Article

Name: Plots about Dreams in Khanty, Mansi and Evenki Writers’ Works

Authors: Natalya A. Nepomnyashchikh

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

In the section Literary Life of the Plot

Abstract:

The subject of this research is plots about dreams in the works of Siberian Indigenous authors: the Evenki writers A. Nemtushkin and G. Ketuke, the Khanty writers E. Aipin and T. Moldovanova, and the Mansi writers P. Cheimetov, O. Koshmanova. Oneiric motifs and situations in the books of these authors can be divided into several groups depending on their functions and semantics. All of them are related to the respective Indigenous people’s cultures as well as to the Russian and the world literature traditions. Results: Based on the semantics and functions of dreams in the works of the authors mentioned above, the literary oneiric motifs can be divided into three groups: 1) dreams as means of communication to otherworldly powers or messengers: a representative of the other worlds appears in a dream in order to pass a message, 2) dreams as journeys to other worlds, 3) dreams as prophecies of misfortune for an individual or a whole nation. The dreams of the third group can include the motifs of the two other groups. However, they are different in the form in which a warning is conveyed to a dreamer: it’s more often communicated directly through images without words, and there is no need for a messenger or a journey to other worlds. The dreams of the third group are more common in the mentioned aouthors’ works: they either predict misfortune to a person or to a whole nation/population. Authors endow their characters with dreams that require interpretation from other characters and readers alike as well as use the dreams a way to express their views on what’s happening both in their texts and in the “beyond-text” reality, which is usually perceived by authors as crisis of their traditional culture and society. The popularity of the dreams of the third group is due to this perception: the writers set themselves the goal of preserving their cultures by means of traditional motifs and images and use the dreams as allegorical warnings for readers.

Keywords: plots about dreams, oneiric motifs, prophetic dreams, Evenki literature, Khanty literature, Mansi literature

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