Eva Toulouze

The beginning of literacy and literature by the Tundra Nenets I have chosen to sum up my reflexions about the first stage of the development of Nenets literature, seen in the perspective of Nenets national identity as a whole.

I will start by putting this problematic into the wider historical perspective of the introduction of literacy.

Literacy in the North: an effect of the Soviets' nationality policy

When Soviet propaganda used to assert that Russia's nationalities, before the Revolution, had no literacy neither literature (for example [START_REF] Gusev ; Гусев | K вопросу о возникновении марийской письменности[END_REF]Gusev :154, Škljaev 1976)), and that both were one of the results of Lenin's national policies, in most cases it was but a soviet fairy tale with little bases in reality. As far as the peoples of the North are concerned, however, this assertion is very close to reality.

In other regions of Russia, the spreading of literacy had been prepared and even started by the missionaries, who had been working among non-Russian people for a very long period (Toulouze 2001 : 453-454). In the Volga area, there had been several attempts to create schools for the indigenous peoples since the 18th century, whose results had been close to nil : many children died and those who resisted the poor material conditions usually left school without any solid knowledge, for they were taught in Russian, a language they did not understand (about the Udmurt example [START_REF] Suvorova ; Суворова | Педагогические шдеи удмуртского просветителя[END_REF]: 11, Frolova 1996 : 7). Since, these experiences had provided a close contact zone between the missionaries and the different ethnic groups. They had prepared the waves of intensification of missionary work based on local languages that took place in the first decades of the 19th century an especially throughout the second half of the same century: during the last 50 years before the revolution, the number of translations was multiplied, the number of schools and thus of children and adults in touch with the Russian world was intensely increased1 . In the Finno-Ugric regions around the Volga these processes led to the emergence of a relatively small but convinced group of educated aborigenes, who were prepared to be clergymen as well as school teachers. They represented the active nucleus who permitted the appearence of national consciousness and subsequently of a national movement.

When the Revolution provided the different ethnic groups with new conditions for their self-affirmation, the "intellectuals" educated by the missionaries had a tool they used for new, independent purposes: the development of a literature accompanied naturally the assertion of self-identity.

In the Northern areas the situation was very different. The people of the North lived in areas far beyond the reaching of State or Church authorities. Most of them were nomads or semi-nomads, and nature founded not only their material welfare, but also their spiritual life. Il was difficult to penetrate these territories. The missionaries were not able to put permanent pressure on them, as they could easily do in areas with sedentary population. Still their presence could be felt mostly in two areas: the European tundras and the Yamal peninsula. : in the European tundras, Veniamin succeeded to baptise, according to Veniamin himself, 3303 Nenets in five years (1825-1830) (Veniamin 1855 : 114). Three churches were built in order to ensure some spiritual care relying on the missionary's work (Nosilov 1895 : 275), and some schools appeared, three of them had only native pupils (Bazanov, Kazanskiy 1939 : 45). Christianity had penetrated into the Nenets' world, touching it without becoming dominant: the Nenets preserved their independence by going on living according to their rules their own nomadic life [START_REF] Vallikivi | Minority and Mission: Christianisation of the European Nenets[END_REF]. In the Yamal peninsula more precisely in its southernmost part in connection to the Russian center of Obdorsk, a mission was founded in 1832, but its activity did not last, until it was renewed in 1854 (Kratkiy ocherk 1892 : 31, Kratkiy ocherk 1893 : 12). The richest period in the Obdorsk mission's activity is when it was led by Irinarh Shimanovski, who arrived in Obdorsk directly after the end of his studies in Novgorod (Golovnev 1992 : 26): at the beginning of the 20 th century he founded an organisation called Saint Guri Confraternity, whose aim was to spread Christianity, to follow up and to provide wider echos to the work done by the mission (Irinarh 1905b : 127). A school was founded by the mission and Irinarh ruled it enthusiastically trying by all means to recruit young people from the surrounding tundras, emphasising the importance of paying attention to the education of native girls, future mothers able to communicate Christian values to their children (Bazanov 1936 : 43) The specialists of the People of the North, especially in the Soviet period, emphasised the failure of the missionaries' endeavours. And certainly, there were but very modest apparent results: not more than some educated individuals who, in most cases, did not go back to their people. According to some reports there was nobody able to read or write among the aborigenes of Western Siberia at the beginning of the 1920-s (Skatchko 1935 : 32) : 32). Although this information is probably partial, it still illustrates the lack of a social group cemented by literacy.

In the Northern areas, there was no social group prepared to interfere in public affairs. After the consolidation of their power, the Bolshevik had a problem for it to solve: how to manage the Northern areas, unfriendly, unexplored, but immensely rich and most important as ways of communication. These areas were inhabited by strange people, speaking unknown languages, whom it was very difficult even to explain the political changes occurred in the Center2 . The political power turned then towards those who had a good knowledge of this area: the ethographers, who were called at the beginning of the 1920-s to elaborate soviet policies for these regions. In 1924 was founded the so-called Committee of the North3 , the main organ of Soviet policy towards the Northern areas [START_REF] Zibarev ; Зибарев | Koмитет содействия народностям Севера 1922-1935[END_REF]: 210-213, Slezkine 1994 : 150-152).

The main Russian etnographers had a real first-hand knowledge of the people they studied and they were devoted to. They tried on the one hand to take measures in favour of the people's welfare, and directed by the wish of helping them to escape the exploitation of the merchants, of the aparachiki and other Russians who took advantage of their cultural differences to cheat them and often to ruin them (Gurvich 1971: 19). The first policy towards the people of the North is thus friendly enough, although the ethnographers could not quite decide thereselves all. Vladimir Bogoraz Tan proposed even a system of reserves [START_REF] Bogoraz ; Богораз | О первобытных племенах (Наброски к проекту организации управления туземными племенами)[END_REF], Bogoraz-Tan 1923a:172), inspired from the American system, but his suggestion categorically rejected, "first of all by Lenin himself" (Uvachan 1965 : 34): the Soviet State intended to integrate the whole of its territory.

Therefore the ethnographers turned to the "missionary's" strategy: They tried to train very quicky a sector of educated persons able to be mediators between the Soviet authorities and the mass of their people (Slezkine 1994 -180-181). Children had to be taught in their own language. This meant to have these languages studied, normalised, fixed, to prepare text books. It took a short decade: although the principle of teaching the Northern children in their mother tongue has been confirmed in the early 1920-s (Vdovin 1959 : 287), the preliminaries required much time. Work started in Leningrad in 1926(Vasilievitch 1958 : 228). The literary languages for 14 languages were officially "ready" in 1932: in January, a "Conference on the development o languages and literacy of the peoples of the North" was held with the participation of all the institutions concerned and of delegates from the regions (Isayev 1979 : 222), and approved the creation of fourteen literary languages, that could be therefore taught only after this deadline. The missionaries did not take time into account, but Soviet managers could not wait until children grow into university students, they had to hurry up the whole process. A huge effort was deployed since 1925 in order to educate in Leningrad adults from the different peoples (Bogoraz-Tan 1927 : 52,62) : the first group, at the Workers' University, consisted of 30 students . There were adults and children, some were not literate and several of them did not speak Russian at all. In 1932, a specific unit, the Institute of the Peoples of the North, was created in order to prepare specialists in humanities, economics and political management (Toulouze 1999 : 66).

They were to be the necessary mediators in both the so-called political and cultural construction, the first link between the indigenous peoples of the North and the Soviet power. They are also the first writers and poets.

The main feature I would like to emphasise about all this highly volontaristic process is hurry: the Soviets felt they were running out of time. Enourmous labour was invested in this enterprise. Undoubtedly there were results: by the end of the thirties, a small group of representatives of the main indigenous peoples of the North had been trained. From the soviet point of view, they were allies within the communities in order to bring them more and more close to the soviet society and close the gap with the rest of the social body.

Who were these persons? Usually, they were young and eager. They wanted to do something constructive for their kin and to guarantee them better life thanks to modernity. As younger members of the community, they were usually deprived of real power from within: the soviet projects gave them an opportunity to invest their potential energy and achieve influence much sooner than the traditional framework.

They believed the soviet's promises: they saw the in the development of literary languages a token of respect as they had neer had before.

By the second half of the thirties, these policies seem to have achieved a Secondly, it is too early to pretend that the literary languages worked. The first persons to use them are those who participated to their creation. They still have no readers, and even by Soviet accounts, they had to wait at least ten years to have the first readers educated . Their works gave hope, but did not represent anything else than the pursuit of the centralised effort to spread literacy (Toulouze 2002 : 236).

