“The people... are the first in time, beauty, and the genius of creativity, philosophers and poets...
It is essential to know the history of the people, and it is equally necessary to understand their socio-political thinking. Scholars—cultural historians, ethnographers—indicate that this thinking is expressed in fairy tales, legends, proverbs, and sayings...
In the simplicity of words lies the greatest wisdom...”
M. Gorky.
It is essential to know the history of the people, and it is equally necessary to understand their socio-political thinking. Scholars—cultural historians, ethnographers—indicate that this thinking is expressed in fairy tales, legends, proverbs, and sayings...
In the simplicity of words lies the greatest wisdom...”
M. Gorky.
The oral poetic creativity of the Kyrgyz has its roots in the past, as evidenced by the original songs, epics, legends, fairy tales, proverbs, and sayings that have survived to this day. Oral creativity reflects the everyday life of the people, their traditions, history, and culture. The process of perceiving reality is directly linked to the process of creativity, reflecting the reality of those days. The genres of Kyrgyz folklore are diverse.
Myths and legends are closely related genres of folklore. This type of folk creativity reflects the people's desire to make the surrounding world simpler and more understandable, to find reasons that explain natural phenomena. They are connected with ancient ideas about the creation of the world, living and non-living nature, stars, and so on. In poetic form, they narrate the origins of the names of constellations, tribes, clans, settlements, and regions, often linking them with the names of mythical or sacred animals. We often use these names without suspecting their origins. According to one legend, the "Kyrgyz" lineage originated from forty girls (kyrk - forty, kyz - girl), the Bughu lineage is associated with a deer, Cholpon-Ata is the patron of sheep, and Jetty-Oguz refers to seven bulls.
An inseparable part of oral folk creativity is fairy tales, where real life and the dreams of the people are reproduced in allegorical form. The aspiration for a better life is embodied in magical fairy tales. Everyday fairy tales narrate events from daily life, where a person, through their wit and hard work, emerges victorious. Animal tales reflect totemic ideas about life, where animals are endowed with strength or other supernatural qualities.
Visit any village, ask its indigenous residents about the names of ails, mountains, valleys, gorges, and you will hear a legend or a tradition in response.
Ancient beliefs and the peculiarities of the people's worldview have helped the imagination to form beautiful poetic images, the cognitive, educational, and aesthetic significance of which was great not only in the past. “...Let us reflect,” writes Ch. Aitmatov, “on the myths and legends themselves. They are, as is known, the memory of the people, a condensation of their life experience, their philosophy and history, expressed in a fairy-tale-fantastic form; finally, they are their bequests to future generations. A person formed their spiritual world through the knowledge of the external nature and recognized themselves as part of this nature.” V. I. Lenin advised to view fairy-tale folklore works “from a socio-political perspective,” seeing in them an expression of psychology, “the aspirations and expectations of the people.”
The ideological and thematic content of the tales is complex. The tales explain the names of coastal settlements, mountains, winds, springs, constellations, etc. For example, it is difficult to point out anything remarkable on Issyk-Kul that has not been poetized and explained.
Equally important in the tales is the socio-political content. These are narratives about class contradictions, the emergence of the Kyrgyz people, their name, morals, and beliefs. Natural and social phenomena are intricately intertwined in these narratives. It is impossible to separate one from the other without destroying the work and its poetic idea.
Tales are stories about the clash of good and evil and the inevitable defeat of the latter by the forces of nature, as well as the moral and intellectual superiority of the worker over their multifacetedly corrupt lord. Personified nature becomes the protector of the oppressed, a force that punishes injustice and cruelty. By punishing dark forces and destroying social evil, nature (not gods) creates a wonderful lake in their place.
How did truth and fiction merge in legendary imagination?
Although legends tell of a distant past, they are always connected to the time in which they live, and their ideological content is directed towards the future.
The meaning of legends is multifaceted. However, four main motives can be highlighted: the desire to know and glorify the majestic native nature; the poeticization of the spiritual and external beauty of laboring people; the sarcastic depiction of the physical and moral deformity of khans and their servants; the condemnation of the glaring injustice of social relations. Not knowing the true paths and means of fighting against them, the people unrealistically overcome evil by taking nature as their ally. This is why there are so many legends about how humanoid monsters—khans whimsically decide the fates of beautiful people, and how nature punishes these oppressors (with floods, sinkholes, etc.). This is why the suicide of a girl, saving her fidelity and honor or the lives of many, is the ultimate degree of protest against khan's violence, against the deadly enmity of rivals, elders, tribes (“Aynur and Nurdin,” “Two Giants and a Girl”) and others. Denying the hateful, the people assert the exact opposite, not directly expressed, but suggested by the entire system of images and events. In the struggle for truth against the injustice and cruelty of social relations, the people go in their imagination to self-sacrifice, thereby saying: better death than a hard and humiliating life. That is why entire cities, khanates, and tribes perish in legends; from the blood of girls and the tears of women, a salty and hot lake appeared; people who were indifferent to the fratricidal war turned to stone, and they now stand around the lake as gray-haired mountain giants (“The Sea of Tears,” “Two Heroes,” etc.).
A legend, like a fairy tale, is a lie, but it contains a hint. It speaks in riddles and does not fully articulate its idea. The listener or reader must extract the meaning from the legendary, obviously fictional (and in the tradition, plausible) facts and events, which are presented as something that happened long ago, truly existing. And no matter how fantastical the episodes of the legends may seem, they always contain elements of reality, primarily in the people's view of natural and social phenomena, in the evaluation of what is and the expression of what is desired, dreams. Troy was found through legends. From the legends about Khan Iskander (whose prototype in world folklore is Alexander the Great), one can judge what the Kyrgyz people's attitude was towards this contender for world domination, how far his influence and fame extended beyond the lands he conquered. The grotesque image of Iskander is a satire of the Kyrgyz people on the khans. And who knows, perhaps many realities in the legends are the key to unraveling the mysteries of the people, their history. It is no coincidence that for many centuries the people, in numerous variations of their tales, essentially say the same thing.
But realities and fiction in the tales also have more concrete connections.
There are scholarly opinions that Issyk-Kul is of tectonic origin. In light of these opinions, the folk tales about water flowing from the earth or the mountains and flooding the valley can be called legends. Their plausibility is confirmed by the account of the earthquake on Issyk-Kul in 1910. At that time, the old residents of Semenovka, Grigorievka, and Ananievo recount that water flowed in streams from huge cracks and sinkholes in the earth.
Even the images of the jarghylchak (hand stone mill) and the magical salt shaker, which continuously provides salt, rich in fiction and fact, are quite explainable and have a solid socio-historical basis. To understand this, it is enough to know that the Pre-Issyk-Kul region has no sources of table salt, and in it, separated from the world by mountains, salt was highly valued and was a source of discord. Yet nearby is a whole sea of salty water. This fact sparked the dream of an abundance of salt among the poor, becoming the basis for legendary plots.
Thus, natural, social, and everyday motives merged into a whole.
Thus, the people expressed their aspirations and expectations.
Such is the socio-political perspective on the tales.
In legends and especially in traditions, there is much information of a historical nature, as well as episodes related to the epic "Manas," explanations of the names not only of ails, ridges, and mountains but also of small lakes, springs, and notable large stones.
