Nikolai Rogov

Who was Nikolai Rogov?

Nikolai Abramovich Rogov was a Russian ethnographer and philologist, a researcher of Komi-Permyak language. He is known as the author of the first and one of most complete dictionaries of that language. The dictionary contains about 13,000 words.

Nikolai Rogov was born in 1825 in Sredne-Yegvinskoye settlement of Perm Governorate in serf family. He studied in the Saint-Petersburg School of Agriculture, Mining and Metallurgical Sciences. Since 1850 he worked as a forester in Stroganovs' estate. Later he was appointed manager of Kyn Factory in Kungursky Uyezd. There, in 1864, he established Kyn Co-operative Society, the first private co-operative society in Russia.

Since 1849 Rogov worked on the creation of "Permyak-Russian and Russian-Permyak Dictionary", which was published in Saint-Petersburg in 1869. The dictionary included about 13,000 words of Inva and Nerdva dialects of Komi-Permyak language. In 2007 the dictionary was republished by Komy-Permyak Publishing House.

A historian Aleksandr Dmitriyev in "Old times of Perm" reported about Rogov as follows:

We have told already, how great importance are philological works of N. A. Rogov about Permyaks, i. e. his Permyak grammatics and dictionary. The best ethnographic essay on Permyaks named "Materials for describing the everyday life of Permyaks" also belongs to him. Other writers did frequently derive from him.