People’s Will and Soviet Ethnographers: The Prose of Tan-Bogoraz

• In Event: From Popular Will to Popular Culture: Socialist and Postsocialist Imaginaries for the Russian Mass Polity

Abstract

My paper will focus on the fiction of Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz. A former member of the People’s Will, Bogoraz, while serving his sentence in Siberia in the late nineteenth-century, started collecting ethnographic research on the indigenous nomadic people of the Russian Far North in order to keep his sanity in exile. By the 1920s, he would become one of the key founders of both the Soviet Institute of Ethnography and of the Institute of the North. In parallel with his ethnographic scholarship and attempts to defend the cultural and environmental diversity of the North by educating a new group of Soviet administrators, Tan-Bogoraz would continue writing hybrid part-documentary, part-fictional prose about the experiences of political prisoners in the Far North. I will discuss Bogoraz’s literary works in the context of the survival of the ideas and cultural imagination of narodnichestvo in the 1920s and 1930s.

Author

• Anastasiya Osipova, U of Colorado at Boulder