RU | EN
Submenu

Filin P. The Logbooks of Ivan Bogdanov’s in 1835–1838 as a Source for the Pomor Maritime Culture of the Russian North

P. Filin
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the RAS
St. Petersburg, Russia
ORCID: 0000-0002-3965-6694
E-mail: pfilin@yandex.ru

 

 Download  |  Go to Issue #2. 2026

 

ABSTRACT. The article analyzes ship logs that were kept on the boat (lodia) St. John during Ivan Bogdanov’s commercial voyages to Novaya Zemlya in 1835–1838. The Russian Geographical Society’s Archive contains these documents, which are a unique source for studying the culture of the Pomors of the Russian North. The author transcribed the manuscripts using the Transkribus, an AI system. Bogdanov’s journals allow us to study routes, the organization of fisheries, elements of maritime practice, and the interactions between vessels and participants in the voyages. This makes the corpus of texts a crucial source on the history and technologies of the popular development of the White Sea — Barents Sea region, and they demonstrate the established, developed system of popular navigation in the Arctic. Bogdanov’s entries seamlessly combine the functions of a ship’s log, a fishing journal, and a personal diary. Within a single narrative are courses, depths, winds and ice, and counts of walrus and char caught. Alongside them are the author’s reflections, emotions, irony, references to tea parties, birthday feasts, and the dreams and anxieties of the crew. This combination of professional and intimate layers allows us to view the journals not only as technical documents but also as ethnographic evidence of the everyday life of the Pomors in the 1830s. Bogdanov emerges as an example of an active shipowner and industrialist, integrated into a vast network of maritime connections and maintaining a strong Old Believer identity. Bogdanov’s journals provide unique evidence of the rich maritime culture of the Pomors of the Russian North.

 

KEYWORDS: Novaya Zemlya, Arctic, Pomors, lodia, Russian Geographical Society, walrus, hunting trades

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2026-2(32)-94-123
UDC 930.2(470.11)

 

REFERENCES

  • Alimova T. A. [Two written monuments from the Pushkin House Antiquities Repository on Russian-Scandinavian relations in the 18th — 19th centuries]. Trudy otdela drevnerusskoy literatury [Transactions of the Department of Old Russian Literature]. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR Publ., 1976, vol. 31, pp. 390–392. (In Russian).
  • Filin P. A. [Pomor diaries as a unique source on the ethnography of the Russian North]. Polevaya etnografiya [Field Ethnography]. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo SPbGU Publ., 2004, pp. 87–92. (In Russian).
  • Filin P. A. Sudostroyeniye Solovetskogo monastyrya: lod’ya “Prepodobnyy Zosima” [Shipbuilding of the Solovetsky Monastery: The boat “Prepodobnyy Zosima”]. Moscow: Institut naslediya Publ., 2004, 177 p. (In Russian).
  • Filin P. A. [From the history of shipbuilding at the Solovetsky Monastery. 1731–1761]. Solovetskoye more. Istoriko-literaturnyy al’manakh [Solovetsky Sea. Historical and literary almanac], 2012, iss. 11, pp. 17–22. (In Russian).
  • Filin P. A. [Main results of the expedition of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the Russian Geographical Society to survey the Severny Island of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in 2024]. Zhurnal Instituta naslediya [The Heritage Institute Journal], 2024, no. 4 (39), pp. 41–52. (In Russian).
  • Nikonov S. A., Filin P. A. [“To bring the hunting to Novaya Zemlya”. Documents on the organization of the hunting in the Novaya Zemlya area in the late 1750s — early 1760s]. Istoricheskiy arkhiv [Historical Archives], 2025, no. 5, pp. 179–199. (In Russian).
  • Popova M. S. Pomorskiye lotsii i geograficheskiye znaniya pomorov: kand. dis. [Pomor sailing directions and geographical knowledge of the Pomors: diss. cand.]. Arkhangelsk, 2014, 202 p. (In Russian).