Finally, two contextual aspects biased the efforts invested in this work. While the first intellectual circles dwelling in Leningrad dreamed for their people of a future where they could live in welfare without losing their values, the very social basis of healthy welfare was being systematically destroyed on the spot. In this tragic period the people of the North lost not the new-born Soviet minded intelligentsia, but their spiritual leaders, the shamans, and those who had the more skills, who were the more deeply rooted into their culture, who mastered their people's lore. The final aim was clearly to sustitute to the old traditionalist elite a new generation, who owed all to the Soviet power. But the brutality of the repression, its absurdity for the people, who did not understand what was going on, the weakness of the replacers did not allow this plan to be successfulwhen we assess it eighty years later.

Another reason for failure is the lack of general bases for the spreading of literacy. In other regions, this had been prepared by centuries of slow penetration, of very close cultural contact situations with its promoters, the representatives of the Church. In the North, these contact situations were but occasional and did not deeply affect the whole of the population. Moreover, the impact of school was also very different in nomadic areas: the few schools functioning in the Northern areas were very deeply isolated from the population, as school was sedentary and the people were nomads. So its impact could hardly be felt outside, as most of the pupils were unable to transmit their new "culture". The soviet "builders" could well, and much better than the missionaries, select goals and achieve them with a small number of actors in little time, but the real impact of their endeavours on the communities could not be forced. It remained superficial: literacy remained an "imported" item and, until nowadays, it does not really work (Toulouze 2002 : 239-240). But this is a different subject.

The geography of emergence of a Nenets' literature

Let us now concentrate on the Nenets. I shall focus first on individuals, for it is clear that at this stage individuals, the very few of them who are concerned, are the core of the action.

The Nenets' territories are impressively extended: they occupy the Eurasian tundras from both in the European part of Russia and Western Siberia up to the Taimyr peninsula. It is not suprising that the first Nenets involved in this adventure were from the westernmost zones, those that had been in the closest contact with the Russian world.

The first Nenets to be involved in literary world may be divided in two main groups.

The first is formed by five young persons from the tundras around Narian Mar, the new "red" town formed to be the centre of the first administrative unit "for" the Nenets in the European North. Their names are connected with an initiative of Narian Mar's literary almanach Zapoljarie. In 1935, the number contained two short stories by S. Nogo and E. Talejev, and the next year three other young Nenets authors were added, I. Negosyty, E. Sobolev and among them a woman, Svetlana Ardeeva [START_REF] Sergeyev 1956 -Сергеев | Литература народов Севера" -Литература народов Сибири[END_REF]: 141, Ogryzko 1998 : 76). We do not know much about them and we do not hear about them later. They do just represent the first attempts to write about themselves, with no higher literary pretentions. As the Almanach's chief editor Ivan Menshikov said, "their Russian is poor" (Popov 1936 : 28). We may suppose that these texts have not been written in Nenets: they have been written directly in Russian with the assistance of the local Russian intelligentsia.

The other group is more interesting for us: the three authors who form it are really the founders of Nenets literature. We may identify their background, follow their career, perceive something of their personality. Let me present them, moving from West towards East.

When introducing Nikolay Vylka, it's impossible not to start by his uncle, Tyko Vylka, whose life was a real exception among the Northern natives. Tyko's parents had fled from the mainland to Novaya Zemlya probably at the end of the 19th century: as servants to rich reindeer herders, without reindeer of their own, they had no hope of a better life and thus decided to look for it on the island, where wild reindeer provided abundant game for hunters. Tyko was born in Novaya Zemlya.

Novaya Zemlya was, at the end of the Czarist era, a place for political exiles: Tyko as a child saw and allegedly got acquainted with two painters, and started drawing himself (Voronova 1976 : 18). The turning point in his life was his meeting with the Russian explorer Vladimir Rusanov, who took him as a guide5 . A great friendship arouse between the two men. In 1910, Rusanov proposed the young Nenets to spend one year in Moscow and to learn painting with the best masters. Tyko accepted. In Moscow, he got a private education, with masters in different subjects (Russian, maths, geography, etc. and even photography) as well as in arts (Koshechkin 1980 : 39). In 1911, he went back home. His wished to go back to the capital but could not: his elder brother died and according to the traditions he married his widow and had to support his new family. But Tyko's experience was of much use later on: he founded the Soviet of the island and remained its president until the end of the 1950-s.

He also supported his nephew Nikolay (?6 -1942), who was impatient to be educated. His personality is an essential element in Nikolay's background. As Tyko, Nikolay was also an artist: while Tyko was a good painter, Nikolay, allegedly, was a sculptor (Polonsky 1961 : 6). He was the first Nenets to publish a short novel and to get a literary price for it. The end of his life is not ascertained: we just know he died during the war, probably of starvation and disease.

The second Nenets personality of that time has a very different story: as Tyko's parents, he came from Bolshezemelskaya tundra. He was an orphan, servant to rich reindeer herders. He had no reindeer, no hope of becoming once independent. The Revolution gave hime the opportunity of changing his fate: it's among people like Anton Pyrerka7 , from lower social groups deprived of any rights in the traditional society, that the newcomers found there more sincere supporters, for they had an intelligible message for them. Pyrerka's good knowledge of his language and culture allowed him to become the first ever Nenets scholar. He participated actively in the creation of literary language. Pyrerka's main literary text is a short novel published in 1940 and awarded by a literary price. He died during the war.

The third Nenets intellectual of that period is Ivan Noho 8 (1891-1947). Ivan Noho was also an orphan, from the Yamal peninsula. He was educated by the Obdorsk mission and learned literacy (Obdorskoye 1907 : 150) The main actors among the Nenets "intellectuals" of the 1930-s were thus prepared, through their background, to be attracted by literacy and written expression. Before I finish on some interesting aspects of their texts, I would like to sum up some provisional conclusions.

It has often been repeated that the missionaries did not succeed at all in the Northern areas. Still, in the places where they acted, they have had some impact:

beside the fact they influenced Nenets worldview, the little that was achieved later in the field of literacy depended much on the prerequisites they had locally succeeded to create. What is usually considered as a total failure may be reviewed as a relative failure. On the other hand, the "cultural construction" considered for decades as a total success may well also be assessed as a relative failure: the soviet power's aim was to replace a lore-based culture rooted in traditional world-view by a modern culture based on literacy and on the ideology of progress. the Northern natives have indeed been cut out of their roots. But the introduction, without due preparation and maturing, of literary culture may be assessed as a total failure.

The encounter of two worldviews: traditional culture and soviet values

I shall now focus on the contents of this infant literature and mainly on the adaptation processes it reveals on the ideological level. The authors were caught in a new net of cultural contacts: with the Russian world, but also with the soviet ideological framework, whose origins were so far from their own world-view. I shall focus now on this new encounter and the way it is expressed through the first literary works in Nenets literature. For these works are very much inspired by the "building of a new life" that was on the agenda for the people of the North at that moment. The guideline was, under different forms, the opposition between the past and the present.

Nikolay Vylka : the syncretical approach

Of the three, Vylka is the less involved in active politics. He came from a background favorable to the communists. Still, the situation in Novaya Zemlya was very different from the one on the mainland. The island had been populated since merely two or three generations, its resources did not allow the accumulation of huge fortunes: there were no reindeer herders, the Nenets and the Komi were mainly hunters. The few Russians had no direct power on the other groups. Socially, the situation in Novaya Zemlya was less conflictual or potentially conflictual than on the mainland. The only tensions Tyko had experienced were connected with the local pope and with the czarist police the latter had called to arrest him (Tyko 1965 : 13).

He had thus not to deal with class struggle and the people in Novaya Zemlya could put this essential item aside.

These special conditions are reflected in Nikolay's work. I base my analysis on four texts: one poem, "Lenin's sun on the tundra9 ", and his three prose short "novels" -"On the island"10 , its adapted version published by Sovetskaya Arktika "How we lived under the Czar11 ", and "Maria". The two main texts are both situated in the Czar's period and reflect thus Nykolay Vylka"s present understanding of the Nenets' past. The poem is a new version of a traditional Nenets legend, where the "bad" guys (here the kulaks and the merchants) stole the sun so that the (poor) people in the tundra lived in darkness. But a hero, a sjudbja (here Lenin) came and rescued the sun and the people came out of the darkness and lived in welfare and happiness.

Thus the legend is presented by Vylka on a rejuvenated form according to the fairy tale he thought the Nenets were about to experience. His Lenin is deeply inserted in the Nenets world: he is not the Lenin of the bolshevik Revolution, he is a Nenets traditional hero himself, travelling on a reindeer sledge and addressing the people in Nenets. The borders between the "Other" and the "Own" are removed, but not by the Nenets becoming similar to the "Other", but by the Nenets swallowing up and integrating the "Other".

In Vylka emphasises also the consequences for the women: the denunciation of the position of women in traditional society was one of the main items in the soviet discourse of the first decades. Still he does not choose to break with the traditions of his people: the preparation of Tabilo's marriage includes the kalym, the bride price so condemned later by soviet authorities. Vylka's approach's main feature is thus the quest for harmony and for unityshowing how deeply rooted he was in his traditional culture.

