The Chukchi Bible (45 page)

The circumstances of his death were revealed to me by the son of Mahomet Dobriev, Alikhan, whom I had met on my long journey from Uelen to Leningrad, in the summer of 1946. At that time, Alikhan was working as a typesetter in a regional typographer's shop, and I often used to watch him set the newspaper's text, along with the Chukchi page, plucking out little letters from a special honeycomb where they were stored. It was his father who had told him the story.

After their return from Moscow, the local Bolsheviks began to accuse Khoroshavtsev of giving the shaman special treatment. Mletkin was blamed not only for his line of work, but also for his sojourn in America – where, it was alleged, he had been recruited by the CIA.

Khoroshavtsev had tried to argue that sooner or later Mletkin would come to accept the Bolsheviks and Soviet rule. One day, during a hunt out on the sea ice, he decided to test once more the shaman's invincibility, shooting him in the back with a Winchester rifle. Mletkin was dead before his body toppled to the ice.

The case of the murder of the Chukchi shaman Mletkin was hushed up; even so, the murderer himself was soon dead and buried on the Hill of Hearts' Peace.

 

I last visited the Uelen cemetery in the summer of 1999. I searched the marshy, rocky tundra for the graves of Khoroshavtsev and of Mletkin, the last shaman of Uelen, who had named me the Unknown – but of them I found no trace.

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Copyright © Yuri Rytkheu, 2000

 

English translation copyright © Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, 2011

 

First Archipelago Books Edition, 2011

 

First published as
Der letzte Schamane
by Unionsverlag AG, Zurich, 2000.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in
any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rytkheu, IUrii, 1930-2008.
[Poslednii shaman. English]
The Chukchi bible / Yuri Rytkheu ; translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse.
– 1 st Archipelago Books ed.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-935-74436-8

1. Chukchi – Fiction. 2. Shamans – Russia (Federation) – Uelen – Fiction. 3. Chukotskii
avtonomnyi okrug (Russia) – Fiction. I. Chavasse, Ilona Yazhbin. II. Title.
PG3476.R965P6713 2011
891.73'44 – dc22 2010046240

 

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This publication was made possible by the generous support of Lannan
Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State
Council on the Arts, a state agency.