Presentations by Streams

During the last decades, serious environmental issues associated with the Russian Arctic area, as well as the situation of the Northern Indigenous peoples, have attracted growing attention in public debate and in research. Within literary studies, the focus has mainly been on the descriptions of the North in Russian literature, particularly in earlier literature, while less attention has been paid to literature written by Northern writers and the late Soviet or contemporary context.

Two panels on literatures of the Russian Arctic area at BASEES 2023 address both Northern literature and descriptions of the North written by authors from elsewhere. The panels offer an extensive view to different genres from non-fiction to prose fiction, comics, and poetry, and include papers both on Indigenous writers’ and ethnically Russian writers’ works from the 1960s to the 2010s.

One of the starting points of the panels is the view that the literatures of the Nenets, Chukchi and Sámi have developed in the interface between different cultures, and in tight relation to Soviet literature. This connection is reflected in the narration in hybrid descriptions, or in the employment of such narrative modes as retrospective autobiographical narration, popular in late Soviet fiction at large.

Another important base for the panels is a multifaceted view of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Northern texts. While Arctic literatures often mediate an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – worldview, such processes and results of the Soviet conquest of the North as industrialization and urbanization are vividly present in the material analysed in the panels, and for their part question the image of the Arctic as a purely natural environment.