Metadata: V. G. Bogoraz-Tan
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences
- Holding institution (official language):
- Санкт-Петербургский филиал архива Российской академии наук
- Postal address:
- 199034, St. Petersburg, Universitetskaia naberezhnaia, d. 1
- Phone number:
- (812) 323-08-21
- Web address:
- http://isaran.ru
- Email:
- archive@spbrc.nw.ru
- Reference number:
- F. 250
- Title:
- V. G. Bogoraz-Tan
- Title (official language):
- Богораз-Тан В. Г.
- Creator/accumulator:
- Bogoraz-Tan, V G
- Date(s):
- 1887/1960
- Language:
- Russian
- English
- French
- German
- Extent:
- 1,258 archival storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
-
The fonds contains manuscripts of V. G. Bogoraz-Tan’s research works and materials used in writing them (1895-1936); his fiction and journalistic works (1887-1936); biographical materials and documents pertaining to his activities in various institutions (1884-1936); correspondence and materials of various other persons (1914-36). Each of the fonds’ inventories contains materials pertaining to Jewish history and culture; these may be provisionally divided into five thematic groups:
1) V. G. Bogoraz-Tan’s personal documents and biographical materials, in particular, his autobiographical statements (1925-27); his certificate of baptism (1885); certification of his right to obtain a residence permit (1901); a biography of his sister P. M. Bogoraz (undated); diplomas from various scholarly societies; correspondence with relatives: his niece A. N. Bogoraz and nephew D. S. Bogoraz and his brothers N. A. and S. G. Bogoraz (1894-36); photographs and portraits of V. G. Bogoraz, as well as photographs of his relatives (1891-1936), etc.
2) Manuscripts, proofs and offprints of literary and journalistic works of V. G. Bogoraz, including the stories “Mobilization. Gomel’ silhouettes,” “Without Residence Rights” (pre-1917), “Jews in Abyssinia” (undated), “Kolyma Judea” (post-1917), “On the Predominance of Jews among Kolyma Political Exiles” (undated) and “Jewish Blood” (post-1917); particular stories subsequently published in Evreiskaia starina [Jewish Antiquity] and Evreiskaia letopis’ [Jewish Chronicle] (1924); and an essay titled “L. Ia. Shternberg as Man and Scholar” (1927); etc.
3) Materials of a historical and ethnographic nature, including notebooks featuring notes on the “Jewish question” (1910); two manuscripts of articles on the 1903 pogrom against Jews in Gomel’, one (by an unidentified author) titled “The Pogrom against Jews in Gomel’, an Onsite Literary Investigation” (undated); the second by G. P. Havkin titled “The Gomel Trial: from Our Correspondent” (1904); manuscripts of essays on the Gomel’ pogrom selected for the collection The Twilight of the Ghetto and the Great Eve; drafts of eyewitness accounts of the pogrom, with charts of the Jewish neighbourhoods of Gomel’ (undated); evaluations by Prof. B. F. Adler, V. I. Anuchin, D. K. Zelenin, B. I. Iokhel’son, L. Ia. Shternberg and S. A. Ratner-Shternberg of the scholarly work of graduate students (1920s-30s); manuscripts and typewritten copies of materials of a commission to organise student ethnographic excursions; notebooks with write-ups of ethnographic summer trips by students of the Leningrad Institute of Jewish History and Literature to Lepel’ (Vitebsk province), the settlement of Khabnoe at the junction of the Kyiv, Volhynia and Minsk provinces, Gomel’ and the village of Sirotino (Vitebsk region) – these write-ups were subsequently published in a collection edited by V. G. Bogoraz titled The Jewish Town in the Revolution (Leningrad, 1926).
4) V. G. Bogoraz’s correspondence with the Society to Aid Jewish Teachers of the Novorossiia Territory and the Bessarabia Region (1909) and with private individuals, including Z. Vendrov, M. M. Vinaver, I. N. Vinnikov, V. I. Iokhel’son, Iu. I. Gessen, E. G. Kagarov, Z. Kader, M. Kissel’, R. D. Koretskaia, S. G. Lozinskii, L. Ia. Shternberg and others (1894-1936).
5) Manuscripts of other persons, including research studies by V. I. Iokhel’son, E. G. Kagarov, E. A. Kreinovich, D. A. Khvol’son, L. Ia. Shternberg and others (1914-35).
