to preserve throughout his entire life. It greatly influenced all his creative work. He adored listening to Olonkho songs and stories. The boy often went to his neighbour, Panteleymon Sleptsov, a great expert in Olonkho who was both entertaining and a singer. Platon would sit for long hours and listen to the wise old man performing his improvisations. Around the age of eight or nine, Platon started to tell and sing Olonkho to his friends. Later, the elders and the tent-dwelling nomads started inviting him to their homes with great pleasure. Everyone agreed that he had a great voice and a remarkable gift for speaking.
A distinguished artist of the YASSR, V.A. Savin, quotes a villager from the Churapcha village, who noted at a regional Revolutionary Committee meeting in 1920: ‘When Platon was very young he could already tell Olonkho well. I thought he would become a famous Olonkho-teller.’ There are some quotations of Platon Oyunsky himself: ‘In my childhood I had an exuberant, vivid imagination, I told the stories eloquently. Toyons invited me to perform and enjoyed listening to my stories in the long evenings while they were resting.’
All this was a part of the pre-revolutionary Yakut traditions: talented children would begin by listening to singers and Olonkho-tellers perform and would later retell the stories to their friends and to close neighbours or relatives. When the children grew up and became established, wealthy landowners would invite them to perform. The young Platon Oyunsky followed this path.
P.A. Oyunsky was born in the village of Zhuleysky, in the Tatta region (modern Alexeevsky region) into a family of limited means. There were famous singers and Olonkho-tellers in P.A. Oyunsky’s mother’s bloodline. This is what D.K. Sivtsev (Sorun Omollon) says about Zhuleysky: ‘The village of Zhuleysky is famous for its masters of traditional oral art: singers, Olonkho-tellers, and story-tellers.’ A famous Olonkho-teller, Tabakharov, also comes from Zhuleysky; a famous Yakut painter, I.V. Popov, once painted his portrait. Distinctively, the most famous Yakut singers and Olonkho-tellers came precisely from the Taatta region. The outstanding Yakut writers – A.E. Kulakovsky, A.I. Sofronov, S.R. Kulachikov (Ellay), I.E. Mordinov (Amma Achygyia), and D.K. Sivtsev (Sorun Omollon) – also came from the Taatta region.
When he became a famous poet and public figure, P.A. Oyunsky did not leave Olonkho behind (as is demonstrated by the foregoing); he continued cherishing it and singing it to his friends.
As mentioned above, Olonkho was not the only thing that P.A. Oyunsky knew and admired. He was knowledgeable about the entire Yakut folklore tradition. Folklore had a significant influence on his career, and it provided the native cultural grounding that he used to attain the summit of his creative achievements. The development of plots and themes in folklore led him to create wonderful literary works, which include a dramatic poem, ‘The Red Shaman’ (1917–1925), and the narratives ‘The Great Kudangsa’ (1929) and ‘Nikolay Dorogunov – the Hawk of the Lena’ (1935).
The play ‘Tuyarima Kuo’ (1930) is a noteworthy work in his writing career; it is a drama based on the Olonkho story Nurgun Botur the Swift and titled after the main heroine of that story. In the drama ‘Tuyarima Kuo’, P.A. Oyunsky is inspired by the main Olonkho theme relating to Nurgun, the hero’s battle with the creature called Uot Uhutaki (literally: ‘fire-breathing’). He preserves the main idea of the plot: the hero saves the people in trouble.
‘Tuyarima Kuo’ was something of a prelude to P.A. Oyunsky’s great work recording Nurgun Botur the Swift and is a model of successful Olonkho dramatization. It may be that it led P.A. Oyunsky to the fulfilment of a long-cherished idea to record the whole Olonkho. P.A. Oyunsky, of course, understood that no editing, no dramatization could give a complete and accurate picture of the great Yakut epic. Hence the idea to record the whole Olonkho as it is...
