Koryak Texts

Koryak Texts

by Waldemar Bogoras


This is a collection of mythological texts from the Koryak, a traditional people who live on the Kamchatka peninsula, in the far east of Russia. The similarity of these tales to native American folklore, particularly from the Northwestern region, is very striking. The characters, although they occupy a supernatural dream-world, move in the same context as the people who tell the stories, hunting, fishing and gathering, celebrating good hunts and going hungry when there is no food. There are trickster figures, and stories about them include gruesome and/or scatological pranks. One gets a vivid sense of the brutal environment which the Koryak inhabited.


About the Author: 


"Waldemar Bogoras was born in Russia in 1865, and he died in 1936. During his life he was at one time exiled into Siberia for being a populist revolutionary. This is where his ethnological research started and this is where he would return to, on more than one occasion. In Siberia he studied the Chuck chi people mostly, he also studied the Koryak, and Yup'ik people. He collected items from people he called "Russified Natives," who had been exiled. He used these to show how cultures were being borrowed and assimilated, because they were being introduced with each other for the first time when these people were exiled. "After the Russian Revolution, he became the director of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, an agency concerned with education and developmental work among the northern tribes of Siberia." He also published books and novels."