Anton Pyrerka : the explicitation of the conflict Anton Pyrerka's world is different. There is no harmony, simply because the author has no experience of it. His main literary work 12 is a largely autobiographical "Bildungsroman". This is important also because Pyrerka's conflict between the old and the new life is not ideological neither propagandistic, it is deeply felt through painful personal experience. "In my soul I was already a Red, because our boss hated them". This is a very convincing psychological explanation. Pyrerka recounts with many details his sorrowful orphan childhood, hungry and ill-treatments, his way out going robbing with Russian boys, his discovery of school and the hopelessness of his life as a servant to a rich reindeer herder. The Nenets traditional world gave him no possibility of building a life on his own, no possibility of using his individual abilitieshe was just condemned to his fate.

The way out comes from the outside: the arrival of the Reds shaked the entireness of the former social organisation and offered people like Pyrerka an actual opportunity. His personal position determines his choice : Pyrerka had positive reasons to join the Bolsheviks on the bases of his own experience of conflict, i.e. class struggle.

Ivan Noho: class struggle on the stage

Ivan Noho is a communist leader. His literary work is mainly a didactic illustration of one of the party's main orientations in the late 1930-ies: the fight against shamans. His aim is to show how shamans 1) deceive people making them believe in their supernatural powers 2) exploit the poor Nenets by demanding huge fees for their healing activities 3) do not live in compliance with the laws as they have more than one wife, and 4) are enemies to the soviet power. All these items may be explicitly found in the play called The Shaman13 , at the end of which the Nenets understand that Stalin was right... For Noho, the theme of class struggle was essential as one of the Party's main ideas, more formally and with less internal pain than for Pyrerka, although he had also some experience of it.

This plot and in general this kind of plays are characteristic of the first times of the soviet era: by the peoples of the Volga we find at the beginning of the 1920-s several plays called « The Sorcerer » or « The Witch 14 », whose aim was exactly the same. But using the stage for didactical purposes has also a long tradition, not the least in Christian practice.

Still there is a very interesting feature in this text, which has been written in Nenets. I have been amazed to discover how little Russian words may be identified even in a political conversation in which one of the parties is a party leader. Noho was still not a Russified Nenets: he was sufficiently skilled in his mother tongue to express central elements of Russian propaganda without copying them directly from Russian.

Conclusion

We may draw from this short analysis some conclusions:



The Soviet authorities allowed to people who did not find any place in the former order to achieve social positions. Both Pyrerka and Noho were weak linksorphans, deprived of full social rights, organically cut out from any perspective. They belonged to a category that, in other times, was the most permeable to Christianity (we know that it was easier to the poorer Nenets to accept baptism, for Christianity proclaims the superiority of poverty). Soviet ideology provided them with a more effective way out, for the communists promised welfare immediately. These are the people the Soviet power mostly relied upon, they are grateful and some of them express it through literature.



The need for seeking an harmony between traditional culture and Soviet ideology was more felt by the only Nenets writer who had no personal experience of class struggle, Nikolay Vylka. He took over from the latter those aspects who fitted into his own mental framework, leaving into shadow the very important issue of class struggle.

was written in the 1920-ies by Buranov and another, "Tunoyos" (plural form) was published by Konstantin Yakovlev in 1928.



Still there are features common to all three of these writers: all of them were sincerely convinced that the Soviet power was opening a new era for the Nenets. They did not feel any threat on their identity as Nenets and they did not see any fundamental contradiction between preserving their identity and accept modernity. They did not feel that the radical changes about to happen were not meant to increase the welfare of the Nenets, but to reduce the distance between them and the rest of the Soviet population and to deprive them of very essential elements of their identity.

Eighy years later, these authorswho have been nearly forgottenstrike both by their utmost sincerity and by the tragic connected with their fate: this is the generation of the misunderstanding.

  considerable success: the literary languages indeed exist. The first text-books, the first literary texts show that literacy started to work: the first Nenets textbook, G.N. Prokofyef's "New Word 4 ", was published in 1932, and the same author, in 1936, published a "teach yourself" textbook for adults. The newly created languages are also used in the press: the first pages in Nenets appear in 1930 in Naryan Vynder, the newspaper of the Western Nenets areas and in Naryana Ngerm in the Yamal peninsula (Komanovsky 1977 : 26). Literacy works: this enthusiastic evaluation became a leit-motiv repeatedly emphasised by the official positions, as this report quoted by Stebnicky: "Literacy is spreading like epidemics, children educate their parents, husbands their spouses. The students at the school of the Party receive letters only in their languages. The collective farms' presidents and secretaries have the reports and requests made by their brigadiers written only in Koriak..." (Tebnicky 1934 : 48). Nevertheless, eighty years later observation in perspective compels us to moderate our assessment. Indeed, literary languages existed. But how much were they used? There were only very little teachers among the natives. Most of the teachers were Russians, who mostly ignored their pupils' languages (Toulouze 1999 : 79). The discussion about the alphabet in 1936-1937 shows that the contingent of teachers able and disposed to use the latin letters in which the native languages were first written was very reduced (Toulouze 1997 : 74-76).

Firstly.

  All the above-mentioned processes are mature after 1935. The first literary texts are published in 1936-1937, in the dark years of stalinist repressions.

  before he was sent to work for a merchant: he knew very well indeed what ethnic discrimination meant at the beginning of the 20th century in Obdorsk. When the Red came, Noho was one of the first to bade them welcome. He entered the Party and became, at the end of the 1930-s, one of its local leaders. As such, he was one of the initiators of the brutal campaign against the kulaks and the shamans (Ogryzko 1998 : 522-523). Noho wrote two plays: Vauli Nenjang, on a historical subject and the Shaman, whose aim was to reveal the "real" nature of the shaman's deeds. On this basis, let me sum up the main features of these individuals:  in different ways, the three of them are marginals. Pyrerka and Noho, because of their being orphans, started life in a very unfavourable position; Nikolay Vylka's marginality is of a completely different nature and lies on transmission of a unique personal experience. Anyhow, none of them is representative of the average traditional nenets society;  they all come from cultural contact zones with the Russians. Novaya Zemlya was an open region whose inhabitants -Komis, Russians, Nenetscame all from the mainland. Moreover, it was widely open even to foreign contacts, for instance to Norwegian fishermen and merchants and to explorers. Tyko's peculiar adventure is the direct consequence of his early contacts with Russian exiles and with Rusanov. All his former knowledge of Russian, of the Russians, his ability to dialogue with them led to Rusanov's proposal. Tyko's model was clearly transmitted to Nikolay. Pyrerka came from the Bolshezemelskaya tundra, which is one of the regions where in the 1820-s Veniamin succeeded to baptise more than the two thirds of the Nenets. It's the infrastructure created by the missionaries that permitted his discovery of literacy. The most direct impact of former contacts touched Ivan Noho, for he was educated by the Obdorsk mission, led by a most active missionary, father Irinarh.

  his prose, Vylka uses clearly autobiographical elementsmost of them inspired by the experiences of his uncle: Maria's parents travel to the island reminds of how Tyko's father Hanec fled from the mainland, the character of On the island, like Tyko, has been in Moscow. Vylka does not talk about the presenttherefore the opposition is not directly formulated. Neither does he indulge in vain praise : true, the text presented as a translation in Sovetskaya Arktika ends with some strokes of very dull glorification of the Soviet power. The discrepancy in style is such that I dare suggest they are an addition by the editors to guarantee political correctness... The central element of the plot in both cases is similar: the cheating of the Nenets by people coming from outsidemerchants, both Russian and, in Maria, Norwegian. But Vylka did not dwell on the "Other's" cunning. He painfully insists on how the Nenets are responsible themselves for what happens to them: alcoholism is certainly one of his main themes. His people cannot resist alcohol, they look for it, drink without measure and are thus unable to fulfil their duties: winter comes, there are no furs to protect them and their families from the cold. It is clear that on this very point, much emphasised by contemporary soviet discourse, there was no contradiction at all with the traditional values of the Nenets. The new element is that

In this process the main actor was a Russian Orientalist scholar and missionary, Nikolay Ilminski, who promoted penetration of Christianity through the use of the peoples' mother tongues. About Ilminski: Znamenskij 1892,Lallukka 1987, Toulouze

2001a.

A good example is provided by the Forest Nenets intellectual Yuri Vella, while remembering his grandfather: "My grandfather, in his youth, because of his ignorance and lack of political training, ran away both from Whites and from Reds"(Vella 1991: 53).

Full name in Russian : Комитет содействия народностям северных окраин (Solidarity Committee with the Populations of the Northern Margins), shortly called Комитет Cеверa (Committee of the North)

In Nenets : Jadej wada, Moscow 1932.

There are different opinions about whenTyko and Rusanov started working together: 1907[START_REF] Kazakov ; Kaзаков | И родился я на Новой Земле[END_REF] : 220), 1908 (Voronova 1977 : 29).

