Article

Name: Historical and literary commentary on the short story “Kamlan’e” by A. I. Makarova-Mirskaya

Authors: Natalya A. Nepomnyashchikh

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract:

The paper presents the first examination of the sources of a shamanic ritual storyline in the short story “Kamlan’e” (Shamanic séance/ritual) by A. I. Makarova-Mirskaya published in the collection “Altayskie rasskazy” (Altai stories) in 1912. The writer fictionalizes the ethnographic material and integrates it into the literary plot frame of “a child watching a shaman’s kamlan’e from a hiding place.” The main character is an Altai boy brought to the shaman by his parents. The young boy observes a sacrificial act during his first experience of a shamanic ritual. Horrified by this experience, he runs away, gets lost, and eventually finds refuge with a family of Russian Orthodox settlers. When the parents find the child, he does not want to see the kamas; he wants them to leave Altai. Thus, the story features both psychologism and criticism of shamanic rituals, combined with a detailed ethnographic depiction of the performance. The narration includes a passage in the Altai language: a speech of the shaman during the various stages of the ritual, each commented on and explained. The depiction of the shamanic ceremony aligns with the accounts published in the Tomsk periodical press in 1869 and 1890. The primary sources for all those texts were the notes of V. I. Verbitsky, published in 1893 as a book titled “Altayskie inorodtsy” (Altai aliens). It is worth mentioning that the book, being addressed to children, was intended to be both educational and highly moral.

Keywords: Siberian Indigenous peoples, shaman plots, image of Altai in literature, V. I. Verbitsky, A. I. Makarova-Mirskaya, plots and motifs

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