Nina Gagen-Torn

Nina Gagen-Torn

Nina Ivanovna fees-Torn (originally Hagen-Thorn ) ( Russian Нина Ивановна Гаген-Торн ; born December 2 ^{. Jul} / 15. December  1900 ^greg. In St. Petersburg , † 4. June 1986 in Pushkin ) was a Soviet ethnographer , Writer and poet .

Life

Gagen-Torn's father was the surgeon of Swedish origin Iwan Eduardowitsch Gagen-Torn . Her mother, Vera Alexandrovna, nee Carefree, was the daughter of a railroad employee . Gagen-Torn attended the private grammar school of the teacher Marija Nikolajewna Stojunina and then the grammar school of Princess Alexandra Alexejewna Obolenskaya .

In the autumn of 1918 after the October Revolution , Hagen-Torn began studying at the University of Petrograd in the Department of Social Sciences . During this time she was a student of Andrei Bely , from which a lasting closer friendship developed until his death. She was enthusiastic about ethnography and listened to Lev Jakowlewitsch Sternberg's lectures . She worked in the Free Philosophical Association. She finished her studies according to her own plan and took the relevant exams by 1924. Even as a student, she worked as a lecturer in the government committee for political education. 1927-1930 she completed the postgraduate for folklore at the Leningrad Research Institute of comparative literary history and languages of the West and East when Dmitry Konstantinovich Zelenin . She worked in expeditions in the north of Russia, in Transbaikalia and in the Volga region. Under the direction of Pyotr Petrovich Yefimenko , she took part in the Central Volga expedition.

In 1930 Gagen-Torn moved to Irkutsk to live with her husband Yuri Michailowitsch Scheinmann (1901–1974), with whom she had been married since 1923 and who had been sent to Irkutsk as a geologist by the Geological Committee. She worked in the Society for the Study of the Productive Forces of Eastern Siberia and was secretary of the Congress of Scientists in this region. When her father became seriously ill and died in 1931, she returned to Leningrad. She then also took her two daughters and separated from her husband by mutual consent. She taught geography , Russian and Ostyak at the Leningrad Institute for the Peoples of the North.

In November 1932 Gagen-Torn became a research assistant at the Institute for the Study of the Peoples of the USSR of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (AN-SSSR) . When this institute became the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography (IAE) of the USSR, she worked in the ethnography section and became the secretary of the editorial office of the Lexicon of the Peoples of the USSR. In November 1933 she came to the Department for Siberia and Northern Europe to describe the collections in that department. In 1936 she was sent to the Volga region to study the origins and culture of the Bessermenen .

On October 17, 1936, during the time of the Great Terror , Gagen-Torn was arrested for counterrevolutionary attitudes and the fight against the CPSU together with the director of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAE) Nikolai Mikhailovich Matorin , who had already been shot on October 11, 1936 was. On May 25, 1937, she was sentenced to 5 years in a camp imprisonment under Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code , which she spent in the Kolyma area in SewWostLag on Nagayeva Bay of the Sea of Okhotsk . After her release in 1942, she was exiled with her mother in the village of Chashi in Kurgan Oblast . She worked in the village library and taught history, literature and geography at the technical center for chemical technology in the dairy industry.

Gagen-Torn completed her candidate dissertation on elements of the clothing of the peoples of the Volga region as material for ethnogenesis , the manuscript of which her friend had kept from 1936, and defended it on January 3, 1946 in the IAE.

On December 30, 1947, Gagen-Torn was arrested again and sentenced to 5 years in a camp, which she spent in TemLag in the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and, after its dissolution in 1948, in the DubrawLag special camp . After that she was exiled to the Krasnoyarsk Territory .

After Stalin's death on April 16, 1954, the sentences were lifted. In the spring of 1954, all those sentenced to a maximum of five years in camp were amnestied, so that Gagen-Torn could return to her mother from exile in Moscow. There she worked in the Institute for Scientific Information of Social Sciences of the AN-SSSR and in the Pushkin Museum . On April 15, 1955, she became an employee in the Leningrad Department of the Moscow Miklucho Maklai Institute for Ethnography of the AN-SSSR. On January 23, 1956, she received her candidate certificate for her dissertation defense on January 3, 1946. On February 17, 1956, the presidium of the Leningrad City Court suspended the 1937 criminal case for undefended guilt, so that Gagen-Torn was fully rehabilitated. In 1958 she took part in the Angara expedition of the Institute for Ethnography. In 1960 she retired.

In retirement, Gagen-Torn published essays on ritual cloths ( ruschniks ) and wooden tools. She has reviewed books by Tatiana Alexandrovna Krjukowa and others. She wrote about Vladimir Klawdijewitsch Arsenjew and Lew Semjonowitsch Berg as well as memories of Alexander Alexandrowitsch Blok , Olga Dmitrijewna Forsch and Vitali Walentinowitsch Bianki .

In addition to her ethnographic studies, Gagen-Torn interpreted some unclear passages in the Igor Song in an interesting but also controversial way from a non-ethnographic point of view . She wrote down her memories of childhood, youth and the camp years. She wrote poetry for many years. Her storage poems stand alongside the poems of Anna Alexandrovna Barkowas , Warlam Tichonowitsch Schalamows , Juri Ossipowitsch Dombrowskis and others. In January 1981 she moved to an AN-SSSR retirement home in Pushkin.

After the funeral in Leningrad, Gagen-Torn was buried next to her mother in the Nicholas Naval Cathedral in Bolshaya Ishora in Lomonosov Raion .

Web links

• Literature by and about Nina Gagen-Torn in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Catalog of the Russian National Library : Гаген-Торн, Нина Ивановна

Individual evidence

1. ↑ BnF: [/ lccn-n97005514 Nina Ivanovna Gagen-Torn (1900–1986)] (accessed on March 2, 2020).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Елена Ревуненкова: Жизнь и судьба Нины Ивановны Гаген-Торн - этнографа и поэта . In: АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ ФОРУМ . No. 16 , p. 370–411 ( [1] [PDF; accessed March 2, 2020]).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Открытый список: Гаген-Торн Нина Ивановна (1900) (accessed March 2, 2020).
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Sankt-Peterburg Enziklopedija: ГАГЕН-ТОРН Нина Ивановна (accessed on March 2, 2020).
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Г.Ю.ГАГЕН-ТОРН: Нина Ивановна Гаген-Торн —ученый, писатель, поэт (accessed March 2, 2020).
6. ↑ В Энциклопедии - Слова о полку Игореве (accessed March 2, 2020).