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...the scarcity of trees, freed people to walk. Particularly in the wintertime. Which connected people physically, communicatively. And mythically. The long nights of winter free people to tell. And to listen.
--Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, "The Sun, the Thunder, the Fires of Heaven."
In the city of the Neva, named after Lenin, yesterday's illiterate children of the taiga and tundra were soon reborn as it were. They did not forget about fire and living trees, but books taught them a new kind of hunting. A page is like snow. Letters are like tracks. Whose tracks? Not an animal's. Thoughts have walked across a page. There are large and small beasts, valuable and worthless animals. All of them leave tracks. But not every track leads to a big catch. It is dangerous and difficult to follow the tracks of a large beast, but there is also an element of pleasure and excitement. And a hunter tracks a large beast with intense strength and passion in order to claim a big catch.
A page is like snow. Letters are like tracks. If thoughts have walked across a page, what were they: great or small, good or evil, transient or eternal?
--Yuri Shestalov, describing his fellow Indigenous Siberian Soviet writers in "A Stride Across A Thousand Years."
Literature in the North
In the Arctic and Subarctic there are universal cultural constants among both Indigenous peoples of the Far North and their histories of colonization and development. It is my contention that northern literature takes its elements from the northern landscape and, thus, is characterized by universal features implicit in such cold margins. Northern literature, from both the ethnographic record and from contemporary, authored, imaginative literature, will reveal universal features that warrant a definition of northern literature as a genre. An examination of literatures from Siberia to Sapmi to Nunavut and beyond may prove valuable in developing a sustainable cultural resource for the Circumpolar North. The work of Sami poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa provides particularly compelling materials for an examination of circumpolar themes in northern literature.
I start from a premise that literature of the North may be characterized by survival and by stark contrast: light and dark; heat and cold; beauty and severity. Nature is not merely a setting, but also an actor. For instance, VeliPekka Lehtola, a Sami historian, maintains that Laplander literature of the 1920s and 1930s is essentially a regional literature, written in situ, its aesthetic constructs deriving, however, from neo-Romantic models. He emphasizes the role of the Lapland landscape in shaping worldviews and vice versa:
Nature and landscape are the basic motifs in settler literature of the kind represented in the case of Lapland, which leads [Lapland author] Erno Paasilinna to describe his overall impression in the following terms: "The main character in the literature of Lapland is always the landscape, nature, the environment. The principal actor is seldom a human being. He is merely a facade, an element of nature, a bystander or a victim." This does not mean, however, that we are dealing with pure descriptions of nature, on the contrary. The concept of nature carries a strong implication that this description represents the author's outlook on the world and the universe. It is a matter of the author's relation to the landscape, a human perception of nature. The landscapes ... are frequently inward-looking; they are mental landscapes, maps of a state of mind. (299-300)
Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, the Sami poet, has certainly considered issues of northernness in his thoughts...
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