Overcoming Boundaries: Life and Work of Nikolai Aboimov

Abstract

The subject of the article is the work of the Russian writer and blogger living in the Far East – the former hunter-reindeer herder Nikolai Iosifovich Aboimov. The case of Nikolai Aboimov’s entering the Evenki culture deserves attention as an example of cultural contact without conflict. He managed to overcome cultural and mental borders between the two cultures due to a long-term lived experience shared with the Evenki. He gained from them deep first-hand knowledge about their unique culture and expressed it in his work. A percipient and observant person as all hunters are, he memorized and recorded his experience in diaries and later transferred it into literary form and videos. This article employs methods and approaches both of ethnology and of literary criticism, attempting to combine biographical analysis and content analysis of various sources such as video blogs and works of art, as well as drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and museum research. I examine the major motives in the literary work of Nikolai Aboimov – namely, those of taiga, education/self-education, play/creativity, and will to live and overcome difficulties. In fact, Aboimov himself used a phenomenological approach in understanding reality, which helped him describe the essence of lived situations. His stories – documentarily accurate miniature sketches of everyday life in the taiga – feature some fifty characters, mainly Evenki and some other people, as well as dogs, reindeer, wild animals and birds. These stories tell us about hunting and reindeer herding, material culture, beliefs, Evenki’s knowledge and pedagogy, as well as collaboration with geologists. I argue that Aboimov’s stories and videos should be seen as valuable and reliable ethnographic sources conveying information about the Bomnak Evenki; furthermore, they provide answers to questions about the ways of overcoming cultural boundaries while maintaining own identity.