vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #149 / Social life / Reading article...

A series of events ranging from a graveside ceremony to a symposium in Vladivostok will mark the 125th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Arseniev, the renowned explorer of the Far East, between Sept. 4 and 19.

The most important happening is the three-day international scientific conference “Vladimir K. Arseniev and His Heritage.” The Arseniev museum will host scientists and biographers from the Russian Far East, Japan and France who will cover different Arseniev-related topics Sept. 16-18.

Arseniev was known for exploring the krai and studying its indigenous peoples. He urged humane treatment of them in the face of persecution by Russian settlers and Chinese traders.

On Sept. 18 the museum will publish a book of historical photographs and biography in Russian and English. Photographer Yury Lugansky says he collected the 800 shots from 1964 up to 1997.

The one he values most came from a Russian immigrant in San Francisco who sent a portrait of Arseniev from late last century.

Photos also include one of Arseniev dressed in Orochi traditional clothing with his arm on a stuffed bear in his museum.

Only a little more than 50 pictures are of the ethnographer himself. Others are views of nature from southernmost Primorye to Kamchatka where Arseniev is known to have traveled or camped with his indigenous guide Dersu Usala.

Festivities also include an expose about the traveler from Sept. 10, the day of his birth, the opening of the Arseniev House Museum at 4 Arsenieva Street with a concert afterwards Sept. 16, and literary meetings of Primorye writers and poets at the Arseniev museum Sept. 4 and 10. Udeghe painter Dunkay will unveil his sole exhibition dedicated to Arseniev at the Gorky library Sept. 19.

Lugansky doesn’t remember what the last jubilee was like. “Officials used to pretend they celebrated it,” he said.

Now he observes a surge of interest in the man, who died because doctors refused to send him an urgent ambulance. The interest, he said, may be because “society has accumulated a sense of guilt about Arseniev because of the long oblivion.”