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Semantics of National Space and the Problem of Ethnic Self-Identification in Anna Nerkaga’s story “Aniko of the Nogo family”

A.I. Smirnova
$2.50

UDC 821.511

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.6-20.300    

 

Smirnova Alfia I.,

Doctor of Philology, Professor,

Head of the Russian Literature Department

Moscow City Pedagogical University

 e-mail: alfia-smirnova@yandex.ru

 

Based on the analysis of the prose of the Russian-speaking Nenets writer Anna Nerkaga, the article implements a methodological approach that involves identifying specific tools of modeling national identity. In the analyzed story “Aniko of the Nogo family”, the semantics of space is defined by isolation (tundra, mountains, camp, plague, sacred place, cemetery) and clear separation from the rest of the world, and time is measured in “moon”. Heroes live inside this world, mythologize it, endow animals with anthropomorphic properties. Self-identification of the characters is due to the dichotomy of “own” and “alien” (without hostility to the “other”): “own” in the text — “tundra, camp people”, “aliens” — strangers, who violate the eternal order of life. The text captures typical feature of the ontological perception of the world by the Nenets: for the heroes of the story, the border between the living and the dead is conditional, the same is the transition from one space (the camp of people) to another (the camp of ancestors). The identity of the character of the story, Aniko, is associated with the development of the national space and patriarchal ancestral traditions (belonging to the genus Nogo, fixed in the title of the work), which are revealed in the text in the system of cultural codes: funeral rites, pagan beliefs in Idols, customs, manners, plague, national food, clothes (malitsa, kisy, yagushka), everyday realities. Bilingualism becomes a specific tool of modeling national identity in the work of a Russian-speaking author, marking the style of the story (interspersed in the Russian-language text of foreign lexicon — names of clothing, food, household items; anthroponyms, zoonyms, toponyms, etc.) and providing aesthetic unity. 

Keywords: Nenets writer, national space, self-identification, “own”, “alien”, cultural code, bilingualism.

 

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