The Epic Heritage of the Bashkirs of the Russian Federation in the Records From the Mid-20th Century

The article is devoted to the topical issue of studying archival records of epic monuments recorded outside the Republic of Bashkortostan, in particular in Orenburg, Kurgan, Chelyabinsk, Samara, and Saratov regions, some of which have been published, and variants are taken into account in the comments to the volumes. In the first monograph devoted to the Bashkir heroic epic, its author A. N. Kireev noted that expeditions to the regions of the Russian Federation listed above gave a lot of new information about the Bashkir folk epic. This article is aimed at the study of epic material recorded precisely outside the Republic of Bashkortostan. The objectives of the article are to identify texts included in the volumes of the scholarly code “Bashkir folk art” and texts that have not yet been published; possible repeated recordings; determining the area of distribution of this or that epic tale, the age and gender of the informants. To solve the tasks, a statistical method was used to characterize the repertoire; the method of comparative analysis was used as the main one, an element of structural analysis and a comparative-descriptive method was also used in the study of repeated recordings in line with experimental approaches developed by V. M. Gatsak in the field of the theory of the preservation of the epic in time. The methodological basis of the article was the works of Russian, including Bashkir, researchers-predecessors in the field of epic studies: A. N. Kireev, S. A. Galina, M. M. Sagitova, V. M. Gatsak, I. V. Pukhov, etc. The study will allow us to present the content, volume of material, distribution areas of the Bashkir epic in the regions of the Russian Federation where Bashkirs live compactly. When studying archival materials, it turned out that epic works about animals and social and everyday ones were particularly widespread there. In the future, archival texts will be published and put into active scientific circulation. It is a subject for special research, including dissertations, on various genres of folklore of the Bashkirs of the Russian Federation, both from the folkloristic and linguistic point of views (dialects are interesting, both archaisms and Russian words are used, even characters of Russian folklore are found in the texts)

Art · Czech · EPIC · Geography · Linguistics · Literature · Regional science · Russian federation · Samara · Classics · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Mathematics · Philosophy