The Book "The Great Campaign"
Work on publishing the Russian text of "Manas" resumed in 1940, and Tashim Baidzhiev, being the head of the folklore sector, approached the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Kyrgyzstan with a proposal to complete the translation and publish "The Great Campaign" in full, i.e., up to the tragic outcome of Manas's campaign to China. However, this did not happen. Soon after, the war with Germany began. Manas scholars T. Baidzhiev and Z. Bektenov went to the front.
Unfortunately, in 1946, the very episode of "The Great Campaign" that was not accepted by scholars and rejected by the republic's leadership was published in Moscow.
The Russian text of "The Great Campaign" began with a conspiracy of khans against Manas, ended with the capture of the Chinese city of Beijing, the division of the spoils, and concluded with the words:
Over Beijing, where Suleiman
Could never enter,
The spirit of Muslims was established,
Kyrgyz power was established.
(Translation by S. Lipkin)
Such an ending of "The Great Campaign" does not exist in any original. In the version by S. Orozbekov, which S. Lipkin translated, Manas, besieging Chot-Beijing (the suburb), receives a rich tribute, concludes a peace treaty, returns to his homeland, and together with his comrades dies in battle against the occupier Konurbai. According to the versions of S. Karalaev, Sh. Azizov, and other storytellers, Manas and his warriors perish at the walls of Beijing, surrounded by Chinese troops and militias. With only the truncated text of "The Great Campaign," "reworked" by Moscow translators, the Russian-speaking reader, who was practically the entire party apparatus, remained unaware of Manas's previous feats in uniting the Kyrgyz tribes, liberating the native land and Turkestan from Chinese invaders, and, most importantly, of the tragic outcome of his campaign to China, which led to Manas being declared an aggressor, the storytellers as reactionaries, and the Manas scholars as bourgeois nationalists, sending them to prison for ten years, confiscating their works, and burning language and literature textbooks on school bonfires.
The book "The Great Campaign," published in Moscow in 1946, was initially submitted for the Stalin Prize but was soon withdrawn as an anti-people's work.
… "With this publication, the epic was essentially compromised before the Russian reader," wrote Moscow writer M. Bogdanova with pain, who was well acquainted with "Manas" and Kyrgyz literature.
Mar Baidzhiev, well familiar with "The Great Campaign," took into account the creative miscalculations of the Moscow translators, who translated not the canonical text of "Manas," but its oral variants, addressed not to the reader, but to the Kyrgyz listener, who at least had a general idea of the content of the entire epic, and often, for the sake of the audience, the storytellers introduced their improvisations, sometimes contradicting the main plot and meaning. Secondly, the episode "The Great Campaign" ("Chots kazat"), torn from the context of the epic, completely distorted the main idea of the great parable about Manas, which is, paradoxically, not found in the hero's victories, but in his defeat. In his article "The Pain of My Heart — 'Manas,'" published in the collection of literary studies "In the Battle for Truth" (2001), Mar Baidzhiev declares this thought as follows:
"Manas was powerful and invincible as long as he defended his people, uniting disparate tribes into a single state, but as soon as he waged war against another people — he was doomed to perish. The great sin of Manas, like a curse of fate, will hang over his descendants — son Semetei and grandson Seitek, and neither of them will manage to restore the former unity and glory of the Kyrgyz people."
Such is the hard-earned author's concept of "Manas" by M. Baidzhiev — a Great Parable and a Great Tragedy.
Another creative task facing M. Baidzhiev was the selection of folklore sources, i.e., the variants of the storytellers-manaschi. The choice fell on the variants of Sagynbai Orozbakov, Sayakbay Karalaev, partly Bagysh Sazanov, and Shaabay Azizov.
The Role of Professor E. D. Polivanov in the Translation of the Epic "Manas"