings.

Tell him, Vaip! - Amrilkut turned to me with a sad look. - He loves Russians, maybe he’ll listen to you!...

How am I going to stay behind?... - Tolin grumbled. - People want to overtake, and I will stop the deer?... Let them do magic! We will find inspiration too!...

To my surprise, Enmuvia, who yesterday so persistently pursued Mitrofan, did not run with the others.

What are you doing? - Selivanov addressed him mockingly. - And they say he’s an easy person!

Enmuvia looked at him sadly.

Bad! - he said with a sigh. - I've been sick since the morning. I didn't drink tea well. I didn't eat any food. Now my whole body is shaking!...

Why did you get sick? - Selivanov asked.

Who knows? - Enmuvia answered evasively. - There are too many people with a strong heart, men and women!...

See! - Selivanov said indignantly, understanding the hint and turning to me this time. - They are the only ones smart enough to spoil each other. Just now it was Tolin’s deer, and now it has come to people!...

Kalai looked for me in the crowd.

Friend! - she said pleadingly. - You promised to supply women too. Deliver it soon! I can't wait. The legs themselves just run away. Please put it on! Let one of us please his soul and take the Russian bid!

I have also placed a bet for women. They turned out to be much more reckless than the men and rushed forward in a crowd, not even giving themselves time to undress and somehow untying their frills as they ran and pulling their furry outer caps over their heads. Fat Viskat did not fail to get entangled in her own dragging trouser leg and immediately stuck her face in the snow near the camp, causing laughter and free jokes from the audience. Together with the older girls and young women, young girls also ran, who could not have any hope of reaching even half the race. Little Wanga also hobbled behind everyone on her short legs. After a quarter of an hour, the women, in turn, disappeared from sight, melting into the sparkling snowy whiteness of the river valley. It took a long time to wait for both parties to return, because running on foot, of course, is much slower than running like a reindeer.

Yetinkau looked around. Akomlyuki and Umka were not there. All those people whose collision could be dangerous were among the participants in the run. A wise plan was suddenly born in his head.

If you fight, he said loudly,
- we must start now. Evening is approaching. When will we finish? “Whoever wants to fight, let him run to warm himself,” he concluded, taking on the role of the owner. - Give me a bet!...

About thirty of those present, all of whom were younger, ran in a crowd along the common road. This was already the third batch of competitors. Etynkeu, having found a more level place, carefully trampled the snow with his feet and removed the branches and chips. The people who ran to warm themselves also disappeared from view, but instead of them several moving dots appeared on the horizon, which, of course, should have belonged to the women's party. The run of the young boys had to extend much further, and it was too early for them to appear in the field of view.

The women gradually approached the camp. They stretched out in a long line with huge intervals and, apparently, were exhausted from fatigue. All their strength went into the swiftness of the initial impulse. Most of them were no longer thinking about the headquarters, but about somehow getting to the camp. Others lay face down on the snow and lay motionless, waiting for those behind to come up. Only Kalyai and another young girl, about eighteen years old, flushed like fire and with her shoulders and chest hanging out of the wide sleeves of her bodice, still had the strength to run. Kalyai, however, managed to get there first and, grabbing the tea and tobacco that were at the headquarters in both hands, exhaustedly sank to the ground. Her face turned blue from tension; the disheveled braids were covered with a thick layer of shaggy frost; on the eyebrows, on the eyelashes - there was a white coating everywhere. She wanted to say something, but could not utter a word and only breathed loudly and quickly, like a driven horse. The girl who came running from behind, with annoyance, pulled her bodice even lower and fell backwards into a snowdrift of loose snow.
snow.

People who had fled to warm themselves before the fight also returned. When they reached the place of the fight, they formed a wide circle along with ordinary spectators. Kalyuun, famous for his skill in wrestling, came to the middle and pulled off his steamed cuckoo, exposing himself to the waist. His beautiful white torso with prominent muscles on the chest and arms was somehow strangely separated from the clumsy fur pants, sewn according to the usual Chukchi cut and therefore lacking a belt and stubbornly moving down.

His neck was decorated with a necklace made of a double row of large multi-colored glass beads.

Well, who wants? - he said, squatting down and rubbing snow on his shoulders and chest to cause a rush of blood to his skin, protecting him from the cold. A lanky young cavalryman stepped out of the ranks and also took off his cuckoo, preparing to fight. He had a limp in his left leg, which prevented him from taking part in the race, but he wanted to make up for it.

Where are you going, Ichen? - the audience stopped him. - Kalyun will break something for you!

But Ichen did not pay attention to the persuasion and stood in a fighting position, bending his torso forward, spreading his legs slightly and trying to firmly plant the slippery soles of his boots on the snow. The fight has begun.

The opponents attacked each other one by one. One stood passively, and the other attacked, trying to knock him down or at least drag him from his place. They indiscriminately grabbed each other by the chest, by the skin on the back of the neck, by the sides, everywhere they could dig in with strong fingers and even nails. Two pairs of hands continuously fell on the wet body and bounced off with a clapping sound, similar to the blows of a roller on wet linen. The wrestlers fell to the ground, rolled over each other, dragged each other in the wet snow and, jumping up, dispersed, squatted at opposite ends of the arena, rubbed themselves with snow and again stood in position to resume the fight. Finally, Kalyun slammed Itchen so hard on the hard-packed snow that he, getting up, began to rub his shoulders in embarrassment and stepped aside, admitting himself defeated.

Having defeated another opponent, Kalyun also joined the ranks in order to take a break. He retained the right to engage in single combat with last winner, in order to test who will be the strongest. New fighters entered the arena, but for some reason the fight did not flare up. The Chukchi, apparently, were afraid to get carried away, knowing very well that with such heterogeneous rivals as there were here, at the first serious skirmish the struggle could turn into a fist fight and end in an unexpected massacre. When about ten people were already in the arena, the cry of teenagers was finally heard, running back and forth across the camp:

The struggle immediately stopped: it was much more interesting to watch the competition of those running. The stake was divided between Kalyun and another black, squat Chukchi, who also knocked down two people.

A few minutes later, those running were already approaching the camp. Kelekkak was indeed ahead of everyone. Despite the ten-kilometer distance remaining behind him, he ran easily, with rare and large leaps, each time throwing his staff forward and trying to step as far as possible with his outstretched toe.

Runs well! - the experts decided. - Real deer legs.

About twenty paces behind Kelekkak, Akomlyuka and one of the young Lamuts were running next to him. Lamut constantly ran forward, but Akomluka again made an effort and overtook him, running from the side of the road and trying to push him into the snow. Others were so far behind that they could barely be seen. Little by little, Lamut and Akomluka began to approach Kelekkak. The distance between them decreased to ten steps, then became even smaller. For one minute it seemed that one of the back pair would snatch the palm of victory from the front runner. But Kelekkak rushed forward with new energy and again left his rivals behind. With several wide leaps he reached his goal and grabbed the prize. His hair, eyebrows and sparse mustache were also covered with frost, but he, apparently, was not very tired.

How can they compete with me? - he said proudly. “I’ve been used to it since I was a child: I run after the herd for days without ever sitting down; I don’t know what a canopy is.

Akomlyuka, exhausted, sank onto the sledge, which stood at the boundary line.

If it weren’t for my illness,” he said, having difficulty pronouncing the words from fatigue, “we would still have competed.” The evil spirit has deprived me of my strength. Everyone knows this!

Akomlyuk indeed recently recovered from his illness.

Do you want it? - Kelekkak said in a defiant tone, in the rapture of victory, apparently having forgotten his dependent position. - If you want, we’ll run again! I'm ready to run as much more!

Those remaining behind ran up one after another. My new friend Yatirgin, despite being tired, immediately inquired about the rate for the wrestlers and was very unpleasantly surprised to learn that the fight was already over.

Why did they do this? - he grumbled loudly.
- Sorry for tobacco! Aren't we people who didn't want to wait for us?

However, his grumbling remained without consequences. The sun was quickly descending to the western slope of the horizon, and there was no time left for a secondary competition.

Young teenagers who did not take part in the running, not wanting to lag behind their elders, started a jumping competition, erecting improvised barriers and obstacles from poles and broken sleds. They jumped without spreading their legs, with their toes tightly folded, trying to give themselves lightness with several successive jumps and make the final, decisive jump as far as possible. The clumsy one usually landed with his feet in the middle of a pile of wooden fragments and suffered rather sensitive bruises. The guys, having rested a little, began to jump back and forth with such enthusiasm, as if none of them had participated in a recent run. Each new jumper tried to surpass his predecessor; the limit line of the jump moved further and further. The winner, however, was not Kelekkak and none of the Chukchi guys,
and a rather elderly Lamut with an ugly face and legs twisted from constantly sitting on a deer ridge. His soles seemed to be made of rubber; he was easily carried over all barriers, and every trace left by his feet in the snow after the ultimate jump was an unattainable goal for all Chukchi jumpers.

The boys lagged behind the adults and, having tied a long belt with a strap at the end to the top of a tree, ran in a circle, amusing themselves with “giant steps.” Several young women gathered at the other end of the camp and started a kind of game, which immediately attracted the attention of all men, young and old.

Three pairs of the most lively women stood opposite each other and began the so-called “throat-wheezing,” which replaces choral singing among the Chukchi and serves as an introduction to dancing. They emitted strange guttural sounds that were completely indescribable, producing them in a continuous succession of short and jerky inhalations and exhalations. It seemed as if the original singers were trying with all their might to keep their voices in the very depths of their throats and every sound that did come out was trying to be swallowed again and returned back. Through this strange wheezing it was difficult to catch the words of the chorus:

A one-eyed old man and a young girl competed in throat-wheezing... Ahai, a-hai, a-hai!...

Until the old man's last eye popped out of his forehead...

A-hai, a-hai, a-hai! A-hai, a-hai, ahai!

Gunya wai, gunya wai! - the singers began a drawn-out recitative.

We have become boneless!

The usual dance began, which consisted of a rather absurd marking time and was diversified by interstitial facial episodes of a naively shameless nature, which I find it difficult to describe. The boys also took part in the dance, and one in particular aroused everyone's delight with the expressive flexibility of his figure and the mobility of his lower back.

After the dance, the women began a number of different games. Some jumped over the rope, swaying from foot to foot, flapping their fur sleeves in time with the jumps and touching their trouser legs each time. Others launched into launches “on four bones,” firmly pressing the toes of their feet into the ground and the fists of their straightened arms, which were supposed to remain unbent all the time. Still others jumped back and forth, huddled in a ball and clutching the toes of their boots with their hands, which, given the massiveness of the fur clothes, required considerable dexterity. The fourth, finally, simply crawled on their bellies, legs stretched out, folded together, resting their elbows on the ground and strikingly resembling crawling seals; they really meant to imitate seals.

Akomlyuka showed a very keen interest in women's games and showered the participants with noisy exclamations of approval. To the most lively he expressed his sympathy even more clearly and used his Long hands, What
earned him quite a hefty push in the chest from Kalya.

Why are you standing like a tree? - He said cheerfully to Yatirgin. - And you won’t hug such daring girls?

Yatirgin just looked at him and did not answer a word. The long figure of Tyluvia, like a silent memento mori, was visible at the entrance to the last tent. She had built a large fire and was putting pieces of meat into the smoked cauldron, preparing to hang it on a hook.

Well, let's at least fight! - Akomlyuka suggested. - Why do you need to stand around doing nothing?

Yatirgin immediately agreed. Despite his frail appearance, he was considered one of the strongest wrestlers in Kichetun, Enurmin and Nathan - three coastal villages located nearby.

