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and they often failed to do so and often enough abandoned it. The family of such a ‘professional’, rarely seeing its head, often lived in great poverty and hunger in winter. My friend, Dmitry M. Govorov (1847–1942), one of the most famous Yakut Olonkho-tellers, lived such a life. He was from the village of Oltektsy 2 in today’s Ust-Aldan region. He earned a living only at the end of his life, during the Soviet period, when he started to receive payments for his Olonkho recordings and publications and when he went into collective farming (kolkhoz). And yet these uneducated, poor Yakut Olonkho-tellers created and passed on the greatest epic creation of universal importance to our generation.

      Recently, due to the widespread distribution of literature, theatre and radio, there has been a decrease in the number of live Olonkho performances, and it is even disappearing in some regions of the Republic. Nevertheless, the people still love and cherish it. Newborn children are named after favourite Olonkho characters – such as Nurgun and Tuyarima. Olonkho continues to be available and exists in new formats: books, radio broadcasts, and theatre and concert-hall performances. Olonkho performance falls within the domain of theatre and popular music.

      Being the focus of the national art of the past, Olonkho had a great influence on the birth and development of Yakut literature and art.

      Platon A. Oyunsky (10 November 1893–31 October 1939) was a famous poet, the founder of Soviet Yakut literature, a distinguished public and government figure, an active participant in the Revolution and the Civil War, and one of the first organizers and leaders of the Soviet government in Yakutia. He was the one who recorded the Olonkho story Nurgun Botur the Swift.

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       Platon A. Oyunsky

      P.A. Oyunsky is one of the first Soviet Yakut researchers; he was a philologist, an ethnographer, a folklorist and a specialist in literature studies. He had an outstanding knowledge of Yakut folklore, especially mythology and Olonkho. He wrote many scientific works.

      At the same time, P.A. Oyunsky was a great Olonkho-teller himself. Here it should be noted that all the early Yakut writers and poets (both revolutionary and Soviet) knew well, loved and cherished Olonkho. It is reasonable to say that they all must have known many plots and even entire Olonkho texts from their childhood; they sang and told them. Most of them became true Olonkho-tellers when they became writers, and told and sang Olonkho alongside their writing career. For example, Semen S. Yakovlev (Erelik Eristin), who lived at the same time as P.A. Oyunsky, and Mikhail F. Dogordurov, a writer, were also Olonkho-tellers. A modern national poet of the YASSR, Dmitry M. Novikov (Kunnyuk Urastyrov), is also an Olonkho-teller. Dmitry K. Sivtsev (Sorun Omollon), a national writer of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (YASSR), is the author of a drama and opera based on the plot of Olonkho. The poet Sergey S. Vasilyev wrote a children’s version of Olonkho.

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       Traditional Sakha elders

      It is not surprising that the first Yakut writers of the pre-Revolutionary and Soviet periods knew Olonkho well, loved it, and were even Olonkho-tellers themselves. As mentioned above, Olonkho played a significant role in the life of every Yakut person from childhood. Olonkho was one of the sources of Yakut literature.

      As for P.A. Oyunsky, it is known that he had already become an Olonkho-teller in his youth. His childhood friend K.A. Sleptsov recalls the following:

      Platon had a very serious childhood hobby which he managed to preserve throughout his entire life. It greatly influenced all his creative work. He adored listening to Olonkho songs and stories. The boy often went to his neighbour, Panteleymon Sleptsov, a great expert in Olonkho who was both entertaining and a singer. Platon would sit for long hours and listen to the wise old man performing his improvisations. Around the age of eight or nine, Platon started to tell and sing Olonkho to his friends. Later, the elders and the tent-dwelling nomads started inviting him to their homes with great pleasure. Everyone agreed that he had a great voice and a remarkable gift for speaking.

