Unpublished Selkup Stories, as Recorded by A. Dulzon in 1962

The article presents five of the fourteen archival Selkup stories recorded by A. Dulzon in 1962 during an expedition to the village of Novosondrovo, Kolpashevsky district, Tomsk oblast: ‘The soul of man flies to God,’ ‘Sparks fly from the chimney,’ ‘Something is burning in the hut,’ ‘I don’t know where it is burning,’ ‘Nobody has pity on me.’ The field materials are kept in the archive of the Department of Siberian Indigenous Languages at Tomsk State Pedagogical University. A. Dulzon’s informant was Maria Pavlovna Pedogina, a speaker of the Middle Ob dialect of the Selkup language. The stories reflect various aspects of the life of the Selkup ethnic group, as well as mythological notions and ideas about spiritual and material culture. The texts verbalize the oldest fragments of the Selkups’ linguistic worldview, such as the personification of fire and the worship of the earth. The story ‘The Human Soul Flies to God’ represents the Selkups’ beliefs and ideas about the body and the soul. The Selkup culture has a dual interpretation of the origin of life: 1) the origin of life from heaven (spiritual life – the soul), 2) the origin of life from the earth (material life – the body). Heaven is the abode of the deity who gives life by sending out the soul embryo with the rays of the sun, and this soul returns there after the end of earthly life. The stories ‘Sparks fly from the chimney’, ‘Something is burning in the hut,’ and ‘I don’t know where it’s burning’ objectify the personification of fire, describe prohibitions associated with fire, and verbalize the idea of controlled and uncontrolled burning. Fire needs nourishment to stay alive, and the process of burning itself can be seen as a constant fire-fest. The story ‘Nobody has pity on me’ reflects the image of the earth. The earth is personified and endowed with the capacity for compassion and empathy, and it is compared to a mother. The texts have not yet been published and analyzed; linguistic and cultural commentaries accompany them. The main purpose of this article is to publish archived Selkup materials that are of great value to the scholarly community.

A. Dulzon, unpublished texts, stories, Middle Ob dialect, Selkup language, linguocultural commentary