Vladimir Korolenko’s Votiaks, Poor Makars, Ukrainian Uniates, and Russian Giants against Modern Anthropology

• In Event: Literature and “Ethnographic Primitivism” in the Russian Empire/Early USSR

Abstract

The paper revisits Vladimir’s Korolenko stories written before and soon after the famous Multan case (1892-96), in which he took part as a public defender of Votiaks (Udmurts) and a self-appointed ethnographic expert on their synthetic Christianity and way of life. Having to embrace modern ethnographic discourse to expose the accusation of Votiaks of practicing human sacrifices as false, Korolenko developed an elaborate critique of “Western” anthropology, its concepts, and methods. The paper reads Korolenko’s artistic prose through the lens of the Multan case and its ethnography and traces his ethnographic views from articles on modern ethnography to literary texts. This approach allows to reconstruct a complex engagement of an authoritative populist imperial intellectual with the universalizing, comparative, classificatory, and theory-driven scientific anthropology of his time.

Author

• Marina B. Mogilner, U of Illinois at Chicago