      A distinguished artist of the YASSR, V.A. Savin, quotes a villager from the Churapcha village, who noted at a regional Revolutionary Committee meeting in 1920: ‘When Platon was very young he could already tell Olonkho well. I thought he would become a famous Olonkho-teller.’ There are some quotations of Platon Oyunsky himself: ‘In my childhood I had an exuberant, vivid imagination, I told the stories eloquently. Toyons invited me to perform and enjoyed listening to my stories in the long evenings while they were resting.’

      All this was a part of the pre-revolutionary Yakut traditions: talented children would begin by listening to singers and Olonkho-tellers perform and would later retell the stories to their friends and to close neighbours or relatives. When the children grew up and became established, wealthy landowners would invite them to perform. The young Platon Oyunsky followed this path.

      P.A. Oyunsky was born in the village of Zhuleysky, in the Tatta region (modern Alexeevsky region) into a family of limited means. There were famous singers and Olonkho-tellers in P.A. Oyunsky’s mother’s bloodline. This is what D.K. Sivtsev (Sorun Omollon) says about Zhuleysky: ‘The village of Zhuleysky is famous for its masters of traditional oral art: singers, Olonkho-tellers, and story-tellers.’ A famous Olonkho-teller, Tabakharov, also comes from Zhuleysky; a famous Yakut painter, I.V. Popov, once painted his portrait. Distinctively, the most famous Yakut singers and Olonkho-tellers came precisely from the Taatta region. The outstanding Yakut writers – A.E. Kulakovsky, A.I. Sofronov, S.R. Kulachikov (Ellay), I.E. Mordinov (Amma Achygyia), and D.K. Sivtsev (Sorun Omollon) – also came from the Taatta region.

      When he became a famous poet and public figure, P.A. Oyunsky did not leave Olonkho behind (as is demonstrated by the foregoing); he continued cherishing it and singing it to his friends.

      As mentioned above, Olonkho was not the only thing that P.A. Oyunsky knew and admired. He was knowledgeable about the entire Yakut folklore tradition. Folklore had a significant influence on his career, and it provided the native cultural grounding that he used to attain the summit of his creative achievements. The development of plots and themes in folklore led him to create wonderful literary works, which include a dramatic poem, ‘The Red Shaman’ (1917–1925), and the narratives ‘The Great Kudangsa’ (1929) and ‘Nikolay Dorogunov – the Hawk of the Lena’ (1935).

      The play ‘Tuyarima Kuo’ (1930) is a noteworthy work in his writing career; it is a drama based on the Olonkho story Nurgun Botur the Swift and titled after the main heroine of that story. In the drama ‘Tuyarima Kuo’, P.A. Oyunsky is inspired by the main Olonkho theme relating to Nurgun, the hero’s battle with the creature called Uot Uhutaki (literally: ‘fire-breathing’). He preserves the main idea of the plot: the hero saves the people in trouble.

      ‘Tuyarima Kuo’ was something of a prelude to P.A. Oyunsky’s great work recording Nurgun Botur the Swift and is a model of successful Olonkho dramatization. It may be that it led P.A. ­Oyunsky to the fulfilment of a long-cherished idea to record the whole Olonkho. P.A. Oyunsky, of course, understood that no editing, no ­dramatization could give a complete and accurate picture of the great Yakut epic. Hence the idea to record the whole Olonkho as it is...

      In the 1930s, ‘Tuyarima Kuo’ was staged at the Yakutsk National Theatre and was a great success. Later it became one of the sources for the creation of the libretto for the first Yakut opera, ‘Nurgun Botur’ by the writer D.K. Sivtsev (Sorun Omollon). P.A. Oyunsky’s principle works have been published in Russian more than once.

      Nurgun Botur the Swift is one of the best and most popular Yakut Olonkho. P.A. Oyunsky reproduced it in its full length.

      He appears to have recorded it very quickly. It is not possible to determine when the work started. The first song (out of a total of nine) was completed and published in 1930, and he wrote down the date when he finished working at the end of the ninth song: ‘1932, August 31. Moscow’. Overall, he spent no more than two-and-a-half calendar years

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