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).
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).