Mäetagused (Aug 2009)
Määratledes ennast suulises esituses. Äänisvepsa naise itk oma mehe haual
Abstract
In July 2005, while conducting fieldwork in Russian Karelia, we found ourselves in an abandoned forest village of Yashozero where we encountered the last native inhabitant of this place – an almost 80 years old Veps woman Maria.This article focuses on a performance which took place at noon on 11 July 2005 at the lake-side cemetery. Maria lamented to her husband in Russian.The performed text is rich in archaic words and concepts common to the so-called epical laments of northern Russia. At the same time the text contains a lot of personal and biographical information. Maria’s viewpoint is shifting between this world and the other, between collective values and her personal miseries. The lament is more a one-sided dialogue than a monologue.It is possible to point out three different features in the lament as a performance. (1) Lament is addressed to the person residing in the grave. At the same time the lamenter defines oneself as a person on the edge – her senses are extremely responsive to the perspective beyond the grave as well as (2) to personal life and the problems linked to it. The transitions can be quite labile and their compositional background seemed to be based on individual preferences. (3) The third perspective of a lament is the sense of surroundings derived from the real situation or, more accurately, from other people currently at the cemetery.The text of the lament examined in the article is relatively unstable as the performancesituation was occasional rather than closely following the ritual order. On the one hand, different orientations, changes in the state of mind and topic are traditionally interwoven. Primordial fear of the dead, psychological problems and possibly also a new personal inclination towards the deceased vary all the time and are expressed in the composition and poetic language of the lament text. But instead of the historical naturalistic, wild and desolate Karelia, Maria’s lament narrates about a traditional society gnarled in the Soviet cataclysm of the 20th century. In this complicated era of many social changes, oral genres act as bridges: they preserve the old while changing and adapting themselves to the new situation. Burial lament links the person, the world(s) and the mental culture in an existentially dramatic situation, where there is little left of what is art or entertainment.
