Hybrids of Soviet Modernity and Iurii Rytkheu’s Blue Foxes

Abstract The chapter presents an analysis of Iurii Rytkheu’s story Blue Foxes, which describes the Soviet modernization of the Chukotka Peninsula through practices of aviation and fox farming. The analysis focuses on the notion of hybridity as a means of questioning and challenging Soviet master narratives of Arctic conquest and the incorporation of Indigenous people in the multiethnic family of Soviet people. The beginning of the chapter addresses representations of two key spaces in the Soviet modernization of the Arctic, the airport and the fox cage. Instead of maintaining modernity’s principal doctrine of the nature-culture divide, they become Latourian hybridizations of nature and culture. In addition to the key spaces of the story, the question of hybridity emerges in the protagonist’s personal quest to become a modern Soviet person through separation from elements connected to his Indigenous background and consequently to the sphere of nature as opposed to modernity, culture, and civilization. Yet, I claim that the narrative uses the figure of the fox smell to bring out the protagonist’s inevitable failure in the attempted transformation of his subjectivity.