Bronisław Piłsudski (1866-1918)
A chronicler of the vanishing cultures of the Far East, Bronisław Piłsudski and his achievements have long remained in the shadow of his brother, Józef Piłsudski, the founder of the Polish Legions and first marshal of independent Poland. Bronisław died tragically in Paris, drowning in the River Seine, and was laid to rest at Montmorency Cemetery on 29 May 1918.

Born in 1866 in Zułów in the Wilno (modern-day Vilnius, Lithuania) region, he grew up immersed in the patriotic atmosphere of his family estate. Initially, there was little indication that he would dedicate himself to a career in ethnography. His future seemed set in law, which he studied at Saint Petersburg University. However, in 1887, following his involvement in a plot against Tsar Alexander III, he was expelled and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to fifteen years of exile on Sakhalin Island in the Pacific. A remote penal colony for both criminal and political prisoners, the island officially became Russian territory in 1875. At first, Piłsudski undertook manual labour, felling trees in the village of Rykovskoye. Yet the aspiring lawyer, fluent in Russian, soon came to the attention of local authorities, who needed skilled professionals to advance the ongoing development of the island. He was transferred to the police office, where he documented records for the penal colony. Eventually, he was allowed to settle in a local village. Piłsudski quickly adapted to the cultural peculiarities of the local people, and he became enthralled by their customs, folklore, and rituals. Although officially still a convict, he was supported in his research endeavours by Russian authorities, who recognised their value to the Tsarist regime. Of strategic value to Russia, Sakhalin’s ports facilitated connections between mainland settlements and the islands of the Kuril Archipelago and the Kamchatka.

A formative moment in Bronisław Piłsudski’s career came when he met a fellow exile and eminent ethnographer, Lev Sternberg. Under the governor’s orders, Sternberg conducted extensive studies on Sakhalin Island and its inhabitants. He introduced the younger Piłsudski to the intricacies of ethnographic research, then an emerging academic field. Piłsudski subsequently wrote a paper on the island’s climate, which served as his gateway to further research opportunities and increasing independence. Despatched to the island’s southern regions to conduct meteorological studies, he encountered the Indigenous Ainu population. After ten years in exile, his sentence was commuted to enforced settlement in the Russian Far East; however, he remained prohibited from leaving the region. Soon thereafter, the Imperial Academy of Sciences invited him to study the cultures of the Ainu, Gilyak, Oroks, and Manguns on Sakhalin.

In 1904, Piłsudski and a fellow former exile, the Polish writer and traveller Wacław Sieroszewski, travelled to Japan’s Hokkaido to continue researching the Ainu, who also inhabited this island. The expedition was funded by the Russian Geographical Society. Using the latest phonograph technology from the United States, invented by Thomas Edison, they recorded over a hundred wax cylinders of native conversations and songs. As a free man, Bronisław Piłsudski settled in the village of Ai, where, beginning in 1905, he studied local communities and started a family and had two children; his descendants still live in Japan today. In one of his articles, Piłsudski wrote of how he viewed the Indigenous People as „(...) the only morally uncorrupted community on the entire island (...). I drew close to these people, dying out and wronged, to breathe better air among them and to offer help.” He supported the Ainu by teaching children and adults to read and write in Russian and by establishing schools with a curriculum he developed, focused on arithmetic, craftsmanship, basic agriculture, and hygiene. His primary interests were in linguistics, folklore, and anthropology, as well as in the study of medicine, shamanism, and the bear cult. He also compiled a foundational work: the Ainu-Russian dictionary.

After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Piłsudski, who faced potential conscription into the Tsarist army, left the island. However, the tribal authorities denied his family permission to join him. In August 1906, he travelled through North America and Western Europe to reach Polish territories, where he resided in Kraków, Lwów (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), and Zakopane. There, he conducted ethnographic research on the inhabitants of the Podhale region, founded the Ethnographic Section of the Tatra Society, and co-established the Tytus Chałubiński Museum. Despite lacking formal academic credentials, Piłsudski enjoyed considerable support from the scholarly communities in Lwów and Kraków. An eminent linguist, Professor Jan Rozwadowski of the Jagiellonian University, edited Piłsudski’s folkloric and linguistic materials from his studies on the Ainu and published them in English. His 1912 work, Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore, published by the University of Michigan Library, is hailed as „the pinnacle achievement in the study of Sakhalin Ainu culture and language.” Much of what modern scholarship understands about the Ainu’s lives, traditions, and customs can be attributed to Piłsudski. Piłsudski’s Ainu language dictionary and audio recordings, later edited by Professor Alfred Majewicz, stand as his final scholarly contribution. Piłsudski was deeply respected and even beloved by this people, threatened by Russian encroachment on Sakhalin and Japanese expansion on Hokkaido. Today, fewer than one thousand Ainu remain in Russia and approximately thirty thousand in Japan. Their language and culture remain at serious risk of extinction.

After the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Piłsudski, a Russian subject, left Zakopane for Switzerland and later moved to Paris, where he became involved with the Polish National Committee as a delegate of Lithuania. Growing family pressures and political tensions led him to suffer from periods of depression. He never again saw the family he had left behind on Sakhalin. Piłsudski died tragically at the age of fifty-two, drowning in the River Seine under circumstances that remain unclear to this day.

Despite his significant contributions to world scholarship, Bronisław Piłsudski remains known only to a small circle of specialists and enthusiasts. His name was consigned to obscurity during the Communist era in Poland, and he remains in the shadow of his younger brother, Józef Piłsudski. However, monuments honouring this extraordinary researcher can be found in Sakhalin and Hokkaido, and a symbolic grave commemorates him at the Old Cemetery in Zakopane.