Found Artefacts: Allegories of Salvage in the Siberian Fiction of Wacław Sieroszewski

Abstract

SEER,Vol. 84, No. i, anuay 2006 Found Artefacts: Allegories of Salvage in the Siberian Fiction of Waclaw Sieroszewski EDWARD MANOUELIAN IN his memoirs, the novelist and ethnographer Waclaw Sieroszewski (i 858- I945) recountsa turningpoint in his Siberianexile, the occasion when he received a package from his sister Paulina containing Polish books, the first he had seen since his departure from his subjugated homeland in I879. Overwhelmedby the shockof recognition, he wept. Butjust then he overheard one of the Jakuttribesmen with whom he had been living whisper to another, 'Nothing! Only books and papers. No salt,no sugar,no tea. No doubt that iswhy he is crying'.' The irony of this anecdote reflects a salient facet of Sieroszewski's work: the attempt, however limited, to representthe viewpoint of the indigenous Other as autonomous from that of the European observer.Yet there is another key aspect of his sensibilityat work in this scene, his peculiar fascination with the objects of human culture, their evocative power and ambiguity. Although Sieroszewskiwas only one of severalexiled revolutionaryturned -ethnographerswho practised a kind of participant/observer method in the most remote areasof Siberiathroughthe last decades of the nineteenth centurybefore the actual coining of the term, he gained scholarly renown as the author of the landmark study Iakuty(The Jakuts),published in I896 under the auspices of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Originally written in Russian, the work then appeared in the author'sown (abridgedand revised)Polishtranslation in I900 asDwanas'cie latwkraju Jakuto5w (TwelveYearsin the Land of the lakuts), a title that emphasizesthe element of personal experience that informs Sieroszewski'smonograph. The I89os also mark the sudden appearance of Sieroszewski'smajorliterarywork. In I897 the influential positivist critic Aleksander Swi,tochowski noted 'the intensely tragic nature of the encounter between two diverse and unequal civilizations' that takes place in Sieroszewski'sfiction, compared to Edward Manouelian is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. ' Waclaw Sieroszewski, Dzieta, ed. Andrzej Lam, 20 vols, Krak6w, I958-63 (hereafter, Sieroszewski, DzieIa),I6, p. 408. EDWARD MANOUELIAN I 7 which the 'shoddypuzzles of [contemporary]Europeannovelists'seem littlemore than a 'poormasquerade'.2 In fact, Sieroszewski'searliest ambitions, predating Siberian exile, were literary. The prodigious notes he had begun to take on his new surroundings(transcriptionsof the Jakutlanguage, as well as observations on local climate, topography and customs) were originally intended as a kind of raw material for fictional work. And while the notes, often scribbled 'on scrapsof newspaper and package wrapping by means of a goose quill and ink derived from a residue of brewed willow bark, [plant] rust and soot',3 served as the basis of his ethnographic research, they were also transformed into a series of novels and short stories that Sieroszewskibegan writing while still in the field. Taking into account his output as a whole suggests the permeability of these two categories. In what follows we begin by examining the authorialpresence in Iakuty,and then move to consider the forms of ethnographic subjectivity that underlie some of Sieroszewski 's most remarkable fiction: the story 'W ofierze bogom' (In Sacrifice to the Gods) and the novel PNa kresach lasodw (At the Forests' Edge). The latter two works foreground the essential paradox of Sieroszewski'sfiction, which can be read on the one hand as part of what PatrickBrantlingeramong othersrefersto asextinctiondiscourse, the 'enormous literature [that] has been devoted to the "doom" of "primitive races" caused by the "fatal impact" with white, Western civilization'.4At the same time, the intense naturalismof Sieroszewski's writing strives to represent the experience of the lakut and Evenk pastoralistsand hunters of north-easternSiberia from their own point of view. Either approach, however, inevitably involves the rhetorical claimsof salvageethnography. Sieroszewski's Siberian fictions stand as allegories of salvage that attempt to give voice to a seemingly disintegratingnative culturewhile at the same time appropriating their material remains. Throughout these workswe are faced with the proximity of the vanishingprimitive motif to a recurrentfocus on objects, whether ritual or utilitarian.So much so that Sieroszewski'snaturalismcan in some ways be seen as a performative anticipation of the collection of specimens that would metonymically represent the Siberian peoples in museum display, a process of...