Everyone has their own Siberia: Interview with Oleg Mandzhiev

The article deals with an understudied issue, that of the daily life of Kalmyks deported to Siberia (1943-1956), and includes an introduction, an interview with the famous Kalmyk writer and screenwriter Oleg Mandzhiev, and an analysis of the discursive strategies he uses in his narrative. The text constructs an autobiographical story more than half a century after the actual events, making the daily life of Mandzhiev’s family all the more interesting and important, particularly given that the narrator’s father had received the title of ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ and his view of the twentieth-century military history is of special value. In an unplanned biographical interview focused on the years of the deportation of Kalmyks, important aspects are not only the mentioned facts and the growing boy’s feelings and thoughts, but also the narrative forms, such as plot, images, judgements, lexical composition, and grammatical structures. Oleg Mandzhiev belongs to the generation of Kalmyk children born in Siberia after World War II. In the interview, he talks about his childhood in Novosibirsk, highlighting topics such as practices of exclusion in school, personal resistance strategies, experiencing stigmatized ethnicity, and accepting Kalmykia as an attributed homeland. Particular attention is paid to the language of trauma, through which traumatic memory manifests itself in a spontaneous narrative: these are stories about feces, festering wounds, and diseases, with parallels drawn with deprived, historical social groups. The article will be of interest to all researchers of the Kalmyk deportation, to historians of the region and urbanists alike.

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