Veps
Reconstructing the Vepsian script: co-operation between researchers and the local community
Summary.The article is devoted to the history of the liquidation of the Vepsian writing in 1938 and to the activities of the Vepsian public to restore it in half a centur.
In the years of restructuring one of the first in the country to restore the Vepsian script, the use of which was discontinued in 1938 after a successful but brief period of its development.
In the 1930s it was created for the Veps, as well as for other small-numbered peoples during the period of liquidation of illiteracy among the non-Russian population of the country. By that time, the Veps territory was already divided between the Leningrad Oblast and Karelia. In 1924 for reasons of economic gravitation to Petrozavodsk as the nearest centre of the tribal composition of the population (Prionezhsky Veps) part of it from the Leningrad Region was transferred to the Autonomous Karelian SSR (hereinafter referred to as AKSSR) [14, L. 20]. In 1927 this territory in Karelia was allocated to the Sheltozero National District. According to the census of 1926 there were 8926 people in it, 8343 of them were Veps (93.5%).
There were 24186 Veps living in the Leningrad region, the main Veps territory [20, p. 385]. The division of the Vepsian territory turned out to be a significant factor that influenced the development of linguistic processes in these regions.
In the Leningrad Region, the creation of scripts for non-written peoples, including the Veps, was carried out with the participation of Prof. D.V. Bubrikh. His students G. H. Bogdanov (Karelian) and M. M. Hämäläinen (Finnish-Ingermanic) and student A. M. Mihkiev (Karelian) on the basis of linguistic material collected in all Vepsian regions from 6 March to 27 May 1931, developed an alphabet of the Vepsian language on the Latin basis, including 28 letters with the addition of the softening sign" ' ", which was approved in 1931 by the All-Union Central Committee of the new (Latinised) alphabet at the Council of Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee (hereinafter - VTSKNA) [17, p.156 -157]. By the autumn of 1931 they prepared the textbook ‘Ezmäne vepsiden azbuk i lugend knig’ (The first Vepsian alphabet and reading book), which was published in November 1932 and was used in schools and in adult literacy courses [17, 157; 19 pp. 26]. In 1932 the work on translation into Vepsian language and preparation of educational literature for work in Vepsian schools was continued by the Vepsian commission at the department of national minorities of Leningrad region, which was headed by M. M. Hämäläinen [12, p. 107]. It consisted of ten people, mostly local teachers, Vepsian in nationality, selected in the Vepsian expedition. Among them was the head of the district of Oshta N.I. Bogdanov, who replaced M.M. Hyamäläinen after his departure in 1932 to work in Petrozavodsk. He stayed here for a short time and, returning to Leningrad in 1933, continued to work in Vepsian language and teacher training. By 1935 the system of education in the native language for Vepsian children was well established. There were 53 Vepsian primary schools and 7 incomplete secondary schools in the Leningrad region, about 3 thousand children studied in them [17, p.159]. In Veps only primary schools worked in their native language, in high school Veps language was taught as a subject.
Training and retraining of teachers for Vepsian schools was carried out at the Lodeynopolsky technical school of the Leningrad region. In 1937, 68 students studied there [21]. During the years of the Commission's work (1932-1937) thirty textbooks in Vepsian language were published, including textbooks on Vepsian language for the second, third and fourth grades, and Vepsian-Russian dictionary (authors F.A. Andreev and M.M. Hämäläinen) with the volume of 5 thousand words [17, p. 157]. A separate book in 1937 was published in Vepsian language by N.F. Grigoriev ‘Pol'tošt’ paginad. Dispetceransanutez. (One and a half conversations: a dispatcher's story)’, which was translated by M. Loginov [23]. In an article by S. Yakovlev ‘Vepsian Literature and School. Experience of the Leningrad Region‘, published on 14 May 1937 in the newspaper 'Krasnaya Karelia", reports that 'This year the Leningrad Branch of the State Educational and Pedagogical Publishing House is publishing 13 more textbooks for primary and secondary schools and for the adult Vepsian population. Andreev's work ‘Methodology of teaching the Vepsian language is also being prepared for printing. ... Children's Literature Publishing House issues 6 books in Vepsian language: Serafimovich ‘Scepchik’, Yakovlev ‘Tales of My Life’, Shorin ‘Odnogodki, etc.'The fate of these manuscripts is unknown.
A month later, in the same newspaper, M.M. Hämäläinen, assessing the experience of work in the Leningrad Region on the development of the Vepsian language, writes ‘that a solid base for further development of the Vepsian literary language has been created, and speaks of plans to translate into Vepsian the Constitution of the USSR and Stalin's speech at the VIII Extraordinary Congress of Soviets. A number of revolutionary songs have been translated into Vepsian language’ [21]. The purpose of these articles was not only to demonstrate the success of the development of the Vepsian language in the Leningrad region, but also to accelerate the transfer of schools to teaching in their native language among the Vepsians of Karelia, where the situation with the Vepsian language was quite different.
