This article examines the ethnographic fiction of N. P. Matveev (Amursky), a prominent local historian, writer, and public figure from Vladivostok. The study is prompted by the growing scholarly interest in the development of literary ethnography in the works of Far Eastern writers from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Matveev’s writing emerged within the broader context of ethnographic approach in Russian fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. As an enthusiastic local historian, Matveev published extensively in newspapers of the Primorye region, and by the beginning of the 20th century, had published collections of stories in Vladivostok and Moscow. These work depict the lives of settlers in the South Ussuri region, their daily concerns and anxieties, as well as their interaction with other ethnic communities – the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. The article examines previously understudied materials from the Primorye press and from Matveev’s own journal, Nature and People of the Far East, making them available for study for the first time. It also identifies the typology of frontier plots in his ethnographic fiction.
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