Vilmos
Diószegi
Siberian Diaries and Letters 1957 - 1958
Excerpts
1957, Leningrad
15 July
The days pass monotonously. I am doggedly and systematically looking through
the material of the three museums here which have Siberian collections. It
is now the turn for the Gosudarstvennyi Muzei Etnografii; it has 30,000 Siberian
artifacts. I am copying the inventory of the collection from 9 o'clock in
the morning till 6 in the evening in one sitting (I don't take a lunch break
so as not to fritter away any time [which is why I eat before 9 and after
6 o'clock, which has also paid off in terms of saving money]), writing out
the items - the whole kit and caboodle - that pertain to shaman artifacts. I must
confess that even for me it is a huge strain. By the evening I cannot straighten
my fingers, and when I go out into the air (after the day's work is done)
I literally stagger. It's all the more difficult that I am working in the
store room, so smoking is out.
22 July
I've cracked up; I just cannot break the back of the job, even though I've
been slogging my guts out. It got to the point where I was simply shuttling
between the different Institutes. In the morning I would go to the one that
opened up earliest, then in the afternoon would transfer quarters to the one
that started and so closed the latest. I did not go off to lunch at midday
either, but even so I cannot get through everything that should (or could)
be done. I suppose roughly a year would be needed to do that. I have now abandoned
the idea of picking up everything; I shall take home only what I am able to
acquire at my own chosen speed (and pushing that too a bit, don't you worry!).
Yet even that is going to be an incredible body of material. Today I was at
the library of the Inst. Etn. Ak. Nauk [Ethnographic Institute of the Academy
of Sciences] to check through the books that have been selected for me: they
are to be microfilmed. It took my breath away - two tables full of stuff. What
I suspected has indeed proved to be the case. The literature on shamanism
is not huge, but scattered; it is hard to assess not because of its immensity
but because the brief 2- and 3-page reports are simply impossible to lay one's
hands on. And now those 1,000 little scraps of information are sitting here,
on my desk...
Confounded bad luck: the Siberian Studies people and curators in all the museums
take off on summer holidays from 1 Aug., which means the collections will
be closed to me. I have carried on copying the catalogues, of course, but
I shall no longer be able to dig around amongst the artifacts themselves as
I was up till now. Is that any cause for lament when I shall be taking back
home with me a description of every shaman artifact that is in Leningrad (in
all three museums). That will come to several thousand! I am assured that
they are going to systematically photograph the things and send those on to
me in Budapest.
I console myself with the thought that this isn't a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,
and I'll come to Leningrad at other times. That is not just a pipe dream.
L. P. Potapov, director of the Academy's Ethnographic Institute, has stated
that I ought to come here for a year, and as he is an academician, his word
carries some weight. It means that I shall then be able to photograph everything.
I delivered my first lecture on Friday. Just imagine, reading a paper in Russian,
as far as one can without stammering and taking care to put the stresses in
the right places. Then understanding the questions (making out the Leningrad,
Muscovite and those good old Siberian dialects) and being able instantly to
formulate answers in my own head (to ensure that they are comprehensible,
well considered and adequate) before uttering them out loud in elegant Russian.
A nice test, wouldn't you say! Words can't describe how great a success I
was. Today, with the aid of a female colleague, I was able to calmly look
through a transcript (an officially stamped copy will eventually be sent to
the Museum as well) and see that I went down well.
One more outcome that wasn't envisaged: I have tracked down, and already copied
from the inventory registers, the shaman songs that are on phonograph cylinders.
In the last few days they have made a start on playing them to record them
on tape, which I shall also be taking home. Over 150 cylinders, from the Voguls
to the Chukchi. Have you any idea what a gold mine this is! - To say nothing
of what it would be worth if my plan works out. Once I have them on tape,
I intend to take the whole lot to the Institute of Northern Peoples and get
the students there to transcribe and translate the texts. If it comes off,
then that in itself is a book's worth - no body of material of its like has
yet been published in the field of shaman studies. - Barely 8 - 10 scattered shaman
songs have been published hitherto, and even those without the tunes, of course.
