This is another in my occasional series of posts about people I think should be more widely known. I learned about this remarkable woman via Boris Dralyuk’s post:
Viktoria Yankovskaya (1909-1996) was born in Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East, to the family of famed Machurian tiger hunter and, later, Korean resort owner, Yuri Yankovsky (1879-1956). Like his father, the Polish naturalist Michał Jankowski (1841-1912), Yuri had an ambivalent attitude towards Russia, speaking the language but never fully identifying with the culture. The family first settled in the Far East involuntarily. Michał had been imprisoned in Siberia for taking part in the January Uprising of 1863, which sought to free part of Poland from Russian rule, but his love of the flora and fauna of the region inspired him to put down roots first in Irkutsk, then farther east in Primorye. After the death of his first wife, he married a Buryat woman, with whom he had five children, including Yuri.
The younger Yankovsky was practically born on horseback with a rifle in his hands. After returning from his studies of agricultural practices in Texas and Illinois, he took over the management of the family estate, marrying the daughter of an important shipbuilder and fathering five children, including Viktoria. During the Civil War, the family fled to northern Korea. They established a resort for émigrés, where Yul Brynner—then a little boy—spent his summers. When Soviet troops entered Korea in 1945, Yuri was arrested for having supplied meat to the Japanese army. He died in the camps.
Yuri’s son Valery (1911-2010) was also arrested and sentenced to a twenty-year term in the camps, but he survived and was released in 1957. Viktoria too was detained by the NKVD, but since she had only recently given birth to her son, she was spared. Instead of being sent to the camps, she was ordered to organize a collective farm. She did as she was commanded and continued to work on the farm until 1953, when she was able to escape to Hong Kong and, from there, to Chile. In 1961, she immigrated to California, settling near the Russian River, where she lived out the rest of her days.
Viktoria’s collection of stories of life in the wild, titled It Happened in Korea [«Это было в Корее»], appeared to critical acclaim in 1935. Although she had written poems from early childhood, she only gathered a handful for publication in 1978, titling the collection Across the Lands of Dispersal. This volume was reprinted, with additional poems and a selection of stories, in Vladivostok in 1993.
Boris translates (with his usual stylishness) her poem Завещание (Will and Testament); you should click through to his post for that and for a couple of photos of the much-traveled heroine looking so fierce you would definitely want her on your side in a bar fight. And at this Russian page there are more poems, as well as an introduction from which we learn that the fine poet Konstantin Balmont considered her descriptions of the Far East in «Это было в Корее» to be as good as anything Mikhail Prishvin wrote, which is high praise. (By the way, although the book claims to have been published in Korea, it seems clear it was actually printed in Harbin, the center of Russian emigré life in China until Shanghai took over that position.)
I was struck by the phrase “the Lands of Dispersal” in the translation of the book title that was apparently По странам рассеяния in Russian. Struck because it seems oddly unidiomatic in the middle of a passage otherwise free of any ESLisms. It is true that “dispersal” is an okay translation of the Greek word διασπορά, which we have borrowed as “diaspora,” but using “dispersal” in English to mean more or less “diaspora” seems off. I might have gone with “the Lands of Scattering” if deliberately looking for a “poetic” synonym and trying to stay away from “exile” and closely-related terms. The poem translated suggests that she (or the poem’s first-person narrator, not necessarily the same thing …) was not entirely reconciled to where she’d been dispersed to.
That said, диаспора borrowed from the same Greek source is apparently an extant Russian word but one she didn’t use, and I don’t know what implications if any flow from using рассеяние where диаспора might have fit. Russian wikipedia offers «русское зарубежье» as an alternative to Русская диаспора, but even with essentially no Russian I can tell that that’s giving off a very different vibe.
Boris writes:
OK, I admit it. That photo may be a bit of posed cheesecake, but it had some truth to it, and with everything else it got me curious. I found a letter from her, sold at auction a few years back. She had been living outside of Healdsburg, right on the river, under the name Victoria Yankovsky. That led me to this blogpost from 2014, with even more details than Dralyuk’s post, and a number of interesting comments and photos sent in by her relatives, who are very proud of her and the whole family.
Her only other books which I could find on WorldCat are the 1935 Это было в Кореѣ, published in Korea in 1935 (where apparently they were still printing with pre-revolutionary type); Обо мне, о весне и о нас, a two-volume collection of diaries published in 2022, in Vladivostok; and the collection Шорохи прошлого : дневники, письма и раннее литературное творчество членов семьи Янковских, published there in 2017. The comments in the post linked above mention these collections.