There are no sure informations about his birth. Elena Susoy mentions 1904; for two literary encyclopaedias, he was born in 1911(Ogryzko 1998 : 161).

His Nenets name was Sjarati(Lebedeva 1958 : 236).

In Russian sources, he is usually called Nogo.

In Russian: "Солнце Ленина светит в тундре (поэма)" -Сказание о счастие -Москва 1970 -стр. 15-27.

In Russian: "На острове" -Наша страна -1936/5-6 -стр. 41-68.

In Russian: "Как мы жили при царя (Из дореволюционного прошлого ненецкого языка)" -СоветскаяАрктика -1937/11 -стр. 41-68.

In Russian: Младший сын Вэдо -Архангельск 1960.

In Nenets and Russian: Тадеба / Шаман -Салехард 1937.

For example in Udmurt literature: there are two plays written in the early 1920-ies by Kuzebay Gerd and P. Batuev called in Udmurt "Tuno" (which is the word for the local "shaman"). A short story with the same title


The Forest Nenets are a small people of maximum 2000 persons living in the North-Eastern Ob basin, in taiga and forest tundra areas. This ethnic group has long been neglected by ethnographic as well as linguistic research: they live mostly in remote zones on the high stream of different rivers (Ob tributaries flowing both North-South 1 and East-West 2 as well as rivers flowing into the Ob bay (flowing South-North 3 ). The access to their territory is thus complicated, and much determination is needed to get near to them. Oh the other hand, researchers have been concentrating their efforts since the 19 th century on the Tundra Nenets, a close ethnic group, or more precisely the main branch of the same people. The Tundra Nenets occupy a huge territory in Northern Russia, from the Kola Peninsula up to the Taimyr Peninsula in Central Siberia, covering thus thousands of kilometres of European and Siberian tundra. They have maintained a strong identity consciousness, based on reindeer herding, and they still live in some regions fairly as they did at the beginning of the 20 th century 4

. The Forest Nenets" culture and way of life is very different and depends on different ecological environment: reindeer herding is practised on a lesser scale, the Nenetsinstead of being nomads all year roundare but semi-nomads, and the function of other activities as hunting and fishing is much more extensive than in the tundra.

Linguistic analysis shows that the language spoken by both groups is structurally the same, and linguists they have considered Forest Nenets as a mere dialect. Nevertheless phonetic dissimilarity between these forms is such, that mutual understanding between Forest and Tundra Nenets is just excluded. Moreover, as Forest Nenets is under the influence of its neighbouring languages, Khanty and Selkup, the lexical divergence is also very significant. Therefore the present trend among linguists dealing with Samoyed languages is to identify not one, but two independent Nenets languages, subdivided into dialects.

(Niglas , 1999)). . Pur, the first element of these names being the names of two Forest Nenets clans. The centre of this region is the village of Tarko-Sale, which, according to visitors, is still a genuine Forest Nenets village, where even children speak Nenets among themselves 5 . During the Soviet period, here as well as everywhere in the Northern areas, indigenous peoples formerly living in the forest have been gathered in villages: in this area, the main Forest Nenets villages are Kharampur and Khalesovaya, where, according to Tapani Salminen, who has visited this region in 1998, Forest Nenets traditional culture is still alive. The second group lives westwards, on the high flows of the Nadym and the Kazym rivers. They are concentrated around the village of Num-to, on the shore of a lake considered both by the local Khantys and the Nenets as a sacred place. This region has still been spared by industrialisation: traditional rules are still dominant, children speak Nenets, motor sledges are still a luxury 6

. The third group lives on the high flow of the Agan and its tributaries, Vatyogan and Amputa; during the first third of the 20 th century, families from

Halesovaya migrated down to this zone, where fish and pastures were abundant. But since the mid 1960, oil industry has massively taken root in this region. This fact has most directly influenced the Forest Nenets" way of life as well as the ethnic contacts in this area. Some of the indigenous families are ready to give up their lands for oil extraction in exchange of different kind of compensations. Others are trying to resist this penetration and fight in order to protect nature from pollution, to save the seriously threatened reindeer pastures and the forest, which provides them with food and, overall, with life. Moreover, the Agan Forest Nenets were even before this invasion in a weaker position, for they have always been fewer than the Khanties. Now the arrival of oil workers coming from all the regions of the former USSR has led to a clear demographic unbalance to the prejudice of the indigenous peoples. In this area, Forest Nenets has lost ground: in 1999, the younger Nenets speaking Nenets as a mother tongue was aged 23. As far as I know, no child speaks either understands it: it is practised actively only by the elder generation 7 .

The information available about the Forest Nenets is quite limited, as this ethnic group has been identified as such only at the end of the 19 th century. The older data are to be found in M.-A. Castrén"s travels reports. The Finnish explorer and linguist had also collected Forest Nenets language samples [START_REF] Castrén | [END_REF][START_REF] Castrén | Castréns "Aufzeichnungen über das Waldjurakische" -Samojedische sprachmaterialien[END_REF]. His work has been continued and systematised by Toivo Lehtisalo, who spent at the beginning of the 20 th century much time making fieldwork among both the Tundra and the Forest Nenets.

In 1914, Lehtisalo worked among the Western Forest Nenets on the river Kiselyovskaya and collected precious samples of oral traditions (Lehtisalo 1947[START_REF] Lehtisalo | Juraksamojedische Texte[END_REF]). The ethnographic information he received from very impressive informants, as the blind shaman Kalyat Ngahany, has been used by Lehtisalo in his general studies on Nenets culture (Lehtisalo 1924) and language (Lehtisalo 1956). Most of the data available at the moment are due to the Finnish researcher. Later, after the October Revolution, Russian researchers took over Nenets studies. One of the most competent specialists on Samoyed peoples and languages was G.

Verbov, young scholar who did not survive World War II: he has been the first to publish a substantial article (Verbov 1936) about the Forest Nenets. Mainly a linguist, he collected data about the language and left to posterity a monograph on this subject, published thirty years after his death (Verbov 1973). This work includes two short tales. Russian ethnographers later on have made occasionally field work by the Forest Nenets, but although L. Homič (1972) on one hand and more recently A. [START_REF] Golovnev | Традиции самодийцев и угров -Eкатеринбург[END_REF] have inserted data among them in more general issues, very few specific research has been dedicated to this topic. Among the linguists, the Finn Pekka Sammallahti (1974) has done a major work with his grammar of Forest Nenets, based on cooperation with a Leningrad student, born half Nenets half Selkup, who provided him with two texts (42 sentences). Sammallahti presents them with extensive and useful comments. Finally two Hungarian scholars, P. Hajdú (1959aHajdú ( , 1959b) ) and J. Pusztay (1984), have abundantly used

Lehtisalo"s material for linguistic analysis.

This survey shows that the last extensive collection of Forest Nenets language and folklore dates from the very beginning of the 20 th century. Therefore in 2000, a working group from Tartu University 8 (Estonia) has undertaken to fill this gap and started systematic fieldwork research, whose final aim is to provide a collection of Forest Nenets texts with morphological analysis and translation. The first expedition took place in autumn 2000 and lasted two months.

We worked in the Agan region, but we had also the opportunity of working very thoroughly with a remarkable informant 9 from Num-to. This first expedition was directly followed by the visit of two Forest Nenets 10 to Tartu, where they recorded several hours of folklore 11 -songs, tales and other forms of oral tradition. A second expedition (Kaur Mägi) took place in autumn 2001 in Num-to region These materials have been partly published, i.e. in the booklet accompaning a CD of Forest Nenets songs [START_REF] Mägi | Discovering Siberia: Songs of the Forest Nenets[END_REF]. The present article is based on these materials.

8 Formed by an Estonian linguist, Kaur Mägi and myself. 9 Tatva Logany. 10 Tatva Logany and Yuri Vella. 11 This expedition was supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment (Eesti Kultuurkapital) and the Endangered Languages Fund, and the invitation for the Nenets informants was delivered by the Estonian National Museum (Eesti Rahva Muuseum). Juri Vella and Tatva Logany spent two weeks in Tartu. All their recordings as well as those made in Siberia are available at the Estonian Folkore Archives (Eesti Rahvaluule Arhiiv) in Tartu.

II. The Forest Nenets' folklore: a general survey

As we see, we have still a limited amount of Forest Nenets folklore materials. Differently from other Siberian peoples, most of the available texts have been recorded recently. This complicates undoubtedly diachronic research and the reconstruction of what Forest Nenets folklore could have been one century ago, but it gives an interesting picture of the situation at the beginning of the 21 th century. This absence of older data, on the other hand, makes comparative analyses quite difficult, for most of the Tundra Nenets folklore collections reflect the situation some decades ago. We shall have to take this fact permanently into account, when referring to comparative data. For the same reason, if we may find some occasional studies in linguistics and ethnography, absolutely no mention of Forest Nenets folklore is to be found in Russian research.

