Oyrotia in the journal Sibirskie Ogni: the initial stage of forming the image of the Soviet national margin

The article examines the publications of the journal Sibirskie Ogni in 1922-1926 devoted to Gorny Altai. After receiving the administrative-territorial autonomy, this part of southern Siberia became known as Oyrotia and its indigenous population - Oirats (i.e. descendants of the legendary Khan Oyrat, the indigenous population associated the idea of liberation from the Russian influence and the idea of national prosperity with his arrival). Under this collective name a conglomerate of the Turkic ethnic groups of Gorny Altai became one of the Soviet "oppressed peoples of the East", whose national identity was welcomed and strongly supported by national policies during the New Economic Policy. When analyzing the effects of the ideological order, the author relies on the works by Y. Slezkin, J. Slocum, T. Martin. The theoretical arguments of the leading authors of the journal V. Pravdukhin and V. Zazubrin associated with the expectation of the peripheral breakthroughs in the art in the early Soviet era were supporting in the analysis of the aesthetic component. The starting position of the article is that writers grouped around Sibirskiye Ogni used Oyrotia, with its diverse ethnic composition of national minorities and exceptional landscape attractiveness, as an experimental platform for generating the image of the Siberian Soviet national margin. The article demonstrates three main lines of constructing the image: 1) ideological (in the conditions of national autonomy natives must urgently overcome underdevelopment); 2) ethnosocial (the Altai/ Oirot natives are exotic primitive peoples); 3) natural and ecological (Gorny Altai is a "wild" exotic space). By the time the Siberian Union of Writers (1926) was created, these lines merged into a conviction that depiction of life of indigenous peoples and appeal to their folklore are an indispensable condition for the development of the Siberian literature. This point became the basis of the accelerated development of literatures of the peoples of Siberia and, in particular, contributed to the formation of the Altai national literature. The first line is considered by example of a cultural-historical essay by L. Konzychakov, the second -by example of essays "Infants of the Mountains" by G. Pushkarev, the third - by example of the report on local history trips to the mountains and the stories by P. Strizhkov. According to the author's observations, all three lines in varying completeness are present in almost every publication of Sibirskiye Ogni about Oyrotia, forming a stable plot and motif complex of the national margin. It is concluded that Sibirskiye Ogni played a crucial role in constructing Oyrotia as a "literary reality". Vivian Itin gave a precise definition of he specificity of the "literary" Oyrotia: "The Altai for the Siberian poetry is like the Caucasus for the Russian one".

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