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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Osokin’s "Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari" and Fedorchenko’s film adaptation blend Soviet history into mythological time. By reimagining Mari folklore of women’s relationships with nature, they seek to reclaim Mari identity beyond the trauma of colonization.

Paper long abstract

My paper explores how myth and nature intersect with cultural identity in Denis Osokin’s "Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari" and Aleksey Fedorchenko’s eponymous film adaptation. Situated at the crossroads of Soviet history and indigenous Mari culture, these works show how mythological time absorbs and reframes historical trauma, including Soviet assimilation. In stories centered on Mari women, Osokin and Fedorchenko draw on folklore of female bonds with nature to challenge binaries of master/subaltern, culture/nature, Soviet/indigenous. Mythic beings such as the forest giantess Ovda or the resurrected dead highlight how Mari cosmologies blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, communal and individual.

By analyzing these narratives as post-Soviet and postcolonial texts, I argue that they resist hierarchical structures—grammatically, visually, and thematically—while presenting indigenous identity through folkloric and ecological lenses. Here, Soviet symbols (military uniforms, propaganda rituals) are not imposed markers of domination but absorbed into Mari traditions, reframed as part of the natural and cultural cycle. This destabilizes colonial narratives and instead offers a transhumanist vision of coexistence with the Other—spirits, ancestors, natural forces.

The Mari case suggests a model of storytelling where land, body, and culture are interconnected. It shows how the narratives of “small” or overlooked nations reclaim voice and continuity through myth, ritual, and the natural world.