Russian specialists on the Nenets" folklore have devoted themselves to the study of Tundra

Nenets oral tradition and especially on Tundra Nenets epics. I am therefore compelled to base my analysis on my own data and on prudent comparison with Tundra Nenets oral tradition.

We have recorded the following folklore genres as part of the living tradition of nowadays Forest Nenets: songs, two distinct types of narratives and riddles.

a) Songs (kynaws

12

).

This genre seems to have had traditionally a major function in social communication, similarly as by the Tundra Nenets (Ojamaa 2002: 2). Although some kinds of songs have clearly lost their former function, the present practice of Forest Nenets singing shows the structural importance of this activity, which gives the individuals a materialised identity inside the community. For the Nenets, singing is a merely individual activity: choral singing is just unknown.

True, in the last decades, under the influence of Russian and Western music, the Nenets have started to adapt their songs to collective performance, in orderconsciously or notto bring it closer to the audience musical habits, and also as a means of supporting collectively endangered ethnic identity

13

. Nenets singing includes extended improvisation: people used to sing about their life and its main events. Songs may be divided into different types. According to the collected corpus as well as to our informants" data, the main subgenres are shaman songs, individual songs and narrative songs.

Shaman songs, called in Nenets "tachepyang-kynaws", were ritual songs, performed during the shamanic séance. As this aspect of Nenets culture has practically disappeared, after the cruel repressions by the Soviet power in the 1930 and the subsequent weakening of religious practice in indigenous societies, shaman songs are no more an active communication form. But although I have not heard it mentioned, we can"t absolutely exclude that some kind of ritual survival exist marginally even nowadays. Shaman songs are mostly nowadays remembered by the elder people who have witnessed shaman séances in their youth or by descendants of shamans. Some songs refer explicitly to the mushroom used by shamans to get into trancecalled in Nenets "vipi"and performed after consumption. Researchers connect these songs to the shaman song type (Ojamaa 2002: 16-18). Our informant Tatva Logany nevertheless asserts that these songs were performed by any person having eaten these mushrooms, which were used not only by shamans, but also by ordinary people as narcotics. Anyhow it is interesting to notice that some of these songs have been transmitted as parodies of the performer: Yuri Vella performs a vipi-song that was sung by an old shaman, who used to fall asleep for some seconds or minutes during the performance [START_REF] Mägi | Discovering Siberia: Songs of the Forest Nenets[END_REF].

The so-called "individual song" is probably the main form of singing in Nenets society as in other cultures of the Arctic peoples. The term "individual song" is used by scholars and its Russian form "lichnaya pesnya" has reached the Nenets, so that many of them use it or its Nenets form nyeshang-kynaws. Nevertheless, the Nenets themselves used to call this kind of song "drunken song" or "drunkard"s song"

14

. Every song is produced by a concrete person 15 , who usually performs it while drinking. It is to be noticed that drinking is not a male peculiarity, and these songs are performed both by men and by women. Although gender work division is part of the Nenets" way of life, the Nenets traditional couple forms a very coherent unit that rarely splits.

Men"s work is usually outdoors and women"s mostly indoors. But relaxing activities are usually performed together and women drink and get drunk like men. It seldom happens that one performs one"s song in ordinary situations, but it may happen, for instance when the presence of a stranger creates a special, stimulating context. When Yuri Vella was asked to perform his own song, he just laughed and answered: "Nobody is so stupid as to sing his own song himself!", showing that usually individual songs are performed by others, not by the person to whom they are ascribed. One special form of individual song is represented by the songs invented by the parents for their children: growing up, the latter may use this song but may also change and have a new song of their own. These songs have no other name that the "owner"s" one. . Yuri Vella, in an introduction to his poems, pretends that "We, the Nenets, used to sing many poemstales, lamentations, songswhich were performed in an artistic language with a popular melody or in form of incantation poetry. The everyday language is used in everyday life, it is poor, without colour, taste or smell, it transmits no warm and no cold. It is impossible in this language to tell a tale or to sing a songbut talking about wood, food or money would insult the artistic tongue". But because of different reasons, the "artistic" language has been lost. According to Yuri"s experience, "My grand-mother found a new way / of telling tales /. At the beginning, she sang the tales according to tradition, but in order to make clear what happened, she repeated the contents in everyday language. Then she went on singing, and again translated the meaning into an understandable language" (Vella 1991: 3, 5). It would be interesting to analyse both parts of these narratives from the linguistic point of view, and to identify whether the difference is really as significant as Yuri Vella says. This reminiscence of archaic sung tales is not to be confounded with the introduction of songs as such into tales. We may find inside a tale some character"s personal song, which plays a role in the narrative pattern 17 .

Nowadays, singing is suffering from the loss of language skills in younger generations.

Moreover, not only the text dimension is becoming totally stranger, but also the melodic pattern is 16 According to Lyudmila Taleyeva, a Tundra Nenets from the Small Tundra (in Northern European Russia), who recognised in the Forest Nenets "recitative" a well-known pattern. 17 More developed analysis and samples of Nenets songs may be found in a CD published by the Estonian Museum of Literature in 2001. Further on, I will concentrate on this topic. As a general presentation, and before analysing details, I must observe that storytelling remains a main entertainment form among the Forest Nenets nowadays. It is true that media have broadly developed their influence over the last decades: in the villages, all the families have televisions and many of them may also watch videos. The radio has been for decades a general tool. In the taiga camps the presence of electricity varies from region to region: where oil industry has expanded, as in the Agan region, the use of electric generators has been generalising over the last decade. This means that even if television programs are not caught for lack of sufficient antennas, most families in this region have video players and may spend evenings watching to film cassettes. This entertainment is not sufficient to fill all the free time and therefore more traditional ways are still alive. So, unlike the well-known situation in other parts of the world (Thomas 1976: 197) , Forest Nenets have not frequent opportunities of gathering and spending time speaking their languages and telling their tales in Nenets : there is always somebody around who does not know Nenets, and the whole company adapts to this single person by switching to Russian. We incited them to communicate among themselves in their own language, and as we were the guests, the non-Nenets members of the family were more tolerant and did not impose the use of a common language.

III. Historical and comparative remarks on narrative genres

Serious discussions have taken place about the focus on indigenous names for oral traditional genres. To Ben Amos" conviction that "The names of folklore forms reflect their cultural conception and significance" (Ben Amos 1982a: 134) -Honko answers by scepticism "I doubt that the indigenous names for genre categories will be of much help in our empirical research" (Honko 1976: 24). Still, if our goal is not to find categories fit for universal folklore classification but to concentrate on one culture trying to get deeper and deeper in its inner coherence, these names may open interesting perspectives. Therefore, sharing Ben-Ames" cautiousness about the danger of etymology"s fetishism (Ben-Amos 1982: 49), I still consider as useful the analysis of indigenous names for genres. This approach may deliver key information for genre evolution history among the Nenets taken as a whole. The fact is that despite slightly different cultural and linguistic evolutions Northern Samoyeds23 are still a pretty homogenous group, as shows the presence of common clans (Ayvaseda/Ayvasedo/Ayvashata, Vylla/Vyllo, Vylko/Vylka/Valey) existing both by the Forest and by the Tundra Nenets, some of them, as the latter, covering an impressive territory.

Ethnomusicologists have pointed out a remarkable closeness between Tundra and Forest Nenets singing cultures: both have the same kind of songs, the same melodic features, the same way of adapting text to tune with special syllables etc. Singing is performed in identical circumstances and his function in social life is similar [START_REF] Ojamaa | Triinu Ojamaa -Uued sundmused neenetsi traditsionaalses muusikas -Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi väljaanne 2002 (to be published) Poshatajeva 1988 Pusztay 1984 -János Pusztay -"Die Pur-Mundart des Waldjurakischen: grammatikalischer Abriss aufgrund der Materialen von T. V. Lehtisalo" -Studia Uralo-Altaica 23 -Szeged 1984 Pushkaryova 1990 -Елена Пушкарева[END_REF]. The difference in the system of narrative genres is therefore most intriguing.

It must be mentioned that folklorists (Kupriyanova 24 , Shcherbakova, Pushkaryova) and linguists (N. Tereshchenko

25

) have mostly dealt with Tundra Nenets folklore. But all the aspects have not been equally studied and some important aspects are still in the dark. Soviet research tended to emphasise the use of folklore for historical and ethnographic research. Soviet folklorists did not focus on oral traditions as elements of a people"s spiritual culture; they expected concrete information on precise elements. This explains why certain genres were considered as less interesting than others, as the following quotation, from Lyudmila Khomič, clearly shows: "among the Nenets folklore genres, stories occupy a remarkable place. Because of their goal being to entertain and their being based on fictive elements, tales (wadako) actually transmit less than other genres data about the real phenomena of the past" (Khomič 1995: 260). The most popular genres among the folklorists are the so-called epic genres

26

. For slightly different reasons, they are important also for the present research.

