POET’S BIOGRAPHY AS A LITERARY NARRATIVE (ON THE LESS KNOWN WORK OF A. E. KULAKOVSKY)

• Main Author: Pokatilova Nadezhda V.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: German; English; Russian
• Published: Publishing and Printing Center NOSU 2017
• Subjects: oral tradition; early literature; literary text; mythologization; singer-poet; biography; alliteration; Education (General); L7-991; Language and Literature; P; Yakut
• Online Access: https://doaj.org/article/c96244df99d44a80a4860a1f44420cf3

The paper covers the special analysis of one of the less known works by the first Yakut poet – A.E. Kulakovsky. The letter to “V.F. Artamonov”, available to us as a manuscript copy, despite being an epistolary form of “written” origin, is essentially a piece of work aligned, in a sense, with oral tradition. Identification of the nature and forms of this alignment defines the purpose and perspective of this article. At the same time the problem of interpretation of author’s biography in the literary text becomes one of the defining aspects of the analysis. From the analysis the significance of this work is revealed, the work which extends beyond mere attempts at epistolary genre in Yakut literature. The poet’s biography and (briefly) his family tree become a subject of a literary work for the first time. The biography intentionally highlights the lyrical element and aspects significant for his body of work: “name”, “home river”, as a symbol of the homeland, ability “to piece verse to verse”. In the context of mythological motives relevant for this work, there is a known trinity in folklore tradition: “name” - “song” - “road”. However in a literary text this trinity, on one hand, gains new meaning as an individual “way” of the poet’s biography, on the other, gets a pronounced ornamental character created by alliteration and assonant repetitions. Among the symbolical overtones we observe how the mystical interpretation of poetic skill gives way to a deliberate mythologization of the author’s life events in an autobiographical work, from real life wanderings to poetic prowess. The cohesiveness of the literary message is created in the text by the poetic function which appears at the crossover point between the poetic technique of vocal reiteration and archetypal meaning which dates back to oral tradition.