They grappled without removing their sashes and began to stomp around, trying to more skillfully pull the enemy towards them. Akomlyuk attacked, and Yatirgin, in accordance with the customs of the struggle, had to limit himself to only passive resistance. Suddenly, noticing that Akomlyuk had leaned too far forward, he jumped back strongly and pulled his opponent’s shoulders, who immediately stretched out to his full length, hitting his face on the snow.

This is against custom! - he shouted, jumping to his feet. - It's not your turn! Now I won’t jerk you like that yet!

But the lanky Enmuvia held his hands. He had managed to recover in the morning and was now eager to try his strength.

I will be! - he said impatiently. - You later!

Willy-nilly, Akomluk was forced to give way to a new contender.

A struggle began between the little horseman and the lanky reindeer herder, who was one and a half heads taller than his opponent, and lasted for a very long time without any decisive advantage in one direction or the other. Enmuvia twice lifted Yatirgin high in his huge embrace and threw him far to the side, completely backhanded, but both times Yatirgin fell to his feet like a cat. On the other hand, all the tricks invented
Chukchi struggle and alternately launched by Yatirgin, turned out to be powerless to knock down a huge representative of the reindeer people.

Akomlyuka never wanted to calm down.

My turn! - he shouted. - Stop it, Enmuvia! Let me try!

The hefty Umka, whose figure really resembled a polar bear and, to complete the resemblance, was dressed from head to toe in white fur, stepped forward and impatiently began to untie his belt.

If you want, then let's dance with me! - he said with a cruel smile on his quadrangular, brick-purple face with a large nose and massive jaws.

Akomlyuk was confused for a minute, but the old men who were among the spectators unanimously protested against the fight.

Enough! - Amrilkut shouted. - Stop it for the night! The people are cold, they need to go into the canopy, the women are already brewing tea. So the sun enters its tent!

The sun really went down. A fire was lit at each tent, and the women fussily ran from the fire to the tent and back, preparing dinner and lodging for the night. All the curtains had already been put in place. The frost was even stronger than yesterday. The young girls were freezing and every now and then they jumped into the thick stream of smoke stretching from the fire in the direction of the wind in order to somewhat warm their half-naked shoulders. My companions have long been huddled in the canopy, although in the newly erected Chukchi canopy, until it is warmed up by the steam of the kettle and the breath of the shelters, it is perhaps even colder than in the yard. Tyluvia lit a lamp in her stone lamp, intending to bring it into the canopy. I thought it best to follow her.

Bogoraz Vladimir Germanovich, pseudonyms - Tan, N. A. Tan, V. G. Tan (15(27).IV.1865, Ovruch, Volyn province - 10.V.1936, died on the way to Rostov-on-Don, buried in Leningrad) - prose writer, poet, ethnographer, folklorist. Public figure. Born into a poor Jewish family. After graduating from the Taganrog gymnasium in 1880, he entered St. Petersburg University. He studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, and from 1881 at the Faculty of Law. From the end of 1880 he worked in revolutionary populist circles. In the fall of 1882, for participating in student unrest, he was exiled to Taganrog, where, having organized a revolutionary circle, he conducted propaganda among the workers. After the defeat of the circle Bogoraz was arrested and spent 11 months in prison. Upon release, B. lived illegally. In 1885 he became one of the founders of the Narodnaya Volya organization in Yekaterinoslav, worked in the underground printing houses of the People's Will in Novocherkassk, Taganrog, Tula and Moscow. In December 1886 he was arrested again and spent 3 years in prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress. In 1889 he was exiled to Sredne-Kolymsk for 10 years. Having become a resident of the “Kolyma Republic,” as the exiles called their commune, Bogoraz began studying the local region and recording the Russian folklore of Kolyma. From 1895 to 1897, on behalf of the Geographical Society, he wandered along the tundra with the Chukchi, getting acquainted with their way of life, customs, and beliefs.

Chukchi with a sailor of the ship "Robber"

Bogoraz considered the study of northern peoples, primitive and half-exterminated, a “social task of the era”, a continuation of his social activities. Life in the Chukchi camps gave him not only a lot of ethnographic material, which he later summarized in his scientific works, but also encouraged him to literary work . Bogoraz, a prose writer, made his debut in 1896 with a story-essay from the life of the Chukchi “Bowlegged”, which V. G. Korolenko published in the magazine “Russian Wealth”. In the same year, his first “Kolyma” poems were published. Bogoraz was guided by the literary experience of Korolenko, considering him the head of the “Siberian school of prose writers,” and immediately declared himself as a writer-ethnographer. In the “Chukchi” stories, he sought to accurately convey the life and customs of the Chukchi, without idealizing the “savages”, without chasing the exoticism of the “primitive”. Bogoraz portrays a little-studied people from the perspective of a humanist, pays tribute to the tenacity of the Chukchi in the fight against harsh nature, their sincerity and directness, appreciates the poetry of their beliefs, but does not hide the barbaric savagery of rituals, poverty, and tribal discord. In 1898, at the request of the Academy of Sciences, he received permission to return to St. Petersburg, where until 1899 he worked at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and collaborated in the legal Marxist magazines Nachalo and Life. Bogoraz’s first book of prose, “Chukchi Stories,” was published in 1899, and in 1900, the poetry collection “Poems.” In 1899, B. went to New York, from there he again went to Siberia, studying the ethnography and languages ​​of the peoples of Kamchatka and Chukotka. After the end of the expedition he lived in America, in 1902 - 1903. processes expedition materials, writes a new series of stories about the North, the novel “Eight Tribes” about the primitive life of the peoples of north-east Siberia, the novel “Over the Ocean”, dedicated to the fate of Russian emigrants in America, a book of essays “Dukhobors in Canada”. Remaining an ethnographic writer, Bogoraz. in the novel "Eight Tribes" for the first time he widely uses folklore material and creates legendary epic images. Returning to Russia in 1904, B. participated in the social struggle and acted a lot as a publicist. In 1905, he was one of the organizers of the Peasant Union, published articles and poems in the Bolshevik newspapers Barracks and Voice of the Soldier. However, B.'s worldview and political position were not clear; he leaned toward populist liberalism and became one of the founders of the People's Socialist Party. The events of the first Russian revolution were reflected in Bogoraz's story "Days of Freedom", in allegorical stories and sharp political pamphlets. In 1905 - 1906 he created the best poems: “The Death Song”, “The Tsar’s Guests”, “Tsushima”, etc. As in the lyrics of the 90s - the beginning of the year, Bogoraz called in them to fight against tsarism, sang the praises of those who died for the revolution. Despite the artistic imperfection, B.'s political poems played the role of outstanding propaganda materials and were widely popular. But Bogoraz, the prose writer, failed to create a coherent artistic image of the revolution, to reveal its heroism and drama. "Days of Freedom" is interesting primarily as a documentary eyewitness account of the events of the Moscow uprising. During the years of reaction, B. did not give up the political struggle, and was repeatedly put on trial for his political beliefs. In 1910 he was sentenced to prison, but was released a few months later due to illness. Bogoraz’s political speeches of those years did not have tangible goals; he lived by rebellion for the sake of rebellion, and this was reflected in its own way in his last pre-October works. Their heroes are loners, full of noble motives and passion for struggle, but their rebellion is doomed, because it is not supported by social necessity.

To create images of fighters against “world evil,” Bogoraz continued to widely use the legends and myths of the peoples of the North. In the novel “Victims of the Dragon” (1909), the young man Yarriy goes out to fight the dragon - the symbol of earthly evil. The science fiction novel “Conquest of the World” (1909) shows a revolt of young “cosmists” who decided to blow up the Earth, a society of “well-fed vulgarity,” and fly into space. Rebellion, according to Bogoraz, is the companion of youth, although rebels are fatally doomed to defeat. This is the meaning of the story “The Winged Icarus” (1914), which uses the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. During the First World War, B. was captured by chauvinistic frenzy. Having gone to the front as part of an ambulance train, he published jingoistic correspondence in newspapers. The October Revolution was not immediately understood and accepted. Only in 1925 - 1926, having experienced a severe ideological crisis, Bogoraz overcame the mood of the “cowardly man in the street”, which, in his own words, took possession of him after the October Revolution. After the revolution, Bogoraz continued his activities as an ethnographer, publisher of folklore of northern peoples, and linguist. Published the novels "The Union of the Young" (1927) and "The Resurrected Tribe" (1935). He explained to students the importance of field work, declaring from the first lecture that “only someone who is not afraid to feed a pound of blood to lice can become an ethnographer,” tries in vain to combine the impossible - Marxist ideology and the principles of the American anthropological school, and still naively declares himself a “Komsomol member,” only those who comprehend the science of Marxism. But the era of relative liberalism is already over. At the end of the 20s, after emigration Yochelson and the death of Sternberg, Bogoraz remains the last of the Russian ethnographers of the old school. And after the resolution adopted in 1929 at a meeting of ethnographers from Moscow and Leningrad, which denied the existence of ethnography as an independent science and made “socio-economic formations” the subject of research, there could be no talk of full-fledged scientific work. In one of his last letters to Boas, the old scientist admits that he is thinking about emigrating. But life decreed otherwise: on May 10, 1936, he died suddenly - as he had lived, on the road, remaining, according to contemporaries, the same rebellious “wild Chukchi.”

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V.G. Bogoraz about himself

Tan-Bogoraz, Vladimir Germanovich Tan-Bogoraz, Vladimir Germanovich Tan-Bogoraz V. G.

(1865-1936). In 1924, he was the initiator of the creation and then one of the leaders of the Committee for Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern Outskirts under the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. The autobiography was written on May 20, 1926 in Leningrad.] - I was born in April 1865, I don’t know the exact day, perhaps the 15th, in a small town. Ovruch, in the wilderness of Volyn Polesie. According to my papers, however, it was stated that I was born in Mariupol in 1862. This happened because, being 7 years old, I began to pester my father so that they would send me to a gymnasium, since it seemed that I could not read. I learned it the same time I started walking. Then I learned arithmetic. We lived in Taganrog, my father went to Mariupol and brought a metric certificate of a suitable nature. My mother was from a merchant family from the city of Bar, Podolsk province. And my father was from a rabbinical family. He himself, in the fluctuations of his unfaithful fortune, was a “dain” in the city of Tiflis - a learned expert, of course, a scholar of Jewish rites. However, in appearance he did not look like a scientist. He was a man of enormous stature and strength, his figure was very similar to the great Peter, as he is depicted in portraits, unlike most Jews he could drink an infinite amount, but he never got drunk. And when he gets going and wants to show his prowess, he will go up to the horse and lift it by the front legs. And my mother was small, nimble, and nimble. And from such a mixture of extremes, we children all came out somehow neither two nor one and a half. There were 8 of us, now there are only five left alive.

