Information about the author:
Tatiana V. Govenko
Tatiana V. Govenko, DSc in Philology, Senior Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya St., 25A, bld. 1, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1296-8399
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Abstract:
V.F. Miller conducted several expeditions to the Caucasus. In the summer of 1883, he traveled there with M.M. Kovalevsky. The ethnolinguistic goals of the trip were to gather new data for a dictionary of the Ossetian language, to repeat the records of Nart tales, to document information about the Balkars and Kabardians, to collect fairy tales, proverbs, and riddles, and to compile collections of artifacts from archaeological excavations. Reports from the expedition were published in various academic journals, and the fictional essay, “In the Mountain Societies of Kabarda”, was published in “Vestnik Evropy”. Despite the fact that the V.F. Miller’s Caucasian expedition of 1883 has been well studied, additional evidence remains beyond the boundaries of scientific analysis, extracted by us from the scholar’s personal archive (RGAL. F. 323. Op. 1. Ed. ch. 541), or rather, from his letters to his wife, E.V. Miller, about his meetings with different people, about his personal feelings from this trip, about his emotional state, about his financial situation and plans for the summer. The article aims to fill this gap.
