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Materials for the BIography of Waldemar Jochelson

Compiled by Nikolai Vakhtin

This book is a collection of materials for a (future) biography of Waldemar Jochelson (1856-1937) collected and compiled from various sources, mostly Russian and US archives. Jochelson’s was a long and turbulent life: he was a revolutionary and a terrorist, a prisoner and an exile, an ethnographer and journalist; he was known under several names, he was married twice, but had no children; he lived in Russia and France, Germany and the United States. He took part in three famous ethnographic expeditions: the Sibiryakov expedition (1894-96), the Jesup expedition (1899-1901), and the Ryabushinsky expedition (1909-1911). He authored several ethnographic books on indigenous Siberian minorities: Yukaghirs and Evens, Koryaks and Yakuts; these books are now considered classical.

The book begins with an extensive introduction where many new archival sources are described and analyzed, allowing to considerably augment and refine details of Jochelson’s biography. The main section of the book presents a complete annotated list of Jochelson’s correspondence (around 350 letters, originally in three languages: Russian, German, and English). A preliminary chronology of Jochelson’s many travels and addresses follows, based on Jochelson’s letters that usually have dates and return addresses carefully indicated. The next section of the book presents an index of archival materials on Jochelson in several Russian and US archives, with exact references to specific collections and funds. The last two sections of the book provide a complete bibliography of Jochelson’s works (from his first article published in 1893 to posthumous editions of his books), and a separate list of research works about Jochelson. In the appendix, a shorter version of an earlier article is reprinted which describes the story of Jochelson’s failed return from the United States to the Soviet Russia in 1927.