Nikolay Kurilov

Biography

The best introduction to Nikolay Kurilov may be the list of languages he writes in: Yukaghir, Sakha and Russian. For a man from one of the small peoples of the Kolyma region this is a working tool rather than an ornament, and he uses it in several genres at once.

He was born on 11 June 1949 in the village of Andryushkino in the Nizhnekolymsky district of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Today the place is called Olyorinsky Suktul. His elder brother Gavril, known as the writer Uluro Ado, and his brother Semyon, a writer and artist, also became men of the arts, so the family offered plenty of examples to follow. In Northern Yukaghir his name is Mikalai Kurilev; in literature he also signed his work with the pen name Okat Bei.

He went far from home to study painting, to the Krasnoyarsk Art College. Then he came back to the Kolyma, and his first working years look little like the biography of a future People’s Artist: he taught engineering drawing and aesthetics, did all the design work that needed doing in the town of Chersky, and photographed for the newspaper Kolymskaya Pravda as a staff photo reporter. The texts available to me say almost nothing about these years, so one can only judge by the list of posts.

From 1976 his work was shown at regional and national exhibitions. At about the same time he began writing poetry and prose and attended seminars for young writers. In 1981 the Yakut regional committee of the Komsomol, the Communist youth organisation, awarded him a diploma as “Best Debut of 1981”. In 1982 he joined the Artists’ Union of the USSR, and in 1988, already in the years of perestroika, the Union of Soviet Writers. For him the double membership was no formality: the two professions ran side by side.

In 1994 he became a staff researcher at the Institute for the Problems of Small Peoples of the North, part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The same year he travelled to the United States, to regions where Native Americans live, to study their art. For an artist from a very small people, such a trip looks like a search for kinship: a way to see how other Indigenous cultures treat their own heritage, though this is my guess and not something he said.

Since 1997 he has been an editor and announcer at the radio station Gevan, which broadcasts in the languages of the small peoples of the North.

He writes stories about the life of Northern peoples, children’s literature, poetry, textbooks and science fiction. With his brother Gavril he compiled a Yukaghir alphabet book, the first primer for children in that language. He is married to the artist Ulyana Prokopyevna.

An unclear story is attached to the poem “Homeland” (“I learned that I have…”). It was heard in the film Brother 2, and a Russian translation by Mikhail Yasnov was published in 1987 as Kurilov’s verse. The text in the film differs somewhat from the printed one. There is also another version: that the poem was written by Vladimir Orlov and is called “Native Again”. I have seen no documents that would settle the question.

On 23 March 2016 Nikolay Kurilov was given the title of People’s Artist of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), for his contribution to the development of the visual arts in the republic and many years of work.