The concept of «culture» in the scientific biographies of the repressed scientist G. V. Ksenofontov during the Soviet nation-building period

Romanova Ekaterina Nazarovna ORCID: 0000-0001-6973-0608 Doctor of History Professor, Chief Researcher of the Department of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North, Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch - Federal Research Centre «The Yakut Scientific Centre of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences». 677027, Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Yakutsk, Petrovsky str., 1, office 305 e_romanova@mail.ru

Pokatilova Nadezhda Volodarovna ORCID: 0000-0002-2869-1400 Doctor of Philology Professor, Chief Researcher of the Department of Folklore and Literature of the Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North, Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch - Federal Research Centre «The Yakut Scientific Centre of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 677027, Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Yakutsk, Petrovsky str., 1 pnv_ysu@mail.ru

The intellectual history of the Siberian province is part of the fundamental project of the new cultural and intellectual history of Russia. Today, the study of the biography and interpretation of the "author's" texts of scientific and creative activity of the founders-intellectuals of national regions is becoming a general methodological space for research in the field of the landscape of "ideas and actions" ^{[6, pp. 29-37; 13, pp.87-90; 17, pp. 12-22; 18, pp. 101-108]}.

The characteristic of G. V. Ksenofontov's scientific creativity within the framework of biographical hermeneutics allowed to reveal the semantic integrity of his scientific "worldview" based on the intellectual traditions of Russian orientalists. Analysis of archival materials of Irkutsk University in the 1920s showed that the folding of the original "author's style" in the works of G. V. Ksenofontov is associated with the "Irkutsk" period, where he studied at the courses of Orientalists of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Irkutsk University ^{[19, p. 78]}. For the first time, the programs and lecture courses of the Oriental Studies department were studied in detail, intellectual communications with Irkutsk orientalists were revealed (B.E. Petri – archaeologist, head of Oriental languages courses, Ts. Zh. Zhamtsarano – one of the founders of the Mongol and Buryat statehood, head of the Mongolian Cabinet, G. Tsybikov). The rich manuscript heritage of the ethnographer G. V. Ksenofontov was studied in the context of cross-cultural and comparative characteristics, where the researcher's optics were aimed at developing theoretical aspects of world and local culture. Understanding the ethnogenesis and cultural genesis of the Sakha people in the context of the global history of Central Asia demonstrates the broad research perspective of the scientist who inscribed the history of the Yakuts into the orbit of the Eurasian world."...Materials on the ancient culture of the Yakuts are a completely new and rather rich category of scientific sources on orientalism in general, which in the future will undoubtedly play a very important role in the study of the cultural history of all pastoral peoples of Central Eurasia. Their exceptional value is due to the fact that the Yakuts did not get into the strongest whirlpool of historical events that accompanied the formation of the empire of Genghis Khan. During this epoch, the original pastoral culture of the steppe peoples of Turkish origin, which had been developing for many thousands of years inside the Mongolian steppes in the process of constant interaction with the settled Chinese civilization, was almost completely destroyed" ^{[19, p. 95]}. These views of the scientist were reflected in his works "Uraanghai-sakhalar" (1937) and "Elleiada" (1977) ^{[10; 11]}. Written in line with historical memory, they actualized the cultural metaphors of the South (the existential code, the mental program). Thus, according to the scientist, the pastoral saga of the northern horsemen preserved to a greater extent the remnants of the ancient nomads than all other Turks and Mongols who were influenced by Muslim or Buddhist culture and religion. Ksenofontov's scientific ideas find much in common with G. V. Vernadsky's concept, where the main place is occupied by the thesis about the determining influence of the geographical environment on the historical development of human societies living in it. G. V. Ksenofontov in his research comes to the important conclusion that history is driven by "scenarios" of conquest, migration, mixing of peoples and cultures.

A holistic analysis of G. V. Ksenofontov's unpublished materials makes it possible to identify the Eurasian context of his scientific heritage and the clearly expressed postcolonial orientation of scientific discourse in his later studies ^{[9; 1; 3]}.

For the first time, the scientist made an attempt to refute the established Eurocentric views when describing the Siberian peoples in pre-revolutionary historiography and to actualize the cultural heritage of nomadic peoples within the framework of a civilizational dialogue. The scientific heritage of the scientist, considered in line with the Eurasian movement in the domestic ethnographic science of the 1920s-1930s, allows us to trace the formation of his author's concept of steppe nomadic culture, the central place in which is occupied by the historical understanding of the world history of nomadic peoples, where the nomad culture is assigned the role of the "locomotive" of the development of human civilization ^{[20, pp.21-22]}.