I am also collecting manuscripts. I am searching high and low for a manuscript
that is recorded in the Tungus language, but the collector [I. S. Suslov?]
did not translate it. His wife was a Tunguz, so he had the opportunity to
take down as many shaman songs as the shamans in his district knew. I would
like to have all of them microfilmed.
I am also systematically going through the photograph archives. Here, too,
I shall only be able to accomplish in full the plan that I hatched back at
home, which is to copy the catalogue entries. Then I shall have a handle on
the entire stock of photographic material - unfortunately, only a description.
Since I have been in Leningrad I have already envisaged getting a copy made
of every negative, but that can't be done right now for financial reasons...
4 August
You know I spend a lot of time mulling over opportunities in the field of
Siberian research, the tasks that need to be tackled. I have now built up
for myself a picture, however dim and patchy it may be, of the materials (artifacts,
photographs, manuscripts, etc.) that are here and the researchers. Here too,
though, the picture is deceptive. I now know for certain that the literature
on shamanism is not huge, merely scattered. And, sad to say, third- (if not
fourth-) rate! To give just one example: amongst the roughly 1,200 bibliographical
references that I have, only 2 articles are concerned with the 'Yenisei Ostyaks'
= Kets, or, another example, Tunguz shaman beliefs are the most thoroughly
researched:
21 articles on them. Can you guess how many pages that amounts to in total?
134. That, I think you'll agree, is no more than a slim book, even if you
were to bang it out in one go. And I am speaking only about the quantity here;
it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the quality is even more mediocre!
Descriptions from missionaries, travellers and exiles to Siberia that were
superficial even a long time ago. These days, no trained ethnographer is studying
shamanism amongst either the Ket or the Tungus. So much, off the top of my
head, for the "inconceivably vast" literature, as one Swedish shaman scholar
(Ohlmarks) would have it.
What about the artifacts? - You are right: there is a huge body of material.
But it's like our own Documentation Dept. Do you remember how I was moaning
on about incantations before I came away? Then I set down to writing out (and
having typed up) the entire material in Documentation, along with all the
relevant collections in Ethn. II. I can tell you, there are no more than 5 - 10
specimens of any given type. When I am copying the inventory entries I get
a sense of being crushed by the sheer quantity. That is literally how it is,
since I must copy several hundred (if not thousand) entries. But when I get
down to sorting them out, it turns out that any given people, or given group
of artifacts, is represented pitifully, if at all. There is not one Ostyak
or Vogul shaman costume, for instance. How, in that case, can any comparison
be made? How can one prepare a page on shaman costumes for an 'atlas of Siberia'?
Yet that is what they are doing; indeed, it has already been done. Then here
we have e.g. the question of shaman songs. I'll stake my life that 10 songs
with notated melodies have not been published from the whole of Siberia. So
those amount to nothing. I have now completed work in the Phonographic Archive,
so I know there are 190 - 200 of them. Impressive, huh? Whilst I was playing
them onto the tape-recorder, from dawn to dusk, I had the feeling it would
never end. No problem if they have not been published before, I thought to
myself, here we have an unknown haul. That's all well and good, but I have
now sorted through them, and do you know what? There are two Yakut shaman
songs - in principle, that is. Because when I dug out the only Yakut-speaker
in Leningrad it turned out that one of the 'Yakut' songs is something else
(possibly Tungus, I shall have to ascertain that at some point in the future).
Then there are 2 which are Vogul! And 3 Ostyak - again in principle, as in practice
there might as well be none at all because the cylinders are so awful (they
were collected by W. Steinitz) that no voice can be made out. - You may recall
that there are 5 major Samoyed ethnic groups. Well, of those only two - the
Nenets and Selkup - are represented here, by 3 and 2 cylinders. So much, then,
for 'Uralic' (= Finno-Ugrian + Samoyedic) shaman songs. Try comparing those!
Of course, there is a lot from other peoples, but it is primarily the Finno-Ugrian
and Samoyedic that are of interest to us...
Yet there is nothing (in reserve). Leningrad therefore drops out of the game.
Moscow did not figure from the outset as there is no shaman specialist there.
