Kaplan Maria Abramovna

1907 (1907), Zhlobin — 1963 (1964), Leningrad

Biography, education, career:

On 29 December 1949 Maria Kaplan defended her Candidate’s Dissertation at the Institute of Ethnography; it was titled The Main Genres of Nanai Folklore: Ningman – Fairy-tales, telungu – Legends. From autumn 1937 she worked as a junior researcher at the Department of Siberia, Institute of Ethnography, USSR AS. Simultaneously, she taught the Nanai language at the Institute of the Peoples of the North (1934–1938). In 1936, by order of the Committee on the New Alphabet of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, she was sent to the Nanai National District on a three-month mission to collect material on the language of the Nanais. From 1 January to 1 August 1939 the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences sent her to work as an editor and translator from the Nanai language to the publishing house of the Northern Sea Route Authority. During the period from 16 December 1940 to 1 August 1941 she participated in the expedition to the Nanai National District, the Amur Basin, mounted by the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where she gathered folklore materials for her dissertation and for ethnographic collections of the MAE. In 1941–1942 she worked as a nurse’s aide in Leningrad military hospital. In February 1942 Kaplan was evacuated to Omsk. In 1942–1943 she worked as a teacher at a secondary school in Loriyak village of Khanty-Mansi National Okrug. In 1943–1945 she was a Lecturer at the Faculty of Language and History of the Peoples of the North, Omsk State Pedagogical Institute. In 1947–1950 she was acting senior researcher and from 1950 – a senior researcher at the Department of Siberia and the Far East of the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR.

Areas of expertise: History and ethnography of the peoples of Siberia, the Extreme North, and the Far East; Folklore studies; Nanai folklore