SOURCE: Stetsenko, Ekaterina. “Retelling the Legends.” In Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges between (Ex)Soviet and American Women, edited by Susan Hardy Aiken, Adele Marie Barker, Maya Koreneva, and Ekaterina Stetsenko, pp. 327-39. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Stetsenko finds parallels between “Storyteller” and Anna Nerkagi's Aniko of the Nogo Tribe.

The evolution of archaic cultures under the foreign influence of so-called civilized societies is slow and complex. Because the literature of Russia's northern peoples was predominantly oral until the Soviets introduced written forms of their languages after the 1917 revolution, the history of their written literature has been relatively short. Coming of age in an atmosphere of tight ideological control, this literature was forced to employ the methods of Socialist Realism. Professional poets and prose writers, who gradually replaced traditional storytellers, were expected to espouse the official view of their peoples' histories...