Ancient Masks of Siberian Peoples [antikvár]

The publication, prepared by the prominent Soviet ethnographer Sergey Ivanov, acquaints the reader with one of the artistic crafts which the peoples of Siberia, the Soviet Far North and Far East traditionally practised in the past. Most of these national minorities embarked on the socialist path of development right from the condition of clan society. At the time of the October Revolution some of them were still at a primitive stage of civilization: thus, for example, in some northern localities the indigenous population worked animal skins with stonescrapers just as in ancient times. Far removed from cultural centres and crushed by colonial exploitation, these nationalities had no chance of intellectual development. In the early twentieth century, in a report on the state of the population in Kamchatka, a governor of this province wrote to St Petersburg: "these people are not capable of learning". As late as 1923, according to the census, none of the Khants in the Tobolsk region were able to read or write. During the Soviet period, however, the peoples of Siberia and the Far East not only attained literacy, but also produced intelligentsia of their own: teachers, doctors, technicians, engineers and, finally, artists and writers. The Great October released the spiritual and artistic powers of the peoples of tsarist Russia. In the multinational family of the Soviet socialist state no people, however small, has been neglected. What is more, it was precisely the smallest nationalities that were given special encouragement and attention by the state. A newly born sense of unity with mankind is expressed by a Mansi writer, Yuvan Shestalov, in his story, The Blue Wind of Nomadic Life-. l'My people are just a particle of mankind, or perhaps one of its oldest pages which has survived by a miracle." In the boundless expanses of Siberia and the Far East, whose population had once lived only by reindeer breeding, new industrial towns are going up, among them such giants as Norilsk and Vorkuta; big ocean-going ships from all parts of the world tie up at the busy piers of Siberian ports. Nature generously yields to man her innumerable treasures: the gas of Tiumen, the oil of Samotlor and the diamonds of Yakutia. The dynamic rhythms of modern life are penetrating the unhurried existence of yesterday's reindeer breeders and hunters, changing their ideas of space and time. The peoples of Siberia and the Far East have also developed literatures, drama and figurative arts of their own. Guest performances of the Eryrgon (The Dawn), the Chukchi and Eskimo choir-and-dance ensemble, were a great success in Moscow. Even the fame of the Yakut diamonds, discovered by Soviet geologists near the Pole of Cold, cannot outshine the names of such poets and writers of the national minorities as Vladimir Sanghi and Antonina Kymytval the Chukchi, Grigory Khodzher the Nanai, Yuvan Shestalov the Mansi, and many others. The name of Yury Rytkhéu, who wrote the autobiographical trilogy, The Melting of the Snows, is universally known. All of them were born after the October Revolution, and their art shows how wrong was the Russian nineteenth century poet, Afanasy Fet, in thinking that neither the Chukchi were able to produce their own Anacreon, nor the Zyriani their own Tiutchev. Before the October Revolution the talents of these peoples lay dormant. Ignorant and illiterate, they longed for the "magic letters"; in the 1820s the Chukchi, Tenevil, even invented a sort of hieroglyphic script. It was only thanks to the social and cultural changes brought about by the October Revolution which introduced them to the artistic heritage of Russia and other countries of the world that these nationalities could develop their own literature and figurative arts in so short a period of time. In the late 1920s, the first sculptured pieces by some students of the Faculty of Culture and Art of the North at the Leningrad Oriental College were displayed at the Art of the Peoples of Siberia exhibition in the Russian Museum. The Institute for the Peoples of the North, founded in 1930, trained the first native writers, poets and artists who brought fame to their peoples both at home and abroad. One of the graduates of this Institute's art studio was the talented Nenets painter, Konstantin Pankov. At the 1939 International Exhibition in New York he and his fellow-countrymen were awarded the Grand Prix. The Chukchi bone carver Vukvol was also trained in that studio. It was from there that both he and Pankov went to the front to defend their Motherland against the fascists; both were killed in battle. Landscapes by Konstantin Pankov are a remarkable phenomenon. They clearly mark a transition from the type of consciousness characteristic of folklore, to an individual perception of the world. Yet the artist's vision is strongly tinged by a feeling of his link with nature. Pankov builds up his compositions in the same way as the northern hunter does his narrative: "Here are the hills," he seems to say. "And more hills beyond. I walk, and the hills walk along with me. I follow a creek and my dog runs ahead of me..." Pankov's landscapes are poetic like a fairy tale, though they show simple everyday life in the tundra. The world-wide fame of Chukchi and Eskimo bone carvers came with the Paris and New York World Fairs of the 1930s. By that time a bone-carving workshop founded with the assistance of Russian artists had begun to function in the town of Uelen in the Chukotka national area. It was the realization of a dream long cherished by local craftsmen. Also, this craft was made accessible to women, to whom the ancient tradition forbade to touch the chisel. "The Chukchi art of carving on tusk is a miracle of your land," said the American artist, Rockwell Kent, to Elena Yanka, when she presented him with one of her works. The