Karelian Autonomy - the first name ‘Karelian Labour Commune’ (hereinafter KTC), was created on the initiative and under the leadership of the ‘red’ Finns’ - revolutionaries from Finland, who were defeated in the socialist revolution of 1918 and forced to move to Russia [4, p.30-43]. KTC (from 1923 - AKSSR) was headed by E. Gülling, a doctor of philosophy, a member of the Finnish parliament, one of the leaders of the revolutionary government by decision of V. Lenin. For E. Gülling and his supporters, not only Finns-Ingermanlanders, but also Karelians and Vepsians were part of the Finnish nation, whose rapid cultural rise was possible only in the Finnish language. Referring to the existence of dialectal differences between different groups of Karelians, the Finnish leadership immediately opposed the creation of Karelian writing [16, p. 16 -18]. Since 1923, the second official language of the republic along with Russian in Karelia was approved as the ‘Karelian-Finnish language’, the role of which was actually fulfilled by the Finnish language [4, p. 227]. The term ‘Karelian-Finnish’ made the course on Finnisation of the Karelian and Vepsian population of the republic less noticeable. In the press and documents it was presented as ‘Karelianisation’. The use of the Finnish language in the educational system in schools of the northern regions of Karelia was successful, but in the southern Karelians (Livviks and Lyudiks), whose dialects differed significantly from the Finnish language, and Veps, it caused much controversy and proved ineffective.
In July 1935 in the newspaper ‘Vepsskaya Pravda’ of the Vinnitsa national district of the Leningrad region appeared an article by E. Gülling ‘Lenin and Stalin helped us’, where he, trying to explain the teaching of Karelians and Vepsians in Finnish in Karelia, wrote that such a decision was made with the approval of Stalin [7].
At the end of October 1935, E. Gülling was dismissed from the leadership of the republic and sent to Moscow for scientific work. The language policy in Karelia changes dramatically. Finnisation was sharply criticised and would later become the basis for large-scale repressions against the Finnish population of Karelia, among whom E. Gülling would find himself [2, с. 110].
In 1936 the implementation of D.V. Bubrikh's idea to create a single written language for all Karelians of the country began [13, 262 - 264]. September 1937 in Karelia it was decided to transfer the education of Karelians and Vepsians into their native language [15, L. 115-116]. In connection with the new settings in the language policy there was a transfer of the Vepsian alphabet to the Cyrillic alphabet, but the textbooks to the new script did not have time to be transferred. Teaching in native language in schools of Sheltozero district was very short - only from the middle of October 1937 till the end of the school year. From the beginning of 1938 education in all Vepsian schools of the Leningrad region, Karelia and in the newly formed Vologda region, where in September 1937 a part of the territory with five thousand Vepsian population was transferred from the Leningrad region, was translated into Russian. The use of Vepsian writing in Latin script was forbidden. Previously published literature in the Vepsian language was withdrawn from schools and libraries. In fact, as T.M. Smirnova, a researcher of the history of national minorities of the Leningrad region and St. Petersburg, rightly pointed out, it was a ban on culture in the native language, i.e. forced assimilation [17, p.173].
The decision was made outside Karelia, because here, until the outbreak of the Soviet-Finnish War (November 1939 - March 1940), work on the creation of a unified written Karelian language continued. After the war KASSR was transformed into the Karelian-Finnish Union Republic (hereinafter KFSSR). The unified Karelian language approved on 10 February 1938 by the order of the People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR was abolished. The second official language, along with Russian, became the Finnish language. This indicated that ‘in Stalin's geopolitical plans was the reunification of Finland with Finnish-speaking Karelia' [10, p.80]. Karelian script, as well as Vepsian, was also banned both in Karelia and outside it. The onset of the second period of ‘Finnisation’ in Karelia did not affect Vepsian schools. Finnish language from the end of 1941 was used in teaching Vepsian and Karelian children during the occupation by the Finnish army of part of the territory of Karelia, including Sheltozero district during the Great Patriotic War [6, p. 33]. After the war Finnish language was taught as a subject in Petrozavodsk and schools of Karelian districts.
The topic of written Karelian and Vepsian languages became taboo for a long time in the KFSSR.
After the war, research into the folklore, languages and cultures of the Baltic-Finnish peoples continued at the Karelian Research Institute of Culture (now the Institute of Language, Literature and History of the Karelian Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
N.I. Bogdanov and M.M. Hämäläinen returned to the Institute and continued collecting materials on the Vepsian language. From 1947 to 1949 it was headed by D.V. Bubrich. In 1952 N.I. Bogdanov became the first candidate of science, researcher of the language of his people [3, с. 48].
The return of Karelia to the status of an autonomous republic in 1956 did not change the situation with the Karelian and Vepsian languages. In the 1960s and 1970s, the collection of field material on Vepsian and Karelian languages was actively pursued. G.M. Kert wrote that ‘work on Karelian and Vepsian dialectology was encouraged, but not a word was allowed to be said about the scripts for these peoples’ [10, p. 76]. The first articles on the history of the Karelian script by A.P. Barantsev [1] and the Vepsian script by M.I. Mullonen [12] appeared thirty years after their prohibition. They did not see the possibility of their restoration. In 1972 M.I. Mullonen and M.I. Zaitseva prepared a dialect dictionary of the Vepsian language, which is a real encyclopaedia of Vepsian folk life [8, p. 746].