My father had excellent abilities and a wonderful memory. He knew the Bible and his Talmudic books by heart - “on the edge of an awl” - this means this: you need to take a sharp awl and pierce an open book with pages fifty deep, and then indicate by heart exactly which places and phrases were pierced. He was also very musical, sang in a pleasant tenor and in difficult moments In his subsequent career, he repeatedly served in synagogues as a chazan - a singer. In addition, he had a certain inclination towards literature, and he wrote quite a lot in Hebrew and Modern Hebrew and even published something. We, his children, inherited these talents in parts, in pieces. Little sisters studied at the conservatory and tried to become a singer. However, at the end of the course, as my father laughed, they quit the course and opened a home factory for making children, that is, they simply got married. And I inherited a taste for literature. As for memory, my father endowed us all with it equally. Father and mother married early. There were three of us children, and my father had just turned 20 years old. They lived in this remote town both poorly and boringly. Without thinking twice, my father decided to go to Novorossiya, where it was easy to get a job at that time. I traveled part of the road with convoys, and part of it I simply walked. And so I found myself in Taganrog, two thousand miles from my native Ovruch. A year and a half later, the family also moved. At that time, Taganrog was a fat city. On the one hand, the export of excellent wheat, and on the other hand, the import of huge amounts of contraband, organized by Vagliano, a Greek merchant, directly through customs, with the participation of customs authorities. My father tried many careers - he traded in wheat and coal, and also participated in the smuggling enterprise of Vagliano and Co. But he didn’t hold on to the money - he was a gambling gambler - whatever he earned, he’d lose it. Otherwise, he will buy large mirrors, gilded furniture, and after another six months, lo and behold, he doesn’t even have fifty dollars to go to the market. However, at that time life in Taganrog was both cheap and satisfying. So we never went hungry. Besides, we children started giving lessons early. I started giving lessons from the 3rd grade, i.e. from the age of 10. My students were big “Grekos-Pendos”. Also Kurkuli Cossacks, Armenians, Karaites. Another big guy will get angry, grab the teacher by the collar and lift her into the air. I, however, fought back fiercely - kicking and biting. The morals in Taganrog were steppe - harsh. We, high school students, fought brutally with the district officers, fought with fists, went wall to wall. They called us “drishpaki”: a terrible word, what it actually means was unknown, but that’s even worse. I learned easily. Firstly, it took away the memory, and secondly, the gymnasium was liberal - they demanded little, and they knew even less. True, then we were appointed director of the fat German Edmund Adolfovich Reitlinger. We called him diminutively: Mudya. He was a Russian patriot, as inveterate as only Russian Germans were at that time. But we didn’t see any particular offense from him. Let's say the inspector was Nikolai Fedorovich Dyakonov - the same devil who Chekhov later described as a "man in a case." And for another teacher, the Czech Urban, we blew up the apartment and planted a bomb under his porch. This was already in the eighties. We made the bomb from a lamp ball, a copper one with threads, and the filling was made from soldier's gunpowder. Nothing, half the house was destroyed. No one was injured. Only Urban was scared almost to death. If anyone asks why we blew up the Czech, I can explain that the Latin and Greek Czech teachers ate into the gymnasium liver worse than the eagle did to Prometheus. This breed was once described by Boborykin in his story “Pan Tsybulka”. That's when the Czecho-Slovak dominance began in Russia. Where and how did the seeds of revolution come to this steppe gymnasium?

There were young teachers who were not very reliable, for example: Karaman, expelled students - Ioganson, Guterman, Karavaev. My older sister Pasha, in Russian Paraskovya, and in Hebrew, actually, Pearl - “pearl”, graduated from high school at that time. Her father wanted to marry her off, but had not yet managed to find a groom, and Pasha left for courses. She had a decisive character: I’ll take it and leave. So she left, and no one stopped her. A year later she returned from St. Petersburg, white-hot by the earthly fire. It was in 1878 - an enchanting time. Dignitaries had already been killed, and Tsar Alexander II was still going to be blown up. For such terrible force , like the Russian police, there was a rebuff - the youth gave themselves to the revolution body and soul. Not everyone, of course, is the chosen one. Not a single generation later burned as sacrificially as these young men and women of 1878-80. At that time we already had a gymnasium club. He read literature, both legal and illegal. We simply stole legal books from the fundamental library of the gymnasium, including all the prohibited books - Pisarev, Chernyshevsky “What to do.” Although the school authorities looked askance at us, they could not do anything. In 1880, my sister and I went to St. Petersburg, to the university. I was, in essence, a puppy, and not a very licked one. What to do - study, read or go to secret meetings? Moreover, they didn’t send us any money from home. I still read a lot, learned French and German. In order to replenish our budget, the writer Krivenko got me translations from Otechestvennye Zapiski - mostly fiction from French. My first translations were from the new book by Zola and Co. - “Medan Evenings”. By the way, I translated Maupassant’s “Pumpkin”. They paid excellently in those days - a quarter for a story. It was generally possible to live. With two kopecks in your pocket, you would look into a sausage shop: “Give me a kopeck’s worth of scraps.” The young clerk will look you cheerfully in the eyes and say semi-affirmatively: “The student is fatter.” He’ll weigh out a pound and a quarter and estimate a healthy, strong lye for free. You can buy peas for ten kopeks and put all this goodness into cast iron and put it in the Russian oven for the hostess. Back then, St. Petersburg housewives also had Russian stoves. After a day he gets restless, then we eat for 3 days and can’t eat everything. The writer Krivenko was in the same circle with my sister. Sofya Ermolaevna Usova, who later married Krivenko in exile, also belonged there, Arkady Tyrkov, who was later arrested in the case on March 1, and two Karaulov brothers. The elder Karaulov died in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the younger, a former officer, became illegal and later ended up in Shlisselburg for hard labor and into exile in Siberia, and from exile he was elected as a cadet deputy to the State Duma. I spent my first year in St. Petersburg somewhat secluded, I didn’t even go to lectures much. By the way, I entered the natural sciences department of physics and mathematics. And I was, of course, drawn to the humanities. However, I studied Mendeleev’s “chemistry” quite thoroughly. And the next year I moved to the economics department of the Faculty of Law, the former “cameral” department. There were about 40 of us students. In addition to legal sciences, we listened to political economy from Wreden, but we did not listen to Roman law. Of the 40 economics students, at least half were socialists. Here I finally switched to the second year. The exams were easy for me. But by this time I had become bogged down in politics. Participated in a student group for the study of Marx. We took Volume I of Capital and began to compose abstracts chapter by chapter. First we'll have dinner, and then we'll read until midnight. True, we were populists, but we studied Marx by heart, and it is still not forgotten, almost half a century later. I have been in other circles of a more decisive nature. I met with Kogan-Bernstein, saw and heard Zhelyabov, nicknamed “Taras”. He was a man of tireless energy. On the one hand, he held in his hands all the threads of the prepared regicide, on the other hand, he found time to tinker with the students. He was an excellent speaker, temperamental and firm. On February 8th, the university anniversary, the beginning of the March 1st tragedy took place. It was played by students under the influence of Zhelyabov

We - radical students - crowded into the choirs in a dense group, preparing for battle. When Rector Beketov’s endless report began to come to an end, Kogan-Bernstein began to make an energetic speech from the balustrade on the topic that “we don’t believe you at all.” Proclamations immediately flew from above like white birds. But no one moved below. They were all very confused. Especially the Minister of Education Saburov sat on a chair in the front row, as if soldered. Then Pappius Podbelsky stepped forward, went to Saburov and gave him a big slap in the face. After that, noise and chaos immediately began. But we pushed the “pedels” back, and both Podbelsky and Kogan-Bernstein left safely. Both of them were arrested a few days later. We ended up in a different link. But 8 years later, in 1889, they met in Yakutsk on the day of armed resistance of political exiles who did not want to go to Kolymsk. Pappius Podbelsky was killed by the first soldier's volley, and Kogan-Bernstein was seriously wounded and lost the use of his legs. Along with others, he was sentenced to hang. At the appointed hour they carried him out on the bed and lifted him up. So both of them and Podbelsky united in posthumous peace. At one time, March 1 happened - the assassination of Alexander II and the public execution of five on the Semyonovsky parade ground. The sister met the terrible procession by chance and followed it to the Semenovsky parade ground, carried away by an irresistible and fatal curiosity, mixed with horror. They hung him high on the platform, and she saw every little detail, even how Mikhailov broke off. She ran home beside herself, screaming and cursing. I'm surprised she wasn't arrested on the street. After this execution, the government decided to stop the edifying spectacle of public gallows, and only during the recent civil war public hangers were again placed in different cities. Rather, in the form of ghosts - they were resurrected, appeared and died. On March 1, as is known, the fall of Narodnaya Volya begins. The wave stood for a while and began to subside. The older strata of radical youth began to become disillusioned, and then even decomposed. Provocation blossomed, and everything went downhill. And in the younger strata, on the contrary, there was admiration and complete readiness to surrender themselves to the power of the mysterious and elusive Executive Committee. At that time, all of us, wounded by the revolution, doomed ourselves to change. We looked at studying and university as preparation. Not preparation for living and working, but preparation for leaving and perishing. Many of us studied, read, took exams, but there was a consciousness that all this was so-so, not real, temporary, the real would come later. I personally stayed at the university for 2 years - I was too small and young. And only in the fall of 1882 he was arrested on student affairs and expelled from St. Petersburg for a year to his native Taganrog. There was an illegal gathering. We knocked out the pedals. One sub-inspector had his sides soaped. The gathering was cordoned off and everyone was arrested. Most of those arrested escaped with punishment cells. A total of 50 people were expelled. We can mention Odessa residents Sternberg and Krol, Kuban residents Brazhnikov and Nevzorov. Brazhnikov, Sternberg, Krol and I were later the founders and members of the last union of Narodnaya Volya.

In Taganrog, during my exile, I was already engaged in propaganda. This provincial and wild steppe city had its own circle of revolutionaries, young and naive, it is true, but active. The most notable was A. A. Kulakov, a tradesman, self-taught, retired soldier. Now he is 72 years old, at that time he was almost 30. He was a unique figure. At the new bazaar he had a “cold shop”, that is, a locker itself, and he sold small items of sole leather. And he himself was also so strong, he is still wearing them. In total, his goods were worth 300 rubles, and his proceeds were worth one and a half rubles. And when party affairs began to play out in Taganrog, we took money from his proceeds and spent it on a printing house. If the authorities had not arrived in time to destroy the printing house, we would have transferred his entire bottom shop to agitprop. In the same circle were Akim Sigida, a scribe for the district court, and Nadezhda Malaksianova, a Greek by birth, a city teacher. We then married them for printing purposes, and after the defeat, Sigida died in the “central” - in a convict prison, as far as I remember, in Kursk, and Nadezhda ended up in the Kari penal servitude, and here, as you know, she died tragically. At that time, a metal plant was opened in Taganrog, then it was called Franco-Russian. I was able to meet the young workers of the plant. Things went quite successfully. They were as young as us, and they earned more money than us. We, schoolchildren and students, were, in general, unhappy people, and even in everyday life there was no reason to look down on the workers. For example, they will put out a samovar, cut sausages, soft bread, olives, ram - they will treat us, no worse than the bourgeois. There were about a dozen of them in the circle at once; I taught them a course on political economy, and they listened extremely attentively. Another detail is that none of them were drinking at the time. Together with political economy, we began to little by little plan a good strike at the plant. But before this strike I was arrested. I spent 11 months in the Taganrog prison. It was there that communication with the people, the human “bottom” and Kuzka’s parent began for me at the same time. It was there, obviously, that my taste for ethnography was born - in the thick of humanity, and the thicker it was, the more pleasant it was. For the Taganrog fort was a fertile place, and the grains that grew there were truly strange. This triple chain of misadventures - arrest, deportation and a new arrest - began my, one might say, public service, in which I have been since then for more than 40 years. At the same time, I happened to convert to Orthodoxy - for revolutionary purposes. My immersion in the Orthodox font took place in the fall of 1885. I was Nathan Mendelevich Bogoraz, became Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz, - Germanovich after godfather, as it was supposed to be then. At that time, converting to Orthodoxy meant ceasing to be a Jew. However, I did not stop being a Jew, as evidenced by many actions. By the way, my literary name “Tan” is the dissected signature of N.A. Tan, i.e. the name “Nathan”. After that, the signature itself was associated with my homeland - Taganrog, pronounced "Tanagrog" (in ancient times the Don was Tanais, and the Greek colony of Tana stood near the mouth). Talking about my Orthodoxy or Christianity is, of course, ridiculous. But from my early youth I considered myself not only a Jew, but also a Russian. Not only a Russian, a Russian citizen, but a Russian. I consider myself Russian and feel Russian.