The central concept of the scientific picture of the world of G.V. Ksenofontov is the concept of "culture", manifested by him in its various manifestations. The handwritten heritage of G. V. Ksenofontov, in addition to its ethnological and culturological significance, can also be analyzed in the aspect of philological issues, which became especially relevant for him in the 1930s, including for his concept of "steppe culture of Eurasia". As a starting point, we should consider the attitude to the "oral tradition" ("oral culture", according to Ksenofontov), the most relevant during the periods of paradigm shift, which appears to be scrapped between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s of the twentieth century in Yakut literature and culture in general. The concept of "oral culture" by G. V. Ksenofontov, as a special type of "culture of the unwritten people", initially included the idea of a certain integrity of a special "oral" order, as a key mechanism of transmission and preservation, based on the memory of its bearers. In the field studies of the 1920s of the shamanic tradition preserved in the "northern" regions of Yakutia, G. V. Ksenofontov has already postulated the mythological integrity of oral culture. In this regard, the search by the Yakut scientist for its, of course, complex mechanisms of functioning is to some extent akin to the typological searches of M. Parry and A. Lord in the field of a special, "formulaic" language of "oral tradition" ^{[12, pp. 42-83]}. 

The concept of "oral culture" by G. V. Ksenofontov was developed in his subsequent studies of the 1930s in a broad interdisciplinary and culturological context. Here it already covers a wide and multidimensional complex of ideas about the traditional culture of different peoples, about the preservation of the "ancient steppe culture" by the Yakut ethnos in "northern" conditions, as evidenced at the same time not only by the facts of the ethnogenesis of the Sakha people, but also by the areal localization of the epic genre of Olonkho and narrative genres, first of all (the cycle of legends about Ellyai and Omogoi) on the "northern" periphery of Yakutia and in the Northeast of Siberia as a whole. Of particular interest here is not so much a significant expansion of the factual material, as the depth of the scientist's thoughts and typological parallels about the changeability of the "unwritten" and "written" periods of civilization; about the syncretic unity of shamanic and poetic traditions (and "practices", including), their common origins in traditional culture; about the global opposition of the "oral"and "written" traditions, about the peculiarities of the emerging written (in the broad sense) culture in Yakut literature; about the relationship of traditional literature with modern "poetry", in a broad sense as literature in general (and Yakut and Russian).

Attention is drawn to the scientist's openness to modern problems, which at this stage acquires a typological orientation and a well-defined methodological meaning. In this regard, G. V. Ksenofontov's analysis of iconic texts of two different traditions is indicative: "The Bronze Horseman" by A. S. Pushkin and "The Red Shaman" by P. A. Oyunsky ^{[14, pp. 101-106]}. The first of them is devoted to his special work "On the question of the symbols of the "Bronze Horseman" by A.S. Pushkin" the second work is presented in his manuscripts by a brilliant analysis of mythological semantics and the poetic form of its expression in the national tradition ^[4]. The scientist's reflections on this work quite naturally move into the field of the fundamental differentiation of "mythological material" and the possibilities of its "poetic" implementation, what we would now call the ratio of "text" and "denotation". However, it is striking that the requirement of "aestheticism" remains common in both cases, which is characteristic primarily for the poet, but also important for the scientist in his comprehension of the essence of the studied laws ^{[2, L. 47-48]}. It should be noted that the works analyzed in detail by the "ethnographer" Ksenofontov were carefully selected according to the principle of poetic significance, which determines their symbolic essence. In parallel with the development of the problems of ethnogenesis, in fact, in the margins of the draft manuscript on the Elleiade, G. V. Ksenofontov writes the mentioned work on the "Bronze Horseman" by A. S. Pushkin." The very idea of the symbolic text of the tradition is developed by the scientist not only on the "native" material (the "Hellian myth"), but also on typologically similar, but fundamentally "different", foreign-language material and, by methods of another humanitarian discipline.

