Tales of the Amur

As we have seen, it was the railway which brought the world fame to the Nanai tribes fishing and hunting in archaic circumstances along the Amur and its tributaries. To the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway arrived from the east Henry W. Jackson who made the first photos of them, and on the completed railway arrived from the west the Russian ethnographers, among whom Vladimir Arsenev, whose book and the movies made of it – 1961 Babayan, 1975 Kurosawa – made familiar at least one Nanai, Dersu Uzala to most moviegoers. However, in the former Soviet Union and “the friendly countries” they became really popular not through Jackson’s never published photos, neither through the film of Kurosawa, but due to a story book published in 1975 with the title Tales of the Amur.
In fact, we should be grateful to the railway also for the book, since its author was born in Chita, its illustrator in Khabarovsk as descendants of railroad building engineers; their work was combined in Vladivostok, and both were inspired by the archaic culture of the Nanais living in the arch of the railway between these three cities.


Dmitry Nagishkin (Chita 1909 – 1961 Riga) studied electrical engineering, but from 1929 he worked as a journalist and illustrator for local papers, while he was more and more fascinated by the then still living Nanai folk culture. He published the tales collected among them for the first time in 1945 with the title Kid Chokcho, followed in 1946 by the Tales of the Amur and in 1949 by the Courageous Azmun. He himself considered as the peak of his literary work not these, but the historical novel Bonivur’s heart, written between 1944 and 1953 on the Far Eastern heroes of the civil war, the “partisans of the Amur”, also remembered in an extremely popular song. This novel, however, is hardly remembered by anyone, despite the fact that in 1969 they still made a film of it...

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@'Poemas del rio Wang'