The Song of Shara Gürgü: Constance and Variability of Poetic Stylistic Components in Asynchronous Texts

Introduction. In the system of artistic and visual means, the epithet occupies one of the important places. To create a heroic image, the narrator uses epithets that characterize the status of the hero, age and heroic merits of the heroes. Goal and tasks. The purpose of the article is to study artistic-identifying combinations - epithets in the recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times, to identify their preservation and change over time. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were solved: epithets were identified in three different-temporal texts of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” (1862, 1970, 1971), a comparative analysis of artistic-identifying combinations in the texts of different dzhangarchi was carried out. Method. To study the poetical and stylistic texture, we applied the comparative method. The material of the research was records of different times: 1) “The Song about how the famous Ulan Shovshur of the mangas khan of the Ferocious Shara Gyurgyu reproached the Maloderbet cycle of 1862; 2) an audio recording of “Songs about the duel of a lion [-the hero] Ulan Khongor the Beautiful with the Ferocious Shara Gyurgyu” by Jangarchi Telty Lidzhiev 1970; 3) audio recording of “Song of Shara Gyurgyu” by jangarchi Mikhail Mandzhiev 1971. Results. The study of epithets in recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times showed that over more than a century that has passed since the first recording, the epic text in its artistic embodiment has undergone changes. The song “Shara Gyurgyu” of the Maloderbet cycle of 1862 is distinguished by an abundance of epithets, while in the recordings of the late tradition of the epic, there is a transformation of the artistic level of the text. Storytellers Teltya Lidzhiev and Mikhail Mandzhiev adhere to the main plot structure in the process of performance, without sharpening attention to poetic tropes. Observations of the texts of different storytellers at different times show that Dzhangarchi, having a wider epic knowledge, performs the song in accordance with the criteria of fidelity of reproduction, following the tradition of the epic school to which he belonged. A comparative analysis of recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times allowed us to identify constant units at the level of textual embodiment, which accumulate the poetical and stylistic basis of the epic narrative and mark the key links of the epic narration of the Kalmyk heroic epic “Dzhangar”.

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