Collection of Buryat Good Wishes in the S.P. Baldaev Fund of the Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of IMBT

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the Buryat blessings or well-wishes (yurools) used in late 19th /early 20th century, collected in various areas of Buryatia by a local folklorist S.P. Baldaev. The study is based on the case No. 475 of Baldaev’s fund. The purpose of the article is to analyze the collection of wishes from the specified fund as historical sources. The following tasks were defined: typing down the text of the wishes; describing the fund’s structure; sorting content by topic; revealing the difference in interpretation of the words «yureel» and «yurool»; examining lexical features of the text. Source studies and textual analysis were used as the primary research methods. As a result, the authors concluded that this fund contains unpublished folklore records made by a researcher of the late 19th – early 20th century that are extremely valuable for various fields of research. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that this fund, a huge storehouse of Buryat oral folk art, has been studied for the first time. The publication of these materials makes it possible to reconstructi the traditional way of life and worldview of the Buryats, preserve and transmit it to the future generations. The research of the block of wishes from the fund revealed that some yurools recorded in different regions are repeated with minor differences. This suggests that the culture of wishes was largely the same in different Buryat tribes, and some Yurools were quite widespread.