Yuvan Shestalov, Bard of the Mansi People
For many centuries the Mansis have lived in North Siberia--a small
people, but sturdy and of great endurance. They are thought to be the
remnant of what was once a much more numerous people who trekked away
westward in search of a new home. One may only conjecture just why this
fragment of the tribe remained.
The Mansis had no written language. But that does not by any means
indicate that they had no poetic sense. The soul of a people is
preserved in customs, in songs, in games, in the tales of the good
forest fairy Misne, in riddles--in many and various things. For a people
is not inarticulate. There are laments, there are lullabies, and tales
told in the long winter nights. But for a people to express itself for
others to understand, written literature, written poetry is needed; then
indeed the poet becomes the voice of the people, their heart and
tongue.
The Mansis did have poets, of course, before writing came to them.
Perhaps they became shamans dealing in magical incantations, or perhaps
their emotional powers were expended on the observation of nature and
imbuing natural phenomena with life.
With the coming of literacy one could expect the coming of the real poet
who would absorb all the spiritual poetic treasures accumulated over
the centuries and offer them to the eyes and ears of other peoples great
and small throughout the world.
It was Yuvan Shestalov who had the good fortune to become this first
Mansi poet. But it was good fortune for his people too, because this
first poet was one of vivid talent and great scope.
There are his books: "Misne," "The Eyes of the White Night," "Fire Upon
Fire," "The Song of the Last Swan," "The Blue Wind of Kaslania" and "A
Heathen Poem." There are his poems: "The Game of Bears," "Kara-Yuia,"
"On the Iron Sledges," "Thoughts in the Taiga," "The Idol," "Yulian,"
and "Throb, My Drum." This is the store of his lyrical poetry and his
frank prose.
There is a well-founded opinion (and Yuvan Shestalov's work confirms it)
that although a true artist in the course of his life may write various
works, he builds up with them a single, unified canvas. It is like a
huge mosaic, in which poems and stories, at first apparently
unconnected, suddenly join to form a harmonious picture with a single
idea, a single composition, welded together by the author's perception
of the universe.
Yuvan's grandfathers, his great-grandfathers, his distant ancestors were
hunters. It is known that hunting brings men closer to nature, merges
them with it more deeply than anything else. So it is natural that all
Yuvan Shestalov's work should be so expressive of nature as it exists in
his native parts. His trees and animals, his fish and his grasses live,
think and act on a level with people.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Yuvan Shestalov's works
are only the voice of nature, vivid and varied as this voice might be.
The spontaneity, the new-born poetic freshness of his talent is
multiplied by his partaking of the wealth of the twentieth-century
culture, for this Mansi writer has studied in college, travelled the
world, met dozens and hundreds of contemporaries, read thousands of
books. Just as one drop is a fragment of the ocean, one of the multitude
of drops which go to form it, so the soul of the poet is that magic
particle of the world which contains the whole. When in Vietnam children
perish under a barbarous rain of bombs, a burning pang wrings the
responsive heart of the poet. A day flies past with its blazing fury of
life, with the opening of the first gas borehole in the North, with new
speeds hidden in the metal of air and land expresses--the iron sledge of
modern man, with the rattle and roar of new construction jobs which are
transforming our old earth, and the poet absorbs all this complex
variety, all the feelings and thoughts of his contemporaries, he is part
of all the achievements, the difficulties, the successes of our day.
Behind his people lie a thousand years. Then came five decades, decades
which in significance are equal to centuries, and all this lives in the
poet. He himself is the vivid, living embodiment of a people that has
found itself, of the new page in its history which came with the
socialist revolution, the power of the Soviets, with Lenin. He himself,
who knew the cold of a windowless, smoky hut and today possesses all the
mighty spiritual wealth of humanity, is the personification of what the
new way of life really means, what this way of life gives to each
people and to each individual. His poems reflect the acute
contradictions of the present-day reality, the pain of man in our day
and his triumph.
Yuvan Shestalov is the voice, the tongue and--grandiloquent as the word may sound--the founder of Mansi literature.
--VLADIMIR SOLOUKHIN, 1972.
|
