A Precious Box: The Early Life and Worldview of Russian Polar Navigators and Explorers
in E.A. Okladnikova's monograph "The Taimyr Find" (St. Petersburg, 2025)
This article explores the recently published monograph “The Taimyr Find” by the renowned Russian historian, archaeologist and social anthropologist E. A. Okladnikova. The article factually explains and explores the epistemological structure, substantive features and cognitive potential of this work. As the article demonstrates, it represents an encyclopaedic reconstruction of the 'worldview' of Russian polar navigators and explorers. Okladnikova correlates the biographies, social contexts and topological memory of these seafarers, as reflected in the notations on pilot charts. She interprets maritime knowledge about wind directions and freezing times and expands the polar everyday, chronicling the stories of famous and anonymous polar explorers and fearless seafarers who journeyed from Western Russia to the east into developing Siberian lands. The monograph's reconstruction of the 'picture of the world' is substantiated as having been carried out by E.A. Okladnikova from a reverse semantic perspective: the text's aesthetic structure includes both symbolic and schematic conventions, with preference given to symbols of a historical and historiographical nature (in the spirit of the reverse perspective, a group of historians and ethnographers from the USSR Academy of Sciences are featured).
While nobody left any comments to this publication.
You can be first.
de Veer, G. (1876), The three voyages of William Barents to the Arctic regions (1594, 1595 and 1596), 2d ed., with an introd. by Beynen, K., Printed for the Hakluyt society, London.
Naumov, V. B. (2025), “Non-governmental digital preservation of cultural heritage: 15 years of experience of the “Preserved Culture” project”, Information Society, 5, 20-32 (in Russ.).
Okladnikov, A. P. (1951), “Bronze Mirror”, Istoricheskiy pamyatnik russkogo arkticheskogo moreplavaniya XVII veka Arkheologicheskiye nakhodki na ostrove Faddeya i na beregu zaliva Simsa [Historical Monument of Russian Arctic Navigation of the 17th Century Archaeological Finds on Faddey Island and on the Shore of Simsa Bay], Glavsevmorput Publishing House, Leningrad–Moscow, USSR (in Russ.), 160–166.
Okladnikov, A. P. (1948), Russkiye polyarnyye morekhody XVII veka u beregov Taymyra [Russian polar seafarers of the 17th century off the coast of Taimyr], Publishing House and Printing House of the Main Northern Sea Route, Moscow, Leningrad, USSR (in Russ.).
Okladnikova, E. A. (2025), Taymyrskaya nakhodka [The Taimyr Find], by Shakhnovich, M. M. (ed.), Sokhranennaya kultura, St. Petersburg, Russia (in Russ.).
Yakovetsky, V. N. (1958), “The Role of Nonequivalent Exchange in the Process of Primitive Accumulation in Russia”, in: K voprosu o pervonachalnom nakoplenii v Rossii [On the Question of Primitive Accumulation in Russia], Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, USSR, 403-421 (in Russ.).
Zenzinov, V. M. (1919), Starinnyye lyudi u kholodnogo okeana. Russkoye Ustie Yakutskoy oblasti Verkhoyanskoy oblasti, [Ancient People by the Cold Ocean. Russian Mouth of the Yakutsk Region of the Verkhoyansk Region], Tsiolkovskiy, Moscow, Russia (in Russ.).