ONCE AGAIN ABOUT THE EPIC HERITAGE OF KORKUT

Abstract

The musical and epic heritage of the legendary Korkut has attracted the attention of researchers since the middle of the 19th century. Turkologists of Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have written a huge number of scholarly studies, which highlighted the problems associated with the main epic monument of Oguz antiquity – “The Book of my grandfather Korkut”. At the beginning of the 20th century, Soviet ideology imposed a ban on this topic. Closer to the middle of the twentieth century, when the Oguz epic was evaluated as a creation of the feudal era, some peoples of Oguz origin refused this written monument. In Kazakhstan, at the turn of the 1970s, this topic was first voiced by Professor Auelbek Konratbayev. He published several articles, then the author translated into Kazakh "The Book of my grandfather Korkut" by V.V. Bartold. In recent decades, especially after the adoption of independence, folklorists, musicologists, and performing musicians have begun to practice this problem. It got to the point that some of them started talking about the newly found legacy of the legendary Korkut – musical compositions for a bowed instrument kobyz. Without referring to reliable primary sources, without arguing the origin of the newly discovered musical compositions, individual authors began to publish their rather detailed research in the form of scientific articles and even books. Despite the critical materials published in international publications, the wave of pseudo-researchers is growing. Questions related to the heritage of Korkut are overgrown with all sorts of tall tales of indiscriminate origin. This article is another attempt at hermeneutical analysis of scholarly research published in recent years on the pages of both foreign and republic’s press. Separate consideration is required by the work of individual homegrown specialists who are engaged in inflating the legends associated with the name of Korkut. The classic version of the Kazakh legend of Korkut was published by V.Velyaminov-Zernov in the second half of the 19th century. Despite the presence of a published text, this legend has been freely interpreted by individual authors. Another legend, once published by A. Zhubanov, is also of unknown origin. The author does not have a link to the original source. All such problems formed the basis of this article, which is put on trial by specialists and a wide range of readers - admirers of the name of the legendary Korkut.

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