(Re)shaping Literary Canon in the Soviet Indigenous North

Abstract

In this article I demonstrate how in the post-Thaw period—the period of “soft” socialist realism—the northern indigenous minorities began to (re)invent literary writing and manifest their own version of the canon. Due to the lack of a pre-Soviet written literary tradition, “young” literatures were born as a symbiosis of folklore, beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the surrogate literary tradition of the Russian-European center: the Soviet “master plot.” Having graduated from universities in Moscow or Leningrad, the first generations of writers “(re)invented” a view of themselves as simultaneously native and Other. A consequence of the fact that the authors internalized the role of the youngest “brother” was, among others, the amalgamation of children's and adults' narrative and pedagogical zeal, which combined folklore ethics with socialist realist moralism. The study is of a transitional time: before the local authors had experienced a cardinal reevaluation of their values during perestroika and afterwards.