Folklorists distinguish two epic genres in Nenets oral traditions: the most archaic, called syudbabc, focus on supernaturally strong heroes, as the more recent yarabc is more similar to a lamentation of unjustly suffering poor Nenets. Probably the rich ethnographic data about the Nenets" material culture and eventually their history to be found in these kinds of texts explain their popularity with researchers. Anyhow the fact is that entire books have been dedicated to their analysis. I am mostly concerned with the etymological coincidence of the Forest Nenets word šotpjaws, which we could translate by "tale", and the Tundra Nenets term sjudbabc. The latter"s origin is connected to the verb sjudbars', "to sing a heroic song" (Poshatayeva 1988: 61);

another scholar mentions in this connection the word sjudbja, "giant-hero" (Kuprijanova 1965: 28).

According to our Forest Nenets informants Yuri Vella and Tatva Logany, the word comes from shotpya 27 , "strong, great, powerful" and wata "word, language, speech"

28

. The whole term is supposed to mean "powerful speech, heroic discourse". Clearly the two words are connected as far as their origin is concerned. The Forest Nenets word"s etymology corresponds also to the Tundra Nenets" meaning, but the contents of the Forest Nenets notion is far from parallel.

The main themes of the Tundra Nenets heroic shyudbabcthe quest of a wife, the orphan"s bloody revenge, the fight for reindeers and pasturesare practically absent in the Forest Nenets tradition. At least, in our collection, there is no correspondent item. I cannot assert that such themes are absolutely unknown, but we have an extended amount of samples and there are absent. I may deduce that if they exist 29 , they are nowadays most marginal. But we must resist to the temptation of treating these notions similarly. The fact is that we have no diachronic insight of Forest Nenets folklore, while most of Tundra Nenets data have been collected decades ago. So there is a chronological shift between the materials on which folklorists are working on and our material.

The absence of such forms in Forest Nenets folklore may be explained by two contradictory hypotheses: 1) These forms have never existed; 2) This forms have existed but have disappeared. There are circumstances in favour of both hypotheses. The fact that, as long as we know, the syudbabc form for Tundra Nenets, considered as the older style, has been losing ground during all the 20 th century: synchronically, the picture is not so unbalanced. But we are not obliged to reconstruct a special epic form parallel to what the Tundra Nenets had. Their social conditions have been thoroughly dissimilarthe Forest Nenets had no huge reindeer herds, a much less developed social stratification, and probably this kind of society did not provide a sufficient basis for the development of the same kind of epics. At the moment, we have no elements allowing the choice of one or the other of these two hypotheses. As a matter of fact, they are presented here in order to open the way to further and deeper fieldwork research.

As far as wanlh are concerned, the situation is reversed. If the Tundra Nenets heroic tale has its share of attention and is considered, without chronological considerations, as a very important element in oral tradition, the stories pretending to historical truth are considered by the Tundra Nenets specialists as a fading genre: "The tales about the past (lahanako, wa'al) are little known nowadays, even by elder people" (Khomič 1995: 260). I would assert the opposite: among the Forest Nenets, these tales are as popular as the other genre: our main wanlh-tellers are men aged 40-50 30 . This genre seems to me to be alive, at least as much as any genre based on language may be among the Forest Nenets.

We know that genre history may hardly be reconstructed (Honko 1989: 22). In this case, nevertheless, I think that the closeness of Forest and Tundra Nenets ethnic groups and the dissimilarity of folklore collection in the first case may reveal some elements about the Forest Nenets worldview and its evolution in the last century. We are allowed, with proper verifications, to use the better known Tundra Nenets genres history at least to question eventual developments in Forest Nenets storytelling practice.

IV. Emic approach in a taxonomy of narrative genres

My approach is clearly focused on the Forest Nenets understanding of their own folklore.

Far from wishing to use categories grown out from other soils to the systematisation of fieldwork research or to construct a universal model comprehending them, my approach has been to follow the way the oral tradition actualisation in practice and its perception by the Nenets themselves is connected and articulated with their own worldview. I would here follow Ben-Amos approach:

"Folklore texts and their performance have a different kind of subjectivity, their own cultural subjectivity. They constitute a reality that is culturally regulated. Like language, their repeated patterns, their regularities are cultural, not scholarly, constructs. We have the opportunity, duty, and privilege to find the meaning of these cultural creations, categories, and orders" (Ben-Amos 1992: 21). At least this is the approach I wish to implement in a first stage. Probably further comparison shall require a provisional framework of common elements between the elements of the comparison. But I consider this as a future task.

So I have tried to understand how the Nenets themselves see and conceptualise their stories. According to Ben-Amos, there are three means of designing a formal category:

"cognitively, by naming it, pragmatically, by performing it in particular contexts, and expressively by formulating it in a distinctive language which is peculiar to the genre" (Ben Amos 1982a: 135).

The first observation during the fieldwork is that when a storyteller prepared to tell a story, he usually asked the audience to choose between a šotpjaws and a wanlh. In other circumstances, the storyteller started his narrative announcing his own choice. This suggested that both types of narratives may be performed in identical conditions, by a same narrator and with the same audience. Therefore, if using Ben-Amos" distinctions, the Nenets themselves do not distinguish these genres pragmatically. On the other hand I have noticed that the Nenets did not introduce themselves a formal distinction in the expressive performance, and I have not noticed any such distinction myself: both genresat least nowadaysare performed in non metric prose. I have not noticed special distinctive starting and closing formulas. And if Tatva closes all his narratives by Či, malhta! ("Here it is, it is the end"), this formula does not introduce a formal taxonomic distinction.

If we look for formal elements of distinction we may find that length may be taken into

account. An old man living in the taiga31 asked his audience to choose between a šotpjaws and a wanlh. The audience has no preferences, so he had to decide himself and he thus discovered that all the shotpyaws he knew were very long. He told the shorter, which lasted forty-five minutes. So length may eventually be a distinctive characteristic of shotpyaws, but this should be verified on a larger scale.

Therefore the main focus must be put on the cognitive principles on which prose genres" taxonomy is based. During our fieldwork, we tried to identify these two genres main features not according to our own analysis (inevitably inspired by exogenous elements) but on the bases of what seemed important to our informants. Who are they? Some elements about their background may be precious to assess the data they transmitted. Our main informants were two men. Tatva

Logany is a man in the early forties, blind since he was three years old, who as therefore been living the two first decades of his life practically without any contact with the non-Nenets world. He did not go to school and was not called to the army. In Num-to, where he lives, there are very few Russians; there is still no industrial exploitation of the region. In the first part of his life, he has receives from his family, from the elder people, their vision of culture, learning to sing and to tell tales listening to his grand-mother. Later on he broadened his repertoire by listening to his neighbours and collecting himself his own people"s folklore. He is extremely curious, mentally active, lives now an independent life with his wife and his child, has built his own house and is an excellent hunter and fisherman. Without any theoretical knowledge (he is unable to read or to write), he has a passionate overview of the Nenets" culture and implement all his mental abilities to reflect on it. Our second informant is Yuri Vella, a very well known personality, who is a reindeer herder with higher education. He has studied at Moscow Literary Institute, is known as a good poet and fights for the rights of his people. Yuri has never really quitted his region (when he studied in Moscow, he was most of the time a hunter in his village), his wife is Khanty. He knows well his own language, has a small repertoire of tales and songs inherited from his grand-mother, and an extensive general culture. He knows deeply both worlds and is therefore an excellent mediator between them, and without being himself a trained folklorist, he acts as a scholar of indigenous origin. But he tries also to conceptualise his culture most varied elements and therefore he often suggests explanations in which the culture bearer and the educated observer are mixed up.

Both our informants agreed on a very simple distinction: šotpjaws is a narrative based exclusively on fiction, while wanlh is a tale from the past, it is verisimilar and the facts related could have taken place in reality. The informants said that the most important is not that it has really happened, but that it could have happened. Likelihood is thus the main element. Therefore we have been told that animal tales are undoubtedly šotpjaws: everybody knows that real animals do not talk. Without any doubt also, etiological tales, explaining the origin of place"s names, of clan history or special features, are clearly wanlh. The Nenets situate their narratives in a bipolar system opposingvery roughlyfairy tale and legends. This is not an exception in the folklore of the peoples of the world. Commenting the nature of legends, Dégh observes that "Attitude toward belief is the essence of the genre [the legend]" (Dégh 1996 : 33). According to Bascom the distinction between fiction and reality, more widely than in legend analysis, is an element that structures many popular taxonomies: "It is certainly significant that some groups [---] distinguish between narratives that they regard as true and false, while the Ojibwa regard all their tales as true. It is essential to the understanding and interpretation of folklore to know whether a given tale is regarded as historical fact of fiction" (Bascom 1965: 283-284). This is confirmed by Ben-Amos : "The referential distinction concerns with the truth value of narrative accounts" (Ben-Amos 1992: 24).

In the case of Forest Nenets, this observation comes from their own comments on a tale.

