A shaman in the literary image of the Soviet national periphery. Oirotia, 1920s-1930s

The article studies works published from the 1920s to the 1930s and dedicated to Oirotia Autonomous Oblast. The material of the research defines and describes the shaman motifs as the most stable representation of a national periphery region. In the period under research, Oirotia attracted writers, journalists, cinematographers, painters, who were eager to picture "the vanishing nature", i.e. the "prehistoric" and "savage" Altai, for they wanted to use it as a background to depict the quickly growing infants of the mountains and the aborigines who were getting civilized. When literature specialists from the Russian capitals came to Oirotia, they felt as characters of Herbert Wells, being thrown centuries back in the past, behind the borders of civilization. They viewed an Altai shaman as a personified symbol of an ancient era and interwove it into discourses to make aborigines of the national autonomy exotic and to discredit the ideological rivals of the Soviet power. Early Soviet literature researchers sent all "small-numbered peoples" of Siberia into "the great nomadic travel" (a long trip, migration passage and other kinds of symbolic change of a place that looked like travelling from wild life to civilization). A "demoniac shaman" in this chronotope was especially organic, which is seen from an issue of SSSR na stroyke (USSR in a construction site), an Oirot propaganda journal (1932, No. 9), from essays by M. Egart, M. Shkapskaya, Z. Richter, D. Stonov. These works convey the idea of Oirotia population that is exhausted from good and evil spirits, and the shamans were seen as "epileptic mystics", "psychopathological types", "terrible pagans". The authors relished murderous details of rituals of animal sacrifice. Writers from Siberia, who started to apply their theorized interpretation of the specific features of local texts (V. Zazubrin, V. Pravdukhin), used their means to compete the neutralizing tasks of the national policy, understanding that the identity of small-numbered peoples was being intentionally ruined, that the cultural unity of aboriginal nations, based on the harmony of man and nature, was ripped apart. New social roles for shamans were found by V. Itin (Kaan-Kerede) and A. Sorokin (Altai i goroda, 'Altai and cities'), who showed a shaman as an aviator and fighter against the platitude and depravity of the civilized world. Pavel Nizovsky, a writer from the Russian capital, joined them with the same ideas (Yazychniki, 'Pagans'). Our review of the outer and inner standpoints on Oirotia allows concluding that the shaman-related motifs were connected with artistic tasks, but, in a greater extent, with pragmatic objectives: getting administrative, territorial and material preferences (autonomy, exaggeration of savagery and primitivism of "dark indigenous outlanders"); confirming ideological correctness of the course line of regional authorities in the building of Soviet culture in Siberia that should be "national in its shape and socialistic in its content"; fighting with religious narrow-mindedness and nationalism; supporting equality of the periphery and the central part in questions of theory and practice of the Soviet arts.

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