Фольклор долган. - 2000. (Т. 19.)

A great deal of t h e textologi c al work has been done by him. A comparison of the original sources from the A.A.Popov’s archives with their published translations into Russian demonstrated that the scientist during expeditions often allowed himself to shorten the texts, missed the repetitions having in mind to proccess the data later. Unfortunately the deciphering of the field materials is missed in the archives. That was the reason why P.E.Yefremov decided to compare and clarify the texts in the Dolganian language with their Russian translations in the book "The Dolganian Folklore" of 1937. He also translated all the other texts included into that volume. Among them one can find unique texts: a fairy tale "A Happy Day, an Evil Day" was written down in 1936 at the Taimyr national district by a prominent linguist — a specialist in the Dolganian language — Ye.I.Ubryatova (1907—1990) who was a first editor of this volume. In her monograph "The Language of the Norilsk Dolgans" she came to the conclusion that the Dolganian language is an independent Turkic language but not a dialect of the Yakut language as it had been considered until the 1980s of this century. During her work as a teacher in Norilsk-Pyasinsk elementary school (1932—1934) and expeditions to the Dolgans (1935—1937) YeJ.Ubryatova had collected 50 fairy tales, 119 songs, 112 riddles. The most important is a fact that she wrote down the folklore works from the informants who had worked with A.A.Popov himself. This fact allows one to estimate the constancy of the repertoire of the story­ tellers, to find out the degree of survival of the folklore works in oral form. Only one of the fairy tales out of the YeXUbryatova’s notes was issued as a scientific publication. The material presented gives readers a chance to get acquainted for the first time with the Dolganian musical folklore. Its genre’s system includes the heroic epos — olonkho and songs. An introductory musicological article is devoted to the studies of originality of the musical culture of the Dolgans. The comparison of the notes of one and the same folklore work received from different performers gave a possibility to trace the evolution of story-teller’s tradition which the Dolgans still have and preserved till nowadays. Also it gave a possibility to find out the balance between the improvised and traditional elements in the performance. For example, published in this volume is a complete olonkho text of "A Son of the Horse Atalamii-bogatyr" written down by A.A.Popov from Petr Aksyonov in the settlement Dolgany in 1931, a musicological analysis being done by G.G.Alekseeva on the basis o f 1964's notes from the olonkhosut I.A.Yeremin. This phonogram is of great interest as a new variant of epos’s performance not breaking the major performing canons of the Dolganian story-tellers. The masterpiece of the oral art of the Dolgans is a heroic epos which they call "yryalaak olonkho" (meaning "olonkho with a song"). A word "olonkho" in the Dolganian language means "retelling", "a story", "fiction". The Dolganian storytellers perform olonkho when spectators gathered, as a rule, in the evenings, after supper. Storytellers usually recite the descriptive part of a heroic epos and sing heroes’ songs, with every hero’s song having its own melody.