Bogoraz was born in 1865 in Volhynia, joined the revolutionary movement as a student, and was arrested and sent to north-eastern Siberia in 1889. Political exiles on the Kolyma had time and no work, and several of them turned to the peoples around them. Bogoraz turned to the Chukchi and the Even, learned the language, and began collecting texts.
When Franz Boas organised the Jesup North Pacific Expedition to test whether the peoples of Siberia and of north-western America were historically connected, he needed Russian fieldworkers, and Bogoraz and Waldemar Jochelson, another exile, were the obvious choices. Bogoraz worked the Chukchi peninsula in 1900 and 1901. The Chukchee, published in the expedition's memoirs between 1904 and 1909, runs to three parts covering material culture, religion and social organisation.
It is a strange and valuable book. It records the Chukchi spirit world, the drum, the assistant beings, sacrifice, and the practice sometimes translated as the soft man, in which a specialist changes gender at the instruction of the spirits. It also records, with some humour at his own expense, that the Chukchi found the ethnographer's questions eccentric. Bogoraz wrote fiction about the same region under the name Tan, and the two bodies of work read very differently.