A person can very well have two national consciousnesses: an Italian from Tessin and a Swiss; Welsh and English at the same time. After all, in addition, I feel like a fiction writer and ethnographer, a Russian revolutionary and a Russian intellectual, a European, a participant in Western-Eastern culture. All these consciousnesses merge harmoniously together. And above all, I feel like a human being. Human- this name is large, comprehensive, clear. I will have to describe my life according to the main stages. 1885 The last union of the People's Will. The existence of an illegal person with a fake in his pocket instead of a passport, with temporary shelter for the night, and sometimes even under a bridge. Three secret printing houses. Guttenberg and Dr. Faust, the inventors of printing, must have had better machines than ours. Marble table, paint rubbing board, roller, iron frame, lead set. During the day, it used to be that you ran around the city, doing “business”, conspiracy, and at night you immediately went to the car. I, however, got so used to it that I could doze while standing, with a roller in my hands, over the hero’s menial work. You'll just get dirty like hell by the morning. Truly menial work. The revolution was temporarily extinguished, its pulse beat barely audible, intermittently, and its very heart was walled up in a stone jar, in Shlisselburg. And we, several young men of the last call-up, also tried, following the example of our elders, to push with our young shoulders the stone woman, the Russian Fedora, from her centuries-old mound. And, of course, they were stressed out. Failure followed. In Ekaterinoslav, Taganrog, Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, everyone was cleared out. And I managed to get out of the trap. I traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, where I worked with other circles. In Moscow, this was the main group from which the wave of a new terrorist offensive later grew. In its center stood Mikhail Gots and Isidor Fundaminsky - senior Gots and senior Fundaminsky. Both of them have already died. These were living transitional links from the old Narodnaya Volya to the new social revolutionary party. The first performance of this group was only in exile in Yakutsk. The group refused to leave Yakutsk for Kolymsk and barricaded themselves in a house with revolvers in their hands. Six were killed on the spot, three were hanged. The “less guilty” were sent to hard labor. But then, after hard labor, Gots Sr. ended up abroad. He was the founder of the new terror. Under the conditions of that time, terror had something truly immortal about it. In St. Petersburg there was another group - young Social Democrats with Shevyrev and Ulyanov in the center, also Ulyanov Sr., Lenin’s brother. The last outbreak of real Narodnaya Volya terror belonged to this group, the second March 1st, 1887. Thus, “Narodnaya Volya” was built in history, as if a glowing arc. Two bright flashes - 1881 and 1887 - and between them countless victims and burning hearts. But before I had time to get close to Ulyanov’s group, I was arrested on December 9, 1886. This time, firmly and for a long time. During the arrest, as usual, they beat me - I was generally lucky in this regard - during arrests and in prison riots they beat me repeatedly. After that, they put me in the Peter and Paul Fortress and only in 1889 they sent me to the most remote places - to Arctic Kolymsk, for 12,000 versts and for a period of 10 years.

I traveled to Kolymsk for about a year, sailed along the Kama and Ob on prison barges, walled up in the hold. From Tomsk to Irkutsk I walked along Vladimirka on foot with the shackled punks. In Krasnoyarsk, in an empty transit prison, starving bugs almost ate us alive. We staged a so-called “bedbug riot,” which I happened to describe in print. We drove from Irkutsk to Yakutsk in winter with gendarmes in troikas, almost half naked. Out of habit, we were terribly cold - our breath froze in our chests. And in Yakutsk they found the afterword of the Yakut execution and execution of those arrested. The shadow of the just hanged Kogan-Bernstein seemed to still live in prison. This was our last meeting with Kogan-Bernstein after the vicissitudes of illegality and revolution. The mood was terrible then. Our comrades were shot and hanged because of this Kolymsk, but we are still going. We went to Kolymsk in twos with the Cossacks, first on a sleigh with horses, then on reindeer, and then on small Yakut skates. And so we arrived in our distant Kolyma patrimony, which we made the Kolyma Republic, the first Russian republic, long before 1905. Kolymsk lay so far to the east that it touched the west. From this Asia it was not far to America.

Burial of a shaman

We were 50 desperate people, and there were about 15 Cossacks in the only city of Sredne-Kolymsk, and together with the police they feared us like fire. On Coronation Day, the police will light up the lights and have a drinking party. Booze is cool. They drink golem alcohol. And we will turn off the illumination and arrange a counter-drinking party, three times cooler. The police will lock themselves up, barricade themselves in the police station’s house and sit there until the morning. However, we got along well with the population, especially with the girls. And they rarely quarreled even with the police chief. On holidays, they played a screw with him, “with a purchase”, “with powder”, “with a nail”, “with an Ethiopian”, “with a triangle”, “classic” simple. And on the hard winter nights we read weighty books in different languages ​​all day long - even police officer Karzin was so screwed that he spent the whole winter trying to get through "Capital" - yes, yes, the real Marx, volume 1 of "Capital". But he didn’t have any capital. He became a violent drinker and sold his government belongings to visiting merchants. Unforgettable years in Kolymsk - subsistence farming, the Stone Age alive. “If you don’t catch, you don’t eat.” You catch fish, ride dogs and feed on this fish together with the dogs. An ermine lives in the barn, grabs mice and carries pieces of meat. Partridges nest in the square. At night a fox comes to the doorstep and licks the slop. There were fifty of us. We had over 200 dogs. A dozen seines. Each person caught 60 pounds of fish a year, and up to a hundred cubic meters of firewood were supplied. All with your own white hands - who can you force? And what frosts: if you spit, the frozen spit sticks into the snow like an icicle. The ice on the river is a fathom thick. If you want to get drunk, please drill through this ice. The same goes for fishing nets. Nothing, we managed. They fought with nature, like the northern Robinsons, and defeated it. The “rogue” wind will blow from the west, “from a rotten corner,” and will completely bury you - sit down, sit back. Appetite obviously comes with food.

From settled peoples I climbed to the nomadic ones, traveled with the Chukchi and Lamuts riding on deer, ate summer carrion, as required by the Chukchi way of life, and “sour” rotten fish, as required by the Yakut way of life. I learned to speak Chukchi, Lamut and even Eskimo. I learned and mastered all sorts of shamanic tricks. Sometimes it happened that a shaman would come and ask: “Come on, look at your witchcraft book and tell me what the spell is against spring blindness.” The "Witch Book" was a notebook. Indeed, all kinds of shamanism were recorded in it. You write in the cold with a pencil, your hand will freeze, writing on hard paper, and then nothing, it will go away. Then, at the overnight stay, in the warmth, you write with deer blood instead of ink. I still have these notes intact, the blood has not faded. I traveled far across the tundra; I could have easily crossed to America, but there was no point in running. The link was coming to an end. It was possible to go no further to the east, but back to the west. In 1898, I traveled back from Kolymsk, straight to St. Petersburg. The Academy of Sciences helped. I was with a different written load - with Chukchi texts and Russian epics and my own Kolyma poems, with stories, with novels and with such an unquenched thirst: “let me fight” - of course, to fight with the authorities. The public received me quite favorably. The literary brothers nicknamed me “wild Chukchi.” From Kolymsk to St. Petersburg.

Not everyone can withstand such a change. The Chukchi felt dizzy. At that time, the Marxist movement was flourishing. Although I am a former populist, I joined the Marxists. Together with Veresaev and Tugan-Baranovsky, he was on the editorial staff of Nachalo and Zhizn. Or rather, I was a direct heretic and have remained so to this day. A few years later he published a number of articles - “Why I am not a Socialist Revolutionary Party,” “Why I am not a Social Democratic Party,” and “Why I am not a Cadet.” And for this non-partisanship of mine I got hit three times - from these, and from those, and from them. In St. Petersburg, at the same time, we celebrated the end of the 19th century (in fact, the birth of Pushkin). At a celebration at the yacht club, the populists united with the Marxists and drank fraternally. But “New Time” was not allowed in, they were not accepted. And I had to read aloud the poems: “To the Thieves of the Pen” addressed to the blacks. The poems were angry and prickly:

Leave our holiday.

Ugly bargaining.

We don't need gifts.

Take them back.

A grimace of delight cannot buy you honor.

The stench flows from your dear censers.

I read badly, and for this bad reading the police decided to expel me from St. Petersburg. I, however, managed to leave before deportation. Jesup's expedition turned up - an invitation from America. The Americans gave money, and the Russians gave scientists - a completely unusual combination. The Jesup Expedition was organized by the American Museum of Natural Science to establish a circum-Pacific connection between Asia and America. It lasted three years. The printed works she published are measured in pounds. "Wild Chukchi" went abroad - to Berlin, to Paris, to London and from there to New York. In London I spoke for the first time in my own sophisticated English dialect. I learned it self-taught in my spare time, in prison and in Kolymsk. I spoke, and, to my surprise, they understood me and even answered me, but I myself did not understand a single sound in the bird chirping and squealing of London street talk. In New York I had to not only speak, but also write in English. At first it was bad, but then it got better. The second expedition-exile, this time voluntary, - Kamchatka, Anadyr, Chukotka Land. During the winter I must have covered 10,000 miles, collected hundreds of pounds of ethnographic collections and transported them to America, while I myself traveled through Japan to Vladivostok and through Manchuria to St. Petersburg.

Here I again ran into departmental expulsion and had to go back to where I came from, fortunately, not to the Chukchi, but to New York. He lived in New York for two years, processed the “Materials”, published two folio volumes in English in 7 parts - linguistics, folklore, material culture, religion, social organization. This work is not finished yet. He wrote topical articles for Russian newspapers and Paleolithic novels: “Eight Tribes”, “Victims of the Dragon”. At the height of the Japanese War, he returned to Europe, and from there to Russia. This happened just in time for the first zemstvo congress. Russia made a noise and got up in arms. Now the old were beating the new, as had been done from time immemorial; now the new were beating the old. I ran after those and others with notebook. I traveled to the Volga, and to the steppe, and to Siberia. He was a passionate newspaperman and feuilletonist. I even felt like an all-Russian art reporter. But he did not abandon his science, Chukchi-English. And so I became a two-faced, dual person. On the right side is Bogoraz, and on the left, illegal, is Tan. There are people who can’t stand Tan, but are quite supportive of Bogoraz. There are also those, on the contrary, who feel a special inclination towards Tan, for example, the prosecutor and the police. From 1905 to 1917 I was brought to court in political and literary cases twenty times. And before that, there were administrative reprisals. I don’t know which is better and which is worse - judicial or administrative. It's getting worse. In 1905 the revolution began.

In January I ran into Gapon, became acquainted with Gapon’s workers, especially Kuzin, a teacher and mechanic, Gapon’s secretary. He was a man of crystal purity, he took in the education of the only son of the chairman Vasiliev, who was killed at the Narva Gate, when the three of them lay spread out in the snow - Gapon in the middle, Vasiliev on the left, Kuzin on the right. Then there was Moscow October. October No. 1. I stood close to the center. strike. to the committee. Even closer to the first Peasant Union. I tried to see everything, find out. There was such insatiable greed, as if there was a sinkhole in the soul, in the depths - you grab fistfuls of boiling life, tear it into shreds and shove it into the depths. You fill the inner emptiness and cannot fill it. There is no time to think about it - write and give to people. If you crumple it up, throw away a few scraps, there you go! And on to fishing, to new things, to new things. This must be because we had to go through three revolutions one after another. Bitter foam of revolution, salty warm blood. And you won’t get drunk with it, you’ll just choke on it like sea foam. And the lips dry up, and the thirst becomes stronger and more persistent. On November 14, 1905, five of us were arrested in the peasant union, the first after the constitution. The bailiff even threw up his hands and asked for an apology: “After all, the identity guarantee has not yet been approved.” Then we were released, then imprisoned again, etc. During this time I wrote a lot, poetry and prose. Many people scolded my poems and even wrote parodies of them. It's hard for me to judge how much truth there is in this. But some of my poems remained and came into use. Boys sing them on the streets: “Sailors of Kronstadt”, “Farewell”.

