Eduard Karlovich Pekarskii

Born Oct. 13 (25), 1858, in Igumen District, now Cherven’ Raion, Minsk Oblast; died June 29, 1934, in Leningrad. Soviet linguist, ethnologist, and folklorist. Honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1931; corresponding member, 1927).

Pekarskii studied at the Kharkov Veterinary Institute in 1877 and 1878. For his participation in the Narodnichestvo (Populist) movement, he was exiled to Yakutia in 1881. There he began compiling a dictionary of Yakut, the first fascicle of which was published in Yakutsk in 1899. From 1894 to 1896 he took part in an expedition of the East Siberian branch of the Russian Geographic Society; and in 1903 he participated in an expedition to Aian and Nel’kan. The Academy of Sciences aided in his return from exile to St. Petersburg in 1905. Pekarskii edited the journal Zhivaia starina (Living Antiquity) from 1914 to 1917, and in the last years of his life he worked at the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Pekarskii’s chief work was the Dictionary of Yakut (fascs. 1–13, 1907–30), written in collaboration with D. D. Popov and V. M. Ionov. A second edition of this work appeared in three volumes in 1958. Pekarskii published ethnologic studies in Russian and Polish on the Yakuts and Evenki and edited Selections

From the National Literature of the Yakuts (vols. 1–3, 1907–18; in Yakut). He also helped make the classification of epic genres in Yakut folklore more precise.