“As If They Didn’t Understand That in the North Everything Depends on Reindeer.”: Human-Animal Relations in Indigenous Literatures of the Soviet North

This doctoral dissertation examines human-animal relations in Indigenous literatures from the northern and Arctic parts of the Soviet Union from the 1960s to 1990. The study asks how the relationship between humans – Indigenous people in particular – and non-human animals is addressed by authors belonging to korennye malochislennye narody severa, “Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North”. The main objective is to analyse representations of human-animal relations to see how the changes that Soviet power brought to Indigenous people’s lives affected the human-animal relationships in the area, how Indigenous people’s experiences of the Soviet Union are reflected in them, and how human-animal relations participate in the production of the northern and Arctic space. The dissertation offers new perspectives on the different interconnections between the Indigenous people, nonhuman animals, Arctic environment, and Soviet state.

The methodological basis of the study lies in the close reading of the research material through a theoretical framework that is situated at the intersection of posthumanist and new materialist theories, human-animal studies, and postcolonial theory. In the study, the relationship between humans and non-human animals is understood as a web of cultural practices and material necessities influenced by traditions, politics, and natural conditions. The material reality in which the human and non-human animals are entangled is shaped not only by the Arctic climate but also by the policies and practices that the Soviet Union carried out in the northern and Arctic regions of the country. In this study, the Soviet conquest of the Arctic is approached in terms of settler colonialism. Despite the anticolonial rhetoric of the Soviet Union, in the home areas of northern and Arctic Indigenous peoples, Soviet power superseded Indigenous peoples’ rights to their native lands and left the Native northerners in a socially and culturally othered position, which resembles in many ways the situation in other settler colonial states.

Following posthumanist and new materialist theories, the analysed human and non-human beings appear as embodied, material entities that are inseparably interconnected to the active and constantly transforming Arctic environment. The idea of the shared materiality of human and non-human bodies and the material surroundings is brought out in the dissertation through the concepts of “becoming” and “trans-corporeality”. These concepts are used as analytical tools that guide the reading and interpretation of human-animal relations as presented in the research material of the study. In addition to humans and animals, also the northern environment and climate are understood as active entities with agentic capacities, which challenges the human/non-human and nature/culture binaries typical of modern cultures – the Soviet Union included. Moreover, the concepts that acknowledge and recognize the agency of the non-human environment appear in this study as theoretical tools for the analysis of such ideas of human-non-human relations that arise from the Indigenous people’s own epistemological viewpoints.

The research material of this study consists of prose texts written by three authors representing different Indigenous communities: the Chukchi author Iurii Rytkheu, the Nenets author Anna Nerkagi, and the Khanty author Eremei Aipin. All the authors examined in this dissertation are among the most prominent names in the literary cultures of their peoples. Their works have been read throughout the Soviet Union and many of their texts have been translated into other languages as well. The earliest text analysed in this dissertation is Iurii Rytkheu’s story Golubye pestsy from 1963, and the latest one is Eremei Aipin’s novel Khanty, ili Zvezda utrennei zari from 1990. The other works addressed in the study are Rytkheu’s novellas Kogda kity ukhodiat (1975) and Teryky (1979) and Nerkagi’s novella Aniko iz roda Nogo (1977).

The dissertation demonstrates that non-human animals are actively present in the Soviet Indigenous literatures throughout the postwar decades. More importantly, instead of appearing simply as part of the northern and Arctic landscape, the dissertation shows that the literary non-human animals appear as companions and co-dwellers with whom the Indigenous people share their Arctic home region. The descriptions of human-animal relations provide the Indigenous authors the means of expressing such views on the relationship between the human and the non-human that challenge human/animal and human/non-human binaries. Instead, depictions of the relationship between human and non-human animals bring forth their embodied interconnectedness and mutual entanglement with the constantly transforming Arctic nature.

At the same time, this dissertation produces new knowledge on the way the Indigenous authors address their experiences in the Soviet Union and views on the relationship between Indigenous communities and the Soviet state through human-animal relations. Firstly, the civilizing mission and modernization processes that the Soviets carried out among the Indigenous people led to the alienation of younger Indigenous generations from their own communities. This alienation and the problems and contradictions it causes to the cultural self-identification of the Indigenous youth are directly reflected in human-animal relations in various ways. Secondly, through modernity’s hierarchical relation between human and non-human animals, the Indigenous authors are able to highlight the culturally othered position of Indigenous people in Soviet society. Thirdly, the violence towards non-human animals is sometimes used to reveal the violent practices of the settler colonial state towards the Indigenous people. The violence towards non-human animals simultaneously points out how the settler colonial violence affects not only Indigenous people but the animals and other non-human entities of the region as well.

Most importantly, the analysis of human-animal relations in works by Indigenous authors reveals the complexity of Soviet Indigenous literatures as a phenomenon and resists understanding the Indigenous authors simply as either representatives of Indigenous traditions or loyal members of the Soviet cultural elite. Instead, as is pointed out in this study, the works underline the cultural hybridity of Indigenous authors and Soviet Indigenous people that is in many ways parallel to the hybridity and complexity of the human-animal relations the authors address in their works.