I don’t know what implications if any flow from using рассеяние where диаспора might have fit
Диаспора means specifically a group or groups of emigres. Страна рассеяния is the country of dispersion where those groups live. In terms of grammatical “vibes”, рассеяние is deverbal noun, thus “scattering” or “dispersion” is a bit better than “diaspora” on this account as well.
The original struck me as a good fit for жестокий романс (cruel romance, the text is not really cruel, it’s just genre), but given that English music culture doesn’t seem to have anything like that, I don’t know whether it is reasonable to ask a translator to keep that kind of vibe.
Это было в Кореѣ, published in Korea in 1935
No, as I say in the post it was actually published in Harbin — there doesn’t seem to have been the appropriate kind of printing press in Korea at the time.
It says the publisher is Novina (Новина). I think that was the name of the resort. So, printed in Harbin, as you say, but officially, self-published in Korea.
Right.
I don’t think you can still assume that a copy of a new book “published by” a Manhattan-based publisher (Simon & Schuster, or whoever) has been physically produced by a printing press also located in Manhattan, or even necessarily in the NYC metro area.
Indeed, it’s been a long time since publishers were necessarily or even usually printers.
I can’t usefully comment on the Russian, but the English phrase “dispersal/dispersion of man” rang faint bells. Per Dr. Google, the first is an old-fashioned anthropological term for the settlement of the Earth, .whereas the second mostly refers to its biblical analogue after Bsbel.
rassejanije (ras- a prefix for spreading in many directions, -sej- “[to] sow”) is an excetionally literal translation of Green diaspora.
I think r. is the word normally used in Russian Christian Historical discourse to refer to the dispersion of the Jews (otherwise known in English as the Diaspora).
Outside of it found in phrases like рассеяны по свету or рассеяны по всему свету (dispered across the [whole] world) with different referents.
There is also characteristic use of abstract -ije nouns: “мы не в изгнании, мы в послании”* (very literally “we are not in expelling, we are in sending”, literally “we are not in exile, we are in sending” the nonce usage which I translate as “sending” normally means “a message”).
Cf. also Biblical вавилонское пленение where less biblical Russian would have плен.
* Google results for this line are Wonderful.
Our of the first 8 links five attribute it it 1. Gippius 3. Merezhkovsky 4. Berberova 5. archbishop Anthony (Bartoshevich) 8 Bunin.
2, 6, 7 are not sure or don’t specify who said it.
I chose not to read the ninth – it will be either less funny which is boring – or more funny which is scary.
“abstract -ije nouns.”
-n-ije nouns, deverabal ones (based on the participle, whence -n-). And while izgnanie normally means 1. exiling, exorcising etc. 2. exile, it technically reads (and even more logical given other uses of -n-) as being-exiled. Hence “2. exile” and re-interpretation of poslanie “message” as being-sent.
(this all is unnecessary, of coruse, because рассеяние is simple what was done to Jews – already Biblical without these details about other -ije words)
Apparently, there is a Korean alternate history web novel called 조선, 혁명의 시대 Joseon, hyeongmyeong-ui sidae (“Joseon, era of revolution”) which has another member of the family, Margarita Jankowska, as a major character.
It’s possible I’ve read about the real-life family before, but if so I have no recollection. I’m both pleased and a little embarrassed to discover another gap in my knowledge. Although I knew about White Russians in Manchuria, China, and Hong Kong, it must have escaped me that they ended up in Korea, though of course it makes sense. I knew about Yul Brynner’s Russian Far East upbringing but had no idea he spent summers in a resort in Korea.
I’m probably not the only Korean for whom Russians vanish from the mental picture in Korea after the Russo-Japanese War only to reappear four decades later at the end of World War II. Now I’m wondering if they might have left any traces in Korea, like they did in Hong Kong which came to have its own version of borscht.
An interesting question!
…which is part of the reason it’s so stupid of scientific journals to require citing the place where a book was supposedly published (never mind that the publisher says it’s based in seven cities on five continents simultaneously).
Though that’s still better than what I still see in the humanities: the German Unsitte* of citing just the place, and not mentioning the publisher’s name at all! It made sense back when there was a 1 : 1 equivalence of publishers and mid-sized German towns, but that hasn’t been how it works in a hundred years.
* “Widespread horrible habit”. Sitte: “traditional custom”; un-: “execrably bad version of”.
