Cedar as a Tree Image of Siberian Text

Abstract

This study aims to create a “portrait” of the cedar as a central dendro-image of the Siberian text and the image of Altai in particular. The research materials are scholarly works on ethnography and folklore studies, Russian and Russian-language fiction of the nineteenth — twenty first centuries about Siberia. The author mostly refers to texts from the five-volume anthology The Image of Altai in Russian Literature of the 19th–20th Centuries (2012). The sources are considered in the context of the geo-poetic approach and ethno-dendrology. The analysis makes it possible to single out a combination of elements of the “tree” generic concept specific to the image of the cedar, which has not previously been the subject of systematic consideration. The real and cultural qualities of the cedar as a coniferous, evergreen, powerful, fruit-bearing, “male” tree determine its sacralisation in Siberian pagan and Russian Christian cultures. The Russian name for the Siberian cedar pine, “кедр”, which dates to the Middle Ages, establishes a correspondence between Siberia and Palestine, North and South, reflects the process of mythologisation of the conquered space in the categories of paradise / locus of the Passion. The main mythological and mythopoetic “cedar” motifs are associated with ideas about the World Tree, the Tree of Life, the family tree, the tree of poetry, etc. The symbolisation of the cedar as a sign and model of a person, a people, homeland, Altai, and Siberia remains unchanged. The cedar is accompanied by images of an animal (bear, sable), bird (eagle), and mountains. The semantic counterpart of the Siberian cedar in Russian culture is the oak, which is the main tree in the European part of Russia. Starting in the twentieth century, the practice of industrial logging leads to the emergence of new, environmental issues.