Sailor from the ship "Robber" at the Chukchi burial grounds

All these poems are illegal, political. And the “Red Banner” entered the revolutionary canon. But this is not my composition, but only a translation. From the stories I will note: “Kolyma Stories” (about exile). Two volumes of American Stories. Three volumes of "Chukchi Stories". Several novels, mostly ethnographic, many essays on life, foreign and Russian. Clouds of newspaper articles. Much has gone through several editions. I did not collect my essays particularly persistently. Still, in 1910 he published the collection in ten volumes, published by "Education". At that time I was in prison and read proofs illegally. Such is the fate of the old Russian writer. He traveled around the world twice by latitude, was on hunger, was in the last war with a medical detachment, walked through the Carpathians, climbed into Hungary, was on the Polish front, then retreated quite quickly. I was on horseback and under horseback. He dragged every living thing with a shovel. He drank all kinds of potion, carbonated and drunk. The hard thinking between the two revolutions came at a cost to us. The authorities placed hangers in all cities. And from below came anarchists, militants, all kinds of exes, fighting squads and bandits. At that time it was good for those who were associated with the party, but we, non-party people, were rushing about. The war began, and with it a patriotic frenzy.

Drying fish (yukola)

We, intellectuals, writers, artists and other riffraff, rejoiced, sang, and saw with our own eyes our treasure, Fedora. It was as if we, outcasts, spiritual exiles, were given a brand new fatherland, freshly minted to military order. And Fedora got seriously angry, gnashed her teeth, climbed up like a bear, crushed the Austrian and ended up on a German spear. Then she turned back and own forest She began to sweep and clear away debris and dead wood with her broken paws. There was a groan, a din, a stomp. Centuries-old trees were hit, and chips flew a thousand miles away. This is how the thousand-strong, spontaneous, boundless revolution of Russia blossomed and flared up after a hundred-strong war. Together with others, I also melodiously declaimed about loyalty to the alliance with the “powers”, maligned and hated, then went through the whole philistine calvary of the hungry time: I lost my family, was left alone like a bog and, accordingly, was angry. And now, on the first tenth anniversary of the revolutionary anniversary, I’m probably ready to give my blessing. Not for people, for others, I am ready to bless for myself, for my own cleansing. How much all sorts of rubbish has stuck to the soul over half a century, like shells on the bottom of a ship. For some reason, a fortune has accumulated in the bank, in boxes of written paper there are dozens of pounds, in the soul there are some slavish habits. He was a revolutionary, then a writer of fiction, an insatiable artist, a global citizen, and became a patriot, a cowardly philistine. The revolution cleaned everything, scraped it down to the bloody meat, and the old ship rose again and inflated the sails. Until it sinks, it floats, and new storms are not scary. History locked the old literature under a key, and what was Thane in me faded, shrank, and I became a professor of private ethnography, acquired students, assistants, students from the workers' faculty, students from the geology department and students just like that - out of the blue, unrecognized volunteers. So, from an artist-writer, from an art reporter-publicist, I became a scientific professor at the Faculty of Geography of Leningrad State University, a scientific curator of the department of the MAE of the USSR Academy of Sciences. How much learning... But what was Thane in me has not died either, it lives on.

The art reporter is a huge gramophone. His soul is all made of sensitive records, and before he sings for others, he perceives it for himself. And my gramophone recorded: “Build, they’ve been breaking enough, we need to build.” After a great fire, we scatter old logs, sometimes quite unceremoniously, and drag in new ones. We fix old boards and glue broken glass. In a new economy, even the old will come in handy. But we need more new things. And we, intellectuals, Russian scientists, specialists in applied and abstract science, create this new thing from our own souls. Fortunately, the revolution has renewed our own souls. And we forge and mint them, like metal, sharp weapons we pull out of our own thoughts. They were sharpened by past storms and past suffering. Having entered my seventh decade, at the age of 62, I am happy and satisfied, not because I survived three whole Russian revolutions, they were also survived by the old fences, which although they were leaning, but had not yet fallen - I am happy that after these revolutions I feel together with everyone, and now, when they are building, I am building with others.

Large biographical encyclopedia

Jesup North Pacific Expedition

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition was a large-scale ethnographic and linguistic expedition conducted in 1897 - 1902 to little-studied areas of Northeast Asia and the northwest coast of North America, including Russian Eastern Siberia and the Far East. The expedition was organized and sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, represented by its president, businessman and philanthropist Morris Jesup, which is why it was named after him. The planning and scientific supervision of the expedition, as well as partial collection of material, was carried out by the world-famous American anthropologist Franz Boas. In addition to him, a number of specialists hired by the museum took part in various stages of the expedition, including Russian scientists Vladimir Bogoraz and Vladimir Yochelson. During the expedition, the life, traditions and culture of the peoples of the north were studied, including the Ainu on Sakhalin, Evens, Evenks and Yakuts in Eastern Siberia, Yukagirs, Chukchi and Koryaks in the Far East

The name of Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz, a famous ethnographer of the northern peoples (mainly Chukchi and Eskimos), has long been known to local historians and writers of the North-East of Russia. His literary and scientific creativity A large amount of research has been devoted. His travels in the North-East are described in B.I. Kartashev’s book “Through the Land of Reindeer People”, published by the central publishing house; In Magadan, a bibliographic index was published with his autobiography and a biography written by the Magadan historian D. Raizman. But in all these works, Bogoraz’s participation in the Dzhezapovo expedition of 1900 - 1901. in Northeast Asia it is indicated only in dotted lines.

Bogoraz with students

In connection with the centenary of this expedition, there is every reason to consider Bogoraz’s participation in it in more detail. The expedition was organized and financed by the American Museum of Natural History. The Okhotsk-Chukchi department of the expedition was led by V. Yokhelson, and Bogoraz headed its Chukchi detachment. Recommending Bogoraz for participation in the expedition, Yochelson wrote that he “... is currently the best candidate for studying the Chukchi tribes.” Initially, Bogoraz's detachment consisted of two people - himself and his wife, Sofia Konstantinovna. Before leaving for Chukotka, they met in Vladivostok, where Bogoraz arrived from Europe (via America and Japan), and his wife arrived by rail from St. Petersburg.

From the materials of the Jesup expedition. Yochelson's photo

They initially chose the Novo-Mariinsky post (later the city of Anadyr) at the mouth of the river as their base in Chukotka. Anadyr was Russia's most remote settlement in Northeast Asia at the time. They left Vladivostok on June 14, 1900 on the steamer "Baikal", the only state Russian postal steamer that sailed there regularly once a year. Contrary to Bogoraz's wishes, the expedition was unable to charter a ship in order to sail as close as possible to the Bering Strait. They spent five weeks on the road, stopping briefly in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Baron Korf Bay. Novo-Mariinsk was located on a spit and consisted of barracks built of wood and completely covered with earth, in which the Cossacks who served here lived, as well as a small camp of indigenous people - the southernmost settlement of the coastal Chukchi. N.P. Sokolyansky, who was then the head of the Anadyr district, allocated a log hut for the expedition, assigned translators, guides and workers to help Bogoraz.

A group of fishermen from the Kolyma district. Spring fishing.

Showing interest in the positive outcome of the expedition, he donated a large number of samples of Chukchi clothing, jewelry and other items to the American Museum. Due to the measles epidemic that spread through the Chukchi villages, Bogoraz was unable to hire a canoe with a crew to go north, as he had planned. Therefore, he spent the first four months of field work at the mouth of the Anadyr (July - October) visiting the Chukchi reindeer camps scattered along the sea coast in the summer. He collected an ethnographic collection, made a series of photographs and anthropometric measurements. At the same time, he studied the language of the Ivan tribe, which was the main group of Asian Eskimos. To this end, he helped two Ivan families who lived with the Chukchi in Mariinsk. Summer conditions were very unfavorable. The measles epidemic, brought by Russian traders from Vladivostok to Kamchatka in previous years, passed along the coast of the Okhotsk and Bering Seas, claiming hundreds of victims.

Photo taken by Yochelson during the expedition

In some places, up to a third of the entire population died. In the summer of 1900, the epidemic reached the Chukotka Peninsula, where the already small population of Chukotka suffered significant losses. Because of her, the summer fair, which usually took place in Novo-Mariinsk at the beginning of August each year, did not take place in 1900, since no one came except for a few tribes from the north of Chukotka and Eskimo settlements. Nevertheless, traveling through the villages, Bogoraz received in exchange for textiles, tea and tobacco an extensive collection of carved bone objects, arrowheads, household items, hunting weapons and ritual objects. At the end of October, when the river froze. Anadyr, Bogoraz left Novo-Mariinsk and went with the Cossacks to Markovo in the middle reaches of Anadyr and from there to the village of Kamenskoye on the Okhotsk coast. His wife remained in Anadyr until the following summer, traveling between Mariinsk and Markovo, and collected, as Bogoraz admitted, most of the collection for the museum, while he himself was mainly engaged in the scientific description of the collection. She was helped by A. Axelrod, the geographer of the expedition, sent by V. Yochelson to Novo-Mariinsk in December 1900 from Kamensky.

Photo taken by Yochelson

Bogoraz traveled around Chukotka almost exclusively on dogs received from the aborigines. From these dogs he formed three teams, which allowed the detachment to move quickly enough when the weather and snow conditions were favorable. The expedition could not take on a large cargo and had to leave behind everything except scientific instruments and exchange items. This forced them to rely almost entirely on food supplies in the villages, and during the entire time they lived on dry fish, venison and marine animal meat. The hardest thing was to find food for the dogs, especially in the spring, when food is scarce in the coastal villages. Thus, dog food had to be taken care of, which reduced the size of luggage for other purposes. On his travels, Bogoraz was often accompanied by Cossacks and local guides. Each person on the trip drove their own 12-dog team. The winter of 1900 - 1901 was harsh in Anadyr. It began with heavy snowfalls, followed by thaws. The moss became covered with a crust of ice, and because of this, the reindeer herds half died out from lack of food, since the animals could not break the ice crust with their hooves. “On the way to Anadyr,” Bogoraz wrote in his report, “deer corpses were lying everywhere, and yesterday I saw a Chukchi boy who died of hunger.” For this reason, the winter fairs were little attended, and the people, scattered throughout the region, were unable to undertake any arduous journey. Blizzards often raged and covered the path to such an extent that the dogs had difficulty making their way through the deep snow. For most of the trip to Markovo, the group skied, helping the teams pull the sleighs. Bogoraz arrived in Kamenskoye on November 20, 1900, a month after traveling through Chukotka, and found Yochelson and his wife there. Upon his arrival, Yochelson sent Axelrod to Anadyr to look after Bogoraz’s base, where he remained until the end of the expedition, describing the flora and fauna of the Chukotka Peninsula.

Bogoraz with his wife. Anadyr.

