Face to Face with Everybody: Fictional World of the Forest Nenets Yuri Vella

• Main Author: Alexey A. Arzamazov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2020-09-01
• Series: Studia Litterarum
• Subjects: national literature; literary traditions of the peoples of the far north; figurative symbolism; genre system; artistic multilingualism; ecology; urban plots.
• Online Access: http://studlit.ru/images/2020-5-3/Arzamazov.pdf

Creative work of the Nenets poet Yuri Vella occupies a special place in the literary community of the peoples of Russia. On the one hand, it fits into the main paradigms of the development of national literatures at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries (rapid increase of the dominance of the Russian language in the ethnohumanitarian environment; urbanistic motivic and figurative cluster; the relevance of the environmental topics; representative value of social narratives; a high level of ethnographic writing, etc.). On the other hand, Vella’s poems highlight one of the possible trajectories of the poetic traditions of the peoples of Russia in the near future (increased significance of the free verse; increased attention to ethnolinguistic “ornamentation” of texts; expansion of the visual component in the structure of the book; coexistence of different languages under one cover). The life and poetry of Yuri Vella confirm that the most important catalyst for the development of national literature is the author’s own active and creative personality. At the same time, the study of Yuri Vella’s work has interest in the context of broader studies of the national literature of the peoples of the Far North and its current state.