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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the collaboration of Soviet folklorists and their informants among the Nenets, an Arctic indigenous community. Focusing on one case, the paper discusses the complex positions of the collaborators and the possibilities that folklore gave them in realizing their aims.

Paper long abstract:

Folklore, conceptualized as the genuine voice of the (working-class) people, was actively collected, recreated, archived and published in the Soviet Union. As an aesthetically and culturally regulated expressive form, oral traditions were equated with written ones, especially when the linguistic and ethnic communities with no written literature were considered. Folklorists not only collected folklore; they also encouraged people to reformulate Soviet folklore focusing on the development of Soviet society.

This paper discusses the role of folklorists and ethnographers in the creation of folklore about Lenin and Stalin among the Nenets, an indigenous people living in the Arctic Russia and Western Siberia. I will especially focus on the collaboration between folklorist Anna Ščerbakova and hunter-politician-artist Tyko Vylka in 1940s and 50s.

I will draw a parallel between state ethnographers and folklorists and discuss the multifaceted and cumbersome positions of the folklorists and their Nenets collaborators in the shifting ideological atmosphere of the Stalinist Russia. These include e.g. the repressions that took place in the institute where Ščerbakova was working together with the forced relocation of Tyko Vylka from his home. Moreover, I will discuss the role of folklore in these complex processes as an ambiguous form of knowledge that at the same time reflects modernity’s Other – the traditional, non-written – and demonstrates its urge to take part in the contemporary discourses. Additionally, I will reflect what kind of public space folklore made possible for the folklorist and her collaborator and how they both manipulated this space for their own purposes.