Jochelson, Vladimir Ilich

Jochelson, Vladimir Il’ich 

(in Russian, V.I. Iokhel’-son). Born Jan. 14 (26), 1855, in Vilnius; died Nov. 2, 1937, in New York. Russian ethnologist, investigator of the peoples of the Far North.

Jochelson was arrested in 1885 for his participation in the Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will) movement and exiled in 1888 to Yakutia on the Kolyma River, where he took part in the expedition of 1894–96 in Yakutia. He studied the Yukaghirs (Iakugirs) and demonstrated that their language, then thought to have disappeared, still existed and occupied an isolated position among the neighboring languages. He also went on the subsequent expeditions of 1900–02 and 1908–11 to study the cultural and historical relationships between northeast Asia and North America. His descriptions of the culture, daily life, folklore, and language of the Koriaks, Yukaghirs, and Aleuts constitute a valuable contribution to the science of ethnology. In 1922, Jochelson took up residence in the USA, where he worked on the ethnological data that he had gathered.

WORKS

Materialy po izucheniiu iukagirskogo iazyka i fol’klora, sobrannye v Kolymskom okruge. St. Petersburg, 1900.
Materialy po izucheniiu aleutskogo iazyka i fol’klora, vol. 1, fasc. 1. Petrograd, 1923.
The Koryak. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 10. Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 6, parts 1–2. Leiden-New York, 1905–08.
The Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 13. Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 9, parts 1–3. Leiden-New York, 1926.
The Jakut. New York, 1933.
History, Ethnology, and Anthropology of the Aleut. Washington, D. C, 1933.

REFERENCE

Shavrov, K.B. “V. I. Iokhel’son.” Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1935, no. 2.

I. S. GURVICH