Ogdo Aksënova, an heiress of two worlds which violently clashed in the 1930s during Sovietisation, was born into a nomadic family. At the Noril’sk boarding school, she gladly discovered the world of literature and authors of the Soviet Union. From Year Ten onwards, she wrote a few verses, prose stories and poems in Lenin’s language, until later celebrating the opening to the world symbolised by the arrival of tractors at Voločanka in 1953: “A caravan with roaring and bright sleds.” Her mother tongue was a truant, which had not then been normalised by the authorities and remained the ornament of the oral literature of a people with “furs lighter than the clouds of summer”. A teacher, librarian and director of a red Čum (“red tent”, a sort of local power branch placed on the nomads’ itinerary), in different villages of the Khatanga canton, she gathered the heritage of her own people while creating, as from 1960, songs based on popular melodies and contemporary language, so that the living Dolgan culture would escape ethnographic museums and folklorisation. Even though her language, not then fixed, was then banned in schools, O. Aksënova published bilingual Dolgan-Russian poems (“Baraksan”, 1973); she created an experimental abecedarium (“Bèsèlèè bukvalar”, [The Cheerful Abecedarium], 1981) and a bilingual dictionary (“Bisernaja boroda”, [The Beard of Glass Pearls], 1992). By creating a written culture for her own people, she was therefore addressing the Russian world on an equal footing. She joined the Writers’ Union in 1976.