In the 1930s, ‘Tuyarima Kuo’ was staged at the Yakutsk National Theatre and was a great success. Later it became one of the sources for the creation of the libretto for the first Yakut opera, ‘Nurgun Botur’ by the writer D.K. Sivtsev (Sorun Omollon). P.A. Oyunsky’s principle works have been published in Russian more than once.
Nurgun Botur the Swift is one of the best and most popular Yakut Olonkho. P.A. Oyunsky reproduced it in its full length.
He appears to have recorded it very quickly. It is not possible to determine when the work started. The first song (out of a total of nine) was completed and published in 1930, and he wrote down the date when he finished working at the end of the ninth song: ‘1932, August 31. Moscow’. Overall, he spent no more than two-and-a-half calendar years on this Olonkho. In the years he was writing it, he worked (in Yakutsk), studying at a postgraduate school (in Moscow), and was intensively involved with the socialist Party and creative work. This left him little time for recording Olonkho. Perhaps, being an Olonkho-teller, he knew Olonkho by heart, which helped him to record them quickly.
Everything said above about the Yakut Olonkho applies to P.A. Oyunsky’s Olonkho Nurgun Botur the Swift. P.A. Oyunsky made no changes to verse, style, the traditional means of expression, archaic language, mythology and characters, conveying it in full, as it was sung. But a recorded folk Olonkho often combined rhyme with rhythmic prose – small prose inserts (e.g. in conversational turns). P.A. Oyunsky put it into verse.
P.A. Oyunsky’s Olonkho is almost twice the length of the longest of the recorded Olonkho (more than 36,000 lines of verse), although there were longer Olonkho. Previously, Olonkho were determined not by the number of lines, as is done now, but by the duration of the performance. To measure the wordage of Olonkho, a single night’s performance was used. An Olonkho performed in a single night was considered to be short (or rather, one might say, abridged); in two nights, medium; and in three nights or more, long. D.M. Govorov’s neighbours say that, depending on the circumstances (his own fatigue and that of his audience, whether he had to work the next day, etc.), he used to sing the Olonkho ‘Sure-Footed Myuldju the Strong’ over two or three nights. This Olonkho, as mentioned above, has over 19,000 lines of poetry. According to Olonkho-tellers, the longest Olonkho would be sung over seven nights.
Olonkho-tellers could extend the length of Olonkho. There were many ways of doing this. One was to add descriptions (scenery, surroundings of yurts, heroic battles and campaigns, etc.). For this purpose, Olonkho-tellers could bring in details and sophisticated visual means (e.g. additional simile) – in sum, they used to endlessly string together ‘embellishment’ techniques. This required from Olonkho-tellers not only virtuosity (P.A. Oyunsky was a virtuoso himself) and an excellent memory (and that he possessed too), but also a colossal amount of training and continuous practice in singing Olonkho (but this is exactly what P.A. Oyunsky did not do often enough). The reality is that all these ‘embellishment’ techniques and different descriptions were not merely contrived by the Olonkho-tellers (though improvisational skills were required and were inherent in the Yakut Olonkho-tellers), but were in ‘the Olonkho air’ in abundance and ready to be sung. The artist who was experienced and trained in the process of singing and recitation inserted them into his text, ‘glued’ them in so that they were naturally included in the text of the Olonkho.
There were amazing masters of such ‘improvised’ endless descriptions. This was known, for example, of Ivan Okhlopkov, an Olonkho-teller from the village of Bert-Uus nicknamed ‘Chochoyboh’. There is a story about how he once sang Olonkho in Yakutsk for the local rich family. He sang an introductory description which was not even finished by midnight. In other words, in five to six hours Ohlopkov recited only about three-quarters of an introductory description and did not sing a single song, did not tell any story.
Another way to extend Olonkho practised by Olonkho-tellers was through a contamination of plots. They would bring parts of other Olonkho into the main plot. They practised this only when the Olonkho-tellers and the audience had plenty of time.
P.A. Oyunsky apparently preferred the second way, as his descriptions in the complete Olonkho were not more than in other Olonkho. This does not mean that it had little in the way of description. On
