Nikolai Ivanovich Spiridonov

Nikolai Spiridonov in the late 1920s

Nikolai Ivanovich Spiridonow ( Russian: Николай Иванович Спиридонов ; * ^July 9th / May 22nd,  1906 ^greg. Near Nelemnoye , Yakutsk Oblast , Russian Empire ; † March 17 or April 14, 1938 in Leningrad ) was a Soviet ethnographer . He was the first scientist of the indigenous peoples of the Russian north and under the pseudonym Tėki Odulok (Тэки Одулок) the first Yukagir writer.

Life

Nikolai Spiridonow was born in 1906 in the nomad camp Ottur-Kjuol on the banks of the Yassachnaja in Yakutia . His parents, who lived by hunting and fishing, had eleven children, only four of whom grew up. Because of economic hardship, his parents gave him as a child to work for a Russian merchant in Srednekolymsk . On the advice of an Orthodox priest, he was sent to the parish school. After the establishment of Soviet power, he entered the Komsomol in 1921 . He attended the party school in Yakutsk in 1924 and became a member of the Communist Party of Russia (B) in 1925 . In 1926 he began studying at Leningrad University , where the ethnographer Vladimir Bogoras became his teacher. As a student, Spiridonov took part in scientific expeditions to the Kolyma and the Chukchi Peninsula , collecting material for his scientific work, which was published from 1927. When he sharply criticized the excesses of collectivization in the Siberian north, he was temporarily expelled from the Communist Party in 1930. In the same year in the journal appeared Sowjetski Sewer (Soviet north) of ODULE, who was virtually unknown to the Soviet ethnographic science his article about living in the Kolyma Okrug Yukagirs strain. For Volume 65 of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia , he wrote the articles "Jukagiren" and "Jukagirian Language". During this time he also began to work on dictionaries for the Yukagir and Ewen languages .

In 1931 Spiridonov successfully completed his studies and began postgraduate studies in economic geography at the Institute of the Peoples of the North (Институт народов Севера) in Leningrad. He went to Chukotka as a member of the Organizing Committee of the Regional Executive Committee of the Far East to establish the National Chukchi Circle . There he lived among the Chukchi , spent seven months in Anadyr and on the Prowidenija and St. Lawrence Bays . In 1933 he published the ethnographic essay На крайнем Севере ( In the Far North ), which he wrote after his notes during the 1927 expedition. In the form of a travel report , he describes the peculiarities of the life of the local population, their customs and rituals. In 1934, Spiridonov defended his dissertation Торговая эксплуатация юкагиров в дореволюционное время ( The Economic Exploitation of the Yukagirs in the Pre-Revolutionary Period ) and received his doctorate as a candidate of the Soviet Union. He was the first scientist to come from one of the indigenous peoples of northern Russia.

In 1934 Spiridonov's most important literary work appeared Жизнь Имтеургина старшего ( The Life of Imteurgin the Elder ). He published it under the pseudonym Tėki Odulok (Jukagir "little jukagire"). The story tells of the tragic fate of a Chukchi family 20 years before the revolution. The book received a special award as one of the best children's books of the year and was published three times during the author's lifetime. It was translated into several languages ​​and appeared in Switzerland in 1940 under the title People in the Snow . A sequel about Imteurgin the Younger is said to have been available as a manuscript, but has been lost. An excerpt appeared in the magazine Pionier in 1937 as Имтехай у собачьих людей ( Imtechai among the dog people ). Spiridonov was the first writer from the Yukagir people.

From 1934 to 1936 he was party secretary of the Ajano-Maiski district on the Sea of ​​Okhotsk again in the Far East. In 1936 he returned to Leningrad and worked at the children's book publisher Detgis .

Nikolai Spiridonov eventually became a victim of Stalin's " Great Purge ". On April 30, 1937, he was arrested along with nine other scientists from the Institute of the Peoples of the North. They were charged with espionage on behalf of Japan . The military court in Leningrad sentenced him to death in January 1938 as a counterrevolutionary and Japanese spy. The verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court of the USSR on March 16, 1938 and carried out the following day. Some sources deviate from April 14th as the date of death. Spiridonov's wife Olga Nikolaevna Spiridonova was exiled to Nolinsk . She gave their son Nikolai to her sister's family, who adopted him. He became a topographer and died in 1995.

Nikolai Spiridonov was rehabilitated on October 29, 1955 only after Stalin's death. Since then, his books have seen new editions.

Honors

Streets in Jakutsk , Syrjanka and Nelemnoye as well as motor ships on the Lena and Kolyma bear the name Tėki Odulok. In 1996 the first Jukagiren national school in Nelemnoye was named after him.

factories

• Одулы (юкагиры) Колымского округа. 1930
• На крайнем Севере. Молодая гвардия, 1933
• Торговая эксплуатация юкагиров в дореволюционное время. Dissertation, 1934
• Жизнь Имтеургина старшего. 1934 ( People in the Snow , Schweizerisches Jugendschriftenwerk , Zurich 1940)
• Имтехай у собачьих людей. 1937

literature

• Andrey Kazaev: Odulok, Tekki . In: Mark Nuttall (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Arctic . tape 3 . Routledge, New York and London 2003, ISBN 978-1-57958-439-9 , pp. 1557 f . (English).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} В. И. Шадрин: Тэки Одулок - первый юкагирский ученый и общественный деятель ( Memento from October 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). National Library of the Sakha Republic (Russian)
2. ↑ Захар Дичаров: Текки Одулок (Николай Иванович Спиридонов) (1906–1938) ( Memento from October 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). National Library of the Sakha Republic (Russian)
3. ↑ В. К. Ефимова: Н. И. Спиридонов - Тэки Одулок ( Memento from October 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). National Library of the Sakha Republic (Russian)
4. ↑ Александр Титков: Тэки Одулок - зачинатель несуществующей литературы . In: Литературная Россия, No. 23, 2006 (Russian)
5. ↑ ^{a b} Тэки Одулок - писатель, ученый, общественный деятель . In: ИЛИН - Историко-географический, культурологический журнал, January 8, 2018 (Russian)
6. ↑ ^{a b} В. Б. Окорокова: "… я прошёл путь от каменного века…" ( Memento from October 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). National Library of the Sakha Republic (Russian)