Danara Ungarlinova, About Myself and My Family

• Main Author: Terbish, Baasanjav
• Other Authors: Churyumova, Elvira, Koldaev, Tseren, Korneev, Gennadiy, Bembeev, Aleksandr
• Format: Moving Image (Video)
• Language: Russian
• Published: Kalmyk Cultural Heritage Documentation Project, University of Cambridge 2018
• Subjects: Autobiography; family; exile; education; Baldwin; Dombra; Dun; Freed; Komsomolskiy; Zubova; Sakhalin; Siberia
• Online Access: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/296331; https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.43375

Danara talks about herself and her family. I grew up in a close-knit family. My mother gave birth to 12 children, only 4 survived. I was born in 1934, and my siblings were born in Siberia. In Kalmykia my father worked at the newspaper Khalmg Unn. My mother was musical, she played the Saratov accordion and dombra. My father could dance well. Apparently, I inherited this gift from him. On holidays, my parents sang traditional long songs (ut dun). My father was wounded in his right hand in the Battle of Stalingrad. (During exile) my mother and I ended up in the Krasnoyarsk territory, in the town of Bogotol, from there we were transported to the village of Yuryevskiy. One day our neighbor saw my father on the street, and we all ran out to meet him. As a disabled veteran, my father took us and moved to Bogotol, to work in Soviet Star which was an artel (a cooperative association of craftsmen living and working together). The artel had 12 cooperatives, including sausage making, carpentry, shoemaking and others. With time, my father started writing with his right hand and became an accountant. After graduating from the 10th grade, I wanted to enter the Pedagogical Institute in Krasnoyarsk, but it did not take in Kalmyk students. I went with a classmate to study how to sew clothes in the Trade and Culinary School instead. In the second year students did practice in shops where they later could become directors. Once I was invited to the regional commandant's office. There I was told that I was freed from the special resettlement and could move around freely. I was given a clean passport, without the word ‘special resettlement’. I wrote to my mom, and she told me to come home. I went home without getting a certificate. My father told me to go to uncle Zambo in Frunze, Kyrgyzstan, to study at a teacher's college. I went to Frunze. But to study at the teacher's college it was necessary to know the Kyrgyz language. I decided to give up and study at the Faculty of Foreign Languages in another university. When I was at the end of my first year, the restoration of Kalmykia began. Ivan Kuznetsovich Ilishkin who taught philosophy at our university, gathered all Kalmyk students and urged us to go to Kalmykia to rebuild it. In Kyrgyzstan, my father was promised an apartment as an invalid of war, and I could study English in my second year. But we decided to return to our homeland. My mother and I began to persuade my father to return to Kalmykia. Ivan Ilishkin told me that he could arrange for me to find work in the village of Komsomolskiy, in Kalmykia, because there they had a better salary. I did as he told me and transferred my course to Pyatigorsk University to study from distance. After a year of work in the village, I moved to Elista where I worked as a teacher of the German language in a secondary school. After work I participated in amateur performances, sang songs in Russian and Kalmyk. Ulan Lidzhieva invited me to sing in the ensemble ‘Tulip’. I asked my father's advice, but he said that I did not need to leave the teaching job, and could sing in the evening. My aunt Mosya sang songs, which the scholars Kichikov and Nominkhanov wrote down. Nikolai was also musical, they lived in Sakhalin, where he learned to play a Japanese melody. My father was well-read, loved to joke, and lived 88 years. My maternal aunt, Matryona Zubova, also played dombra, sang songs, and people gathered in her house during holidays. Sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin