Yuri Rytkheu, Narrative Time, and the Afterlife of Second World Literature

Abstract

Amid recent interest in postcolonial approaches to Second World literature, Yuri Rytkheu, the so-called father of Chukchi literature, cuts an ambiguous figure. Once an esteemed representative of multinational Soviet literature and a participant in Second and Third World cultural exchange, Rytkheu nearly disappeared with the collapse of state socialism, transforming into a strictly regional author. He was rediscovered in translation in the early twenty-first century as world literature. Today Rytkheu is largely read as a contradictory exemplar of an “alternative” modernity, variously taken to task for his socialist realism and decision to write in Russian, not Chukchi, or otherwise celebrated as providing access to an authentic national essence. This essay takes a different tack. It recovers a dialectic narrative time in Rytkheu’s prose that makes available an understanding of modernity as one, unequal, and multitemporal. The essay focuses on his final novel, The Chukchi Bible (Poslednii shaman, 2004), in which modernity emerges neither as a stage of development nor as a spatial category; modernity in Rytkheu’s prose is instead a dynamic process—a temporalization of history—that renders older forms of life archaic. Resisting ethnographic readings, Rytkheu works through the particular to offer a critical universalism that attends to the ways that modernization produces, rather than erases, difference.