“One Day, He Did Not Come to His Museum”: The Ethnographer A.B. Piotrovsky

Abstract

The article discusses the life and career of Aleksandr Piotrovsky (1888–1942), a distinguished Russian/ Soviet ethnographer and scholar of Oceania. Working at the Department of Australian and Oceanian Studies of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Academy of Sciences of the USSR), he did extensive research on museum collections, organized exhibitions, as well as published on the ethnography of the region. Among his most important contributions was one into the study of scholarly work and ethnographic collections of the nineteenth-century Russian pioneer of field ethnography, Nikolai Mikhloukho-Maclay. He was one of the principal organizers of the 1938 commemorative exhibition and the 1940–41 academic edition of Mikloukho-Maclay’s work. It was a bitter irony of fate that, having survived the period of Stalinist repressions, Piotrovsky died during the siege of Leningrad in the World War II.