Olonkho. P. A. Oyunsky

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      The long introductory descriptions of the main character’s land, of his homestead with its buildings, and of the house itself and its ­interior are a typical feature of Olonkho. Special emphasis is given to describing the land’s central point, a sacred tree called Aar-­Luuk-Mas (‘Tree of Life’). These introductory descriptions can run to 1,500-2,000 verses. There are many descriptions found further on through the Olonkho plot as it unfolds. They include descriptions of other lands to or through which the main character travels; the physical appearance of friends and foes, the bride and her parents; Esekh (a Yakut traditional festival); and the mighty heroes’ battles, campaigns, etc.

      The interpenetration of the plots gives them a special flow and the ability to freely reduce and expand. The same can be said of the descriptions. They can also be reduced or expanded. Olonkho-tellers often not only significantly reduce the introductory descriptions, but may also simply omit them, saying: ‘They inhabited the same land and the same country as in all Olonkho stories.’ Different portions of Olonkho existed independently in the vast land of Yakutia, separate parts of which were greatly disjoined in the past; this gave rise to different traditions in telling the entire Olonkho and its component parts – the introductory descriptions in particular. In the past, Olonkho was told by special master narrators without any supporting background music. The Olonkho characters’ monologues are sung, while the rest of the text is recited rapidly in a singsong voice, similar to a cantillation. One person performs the entire Olonkho: Olonkho, in fact, is a one-man performance. The performance of songs sung by different characters with different tone quality and tunes is a typical feature of Olonkho. The performers try to sing the mighty heroes’ parts with a bass voice, the young mighty ­heroes’ parts with a tenor voice, and the parts of the mighty Abaahy with a purposely untrained harsh voice. There are also the songs of heroines and elders: the hero and heroine’s parents; Serken Sehen, the wise man; the slave, who is also a horse wrangler; Simekhsin, a slave woman; the Aiyy shamans and the Abaahy shaman girls (their voices differ from those of the Aiyy shaman girls in their harshness and somewhat crazy dissoluteness) and so on. Imitation of animal sounds plays a noteworthy part in Olonkho songs: the horse laugh, the voices of different birds and animals. Outstanding Olonkho-tellers managed to express such a variety of sounds that it gave Olonkho an exceptionally bright, picturesque character, and the listeners were always impressed by the performance.

      In the past, every Yakut person knew a great number of different Olonkho stories from childhood and would try to repeat them. There were always many professional Olonkho-tellers in the community. In autumn, winter and the hungry spring period, some of them travelled to different regions of Yakutia to sing Olonkho. What they received in payment was not particularly big, and they were usually paid in kind: a piece of meat, some butter or some grain. Singing Olonkho was a secondary job for them. All the Olonkho-tellers had a traditional household to look after, which, as a rule, was quite poor. Apart from social reasons, Olonkho-tellers were poor because they were competing with famous professional travelling artists and poets. Nevertheless, Olonkho-tellers were enthusiastic about their art: they devoted much of their time to it, learning the text by heart, listening to other Olonkho-tellers, memorizing their versions of Olonkho separately and as a whole, and linking them into their own version. In the same way, it took them a long time to practise singing and recounting the epic. It was therefore difficult for them to take care of their household 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.

       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.

       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:

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