One of the forms of expression of aesthetic (hidden "aestheticism") in cultural texts is poetic functionality, while for G. V. Ksenofontov the nature of this text (whether it is a mythological, folklore or literary text) is irrelevant, the poetic perfection of the form becomes decisive in it, distinguishing it as a text of the cultural tradition of a certain territory, in its indispensable geographical and historical localization (Homer's Iliad in the "Mediterranean culture", the oral heroic epic in the "steppe culture of Eurasia", etc.).

The reconstructive focus of the researcher on the issues of ethnogenesis and a broad understanding of the "steppe culture of Eurasia" should be designated as a movement towards the search for appropriate forms of expression of non-discrete, in essence, development. Based on the material of the scientist's "late" records, it is quite possible to suggest that for a Yakut scientist, the consistency of any order is determined by the presence of a deep structure in the subject of research itself ^{[7, p. 21; 8, p. 321-322]}. His numerous records of this time indicate that he moves from the issues of scientific description of a particular cultural tradition to the formulation of typological problems: the disclosure of the laws of cultural development by identifying the forms of its expression.

Such an understanding of the text of culture and the poetic principle in it can go back to the Eurasian ideas about the "language union" and especially about the "union of language families", which has a territorial conditionality, in the works of N.S. Trubetskoy ^{[21, pp. 494, 500-501, 503, 512]}, as well as to the "poetic functionality" in in the early works of E. D. Polivanov and to the "poetic function" in the later works of R. O. Jacobson ^{[15, pp. 96-118; 16, pp. 295-305; 22, pp. 234, 252]}. We have no evidence of the Yakut scientist's acquaintance with the works of the Eurasians, but their ideas and the works of the Prague Linguistic Circle could have been known through the mediation of the works of the national linguistics. At least, in the work of G. V. Ksenofontov on the "Bronze Horseman" and in a number of his sketches on the metric of verse, which includes typological parallels between Slavic (Russian) and Turkic (Yakut) verse, there are references to the poetic works of B. V. Tomashevsky. In all likelihood, it is not by chance and not without the influence of contemporary Opoyazov works in the records of G. V. Ksenofontov in recent years, a philologically (including verse studies) justified emphasis on prosodic patterns of verse appears, when the specifics of Yakut (and wider – Turkic) verse is associated not with stress and unstressed, but with the "primary vowel length", the absence of rhyme in the traditional verse as such, compensated by the consonances of a fundamentally different etiology (alliteration, assonances and other techniques of sound "poetic technique"), which, by the way, goes back to the works of another "opoyazov", and then "Prague", a representative of the Prague linguistic circle of the turn of the 1920s-1930s – linguist – orientalist E. D. Polivanov, whose works and scientific ideas, in turn, had a significant impact on the Yakut linguist S. A. Novgorodov and his development of mass Yakut writing.  

In the same context, the "old" polemic of G. V. Ksenofontov with E. K. Pekarsky, the author of the dictionary of the Yakut language and a series of publications of "samples" of Yakut folk literature, about the publication of monuments of the epic tradition of Olonkho, appears completely differently. The scientist returns to it once again in one of the seemingly private moments, such as the opposition of "verse" and "prose" when publishing monuments of the epic tradition, and, as it turns out in a particular case, in order to publish both the Yakut and Buryat epics. In the polemic with E. K. Pekarsky, the researcher, objecting to the continuous "prosaic" publication of the epic, emphasizes his understanding of poetic (usually sung) speech, developed as a result of the centuries-old development of oral literature and representing the accumulation of rhythmic repetitions, deep symmetry underlying the oral tradition. It is this verse ("metric", according to B. V. Tomashevsky and E. D. Polivanov) form of performance that is basically, according to his ideas, an indicator of the poetic perfection of an oral text. The main argument of G. V. Ksenofontov in favor of the unexplored poetic specifics of the epic is a reference to the fact that the study of this problem "lags behind the general, brilliant level of scientific Yakutology." Bearing in mind the long linguistic tradition of studying the Yakut language, starting from the works of the Sanskritologist O. N. Betlingka, on whose works more than one generation of linguists, including Yakut ones, grew up (at that time they were S. A. Novgorodov and G. V. Baishev) ^{[5, L. 212-214 vol.]}.

The presence of a philological component in the handwritten heritage of G. V. Ksenofontov indicates that it, in turn, is connected to his holistic conceptuality of the typological plan. The designated layer of scientific problems should be considered as one of the options for categorizing the concept of "culture" at this stage, and its understanding of "oral culture" as one of the possible ways of interdisciplinary measurement of humanities in its movement to create a "typology of cultures".

