Jangar Pyurveev, Autobiography

Abstract

Jangar is an architect and a philosopher. He was born in Elista in 1938. He is from the Baga-Chonos clan. Jangar’s step father, Konstantin Erendzhenov, was a famous Kalmyk poet who was Maxim Gorkiy’s friend and he was sent to gulag from 1938 to 1958. While in gulag he extracted 37 kg of gold for which he received a medal. Jangar’s mother, Bova Kolpakova, was one of the first Komsomol members in Kalmykia. In 1925, she went to study in Leningrad. She was a talented singer and dancer and appeared in several movies. In Jangar’s family there were four children. In 1944 when their family was sent to exile to Altaiskiy krai in Siberia, Jangar’s younger brother was 4, Jangar himself was 6, and his older brothers Mingiyan and Bold were 8 and 10 respectively. After the exile, the family returned to Kalmykia where Jangar and Mingiyan worked in various cultural projects, including Kalmyk music, art, theatre and architecture. His brother Mingiyan’s songs are well-known in Kalmykia. Mingiyan was also an architect, builder, and the first secretary of the State Construction Company of Kalmykia. The two brothers worked together on many building projects in Kalmykia, including the House of Government, Lenin’s square, various rayon centres and so on. Jangar’s other brother Bold was an Honoured Artist of Kalmykia. In this way, many members of Jangar’s family contributed to the revival of culture in post-exile Kalmykia. Jangar also has an interest in questions about the origin of nomadic architecture, civilization and culture. Jangar describes himself as a cosmist and philosopher. He has developed a theory of nomadic architecture and nomadic city building. In 1987, his lunar settlement project won first prize in a competition. Jangar says that the yurt (nomadic tent) has a circular form, and in a similar way Earth too rotates around the sun in a circular orbit. According to him, all living beings move in circles or rotate. Jangar also talks about the origin of civilizations, world political processes, noosphera (a theory about cosmic consciousness first developed by Vernadskiy), energies, the cosmic theory of memory and other topics. Jangar contends that in Russia people have what he calls ‘creative thinking’. In the west, in contrast, people have ‘rational thinking’.