At the end of December, after a four-week stop, Bogoraz traveled across the Parapolsky Dol plateau to the first settlements of the Kamchatka Koryaks and from there to the settlements of the Kamchadals on the western coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. There, in 8 settlements, he found out that the Kamchadal language was still spoken, although they were quickly switching to Russian. At the end of February 1901, Bogoraz left Kamenskoye and went back to Anadyr along the coast of the Bering Sea through territory previously completely unknown and unexplored. He was in a hurry to reach Mariinsk on March 25, since he had an agreement with the Anadyr part of the expedition to prepare everything by this time for the trip to the north. On the way, he caught a cold in one of the villages of Kamchatka and temporarily lost his voice, so that he could communicate with local residents only using gestures for more than two weeks. At one time his illness became so dangerous that the Cossack who was accompanying him asked him for instructions on how he would like his body and his official papers to be taken care of in case he died en route. Bogoraz ordered to pack all the documents in a leather bag and carefully deliver it to Anadyr to the rest of the expedition members. Along the way, Bogoraz’s detachment crossed the border between the Koryaks and Chukchi reindeer herders, who in former times were involved in long wars with each other, then moved along the line of Kerek villages. The latter were an offshoot of the coastal Koryaks, who lived in the most remote parts of the territory, poor natural resources. In the past, they lived by hunting walruses, but over the past few decades, that is, with the advent of American whalers who drove the walruses further north, they quickly died out from frequent hunger strikes.

In the photo: Employees of the MIR Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Sitting (from left to right): Yu. P. Frantsev, A. R. Polyakova, V. G. Bogoraz, G. O. Monzeller, M. Potapov. Standing (from left to right): V. P. Nedelsky, M. I. Shakhnovich, P. A. Mezentsev, A. N. Novikov, A. A. Nevsky, L. N. Manuilova, N. N. Troinitsky, S. I. Klementov, G. E. Petri.First.

Between the Kerek villages and the first camps of the Anadyr reindeer Chukchi lay an uninhabited mountainous country. It was unknown to the Kereks, who were unable to provide Bogoraz with guides, and the detachment crossed this place, guided exclusively by frozen mountain rivers rising to the pass and then leading down to the tributaries of the Anadyr. “A significant part of my journey,” Bogoraz wrote, “has not yet been traveled by any civilized person.” This journey greatly exhausted the strength of the dogs and riders. On March 26, the detachment returned to Novo-Mariinsk, where for two weeks Bogoraz prepared the collections he collected during the expedition for shipment to Vladivostok. In mid-May 1901, Bogoraz's detachment continued its exploration by traveling north with a group of local (indigenous) traders who had returned from their annual trip with the Anadyr Cossacks in Chukotka. Bogoraz was accompanied by Axelrod and 4 Russified aborigines with additional teams of dogs carrying provisions and goods for exchange. On the way, Axelrod studied the surrounding area. In four weeks, having crossed the Gulf of the Cross on ice, the detachment reached Cape Chaplin (then Cape Indian), where they spent a month, during which Bogoraz went on a kayak to the island. St. Lawrence. The object of the study were the coastal Chukchi and Asian Eskimos. Here he collected large collection Eskimo household items and recorded the texts of Eskimo folklore. These materials were published by him in 1913 in the monograph “Eskimos of Siberia” in English.

This book was never published in Russian, which cannot but cause regret. For some time Bogoraz was waiting at Cape Chaplin for the Russian mail steamer Vega to return to Novo-Mariinsk. However, he lingered in the Bering Strait area, providing assistance to a wrecked whaling ship, and was unable to arrive at Cape Chaplin at the required time. Therefore, the ethnographic collections from there were sent by Bogoraz on the American whaling ship "William Bellis" heading to America, whose captain undertook to deliver the cargo to New York. At the end of June, when it became clear that there was no point in waiting for the ship at Cape Chaplin, since it would be possible to miss the last ship leaving Novo-Mariinsk for Vladivostok, the detachment set off on the return journey to the mouth of Anadyr on their own in a canoe. For this trip, Bogoraz purchased a canoe frame and, with the help of local residents, covered it with walrus skin. Due to lack of space in the canoe, they had to leave some of the equipment and sell the dogs cheaply. Bogoraz had the opportunity to leave Chukotka directly to the United States on a whaling ship, but he chose not to leave the collections stored in Novo-Mariinsk unattended, and it was necessary to return back the assistants who had gone with him from Anadyr. The journey by sea on this boat lasted 32 days, and they arrived in Mariinsk on July 28, 1901 (10 days before the arrival of the annual mail steamer that took the Chukchi detachment back to Vladivostok). From there, Bogoraz sent the collections, packed in more than a hundred large boxes, by sea to New York, and he and his wife traveled by Siberian Railway to St. Petersburg. Upon arrival, he caught a cold and was unable to go to New York until April 17, 1902. As a result of the work of the Chukotka detachment, the ethnography and anthropology of the Chukchi, Asian Eskimos, partly Kamchadals and Kamchatka Koryaks were studied. A collection has been assembled consisting of 5,000 ethnographic objects, 33 plaster copies of faces, 75 skulls and archaeological materials from abandoned settlements and burial grounds. 300 fairy tales and traditions were recorded, 150 texts in the Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchadal and Eskimo languages, descriptions and grammatical sketches of these languages ​​were made, 95 phonographic records of the Chukchi language, 860 anthropometric measurements, a small zoological collection was collected, and a meteorological journal was kept throughout the expedition. He also took about a thousand photographs reflecting various aspects of the life of the Chukotka aborigines and the progress of the expedition. These materials became the basis of V. G. Bogoraz’s large scientific work “The Chukchi,” published first in 1904 - 1910 in English, and then, in parts, in the 1930s and 1990s in Russia. The results of the expedition were recognized throughout the world.

Franz Boaz

Based on numerous data obtained by V. I. Yochelson, V. G. Bogoraz and other participants of the Dzezapovo expedition, the scientific organizer of the expedition F. Boas, comparing the types of languages ​​and cultures, concluded that the peoples of North-East Siberia are much more closely related Native Americans than other Asian peoples.

S. B. Slobodin, Candidate of Historical Sciences, senior researcher at the Laboratory of History and Archeology of the North-Eastern Scientific Research Institute.

