#chukchi

Thank you so much for the interest in Zimov! He is honestly my most favorite character in the story (I mean, obviously, I made him the main character after all).

Zimov does have Asian roots. While researching the USSR, I got really invested in the indigenous people of the Siberian region. The Itelmen and the Chukchi people were especially interesting to me, because of their ties to nature, their spirituality and mythologies.

I took the images from Google.

As I said it in my main profile - my favorite animals are crows and ravens. Well, it turns out that in the mythology of the Itelmens there is a Raven spirit named Kutkh. Kutkh is a very intriguing character with appearances in many contradictory myths. He is often portrait as the creator of the world and yet also a laughing-stock and a trickster. He immediately became one of my favorite mythology figures and a new hyper focus.

The images are from Google. The first is the cover of the book "Raven Kutkh" by Publishing house "Malysh" ("Ворон Кутх" Издательства "Малыш"). The middle one is an illustration from the book "Fairy tales of the peoples of the North" compiled by V. Vinokurova, Yu. Sem ("Сказки народов Севера" Составители: В. Винокурова, Ю. Сем). The last one is an illustration from the book by Georgy Menovshchikov - "Travels of the Raven Kutkh in the Northern Countries" (Георгий Меновщиков - "Путешествия ворона Кутха по северным странам").

Because of that, I wanted Zimov to have roots that tie him to this Raven spirit. For the purposes of my story, I made up a Siberian tribe that is inspired by the Itelmen and the Chukchi people. Zimov’s mother comes from that tribe and has passed down the ties to the mystical world and her more spiritual nature to her son.

I hope that answers your question.

The Anthropological Masterlist is HERE.

The Turkic people are a Eurasian people that speak a Turkic language. 

ALTAI ─ “The Altai people are a Turkic people. They are native to the Altai Republic in Russia.” ─ Altai Religion from the 1890s to the 1920s ─ Altai Language (in Russian)

CHUKCHI ─ “The Chukchi, or Chukchee, people are an Indigenous Russian people. They are native to the Chukchi Peninsula in Russia.” ─ Chukchi Information ─ Chukchi Mythology ─ Chukchi Language

CHUVASH ─ “The Chuvash people are a Turkic people. They are native to the Volga-Ural region of Siberia.” ─ Chuvash Culture & Dictionary ─ Chuvash History ─ Chuvash Phonetics

KOMI ─ “The Komi people are a Permian people. They are native to northeast European Russia, around the basin of the Pechora river.” ─ Permian Komi History ─ Permic Script

TATAR ─ “The Tatar people are a Turkic people that share the Tatar language. Historically, it was also used to refer to people that came from Tatary.” ─ Volga Tatars ─ Crimean Tatars (in Russian) ─ Tatar Language Dialects (in Russian)

TUNGUSIC ─ “The Tungusic people are a Tungusic people. They are native to Siberia and northeast Asia.” ─ Manchu-Tungusic People

TURKIC ─ “The Turkic people are an ethnic group that consists of anyone that speaks Turkic languages. They are native to many parts of Asia and Europe.” ─ Literature of the Central Asian Turkics ─ Turkic Mythology ─ The Turkic Expansion

TURKISH ─ “The Turkish, or Turk, people are a Turkic people. They are native to Turkey and northern Cyprus.” ─ Turkish Culture ─ The Ottoman Empire ─ Turkish Dictionaries

Portraits of Chukchi men by Borgoras Waldemar, early 1900s