'Everything Became Possible but Nothing was Needed’ – Fate of Non-Russian Writers after 1991

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 6 – Many non-Russian writers suffered the fate Yury Rytkheu did after 1991: “everything became possible, but nothing was needed,” Siberian commentator Vasily Avchenko says. They could now write whatever they wanted, but they no longer had the state subsidies that had allowed them to overcome the small size of primary markets.

            Rytkheu, the only Chukchi writer most people have ever heard of, who wrote in Russian and who remains a presence abroad in translation, largely stopped writing after the collapse of the USSR not because he remained sympathetic to that system but because he felt he was not in a position anymore to speak to or for his nation (sibreal.org/a/30457908.html).

            It has turned out, Avchenko continues, that “the market in this sense is worse than censorship.” Rytkheu “did not go silent. He simply ceased to be heard” in his own country. His new books have continued to appear in Europe and America “but not in Russia. Somehow they remain in demand in the Western marketplace.”

            He, together with the Kyrgyz novelist Chingiz Aitmatov, helped organize a translation house in Europe to publish their books and those of others. That and other translation projects were a success. But at home, they faced a new challenge: the tastes of consumers had changed, and the state was no longer compensating for their small markets with subsidies.

            Their works either don’t appear anymore or in such small print runs that few have the chance to read them. (Online publishing compensates only in part because it does not bring the income that allows such writers to continue to work: they may be able to issue this or that book but not build a career on the web alone.)

            It is important to keep this trend in mind when thinking about Russian policy toward the non-Russians. Even if Moscow were sympathetic to the non-Russians, if it did nothing and simply allowed market forces to operate, the fate of their writers and thus their entire peoples would be dire. And thus when Moscow isn’t sympathetic, it can lead to silence and disaster.

            Moreover, if these writers go silent or appear to, all of us lose a window onto another world, with all its variety and instructive features. Rytkheu, who chronicled the struggle of the old and the new, was especially focused on shamanism with which he had close family ties, Avchenko points out.

            His book, The Last Shaman,” tells the story of Rytkheu’s grandfather who was one.  “Shamanism in the USSR was denounced as obscurantist and wildness,” the Siberian writer says; “but Rytkheu presented the shaman as a preserver of national culture and a healer who helped his people survive physically and spiritually.”

            The late Chukchi writer was thus entirely in agreement with Vladimir Avsenyev who observed that “faith in shamanism if it doesn’t cure those who are ill, at least it eases their suffering … As soon as shamanism is taken from these peoples, they … feel an emptiness and a split takes place in their souls.”