Old stories in contemporary times - a collecting experience in the Orava village in Siberia

Abstract

Far away from Estonia, in Siberia Estonian emigrants have been living for more than a century. The Czar had promised free land to the people and in the wake of that knowledge people settled in the faraway land. If up to the final decade of the 19th century the Estonian settlers of Siberia were mostly those banished from their homeland and their descendants ‐ all in all 1.600‐1.700 people, then a hundred years ago a voluntary emigration to the fertile fields of black soil was undertaken by many. It was advanced by the railway connexion between European Russia and Omsk that had been opened in 1894. Thus the number of Estonians who resettled in Western Siberia nearly doubled itself in ten years (Kulu 1997: 90‐102). Usually, the settlers started villages of their own. By now, about 30 of the Estonian settlements have remained from that time. To collect the folklore of Estonian expatriates, The Estonian Folklore Archives have arranged nine expeditions during the past ten years. In the spring of 1998 (the 8th expedition) Anu Korb and Mari Sarv from the Estonian Folklore Archives and the present author from the University of Tartu departed for Siberia. I have to admit that having collected folklore in different regions of Estonia I expected the folklore of the faraway Siberia to be extremely original and was hoping to meet “something authentic” over there. If folklore specialists from the Western world like to hunt for folk tradition among representatives of exotic cultures, the interests of Estonian folklore collectors lie in the folklore of the older type that survives in the borderlands of Estonia even these days. Naturally, the collecting trips at home had moulded our expectations and the hopes placed on the Siberian expedition were comparatively high. The relative similarity of the material “gleaned” from the distant journey to that collected in Estonia even seemed to be something of a disappointment at the beginning. There were