If I take stock of where any attention is given to shamanism, the picture
is far from rosy, to be sure. There is no one in Helsinki; the Scandinavians
look no further than the Lapps [Sami]; Berlin runs to no more than Steinitz,
and he is more a linguist at that; in Paris, Eliade is at a far remove from
the Siberian material; Switzerland comes into the reckoning with Schröder
alone, but he works only with the Mongolians; Mongolia itself is still weak
(Rinchen is on his own, and he is only collecting); Japan is a blank; the
Turks have only that Bashkir (his name escapes me) and Köprülü Mehmed Fuad,
with the former untrained whilst the latter has opted for politics; the Estonians,
who have pitched in to Siberian studis substantially, are no more interested
in shamanism now than they were before. I could carry on the list for minutes
on end.
It may sound a boast if I say that that leaves Budapest, since there was at
least a tradition of research into shamanism there (cf. the work of Aladár
Bán, János Jankó, Bernát Munkácsi, Sándor Solymossy). But who is there now?
The only person who is attempting to examine the ethnography of Siberia - and
it is perhaps not a boast to say so - is me. So, it's down to me to represent
Hungary... up till now I was under the apprehension that the cause of shamanism
here, in the Soviet Union, was in strong (and, above all, many) hands, and
I thought it would do if I were merely to examine the matter from a Hungarian
viewpoint. Here, though, it has become clear that no one accepts responsibility
for research into sh[amanism]. For my part, I sense (indeed, know) that the
Hungarian issues will not be resolvable as long as certain aspects of Siberian
shamanism remain shrouded in mystery.
The long and short of it is that, faute de mieux, it is up to me to take on
the job.
...
1958, Siberia
9 July, Alygdzher
My work is going well. I have tape-recorded shaman chants and we have already
put those down on paper and the translations are ready; I have photographed
work processes, taking around 80 shots of a shaman headdress-in-the-making
and around 40 of a shaman's drum beater being produced from reindeer antler.
I have made a detailed description of the shaman costume, producing drawings
of the cloak, the neckerchief and the boots. I have sketched each little pendant,
ribbon, etc., making notes of the Karaghas names, the material, colour, its
significance. I have also made a thorough study of the shaman drum. Some touching
subtleties have emerged. I now have, for instance, the 9 kinds of wood of
which it is made. A genuine 'magic steed', since it too is a saddle beast!
Which is why it is made e.g. from the hide of a middle-aged roe-deer, because
a young animal tires quickly, whereas an old one doesn't go fast enough. Then
too, there are two cross-sticks in the drum, which have the same names as
are given to the breast and loin straps on a reindeer; in other words, the
drum is 'saddled'. Nothing better demonstrates how very much it is an animal
than the fact that it has 'ears' and 'blood', for example.
The Karaghas comprise 5 clans. The costume of the shamans of each clan differ
from one another in minute details. Each differently coloured little ribbon
or each animal hide indicates the clan to which the wearer belongs.
The Karaghas have taken a shine to me, and I to them. I am staying with the
younger sister of a shaman, and it was a good choice.
But there are many, many fine things besides shamanism that one comes across.
A little bag for keeping odds and ends in: made by skinning the hide of a
roe kid in one piece and sewing up the natural apertures (neck, limbs), and
there you have your bag. Wood, bark and antler - those are the raw materials
from which pots and various implements are made. As for buildings, there are
tepees of birch bark. The fire burns in a small pit in the middle. And just
to set your mouth watering, whilst I sit on a bear skin my slant-eyed hostess
scrapes the ash from the embers, places little 'dumplings' on them, rakes
the ashes back over them, and by the time I have put to her the question of
how many souls a person has, she is grubbing up piping-hot 'ash-baked' scones.
Recipe: tea, salt, flour, and maybe reindeer milk. You wouldn't believe what
it is like to lie down in a tepee. You can gaze at the figures traced by the
smoke pouring out through the smoke vent, breathe in lungfuls of the redolence
of burning pine- and birchwood. The silhouette of each birch-bark vessel shows
up on the 'wall'. Outside, the clatter of reindeers galloping by... (their hooves
really do clatter). And if the 'master of the fire' should appear amongst
the flames, my hostess would sprinkle a little milk for him, so he should
not starve, poor thing.
Is there any life more splendid than that of an ethnographer?
In the morning, I shall be hitting the road again. I have a driver and reindeer;
by the evening I shall be looking into the deeds of the shamans at Nyerkha.
