Nº 5 (2025)

This publication introduces into scientific circulation the correspondence of Sergei Tokarev with Yuri Knorozov, stored in Collection 40 of the Archive of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. These letters cover the period from 1948 to 1958 and demonstrate the development of their personal relationships, as well as Tokarev's influence on the formation of the Soviet school of Americanist studies and its international perception.

The article presents a study of the way Chinese people are perceived in S.V. Maksimov's book "In the East: A Trip to Amur: Travel Notes and Memoirs", which was one of the first writings of the kind produced by writers of the Russian Far East. I highlight the peculiarities of the narrative strategy of the writer-ethnographer, focusing on the use of two narrating instances in creating an image of perception – a direct observer-onlooker and a statesman-minded researcher who knows the historical and political situation. Everyday observations on the life of the Chinese population of a border town by and large cause the feeling of aversion in the "observer-onlooker" whose philistine mind tends to absolute aspects such as bribery as the basis of the management system and business relations, the pursuit of sensual pleasures, or the spharitism and disposition to theft. At the same time, the statesman-minded researcher, who is keen on searching for universal of human communication, discovers the most important (in his opinion) feature of the national character of the Chinese: patriotism as love and devotion to their native land, native culture, and their people. Maksimov, who juxtaposes patriotism to the tendency of Russians abroad to melt in a foreign culture, implicitly asserts love for the native land and native culture and history as the main condition for understanding and inculcating the sense of "nationality"; that is, he sees it as the basis of ethnic identity and ethnicity capable of influencing the foreign and domestic policies of Russians in their communication with the Chinese. I argue that Maksimov's travel notes are valuable not only as a purely ethnographic source for academic research on historical realities of the mid-19th century and Russian-Chinese interaction and relationships, but also as a literary genre that set a trend in the formation of a distinctive artistic-ethnographic style in the writings of later authors of Russia's Far Eastern frontier, such as V.K. Arsenyev, N.A. Baykov, P.V. Shkurkin, and V. Marta.

In this essay, I attempt to examine travel prose of Russian-language authors of the 20th century – fictional and documentary descriptions of travels across the territory of the European part of Russia – as sources for reconstructing the social space of the road. The structure of the positions of those interacting in this space is defined as dependent on the process of movement, as well as the means of transportation or their absence. I further consider the social space of the road in the perspective of intersections with external segments of social space through the simultaneous definition of communicants in the road and external systems of statuses.

The subject of the article is the work of the Russian writer and blogger living in the Far East – the former hunter-reindeer herder Nikolai Iosifovich Aboimov. The case of Nikolai Aboimov's entering the Evenki culture deserves attention as an example of cultural contact without conflict. He managed to overcome cultural and mental borders between the two cultures due to a long-term lived experience shared with the Evenki. He gained from them deep first-hand knowledge about their unique culture and expressed it in his work. A percipient and observant person as all hunters are, he memorized and recorded his experience in diaries and later transferred it into literary form and videos. This article employs methods and approaches both of ethnology and of literary criticism, attempting to combine biographical analysis and content analysis of various sources such as video blogs and works of art, as well as drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and museum research. I examine the major motives in the literary work of Nikolai Aboimov – namely, those of taiga, education/self-education, play/creativity, and will to live and overcome difficulties. In fact, Aboimov himself used a phenomenological approach in understanding reality, which helped him describe the essence of lived situations. His stories – documentarily accurate miniature sketches of everyday life in the taiga – feature some fifty characters, mainly Evenki and some other people, as well as dogs, reindeer, wild animals and birds. These stories tell us about hunting and reindeer herding, material culture, beliefs, Evenki’s knowledge and pedagogy, as well as collaboration with geologists. I argue that Aboimov’s stories and videos should be seen as valuable and reliable ethnographic sources conveying information about the Bomnak Evenki; furthermore, they provide answers to questions about the ways of overcoming cultural boundaries while maintaining own identity.

Discussions on the ethnic origins of Armenians in scientific publications do not cease. As a rule, the historians and ethnographers of the Ancient Middle East dispute two popular theories. The first of them is “autochthonous” (“Ḫayaša hypothesis”), which has been widely supported by the academic circles within the Republic of Armenia since Soviet times. The second is “migration-mixed” (“Ḫatti hypothesis”), to which many Russian and Western specialists continue to appeal. Due to the lack of consensus, the author of this article set out to analyze the history and main provisions of both scientific theories. In addition, he extracted from the multilingual cuneiform monuments of the Assyrian, Achaemenid, Babylonian, Urartian, Hittite, and Sumero-Akkadian cultures, Luwian hieroglyphics, as well as from the books of the Old Testament and ancient Greek and ancient Armenian literature all the materials that may be related to the ethnic and linguistic elements that took part in the long process of ethnogenesis of the Armenians.