The situation began to change in the early 1980s. A. P. Maksimov, head of the Sheltozero Museum, was the first to speak in the press about the need to restore the Vepsian script and to teach the Vepsian language at school in the newspaper of the Prionezhsky district ‘Communist of Prionezhye’ of 21 November 1981. In 1983, the question of the necessity of studying Vepsian at school was included in the programme of an ethno-sociological study on the current ethno-cultural processes among the Vepsian rural population, which was conducted by the Institute of Language, Literature and History (ILLH). It turned out that more than a third of Vepsians were in favour of studying Vepsian at school in a desirable or affirmative form, about 20% were against it, and the majority of the rest found it difficult to answer. In Karelia and the Vologda Oblast, the share of supporters of restoring the Vepsian script and organising teaching was up to 40%, in the Veps of the Leningrad Oblast less than a third. The motives of those in favour of learning the Vepsian language are mostly similar: they express the desire not only to preserve the language, but also the people. Thus, the majority of those who answered in the form of a wish considered it necessary in order ‘not to forget the Vepsian language completely’ or ‘it would be worthwhile to support the Veps’, and only one third saw knowledge of the Vepsian language, as well as any other language, as an additional source of information - ‘it is not bad to know an extra language’. Among those who were extremely interested in learning Vepsian language there was a very clear commitment to ethnic values, they argued that ‘otherwise the language, folk traditions, culture cannot be preserved’, ‘parents know and children should know’, or they considered it as a means of raising the prestige of the Veps people - ‘so that more people would know about the Veps’. But the positions of young people and the older generation diverged sharply: mostly young people (18-29-year-olds) insisted on its study at school, i.e. those who did not know Vepsian well themselves and who faced the real problem of whether their children would know it. The share of those who answered ‘in favour’ was more than a half and less than a third were against, whereas among the older generation, opponents of the restoration of the written language prevailed, with a significant number of those who found it difficult to answer. Although it was the older generation that were the main connoisseurs and the most active ‘users’ of the Vepsian language. The well-known law of the ‘third generation’, when interest in ethnic roots ‘breaks through’ a generation, according to the principle ‘what the son would like to forget, the grandson wants to remember’, was clearly manifested when identifying opinions on the need to restore the Vepsian script. Thus, despite the long policy of suppression of Veps ethnic identity, a significant part of Veps youth developed, probably more instinctive than ‘educated’ by the older generation, a desire to maintain and develop their ethnic identity. It needed very active support in order to become a real force capable of influencing the ethnic development of their people [5, с. 35 - 36].
In 1986-1987, during the period of glasnost, the issues of restoring the Karelian and Vepsian scripts, choosing the basis for their alphabets - Latin or Cyrillic, and organising language teaching in schools began to be widely covered in the press [9, pp. 9-94; 5, pp. 30-70]. In the spring of 1987, an initiative group of rural intelligentsia under the leadership of A. P. Maksimov, R. P. Lonin, and R. F. Maksimova was formed in Sheltozero village. In the republican and district press there was a heated discussion ‘To be or not to be the Vepsian language?’ [5, p. 30 - 37]. In Sheltozero village by decision of the school director R. F. Maksimova in April 1987. F. Maksimova in April 1987 began optional classes in the Vepsian language. They were conducted by R. P. Lonin, using the materials of the textbook presented to the Sheltozero museum in 1975 by M. M. Hämäläinen [5, p. 101]. The subject of the discussion soon became not the question: should the Vepsian script be restored, but on what basis? In the recommendations of the meeting ‘Veps: problems of economic and cultural development in the conditions of perestroika’ (Petrozavodsk, 28 October 1988), which was attended by representatives of federal and regional authorities, it was decided to create a Vepsian alphabet in Cyrillic alphabet [5, p. 83]. However, among the Vepsian community, opinions were divided. On 20 April 1989, the Council of Ministers of the KASSR approved the alphabet and basic spelling rules for the Vepsian language recommended by the Academic Council of ILLH in two versions; Latin-based and Cyrillic-based [5, p. 115 -116]. It was assumed that the final decision would be made after the experience of their practical use. In 1991 in Petrozavodsk a Vepsian primer in Latin script ‘Abekirj’ was published by N. G. Zaitseva and M. I. Mullonen [24], a year later in St. Petersburg - a Vepsian primer in Cyrillic script by E. V. Kottina and R. F. Maksimova [11]. Vepsian writing in Latin script was fixed in school education and book publishing. The Resolution of the Government of Karelia dated 16 March 2007. ‘On Approval of the Alphabets of the Karelian and Vepsian Languages’ recognised the 1989 decree on the Karelian and Vepsian alphabets as invalid. The new decree approved the Latin-based alphabet as the only alphabet for the Vepsian language.
In this unusual way, the Vepsian community made the final choice of the graphic basis for the alphabet of their language. Thanks to the work of linguists of two generations, it became possible in the late 1980s to restore the Vepsian script and to ensure the wide use of the Vepsian language in education, culture and the media.
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