Paper short abstract:

This paper describes and analyzes autobiographical texts of a northern indigenous Tiko Vilka produced together with folklorist Ščerbakova as ways of presenting Vilka as a citizen of transnational Soviet community, yet omitting some of the general textual strategies of Soviet biography.

Paper long abstract:

Within the tradition of Socialist Realism and the so-called Soviet folklore, it was customary, if not obligatory to present the flow of time through binary opposition between the pre-Soviet tsarist years of misery and subordination and post-Soviet joy and advancement. To remember this way, was to become modern citizen of Soviet Union, and the press, publishers and stages provided immense exemplars for representing the proper model for the past. This applies also for the indigenous literatures that were a triumph of Soviet modernity and nationalities policy proving that the backward people could be mobilized towards social, cultural, and economic change through education and technical reformations.

The early Nenets literature represents one exception, Tiko Vilka. Vilka's autobiographical texts, produced in co-operation with folklorist Anna Ščerbakova, certainly discuss the process of becoming modern, being part of the transnational community of imperial Russia and Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he is able to pass the established dichotomies and tropes related to Soviet frames.

This paper seeks to describe Vilka's texts and their process of production, and understand through this and though the analysis of Vilka's use of both vernacular and official linguistic strategies, how he builds himself modern Soviet citizen yet avoiding some dominant modes available. Its proposition is that the exceptional mode is based on the texts' quality as neither literature nor folklore.