Olonkho - P. A. Oyunsky

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school (in Moscow), and was intensively involved with the socialist Party and creative work. This left him little time for recording Olonkho. Perhaps, being an Olonkho-teller, he knew Olonkho by heart, which helped him to record them quickly.

      Everything said above about the Yakut Olonkho applies to P.A. Oyunsky’s Olonkho Nurgun Botur the Swift. P.A. Oyunsky made no changes to verse, style, the traditional means of expression, archaic language, mythology and characters, conveying it in full, as it was sung. But a recorded folk Olonkho often combined rhyme with rhythmic prose – small prose inserts (e.g. in conversational turns). P.A. Oyunsky put it into verse.

      P.A. Oyunsky’s Olonkho is almost twice the length of the longest of the recorded Olonkho (more than 36,000 lines of verse), although there were longer Olonkho. Previously, Olonkho were determined not by the number of lines, as is done now, but by the duration of the performance. To measure the wordage of Olonkho, a single night’s performance was used. An Olonkho performed in a single night was considered to be short (or rather, one might say, abridged); in two nights, medium; and in three nights or more, long. D.M. Govorov’s neighbours say that, depending on the circumstances (his own fatigue and that of his audience, whether he had to work the next day, etc.), he used to sing the Olonkho ‘Sure-Footed Myuldju the Strong’ over two or three nights. This Olonkho, as mentioned above, has over 19,000 lines of poetry. According to Olonkho-tellers, the longest Olonkho would be sung over seven nights.

      Olonkho-tellers could extend the length of Olonkho. There were many ways of doing this. One was to add descriptions (scenery, surroundings of yurts, heroic battles and campaigns, etc.). For this purpose, Olonkho-tellers could bring in details and sophisticated visual means (e.g. additional simile) – in sum, they used to endlessly string together ‘embellishment’ techniques. This required from Olonkho-tellers not only virtuosity (P.A. Oyunsky was a virtuoso himself) and an excellent memory (and that he possessed too), but also a colossal amount of training and continuous practice in singing Olonkho (but this is exactly what P.A. Oyunsky did not do often enough). The reality is that all these ‘embellishment’ techniques and different descriptions were not merely contrived by the Olonkho-tellers (though improvisational skills were required and were inherent in the Yakut Olonkho-tellers), but were in ‘the Olonkho air’ in abundance and ready to be sung. The artist who was experienced and trained in the process of singing and recitation inserted them into his text, ‘glued’ them in so that they were naturally included in the text of the Olonkho.

      There were amazing masters of such ‘improvised’ endless descriptions. This was known, for example, of Ivan Okhlopkov, an Olonkho-teller from the village of Bert-Uus nicknamed ‘Chochoyboh’. There is a story about how he once sang Olonkho in Yakutsk for the local rich family. He sang an introductory description which was not even finished by midnight. In other words, in five to six hours Ohlopkov recited only about three-quarters of an introductory description and did not sing a single song, did not tell any story.

      Another way to extend Olonkho practised by Olonkho-tellers was through a contamination of plots. They would bring parts of other Olonkho into the main plot. They practised this only when the Olonkho-tellers and the audience had plenty of time.

      P.A. Oyunsky apparently preferred the second way, as his descriptions in the complete Olonkho were not more than in other Olonkho. This does not mean that it had little in the way of description. On the contrary, it is possible to say that it contained a complete set of various descriptions, but they were not as sophisticated as, say, those in Olonkho by D.M. Govorov or (it is said) Ivan Okhlopkov. Among the recorded Olonkho there is one which can be considered as a basis for P.A.Oyunsky’s Nurgun Botur the Swift. This is also Nurgun Botur the Swift, recorded by an illiterate Yakut man, K.G. Orosin, in 1895 at the request of a political exile, E.K. Pekarsky, later a famous researcher.

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       Sakha lady in national costume

      E.K. Pekarsky did much textual analysis on K.G. Orosin’s manuscript and included it in his ‘Obraztsy’. Interestingly, none of the other Olonkho recorded under the title ‘Nurgun Botur’ bears any relation to the plot of the Olonkho of the same name by K.G. Orosin and P.A. Oyunsky.

