The portrait of Andrey Andreyevich Savvin displayed in the museum was painted by the artist Grigory Grigorievich Turantaev in 1980.

Andrey Andreyevich Savvin was a folklorist and ethnographer. While working as a school teacher, he got interested in science, and bought literature on ethnography and folklore. Later, he recalled,

In 1937, Andrey Savvin joined the “Society for the Study of the Yakut Country” as an instructor of local lore. In November of the same year, together with Sesen Ivanovich Bolo, an archaeologist and one of the founders of Yakut field folklore studies, he was hired by the Institute of Languages and Culture. Shortly afterward Savvin went on a six-month expedition to the Vilyui River. The trip resulted in extensive material.

In 1939, Andrey Savvin together with Sesen Bolo again went on another expedition to the northern regions of Yakutia: Allaihovsky, Verkhoyansky, Abyisky, and Ust-Yansky. They stayed there for eight months.

The expedition produced a variety of materials: seven northern tales “olonkho”, about 30 fairy tales, two dozen folk songs, numerous riddles, proverbs, tongue twisters, and historical legends. On top of that, Savvin collected shamanic texts and ritual descriptions for them, studied the history of the Russian Civil War, kept records of ancient monuments in villages, gave lectures on the importance of folklore, and organized a network of correspondents.

The researcher studied the peculiarities of the spoken Yakut language and dialects of northern Yakuts, Russian old residents, and Allaihovsky Yukaghirs.

Andrey Savvin is the author of “Yakut Food”, “Materials on Beliefs”, “Elements of Buddhism in Yakut Religion”, “Yakut Pottery”, “Yakut Magic”, “Shamanism” and many others. The scientific works of the ethnographer are characterized by reliable sources, which are based on the works of the orientalist historian Nikolay Aleksandrovich Aristov, orientalist-turkologist and ethnographer Vasily Vasilievich Radlov, and the Buryat researcher Dorzhi Banzarov as well as other researchers.