Boris Vildé

Boris Vildé was a linguist and ethnographer at the Musée de l'Homme, in Paris, France. He specialised in polar civilizations. He was born in St. Petersburg into a family of Eastern Orthodox Russians. When his father died, his mother moved with him to her family estate in Yastrebino. Because of the Russian Revolution, the family then moved to Tartu, Estonia in 1919. He studied first at the high school and then at the University of Tartu, where he did not complete his courses but learned the German language and some notions of chemistry. He also acquired a taste for literature and poetry and moved to Germany in 1930 hoping for a literary career there. In 1933, as a militant against Nazism, he felt unsafe in Germany and moved to France.