Lost Land (A Historical and Ethnographic Essay)

Anatolii M. Kaigorodov was born in China in 1927, where his parents ended up after the Civil War in Transbaikal. He spent his childhood and youth in Trekhrechye, an area on the right bank of the Argun River, the border between Russia and China. In 1948 he entered the Harbin Polytechnic Institute’s faculty of Eastern Economics. As a student, he participated in the work of the Circle for the Study of the Manchurian Region, which was organized at the local historical museum of Heilongjiang Province (Director V. N. Zhernakov). After graduating from the Institute in 1952, he was sent to work in Shenyang and then transferred to Beijing. In 1954, like many Russians who lived in China, he left for the Soviet Union. In 1955, he joined the All-Soviet State Library of Foreign Literature. Fluent in Chinese and Japanese, he learned Mongolian, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. At the library, he worked as chief bibliographer, collecting literature and compiling scholarly bibliography, until his retirement in 1988.

Anatolii was virtually the first to conduct research on the life of the Russian and Evenk population of Trekhrechye. His early work was published in the journal “Sovetskaya etnografiya” (Soviet Ethnography) (1968, No. 4, 1970, No. 2, 3, 6). Subsequently, many essays and notes were published in the newspapers “Zabaikal’skii rabochii” (Transbaikal Worker), “Sovetskoe Priargun’e” (Soviet Transargun Region), “Severnyi krai” (Northern Territory), and in the magazines “Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka” (Problems of the Far East), “Okhota i okhotnich’e khozyaistvo” (Hunting and Hunting Economy), and a number of other periodicals. Today, several monographs and many scientific articles have been written about Trekhrechye, including those published on the pages of “Traditsionnaya kul’tura” (Traditional Culture). Anatolii worked on the essay for four years (1990–1994), and the first version of the essay now being published appeared in a significantly abridged version in 1991 in the newspaper “Sovetskoe Priargun’e” (No. 114–116); some of its material has already entered scholarly circulation. It is now being presented in full for the benefit of researchers of Russian culture in China. The typescript of the essay is preserved in A. M. Kaigorodov’s family archive.