Vladimir Bogoraz

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Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz
Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz

Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz, best known under literary pseudonym N.A. Tan (April 27, 1865 — May 10, 1936) was a Russian writer and anthropologist, especially known for his studies of the Chukchi people in Siberia.

Vladimir Bogoraz was born in the city of Taganrog in the family of a Jewish school teacher. After finishing Chekhov Gymnasium in 1882, he enrolled in Saint Petersburg University, Legal Dept., but was dismissed for revolutionary activity with Narodnaya Volya and exiled to his parents' home in Taganrog. He spent 11 months at Taganrog prison for revolutionary propaganda. In 1886, he moved to Saint Petersburg where he was arrested and later exiled into North-Eastern Siberia, near Yakutsk (1889-1899), where he studied the Chukchi people, their way of life, traditions, language, and beliefs, giving Bogoraz precious material for poems and belletristic essays.

Bogoraz published his first literary works in the early 1880s, but he became famous by 1896-1897 under literary pseudonym Tan for poems and novels published in various periodicals. In 1899, he published the book 'Chukchi Tales' and in 1900, 'The Verses'. The materials, published by Tan-Bogoraz in perodicals of the Russian Academy of Sciences, such as 'Specimens of Materials for Studying Chukchi Language and Folklore' and 'Studies of Chukchi Language and Folklore Collected in Kolyma District' were a very valuable contribution to development of linguistics and made the author popular around the world. In 1899, by recommendation of the Academy of Sciences, Bogoraz was invited by New York's American Museum of Natural History for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1900-1901) aimed at studying the ethnography, anthropology and archaeology of the Northern coasts of the Pacific Ocean, where Tan-Bogoraz and his friend Vladimir Jochelson were in charge of the Anadyr region of Siberia, gathering materials for ethnography of Chukchi, Koryaks, Lamuts and other indigenous Siberian peoples. He fled Russia for political reasons in 1901 and settled in New York City, where he became curator of the American Museum, and produced his great works The Chukchee (1904–09) and Chukchee Mythology (1910).

Tan-Bogoraz returned to Russia in 1904, Bogoraz helped to organize the first peasant congress and the Labour Group in the Duma. In 1910 was published the collection of his works in ten volumes. In 1917, he became professor of ethnology at Petrograd University. During the 1920s and '30s he did important anthropological work creating and teaching written languages for indigenous Siberian peoples and founded the Institute of the Northern Peoples in Leningrad.

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