Narrative Objects focuses on a mammoth ivory composition made in the 1860s and depicting yhyakh, the Sakha summer festival, within the broad contexts of the art and culture of the Sakha people (Yakutia, Russia). Thanks to the efforts of these authors, this composition, which is now part of the British Museum collection, was exhibited in 2015 at the National Art Museum in Yakutsk. Its accurately executed scenes of the festival in the second half of the nineteenth century provoked wide interest in the Republic, among the general public and scholars alike, as important ethnographic evidence of the celebrations at that time. The ancient festival of yhyakh, which rose from the ashes in the 1990s, brings together the spiritual and material culture of the Sakha people, to which the authors draw attention in their book, connecting the silence of the past Soviet era with the modern-day celebration. This is an original study of the yhyakh celebration which is supported by Indigenous insights into the process of the revival of the old Sakha traditions.
~ Professor Zinaida Ivanova-Unarova, Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts, Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).