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The book situates its inquiry at the intersection of three inter methods—interdisciplinary, intertextual, and intergeneric. Throughout history, Russian literati have engaged in intertextual and intergeneric exchange as an intellectual and political game, transmitting their ideas via references to each other, commenting on events, critiquing politics, creating a densely coherent body of works extending across artistic and disciplinary divides. Historical ethnomusicology provides a vehicle for questions that challenge established historical perspectives, in this case dealing with opera, gender, and empire. At the core of the study is the issue of gender, which, not originally conceived as the main agenda, took centre stage in the course of the research.

The death of Catherine II signalled the end of the women’s kingdom and the restoration of patriarchy in the name of nationalism – a concept profoundly and militantly gendered. None of the ingredients of literary nationalism were new: Orthodoxy as an ideology of conquest; Russia, conquering the East and modelled on while surpassing the West; the native champion embodying the lore of conquest; the folk associated with tales, bylinas, songs, and in operas with folk choruses, weddings, the imperial polonaise, and the monumental choral “Slava” (Glory to the tsar/patria). Appropriating, redefining, and significantly expanding these tropes, early nineteenth-century literati were driven by both generational and gender anxiety regarding the recent past. They inherited a culture of masquerade in which a female ruler was identified, on operatic stage, with Minerva, Roman Tito, Alessandro, and Oleg. Beginning with Ruslan and Luidmila by Glinka, the “Columbus of Russian music,” the Russian fairy-tale operas became populated by formidable monarchical sorceresses, confronting and often defeated by native champions. This chapter proposes to view these female figures in the context of inoskazanie – a literary masquerade in which a writer says something other than he seems to say and a reader understands what has not been said.

In this chapter, the author describes the fur trade in Russia. He first narrates his trip to Nelemnoye, a village where the Yukaghirs lived and where virtually everyone makes a living from hunting sable, together with his friend Uffe Refslund Christensen, who is also his partner in the Danish-Yukaghir Fur Project that they were pursuing. He then discusses his meeting with Slava Shadrin, who replaced Kolya Shalugin as director of the Teki Odulok obshchina (commune), to talk about the fur project. He also provides a background on the history of Russian fur trading and how it fared during and after Communism, along with the Sakha and Yukaghir sable hunters in Siberia.

In this chapter, the author narrates his meeting with Slava Shadrin, director of the Teki Odulok obshchina (commune), as he was hunting in the Siberian taiga. The author at this point had been waiting for news from Shadrin about the state of the Danish-Yukaghir Fur Project in which he was involved. Shadrin said he had been arrested by the police in Zyryanka as he was about to boardd a plane to Yakutsk, from where he was to send the sable furs to Moscow and then on to Denmark. The police said he had broken the law and that they had been ordered to confiscate the sable furs even after he showed them the various permits he had. Shadrin had eventually been released. The author also discusses the Yakutian state enterprise Sakhabult and its monopoly of the Russian fur trade, the Yukaghirs’ relationship to power in the Kremlin, and the illness that befell Spiridon Spiridonov, a Yukaghir known for his hunting prowess, after eating rancid butter.

In this chapter, the author narrates how Slava Shadrin, director of the Teki Odulok obshchina (commune), was cheated by the people at Sakhabult, the Yakutian state enterprise which has a monopoly of the Russian fur trade. Shadrin signed a contract with Sakhabult to sell the obshchina’s 300 sable furs at the fur auction in St. Petersburg for a 10 percent commission. The furs were being sold as part of the Danish-Yukaghir Fur Project, in which Shadrin and the author were involved. Nikifor Petrov, president of Sakhabult, told Shadrin that their furs had been sold for an average price of 1,200 rubles, which was only half of what he was expecting. In addition, Sakhabult had wanted a 25 percent commission for having traded the obshchina furs at the auction, leaving Shadrin and his group with only 900 rubles per fur. The author, in collaboration with two young journalists at the local newspaper Ilken, Olga Ulturgasheva and Varvara Danilova, wrote an article accusing Sakhabult of cheating the Yukaghir hunters out of their money.

In this chapter, the author talks about his return to Denmark after his one-year stay in the wilderness of the Siberian taiga to conduct a field study of the Yukaghirs and their lives as sable hunters as well as to revive the Danish-Yukaghir Fur Project. His girlfriend, Helene, had left him for another man, and his friend Uffe Refslund Christensen had been struggling with his own problems. At Cambridge University, he finished writing his PhD thesis on the Yukaghirs’ spiritual beliefs in 2003. In 2007, his book, Soul Hunters, was published. In it he describes the Siberia that he had come to love: life as a hunter, the relationship to the spirits, and the just distribution of meat among the Yukaghirs. The author also comments on the Russian bureaucracy that Uffe and Slava Shadrin, director of the Teki Odulok obshchina (commune), had to deal with as they pursued the fur project. Finally, he reflects on his visit to Sakhabult’s headquarters.