The general picture of intellectual searches of this time would be incomplete without the defining leadership influence of G. V. Ksenofontov as a scientist. It was his ideas about "culture" (in a broad sense) and language as a "language of culture" that had a very strong influence, first of all, on P. A. Oyunsky and his followers in creating an organizational system of field and scientific research in the North-East of Russia. Traces of this influence are found in the concept created in 1934-1935. The Institute of Language and Culture under the Council of People's Commissars of the YASSR, and even in the literary works of P.A. Oyunsky of this period, when in a number of his texts that appeared in the context of the writer's general turn from poetry to prose in the 1930s, a different, expansive interpretation of "culture" as a special, civilizational mechanism of integration into the world literary process is outlined and/or world culture. Thus, in the scientific developments of G. V. Ksenofontov in the 1930s, the breadth of the researcher's coverage of various categories of "culture" appears: from the concept of the type of culture ("steppe culture", "Mediterranean culture", etc.) to the concept of creating an "Institute of Language and Culture". The principles of categorization at the same time extend to the existential component of the scientific concept, and to the practical application of the results of scientific research in the linguistic and cultural construction of the 1930s.

At the early stage of its formation (1934-1935), it was the ideas of the encyclopedic scientist G. V. Ksenofontov that influenced the concept of the Institute of Language and Culture, which determined the direction of its research and expedition work, the personnel of the first employees of the Institute under the leadership of the organizing director P. A. Oyunsky. Research shows that under the influence of the concept of "oral culture" by G. V. Ksenofontov, as a certain and specific integrity that requires a special integrated approach to tradition, the ideas of the participants of the first expedition project (Vilyuisk expedition) are formed Institute of Language and Culture – A. A. Savvina and S. I. Bolo.  

One of the aspects of G. V. Ksenofontov's influence on the intellectual tradition of his followers is not only the "practice" that was formed during these years, but also a kind of "theory" of folklore gathering, the presence, as a rule, of theoretical aspects in the practice of field research, which was reflected in the results of the first Vilyu expedition and was continued during the second The Northern expedition of A. A. Savvin and S. I. Bolo in the "northern" regions of the republic. The results of the first expedition in 1938 exceeded all expectations in the sense that for the first time in the collection of collected artifacts, confirmation of G. V. Ksenofontov's hypothetical assumptions about the holistic picture of the mythological and genre development in a separate geocultural locus was obtained on folklore material. The synchronous cross-section of the "Vilyuisk" tradition, carried out by A. A. Savvin, made it possible to identify those processes of conservation of the "all-Yakut" plot-motive fund (in legends, epics and small genres) in the conditions of the Vilyuisk region and in the closed local space of individual epic foci, which were predicted by G. V. Ksenofontov in the 1920s. The folklore materials of A. A. Savvin and S. I. Bolo not only confirm in principle the assumptions of his outstanding predecessor, but also turn out to be involved, as modern analysis shows, in the very logic of conservation and changes in traditional culture as a whole.

Conclusion. G. V. Ksenofontov in his typological understanding of culture appears as a researcher of a broad, culturological plan, an encyclopedic scientist who discovered new ways in the formation of the interdisciplinary discourse of modern humanities back in the 1930s. The scientist sets a new vector of research on nomadism: steppe culture is the successor of an ancient civilization that once flourished on the territory of the countries of the Far East and Northern China with the Mongol-Manchurian steppes. He identifies the following cultural parameters of the historical past:

-        The General Cultural Fund of the Nomadic Peoples of Eurasia

-        Dialogue of cultures

-        Monuments-texts of past eras

A systematic analysis of the scientist's research works revealed the commonality of scientific topics and the proximity of ideas: ethnogenesis, folklore, culture, shamanism of the Yakut people, actualization of historical memory, the idea of the existence of an ancient southern ancestral homeland among the Yakuts. In this regard, the role of G. V. Ksenofontov in the creation of a joint intellectual project on the organization of the Institute of Language and Culture as an important mechanism for the preservation, reproduction and reproduction of national identity is determined.

In the biographical narrative of G. V. Ksenofontov, in addition to the previous stages known for his scientific activity: the Tomsk period ("regional"), Irkutsk ("scientific" or "field"), Yakut ("autonomist"), the last period in his activity should be highlighted: intellectual and project ("Eurasian").