Unknown play by Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan. Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan. Dragon Victims

Abstract

Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz (1865–1936, pseudonyms: Tan, Tan-Bogoraz, Bogoraz-Tan), the famous ethnographer, linguist, religious scholar, and researcher of Northern peoples, was also a prolific and popular fiction author, in particular, a prominent representative of the so-called prehistoric fiction, i.e. fiction about prehistoric times. This is the first publication of Bogoraz’s play “Dragon Victims” which is a revision of his prehistoric novel under the same name (1909, “Sons of Mammoth” in English translation of 1929), commissioned in 1920 by the Section of Historical Pictures at the Petrograd Theater Department of the People's Commissariat of Education, after Bogoraz, at that time an employee of the Petrograd Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, had been invited by the Section to write an introduction for the upcoming paleophantastic play “Rhino Hunt” by N.S. Gumilev. The text of Bogoraz’s play “Dragon Victims”, preserved in the archive (St. Petersburg Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives), is published according to the typescript with author’s handwritten corrections. In a detailed introductory article, the publisher clarifies the dating, the history of creating, and the literary characteristics of the play as compared to the novel, as well as the programmatic nature of the encouraging attitude to composing plays on prehistoric themes that came from A.M. Gorky, the founder and head of the Section.

Keywords

• vladimir bogoraz-tan
• prehistoric fiction
• “dragon victims”
• nikolay gumilev
• “rhino hunt”
• section of historical pictures