Moreover, this question has been directly submitted to them and has led to a detailed discussion on this point. During the quarter of an hour it lasted no other criterion than the above mentioned was presented. We may well appreciate the further potential developments opened by this explanation if we treat it as one element in a system functioning according to its own logics: if the likelihood criterion, the possibility of a tale being rooted in reality, is really the line dividing one genre from the other, the distribution of tales into genres by the Nenets themselves allow to identify their own understanding of reality. What comes to the surface is belief. As Linda Dégh observes, "In the experience of folklorists, tellers state, explain, interpret or at least imply their personal attitude toward the belief content of the legend they tell" (Dégh 1996: 33). She insists on the need to work on beliefs: "any legend researcher needs to focus on the attitude towards belief expressed by individual participants in the legend process to gain insight into the dialectics by means of which believiability, the purpose of any legend communication, are debated" (Dégh 1996: 38).We must deduce by Forest Nenets very simple distinction that the whole of their tale repertoire is structured by belief, forming thus a kind of "corpus" of belief. It is therefore possible to get in tales data on about the Forest Nenets mental universe, is we don"t take the word "belief" in its religious contents, but we use it in order to analyse broader mentality elements. It is therefore a guideline for further fieldwork to follow very precisely what informants and the people in the audience say about the recorded tales in order to analyse individual persons and small groups from the point of view of their "belief". This analysis is by nature complex: for the perception of likelihood is probably one of the elements most submitted to evolution in cultural models. The researching needs also the utmost delicacy 32 and we must be conscious of the fragmentary nature of the recorded data.

The integration of people elder than 50 into school system, the latter"s increasing influence and the family values decreasing presence in the younger generations" life, have probably direct effects on the belief system and on the extent of the verisimilitude field.

Undoubtedly the Soviet power"s fight against religions, superstition, and against every kind of magic way of thinking has led to treat as shotpyaws stories, which would have been seen by elder generations as wanlh. Moreover: the very formulation of this criterion shows the progress of the so called scientific way of thinking in the Nenets" mentality: some decades ago it would have probably been formulated as a direct distinction between truth and fiction. Now, the informants have integrated a new way of thinking that is reflected by the cautiousness of their formulation.

Therefore this criterion is very much alive, it develops and changes and follows the present worldview of the actors in the communication process. Both Yuri Vella and Tatva Logany, each one according to his vision, present the example of Toivo Lehtisalo"s main informant, the blind shaman Kalyat, who was Tatva"s grand-grand-uncle. During about half an hour 33 Tatva recalled this man"s legendary history, how he had acquired his shamanic gift and has become an mediator between the world of men and the world of spirits, how he implemented them, and how the was killed in a competition with a dark and stronger shaman. Integrated in Tatva"s narrative there are two songs: their text reminds how Kalyat went to the South with the storks and came back with them at the beginning of spring, and how he had joined the divers after having covered his body with a diver skin in order to protect is from the cold. For Yuri Vella, this tale is considered as a šotpjaws, for Lehtisalo has told to Kalyat much about his own country, about life abroad, and Kalyat has in his own way transmitted this knowledge to his countrymen. The latter have turned him into the hero of legends. Kalyat"s narratives show the birth of a legend, and Yuri occasionally shows how stories told nowadays by the Nenets are in good way to become legends themselves.

IV. Hybrid narratives

This should not lead, nevertheless, to a polarised image of Nenets tales classification.

The fact is that between the wanlh"s truth and the šotpjaws' fantasy there is a large field for uncertainty, as many stories may prove. One example is abundantly commented by Yuri Vella.

32 I agree with Linda Dégh on the inopportunity of questioning directly the Nenets: "Do you believe in that ?" She comments this question as follows: "The question itself provokes distortion. In the first place, belief is fluctuating, hesitant and selective, non consistent or absolute. In the second place, the informant has many reasons not to tell what he or she believes" (Dégh 1996: 39). 33 On 2000, October 10 th .

Tatva announces that he is going to tell a shotpjaws 34 . The story"s main character is a young girl called Atpälha. Her stepmothers are jealous of Atpälha"s father love for her and decide to kill her.

Pretending to give her marrow from reindeer bones they throw a hot thimble into her throat.

Atpälha falls as if she were dead. The desolate father puts Atpälha on a sledge with his best reindeer and orders the latter to bring her where she must go. Atpälha is not really deadshe sees all but she can"t move either speak. As the reindeer goes, she sees people in the forest: some people carry wood on their shoulders, but they can"t put it downthese are persons who, while living, stole their neighbour"s wood. We understand that she is in the other world, where she sees many other scenes like and starts to live another life. But then she receives a blow on her back and the thimble fells out of her mouth: she is again in the human world, in a cemetery. When she returns home, her father hears what really happened and punished the stepmothers.

After having told his story, Tatva adds: "This may be a shotpjaws or may be it is a wanlh, nobody knows". Yuri Vella developed abundantly this item: if we consider that this trip in the other world is but a dream, it may very well be a wanlh. It is true that nobody ever harnesses only one reindeer and reindeer do not obey directly to words (shotpjaws element), but the reindeer may have been taught to react to human voice, so even this element may correspond to likelihood.

I presented this example in details for it shows to interesting aspects of this question, on which Yuri Vella himself draws our attention. Even for a Nenets culture bearer the uncertainty of the relationship between tales and reality or potential reality exists. Even Tatva, who presented the tale as a šotpjaws, does not exclude other interpretations. True enough, in another conversation, he clearly included Atpälha among the shotpjaws for children. So he has a clear interpretation preference. This shows the existence of an interpretation margin that may give to certain elements a hybrid status.

In Yuri Vella"s repertoire there is a fragment, including a recitative section, that was performed by Yuri"s neighbour, Auli Yusi, dead in 1995. The main character is a man who discovered that his fish is being regularly stolen. He sets a trap and discovers one morning that the culprit has been wounded. Following the footprints he gets up to a place where there is a hole in the earth. The man watches into the hole and understands that it is as a matter of fact the upper hole of a Nenets tent. There is a woman who speaks to a very old man, who is lying wounded in a cradle and weeps. What the woman says is reported in recitative rhythm. The scolds the old man in the cradle for having taken human food, which is not meant for them, and calls him to be as wise as his grand parents, showing him to children who are playing on the other side of the tent. So the man understands that he is at the jointure point of this and the other world, where time runs the other way round: children are adults, the elder are children. And he got scared and went back home. , where the beyond is shown even more clearly than in Atpälha"s story. But I would not dismiss so easily Yuri"s title. It does not come from his fantasy. The fact that the elements of the title are scarcely understandable to Tatva show that they are probably archaic remainders -I would suppose this title to have been given by Auli or by the person who told him. Therefore it may reflect a different interpretation. Further research will probably confirm or not this hypothesis. But meanwhile I would propose two eventualities: either, for an elder generation, this contact with the world beyond was considered as real and the dread of the border between the two worlds was so material that it justifies the link with reality of this illustrative tale. This chronological difference could explain the difference between Tatva"s opinion (he is a man in his 40-ies) and the name given either by Auli, who was a very old man when he died, either by even more remote authors. Another possible explanationand these hypotheses may not exclude one anotherthat likelihood is perhaps not the only criterion of wanlh. More modestly, wanlh required perhaps a contact point with reality 36 and had a concrete function of warning or providing the audience with useful information, with convincing explanations even is the intervention of supernatural elements gave more strength to the didactic message. Another text presented as a wanlh confirms this direction: two friends are compelled to spend the night in the taiga. One decides to sleep in a small heightened hut 37 where usually food stocks, working tools and sacral objects are kept. The other sleeps outdoors. In the morning, the first has been reduced to his bones. This wanlh has been told by Yuri Vella"s mother, who is now in her 70s 38 .

As a matter of fact, the shotpjaws of our collection seem to ignore the moralising dimension, which is a basic element in folklore

39

. There are many animal narratives where the fox, often for a good reason, cheats all his companions or tales where the main character obtains what he wants by lying and deceiving. Their function, at least at first sight, seems to be more entertaining than edifying. On the other hand the didactic element seems to be much more present in tales called wanlh by our informants. But this hypothesis requires further research and probably a larger analysed corpus. I am just at the beginning of this work.

35 Kaur Mägi"s personal communication.

36 Linda Dégh observes moth convincingly: ""truth" does not necessarily means that people believe the legends they tell, but rather that legends are about what real people experience within their own topographically delimited territory in the real world. The real world is the referent of the legend" (Dégh 1996: 41). 37 According to Nenets traditions, and because of the eventual presence of sacral objects, only the family whom the hut belongs is allowed to creep there. The prohibition is particularly severe for women. 38 Ateni Kazamkina, 2000 October 5 th . 39 For Bascom this dimension is the third of folklore's functions "In many non literate society the information embodied in folklore is highly regarded in its own right" (Bascom 1965: 293).

