ABSTRACT
The Russian artist Ivan Bilibin is known well outside Russia first of all as a Russian fairy tale and folk tale book illustrator. According to Minister of Public Education Count Uvarov's famous triad, the plan was to construct an orthodoxy, sovereignty, and national spirit, using the then popular organism-related metaphor of a common "national body." Speaking about geographic borders, there is a narrow and a broad definition of the notion of the Russian North in the academic literature. In the first case, the territory north of the Volga-Sukhona watershed between the Komi and the Karelians' resettlement regions is implied. The linguistic study of the Russian North is connected with the name of M. Kastren, a Finnish linguist and explorer, whose research work was regularly funded by the St. Petersburg Academy of Science. His works laid the basis for a systematic comparative study of the Ural-Altaic languages.
