Once again about the epic heritage of Korkut

Abstract

   The musical and epic heritage of the legendary Korkut attracts the attention of researchers, beginning from the middle of the XIX century. Scientists-Turkologists of Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan wrote a huge number of scientifi c surveys, which highlighted the problems associated with the main epic monument of Oguz antiquity – “The book of my grandfather Korkut.” In Kazakhstan at the turn of the 1970s, Professor Auelbek Konratbaev first voiced this topic. He published several articles, and then the author translated into Kazakh “The book of my grandfather Korkut” according to the publication of V. V. Bartold. Over the past decades, especially after the adoption of independence, folklorists, musicologists, and performing musicians have become involved in this problem. In this article, another attempt is being made to hermeneutically analyze scientific research published in recent years on the pages of both the foreign and republican press. It is well known that V. Velyaminov-Zernov published the classic version of the Kazakh legend about Korkut in the second half of the 19^th century. Since then, numerous judgments have been made about the content of this legend, which, one might say, merged with the mythological ideas of the people. Researchers to this day address both the personality of the legendary Korkut and “The book of my grandfather Korkut” and lay out their vision of the problem. All scientific problems raised in the works of later authors formed the basis of this article, which is put on trial by specialists and a wide range of readers – admirers of the legendary Korkut.