The Kyrgyz epic is a professional form of oral folk musical and poetic creativity. In the epic, the richness of the people's worldview and artistic reflection of the surrounding reality is manifested more fully and vividly than in other genres. The epic captures global categories of social existence and consciousness: history, religion, material and artistic culture, and the mentality of the Kyrgyz.
The epic as a literary chronicle of the people is realized in the work of professional storytellers-improvisers. The art of storytelling in the epic, during which the narrator creates their own version based on genre canons, is the most complex and responsible aspect of Kyrgyz folklore.
The significance of the epic is extremely great. It serves as an "encyclopedia" of folk life and art, an essential means of spiritual self-expression, and a source of national knowledge. The epic has been perfected over many centuries against the backdrop of the richest history and culture, which formed its content and form, as well as due to the inherent qualities of folk speech.
“The Kyrgyz master their language,” wrote V. Radlov. “They can give their speech a certain degree of elegance, and even in the most ordinary conversation, when constructing phrases and periods, they often have a clear rhythmic measure, so that sentences follow one another in the form of verses and stanzas, creating the impression of poetry.” Furthermore, the scholar emphasizes that listeners attentively and enjoyably follow the words of the storyteller and can appreciate successful speech. “It is clear that a people who so thoroughly enjoy eloquence regards rhythmic speech as the highest art in the world,” concludes V. Radlov. “Therefore, folk poetry among the Kyrgyz has reached a high degree of development.”
The epic has accumulated the most valuable and enduring aspects of the historical, spiritual, and creative experience of the Kyrgyz people. Heroism and fantasy, lyricism and drama, humor and satire have found their place in its content. Above all, it embodies folk philosophy. The epic is also the focal point of all oral genres of verbal and musical arts: artistic prose, poetry, vocal, and (to some extent) instrumental music. Epic storytelling includes elements of theater. Such complexity of the Kyrgyz epic, its truly gigantic volume of information, as well as the vast musical and poetic corpus have no precedent in world culture.
The word epic (Greek “epos”) appeared in Kyrgyz literary studies in the 1920s and 1930s in connection with the study of oral folk creativity. It gradually displaced the term jomok (in Kyrgyz - "fairy tale, legend"). In its broad sense, this term unites all genre subtypes of epic creativity in Kyrgyzstan—from fairy tales to the largest epic in the world, "Manas." In a more specific sense, it denotes musical and poetic narratives about outstanding events and people. The term "epic" also has a wide international usage.
In the epic culture of Central Asian countries, the term dastan is widespread. Among ancient Turkic-speaking peoples, dastan referred to elaborate prose or poetic narratives performed in an oral recitative form. In modern Kyrgyz art studies, this term is also applicable to authorial poetic epics.
The term dastan is close in meaning to the term poem (Greek “poicma”), which scholars use to define musical and poetic works of medium volume, including folk ones.
Thus, in the practice of studying the Kyrgyz epic, all three of the above-mentioned terms are encountered.
The Kyrgyz epic as a whole is a multifaceted phenomenon. It is a collection of many epic works that have different content, volume, and style. It consists of two major layers: the large and small epics. In this division, proposed by Kyrgyz literary scholars, the overall scale of specific works is primarily taken into account. This approach can be considered methodologically justified, as it is based on the aesthetic principles of artistic creativity, according to which form and content are interdependent phenomena.
The large epic refers to the epic "Manas," which, in terms of the fullness and diversity of its coverage of folk life, has no equal in world epic literature.
The small epic refers to a collection of numerous dastans and poems that are many times smaller in volume than "Manas." Comparing the large and small epics by the number of poetic lines, it is easy to notice a striking difference between them. For instance, if "Manas" in the version recorded from the storyteller Sayakbay Karalaev contains over 400 thousand lines, then the majority of small epic works—“Er Teshstuk,” “Er Tabyldy,” “Er Soltonoy,” “Zhodarbeshim,” “Kedeykan,” “Zhatyl Myrza,” “Seiyitbek,” “Zhanish-Bayish,” “Kurmanbek,” “Kozhozhash,” “Sarynjy-Bekey,” “Olzhobay menen Kishiimzhan,” “Gulgak,” “Ak Meer”—together total 84,319 poetic lines.
One of the complex questions in the study of the Kyrgyz folk epic is its genre formation. It is unlikely that anyone can precisely and unambiguously determine the time and circumstances of its emergence. However, all scholars agree that at the stage of the formation of the Kyrgyz nation, the epic arose from historical songs, myths, and musical-poetic tales, and then, as a result of the summation and development of small forms, it evolved into an epic poem (dastan) and finally into an epic. The genre and plot varieties of the folk epic were the result of the constant creative search of storyteller-improvisers.
The epic has always stood apart from other genres of folklore. This is due to its artistic and aesthetic features, such as monumentality, heroism, a wide range of artistic images, as well as a flexible recitative-melodic form and the mastery of storytellers. The prestige of folk epic compared to other genres was such that it absorbed and dissolved the features of most folklore genres. None of them can compare with the epic in terms of the nature of content and the scale of embodiment.