- Archival history:
- The Academy’s archive was established by decree of Emperor Peter I in 1728 to house documents of the Conference (supreme assembly) of the Academy of Sciences. At the same time, Academy of Sciences President L L Bliumentrost appointed Gerhard Friedrich Müller, a student of the Academy gymnasium (subsequently an academician, and the first historiographer to the Russian Empire), to organise the files of the Conference of the Academy of Sciences. During the 18th-20th centuries, separate archives of other subdivisions of the Academy of Sciences existed as well: the archives of the Chancellery of the Academy of Sciences (18th c.) and the Committee of the Board of the Academy of Sciences (the chancellery’s institutional successor; documents date from 1803), and archives of departments. In 1922, all Academy archives were merged into a single Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, renamed in 1930 the Archive of the USSR Academy of Sciences (and in 1991, once again the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences). In 1936, a Moscow branch of the archive was created in connection with the Academy’s relocation to that city. In 1963, the Archive of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad was reorganised as the Leningrad Branch of the Archive of the USSR Academy of Sciences, while the Archival Directorate was transferred to Moscow. In 1991, the Leningrad branch was renamed the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPF ARAN). The archive houses over 1,600 fonds containing approximately one million storage units.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz (pseudonym – Tan; 1865-1936) was a revolutionary activist, ethnographer, linguist, specialist in the Russian North, writer and professor at Leningrad State University. He was born in Volhynia province into the family of a rabbi and converted to Christianity at the age of twenty. He studied at the Taganrog men’s classical secondary school [gimnaziia]. In 1885 he joined the People’s Will group. He took part in the operations of underground printing presses. He was arrested numerous times and in 1889 was exiled for ten years to Srednekolymsk (Yakutia).
From this period on, he was active in the field of the ethnography of the northern peoples and was so successful in his studies that in 1894 the Imperial Academy of Sciences included him in its expedition to study the life of the Chukchi and other peoples of the northeastern Eurasian continent. From 1895-97 he lived among the nomadic Chukchi. When the expedition concluded, the Academy of Sciences obtained permission for him to return to St. Petersburg and in 1900 sent him on a new North Pacific expedition.
In 1896 he began his literary career, publishing essays, stories and poems. His first book of prose, Chukchi Stories, appeared in 1899 and his first book of poetry (Poems) was published in 1900. In 1899 he left for the United States, from where he embarked on a Far East expedition led by the anthropologist Franz Boas and collected ethnographic material regarding the Chukchi, Koriaks, Itelmens and others. Until 1904, he worked as curator of the ethnographic collection of the American Museum of Natural History; here he published an English-language monograph titled The Chukchi, which received international recognition as a foundational study on the ethnography and mythology of this people.
Upon his return to Russia in 1905, he was one of the organisers of the Peasant Union; in 1906, as a deputy to the First State Duma, he took part in the creation of that body’s “Labour Group”. Amid the revolutions of 1917, he took a Smena vekh (“Change of Landmarks”) stance in his journalistic articles, published in the journals Russia and New Russia.
From 1918 he was a research associate of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences; and from 1921 he was a professor at several Leningrad universities (in particular, he taught in the ethnography department of the Leningrad Institute of History, Philosophy and Linguistics). In 1929, on the initiative of V. G. Bogoraz, the Institute of the Peoples of the North was founded, where he also worked as a professor and taught courses on general ethnology; he also initiated the establishment, in 1924, of the Committee to Aid the Peoples of the Northern Peripheries (the Committee of the North) under the presidium of the USSR Central Executive Committee. In 1930-31 he founded the Museum of the History of Religion and served as its director for the rest of his life.
- Access points: locations:
- Bessarabia region
- Gomel’
- Khabnoe
- Lepel’
- Russia
- Sirotino
- St. Petersburg
- Access points: persons/families:
- Adler, B F
- Anuchin, V I
- Bogoraz-Tan, Vladimir Germanovich
- Bogoraz, A N
- Bogoraz, D S
- Bogoraz, N A
- Bogoraz, P M
- Bogoraz, S G
- Gessen, Iu I
- Havkin, G P
- Iokhel’son, B I
- Iokhel’son, V I
- Kader, Z
- Kagarov, E G
- Khvol’son, D A
- Kissel’, M
- Koretskaia, R D
- Kreinovich, E A
- Lozinskii, S G
- Ratner-Shternberg, S A
- Shternberg, L Ia
- Vendrov, Z
- Vinaver, M M
- Vinnikov, I N
- Zelenin, Dmitrii Konstantinovich
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds comprises five inventories arranged according to the thematic-chronological principle (ops. 1, 3), chronologically (op. 2) and alphabetically.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary