Pitirim sorokin biography channel

Pitirim A. Sorokin, “Sociology of My Mental Life,” in Philip J. Allen, ed., Pitirim A. Sorokin in Review: The American Sociological Forum, (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1963), pp.

4-36

— posted by Roger W. Smith

    January 2018

Early Years

I was born in January 21, 1889, and lived up to the age of eleven among the Komi people, one of the Ugro-Finnish ethnic groups, in the North of Russia.

Pitirim sorokin biography channel

My Russian father was an itinerant “master of gilding, silvering, and ikon-making” (as his guild certificate testified). How and for what reasons he moved from the Russian city Velikiy Ustiug to the Komi region (a distance of more than three hundred miles) and remained there up to his death, I do not know.

One of the possible reasons was that among the Komi people he probably found more work than among the Russian population. My mother was a Komi peasant daughter. The only thing I remember about her is the scene of her death—which occurred when I was about