Anyhow, even the data available at the moment allow us to precise some basic points. It clearly appears that in our informants" consciousness the notions of true/non true are not in a contradictory relationship. When Ben Amos states that these elements exclude 40 one another, as well as a text can not be at the same time prose and poetry, I can't but disagree with him. At least in Nenets culture, they occupy the extreme positions on an axis whose poles the purest forms represent. There is between them a continuum, permitting, without any sharp rupture, to pass from one to the other. There is a dynamics of difference but not of confrontation that reminds us a fundamental feature of the arctic mentality, which is clearly revealed by religious beliefs: any kind of rigid opposition of contraries is unknown, as well as such values as good and evil as absolute opposites. Evil forces exist, but in Nenets worldview they are not to be fought or eliminated, they are to be neutralised. Thus the Nenets sacrifice to the spirits of diseases in order to protect them, and they do not traditionally fight against wolves, considering that they have also right to eat -if only they do not exaggerate… By analogy, truth and non-truth do not oppose, they complete one another.

Conclusion

This scheme of a continuum between two opposite poles explains also why the Nenets have not felt necessary to create a third hybrid category, either wanlh neither šotpjaws, but something different. the fact is that these two words do not cover closed categories whose aim is to encompass the whole of reality. This is not a scientific classification, but a functional distinction, pertinent in the Forest Nenets' mental logics 41 . This distinction gives both to the performer and to the audience a much free room. There is place left, as required, for the hybrid (Stross 1999: 260), but it is to be found on an axis and not in a special compartment. I am sure, as far as Atpälha is concerned, that Yuri's and Tatva's perception is not the same; both, nevertheless, are conscious that this tale may be submitted to different interpretations and may be accepted by different sensibilities. Nenets tales seem thus to be supplied with excellent tools allowing them to adapt to the evolutions in mentality that have taken place in the last decades by the Forest Nenets as well as by other arctic peoples. The listeners may believe or not the episodes of the narrative, the framework gives them the possibility to dialogue with the performed story without having to make compromises with their own understanding of reality. Unlike the experience reported by Leea

Virtanenaccording to which in Finland, as electricity reduces the fear of ghosts, the 40 "People make the distinction between true and false accounts within the framework of their own cultural knowledge and perception of their world. Within such a framework such a distinction is absolute. Like the differentiation between speech with and without metric structure, there cannot be any intermediate position between truth and falsehood" (Ben-Amos 1992: 25).

41 Again Ben-Amos deserves to be quoted : "Native taxonomy has no external objective. It is a qualitative, subjective system of order. The logical principles that underlie this categorisation of oral tradition are those which are meaningful to the members of the group and can guide them in their personal relationships and ritualistic actions" (Ben-Amos 1982 : 48).

  less and less familiar to people getting used to the "Western" aesthetics transmitted by the media(Ojamaa 2002: 5).b) RiddlesCertainly the riddle (in Nenets kowsu) has resisted better to the fading of traditional culture: although not all the cultural patterns may easily be translated into Russian, it is easier to translate a riddle in a different language and many Nenets riddles are still known in Russian by the younger generation, are part of the children"s games, are performed by adults in family or friend"s evenings. Nenets riddles are deeply connected with the Nenets material culture and its environment: nature and reindeer in the most concrete details are inexhaustible items. A distinctive feature of Nenets riddles is probably the abundant scatological elements: this kind of riddles is not easy to transfer in other languages, where language taboos may respond to different rules 18 . c) Prose narrative genres (shotpyaws and wanlh)

  , new technologies have not lead to the total disappearance of storytelling as a family entertainment. In other regions of the Forest Nenets area, techniques have not penetrated so deeply and therefore influence still less everyday life style. approval or surprise (ta-ta, kay-to), interruptions, questions and comments. Without this kind of interaction, storytelling has no meaning at all. When we recorded most of the stories of our informants" repertoires, our knowledge of Nenets wasn"t sufficient to react properly and satisfactorily. That"s why there was no occurrence of storytelling meant only for recording. All our recordings were therefore made in real communication occurrences, where the

	messages, expressing recipient was represented by other Nenets	20 . We did not only record the pure text of the narrative,
	but only the preparation and the final comments of the narrator as well as the audience"s
	reactions. As a matter of fact, our interest for their language and culture was a very effective
	stimulus for our partners, who lived in an environment where they know the dominant languages
	(Khanty, Russian), without anybody knowing theirs	21 , being most of them integrated in ethnically
	mixed (Khanty-Nenets) families	22
	Before I present the details of narrative genres in Forest Nenets context, it may be
	interesting to precise how our material has been recorded. When a Forest Nenets tells a story	19 ,
	his or her audience is far from passive: the storyteller expects reactions to the delivered

  What is interesting in this tale is that Yuri performs it with a title, probably borrowed to Auli, which is wanlh petyalh. True enough, other Nenets, as Tatva, do not understand this title and consider this to be without any doubt a shotpjaws 35

34

On 2000, October 29 th .

Personal communication by Tapani Salminen (may 2001).

My conversations with Vadim and Taysya Pyak (February 2000), as well as Kaur Mägi"s fieldwork (september-october 2001).

My own fieldwork 2-4/1999My own fieldwork 2-4/ , 9-10/1999, ,

8-10/2000.

The Tundra Nenets form of the same word is hynabc, hync(Pushkaryova 1990 : 82)

I have an example from the Agan region: some elder women (the younger is merely 50, the elder about 70) from the village of Varyogan, where Khanties dominate, have been singing together for some years, performing in local cultural events, until the death, in 1999, of one of them. One of these elder women is my main informant, Yuri Vella"s mother. His son does not approve on her not respecting the traditional performance style, and criticizes the Russian influences he perceives in her mother"s singing. I am sure anyhow, that one of the main motivations of the women has been the wish of being together, speaking their language that the younger do not know any more, and feel stronger to be themselves in a non-Nenets environment.

According to Lehtisalo, the Tundra Nenets call them yabe'ma syo or yabe'ma hync (drunkenness song), or just yabe'mai (drunkenness)(Lehtisalo 1947: 551-591). Although Yuri Vella (from the Agan region) asserts that no such kind of word is known by the Nenets themselves, Kaur Mägi"s fieldwork in Num-to proves that this is the very way the Nenets there use for this kind of song.

This is the criterion adopted by Pushkaryova in order to identify this king of song(Pushkaryova 1990: 82). The explicit existence of an author leads the Nenets folklorist to consider this type as a literary genre and to exclude it from folklore (Idem: 85).

According to my personal observations. This is particularly true for translation into Russian, where the social use of some terms is strictly limited to male society.

This is of course no original feature: "This activity of participation involves both understanding and enjoyment. The audience receptive competence in no ways refers to passivity"(Abrahams 1976: 16)

Strange enough, what must only be considered as a weakness on our side, the ignorance of the language, played here undoubtedly a positive role. Our experience seems to contradict Honko's objection to later trends in folklore research: "We seem to wish to come as close as possible to the informant and the performance, the social interaction, the empirically observable human main and at the same time we want to affect the authentic folklore communication process as minimally as possible by our own presence. This attempt is proved to be rather illusionarynot even the long cherished technique of participant observation (…) will solve the problem" (Honko 1976 : 23). Our presence undoubtedly influenced the process: we gave the Nenets a rare opportunity. But the ignorance of the idiom very soon rejected us out of the frame, and the Nenets found themselves not being disturbed in behaving in a familiar way, internal to their group, which is not often actualised because of other disturbing factors our presence removed. Our presence was marked verbally usually at the end of the narrative, either with jokes about our not understanding the point or with comments wondering what we would do of these unintelligible materials.

This is true for Russian as well as for Eastern Khanty. Languages are set in a clear hierarchy, Russians don"t know any of the local idioms and Khanty knowing their and Russian. If the younger Nenets speak only Russian, the elder ones are able to communicate either in Russians or in Khanty. In the Agan region, the only Khanty who spoke Nenets was an old man called Mihail Sardakov, who died in October 2000, some days after an evening in which he participated in a Nenets story recording event.

Many Nenets are married to Khanty women, and the reverse model also exists. Anyway mixed marriages have very long been a reality: in 1936 G. Verbov remarked clear exogamic relations between Eastern Khanty and Forest Nenets clans(Verbov 1936: 69).

This group includes, besides Forest and Tundra Nenets, also the Enets and the Nganassans.

cf. Kupriyanova 1965.

cf.Tereshchenko 1990.

According to the terminology used in Russia.

Notons que le nenets ne connaît pas de catégorie spécifique de l"adjectif.

Personal communication, in Tartu

29/10/2000.29 We have no records from the Pur region. The collection of new data from that area may possibly modify the present picture, as the Nenets from the Pur are in very close contacts with Tundra Nenets groups.

Tatva Logany (Num-to, 44) and Semyon Ayvaseda (Varyogan, 49).

Vahalyuma Ayvaseda, 29/09/2000.