Article

Name: The “missing” trees in the arboreal image of Siberia: birch and palm

Authors: Tatiana A. Bogumil

Altai State Pedagogical University, Barnaul, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract:

The purpose of this work is to characterize the arboreal aspect of the literary image of Siberia and Altai. The tree image of Siberia is viewed through the phrase of Vsevolod Ivanov opening his story “Glinyanaya shuba” (Clay Coat), 1921: “Pal’ma v Sibiri ne voditsya, – est’ topol’, kedr, listvennitsa…” (There are no palm trees in Siberia, there are poplar, cedar, larch...). The emphasis is on the “missing” species: palm and birch. Geopoetic, ethnodendrological, and inter-textual approaches allowed identifying the geo-cultural contexts and subtexts of the tree images. The research analyzes the scientific works on ethnography and folklore studies and Russian fiction of the 19th–20th centuries about Siberia. Underlying Ivanov’s phrase is a poem by Heine/Lermontov and the positivist analogy between social strata and the vegetation of natural zones. The palm tree (and its equivalent, the garden) is a tree image participating in the basic semantic oppositions of the Siberian text: “North – South,” “Wildness – Culture,” “Reality – Dream,” “Old – New (utopian) society.” Given the widespread of birch in the area and its sacred function in the beliefs of the indigenous Siberian peoples, the fact that Ivanov does not mention it is not without significance. The semantization of birch as a “Russian” tree reveals the underlying confrontation between Siberia and Central Russia, exacerbated at different stages of history. Including the birch in the artistic world picture of Siberia, for example, in the works of V. Shukshin, eliminates the conflict and brings the country into a single whole.

Keywords: Siberian text, the image of Siberia, image of a tree, Altai, V. Zazubrin, V. Shukshin

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