Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

‘ I would like to conclude with a reflection which may perhaps seem harsh, but which is today more relevant than ever: I would like to launch an appeal which may affront the more tender-hearted among you, but which I nonetheless hope will prick the consciences of those who have our language and our culture truly at heart.

‘In this age of stagnation and decline, certain sated and jaded nations have squeezed themselves into history, only to find they can’t get out. They clog up the course of events, wallowing in their decadence. Like some monstrous misshapen tumour, they are sprouting from the very thing which throttles them. In the normal course of events it would take centuries before they were digested, before their flesh dissolved, hardened as it is by its thousand-year acquaintanceship with evil. But their incurable corruption produces recurrent flare-ups of infection in which thousands of human beings are annihilated. How many more gulags, how much more ethnic cleansing will it take before humanity is purged of that toxic pustule, the Slavs? For how long will man’s progress towards all that is good continue to be hampered by these corrupt and backward nations, scions of a primitive world that is no more? All forms of life, each man, each plant, each animal, each stone, strain inexorably to move on from the purely material, to march towards the perfection which will link them once more to God. But the dinosaurs of our time refuse to die, and their interminable death throes oblige the rest of humanity to linger on in a world of evil. Their very language has turned against them: it no longer stills incomprehension but foments it, and, when words have become irretrievably snarled up, a language will subdivide and move ever further away from its original meaning, indeed from any meaning. Then debate and even invective become vain, and we are left with just yes and no, and black and white. This spiral of destruction spawns monstrous languages, designed to conceal, to deceive, to erect a barrier between words which were once held in common, to give them double meanings, so that even the most humdrum of phrases — “Hello, who’s speaking?” for example — may trigger off a war. In the new world we’re all waiting for, a drastic new morality will be needed, one which will ensure the suicide of any distinctive group when it becomes useless or threatening to the rest of humankind. People who can no longer be understood should have the humility to change languages, seeking continued existence in the freshness of another tongue, cleansing themselves through some salutary cultural transfusion which puts new sap in their veins, and infuses new grace into their customs.

‘It was the Greeks who fostered the slippery notion of democracy, the tortuous concept of the state, the unnatural condition of living penned up within city walls. This was the model adopted by continental Europe, which further elaborated the concept of creeping, all-pervasive governance and cherished the teeming cesspit of the city and the myth of the public institution. But what is an institution? It is an empty building where no one lives, it is faceless and anonymous, even its telephones remain unanswered. All these ideas are alien to Finnish culture. For us, the village is the centre of all things, the institution is a living being, which sits itself down and drinks beside us, whose every secret we are privy to, which bares its all to us openly in the sauna. So it is to the village that we must return and, by founding one after another, repopulate the land we have abandoned, bringing back the music of our language into forests that have too long been silent, intimidated by the Slavic bark. This is how we will escape the steam-roller of the great western democracies and their blackmailing call for enforced assimilation. But we must do more besides, combining renewed cultural expansionism with firm yet passive resistance. Now I shall explain how this might be done.

‘Over these last years we have at last been able to take stock of the state of the various Finno-Ugric languages, and have found them to be in rude health and consistent growth, much more so than their past history might suggest. Driven by enemy peoples out of their first homelands into the Siberian tundra at the edge of the occupied world, forced to live in climatic conditions which put their very existence in jeopardy, the Finnish peoples survived centuries of persecution, and indeed of genocide during the dark Soviet era. Besieged by the hostile tide of Slavs, our peoples resisted cultural assimilation, keeping the memory of their mother tongue alive to the point that it may now at last be reborn. Suddenly a mood of brotherhood is stirring once again, one which we thought had been put out, but which is now making itself felt from the Urals to the Atlantic, from Mordvia to Karelia, from Ingria to Hungary, over an area the size of Western Europe. All in all, what saved our peoples from Russianisation and linguistic annihilation was not just their intrinsic physical robustness, their dogged hold on life, their fighting spirit, but sheer ignorance. It was our ignorance of the Russian language, our refusal to learn it and to surrender to the dominant culture, which enabled our peoples to survive linguistically. If today Nenets, Ngnasan, Mordvin, Vogul and Votic are still spoken, it is because they have been protected by their speakers’ ignorance. Instead of learning Russian and improving their social condition by moving into the great industrial centres or emigrating to more prosperous areas, the Finnish peoples preferred to barricade themselves behind their own language, thus remaining impervious to Russianisation.

And this should serve us as an example. In the world of mass culture, where the weaker languages are threatened by a new linguistic colonialism which stifles minority cultures, only ignorance can protect us from extinction. My call to the new generations, here as in the former Soviet republics of Finnish stock, is therefore this: cherish ignorance, do not study the language of the foreigner, but force him to learn your own! Since he cannot take on the world’s linguistic colossi on equal terms, all that the speaker of a Finnic language can do is to adopt an attitude of resolute, dumb ignorance, the very one which has enabled him to survive intact over so many centuries. Ignorance will be our strength, our breastplate, and it will sabotage linguistic imperialism until it is no more. We must never forget that expansion always saps the strength, and that the day will inevitably come when the dominant languages crumble away. Too far from their meanings, like an advance guard too far from their supply lines, such foreign words as are still trickling into the Finnic languages will be swallowed up by the very tongues which they themselves were destined to stifle; their sounds and phonemes will be cast out, their double consonants will fall away, their vowels will broaden out and the language of true men will be reborn. Who today recognises the Indo-European roots of our familiar ranta or pullo or kaupunki ? Yet these were originally Germanic words, which were brought into Finland with domination in mind. But the Finnic languages gobbled them up, turned “strand”, “bottle” and “kaufpunkt” into something of their own, stripping away the undesirable sounds which our mouths found hard to pronounce, giving new strength to tainted vowels and merging three untidy palatals into a single velar, thereby creating new and solid words, destined to last forever.

‘So, on this solemn occasion, I am taking advantage of this celebration of our languages to express the hope that, in fifty years time, no one between the Gulf of Bothnia and the White Sea will know one single word of English or of Russian, and that the vocalic harmony of the Finno-Ugric languages will ring out loud and clear, dense and compact as our own forests. Long live Finland! Long live ignorance!’