Ethnographic Collections of Yuriy and Sophia Marr at Peter the Great Kunstkamera

Abstract

Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of Russian Academy of Sciences holds four collections of watercolours, photographs and material culture items, related to Persia of the 1920s and gathered there by Yuriy and Sophia Marr. Yuriy Marr (1893—1935), the son of Academician Nikolai Marr (1865—1934), who had an unprecedented impact on the development of the humanities in the early Soviet period, devoted his short life to Iranian studies and was among the best experts in the Persian language, literature and daily life of contemporary Persia. In recent decades, Yuriy Marr gained new recognition as a futurist poet due to a series of publications of his literary heritage, carefully preserved for many years by his wife Sophia Marr (1890—1980). In 1925—1926 Yuriy Marr was on mission in Persia to establish cultural ties and collect data on librarianship and publishing activities. The article briefly highlights the features of three collections representing some ethnographic realities of Persia on the eve of comprehensive modernization of the country. Emphasis is made on the collection that was received from Sophia Marr in 1978. The collection includes a woolen cloak (‘aba’) brought by Yuriy Marr from his student trip to Lebanon and Syria in 1914, and 15 watercolour portraits on plywood sheets, copied from the original photographs that were found in the Archives of Orientalists at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences.