Evenk Children’s Literature: History and Specific Features

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the historical development of the Evenki children’s literature in the context of the Evenki national literary school’s total flow. The corpus of Evenki fairytales about animals is analyzed from the perspective of embodiment the peculiarities of ethnic worldview and ethnic world outlook in the artistic signs. The coexistence of a clear and simple stylistic well-formedness of the Evenki fairytales with a profound meaningful point relating the explanation of a number of natural phenomena surrounding man has been revealed. It converts seemingly children’s literature to adult perception. In addition, a tendency of modeling the situation of men and nature proximity by the tools of artistic and literary images is detected. Ethnic component of the Evenki children’s fairytales can be traced in the characters’ description, their occupation, place of residence and food. As a rule, this is a generalized image of an Evenki or Russian as a whole. The Evenki is the one who lives in the cold, but rich in food taiga, in chum and engaged in traditional occupations: reindeer herding and fishing. The Russian is an ethnos, different from the Evenki ethnic group, engaged in animal husbandry and, at the same time, adjacent to the Evenki ethnocultural group.