“He was the Only One in His Entire Family who has Become a Scholar”: To a Scientific Portrait of Anatol Nosov

Author

Taran Olena

a Ph.D. in History, a senior research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Center Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0548-0678

“He was the Only One in His Entire Family who has Become a Scholar”: To a Scientific Portrait of Anatol Nosov

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the description of scientific biography of Ukrainian scholar-anthropologist Anatol Nosov (1883–1941), head of the F. Vovk Cabinet of Anthropology and Ethnology at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. A significant part of the article is about the student years of the future scientist, since it was within the walls of the university that he had a fateful meeting with his fellow countryman Fedir Kindratovych Vovk, which has determined the further scientific fate of the future ethnologist, museum worker and anthropologist. In fact, F. Vovk’s lectures, as well as active participation in student clubs and scientific societies have made it possible to form A. Nosov’s scientific worldview. A. Nosov has set several tasks as a head of the Anthropology Department: anthropometric studies of the population of Ukraine (age, gender, and professional variations), as well as the «popularization of anthropological knowledge», primarily among students. Anatol Nosov has conducted his research using methods he learned from F. Vovk’s lectures while studying at St. Petersburg University. The relevance of A. Nosov’s active anthropological research has consisted in the extremely insignificant number of published works on this subject. He has set the goal of collecting material for himself and his colleagues in the department to determine the anthropological type of the Ukrainian people as a whole and its constituent elements (anthropological study of individual groups). Therefore, A. Nosov’s anthropological works contain neither theoretical generalizations, nor address the issue of the ethnogenesis of Ukrainians. This goal has been postponed for the future. Unfortunately, A. Nosov and his colleagues were unable to carry out their intentions because of the internal political processes in the state associated with political terror. The change in economic policy in the late 1920s in the USSR has also affected the cultural and political life of the country, influencing various scientific institutions in particular: mass personnel transfers and a total reorganization of the scientific process have started. As a result, the Cabinet of Anthropology has been eliminated and A. Nosov is repressed.

Keywords

Anatol Nosov, Fedir Vovk, F. Vovk’s scientific school, ethnology, anthropology, expeditionary activity.

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