The Fate of a Person and the Fate of a Book: Nikolai Schnakenburg and the Volume “The Soviet Eskimos”

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Abstract

The article describes the biography of the young ethnographer Nikolai Borisovich Schnakenburg (1907–1941), a student of Vladimir Bogoras, who worked in Chukotka in 1930–1933 and was killed at the war frontlines near Leningrad in 1941. Until now, his life and work remained understudied. The article further examines the question of the authorship of an unpublished manuscript “The Soviet Eskimos”, the first comprehensive report on the Siberian Yupik people. The article is based on the documents discovered in the family archives of Schnakenburg’s descendants.

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Nikolai Vakhtin

European University at St. Petersburg

Author for correspondence.
Email: vakhtin@eu.spb.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4011-2141

доктор филол. наук, член-корр. РАН, профессор факультета антропологии

Russian Federation, 6/1A Gagarinskaya St., St. Petersburg, 191187

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2. Fig. 1. N.B. Schnakenburg in 1931. Photo from the family archive of Schnakenburg’s descendants. (Author’s personal collection)

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