The things I learn…
One of my earliest blogposts was about the prewar Russian community in Korea.
https://faroutliers.com/2003/12/31/the-prewar-russian-community-in-korea/
It attracted a few interesting comments from descendants of the Yankovskys and others.
The Novina resort was near the city of Chongjin, where the recent North Korean military ship-launch went awry. Yul Brynner’s son, Rock Brynner (1946-2023) used to comment on some of my CJK-related blogposts.
https://www.tvinsider.com/1109689/rock-brynner-dead-yul-brynner-son/
A Korean doctor I used to know grew up near Novina, where he saw his first European women swimming. He told me that the Koreans in the far northeast used to use Russian loanwords for ‘bread’ and ‘matches’ rather than Japanese loans. I posted some memories about him.
https://faroutliers.com/2004/01/03/koreans-in-indiana/
Another Russian emigre to the Far East was Victor Starffin (Japan’s Cy Young), now in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, with a lifetime ERA of 2.09 who set Japan’s single-season win record in 1939.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Starffin
One of my childhood favorites in Japanese sumo was Taiho, born on Sakhalin/Karafuto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taih%C5%8D_K%C5%8Dki
Wow, what great stuff! What makes me shake my head in puzzlement, though, is how on earth do you get Starffin from Starukhin??
I am likewise impressed by Joel’s links. We have no Russia-born baseball players in the U.S. Hall of Fame. This piece from a few years ago lists the only five “Russian-born” MLB players on record (for values of “Russian-born” that do not retroactively impose current borders and e.g. exclude Odessa). https://www.mlb.com/news/russian-born-players-in-the-modern-era-c252327418
The prospect that article mentions as having at the time just been signed by the Phillies apparently knocked around in the Phillies farm system for four or five seasons but never ascended as high as triple-A.
I see that after his mysterious death Victor Starffin was buried in Tama cemetery, which I have been to on various occasions (albeit not in the last 39 years since moving back to the States) as it is located close to the campus of the American School in Japan.
how on earth do you get Starffin from Starukhin??
WP:
Doesn’t exactly answer it, but a step in that direction. Presumably it’s f before a vowel, and the u is then elided, as it will.
Ah, that’s enlightening — thanks.
…but then, Khabarovsk and Sikhote Alin are transliterated with an h, like German [x] does.
In Ka-za-fu-su-ta-n the u’s are epenthetic, and the realisation of the /h/ as [ɸ] before /u/ is just business as usual for Japanese phonotactics; there is (or was) no /h/ versus /f/ contrast in Japanese, but the Hepburn romanisation conventionally writes “f” for the [ɸ] allophone.
Still doesn’t explain “Starukhin.” Presumably the preceding /u/ in “Starukhin” was enough to make the [f] seem cromulent or induce an [ɸ] for some.
The Japanese page on Victor Starffin actually calls him Sutaruhin.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A3%E3%82%AF%E3%83%88%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B9%E3%82%BF%E3%83%AB%E3%83%92%E3%83%B3
In Japanese, [ɸ] is an allophone of /h/ before /u/, but I don’t know why /h/ would be romanized that way before /i/. Normally ヒ would be hi. I can understand removing epenthetic vowels from Sutaruhin, but the ff is odd.
One cannot hope for strict methodological consistency in the translation of foreign names borne by folks who move to the U.S. from non-Latin-scripted places of origin, but now I’m curious about Viktoria for Виктория. Victoria would be perfectly fine, whereas Viktoriya would go Full Foreign in a consistent way (Viktorija would have more of a former-Yugoslavia vibe, although apparently it’s also favored by Lithuanians), but Viktoria seems kind of semi-awkwardly in-between. Although on the other hand one does for example see Ksenia rather than Kseniya for Ксения used by those who have declined to Westernize all the way to Xenia.
Khrushchev is フルシチョフ furushichofu, FWIW.
Now you’ve got me reading FWIW as a Russian obscenity.
Thanks, Joel, for the fascinating links!
To correct my previous comment, it looks like the character Margarita Jankowska in the Korean web novel is indeed inspired by the real-life family but not her actual namesake.
In the novel she is a Polish patriot and cousin of Michał Jankowski according to a summary I found. But the real-life Margarita Yankovskaya (née Shevelyova), was Yuri Yankovsky’s wife, i.e. Michał’s daughter in law, whose only Polish connection seems to have been through marriage.
In my defence, the web novel features several characters based on historical figures, and I assumed initially that it was doing the same thing with Margarita.