Oirotia - Gorny Altai: a national project in early Soviet literature (Mountains by V.Ya. Zazubrin)

The paper studies the novel Mountains (1933) written by V.Ya. Zazubrin in the context of the early Soviet literary interpretation of Oirotia as an eastern national periphery (the novel was preceded by V. Gzhitsky's The Black Lake and followed by A. Koptelov's The Great Migration). The cultural and ideological context of the novel is based on the chronicle of Siberian literary life of 1922-1936 depicted in Sibirskie Ogni. Giving a new name of Oirotia to Russian / Gorny Altai, the writer interprets it as a translation into the category of the imaginary. The novel name of the new autonomous region and its residents corresponds to the mythology of "a new world", which made it possible for writers to construct a space for the early stage of the Soviet nation building, i.e. to show a symbolic travelogue of underdeveloped peoples into a better tomorrow. The imaginary nature of Oirotia is coded in its name: the Oirots never lived in Russian Altai, they never spoke the Oirot language. The Oirots (Oirats) are the Western Mongolians. The starting message of the research is that, being far from cultural centres of the country and due to its mountainous landscapes and ethnic heterogeneity, Russian (Gorny) Altai remains in Russian consciousness an imaginary, rather than visualized, space (see V. Sorokin's Tellurion). The imaginary Oirotia is constructed within the frontier, colonial (oriental) and ideological discourses. When the ideologeme of wildness and backwardness used for almost all national outskirts of the USSR is used for Oirotia, it is enriched with a traditional archetype of a Godforsaken place traditional for the Siberia text of the Russian culture. it is in this place where Ivan Bezugly, the main character in Zazubrin's novel, finds his home and family. He perceives the mountains as a guarantee of inviolability of the world. The inviolability and timelessness of the natural world is important for the theme of indigenous people of the highlands who get a collective name of Altaitsi, or the Altai people, in Zazubrin's novel. Unlike Old Believers, who are perceived as alien, the Altai people belong to this place, they follow in the footsteps of their ancestors (scenes of their everyday life, hunting, shaman practices). Zazubrin describes the colonisation of Altai mountains in the light of the ideologeme of "Siberia as a colony". What understood as modern is not as simple as black and white, yet the author, who had been seriously criticized for his views, clings to his convictions -describing the Altai people he is focused on ethnic and cultural rather than ideological aspects. The book by Zazubrin is in a significant contrast to ideologically marked "Oirot" texts in terms of its onthological theme, which becomes most overt after addressing N. Zarudin's Beautiful Oirotia and I. Kataev's Under Clear Stars.

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