Vladimir Klavdiyevich Arsenyev, (; 10 September 1872 – 4 September 1930) was a Russian explorer of the Far East who recounted his travels in a series of books— (, "Along the Ussuri land," 1921) and (, "Dersu Uzala," 1923)—telling of his military journeys to the Ussuri basin with Dersu Uzala, a native hunter, from 1902 to 1907. He was the first to describe numerous species of Siberian flora and the lifestyles of the local ethnic groups.

Life

Vladimir Arsenyev was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, on 10 September 1872. His father Klavdy Arsenyev was the illegitimate son of Fyodor Goppmayer, a Tver townsman, and Agrafena Filippovna, a serf woman who was later freed and married Goppmayer. Klavdy Arsenyev, who took the surname of his godfather, was raised to the status of burgher () after the death of his father. He spent most of his life as a clerk for the Nikolayevskaya (Saint Petersburg–Moscow) Railway. (Later, when Vladimir was already an adult, his father served as chief of the Moscow District Railway.) Vladimir's mother, Rufina Kashlachevaya, was the daughter of a serf from the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate. He studied various local peoples, especially the Udeges. Ethnographic materials collected by Arsenyev are held at the Russian Museum of Ethnography in Saint Petersburg, the Khabarovsk Regional Lore Museum, and elsewhere. He conducted an expedition to Kamchatka in 1918 and another to the Commander Islands in 1923. In 1927 he led a large expedition along the route Sovetskaya Gavan–Khabarovsk. He served as the director of the Khabarovsk Regional Lore Museum from 1910 to 1918 and again from 1924 to 1925. After the Far Eastern Republic was absorbed by Soviet Russia in 1922 Arsenyev refused to emigrate and stayed in Vladivostok. He gave lectures on ethnography, anthropology, archeology, and the history of "primitive societies" at the universities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. He played a major role in the preparation of the 1926 Soviet census and helped draft an ethnographic map of Siberia. The third book of Arsenyev's trilogy, In the Sikhote-Alin mountains, was published posthumously in 1937.

Arsenyev's books have been translated into multiple languages including English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. The "Dersu Uzala trilogy" was first translated in 1924 into German as a two-volume set (In der Wildnis Ostsibiriens). More recently, in 2016 an uncensored, annotated edition of 1921's Across the Ussuri Kray was translated to English.

Legacy

thumb|140px|right|1956 Soviet postage stamp commemorating Vladimir Arsenyev.

Arsenyev's family home in Vladivostok has been made into a museum. A town, Arsenyev, and a river, the Arsenyevka, both located in the Primorsky Krai, are named after him. In 2018 Vladivostok International Airport was renamed after him.

Selected works

  • (1921) ( (Through the Ussuri land (Dersu Uzala): journey in the mountainous region of Sikhote-Alin)). Vladivostok: Tip. Ekho. The first book of Dersu Uzala trilogy. English translation: Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains (Indiana University Press, 2016).
  • (1923) ( (Dersu Uzala: memories from journeys in the Ussuri land in 1907)). Vladivostok: Svobonaya Rossiya. The second book of the Dersu Uzala trilogy.
  • The heavily redacted 1926 combination of and , titled , was translated into English by Malcolm Burr and published as Dersu the Trapper (London: Secker & Warburg, 1939). Another heavily redacted combination from 1946 was translated into English by Victor Shneerson and published as Dersu Uzala (1950). Anne Terry White's 1965 adaptation With Dersu the Hunter: Adventures in the Taiga is a shortening of Shneerson's translation. (The works in this collection were subject to censorship and abridgment.)