Tales of Yukaghir

Waldemar Bogoras
Introduction by Lenore Grenoble

320 pages, 4.25 x 5”
Paper, $19.95  ISBN 978-0-9821703-3-5

First published in English in 1918 by the American Museum of Natural History in its series of Anthropological Papers, the stories told here in Tales of the Yukaghir were collected among Russianized natives of Eastern Siberia at the end of the nineteenth-century while Bogoras was exiled into North-Eastern Siberia for revolutionary activities. These tales tell of kings, young heroes on horseback, and adventurous animals with varied powers, relating details of native life that clearly show their Russian or Turko-Mongol provenance. In addition to delighting audiences around the world, Bogoras’s work in ethnography and ethnology proved valuable to the development of the field of linguistics.

A widely published ethnographer and novelist, Waldemar Bogoras was a “populist revolutionary” whose studies of the northern Siberian tribes became classics in the field.