Kulakovskii, Alekseieliseevich

Born Mar. 4 (16), 1877, in the fourth Zhekhsogonskii nasleg (settlement) of the ulus (small rural district) of Boturusskii, now in Alekseevskii Raion, Yakut ASSR; died June 6, 1926, in Moscow. Soviet Yakut poet. Scholar and enlightener. Founder of written Yakut literature.

Kulakovskii graduated from the Yakut Realschule in 1897. He traveled around Yakutia for a quarter century, studying the history and the economic and legal position of the Yakuts. In 1900, Kulakovskii wrote the song “Baianai’s Invocation,” the first piece of literature in the Yakut language. His publicistic articles championed moving closer to Russian culture. His narrative poems Portraits of Yakut Women (1904), The Song of a Hundred-year-old Woman (1906), and The Miserly Rich Man (1907) criticized the vestiges of primitive backwardness and feudal exploitation and the oppressed position of Yakut women.

He sharply condemned the tsarist yoke in the narrative poem The Shaman’s Dream (1910) and the verses “The Song of the Drunken Bourgeois” (1915), “City Girl” (1916), and “Vodka” (1916). Kulakovskii’s fiction and scholarly papers were published only under Soviet power. He welcomed Soviet power in the narrative poem Summer’s Progress (1924) and the verses “Airplane” (1924) and “Old Man’s Tale” (1924).