MAIN CHARACTERS IN TATAR ROMANTIC DASTANS: GENERAL AND INDIVIDUAL QUALITIES

Abstract

Since ancient times, every nation has been telling stories about eternal heroes, which are passed from person to person. Whereas in some legends, they accomplished significant heroic feats, in others, they left a mark in their nation’s history. Among these heroes are some who knew how to love and were faithful to their beloved for the rest of their lives. People idealized these heroes, and enriched them with the positive qualities that they wanted to see. The love story of these characters has survived both orally and in manuscripts. In folkloristics, these tales or stories are called romance epics. Among the Turkic peoples who came under Persian influence, including the Tatars, they are called dastans or kyissa. Studying the worldview presented in romantic dastans world and the characteristic features of the main heroes provides the opportunity to learn about the spiritual values and ideals of the Tatar people. This study is relevant due to the insufficiency of current scholarship on the system of imagery in the Tatar romanic dastans. The research materials for this study are the texts of epics about love, which among the Tatars includes “Leila and Majnun,” “Takhir and Zukhra,” “Kuzy Kurpech and Bayansylu,” “The story of Yusuf,” “The Sayfulmuluk,” and others. The purpose of this article is to identify the main qualities of the imagery used in dastans, as well as their characteristic features. To achieve this goal, we completed the following tasks: identified the main characters of the Tatar love epic, analyzed their behaviour in different situations, and compared the characteristic qualities of the main hero of Tatar folklore variants with heroes of Turkic and Persian poems. This study used comparative and historical-typological methods. This study allows us to conclude that, each variant has many of folklore variants and literary versions. As for the protagonists, although there are many variations, they are mostly similar to each other, their appearance and the role they perform in dastans remains unchanged. This type of permanence is preserved in literary works, but the basic imagery reflected in Tatar folk art is enriched by such qualities as patience and determination.

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