Poetic ethnographism is one of the discursive manifestations of literary ethnography, organic for the lyrical type of consciousness. Despite the great degree of metaphor, occasional and artistic fiction, poetic ethnographism in the work of individual authors can become a valuable source of religious observations. This article presents the results of the study of the religious aspect of poetic ethnographism, which determines the content of “Letters from India” and “Letters from Tahiti” by the Harbin poetess Larissa Andersen (journal “Occultism and Yoga”). The object of lyricized epistolaries is the religious beliefs of the inhabitants of India and Tahiti as a direct expression of the religiosity of L. Andersen: Orthodox by faith, she was interested in esoteric teachings, was seriously engaged in yoga, while gravitating towards pantheism. This determined the tendency to syncretize religious phenomena and explains, on the one hand, L. Andersen’s interest in the developed spiritual culture of India, and on the other, her organic perception of the primitive archaic beliefs of the Tahitians. The author of the article concludes that the ethnographic observations of Larissa Andersen for the inhabitants of India and Tahiti (in particular, for the religious side of their life) and her ethno-religious sketches are valuable in the context of the ethnographic direction of research that developed in the first half of the 20th century in Manchuria, as well as – in the context of studying the religious syncretism of the inhabitants of Russian Harbin (and more broadly – Russian China).
Keywords: Larissa Andersen, “Letters from India”, “Letters from Tahiti”, literary ethnography, poetic ethnographism, pantheism, religious syncretism
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2021.1.124-135
About the author
 |
Olga E. Tsmykal – Assistant at the Department of Literature and World Arts, Amur State University; |