By the time you read these lines, my tape-recorder will be capturing the chants
of Buryat shamans... My hostess has not yet finished the milking; I am waiting
for her, because she is going to do a bit of shaman ritual for the tape-recorder...
The country in which this 'village' is situated is gorgeous. All around are
the peaks of the Sayan Mountains, with the streams of the River Uda punching
in through small ravines to race down through the valley. Rock-falls, caves
and an immense cleft up on high. The shamans would ride their drums over that
when they had business to attend to in the other world. Dogs - laikas - in great
numbers all over the place; they are the most intelligent hunting dogs. Canoes
hewn from single tree trunks are beached on the riverbank. Every now and then
a screech from an alarmed bird breaks the silence.
28 July, the banks of the River Oka
This morning we carried on towards Bratsk. The goal: after Shamankovo, looking
for petroglyphs on the banks of the River Oka a few kilometres from the village
of Bolshaya Kada.
We reached the site in question late p.m.
The Oka races wildly in its rocky channel, bordered on its left bank by a
vertical rock wall (basalt). An ideal place for prehistoric man to bring a
hunt to a conclusion; by driving forest animals towards the riverbank, they
were forced against the rock-wall perimeter. In a fit of despair, the fleeing
animals would have flung themselves into the foaming water, which of course
did not bring salvation, only another kind of death. At the bend in the river,
where the water quietens down, it would have been easy for them to haul the
battered animals out of the water. It is quite impossible to swim in the Oka
here; the bed is full of rocks and boulders, and the hurtling river smashes
everything up on those.
Prehistoric man also sought to ensure the success of a hunt by magical means:
he inscribed and painted various drawings on the rock-wall.
By the light of the setting sun, we were still able to make out relics of
the art of Neolithic and Bronze-Age man.
I was firmly convinced that I would also find relics of shamanism here. - In
places (where there was not so much as a foothold on dry land at the base
of the wall) I waded determinedly through the water in search of what I was
so fervently expecting.
All at once, a rush of warmth: after the many glyphs of deer, swans, etc.,
my eye alighted on a disc. Merely a sun disc? A squint at it from left and
right: it's not a sun disc, that's for sure. Maybe a shaman drum. I now trace
round the contours with chalk; the water is swirling under me, but I don't
think for one moment about the fate of the unfortunate animals caught up in
the hunt because the oldest hitherto known relic of shamanism unfolds before
my very eyes. There is no doubt that this is a drawing of a shaman's drum;
it greatly resembles a drawing of a double drum.
The failing light hinders scrutiny of the drawing's every detail. Well, there's
always tomorrow.
Tuesday, 29 July, the Oka valley, Bratsk
The rays of the rising sun found me already perched on a wooden pole that
was jammed into a crack below the drawing. Using a candle, I cast light or
shade on the drawing from various angles so that every detail should be precisely
distinguishable. The lines are slightly carved into the rock and coloured
with a reddish-brown pigment - just like the pigment on painted drums of the
modern Altai and Khokass peoples. Having marked out the outlines with chalk,
I laid a piece of tracing paper over the glyph and copied the lines with a
pencil. The glyph, in Okladnikov's opinion, is Bronze Age, so the drum is
a Bronze-Age shaman's drum.
It looked like this: the drum was decorated with three sets of seven lines
('the journey of the spirits'), a representation of the sun and one of the
moon, and a longer line ('the spirit journey').
We finished copying all the petroglyphs by midday...
...
20 August, Medvedevka
In the morning, I went to the Council Office and made a note of the few old
Soyot names then took off to try my luck. I went first of all to the younger
sister of the shaman I was looking for, 73-year-old Syzykpen. Two shamans
used to operate here: the female shaman Saljak Khrorlu, who died in 1952,
and Syzykpen, who is still alive. I made a drawing of the deceased female
shaman's costume first of all. The shaman outfit of the Soyots of Ka-khem
differs sharply from the Todzhan costume that's for sure. Whilst I was in
the middle of my collecting work a middle-aged man dropped by; he was obviously
familiar with Soyot shamanism. When I had completed the drawing of the costume,
I turned to interrogating the guest, who was seated on the floor, slurping
salty tea from a Chinese-style bowl. It soon became clear that he also knew
some shamanic chants: when on his own in the forest, he often practiced singing
the chants he had heard during shamanic rituals. He soon proved as good as
his word by singing them for the tape-recorder; he quickly showed what he
knew.