Childhood. Adolescence. Youth. Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz was born in April 1865 (1) in Western Ukraine in the town of Ovruch, Volyn province - “in the wilderness of Volyn Polesie,” to use his own figurative expression. The parents named the child Nathan. Having converted to Orthodoxy in 1885, in accordance with custom, Bogoraz received a new name - Vladimir, and a patronymic from his godfather - Germanovich. He nevertheless retained the name Nathan in the form of a secret name and literary pseudonym: N.A. Tan. Subsequently, Tan turns into a prefix to the surname - Tan-Bogoraz or Bogoraz-Tan. V.G. Bogoraz attached special significance to his double name, considering it as a reflection of various aspects of his activities, and more in a broad sense- as two of my hypostases, different interests and aspirations: “And so I became a two-faced, dual person. On the right side is Bogoraz, and on the left is the illegal Tang” (2). Tang is “a revolutionary, then a fiction writer, an insatiable artist, a global citizen”; Bogoraz is a “craven philistine” who became a “professor of private ethnography”, “scientific keeper of the department of the MAE of the USSR Academy of Sciences” (3).
His father - Mendel (in the Russified version - Maximilian Markovich) Bogoraz came from a rabbinical family. A man of enormous stature and strength, he was a remarkable man, endowed with many talents, very enterprising, passionate and cheerful. He had an excellent memory - he knew the Bible and Talmudic books by heart. He was very musical, sang in a pleasant tenor and repeatedly served as a chazan (singer) in synagogues. Having a penchant for literature, my father wrote quite a lot in Hebrew and Yiddish and even published something. Mother came from a merchant family in the town of Bar, Podolsk province. There were eight children in the family: four brothers and four sisters.
Nathan inherited from his parents an active, lively and lively nature, zest for life, a talent for languages, an excellent memory and, as he himself noted, a penchant for literary creativity- “taste for literature” (4), which did not change him throughout his life.
Soon after Nathan's birth, the family moved to Taganrog. V.G. Bogoraz recalled his childhood as quite happy. He studied at the classical Greco-Roman gymnasium, the same one where A.P. Chekhov studied two classes older. Studying was easy for the boy, and the gymnasium, as he later recalled, was “liberal”, in the sense that “they demanded little, and knew even less” (5). The matriculation certificate issued to Nathan Bogoraz after eight years of study at the Taganrog Gymnasium testified “that, based on observations throughout the entire period of his studies at the Taganrog Gymnasium, his behavior was generally excellent, his efficiency in attending and preparing lessons, as well as in relation to written work was very satisfactory, diligence is very satisfactory, curiosity about Russian literature is commendable.” Annual certificate grades in all subjects are excellent, exam grades are good (6).
The spirit of revolutionary struggle of the Narodnaya Volya type entered the lives of the Bogoraz brothers and sisters very early. Probably the most serious conductor of radical sentiments in the family was the elder sister Pearl (Praskovya), who studied in St. Petersburg at the Higher Women's (Bestuzhev) Courses and took Active participation in the activities of first “Land and Freedom” and then “Narodnaya Volya”. In 1878, she returned from St. Petersburg to Taganrog, as V.G. Bogoraz wrote in his autobiography, “white-hot with the Narodnaya Volya fire” (7). Praskovya brought from St. Petersburg the collection “From Behind Bars,” illegally published in Geneva in 1877. The revolutionary poems of the Narodnaya Volya member S. Sinegub, published in this collection, made such a strong impression on the young Bogoraz that he later stated that he “entered the revolution precisely through the bright poems of Sinegub” (8). Not only Nathan, but also his brothers, following their older sister, “went through the revolution.” Praskovya was tried in the Kyiv case and died in the Moscow transit prison along with infant. Following her brother Sergei, who took part in the Gorlovka workers' uprising in 1905, fearing death penalty, fled abroad. Another brother, Nikolai, who went through prison and exile, became a famous surgeon and professor at Rostov University under Soviet rule (9).
In the spring of 1880, after graduating from high school, Nathan Bogoraz, who was not yet sixteen, left for St. Petersburg with his older sister. In St. Petersburg, a great many opportunities opened up for his active nature not only to continue his education, but also to find application for his inclinations and aspirations. In the fall of 1880, he entered the natural sciences department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. Bogoraz spent his first year in St. Petersburg rather secluded. By his own admission, he attended few lectures, but he read a lot and mastered the French and German languages ​​to such an extent that he was able to support himself financially by translating Zola and Maupassant from French for “Notes of the Fatherland” (10). The next year, obeying a craving for the humanities, he transferred to the economics department of the Faculty of Law and easily passed the first-year exams. At the same time, Nathan, having joined a secret student circle for studying the works of Karl Marx, managed to pay attention to his political education. Bogoraz also attended other circles of a “more decisive nature” (11). By the end of 1880, he became a member of the Narodnaya Volya circle, led by A. Zhelyabov (12). Gradually, the element of political struggle draws Bogoraz in more and more. The ardent passion for Narodnaya Volya ideas, the thirst for activity and the desire to “treat the Russian autocracy with iron and fire, or rather, with dynamite bombs” soon leads to a natural result. In November 1882, for participating in another illegal student gathering, Bogoraz was arrested and deported first to Rostov-on-Don, and soon after that - by his own choice - to Taganrog under the secret supervision of the police.
With this expulsion, as V.G. Bogoraz himself believed, “the political existence” of the eighteen-year-old revolutionary actually begins. He was actively involved in propaganda work - he organized a political circle for senior high school students, issued proclamations, and in essence, not so much with revolutionary enthusiasm as with boyish excitement, he annoyed his superiors. As he himself later recalled, the young revolutionaries quickly became bored with political economy, and soon the circle members, under the leadership of Bogoraz, began “political and even military actions” - a war with a new teacher Greek language, whose apartment was blown up by a homemade shell (13).
At the beginning of 1883, Bogoraz's revolutionary activities took on more serious forms. He became a member of the leadership of the central People's Will circle organized in Taganrog, and gave general education lectures on political economy, history and sociology to the factory workers. From lecturing we moved on to preparing the first workers' strike at the plant in Taganrog. All this could not fail to attract the attention of the police. During the search, Bogoraz was found to have a draft of an appeal he had drawn up to the workers calling for a united strike and the creation of a mutual aid fund at the plant, as well as “literature” (illegal Narodnaya Volya publications). On June 17, 1883, Bogoraz was arrested and imprisoned in Taganrog prison. In one of the versions of his autobiography, V.G. Bogoraz wrote about the Taganrog prison: “It was there that communication with the people, the human “bottom” and Kuzka’s parent began for me at the same time. It was there, obviously, that my taste for field ethnography was born in the thick of humanity, and the thicker it is, the more pleasant it is” (14). After serving more than nine months of imprisonment, Bogoraz came under public police supervision, first in Taganrog, and then he was sent to the city of Yeisk.
At the end of March 1885, having served his exile, Bogoraz returned to Taganrog, where he continued to lecture in Narodnaya Volya circles. However, this kind of activity no longer satisfied his ebullient and temperamental nature. Bogoraz strove for a new field to apply his energy and found it in the idea of ​​reviving Narodnaya Volya, which by that time was in a serious crisis. On the recommendation of the young Narodnaya Volya member Boris Orzhikh, on whom Nathan made the “impression of a mental treasure” with his remarkable memory, natural intelligence and great erudition (15), Bogoraz enters the newly organized South Russian group of Narodnaya Volya members. The group, in addition to B. Orzhikh, included L. Yasevich, A. Kulakov, A. Sigida, U. Fedorova, M. Krol and other Narodnaya Volya members from Novocherkassk, Kharkov, Yekaterinoslavl, Rostov, Taganrog, Odessa. It was here that fate first brought Bogoraz together with L.Ya. Sternberg, who represented the Odessa Narodnaya Volya members in the group. At one of the meetings held in the summer of 1885, the southern Russian group decided to convene a congress of representatives of the People's Will groups of the southern cities of Russia in Yekaterinoslavl.
In July 1885, again expelled from Tanganrog, this time to Novocherkassk, Bogoraz for “the purposes of the revolution,” i.e. mainly for conspiratorial reasons, decides to convert to Orthodoxy (16). “Giving up your old name and title was a small sacrifice. Moreover, we, southerners, were not very inveterate Jews at that time” (17), - this is how he assessed his decision. Although, perhaps, his attitude towards this fact of his biography was not unambiguous. Subsequently, Bogoraz emphasized more than once that he did not stop being a Jew, but rather viewed himself as a kind of Orthodox “Maran” (a baptized Jew who kept his Mosaic Law secret) (18). However, he did not regret at all that he was baptized: “A small nation is a cramped spiritual prison, and the closest of all is a Jewish prison - a thousand-year-old ghetto. I bless my fate that I left this prison in a timely manner” (19). “From my early youth I considered myself not only a Jew, but also a Russian. And not only a Russian citizen, but a Russian one” (20).
In the fall of 1885, V.G. Bogoraz, having completely gone illegal, came to Yekaterinoslavl to participate in the work of the congress, which was held outside the city with careful observance of precautions and secrecy. The congress participants discussed the methods of the upcoming revolutionary struggle. Bogoraz noted in his autobiography: “Strange as it may seem, at that time we treated terror coldly. Only Sternberg stubbornly defended the immediate restoration of terror” (21). It was decided, first of all, to restore the organization, establish connections in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then engage in terrorism. The members of the group were also concerned about the dire financial situation of the organization, which raised the question of carrying out “expropriations.” After some hesitation, this idea was abandoned. The issue of publishing and literature that could provide propaganda and educational work among the population, which was recognized as an extremely important area in the party’s activities, was also discussed at the congress. It is characteristic that it was this question that aroused the greatest interest of both Bogoraz and Sternberg, who were, as Bogoraz himself emphasized, “essentially, writers.” And this was precisely their “vested interest” (22).
In accordance with the decision of the conference, a double issue (Nos. 11-12) of Narodnaya Volya was prepared. The appearance of the newspaper, printed in the secret printing house of the Narodnaya Volya organization, was evidence of the viability of this organization, which had once again risen after the defeat and was ready to continue its struggle with the government. There is one fact associated with this issue that is not uninteresting, if we keep in mind the future ethnographic career of V.G. Bogoraz. One of the articles showed the state of Russian society as it was seen by the Narodnaya Volya members, and mentioned, among other things, social-utopian motives in the behavior of some public figures, in particular the “fantastic ideas” of N.N. Miklouho-Maclay (23).
At the very beginning of 1886, V.G. Bogoraz, B. Orzhikh, A. Sigida, N. Malaxiano-Sigida, E. Trinidatskaya, U. Fedorova and other Narodnaya Volya members prepared for publication a collection of revolutionary poetry “Echoes of the Revolution”, to which Bogoraz donated several works of his revolutionary lyrics: “Two Paths”, “Mothers”, “For the Coronation”, “Cursed Cemetery”, “Dream”. The printing of the book, which began in Taganrog, was interrupted by the arrest of the printing house workers, and the collection was never published. Bogoraz hastily moved from Taganrog to Yekaterinoslavl, where, together with Orzhikh, in one night he managed to print several dozen copies of the brochure he had written, “The Struggle of Social Forces in Russia.” In February 1886, after the failure of the printing houses and the arrests of his comrades, Bogoraz, having happily avoided this fate, took a suitcase with printed issues of Narodnaya Volya and moved north, to Moscow, in order, as planned by the Southern Organization, to establish connections with the Moscow and Northern -Western circles of Narodnaya Volya.
In Moscow, where Vladimir Germanovich joined the Narodnaya Volya circle, this intention took on more ambitious forms: the idea arose of forming a new all-Russian Narodnaya Volya center. He never gave up the idea of ​​continuing the publication of Narodnaya Volya at any cost. Tula was chosen as the place for publication of the newspaper, where Bogoraz went. In June 1886, the Tula printing house began working. V.G. Bogoraz wrote articles and carried out all the editorial work for the publication of Narodnaya Volya. At the same time, the Moscow circle of Narodnaya Volya members, with whom he maintained close contact, began printing the illegal collection “Poems and Songs,” for which Bogoraz contributed some of the poems from the collection “Echoes of the Revolution,” which was never published in Taganrog. His poetic proclamation “To the Modern Generation” was also published (24). In November 1886, Bogoraz arrived in Moscow with printed copies of the “Listok Narodnaya Volya” and actively became involved in the work of the organization. He took part in secret meetings of students, met with illegal revolutionaries, intending to establish contact with Alexander Ulyanov, who headed the St. Petersburg group of Narodnaya Volya members, and coordinate the work of the Narodnaya Volya circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The implementation of these far-reaching plans was stopped on December 9, 1886 by arrest on charges of belonging to the Narodnaya Volya organization and setting up an illegal printing house in Tula. Bogoraz spent a year and a half in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress (from December 13, 1886 to August 1, 1888). “A terrible thing is being alone. A living grave... Even time seems to stop its flow over you... You walk for hours in your cell back and forth, like an animal in a cage trampled by the feet of your predecessors, and you sort everything out of nothing to do about the past...", Vladimir Germanovich later recalled (25). It was here that he first took up the study of English, which he had to complete in Kolyma (26). On November 2, 1888, after his transfer to the House of Pre-trial Detention, the Highest Order of deportation to Siberia for a period of 10 years followed. Before being sent into exile, Bogoraz spent another six months in the Moscow Central Transit Prison (Butyrki) awaiting the formation of a party of exiles sent to remote areas of Siberia (27).

