Vladimir Jochelson

Vladimir Ilyich Jochelson (Russian: Владимир Ильич Иохельсон) (January 14 (N.S. January 26), 1855, Vilnius - November 2, 1937, New York City) was a Russian ethnographer and researcher of the indigenous peoples of the Russian North.

Jochelson came from a wealthy, religious Jewish family. He attended the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, where he participated in the socialist, revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya. Compelled to leave Russia in 1875, he went first to Berlin and then in 1879 to Switzerland, where he remained four years, studying at Zurich and then teaching at a school on the Lake of Geneva, while keeping in touch with the revolutionary movement as editor of the Vyestnik Narodnoi Voli, which had a clandestine circulation in Russia. On his return to Russia in 1884 he was recognised, arrested and confined for three years in the Petro-Pavlovsk fortress in St. Petersburg, and in 1887 was sentenced by order of the czar to exile for ten years in northern Siberia, in the province of Yakutsk.

In Siberia Jochelson made a special study of the language, manners, and folk-lore of the aboriginal inhabitants, especially that of the Tungus, Yakuts, and the fast-disappearing Yukaghirs. His articles on those subjects began to attract attention, and in 1894 he and a fellow exile, Vladimir Bogoraz ("Tan", also of Jewish descent), were by special permission attached to the first expedition of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (1894–97), which had been sent to that part of Siberia at the expense of a wealthy Russian promoter of art and science named Sibiryakov. On that expedition Jochelson discovered among the natives in the outlying regions two Yukaghir dialects then considered as extinct. The Imperial Geographical Society published his discoveries in the field of ethnology, while the linguistic reports of his investigation were acquired for publication by the Imperial Academy of Science.

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