When, in the late 1990s, a project was initiated to erect a monument in the capital of the Sakha Republic in honour of the Polish exiles who had become distinguished researchers on the lands of Yakut, it was patently obvious that among those to be commemorated, the name of Edward Piekarski could not be omitted. He was one of those Poles who had, similarly to Aleksander Czekanowski, Jan Czerski, Wacław Sieroszewski and many others, fashioned the environment of his exile into terrain where he could deepen his research work. He laid the groundwork for modern Yakut studies, devoting more than fifty years of his life to the creation of his monumental Thirteen-Volume Dictionary of the Yakut Language.
Edward Piekarski came into the world on 26 October 1858 at the Piotrowicze estate in the region of Minsk. He studied at the Veterinary Institute in Kharkiv, but his participation in student protests cost him his university place and a sentence of exile to the Arkhangelsk Governorate. However, after eluding the police, he avoided being sent to that destination. He evaded capture, living under an assumed name as a member of the revolutionary organization Land and Liberty, engaging in political agitation activities. Eventually arrested in Moscow, where for some time he had been in hiding, Piekarski was detained at the Butyrka prison. In the wake of a lengthy investigation, for his revolutionary activity he was then sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour and deprivation of civil rights — a punishment that was subsequently commuted to indeterminate exile in northeastern Siberia, in Yakutia. In that land of permafrost he was to spend twenty-four years of his life.
He was sent to a remote ulus (district) approximately 250 kilometres from Yakutsk. At first, he was housed in a communal yurt, before receiving a small plot of land on which he proceeded to build his own. Farm the land himself and raising livestock, he lived with a Yakut woman who taught him the local language. Over time he compiled two mini-dictionaries for his own personal use— Yakut–Russian and Russian–Yakut — gradually organizing and expanding his ever-growing knowledge. He established contact with the Yakut Statistical Committee of Eastern Siberia and the local branch of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, who proposed to him the publication of the mini-dictionaries. The first edition of his dictionary was made available in 1889. Between 1894 and 1896, he took part in Innokenty Sibiryakov’s expedition, devoted to studying Yakut language and folklore. The first notebook of the Yakut dictionary compiled by Piekarski was published in 1899 as one of the expedition’s scientific volumes.
At the end of 1899, Piekarski was permitted to move to Yakutsk, where he became a full-time employee of the district administration. In 1903, he participated in the Nelkan–Ayan expedition, during which he conducted research on the Tungus people (Evenks), carried out a census, and collected ethnographic artifacts for the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. Around this time, he also published a concise Russian–Yakut dictionary. In 1904, he was married to Helena Kugajewska, the daughter of a high-ranking local official of Polish descent.
Due to the support of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, which greatly prized his linguistic work, Piekarski was permitted to settle in the imperial capital. From 1905 to 1910, he was employed at the Russian Museum, where he catalogued ethnographic collections. He late attained the position of curator at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) and was elected as secretary of the Ethnographic Section of the Russian Geographical Society. He simultaneously worked on his dictionary of the Yakut Language published between 1907 and 1930, which contained about 38,000 words, totaling more than 2,000 pages. In a sense, it can also be viewed as an encyclopedia of Yakut folk culture.
Aside from these ventures, Piekarski was also author of numerous studies and articles on Yakut culture, including an anthology of folklore. In recognition of his scholarly achievements, he was awarded gold medals by both the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Geographical Society. In 1927 he was made a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and four years later, an honorary member of that same institution. Despite lacking formal academic education in the field, he published a number of important ethnographic works, including the three-volume Patterns of Yakut Folk Creativity (1907–1917).
Fully conscious of his Polish heritage, Piekarski even before World War I had reconnected with Polish academic circles. In 1928, the Polish Oriental Society bestowed upon him honorary member status, and he began to publish many of his works exclusively in Polish — including the Yearbook of Oriental Studies. He never was to return to independent Poland — in part because his native region remained within Soviet borders, but above all because he wished to personally oversee the final publication of his dictionary.
To this day, Edward Piekarski is both well-known and well-regarded in Yakutia as a pioneering linguist and ethnographer. His name comes up frequently in local school curricula, and the yurt in which he lived for 18 years is now preserved as a museum exhibit.
Piekarski died in Leningrad on 29 June 1934. All the materials he had collected were transferred to the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was laid to rest in one of the oldest cemeteries in St Petersburg- the Smolensk Lutheran Cemetery.
In 2001, a monument in Yakutsk was erected thanks to the efforts of Poland’s Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw, and was co-financed by the authorities of the Sakha Republic. Edward Piekarski was honoured with a dedicated commemorative stone and inscription, although it no longer exists, having been dismantled in 2023.
Ewa Ziółkowska
Translated from Polish language by Jan Dobrodumow