      In Soviet times, a well-known folklorist, G.U. Ergis, released a separate publication, breaking the text into verses (but not touching the basis of E.K. Pekarsky’s textual analysis) and supplying it with a parallel translation into Russian with scholarly notes.

      First of all, there is the interesting evidence of E.K. Pekarsky that K.G. Orosin learned this Olonkho from one of the Olonkho-tellers from Zhuleysky (the native village of P.A. Oyunsky). This means that Olonkho written by K.G. Orosin and P.A. Oyunsky have the same source. Comparison of the Olonkho texts shows that they are indeed variants of the same Olonkho.

      I will not address all the similarities and differences between these two Olonkho. I will discuss the main one: The descriptions of the descent of Nurgun Botur from heaven to earth to protect people, the battle between Nurgun Botur, his brother Urung Uolan and the monster Uot Uhutaki, the salvation of warriors, captives and imprisoned in the Under World, and the occurrence and descriptions of many other events as well as many songs of heroes are basically identical. This can occur only with an Olonkho existing in one singing environment which is used as a source text by a number of Olonkho-tellers from one village or several adjacent villages.

      But P.A. Oyunsky’s variant has many stories, personal details and descriptions that are missing in the version by K.G. Orosin. I will point out the main ones. In Orosin’s Olonkho, for example, there are no stories related to the battle against the hero Uot Usumu, and there are none related to the birth, upbringing and battle of the young hero Ogo Tulayakh, a son of Urung Uolan and Tuyarima Kuo. In K.G. Orosin’s Olonkho, there are no episodes associated with the Tungus hero Bokhsogolloy Botur.

      It is difficult to say whether these stories were originally from Nurgun Botur the Swift or whether P.A. Oyunsky got them from other Olonkho. In any case, we must bear in mind that in the introduction to his Olonkho, he wrote that Nurgun Botur the Swift was created ‘out of thirty Olonkho’. When he said that he had created his Olonkho ‘out of the thirty Olonkho’, he was using poetic hyperbole, and the number ‘thirty’ was an ‘epic’ figure. Incidentally, in the past a love of hyperbole was common among Olonkho-tellers. To show how great their Olonkho was, Olonkho-tellers would say: ‘I created it by combining thirty Olonkho.’ Even so, it must be admitted that P.A. Oyunsky introduced stories into his Olonkho from other Olonkho. As mentioned above, this was a typical, traditional practice of Yakut Olonkho-tellers.

      We can say with a high probability that P.A. Oyunsky took the plot about a slave called Sodalba from the Olonkho ‘The Shaman Women Uolumar and Aygyr’. Moreover, in this Olonkho, Sodalba is uncle of the young heroes, but in Oyunsky’s Olonkho he is a warrior-servant and Nurgun Botur turns to him. Usually, the hero, coming to his bride, because of whom a battle is to take place, masks and turns to a slave boy, the son of an old woman, Simekhsin. He does this so that the enemies who come to the bride before him will not notice him at first and will not take any decisive action.

      In the Olonkho ‘The Shaman Women Uolumar and Aygyr’ the character of Sodalba is associated with avunculate, reverence for the maternal uncle and his assistance to his relatives. Interestingly, the avuncular Sodalba in the Olonkho about shaman women was transformed into a slave not only taking care of his nephews and fighting for them, but also obediently carrying out all their whims. Only at the end of the Olonkho does the slave Sodalba rise against and leave his young nephew-masters. P.A. Oyunsky (and perhaps his predecessors from Zhuleysky and neighbouring villages) included this remarkable image of the mighty slave in his Olonkho. The character of Sodalba in Nurgun Botur the Swift was introduced from another Olonkho, and it can be said with confidence that the transformation of the hero in the boy-servant was an age-old theme in all Olonkho presenting this situation.

      But what is typical: the character of Sodalba in ‘Nurgun Botur’ somehow does not give the impression of having been imported. It is merged with the whole context of the Olonkho. These are the distinctive features of Olonkho and of the exclusive ingenuity of the Yakut Olonkho-tellers.

      In

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