In three parts, Nau lives to know her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-greats. This creation story, an original, imaginative work by the author, draws upon Chukchi traditional stories Rytkheu heard as a boy. In the place known as Shingled Spit, where the Great Love begins, the close kinship between humans and whales is honored. She gives birth, first, to whale babies, and then to human babies, who populate the known world. The whale, known as Reu, transforms into a man to live with her. Nau is First Woman, who falls in love with a whale. Even the sullen black rocks were alive and dear to her.”
She had never yet thought of herself as separate from those who dwelled in ground warrens, or nested on cliffs, or crawled in the grass, nor thought of herself as different from them. “Nau was fast breeze, green grass, wet shingle, high cloud, and endless blue sky, herself and all these things at once. “When the Whales Leave” is also a cautionary tale, pertinent today for thinking about relationships between human society and the natural world. The latest of these, a delightful small book originally published in 1975, will remind Alaska readers of the ties between our northern peoples. Three of his novels have been translated into English, and all three inform readers of the lives of the Chukchi people. He studied literature at Leningrad University and was a highly regarded and well-published writer during Soviet days. Yuri Rytkheu, the best known of Chukchi writers, was born in 1930 to a family of hunters and trappers, in Uelen, a village on the coast of what is now Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula. "When the Whales Leave," by Yuri Rytkheu.
Translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse.
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