Efimenko, Petr Savich

Born 1835 in the village of Bol’shoi Tokmak, Berdiansk District, in present-day Zaporozhye Oblast, Ukrainian SSR; died May 7 (20), 1908, in St. Petersburg. Russian and Ukrainian ethnologist and folklorist of the bourgeois-liberal trend. Efimenko studied at the universities of Moscow and Kharkov. A member of the Kharkov-Kiev Secret Society, he was arrested in 1860 and exiled, first to Perm’ and then to Arkhangel’sk Province. After 1870, having finished his exile, he lived under strict surveillance in the cities of central Russia and the Ukraine. Efimenko collected a great deal of material on ethnology and folklore. His major works were Collection of Folk Juridical Customs of Arkhangelsk Province (1869), Materials on the Ethnology of the Russian Population of Arkhangelsk Province (parts 1–2, 1877–78), and Collection of Ukrainian Incantations (1874).