Next came the critical moment, when I asked him to talk shaman Syzykpen into
demonstrating a shamanic ritual. After 20 minutes of (for me, nail-biting)
waiting, the old man made an appearance. The Soyots had seemingly already
got wind of the favourable decision, because the yurt was full of people by
the time the shaman arrived. A few men and many women were already seated
in a circle. The shaman took his place on the ground. He had to be entreated
a wee bit more but then set to it - sooner than I had expected. He had already
started by the time I had dictated into the microphone who was going to sing. - On
the second go, though, he managed to get going properly. He had barely got
through the first few lines when his eyes closed and he was rocking his head
from side to side as he chanted. It made a big impact on his audience. The
women had begun breast-feeding their infants so they would not kick up a racket,
but they now forgot about their children, and the children themselves about
crying, instead letting the life-sustaining teat drop from their mouths, so
attentively did they give ear to what was going on. The womenfolk listened
raptly to the shaman, oblivious to the fact that their dresses were still
open. The ecstasy rose to an ever-higher pitch. By now I had abandoned any
hope of being able to follow the shaman's flailing head with my microphone,
and in despair I toyed with the idea of notating the chant and getting by
that way. The shaman was thrashing his head around without a moment's pause,
at one time whispering very softly, at another singing in a loud roar, whooping,
sucking the air into his lungs then covering his mouth with his hand, so that
the words were distorted into a mumble. When the dramatic tension had reached
fever-pitch, one of the women took up her infant from her lap and laid it
on the ground then crawled over to the shaman, picked up a pipe that had fallen
from his belt, filled it with tobacco and lighted it. At the right moments,
she would blow a lungful of smoke onto the shaman - more and more each time.
Then, all of a sudden, the chanting broke off, the shaman placed his palm
before his mouth and started swallowing the smoke with loud gulps. He had
now turned completely away from me; so, standing behind him, I held the microphone
over his head to try and keep it in front of his mouth. My brow was meanwhile
beading with sweat: the tape was coming to an end and valuable lines of the
chant might be lost whilst I turned it over. I had devilish good luck. Just
as the tape was unwinding from the reel, the shaman finished his invocation
of the spirits and the woman again blew smoke from the pipe on the shaman's
mouth. I then signalled with my eyes for her to keep it up, keep on going,
because the shaman struck up his chanting again. Perhaps nothing was missed.
The first words the shaman spoke after the ritual, the first indications of
recovering consciousness, fitted onto the very last bit of the reverse side
of the new tape.
The ritual had come to an end. The shaman Syzykpen exerted just as magnetic
an effect on those around him as the Sagay Kizlan had done last year in Western
Sayan, though it did not have such a powerful impact on me as that did. It
seems one can become habituated even to shamanic ecstasy.
Late in the afternoon we made a start on committing the recorded chants to
paper. We are having to replay lines 10, 20 and sometimes as many as maybe
100 times before Syzykpen's words become intelligible. We shall not record
any new ones until the first has been transcribed. After that has been written
down, we shall make an attempt, with his help, to understand the lines that
could not be transcribed, and similarly it is only him we can ask about words
which are unintelligible or of obscure meaning, which is why it is necessary
for us to commit the text to paper whilst we are still here.
As it is, the note on which I parted from the old shaman was that tomorrow
he will sing some more for the tape-recorder. It may be, however, that we
shall meet before the end of the day, as we are not getting on too well with
the text; it's very hard to understand. Now we have replayed each line to
the old fellow so he has a better chance of understanding his own words. And
something I have experienced a good few times before has again proved to be
the case, which is that the shaman himself is unable to understand it much
better. He doesn't understand because he doesn't know his own texts. A splendid
piece of evidence to prove that shamans improvise, albeit from fixed elements,
of course. We carried on the transcription work on the turf in front of the
yurt as long as there was light for us to see by. I agreed with Syzykpen that
we would call by his place first thing in the morning, at daybreak, to carry
on with the work of transcription.
