Bronisław Piłsudski (1866-1918)
. A documentalist of the cultures of the disappearing peoples of the Far East, whose achievements were overshadowed by those of his brother, Józef Piłsudski - the founder of the Legions and first Marshal of independent Poland. He died a tragic death in Paris, drowning in the Seine. On 29 May 1918, he was laid to rest in the Montmorency cemetery.

He was born in 1866 in Zułów in the Vilnius region, where he grew up in the patriotic atmosphere of the family manor. Initially, there was little indication that he would devote himself to a career in ethnography. He saw his future in law and studied this subject at St Petersburg University, but in 1887, for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III, he was expelled from the university and sentenced to death. This was changed, however, to 15 years' exile on Sakhalin Island, in the Pacific Ocean and formally belonging to Russia since 1875, which at the time served as an isolated penal colony for both criminals and political opponents of the Tsar. Initially, Piłsudski worked physically at clearing the forest in the village of Rykovskoye, but the would-be lawyer, with an excellent command of Russian, was noticed by the local authorities, who were short of people in the process of developing the island at the time. He was transferred to the police chancellery, where he completed the documentation of the penal colony, and was later given the opportunity of living in a local settlement. Piłsudski quickly assimilated with the culturally alien population, succumbing to a fascination with its customs, folklore and rituals. Although officially Piłsudski remained a convict, the Russian authorities supported his research efforts, as his activities were useful to the Tsar. The island was of strategic importance to Russia in the Far East, with its ports facilitating communication between the mainland settlements and the islands of the Kuril Archipelago and Kamchatka.

A formative moment in Bronisław Piłsudski's career was his encounter with another exile, the eminent ethnographer Lev Shternberg, who, at the behest of the Governor of Sakhalin, was conducting a multi-faceted study of the island and its inhabitants. He initiated the younger exile into the arcana of ethnographic research, which was then a young discipline of science. Piłsudski wrote a paper on the island's climate, which became the ticket to his further research and increasing freedom. When he was sent to the south of the island to study the meteorological conditions there, he came into contact with the indigenous Ajn people who inhabited that part of the island. After 10 years of exile, his sentence was commuted to a settlement order in the Russian Far East, but without the right to leave it. Shortly afterwards, the Imperial Academy of Sciences offered him the opportunity to study the culture of the Ajns, Gilaks, Oroks and Manguns on Sakhalin.

In 1904. Piłsudski, together with another former exile, the Polish writer and traveller Wacław Sieroszewski, travelled to the Japanese island of Hokkaido to continue his research on the Ajns, who also inhabited the area. The expedition was funded by the Russian Geographical Society. For ethnographic research, they used Thomas Edison's then state-of-the-art phonogram, imported from the United States, with which they recorded the conversations and chants of the indigenous people on 100 wax rollers. Already a free man, Bronisław Piłsudski settled in the village of Ai, where he had been researching local communities since 1905. He also started a family, surviving to have two children, whose descendants still live in Japan today. In one of his articles, Bolesław Piłsudski wrote that the indigenous people represented for him; "(...) the only morally uncorrupted environment on the whole island (...). I approached these people who were dying out and being harmed, in order to breathe a better air among them and to bring them help". He worked on behalf of the Ajns, teaching children and adults to write and read Russian. He set up schools for them, where he created an original education programme based on learning arithmetic, crafts, the basics of agriculture and hygiene. His main fields of interest were linguistics, folklore and anthropology, as well as medicine, shamanism and bear worship. He also compiled a fundamental work: the Aynesian-Russian dictionary.

After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Piłsudski, threatened with mobilisation into the tsarist army, left the island. His family's departure was refused by the tribal authorities. In August 1906, via North America and Western Europe, he arrived in Poland. He lived in Krakow, Lviv and Zakopane, where he took up ethnographic research on the inhabitants of Podhale and founded the Folklore Section at the Tatra Society, as well as co-organising the Tytus Chałubiński Museum. Although he held no title or academic degree, he enjoyed the support of members of the Lviv and Krakow scientific community. The eminent linguist, Jagiellonian University Professor Jan Rozwadowski edited the folklore and linguistic materials from Piłsudski's studies of the Ajns and published them in English. Published in 1912 by the University of Michigan Library, Bronislaw Pilsudski's work 'Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore' has been called 'the pinnacle achievement in the study of the culture and language of the Sakhalin Ajns. What modern world science knows about the life, traditions and customs of the Ainu is largely due to this one researcher. Bronisław Piłsudski's work - a dictionary of the Ainu language prepared by him and re-edited by Professor Alfred Majewicz, as well as an audio recording of their speech - are his last testimonies. Bronisław Piłsudski was cherished and even loved by this vanishing people threatened by the Russians on Sakhalin and by the Japanese on Hokkaido. Today, there are less than a thousand Ainu living on Russian territory, and about 30,000 in Japan. Their language and culture are threatened with extinction.

After the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. As a Russian subject, Piłsudski left Zakopane for Switzerland, from where he moved to Paris, where he was active on the Polish National Committee as a representative of Lithuania. A difficult family situation and political tensions caused him to suffer from depressive states. He never saw his family left behind in Sakhalin again. He died tragically, drowning in the Seine at the age of 52; the circumstances of his death remain unclear to this day.

Despite his great contribution to world science, Bronisław Piłsudski is known to a small circle of specialists and enthusiasts. During the communist period, his name was condemned to oblivion, while today he remains in the shadow of his younger brother, Józef Piłsudski. There are monuments commemorating this exceptional explorer in Sakhalin and Hokkaido, and his symbolic grave is located in the Old Cemetery in Zakopane.