Kolyma link. The painful journey from Moscow to Sredne-Kolymsk, Yakutsk region, began in May 1889. “I sailed along the Kama and Ob on prison barges, walled up in the hold. From Tomsk to Irkutsk I walked along Vladimirka on foot with the shackled punks. In Krasnoyarsk, in an empty transit prison, starving bugs almost ate us alive<...>We rode from Irkutsk to Yakutsk in winter with the gendarmes in troikas, almost half naked. Out of habit, we were terribly cold, our breath froze in our chests, and the snot froze under our noses. We went to Kolymsk in twos with the Cossacks, first in a sleigh with horses, then on reindeer, and then on small Yakut skates. And so we arrived in our distant Kolyma patrimony” (28).
“Unforgettable years in Kolymsk - subsistence farming, the Stone Age alive. If you don’t catch, you don’t eat. You catch fish, ride dogs, and feed on this fish together with the dogs. An ermine lives in the barn, grabs mice and carries pieces of meat. A partridge nests in the square. At night a fox comes to the doorstep and licks the slop. And the frosts are so cold - you spit, the frozen spit sticks into the snow like an icicle. There were fifty of us. We had over 200 dogs. A dozen seines. Each person caught about 60 pounds of fish per year, and up to a hundred cubic meters of firewood was prepared in total. All with your own white hands, who can you force” (29). And yet, despite all the difficulties of everyday life, which took the form of a struggle for existence, life continued in exile. “We became completely close to the Russian population on the Kolyma River,” recalled V.G. Bogoraz. “We danced at winter gatherings, sang old game songs with the girls. On holidays, they played a screw “with a purchase”, “with powder”, “with a nail”, “with an Ethiopian”, “with a triangle” and a “classic” simple one. And on heavy winter nights they read heavy books in different languages ​​all day long” (30). Somewhat later, the passion for learning new things led Bogoraz to the Siberian aborigines. “He climbed from sedentary peoples to nomadic peoples, traveled with the Chukchi in winter and summer, rode with the Lamuts on reindeer. In the summer, he ate the carrion of deer that had died from infection, as required by the Chukchi way of life - so that the food would not go to waste. In winter, he fed on sour “mundushka” - small fish from spare fish pits, as required by the Yakut way of life” (31).
Interest in the “people”, into whose midst he found himself, albeit not of his own free will, was to a certain extent a continuation of Bogoraz’s Narodnaya Volya beliefs, as he himself later formulated it: “The social task of the era for the last Land Volyas and Narodnaya Volya members who found themselves in distant exile in the extreme northeast, consisted of studying the peoples scattered there, primitive, half-exterminated and almost completely unknown” (32). It was also important that for Bogoraz, with his lively and active nature, the psychological pressure of exile was extremely difficult. “What a strange state of mind - not laziness in the proper sense, but indifference... alienation... Your steamy and wet island is still part of the globe and with it it lives and moves, if not forward, then at least backward. Kolymsk is a special planet, even less dependent on the earth than the moon, completely alien to it, a block of ice thrown into airless space and frozen motionless over the abyss, where all random life freezes and suffocates,” he wrote to Sternberg on Sakhalin (33 ). Bogoraz, like many other exiles, urgently needed to find a type of activity for himself that supported the will to live, interest in it, and, finally, just a sound mind. In another letter to Sternberg, after the usual complaints about melancholy and irritation from his idle existence, Bogoraz writes that he is now “flirting with ethnography” - “travelling around the region, lived for six months with the Chukchi, damn them, traveled on a reindeer, rafted on boats - all this is interesting only to the ethnographer” (34). The tone of these statements hardly indicates that Bogoraz from the very beginning took his studies in ethnography very seriously and initially saw in them any prospect for himself. Rather, it was simply an outlet in his closed world, cut off from big life. However, after some time it became obvious that studying the language, folklore and ethnography of little-known peoples is not only a matter of personal interests and passions, but also areas of knowledge in demand by science.
Being a person prone to languages ​​and literary creativity, Vladimir Germanovich naturally began his scientific research by studying the peculiar local dialect and folklore of the Russian Kolyma residents. In the period 1890-1896. he enthusiastically wrote down Russian folk songs, epics, fairy tales, riddles, proverbs and sayings of Kolyma residents. In 1896, V.F. Miller, Chairman of the Ethnographic Department of the Society of Lovers of Natural History, Anthropology and Ethnography at Moscow University, published for the first time in the Ethnographic Review three of the seven epics sent by Bogoraz, recorded by him in Sredne-Kolymsk (35), and then in In 1901, he published eight more newly recorded epics (36). The bulk of Bogoraz’s Russian folklore records in Kolyma was published in 1901 in the 86th volume of the “Collection of the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences” (37).
The “Regional Dictionary of the Kolyma Russian Dialect” includes 153 songs, 103 riddles, 8 tongue twisters, 27 proverbs and 5 fairy tales, recorded mainly from the townspeople and Cossacks of Sredne-Kolymsk, Nizhne-Kolymsk and Pokhodsk (38). The texts are preceded by an article by V.G. Bogoraz “Songs of Russian Porechans in Kolyma,” which gives a general description of local song folklore. During game (round dance) songs, the games that accompanied them are described. A detailed dictionary of the Kolyma dialect with numerous illustrations for it in the form of separate phrases, occupied 144 pages of text and characterizes the local vocabulary in great detail. The interpretation of dialect words also required extensive use of ethnographic data. Thus, the dictionary contains not only rich linguistic material, but also valuable information about the culture of the old-time Russian population of Kolyma of the late 19th - early 20th centuries.
In 1894, the East Siberian Department of the Russian Geographical Society, with funds donated by the famous industrialist and philanthropist I.M. Sibiryakov, organized the Yakut ethnographic expedition, the research of which was carried out in three districts - Yakutsk, Olekminsk and Kolyma. The expedition was led by D.A. Clementz. It was a fairly large-scale (scientific and organizational) enterprise. The scientific objectives of the expedition were complex and included studying the language of the ethnographic group being surveyed, recording folklore texts, a household census to study the economic situation of the population, collecting archival materials to help become familiar with local administrative policies, and, finally, a description based on direct observations of existing forms of material culture, social institutions, beliefs. Local officials and clergy, as well as more than ten political exiles who lived in Yakutia, were recruited to carry out the work of the expedition. The need for educated people in the remote outskirts of Russia was a problem so acute that the administration had to turn a blind eye to the fact that it would have to work with people who were politically unreliable. Miller, already familiar in absentia with the scientific activities of Bogoraz, considered it possible to invite him as an ethnographer to study local Russians, nomadic Chukchi and, incidentally, Lamuts.
Having started work on the expedition, Vladimir Germanovich came face to face with the problem of communication. The Russian translators, whose help he tried to use at the beginning, turned out to be of little use for normal work - it turned out that they only knew the Chukchi-Russian jargon developed by the Russians of Kolyma for trade relations with the Chukchi (39). This was completely insufficient to meet the scientific objectives of the expedition: many areas of life of the indigenous population were completely beyond the capabilities of this jargon. In a letter dated September 15, 1895 to VSORGO, Bogoraz wrote: “Due to the lack of any decent translator for both the Chukchi and Lamut languages, I had to direct my main efforts to learn to at least somewhat speak with representatives of these tribes without intermediary other persons. In Chukchi I have learned to a certain extent, if not to speak, then at least to understand other people’s speech, and at present I could still conduct ethnographic research among the Chukchi tribe, without being very difficult in terms of methods of expression and without needing a translator, especially that Russian translators in Kolyma speak the Chukchi language no better than me” (40). It was obvious that ethnographic research required a good knowledge of the real Chukchi language, without which it was impossible to study either folklore as an ethnographic source, or the features of the social system, or culture. “Even at the very beginning of my work, I believed that no serious ethnographic research was unthinkable without knowledge of the language. Subsequently, the conditions of Chukchi-Russian relations showed me that knowledge of the language is the only key to communication with the Chukchi, and forced me to devote more than half of my time to studying its lexicology and grammar” (41).
For almost three years (1895-1897) V.G. Bogoraz comprehensively researched the language, social system, life and culture of the Chukchi and Evens, who wandered along the tributaries of the Kolyma - the Bolshoy Anyu, Oloy and Omolon. He makes folklore records, studies grammar, the basics of morphology and partly the syntax of the Chukchi language. Knowledge of the language ensured high-quality, deep and thoughtful research work of the ethnographer. On a number of long trips, Bogoraz was accompanied by the Chukchi Ainganvat, who provided him with “great services to familiarize himself with the language and explain various obscure phenomena of Chukchi life” (42). Before Bogoraz, a world of a different vision of the environment, unusual and original ideas, concepts that had not previously been revealed by anyone who wrote about the Chukchi was revealed wider and deeper (43).
While working on the expedition, Vladimir Germanovich simultaneously took part in the first General Census of the Russian Empire, conducted in 1897. The very nature of the census (wide coverage of collected data, including the number and geography of settlement, tribal and clan composition, national and religious affiliation, distribution of local languages ​​and much more) created a good basis for a comprehensive acquaintance with the culture of the people, the social and economic foundations of their life, and their way of life.
Speaking about the role of the Kolyma exile in the fate of V.G. Bogoraz, one cannot help but dwell on one more aspect of his activity, to which he himself attached great importance and in which, what is important for us, his ethnographic research was uniquely reflected. It was in exile that Bogoraz took his first steps in “ethnographic” fiction, which, strictly speaking, is a kind of refraction, free creative processing and comprehension of his Chukchi folklore, linguistic, ethnographic materials.
His first two stories about the Chukchi - “At the Camp” and “Bowlegged” - V.G. Bogoraz. wrote already in 1894. In October 1896, the first work from the series of famous “Chukchi stories” was published (44) under the name N.A. Tan. In the field of view of Bogoraz the writer were not only the details of Chukchi life, but also the worldview of the heroes. He generously introduces mythological images into the story. The wide and varied use of Chukchi folklore, noticeable already in the first story, will later become a distinctive feature of Tan-Bogoraz’s work (45). Another story in the cycle - “At the Camp” (later “At the Dead Camp”) (46) introduces us not only to the real life of the Chukchi, but also recreates their beliefs in detail and introduces the reader to ideas about the world around them. A separate book, “Chukchi Stories,” was published at the end of 1899 (47).
Simultaneously with “Chukchi Stories” V.G. Bogoraz in 1896-1899. writes short stories, short stories, and a story about the life of political exiles in Kolyma, which formed the cycle “Kolyma Stories” (48). In the second half of the 90s, several more stories and essays from Chukotka life appeared (“On the Wolverine River”, “At Grigorikha”) (49). And already in Irkutsk, V.G. Bogoraz wrote his first “Chukchi” story “On the Kamenny Cape” (1898) (50). Both the story and the stories generously use factual material obtained during expeditionary trips to Chukotka.
It is curious that literally from the first steps in the literary and ethnographic field, Vladimir Germanovich receives claims from two sides. On the part of representatives of science - in that he is sometimes inclined to a rather free interpretation of strictly scientific facts, or, in the words of D.K. Zelenin, “the fiction writer in him often fought with the scientist and often won, as all ethnographers who were at the reports know.” and Bogoraz’s lectures” (51). From the side of admirers of his literary talent, it is that the scientist in him fetters the artist’s creativity. Indeed, for example, the original text of some of his “Chukchi Stories” was overloaded with Chukchi words. So in the magazine publication “Krivonogy” we find about 40 footnotes explaining the meaning of one or another Chukchi word. As V.G. Korolenko noted, the author of “Chukchi Stories” combines a serious ethnographer and a keen-eyed artist. And although in Tan’s works the ethnographer sometimes seems to connect with the artist, the artist brings to life ethnographic observations and descriptions, which in themselves are interesting and fascinating (52).
Thus, the ethnographic career of V.G. Bogoraz begins precisely with the Kolyma exile. He worked completely independently, without receiving any special training. He entered his new profession almost self-taught. It is known that he was not even in Yakutsk, where D.A. came. Clements to instruct the participants of his expedition. Having almost no textbooks on general linguistics, he was forced to follow a completely independent path in the study of the Chukchi and Even languages. It is important to note that from the first steps of studying the Chukchi, Bogoraz understood the need to master, first of all, their language (53). Later he formulated this position as follows: “Language is not only a tool for communicating with the natives without the help of translators, often careless and ignorant, it is the best means for understanding the people themselves - an error-free and accurate means, because from every phrase, even from every single forms, precious details can be extracted relating to production stages, social institutions and associated ideology” (54).
Bogoraz handed over the materials collected during the expedition to VSORGO. A special commission recognized their high scientific value and petitioned for permission for Bogoraz to serve the remainder of his exile in Irkutsk to process the materials he had collected on the study of the Chukchi. Permission was received, and on September 25, 1898 he arrived in Irkutsk. In October of the same year, at a meeting of the VSORGO Administrative Committee, he read out his “Brief Report on the Study of the Chukchi of the Kolyma Territory,” which, in accordance with the decision of the committee, was soon published (55).
This report was the first ethnographic work of V.G. Bogoraz about the Chukchi, which, in the competent opinion of the famous ethnographer and Siberian scholar I.S. Vdovin, covered a wide range of issues not only of a descriptive, but also of a generalizing nature (56). The report contains information about the settlement of the Reindeer Chukchi, sets out some ideas about their origin, describes in sufficient detail rituals, beliefs, social and family relations, legal norms, features of the psychology of the Chukchi, etc. It also provides a description of the main features of the phonetics and grammar of the Chukchi language, first definition and characteristics of the genres of Chukchi folklore. The report is accompanied by a “List of collected materials” and a “Route map”.
In addition to this report, Vladimir Germanovich presented to VSORGO his materials on the Chukchi language and folklore, which he systematized and prepared for publication in Kolyma. Appreciating these materials, but not being able to publish them, the East Siberian Department turned for assistance to St. Petersburg, to the Historical and Philological Department of the Academy of Sciences. Having considered this appeal, the department recognized the need to first familiarize itself with these materials, for which a commission was created consisting of academicians V.V. Radlov, V.I. Vasilyev, K.G. Zaleman, A.A. Kunik, V.R. Rosen . This commission “found it highly desirable to publish materials on the folklore and language of so little known Yukaghirs and Chukchi, however, before entering the department with a publication plan, it asked expedition members V. Yochelson and V. Bogoraz to present samples of the texts they collected with grammatical explanations” (57).
V.G. Bogoraz coped with the heaviest burden of the Kolyma exile with utmost dignity. By the end of this ten-year period, he already had significant scientific knowledge, was well oriented in the subtleties and details of the realities of aboriginal culture, spoke the Chukchi language fluently, had experience in participating in a large expedition project and even some experience in collecting work. In addition, the uniqueness, enormous value and high demand for the materials he collected during his forced stay in the field become obvious. Professional studies in ethnography and linguistics become for Bogoraz a real path to acquiring a certain social status.
On November 2, 1898, the ten-year period of exile expired. From that time on, V.G. Bogoraz had to be under the secret supervision of the police and take into account significant restrictions in choosing his place of residence. Nevertheless, at the request of a number of prominent figures of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, the Academy of Sciences, in particular, thanks to the active assistance of Academician V.V. Radlov, Vladimir Germanovich received permission from the authorities to come to St. Petersburg to continue his scientific activities.