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In memoriam Artem Kozmin (March 15, 1976 – February 1, 2013)
On February 1, 2013, at the age of 36, Artem Kozmin, young Russian folklorist and anthropologist, researcher of the Centre of Folklore Typology and Semiotics at the Russian State University for the Humanities, died in Ulan-Bator. Artem Kozmin was a disciple and colleague of the famous Russian folklorist Sergey Neklyudov, a researcher of a wide range of interests and competences. During his short life time, he managed to write about the structure and semantics of narrative folkloric texts, genre systematics and geographic spread of folklore, metrics of poetic texts, and Polynesian languages and tradition, as well as carry out fieldwork in Mongolia and North Caucasus. Artem Kozmin’s contribution to the creation of digital databases and registers, including software, for folklore and myth texts, as well as the development of digital analysis methodology and its practical use in folklore is especially weighty. His candidate’s dissertation entitled Структурно-семантический указатель фольклорных сюжетов компьютерная модель установления связей между текстом и единицами его описания (Structural-Semantic Index of Folklore Plots: A Computer Model for Establishing Text-Index Unit References) was also dedicated to the same topic.
Quite a few Estonian folklorists knew Artem Kozmin personally – either from summer schools of folkloristics at the Russian State University for the Humanities or other science forums. We will remember him with gratitude for his writings, the registers and databases created by him, his numerous invaluable digital gifts to us, as well as his humane empathy and cheerfulness.
